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

by Antonia Fraser

  Thereafter the young Lady Northumberland resided chiefly in Paris, her valuable affections having been secured by Ralph Montagu, Charles II’s Ambassador to the French court, who married her three years after her first husband’s death. In 1696 Francis Viscount Shannon would dedicate the second edition of his Discourses and Essays, in which he strongly advocated against marrying for ‘mere love’, to Lady Northumberland, then keeping herself ‘in a kind of religious retirement’; but there seems to have been something of love implicit in the widow’s selection, for the unprincipled but fascinating Ralph Montagu had the knack of attracting the opposite sex. Ralph Montagu’s motives were more cynical and the marriage was not a very happy one, any more than Lady Northumberland enjoyed her sojourn in France. Here the tart wit of Madame de Sévigné found an ideal target in the appearance of this famous English beauty – her features were not good, she looked surprisingly old and careworn and in case her dress might be supposed to atone for these defects: ‘elle est avec cela mal habillée, point de grâce’.38 One of Lady Northumberland’s problems abroad was not understanding the French language; one hopes that as a result she was at least spared knowledge of Madame de Sévigné’s chauvinist criticism.

  Meanwhile at home the child Elizabeth Percy fell into the care of her strong-minded paternal grandmother, widow of Algernon, tenth Earl of Northumberland. (She was his second wife; Lady Anne Cecil, that bride he had insisted on marrying for love, had died in 1637). Indeed, old Lady Northumberland seized the opportunity of her daughter-in-law’s second marriage to insist that the marrying off of Elizabeth Percy was to be her, grandmother’s, sole concern.39 The younger woman, being of a far gender character, made no exaggerated counter-claim but protested that it was very hard that her own child ‘should be disposed of without her consent’ – especially since Elizabeth Percy ‘if she had no other children must be her heir’. In the end some kind of accommodation was reached between the two Countesses of Northumberland on this important subject, by which the ladies both agreed not to marry off the girl without each other’s consent – and without her consent as well. (It was also incidentally agreed that Elizabeth Percy should not be married below the age of legal consent.)

  Nevertheless it was the old Countess, a redoubtable and scheming character, who in effect won out, since she retained control of the girl in England. The first match she arranged, in 1679, when Elizabeth Percy was only twelve, had at least the merit of dynastic suitability: this was with the thirteen-year-old Lord Ogle, heir to the Duke of Newcastle. Immediately on marriage, he assumed the surname of Percy. Dorothy Countess of Sunderland, however, thought him ‘as ugly as anything young can be’.40 Either for this or some more worldly reason connected with old Lady Northumberland’s intrigues and Elizabeth Percy’s tender age, her mother did not approve of the match. This led to a quarrel between young Lady Northumberland and the new Lady Ogle.

  Rachel Lady Russell, Lady Northumberland’s wise step-sister, tried to effect a reconciliation between the two in a letter to her niece on the subject of her marriage: ‘You have my prayers and wishes, dear Lady Ogle, that it may prove as fortunate to you as ever it did to any and that you may know happiness to a good old age; but, Madam, I cannot think you can be completely so, with a misunderstanding between so near a relation as a mother …’ Lady Russell begged Lady Ogle to seek her mother’s pardon. After all Lady Northumberland’s advice had had but ‘one aim and end … your being happy’.41

  But Lady Ogle did not enjoy happiness to a good old age, at least not just yet, and not with this bridegroom.

  A few months later Lord Ogle died. What was to happen to ‘my Lady Ogle’ now? Rumours abounded, correspondence of the period avidly reported the latest supposed developments in her situation as though the fate of ‘my lady Ogle’ was some major matter of State. Everyone was talking ‘about Lord Ogle’s death and Lady Ogle’s position’.42

