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

by Fraser, Antonia

  Over children too, the theoretical authority of the parent remained intact in the second half of the century even if custom asked that it should be exercised more kindly. There was a pretty to-do in May 1667 when the eligible young Viscount Maidstone, heir to the third Earl of Winchilsea, was secretly married off at the age of fourteen to one Elizabeth Windham, without his father’s knowledge, let alone his permission.22 The whole affair sounded extremely dubious – at least to the ears of the outraged Earl of Winchilsea, then absent on a diplomatic mission in Belgrade. The boy had lived in the same house as his bride for some time while at Cambridge, and was encouraged by her relations to make advances to her. Still, the young Lord kept his head sufficiently not to consummate the marriage after the ceremony (or else was too frightened of his father to confess it). Writing back to King Charles II in a state of righteous indignation on the subject, Lord Winchilsea passed on his boy’s account of the fateful afternoon: how he had been made drunk ‘by their putting of wine into his beer’ at the time of the marriage, but that as soon as the bride’s mother left the chamber ‘he ran out of the room’. Lord Winchilsea concluded triumphantly ‘Nor doth he know whether she [the bride] be a man or a woman.’

  To the Earl of Clarendon, Lord Winchilsea summed the matter up: this ‘foulest piece of fraud and abuse’ would shock all parents who claimed a title in ‘the happy disposal of their children’. Still, a year later Lord Winchilsea had not succeeded in getting the marriage annulled. At some point the marriage was evidently consummated: Lord Maidstone died young, but left a posthumous son Charles behind him, the child of his Cambridge bride, who in time inherited his grandfather’s title to become the fourth Earl of Winchilsea. When the time came for this boy to be married in the 1690s his widowed mother, Elizabeth Viscountess Maidstone, wrote a careful letter to his guardian Lord Nottingham about the possible choices: ‘He has seen both these ladies and thinks them very beautiful, but if we were permitted to make choice, your Lordship knows our first desire …’ Lord Nottingham’s eventual choice of Sarah Nourse, an heiress worth £30,000 in money and land, as the bride was acceptable to Lady Maidstone not only for financial reasons but also because ‘My son has seen the lady and likes her very well.’ Unlike the earlier Maidstone match, therefore, which had flouted the conventions, this projected union had everything to be said for it by the standards of the time.

  In 1701 The Athenian Oracle, one of the early magazines for answering young ladies’ queries, came down firmly on the side of parental authority. The questioner had vowed to leave her father and mother as soon as possible because they treated her so unkindly, and an opportunity presenting itself, wondered which obligation came first, her vow or her duty to her parents. The answer came back: ‘Your Vow does not oblige you, for your Body is the Goods of your Father, and you can’t lawfully dispose of your self without his knowledge and consent, so that you ought to beg God Almighty’s Pardon for your Rashness’ (in making the vow in the first place).23

  Similarly the wife’s legal position remained humble, as it had been at the beginning of the century. In the categorical words of John Evelyn to Margaret Godolphin on the subject: ‘marriage entities [the husband] to your person, and to all you bring with it of worldly goods, and he can do with it what he pleases without your consent’.24 (The exception to this, already noted, was the development of the concept of the trust in Chancery, which if held for an heiress could not be swallowed up in the husband’s property – see p.14; but this of course only applied to a tiny percentage of women.)

  The wedding of Lucy Pelham and Gervase Pierrepont at East Hoathly in Sussex in March 1680 celebrated a match made very much in this world; as a result it was not a very cheerful affair. The choice of Halland, the ancient seat of the Pelhams, was dictated by a mixture of economy and family pride. The bride’s mother would have preferred the fun of a jaunt to London, but Sir John Pelham ‘thought it would be more expense, and not handsome because of his great relations’.25

  Gervase Pierrepont himself represented no maiden’s dream. The bride’s aunt was the former Dorothy Sidney, now styled Dowager Countess of Sunderland (her second marriage to Sir Robert Smythe was conveniently swallowed up in the senior title). Lady Sunderland wrote tardy: ‘He is not a pleasant man – very few are; neither is [he] the very next sort for entertainment.’ The high point of the ceremony was that moment when the groom, by tradition, placed a purse upon the prayer book to accompany his vow: ‘With all my worldly goods I thee endow.’ A few years earlier at court the young William of Orange had deposited his own little heap of symbolic gold when wedding his cousin Princess Mary of York. King Charles II, the bride’s uncle, had been in a merry mood and had commanded the fifteen-year-old Mary: ‘Take it up, take it up. It’s all clear gain to you.’ In this case the congregation at East Hoathly was enchanted to see that Mr Pierrepont put down a purse containing 200 guineas! As Lady Sunderland commented: ‘Everybody puts somewhat, but this is the most I have heard.’26

