The Elizabethans

by Wilson, A. N.

  Modern research into marriage licences in the diocese of Canterbury in the seventeenth century – between 1619 and 1660 – found that the average age for women to marry was twenty-four, and for men twenty-eight. The Elizabethans inherited a tradition of child-marriages and adapted it to a different convention. Whereas medieval and early Tudor people accepted child-marriages, Elizabethans increasingly expected the married couple to take responsibility for their own households, to farm their own plot of land, to run their own business, to be independent. This meant that whereas the landed classes could afford to continue marrying very young, the yeoman, the baker, the shopkeeper, the craftsman would have to wait until he could afford to be master of a household, however modest.5 Marriage, for the huge majority, meant marriage for life, and if life was in many cases shorter, it was not invariably so, and Elizabethans paid as much attention as other generations that married mistakes be kept to a minimum. Elizabethan marriages usually came about in two stages: the espousal or contract, in which the partners (and their families) would agree upon the match, and then the marriage itself.

  Espousals could take two forms – in verbis de futuro (‘I shall take thee to my wife’) or in verbis de praesenti, when the two people would say ‘I do take thee’ or similar words. ‘I N doe willingly promise to marrie thee N. If God will, and I live, whensoever our parents shall thinke good, & meet till which time, I take thee for my only betrothed wife, and thereto plight thee my troth. In the name of the Father, the Sonne, and the Holy Ghost: So be it’ is how a contract in verbis de praesenti is set out by Robert Cleaver in his A Godlie Forme of Household Government (1598). Once such a formula has been undertaken, although the partners were not yet married in law, the couple could consummate their union. In Twelfth Night, Olivia apologises to Sebastian for hurrying along their union, but she wants to become informally espoused in the presence of a priest:

  Blame not this haste of mine. If you mean well,

  Now go with me, and with this holy man,

  Into the chantry by; there, before him,

  And underneath that consecrated roof

  Plight me the full assurance of your faith,

  That my most jealous and too doubtful soul

  May live at peace.6

  In John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1623), the Duchess says to Antonio:

  I have heard lawyers say, a contract in a chamber

  Per verba de presenti is absolute marriage

  Bless, heaven, this sacred Gordian, which let violence

  Never untrue.

  The vagueness during this period about what exactly constituted a legally valid contract between partners is one reason why we find a very low illegitimacy rate in Elizabethan England. There must have been many in the position of the eighteen-year-old William Shakespeare, who found his lover/future wife Anne Hathaway to be pregnant before a formal marriage was solemnised. Whether Shakespeare and Hathaway had undergone an informal espousal or in verbis de presenti we do not know. Customs varied in different quarters of the British archipelago, with far more illegitimate children in Gaelic society – either in the Highlands of Scotland or in Ireland.7 Edmund Campion, in his Two Bokes of the Histories of Ireland, complained of the Irish ‘strumpets’ who were used by noblemen to increase the numbers of descendants carrying their name. ‘He that can bring most of his name into the field, base or other, triumpheth exceedingly; for increase of which name they allow themselves not only whores, but also choice and store of whores. One I hear named which hath (as he called them) more than ten wives in twenty places.’8 In general, Campion thought that the Irish ‘much abased’:

  the honourable state of marriage . . . either in contracts unlawful meeting the levitical and canonical degrees of prohibition, or in divorcements at pleasure, or in omitting sacramental solemnities, or in retaining either concubines or harlots for wives. Yea, even at this day, where the clergy is faint, they can be content to marry for a year and a day of probation, and at the year’s end to return her home upon light quarrels, if the gentlewoman’s friend be unable to avenge the injury. Never heard I of so many dispensations for marriage as these men show.9

  In England marriage customs tended to be more tightly regulated – as was the life of women generally. A statute of the fifth year of Elizabeth’s reign decreed that if a woman between twelve years old and forty was unmarried and out of work, she could be forced by two justices of the peace (in the country) or the head officer and two burgesses (in the city) to serve and be retained by the year, week or day in any work these officers thought proper.10 This was a very strong incentive indeed to marry. Many a husband must have echoed Otter in Ben Jonson’s Epicoene: ‘Wife! There’s no such thing in nature. I confess, gentlemen, I have a cook, a laundress, a house-drudge, that serves my necessary turns, and goes under that title; but he’s an ass that will be so uxorious to tie his affections to one circle.’11

