Lady Mary Firebrace

Lady Mary Firebrace was buried in the north cloister of Westminster Abbey on 1st February 1688 (New Style dating) and her infant daughter Mary was buried in the same grave on 4th February following. The grave inscription, which was near the grave of John Frost, has now worn away but was recorded as:

Dame Mary, late wife of Sir Henry Firebrace, Chief Clerk Comptroller to His Majesty's Household, obiit 1687

She was a daughter of Richard Dalton, Serjeant of the Wine Cellar to Charles II, and his wife Mary. (Her sister in law Margaret (Johnson), married to Richard Dalton junior, was buried in the same cloister on 25th August 1686). Lady Mary married first, at St Margaret's Westminster in 1670, Lowde Cordell a page of the bedchamber to Charles II and they had two sons and four daughters. She married secondly in 1685 Sir Henry Firebrace, clerk of the kitchen to Charles I and Charles II and was his third wife (the marriage of his daughter Susanna by his first wife took place in the Abbey in 1669). Sir Henry worked towards the escape of Charles I from imprisonment in Carisbrooke castle on the Isle of Wight but the attempt failed. He died 17th January 1691 and was buried at Stoke Golding in Leicester.

Further reading for Sir Henry

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 2004

"Honest Harry, being the biography of Sir Henry Firebrace" by C.W. Firebrace, 1932