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

by Fraser, Antonia

  The first of a long series of legal proceedings to get rid of Lady Anne Roos was instituted in the House of Lords by the Rutland family. Lord Dorchester was said to be quite exasperated by their attitude, which combined the mercenary and the moral: why should he relinquish any part of his estate, i.e. the money that had constituted her dowry, to make up for ‘the miscarriages of his daughter’?36 Implicitly the Rutland family was fining Lord Dorchester for having sold them a bad bargain in the shape of Lady Anne in the first place.

  Unfortunately Lord Dorchester’s faith in his daughter’s virtue was not justified. Lady Anne, growing bored with a discreet but dull existence under her father’s roof, fled from his protection. Reverting to her former defiant ways, she led a life which became a public scandal. (Given her situation, one has to admire her courage if not her morals; or perhaps it was sheer miscalculation, based on her original contempt for her husband, which induced her to take such risks.) At some point she secured custody of Ignoto and she also gave birth to another child, also a son. These two boys went through life known as John and Charles Manners respectively, the family name of the man who was still in the early 1660s their legal father.37

  Lady Anne’s behaviour disgusted and infuriated Lord Dorchester. In one of those sudden volte-faces to which this passionate and peppery man was prone, he abandoned her cause altogether. He flung himself urgently on the side of the Rutland family and was henceforth prominent among his daughter’s attackers. It was certainly bad luck for Lady Anne that as well as having an inadequate husband, she was also saddled with a half-crazy father. Supposing as we must that she had inherited her own share of instability from Lord Dorchester, it was also bad luck that it manifested itself in her reckless sexuality; so much less socially permissible in a woman than violent arguments and ridiculous chemical experiments in a man.

  At this point a divorce from bed and board was secured in the ecclesiastical courts, on the grounds of Lady Anne’s adultery, without too much difficulty. The next step was to illegitimate Lady Anne’s sons and any other children she might bear. This needed an Act of Parliament and a Bill was duly prepared relating details of Lady Anne’s ‘foul carriage’ in full. This Bill was given its first reading in October 1666.

  By this time Lady Anne herself had retreated to Ireland, When the Bill to illegitimate the children came to have its second reading in the House of Lords in November 1666, Lady Anne was summoned ‘at the last place of her abode that can be discovered’, but failed to appear.’38 The Bill seemed all set to go through when suddenly the ancient quarrel concerning the Roos title blew up again.

  The Duke of Buckingham complained that the language of the Bill was prejudicial to his own claim to the Roos title. Lord Dorchester, now a fierce Roos partisan, first insulted Buckingham and then had a physical fight with him in the Painted Chamber (although he was nearly twenty years his senior). In the course of this Lord Dorchester had his periwig pulled off and the Duke had a handful of his hair pulled out. Both the fuming peers were clapped into the Tower to cool off, and only released on petitions of apology. The question of the Roos title was not so easily settled. The committee could not find a way of satisfying both parties, and the Bill as a result got further delayed.39

  It was not until 8 February 1667 that the Act making the children of Lord Roos illegitimate finally received the royal assent.40 In the meantime, in late January, the active Rutland family had seen to it that no trouble was experienced with the Bill in the House of Commons: no fewer than forty-six Members were entertained at their expense to a dinner at the Dog Tavern, and although Lord Roos himself had a fit of colic and had to rush away (festivities do not seem to have been his strong point), the Members stayed on. Then, ‘as soon as they had dined, we carried them to the House of Commons’, where the Bill was passed without amendments.41

  As for the debated Roos title, that matter was not finally settled for a further 200 years. 2 The Duke of Buckingham died in 1687 leaving no children of either sex; as a result the ancient barony of Roos or de Ros (which could pass through the female line) fell into abeyance between the descendants of his aunts; to one of these the barony was allowed in 1806. On the other hand the Earls and later Dukes of Rutland were permitted to bear the Roos title by both Parliament and sovereign until the late nineteenth century when it was quietly dropped.42

  Lord Roos was now once more in the happy position as it seemed to him, of being without a legal heir. He was also separated from Lady Anne in the ecclesiastical courts. But the enormous hurdle of the divorce a vinculo matrimonii remained to be cleared. Even assuming that this type of divorce was secured by Act of Parliament, it was still by no means clear at this date that Lord Roos would be able to remarry in such a way that the offspring of such a second marriage would be unquestionably legitimate. And that after all was the whole object of the exercise. What point was there in dragging the family name through Parliament to obtain an expensive and controversial divorce if at the end of the day Lord Roos was simply free from Lady Anne? In most senses he was free from her already and he was certainly free from the presumptuous claims of her cuckoo sons. From the point of view of the Rutland family then, the Roos case in Parliament was entirely about remarriage, not divorce.

