The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (18 page)

This was, after all, an age in which the life expectancy at birth was not much more than thirty-five years.
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Each sex was subject to its own special threat. Women had to face the continuous peril of childbirth. Men on the other hand appear to have been more prone to disease, while the male population was also periodically decimated by war, whether at home or abroad.

Under these circumstances remarriage, far from being a distasteful aberration, was in fact a very common occurrence, it having been calculated that about a quarter of all marriages were a remarriage for either the bride or the groom. In the upper echelons of society – that is to say, those ranks where the interests of money and property were at stake in any given marriage – it has been further estimated that about 25 per cent of the population married again in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and about 5 per cent married three times. Four or even five marriages in a lifetime were as likely to be achieved then in a society with a high rate of mortality as they are today in a society with a high rate of divorce.
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The career of Eleanor Wortley, who married in turn Sir Henry Lee of Quarendon in Buckinghamshire, the sixth Earl of Sussex, the second Earl of Warwick, and the second Earl of Manchester, was notable more for the fact that she married a series of aged husbands than for the number of her bridegrooms. Sir Ralph
Verney (he was knighted in 1640 but made a baronet at the Restoration) actually used to refer to her in code in his letters as ‘Old Men’s Wife’.
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Lady Sussex was a woman of tempestuous character whose tribulations – as well as marriages – enlivened the existence of her friends. She also had a rather beguiling vanity. She recommended Mary Lady Verney (Mary Blacknall, the heiress, now a contented married lady) to use myrrh water for her complexion, explaining: ‘I have long used it and find it very safe. ’Tis good for the head and to make one look young long. I only wet a cloth and wipe my face over, at night with it.’ However, it says less for Lady Sussex’s artistic sense that when Van Dyck wanted to paint her she was torn between vanity and avarice: ‘I am loth to deny him, [but] truly it is money ill bestowed.’ (Van Dyck got £50 for the job.) Later Ralph Verney had to intervene, in a common problem, alas, with portraiture: he prevailed upon Van Dyck at Lady Sussex’s request ‘to make my picture leaner, for truly it was too fat.’
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Later, after her third marriage, Lady Sussex tried to get hold of the picture for her new husband, but perhaps deservedly, failed.

The ‘Old Men’s Wife’ was not, however, an unloving character. As the aged Lord Sussex lay on his deathbed at his estate at Gorhambury during the Civil War, she declared: ‘I will not stir from my good old Lord whatsoever becomes of me.’ She assured the Verneys: ‘Now I must tell you that which maybe you will hardly believe, that I heartily suffer for my good old lord who truly grows so very weak that I fear he will not hold out very long.’ She then spent a considerable sum of money – £400 – on his funeral as a mark of her respect. ‘Good man’, she wrote of Lord Sussex after his death, ‘I am confident he is happy.’
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Lady Sussex’s third husband, Robert Earl of Warwick, was approaching sixty – a vast age by the standards of the time, when thirty was held to mark middle age. She was frank about her reasons for choosing him. ‘Wanting a discreet and helpful friend … made me think of marriage’, she told the Verneys, ‘being unable to undergo what I found continually upon me.’ The Earl of Warwick was not only ‘extreme kind’ as she put it,
but in the view of his daughter-in-law Mary Rich one of the ‘cheerfullest persons’. He was also a grandee who did not allow his religious and political Puritanism to stand in the way of the great state he kept at Warwick House in Holborn. Nine months after his death in 1658 Eleanor married another Parliamentary leader, the fifty-six-year-old Earl of Manchester, a double which won for her the sobriquet of ‘the Peeress of the Protectorate’. She still, however, kept Warwick House, which had been willed to her by her third husband. It is a tribute to Eleanor’s warm character that Mary Rich, by now Countess of Warwick in her turn, wept bitterly at her death in 1667. ‘I was much affected for the loss of my poor mother-in-law’, wrote Mary; she found it no consolation that her husband would now at last be free to use the family residence of Warwick House.
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By her two matches with the Earl of Warwick and the Earl of Manchester, Eleanor had entered into a remarkably complex network of relationships. At the time the situation was summed up by the saying that the Earl of Manchester, following his first wife’s death had married ‘Warwick’s niece, Warwick’s daughter and Warwick’s wife’:
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that is to say his third wife, Essex Cheke, ‘Warwick’s niece’, that philoprogenitive lady who had fed seven children at the breast, was the daughter of Warwick’s sister; she was thus a first cousin of Manchester’s second wife, who had been ‘Warwick’s daughter’, Lady Anne Rich; Manchester’s fourth wife was of course Warwick’s widow, Eleanor. (After Eleanor’s death, the ever-game Lord Manchester went on to marry for a fifth time, the widowed Countess of Carlisle, who survived him.)

