She was trusted with Elizabeth I's pearls. When her husband fell under suspicion, she was put out of court.

Frances Newton, Lady Cobham, died on 17 October 1592 at Cobham in Kent. She had served in Elizabeth's private household for much of the reign, close enough to know how the queen liked a sleeve made and to be asked what she thought of a prospective royal husband. Neither kind of knowledge made her position permanent.

She was the daughter of Sir John Newton and Margaret Poyntz, from a Gloucestershire gentry family. By the beginning of 1559 she was serving in the new queen's bedchamber. The following year she married William Brooke, Lord Cobham, a widower whose family seat was Cobham Hall in Kent. They had several children. The marriage gave Frances a title and a household of her own, and her service to Elizabeth continued alongside both.

The family portrait dated 1567 gathers Frances, William and six children around a table. There is fruit, there are pets, and there are small figures dressed with the care expected of a noble family presenting itself for posterity. It is an orderly picture of a substantial household. Another glimpse of that household survives in a letter Frances had written to her friend Bess of Hardwick a few years earlier, with a child still to be born and the queen's clothes to attend to.

She was at Cobham, waiting to give birth. She expected her confinement about a week before St Andrew's Day, towards the end of November, and wished her friend had good cause to come into Kent. She asked Bess to pray for her. "I know I shall speed much the better," she wrote, "for a good woman's prayer."

Then she turned to the sleeve.

She had basted it to the width that would best please the queen. She enclosed the breadth and length for a caul, a netted head-dress, also meant for Elizabeth. Bess could send the work up unmade, because the fashion had altered a great deal since she was last at court, and ten yards would be enough for the ruffs at neck and wrists. Even at Cobham, a few weeks from childbirth, Frances was the person a friend consulted about pleasing Elizabeth.

Her son Henry was born on 22 November 1564, within a day of her reckoning.

The queen consulted her too, on matters rather harder to alter than a sleeve.

Early in 1571 Elizabeth was considering marriage to the young Duke of Anjou. In a conversation reported at the time, she asked Frances and Lady Clinton to give their opinions frankly. Lady Clinton praised the match and dismissed the difficulty of the bridegroom's youth. Frances was more cautious: marriages, she said, were generally happier when the two people were nearer in age. Elizabeth replied that the difference was only ten years. It was nearer eighteen. A queen could ask for frankness without becoming any easier to contradict.

Later that year the danger came from Frances's own family. The Ridolfi conspiracy sought to put Mary, Queen of Scots, on the English throne with foreign support. As Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, William had allowed a packet of letters seized at Dover to reach the Bishop of Ross, Mary's agent in London. When the plot came apart he was arrested. In October, news of his arrest travelled with news that his wife had been removed from court.

Frances had known Elizabeth's preferences in clothes, had been invited to speak about her marriage, had held a place in her private household. Now that place was gone. The distinction between a woman's service and her husband's political difficulties offered her very little protection.

She did return.

By June 1574 the Earl of Leicester was reporting that Lady Cobham had regained the queen's favour and that Elizabeth had promised her old place back. Reinstatement followed, with her arrears of pay. Frances was returning to duties for which she was paid, as well as to the company of a woman she had served for years.

Later that month, at the court at Greenwich, she was asking every day after Bess. She asked Bess's son-in-law, Gilbert Talbot, to send her hearty greetings when he next wrote, saying openly that she remained to Bess as she always had, "as unto her dearest friend". The woman who had once sent sleeve widths from Cobham was still keeping up with her friend's welfare. Royal favour had been interrupted; that friendship had continued.

On 30 June 1577 the queen's pearls were brought out for examination. A London goldsmith and one of the queen's auditors viewed and weighed them, with Sir Francis Walsingham present, and their custody was recorded. They had been delivered into Lady Cobham's keeping in 1570. The following year she had been put out of court.

She died fifteen years later and was buried at Cobham. The letter to Bess survives, with its sleeve basted to the queen's width and its request for a good woman's prayer. So does the record of that June day in 1577. When the weighing was done, the pearls were left in Lady Cobham's charge until the queen should order otherwise.