  It was also in the nature of a test case, in quite a different respect. By the late 1660s hopes that Catherine of Braganza, the Portuguese wife of Charles II, would bear a living child were fading (she had suffered two miscarriages). The King however already had a large brood of illegitimate children, and was clearly capable of begetting a great many more (in fact several of his bastards were born in the 1670s). One way to solve the problem of the royal succession – his brother James Duke of York, already suspected of Catholic sympathies, was heir presumptive to the throne – would be for the King to divorce Queen Catherine and marry again. There is evidence that Charles II did at least passingly consider this solution; he certainly paid keen attention to the debates over the Roos case in the House of Lords, attending them sedulously, and observing in one of his characteristic asides that the whole thing was as good as a play. Once again, it was the question of the legitimacy of the children of a second marriage which obsessed the monarch: heirs to the throne of dubious legitimacy threatening a national disaster where for the Earls of Rutland it was merely a personal misfortune.

  There were other interests at stake. Lords Anglesey and Ashley (the latter soon to be created Earl of Shaftesbury), whose sons had married Lord Roos’s two sisters, ‘drove in on the bill’; it was not in their sons’ best interests that Lord Roos should be allowed to remarry, since if he could not both their wives were potential beneficiaries. Lord Castleton took the opportunity to demand a fourth part of the lands settled on his mother, sister to the Earl of Rutland, but later withdrew the claim.43

  Remarriage then was the issue for most of the interested parties – most but not all. For Lady Anne Roos the issue was quite different: it was the uncomfortable issue of money, her money, her very livelihood. In February 1668 Lady Anne brought her own petition to the House of Lords stating that she had not received a penny from Lord Roos for four years and was thus destitute, yet she had brought a great fortune to Lord Roos on her marriage. None of this was now allowed to her, and she could not dispose of her own estate during Lord Roos’s lifetime. Thus she was daily in danger of being arrested for debts, some of which had been contracted while she still lived with her husband. It was this dire state of poverty, she explained, which had caused her to flee to Ireland ‘that her friends and relations might not be eye-witnesses of her misery’. While in Ireland she had been unable to travel to England to vindicate her honour. (Rumour said that Lady Anne had in fact travelled to Ireland with her lover; probably both stories were true.) Lady Anne implored Lord Roos to pay her reasonable debts, to give her yearly maintenance in proportion to the dowry she had brought with her, and enable her to dispose of her own estate so that she could support her children and keep them and her out of gaol.44

  In the spr
ing of 1670 a Roos Bill – for divorce – was once more before Parliament, and in society provided the main topic of conversation. Much turned on the precise interpretation to be given to various texts in the New Testament. The most favourable were those of St Matthew, in particular that verse where Jesus declared that ‘whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery’ – for this could be held to justify remarriage when fornication had been the cause of separation. (The versions given by St Mark and St Luke were less susceptible of such a favourable interpretation: ‘Whosoever shall put away his wife, and marry another, committeth adultery against her’.) Then the various precedents were discussed, the most often quoted being that of the Marquess of Northampton in the reign of Edward VI. After his first wife had been put away for adultery, he had married ‘the good and virtuous’ Lady Elizabeth, daughter of Lord Cobham; the children of this marriage had been legitimated.45

  On the second reading of the Bill, Lady Anne was once more called to the House of Lords. This time she did appear and had her petition for maintenance read. At the same time she was asked what she said to ‘the scandals’ laid upon her by Frances Countess of Rutland. Lady Anne’s answer concerned money not morals: her petition she said was no scandal, as she hoped to prove if she had liberty of appeal. She asked to have counsel to speak for her. Lady Anne then left and the House considered the matter. However when Lady Anne was recalled the answer came back that ‘she was gone’.46 There is no evidence that she ever did get her portion returned – particularly in view of the hostility of her father – while her peripatetic way of life indicates that her debts continued to plague her. So Lady Anne ended by being penalized financially for her immoral behaviour; a development which was not exactly planned, but not disagreeable to society either.

  As for the Marquess of Dorchester, he stood up in the House of Lords and publicly gave his assent to the Bill because of the ‘foul blemish’ done by his daughter to her husband; while the Earl of Rutland spoke eloquently of Lord Roos being the ‘sole heir male’ to the ancient Manners family, with whom the honour must expire if he was not allowed to marry – and procreate – again. Lord Rutland’s appeal fell on receptive ears in the Lords. There was general compassion for his family’s plight and general indignation that an ‘impudent woman’ should have brought it about. Although some peers still queried the important precedent which was being set, and the Duke of Buckingham continued to fuss about the use of his own title in the Bill, finally it passed through Lords and Commons.

  On 1 March Lord Roos felt confident enough to spend 1s 10d on ‘Fagotts’ for a bonfire ‘at the good accord of the King and the House of Parliament’. On 11 April 1670 the Bill for a divortium a vinculo matrimonii received the royal assent (although the Duke of Buckingham succeeded in getting the actual title of Roos left out of it).47

  The decision created a sensation and was much discussed, often with a sense of unease. Although public sympathy lay with the injured and innocent Lord Roos, the words of the New Testament, especially those of St Mark and St Luke, had to be explained away. A pamphlet printed afterwards of a discussion between ‘a clergyman’ and ‘a private gentleman’ stressed St Matthew’s text; of the Early Fathers, St Jerome had supported the view that a man could put away his wife for fornication; certain early councils of the church had allowed remarriage. All of this was less convincing than the robust practical statement at the end of the pamphlet that if a man were not allowed to remarry he were ‘to be put into a kind of Matrimonial Purgatory, and be rendered thereby incapable to enjoy, either the advantages of a married one, or the freedom of a single man.’48

  It was to free Lord Roos from the ‘Matrimonial Purgatory’ into which the wanton behaviour of Lady Anne had cast him that the whole cumbersome long-drawn-out process of the law, lasting one way and another for nearly ten years, had had to be invoked.

