Born during the reign of Elizabeth I, Lucy and Dorothy Percy came to prominence at the court of Charles I. Lucy, the Countess of Carlisle, dominated the royal scene. Her beauty was immortalized in magnificent Van Dyck portraits, her political skills attracted many famous lovers, and her talent as a gossip ensured her inclusion in the queen's inner circle-;until civil war and its machinations led to her imprisonment in the Tower of London. Her sister, Dorothy, Countess of Leicester-;wife of a diplomat and an ancestor of Princess Diana-;managed the family estates and raised twelve surviving children. Though brilliant, with a keen eye and special purview of European politics, she had a reputation as a shrewish wife and, when her husband rebelled after thirty-five years of marriage, it caused a public scandal. Viewing a tempestuous era through the exceptional lives of Lucy and Dorothy Percy, Lita-Rose Betcherman's Court Lady and Country Wife offers a perfect window into a remarkable world.

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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.

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