The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (5 page)

Coke, however, paid no attention to his wife’s objections, and as for Frances’s feelings, they were judged to be quite irrelevant. Negotiations with the Villiers family went on apace. ‘I would have been pleased to have taken her in her smock’, declared Sir John Villiers gallantly of the lovely Frances; in fact the bride was to be dressed a great deal more richly, metaphorically speaking. Coke proposed a down payment of £10,000, and an allowance of £1,000, with the magnificent prospect of her Hatton expectations to come.
¹⁷

Lady Hatton’s next move was swift. Her pleas being unavailing, she suddenly removed Frances by coach to Oatlands, near Weybridge, which had been rented for the summer by one of her cousins. Here Lady Hatton tried to get Frances personally committed to another suitor, Henry Earl of Oxford (an official betrothal in those days – or ‘spousals’ in front of witnesses – having arguably the validity of a marriage).
¹⁸
To help matters along Lady Hatton first forged some love letters from Lord
Oxford and then obliged her daughter to sign a document pledging herself to him entirely: ‘and even if I break the least of these [vows]’ it ran, ‘I pray God Damn me Body and Soul in Hell fire in the world to come’. It was signed by Frances on 10 July 1617 ‘in the presence of my dear mother Eliza Hatton’.
¹⁹
Presumably as the result of the forged letters, Frances herself now felt a clear preference for Lord Oxford over Sir John Villiers.

The great Sir Edward Coke was not, however, so easily outwitted. Arming himself with a search warrant of sorts – its validity was very doubtful – he arrived at Oatlands to reclaim his daughter. When he was refused admittance, Coke simply battered down the door and then searched the house from top to bottom until he found Frances and her mother cowering in a dark closet. A physical tug-of-war between the rival parents ensued. Coke won. Frances was dragged weeping away.

Now it was Lady Hatton’s turn. In hysterics, she got a warrant from the Council, signed by the Lord Keeper Bacon (whom she had woken in the middle of the night), and set off to rescue her daughter with men and pistols. In return Coke summoned his wife for kidnapping and counterfeiting the Oxford engagement and planning to seize the girl again. Lady Hatton was more than equal to this one: ‘Who intended this [i.e. force]? The Mother. And wherefore? Because she was unnaturally and barbarously secluded from her daughter – and her daughter forced against her will contrary to her vows and liking to the will of him she disliked.’
²⁰

The Council felt some cautious sympathy for the plight of Lady Hatton and Frances – the caution being due to the fact that King James was absent in Scotland and his reaction to the prospective match was as yet unknown. When the King returned, making it clear that in his eyes Buckingham could do no wrong, the Council attempted to strike some kind of compromise which would soothe the outraged Lady Hatton and yet not risk offence to the favourite. So Frances was officially restored to Hatton House, and there amidst its arbours and fountains, it was ordained – perhaps rather optimistically – that Sir John Villiers should be allowed to win her hand for himself. Even more optimistically, his mother should be allowed to support him.

But Frances was not to be wooed. Lady Hatton, maintaining her opposition to the match to the last, was finally put under house arrest at the lodging of an alderman of the City of London. Lord Oxford, nervously aware of Frances’s preference for his suit, backed away at the prospect of Buckingham’s powerful displeasure. Even so, the fourteen-year-old Frances would not give in.

In the end she was ‘tied to the Bedposts and whipped’ – possibly more than once – ‘till she consented to the Match’. Only now did Frances surrender and write a pathetic dictated letter to her mother, saying that she was a mere child, ‘not understanding the world nor what is good for myself’; besides, Sir John Villiers was a gentleman and she saw no reason to dislike him. She ended with an ironic postscript: ‘Dear mother, believe there has no violent means been used to me by words nor deeds.’
²¹

This then, was the grotesque preamble to the ceremony on Michaelmas Day – 29 September – at which the King presided so magnificently, drinking many a health to the bride and inquiring so eagerly after the details of the wedding-night the next morning. Lady Hatton, the mother of the bride, still under house arrest, was at first refused permission to attend and then ordered to do so – at which she declined to come, saying she was sick.