  Whether this large sum was all clear gain to the new Mrs Pierrepont depends on one’s attitude to that other sort of price she had to pay for it. At the time, commented Dorothy, she seemed pleased enough by events: ‘but she loves more compliments and mirth than she will ever find. I prepared her, as well as I could, not to expect it …’27

  Lucy Pelham, one of the two daughters of Lady Lucy Sidney by her marriage to Sir John Pelham, a Member of many successive Parliaments, was born beneath that glittering net of aristocratic family relationships which spangled English society after the Restoration and onwards. When the time came for Lucy herself to be woven into this net by means of marriage the negotiations were entrusted to her mother’s sister Dorothy – since both Pelhams were kept in the country, the one by inclination and gout, and the other by illness alone.

  Dorothy Sunderland’s life had changed. Gone was the delicious magic of her youth which had led the poet Waller to make her his Sacharissa. Robert Earl of Sunderland, the ambitious rising politician, and his clever wife Anne, reigned at Althorp. Dorothy Sunderland was now in her sixties, living as she put it ‘in twilight’ in a little house in Whitehall. Gone too were the days when her own daughter Dorothy Spencer had reigned at Rufford in Lancashire as wife of Lord Halifax. Dorothy Spencer had died in 1670 and two years later Lord Halifax took Gertrude Pierrepont as his second wife. (Betty, for whom he wrote the famous Advice to a Daughter, was the fruit of this second union.) There is a story that Dorothy in these latter days asked Waller when he would write some more poetry for her. The poet is said to have replied: ‘When you are as young again, Madam, and as handsome as you were then.’ If true, the sourness was all on Waller’s side – his poetry had gone sadly out of fashion. Dorothy, who described herself lightly as ‘the poor old dolt in the corner’ can hardly have been much put out by the rebuff; her correspondence shows that her humour and common sense remained pristine, with her Halifax grandchildren, Nan Savile in particular, close to her, and her friendship with their father uninterrupted despite his second marriage.28 Indeed, far from living ‘in twilight’ Dorothy the Dowager Countess acted as the secret matriarch of this golden world, reconciling in herself the political differences which existed between its various members.

  Romantic figure as she may have been in the past, Dorothy in old age displayed a brisk attitude to the whole subject of marriage. The selected bridegroom was a grandson of the Earl of Kingston and a first cousin of Halifax’s second wife. Even more to the point was the fact that Gervase Pierrepont was rich. Apart from that, frankly there does not seem to have been much to say for him; and it is significant that Dorothy did not try to say it.

  She wrote approvingly of Pierrepont’s ‘good fortune’ – £200 a year and £5,000 more in ‘money’ – besides which there was an aunt of seventy in the offing, from whom more was expected, one who was conveniently suffering from a quartan ague. As to the rest: ‘One finds that he does not talk … another finds fault with his person who have little reason, God knows, to meddle wit
h that.’ In Dorothy’s own opinion ‘the worst of him is his complexion, and the small-pox is not out of his face yet; he had them but eight months ago.’ His person was certainly not ‘taking’. On another occasion she wrote even more straightforwardly that it was ‘ugly’. Nor was this wealthy pock-marked Beast endowed with the kind of sparkling wit which would make up to Beauty for his appearance. He was ‘well enough dressed and behaved’, said Dorothy, but ‘of few words’, otherwise ‘very bashful’, certainly too bashful to speak to strangers. Nevertheless Dorothy was optimistic about the success of the match. After all Mr Pierrepont was no more ill-favoured than Edward Montagu, Lucy Pelham’s sister’s bridegroom; ‘and his wife kisses him all day, and calls him her pretty dear’.29

  What was Lucy Pelham’s reaction to all this? Dorothy, who had a special fondness for her Pelham nieces, made it clear that she had no wish to ruin Lucy’s life for the sake of a good fortune: ‘I desired her to tell me if she had any distaste to him, and I would order it so it should not go on, and her father should not be angry with her. But,’ Dorothy added, ‘she is wiser than to refuse it.’

