Anne North, Countess of Guilford
wife of Lord North
Anne North, Countess of Guilford (née Speke; 1740 – 17 January 1797) was an English woman of the 18th century, best known as the wife of Frederick, Lord North, who was Prime Minister of Great Britain between 1770 and 1782. During his term in office, she was known as "Lady North"; she became Countess of Guilford when her father-in-law died in 1790.
Early life
Anne was born around 1739–1741 in Ilminster, Somerset, to George Speke MP and his third wife Anne (née Williams). Her father died in 1753, when Anne was about 12 years old, and she inherited the former Drake estates in Devonshire, as well as Dillington House.
Married life
On 20 May 1756, aged about sixteen, Anne married Frederick, Lord North, who was the eldest son of Lord Guilford and was then the MP for Banbury. He was about eight years her senior. Her inheritance was worth about four thousand pounds a year. Jokes in society mocked the couple's lack of good looks, Lady Harcourt saying that the short and plump Lord North was “beautiful in comparison to the Lady the world said he is to marry.” However, their marriage appears to have been a happy one.
She gave birth to their first child, George Augustus, on 11 September 1757. A daughter, Catherine Anne, followed in 1760, and another son, Francis, in 1761, and a second daughter, Charlotte.
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This entry incorporates text from “Anne North, Countess of Guilford” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.