Miss Beauclerk Coventry
(1840-1921)
4 April 1861

Volume 3, page 40, sitting number 2860.

[Identified as ‘Miss Coventry’ in the Silvy daybooks, the sitter is identified as ‘Miss Beauclerk Coventry’ on the album page. The album was compiled by Augustus Gough-Calthorpe, later 6th Baron Calthorpe.]

Mary Beauclerk Coventry was one of the five daughters of Caroline Sterling née Dundas and her husband, the Honourable Henry Amelius Coventry, younger son of the 8th Earl of Coventry by his second wife Lady Mary Beauclerk.

Born in Edinburgh in 1840, she was baptised on 2 June 1840 at North Berwick, East Lothian, Scotland. She never married.

In 1856 she was one of the bridesmaids at the wedding of Charles Sterling Dundas and Mary Louisa Knatchbull, the eldest daughter of Sir Norton Knatchbull (Derbyshire Advertiser and Journal, 11 April 1856).

In 1858 she and and her recently married sister, Mrs John Turner Hopwood (née Mary Augusta Henrietta Coventry), were presented by their mother, the Honourable Mrs Coventry, at one of Her Majesty's Drawing Rooms (Aris's Birmingham Gazette, 10 May 1858).

Miss Beauclerk Coventry appears on the 1871 census, living with her father, now a widower, and fourteen servants at 25 Belgrave Square, London.

In 1901 she was living with her sister and brother-in-law, Mary and George Atkinson-Clark, at Belford Hall in Northumberland. In 1911 she was living in her own establishment with a lady’s maid, a cook and a parlour maid at Cromartie House, Hornsey Rise, north London.

She died there, aged 80, on 8 February 1921, leaving an estate valued at £8256. A brief announcement of her death appeared in the Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette (12 February 1921): ‘Miss Mary Beauclerk Coventry, who died in London on Tuesday, was the eldest daughter of the late Hon. Henry Coventry, second son of the eighth Earl of Coventry. She was the sister of Mary Countess of Suffolk, grandmother of the present young Earl of Suffolk. Miss Coventry’s funeral takes place at Charlton, Malmesbury.’