  As might have been predicted, it was not long before Lord Roos, freed from his purgatory, essayed again those delights of heaven – would that they might not prove once more the torments of hell – promised by marriage. He had in fact been a target for matchmakers for some years, who laid contingency plans just in case this rich prize became available. In 1671 he married Lady Diana Bruce. The choice, out of all the girls in England, was an unlucky one; the next year she died in childbirth, and the child, a boy, died too. (The payment for embalming the body of the second Lady Roos appears in the family papers shortly after that joyous expenditure of 1s 10d on faggots for a bonfire to celebrate freedom from the first.)49

  Eighteen months later Lord Roos married again: the new bride was Catherine Noel, daughter of Viscount Campden. A son John was born in 1676, who bore in his turn the controversial title of Lord Roos when his father succeeded to the earldom of Rutland three years later. So the Manners succession was secure; too late however for Lord Roos’s mother – Frances Countess of Rutland had lived to see her son’s divorce pass through Parliament but died a year later.

  John, ninth Earl of Rutland, a prominent supporter of William III, was in his later years also famous for his dislike of the town of London; no doubt his early traumatic experiences with Lady Anne had inculcated this loathing. Mainly at Belvoir, he lived till 1711. As for Lady Anne, she was dead before January 1697. She too married again – a Mr Vaughan, about whom little is known except the fact that he was wounded in a duel by the boorish seventh Earl of Pembroke in 1677. John and Charles Manners were still living in 1699, but beyond that vanish from the pages of history.’50 The end of their lives is Ignoto – unknown – as once John Manners’s name had been.

  Yet the trail of the Roos scandal was not totally obliterated, even in the next generation. If we return to Rachel Lady Russell, that ‘bright example to a brittle age’, we find that one of her primary aims in her dutiful widowed years was the splendid mating of her two daughters, another Rachel, and Katherine, as well as the care of her son Wriothesley. Rachel – little Rachel, she who had sung in bed and talked of Papa at ‘Wobee’ – was just fourteen when she married Lord Cavendish, heir to the Earl of Devonshire. Where Katherine Russell was concerned, the most eligible bridegroom in England in the early 1690s (other than her younger brother Wriothesley) was none other than John Lord Roos, offspring of his father’s third and fortunate marriage to Catherine Noel.

  Once again, as with the union of that other Lord Roos and Lady Anne Pierrepont nearly forty years earlier, everything seemed set fair for the match. John Earl of Rutland, as a Whig, was likely to look upon the daughter of the martyred Lord Russell with sympathy, and the Russells were likely to regard him with similar benevolence. There was a family connection: Catherine Countess of Rutland, born a Noel, was related by marriage to Rachel Lady Russell’s ‘sister Noel’. As for Katherine Russell herself, she was said to be ‘of a sweet temper’, had had a suitable education for her position, would be a good manageress, and ‘wanted no wit’:51 in short, the ideal daughter-in-law. Nothing was known to the discredit of the young Lord Roos (he was the same age as his intended bride) and a great deal to his credit, including those vast Midland possessions he must one day inherit.

  All the same Rachel Lady Russell hesitated. Twenty years later the memory of that frightful decade of scandal and divorce centred on the name of Roos had not utterly faded; besides there were those awkward Manners sons to be remembered, barred from the honours and the estates, but still in themselves constituting a reminder of those ugly days.

  In the end, wise woman that she was, Lady Russell decided that it was wrong to avoid ‘the best match in England for an imaginary religious scruple’. In characteristic fashion, she managed to sound a note which was both high-minded and worldly. ‘If a divorce is lawful’, she wrote, ‘as agreeing with the word of God, I take a marriage after it certainly to be so. And as for the estate, as we enjoy that by man’s law, and that man can alter, and so may alter again, which is a risk I am willing to run, if there should be enough left.’52

  So Jo
hn Lord Roos and Katherine Russell, both still just under seventeen, were married in August 1693. The wedding took place at Woburn Abbey. Afterwards the bridal pair made a triumphal progress to Belvoir Castle, something more like the journey of young sovereigns through their own country, than that of a bride and groom going to his father’s house. The High Sheriff paid his respects at Harborough. As they approached Belvoir, thousands of people began huzza-ing. At the gates of the Castle were to be found twenty-four fiddlers and twenty-four trumpeters. A magnificent banquet was followed by a visit of the bridal pair to the Great Hall where a vast cistern full of wine had been established. Healths were drunk – first in spoonfuls, then in cupfuls; after an hour the level of the cistern had hardly dropped an inch. After that the healths were drunk in great tankards.53 The celebrations were in short even more magnificent than those which had heralded the arrival of Lady Anne Pierrepont into the Manners fold in 1658.