| Nationality | Rich [née Boyle], Mary, countess of Warwick (1624–1678), noblewoman, was born, according to her father, on 11 November 1624 at Youghal, co. Cork, Ireland, the thirteenth of fifteen children of Richard Boyle, first earl of Cork (1566–1643), Irish landowner and politician, and his second wife, Catherine (c.1588–1630), only child of Sir Geoffrey Fenton, principal secretary of state for Ireland. At the age of three, Mary Boyle was sent to live in the household of Sir Randall Cleyton, her father's agent, on a farm near Cork. Having no children of her own, Lady Cleyton treated Mary like a daughter, taking 'great care to have me soburly educated' as Mary recalled (BL, Add. MS 27357, fol. 2v). With tutorial assistance from two gentlewomen and a Frenchwoman, Mary learned English and French, which facilitated her youthful addiction to plays and romances (she was reading Sidney's Arcadia at twelve). She also learned her catechism and Bible, and fancy needlework.
In 1638 Mary Boyle was presented with a marriage treaty her father had arranged. The prospective groom was James Hamilton, son and heir of Cork's friend Viscount Claneboye, with an estate of £8000 per annum. Although James professed a 'great passion' for Mary, she failed to return it: 'my aversion for him was exstrordnary' (BL, Add. MS 27357, fol. 3v). She defied the entire Boyle clan and refused the match. Presented subsequently with many advantageous offers, she rejected them all, having meanwhile fallen in love with Charles Rich (1616–1673), second son of the second earl of Warwick, whom she had met through the court connections of her sister-in-law Elizabeth Boyle (née Killigrew). Again in defiance of her father, Mary informed her family that, while she would not marry Charles without her father's consent, she refused to marry anyone else. Finally obtaining the earl of Cork's consent to the union and his agreement to a marriage portion of £7000 (which, in the event, he never finished paying), the couple stole away to be married privately. Instead of the grand London wedding Cork planned, the ceremony took place at Shepperton near Hampton Court on 21 July 1641, Mary having declared herself 'a great enemy allwayes to publicke maredge' (BL, Add. MS 27357, fol. 15v).
The couple began married life in the earl of Warwick's household at Leighs, Essex. Mary bore a daughter (Elizabeth) in 1642, and a son (Charles) in 1643. Worried that they might have too many children for their slender means (Charles remarked he 'feared he should have so many as wold undoe a younger brother'), and that frequent child bearing would spoil Mary's beauty, they stopped having children, though both parents were devoted to their son and daughter (BL, Add. MS 27357, fols. 33v–34). When Elizabeth died at fifteen months, Mary was very distressed, while Charles was 'pationately so … he being most exstrordnarely fond of hur' (BL, Add. MS 27357, fol. 18v). In 1647 the sudden illness of four-year-old Charles accelerated a conversion process that Mary had begun at Leighs, encouraged by the earl's household chaplain Anthony Walker. Before her marriage Mary had been hostile to religion, being 'stedfastly sett against being a Puritan' (BL, Add. MS 27357, fol. 23). Now, vowing she would become a 'new Creature' if her son were restored to health, she transformed herself into a paragon of piety, beginning an all-encompassing devotional routine to which she adhered for the rest of her life (BL, Add. MS 27357, fol. 19v).
After the successive deaths in 1658 and 1659 of Charles's father and elder brother, Charles succeeded as fourth earl of Warwick. The succession was an ironic turn of events: Charles was already disabled by the gout which was to kill him, and in 1664 young Charles, the couple's sole surviving child, died of smallpox. On hearing the news the earl 'cryed out so terably that his cry was herd a great way' (BL, Add. MS 27357, fol. 31v). But, as Anthony Walker recalled, the earl was even more concerned that the news would kill his wife, 'which was he said more to him than an hundred sons' (Walker, Eureka, 91). Mary confessed she loved her son so dearly she would willingly have died either 'for him, or with him' (BL, Add. MS 27357, fol. 31v). Yet aided by religious discipline, the countess survived to nurse her increasingly crippled and irascible husband until he succumbed to his illness on 24 August 1673. She also raised and married off her three nieces, the daughters of the third earl. Both before and after her husband's death, the countess was a revered leader in her local Essex community, settling disputes between neighbours, arranging an equitable distribution of income to ministers of various denominations, and giving away a third or more of her income to the poor, the clergy, and local institutions such as Felsted School. Although she led a quiet life at Leighs, Mary remained close to her siblings and other relations, especially her sister Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh, and her younger brother Robert Boyle, the natural philosopher, who had dedicated his Some Motives and Incentives to the Love of God (1659) to Mary in gratitude for her pious influence.
During the 1660s the countess embarked on various forms of spiritual and autobiographical writings. From about 1663 she wrote intermittent 'Occasional meditations' (BL, Add. MS 27356), using homely analogies from housewifery and other feminine concerns to draw godly morals. In July 1666 she began a diary (now BL, Add. MSS 27351–27355), in which she recorded her devotional routine and daily events until the end of her life, and in February 1672 she set down her autobiographical reminiscences, 'Some specialties in the life of M. Warwicke' (BL, Add. MS 27357).
The countess died at Leighs on 12 April 1678 and was buried in Felsted church on 30 April. The funeral sermon, with biographical reminiscences and selections from her 'Occasional meditations', was preached by the Revd Anthony Walker, and published in 1678 as Eureka, eureka. The virtuous woman found, her loss bewailed, and character examined in a sermon preached at Felsted in Essex, April 30, 1678, at the funeral of … Mary, countess dowager of Warwick, the most illustrious pattern of a sincere piety, and solid goodness his age hath produced. In addition to this lengthy public eulogy, there was a touching private tribute by her friend Elizabeth Walker in the latter's autobiographical memoirs:
April 12. 1678. It pleased God to take to himself the Most Excellent Lady, the Countess of Warwick. She was Eminent in Religion; a sound Christian in Knowledge and Practice; exceeding Charitable; did very much good; a very sincere and obliging Friend; very sweet in Disposition, and in Condescention to all; even to those much below her; she did excell both in Religion, and in all other commendable Vertues; she lived very desirable, and dyed much bewailed, as a deep Loss to her Relations, to the Neighbourhood, to the Church, and People of God, to all that knew her … to my Dear Husband … she was a most entire Friend, and to my self.
Walker, Holy Life, 128
By the time she died, the countess had attained almost legendary status as a pattern of the saintly life. After her death her writings, including her diaries and occasional meditations, were preserved and annotated by her household chaplain, Thomas Woodroffe, who transcribed exemplary passages under the title 'Collections out of my Lady Warwick's papers' (now BL, Add. MS 27351). Extracts from 1666 to 1672 taken from another transcript of the diaries in the possession of the Revd Nathaniel Woodroffe were published by the Religious Tract Society in 1847. The following year the countess's manuscript autobiographical memoir was edited by Thomas Crofton Croker for the Percy Society. Two biographies of the countess were published in 1901, by Charlotte Fell Smith and Mary E. Palgrave respectively. |