In January 1601, Elizabethan courtier Lord William Herbert of Cardiff inherited the Earldom of Pembroke on the death of his father. Only weeks later, the newly-elevated Pembroke was disgraced and imprisoned, when news of his affair with the unmarried and heavily-pregnant Mary Fitton, one of Elizabeth I's Maids of Honour, became public knowledge, and he incurred the wrath of the famed unrelenting and often unforgiving monarch.

Edmund Dudley, esq. was the grandson of John Dudley, 1st Baron Sutton - a courtier and diplomat, who after switching from the Lancastrian to the Yorkist cause during the Wars of the Roses, joined the court of Edward IV and was appointed as 'Constable of the Tower of London'.