On 1 January 1580 Oxford presented to the Queen, as a New Year's gift, ‘a fair juell of golde, being a shippe garnished fully with dyamonds and a meane perle pendant’; similarly, the still-estranged Anne presented ‘a payre of braceletts of gold, conteyneing 24 peeces, whereof in seven of them are two perles in a peece, and six stones being lapis lazareus, and six clowde stones or shelles of the sea’.

On 27 January Sir Edward Seymour, styled Earl of Hertford, noted in his diary following a visit to Burghley at Whitehall:

Seymour does not reveal the conversation that may have passed between Queen and Earl. The apparent tranquility of the meeting belies the mayhem and scandal that were to touch Oxford in the ensuing months.

From the diary of Arthur Throckmorton we learn that on this very day the quarrel between Oxford and Sidney flared anew:

Rowse, who first noted this entry in print, thought he had caught Oxford dispatching the formal challenge of the ‘tennis-court quarrel’. If so, Oxford delayed far longer than is usually supposed. Possibly Oxford was renewing the quarrel, using Throckmorton (rather than Charles Arundel and Walter Ralegh) to convey the challenge. The entry at any rate cuts the ground from under Ward's thesis that Oxford played a passive rather than an active role in the dispute between himself and Sidney. Throckmorton wrote further in his diary:

Thus Oxford remained under house arrest from 29 January to 11 February, about a fortnight.