Russell, Lucy, Countess of Bedford

Abstract

Lucy Russell (née Harington) (1581–1627), Countess of Bedford, daughter of John Harington, 1st Baron Harington of Exton (1539/40–1613) and Anne Keilway (c. 1554–1620), was Queen Anna of Denmark’s First Lady of the Bedchamber from 1604 to 1619 and one of the most powerful courtiers of the Jacobean period. While her husband shunned public life, she wielded cultural and political influence through literary patronage of male authors including Ben Jonson and John Donne, the masques put on by Queen Anna’s court, and her frank correspondence with both her former lady-in-waiting and close friend Lady Jane Cornwallis Bacon (1581–1659) and collector and diplomat Sir Dudley Carleton (1573–1632). Her interests included garden design and collecting visual art, coins, and medals. She also wrote poetry and shared at least one elegy with Donne, in effect agreeing to its scribal publication. The fact that she worked hard to restrict the circulation of her verses, however, perhaps explains why only one of her poems survives, and that with but eight manuscript witnesses.