The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (4 page)

‘House and possessions, wealth and riches, land and living is that, that most men regard, and look after: yea men are wont to seek wives for wealth. But saith Solomon, as a good name, so a good wife, a wise and a discreet woman is better than wealth; her price is far above pearls …’

THOMAS GATAKER
, ‘A Good Wife Gods Gift’, 1624

L
et us begin with a wedding. That was after all how most women in the early seventeenth century were held to begin their lives ‘All the Time of your Life you have been gathering for this Day’, Honoria Denny was told at her wedding to James Lord Hay at Twelfth Night in 1607, ‘therefore learn to practise now that [which] you learned before; that is, to honour, to love and to obey …’
¹
Thus was Honoria, only daughter and heiress of Lord Denny, dispatched into the arms of her bridegroom with the aid of a masque devised by Thomas Campion and a prolonged banquet.

It was all held in the presence of the King. James I enjoyed these pretty wedding celebrations of a young couple, particularly when as on this occasion he had acted as matchmaker. In the course of the masque, characters such as Flora, Night, Hesperus and Zephyrus emitted suitably nuptial sentiments, to the dulcet sounds of violins, a harpsichord, the odd double sackbutt and several bandoras (an early form of guitar or banjo) twanged by ‘two Sylvans’.
²
The King looked on with sentimental satisfaction. James Hay, a good-natured but extravagant young man, was the first of his favourites at the English court: King James sought to cure his financial problems with the aid of Honoria Denny’s rich
expectations. Although the bride’s father had for some years opposed the match – for exactly the same reason as the King was promoting it
–
he had finally succumbed to royal blandishments which included a title and the grant of a patent. So the new Lord Denny handed over Honoria.

At the wedding ceremony, the Rev. Robert Wilkinson, chaplain to the Prince of Wales and rector of St Olave’s Church, chose to denounce marriages based on mercenary considerations in the course of his sermon. It was ‘the Manner of the World’, he proclaimed angrily, to seek wives ‘as Judas betrayed Christ, with a
Quantum Dabis?
(How much will you give?)’ Later, for the benefit of the young couple – and the world in general – he had printed ‘what so lately sounded in your ears’.
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This sermon was reprinted in a collection entitled
Conjugal Love
as late as 1725. Despite the genesis of the Hay marriage, Wilkinson’s words would not have echoed ironically in the ears of his fashionable audience in 1607, or plagued the consciences of his readers in the ensuing decades.

Throughout the seventeenth century marriages for money were regularly denounced from the pulpit, and in guides to behaviour of all types. The Puritan handbooks in particular pointed to the perils inherent in such money-based matches. In another wedding sermon of 1624, ‘A Good Wife Gods Gift’, the Puritan divine Thomas Gataker was as firm as the royal chaplain had been: ‘House and possessions, wealth and riches, land and living is that, that most men regard, and look after: yea men are wont to seek wives for wealth. But saith Solomon as a good name, so a good wife, a wise and a discreet woman is better than wealth; her price is far above pearls: For house and possessions are the inheritance of the fathers; but a prudent wife is of the Lord.’
⁴

At the same time in real life, the inquiry ‘
Quantum Dabis?
’, far from being regarded as the cry of Judas, was a question seldom off the lips of any respectable and dutiful father. A girl brought with her a dowry, or ‘portion’ as it was termed; in return she would be promised a ‘jointure’, something to support her should she survive her husband. An heiress not only brought with her a larger portion at the time of her marriage; her jointure would also
be larger, since there was considered to be some mathematical relationship between the size of the dowry and the size of the jointure. That however lay ahead
–
it was always possible she would predecease her husband. At the time of the marriage it was more relevant that, in the words of
The Lawes Resolutions
(an exposition of the law concerning the female sex printed in 1632 but thought to have been written by two lawyers at the end of the sixteenth century), ‘That which the husband hath is his own’ and ‘That which the wife hath is the husband’s.’
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Marrying an heiress, or at least a bride with a decent portion, was therefore a recognized – and respectable – path to material advancement at this date, one which a good parent did not hesitate to recommend to his offspring.

