The splits in Christianity that came with the Reformation greatly affected regimes of marriage. Luther championed marriage as a state ‘divinely ordained’: man and woman were ‘created to multiply’, and only very few of them made for a chaste spiritual calling. His own marriage to Katarina von Bora in 1525, a nun he had helped after her escape with eleven others from a convent, set the seal on clerical marriage. Katarina bore him six children, and his marriage to this feisty, enterprising and hardworking woman was as influential an affair as Henry VIII’s divorce.
By abandoning the concept of original sin and emphasizing the significance of individual conscience as well as private communion with God, Protestantism gave weight both to personal autonomy and to that inner life where love plays so major a part. In England and America, where Puritanism had such a strong hold in the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries, conflicting trends emerged. On the one hand the Puritans, taking their cue from the Bible, insisted on patriarchal authority, that respect and obedience due to the father as head of the family: this underscored paternal power in the choice of a marriage partner and obedience to the husband from both wife and children. On the other hand, the Puritans rebelled against the Catholic ideal of chastity, not only for the priestly classes but as a virtue for all Christians. In his ‘wedding sermon’ or ‘direction for married persons’ of 1619, A Bride-Bush, the preacher William Whately encourages ‘mutual dalliances for pleasure’s sake’. Not only is marital sex condoned by the Puritans for the sake of generation, but it is intended for the equal satisfaction of both husband and wife. In the bedchamber, the wife is ‘both a servant and mistress, a servant to yield her body, a mistress to have the power of his’.
Amongst many others, the leading Elizabethan Puritan clergyman William Perkins declared marriage ‘a state in itself far more excellent than the condition of a single life’. Marriage was now sanctified into ‘holy matrimony’, a union which not only permitted fornication to be avoided and legitimate children to come into the world, but which according to the Prayer Book of 1549 was conducive to a better life, enabling ‘mutual society, help and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and in adversity’. These words are an early version of those still used by the Anglican Church today in wedding ceremonies. They are evidence of a general Protestant endorsement of the need for mutual affection in marriage.
Milton, in that great defence of marriage embedded in his Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, takes us one step closer to modernity. He argues that God’s intention in creating a ‘helpmeet’ for Adam was based on the understanding that ‘It is not good that man should be alone.’ The only conclusion to be drawn from this, Milton goes on to write, is that ‘a meet and happy conversation is the chiefest and noblest end of marriage, for we find no expression so necessarily implying carnal knowledge as this prevention of loneliness to the mind and spirit of man’. It is worth noting, in thinking about marriage, how often conversation, another version of that many-faceted word ‘intercourse’, recurs as one of the underpinnings to its happy state.
The horrors of the Civil War, which had split families apart, often leaving women to fend for themselves and their children, had empowered women as ‘helpmeets’ in a new way. Some, like the Leveller women, had even engaged in direct political action. It could be argued that in England the ideal of a companionate marriage came early because of the shift not only in political but in sexual power instigated by civil war.
The Companionate Marriage
Following the trauma of the Civil War, and the brief excesses for the privileged few of the Restoration, the Glorious Revolution initiated an epoch of growing secularism alongside economic and political liberalism in England. The end of absolute monarchy brought a diminution of paternal power in its wake. Self-interest, the pursuit of individual happiness, which John Locke had defined in his Two Treatises on Government (1690) as the basis of liberty, was now understood as something which extended to the good of the community as a whole. As Alexander Pope put it in his Essay on Man (1733): ‘That reason, passion, answer one great aim/That true self-love and social are the same.’ Individual gratification was edging away filial duty in the hierarchy of values.
In America, Locke’s idea of the ‘pursuit of happiness’ would find its way into the Declaration of Independence of 1776. Abigail Adams, wife of John Adams, who was to become the second president of the United States, urged him during the process of drafting the legislation to ‘remember the ladies’ and the state of marriage. He dismissed her request, even though their own union had been based on a loving courtship, while respect, mutual care and friendship characterized their long lives together. But this highly intelligent woman’s description of the balance of power in an affectionate marriage, her use of the term ‘happiness’, point to the new understanding that had grown up through the century: ‘Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands,’ Abigail writes. ‘Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could… give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of friend… [R]egard us then as Beings placed by providence under your protection and in imitation of the Supreme Being make use of that power only for our happiness.’
It is clear from fiction and drama from the late medieval period on, that love had long played its part in the making of marriages, despite familial opposition: families ever ranked property, financial gain and enhanced status above the mere matter of love. But, as Lawrence Stone has argued, from the late seventeenth century on in Britain there was a far more general trend towards ‘affective individualism’ and the ‘companionate family’. Love, gradually even romantic love, now took on a central role in the making of marriage. Affection between partners, which includes sexual affection, became widely understood as a good. The statesman and essayist Sir William Temple, whom Jonathan Swift served as secretary during the 1690s, was one prominent voice to put the case for love, decrying materialistic marriage as a ‘popular discontent’: ‘our marriages are made just like other common Bargains and Sales, by the mere consideration of Interest and Gain, without any Love or Esteem, of Birth or of Beauty itself, which ought to be the true Ingredients of all Happy Compositions of this kind, and of all generous Productions’.
