LADY PENELOPE RICH, née Penelope Devereux, the Stella of Sir Philip Sidney's
Astrophel and Stella, was the daughter of Walter Devereux,
1st Earl of Essex. She was a child of fourteen when Sir Philip Sidney accompanied Queen Elizabeth
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. Perhaps
the marriage of Lettice Knollys, Lady Essex, with the Earl of Leicester, which destroyed
Sidney's prospects as his uncle's heir, had something to do with the breaking off of the proposed match with Penelope.
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. The earlier sonnets are in praise of her beauty, or treat of the
conventional topic of the struggle between reason and love, while the later ones are marked by unmistakable passion.
The eighth song of Astrophel and Stella narrates Stella's refusal to accept Sidney as a lover.
Lady Rich was the mother of six children by her husband when she contracted in 1595 an open liaison with Charles Blount, 8th Lord Mountjoy, a brilliant
courtier and favourite of Elizabeth, to whom she had long been attached. Rich took no steps against his wife during her brother's lifetime, and she nursed
him through an illness in 1600, but they obtained a legal separation in 1601, and Mountjoy acknowledged her five children born after 1595. Mountjoy was
created Earl of Devonshire on the accession of James I, and Lady Rich was in high favour at court.
In 1605, however, they legitimized their connexion by a marriage celebrated by William Laud,
the Earl's chaplain. This proceeding, carried out in defiance of canon law, was followed by the disgrace of both parties, who were banished from court.
Devonshire died on the 3rd of April 1606, and his wife within a year of that date. Her eldest son by Lord Rich, who became Earl of Warwick in 1618, was
Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick (1587-1658). The second, Henry Rich, Earl of Holland, was beheaded in 1649 for his share in the second Civil War. Her
eldest son by Mountjoy, Mountjoy Blount, Baron Mountjoy and Earl of Newport (c.1597-1665) also figured in the Civil War.
Excerpted from:
Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th Ed. Vol XXIII.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910. 293.
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