Lady Mary Villiers, Duchess of Richmond and Lennox (1622-85)

She was 15 in the summer of 1637, and on 3 August she married James Stuart, Duke of Lennox, in the archbishop's chapel at Lambeth. Charles I gave her away. Her father, the Duke of Buckingham, had been stabbed to death at Portsmouth when she was six, and the king had brought her up alongside his own children. Van Dyck painted her as Saint Agnes, with the lamb and the palm branch that belong to that saint. Agnes was the patroness of women about to marry, which is why the portrait is usually placed in the weeks around the wedding. The Royal Collection's own note adds that she looks a little older than 15. The picture was probably made for the king himself. It appears in an inventory of the gallery at St James's Palace in 1639, and when Charles I's collection was broken up and sold after his execution, this one was never listed in the sale. It turns up again in a Windsor inventory of 1688.