  Nor did Lucy refuse the match negotiated by her clever aunt – which included a splendid jointure for the widow after her husband’s death: ‘I demanded a thousand a year and his London house and I have got it’, wrote Dorothy triumphantly. The girl’s father would never have thought of asking for the house as well: ‘but a very pretty house so furnished as that will be very considerable to a woman’. Then there were six coach-horses to be bought, with Lady Halifax, Mr Pierrepont’s cousin, to choose the coach. Lucy was to have her own page as well. In return the bride’s father engaged to give a dowry in a ratio of 7 to 1 to the jointure: £7,000 pounds, £1,000 of which was payable on his death. Even Lucy’s brother Tom, who disapproved of some of the financial clauses, admitted that his sister needed ‘no persuasion’ to marry Mr Pierrepont; although it should perhaps be mentioned, as an example of Dorothy Sunderland’s famous wisdom, that she did not allow the pock-marked Mr Pierrepont to call on his future bride until her father had come to town to complete the arrangements.30

  The only hitch which occurred concerned high politics, not the humble affections. It was unfortunate that the marriage negotiations, in early 1680, were taking place at a time of mounting tension over the possible ‘Exclusion’ of the Catholic Duke of York from the royal succession. In a complicated situation, Robert Earl of Sunderland and Lord Halifax represented roughly speaking, rival political views. Sunderland naturally raised his eyebrows at the thought of his kinswoman marrying into the Halifax set. From the other point of view, Lucy’s brother Tom Pelham, who had ranged himself far more violently against the King than the moderate Halifax, found the marriage equally unwelcome.

  However, Dorothy Sunderland’s granddaughter Nan Savile was said to be ‘very comical’ about the whole business, dangling invitations to Rufford before Mr Pierrepont’s eyes.31 Somehow all this was smoothed over, perhaps because Dorothy Sunderland’s own political sympathies lay with her erstwhile son-in-law Halifax. Finally the wedding was allowed to take place.

  At first Lucy seems to have been most contented with her new life. She was a giddy young woman wrote her aunt, and ‘delighted with liberty and money’. Of Mr Pierrepont she said that he was as kind as she could desire, allowing her to have everything ‘to the uttermost of his fortune’, and begging her to buy whatever plate or furniture she wanted, and he would pay for it. Dorothy was not quite as happy about all this extravagance as her earlier matchmaking might have indicated. She intended to advise her niece not to abuse her husband’s generosity, for his grand relations would not think well of her if she proved herself too ‘expensive’. She was also surprised – ‘Pierrepont blood’ not being famous for its open-handedness. Altogether it was a worrying situation, with Lucy ‘a little too free and too merry in appearance’, and Mr Pierrepont in contrast very grave and lacking altogether in self-confidence; he had ‘an ill opinion of his own opinion’, wrote Dorothy.32

  Alas, poor Lucy. Mr Pierrepont, for all his wealth, was but a gilded sepulchre. By June, only a few months after the marriage, Dorothy feared that he would not prove a good husband. He was fond enough of his wife, but ‘so unquiet in the house’: that is to say he meddled with everything in the kitchen, and interfered with the servants, abusing them to such an extent that they had wearied of their positions and were all leaving. For his part, Mr Pierrepont was threatening to sack Lucy’s personal maid, who had been overheard saying: ‘God bless her mistress, she would be glad never to see her master again.’ Above all, his Pierrepont blood had asserted itself and he was now very mean in everything that was not for show – so much for the visible splendours of the plate and furniture which Lucy had been encouraged to buy.

  Lucy herself, according to Dorothy, was very depressed by this turn of events; still, she showed no signs of revolting against her fate. No great natural housekeeper, somewhat bewildered by that side of life, she was generally felt to have ‘a hard task’ coping with the demands of Mr Pierrepont. Yet she neither complained to nor confided in her aunt on the subject – rather to the latter’s annoyance. On the contrary: ‘she does observe him [Mr Pierrepont] as much as possible’. Dorothy added: ‘Severity not well understood has no bounds.’33

