Anne Bacon Drury (1572–1624) was an English literary patron. Her painted closet survives as a very rare example of Jacobean interior decoration.
Anne was the fourth daughter of Sir Nicholas Bacon (d. 1624) and Anne Butts (d. 1610). Her grandfather was Sir Nicolas Bacon, and her uncle Francis Bacon.
Her future brother-in-law, Philip Gawdy called her "Nann Bacon".Meakin, Painted Closet (2013), p. 43. She married Sir Robert Drury of Hawstead and Hardwick in 1592.Diarmaid MacCulloch, Letters from Redgrave Hall (Suffolk Record Society, Boydell, 2007), p. xv. Her parents provided a dowry of £1,600. Anne was a friend of the poet John Donne.Diarmaid MacCulloch, Letters from Redgrave Hall (Suffolk Record Society, Boydell, 2007), p. xxii. Donne's Anniversaries commemorate her daughter Elizabeth Drury, who died in 1610 aged 14 or 15.Meakin, Painted Closet (2013), pp. 1, 21, 41.
Letters addressed to Lady Bacon include Latin phrases.Diarmaid MacCulloch, Letters from Redgrave Hall (Suffolk Record Society, Boydell, 2007), p. xxiii. She created a painted bedroom closet for meditation and study and entertaining close friends at Hawstead Place, near Bury St Edmunds. The painted panelling was removed to Hardwick House, Suffolk. It is now in Christchurch Mansion, part of Ipswich Museum. The decoration consists of a series of forty emblems including Latin phrases.
In August 1610 the family had a royal license to travel, and were said to be going from France to Spa in Belgium. They travelled abroad again in 1611, after the death of their daughter Elizabeth.Meakin, Painted Closet (2013), pp. 52-3. Anne and Robert Drury were in Vlissingen in August 1612 and met Viscount Lisle.William Shaw & G. Dyfnallt Owen, HMC 77 Viscount De L'Isle Penshurst, vol. 5 (London, 1961), p. 59-60.
Robert Drury died in April 1615.Meakin, Painted Closet (2013), p 54. Anne Drury made her will in 1621.Samuel Tymms, Wills and inventories from the registers of the commissary of Bury St Edmunds and the archdeacon of Sudbury (Camden Society, 1850), p. 166–168 She bequeathed a cloth bed of "my owne workinge", that she had embroidered, to her sister-in-law, Elizabeth Drury Cecil, Countess of Exeter. Her closet contained a couch bed.Meakin, Painted Closet (2013), pp. 45, 60-1.
She died on 5 June 1624 at Hardwick House.Meakin, Painted Closet (2013), pp. 60-1, 81. She was buried in All Saints' Church, Hawstead.Meakin, 'Painted Closet' (2013), p. 79.
Monument to Elizabeth Drury Her daughter Dorothy Drury died aged 4 in 1597.Meakin, Painted Closet (2013), p. 86. Her daughter Elizabeth Drury died in 1610. She had a memorial portrait made which shows her lying as if alive on a couch.Meakin, Painted Closet (2013), pp. 63, 79. Her monument in Hawstead church has her effigy in a similar pose,'Elizabeth Drury, engraved by James Basire, NPG. with a verse inscription possibly by John Donne who also composed an Elegy for the child.Diarmaid MacCulloch, Letters from Redgrave Hall (Suffolk Record Society, Boydell, 2007), p. xv.
References
Sources R. C. Bald, Donne and the Drurys (1959) H. L. Meakin, The Painted Closet of Lady Anne Bacon Drury (Ashgate, Aldershot, 2013) J. Rowe, 'Drury family (per. 1485–1624)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn, Jan 2008, subscription required.
External links Lady Anne Drury: Suffolk Wills: The texts and analysis of sixteenth-century wills Portrait of Lady Elizabeth Drury aged 15, PSNC.2610. Newport Historical Society