The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (WOMEN IN HISTORY)

by Fraser, Antonia

  A few months after Lord Russell’s death, Rachel’s old mentor Dr Fitzwilliam advocated a recourse to the Scriptures for comfort. In reply, Lady Russell burst out that nothing could comfort her because of her lack of him. ‘I want him to talk with, to walk with, to eat, and sleep with. All these things are irksome to me. The day unwelcome, and the night so too …’57 Even her children made her heart ‘shrink’ because she remembered the pleasure their father had taken in them. Two years later she was still torturing herself with thoughts that she could have done more to save him.

  At the death of Anne Countess of Bedford (an event probably brought forward by the shock of her son’s execution) Rachel took the opportunity to visit the family vault at Chenies in Buckinghamshire where her husband’s body was entombed. She defended her decision to Dr Fitzwilliam. ‘I had considered. I went not to seek the living among the dead. I knew I should not see him anymore, wherever I went, and had made a covenant with myself, not to break out in unreasonable fruitless passion.’ She went deliberately to ‘quicken my contemplation’ as to ‘whither the nobler part was fled, to a country far off, where no earthly power bears any sway, nor can put an end to a happy society.’58

  When Lady Russell went to London for the sake of her little boy’s future, she determined to be brave about visiting Southampton House: ‘I think (by God’s assistance) the shadows will not sink me.’ Yet every anniversary destroyed her resolution by ‘breaking off that bandage, time would lay over my wound’. In 1695, suffering in fact from cataract of the left eye, she was said to have wept herself blind. In extreme old age, listing her sins in shaky handwriting, Rachel included the fact that she had been inconsolable for the death of him who had been ‘my dear Mr Russell, seeking help from man but finding none’.59

  It was natural that this tragic widow should resolve never to marry again; instead she resolved to see ‘none but lawyers and accountants’ in the interests of her children. Both decisions were much applauded by a society which admired Lady Russell’s heroism in adopting such a stern and secluded way of life. So by degrees Lady Russell fulfilled the highest expectations of her time for a great lady.2

  Her future efforts were entirely for her family. She succeeded in getting the attainder on her husband’s title reversed so that her son Wriothesley could bear it. She carefully arranged, as we shall see in the next chapter, important worldly matches for her daughters. As for Wriothesley, he was not yet thirteen when old Sir Josiah Child, the magnate of the East India Company, described by John Evelyn as ‘sordidly avaricious’, but doubtless with compensating qualities, proposed the boy a bride in the shape of his granddaughter; this was Lady Henrietta Somerset, offspring of Lord Worcester and Miss Rebecca Child. Although Sir Josiah used a clergyman as his envoy, he found Lady Russell’s reply disappointingly cold. As for the tactful response that the young lord was still being educated, that made Sir Josiah indignant: he wrote back that that had never been ‘a bar to parents discoursing of the matching of their children, which are born to extraordinary fortunes’. City money was evidently not the problem, nor necessarily youth: for only two years later the young lord was duly married off to another Child granddaughter. Elizabeth Howland. This granddaughter was even richer, which may have been the point. The sum of the young couple’s ages came to twenty-eight years, wrote a contemporary; the bride alone, however, was worth a total of £100,000, a new Howland title being created for the Russell family as a compliment to her possessions.61

  Rachel was clearly determined to show herself a sympathetic mother-in-law to the girl, only just in her teens; a year after the marriage she approved the news that Mr Huck the dressmaker had taken her in hand. While Lady Russell herself believed fashion to be ‘but dross’, she prayed constantly that her daughter-in-law might be ‘a perfect creature both in mind and body; that is, in the manner we can reach perfection in this world’. In this perfection, Lady Russell was wise enough to see that Mr Huck the dressmaker had his place.62

  As for Wriothesley, Marquess of Tavistock after the elevation of his grandfather to the dukedom of Bedford, when he turned out to be weak and an inveterate gambler – with a dead hero for a father and a doting mother did he ever have a chance? – Rachel Lady Russell was there to act as an intermediary in confessing his gambling debts to his dreaded grandfather

  At the death of the old Duke in 1700, Rachel only waited a few days before writing to King William and asking for the Garter ‘his grandfather so long enjoyed’ on behalf of her twenty-year-old son. ‘Sir, I presume on your goodness to forgive a woman’s troubling you,’ she wrote: not only the new Duke ‘but I know the whole family would always look upon it as a mark of your grace and favour to them’.63 Even in her sixties with problems of eyesight Rachel could be relentless where the advancement of her family was at stake.

