Elizabeth Tanfield was born in 1585, the daughter of Sir Laurence and Lady Elizabeth Tanfield. She spent much of her time as a young girl studying, immersing herself in Latin, Spanish, French, and Hebrew (her extraordinary abilities as a translator were widely known). In 1602, she married Sir Henry Cary in what was no doubt a marriage arranged by her parents. As Sir Henry went off to the Netherlands as a soldier not long after their wedding, the new bride was left alone for several years, at first still living in her family's home and then finally joining the Cary household in 1603.
Elizabeth and her husband seem to have gotten along quite well at first, with Elizabeth eventually giving birth to 11 children. Their religious differences--Henry's strict Protestantism against Elizabeth's Catholic tendencies, not to mention his cruel treatment of Irish Catholics as Lord deputy Of Ireland-- put a tremendous strain on their relationship in 1626, when Elizabeth's alleged plan to officially convert to Catholicism was revealed at Court. Henry, upon hearing the news, immediately took her children from her, cut off all of her financial support, and disowned her. In 1631, Queen Henrietta Maria managed to get the two to agree to a lukewarm reconciliation, and in 1633, when Henry was dying of gangrene in a wounded leg, Elizabeth rushed to his side to tend him in his final days.
Elizabeth herself died in 1639, after a long creative and monetary drought; her alliances with all things Catholic had made her a sort of pariah at Court. All but two of her daughters entered convents, and one (perhaps Anne, who took the name Clementia upon becoming a nun at Cambray) wrote The Lady Falkland: Her Life, a biography of Elizabeth Cary that is a cross between hagiography and an honest account of a person's life.
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