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| Keywords: people Spencer [née Sidney], Dorothy, countess of Sunderland [known as Sacharissa] (1617–1684), subject of poetry, was born early in October 1617 at Syon House, the London seat of her grandfather Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland (1564–1632), and baptized in the nearby village of Isleworth on 5 October 1617. She was the eldest of thirteen children of Robert Sidney, second earl of Leicester (1595–1677), and Dorothy Percy (1598–1659). Her brothers included Philip Sidney, third earl of Leicester (1619–1698), the republican Algernon Sidney (1623–1683), and, her favourite brother, Henry Sidney, earl of Romney (1641–1704). Dorothy Sidney spent her youth in the beautiful and peaceful surroundings of Penshurst, the family estate in Kent, eloquently praised in Jonson's ‘To Penshurst’ as representing a harmonious ideal of natural abundance and social order. During her early years, until her paternal grandfather's death in 1626, Dorothy and her mother resided at Penshurst while her father spent much of his time on military service in the Netherlands. When her father succeeded to the earldom he inherited the estate, and his wife, now countess of Leicester, continued to reside there, occasionally complaining about the ‘solitariness’ of ‘this lonely life’ in the country (Cartwright, 42). Several letters from the countess to her husband, absent on ambassadorial duties in France between 1636 and 1639, discuss the relative merits of possible suitors for Dorothy's hand. Although in October 1636 she anxiously writes, ‘it greeves me ofne to see that our poore Doll is sought by none, and that shee will shortly be called a staile maide’, she was soon actively engaged in negotiations with the families of two young noblemen, Lord Lovelace and Lord Devonshire, after conceding that a third, Lord Russell, about whom she had had ‘some hopes’, was ‘disposed on’ elsewhere (De L'Isle and Dudley MSS, 60–61, 68, 92). Lord Lovelace, who had the advantage of an estate of £6000 a year and a mother ‘who is rich, and loves him very much’ but the disadvantages of a ‘breeding’ which ‘hath not been precisely of the best’, with a tendency to keep ‘extreame ill company’ and to ‘drink to distemper himself’, was put forward by Lady Leicester's brother Henry Percy. The proposed match foundered on Dorothy's dislike—‘she abhorred the man’—and his own ‘wildness’ and ‘idle’ nature, which made the countess ‘studie how to break off with him’ without giving offence (Cartwright, 58, 60–61). Lord Devonshire, the brother of Dorothy's close friend, Lady Anne Cavendish, the ‘Amoret’ of Waller's poems, was a more plausible candidate. But here Lord Devonshire's mother had other plans for her son: she and her emissaries, the countess complained, were ‘so full of desaite as it is inpossible to know what thaie meane by that they saie’, while her son, though ‘a verie honest man … has no will of his owne’ and ‘dairs not eat or drinke but as she apoints’ (De L'Isle and Dudley MSS, 101, 106). The earl of Holland, who professed to be acting in their interest, was secretly intriguing ‘in makeing a Mariage for an other’, a wealthy French heiress, and the countess concluded that ‘he is so weak, and so unfaithfull, as his Friendship is not worth the least Rushe’ (Collins, 2.472). The name of Edmund Waller does not appear in the countess of Leicester's list of eligible suitors. Aubrey claims that ‘he was passionately in love with Dorothea, the eldest daughter of the Earle of Leicester, who he haz eternized in his Poems’ and also that ‘the Earle loved him, and would have been contented that he should have had one of the youngest daughters’ (Brief Lives, 308), but there is no supporting evidence that he was considered seriously by the family as a possible husband for Dorothy or her sister Lucy. Waller's poems to and about ‘Sacharissa’ are characterized by courtly praise, in poems to be circulated among a coterie audience, rather than by burning, unrequited passion. Waller's poetic courtship of Sacharissa began in 1635, before the earl of Leicester's departure for France, when he wrote: That beam of beauty, which began To warm us so, when thou wert here. (Poems of Edmund Waller, 1.xxiv, 48, 57) These praises continued until 1638, during which time Waller was a regular visitor at Penshurst. As Johnson remarks, the sugary name Dorothy was given is somewhat inappropriate for one described consistently as haughty and remote, the ‘cruel fair’ of the Petrarchan tradition, ‘inviting fruit on too sublime a tree’, unmoved by her servants' protestations of love (Johnson, 1.253; Poems of Edmund Waller, 1.43, 52) . On 20 July 1639 Dorothy Sidney was married to Henry, Lord Spencer (bap. 1620, d. 1643) at Penshurst. Waller wrote a