  In the twelfth year of Henry VII’s reign, a judge, Justice Broone, ruled that ‘if a man beat an out-law, a traitor, a Pagan, his villain [peasant] or his wife it is dispunishable, because by the Law Common these persons can have no action’. The judgement was quoted in a book of 1632 entitled The Lawes Resolutions of Women’s Rights: or, The Laws Provision for Weemen. A Methodicall Collection of such Statutes and Customs, with the Cases, Opinions, Arguments and points of Learning in the Law, as doe properly concerne Women. The author concluded (since the law plainly did allow wife-beating), ‘God send Gentle-women better sport, or better companie.’

  Perhaps, for the Elizabethans, as for us, marriage was partly a matter of luck. There are plenty of examples, in the literature of the period (both fiction and plays on the one hand, and manuals of moral instruction on the other), where harmony and friendship within marriage are encouraged or celebrated. Edmund Tilney, in A brief and pleasant discourse of duties in Marriage – called The Flower of Friendship (1568), says that a man should love his wife, if for no other reason, out of self-interest; for ‘the man that is not lyked and loued of his mate, holdeth his lyfe in continuall perill, his goodes in great jeopardie, his good name in suspect, and his whole house in vtter perdition’.12 Robert Cleaver went further and in A Godlie Forme of Household Government believed that a man should love not only his wife, but also her relatives. There is no reason to suppose that any more, or fewer, married pairs were unhappy together in Elizabethan England than at any other period of history.

  The wedding ceremony itself was generally held, if at all possible, in the summer. In the church register of Everton, Nottingham, is the rhyme:

  Advent marriages don’t deny;

  But Hilary gives thee liberty –

  That is, marriages were forbidden in the penitential season of Advent, before Christmas; it became possible by canon law to marry again after 13 January (Feast of St Hilary of Poitiers). There follows another season when marriages were outlawed – from seventy days before (Septuagesima) Easter to eight days afterwards. It was also forbidden to have weddings on Rogation Days when people were supposed to be in church in early summer praying for a good harvest later in the year, but any time after Trinity Sunday (end of May beginning of June) was suitable:

  Septuagesima says thee nay

  Eight days from Easter says you may,

  Rogation bids thee to contain,

  But Trinity sets thee free again.13

  The celebration of a wedding would take all day. At dawn, the village girls would wake the bride and dress her. The ‘marrying smock’ would be white: ‘home-spun cloath’ for the poor, the finest silks for the rich.14 The bride and her flower-clad party would walk to the church. If possible the bride would have a bouquet of myrtle, a plant with shining leaves and white sweet-scented flowers, sacred to Venus.

  In the Middle Ages the marriage itself took place in the church porch. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath had five husbands ‘at chirche dore’. Once married, the couple would then enter the church for a blessing by the priest or a nuptial Mass. After the Elizabethan Settlement, howev
er, the new Book of Common Prayer solemnised marriages in the churches themselves. ‘At the day and the time appointed for solemnisation of matrimony, the persons to be married shall come into the body of the Church with their friends and neighbours.’ So began a tradition that persists to this day in England. The wedding ceremony (emended in 1928/9 to omit the bride’s promise to obey her husband) is the one part of the Elizabethan Prayer Book to remain integral to the common culture. Fewer than a million English people in the twenty-first century regularly go to church. When they do so, no more than a tiny fraction of these follow the rites of the old Prayer Book. But a much, much larger number attend weddings. The prodigious success of Richard Curtis’s film Four Weddings and a Funeral attests to the abiding appeal of a wedding in church, with some of the old folklore surrounding such matters as flowers and female attendants on the bride. And people go to these old-fashioned weddings at least in part because the words, alone of all the others in the now all-but-defunct Book of Common Prayer, remain part of the shared language. ‘In sickness and in health; and forsaking all other . . . for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer . . . with this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship . . .’

