Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford (1580 – 1627)

William Larkin, Lucy Harington Countess of Bedford, 1610, National Museum, Stockholm.

Lucy Harington married Edward Russell, 3rd Earl of Bedford, when she was 13 years old, and Queen Elizabeth was still on the throne. Ten years later she had become the First Lady of the Bedchamber to the new Queen Anne of Denmark,  and a dazzling favourite of the Court.  She was well-educated, being literate in French, Spanish and Italian, and like Anne, she became a great patron of the Arts.

As well as appearing in plays and masques (many of them presented by Queen Anne) she supported such literary figures as Ben Jonson, John Donne and Inigo Jones – not with money but with her influence at court which implicitly conveyed Royal favour. She was in fact, in great financial hardship, having acquired the debts of her father as well as those of her own marriage.  Nevertheless, works were dedicated to her in the hope that she would bestow her patronage, with lavish words such as ‘the first good Angell…that ever did in womans shape appear’ (Donne), and ‘Lucy, you brightness of our sphere, who are Life of the muses day, their morning star!’ (Jonson). She did not help everyone however, and a certain Italian refugee, Giacomo Castelvetro, who considered his work to be no less than ‘concerning the health and well-being of mankind’ dedicating it to ‘my most illustrious lady and patron, Lucy, Countess of Bedford’.  Sadly, it was ignored and probably unread, and he died two years later in poverty.

Lucy Russell was best known to us gardening enthusiasts  however, for her magnificent gardens. In 1608 she bought Twickenham Park from Francis Bacon and had them redesigned. Donne called it a ‘balm’ and a ‘True Paradise’. Then in 1617 she moved to Moor Park in Hertfordshire and employed the very fashionable Isaac de Caus to lay out terraces and build summerhouses and statues in the Renaissance style. 

But Lucy was also extremely interested in the plants in the garden, and was clearly a keen gardener, asking a friend around 1618 for ‘the little white single rose rootes I saw at Broome…for I am now very busy furnishing my gardens’.

The gardens were described later by Sir William Temple who had stayed at Moor Park when he was a young man.  His description of the gardens is one of the best surviving accounts of an aristocratic garden before the civil war which of course ended in the destruction of so many of them. He remembered it as 'the sweetest place, I think, that I have ever seen in my life, either before or since, at home or abroad'.

The garden consisted of three large terraces. The first at the top was ‘a quarter of all greens.....adorned with rough rock work and fountains’. The next was ‘divided into quarters by gravel walks and adorned with two fountains and eight statues' with summerhouses at each end, and cloisters and arches covered with climbing plants.  On the lowest terrace were 'all fruit trees ranged about the several quarters of a wilderness which is very shady. The walks here are all green, the grotto embellished with figures of shell-rock-work, fountains, and water-works.’

Regrettably, we only have the description of the gardens available to us as they were replaced first by Charles Bridgman and later, in 1752, by parkland designed by Capability Brown, but the words of Temple succeed in conveying the passion and drive of this remarkable woman who enjoyed the beauty of the Arts in all its forms.