graceful letter of congratulation to Lucy Sidney: May she that always affected silence and retiredness, have the house filled with the noise and number of her children, and hereafter of her grandchildren, and then may she arrive at that great curse so much declined by fair ladies, old age; may she live to be very old, and yet seem young. (Poems of Edmund Waller, 1.xxix) In autumn 1639 Lord and Lady Spencer, with the countess of Leicester, joined the earl of Leicester in Paris, where two children were born in the next two years. Their daughter, Dorothy, born in 1640, married Sir George Savile, later the marquess of Halifax, in 1656. Their son Robert Spencer, later second earl of Sunderland (1641–1702), like his brother-in-law became an important statesman during the Restoration period. After the return of Lord and Lady Spencer to England in 1641, at which time they took up residence in Althorp, Northamptonshire, two more children were born: Penelope in 1642 and Harry in 1643. In June 1643 Lord Spencer was created earl of Sunderland, possibly as a consequence of a loan of £5000 to Charles I. At the outbreak of the civil war the Sidney family was bitterly divided. Dorothy's brothers Philip (Lord Lisle) and Algernon took up arms for the parliament, and the earl of Leicester, ‘suspected and distrusted of either side’, wrote gloomily from the king's camp, ‘we know not what we do, nor what we would have, unless it be our own destruction’ (Cartwright, 83–4). Sunderland served in the king's army as a volunteer, and, in spite of ‘having no command in the army, attended upon the King's person under the obligation of honour’ (Clarendon, 3.177). In a series of letters written to his wife in 1642 and 1643 he expresses a longing for peace and a deep suspicion of the queen's party and the king's advisers, but a loyalty to the royalist cause despite these reservations: ‘If there could be an expedient found, to save the punctilio of honour, I would not continue here an hour. The discontent that I, and many other honest men, receive daily, is beyond expression’ (Cartwright, 88–9). In September 1643 he was killed, at twenty-three, at the battle of Newbury, ‘having often charged the enemy before that fatall shott befell him’, and the news of his death caused the pregnant Lady Sunderland to fall ‘into a great passion of griefe’; ‘Doll thinkes of nothing but her great los[s]e’, her mother writes (De L'Isle and Dudley MSS, 434–5). Sunderland left legacies of £10,000 and £7000 to two of his children, and Lady Sunderland and her father were awarded joint wardship over her son Robert. For the next seven years the widowed Lady Sunderland and her children lived with her parents at Penshurst, where in March 1649 her youngest child, Harry Spencer, died at the age of five. After the execution of Charles I, two of the royal children, the duke of Gloucester and Princess Elizabeth, were placed under the care of the earl and countess of Leicester, and after Elizabeth's death in 1650 a diamond necklace and other keepsakes were bequeathed to Lady Sunderland and her mother as a token of the care the princess had received at Penshurst. In 1650 Lady Sunderland and her children left Penshurst, to live at Althorp, where she remained for most of the next twelve years managing her son's estate until he came of age in 1662. One contemporary account says that in the 1650s she provided sanctuary as well as maintenance at Althorp for ejected Anglican clergymen (Cartwright, 126). In 1652 she surprised a number of observers by marrying for a second time; her second husband was Robert Smythe (1613–1664×7) of Boundes, near Penshurst; he was later knighted. The earl of Leicester declined to attend the wedding, though other members of the family were present. Dorothy Osborne, teasing Sir William Temple about his long-standing admiration for Lady Sunderland, whose portrait he owned, remarked caustically: My Lady Sunderland is not to bee followed in her marrying fashion … Whoe would ere have dreamt hee should have had my Lady Sunderland, though hee bee a very fine Gentleman … I shall never forgive her one thing she sayed of him, which was that she marryed him out of Pitty … To speak truth 'twas convenient for neither of them … She has lost by it much of the repute she has gained, by keeping herself a widdow. It was then believed that Witt and discretion were to be Reconciled in her personne that have soe seldome bin perswaded to meet in any Body else: but wee are all Mortall. (Osborne, 52–4) The second marriage appears to have been happy, producing one child, Robert Smythe (1653–1695), who eventually inherited his father's estates at Boundes and Sutton-at-Hone. During her second marriage Lady Sunderland lived partly at Althorp and partly at Boundes, and after 1663 spent much of her time