The mysterious Lady Lumley

This is rescheduled from October and a change to the advertised programme.

Thousands of pupils have graduated from Lady Lumley’s School in Pickering and from her earlier schools in Sinnington and Thornton Dale. Similarly, hundreds of people have benefited from residence in her almshouses in Thornton Dale and London. Yet the life of this kindly benefactor has been shrouded in mystery for four centuries. No portrait was known of her, no document signed by her, none of her many manor houses survives and even one of her almshouses has disappeared. Everything she owned had turned to dust. John Smith, a former Lady Lumley’s History teacher, has spent 30 years trying to gather snippets of evidence about her life.

Born into a Catholic noble family in Norfolk during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, she inherited lands in North Yorkshire from her mother, of the Latimer family. Her early life in London witnessed much scandal – her eldest sister embroiled in a love affair with a servant, her second sister murdering another man with a pistol, and her youngest sister and her husband branded as Catholic traitors and forced to flee abroad. But life was not all scandal and the family house was in the Theatre area, allowing the young Eliza to meet her father’s friend Ben Jonson and perhaps William Shakespeare. The Queen herself stayed at their home. Eliza herself was involved in the Great Civil War in England, as her second husband, Viscount Lumley, was one of King Charles’ principal commanders. She retired to the safety of Sinnington and appears to have lived out her long life here. She determined to leave her fortune for good works. She died at over 80 years old, a considerable age at the time, and, as she had separated from her husband many years before, she was buried in a ‘borrowed’ tomb in Westminster Abbey, alongside her beloved aunt and uncle. No memorial to her was ever erected there. But here in Ryedale she is still remembered, because of her legacy, almost 450 years ago, yet is still in many ways a mysterious figure from Elizabethan Ryedale.