  The Elizabethan wedding celebration customarily took place at the house of the groom, where there would be as elaborate a feast as the family could afford, and, with any luck, as denounced by the Puritan clergy, ‘publique incendiaries of all filthy lusts’15 – in other words, a great deal of drinking, singing and dancing. Madam Haughty complains bitterly to Morose in Jonson’s Epicoene that he has let his wedding celebration ‘want all marks of solemnity’. ‘We see no ensigns of a wedding here; no character of a bride-ale: where be our scarves and gloves? I pray you, give ’em us. Let’s know your bride’s colours, and yours at least . . . no gloves? No garters? No epithalamium? No masque?’

  Masques and pageants would have attended the greatest marriage feasts, but for most couples their wedding day was an occasion of less showy rejoicing. We do not know anything, unfortunately, about the festivities in the spring of 1543, when the thirteen-year-old Robert Barlow of Barlow (sometimes spelt Barley) married his fifteen-year-old Derbyshire neighbour Elizabeth Hardwick, who had been born in her father’s small manor farmhouse in Hardwick in 1527. What we do know is that this woman, known to posterity as Bess of Hardwick, made a spectacular career out of serial monogamy. Robert Barlow left her a widow when she was sixteen. Although he did not leave her much of a fortune, it was enough to begin her portfolio. She went to court to claim one-third of the revenue from her husband’s estates – with ‘80 messuages [dwelling houses], 7 cottages, 880 acres of land, 260 acres of meadows, 550 acres of pasture, 320 acres of woods, 400 acres of furze and heath, and £8 10s. 0d. rent with the appurtenances for sundry properties in the villages of Barley, Barley Leeds, Dronfield and Holmfield’.16

  Bess came from the gentry or squire class. Many of these families held the same manors, and looked after the same English acreage, from the time of the Norman Conquest. Others were new money in early Tudor times and acquired lands that had formerly belonged to monasteries. They continued, a stabilising force in English society, until the agricultural crises of the 1870s – falling food prices and land value – forced many to sell. Some continued until the twentieth century. From this class came the magistrates, the JPs who administered local justice. They housed, and employed, the rural population – which in Elizabethan England was the great majority of people in the kingdom. They provided much of the officer class in the army and navy, and many of the clergy. Some, the richer ones, or the more socially ambitious, were to be found bettering themselves by marriage and entering the aristocracy; but most of them were not ennobled. They remained Mr (or perhaps Captain) this or that – the squire in his manor house. They would mix with local aristocrats, however, and some of them would have noble cousins. The Hardwicks, for example, were distantly related to the Dukes of Suffolk, the Marquesses of Dorset and the Earls of Derby.17

  Widowed at sixteen, Bess Hardwick next married a man twice her age: Sir William Cavendish, a privy councillor and Treasurer first to Henry VIII, to whom he owed his knighthood, and then to Edward VI. Cavendish was one who had done well out of the Dissolution of the monasteries, many of which he had taken a personal hand in closing down. The Manor of Northaw, part of the vast riches and lands of the Abbey of St Albans, had fallen into his hands in 1534, and he bought the nearby manors and lands of Cuffley and Childergate. A decade later he bought Chatsworth, an estate that would have been familiar to Bess Hardwick, and they built a vast house there of old-fashioned neo-medieval design, with battlements and turrets. (This was demolished to make way for the seventeenth-century palace at Chatsworth which stands there now.) By the time Sir William died, in 1557, his widow Bess, now thirty years of age, had become one of the greatest landowners.

  In 1559 Bess married for the third time – to Sir William St Loe, a widower and a soldier who was captain of Elizabeth’s personal bodyguard during the reign of her sister Mary I. In the panelled and plastered parlour at Sutton Court, Somersetshire, Sir William’s country seat, was an arras, or wall hanging, that depicted in heraldic form the accumulation of privileges and property brought about by the marriage – here were the arms of Hardwick and Cavendish, quartered with those of Sir William’s own heritage, St Loe, Poynz, Fitznichols, Rivers, Fitzpayne and Arundell. These heraldic devices are also to be seen in stained glass in a window in the north aisle of the parish church at St Andrew’s, Chew Magna.18

  It is possible that Sir William was murdered by his brother Edward, with whom he had been at loggerheads for many years. After seven years of happy marriage, Bess buried him at St Helen’s Bishopsgate in the City of London. She was now a woman of prodigious wealth, and a courtier of influence, attending the Queen’s bedchamber with her friends Blanche Parry, Frances Cobham and Lady Dorothy Stafford. Inventories of Chatsworth in 1565 (incomplete as they are) indicate the rich stuffs, the pictures and jewels of which she was the owner, not to mention her lands and rents.

