The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (59 page)

Remarriage then was the issue for most of the interested parties – most but not all. For Lady Anne Roos the issue was quite different: it was the uncomfortable issue of money, her money, her very livelihood. In February 1668 Lady Anne brought her own petition to the House of Lords stating that she had not received a penny from Lord Roos for four years and was thus destitute, yet she had brought a great fortune to Lord Roos on her marriage. None of this was now allowed to her, and she could not dispose of her own estate during Lord Roos’s lifetime. Thus she was daily in danger of being arrested for debts, some of which had been contracted while she still lived with her husband. It was this dire state of poverty, she explained, which had caused her to flee to Ireland ‘that her friends and relations might not be eye-witnesses of her misery’. While in Ireland she had been unable to travel to England to vindicate her honour. (Rumour
said that Lady Anne had in fact travelled to Ireland with her lover; probably both stories were true.) Lady Anne implored Lord Roos to pay her reasonable debts, to give her yearly maintenance in proportion to the dowry she had brought with her, and enable her to dispose of her own estate so that she could support her children and keep them and her out of gaol.
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In the spring of 1670 a Roos Bill – for divorce – was once more before Parliament, and in society provided the main topic of conversation. Much turned on the precise interpretation to be given to various texts in the New Testament. The most favourable were those of St Matthew, in particular that verse where Jesus declared that ‘whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery’ – for this could be held to justify remarriage when fornication had been the cause of separation. (The versions given by St Mark and St Luke were less susceptible of such a favourable interpretation: ‘Whosoever shall put away his wife, and marry another, committeth adultery against her’.) Then the various precedents were discussed, the most often quoted being that of the Marquess of Northampton in the reign of Edward VI. After his first wife had been put away for adultery, he had married ‘the good and virtuous’ Lady Elizabeth, daughter of Lord Cobham; the children of this marriage had been legitimated.
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On the second reading of the Bill, Lady Anne was once more called to the House of Lords. This time she did appear and had her petition for maintenance read. At the same time she was asked what she said to ‘the scandals’ laid upon her by Frances Countess of Rutland. Lady Anne’s answer concerned money not morals: her petition she said was no scandal, as she hoped to prove if she had liberty of appeal. She asked to have counsel to speak for her. Lady Anne then left and the House considered the matter. However when Lady Anne was recalled the answer came back that ‘she was gone’.
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There is no evidence that she ever did get her portion returned – particularly in view of the hostility of her father – while her peripatetic way of life indicates that her debts continued to plague her. So Lady Anne ended by being penalized financially for her immoral behaviour; a development
which was not exactly planned, but not disagreeable to society either.

As for the Marquess of Dorchester, he stood up in the House of Lords and publicly gave his assent to the Bill because of the ‘foul blemish’ done by his daughter to her husband; while the Earl of Rutland spoke eloquently of Lord Roos being the ‘sole heir male’ to the ancient Manners family, with whom the honour must expire if he was not allowed to marry – and procreate – again. Lord Rutland’s appeal fell on receptive ears in the Lords. There was general compassion for his family’s plight and general indignation that an ‘impudent woman’ should have brought it about. Although some peers still queried the important precedent which was being set, and the Duke of Buckingham continued to fuss about the use of his own title in the Bill, finally it passed through Lords and Commons.

On 1 March Lord Roos felt confident enough to spend 1s 10d on ‘Fagotts’ for a bonfire ‘at the good accord of the King and the House of Parliament’. On 11 April 1670 the Bill for a
divortium a vinculo matrimonii
received the royal assent (although the Duke of Buckingham succeeded in getting the actual title of Roos left out of it).
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The decision created a sensation and was much discussed, often with a sense of unease. Although public sympathy lay with the injured and innocent Lord Roos, the words of the New Testament, especially those of St Mark and St Luke, had to be explained away. A pamphlet printed afterwards of a discussion between ‘a clergyman’ and ‘a private gentleman’ stressed St Matthew’s text; of the Early Fathers, St Jerome had supported the view that a man could put away his wife for fornication; certain early councils of the church had allowed remarriage. All of this was less convincing than the robust practical statement at the end of the pamphlet that if a man were not allowed to remarry he were ‘to be put into a kind of Matrimonial Purgatory, and be rendered thereby incapable to enjoy, either the advantages of a married one, or the freedom of a single man.’
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It was to free Lord Roos from the ‘Matrimonial Purgatory’ into which the wanton behaviour of Lady Anne had cast him that
the whole cumbersome long-drawn-out process of the law, lasting one way and another for nearly ten years, had had to be invoked.

As might have been predicted, it was not long before Lord Roos, freed from his purgatory, essayed again those delights of heaven – would that they might not prove once more the torments of hell – promised by marriage. He had in fact been a target for matchmakers for some years, who laid contingency plans just in case this rich prize became available. In 1671 he married Lady Diana Bruce. The choice, out of all the girls in England, was an unlucky one; the next year she died in childbirth, and the child, a boy, died too. (The payment for embalming the body of the second Lady Roos appears in the family papers shortly after that joyous expenditure of 1s 10d on faggots for a bonfire to celebrate freedom from the first.)
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Eighteen months later Lord Roos married again: the new bride was Catherine Noel, daughter of Viscount Campden. A son John was born in 1676, who bore in his turn the controversial title of Lord Roos when his father succeeded to the earldom of Rutland three years later. So the Manners succession was secure; too late however for Lord Roos’s mother – Frances Countess of Rutland had lived to see her son’s divorce pass through Parliament but died a year later.