  ‘Grandmamma Russell’, as Rachel was ultimately known, lived to be nearly ninety, still keeping Fridays as a day of recollection. She died in 1722. The Weekly Journal commemorated one who had been the heroine of her age, as well as being married to a hero, as follows:

  Russell, the chaste, has left this earthly stage,

  A bright example to a brittle age …

  No arts her soul to second vows inclin’d

  No storm could frighten his unshaken mind …

  She was in short, like her husband, ‘Proof against all, inseparably good.’64

  1 This touching family scene, together with ‘The Parting of Lord and Lady Russell’ and Lady Russell pleading for mercy from King Charles II, was to become a favourite subject among Victorian painters, figuring in exhibitions at the Royal Academy throughout the nineteenth century.56

  2 This admiration for Lady Russell’s thoroughly feminine withdrawal did not fade. In 1815 Mary Berry, Walpole’s friend, editing her letters, referred to Lady Russell with approval as having spent the rest of her existence, unlike most heroines, ‘within the pale of private life and female duties’; an example which should be more widely followed.60

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Divorce from Bed and Board

  ‘A Divorce is from Bed and Board; and is not void in respect of the Marriage so as that the Injured [Party] may marry again.’

  The Athenian Oracle, 1701

  There was no such thing as divorce in the seventeenth century, at least not in the sense the term is understood today. This does not necessarily imply a starry-eyed view of human nature, still less a higher level of marital happiness: the pragmatic need for the separation of miserable or discordant couples was well appreciated, as it had always been, and such separations took place on a number of different levels of society.

  In 1670 the Earl of Lauderdale, later created a Duke, Charles II’s viceroy in Scotland and a member of the acronymic Cabal, was conducting a flagrant liaison with Bess Countess of Dysart. His wife separated from him and went to live in Paris; but Lauderdale paid for her and she was allowed to take with her not only her own jewels but also – to Bess’s disgust – the Lauderdale family heirlooms.1 After her death, Lauderdale and the flame-haired Bess were able to marry; as Duke and Duchess of Lauderdale they held proud court in Scotland.

  A less grandiose form of separation occurred when one spouse absented herself or himself without formality from the other spouse’s side. In the 1650s Tom Oxinden had married a fourteen-year-old heiress whom he brought home under proper supervision. As he wrote to his step-mother: ‘I hope she carries herself civilly and dutifully towards you and lovingly towards my sisters, as I have often desired her to do.’ A few years later the bond was not sufficient to prevent Tom falling in love with Mrs Zutphenia Ower, wife of Robert Ower of Sydal. The pair went off and lived together. In 1662 Elizabeth Oxinden, the deserted wife, heard to her satisfaction that ‘the Lady’ and her husband were not happy together, Tom looking lean and pale. It must have given her less satisfaction when the ne’er-do-well Tom took to being a highwayman, was apprehended and died in prison in 1668. At this point Elizabeth Oxinden was free to marry again, did so,
and bore four children by her second husband.2

  The Oxindens belonged, roughly speaking, to the middle class and there was no question of Elizabeth Oxinden remarrying before Tom’s death since details of his unfortunate existence filtered through to her. It was however quite possible in a ramified country like England for an errant husband (or wife) of a lower class to disappear altogether. Under such circumstances a second – bigamous – marriage might take place in the lifetime of the previous partner. Before the Hardwicke Act of 1753 which not only necessitated parental consent for minors but also made void those marriages performed without publication of the banns or a licence, such ceremonies were not too difficult to accomplish. In this manner it could be said that the propertyless classes enjoyed a kind of de facto liberty denied to their wealthier contemporaries. (Evidence of this popular ‘divorce’ in defiance of the rules is provided by the case-books of Richard Napier.)3

