The Weaker Vessel: Women's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England

by Antonia Fraser

  This time it was a venal turnkey who enabled the dauntless Lady Purbeck – still determined not to perform her penance – to escape. She headed for France. Sir Robert Howard had also been confined, but in June 1635 was released on his promise not to ‘come at’ Lady Purbeck. Promptly breaking his promise, Howard was happily reunited with his mistress in Paris. Both became Catholics. Now perhaps, with French society ready to receive them, the couple might be allowed to rest. It is good to know that Sir Kenelm Digby, meeting the notorious Lady Purbeck in Paris, discovered in her ‘Prudence, sweetness, goodness, honour and bravery’ beyond any other woman he knew: ‘vexatio dat intellectum’. He was full of indignation that this enchantress should be obliged to live in exile.28

  Frances Purbeck’s adventures were however not concluded. King Charles I, in an unwise gesture, attempted to have the writ served on her in Paris, which aroused French nationalist fury. Then Frances withdrew into a nunnery, but finding it not to her liking, resumed her life in Paris, where she lived in considerable penury. By 1640 she was back in England petitioning for the return of her marriage portion from Buckingham’s sister Lady Denbigh; only to find whatever estates she had secured sequestrated by Parliament in 1644. Frances Lady Purbeck died in June 1645 at Oxford, where the King was then holding his court and Parliament; she was buried in St Mary’s Church. Sir Robert Howard, who had stuck to his mistress through all these traumatic events with admirable constancy, remained a bachelor until after her death, marrying for the first time at the age of fifty-eight.

  The story of Frances Coke had a curious postscript. Lord Purbeck married again but never succeeded in begetting legitimate issue. The love-child Robert Wright, or Robert Villiers as he was alternatively termed, did make some claim to the title; but his real political sympathies were elsewhere. Under the Commonwealth he abandoned the Royalist name of Villiers for Danvers, that of his wife, daughter of one of the judges who tried Charles I. After the Restoration he became involved in an anti-governmental conspiracy and fled the country. But his widow, children and grandson resumed the claim to the Purbeck title, and also that of Buckingham after the second Duke of Buckingham’s death, in a long-running cause célèbre.29 The claim only ended properly in 1774 with the death of the last male descendant of that doomed union between Frances Purbeck, the wife sought ‘for wealth’, and Robert Howard, who sought her for love.

  Mary Blacknall, heiress to a large amount of property in Berkshire including the Abbey of Abingdon, was, unlike Frances Coke, an orphan.30 The lack of a father to hector her was however not necessarily to her advantage. In the first half of the seventeenth century the Court of Wards still engulfed heirs to the Crown’s tenants-in-chief who inherited at the age of fourteen (if a girl) or twenty-one (if a boy). It was the right of the Court of Wards to sell off these orphans in marriage, the Crown receiving a fat fee in return; the Master of Wards could be just as unsympathetic a matchmaker as Sir Edward Coke, indifferent to the feelings of his wards where pecuniary concerns were at stake.

  The Court of Wards and its procedure was one of the abuses of the Crown’s position most resented on the eve of the Civil War: swept away by Parliament in 1645, it was officially abolished at the Restoration. Before that date interested relatives sometimes bought the wardship of a child back from the Crown. It would be nice to relate that this argued concern for the orphan’s free choice of a spouse, but in most cases the transaction was once again financial. The relatives hoped themselves to benefit from administration of the properties and, sooner or later, the arrangement of a match.

  This was the fate of Mary Blacknall. Four of her maternal relations – Richard Libb, Charles Wiseman and two Anthony Blagroves, father and son – paid a £2,000 fine to the Crown for the lease of her lands. Ostensibly they were securing for Mary not only a good education, outside the impersonality of the Court of Wards, but also freedom of choice of bridegroom when she reached the age of fourteen and was free from their guardianship. But somewhere along the way, three out of her four guardians forgot these fine feelings and married Mary off when she was ten to her first cousin, the son of Uncle Libb.

