THERE had been another reason why Blount wanted to capture Castle Park fortress on Coronation Day – a reason he could never have admitted to the Queen.
The victory, had it happened, would have been his secret anniversary gift to Penelope. All couples have their special days, and 17 November belonged to Charles Blount and Penelope Rich. It was the date when he had first publicly declared his love for her. He had done it in chivalrous style, like some Lancelot pledging his troth to the married Guinevere. Neither of them would ever forget the moment eleven years ago when he had galloped out into the jousting arena, visor lowered, lance levelled, boldly carrying the colours of a lady who belonged to another man.
The date: 17 November 1590. The royal court had been in full festival mood to celebrate the anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s accession. Charles Blount was now aged twenty-seven. He had overcome his early gaucheness and had matured into a self-assured courtier. Coronation Day featured a mediaeval jousting competition, a colourful Arthurian extravaganza in which courtly knights championed a lady and carried her colours as they tilted lances against an opponent. Everyone watched eagerly to see whose colours would be carried by the single and highly eligible Sir Charles Blount.
Blount was an adept jouster. ‘As centaurs were … so he seemed on the horse,’ remarked one observer. As he donned the armour bearing his family crest – a sun containing a watchful eye – he scanned the ranks of ladies in the arena and viewing-rooms, looking for one particular face. Her golden hair and jet-black eyes would be unmistakeable.
When his charger thundered into the daylight to the jousting beam, a collective frisson swept through the ladies in the crowd: He is carrying the colours of my Lady Rich, they whispered in scandalised delight.
It was true. Blount’s colours of blue and gold proclaimed his love for Lady Penelope Rich, the twenty-seven-year-old trophy wife of one of the wealthiest barons in England.
One fashionable poet was beside himself with excitement. He punned that Blount was ‘Rich in his colours, richer in his thoughts/ Rich in his fortune, honour, arms and art.’ It was not the first time that a poet had used the same wordplay on Penelope’s married surname. The chivalrous soldier-poet Sir Philip Sidney, who was once equally besotted with Lady Rich, had penned a sonnet praising a nymph who was ‘rich in all beauties’ but who ‘hath no misfortune but that Rich she is’.
This remarkable woman, who had enthralled so many men, was born as Penelope Devereux, eldest daughter of Walter, Earl of Essex, sometime around 1563. She is better known to history by her married name, but in the world of literature she had already been immortalised as ‘Stella’.
As the great muse of Philip Sidney’s life, she inspired his long sonnet cycle ‘Astrophil and Stella’, a thinly disguised account of his doomed and painful passion for her. No one knows whether their relationship was ever consummated, but to the heartbroken Sidney it seems to have taken a disturbingly masochistic twist. He wrote the poem, he says, in order ‘that the dear She might take some pleasure from my pain’. Penelope was ‘most fair’ but also ‘most cold’. Trying to win her heart was like storming a citadel, ‘so fortified with wit, stored with disdain, that to win it is all the skill and pain’.
(Curiously, another poet was later to use much the same words about Penelope Rich. Dedicating a poem to her in 1594, the eccentric poet Richard Barnfield described her as a woman ‘whose speech is able to enchant the wise, converting joy to pain, and pain to pleasure’, which, it must be said, are extremely odd words to use in a dedication.)
Penelope had first met Philip Sidney when she was in her early teens and he was twenty-two. They were engaged to be married. Sidney was lukewarm at first, but as Penelope grew into adulthood he fell hopelessly in love with the stunning beauty whose coal-black eyes were set in a skin white as ‘alabaster pure’.
It was too late. Her father had died, and her guardian nominated the wealthy landlord Robert Rich instead.
Rich appears to have been a dour and antisocial individual, and the gregarious Penelope objected strenuously. Blount was later to claim that she interrupted the actual wedding ceremony with a loud declaration of protest.
There is no evidence that she retained Sidney as a lover, but if his poem reflects real life, she definitely kept him hanging on. Resisting his advances, the married Stella assures her suitor that only ‘tyrant honour’ stops her from succumbing. Eventually the poet gave up. He later married Frances Walsingham, daughter of the famous spymaster, Francis.
Sidney had been wasting his time with Lady Rich (at least romantically, if not poetically). Penelope had already found the true love of her life in Charles Blount. As a close friend of Penelope’s brother Robert (the new Earl of Essex), Blount was a regular visitor to her family home.
Sir Charles Blount would have cut a dashing figure at this stage. As an army captain, he had been wounded in the Low Countries. He had been present when Sidney died from an infected wound near Zutphen. When the Great Armada threatened England, Blount had been in the centre of action aboard the fighting ship Rainbow at Gravelines. Well-read, well-travelled, well-dressed and well-connected, Blount was in every way the opposite of Penelope’s boorish husband, Robert Rich.
No one knows how early their love affair began. If it pre-dated her marriage, they must both have been very young at the time. One seventeenth-century writer recorded that the ‘gallant’ Blount fell headlong for Penelope’s ‘graces of beauty, wit and sweetness of behaviour, which might render her the absolute mistress of all eyes and hearts’. The source claimed the couple became secretly betrothed before the forced marriage wrecked their plans. Or at least delayed them for a while.
As the same writer reported: ‘Long had she not lived in the bed of Rich, than the old flames of her affection unto Blount again began to kindle in her.’ He said that their secret meetings soon became dishonourably ‘familiar’. The dalliance became a full-scale love affair by, at the latest, 1591, when their first daughter, Penelope, was conceived. Five other children – four of whom survived infancy – were to follow in this ‘parallel family’. Meanwhile, in her other maternal role, the busy Penelope had borne five children with her husband, Robert Rich. One died as an infant. In total she was to give birth to eleven babies, raising five surviving children by Blount and four by Rich.
Shortly after her first child with Blount, Penelope had a crisis of conscience. She secretly met an undercover Jesuit priest and announced she wished to end her ‘life of frivolity’ by converting to Catholicism. The priest was preparing her for her first Confession when Blount ‘rushed down to see her and began to talk her out of her resolve’. Blount was an expert in theology and a convert from Catholicism, but of course he had another agenda. As the priest said: ‘[He] loved her with a deep and enduring love.’
Love won, and the priest lost his convert.
Blount became the new Lord Mountjoy after the death of his elder brother. The Queen lavished him with lucrative positions, partly because she wanted to keep him close to her at court. However, Blount was born to be a soldier. He quietly disobeyed, slipping away from London to fight in Brittany, where Juan del Águila and his Spaniards were causing such a headache to the English. Elizabeth testily summoned him back home, saying she didn’t want him to end up dead like Sidney. ‘You shall go where I send you,’ she commanded. ‘Lodge in court where you may follow your books, read, and discourse of war.’
That had been the Queen’s plan for Blount. But as Penelope and Charles knew all too well, life does not always work out the way you plan it.