A marriage begun with such a gorgeous sham of a ceremony was not necessarily doomed by the standards of the age. It was Buckingham’s – and Coke’s – cold ruthlessness in condemning Frances to such a demonstrably unsuitable bridegroom, which led to the next fatal episode in the heiress’s story. Lady Hatton still refused to bestow certain Dorset properties on her new son-in-law, as a result of which the King felt obliged to create Villiers Viscount Purbeck to atone (the title being derived from those properties he had not yet acquired). As Viscount and Viscountess Purbeck, the newly wedded pair might be hoped to sparkle, he as Master of the Robes to the Prince of Wales, she as one of the reigning beauties of the court.

Instead, Purbeck’s madness grew steadily worse. (It is interesting to note that Richard Napier, the clergyman-physician who began to treat Purbeck in 1622, seriously blamed his mother for
his condition.) He was already ‘weak in mind and body; when his worst fits were on him, he needed to be restrained from doing violence to himself.
²²
Buckingham’s reaction was brilliantly rapacious. Announcing that his brother was mad, he proposed to take Purbeck’s estates into his own care to administer them – which of course had the effect of denying Frances altogether the use of what had once been hers.

At the same time, Frances’s beauty brought its own natural temptations, all the harder to resist in view of the unsatisfactory nature of her husband. ‘You will turn all Hearts to Tinder’, wrote Ben Jonson of his ‘Queen of Love’. One heart in particular Frances’s charms burnt up – that of Sir Robert Howard. Handsome and unmarried, Howard was ten years Frances’s senior. Their adulterous liaison was not a very well-kept secret. It was said afterwards that Howard had been seen coming by water in the evenings to visit Lady Purbeck at York House, ‘there being a private and secret passage to her chamber’; he would also be seen slipping away early the next morning.
²³

Adultery was at that date still officially a matter for the church courts (even though the common law was beginning to establish its jurisdiction in certain cases).
²⁴
An ordinary couple so convicted could expect to perform some form of humiliating and arduous penance at least. However, cuckoldry was hardly unknown at the Jacobean court and under normal circumstances Lady Purbeck and Sir Robert Howard might have been left more or less free to pursue their liaison. The circumstances were made abnormal by two things: first, Buckingham’s determination to secure Lady Purbeck’s fortune on behalf of his mad brother; second, Lord Purbeck’s presumed inability to beget a child – certainly he was unable to do so while living under restraint, apart from his wife.

Frances’s petitions concerning her poverty after Buckingham seized Purbeck’s estates make piteous reading: she could not even get ‘relief in her necessities’; she declared herself ‘most barbarously carried by force into the open street’. Buckingham in reply merely suggested that Frances’s conduct had been the cause of Purbeck’s madness. Frances really had no alternative but to
declare herself willing to return to her unsatisfactory husband; ‘though you may judge what pleasure there is in the conversation of a man in the distemper you see your brother in’. Otherwise she would be completely poverty-stricken, despite the injustice of the situation: ‘for you know very well I came no beggar to you, though I am like so to be turned off’.
²⁵

Even the King seems to have felt that Buckingham had gone rather far on this occasion, for he intervened. Frances secured an annual income on condition that she left Purbeck for good – which of course also meant abandoning the estates to Purbeck, or rather Buckingham.

Frances now became pregnant by Sir Robert Howard. Given the lack of any effective form of birth control at the time, this development was perhaps inevitable, but it did undoubtedly complicate her cause. For one thing the law of the time, so cruel to wives, was very much softer towards children born – if not necessarily conceived – within wedlock. If the husband was testified to have been ‘within the four seas’ (i.e. not in foreign parts) at the time, the child was deemed to be his. The hysteria of the Villiers family at the prospect of Frances’s pregnancy
–
which they maintained could not possibly be attributed to Lord Purbeck – was made still worse by the fact that Buckingham had at this point no male heir; a Purbeck son might actually inherit from his legal uncle Buckingham as well.
¹

Frances first of all denied that she was pregnant. When the story leaked out to Buckingham, via a necromancer called Dr Lambe, whom Howard and Frances had rather unwisely consulted, Frances bolted. Under the assumed name of Mistress Wright, she gave birth in lodgings to a baby which was secretly baptized as ‘Robert Wright’.
²⁶
Nevertheless she still swore when taxed that the baby was her husband’s child. Afterwards Frances justified this guilty flight by saying that it had been caused by a brutal gynaecological ‘search’ of her person, at the hands of midwives employed by her mother-in-law. Given the latter’s character, that was quite believable. Frances’s explanation for the
conception of her baby demanded more of an act of faith: she explained that Lord Purbeck had somehow eluded his captors for a short period, in the course of which a secret encounter with his wife had resulted in her pregnancy.