  The person soon selected for Lady Ogle by old Lady Northumberland was Thomas Thynne Esquire of Longleat Hall in Wiltshire, and some kind of contract between the two was signed. This produced consternation in more than one quarter. The match was not considered worthy of Lady Ogle by the world at large, she whose name had been coupled with a bridegroom as august as the Prince of Hanover. Nor was Mr Thynne himself a specially savoury character, having seduced another girl under promise of marriage, before abandoning her for the lure of Lady Ogle. Lord Essex, Lady Ogle’s uncle by marriage, believed that her grandmother had ‘betrayed’ her ‘for money’; the Earl of Kingston or Lord Cranborne (Lord Salisbury’s heir) would have been far more suitable.43 Another unsavoury participant in the whole affair was the financier Richard Brett, who was rewarded by Thynne with valuable property for helping to bring about the ‘sale’ of Lady Ogle; Brett’s wife being a connection of the heiress.44

  As for Lady Ogle herself, it was said that ‘the contract she lately signed rises in her stomach’. It may be that Lady Ogle had encountered a powerful counter-attraction in the shape of the handsome Count Königsmarck, who had been paying her court. At this point the drama increased when Lady Ogle herself vanished from her grandmother’s house. On 10 November 1681, as Sir Charles Hatton wrote excitedly, no one yet knew with whom or to where she had fled. But it was generally believed that ‘she went away to avoid Mr Thynne, whom she sometimes [that is, previously] married’. This marriage, which took place in the summer, had not been consummated before Lady Ogle’s flight. There was now a rumour that it would be made void and that Lady Ogle would be wedded to George Fitzroy, one of Barbara Duchess of Cleveland’s sons by Charles II, who had recently been granted that Northumberland title which had become extinct at Lady Ogle’s father’s death.45

  The next stage of the drama took place when Mr Thomas Thynne, the unsuccessful husband – or suitor – of Lady Ogle was shot by a posse of Count Königsmarck’s men; with five bullets in his belly he died next morning. Now the furore reached new heights. Had there been a duel? Duelling was against the law, and the King did all he could to enforce the prohibition but it was at the same time a recognized social procedure where honour was concerned. Murder hardly came into the same category. Count Königsmarck’s men tried to maintain that one of them – a Pole – had challenged Mr Thynne to a duel, but unfortunately this man was known to have asked the Swedish Ambassador the night before ‘whether if Mr Thynne was removed, his master might not marry the Lady Ogle according to the law of England’. The girl Thynne had betrayed was said to have played some part in the conspiracy, hence the satirical epitaph:

  Here lies Tom Thynne of Longleat Hall

  Who never would have miscarried,

  Had he married the woman he lay withal;

  Or laid with the woman he married.46

  The responsibility of the Count himself – who had fled – was another much debated point.

  In fact the Count only got as far as Gravesend where he was found in a boat ‘disguised in a poor habit’. He was taken to Newgate and subsequently put on trial. However, his men loyally stuck to the story that there had been a challenge to a duel. It had actually been refused but one of their number, ‘the Polander’, had failed to appreciate this fact and thus fired the fatal shot.47 So the Count was acquitted. (His men were hanged.)

  None of this of course had improved the Count’s chances of marrying Lady Ogle although, imperviously, he did renew his suit. In any case on 30 May 1682, the exciting chase was ended. Steps had been taken earlier in the year to render the Thynne marriage contract void at the Court of the King’s Bench. In May Lady Ogle was married to the nineteen-year-old Charles Seymour, sixth Duke of Somerset. No one could deny that that was a splendid match: the latest bridegroom was dark and handsome, generous and cultivated. His only defect – an overweening arrogance on the subject of his ancestry, which led to his being termed ‘the Proud Duke of Somerset’ – was perhaps not such a defect after all for one who was herself ‘the last of the Percies’. It showed tact on the part of the new Duchess that she did not finally hold th
e Proud Duke’ to that promise which was part of the marriage contract, to change his surname from Seymour to Percy.

  So the former Elizabeth Percy, Lady Ogle, lived in splendour for forty years as Duchess of Somerset, bearing her husband thirteen children, and ornamenting the court of William and Mary. Later her political influence was feared by the Tories under Queen Anne, when she became First Lady of the Bedchamber following the fall of Sarah Duchess of Marlborough. This incurred for her the enmity of Swift and thus was her red hair (and her dramatic past) angrily mocked:

  Beware of carrots from Northumberland;

  Carrots sown Thynne a deep root may get,

  If so be they are in Somer set.48

  For all the Sturm und Drang which had surrounded the early years of ‘my lady Ogle’, it is appropriate to note that her aunt Rachel Lady Russell, the tragic much admired heroine of the same period, was herself an heiress and as such made a supremely happy marriage. It was possible in the second half of the seventeenth century, as it had been in the first, for love to flourish under rich bedcovers. The sorrows which came to Lady Russell, came from her husband’s political convictions and his defeat at the hands of the established order. Her pleasures were on the contrary produced by her acceptance of the rules of society, within which framework she brought her own remarkable character and intelligence to play.

