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Abstract
One of the early Stuart vicereines of Ireland, Elizabeth Wentworth, countess of Strafford, contributed significantly to the expression of vice-regal honour during her husband’s deputyship. This article draws attention firstly to her work in establishing and maintaining the household of the lord deputy, or viceroy, including her responsibilities in caring for stepchildren and her fulfilment of charitable duties. Secondly, it discusses the ways in which she was presented to others on public occasions. It argues that these interactions were guided in part by Lord Deputy Wentworth’s understanding of older conventions governing the conduct of the governor’s wife, but also influenced by the more recent significance attached to the role of the queen-consort, underlined by the appearance of a portrait of Henrietta Maria in Dublin Castle and its role in Wentworth’s inauguration ceremony.
Notes
1 The National Archives, State Papers [hereafter TNA, SP] 63/254/46, Captain Plumleigh to Secretary Nicholas, 29 July 1633.
2 Rachel Wilson, ‘The Vicereines of Ireland and the Transformation of the Dublin Court, c. 1703–1737’, The Court Historian 19 (2014), pp. 3-28, quotation on p. 28: ‘Gone … were the days when the lord lieutenant’s wife was a shadowy figure, known only to a few and rarely seen in public beyond a few state occasions.’
3 Heather Wolfe (ed.), Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland: Life and Letters (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 119-20.
4 Sean Kelsey, ‘Cary, Henry, first Viscount Falkland’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004); Wolfe (ed.), Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland, pp. 13-14, 19; Mark Empey (ed.), ‘The Diary of Sir James Ware, 1623–66’, Analecta Hibernica 45 (2014), pp. 55-146, p. 70.
5 Biographica Britannica (London, 1766), vol. VI, part II, pp. 4181-3; R. M. Milnes (ed.), ‘Private Letters from the Earl of Strafford to his Third Wife’, Philobiblon Society 1 (London, 1854), pp. 3-24. Richard Monckton Milnes, Lord Houghton, was a descendant of Lady Wentworth’s brother, Sir Edward Rodes.
6 Only three of the seven items listed in the printed guide to the Strafford Papers under ‘Wentworth, Elizabeth’ are letters by the Viscountess, one to the steward of Wentworth’s Yorkshire estates, Richard Marris, and two to her husband: Sheffield City Council, Libraries, Archives and Information: Sheffield City Archives: Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments, Strafford Papers [hereafter SCC: LAI, Str. P.] 22/14 to Marris, 1 June [1633]; 19/98 to Wentworth, 14 Sept. [1636, wrongly listed as 1639]; 17/163 to Wentworth, 16 Aug. 1637, damaged and partially illegible. Three of the other letters are from Wentworth’s sister-in-law, Elizabeth Wentworth, née Savile, to Marris; one other is to Wentworth from his sister-in-law, Anne Wentworth, née Rush [Ruishe]. WWM (Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments) are cited below with permission from The Milton (Peterborough) Estates Company and the Director of Communities, Sheffield City Council (the Wentworth Woodhouse papers have been accepted in lieu of inheritance tax by HM Government and allocated to Sheffield City Council).
7 Ciaran Brady, ‘Viceroys? The Irish Chief Governors 1541–1641’, in Peter Gray and Olwen Purdue (eds), The Irish Lord Lieutenancy c. 1541–1922 (Dublin, 2012), pp. 15-42, quotation p. 18.
8 Dougal Shaw, ‘Thomas Wentworth and Monarchical Ritual in Early Modern Ireland’, The Historical Journal 49 (2006), pp. 331-55.
9 Oliver Millar, ‘Strafford and Van Dyck’, in Richard Ollard and Pamela Tudor-Craig (eds), For Veronica Wedgwood: These Studies in Seventeenth-Century History (London, 1986), pp. 109-123, p. 110; Shaw, ‘Thomas Wentworth and Monarchical Ritual in Early Modern Ireland’, pp. 341-44; Jane Fenlon, ‘The Presence Chamber at Dublin Castle in the Seventeenth Century’, in Myles Campbell and William Derham (eds), Making Majesty: The Throne Room at Dublin Castle (Dublin, 2017), pp. 2-21, p. 9.
10 Laura Lunger Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity: from Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve (Cambridge, 2011).
11 Caroline Hibbard, ‘The Theatre of Dynasty’, in R. M. Smuts (ed.), The Stuart Court and Europe: Essays in Politics and Political Culture (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 156-76, pp. 171-4; Richard Cust, Charles I and the Aristocracy (Cambridge, 2013), p. 88.
