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

by Antonia Fraser

  As it happened, Dorothy Osborne was probably right about the peripatetic Lady Anne Blount. By the next year William Blunt, her erstwhile partner, was petitioning against her, saying that she had only run off with him to obtain some money, so that she was presumably home again. The year after that Lady Anne had taken flight once more without her father’s consent – this time with Thomas Porter, son of Endymion Porter, who had been Groom of the Bedchamber to Charles I. Yet Dorothy’s own fear of ‘this senseless passion’ obviously runs deeper than mere condemnation of a flighty young lady’s self-destructive behaviour.

  There is a malaise here, seen again in her yearning for a peaceful life in another letter to Temple: ‘Do you remember Herm [a Channel island]’, she wrote, ‘and the little house there? Shall we go thither? That’s next to being out of the world. There we might live like Baucis and Philemon, grow old together in our little cottage, and for our charity to some ship-wrecked strangers obtaining the blessing of dying both at the same time.’25 Some of this desire for an existence dominated by tranquillity – as opposed to some more excitable emotion – even with her lover, can of course be attributed to the troubled nature of the times. Nevertheless Dorothy and the rest of her generation, whatever the political strife about them, still drew back in apprehension from love itself, especially love in marriage.

  “No passion could be long lived, and such as were most in love forgot that ever they had been so within a twelvemonth after they were married.’26 The words are those of Dorothy’s brother Henry, trying to convince her that the very nature of this type of affection was to be impermanent. Dorothy, by her own account, was puzzled at the want of examples to bring to the contrary. Throughout the whole of Dorothy’s correspondence, one detects a wistful hankering that Temple himself should somehow represent the settled convenient match of her family’s desires. He did not. He represented something more dangerous. And in the end she married him.

  At the marriage of William Herbert and Anne Russell in 1600, in the time of Queen Elizabeth, the traditional masque followed: ‘delicate it was to see eight ladies so prettily and richly attired’. Mary Fitton, a lady-in-waiting, led the masquers. After they had finished, and it was time for each lady to choose another to tread the measure with her, Mary Fitton went up to the Queen and ‘Wooed her to dance’. The Queen asked Mary Fitton what allegorical character she represented; Mary Fitton replied that she was Affection.

  ‘Affection!’ said the old Queen. ‘Affection is false.’ Yet all the same Queen Elizabeth rose up and danced.27 Many of the dancers in the pageantry of marriage in the seventeenth century believed that affection was false; yet trod to its measure all the same.

  For love, like cheerfulness, kept breaking in, and ever with love came guilt. In July 1641 the fifteen-year-old Mary Boyle, daughter of the great Earl of Cork, made a match which at the time was conspicuous for its unworldliness. She married, very privately, Charles Rich, a ‘very cheerful, and handsome, well-bred and fashioned person’. Then merely a younger son without prospects, he promised to make up for ‘the smallness of his fortune’ by the ‘kindness’ he would ever have for Mary. Previously ‘unruly Mary’, in her father’s disapproving phrase, had rejected the suitor chosen by him in Ireland, the wealthy Mr Hamilton ‘who professed great passion for her’, on the grounds that her ‘aversion for him was extraordinary’.28

  It was unexpected that (by the deaths of several relations) Charles Rich should eventually succeed to the title and property of the Earl of Warwick, establishing Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick, as the great lady her father had always intended her to be. Despite this fortunate occurrence, and despite an affection for her husband which persisted throughout their married life, Mary Countess of Warwick still felt it necessary to apologize for the circumstances of her marriage in her autobiography. ‘My duty and my reason having frequent combats within me, with my passion’, she wrote, she had acceded to the latter. In so doing she had gone against her father’s wishes, and years later she still regarded this piece of defiance as ‘an ill and horribly disobedient answer’ for a daughter to give to a father.29

  Not all stories where love and duty tugged in different directions ended as happily as that of Mary Countess of Warwick, especially when the financial arrangements could not be satisfactorily sorted out (finally the Earl of Cork did give his daughter her large dowry). From the Oxinden papers, the intimate records of a family living in East Kent, emerges the sad story of Dorothy Denne, who fell in love with a personable serving-man.30Dorothy Denne, an Oxinden cousin, was one of the five daughters of the Recorder of Canterbury; William Taylor worked for her brother Captain John Denne.