  Rachel Wriothesley was born in 1636, the daughter of the Earl of Southampton by his first wife, a French Protestant noblewoman named Rachel de Ruvigny. Where her education was concerned, like her future sisters-in-law the Ladies Diana and Margaret Russell, she benefited from a domestic chaplain, Dr Fitzwilliam; at the age of seventeen she was married to Lord Vaughan, heir to the Earl of Carbery, a match later referred to as ‘acceptance without choosing on either side’. In later years Lady Russell would describe herself as having been at this period fond of ‘a great dinner and worldly talk’, following a sermon which was not too long.49 The only child of this marriage was born and died in 1665, in which year died also Lord Vaughan.

  In a financial sense, however, the important event in the life of Rachel Lady Vaughan was the death of Lord Southampton two years later without a male heir. The three daughters who were his co-heiresses – ‘my sister Noel, my sister Northumberland and myself’ as Rachel described them – now cast lots for the valuable properties which formed part of his fortune. It was in this historic manner that Rachel acquired Southampton House and that area known then as ‘the manors of Bloomsbury and St Giles’ which was to provide the foundations of the great London property holdings of the Russell family. Rachel Lady Vaughan was now in the vastly desirable situation of being a wealthy and childless widow in her early thirties who had complete control over her fortune – and thus over her future. Although her fortune could not perhaps be compared with that of her step-niece ‘my lady Ogle’, certainly her immediate fate was likely to be preferable. And so it proved.

  William Russell was in fact the second son of the Earl of Bedford, one of his immense brood of children by Anne Carr, the good Countess sprung from the bad mother, but his eldest brother was sickly and it was tacitly assumed that William was the heir; this brother died in 1678 and William then succeeded to the courtesy title of Lord Russell. Otherwise he was intelligent and charming if also, as time would show, of that steely stuff of which political martyrs are made. He was, however, a few years younger than Rachel Lady Vaughan. Still, a fortune glossed over such matters wonderfully. Although the wooing took some two years to complete, in view of the vested interests on both sides, it was finally successful. Rachel Lady Vaughan and William Russell were married on 31 July 1669. From his family accounts we know that William Russell spent lavishly on his own clothes for the occasion: £ 250 on cherry-coloured silk, scarlet and silver brocade and gold and silver lace.50 (We do not know what the bride wore.)

  William Russell now happily acquired control of Rachel’s Bloomsbury properties, according to the laws of the time, just as her father’s residence of Southampton House became their family home in London. In personal terms an equally blissful union was inaugurated. Two daughters – Rachel and Katherine were born in 1674 and 1676; the Russells’ joy was completed when a son, named Wriothesley in compliment to his mother’s family, was born in 1680. Since Rachel Lady Russell was by now forty-four, there must have been some anxiety about the prospect of a male heir. Certainly the old Earl of Bedford at Woburn Abbey gave the messenger who brought him the news a present of sixteen guineas, nearly twice as much as had greeted the news of the arrival of the girls.51

  The Russells were seldom apart, except when William went to visit the family estates at Woburn, and even then, as Rachel quaintly expressed it in 167 5, she did not like to let ‘this first post-night pass without giving my dear man a little talk’, in the shape of a letter. Both were particularly fond of their own house (part of Rachel’s inheritance) at Stratton in Hampshire. Rachel painted a placid domestic picture to William away at Woburn: the little boy asleep as she wrote, the girls singing in bed, with little Rachel telling herself a long story, ‘She says, Papa has sent for her to Wobee, and then she gallops and says she has been there, and a great deal more.’ Lady Russell ended her letter on a cheerful gourmet note: ‘but’, she wrote, ‘boiled oysters call’. In June 1680 she told her husband more spiritually: ‘My dearest heart, flesh and blood cannot have a truer and greater sense of their own happiness than your poor but honest wife has. I am glad you find Stratton so sweet; may you live to do so one fifty years more’. On another occasion she was writing with ‘thy pillow at my back; where thy dear head shall lie, I hope, tomorrow night’.52

