Frances Shirley

From http://www.kateemersonhistoricals.com/TudorWomenU-V.htm

FRANCES VAVASOUR (1568-c.1606)

Frances Vavasour was the daughter of Henry Vavasour of Tadcaster, Copmansthorpe,Yorkshire, and Margaret Knyvett (b.c.1537) and the younger sister of Ann Vavasour. Frances came to court as a maid of honor around 1590, when "our new maid, Mistress Vavasour" was said to "flourisheth like the lily and the rose." By 1591, she was romantically involved with Sir Robert Dudley. Later that year, he married Mary Cavendish while Frances secretly wed Sir Thomas Sherley or Shirley (1565-1633). Before the secret marriage was revealed in September 1591, Sherley publicly courted Frances Brooke, the widowed Lady Stourton, as if he were free to marry her. Sherley was imprisoned until the spring of 1592 as punishment for his deceitful behavior. In 1606, after Frances’s death, Dudley claimed he had married her around 1591 and thus had never been legally married to either Mary Cavendish or his second wife, Alice Leigh. Dudley was trying to free himself from this second marriage in order to wed his mistress, Elizabeth Southwell, with whom he had eloped to the Continent. A. L. Rowse, in Sex and Society in Shakespeare’s Age records a visit to Dr. Simon Forman the astrologer by a Frances Vavasour, age 29, in July 1600, to inquire who she will marry. This seems odd, since her husband was still living, but there does not seem to have been any other Frances Vavasour close to that age. If the date was July 1590, it would make more sense. Frances had at least three sons and four daughters with her husband (some sources say five sons),including Cheyney (d.yng.), Henry (d.1627), and Thomas (b. June 30, 1597).

There is this Frances Vavasour also: Frances Elizabeth Slingsby