It was not a question of rank. At roughly the same date as Jonson’s play appeared, Henry, ninth Earl of Northumberland, was appalled to discover that his son, Algernon Lord Percy, had secretly engaged himself to Lady Anne Cecil, daughter of the Earl of Salisbury – and all for love!
It was true that in 1628 the families of Northumberland and Salisbury stood in roughly the same friendly relationship to each other as Montagues and Capulets in the opening scene of Romeo and Juliet. The ‘ancient grudge’ which existed between them, or as Lord Northumberland put it, the family wounds ‘fresh smarting in my sides to this day’, originated at the time of the Gunpowder Plot. Then Salisbury’s father had been instrumental in having Northumberland imprisoned in the Tower of London for several years, although nothing had been proved against him; Northumberland had also been forced to pay an enormous fine. Twenty years later it was particularly galling for Northumberland to find that his son had secretly chosen a bride in whose veins ran the hated Cecil blood; which in Northumberland’s opinion ‘would not mingle [with his] in a basin, so averse was he from it’.4
The fact that Lord Percy had actually fallen in love with Lady Anne, far from being an extenuating circumstance, only made things worse. Lord Northumberland expostulated to Lord Salisbury: ‘My son hath abused your Lordship, himself and me too. If I had had a daughter and your son had engaged himself in this sort, I should not have trusted his words … nulla fides est in amore [there is no faith in love].’ While it is difficult not to detect a note of gloomy satisfaction in his prediction of Anne Cecil’s future: ‘Poor lady, [she] I fear, will have the least good in the bargain, how so ever pleasing for the present. Loves will weave out and extinguish when the knot that ties them will not do so.’5
Lord Percy’s reckless behaviour had also of course made it difficult for Lord Northumberland to strike that kind of hard bargain over the marriage settlement on which a father might pride himself – one excellent reason for distrusting love in the first place. Beauty, because it might incite a susceptible Romeo to love, as Lady Anne’s beauty had won Lord Percy, was not to be trusted either. Joseph Swetnam, in that violent attack on women first printed in 1615, paid particular attention to the turpitude of beautiful women who represented traps for men. ‘The fairest woman’, he declared, had ‘some filthiness’ in her; beautiful women in general he compared to glow-worms, ‘bright in the hedge, black in the hand’. Even the far more temperate Thomas Gataker referred to beauty as having ‘a bait to entice’ while adding that it had ‘no hook to hold’.6 Certainly Lord Northumberland, who had already given his views on the likely impermanence of his son’s ‘hooked’ affections, would also have agreed with Gataker that beauty was ‘a bait to entice’. Throughout his negotiations with Lord Salisbury before the marriage finally took place, he constantly bewailed the expensive settlement he was obliged to make because ‘the beauty of your daughter fettered my son’. (The marriage was however a happy one, cut short by Anne Cecil’s death ten years later.)
Another celebrated infatuation of the time aroused echoes not so much of an ancient ‘grudge’ as of an ancient scandal. In 1634 the twenty-one-year-old William Lord Russell was described as being ‘all in a flame of love’ with the nineteen-year-old Lady Anne Carr.7 Unfortunately this modest and charming young girl was the daughter of that notorious beauty of the Jacobean court, Frances Countess of Somerset, her father being Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, yet another of the favourites of King James I. The fact that the ancient scandal – almost too light a word – concerned the bride’s mother in this case made Anne Carr’s descent even more unfortunate than that of Anne Cecil. Anne Cecil’s grandfather might have had Lord Northumberland imprisoned, but Anne Carr’s mother was a self-confessed murderess – and an adulteress too – who had spent some years in the Tower of London for conspiring to poison Sir Thomas Overbury.
‘Cat will after kind’ – so ran a popular saying of the day. There was a dire suspicion that a girl’s moral character was inherited directly from her mother (it was the same kind of logic which held that all women were contaminated by their descent from Grandmother Eve). Anne Carr could be held to have been bred for depravity – for her maternal grandmother Katherine Countess of Suffolk had been another notorious woman.