  Propinquity led to a mutual attraction, but the question of privacy for the courtship was another matter. A rendezvous indoors was virtually impossible at a time when even the wealthy lived without any privacy in the modern sense. Under the circumstances ladies such as Mary Countess of Warwick and Dorothy Osborne turned to nature for spiritual retirement. Mary Warwick’s ‘wilderness’, an artificial creation of trees and shrubs which she called her ‘sweet place’, was her favourite resort for meditation. Dorothy Osborne would dream of William Temple at night alone in the garden – ‘a place to roam in without disturbance’; with the jasmine smelling ‘beyond all perfume’.31 Dorothy Denne and William Taylor too were compelled to turn to the outdoors, in a series of trysts.

  Dorothy’s letters, making the arrangements for them, can still be read: ‘Friend’, she begins, ‘My sorrow and vexations [at not meeting] are as great as yours. I would fain speak with you therefore any fair day about four o’clock in the afternoon, if you send Jack Munday or Jane to me … I will venture to speak with you in the orchard.’ Somehow Dorothy and William were surprised at this rendezvous, possibly because William had told a ‘lying … prating wench’ (Dorothy’s description) who was his official sweetheart about it. Great was Dorothy’s lamentation, principally on the subject of the scandal: ‘I think there lives not a sadder heart than mine in the world, neither have I enjoyed scarce one hour of contentment since we happened to be discovered at our last meeting … If you had borne any true and real affection to me and valued my reputation you would never have run that hazard, knowing that a woman which has lost her good name is dead while she lives…’32

  The romance continued, with Dorothy persistently preaching the superior claims of duty (and financial security) to those of passion, yet by her conduct encouraging very different expectations in her admirer. She maintained that it would be ‘a sin of a high nature’ if she ran off with her William, and neither of them could expect the blessing of God on such an enterprise. She had heard that William might secure ‘a gentlewoman worth a thousand pounds’ as a wife: ‘for the Lord’s sake take her or any other, and make not yourself and me ever miserable’. As to William’s romantic notions – ‘You speak of having me without any clothes or one penny in my purse’ – Dorothy made short work of them: ‘people would think me either stark mad or a fool … to bring myself to beggary and contempt of all that know me’. Yet at the end of this long letter recommending prudence on both sides in a note in another hand – presumably William’s: ‘We did meet the same time.’33

  Dorothy was appalled when news of their clandestine relationship began to leak out, which might mean that her father would reduce her inheritance; only God could protect them from the ‘poverty and misery’ which their sinful relationship deserved. At the same time Dorothy suffered agonies because of the news – reported maliciously by her maids – that William was courting another lady in the same village: ‘They say it is a great disgrace for me to love such an unworthy fellow as you are …’ Nevertheless at the end of the letter Dorothy signed herself William’s ‘true and faithful yoke fellow so long as my life shall last’.34

  William’s letters have vanished but they must have been comparatively ardent since at one point Dorothy exclaimed: ‘Dear Love, you write in such strains of rhetorick I know not well how to answer them. Your compliments term me a
goddess … I am not divine but a poor mortal creature, subject to all kinds of miseries, and I account myself the more miserable in losing thy sweet company.’35 The end of the affair was, however, on a less elevated plane, since Dorothy eventually married a rich London draper named Roger Lufkin, whereupon William Taylor’s mother tried unsuccessfully to blackmail Dorothy by producing the compromising correspondence. At least Captain John Denne, Dorothy’s brother, still remembered William Taylor kindly in his will, while it is to William’s mother’s malevolence that we owe the preservation of Dorothy’s agonized letters among the Oxinden papers.

