Lettice Digby, 1st Baroness Offaly

Lettice Digby, 1st Baroness Offaly (c.1580 – 1 December 1658) was an Irish peeress and landowner.

Born Lettice FitzGerald, she was the only surviving child of Gerald FitzGerald, Lord Gerald (1559–1580), and his wife, Catherine (died 1632), daughter of Sir Francis Knollys (died 1596). She may have lived first on her mother's Irish jointure lands at Portlester, Woodstock, and Athy, but these were forfeited on Catherine's remarriage to Sir Philip Boteler of Walton Woodhall, Hertfordshire. Shortly after a prenuptial agreement on 19 April 1598, Lettice married Sir Robert Digby (c.1575–1618) of Coleshill, Warwickshire (becoming Lady Digby), a client of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex; they had seven sons and three daughters. Following the successive deaths of her paternal grandfather, Gerald FitzGerald, 11th Earl of Kildare and 1st Baron Offaly (1525–1585), and uncles Henry FitzGerald, 12th Earl of Kildare (died 1597) and William FitzGerald, 13th Earl of Kildare (died 1599), Lady Digby (as heir general) assumed the style of Baroness Offaly and claimed the title and certain lands, while the earldom went to the heir male, Gerald FitzGerald (died 1612). Although Sir Robert represented his native county as a Member of Parliament in 1601, thereafter the couple spent most of their time in Ireland.

Over the next two decades, the Digbys made concerted efforts to consolidate their position. Making common cause with Mabel FitzGerald, widow of the 11th Earl, they pressured the 14th Earl for restitution of jointure rights and concession of the Offaly title. Digby became a Justice of the Peace in County Kildare and a member of the Privy Council of Ireland. He was an active supporter of the government in the Parliament of Ireland of 1613, and in 1615 became a member of the council of Munster. With powerful friends at the English court, including Lady Digby's uncle William Knollys (1547–1632), Villiers connections of her stepfather, and Digby's younger brother Sir John Digby, Ambassador to Spain, the Digbys continued to press their case through the minority of Gerald FitzGerald, 15th Earl of Kildare (1611–1620). The cost of the dispute meant that, when Sir Robert died on 24 May 1618, he left his estate, and Lady Lettice as his executor, in financial difficulties, but on 11 July 1619, James I awarded her and her heirs the manor and parsonage of Geashill, comprising considerable lands near Philipstown in King's County. Although the king dismissed her claim to be heir general of her grandfather, on 26 June 1620, he confirmed her as Baroness Offaly, stipulating that the barony was then to revert to the Earls of Kildare. The baroness's eldest son, Robert Digby, was, in compensation, created Baron Digby, of Geashill, on 29 July.

Anticipating by several months the final, formal transfer of Geashill into her hands, Lady Offaly took up residence at Geashill Castle and lost no time in placing an English clergyman, John Meall, in the local living. She regarded the estates as traditionally a nest of rebels, and energetically collaborated in setting up English plantations with successive guardians of George FitzGerald, 16th Earl of Kildare. From 1629, the guardian was Richard Boyle, 1st Earl of Cork, whose daughter, Lady Sarah, had married Robert Digby in 1626. Following Sarah's death in 1633, her children lived with Lady Offaly at Geashill, provided for by their grandfather, Lord Cork. The plantations came in for fierce local resistance, and in 1642, Lady Offaly was closely besieged. She resisted with spirit, though the rebels sent four messages to remind her that the castle was garrisoned only by women and boys. In reply to their first summons to surrender, she avowed her loyalty to the king, proclaiming "I will live and die innocently and will do my best to defend my own, leaving the issue to God". The besiegers' guns burst upon themselves, and she was at last rescued, in October that year, by Sir Richard Grenville. She then retired to Coleshill, in which her husband had left her a life interest and where she died on 1 December 1658, and was buried with her husband. A portrait of her at Sherborne Castle represents her with a book inscribed, – "...I am escaped with the skin of my teeth".

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