12 Sara J. Wolfson, ‘The Female Bedchamber of Queen Henrietta Maria: Politics, Familial Networks and Policy, 1626-40’, in Nadine Akkerman and Birgit Houben (eds), The Politics of Female Households: Ladies-in-Waiting across Early Modern Europe (Brill, 2014), pp. 311-41; Gemma Allen, ‘The Rise of the Ambassadress: English Ambassadorial Wives and Early Modern Diplomatic Culture’, The Historical Journal 62 (2019), pp. 617-38.
13 See Brendan Kane, The Politics and Culture of Honour in Britain and Ireland, 1541–1641 (Cambridge, 2010), chapter 7, in particular pp. 232-3, and p. 252 where Wentworth’s emphasis on the honourable standing of his household is discussed.
14 Sir William Wentworth’s advice to his son, 1604, in J. P. Cooper (ed.), Wentworth Papers 1597–1628, Camden Society fourth series vol. 12 (London, 1973), p. 20.
15 Her mother, Ann, née Lewknor, was Sir Godfrey’s second wife and he married for a third time in 1610 suggesting that his second wife died in 1608-9. Elizabeth was not the youngest child of this marriage and was probably born in about 1606: J. W. Clay (ed.), Dugdale’s Visitation of Yorkshire (London, 1899), p. 99. Elizabeth was not about eighteen as has previously been claimed: C. V. Wedgwood, Thomas Wentworth, First Earl of Strafford, 1593–1641: A Revaluation (London, 1961), p. 124. Other biographers of Wentworth were less precise: Elizabeth Cooper described her as ‘young, beautiful and amiable’, The Life of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, (London, 1874), vol. I, p. 162; Lady Burghclere called her ‘young … meek and dutiful’, Winifred, Baroness Burghclere, Strafford (2 vols, London, 1931), vol. I, p. 170; Lord Birkenhead made no comment on her age at all: Strafford (London, 1938), pp. 153-4.
16 Laud referred to ‘a report wch God knows whoe raysed, & wch they wch love you not make sport with. That is that you have sent down a prettye hansome Nurse for your children. And what this report will throw up I doe not knowe, but I presume you will look to it’: SCC: LAI, Str. P. 20/112v, 1 Oct. 1632; and 8/16, 16 Aug. 1633, when Laud raised the subject again.
17 SCC: LAI, Str. P. 8/18, Wentworth to Laud, 9 Sept. 1633.
18 Wedgwood, Thomas Wentworth, p. 125.
19 Biographica Britannica, vol. VI, part II, p. 4182, 30 October 1632.
20 Ibid., 19 November 1632.
21 Wedgwood, Thomas Wentworth, pp. 123-5.
22 SCC: LAI, Str. P. 1/78v, Cottington to Wentworth, 18 Oct. 1632; Fiona Pogson, ‘Wentworth as President of the Council of the North, 1628–41’, in John C. Appleby and Paul Dalton (eds), Government, Religion and Society in Northern England 1000–1700 (Stroud, 1997), pp. 185-98, p. 189; SCC: LAI, Str. P. 40/70, Radcliffe’s ‘Essay towards the Life of my Lord Strafforde’, printed in William Knowler (ed.), The Earl of Strafford’s Letters and Despatches (Dublin, 1740), vol. II, p. 430.
23 See below.
24 Calendar of State Papers relating to Ireland 1633–1647 (London, 1901), p. 15, Captain Plumleigh to Secretary Nicholas, 29 July 1633; British Library, Additional MS [hereafter BL, Add. MS] 29587, f. 22v, Walsingham Gresley’s newsletter, July 1633.
25 SCC: LAI, Str. P. 34/3(a), ‘Digressions to be incerted in fit places’, undated. While it may be relevant there, Radcliffe’s lengthy comments on ‘Platoniq love’ primarily reflect concerns regarding Wentworth’s relations with women other than his wife, in particular the countess of Carlisle. I am grateful to Mark Empey for discussing his views on the early arrival of Lady Wentworth as a means of intelligence-gathering.
26 Biographica Britannica, vol. VI, part II, p. 4182, Lady Wentworth’s note on the back of her husband’s letter of 30 October 1632 which gives her son’s birth date as 17 September 1634; Empey (ed.), ‘The Diary of Sir James Ware, 1623–66’, p. 101.
27 A portrait of her is reproduced in Geoffrey Howse, The Fitzwilliam (Wentworth) Estates & the Wentworth Monuments (Wentworth, 2012), p. 25.
