RICH, PENELOPE, LADY (c. 1562-1607), the Stella of Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella, was the daughter of Walter Devereux, ist Earl of Essex. She was a child of fourteen when Sir Philip Sidney accompanied the queen on a visit to Lady Essex in 1576, on her way from Kenilworth, and must have been frequently thrown into the society of Sidney, in consequence of the many ties between the two families. Essex died at Dublin in Sept. 1576. He had sent a message to Philip Sidney from his death-bed expressing his desire that he should marry his daughter, and later his secretary wrote to the young man's father, Sir Henry Sidney, in words which seem to point to the existence of a definite understanding. But her relative and guardian, Henry Hastings, earl of Huntingdon, secured Burghley's assent in March 1581 for her marriage with Robert Rich, 3rd Baron Rich. Penel ope is said to have protested in vain against the alliance with Rich, who is represented as a rough and overbearing husband. The evidence against him is, however, chiefly derived from sources as interested as Sir Philip Sidney's violent denunciation in the twenty-fourth sonnet of Astrophel and Stella, "Rich f ooles there be whose base and filthy hart." Sidney's serious love for
Penelope appears to date from her marriage with Rich. The eighth song of Astrophel and Stella narrates her refusal to accept him as a lover.
Lady Rich was the mother of six children by her husband when she contracted in 1595 an open liaison with Charles Blount, 8th Lord Mountjoy, to whom she had long been attached. Rich obtained a legal separation in 1601, and Mountjoy acknowledged her five children born after 1595. Mountjoy was created earl of Devonshire on the accession of James I., and Lady Rich was in high favour at court. In 1605 they legitimized their connection by a marriage celebrated by William Laud, the earl's chaplain. This proceeding, carried out in defiance of canon law, was f ol lowed by their banishment from court. Devonshire died on April 3, 16°6, and his wife within a year of that date.
See the editions of Astrophel and Stella by Dr. A. B. Grosart, E. Arber and A. W. Pollard; also the various lives of Sir Philip Sidney, and Mrs. Aubrey Richardson's Famous Ladies of the English Court (London, 1899). See also references under SIDNEY.