Four vying arrangements exist in the making of marital matches. The choice of a mate can rest entirely with parents and kin: this is the order of the day in patriarchal societies amongst the property-owning classes. A second option has parents making the choice, but with a right of veto by the child. There is an underlying assumption here that compatibility is necessary for a good marriage and that a child’s antipathy to the parental choice will prevent a reasonable outcome. The next option is that the choice is made by the child, but now the parents have the right to veto a mate made unacceptable by reason of either financial or social place. This is the version of match-making that gains pre-eminence, though is hardly universal, during the eighteenth century in England and some other parts of Europe, as well as in North America. The final option, in which children make their own choice and then inform their parents, is the one which largely reigns today in the West, except in enclaves where arranged marriages are still the rule.
Marriage based on individual choice and love was on the ascendant during the Enlightenment. But the trend did not go unopposed, in the first instance by parents of the propertied classes themselves. The heated public debates which led to the controversial English Marriage Act of 1753 paint a various and conflicted picture of everyday marital mores, which the Act sets out to tidy in the best interests of the governing class. They indicate, as do the growing number of diaries and autobiographies in this period of increasing individualism, that the course of true love was decidedly bumpy, with steep precipices on both sides.
Subtitled ‘An Act for the Better Preventing of Clandestine Marriage’, the legislation set out to outlaw bigamy and make it impossible for those under twenty-one to marry without parental permission. The period had seen a boom in clandestine mar
riages, popular with the poor from 1660 onwards. Elopements by under twenty-ones under the influence of ‘love’ were numerous: a rash of cartoons show girls climbing out of the windows of boarding schools into waiting carriages. The clandestine activity was abetted by the fact that marriages could be cheaply bought in London marriage shops and in the precincts of the Fleet Prison. There, too, partners for pregnant women could be found for a fee, and unions backdated to legitimize illegitimate children.
Equally troubling to the rising numbers of the bourgeoisie and the landed classes was the laxity of a marriage regime that permitted adventurers and courtesans–‘sharpers’, ‘bawds’ and ‘strumpets’, as the 1753 parliamentary debate had it–to marry the under-age children of the propertied classes. Men, but also women, on the make seduced the impressionable young of greater wealth and status into marriages rich families could not approve. A bigamist, having seduced a young woman in one part of the country and often got her with child, could move elsewhere and enter into a second marriage, with no one the wiser. Parish records could not instantly be tapped, while poor priests could easily enough be induced into falsifying them. Action had to be taken, as Attorney General Sir Dudley Ryder put it, ‘for guarding against the many artful contrivances set on foot to seduce young gentlemen and ladies of fortune, and to draw them into improper, perhaps infamous, marriages’.
The Act brought a law into being that legalized solely marriages performed in a public ceremony according to the Book of Common Prayer, in a local church where the parties would be known, and before witnesses. (Exceptions were made only for Jews, Quakers and the Royal Family.) Marriages had to be registered in a document signed by the parties, witnesses and a priest. For minors under twenty-one, paternal consent had to be given. The Act made all clandestine marriages null and void. Appeal to ecclesiastical courts–as had often been made by women promised marriage, seduced and then abandoned–was prohibited. ‘Young innocent girls’ under the age of consent led astray by ‘rakish young lords and squires’ could no longer sue for breach of promise. This was a law made for the privileged. Elite parents needed the state, it seems, to help them keep control of children who might contract ‘a scandalous or an infamous marriage’. It also prevented children from prior ‘secret’ marriages suing for inheritance. Property was paramount.
The Act’s opponents, as David Lemmings has argued, were hardly all the champions of love, of individual choice or of defenceless girls and the poor, despite their persuasive speeches. They may have decried ‘paternal authority’ as being ‘whimsical and selfish’, and indeed, often enough ‘abused by parents’. They may have criticized the Act for attempting to control ‘all the emotions of love and genuine affection in youth by the frigid maxims of avarice and ambition imbibed by age’. But amongst the Act’s most vocal opponents were instances of men behaving badly that would make today’s excesses pale by comparison. Robert Nugent, for instance, spoke in the House of that ‘tender and elegant passion we call love’ and pleaded the case for the ‘fair sex’ for whom the Bill would ‘prove a snare for entrapping many of them to their ruin… A young woman is but too apt by nature to trust to the honour of the man she loves, and to admit him to her bed upon a solemn promise to marry her.’ Yet this was a man who twenty years earlier had abandoned his cousin in Ireland, leaving her with a son he refused to recognize, and who had then married ever richer heiresses and a string of affluent widows, all the while ‘whoring’ elsewhere. Robert Walpole was inspired to coin the word ‘Nugentize’ to characterize such doings.