Lord Russell’s father, the Earl of Bedford, a leading Puritan, was of a notably harsh character. He had himself been present in the House of Lords on that fatal occasion in January 1616 when the lovely Countess of Somerset, all in black with ‘cobweb lawn ruff and cuffs’, had confessed her guilt ‘in a low voice, but wonderful fearful’.8 Only a few weeks earlier she had given birth to a child. That child was Anne Carr. Subsequently the Countess was imprisoned in the Tower of London. Who would welcome a girl of such flagrantly unfortunate antecedents as a daughter-in-law?
Yet this was the bride on whom William Lord Russell, ‘a handsome genteel man’ wrote the Rev. George Garrard, a contemporary observer, had set his heart. When William came back from the Grand Tour in 1634 he announced to his father that he would have Anne Carr or no one; this despite the fact that there was, in the words of the same observer, ‘much looking on’ the handsome and eligible young man – the names of the far more suitable Dorothy Sidney and Elizabeth Cecil (Anne Cecil’s cousin) being mentioned in this connection.9
Lord Bedford utterly refused to entertain the idea of the marriage. With regard to Anne Carr he had given his son instructions ‘to choose anywhere but there’. Equally William Russell refused to give way. Then Lord Bedford, faced with an only son who threatened not to marry at all, tried to scupper the match in another way by demanding a portion from the bride’s father, which he believed Somerset – who was known to be financially embarrassed – would not be able to pay. Heroically, the Earl of Somerset decided that if ‘one of the two must be undone’, he would rather it was himself than his daughter, and he decided to pay the price asked.10 Still the match lagged. Even King Charles I, on a visit to the Earl of Bedford at Woburn Abbey, failed to persuade the angry father to give way.
After four years of wrangling, the marriage finally took place in July 1637. It was a victory for love – not heredity – that Anne, Countess of Bedford and chatelaine of Woburn Abbey after her father-in-law’s death, proved a pattern of gentle virtue; she was blessed with nine surviving children and enjoyed nearly fifty years of happy marriage. (Only her own life ended in a tragedy, as dramatic in its own way as her beginnings in the Tower of London – with the execution of her son William Lord Russell for treason – but to that we shall return.)
So for all the fulminations of fathers and the directives of hand-books, love, as it always has done, did find a way. What the prevailing climate of opinion on the subject did induce, however, was a distinct feeling of guilt on the subject, even when romantic love triumphed over such normal considerations as financial prudence and personal suitability.
Lettice Morrison was eighteen years old when she captured the heart of Sir Lucius Cary, later Viscount Falkland. The daughter of Sir Richard Morrison of Tooley Park, Leicestershire, she was an exceptional character, not only for her beauty, but also for a genuine love of study, which marked her out from most girls of her time: ‘oft-times at a book in her Closet when she was thought to be in bed’. After Lettice Falkland’s death, her chaplain wrote a eulogistic biography of her: here at last was one descendant of Eve who ‘in her cradle’ had ‘strangled the serpent’.11
Scorning the contemporary fashion of wearing her hair ‘in loose braids’ in order to ensnare men, Lettice did none the less unwittingly ensnare Sir Lucius Cary; for she offered a far more unusual attraction than floating hair: a character which combined ‘Piety, wisdom, quickness of wit, discretion, judgement, sobriety and gravity of behaviour’. Unfortunately, as her chaplain succinctly put it, Lettice brought with her no dowry beyond these ‘riches’.12 Such qualities might be portion enough for her lover, but her lover’s father took a more worldly view and expressed strong disapproval. Father and son quarrelled. Even so Cary
persisted in his suit – helped by the fact that he, not his father, had been made heir to his rich grandfather Lawrence Tanfield. Shortly after Easter 1630 Cary was married to this lovely but penniless girl. A short while after that Cary succeeded to the Falkland title; under which name his story, with that of the wife at his side, became woven into the political, religious and literary life of England on the eve of the Civil War; whether at his estate of Great Tew near Oxford, or in Parliament itself.
Despite Lettice’s admirable character, Falkland’s contemporaries were amazed that this ‘incomparable young man’ should marry in this rash way. Clarendon, who adored Falkland and thought that his death alone was enough to make the whole Civil War accursed, summed up the general feeling: Falkland had ‘committed a fault against his father in marrying a young lady whom he passionately loved’.13 Others, for whom mere love seemed an insufficient explanation, developed a theory that Falkland had married Lettice for her strong resemblance to her brother Henry, Falkland’s friend, who had died young.