  The fourth guardian, Uncle Wiseman, then proceeded to appeal to the Court of Wards on the grounds that Mary was under the age of consent. The appeal was successful. Orders were given that Mary should be delivered forthwith to the house of Sir John Denham, one of the barons of the Exchequer, at Boarstall; there she would be brought up with his own daughters. Despite her recent experiences, Mary was officially pronounced ‘unmarried, unaffyed, and uncontracted’. At this point Uncle Wiseman evidently felt that he had frightened Uncle Libb sufficiently; the order was not enforced and Mary, remained with the Libbs – the possibility of a £5,000 fine hanging over the guardians’ heads if they indulged in any further conspiracies before Mary reached the age of fourteen.

  If not her Libb cousin, who was Mary to marry? The guardians set to with a will once more to see if some more congenial prospect could be envisaged. Of various offers made for Mary, that of Sir Edmund Verney on behalf of his son Ralph was held to be the best. So Mary was ordered to be delivered once more, this time to the house of Sir Francis Clarke, as the future bride of Ralph Verney. Sir Edmund Verney engaged himself to protect the guardians against any penalty imposed by the court, and also paid that half of the guardians’ discharge to the Crown which remained outstanding. Still Mr Wiseman was not satisfied that Mary would retain her right of free choice at the age of fourteen; so Mary lingered on at the house of Mr Libb. Whereupon Sir Edmund Verney himself appealed to the Court of Wards, anxious that this prize should not slip through his – or rather his son’s – fingers. The Court of Wards ruled in his favour. This time Mary really was delivered. And on 31 May 1629 Mary Blacknall was married to Ralph Verney.

  There was still some explaining to do. First, Sir Edmund had to draft a letter for Mary to write to Mrs Wiseman: ‘Good Aunt – Besides the desire I have to hear of your health and my uncle’s, I think it fit to acquaint you that now I am married.’ Since Aunt Wiseman’s main preoccupation was to outwit Aunt Libb in the matter of the marriage – and Aunt Libb’s plans for her son – Aunt Wiseman was not too much put out. She did hope however that the Wisemans would not be blamed ‘when she [Mary] shall come to understand what she hath done’: that was because Sir Edmund should have made a settlement for Mary before the marriage and had not yet done so. Aunt Libb on the other hand vowed that Aunt Wiseman would repent this matter as much as anything she did.

  The second aspect of the affair was more serious. Mary referred in her letter to her marriage having been ‘privately done’ at her own request, to explain why the Wisemans had not been invited. Her mother-in-law wrote in the same vein: ‘She desired so much to have it privately done …’. Weddings at this date were not necessarily the grandiose court affairs of Honoria Denny and Frances Coke – nor the similarly celebratory if less magnificent occasions which in villages and country districts constituted one of the main features of social life. There was a good deal of vagueness as to what constituted a valid union in the first place.31 It was naturally even more difficult to ascertain the validity of a marriage which had been ‘privately done’. In the case of Mary Blacknall the obscurity of her wedding was surely deliberate. For on 31 May 1629 Mary Blacknall was still only thirteen years old. Once she was fourteen it would be theoretically possible for her to repudiate what had earlier been done in her name.

  There is some evidence that efforts were made by her maternal relatives to persuade her to do so after her fourteenth birthday on 14 February 1630. How were the Verneys to prevent Mary from being once more wrested away? The obvious and natural solution was to persuade young Ralph Verney, by now a student at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, to win with soft words the prize which had hitherto been his solely in terms of a contract. Ralph was therefore tipped off that now, if ever, was the time for a gallant courtship of the young lady, ‘rather than let slip this occasion, which if not now performed is not likely ever to be ended’.


  Ralph Verney set to with a will. Shortly afterwards his tutor was hastily pointing out the inadvisability of total concentration on ‘Hymen’s Delights’; he must not neglect his work at university entirely for Mary’s sake: ‘the sweetness of a kiss will relish better after the harshness of a syllogism’. Happily for Mary, if not the tutor, Ralph preferred kisses to syllogisms. Mary Blacknall remained – or rather became in the fullest sense – his bride. Nearly twenty years later Ralph would refer to her as ‘my dear, discreet and most incomparable wife’.32

  We shall meet her again, this gallant supporter of her husband through all the tumult of war, exile and sequestration. At the present time it is enough to quote Ralph Verney’s own description of his married life: ‘We who ever from our very childhoods lived in so much peace, and christian concord …’33 The practical common sense which dictated that, heiress as she might be, Mary must have her consent wooed not wrested from her, was responsible in no small measure for this happy union.

