Elizabeth Wilmot, Countess of Rochester

John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester became infatuated with Elizabeth Malet and asked for her hand in marriage.

In his diaries, Samuel Pepys describes Elizabeth Malet as the "great beauty and fortune of the North" and notes the scandal of her kidnapping by Rochester:

Here, upon my telling her a story of my Lord Rochester’s running away on Friday night last with Mrs. Mallett, the great beauty and fortune of the North, who had supped at White Hall with Mrs. Stewart, and was going home to her lodgings with her grandfather, my Lord Haly, by coach; and was at Charing Cross seized on by both horse and foot men, and forcibly taken from him, and put into a coach with six horses, and two women provided to receive her, and carried away.

After the couple married, Rochester spent much of his time in London, where he engaged in public affairs, most famously with the actress Elizabeth Barry.

The manuscript, now held by the University of Nottingham, includes songs and a fragment of a pastoral attributed to Elizabeth Wilmot, some of which has been anthologized in Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women's Verse.