John, ninth Earl of Rutland, a prominent supporter of William III, was in his later years also famous for his dislike of the town of London; no doubt his early traumatic experiences with Lady Anne had inculcated this loathing. Mainly at Belvoir, he lived till 1711. As for Lady Anne, she was dead before January 1697. She too married again – a Mr Vaughan, about whom little is known except the fact that he was wounded in a duel by the boorish seventh Earl of Pembroke in 1677. John and Charles Manners were still living in 1699, but beyond that vanish from the pages of history.’
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The end of their lives is Ignoto – unknown – as once John Manners’s name had been.

Yet the trail of the Roos scandal was not totally obliterated,
even in the next generation. If we return to Rachel Lady Russell, that ‘bright example to a brittle age’, we find that one of her primary aims in her dutiful widowed years was the splendid mating of her two daughters, another Rachel, and Katherine, as well as the care of her son Wriothesley. Rachel – little Rachel, she who had sung in bed and talked of Papa at ‘Wobee’ – was just fourteen when she married Lord Cavendish, heir to the Earl of Devonshire. Where Katherine Russell was concerned, the most eligible bridegroom in England in the early 1690s (other than her younger brother Wriothesley) was none other than John Lord Roos, offspring of his father’s third and fortunate marriage to Catherine Noel.

Once again, as with the union of that other Lord Roos and Lady Anne Pierrepont nearly forty years earlier, everything seemed set fair for the match. John Earl of Rutland, as a Whig, was likely to look upon the daughter of the martyred Lord Russell with sympathy, and the Russells were likely to regard him with similar benevolence. There was a family connection: Catherine Countess of Rutland, born a Noel, was related by marriage to Rachel Lady Russell’s ‘sister Noel’. As for Katherine Russell herself, she was said to be ‘of a sweet temper’, had had a suitable education for her position, would be a good manageress, and ‘wanted no wit’:
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in short, the ideal daughter-in-law. Nothing was known to the discredit of the young Lord Roos (he was the same age as his intended bride) and a great deal to his credit, including those vast Midland possessions he must one day inherit.

All the same Rachel Lady Russell hesitated. Twenty years later the memory of that frightful decade of scandal and divorce centred on the name of Roos had not utterly faded; besides there were those awkward Manners sons to be remembered, barred from the honours and the estates, but still in themselves constituting a reminder of those ugly days.

In the end, wise woman that she was, Lady Russell decided that it was wrong to avoid ‘the best match in England for an imaginary religious scruple’. In characteristic fashion, she managed to sound a note which was both high-minded and
worldly. ‘If a divorce is lawful’, she wrote, ‘as agreeing with the word of God, I take a marriage after it certainly to be so. And as for the estate, as we enjoy that by man’s law, and that man can alter, and so may alter again, which is a risk I am willing to run, if there should be enough left.’
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So John Lord Roos and Katherine Russell, both still just under seventeen, were married in August 1693. The wedding took place at Woburn Abbey. Afterwards the bridal pair made a triumphal progress to Belvoir Castle, something more like the journey of young sovereigns through their own country, than that of a bride and groom going to his father’s house. The High Sheriff paid his respects at Harborough. As they approached Belvoir, thousands of people began huzza-ing. At the gates of the Castle were to be found twenty-four fiddlers and twenty-four trumpeters. A magnificent banquet was followed by a visit of the bridal pair to the Great Hall where a vast cistern full of wine had been established. Healths were drunk – first in spoonfuls, then in cupfuls; after an hour the level of the cistern had hardly dropped an inch. After that the healths were drunk in great tankards.
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The celebrations were in short even more magnificent than those which had heralded the arrival of Lady Anne Pierrepont into the Manners fold in 1658.

Rachel Lady Russell herself had to imagine the spectacle of her daughter’s apotheosis since her eyesight was by now very bad; she followed to Belvoir more slowly and in some discomfort. Ultimately however, it was a great source of satisfaction to her that all three titles with which she was associated, Bedford, Devonshire and Rutland, were transformed into dukedoms. Bedford – her father-in-law – and Devonshire – her son-in-law were created dukes in 1695. Transforming the earldom of Rutland into a dukedom took a little more time in view of John, ninth Earl of Rutland’s obstinate dislike of London; despite Rachel’s pleas he refused to attend the coronation of Queen Anne, the perfect opportunity for securing such titular advancement. Finally in 1703 John Manners, formerly the unhappy cuckolded Lord Roos, was made the first Duke of Rutland. His story had ended happily after all.

The story ended happily in another way. It had been written into Katherine Russell’s marriage contract – oh shades of the past! – that she would forfeit her jointure ‘if ever she lived in town without his [her husband’s] consent’.
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So amiable, so diligent and so virtuous did this Lady Roos prove herself that eventually her father-in-law relaxed the prohibition. When in 1711 Katherine died giving birth to her sixth child at the age of thirty-five not only Rachel Lady Russell but all her adopted family were cast into despair. It was appropriate that where woman’s reputation was concerned, the ghost of the wanton and ‘impudent’ Lady Anne Roos should be finally laid by the daughter of the noble Rachel Lady Russell; for the one was the classic villainess, the other the classic heroine of the age in which they lived.

1
It was not until 1857 that divorce was made generally available in England – to men on grounds of their wives’ adultery alone, and to wives on grounds of their husbands’ adultery, accompanied by cruelty or desertion.

2
Today both titles are still represented in the ranks of the peerage: there is a Baroness de Ros (for the ancient barony is currently held by a woman) and Baron Roos of Belvoir is among the titles held by the Duke of Rutland; this new barony being created in 1896.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Benefiting by Accomplishments