Isabella Markham

Isabella Markham (28 March 1527 – 20 May 1579), was an English courtier, a Gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber of Queen Elizabeth I of England and a personal favourite of the queen. Isabella Markham was muse to the court official and poet John Harington, who wrote sonnets and poems addressed to her, before and after they married. Thomas Palfreyman dedicated his Divine Meditations to her in 1572.

Isabella Markham was born on 28 March 1527 in Ollerton, Nottinghamshire, England, the daughter of Sir John Markham of Cotham (before 1486- 1559) and his third wife, Anne Strelley. She had two brothers: Thomas, who married Mary Griffin, by whom he had issue, including Sir Griffin Markham; and William, whose wife was Mary Montagu. Her elder sister, Frances was the first wife of Henry Babington, whose son (by his second wife Mary Darcy) Anthony Babington would be executed for having organised an assassination plot against Queen Elizabeth.

The Markhams were an ancient family, who traced their agnatic line of descent from Claron, who had held the manor of West Markham at the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066. Claron's descendants assumed the name of de Marcham which was anglicised into Markham, and had often distinguished themselves in English history throughout the centuries since their ancestor Claron had served Edward the Confessor.

She joined the household of Lady Elizabeth Tudor as one of her ladies-in-waiting sometime before 1549. When the princess was arrested in March 1554 by the orders of her half-sister, Queen Mary I, for suspected treason, Markham, described as having been a favoured lady-in-waiting, accompanied the princess to the Tower of London, where her father had served as Lieutenant from 1549 to 31 October 1551. While there she encountered her long-standing admirer, the poet and former treasurer of King Henry VIII, John Harington, who was imprisoned as the result of a letter which linked him to Thomas Wyatt's conspiracy against Queen Mary. He was married to another of Elizabeth's attendants, Ethelreda Malte, a rumoured illegitimate daughter of Henry VIII, who had also joined the princess in the Tower. He had been enamoured of Markham sometime before 1549 (this is the date of his first sonnet to her), when he had later reminisced that he had "firste thought her fayre as she stode at the Princesse's windowe in goodlye attyre, and talkede to dyvers in the Courte-Yard". As Harington had previously been imprisoned in the Tower from early 1549 to the spring of 1550 for complicity in the treason of Thomas Seymour, 1st Baron Seymour of Sudeley, and his involvement in the plot to bring about a marriage between King Edward VI and Lady Jane Grey, it is curious to note that the object of his love was in fact the daughter of his former jailer. Sir John Markham served as Lieutenant of the Tower during the period of Harington's incarceration.

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