Interestingly, Falkland himself clearly felt a kind of honourable guilt about the whole matter. He was prepared to stand by his affections: at the same time he did not pretend he had behaved altogether correctly. According to Clarendon, he offered to resign the estate inherited from his grandfather and depend solely on maintenance from his father in order to atone ‘for the prejudice he had brought upon his fortune, by bringing no fortune to him’. But his father’s anger caused him to refuse this handsome offer.14
Had Falkland been influenced in his choice of Lettice Morrison by the example of his own mother? Elizabeth Tanfield, Viscountess Falkland, accorded the supreme compliment of having ‘a most masculine understanding’,15 was one of those remarkable late Tudor women, educated in the great tradition of female learning of that time. Her accomplishments included a knowledge not only of French, Italian, Spanish, Latin and Greek but also of Hebrew and Transylvanian. Perhaps Falkland had early discovered in his mother the charms of the company of a well-educated woman.
Or was it on the contrary Lettice’s natural seriousness – a sense of the sadness at the centre of things – which struck an answering chord in Falkland’s heart? There had been a streak of melancholy in her make-up even as a girl, when some had criticized her ‘lack of joy’. Aubrey tells us that during her married life she deliberately used her ready tears to obtain favours for her servants; but then Aubrey disapproved of a man of Falkland’s reason and judgement being ‘stormed’ by a woman’s tears for what he deemed an unworthy purpose.16
At the onset of the war, Falkland’s own ‘natural cheerfulness and vivacity’ grew clouded. Having believed in the possibility of a simple Royalist victory, he watched instead the country being torn apart. Clarendon paints an unforgettable picture of the agonies of a man of conscience in a world of war: ‘Often, after a deep silence and frequent sighs, he would, with a shrill and sad accent, ingeminate the word Peace, Peace.’ Falkland was killed at the age of thirty-three at the first Battle of Newbury: he rode into the heart of the fighting – looking at last ‘Very cheerful’, as he always did ‘upon action’17 – and was shot down.
Lettice Falkland never recovered from the blow. ‘The same sword which killed him, pierced her heart also’, wrote her chaplain. She lived another four years, spending her time in rigorous works of philanthropy, not all of which commended themselves to her friends. Her scheme for helping widows was one thing, but she was much criticized for encouraging layabouts by her charity.
‘I know not their hearts’, Lettice replied with spirit. ‘I had rather relieve five unworthy Vagrants than that one member of Christ should go empty away.’18 Her desire, as a Royalist, to help Roundhead prisoners in Royalist gaols aroused further suspicion.
Examples of her growing melancholia were more disquieting. Lettice became increasingly scrupulous in her piety, full of fears of the devil. Having already banned all rich clothing on her husband’s death, and even looking-glasses, in order to extinguish personal vanity, she further abandoned that household pomp ‘which her quality might have excused’. Lastly she turned on that very affection which had been the foundation stone of her own life. Urging other wives not to be too fond of their husbands, she insisted that there was ‘no real comfort from any espousals but from those to Christ’.19
Lettice Viscountess Falkland died in 1647 at the age of thirty-five ‘without twitch or groan or gasp or sigh’ of what was surely a form of broken heart. (Her two surviving sons succeeded in turn to the title of their father.) It was notable that even in the elegy on her death the strange circumstances of her marriage, including Lord Falkland’s waiving of a dowry, were solemnly commemorated:
Nor did He wed her to join Fortunes and
Lay Bags to Bags, and couple Lands to Land
Such Exchange Ware he scorn’d, whose Noble eye
Saw in her Virtues, Rich Conveniency.20
It would be quite wrong, however, to describe the general distrust of love among the upper classes as a purely masculine conspiracy. Those few women before the Restoration with the opportunity for self-expression did not hesitate to join in the chorus. Both Margaret Duchess of Newcastle and Dorothy Osborne, whatever the reality of their private lives, shuddered away from the concept of love, and above all from its devastating consequences.