28 SCC: LAI, Str. P. 22/15, Lady Wentworth to Richard Marris, 1 June [1633]: ‘I give you many thankes because you informed me of the welbeing of those sweet babes who are as dear to me as to him whose owne they are how ever the world doeth Censure those that are in my Condition.’
29 Howse, The Fitzwilliam (Wentworth) Estates & the Wentworth Monuments, p. 52. She remained nevertheless buried in the church of St John the Baptist, Hooton Roberts, Yorkshire.
30 SCC: LAI, Str. P. 17/163, Lady Wentworth to Wentworth, 16 Aug. [1637]; Milnes (ed.), ‘Private Letters’, p. 19, Wentworth to Lady Wentworth, 13 August 1637.
31 Charles Jackson (ed.), The Autobiography of Mrs Alice Thornton of East Newton, co. York, Surtees Society (Durham, 1875), pp. 8-12; Raymond A. Anselment, ‘Alice Thornton, Elizabeth Freke, and the Remembrances of Ireland’, in Julie A. Eckerle and Naomi McAreavey (eds), Women’s Life Writing & Early Modern Ireland (Lincoln, Nebraska, 2019), pp. 23-50, p. 28.
32 Margaret MacCurtain, ‘Women, Education and Learning in Early Modern Ireland’, in Margaret MacCurtain and Mary O’Dowd (eds), Women in Early Modern Ireland (Edinburgh, 1991), pp. 160-78, pp. 170-73; Ann-Maria Walsh, The Daughters of the First Earl of Cork: Writing Family, Faith, Politics and Place (Dublin, 2020), pp. 54-63.
33 SCC: LAI, Str. P. 10a/348, Wentworth to the dowager countess of Clare, 10 August 1639; Jane Ohlmeyer, Making Ireland English: The Irish Aristocracy in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, 2012), p. 435.
34 Alan J. Fletcher, Drama, Performance and Polity in Pre-Cromwellian Ireland (Cork, 2000), pp. 262-4; Eva Griffiths, ‘James Shirley and the Earl of Kildare: Speculating Playhouses and Dwarves à la Mode’, in Michael Potterton and Thomas Herron (eds), Dublin and the Pale in the Renaissance c. 1540–1660 (Dublin, 2011), p. 363.
35 Calendar of State Papers relating to Ireland, 1633–1647, p. 121.
36 Jackson (ed.), The Autobiography of Mrs Alice Thornton, pp. 8-12.
37 Dorothy Osborne, Letters to Sir William Temple, ed. Kenneth Parker (London, 1987), p. 69.
38 ‘Chronicle of Mother Mary Bonaventure Browne’, Monastery of the Poor Clares, Galway, f. 4v. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer for alerting me to this visit and to Bronagh McShane for providing me with the text from Mother Mary’s Chronicle. Mother Mary referred to Lady Wentworth as ‘ye Lady Deputy’.
39 SCC: LAI, Str. P. 13/25, Falkland to Wentworth, 12 August 1633 and 8/64, Wentworth to Robert Sidney, Earl of Leicester, 24 December 1633, noting the careful preservation of a stone inscribed with his grandfather Lord Deputy Sidney’s verses during building work at the castle. Parts of the castle were in a very poor condition in the early 1630s: Calendar of State Papers relating to Ireland, 1625–1632, p. 648, Charles I to the Lords Justices, 21 Feb. 1632; Jane Fenlon, ‘“They say I build up to the sky”: Thomas Wentworth, Jigginstown House and Dublin Castle’, in Michael Potterton and Thomas Herron (eds), Dublin and the Pale in the Renaissance (Dublin, 2011), pp. 207-23, pp. 209-11.
40 Jackson (ed.), The Autobiography of Mrs Alice Thornton, p. 12.
41 Milnes (ed.), ‘Private Letters’, p. 13, 29 June 1636; Howse, The Fitzwilliam (Wentworth) Estates, p. 120.
42 SCC: LAI, Str. P. 22/14, Lady Wentworth to Marris, 1 June [1633].
43 Ibid.; BL, Add. MS 64906, f. 47, George Radcliffe to Lord Deputy Wentworth, 20 May 1633, on the loss to piracy of ‘a trunke of Damaske and other linnings of y[ou]r Lo[rdshi]p’.
44 Biographica Britannica, vol. VI, part II, p. 4182, 13 December 1640.
45 Kane, The Politics and Culture of Honour, p. 252.
46 Fiona Pogson, ‘Financial Accounts of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, and Sir George Radcliffe, 1639–40’, Analecta Hibernica, Irish Manuscripts Commission, vol. 48 (Dublin, 2017), pp. 102, 109.
