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www.adams.ieThe R.S.J.Clarke Collection of Cartography
15
th
December 2015
108
Robert Dudley (1573-1649)
A Chart of Ireland and the Irish Sea
From Dell Arcano del Mare. Published in Florence in 1646/7. Abl 2(i).
775 x 477.
€ 3,000 - 5,000
This is chart number XXVIII in Volume 6 of Robert Dudley’s Dell’ Arcano del
Mare, and occurs in both the 1646 and 1661 editions.
The chart includes Ireland and much sea to the west, also the
coast of Great Britain from Cornwall to the Outer Hebrides. Coastal towns
and headlands are marked but there is no inland detail. The outline of Ire-
land is similar to that of Speed, with no “Connaught bulge”, and Innishowen
is cut off from the mainland as two islands. The chart includes “I. O Brasil e
Isola disabitata e’ incerta feci et al Isola ono”. It is depicted due west of Cork,
in the Atlantic Ocean, approximately 51.5 degrees north and as large as An-
glesea. The title, in a decorated oval cartouche, in the top left corner, reads
“Carta particolare dell Mare di Ierlandia e parte di Inghilterra e della Iscotia.
La longitudine comincia da l’Isola di Picco d’Asores. di Europa Carta XXVIII”.
The final Roman digit of the chart number looks as if it was an addition to the
plate. The engraver’s signature “AF. Lucini Fece.” is in the lower left corner.
There is one compass rose below the title showing north to the top, and one
ship, but no rhumb lines. There is a grid of latitude and longitude, east of the
Isle de Fer, using Mercator’s projection, but no scale.
Robert Dudley was born on 7th August 1574, son of Robert Dud-
ley, Earl of Leicester and Lady Douglas Sheffield. They had been
married in May 1573, but secretly to avoid a row between Leicester
and Queen Elizabeth, with whom a stormy friendship continued.
However, Leicester later deserted Lady Douglas for Lettice Knollys,
widow of the first Earl of Essex, ignoring his existing marriage. Rob-
ert was always recognised by Leicester, though referred to as “His
base sonne” and was sent to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1587. There
Thomas Cha loner was his tutor and played a large part in directing
his interests towards mathematics and marine problems. Leicester
had no other surviving son and Robert inherited most of Leicester’s
property, including Kenilworth, either on his father’s death in 1588
or in the following year after the death of Ambrose Dudley, Earl of
Warwick.
Robert married in 1591 Margaret Cavendish, one of the
Maids of Honour of Queen Elizabeth. She was a cousin of Capt.
Thomas Cavendish, the circumnavigator, and through him Robert
became a close friend of the mariners John Davis and Abraham Kend-
all. In 1594/5 he fitted out, at his own expense, a fleet of five ships for
the West Indies, attacking Spanish shipping and looking for gold mines.
While there he explored Trinidad and the Orinoco estuary, later to be
covered more extensively by his rival, Sir Walter Raleigh. In 1596 he took
part in Essex’s raid on Cadiz, for which he was knighted. However, an-
other voyage which he later fitted out for China and the East Indies was a
failure and he lost all his ships. Margaret Dudley died of the plague while
he was in the West Indies, and in 1596 he married Alice Leigh, daughter of
Sir Thomas Leigh of Stoneleigh, near Kenilworth. Pressure from the Leigh
family was one of the factors which caused him to open the question
of his illegitimacy which he had accepted so far without worry. In 1602
he began a suit which dragged on past the accession of James I, against
rival claimants for his father’s estate. In the end they were too strong
for him, and in June 1605 the Star Chamber rejected the evidence of his
mother and various witnesses, and he was disgraced. This miscarriage of
justice so enraged him that he left the country in July with Miss Elizabeth
Southwell, Maid of Honour to Queen Anne, and daughter of Sir Robert
Southwell of Woodrising. When ordered to return home and provide for
his deserted wife and five daughters, he refused, was outlawed and his
property confiscated. He then remained on the continent, became a Ro-
man Catholic and married Elizabeth Southwell at Lyons. Early in 1607 he
entered the service of Grand-Duke Ferdinand of Tuscany and remained
attached to the Medici court at Florence under various Dukes, for the rest
of his life.
Dudley’s main work in Tuscany was the drainage of the marshes
behind Livorno and construction of the port there, but he was also
constantly supervising the construction of new ships for the Duke’s navy.
Intermittent negotiations for his rights continued over the years, but only
in 1643 did Charles II recognise his legitimacy, and then mainly for the
benefit of his deserted wife and daughters. In Italy he was recognised as
Earl of Warwick and from 1620 as Duke of Northumbria. He died near
Florence on 6th September 1649 having had many children, but the line
soon died out and no monument to any of the family in Italy now sur-
vives.
In the last years of his life he produced his great atlas Dell’
Arcano del Mare (The Secrets of the Sea), which was published by Fran-
cesco Onofri in Florence in 1646-47. Although produced in Italy, it may
be regarded as the first English sea-atlas, the first in which all the charts
were drawn according to Mercator’s projection, and certainly the most
beautiful in terms of engraving. It is arranged in 6 books, the charts
occupying part of booke II and VI, but with much other material on navi-
gation and the organisation of a navy. The chart of Ireland is number 28
of Book VI and is one of those (approximately half) occupying two pages.
There is also a short description of Ireland on page 13 of Book VI. In his
memoirs the engraver Antonio Francesco Lucini states that engraving the
plates for the atlas had taken twelve years to complete and consumed
5,000 pounds of copper in the process. A second edition of the atlas was
published in Florence in 1661, largely due to the efforts of Lucini.