RICH, LADY PENELOPE

ne Devereux born 1562? died 1607 English noblewoman who was the Stella of Sir Philip Sidney's love poems Astrophel and Stella (1591). She was the daughter of Walter Devereux, 1st Earl of Essex. At age 14 she won the attentions of Sidney, whom her father desired her to marry, but after her father's death her guardian, Henry Hastings, 3rd Earl of Huntingdon, arranged her marriage in 1581 to Robert Rich, 3rd Baron Rich (afterward Earl of Warwick). The marriage was unhappy from the start, and so she encouraged Sidney's continued emotional attachment to her until his death in 1586. Sidney celebrated her charms and his affection for her in the series of sonnets collected in Astrophel and Stella. Though married and the mother of seven children, Penelope became the mistress of Charles Blount, 8th Lord Mountjoy, in about 1595 and bore him five children. Her husband abandoned her in 1601 after her brother, Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, was executed for plotting a revolt against Queen Elizabeth, and she thenceforth lived openly with Mountjoy (afterward Earl of Devonshire), marrying him in 1605 after having obtained a divorce from her first husband.