  The sort of marriage which had been preceded by a financial settlement, with negotiations for a dowry then and a jointure to come, presented more of a problem when its component parts began to fall apart. Money was a powerful shackle, particularly for the woman. A wife was unlikely to secure any kind of maintenance if she separated from her husband, and legally had of course no money of her own, all of this having been handed over to her spouse on marriage. When Lady Hatton, mother of Frances Coke, separated from her second husband Sir Edward Coke, part of their violent quarrel over money concerned her wish to preserve that property she had inherited from her first husband, Sir William Hatton.4

  Influential relations were a help. Lady Isabella Rich, the daughter of the Earl of Holland and the heiress Isabel Cope of Kensington, married Sir James Thynne of Longleat. When Charles I was at Oxford, she acted the part of Egeria to the court (it was her knowledge of statecraft which had prompted Ann Lady Fanshawe’s unfortunate intrusion into her husband’s political affairs – see pp. 68—9). Lodged at Balliol College, Lady Isabella and Ann Fanshawe could cause ‘a flutter’ appearing in Trinity College Chapel ‘half-dressed like Angels’. Dorothy Osborne described Lady Isabella as ‘the loveliest thing that could be looked on’. And her talent for music, combined with her air of nonchalance, inspired Waller to a poem, ‘Of my Lady Isabella playing on the Lute’, beginning:

  Such moving sounds from such a careless touch!

  So unconcerned herself, and we so much!

  Aubrey however put his finger on her disadvantage as a wife: ‘most beautiful, most humble, most charitable etc.,’ as she was, Lady Isabella ‘could not subdue one thing’.5

  She became the mistress of the Royalist leader, the Marquess of Ormonde, finding him ‘too agreeable’, and bore him an illegitimate son (her marriage to Sir James Thynne was childless). Later she became involved in Royalist plotting, her father the Earl of Holland having been executed for his part in the second Civil War. Lady Isabella left England in 1650, finding refuge with Ormonde’s charitable and sensible wife Elizabeth Desmond.6

  It was hardly surprising under the circumstances that a formal separation was arranged between Sir James Thynne and his wife, the deed being dated 1 November 1653.7 The real point of this extremely long and detailed document was not however that husband and wife should ‘freely and voluntarily for ever hereafter permit and suffer each other to live separate and apart the one from the other’; nor even that Lady Isabella should be accounted, so far as her husband was concerned, as ‘feme sole’, that is he should exercise no control over her; since both these states of affairs obtained already. Both sides were actually concerned to establish proper financial arrangements: Lady Isabella abandoned her claim on ‘all her Jointures and title of Dower’ settled on her at her marriage in 1640, in return for proper provision and maintenance.

  Yet it was seldom that a woman, even supported by influential relations, secured more than the partial return of what had once been theoretically her own; Lady Isabella’s allowance being a small part of what she had brought with her on marriage.

  Not all the matches arranged by Mary Countess of Warwick for her Rich nieces were as happy as that of Lady Essex and Daniel Finch. Lady Essex’s sister, Lady Anne Barrington, was made of flimsier stuff. Like many late seventeenth-century ladies Lady Anne heartily disliked living in the country. In 1658 wilful Betty Verney had written yearningly from the bedside of her sick sister of her London memories: ‘Hyde Park and the cherries there is very pleasant to me.’ It was also taken for granted that more estimable characters would share these sentiments: that admirable woman Lucy Countess of Huntingdon ‘naturally loved London very well’, wrote one of her children in 1664. But as time wore on, the connection between London and adultery (at least for wives) and the country and boredom (at least for wives) did not only exist in the plots of Restoration plays. Husbands punished their wives or alternatively secured the sanctity of their marriage beds in advance by dispatching their wives away from temptation. ‘To send a man’s wife to the Peak’ was a phrase coined when the second Earl of Chesterfield sent his Countess back to his Derbyshire estates in a fit of jealousy.8

  In 1679 Lady Anne’s husband, Tom Barrington, made a stand after a lengthy period of unhappiness. ‘But for you living in London’, he told her, ‘I shall not, nor ever will consent thereto …’ For fifteen years he had conformed to her humour, and now she must conform to his and live ‘a soberer life in the country’. Furthermore she must settle all her estates on their children. The negotiations were left to Lady Anne’s brother-in-law Daniel Finch. He proceeded carefully: while not defending Lady Anne’s rash conduct in London, he pointed out that she must receive some allowance in return for her estates; otherwise it was ‘as if my Lady had committed so great a fault as that she must pay a thousand pounds a year per annum to repair it’. Lady Anne might have been a bad wife, but she had been a good mother, rising in the middle of the night to care for her child and visiting it while at nurse daily. Fortunately for Lady Anne the situation was resolved when Tom Barrington died; three years later she was able to marry again without hindrance.9

