The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (55 page)

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’. And 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.
⁵⁵
1

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.

A few months after Lord Russell’s death, Rachel’s old mentor Dr Fitzwilliam advocated a recourse to the Scriptures for comfort. In reply, Lady Russell burst out that nothing could comfort her because of her lack of
him
. ‘I want him to talk with, to walk with, to eat, and sleep with. All these things are irksome to me. The day unwelcome, and the night so too …’
⁵⁷
Even her children made her heart ‘shrink’ because she remembered the pleasure their father had taken in them. Two years later she was still torturing herself with thoughts that she could have done more to save him.

At the death of Anne Countess of Bedford (an event probably brought forward by the shock of her son’s execution) Rachel took the opportunity to visit the family vault at Chenies in Buckinghamshire where her husband’s body was entombed. She defended her decision to Dr Fitzwilliam. ‘I had considered. I went not to seek the living among the dead. I knew I should not see him anymore, wherever I went, and had made a covenant
with myself, not to break out in unreasonable fruitless passion.’ She went deliberately to ‘quicken my contemplation’ as to ‘whither the nobler part was fled, to a country far off, where no earthly power bears any sway, nor can put an end to a happy society.’
⁵⁸

When Lady Russell went to London for the sake of her little boy’s future, she determined to be brave about visiting Southampton House: ‘I think (by God’s assistance) the shadows will not sink me.’ Yet every anniversary destroyed her resolution by ‘breaking off that bandage, time would lay over my wound’. In 1695, suffering in fact from cataract of the left eye, she was said to have wept herself blind. In extreme old age, listing her sins in shaky handwriting, Rachel included the fact that she had been inconsolable for the death of him who had been ‘my dear Mr Russell, seeking help from man but finding none’.
⁵⁹

It was natural that this tragic widow should resolve never to marry again; instead she resolved to see ‘none but lawyers and accountants’ in the interests of her children. Both decisions were much applauded by a society which admired Lady Russell’s heroism in adopting such a stern and secluded way of life. So by degrees Lady Russell fulfilled the highest expectations of her time for a great lady.
²

Her future efforts were entirely for her family. She succeeded in getting the attainder on her husband’s title reversed so that her son Wriothesley could bear it. She carefully arranged, as we shall see in the next chapter, important worldly matches for her daughters. As for Wriothesley, he was not yet thirteen when old Sir Josiah Child, the magnate of the East India Company, described by John Evelyn as ‘sordidly avaricious’, but doubtless with compensating qualities, proposed the boy a bride in the shape of his granddaughter; this was Lady Henrietta Somerset, offspring of Lord Worcester and Miss Rebecca Child. Although
Sir Josiah used a clergyman as his envoy, he found Lady Russell’s reply disappointingly cold. As for the tactful response that the young lord was still being educated, that made Sir Josiah indignant: he wrote back that that had never been ‘a bar to parents discoursing of the matching of their children, which are born to extraordinary fortunes’. City money was evidently not the problem, nor necessarily youth: for only two years later the young lord was duly married off to another Child granddaughter. Elizabeth Howland. This granddaughter was even richer, which may have been the point. The sum of the young couple’s ages came to twenty-eight years, wrote a contemporary; the bride alone, however, was worth a total of £100,000, a new Howland title being created for the Russell family as a compliment to her possessions.
⁶¹

Rachel was clearly determined to show herself a sympathetic mother-in-law to the girl, only just in her teens; a year after the marriage she approved the news that Mr Huck the dressmaker had taken her in hand. While Lady Russell herself believed fashion to be ‘but dross’, she prayed constantly that her daughter-in-law might be ‘a perfect creature both in mind and body; that is, in the manner we can reach perfection in this world’. In this perfection, Lady Russell was wise enough to see that Mr Huck the dressmaker had his place.
⁶²

As for Wriothesley, Marquess of Tavistock after the elevation of his grandfather to the dukedom of Bedford, when he turned out to be weak and an inveterate gambler – with a dead hero for a father and a doting mother did he ever have a chance? – Rachel Lady Russell was there to act as an intermediary in confessing his gambling debts to his dreaded grandfather

At the death of the old Duke in 1700, Rachel only waited a few days before writing to King William and asking for the Garter ‘his grandfather so long enjoyed’ on behalf of her twenty-year-old son. ‘Sir, I presume on your goodness to forgive a woman’s troubling you,’ she wrote: not only the new Duke ‘but I know the whole family would always look upon it as a mark of your grace and favour to them’.
⁶³
Even in her sixties with problems of eyesight Rachel could be relentless where the advancement of her family was at stake.

‘Grandmamma Russell’, as Rachel was ultimately known, lived to be nearly ninety, still keeping Fridays as a day of recollection. She died in 1722. The
Weekly Journal
commemorated one who had been the heroine of her age, as well as being married to a hero, as follows:

Russell, the chaste, has left this earthly stage,

A bright example to a brittle age …

No arts her soul to second vows inclin’d