The marital career of the second Earl of Warwick, straightforward compared to that of the Earl of Manchester, was not without its own incidents. His first marriage, which had taken place as long ago as 1605, was to Frances Hatton, step-daughter of that spirited Lady Hatton who was the mother of Frances Coke. His second wife was Susan Halliday, the widow of a rich London alderman; of her Mary Rich wrote: ‘Because she was a citizen, she was not so much respected in the family as in my opinion she deserved to be.’ Warwick’s other daughter-in-law, Lady Anne Cavendish, a haughty scion of the house of
Devonshire, had been particularly unpleasant to her. Mary, however, found her ‘as good as my own mother’, sympathized with her ill-health, and ‘when God called her away, [I did] much mourn for losing her’.
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Remarriage, then, was a fact of contemporary life and it was not only the great Parliamentary magnates, the leaders of their society, who indulged guiltlessly in this potentially acquisitive pastime.

That same Lord Herbert who refused to acknowledge in print the second marriage of his mother, relates in his autobiography a cold-blooded conversation with his own wife. When they had established a family of three, he called the children in front of their mother and asked her how she liked them. ‘Well’, she replied. In which case Herbert requested his wife to settle her estates on these children in her lifetime, because there was a strong possibility of one or other of them dying, and the survivor marrying again; he being young for a man and she ‘not old for a woman’ (she was thirty-one, four years older than he was). Future offspring of these hypothetical second marriages might damage the financial prospects of their existing family. Although Lady Herbert refused, on the grounds that she did not wish to find herself in the power of her own children – ‘she would not draw the cradle upon her head’ – her husband’s premise concerning death and remarriage was not in itself surprising or shocking to her.
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In reality it was more often the question of the children’s financial future – the children of the first marriage, that is – which bedevilled the prospect of a widow’s remarriage, than the notion of her fidelity to her first husband. William Blundell quoted with approval in his diary the Latin tag of a certain widower:

Liberorum causa duxeram uxorem

Liberorum causa rursus non duxi

(‘I had married a wife for the sake of children; for the sake of my children I have not married again’). Widows too were adjured to
bear in mind the consequences of a second marriage for those who had something to lose from it, such as their children. (Later the Quakers would make it a feature of their religion that proper provision should be made for the children of first marriages before a second marriage took place.) Brilliana Lady Harley summed up the two sides to the question with good sense in 1642 when she described herself as ‘glad’ that her cousin Catherine, widow of Oliver St John, was remarrying: ‘I believe it is for her advantage; tho’ in my opinion, when one has children, it is better to be a widow.’
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From the opposite point of view – those with something to gain from a woman’s remarriage, notably her prospective second husband – no spectacle was more stirring than that of a wealthy widow. A Tally-Ho would go up when one of these creatures was sighted, followed by a pursuit which can only be compared to the contemporary chase after an heiress; except that the fox in this case was older and therefore wilier.

