The Life and Letters of Lady Anne Percy, Countess of Northumberland (1536—1591)

Collects the correspondence of a leader of the Northern Rebellion of 1569 who became a prominent figure in the English Catholic exile community.


Lady Anne Percy (1536-1591), Countess of Northumberland, rode with rebel forces, leading small parties of men independently, and intercepting post between Queen Elizabeth and the Regent of Scotland. After the failure of the rebellion, she became a prominent figure among the English Catholic exiles in the Low Countries throughout the 1570s.


She was at the centre of a transnational network of that shared intelligence and news in support of Mary, Queen of Scots. She also became a spokesperson for the English gentlemen fugitives seeking pensions from the Spanish court, as well as backing the publication of Catholic polemical tracts. She was able to secure personal and political support from papal, Spanish, and French authorities.


This edition collects Lady Anne Percy's correspondence for the first time. In a substantial introduction, Jade Scott provides an account of Lady Anne's life and her experience as an exile, first in Scotland and later on the Continent, and discusses the linguistic, rhetorical, and material features of her correspondence, highlighting the strategies that she employed to maintain her networks and ensure a position of influence throughout her life in exile.

Dr Jade Scott is a historical linguist and expert in Early Modern women's correspondence. Her research brings together approaches from historical pragmatics and gender and social history to examine women's linguistic agency. She is especially interested in multilingual communities of correspondence and has studied female Catholic exiles under Elizabeth I, code-switching in the letters of Mary, Queen of Scots, and most recently non-royal Scottish women before the death of James VI.