The Weaker Vessel: Women's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England

by Antonia Fraser

  The marital career of the second Earl of Warwick, straightforward compared to that of the Earl of Manchester, was not without its own incidents. His first marriage, which had taken place as long ago as 1605, was to Frances Hatton, step-daughter of that spirited Lady Hatton who was the mother of Frances Coke. His second wife was Susan Halliday, the widow of a rich London alderman; of her Mary Rich wrote: ‘Because she was a citizen, she was not so much respected in the family as in my opinion she deserved to be.’ Warwick’s other daughter-in-law, Lady Anne Cavendish, a haughty scion of the house of Devonshire, had been particularly unpleasant to her. Mary, however, found her ‘as good as my own mother’, sympathized with her ill-health, and ‘when God called her away, [I did] much mourn for losing her’.17

  Remarriage, then, was a fact of contemporary life and it was not only the great Parliamentary magnates, the leaders of their society, who indulged guiltlessly in this potentially acquisitive pastime.

  That same Lord Herbert who refused to acknowledge in print the second marriage of his mother, relates in his autobiography a cold-blooded conversation with his own wife. When they had established a family of three, he called the children in front of their mother and asked her how she liked them. ‘Well’, she replied. In which case Herbert requested his wife to settle her estates on these children in her lifetime, because there was a strong possibility of one or other of them dying, and the survivor marrying again; he being young for a man and she ‘not old for a woman’ (she was thirty-one, four years older than he was). Future offspring of these hypothetical second marriages might damage the financial prospects of their existing family. Although Lady Herbert refused, on the grounds that she did not wish to find herself in the power of her own children – ‘she would not draw the cradle upon her head’ – her husband’s premise concerning death and remarriage was not in itself surprising or shocking to her.18

  In reality it was more often the question of the children’s financial future – the children of the first marriage, that is – which bedevilled the prospect of a widow’s remarriage, than the notion of her fidelity to her first husband. William Blundell quoted with approval in his diary the Latin tag of a certain widower:

  Liberorum causa duxeram uxorem

  Liberorum causa rursus non duxi

  (‘I had married a wife for the sake of children; for the sake of my children I have not married again’). Widows too were adjured to bear in mind the consequences of a second marriage for those who had something to lose from it, such as their children. (Later the Quakers would make it a feature of their religion that proper provision should be made for the children of first marriages before a second marriage took place.) Brilliana Lady Harley summed up the two sides to the question with good sense in 1642 when she described herself as ‘glad’ that her cousin Catherine, widow of Oliver St John, was remarrying: ‘I believe it is for her advantage; tho’ in my opinion, when one has children, it is better to be a widow.’19

  From the opposite point of view – those with something to gain from a woman’s remarriage, notably her prospective second husband – no spectacle was more stirring than that of a wealthy widow. A Tally-Ho would go up when one of these creatures was sighted, followed by a pursuit which can only be compared to the contemporary chase after an heiress; except that the fox in this case was older and therefore wilier.

  ‘If a widow happens to fall in the mean time she shall be kept in syrup for you’, wrote a correspondent to Framlingham Gawdy in 1637, at the end of a list of available widows which included their incomes. Sir John Eliot, the leading spirit in the forcing of the Petition of Right upon King Charles I, a man who was imprisoned for his opposition to arbitrary power, left the question of his second marriage entirely in the hands of his friend Sir Henry Waller, who knew of a wealthy widow who had recently ‘fallen’, i.e. become available. Eliot made no inquiries concerning his bride’s Moral character.20

  In 1653, about the time of Dorothy Countess of Sunderland’s second marriage, Dorothy Osborne went to dinner with a rich widow, middle-aged and ‘never handsome’, who had ‘broke loose from an old miserable husband’ with the avowed intention of spending all his money before she died. Whereas Sacharissa’s fall from grace had shocked Dorothy, the widow’s palpable state of siege thoroughly amused her. For all the widow’s frank words concerning the use to which she intended to put her late husband’s money, and despite her lack of physical attraction, she was, wrote Dorothy, ‘courted a thousand times more than the greatest beauty in the world that had not a fortune’. They could hardly get through dinner for the disturbance caused by letters and presents pouring through the door in order to persuade the widow to change her mind.21

  Other widows made a different use of their opportunities. Francis Kirkman described in his autobiography how his thrice-married stepmother had had a dubious past, diddling another step-son out of his estate by forging her first husband’s seal on a will. But Francis Kirkman’s father was hardly interested in such details. ‘My father married her upon small acquaintance’; he only knew that she had a considerable estate, ‘that being the chief care of most thriving citizens to inquire into that’.22

