Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick, and the Gift of Tears

Abstract

The sermon Anthony Walker expanded into the life of Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick, eulogizes 'the most Illustrious Pattern of Sincere Piety, and Solid Goodness this Age hath produced'.1 His effusive praise of 'our noble Mary' is not simply the conventional hyperbole of seventeenth-century commemorations. Walker had known the countess for thirty years, first as the household chaplain of her father-in-law and then as a spiritual advisor and close friend. Both he and Anne Woodrooffe, another valued friend of Rich, attest to the pious life she lived as the wife and dowager widow of the fourth Earl of Warwick, Charles Rich; each also stresses the fervent weeping so dominant in the 1300 manuscript folios of the diary she began in 1666 and continued writing until her death in April 1678. Walker recalls that while she prayed 'sighs and groans would eccho from her Closet at good distance' and that on other occasions tears would flow from her eyes 'more fluid than the springs of Pisgah'.2 While she appeared to others dry-eyed in 'tear-moving circumstances' that affected her personally, Walker and Woodrooffe testify that the countess was determined to shed tears only for her sins.3 The entries in the diary, however, reveal that sins were not the only cause of the copious tears that flowed often twice, even three times a day. Although linked with piety, the tears are emblematic of her worldly and spiritual sorrows. Where other contemporaries noted in their daily lives divine deliverances from adversity,4 in the spiritual ledger that is her diary, tears are not simply a measure of affliction; they are ultimately an accounting of God's beneficence and a testimony of her faith. Hers is a distinctive yet paradoxically traditional religious sensibility that merits appreciation in the contexts not only of her life but also of seventeenth-century teachings about repentance and godly sorrow.Mary Rich's life was not a reclusive one of simple piety. The daughter of the first Earl of Cork, Richard Boyle, and the mother of two children, both of whom predeceased her, she came from an English family of some prominence in Ireland and married into a more established family in Essex.5 For the first sixteen years of their marriage in 1641, the Riches often lived in the household of her father-in-law, Robert Rich, second Earl of Warwick, who welcomed a number of religious ministers to his Essex estate in Leighs and supported the parliamentarian position in the civil war. Both he and Mary Rich's brother Roger Boyle, Baron Broghill, served the interregnum government, though their relationships with Oliver Cromwell did not later compromise her position in the Restoration. Rich knew Anne Hyde, the Duchess of York, quite well; entertained Anne's father, Lord Chancellor Edward Hyde; and dined at Clarendon House with him as well as at Whitehall with the Lord Chamberlain, Edward Montagu. She also appeared at court where she was on familiar terms with Queen Katherine.6 Closer bonds existed throughout Rich's adult life with her sister Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh, and her brother Robert Boyle. Lady Ranelagh was among the foremost women intellectuals, and Robert was an eminent natural philosopher who dedicated two of his works to his older sister Mary and may have influenced her writing of the numerous occasional meditations that survive in a manuscript quarto.7 The appearance of her name in the prefaces of other books and the entries in her diary further indicate her association in Essex and in London especially with a number of religious figures, including prelates in the Established Church, latitudinarian divines, and nonconformist ministers. The books that Rich notes in the diary, the sermons that she summarizes, and the company of clergy and religious she mentions create some sense of a serious, devout woman who found the time for long periods of morning and evening mediation amidst her many family, domestic, and social responsibilities. An inseparable part of her religious life are the tears sanctioned by well-established tradition. …