Renaissance humanism and science figured large in the Dudley children 's education . In 1553 Jane Dudley herself commissioned two works from the mathematician and Hermeticist John Dee about heavenly configurations and the tides . Jane Dudley was close to her children ; her eldest son , Henry , had died during the siege of Boulogne in 1544 , aged 19 . A postscript she wrote in 1552 under a letter by her husband to their then eldest son , John Dudley , 2nd Earl of Warwick , read : " your lovynge mothered that wyshes you helthe dayli Jane Northumberland " . She also had health problems : In 1548 her husband was unwilling to leave her side , because she " had had her fit again more extreme that she had any time yet . "