  Unofficial separations brought their own problems, also financial. Peg Verney never really got on with her husband Sir Thomas Elmes – neither of them was sufficiently even-natured to make a go of it – and after a few years what amounted to a separation was tried. Sir Thomas believed that ‘to part in Love’, that is, amicably, might increase the affection they felt for each other; but he was concerned that it should be ‘done in a way that nobody may know, certainly guess they will, but know they need not’. There was an attempt at a rapprochement which did not really work; for the rest of her life Peg was involved in arguments with Sir Thomas over the kind of money due to her, if any. At her death Sir Thomas angrily took the line that Peg had had no right to make a will leaving away money from him (because she was legally still his wife).10

  When it came to an official arrangement it was possible to secure a form of divorce – divortium a mensa et thoro, divorce from bed and board as it was known – in the ecclesiastical courts. This was the kind of process threatened by the father of Mary Joyce in January 1661, as reported by Pepys, because she and her husband Will led ‘a strange life together, nothing but fighting, etc.’.11

  The word ‘divorce’ was generally applied to such cases, but we should in fact find the term judicial separation more accurate, since it was an important aspect of the process in the ecclesiastical courts that the parties concerned, including the injured party, were not free to marry again. This was in accordance with Canon Law. Although at the start of the century some preachers had been suggesting that remarriage might be possible for the innocent, this prohibition was strongly restated at the ecclesiastical conference of 1604.

  Occasionally people did remarry, thus forfeiting the money which they had deposited as a security against doing so. In November 1605 the beautiful Penelope Rich, inspiration of Sir Philip Sidney and long-time mistress of Sir Charles Blount (by whom she had borne several children), obtained this type of divorce a mensa et thoro fr
om Lord Rich in the ecclesiastical courts. It was specifically laid down that neither should remarry in the lifetime of the other. Despite this, six weeks later Penelope Rich was married to Sir Charles Blount. However, since this was a clear violation of Canon Law, her children by Blount were not made legitimate; and ironically enough Penelope Lady Blount, who had been happily received at court throughout her long adulterous liaison, was now debarred from it.12

  William Whateley was a country vicar in the early seventeenth century, known as the Roaring Boy of Banbury for the power and vitriol of his sermons. In 1619, in a tract called. A Bride-Bush, he stated that adultery and desertion annulled the marriage contract and thus permitted remarriage. He was promptly called before the Court of High Commission and obliged to recant; he withdrew the assertion in print in a second tract of 1624, A Care-Cloth. Only the Commonwealth Marriage Act of 1653 brought in a brief period of greater latitude; the notion of marriage as a purely civil ceremony denied the iron grip of Canon Law. The Act stated that the innocent party should be allowed to marry again according to the recommendations of the Westminster Assembly of Divines. (Milton’s famous proposals on the subject of divorce were obviously framed with the idea of remarriage in mind.)13 But although reformers continued to press for this possibility, with the Restoration this sophisticated Puritan interlude came to an end.

  If the parties were anxious to remarry, the simplest method was for them to secure a decree of nullity which established that the marriage had been void ab initio, from the beginning. The Ladies Dictionary of 1694, a comprehensive work, referred to divorce ‘in our Courts’ as only being through nullity; grounds including Consanguinity and Affinity (of blood) as well as Precontract and Impotency. To be cynical, a decree of nullity was expensive but not impossible to secure. Of the various grounds, non-consummation, if applicable, was the obvious one to choose; it was a subject however which might produce some strange assertions. When Frances, later Countess of Somerset, had been determined to get rid of her first husband, the Earl of Essex, she did so on the remarkable grounds that, although not impotent towards women in general, Essex was impotent towards her in particular. With the support of King James, Frances secured her decree of nullity and was able to wed Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, the royal favourite. On the other hand when Lady Desmond sued Lord Desmond in 1635 it was on the more straightforward grounds that her husband had ‘insufficiency to please a reasonable woman’.14