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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2011
Distinguished as well for her learning and taste as her courtly manners, Lucy Harrington is interesting as being the companion of the early days of Elizabeth Stuart, at Combe Abbey, before the cares of state had pressed on that fair brow the seal of sorrow. When still very young, she showed her love of pomp and expense, and a fondness for gorgeous decoration and elegant erections, which, in after-life, became a source of vexation and disappointment, carried as the pleasure was by her to a ruinous extreme. In the masques of Queen Anne, of Denmark, to whom she was lady of the bedchamber, none appeared with greater splendour than Lucy Harrington, and no pageant or revel was complete without her.
The death of her brother, the friend and companion of Prince Henry, taken untimely from his sorrowing family as suddenly as the hope of England himself, conferred on her his large fortune and inheritance; and when she became the bride of the Earl of Bedford, she was one of the richest heiresses of the kingdom. Her extreme profusion, however, the vice of her time, soon made itself felt, though others profited by her liberality, particularly the professors of the gaie science, for poets were ever welcome with her, and to the arts she was a munificent patroness.
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