The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (WOMEN IN HISTORY)

by Fraser, Antonia

  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.16

  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 i
n 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.