Penelope Rich was an English court office holder. She served as lady-in-waiting to the queen consort of England, Anne of Denmark.
Background
Penelope Rich was born c. 1562 at Chartley Castle, Staffordshire, England. She was the daughter of Walter Devereux, 16t Earl of Essex and Lettice Knollys.
She was a child of fourteen when Sir Philip Sidney accompanied the queen on a visit to Lady Essex in 1576, on her way from Kenilworth, and must have been frequently thrown into the society of Sidney, in consequence of the many ties between the two families. Essex died at Dublin in September 1576. He had sent a message to Philip Sidney from his death-bed expressing his desire that he should marry his daughter, and later his secretary wrote to the young man's father, Sir Henry Sidney, in words which seem to point to the existence of a very definite understanding. Penelope's great-grandmother was a sister of Anne Boleyn, and she and her brother Robert were therefore distantly connected with Elizabeth.
Career
Penelope Rich was considered one of the beauties of Elizabeth's court. She was golden-haired with dark eyes, a gifted singer and dancer, fluent in French, Italian, and Spanish.
Penelope is traditionally thought to have inspired Philip Sidney's sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella (sometimes spelled Astrophil and Stella). Likely composed in the 1580s, it is the first of the famous English sonnet sequences, and contains 108 sonnets and 11 songs. Many of the poems were circulated in manuscript form before the first edition was printed by Thomas Newman in 1591, five years after Sidney's death. They were set by the French lutenist Charles Tessier and published in London in 1597.
Whether Sidney fell passionately in love with Penelope in the years between her arrival at court in 1581 and his own marriage in 1583, or whether the "Stella" sonnets were courtly amusements reflecting fashionable poetic conceits may never be known.
Sidney died of wounds received at the Battle of Zutphen in 1586. In 1590, Penelope's brother Essex married Sidney's widow Frances, daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham, and Lady Rich was much cultivated by poets and musicians during her brother's ascendancy at court in the 1590s. Poet Richard Barnfield dedicated The Affectionate Shepherd, his first work, which was published anonymously in November 1594, to Penelope Rich. Bartholomew Yong dedicated his translation of Jorge de Montemayor's Diana (1598) to her; and sonnets are addressed to her by John Davies of Hereford and (to her portrait by Nicholas Hilliard) by Henry Constable.
The queen's miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard is known to have painted two miniatures of Lady Rich, in 1589 and 1590 respectively. One was given to James VI of Scotland (later James I of England) and the other to the French ambassador. A miniature in the Royal Collection (above) may be one of these. Charles Tessier dedicated his book of part-songs in French and Italian, Le premier livre de chansons, to "Madame Riche", commending (in Italian) her musical judgement, and John Dowland composed "My Lady Rich's Galliard" in her honour.
Achievements
Connections
Her relative and guardian, Henry Hastings, earl of Huntingdon, secured Burghley's assent in March 1581 for her marriage with Robert Rich, 3rd Baron Rich. Penelope is said to have protested in vain against the alliance with Rich, who is represented as a rough and overbearing husband. The evidence against him is, however, chiefly derived from sources as interested as Sir Philip Sidney's violent denunciation in the twenty-fourth sonnet of Astrophel and Stella, " Rich fooles there be whose base and filthy hart. " Sidney's serious love for Penelope appears to date from her marriage with Rich.
Lady Rich was the mother of six children.
Penelope's marriage to Rich was unhappy, and by 1595 she had begun a secret affair with Charles Blount, Baron Mountjoy. Lord Rich took no action during the lifetime of Penelope's brother, the powerful Earl of Essex, who became the aging Queen's favourite in the years after the death of Leicester in 1588.
But Penelope was tainted by association with her brother's plotting. Essex shocked many people, after the failure of the Earl of Essex Rebellion, by denouncing her as a traitor, and after his execution for treason in 1601, Lord Rich had Penelope and her children by Mountjoy cast out. Mountjoy, like Penelope, had been implicated in the Essex rebellion, but the Queen, who wished to show as much clemency as possible to the rebels, took no action against either of them. Lady Rich moved in with her lover, and the couple began a very public relationship. Mountjoy was created Earl of Devonshire on the accession of James I, and Lady Rich was in high favour at court, . She was among the ladies who escorted Anne of Denmark on her entry to London in 1603 and served Anne as a Lady of the Bedchamber. She danced as the nymph Ocyte in Ben Jonson's Masque of Blackness on Twelfth Night 1605.
In 1605, Rich sued for a divorce, and Penelope wanted to marry Blount and legitimise their children. In the divorce proceedings, she publicly admitted to adultery. The divorce was granted, but the requests to remarry and legitimise her children were refused. She married Blount in a private ceremony conducted by his chaplain, William Laud, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, on 26 December 1605 at Wanstead House in London. This proceeding, carried out in defiance of canon law, was followed by the disgrace of both parties, who were banished from court by King James. The couple continued to live together as husband and wife with their children until his death a few months later. Blount died on 3 April 1606 and Penelope on 7 July 1607.