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Frances Wray was the daughter of the Magdalene benefactor Sir Christopher Wray.
She married her brother’s friend, Sir George St Paul (1562-1613), who had homes at Melwood Grange , Epworth, and Snarford in Lindsey.
He was an ardent puritan. His grandmother was Jane Askew, sister of the famous Protestant martyr Anne Askew.
Frances and St Paul’s only child, a daughter, had died in 1597 and much of their wealth was spent on charity. They supported ten old men and old women and young tradesmen in Market Rasen where St Paul also funded a schoolmaster and supported a hospital. He died in 1613.
Frances and her sister Isabel together are credited with financing the Cambridge education of the puritan rector of Worksop Richard Bernard and he dedicated his book, Christian Advertisement, to St Paul and Frances.
Frances then married Robert Rich, 1st Earl of Warwick, who was also a puritan. She was described in later life as ‘a person of shining conversation and eminent bounty’ and who supported her father’s patronage of Magdalene College at Cambridge with three Fellowships and six scholarships. The Countess of Warwick, as she had now become, continued to support the university education of suitable young men such as Edward Reyner, who graduated in 1621 and then became master of Sir George St Paul’s school in Market Rasen. During the Civil War he was nearly murdered by Royalists in the cathedral library, but was saved by a past pupil; later he preached to the Parliamentary army at the siege of Newark.