The Gentleman's Daughter

by Amanda Vickery

  9 ‘The Assignation’, from the Lady's Magazine (1772), depicting the thrill of clandestine correspondence.

  2

  Love and Duty

  THE WALK TO THE ALTAR was the most decisive a lady was ever to take. For all but the most privileged, or the most desperate, there was, quite literally, no going back. As marriage was ‘a thing of the utmost consequence’, involving ‘so material a Change of Life’,1 the awful significance of a woman's choice loomed very large. As the wary Mary Warde put it on the occasion of her cousin's marriage in 1742, ‘No Woman of understanding can marry without infinite apprehensions, such a step inconsiderately taken discovers a Levity and Temper that is allways displeasing to a looker on … & if the woman has the good fortune to meet with a man that uses her well it is being happy so much by chance that she does not deserve it’. In short, the reckless bride risked bondage to misery. When the worldly Miss Warde herself resolved on ‘taking the most Material Step in Life’ three years later, her letters were replete with solemn reflections: ‘you cannot imagine how infinitely serious it makes me, a temper naturally thoughtful & diffident of itself cannot be otherwise on such an occasion, & the leaving my Father & Brother is more painfull then I will attempt to express, or perhaps a steadyer mind would feel …’2 Of course, a match well made was a bed of contentment for the partners, the tap-root of stability in a household, a firm promise for the lineage and a secure bulwark in the defensive networks of the kindred. At best, marriage could offer a sustaining union of bodies and souls, as conventional blessings so often envisioned. After all, according to the Book of Common Prayer, one of the express purposes of marriage was to promote the mutual society, help and comfort of the partners. Well-wishers routinely testified that the union of man and woman offered the greatest happiness this side of the grave; that mutual love would bear couples up through all the trials of life. Needless to say, the keys to earthly paradise were not given to all, and those without might endure thirty years or more in matrimonial purgatory. The petty irritations, inconveniences and denials to which the married women was heir were carefully noted by observant spinsters: ‘really there is so much Care in a Married State & fiddle faddle in most Men's Tempers that I Esteem myself vastly happier in having nothing to do with 'em …’ Spectacularly disastrous marriages were sufficiently publicized to lead even the decorous to liken wedlock to the ‘Dreadful noose’.3 The vagaries and varieties of marital fortune were too conspicuous to be ignored.

  Contemporaries were convinced of the determining role of ‘temper’ and ‘disposition’ in marriage; a belief in the significance of personality which novels only reinforced. Amiability, generosity and good sense recommended the pleasant husband. Yet these sterling qualities were hardly distributed equally amongst the male population, so a shrewd evaluation of a suitor's character was crucial. Friends and family drilled young women on the monumental importance of making their marital beds such that they could lie in them for a lifetime: ‘When you are of an age to think of settling,’ Elizabeth Kennedy urged her daughter in 1801, ‘let your affections be placed on a steady sober, religious man, who will be tender and careful of you at all times … Do not marry a very young man, you know not how he may turn out; it is a lottery at best but it is a very just remark that “it is better to be an old man's darling than a young man's scorn”.’ Altogether conventional in her advice, Kennedy did not neglect to mention the material underpinnings of connubial bliss, reminding her daughter ‘that when poverty comes in at the door love flies out at the window’.4 A prudent and considered choice was of the essence if a girl was not to be architect of her own misfortune.

  Not that young lovers were expected to decide alone, listening only to the promptings of their urgent hearts. We should be suspicious of the entrenched argument that the eighteenth century saw the substitution of the arranged marriage with the romantic betrothal, not least because the artificial dichotomy of cold-blooded arrangement versus idyllic freedom makes a mockery of the wide spectrum of courtship practices which have been identified in the early modern period. The seventeenth-century family was not so uniformly cold-blooded as Lawrence Stone has suggested, nor was the eighteenth-century one so universally romantic.5 Among the seventeenth-century nobility, upper gentry and urban plutocracy, parental decisions usually governed choice, although formal consent was always sought. Less preoccupied with dynastic imperatives, the lesser gentry allowed their children more initiative and privacy in courtship. Among the propertied middling sorts, parental consent was useful, but not decisive for sons, but across all social classes, early death robbed many parents of the opportunity to arrange their children's future. A good match satisfied a range of criteria, including family advancement, the ideal of parity, character and affection. Of course, the relative importance of these factors varied – piety might count for more with a Puritan gentleman than with an Anglican peer – but strategic considerations weighed heavily with most propertied parents, from the dynastic elite to the modestly prosperous, and often in the calculations of their more conformist children. Mutual affection which crowned an advantageous match was a welcome blessing, but immoderate passion leading couples to disregard other criteria was thought near-insane. Nevertheless, manuscript evidence of heady, romantic expectation among the wealthy abounds, surfacing in courtship correspondence as early as 1400. Wronged lovers complained of lovesickness in the Stuart church courts, and the torture of frustrated passion brought many patients to the consulting rooms of the celebrated early seventeenth-century physician Richard Napier.6 The eighteenth-century romantic novel did not arrive upon the discursive scene wholly unanticipated.

