This sentiment closed our conversation, and being now arrived again at Shotover, by common consent we spurred our horses forward and were soon riding in at the Manor-house gate.
Mr. Milton came up from Oxford to our house twice or thrice before the wedding and discoursed a great deal. We were all mighty busy in the house with the making of wedding clothes and fitting me out with necessaries. I was promised two black silk gowns, but received only one, and a pink-coloured gown to be married in. The expense of the clothes alone cost my father above £60. I loved Mr. Milton neither better nor worse as I came to know him. I had already deduced his character and stature from my first sight of him—ex pede Herculem,4 as the saying is. Mr. Milton’s stature (to write figuratively) was not above the middling; yet he hoped, by taking religious thought, to add four or five cubits to it and straddle across any hall or court like a Colossus of Rhodes. In agreeing to marry him, I had reasoned that he would hold himself in such haughty superiority that I could live, in a manner, apart from him; as I could not hope to do with any man of lesser pretensions or earthier inclinations. Only thus could I preserve unhurt that true and enduring love that bound me to Mun. How nicely or how mistakenly I thus reasoned, my consequent story will show.
Meanwhile, to tell of our marriage, which was performed on a morning so wet that I had to be carried by my brothers all the way from our coach to the church porch, because the path between the hollies was a rushing torrent. The old wives prognosticated from this flood that the marriage would be a fruitful one.
However, the rain abated as soon as ever the jangling bells ceased—they jangled so in my ears that morning that they drove me nearly out of my wits. Not a great many of our kinsfolk and acquaintances were gathered in Church, for the notice given them had been but a short one. It was also on this very day, as it happened, that Mun’s little sister Cary, who had been wedded to Sir Thomas Gardiner the Younger, came with him from London to his house at Cuddesdon; and much company was drawn thither to congratulate not only his marriage, but also the enlargement from prison of his father, the elder Sir Thomas.5
Mr. Milton had at first made difficulties about the use of a ring in our marriage, holding it no less idle and superstitious than the cross in baptism. My mother declared that he might please himself about the baptismal cross when he had begotten children on me, but “no ring, no wedding,” said she, for without a ring she would not consider me truly wedded—neither would I myself; and I must not have my conscience forced in this. Let him say what he might say, she would not tolerate the omission of the ring. So he yielded to her, for though the curate seemed willing enough to let him have his way, my father was the rector and had the last word.
In acknowledgment of Mr. Milton’s suppleness in so “bowing his knee in the House of Rimmon” (as he expressed it), my father at his request forbade the customary tilting at the quintain. For this old sport was still in use among us in Oxfordshire, and the man who, riding at the board with a stave for a lance, could first break it, wore the gay garland and was accounted the Best Man at the wedding. He had for his reward the privilege of carrying home the bride with her legs about his neck, and when she was fairly over the threshold, of pulling off her garters to wear in his hat. This Mr. Milton held a rude and nasty custom; but that children should strew flowers as we walked from the Church door to our house, he accepted as jolly; as also that there should be rustic gitterning and horn-blowing before us and a scrambling for halfpence by the boys, and comfits of honey and almond bestowed upon the girls.
In the Church porch, where my brother Richard was brideman at the spousals, I played my ceremonial part in a sort of trance; and when the ring was drawn upon my finger and I solemnly plighted my troth, I heard my voice proceed as it were from another mouth than mine, and concluded from the strangely-worded undertaking, to which I engaged myself, that it was not myself who spoke.
All the country sent us in presents—a brace of bucks from the Tyrrells, and from others wine, fish, wild fowl, fruit and all good things; and in return my father gave or sent out a score and a half of bridelaces, and three-score pairs of coloured trimmed gloves for wedding tokens, of Oxford make. It had been agreed that the celebration of our marriage should be in several parts: a breakfast at the Manor-house, whither all the tenants should come and drink ale and eat tarts and pies—which they had already done, very voraciously; next the spousals at the Church door and the blessing given in the Church; next, a banquet in our hall, for the nobility and gentry, with bumpers and speeches. After this, our whole family would take horse or coach to London, to conclude the merry-making there at Mr. Milton’s house: for my husband held it indecent for a woman, on the first night of her marriage, to be under her father’s roof. He railed against the vicious and frantic fashion of dancing in use at country weddings. He said there was such running and leaping and capering, against all tune and measure, such obscene, naughty language, such rude tumbling of the women’s apparel by the young men and shameless lifting up of their skirts, as he would never suffer in his own house; and he detested that his bride should be required to keep foot with all dancers and refuse none, however drunken, scabbed, bepoxed, rude, awkward or stinking-breathed one might be. Moreover, he intended on his bridal night to be where he could set a guard at the door of the chamber, that no mannerless louts and hussies might stand outside, to sing smooty ballads and take turns at the keyhole, as the base custom was.
