Thence he wrote to the landlady protesting his honesty and told her that he had informed the queen of the earl's faithlessness (Wright, Elizabeth, ii. 414).
A second marriage soon afterwards with Elizabeth Trentham, one of the queen's maids of honour, seems to have temporarily restored Oxford's tottering fortune. In 1592 he petitioned for a monopoly to import into the country certain oils, wool, and fruits, but appears to have met with no success. The rest of his life was mainly spent in retirement. But he sat on the trials for high treason of Robert, earl of Essex, and Henry, earl of Southampton, on 19 Feb. 1600–1601. He subscribed the proclamation of James I, and at James I's coronation (25 July) he officiated as lord great chamberlain. Towards the end of his life he lived in Cannon Row, Westminster, whence he removed before his death to a house at Newington, Middlesex. There he died on 24 June 1604; he was buried in Hackney church on 6 July.
Oxford, despite his violent and perverse temper, his eccentric taste in dress, and his reckless waste of his substance, evinced a genuine interest in music, and wrote verse of much lyric beauty. Puttenham and Meres reckon him among ‘the best for comedy’ in his day; but, although he was a patron of a company of players, no specimens of his dramatic productions survive. A sufficient number of his poems is extant, however, to corroborate Webbe's comment that he was the best of the courtier-poets in the early years of Elizabeth's reign, and ‘that in the rare devises of poetry, he may challenge to himself the title of the most excellent among the rest.’ Twenty-three lyrical pieces have been identified as his work. Most of them first appeared in poetical anthologies signed ‘E. O.,’ or ‘E. of O.’ Seven were published in the ‘Paradise of Dainty Devices.’ Three poetic fragments are in ‘England's Parnassus’ (1600); two of these, ‘Doth Sorrow fret thy Soul?’ and ‘What Plague is greater than the Grief of Mind?’ together with another beginning ‘Faction that ever dwells,’ figured in the appendix to the publisher Newman's surreptitious edition of Sidney's ‘Astrophel and Stella’ (1591). Others are found in ‘Phœnix Nest’ (1593) or in ‘England's Helicon,’ 1600 (‘The Shepherd's Commendation of his Nymph’). The earl is noticed as one of the poets from whose works unspecified extracts figured in Bodenham's ‘Belvedere, or the Garden of the Muses,’ 1600. The most attractive of his poems, a dialogue between the poet and Desire, was first printed imperfectly in Puttenham's ‘Art of Poesy’ (1589), and then perfectly in Breton's ‘Bower of Delights’ (1597). Verses by Oxford ‘To the Reader,’ together with a prefatory letter from the earl's pen to the translator, were prefixed to Bedingfield's translation of Cardanus's ‘Comfort,’ 1576, which was ‘published by commandment of the right honourable the Earl of Oxenford.’ A few others of the earl's poems have been recovered by modern editors from the unprinted collection in the Rawlinson manuscripts in the Bodleian Library (No. 85). Hannah printed five of the earl's poems in his ‘Courtly Poets’ (1885, pp. 142–7). Dr. Grosart printed all the extant verse that has been assigned to Oxford in his ‘Miscellanies of the Fuller Worthies Library,’ 1872.
Among men of letters who acknowledged Oxford's patronage the chief were John Lyly, who dedicated to him ‘Euphues and his England’ (1584), and Edmund Spenser, who addressed a sonnet to him in the opening pages of his ‘Faerie Queene’ (1590). Of books of smaller account that were dedicated to him mention may be made of the translation of Justinus's abridgment of Trogus Pompeius by his uncle, Arthur Golding (1564), Underdown's rendering of Heliodorus (1569), Thomas Twine's translation of Humphrey Lhuyd's ‘Breviary of Britayne’ (1573), Anthony Munday's ‘Galien of France’ (1579? lost), Zelauto (1580), and ‘Palmerin d'Oliva’ (1588), Southern's ‘Diana’ (1584), and John Farmer's song-books (1591, 1599).
A portrait of Oxford is at Welbeck, and has been reproduced in Mr. Fairfax Murray's catalogue of the pictures there (1894, p. 147). Another portrait—a small bust—was lent by Dr. John Harley to the Tudor Exhibition in 1890.
Oxford's first wife, Anne, elder daughter of William Cecil, lord Burghley, died at the queen's palace at Greenwich on 6 June 1588, and was buried in state at Westminster Abbey on 25 June. A Latin epitaph is preserved in Cottonian MS. Julius F. x. f. 132. She was a woman of notable cultivation, and was author of ‘Foure epytaphes, after the death of her young sonne the Lord Bulbecke,’ &c. which, together with ‘the fowre last lynes of [two] other that she made also,’ were printed in the volume of poems by John Soowthern [q. v.] called ‘Diana,’ 1584. By her the earl had issue: Elizabeth, born 2 July 1575, who married at Greenwich, on 26 Jan. 1594, William Stanley, earl of Derby, and died at Richmond on 10 March 1626–7; a son, born in May 1583, who died a few hours after birth (Birch, Memoirs, i. 32); Bridget, born 6 April 1584, who was married to Francis, lord Norris (afterwards Earl of Berkshire) [q. v.]; Frances, buried at Edmonton 12 Sept. 1587; and Susan, born 26 May 1587, who was first wife of Philip