‘If a widow happens to fall in the mean time she shall be kept in syrup for you’, wrote a correspondent to Framlingham Gawdy in 1637, at the end of a list of available widows which included their incomes. Sir John Eliot, the leading spirit in the forcing of the Petition of Right upon King Charles I, a man who was imprisoned for his opposition to arbitrary power, left the question of his second marriage entirely in the hands of his friend Sir Henry Waller, who knew of a wealthy widow who had recently ‘fallen’, i.e. become available. Eliot made no inquiries concerning his bride’s Moral character.
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In 1653, about the time of Dorothy Countess of Sunderland’s second marriage, Dorothy Osborne went to dinner with a rich widow, middle-aged and ‘never handsome’, who had ‘broke loose from an old miserable husband’ with the avowed intention of spending all his money before she died. Whereas Sacharissa’s fall from grace had shocked Dorothy, the widow’s palpable state of siege thoroughly amused her. For all the widow’s frank words concerning the use to which she intended to put her late
husband’s money, and despite her lack of physical attraction, she was, wrote Dorothy, ‘courted a thousand times more than the greatest beauty in the world that had not a fortune’. They could hardly get through dinner for the disturbance caused by letters and presents pouring through the door in order to persuade the widow to change her mind.
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Other widows made a different use of their opportunities. Francis Kirkman described in his autobiography how his thrice-married stepmother had had a dubious past, diddling another step-son out of his estate by forging her first husband’s seal on a will. But Francis Kirkman’s father was hardly interested in such details. ‘My father married her upon small acquaintance’; he only knew that she had a considerable estate, ‘that being the chief care of most thriving citizens to inquire into that’.
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City widows (like Susan Halliday, the second Countess of Warwick) were a particular target, because the Custom of London concerning the disposition of a man’s estate was so favourable towards his relict. Marriage to an important widow (in the commercial sense) was the basis of one of the most successful businesses built up in the City in the seventeenth century. William Wheeler was a goldsmith; a profession incidentally where there was a tradition of bright-eyed and quick-witted wives, including that famous mistress of Edward IV, Jane Shore, who displayed her ‘beauty in a shop of gold’. Wheeler transferred the Cheapside shop inherited from his father to the Marygold, formerly a tavern, in Fleet Street near Temple Bar. When Wheeler died his widow Martha married one of his two apprentices, named Robert Blanchard, who then succeeded to the business. (Wheeler’s daughter Elizabeth married another apprentice, Francis Child; he later inherited the business in his turn, and as Sir Francis Child, was reckoned ‘the father’ of the banking profession.) It was appropriate that Blanchard, who owed so much to the Widow Wheeler, should leave £200 in his will to the Goldsmiths’ Company to pay £4 a year to two widows of good repute, over the age of fifty, who were less well endowed.
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When Sir William Craven died in 1618, his was the largest fortune known at the time from a will – at least £125,000. In turn
Lady Craven at her death was reputed by John Chamberlain to be ‘the richest widow (perhaps) that ever died, of London lady’; she was said to have left an income derived from land worth £13,000 a year between her two sons. The Vyners were another remarkable City dynasty. Pepys gazed in awe at Mary, wife of Sir Robert Vyner, but for once not for her looks; it was true she was still handsome but from having been ‘a very handsome woman’ he reckoned her at the age of thirty-four ‘now old’. No, Pepys’s awe arose from the fact that Lady Vyner, a wealthy widow at the time of her marriage, was reputed to have brought her husband ‘near £100,000’.
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The prize did not however have to be on quite such a lustrous scale for the competition to be keen, as is manifested by the case of the Widow Bennett.

Elizabeth Cradock – the Widow Bennett of the story – came of a decent Staffordshire family and her father had probably been some form of mercantile agent.
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She was still a young and attractive woman when her husband, Richard Bennett, a well-off merchant and son of a former Lord Mayor of London, died in April 1628. The widow was left with a four-year-old son, Simon, doubtless named for her husband’s brother Sir Simon Bennett, who had been created a baronet the previous year. With respectable if not brilliant connections, the Widow Bennett was certainly well placed to make a sound second marriage, especially as she was the sole executrix of her husband’s will, under which she received two-thirds of his estate. That was not all. She also inherited her husband’s coach with its four grey coach-horses (mares and geldings), to say nothing of jewels which included chains of pearl and gold, and diamond rings. In short, the Widow Bennett was in a position to cut just that type of ‘ladyfied’ figure alluded to by Massinger in his satirical play
The City Madam
who wore: