Mary, Countess Cowper (1685 – February 5, 1724) was an English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 courtier and diarist, and the wife of William Cowper, 1st Earl Cowper

William Cowper, 1st Earl Cowper

William Cowper, 1st Earl Cowper PC KC FRS was an English politician who became the first Lord Chancellor of Great Britain. Cowper was the son of Sir William Cowper, 2nd Baronet, of Ratling Court, Kent, a Whig member of parliament of some mark in the two last Stuart reigns...

.

Biography

In 1706, September, William Cowper secretly married the beautiful 20 year old Mary, daughter of John Clevage, of Chopwell, Durham after his first wife died in 1705. In November of the same year he succeeded to his father's baronet

Baronet

A baronet or the rare female equivalent, a baronetess , is the holder of a hereditary baronetcy awarded by the British Crown...

cy and in December he was raised to the peerage

Peerage

The Peerage is a legal system of largely hereditary titles in the United Kingdom, which constitute the ranks of British nobility and is part of the British honours system...

 as Baron Cowper of Wingham, Kent.

In May 1707 Queen Anne

Anne of Great Britain

Anne ascended the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland on 8 March 1702. On 1 May 1707, under the Act of Union, two of her realms, England and Scotland, were united as a single sovereign state, the Kingdom of Great Britain.Anne's Catholic father, James II and VII, was deposed during the...

 in Council named William Cowper the first Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain and he was later appointed one of the Lords Justices responsible for governing the country until George I

George I of Great Britain

George I was King of Great Britain and Ireland from 1 August 1714 until his death, and ruler of the Duchy and Electorate of Brunswick-Lüneburg in the Holy Roman Empire from 1698....

 arrived in England after Queen Anne's death.

As Lady of the Bedchamber

Lady of the Bedchamber

This is an incomplete list of those who have served as Lady of the Bedchamber in the British Royal Household...

 to Caroline, Princess of Wales

Caroline of Ansbach

Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach was the queen consort of King George II of Great Britain.Her father, John Frederick, Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach, was the ruler of a small German state...

, Mary immediately put her new-found access to court and her fluent French to use in acting as a go-between for her husband. The first day she attended the Princess she gave her Bernstorff

Bernstorff

Bernstorff is a German-Danish noble family of Mecklenburgian origin. Notable members of the family include:* Albrecht von Bernstorff diplomat, Prussian Foreign Minister...

’s 'A Treatise on the State of Parties' which she 'had transcribed and translated for my Lord, in French and English, to give the King'

In April 1718 Earl Cowper resigned office and retired to Colne Green, his home in the country, but Mary remained at Court as Lady of the Bedchamber to Caroline, Princess of Wales and in her diaries wrote an account of events at Court. Some of the diaries were destroyed by Mary but the diaries covering October 1714 to October 1716 and April and May 1720 were later published by Charles Spencer Cowper in 1864.

Lord Cowper died after a short illness on the 10th of October 1723 at his residence, Colne Green, in Hertford

Hertford

Hertford is the county town of Hertfordshire, England, and is also a civil parish in the East Hertfordshire district of the county. Forming a civil parish, the 2001 census put the population of Hertford at about 24,180. Recent estimates are that it is now around 28,000...

, built by himself in 1704 (demolished by the 5th Earl in 1801 on advice from the landscape designer Repton) nearby to which the later mansion of Panshanger was built in 1840 (and also sadly demolished in 1954). Mary died grief stricken several months later. The 1st Earl and Mary left two sons and two daughters. Mary was the great aunt (by marriage) of William Cowper

William Cowper

William Cowper was an English poet and hymnodist. One of the most popular poets of his time, Cowper changed the direction of 18th century nature poetry by writing of everyday life and scenes of the English countryside. In many ways, he was one of the forerunners of Romantic poetry...

, the poet.

Sources

• Boyle, Mary Louisa. Biographical catalogue of the portraits at Panshanger, the seat of Earl Cowper. London, Elliot Stock, 1885
• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
• Diary of Mary, Countess Cowper, ed. [S. Cowper] (1864)