Patricia Russell, Countess Russell Robert Russell, 5th Earl Russell, who became a prominent historian and one of the leading figures in the Liberal Democrat party. They had an acrimonious separation in 1949. Patricia Russell, Countess Russell Patricia Russell, Countess Russell (1910–2004) was the third wife of philosopher Bertrand Russell, and a significant contributor to his book "A History of Western Philosophy". Countess Russell was born Marjorie Helen Spence in 1910. As her parents had always wanted a boy, she was known as 'Peter'. She met Bertrand Russell in 1930 when she was a twenty-year-old undergraduate at the University of Oxford, hired by Russell's second
Bertrand Russell Park. His grandfather, former Prime Minister Earl Russell, died in 1878, and was remembered by Russell as a kindly old man in a wheelchair. His grandmother, the Countess Russell (née Lady Frances Elliot), was the dominant family figure for the rest of Russell's childhood and youth. The countess was from a Scottish Presbyterian family, and successfully petitioned the Court of Chancery to set aside a provision in Amberley's will requiring the children to be raised as agnostics. Despite her religious conservatism, she held progressive views in other areas (accepting Darwinism and supporting Irish Home Rule), and her influence on Bertrand