The earl had sought political power throughout the last decade of Elizabeth's reign. A soldier, a courtier, a patron of the arts and sciences, he lived on a grand scale and spent sumptuously. As the era drew to a close he moved to secure his own hold on power by marshalling his followers and counselling James VI of Scotland. To the Scottish king he expressed the peers' discontent with Elizabeth's policies:

The earl challenged the power of Robert Cecil, became a leading political patron himself and, indeed, demanded to oversee royal patronage. In the end, he fell in a plot against his sovereign

While such a story might suggest only one man, Elizabeth's favourite, Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, it actually chronicles his brother-in-law Henry Percy, ninth earl of Northumberland. Scion of the northern earls who were long keepers of the borders between England and Scotland, Percy's story is not as well known as that of the earl of Essex. Yet Northumberland's complaints to King James vividly display demands for political power and patronage by members of the Elizabethan nobility that went unanswered in the last years of Queen Elizabeth's reign.