and the disaffection spread to Limerick, Wexford, Waterford, and Kilkenny. Mountjoy with a small force at once set out for the disaffected districts. He punished the offenders, and rapidly brought the towns to submission. On 26 May Mountjoy was summoned to England and never returned to Ireland, although he assisted the privy council, to which he was admitted as soon as he reached home, with his wide knowledge of Irish affairs until his death. He brought with him to his house at Wanstead, which he had purchased of Essex early in 1599, O'Neil, earl of Tyrone, in order to enable him to make a personal submission to James. On 17 Nov. 1603 he was one of the commissioners who sat in judgment at Winchester on Sir Walter Raleigh.
On 21 July 1603 Mountjoy was created Earl of Devonshire, and on 13 Aug. was made master of the ordnance. On 8 May 1604 he had been reappointed keeper of Portsmouth castle. Through the whole of that year he was in regular attendance on the king and high in his favour. Grants of land in Lancashire were made him on 21 June 1603 and on 27 Feb. 1603–4. He was nominated one of the commissioners for discharging the office of earl marshal (5 Feb. 1604–5), and on 13 Feb. 1604–5 received the manor of Loddington, Leicestershire, and part of the lands of Lord Cobham in Somerset and Kent (1 July). On 20 May 1604 he with other commissioners met commissioners from Spain to determine the English relations with the States-General and the Indies. Later in the year the new Spanish ambassador, Villa-Mediana, induced the Earl of Devonshire to accept a Spanish pension of 1,000l. a year. On 9 Nov. 1605 he was nominated the general of a force called out to repress a rising which, it was feared, might follow the discovery of the gunpowder treason (Winwood, Memorials, ii. 173).
A grave scandal disfigured Blount's private life, and caused him much anxiety in his last years. He had contracted in early life a liaison with Penelope, the wife of Lord Rich and a sister of the Earl of Essex. This lady (born in 1560) had come to know Sir Philip Sidney in 1575, and she is the Stella of Sidney's sonnets entitled ‘Astrophel and Stella.’ In 1580 she was married against her will to Lord Rich, a man of violent and coarse temper; but between the year of her marriage and the spring of 1583, when Sidney himself married, she was guilty of a criminal intimacy with her former lover. A few years after Sidney's death in 1586 Mountjoy appears to have succeeded to his place in Lady Rich's affections. By her husband she had seven children, but after 1590 she became Mountjoy's mistress, and bore him three sons, Mountjoy [q. v.], Charles, and St. John, and two daughters, Elizabeth and Isabel. During the lifetime of his brother-in-law, the Earl of Essex, Lord Rich showed no open resentment against his wife; but after Essex's death (25 Feb. 1600–1) he separated from her, paying her a yearly allowance. A year or two later he obtained a divorce from her a mensa et thoro in the ecclesiastical courts. Soon after his return from Ireland Mountjoy resolved to marry the lady, although the canon law did not allow the re-marriage of any person divorced by the ecclesiastical process. The earl after much persuasion induced William Laud, who became his chaplain on 3 Sept. 1603, to perform the ceremony at Wanstead on 26 Dec. 1605. Doubts as to the legality of Laud's action were at once raised, and in his ‘Diary’ Laud repeatedly refers to ‘My cross about the Earl of Devon's marriage,’ which he asserts was for many years a bar to his preferment in the church. The earl defended his conduct in a tract, dedicated to James I, which has been often printed, and of which a manuscript copy is in Lambeth Library (943, p. 47). After describing the indignities to which Lord Rich had subjected his wife, the earl argued that there was nothing unscriptural in Lady Rich's conduct, nor aught contrary to the canon law; but Laud attempted to confute his arguments, and forwarded elaborate notes to the earl, which have been printed in vol. vii. of Laud's collected works. While Lady Rich and the earl were openly living in adultery they were well received at court, and after her divorce Lady Rich received (17 Aug. 1603) a grant of ‘the place and rank of the ancientest Earl of Essex, whose heir her father was,’ to replace the inferior dignity of baroness which she derived from her marriage with Lord Rich. But her second marriage offended both the king and queen. It had been little expected. In 1602 it was generally understood that Mountjoy was to marry the only daughter of Thomas, tenth earl of Ormonde (Manningham, Diary, Camd. Soc. p. 59).
Amid the discussion raised by the marriage the earl died, after a short illness caused by inflammation of the lungs, on 3 April 1606, at Savoy House, in the Strand. ‘The Earl of Devonshire left this life,’ wrote Chamberlain to Winwood, ‘on Thursday night last; soon and early for his years, but late enough for himself: happy had he been if he had gone two or three years since, before the world was weary of him, or that he had left his scandal behind him’ (Winwood, Memorials, ii. 206). He was buried about
