Margaret Russell, Countess of Cumberland’s Letter to John Layfield: Composing Grief through Consolation and Lamentation

Abstract

In 1591, Margaret Russell, Countess of Cumberland, wrote an autobiographical letter to her friend and one-time household chaplain, John Layfield, in which she places her grief at the recent death of her five-year-old son within a narrative of her life. Through this letter, she engages in the Renaissance consolatio tradition and other contemporary forms of lament modeled on Christian scripture. She draws upon classical philosophical works such as Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy along with other philosophical work as she constructs her narrative. She places her suffering within seventeenth-century providentialism, including reference to a dream that presaged the death of her child. The letter critiques, and ultimately discards, the comforts of the consolatio tradition and even her sense of the providential as means to relieve grief, ultimately rejecting these for an affective plea to the divine. Russell creates a powerful autobiographical narrative of suffering that exposes the limitations of contemporary philosophical and providential discourse in relieving the mental distress experienced by seventeenth-century individuals. An edition of Russell’s letter is included. [J.M.]