at Rufford, the seat of her son-in-law, the marquess of Halifax. She was widowed a second time in the mid-1660s. After the death of her daughter, Lady Halifax, in 1670, she assumed responsibility for the care of her daughter's four children until Halifax's second marriage two years later. She was always on close terms with Halifax, and twelve of her letters to him, all written in 1680, survive. She also remained friendly with ‘old Waller’. When she asked him in 1680 when he would write some more ‘beautiful verses’ to her, he replied, with unsentimental realism, ‘When, Madam, your Ladyship is as young and as handsome again’ (Poems of Edmund Waller, 1.lxvii). There are several reports of serious illnesses and injuries: an injured hand in 1666 and a dangerous attack of ague in 1679, about which Halifax reports she ‘hath been very ill, and is not yet out of danger’ (Savile Correspondence, 77). Lady Sunderland's letters of 1679–81 to Halifax and her brother Henry Sidney provide a detailed commentary on the politics of the Exclusion Bill crisis. Her own views were much closer to Halifax's than to those of her son the earl of Sunderland. In November 1680 she expressed disquiet that her son was in league with Shaftesbury and the whigs against Halifax (‘that is the thorn in my side’) . She despised Shaftesbury (‘this great value he puts on himself is more than anybody else does’) , had a low opinion of the duke of Monmouth, and disapproved of her brother Algernon's republican politics, though she remained on friendly terms with him. In writing to Halifax in July 1680 she expressed her hope that ‘the moderate, honest people’ would prevail, as against those ‘who have designs that can never be compassed, but by the whole nation being in a flame’ (Cartwright, 255, 281–2, 296). Lady Sunderland died in February 1684, three months after the execution of her brother Algernon, and was buried on 25 February 1684 in the chapel of the Spencers at Brington church, Northamptonshire. She left no will, but letters of administration were granted in March 1684 to a creditor, John Benn, rather than to her two surviving children, the earl of Sunderland and Robert Smythe. There are many portraits of Lady Sunderland, including four from 1639–40 by Van Dyck (at Petworth, Althorp, Chatsworth, and Penshurst), two later paintings by Lely and Riley, a miniature by Cooper, and engravings, after Van Dyck, by Lombart, Vertue, and others. Spencer [née Sidney], Dorothy, countess of Sunderland [known as Sacharissa] (1617–1684), subject of poetry, was born early in October 1617 at Syon House, the London seat of her grandfather Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland (1564–1632), and baptized in the nearby village of Isleworth on 5 October 1617. She was the eldest of thirteen children of Robert Sidney, second earl of Leicester (1595–1677), and Dorothy Percy (1598–1659). Her brothers included Philip Sidney, third earl of Leicester (1619–1698), the republican Algernon Sidney (1623–1683), and, her favourite brother, Henry Sidney, earl of Romney (1641–1704). Dorothy Sidney spent her youth in the beautiful and peaceful surroundings of Penshurst, the family estate in Kent, eloquently praised in Jonson's ‘To Penshurst’ as representing a harmonious ideal of natural abundance and social order. During her early years, until her paternal grandfather's death in 1626, Dorothy and her mother resided at Penshurst while her father spent much of his time on military service in the Netherlands. When her father succeeded to the earldom he inherited the estate, and his wife, now countess of Leicester, continued to reside there, occasionally complaining about the ‘solitariness’ of ‘this lonely life’ in the country (Cartwright, 42). Several letters from the countess to her husband, absent on ambassadorial duties in France between 1636 and 1639, discuss the relative merits of possible suitors for Dorothy's hand. Although in October 1636 she anxiously writes, ‘it greeves me ofne to see that our poore Doll is sought by none, and that shee will shortly be called a staile maide’, she was soon actively engaged in negotiations with the families of two young noblemen, Lord Lovelace and Lord Devonshire, after conceding that a third, Lord Russell, about whom she had had ‘some hopes’, was ‘disposed on’ elsewhere (De L'Isle and Dudley MSS, 60–61, 68, 92). Lord Lovelace, who had the advantage of an estate of £6000 a year and a mother ‘who is rich, and loves him very much’ but the disadvantages of a ‘breeding’ which ‘hath not been precisely of the best’, with a tendency to keep ‘extreame ill company’ and to ‘drink to distemper himself’, was put forward by Lady Leicester's brother Henry Percy. The proposed match foundered on Dorothy's dislike—‘she abhorred the man’—and his own ‘wildness’ and ‘idle’ nature, which made the countess ‘studie how to break off with him’ without giving offence (Cartwright, 58, 60–61). Lord Devonshire, the brother of Dorothy's close friend, Lady Anne Cavendish, the ‘Amoret’ of Waller's poems, was a more plausible candidate. But here Lord Devonshire's mother had other plans for her son: she and her emissaries, the countess complained, were ‘so full of desaite as it is inpossible to know what thaie meane by that they saie’, while her son, though ‘a verie honest man … has no will of his owne’ and ‘dairs not eat or drinke but as she apoints’ (De L'Isle and Dudley MSS, 101, 106). The earl of Holland, who professed to be acting in their interest, was secretly intriguing ‘in makeing a Mariage for an other’, a wealthy French heiress, and the countess concluded that ‘he is so weak, and so unfaithfull, as his Friendship is not worth the least Rushe’ (Collins, 2.472). The name of Edmund Waller does not appear in the countess of Leicester's list of eligible suitors. Aubrey claims that ‘he was passionately in love with Dorothea, the eldest daughter of the Earle of Leicester, who he haz eternized in his Poems’ and also that ‘the Earle loved him, and would have been contented that he should have had one of the youngest daughters’ (Brief Lives, 308), but there is no supporting evidence that he was considered seriously by the family as a possible husband for Dorothy or her sister Lucy. Waller's poems to and about ‘Sacharissa’ are characterized by courtly praise, in poems to be circulated among a coterie audience, rather than by burning, unrequited passion. Waller's poetic courtship of Sacharissa began in 1635, before the earl of Leicester's departure for France, when he wrote: That beam of beauty, which began To warm us so, when thou wert here. (Poems of Edmund Waller, 1.xxiv, 48, 57) These praises continued until 1638, during which time Waller was a regular visitor at Penshurst. As Johnson remarks, the sugary name Dorothy was given is somewhat inappropriate for one described consistently as haughty and remote, the ‘cruel fair’ of the Petrarchan tradition, ‘inviting fruit on too sublime a tree’, unmoved by her servants' protestations of love (Johnson, 1.253; Poems of Edmund Waller, 1.43, 52) . On 20 July 1639 Dorothy Sidney was married to Henry, Lord Spencer (bap. 1620, d. 1643) at Penshurst. Waller wrote a graceful letter of congratulation to Lucy Sidney: May she that always affected silence and retiredness, have the house filled with the noise and number of her children, and hereafter of her grandchildren, and then may she arrive at that great curse so much declined by fair ladies, old age; may she live to be very old, and yet seem young. (Poems of Edmund Waller, 1.xxix) In autumn 1639 Lord and Lady Spencer, with the countess of Leicester, joined the earl of Leicester in Paris, where two children were born in the next two years. Their daughter, Dorothy, born in 1640, married Sir George Savile, later the marquess of Halifax, in 1656. Their son Robert Spencer, later second earl of Sunderland (1641–1702), like his brother-in-law became an important statesman during the Restoration period. After the return of Lord and Lady Spencer to England in 1641, at which time they took up residence in Althorp, Northamptonshire, two more children were born: Penelope in 1642 and Harry in 1643. In June 1643 Lord Spencer was created earl of Sunderland, possibly as a consequence of a loan of £5000 to Charles I. At the outbreak of the civil war the Sidney family was bitterly divided. Dorothy's brothers Philip (Lord Lisle) and Algernon took up arms for the parliament, and the earl of Leicester, ‘suspected and distrusted of either side’, wrote gloomily from the king's camp, ‘we know not what we do, nor what we would have, unless it be our own destruction’ (Cartwright, 83–4). Sunderland served in the king's army as a volunteer, and, in spite of ‘having no command in the army, attended upon the King's person under the obligation of honour’ (Clarendon, 3.177). In a series of letters written to his wife in 1642 and 1643 he expresses a longing for peace and a deep suspicion of the queen's party and the king's advisers, but a loyalty to the royalist cause despite these reservations: ‘If there could be an expedient found, to save the punctilio of honour, I would not continue here an hour. The discontent that I, and many other honest men, receive daily, is beyond expression’ (Cartwright, 88–9). In September 1643 he was killed, at twenty-three, at the battle of Newbury, ‘having often charged the enemy before that fatall shott befell him’, and the news of his death caused the pregnant Lady Sunderland to fall ‘into a great passion of griefe’; ‘Doll thinkes of nothing but her great los[s]e’, her mother writes (De L'Isle and Dudley MSS, 