Court Lady and Country Wife : Two Noble Sisters in Seventeenth Century England

by BETCHERMAN LITA-ROSE

• ISBN13: 9780060762889
• ISBN10: 0060762888
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-09-14
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

The lives of two dazzling aristocratic sisters, Lucy and Dorothy Percy, present a perfect window into the world of political unrest and social intrigue in seventeenth-century English society. The sisters' breeding, beauty, and cunning made them among the most influential women of their time. Born during the reign of Elizabeth I, the Percy sisters came to prominence at the court of Charles I in the 1630s. Lucy, the Countess of Carlisle -- the "court lady" -- dominated the royal scene thanks to her position at the center of power. Her beauty, captured in magnificent Van Dyck portraits, and her political skills attracted prominent lovers, and her charm and talent as a gossiper ensured her inclusion in the queen's inner circle. Then her machinations during the English Civil War led to her imprisonment in the Tower of London. Her sister, Dorothy, Countess of Leicester -- the "country wife" -- had twelve surviving children and managed the family estates while her husband traveled abroad or immersed himself in books. She was brilliant as a diplomat's wife, with a keen eye and special purview of European politics. This early ancestor of Princess Diana's family was also a shrewish wife who bossed her mate for more than thirty-seven years before he rebelled publicly, causing a scandal. In Court Lady and Country Wife, Lita-Rose Betcherman shines a spotlight on the position of upper-class women in seventeenth-century Britain and illuminates the major events and figures of a grand and turbulent era.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Note on Names	xi
Proloque	1	(6)
PART ONE MONEY AND MARRIAGE
1. Two Pretty Sisters	7	(16)
2. Dorothy's Choice	23	(14)
3. Lucy's Choice	37	(24)
4. Buckingham's Charms	61	(13)
5. Life in the Country and Life at Court	74	(21)
6. The Queen's Favorite	95	(11)
7. Court Politics	106	(14)
8. Death of Carlisle	120	(25)
PART TWO AT THE KING'S COMMAND
9. Dorothy a Grass Widow	145	(17)
10. Lucy a Wealthy Widow	162	(14)
11. Family Affairs	176	(18)
12. A Noble and Intelligent Friendship	194	(18)
13. Strafford's Trial and Execution	212	(16)
14. Lucy Changes Her Gallant	228	(13)
PART THREE THE FORTUNES OF WAR
15. Mourning a Beloved Soldier	241	(19)
16. Secret Cabals at the House of the Countess of Carlisle	260	(15)
17. "I Would Rather Serve the Prince Than Live"	275	(26)
PART FOUR A NEW ORDER
18. In the Tower	301	(14)
19. A Dysfunctional Family	315	(16)
20. "The Old Lady Carlisle Is Dead"	331	(6)
Notes	337	(26)
Bibliography	363	(12)
Index	375

Excerpts

Court Lady and Country Wife
Two Noble Sisters in Seventeenth-Century England

Chapter One

Two Pretty Sisters

Dorothy was seven and Lucy six when their father, Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland, was sent to the Tower. On November 4, 1605, he set out by water from Syon House, his country home on the banks of the Thames just west of London, to attend the opening of Parliament the following day. Six months later he was found guilty of treason. It would be sixteen years before he returned.

The sisters' lives, however, hardly changed as a result of their father's imprisonment. Like all children of the nobility, they saw little enough of their mother and even less of their father. Theirs was a world of nurses and maids, grooms and gardeners. In truth, they were better acquainted with the seventy blue-liveried servants at Syon than they were with their father. Nor was the Earl a fond parent to be missed. When he came upon them at play, he would not stop to talk: the conversation of children "is unsuitable to my humour," he was wont to say.1 For their part, the sisters shed few tears at his absence. With their father gone they no longer had to listen to their parents' squabbles. How it had made their hearts pound to hear their hot-tempered mother shouting at their father and his cold, low-spoken replies goading her into wild sobbing.