  She married her fourth husband, George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, in 1568. Since there was by then only one duke in England – that of Norfolk – the Earl was all but the premier peer, a privy councillor, a Knight of the Garter, and eventually (1572) to become Earl Marshal when Norfolk forfeited the title, as well as Lord Lieutenant of the counties of Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. He was immensely rich, owning land all over Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire and Yorkshire. He owned a great house at Sheffield, as well as Wingfield Market, Worksop Manor, Buxton Hall, Welbeck Abbey and Rufford Abbey. As Countess of Shrewsbury, Bess was a figure of great power, wealth and influence. She was also, after her Cavendish marriage, the mother of great dynasties. Her daughter Frances married Sir Henry Pierrepoint and was the mother of Viscount Fenton, the Earl of Kingston and Grace Manners, mother of future earls, later Dukes of Rutland. Her son William became first Earl of Devonshire (and ancestor of the Dukes of Newcastle and of Portland). Her daughter Mary married the 7th Earl of Shrewsbury, who begat future Earls of Pembroke, Earls of Kent and, in the restored line, Dukes of Norfolk. Her daughter Elizabeth married Charles Stuart, 5th Earl of Lennox, the father of Arbella Stuart (1575–1615), who became Marchioness of Hertford. Arbella stood to inherit the throne of England, should James VI of Scotland not live to do so. (She it was that the Gunpowder Plotters of 1605 intended to make the English queen if they succeeded in blowing up King, nobility and Parliament.)

  This was a considerable lineage to proceed, via the womb of a highly ambitious and very determined woman, from a comparatively modest manor house in Derbyshire. Bess’s marriage to the Earl of Shrewsbury began happily, but it went sour. In 1569 the Queen entrusted the earl with the appallingly delicate task of holding Mary, Queen of Scots in custody. The earl was to treat his prisoner, ‘being a Queen of our blood, with the reverence and honour mete for a person of his state and calling, and for her degree’. She was to be accorded all the ceremony
due to her position, ‘not by this removing [to Tutbury Castle in Staffordshire] have her state amended’.19

  It is not entirely clear why Queen Elizabeth considered Lord Shrewsbury’s Staffordshire hunting lodge an apt prison for the Scottish queen. When they viewed it, both Bess and the earl considered it entirely unsuitable. It had not been inhabited for years. It was cold, dank and all but unfurnished. They sent some of the better tapestries and furniture from Sheffield and Chatsworth, but Mary Stuart herself found it a dismal place:

  I am in a walled enclosure, on the top of a hill, exposed to all the winds and inclemencies of heaven. Within the said enclosure, resembling that of a wood of Vincennes, there is a very old hunting-lodge, built of timber and plaster. Cracked in all parts, the plaster – adhering nowhere to the woodwork . . . [is] broken in numerous places . . . It is so damp that you cannot put any piece of furniture in that part without its being, in three or four days, covered with mould.20

  So wrote a plaintive Scottish queen to Bertrand de la Mothe Fénelon, the French Ambassador. The garden was no more than a ‘potato patch . . . fitter to keep pigs in the house, having no drains to the privies, is subject to a continual stench’.21

  Bess was forty-one when the Scottish queen moved to Tutbury, Mary was twenty-six. Initially, they spent much of each day together. When it was deemed safe to take exercise – and there was constant fear that Mary would be kidnapped by her Roman Catholic supporters – Bess and she could ride together. (The expenses of the Queen’s horses and those of her entourage were borne by the earl. The forty-five shillings a week sent by Queen Elizabeth to feed her cousin could not buy the foods demanded by Mary.)

  An inventory of the Scottish queen’s belongings six months before her death included many items of unfinished embroidery: bed hangings and chair covers, and the like. Mary liked to incorporate her own heraldic devices and anagrams of her name into her exquisite stitching. Into her cloth of state, which Shrewsbury allowed to hang in her room as if she were still a reigning monarch, was embroidered the ominous motto: ‘In my end is my beginning’22 – En ma fin git mon commencement – the motto of her mother, Mary of Lorraine, embroidered around her impresa, a phoenix rising from the flames.23