47 Sir Anthony Van Dyck, William, Anne and Arabella Wentworth, 1639, held in the private Fitzwilliam Collection at Bourne Park; see the National Portrait Gallery web-page https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw130819 for the engraving of the painting by George Vertue (1739).
48 Pogson, ‘Financial Accounts’, p. 133. The youth was Anthony Brabazon, possibly related to William Brabazon, earl of Meath, but see Ohlmeyer, Making Ireland English, p. 240, on Wentworth’s rough handling of the Earl. See also Jackson (ed.), The Autobiography of Mrs Alice Thornton, pp. 34-6, on the Wandesford family’s similar ‘adoption’ of a young Irish boy, and Ann-Maria Walsh, Daughters of the First Earl of Cork, pp. 57-58 on Lady Mary Rich’s religious education of her three nieces.
49 Bodleian Library, MS Additional C 286, Letters of Christopher Wandesford, f. 33; Milnes (ed.), ‘Private Letters’, p. 12, 29 June 1636.
50 Felicity Heal, The Power of Gifts (Oxford, 2014), pp. 63, 137; Michael C. Questier (ed.), Newsletters from the Caroline Court, 1631–1638: Catholicism and the Politics of the Personal Rule (London, 2005), p. 206; J. H. Bettey (ed.), Calendar of the Correspondence of the Smyth Family of Ashton Court 1548–1642 (Gloucester, 1982), p. 119.
51 SCC: LAI, Str. P. 3/60, Wentworth to Charles I, 2 January 1634.
52 Milnes (ed.), ‘Private Letters’, pp. 12-17, 29 June 1636.
53 Ibid., p. 10, 3 October 1636.
54 Ibid., pp. 20-21, [summer] 1637. See ‘Sir William Wentworth’s advice to his son’ on speaking openly to trusted people, including his wife: J. P Cooper (ed.), Wentworth Papers 1597–1628 (London, 1973), p. 10.
55 SCC: LAI, Str. P. 17/163 and 19/98, Elizabeth to Wentworth, 16 August 1637 and 14 September [1636]. See also Milnes (ed.), ‘Private Letters’, p. 19.
56 Milnes (ed.), ‘Private Letters’, pp. 10, 3 October 1636; p. 12, 29 June 1636. ‘Lady Tyrconnell’ probably refers to Brigid Fitzgerald, wife of Rury O’Donnell, styled first earl of Tyrconnell, rather than her daughter-in-law Anne Marguerite de Hénin who was married to Hugh Albert O’Donnell, self-styled second earl of Tyrconnell, an officer in the Austrian armed forces. I am grateful to Jonathan Spangler for helping me to identify ‘Lady Tyrconnell’. Brigid’s maternal grandfather was Charles Howard, earl of Nottingham, Elizabeth I’s Lord Admiral: John J. Silke, ‘O’Donnell, Rury’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004). Although she had married Sir Nicholas Barnewall in 1617, Brigid was probably referred to by her first married title as it ranked higher than her second, as indeed was the widow of the duke of Buckingham after her re-marriage to the earl of Antrim.
57 Milnes (ed.), ‘Private Letters’, pp. 17-18, 29 June 1636. See also Walsh, Daughters of the First Earl of Cork, p. 85.
58 Cheshire Record Office, Leicester-Warren Family of Tabley, DLT/B43, ‘A short schetch of Ld Straffords life’.
59 Wedgwood, Thomas Wentworth, p. 126. See Milnes (ed.), ‘Private Letters’, p. 13: ‘your witts lie a graver way then sorts with making of verses’.
60 Indeed, her performance might have influenced the conduct of a later vicereine, the duchess of Ormond: I owe this suggestion to Naomi McAreavey.
61 BL Add. MS 29587, f. 19, ‘A Letter of News from Ireland’ [July] 1633. The unnamed recipient was, like Gresley, a servant of John Digby, earl of Bristol. See also the entries for 23-25 July 1633 in the Earl of Cork’s diary: Alexander B. Grosart (ed.), The Lismore Papers, first series, vol. III (London, 1886), pp. 202-203.
62 BL Add. MS 29587, f. 22.
63 Shaw, ‘Wentworth and Monarchical Ritual’, p. 347.
64 Fenlon, ‘The Presence Chamber at Dublin Castle’, p. 9. I am grateful to Dr Fenlon for discussing these portraits with me; she has argued that the portrait of the Queen was probably a version of the Mytens state portrait rather than the less formal Van Dyck portrait that was recorded in the late seventeenth-century inventory of the second earl of Strafford printed in Millar, ‘Strafford and Van Dyck’, p. 120. If so, it raises the interesting question of how the Van Dyck portrait, a copy of the original in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, came into the Wentworth collection.