The Duchess of Newcastle was that extravagantly dressed woman of letters who in later life would alternately fascinate and appal Restoration society. As a young woman, she prided herself on never having felt ‘amorous love’ for her husband. ‘I never was infected therewith’, she wrote. ‘It is a disease, or passion, or both, I know only by relation.’21 This was not a matter of mere cynicism towards the state of marriage – for the Duchess also prided herself with justice on her devotion to her husband; condemnation of ‘amorous love’ was a matter of principle.
William Cavendish, in turn Earl, Marquess and Duke of Newcastle, was over fifty and a grandee at the court of Charles I, when he began to woo Margaret Lucas, thirty years his junior, as his second wife. For all his seniority – he was well past middle age by the standards of the time – Newcastle displayed surprising vigour in his suit. It was his very enthusiasm which Margaret regarded with suspicion. First she was concerned that her own declarations should not be too explicit: ‘I am a little ashamed of my last letter more than the others,’ she wrote on one occasion, ‘not that my affection can be too large but I fear I discover it too much in that letter, for women must love silently.’ Then she was obsessed by the essentially ephemeral nature of any ardent protestation: ‘If you are so passionate as you say,’ she continued, ‘and I dare not but believe [it], yet it may be feared it cannot last long, for no extreme is permanent.’22
Another lively and articulate young lady, Dorothy Osborne of Chicksands, never ceased to identify ‘passion’, that is, strong feeling, as the enemy of all mankind – and womankind in particular. Yet her beguiling and chatty love letters to William Temple, later an important diplomat in the reign of Charles II, seem to us to breathe a very romantic form of affection.23 This was another star-crossed match, for Dorothy was the daughter of the Royalist Governor of Guernsey, while William Temple’s father sympathized with Parliament. Even the lovers’ first meeting was suitably exotic. On the Isle of Wight, on his way to France, Dorothy’s brother rashly inscribed a piece of pro-Royalist graffiti on a window pane in hostile territory: Temple witnessed with admiration how the sister saved the brother from the consequences of his audacity by taking the responsibility for the inscription upon herself. Then family opposition to the marriage confined Temple and Dorothy to an apparently eternal courtship, while Temple travelled abroad, and pretty witty Dorothy was courted by a series of other men.
Through all this, the lovers remained true to each other. As this seventeenth-century Penelope rejected a number of eligible suitors, including the Protector’s son, Henry Cromwell, she had to endure the vehement reproaches of her family, led by her youngest brother. Then Dorothy was struck down by th
at dreaded scourge of female beauty, smallpox, and much of her early physical charm vanished. Still William’s fidelity held him to his vows. Finally in 1655 they were married.
The romantic elements in this story, including the constancy under trial of both parties, make an interesting contrast to Dorothy’s oft-professed scorn for ‘passion’. As much as Margaret Duchess of Newcastle, Dorothy prided herself that she had not been seared by that awkward emotion, amorous love. In her letters she was quick to denounce those who, by coming too close to its perilous flames, had been burnt or branded. When Lady Anne Blount, daughter of the Earl of Newport, ran off with one William Blunt (no relation), Dorothy bewailed her fate to Temple. She was also quite clear where the responsibility for Lady Anne’s ‘fall’ lay.
‘Ah! if you love yourself or me’, she wrote to Temple, ‘you must confess that I have reason to condemn this senseless passion; that whereso’ever it comes destroys all that entertain it; nothing of judgement or discretion can live with it, and [it] puts everything else out of order before it can find a place for itself. What has it not brought my poor Lady Anne Blount to?’, Dorothy went on. ‘She is the talk of all the footmen and boys in the street, and will be company for them shortly, who yet is so blinded by her passion as not at all to perceive the misery she has brought herself to …’ As for William Blunt, Lady Anne’s partner in the affair, ‘if he had loved her truly he would have died rather than been the occasion of this misfortune to her’.24 Once again we hear the Cassandra-like voice of Lord Northumberland, condemning his son’s infatuation for Anne Cecil, because it would certainly lead to her undoing.
The Weaker Vessel: Women's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England Page 5