Mary Mildmay Fane, Countess of Westmorland

Mary Mildmay, or Mary Fane Countess of Westmorland (b. c.1582 - d. 9 April 1640) continued her mother Grace Mildmay's interest in physic and was a significant author of spiritual guidance and writer of letters.

Mary, Countess of Westmorland

Family background

Mary was the daughter and eventual sole heiress of Sir Anthony Mildmay (d. 1617), of Apethorpe Palace, Northamptonshire, and Grace Sherington (1552–1620), who was daughter and co-heir of Sir Henry Sherington (alias Sharington) (c. 1518-1581) of Lacock Abbey, Wiltshire. Mary built an imposing monument to her parents at Apethorpe Church in 1621, the sculpture attributed to Maximilian Colt. On 15 February 1598/99 Mary married Francis Fane, and he became the Earl of Westmorland.

Writing and Letters

Mary collated and transcribed her mother's medical works. Grace had dedicated her 'Spiritual Meditations' to Mary.[1] Mary wrote a 'Book of Advices to the Children' for her sons Francis and Mildmay.[2] She also wrote letters of advice to Francis.[3] Other letters include a group of business letters sent to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, four letters to her daughter Grace Fane, Countess of Home, and a number of letters of petition to Viscount Dorchester and others.[4]

On December 1635 she wrote to Secretary Windebank thanking him for royal letters sent in her favour to the Court of Session in Edinburgh and asking him to prevent the king taking the side of her adversary, the dowager Countess of Home, who was then in London. Westmorland explained that Home had the advantage of continual residence and acquaintance in Edinburgh. She asked him to keep her business secret.[5]

On 6 May 1639 Mary wrote a letter to Secretary Windebank advising against sending an army to Scotland in the first Bishop's War.[6] The letter has sometimes been attributed to her daughter-in-law, Mary Vere.[7] A later reader endorsed it as, "A very sencible and Prophetick letter". She wrote that the Scots were better prepared and better suited for war;

"The Scots have many spies which flock about the King; and they cannot but know how the state of this kingdom stands, and be encouraged, knowing how uncertainly a war will be maintained, which is to be maintained out of prerogative, imposition, and voluntary contributions. They know our divisions, and the state of their own combination; and that they have a party amongst us, and that we have none amongst them, and they are a people that can live of nothing, and we, that can want nothing without discontentment and mutiny, and our men and horses so unused to war, that if his majesty attempt any thing before they be better exercised, the dishonour is likely to be increased ... "[8]

Writing to her daughter Rachel Fane on 9 January 1640, Mary, now dowager countess, called herself an old hen, her daughter Katherine a chick, and praised Mary Vere; "the olde hen left at home, with her best chick, my daughter of Westmorland hath proved a good Christmas woman & has made on, & allowed of much mirth".[9]

Mary died at Stevenage on 9 April 1640 and was buried at Apethorpe.[10]

Family and Children

Mary and Francis had seven sons and six daughters:[11]

Sons
  1. Mildmay Fane, 2nd Earl of Westmorland (24 January 1602 – 12 February 1666), a poet and Member of Parliament.
  2. Thomas Fane, died in infancy
  3. Sir Francis Fane (c. 1611–1681?) of Fulbeck, third but second surviving son. He was a Royalist governor of Doncaster, and afterwards of Lincoln Castle. He was the great-grandfather of Thomas Fane, 8th Earl of Westmorland.
  4. Anthony Fane (1613–1643), a colonel in the Parliamentary army, who suffered a shot wound to the cheek at the siege of Farnham Castle on 9 December 1642 and died at his home in Kingston upon Thames early the following year.[12]
  5. Col. George Fane (c. 1616 – April 1663), fifth but fourth surviving son. A Royalist officer and later Member of Parliament.
  6. William Fane
  7. Robert Fane

Daughters
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References
  1. Linda Pollok, With Faith and Physic, (London, 1993), pp. 11-2, 15-8, 70.
  2. Femke Molekamp, Women and the Bible in Early Modern England, (Oxford, 2013), 94-98
  3. Susan E. Hrach, "Maternal Admonition as Devotional Practice: Letters of Mary Fane, Countess of Westmorland", ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles Notes and Reviews, 24 (2011), pp. 63-74.
  4. Notes & Queries 4th S II (11 July 1868), pp. 25-8: Calendar State Papers Domestic: Charles I: NRAS 217.
  5. Calendar State Papers Domestic, Charles I: 1635, vol. 8, p. 610: TNA SP14/305 f.210.
  6. Conrad Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies, 1537-1642, (Oxford, 1991), 81
  7. Jacqueline Eales, 'Anne and Thomas Fairfax, and the Vere connection' in Andrew Hopper & Philip Major, England's Fortress: New Perspectives on Thomas, 3rd Lord Fairfax, (Farnham, 2014), 161 (attributes the letter to Mary Vere).
  8. Philip Yorke, Miscellaneous State papers from 1501 to 1726, (London, 1778), pp. 128-130: W. Douglas Hamilton, Calendar State Papers Domestic, Charles I, 1639 (London, 1873), pp. 123-4: Gerald W. Morton in Helen Ostovich, Elizabeth Sauer, Melissa Smith, Reading Early Modern Women: An Anthology of Texts in Manuscript and Print (Routledge, 2004), pp. 191-4: TNA SP16/420 f202: Spelling modernised here.
  9. Marion O'Connor, 'Rachel Fane's May Masque at Apethorpe, 1627', English Literary Renaissance, vol. 36, No. 1 (Winter 2006), pp. 90-113, 97-8.
  10. Herald's funeral certificates The National Archives TNA SP16/360/10.
  11. Collins 1812, pp. 294,295
  12. Brayley, Edward Wedlake (1844). The History of Surrey. 3, Part 1. R.B. Ede. p. 34.
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