Of the banquet in our hall I remember little, for I was in such a confusion of mind, which I increased by drinking a great deal of cherry cordial, that I scarce knew who was who, confounding my Godmother Moulton with my Aunt Archdale (to the disgust of both) and returning distracted answers to simple questions. Only, I know that Mr. Milton, in his plain black suit with very fine lace and crystal buttons set in silver, was called upon for a speech; which he delivered not in the halting, grinning, stumbling manner that seems hereditary with bridegrooms, but, being stark sober, stood for three-quarters of an hour or more, with modulated voice and graceful gesture tracing the honourable history of matrimony from the most ancient times to the present; and for conclusion recited a stanza or two of his own composition—which I think were intended for his play, to be sung by the Chorus of Angels in honour of Adam and Eve. My Uncle Jones and one or two others afterwards declared that he had spoken seraphically and raised them to a sort of ecstasy; but upon the light spirits of the company almost a gloom descended, as though they said to themselves: “We hoped that we had done with Church for to-day, yet here we must sit through a second thunderous sermon.” However, they buried their faces in their tankards and drank themselves merry again.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I Am Taken to London
So soon as ever the bridal banquet was done we said our farewells and started for London: Mr. Milton, my whole family and myself. The gentlemen rode on horses, my mother and I and the children in our two coaches. There was no place for Trunco, but she was found a seat in the wagon of the common carrier and was packed off the next morning. At the first hill where the horses slackened their pace, my husband said to me through the coach window: “Now, Wife, since you have changed your father’s name for mine, I intend to make a reformation of your Christian name, too; for I hate all cringing Frenchery. Understand that from henceforth your affected ‘Marie’, that has a whine in it, will be honest English ‘Mary’.”
“Husband,” said I, “you may call me what you will, but I dare say it will be a great labour to persuade my kinsfolk and acquaintance to follow your example.”
“That daunts me not,” he replied. “Those of your kinsfolk and acquaintance who are too stubborn to conform civilly to my wishes shall not be admitted into my house.”
My mother, who sat beside me in the coach, but with her face turned away to hide her tears, now blew her nose like a trumpet and cried in a challenging voice: “My child was named in honour of Her Majesty the Queen. How can you dare to change her name?”
My husband answered respect
fully: “Dear Madam, since the Queen has put in pawn, or sold, the best of the Crown jewels to purchase arms for the King’s use against his People, think you that any honour ought still to be paid to her?”
My mother replied: “The answer, Son, is according as you are a loyal subject or a damned Roundhead”—for this appellation was lately come into general use—“and to prove that myself am no Roundhead’s wife I shall continue to Marie my daughter; and I expect not that you will be so hardy as to forbid her a sight of me.”
“Why, Madam,” said he, “mothers are by common custom allowed to babble to their daughters whatever fond gibberish talk may please ’em; and while I am resolute in what I have laid down as touching my wife’s kinsfolk and their use of the name Mary, I am not so careless of language as to include her father or her mother among her kin.”
“Ton discours est parfaitement gentil, mon beau petit beau-fils,” cried my mother derisively.
So the quarrel was smothered, and we rode forward in silence. When I wondered that we took the Abingdon road, I was informed that we went not by the direct way to London, but would lie that night at the house of my husband’s brother Christopher, a young lawyer who had established himself at Reading, and had been prevented by an accident from seeing us married.
As we drew near to the town bridge of Abingdon, we heard from across the river a great roaring and a hooting noise; and over the bridge came ragged outriders of that country procession called with us “the ride to rough music,” but here and elsewhere “a skimmington,” whereby a woman who has wronged her husband’s bed and turned shrew is given a mock triumph by her neighbours. When these outriders came past, blowing beef-horns and banging upon kettles and pots, with “Make way there, cuckolds all, make way!” my husband refused to oblige them, and clapped his hand to his sword in warning, but my mother bawled to the coachman: “Ned, Ned, pull us off the road at once—there, to the right hand, in at that gentleman’s gate!”
The other coach drew in after us, only just in time to avoid halting the procession; and my husband, when he saw what followed behind the outriders, bethought himself and spurred after us. First came striding a mad old man with long white hair flying, dressed in a leathern suit and burst boots, who blew upon a flageolet of the sort that sow-gelders use to announce their presence in a village or hamlet. Next, upon an ass, rode a standard-bearer with a woman’s petticoat nailed to a pole as his standard, and tattered bagpipers marched alongside, playing “My Lady Greensleeves” in a villainous snuffling manner. These wretches were followed by an old hag, a true Mother Grime by her look, seated upon a bony carthorse, with a pannier on either side of her filled with stinking night-soil which, with a skimming ladle, she tossed indiscriminately among the mocking crowd of bystanders, and over her shoulders at the retinue; her horse had spreading paper antlers tied to his head. Then came the main persons of the progress: a little, pale, sharp-faced woman riding astride a horse, without her petticoat, but with a great wooden spoon in her hand; and, tied with his back to her, so that he faced the horse’s rump, was a great burly red-faced man, her husband, holding a spindle and distaff in his hand; and the louts and slouches pacing beside him, in the guise of whifflers, threatened them with clubs unless the wife constantly beat her husband with the spoon, and unless he plied the distaff and spindle laboriously. Then followed a general dirty rabble of the Abingdon popular, every man and woman armed with a musical instrument snatched at random from the kitchen or shop or cowshed when they heard the summons to the ride—such a clashing of saucepans and pails, such a twanging of Jews’ harps, such a drumming with marrow-bones upon salt boxes, such music of keys and tongs, I never heard in all my life.