  Dorothy Denne accepted her destiny and made in the end a prudent match, the charms of William Taylor forgotten. The moral tale of Henry Oxinden of Barham’s refractory daughter Peg demonstrated – from the point of view of the period – exactly what could happen to a young woman who refused to conform.36 Peg had already declined one suitor produced by her father in 1647, when she was just over twelve. Henry Oxinden took her rejection ill, raging on in his letters that ‘the folly of a girl’ was preventing ‘her own happiness’ as well as making her ‘assuredly miserable’ in the future; he also punished Peg by denying her new clothes. Then Peg did worse still by selecting her own suitor, in the shape of John Hobart, son of a Lady Zouch by her first marriage; he was attending school at Wye nearby, and lodging at Barham.

  Although the marriage did take place finally in 1649, Lady Zouch was quite as disapproving as Henry Oxinden. In vain her son pleaded for her forgiveness: ‘I must confess that I have married one whom I have loved ever since I saw her’, he wrote. Lady Zouch got her revenge by acting the tyrannical mother-in-law to Peg when the young couple came to lodge with her in London. As for Henry Oxinden, he continued to denounce Peg’s ‘neglective demeanour’ to him, and when the marriage started – perhaps inevitably – to go badly, he took Lady Zouch’s side. Peg, he decided, was growing ‘too headstrong’ and needed ‘such a one as the lady [Zouch] to break her if possible of her wilful courses’. So Peg was not allowed to leave the house without permission, a sad fate for one who had led a comparatively unrestricted life in Kent. Poor Peg’s troubles only increased when she became pregnant: she was still part of the Zouch household, Henry Oxinden insisting that she should not leave of her own accord, for then ‘she would not have been allowed any maintenance by law’; a message also came from him, saying that Peg could expect nothing from her father. John Hobart’s early love had clearly faded as well: Peg’s husband, wrote an observer, minded her pregnancy ‘as much as my cows calving’. No money was supplied for the lying-in or baby linen: ‘she is as unprovided [for] as one that walks the highways’. Such was the unhappy end of Peg’s defiance, based on impetuous affection.

  Only at the bottom of society was some kind of proper independence enjoyed. Women of the serving or labouring classes were in theory subject to exactly the same pressures where love was concerned. ‘This boiling affection is seldom worth anything’ when making a choice of a husband, wrote Hannah Woolley in her commonsensical handbook for ‘the Female Sex’ which included ‘A Guide for Cook-Maids, Dairy-maids, Chamber-maids, and all others that go to the service’.37

  Nevertheless in practice these toiling females enjoyed a good deal more freedom of choice where their marriage partner was concerned than their well-endowed sisters, simply because they lived below the level where such considerations as portions and settlements could be relevant. With freedom of choice came obviously the freedom to marry for love, if so desired, simply because no one else’s interests were at stake. Richard Napier was a consultant clergyman-physician who kept notebooks of his cases between 1597 and 1634; they reveal, according to their editor, many instances of romantic love (and its problems) ‘among youth of low and middling parentage’.38

  The lack of acute concentration on the matches made in the lower ranks of society did not of course mean that love suddenly became the paramount blinding emotion which guided them: the eternal practical consideration of the wherewithal on which to marry remained. This could take many different forms, according to the type of society in which a couple lived, urban or agricultural. The brother of Adam Martindale, a Nonconformist minister of Lancashire, disappointed his father grievously when he set his heart on ‘a wild airy girl … a huge lover and frequenter of wakes, greens, and merry-nights, where music and dancing abounded’, with a dowry of only £ 40 when he could have had a bride worth £140. Although the wild airy girl proved an excellent wife, the sense of disappointment remained.39 (Perhaps only women of the vagrant classes enjoyed total freedom to follow their fancy – and they very often, so far as can be made out, did not bother to marry at all.) This lack of concentration did mean that women outside the propertied classes of the aristocracy and gentry married really quite late – according to recent research – at an average age between twenty-three and twenty-four.40 Whatever the manifold disadvantages of the poor, that was another freedom they enjoyed, when one thinks of the ordeals of the wealthier young ladies, torn between ‘duty and reason’ and ‘passion’ in their early teens.