Henry, fifth Earl of Huntingdon, laying down some ground rules by which his son Ferdinando might choose a wife in about 1613, advised him not to bother too much about her exact rank, since he was ‘already allied to most of the nobility’; the boy would do better to ‘match with one of the gentry where thou mayest have a great portion’. The true interests of a noble family were at stake: ‘without means thy honour will look as naked as trees that are cropped’. Oliver Cromwell, by birth a member of the gentry, set to with a will to secure an heiress – Dorothy Mayor – for his unsatisfactory elder surviving son Dick; he regarded getting the best terms out of Dorothy’s father as a kind of holy task, devoting a great deal of correspondence and worry to it at two crucial periods in his political career. At one point there was a question of
£
2,000 in cash being handed over: ‘I did insist upon that … The money I shall need for my two little wenches.’
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In other words, as the pattern of the prudent Puritan father, Cromwell wished to do his best by Dick, in order to promote the interests of his own unmarried daughters Mary and Frances.

A coarser view was expressed by Richard Lane. Hearing that his friend Christopher Lord Hatton had a mistress, he gave the following advice: ‘Well Kitt, do anything but marry her, and that too if she have money enough; but without it you shall never have my consent, since this is to reduce you to a filthy dowlas [very coarse linen] and bread and cheese, which, whilst the love
lasts, is fancied partridge and pheasant, but when that is gone (and we know it will go) then it turns to cheese again; and what will you do then?’
⁷

It is true that the seventeenth century also witnessed a cautious development of the law of equity in the Court of Chancery, where an heiress’s financial interests were concerned. A judgment of 1638, for example, indicated that where a deceased person’s estate was ‘thrown into Chancery’ for administration, the interests of any married woman who might be amongst his beneficiaries obtained indefeasible protection. (Previously, although the dating of the change cannot be pinpointed precisely, the Court of Chancery had followed the common law courts in upholding the doctrine of conjugal unity where finance and property were concerned.)
⁸
But this modest and gradual amelioration of the female lot at law applied of course only to those few women whose affairs somehow reached the august precincts of Chancery. Where the majority of women were concerned, their lives were lived within the depressing and total restrictions of the common law.

So, in an age before the English had properly discovered the rumbustious sport of fox-hunting, heiresses were hunted as though they were animals of prey. But these vulnerable creatures, unlike foxes, were neither wily nor predatory. For the most part they were very young. The age of consent for a girl was twelve (fourteen for a boy),
⁹
but the exciting whiff of a glittering match particularly if the girl was an orphan, was often scented long before that; then the chase was on. The mention of ‘unripe years’ might mean the postponement of such routine accompaniments to the marriage as consummation; but the contract itself was made, even though a bride was theoretically entitled to her own choice of husband at the age of consent, without a previous betrothal to inhibit her.

The peculiarly confused state of the laws of England concerning valid marriages and the marriage ceremony before the Hardwicke Act of 1753, helped to make the chase still more exciting when much was at stake. Throughout the seventeenth century a girl might well have been forced into a marriage against
her will, by parental pressure, or even outright violence from a stranger, and have found herself thereby robbed of her freedom and her money.

Under these circumstances, the heiress’s lot could hardly be described as invariably happy, despite the fact that her hand was so avidly coveted by her male contemporaries. Moreover, where the law was concerned, there was yet another sinister rider on the subject of adultery.
The Lawes Resolutions
had something pithy to say about that too: adulterous wives, if convicted, lost their ‘dower’; men, on the other hand, could commit adultery with impunity where finance was concerned. ‘They may lope over ditch and Dale’, for the fortunate male there would still be no ‘forfeiture’.
¹⁰
This provision relating to the adulterous wife was particularly ominous where an heiress was concerned. Married when still virtually a child for her ‘house and possessions’, a wife sought ‘for wealth’ in Gataker’s phrase, it might be easy and even natural for her to look elsewhere for affection. But the consequences, as we shall see, could be disastrous.