The little girls would have had no recollection of it, but their parents had separated when Lucy was an infant and Dorothy just a toddler. In October 1599, the Countess left her husband. Her side of the story was that the Earl had thrown her out for no reason: "It was his Lordship's pleasure upon no cause given by me to have me keep house by myself," she wrote her brother, Essex.2 It may have been no coincidence that at this very time the Earl of Essex, formerly Queen Elizabeth's pampered favorite, was under house arrest for disobeying the Queen. The ambitious Northumberland had married the sister, Dorothy Devereux, because of the brother: a family connection with the fallen favorite now was politically unwise.

Forced to live on her own, Lady Northumberland rented a modest house in Putney, leaving the baby girls with their father. It was not that she did not love her daughters; she simply did not have the wherewithal to provide for them in a manner suitable to an earl's children. Because the land and goods she had brought into the marriage had automatically become her husband's property, she was left with a very small allowance. Nevertheless, several months later when she heard that her daughters were not thriving, she insisted that they live with her. Perhaps Lucy was rejecting the wet nurse's milk, or perhaps the two-year-old was pining away. Lord Northumberland allowed the girls to go to their mother but provided no increase in her allowance to care for them.

In December 1601, Lady Northumberland returned to her husband. Again, the fate of her brother may have determined her own. Essex had recently been beheaded for an abortive insurrection against the Queen. Without a powerful male relative, Lady Northumberland took the most prudent course for her little girls. The resumption of their parents' stormy marriage produced two brothers: Algernon in 1602 and Henry, called Harry, in 1604.

Two years after Lady Northumberland went home, Queen Elizabeth died in her seventieth year. It had been a pathetic death. Word seeped out of the palace of Her Majesty sitting on a pile of cushions on the floor, unable to sleep and eating nothing, her finger in her mouth like a child.3 At last, she allowed the doctors to carry her to bed, where on March 23, 1603, she passed away.

She had reigned for almost forty-five years and few could remember an England without her. She had remained unmarried, to be, in her own words, "king as well as queen" of her realm. A very visible monarch, while on progress (as royal visits to the country homes of the nobility were called) she would stop at hamlets and villages to show herself in all her glory to her subjects, dazzling them with her jewel-bedecked gowns and winning their hearts with flattering speeches. Everywhere the Virgin Queen went, she was greeted with aves as if she were the Virgin herself.

Elizabeth was a true daughter of the formidable Henry VIII. Along with his red hair she had inherited his domineering personality and his charisma. Her father had broken with Rome and declared himself head of the Church of England for no other reason than that he had lusted after her mother, Anne Boleyn, and the Pope would not grant him a divorce from his Spanish queen, Catherine of Aragon. After the short reign of the sickly boy king Edward VI, Roman Catholicism had enjoyed a brief revival under Catherine's daughter Mary, known to history as Bloody Mary for the hundreds of Protestants she burned for heresy. When Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558, she completed her father's reformation, establishing the Anglican Church and effectively outlawing Catholicism.

But the Old Faith died hard in England. These were the days of the "priest's holes," where the Catholic nobility hid their chaplains. Indeed, during her reign, Elizabeth had to put down a Catholic rebellion (led by the seventh Earl of Northumberland) and an assassination plot, both of which were aimed at replacing her with her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots. Having fled from her hostile barons in Scotland to save her life, Mary Stuart lived as a prisoner in England. Ultimately, Elizabeth had to execute this royal troublemaker.

Almost as troublesome to Elizabeth as the Anglo-Catholics were the Puritans who wanted to import the strict Protestantism that John Calvin had introduced in Geneva. Calvinists wanted no bishops, no ritual or music in church, sermons by a lay preacher rather than the parson, and a Sabbath without festivals or saints' days. Elizabeth, who favored moderation in religion, regarded the Puritans as zealots. Anglicanism, as she conceived it, was a broad, shallow faith that could encompass all Englishmen.

Court Lady and Country Wife
Two Noble Sisters in Seventeenth-Century England. Copyright © by Lita-Rose Betcherman. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

---

Excerpted from Court Lady and Country Wife: Two Noble Sisters in Seventeenth Century England by Lita-Rose Betcherman
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.