The Earl of Leicester was the man who almost swept Queen Elizabeth I off her feet. Chris Upton explores his relationship with the people of his Midland empire.

The Tudors will always appeal to the makers of TV soaps and big screen movies. Here are exactly 118 years of vaunting ambition, infidelity, murder and intrigue. If you had made the Tudors up, they would have been thrown out as far-fetched.

But if one sets aside the royals themselves, one man seems to encapsulate the whole era, a man whose ambition (and wealth) knew no bounds, and who swash-buckled his way to within an inch of the throne of England itself. In a time of over-achievers, he over-achieved more than most.

The man was Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. I could give his dates (1544-88), but that would be unduly to curtail his activities. Long after he was laid to rest in St Mary’s church in Warwick, Dudley continued to stride through literature and the popular imagination. The hero of Lytton Strachey’s Elizabeth and Leicester, and the villain of Walter Scott’s Kenilworth, he still picks up acting credits today.

Robert Dudley is the subject of an exhibition currently running at Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum. A trip to the gallery serves as the perfect stopping-off point before launching forth to explore Lord Leicester’s Warwickshire, which is itself rich in Elizabethan history.

Robert and his brother, Ambrose – one the Earl of Leicester, the other Earl of Warwick – bestrode the Tudor Midlands. In another era, such as that of their reputed ancestors, the Beauchamps, they would surely have been kingmakers and warlords. But the reign of Elizabeth was, in general, a more peaceful place, and war had been replaced by pageantry, gardening and building work instead.

The recent reconstruction of the formal gardens at Kenilworth Castle by English Heritage, created solely to entertain the Queen in 1575, gives some hint of how much Leicester was prepared to fork out when required. It was, perhaps, Leicester’s last official attempt to persuade Elizabeth to take his hand in marriage. But the Virgin Queen was not for turning.

The Leamington exhibition explores Dudley’s relationship with the towns and cities that lay within his patch, notably with Coventry and Warwick, the fairest towns in the county. In addition, there’s a rare opportunity to view The Black Book of Warwick, one of the most important manuscripts to be held in the West Midlands.

Robert Dudley’s relationship with the towns close to him were not always easy. When he rode into Warwick in September 1571 to celebrate his investiture as a member of the Order of St Michael, no one came out to meet him. The corporation had decided, in its wisdom, that Dudley was not royalty (much as he’d like to be) and therefore did not merit a formal welcome. Given that Dudley had in his train a couple of earls and half a dozen knights, it was an embarrassing omission.