Mary (Palmer), Lady Beauchamp-Proctor

British, 1760 - 1848

BiographyMary Palmer was born around 1760, the second daughter of Robert Palmer of Sonning, Berkshire. On May 5, 1778 she married Sir Thomas Beauchamp-Proctor (1756-1827), 2nd Bart., of Langley Park, Norwich, who the previous year had received his M.A. from Christ's College, Cambridge, and made the Grand Tour of Europe. Deeply interested in art and literature, Lady Beauchamp-Proctor read Sir Joshua Reynolds's Discourses on Art soon after their publication, and she and her husband collected art under the guidance of the painter Henry Walton. They also pursued an ambitious building scheme at Langley Park, a Palladian-style red brick building by Matthew Brettingham. They remodeled the West Wing, erected gates designed by Sir John Soane, and added lodges, a portico, and a new dining room. In 1803, Lady Beauchamp-Proctor purchased an imported sixteenth-century stained glass window for the altar of Langley Chapel. Although rural Norwich cramped the full range of her interests, her extensive correspondence with the poet Edward Jerningham (preserved in the Huntington Library) documents Lady Beauchamp-Proctor's devotion to a variety of intellectual and domestic concerns. When not riding horses with her children or attending to their needs, she played the harpsichord and harp. She canvassed widely for additions to her ambitious reading program, but believed "a methodical plan of reading is infinitely preferable to a desultory one," for lack of retention seemed to result from her "too dissipated & wandering attention." With Jerningham's aid, she procured books for local children's schools, and confessed herself "ever ready to grasp at any book that may tend either remotely, or immediately to the improvement of my children," of whom she bore at least seven. During much of their marriage, she nursed her husband through gout and other illnesses. He died at the age of seventy-one on June 29, 1827. His widow survived him by over two decades, dying on December 25, 1848, aged eighty-nine, at Hertford Street, Mayfair.

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