[3] Frances was the younger daughter of the judge and privy councillor Sir Edward Coke and his second wife Lady Elizabeth Hatton.

The match was an apparent bid by Sir Edward Coke to win back royal favour, following his dismissal as Lord Chief Justice and from the Privy Council.

Among her twenty commissioner-judges (only one of whom, Sir Charles Caesar, dissented from the judgment by excusing himself) was the poet John Donne, who was then Dean of St Paul's Cathedral.

[15] Eventually she returned to England, at the time of the English Civil War, where she died of illness during the second siege of Oxford in May 1645 at the age of 42.

[16]During her exile in Paris, Sir Kenelm Digby wrote of her: "I have not seen more prudence, sweetnesse, goodnesse, honor and bravery shewed by any woman that I know, than this unfortunate lady sheweth she hath a rich stock of.

"[17] Arthur Wilson, the early historian of the reign of King James I, wrote in 1653 that she was "a Lady of transcending beauty, but accused for wantonness".

The well-known British author Antonia Fraser devotes part of a chapter of her The Weaker Vessel (1984) to a modern summary of Frances' life.

A new biography by American historian Johanna Luthman, Love, Madness, and Scandal: The Life of Frances Coke Villiers, Viscountess Purbeck, was published by Oxford University Press in 2017.

van Mierevelt of Delft and dated 1623, is on view to the public as part of the guided stairway tour at Ashdown House, Oxfordshire, a National Trust property.