The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (19 page)

Satin on solemn days, a chain of gold,

A velvet hood, rich borders, and sometimes

A dainty miniver cap, a silver pin …
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Only six months after her husband’s death the Widow Bennett had acquired three established suitors. Like some latter-day
Paris, the widow was expected to bestow the golden apple of her fortune on one of the trio. There however the mythical comparison ends and a more homely note is struck, for, to the general amusement of society, these three suitors happened coincidentally to bear the names of Finch, Crow(e) and Raven.

Finch was undoubtedly the best of the flock. Sir Heneage Finch came of an excellent Kentish family, he had been Speaker of the House of Commons in 1626 and was now Recorder of London, and his establishments included a handsome house and garden in that countrified outpost of London called Kensington (where Kensington Palace and Kensington Gardens now lie). Crow, in the shape of Sir Sackville Crowe, was embarrassingly eager that this ‘Twenty thousand pounds widow’ should help him to make up that gap in the public accounts which would shortly cause him to retire from his office of Treasurer of the Navy. Raven was a doctor, and a dashing fellow – but as it proved, rather too dashing a fellow for the widow’s taste.

One night Dr Raven bribed the widow’s servants to let him secretly into her house. He then entered her bedroom, where the widow was sleeping, and proceeded to make passionate love to her. It was a commonly-held assumption of the time that a ‘lusty widow’, as the Duchess of Malfi was termed by her brother Ferdinand, must be ever on the look-out for sexual fulfilment. Ferdinand expressed the reason thus: ‘You know already what man is.’ Joseph Swetnam, for example, in
The arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward and Unconstant Women
laid it down that no widow, ‘framed to the conditions of another man’, could possibly ‘forbear carnal act’ if an opportunity came her way, since she was habitually deprived of it.
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One can only observe that the Widow Bennett’s behaviour would have proved a sad disappointment to anyone proceeding on this assumption.

Far from showing herself unable to forbear carnal act, the widow immediately sprang out of bed, and began to shriek such unamorous words as ‘Thieves!’ and ‘Murder!’ She managed to summon her venal servants, and in the course of time the dashing doctor was arrested by the parish constable. Haled before the Recorder of London the next day, the Raven found
himself facing none other than the Finch. The latter having sent him into custody until the next sessions, it was some time before the unfortunate Raven, having pleaded guilty to ‘ill-demeanour’, was finally set free.

At this point a fourth bird joined the flock, in the shape of a recent widower called Sir Edward Dering. Much of Dering’s journal of his campaign to secure the widow’s hand survives; it supplies vivid details of all the necessary preparations for such an assault. Here are the Widow Bennett’s servants bribed (again! it must have been a lucrative position) and supplying Sir Edward with tit-bits of encouraging gossip to spur him on. One servant would whisper ‘Good news! Good news!’ and Sir Edward’s heart would leap. There would be a hint that ‘the widow liked well his carriage and … there was good hope’, provided that Sir Edward’s land was not already settled on his son by his first marriage.

Sir Edward’s own efforts included the dispatch of rich presents for the widow herself, as well as her servants, and visits to the church where he might spy her – and presumably be spied. These could be quite demanding, for the good widow was a great church-goer: ‘Nov 30: I was at the Old Jewry Church, and saw her, both forenoon and afternoon.’ Then there were his advisers, who included the Widow Bennett’s cousin Cradock, and even Sir Heneage Finch (who appeared at this point to have withdrawn from the campaign). The two men had dinner together. Others who interested themselves in Sir Edward’s cause were his cousin, the Dean of Canterbury, and his late wife’s mother and sister (who far from advocating any form of fidelity to his dead wife had clearly decided that Sir Edward’s family would benefit generally from the supplement of the Widow Bennett’s estate). When Sir Henry Wotton, the Provost of Eton, happened to meet Sir Edward in the Privy Chamber, he expressed the general interest in the pursuit by genially wishing Sir Edward ‘full sail’.

