Individual Details
(Dec 1559 - 24 Mar 1618)
Sir George Throckmorton and the odious Rich - whose convictions were as Catholic as Sir George's - turned King's evidence against Cromwell......... ............from the racking she (Anne Askew) had endured in the Tower at the hands of Wriothesley and Rich, both Catholics. Throckmorton's duty was with Lord Darcy, Lord Rich and George Hopton........to escort the Palatine Count Laski into London. ........the young Earl of Essex and his sister Penelope, Lady Rich, the "Stella" celebrated in Sidney's Sonnets and by so many poets. Lady Rich was an Essex neighbor at Leez priory near Chelmsford. This desirable monastic residence had been annexed and reconstructed by the first Lord Rich, most detestable of all the Henricians active in the Dissolution. He lent himself to the ruin of most of the leading figures of that black time, Cromwell, Somerset, Northumberland, but he was especially concerned in tricking and trapping the Catholics, Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More. Such convictions as Lord Rich possessed were Catholic; he amassed a very large fortune out of his activities, and made a pious death. His son was a Protestant and more respectable. So was his grandson, Penelope's husband; but it is hardly surprising that no-one loved the Riches, least of all the Lady Rich, who could not abide her spouse. Everyone sympathised. She had been forced into the marriage. She had been intended for Philip Sidney, but, left an orphan by the death of her father, the first Earl of Essex, in Ireland, she was married off by her guardian, the Puritan Earl of Huntingdon, to young Lord Rich. (From being Catholics the Riches became Puritans.) Leez: one can still see from what remains of it what a splendid,characteristic Tudor structure it must have been. The first lord turned the nave of the monastic church into his great hall, the chapter house into his domestic chapel. The keep-like inner gate-house of red brick,with lofty turrets and fantastic chimneys, remains; so does the outer gate-house with a lower rang e of buildings on either side. (Sir Walter Ralegh, His Family and Private Life, by A. Rowse, 1962)
Events
| Birth | Dec 1559 | Warwick, Nottinghamshire, England | | | |
| Marriage | 10 Jan 1581 | London, Middlesex, England - Lady Penelope DEVEREUX Countess of Devonshire | | | |
| Death | 24 Mar 1618 | Snarford, Lincolnshire, England | | | |
| Burial | 28 Mar 1618 | Felsted, Essex, England | | | |
| Occupation | | Earl of Warwick | | | |
| Title (Nobility) | | 3d Baron Rich | | | |
Families