  It was fashionable to gaze from outside at the innocence of the fresh country world, and marvel at it, as though with nostalgia for some lost paradise, as in the picture presented by the ballad of ‘The Happy Husband-man’:

  My young Mary do’s mind the dairy

  While I go a howing and mowing each morn …

  Cream and kisses both are my delight

  She gives me them, and the joys of night.

  A good deal of this was sentimental: Sir Thomas Overbury’s ‘fair and happy milkmaid’, dressed without benefit of the silk-worm, being ‘decked in innocence, a far better wearing’, would with reason have envied the material lot of a court lady.41 But there was one respect in which the milkmaid possessed an advantage to which the court lady could not aspire.

  Robert Herrick wrote of the carefree celebrations of the country life:

  For Sports, for Pageantry and Plays,

  They hast their Eves, and Holidays:

  On which the young men and maids meet,

  To exercise their dancing feet.42

  It is true that Herrick’s young men and maids enjoyed a kind of guiltless freedom in the sphere of the affections unknown to their social superiors (even if it would never be expressed in literature or letter), especially when one bears in mind that this was a sphere in which enormous attention was not paid to the subject of the bride’s virginity. Furthermore that simple betrothal before witnesses which constituted a valid precontract of marriage justified in many people’s opinion full sexual intercourse.

  Dorothy Osborne described how she would walk out of a hot May night to a common near her house, ‘where a great many wenches keep sheep and cows, and sit in the shade singing of ballads’. When she walked over to them, she found their voices and appearance vastly different to ‘some shepherdesses that I have read of’. But when she fell into discussion with them, she found that despite these deficiencies, they wanted ‘nothing to make them the happiest people in the world but the knowledge they are so’.43

  If not the happiest people in the world, Dorothy’s wenches were, in the single instance of their emotional independence, ahead of the majority of their female contemporaries.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Crown to her Husband

  ‘I with great thankfulness acknowledge she was my crown and glory…’

  DR ANTHONY WALKER, The Holy Life of Mrs Elizabeth Walker

  ‘Avirtuous woman is a crown to her husband’; so Elizabeth Walker, wife of the minister Dr Anthony Walker, would emphasize to her daughters, quoting from the Proverbs. Samuel Hieron, a London preacher whose printed sermons were so popular that they had run through eight editions by 1616, referred to marriage as ‘this blessed knot’ appointed by God; a ‘holy and sacred ordinance’ since He had seen in His wisdom ‘that it was not fit for mankind to be alone’. Woman was intended to act as man’s helpmate. Elizabeth Walker succeeded triumphantly in this pious ambition accordin
g to her husband, who wrote her Holy Life after her death: ‘I with great thankfulness acknowledge she was my crown and glory…’ Similarly, a poetic obituary upon Mrs Anne Mors, a merchant’s wife of King’s Lynn, referred to the support she had given her husband’s business in her lifetime:

  If women’s soul be Planets in the air

  And rule like potent Constellations there

  Surely the Merchants’ wives will there reside

  Darting kind beams their husbands’ ships to guide…1

  There were many other wives in the seventeenth century – not only among the ranks of the Puritans and the merchants – who were adjudged to have reached the status of an ideal wife; women whose funeral elegies might run like that of Lady Katherine Paston who died in 1637. On her monument it was written that her ‘sad Consort’ had ‘reared this structure here’:

  That future Ages might from it collect

  Her matchless merit, and his true respect.

  The (extremely long) memorial to Elizabeth Cavendish, Countess of Bridgwater who died in 1663 at the age of thirty-seven and was described amongst other things as ‘a most affectionate and observing wife to her husband, a most tender and indulgent mother to her children, a most kind and bountiful mistress to her family’ (i.e. her household), ended: ‘In a word she was so superlatively good, that language is too narrow to express her deserved character.’2 There was indeed a remarkable unanimity in the nature of such tributes. For all the religious differences which bedevilled the structure of society, the qualities which went to make up a right royal ‘crown to her husband’ were not much in dispute.