Of course there was the continuing anxiety of the other suitors. Front-runners were the newly created Viscount Lumley and a Mr Butler. The latter was rejected by the widow for being ‘a black blunt-nosed gentleman’, but Lord Lumley also prosecuted his suit by going to the widow’s church. In all of this, Sir Edward’s interviews
with the widow, as opposed to ecclesiastical sightings of her, were really rather disappointing, but somehow no one seems to have noticed this fact in all the excitement of rumour and counter-rumour. At one interview Sir Edward could get ‘no answer of certainty, nor yet indeed any denial’. At another the widow protested that she would not marry at all, or at any rate she would make no answer to his proposal at the present time. At yet another meeting, in February, Sir Edward ‘intreated of her’ to grant him at least one suit: ‘viz., to love herself … viz., to choose that man with whom she might live happiest’. The widow’s reply was scarcely encouraging: ‘Say that you left me, and take the glory of it.’

When the dreams of the Widow Bennett – and of Sir Edward – were introduced into the proceedings as relevant evidence by her cousin Mrs Norton, another of Sir Edward’s informants, they were not exactly encouraging either. The Widow Bennett dreamt that as Mrs Norton was bringing her ‘a mess of milk’ in bed, Sir Edward came into the room behind her, at which the Widow Bennett sprang out of bed – with that same strange lack of carnality with which she had eluded Dr Raven – and ran out of her bedroom into the parlour ‘in her smock’, whereupon she caught cold. Sir Edward, more prosaically, dreamt that the widow had sent him a Twelfth Night cake.

But what were these lack-lustre portents compared to the glittering prospect of her fortune? Sir Edward gloated over it: ‘George Newman [her servant] says she hath suits of silver plate, one in the country and the other here, and that she hath beds of £100 the bed.’

The trouble was that the widow herself was not totally without cares in her new state. It has been mentioned that she had a small son, Simon. The wardship of this boy had been sold by the Crown to a man named Steward, according to the custom – so much resented – of the time. Throughout Sir Edward’s courtship, the widow was engaged in trying to buy back the wardship of her boy into her own hands for £1,500; but having paid the amount, she then discovered that Steward himself had already sold the wardship into another’s hands. Was it this problem which was causing the widow to hang back so unconscionably from matrimony?
Sir Edward, like many would-be second spouses, was well aware of the importance of little Simon in his mother’s favours. He ambushed the child at his daily walk, when he was out with his nursemaid Susan and George Newman. ‘Susan professed that she and all the house prayed for me, and told me the child already called me “Father”’, Sir Edward reported joyfully in his journal.

Perhaps little Simon was the key to the situation. With the question of the wardship at last settled in the spring, the widow was to be found ‘in a merry plight’, according to her cousin Mrs Norton. The two women were drinking beer and chatting together: ‘Well, Thomas,’ she said to her servant, ‘I must have one glass of beer more.’ The widow agreed to drink a toast to Sir Edward ‘as one that loved her’. And shortly afterwards in April 1629, a year after the death of her first husband, the Widow Bennett did duly marry again. She married however not patient aspirant Sir Edward, but the Finch.

It has been suggested that Sir Heneage had been advising the widow all along on the provoking matter of the wardship. The Finch may have allowed Dering’s blatant courtship to conceal his own more discreet suit.
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Be that as it may, with the marriage the dramatic story of the Widow Bennett and her suitors ends. It remains only to say that though the Finch marriage was short-lived (Sir Heneage died in December 1631 and this time the widow did not venture to remarry), it lasted long enough for the new Lady Finch to bear one daughter and conceive an even more remarkable child, born after her father’s death. But the story of Anne Finch, Viscountess Conway, belongs to another chapter.

The Widow Bennett, seen through the pages of Sir Edward Dering’s journal, was no pliable character on whom the masculine sex necessarily imposed: in the end she secured a distinguished second husband (of considerably higher social rank than her first) who supplied her need for ‘a discreet and helpful friend’, as Eleanor Lady Sussex had described her protective third husband the Earl of Warwick.

This is where the figure of the wealthy widow, that contemporary object of desire, begins to emerge as one vessel who was in practice by no means quite so weak as the rest of womankind. Widows by their very nature presented considerable problems to those pundits who postulated that obedience was the female’s essential lot. If unmarried girls obeyed their fathers, and wives obeyed their husbands, whom should a widow obey? There was no clear answer to that question. Widows, indeed, could be held to be technically ‘masterless’, especially if their jointure or other form of inheritance was free from legal restraint.

