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.