TUDOR AND S TUART PORTRAITS
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English School circa 1600
Frances Howard, dowager Countess of Kildare (c.1572 – 1628), later Baroness Cobham Oil on canvas: 80 x 44 ⅝in. (203.2 x 113.3 cm.) Painted circa 1600 – 1601 Provenance By descent through her niece Catherine Southwell (d.1657), daughter of Elizabeth Southwell (no.8), who married in 1618 Sir Greville Verney, 7th Baron Willoughby de Broke (c.1586 – 1642), of Compton Verney, Warwickshire, and by thence descent to Sir Richard Greville, 19th Baron Willoughby de Broke (1869 – 1923), of Compton Verney, Warwickshire; Sotheby’s London, 27 June 1921, lot 67, as ‘Marcus Gheeraerdts, the Younger’; bt. by Leggatt Bros., London, from whom acquired by Harold Pearson, 2nd Viscount Cowdray (1888 – 1933); thence by descent to Michael Pearson, 4th Viscount Cowdray (b.1944), Cowdray Park, Sussex. Literature R. Strong, ‘Forgotten Age of English Paintings, Portraits at Cowdray and Parham, Sussex’, Country Life Annual, 1966, p. 46. C. Anson, A Catalogue of Pictures and Drawings in the Collection of The Viscount Cowdray, London, 1971, p.10, no.30, pl.4, as ‘Marcus Gheeraerts’. Exhibited Vienna, Galerie of the Succession, Exhibition of British Art, September-October 1937, as ‘Gheeraerts’ (lent by Viscountess Cowdray).
O
ne of the most ravishingly beautiful of all late Elizabethan full-lengths and steeped in romantic symbolism, this portrait has survived in an almost pristine state of preservation. Once thought to represent Catherine Carey, Countess of Nottingham (no.7), research reveals the portrait is almost certainly Catherine’s second daughter, Frances Howard (c.1572 – 1628). It was painted around 1601 at the time of her betrothal or marriage to her second husband, Henry Brooke, 11th Baron Cobham (1564 – 1628), some time after the death of her first husband, Henry Fitzgerald, 12th Earl of Kildare (1562 – 1597). In the 1921 Willoughby de Broke sale at Sotheby’s, the sitter was incorrectly identified as her mother, Catherine Carey. Roy Strong was the first to suggest in his 1966 article ‘The Forgotten Age of English Paintings’ (op. cit.), that it might alternatively be one of the Countess’s daughters.
1. See D. McKeen, A memory of honour: the life of William Brooke, Lord Cobham, 1986, vol.2, p.435.
Frances’s first husband Henry Fitzgerald, 12th Earl of Kildare was known for his military prowess as ‘Henry na Tuagh’ (‘Henry of the Battleaxes’). He fought against the Spanish invaders in Ireland in 1588, the year before his marriage to Frances. However, he was mortally wounded in July 1597 aged only thirty-five, at a skirmish on the Blackwater to quell the Earl of Tyrone’s uprising in Ulster. Frances’s second husband, Henry Brooke, was very much a favourite of the Queen and in 1599 had just been nominated a knight of the Garter. In the year of the couple’s betrothal and presumably the year of this portrait, Cobham sumptuously entertained Elizabeth I at his London house in Blackfriars, and it was not long after, in May 1601, that they were married. The Queen’s delight in the couple was much to the chagrin of Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, who coveted Cobham’s position as lord warden of the Cinque Ports, an office he had inherited from his father. Famously Essex called Cobham ‘Sir John Falstaff’, in other words, little better than a court jester, and thought him a ‘sycophant’.1 Frances was likewise much favoured by the Queen, both for her marriage to Cobham, but also as kin – her mother, Catherine Carey, being Elizabeth’s cousin. Her status at court was such that at the Queen’s death, Frances was one of the two noblewomen appointed to lead a delegation sent to meet Anne of Denmark on her journey down from Scotland. Frances’s relationship with Cobham became strained following the death of the Queen. For whilst initially her husband had been instrumental in the privy council’s deliberations to proclaim James VI of Scotland King of England, he was implicated in the so-called Bye Plot to kidnap King James I. With his younger brother, George Brooke (1568 – 1603), as the principal participant, this conspiracy had the aim of securing guarantees from the King for the toleration of Catholics in England. Despite his professed innocence, Cobham was sent to the Tower of London, forfeiting his titles and estates. Though he continued to deny any involvement in treason, Cobham was held in the Tower until 1617,
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