Here was an adultery with a fortune at stake. Frances and Robert Howard were called in front of the Court of High Commission; on and off the proceedings would continue for three years before both were found guilty and condemned to public penance. Frances throughout behaved with characteristic defiance. Some of her sayings have a biblical ring. In front of the court, ‘with bitter revilings’, she called on the prelates concerned ‘that they should make their own Wives set the good example, by swearing that they were free from all Faults’.
²⁷

One of the last acts of James I, who died in the spring of 1625, was to sign a warrant by which Frances, her baby, its nurse and her other servants, were committed to the care of Alderman Barkham of the City of London, the same kind of house arrest to which Lady Hatton had been subjected. Unfortunately the new King, Charles I, was equally intoxicated by the personality of Buckingham; Howard received a coronation pardon but by 1627 there seemed no way in which Frances could avoid carrying out her destined penance. As well as paying a £500 fine, on a Sunday she was to walk barefoot and dressed in a white sheet from St Paul’s Cross to the Savoy, and there stand at the door of the church for all to see.

But Frances still did not see fit to perform her penance. With the connivance of the Ambassador of Savoy she managed to escape, dressed as a page-boy. She was next heard of living with her lover Robert Howard on his Shropshire estates. It was not until the mid 1630s that the guilty pair felt it was safe to return to the capital – by which time an assassin had removed Buckingham from their path, and his mother was dead. Their return was however, a misjudgement. Frances was imprisoned once more on the old warrant and placed in the Westminster prison known as the Gatehouse.

This time it was a venal turnkey who enabled the dauntless Lady Purbeck
–
still determined not to perform her penance
–
to
escape. She headed for France. Sir Robert Howard had also been confined, but in June 1635 was released on his promise not to ‘come at’ Lady Purbeck. Promptly breaking his promise, Howard was happily reunited with his mistress in Paris. Both became Catholics. Now perhaps, with French society ready to receive them, the couple might be allowed to rest. It is good to know that Sir Kenelm Digby, meeting the notorious Lady Purbeck in Paris, discovered in her ‘Prudence, sweetness, goodness, honour and bravery’ beyond any other woman he knew: ‘
vexatio dat intellectum
’. He was full of indignation that this enchantress should be obliged to live in exile.
²⁸

Frances Purbeck’s adventures were however not concluded. King Charles I, in an unwise gesture, attempted to have the writ served on her in Paris, which aroused French nationalist fury. Then Frances withdrew into a nunnery, but finding it not to her liking, resumed her life in Paris, where she lived in considerable penury. By 1640 she was back in England petitioning for the return of her marriage portion from Buckingham’s sister Lady Denbigh; only to find whatever estates she had secured sequestrated by Parliament in 1644. Frances Lady Purbeck died in June 1645 at Oxford, where the King was then holding his court and Parliament; she was buried in St Mary’s Church. Sir Robert Howard, who had stuck to his mistress through all these traumatic events with admirable constancy, remained a bachelor until after her death, marrying for the first time at the age of fifty-eight.

The story of Frances Coke had a curious postscript. Lord Purbeck married again but never succeeded in begetting legitimate issue. The love-child Robert Wright, or Robert Villiers as he was alternatively termed, did make some claim to the title; but his real political sympathies were elsewhere. Under the Commonwealth he abandoned the Royalist name of Villiers for Danvers, that of his wife, daughter of one of the judges who tried Charles I. After the Restoration he became involved in an anti-governmental conspiracy and fled the country. But his widow, children and grandson resumed the claim to the Purbeck title, and also that of Buckingham after the second Duke of Buckingham’s death, in a long-running
cause célèbre
.
²⁹
The claim
only ended properly in 1774 with the death of the last male descendant of that doomed union between Frances Purbeck, the wife sought ‘for wealth’, and Robert Howard, who sought her for love.