Peter Lely (1618 –1680) and Studio, Portrait of Elizabeth Murray, Countess of Dysart, later Duchess of Lauderdale (1626-1698), 1648, Oil on canvas, 122 x 98cm, Ham House, Richmond, Surrey
Few women in 17th-century England moved with such daring across the fault lines of politics, power, and intrigue as Elizabeth Murray, later Duchess of Lauderdale. Born in 1626 into a family close to the Stuart court, she became, during the upheavals of the Civil Wars and Interregnum, one of the most resourceful Royalist agents. Her ability to inhabit two worlds—socially engaged with Oliver Cromwell’s household, while secretly funnelling intelligence to Royalist exiles—made her indispensable to networks such as the Sealed Knot. It was a dangerous game of duplicity and coded correspondence, in which charm and social dexterity became weapons as sharp as any blade. By the time of the Restoration in 1660, Elizabeth had ensured her place as both survivor and power-broker, a woman whose wit and audacity were as legendary as her beauty.
Peter Lely’s earliest portrait of her, painted with the assistance of his studio in 1648, captures Elizabeth at just twenty, newly married to Sir Lionel Tollemache. The picture freezes a moment of youthful ascendancy, presenting a poised young woman at the threshold of the turbulent career that would define her. It is the first in a visual sequence that charts her evolution from ingénue to formidable duchess.
As the decades advanced, so too did the way Elizabeth was portrayed. Lely’s later images, painted in the 1660s at the height of her influence, show her transformed into the assured Countess of Dysart, draped in silks and jewels befitting her prominence in Charles II’s resplendent court. One later portrait even brings her together with her second husband, John Maitland, Duke of Lauderdale, one of the most powerful of the Restoration grandees. Here, the couple is presented as a political partnership, their likenesses embodying not only personal union but also their role as arbiters of courtly and cultural life.
Taken together, these portraits offer more than likenesses: they are fragments of a political biography in paint. Through Lely’s brush, we see Elizabeth Murray’s metamorphosis—an aristocratic daughter, a covert agent, a consummate courtier, and finally a duchess whose presence shaped the Restoration world.