  Dorothy had originally been waspishly worried that this new ‘fond’ couple might take to kissing each other in public, and calling each other ‘pretty dear’ in the manner of Lucy’s sister Elizabeth and her unprepossessing husband Edward Montagu. If so, she had intended to exercise her authority over her niece to put an end to such tasteless public exhibitions. In fact, the Pierreponts’ married life was more reminiscent of the sad disgruntled marriages of late Restoration drama, that of Squire Sullen and Mrs Sullen in The Beaux’ Stratagem perhaps (‘O matrimony!’ cries Mrs Sullen, ‘Oh the pleasure of counting the melancholy clock by a snoring husband’);34 except that the Pierreponts’ union was less colourful – no scandal smirched Lucy’s name. Her earlier giddiness and love of liberty was presumably extinguished by the strain of housekeeping for Mr Pierrepont. Her husband was created an Irish peer – Lord Pierrepont of Ardglass – in 1703, and Lord Pierrepont of Hanslope in Buckinghamshire, in 1714. But Lucy Pierrepont never had any children, so the titles died out on his death.

  The story of Elizabeth Percy, that child known as ‘my lady Ogle’, if its dénouement was less tragic than that of Frances Coke, Lady Purbeck (see p.i 5ff), showed that the notion of the heiress had lost none of its power to lure in the intervening half-century. This was after all a venturesome – and mercenary – age in which the rumour of a girl’s fortune was enough to incite some coarse spirits to extraordinary acts of boldness.

  There was that Cornet Wroth who, dining with Sir Robert Vyner at his country house, took the opportunity to carry off an heiress named Miss Hyde in a coach after dinner. When a wheel broke, the egregious Cornet was still not checked: he put the girl across his horse and got as far as the Putney ferry, where another coach-and-six awaited, before his pursuers finally caught up with him. The girl, speechless after her ordeal, was recovered; but Cornet Wroth escaped. In February 1680 the mere rumour that one of Lady Tirrell’s daughters possessed a considerable fortune was enough to encourage certain ‘robbers’ to break into her house in Buckinghamshire. The motive, it was explained afterwards, was not robbery at all, but the desire to lay hands on Miss Tirrell. One of the housebreakers, fearing not to be able to accomplish his design by ordinary means, ‘did endeavour to have carried her away under some crafty pretence and to have married her’.35 Matters had not really progressed very far since the presumptuous Roger Fulwood abducted the schoolgirl Sara Cox from Newington Common in the reign of Charles I (see p.27).

  The matrimonial affairs of ‘my lady Ogle’ were on an even more sensational level, owing to the particular combination of enormous wealth and high position in society. John Evelyn quoted a contemporary opinion: she was ‘one that both by birth and fortune might have pretended t
o the greatest prince in Christendom’. This child’s father was Joceline Percy, eleventh and last Earl of Northumberland of the ancient Percy creation. Her mother, Elizabeth Wriothesley, Countess of Northumberland – ‘a beautiful lady indeed,’ wrote Pepys goggling at her in court in 1667 – was seldom mentioned without some allusion to her celebrated looks.36 Certainly Lely’s portrait of her among the Hampton Court beauties shows an angelic blonde docility; an impression borne out by the blameless quality of her personal life. A daughter of the Earl of Southampton by his second marriage, Lady Northumberland was one of the co-heiresses of the Southampton fortune with her step-sisters Rachel Lady Russell and Lady Noel. But through her mother, a Leigh, who had been the sole heiress of her father, the Earl of Chichester, Lady Northumberland was also extremely rich in her own right. Elizabeth Percy was her only surviving child.

  At the death of the Earl of Northumberland in 1670, it was possible to see in Elizabeth Percy merely a little red-headed girl of three years old. More romantically, one could see in her ‘the last of the Percies’ (she inherited all those ancient resonant Percy baronies which could pass through the female line). It was also possible to envisage this small child as a prize to be captured. On the whole society took the latter view.

  Still in her early twenties and quite apart from her beauty said to be worth £6,000 a year, Lady Northumberland was also now herself a natural target for a stream of suitors. In September 1671 bold Harry Savile found himself staying at Althorp at the same time as the lovely widow. Finding her door open, he entered in his nightgown, went right up to her bedside, and started to call ‘Madam! Madam!’ until Lady Northumberland awoke. He then acquainted her with the passion he had long nourished for her but had somehow been unable to confess in the hours of day-light. Lady Northumberland, in a fright, called her women, and Harry Savile was advised to leave Althorp as soon as possible. He did so, and subsequently went abroad rather than fight the duel which would have been proposed to avenge Lady Northumberland’s honour.37