Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick

[1] She was born in 1625 in Youghal, County Cork, and after her mother's death in 1628, was raised by her relatives Sir Richard and Lady Clayton in Mallow, before becoming a maid of honour to Queen Henrietta Maria.

[6] Two years later, having been banished from her father's house to another abode near Hampton Court, she made a secret love marriage with Charles Rich, 4th Earl of Warwick, who was then a penniless younger son with no financial prospects, who had frequently visited her when she was recovering from an attack of measles.

In one of her diary entries, she noted that her heart was "gratefully affected for God's good and strange providence in raising my family, by my father, from a mean and low beginning, to be one of the greatest men of fortune in Ireland.

Her diaries record her religious fervour; they also reflect her increasingly bitter quarrels with her husband, whose character was ruined by twenty years of chronic pain from gout and by the tragic deaths of their son and daughter.

Viewed as a human document only, it is equally interesting, as it affords an insight into the mind of a woman of a type foreign to that we are accustomed to connecting with the decadent years of the later Stuarts.

Rich in domestic detail, vivid analogies, and homely comparisons, these are a memorable expression of a deeply religious woman, who achieved a distinctive sense of self as she strove to make her life one with God.

There's not a day of wedded life, if we Count at its close the little, bitter sum Of thoughts and words and looks unkind and froward, Silence that chides, and woundings of the eye, But prostrate at each other's feet we should