On Michaelmas Day 1617, ten years after the wedding of Honoria Denny and James Hay, King James presided over another magnificent nuptial celebration. The bride was Frances Coke, daughter of the great jurist Sir Edward Coke. She was fourteen years old. The bridegroom, Sir John Villiers, was twenty-six. In this case it was not upon him but upon his younger brother George Villiers, recently created Earl of Buckingham, that the King’s affections were passionately focused. (As for Honoria, she was by this time dead, during her brief life having fulfilled one normal female destiny by providing her husband with a male heir – and property; the spendthrift Lord Hay was on the verge of taking a seventeen-year-old girl, Lucy Percy, as his second wife; at their wedding the King would be once again ‘exceeding merry’.)
¹¹

At Frances Coke’s marriage, James I himself gave away the bride. Splendid court festivities ensued and the King rounded off his own enjoyment of the proceedings by sending a directive to the newly married pair to the effect that they should be in no
hurry to end their wedding-night. He intended to visit them personally, lying in bed, sometime after noon the next day, to hear details of what had transpired. Such visits were a royal hobby: in 1612 James had paid a similar visit to ‘two young turtles’ (doves), his sixteen-year-old daughter Elizabeth and her husband the Elector Palatine.
¹²

Yet what a world of trouble, pain and unhappiness lay behind the formal proceedings by which the fourteen-year-old Frances Coke was wedded and bedded with Sir John Villiers!
¹³
It is true that Frances herself was quite beautiful enough – if not sufficiently docile – to be compared to a turtle-dove. As one of the late flowers of the Jacobean court, Ben Jonson would hail her:

Never yet did Gypsy trace

Smoother lines in Hands or Face;

Venus here doth Saturn move

That you should be Queen of Love …
¹⁴

John Villiers, on the other hand, shortly to be ennobled as Viscount Purbeck, the name by which he is known to history, was nobody’s idea of an appealing bridegroom. The man suffered from periodic fits of insanity of a manic nature which might lead him to smash glass and ‘bloody’ himself. The matching of this disparate pair had nevertheless become the dearest project of the bride’s father, Sir Edward Coke.

Coke, in political disgrace, saw in the alliance of his child with the all-powerful Buckingham-Villiers clique a means back into the King’s favour. The Villiers family was at this point headed by an ambitious matriarch Lady Compton, mother of both Villiers and Buckingham, now the wife of the wealthy Sir Thomas Compton. Having persistently married for money herself, Lady Compton intended her sons to do likewise. For her part, she saw in Frances Coke’s enticing portion and still more savoury expectations just the kind of fortune her son needed.

As it happened, Frances Coke’s expectations owed much to her mother as well as to her father. Elizabeth Lady Hatton had been the young rich widow of Sir William Hatton when she
married the elderly Coke a few months after Hatton’s death in 1597. (Lady Hatton was generally known by the title of her first husband even after she married Coke.) From Hatton Elizabeth had received endowments including Corfe Castle in Dorset and Hatton House in London, with its tranquil garden containing fishponds, fountains, arbours and a dovecot. Much of this might accrue to John Villiers if he married Frances; and then there was the question of the additional fortune, of Queen Elizabeth’s favourite, Christopher Hatton, which Sir William had inherited from his uncle.

Unfortunately for the smooth resolution of Coke’s plan, neither Lady Hatton nor for that matter Frances Coke happened to represent that kind of modest submissive female, full of ‘bashful shamefastness’ which was the masculine ideal of the time.
¹⁵
Lady Hatton had no particular wish to fall in with Coke’s plans, having come to dislike her second husband; in any case, quite reasonably, she did not regard John Villiers as a suitable bridegroom for the child described by a contemporary as ‘the Mother’s Darling’. Furthermore Lady Hatton detested the ambitious Lady Compton, with whom she had recently quarrelled.
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