ABSTRACT
When Leah Mawe, wife of William Bedell (1571–1642), Bishop of Kilmore, passed away on 26 March 1638, Bedell himself preached her funeral sermon in which he eulogized his wife’s reputation for piety and virtue. That sermon, according to Gilbert Burnet, Bedell’s biographer, was ‘such a mixture both of tenderness and moderation [and] touched the whole congregation so much … [that] there were very few dry eyes in the church’. 1 Leah was buried in the churchyard of Kilmore Cathedral where, upon his death in February 1642, according to directions stipulated in his will and in public acknowledgment of the couple’s happy union, Bedell was interred next to his ‘dear wife Leah’. 2 Twenty years earlier, when George Montgomery, Church of Ireland Bishop of Meath and Clogher, died at Westminster on 15 January 1621, his body was repatriated to Ireland to be interred, in accordance with his will, alongside his first wife, Susan Steynings (d. 1614), in the family vault he had constructed in the parish churchyard of Ardbraccan in County Meath. Complete with effigies of Montgomery, Susan and the couple’s daughter Jane, the tomb still stands today. 3 The willingness of Bedell and Montgomery, both senior rank clerics within the Church of Ireland episcopate, to publicly pay tribute to their wives was indicative of the recognition and respect attributed to the role of the clergyman’s wife within the Church of Ireland community during the early to mid-Stuart period.