Marriages based on that troublesome entity, love, may have been both cultural wish and sometime practice in an eighteenth century that prioritized a degree of individual freedom. This is the period, after all, when for the first time men have their portraits painted with their wives–witness Gainsborough’s famous Mr and Mrs Andrews gazing out at their estate and Jacques-Louis David’s Lavoisier looking up at his wife with admiration. Yet little was put in place, either legally or through custom, to make women the loving, equal companions Daniel Defoe had in mind when he observed: ‘Love knows no superior or inferior, no imperious command on the one hand, no reluctant subjection on the other.’
Though greater and greater numbers of women, stretching to the daughters of artisans and shopkeepers, were taught in the course of the century to read and could take in the breadth of a magazine like Addison and Steele’s Spectator, alongside a burgeoning variety of novels and journals aimed specifically at women, their schooling was still largely a matter of learning ladylike ‘accomplishments’. Grace or deportment, a little piano, some French, and above all needlework and embroidery were skills calculated to allow them to please their husbands and at best run a household. Such an education was often less than sufficient to permit women to establish that ‘conjugal happiness’ for which it was essential ‘that the husband have such an opinion of his wife’s understanding, principles and integrity of heart as would induce him to exalt her to the rank of his first and dearest friend’. Though there was a marked improvement in women’s education by the end of the century, its aim was limited to turning girls into genteel ladies of leisure, at best mothers able to provide their toddlers with the rudimentary principles of good behaviour. In The Subjection of Women (1869) John Stuart Mill could still observe that women’s whole education had as its object to please men, their masters, who in the course of the nineteenth century added to the restrictions on women the presumption of an inferior ‘mental capacity’.
Crucially, women once married had no status in law. As the jurist Sir William Blackstone put it in his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–9), ‘the husband and wife are one, and the husband is that one’. A wife gave up her entire legal person to her spouse, a fact Daniel Defoe bemoans in Roxana (1724): ‘the very nature of the marriage contract was… nothing but giving up liberty, estate, authority and everything to a man and the woman was indeed a mere woman ever after–that is to say a slave’. Little of substance had changed when Mill came to write 145 years later. Property, children, the wife’s very body belonged to her husband, the first two even after his death, unless he bequeathed otherwise. If she left him, he could compel her to return. Any earnings or gifts she might receive were his. Beatings were no crime. During the nineteenth century there were some slight improvements, but these pertained only to wealthy women who could afford legal interventions. The marriage contract could include a clause about a regular sum of pin money being put at the wife’s disposal. Formal separations in which the wife was granted a financial settlement and possibly allowed to take one of the children with her became slightly more common amongst the upper classes. But husbands, unless they were otherwise inclined, had absolute authority over their wives.
Yet, despite these long-lasting legal and social inequities, the eighteenth-century ideal of a companionate marriage, one that was sparked by love and went on to include friendship, mutual respect, sexual pleasure and the possibility of ‘happiness’, wore a decidedly modern loving face.
So much so that, seen from Catholic Europe, this marriage based on love seemed a decidedly odd beast. It could be said that Catholicism, by allowing sin to be easily absolved through the simple recourse to a confessional, had an easier relationship to individual conscience and transgressions of the flesh and helped to excuse adultery. As Oscar Wilde quipped, the Roman Catholic Church is ‘for saints and sinners alone–for respectable people, the Anglican Church will do’. In Catholic Europe, marriage long maintained its primary relationship to family, progeny and property, while love resided elsewhere. The Duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, travelling through England in 1785, observed with great surprise that here ‘husband and wife are always together and share the same society’, something that would be ridiculous in France. ‘Three marriages out of four are based on affection.’ Couples had an ‘appearance of perfect harmony’ and the ‘wife in particular has an air of contentment’. Comparing mores, he reflected: ‘To have a wife who is not agreeable to you must
, in England, make life a misery.’ In France, as long as her wealth was intact, it presumably made little difference.
France: From Old Regimes to New
Montaigne, that supreme analyst of his own and the human condition, who bridges the classical past with modernity, was no great believer in conjugal love. In his famous essay ‘De l’amitié’, ‘On Affectionate Relationships’, he ranks marriage lower than friendship on the scale of affection, though allows that it could be otherwise, if conditions were different.
As for marriage, apart from being a bargain where only the entrance is free (its duration being fettered and constrained, depending on things outside our will), it is a bargain struck for other purposes; within it you soon have to unsnarl hundreds of extraneous tangled ends, which are enough to break the thread of a living passion and to trouble its course, whereas in friendship there is no traffic or commerce but with itself. In addition, women are in truth not normally capable of responding to such familiarity and mutual confidence as sustain that old bond of friendship, nor do their souls seem firm enough to withstand the clasp of a knot so lasting and so tightly drawn. And indeed if it were not for that, if it were possible to fashion such a relationship, willing and free, in which not only the souls had this full enjoyment but in which the bodies too shared in the union–where the whole human being was involved–it is certain that the loving-friendship would be more full and more abundant.
All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion Page 15