Lettice Digby, 1st Baroness Offaly

Who was Lettice Digby, 1st Baroness Offaly?

Lettice FitzGerald, 1st Baroness Offaly was an Irish noblewoman and a member of the FitzGerald dynasty. Heiress-general to the Earls of Kildare on the death of her father, the title instead went to the next FitzGerald male heir when her grandfather, the 11th Earl of Kildare died in 1585. In 1620 she was created suo jure Baroness Offaly by King James I of England.

She was the wife of Sir Robert Digby, a landed English aristocrat by whom she had ten children.

In early 1642, at the age of about sixty-two, her castle of Geashill was besieged by a force of insurgents from the O'Dempsey clan; she managed to hold out against them until October 1642. Her defence has been described as having been the "most spirited episode in the history of the Irish Rebellion of 1641".