65 BL Add. MS 29587, f. 22v.
66 SCC: LAI, Str. P. 5/46, Wentworth to Secretary Coke, 31 January 1633[4].
67 BL Add. MS 29587, f. 19v, ‘A Letter of News from Ireland’ [July] 1633.
68 Calendar of State Papers relating to Ireland, 1615–1625 (London, 1880), p. 134, memorandum on the reception of Sir Oliver St John.
69 Empey, ‘The Diary of Sir James Ware’, p. 95.
70 BL Add. MS 29587, f. 19v, ‘A Letter of News from Ireland’ [July] 1633.
71 TNA, SP 63/254/46, Plumleigh to Nicholas, 29 July 1633.
72 Milnes (ed.), ‘Private Letters’, p. 23, 12 Sept. 1637. Wentworth’s comment about the sword suggests a knowledge of the portrayal of Lord Deputy Sir Henry Sidney’s triumphant return to Dublin in John Derricke’s The Image of Irelande (London, 1581), plate 10.
73 BL Add. MS 29587, f. 19r, ‘A Letter of News from Ireland’ [July] 1633.
74 Hugh Kearney, Strafford in Ireland (Cambridge, 1989), p. 100.
75 SCC: LAI, Str. P. 5/45, Wentworth to Secretary Coke, 31 January 1633[4].
76 Calendar of State Papers relating to Ireland, 1633–47 (London, 1901), p. 301, Charles I to Sir William St Leger, 8 June 1641.
77 Her dower house is now the Earl of Strafford public house and restaurant. The front of the building was much altered in the late eighteenth century, but the garden-facing parts of the building show the late sixteenth or early seventeenth-century architecture. See J. P. Cooper, ‘The Fortune of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford’, Economic History Review, second series, 11 (1958), p. 233, fn. 2, on her lease of Hooton Roberts.
78 Burghclere, Strafford, I, p. 171.
79 See Katharine Aynge Walker, ‘Seventeenth Century Northern Noble Widows: A Comparative Study’, Ph.D. diss., University of Huddersfield (2004), pp. 4, 26, 194-5, 213, 246. The portrait is reproduced in C.V. Wedgwood’s first biography of Strafford (1935): it belonged (and still does) to the descendants of the Rodes family, whereas the portrait, also by Lely, of her daughter Margaret was displayed at Wentworth Woodhouse: Revd. Richard Warner, A Tour through the Northern Counties of England and the Borders of Scotland (London, 1802), vol. I, p. 211.
80 BL, Add. MS 75361, Letters of William, 2nd earl of Strafford to George, 1st marquess of Halifax, unfol., 26 February, 1679[/80].
81 This is now held at the Clifton Museum, Rotherham. I am grateful to the Museum staff for their assistance and to the Churchwardens of St John the Baptist, Hooton Roberts, for granting permission to view the plate. It is a plain piece, measuring 19 cm in diameter, adorned only by the Wentworth griffin, and showing signs of use.
82 Wilson, ‘The Vicereines of Ireland’, pp. 3-28.
83 Hugh Kearney, Strafford in Ireland, 1633–41: A Study in Absolutism (Cambridge, 1989); Mark Empey, ‘Paving the Way to Prerogative: The Politics of Sir Thomas Wentworth, c. 1614–1635’, PhD diss., University College Dublin (2009), especially chs. 3 and 4; Pogson, ‘Wentworth as President of the Council of the North’, 185-98; Pogson, ‘Making and Maintaining Political Alliances during the Personal Rule of Charles I: Wentworth’s Associations with Laud and Cottington’, History 84 (1999), pp. 52-73.
84 See Karen Hearn (ed.), Van Dyck & Britain (London, 2009), p. 123, no. 57.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Fiona Pogson
Fiona Pogson
Fiona Pogson is a Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at Liverpool Hope University. Her doctoral thesis focused on Wentworth’s role in court politics, 1628–40, and she has published a number of articles on aspects of Wentworth’s career. She has also edited the surviving financial accounts of Wentworth and Sir George Radcliffe for the Irish Manuscripts Commission, Analecta Hibernica 48 (2017), and written on Radcliffe’s activities at the royalist court at Oxford, published in Irish Historical Studies, 2019.