  However, this is not to deny the extraordinary eighteenth-century proliferation of literature which glamorized romantic experience. The early eighteenth century has been isolated as a key period of innovation in prescriptions for manners, a period when courtesy writers began to dwell at some length on the naturalness of female virtue, the benefits for men of female company and the positive pleasures of matrimony and domestic life.7 The mid-eighteenth century saw the phenomenal success of the novels of sensibility, which glorified the supposedly female qualities of compassion, sympathy, intuition and ‘natural’ spontaneous feeling, while neglecting the cardinal virtues of reason, restraint and deference to established codes and institutions. But new idioms do not necessarily connote new behaviour. This literature may have exaggerated young people's expectations, but hope and experience are different creatures as parents and pamphleteers monotonously cautioned. It may be that the titled elite (on the basis of whose papers most arguments are made), developed more of a taste for the sugar-frosting of romance on their political and dynastic alliances, but love hardly carried all before it. Nobles who threw away All For Love remained the deluded exception, for as the wits put it ‘Love in a cottage? … Give me indifference and a coach and six.’8 Noble endogamy was still emphatically the norm, only now parents sought to achieve by education and an exclusive marriage market that which had previously been enforced by fiat. After all, if young people met only suitable companions, they would assuredly make a suitable, free choice. So it was that when the seventeen-year-old Lady Catherine Cecil gave her hand to Viscount Perceval in 1737, she assured him that she would not have agreed to an arranged marriage: ‘She told him, among other things, that she would have refused the Earl of Berkeley and the Duke of Leeds if they offered.’9 A little more romance in the aristocratic drawing-room was hardly a social revolution in the making. Nor did genteel matchmaking suddenly become a thrilling free-for-all either. The propertied did all they could to ensure that their children planted their affections in prudent soil. As Pollock has astutely observed ‘it is uncoerced consent which lies at the heart of our marital system not unconstrained choice’.10

  10 ‘The Choice of a Husband’, c.1825.

  11 ‘The Choice of a Wife’, c.1825.

  One-dimensional accounts of marital motivation that present families making a clear-cut operatic choice between love o
n the one hand and lucre on the other crudely reduce the intricacies of human choice. For surely the strategic and the emotional are blended in all of us? Human motivation rarely boils down either to pure, disinterested emotion or to scheming, material strategy.11 In any case, that the eighteenth century witnessed a great surge of romantic emotion which washed away all mercenary stains is unlikely in the extreme. In 1790s ladies' debating societies were still deliberating ‘In the Marriage State, which constitutes the greater Evil, Love without Money, or Money without Love?’12 All but the most quixotic parents urged their offspring to make a sensible match, and as Elizabeth Bennet archly remarked in 1813, ‘Where does discretion end, and avarice begin?’13 Simple choices are the essence of romantic tragedy, or a staged debate, but rarely are they the basis of decision-making in life. Wealth and rank had an intensely romantic, as well as mercenary, appeal.

  If eighteenth-century choices are allowed to be complex, so eighteenth-century lovers must be allowed to vary. There was no single model of romantic presentation. There was, however, something of a standard, fashionable repertoire, as humourists enjoyed pointing out. Thus, Oliver Goldsmith mocked preening pretensions in his sketch of the history of courtship:

  The lover in the reign of King Charles was solemn, majestic and formal. He visited his mistress in state. Languished for the favour, kneeled when he toasted his goddess, walked with solemnity, performed the most trifling things with decorum and even took snuff with a flourish. The beau of the latter part of Queen Ann's reign was disgusted with so much formality, he was pert, smart, lively; his billet doux were written in quite a different stile from that of his antiquated predecessor; he was ever laughing at his own ridiculous situation; till at last, he persuaded the lady to become as ridiculous as himself. The beau of the third age, in which Mr Nash died, was still more extraordinary than either; his whole secret in intrigue consisted in perfect indifference. The only way to make love now, I have heard Mr Nash say, was to take no manner of notice of the lady, which method was found the surest way to secure her affections.14

  Jocular use of the romantic conventions of the 1730s was made by a Miss Marthae Taylor on a coach trip, when she and three other ladies teased an ‘old bachelor’ with their flirtatious attention. ‘For my part I did not scruple to mimic all the arts of his sex … Today I addressed him in the languishing vein, tomorrow in the heroic; now I speak my passion with a certain plainness and simplicity of style, by and by I adorn it with all the flowers of rhetoric and garnish of gesture that my sportive fancy could suggest, nor were gentle airs or soft poetry omitted …’15 Similarly, Eliza Haywood in her novel The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) mocked the romantic addresses of a range of suitors, from the blunt sailor who offered ‘I can weather out any storm to come at you’, to the designing imposter who oiled ‘Divine Charmer … you are the empress of my heart, – the goddess of my soul … Words cannot describe the ardency of my flame.’ And so on. The courtier, the beau, the rake, the fool, the villain and the man of honour all had their own vocabularies. ‘What a romantic jargon is here?’ concluded Miss Thoughtless, unimpressed.16 Thus, a range of rhetorical options was comfortably in place before the rise of literary sensibility and Romanticism.

  Despite the appealing array of courting characters, the demands of Georgian gentility were such that matchmaking amongst the propertied remained a lengthy and complicated process of negotiation involving a range of family and friends, rather than a simple matter of beating hearts and lovers' vows. The issues at stake are perhaps best conveyed by the close analysis of the correspondence surrounding the making of an eighteenth-century marriage. Eighty-one letters written between 1745 and 1751 by Robert Parker of Alkincoats and Elizabeth Parker of Browsholme map the long road to marriage amongst the northern gentry. The protracted negotiations are most revealing in the exposure of power relations and gender strategy: the interplay of paternal commands and filial entreaties being basic to the Parker negotiations, although even individual decision-making was far from straightforward. Elizabeth Parker was profoundly ambivalent in the face of parental opposition, revealing the tension between the will to wed and the will to obey operating in a single breast – a reminder of the extent to which a woman could identify with the principles of her elders. Robert Parker's letters are enlightening in their recourse to a range of voices, from the courtly to the desperate, through which he hoped to prevail upon his lady love. But whether dignified or despairing, the language Robert Parker used a-wooing also suggests some of the pleasure courtship held for women. For a sweet interval the tables were turned; as men coaxed and petitioned while women sat in judgement.

  Robert Parker's courtship campaign lasted at least seven years, enduring many intermissions and revivals. His advances had been firmly and repeatedly discouraged by Elizabeth Parker's family in the 1740s, and his friends urged him to abandon his hopeless suit: ‘after ye usage you have mett wth nothing could be imputed to you, if you did make advances elsewhere.’ Still his hopes had not been extinguished; this was his ‘old love … not be forgot.’17 In May 1751, after a silence of three years, Robert Parker resolved to bid again for Miss Parker's hand. He was thirty-one years of age, his father was dead and the match was his own to make. But how was he to go about reopening his suit? Under ordinary circumstances, he might contrive an encounter with his sweetheart at a public assembly or ingratiate himself in the home of a mutual acquaintance. Once on a cordial footing he might call on her in the bosom of her family.18 With proximity guaranteed, a pretender could then introduce the courting strategy advocated in the humorous Ladies Dictionary of 1694. This manual advised the fashionable suitor to mobilize all his parts to secure the affections of his lady-love. If sufficiently enraptured a young woman might then be prepared to apply to her mother, harrying the older woman until she yielded her consent. Once won over, it should be left to the mother's discretion ‘to mould the father into a complying temper; as best able to deal with him’.19 Unfortunately for Robert Parker, chance meetings on the moors of the remote Lancashire–Yorkshire border were improbable, assemblies were rare and he had long since been barred from visiting Miss Parker at home. Thus, he was limited to regenerating affection through a third party or by letter. Robert faced guaranteed paternal opposition and with Elizabeth's mother long dead there could be no hope of maternal intercession. The need to engage his sweetheart's advocacy was paramount. In the event, he renewed his campaign with a written proposal, secretly delivered by a visiting gentleman sympathetic to his suit.

  On the face of it, Robert's opening volley reads like the innocent relation of news to an old acquaintance:

  After this long silence I make no doubt but you willl be greatly surprized to receive a Letter [from] me, but you may remember [when] I had the Pleasure of spending a few Happy Hours [with] you, [that] I always promised to let you know before I attempt'd to make my Addresses to another, [which] now I am determined upon, & my Choice meets [with] the approbation of several of my Friends, [therefore] I hope you'll excuse it;

  but the style is deceptive. This was an incendiary, designed to inflame an old love and frighten her into action. Nevertheless, Robert Parker could ill afford to hurt Elizabeth Parker's pride, so he followed up with fulsome reassurances: ‘You can't but imagine after [what] has passed betwixt us but that this Resolution is forced and … that I have nothing but wretchedness and Misery before me … dear Miss Parker … give me leive to hope [that your last decision] & Severe decree is not irrevocable.’ The rest of the letter used the conventional language of proposal, familiar from the popular letter-writing manuals of the period. Invariably, when the perfect gentleman correspondent disclosed a sincere and honourable passion, he diffidently stressed his own unworthiness, in contrast to the estimable qualities of his chosen object.20 Robert Parker was no different. He presented himself as supplicant, ‘a humble servt and sincere admirer’. In emphasizing his subservience to Elizabeth's wishes, he flatteringly accentuated her power over him and her gracious
condescension: