Voce Pia Mater: Memorialising Mothers and the Death-Ritual in Early Modern England

In a gloomy corner of St Edmund's Chapel in Westminster Abbey stands the monument of Elizabeth Russell who died in 1600 at the untimely age of twenty-five (Fig. 4.1). The first seated effigy of its type to be erected in an English church, it was commissioned by Elizabeth's sister Anne and as such offers a visible testimony of the enduring bond between two women. Garnished with a simple yet poignant epitaph which reads ‘She is not dead but sleepeth’, Russell's stony doppelganger adopts what one eighteenth-century commentator described as a ‘very melancholy posture’. Countless visitors file past this arresting figure on a daily basis, stopping perhaps to admire the quality of the carving or the richness of the age-coloured marble, entirely unaware that it remains at the heart of an enduring mystery.

It has not yet been explained why this tomb, dedicated to an unmarried woman, became the template for a number of similar memorials in the early years of the seventeenth century, all of which were, intrigu-ingly, devoted to mothers who had fatally succumbed to the rigours of childbirth. The earliest of these can be seen in All Saints' Church in Fulham and is dedicated to Lady Margaret Legh who passed away in 1603, a mother to nine children, three of whom died in infancy (Fig. 4.2).