  ‘I know, as certainly as I live, that I have been, for twelve years, as passionate a lover as ever woman was, and hope to be so one twelve years more.’ Thus Rachel Lady Russell in September 1682. Less than one year after this declaration of an ideally happy wife, William Lord Russell was on trial for conspiring to kill the King and the Duke of York in what was known as the Rye House Plot. His specific guilt remains doubtful although with the other extreme Whig, Algernon Sidney, William Russell admitted he had declared it was lawful to resist the King on occasion. Significantly, when reasons were given to Charles II for leniency towards Lord Russell, the monarch tersely replied: ‘All that is true, but it is as true that if I do not take his life he will soon have mine.’53 In a test of strength between the King and the Whigs therefore, William Lord Russell was cast in the role of the Whig martyr, a role he was not unwilling to fulfil.

  During the period between Lord Russell’s arrest on 26 June 1683 and his trial which began on 3 July it was Rachel who beavered away, seeking support. And at the trial itself she caused a thrill of anguish by her appearance at her husband’s side in the courtroom. Officially, the defendant in a treason trial at this date was not allowed a legal adviser; the Attorney-General, to anticipate Lord Russell’s protests, declared that he could have a servant to take notes for him. A sensation of a different sort was caused when Lord Russell announced: ‘My wife is here to do it’, or in another version: ‘I require no other assistance than that which the lady can give me who sits by my side.’54

  ‘If my lady will give herself that trouble’, was the embarrassed reply of the Chief Justice. The Attorney-General then offered two persons to write for Lord Russell if he so wished; the astonishment caused by Lord Russell’s announcement being a striking commentary on the low level of female literacy at the time.

  The predictable verdict was guilty and the sentence execution. Rachel’s frantic efforts to bring about a reprieve, her own desperate pleas for mercy, the pleas of her relations and those of Lord Russell were all unavailing. The date was set for Friday 21 July. On the Thursday, Lord Russell told Gilbert (later Bishop) Burnet he wished for his own sake that his wife would cease ‘beating every bush’, and ‘running about so’ in the useless task of trying to save him; and yet when he considered that ‘it would be some mitigation [to her afterwards] that she had tried everything he had to let her continue’. A
nd there was a tear in his eye as he turned away. But he received his beloved children for the last time, according to Bishop Burnet, ‘with his ordinary serenity’ and Rachel herself managed to leave without a single sob.551

  Late that night the husband and wife said goodbye for the last time. Lord Russell expressed ‘great joy’ at that ‘magnanimity of spirit’ which he found in Rachel to the last; parting from her was of all things the hardest one he had to do. As for her, he feared that after he was gone and she no longer had the task of his reprieve to buoy her up ‘the quickness of her spirits would work all within her’. They kissed four or five times and still both managed a stoical restraint.

  After Rachel’s departure, William mused aloud on his great blessing in having had such a wife, one who had never begged him to turn informer and thus save his own life. How terribly this last week would have passed, he told Bishop Burnet, if she had been ‘still crying at me’! God had showed him a ‘signal providence’ in granting him a wife of ‘birth, fortune, great understanding, great religion, and a great kindness to him’ – note the order even at the last in which these benefits were listed – ‘but her carriage in this extremity went beyond all’.

  After Lord Russell’s death, Rachel Lady Russell’s conduct in her bereavement justified her husband’s fears for her. Through the intercession of Lord Halifax, she was allowed to place a public escutcheon of mourning over the door of Southampton House; this permission indicated that the King did not intend to profit from the forfeiture of Lord Russell’s personal estate (a penalty which was generally exacted after the death of a traitor). In other ways Lady Russell withdrew into a more private world of lamentation. No visitors were ever allowed to call at Southampton House on Fridays – the fatal day – and in addition 26 June, 3 July and 21 July were kept sacred to commemorate his arrest, trial and execution.