My parents, my sisters and my little brothers laughed at this spectacle till their sides ached. My husband looked grim and chuckled, my brother James in disgust turned away to watch the swans on the river; and, as for me, a sort of amazed disgust overtook me at the barbarity of these townsfolk, for though I had often heard railing threats of a ride to rough music, I had never before witnessed the act.
My husband, when the rout had gone by, began to discourse learnedly upon it to my father, observing that a flouting sort of anti-masque of a sordid nature had customarily followed Roman generals when they rode through their city in god-like triumph, which was a reminder to them of their mortality; and he supposed that, similarly, this skimmington had in ancient times followed at the heels of all grand nuptial processions, as a horrid reminder to husband and wife of the immutable relation of man and woman—he the absolute ruler, she the willing and obsequious servant.
“Nevertheless,” said my father, “though in England a wife is de jure, as you say, but a servant or chattel, yet I have heard it said that were there a bridge built across from Calais to Dover all the women of Europe would make haste to run over: for de facto the Englishman is so respectful and tender towards his wife that he gives her the uppermost place at table, and the right hand everywhere, and puts upon her no drudgery or hardship that he can without shame take upon himself.”
To which my husband answered with a dry mock: “I believe you are right, sir. Some Englishmen there are, and some Welshmen too, who are so indulgent to their wives, that the Dame has the best chamber in the house for her sulking ground, while the Master must cast his accounts in a little dark closet that serves also as her linen-room.”
My father replied merrily: “You prick me there, sir; yet my wife brought me in a full £3,000 when we married, and it is well known that ‘he who pays the piper may call the tune.’”
My husband then said, off-hand, with a smile to me: “Wife, I read lately in the Papers of Mr. Richard Hakluyt how it is among the Russians when there is love between two. The man, among other trifling gifts, sends to the woman a whip to signify what she must expect if she offend. And it is a rule among them that if the wife be not beaten once a week, she thinks herself unbeloved, and is the worse. These wives are very obedient and stir not forth but at set seasons. Upon utter dislike of his wife the husband divorces, which liberty no doubt they received from the Greek Church upon their first conversion.”
I answered nothing to this, not even an “Oh,” or a “Lord have mercy!”
We reached Reading after nightfall and ate a supper at Mr. Christopher Milton’s house, with fatted chickens, though not near so good as our own, a fine dish of salmon, fresh-boiled peas with butter, a salad of the hearts of artichokes, and plentiful strawberries and cherries. Mr. Christopher was a pleasant gentleman, with the keenness of mind to be expected in a lawyer, but with nothing of my husband’s austerity. He came closer to the Powell way of thinking, in the matter of religion and politics, than my husband; and his wife Thomasine was a sweet woman and considerate.
In a controversy at supper my husband began to speak of the rights of Parliament, declaiming that it was the highest court in the land and that the King had no shred of power to diminish its liberties and privileges. Yet his brother Christopher held otherwise: he quoted Dr. Cowell, Reader in Civil Law at Cambridge University, who had pronounced the King to be lifted above the Law by his absolute power and declared that though His Majesty, for the convenience of making laws, admitted the Bishops, the Nobility and the Commons into council with him, that was not of constraint, but of his own benignity. Of what use, Mr. Christopher asked, was the empty title of King, if His Majesty could by Parliament be bound to laws repugnant to his spirit?
Then my husband began to roll his voice thunderously across the board and to maintain that this new-fangled doctrine, lately foisted upon England, namely, that the King’s pleasure is the People’s law, was a foreign whim-wham, a poisonous goblet which Parliament would not be slow to vomit out.
“Aye, Parliament!” cried my mother. “Parliament may vote a turd to be a rose; but a turd it still remains!”
This observation my husband disregarded and cried: “For four hundred years and more, ever since old Bracton published his treatise upon the Law and Constitution of this Kingdom, there ha
s risen, each in his turn, an unbroken succession of honest witnesses to maintain that the King of England cannot at his pleasure make any slightest alteration in our well-contrived laws; so that this free people, governed by laws enacted by our own consent and approbation, is not to be deprived of goods, lives or liberties by any puny, stammering Scottish—”
“Have a care, brother,” broke in Mr. Christopher, “for my Reading and Mr. Justice Powell’s Oxford are more loyal places than your City of London.”
My husband continued, unabashed: “—stammering Scottish pretender. Here, then, Brother, is the case at issue. And when it is asserted, as lately by Dr. Roger Mainwaring, that ‘the King’s Royal will and command doth oblige the subject’s conscience upon pain of eternal damnation,’ such blasphemous and hypocritical fucus upon the face of monarchy cannot long be tolerated by our noble people, who will strip it off before long, with a rough hand, and fetch some of the skin with it. Be assured that before this summer is out (unless I have greatly mistaken the times) it will come to open warfare, in which I for one, weapon in hand, will maintain the cause of the People.”
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