Lady Carden
17 July 1861

Volume 4, page 229, sitting number 4985.

This is possibly Pamela Elizabeth Edith née Andrews (1806-1874), the wife of Sir Robert Walter Carden, 1st Baronet of Molesey. Her husband was the Lord Mayor of London 1857-1858 and the Member of Parliament for Gloucester between 1857 and 1859. In 1880 he was returned to Parliament as the representative for Barnstaple, a position he held until 1885. 

I thought at one point that this might be the second wife of Sir John Carden, 4th Baronet, of Templemore, County Tipperary. Born Julia Isabella Robinson, she was the daughter of Admiral Charles Gepp Robinson. The couple were married on 21 June 1852 at St John's Episcopal Church in Edinburgh. However, since she was born in or about 1835 she would have been too young to be the woman in this portrait. 

Sir John Carden's mother, however, was still alive in the early 1860s. Newspaper columns concerned with the comings and goings of high society mention on several occasions the arrival in London of the Dowager Lady Carden from Ireland. She died in 1867 'at Mountbutler, Roscrea [...] in her 84th year' (King's County Chronicle, 26 June 1867). Born Louisa Thompson, the daughter of Frederick Thompson, she had married Sir Henry Robert Carden, 3rd Bt., on 10 March 1818.