Elizabeth Wilmot (1651–1681)

Elizabeth Wilmot, Countess of Rochester, was born Elizabeth Malet, a wealthy heiress described by Samuel Pepys in his diaries as the "great beauty and fortune of the North." In 1665, John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, became infatuated with her and proposed marriage. She refused to marry him, and he attempted to kidnap her. She later forgave him, and they were married in 1667. After the marriage, Rochester spent much of his time in London, leaving Elizabeth at his family's home Adderbury House, near Woodstock in Oxfordshire, along with his nieces Eleanor and Anne Lee -- later the poet Anne Wharton. The couple had four children between 1670 and 1676. Elizabeth Wilmot wrote poetry that survived in a manuscript that she and her husband produced together. Some of her work is published in Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women's Verse (1988).