434–5). Sunderland left legacies of £10,000 and £7000 to two of his children, and Lady Sunderland and her father were awarded joint wardship over her son Robert. For the next seven years the widowed Lady Sunderland and her children lived with her parents at Penshurst, where in March 1649 her youngest child, Harry Spencer, died at the age of five. After the execution of Charles I, two of the royal children, the duke of Gloucester and Princess Elizabeth, were placed under the care of the earl and countess of Leicester, and after Elizabeth's death in 1650 a diamond necklace and other keepsakes were bequeathed to Lady Sunderland and her mother as a token of the care the princess had received at Penshurst. In 1650 Lady Sunderland and her children left Penshurst, to live at Althorp, where she remained for most of the next twelve years managing her son's estate until he came of age in 1662. One contemporary account says that in the 1650s she provided sanctuary as well as maintenance at Althorp for ejected Anglican clergymen (Cartwright, 126). In 1652 she surprised a number of observers by marrying for a second time; her second husband was Robert Smythe (1613–1664×7) of Boundes, near Penshurst; he was later knighted. The earl of Leicester declined to attend the wedding, though other members of the family were present. Dorothy Osborne, teasing Sir William Temple about his long-standing admiration for Lady Sunderland, whose portrait he owned, remarked caustically: My Lady Sunderland is not to bee followed in her marrying fashion … Whoe would ere have dreamt hee should have had my Lady Sunderland, though hee bee a very fine Gentleman … I shall never forgive her one thing she sayed of him, which was that she marryed him out of Pitty … To speak truth 'twas convenient for neither of them … She has lost by it much of the repute she has gained, by keeping herself a widdow. It was then believed that Witt and discretion were to be Reconciled in her personne that have soe seldome bin perswaded to meet in any Body else: but wee are all Mortall. (Osborne, 52–4) The second marriage appears to have been happy, producing one child, Robert Smythe (1653–1695), who eventually inherited his father's estates at Boundes and Sutton-at-Hone. During her second marriage Lady Sunderland lived partly at Althorp and partly at Boundes, and after 1663 spent much of her time at Rufford, the seat of her son-in-law, the marquess of Halifax. She was widowed a second time in the mid-1660s. After the death of her daughter, Lady Halifax, in 1670, she assumed responsibility for the care of her daughter's four children until Halifax's second marriage two years later. She was always on close terms with Halifax, and twelve of her letters to him, all written in 1680, survive. She also remained friendly with ‘old Waller’. When she asked him in 1680 when he would write some more ‘beautiful verses’ to her, he replied, with unsentimental realism, ‘When, Madam, your Ladyship is as young and as handsome again’ (Poems of Edmund Waller, 1.lxvii). There are several reports of serious illnesses and injuries: an injured hand in 1666 and a dangerous attack of ague in 1679, about which Halifax reports she ‘hath been very ill, and is not yet out of danger’ (Savile Correspondence, 77). Lady Sunderland's letters of 1679–81 to Halifax and her brother Henry Sidney provide a detailed commentary on the politics of the Exclusion Bill crisis. Her own views were much closer to Halifax's than to those of her son the earl of Sunderland. In November 1680 she expressed disquiet that her son was in league with Shaftesbury and the whigs against Halifax (‘that is the thorn in my side’) . She despised Shaftesbury (‘this great value he puts on himself is more than anybody else does’) , had a low opinion of the duke of Monmouth, and disapproved of her brother Algernon's republican politics, though she remained on friendly terms with him. In writing to Halifax in July 1680 she expressed her hope that ‘the moderate, honest people’ would prevail, as against those ‘who have designs that can never be compassed, but by the whole nation being in a flame’ (Cartwright, 255, 281–2, 296). Lady Sunderland died in February 1684, three months after the execution of her brother Algernon, and was buried on 25 February 1684 in the chapel of the Spencers at Brington church, Northamptonshire. She left no will, but letters of administration were granted in March 1684 to a creditor, John Benn, rather than to her two surviving children, the earl of Sunderland and Robert Smythe. There are many portraits of Lady Sunderland, including four from 1639–40 by Van Dyck (at Petworth, Althorp, Chatsworth, and Penshurst), two later paintings by Lely and Riley, a miniature by Cooper, and engravings, after Van Dyck, by Lombart, Vertue, and others. | ||||
