Elizabeth Malet

Elizabeth Wilmot, Countess of Rochester (1651 – 20 August 1681) was an English heiress and the wife of John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, the "libertine." She was born Elizabeth Malet, the daughter of John Malet of Enmore Manor, and Unton Hawley.

John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester became infatuated with Elizabeth Malet and asked for her hand in marriage. She refused to marry the earl, and he attempted to abduct her on 26 May 1665. In his diaries, Samuel Pepys describes Elizabeth Malet as the "great beauty and fortune of the North" and notes the scandal of her kidnapping by Rochester:

Thence to my Lady Sandwich’s, where, to my shame, I had not been a great while before. Here, upon my telling her a story of my Lord Rochester’s running away on Friday night last with Mrs. Mallett, the great beauty and fortune of the North, who had supped at White Hall with Mrs. Stewart, and was going home to her lodgings with her grandfather, my Lord Haly, by coach; and was at Charing Cross seized on by both horse and foot men, and forcibly taken from him, and put into a coach with six horses, and two women provided to receive her, and carried away. Upon immediate pursuit, my Lord of Rochester (for whom the King had spoke to the lady often, but with no successe) was taken at Uxbridge; but the lady is not yet heard of, and the King mighty angry, and the Lord sent to the Tower. Hereupon my Lady did confess to me, as a great secret, her being concerned in this story. For if this match breaks between my Lord Rochester and her, then, by the consent of all her friends, my Lord Hinchingbroke stands fair, and is invited for her. She is worth, and will be at her mother’s death (who keeps but a little from her), 2500l. per annum.

Graham Greene corrects Pepys. He writes about the Heiress of the West.. In the quote from Pepys Mrs. Stewart is Frances Teresa Stuart, duchess of Richmond and Lennox, my Lord Haly is Francis Hawley, 1st Baron Hawley and Lord Hinchingbroke is Edward Montagu, Viscount Hinchingbroke at the time and later 2nd earl of Sandwich.

Elizabeth Malet later forgave Rochester, and they were married on 29 January 1667.

After the couple married, Rochester spent much of his time in London, where he engaged in public affairs, most famously with the actress Elizabeth Barry. Elizabeth Wilmot stayed in his house at Adderbury House in Oxfordshire along with Rochester’s mother Anne Wilmot, Countess of Rochester, her mother Elizabeth Hawley, and Rochester’s nieces Eleanor and Anne Lee (later the poet Anne Wharton).

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