  The worst of Mary Blacknall’s fate was to be the object of gentlemanly bargaining among her adult relatives. The affair of the orphan Sara Cox represented an altogether darker aspect of the heiress’s life. In August 1637 Sara Cox was fourteen years old. Being ‘fatherless and motherless’ and ‘of a good portion’ she had been made ‘orphan of the City of London’ (that is, placed under their guardianship).34 She had then been sent to a well-known girls’ boarding-school run by Mrs Winch at Hackney – a favourite area for such schools at the time, because although pleasantly rural, it was also convenient for the girls’ parents many of whom were merchants and other dwellers in the City of London.

  One of Sara’s schoolfriends was called Katherine Fulwood. It was Katherine’s brother, Roger Fulwood, who, hearing of Sara’s ‘good portion’, conceived from afar the notion of transforming his fortunes by marrying her. Using Katherine as an intermediary, Roger tried to persuade Sara to share in this brilliant scheme – without success. On 22 August therefore, as Sara and a few of her schoolfriends were taking the air on Newington Common, an array of horsemen with drawn swords suddenly emerged. From out of the midst of her friends, Sara was seized and bundled off into a waiting coach. Here lurked Roger Fulwood. In this coach, Sara Cox, a latter-day Europa with Roger Fulwood as her bull, was ‘carried off Screaming’.35

  Her destination proved to be Winchester House in Southwark on the south bank of the Thames, residence of the Bishop of Winchester. At first her reception here seemed reassuringly respectable: for she found Roger’s mother Lady Fulwood presiding, and spent the night under her protection. The next morning however matters took a grimmer turn. On the pretence of being shown over the Bishop’s dwelling, Sara was inveigled into the chapel. Here, to her dismay, she found a waiting minister of religion and she was forthwith – and forcibly – married to Roger Fulwood in the presence of Lady Fulwood.

  Worse followed. Lack of consummation being a well-known ground for establishing the nullity of a marriage, it was important to the Fulwoods that this enforced union should be seen to be a full one. So Sara’s clothes were pulled off her and Sara herself was placed in bed with Roger Fulwood. (From what follows, it seems that this was done more as a formality than with the serious intent of consummating the marriage, but the experience must have been none the less terrifying for the fourteen-year-old Sara.)

  Fortunately at this critical juncture the help of the law was at hand. Sara’s abduction from Newington Common had led her friends to institute a furious search: that night Roger Fulwood and his accomplice, named Bowen, were at last located by the Lord Keeper’s Sergeant-at-Arms and apprehended. Fulwood and Bowen, accompanied by Sara, were brought before the Lord Mayor of London at one o’clock in the morning. Poor Sara flung herself on her knees before him: ‘she beseeching him … and for God’s sake, to deliver her out of the hands of these people’.36

  The horrified Lord Mayor complied. Sara was given back into the custody of her friends. And now the full extent of Fulwood and Bowen’s duplicity – and that of the Bishop of Winchester’s housekeeper, one Nicholas Young – was known. The marriage licence for the wedding of Sara and Roger Fulwood had been secured on Young’s false affidavit that the intended bride was neither heir nor ward. It was further affirmed that Sara had given her own consent to the match, because her friends had been planning to marry her off to a Dutch doctor – another fabrication.

  The erring Roger Fulwood was arraigned for his life on 3 September: by an Act of the reign of Henry VII taking of women against their wills for ‘the lucre of their substance’ and either marrying them or ‘defiling’ them had been made a felony.37 The events of this sordid abduction were outlined to King Charles I in a petition from the Lord Mayor on 17 September. The King’s indignation was promptly expressed.

