Portrait of Edward Denny, 1st Earl of Norwich (1569-1637), full-length, seated, wearing black silk Court dress, holding a book beside a table draped with red velvet

Edward Denny, 1st Earl of Norwich, lived the comfortable existence of a wealthy aristocrat; grandson of Sir Anthony Denny, one of Henry VIII’s closest confidents, he was himself a courtier and Member of Parliament, being raised to the Earldom in 1626. However, posterity best remembers him for his protests at the time of the publication of Lady Mary Wroth’s prose romance The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, the first known work of its genre to be written by a woman. Denny believed that Lady Mary had drawn upon the lives of Denny, his only daughter Honoria, and her husband James Hay, 1st Earl of Carlisle, in a satire that cast him as a murderous father, his daughter as a harlot and her husband as a cuckold. In retaliation Denny wrote his own satirical poem about Lady Mary, in which he called her a ‘hermaphrodite in show, in deed a monster.’ The relationship between the two further deteriorated, with Worth lambasting him as a drunkard and a ‘lying wonder’. It is probably this chapter that led to the epitaph on his tombstone, which tells those who venture into Waltham Abbey that Denny was ‘A courtier in the chamber, / A soldier in the field, / Whose tongue could never flatter, / Whose heart could never yield.’