It was a point made by a headstrong young widow, Mrs Margaret Poulteney, who was actually Ralph Verney’s aunt, although only a year older than he. Enjoying a handsome jointure without encumbrances, Margaret Poulteney went and married herself secretly to a Catholic soldier named William Eure; this despite the prolonged negotiations for a conventional second marriage, made on her behalf by her family. Eure’s proscribed religion, the secrecy of the event, the embarrassment felt towards Margaret Poulteney’s other suitors who had been assured she was ‘a free woman’; all these contributed to a feeling of collective indignation in the Verney family breast.
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Sir Edmund Verney hoped gloomily that ‘some lucky bullet may free her of this misfortune’. Margaret Poulteney was felt to have behaved particularly badly because she had tricked Ralph’s wife Mary into buying her a form of trousseau – a black taffeta waistcoat and petticoat trimmed with handsome lace – and delivering Margaret’s favourite red damask petticoat and waistcoat from Claydon. Margaret used the excuse that she needed a new outfit for a christening. Instead she rushed off with her finery to meet William Eure on his way back from Scotland, where he had been serving in the King’s Army.

To all these reproaches Margaret, now Mrs Eure, had an irrefutable as well as disdainful reply: ‘The town makes havoc of my good name, but let them do their worst, I defy them all. None in the world can call me to account for my actions; for I am not in any one’s tuition.’
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By the 1670s T
he Ladies Calling
was trying to get round this
awkward possibility by suggesting that God did not set the same value upon their being ‘masterless’ as some over-independent widows did: ‘He [God] reckons them most miserable when they are most at liberty.’
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This last shot was presumably mere conjecture on the part of the Anglican divine who wrote
The Ladies Calling
; the feelings of the widows themselves, which can be established with more certainty, were very different. Liberty, if accompanied by affluence, could be very sweet.

Lady Anne Twysden was a widow with two fine houses, one in London and the other at East Peckham, Kent. In her youth she had been a beauty, tall but very slender. Her own son, Sir Roger Twysden, paid this tribute to her: ‘She was the handsomest woman (at least as handsome) as I ever saw’, with ‘skin exceeding fair’ and ‘light brown hair’. After forty, although she continued to look young for her age, ‘fatness’ was ‘much trouble to her’.
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Despite this hampering weight, ill-health generally and a lame foot where she had been dropped by her nurse as a child, Lady Anne ruled her domains with a rod of iron. Endowed with an excellent business brain, aided by a fluent epistolary style (and that female rarity, good handwriting), Lady Anne Twysden hardly accorded with the prevalent notion of woman as the helpless sex. At the time of the ship-money crisis in the 1630s, Lady Anne at one juncture had the courage to refuse to pay the tax – a development which deeply worried her son on her behalf, but which he could not affect.

Even though she was physically unable to move about the house, somehow Lady Anne, according to her son, managed to know ‘every egg spent in it’. Her thriftiness was combined with a chastity, one might almost say, prudery, which prevented her from being alone with a man – even her own son when grown up – without a maid present. Thrifty and prudish as she might be, Lady Anne was also, wrote Sir Roger, ‘full of motherly affection’.
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She must have been warm-hearted, for she managed to make herself beloved to those around her, including the young gentlewomen of little fortune whom she employed as attendants (no doubt to report on the egg-spending).

One of these, the thirty-year-old Isabella Saunders, was finally
selected by Lady Anne as a bride for Sir Roger, still a bachelor at the advanced age of thirty-seven. Isabella tended her mother-in-law with devotion and wept copiously at her deathbed in 1638, although after her marriage it was still Lady Anne, not the new Lady Twysden (generally termed Dame Isabella, perhaps to differentiate her), who ran Roydon Hall. Sir Roger Twysden’s notebooks also leave us an exact record of the financial restraint which Lady Anne imposed upon him under the heading ‘Reckonings between me and my mother’; as for example, ‘The 6th July 1629 I owed her £46.12.10. pd her £20. 20 July and pd. her £40. 10 Sept and told her where she cd have another £100 in London.’
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