  In the end Roger Fulwood and his friend Bowen did not pay the harshest penalties. Lady Fulwood weighed in with her own petition to the King at the beginning of November: on the one hand she complained that the matter was ‘not nearly so barbarous as had been bruited’ (presumably a reference to the fact that Sara had not actually been ‘defiled’ by Roger, whatever appearances might suggest); on the other hand she begged for mercy. On 25 November Fulwood and Bowen were both pardoned for their lives and for their estates, which as felons they had forfeited.38

  Still the troubles of Roger Fulwood were not over. Obviously Sara’s friends’ chief concern was to secure a declaration of the nullity of this ‘marriage’ so that Sara’s future prospects were not impaired. They were clearly reluctant to see Roger Fulwood leave prison until this matter had been settled in Sara’s favour, for the following June Roger was still in prison, despite his pardon. He issued a desperate petition to the King: ‘the said Sara and her friends desiring to question the said marriage’, he had agreed in advance to give his consent to a suit of nullity, whenever it would be required by the court concerned. If he was not released now, he would have to lie in prison throughout the long vacation of the courts. Finally Roger offered a surety of £2,000 that he would consent to the annulling of the marriage when the time came, and was released.39 Thus Sara Cox was officially restored to her maiden state.

  This cautionary tale showed that young men who were ‘wont to seek wives for wealth’ needed to have the weight of the establishment, royal and legal, behind them. Roger Fulwood had transgressed not so much in his intention to marry an heiress – which was that of many respectable men of his time – as in the rash and violent manner in which he tried to carry it out. As a result, Sara Cox suffered a fearful ordeal at the hands of strangers; all because she epitomized that seventeenth-century object of desire, a young lady ‘of a good portion’.

  1Divorce – keeping the bride’s dowry, which was the aim of the Buckingham family – was virtually impossible at this date, as will be described in

  CHAPTER TWO

  Affection Is False

  ‘“Affection!” said the Queen, “Affection is false.” Yet her Majesty rose and danced; so did my Lady Marquess of Winchester.’

  ROWLAND WHYTE TO SIR ROBERT SIDNEY, JUNE 1600

  ‘Poor greenheads’, wrote the Puritan Daniel Rogers of those who married purely for love: when a year or two had passed and they had skimmed the cream of their marriage, they would soon envy the good fortune of those whose union was built on stronger foundations. In Matrimoniall Honour Rogers even went so far as to argue that over-passionate marriages might actually result in contaminated offspring: ‘What a cursed posterity such are likely to hatch … what woeful imps proceeded from such a mixture.’1

  During this period, the emotion we should now term romantic love was treated with a mixture of suspicion, contempt and outright disgust by virtually all pundits. From the Puritans in their benevolent handbooks of domestic conduct to the aristocrats concerned to see that society’s pattern was reproduced in an orderly fashion, that tender passion which has animated much of the great literature of the world (including those plays of Shakespeare and the Jacobean dramatists familiar to theatre a
udiences of the time) received a hearty condemnation. Nor was this a revolutionary state of affairs in seventeenth-century England, the arranged marriage as opposed to the romantic union having been preferred by most societies in the history of the world.

  Only briefly at the court of Henrietta Maria did the cult of Platonic love (imported from the Queen’s native France) hold sway. Then the elaborate paraphernalia of gallantry which attended this philosophy merely helped to underline the chasm which existed between the Queen’s small coterie and the rest of the country. In his play of 1629, The New Inn, Ben Jonson cheerfully mocked the cult. Lady Frances Frampul was a ‘Platonique’ who desired nothing more than ‘a multitude of servants’, i.e. platonic admirers to worship at her shrine. Love itself was defined as

  … a spiritual coupling of two souls

  So much more excellent, as it least relates

  Unto the body …2

  Outside this make-believe little court – and the realms of satire which fed upon it – public advocacy of romantic love was unknown.

  James Houblon was the son of a Huguenot refugee who rose to wealth and success in the City of London, identified with the new Royal Exchange. He married, in 1620, an eighteen-year-old girl also of Huguenot descent, Marie du Quesne – ‘in a happy day’ as he later described it. When Marie died nursing a child of plague in 1646, she left her husband with seven young sons to bring up, her daughters being already married. (One of these sons, Sir John Houblon, was the first Governor of the Bank of England.) In his old age James Houblon was quite clear how his daughters should ‘undertake the matching’ of their children. ‘Beg first the Assistance of God, and see that you match them in families that fear the Lord and have gotten their Estates honestly.’ There was nothing here about inclination or susceptibility.3