  City widows (like Susan Halliday, the second Countess of Warwick) were a particular target, because the Custom of London concerning the disposition of a man’s estate was so favourable towards his relict. Marriage to an important widow (in the commercial sense) was the basis of one of the most successful businesses built up in the City in the seventeenth century. William Wheeler was a goldsmith; a profession incidentally where there was a tradition of bright-eyed and quick-witted wives, including that famous mistress of Edward IV, Jane Shore, who displayed her ‘beauty in a shop of gold’. Wheeler transferred the Cheapside shop inherited from his father to the Marygold, formerly a tavern, in Fleet Street near Temple Bar. When Wheeler died his widow Martha married one of his two apprentices, named Robert Blanchard, who then succeeded to the business. (Wheeler’s daughter Elizabeth married another apprentice, Francis Child; he later inherited the business in his turn, and as Sir Francis Child, was reckoned ‘the father’ of the banking profession.) It was appropriate that Blanchard, who owed so much to the Widow Wheeler, should leave £200 in his will to the Goldsmiths’ Company to pay £4 a year to two widows of good repute, over the age of fifty, who were less well endowed.23

  When Sir William Craven died in 1618, his was the largest fortune known at the time from a will – at least £125,000. In turn Lady Craven at her death was reputed by John Chamberlain to be ‘the richest widow (perhaps) that ever died, of London lady’; she was said to have left an income derived from land worth £13,000 a year between her two sons. The Vyners were another remarkable City dynasty. Pepys gazed in awe at Mary, wife of Sir Robert Vyner, but for once not for her looks; it was true she was still handsome but from having been ‘a very handsome woman’ he reckoned her at the age of thirty-four ‘now old’. No, Pepys’s awe arose from the fact that Lady Vyner, a wealthy widow at the time of her marriage, was reputed to have brought her husband ‘near £100,000’.24 The prize did not however have to be on quite such a lustrous scale for the competition to be keen, as is manifested by the case of the Widow Bennett.

  Elizabeth Cradock – the Widow Bennett of the story – came of a decent Staffordshire family and her father had probably been some form of mercantile agent.25 She was still a young and attractive woman when her husband, Richard Bennett, a well-off merchant and son of a former Lord Mayor of London, died in April 1628. The widow was left with a four-year-old son, Simon, doubtless named for her husband’s brother Sir Simon Bennett, who had been created a baronet the previous year. With respectable if not brilliant connections, the Widow Bennett was certainly well placed to make a sound second marriage, especially as she was the sole executrix of her husband’s will, under which she received two-thirds of his estate. That was not all. She also inherited her husband’s coach with its four grey coach-horses (mares and geldings), to say nothing of jewels which included chains of pe
arl and gold, and diamond rings. In short, the Widow Bennett was in a position to cut just that type of ‘ladyfied’ figure alluded to by Massinger in his satirical play The City Madam who wore:

  Satin on solemn days, a chain of gold,

  A velvet hood, rich borders, and sometimes

  A dainty miniver cap, a silver pin …26

  Only six months after her husband’s death the Widow Bennett had acquired three established suitors. Like some latter-day Paris, the widow was expected to bestow the golden apple of her fortune on one of the trio. There however the mythical comparison ends and a more homely note is struck, for, to the general amusement of society, these three suitors happened coincidentally to bear the names of Finch, Crow(e) and Raven.

  Finch was undoubtedly the best of the flock. Sir Heneage Finch came of an excellent Kentish family, he had been Speaker of the House of Commons in 1626 and was now Recorder of London, and his establishments included a handsome house and garden in that countrified outpost of London called Kensington (where Kensington Palace and Kensington Gardens now lie). Crow, in the shape of Sir Sackville Crowe, was embarrassingly eager that this ‘Twenty thousand pounds widow’ should help him to make up that gap in the public accounts which would shortly cause him to retire from his office of Treasurer of the Navy. Raven was a doctor, and a dashing fellow – but as it proved, rather too dashing a fellow for the widow’s taste.

  One night Dr Raven bribed the widow’s servants to let him secretly into her house. He then entered her bedroom, where the widow was sleeping, and proceeded to make passionate love to her. It was a commonly-held assumption of the time that a ‘lusty widow’, as the Duchess of Malfi was termed by her brother Ferdinand, must be ever on the look-out for sexual fulfilment. Ferdinand expressed the reason thus: ‘You know already what man is.’ Joseph Swetnam, for example, in The arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward and Unconstant Women laid it down that no widow, ‘framed to the conditions of another man’, could possibly ‘forbear carnal act’ if an opportunity came her way, since she was habitually deprived of it.27 One can only observe that the Widow Bennett’s behaviour would have proved a sad disappointment to anyone proceeding on this assumption.

  Far from showing herself unable to forbear carnal act, the widow immediately sprang out of bed, and began to shriek such unamorous words as ‘Thieves!’ and ‘Murder!’ She managed to summon her venal servants, and in the course of time the dashing doctor was arrested by the parish constable. Haled before the Recorder of London the next day, the Raven found himself facing none other than the Finch. The latter having sent him into custody until the next sessions, it was some time before the unfortunate Raven, having pleaded guilty to ‘ill-demeanour’, was finally set free.

  At this point a fourth bird joined the flock, in the shape of a recent widower called Sir Edward Dering. Much of Dering’s journal of his campaign to secure the widow’s hand survives; it supplies vivid details of all the necessary preparations for such an assault. Here are the Widow Bennett’s servants bribed (again! it must have been a lucrative position) and supplying Sir Edward with tit-bits of encouraging gossip to spur him on. One servant would whisper ‘Good news! Good news!’ and Sir Edward’s heart would leap. There would be a hint that ‘the widow liked well his carriage and … there was good hope’, provided that Sir Edward’s land was not already settled on his son by his first marriage.

  Sir Edward’s own efforts included the dispatch of rich presents for the widow herself, as well as her servants, and visits to the church where he might spy her – and presumably be spied. These could be quite demanding, for the good widow was a great church-goer: ‘Nov 30: I was at the Old Jewry Church, and saw her, both forenoon and afternoon.’ Then there were his advisers, who included the Widow Bennett’s cousin Cradock, and even Sir Heneage Finch (who appeared at this point to have withdrawn from the campaign). The two men had dinner together. Others who interested themselves in Sir Edward’s cause were his cousin, the Dean of Canterbury, and his late wife’s mother and sister (who far from advocating any form of fidelity to his dead wife had clearly decided that Sir Edward’s family would benefit generally from the supplement of the Widow Bennett’s estate). When Sir Henry Wotton, the Provost of Eton, happened to meet Sir Edward in the Privy Chamber, he expressed the general interest in the pursuit by genially wishing Sir Edward ‘full sail’.

  Of course there was the continuing anxiety of the other suitors. Front-runners were the newly created Viscount Lumley and a Mr Butler. The latter was rejected by the widow for being ‘a black blunt-nosed gentleman’, but Lord Lumley also prosecuted his suit by going to the widow’s church. In all of this, Sir Edward’s interviews with the widow, as opposed to ecclesiastical sightings of her, were really rather disappointing, but somehow no one seems to have noticed this fact in all the excitement of rumour and counter-rumour. At one interview Sir Edward could get ‘no answer of certainty, nor yet indeed any denial’. At another the widow protested that she would not marry at all, or at any rate she would make no answer to his proposal at the present time. At yet another meeting, in February, Sir Edward ‘intreated of her’ to grant him at least one suit: ‘viz., to love herself … viz., to choose that man with whom she might live happiest’. The widow’s reply was scarcely encouraging: ‘Say that you left me, and take the glory of it.’

  When the dreams of the Widow Bennett – and of Sir Edward – were introduced into the proceedings as relevant evidence by her cousin Mrs Norton, another of Sir Edward’s informants, they were not exactly encouraging either. The Widow Bennett dreamt that as Mrs Norton was bringing her ‘a mess of milk’ in bed, Sir Edward came into the room behind her, at which the Widow Bennett sprang out of bed – with that same strange lack of carnality with which she had eluded Dr Raven – and ran out of her bedroom into the parlour ‘in her smock’, whereupon she caught cold. Sir Edward, more prosaically, dreamt that the widow had sent him a Twelfth Night cake.

  But what were these lack-lustre portents compared to the glittering prospect of her fortune? Sir Edward gloated over it: ‘George Newman [her servant] says she hath suits of silver plate, one in the country and the other here, and that she hath beds of £100 the bed.’

  The trouble was that the widow herself was not totally without cares in her new state. It has been mentioned that she had a small son, Simon. The wardship of this boy had been sold by the Crown to a man named Steward, according to the custom – so much resented – of the time. Throughout Sir Edward’s courtship, the widow was engaged in trying to buy back the wardship of her boy into her own hands for £1,500; but having paid the amount, she then discovered that Steward himself had already sold the wardship into another’s hands. Was it this problem which was causing the widow to hang back so unconscionably from matrimony? Sir Edward, like many would-be second spouses, was well aware of the importance of little Simon in his mother’s favours. He ambushed the child at his daily walk, when he was out with his nursemaid Susan and George Newman. ‘Susan professed that she and all the house prayed for me, and told me the child already called me “Father”’, Sir Edward reported joyfully in his journal.

  Perhaps little Simon was the key to the situation. With the question of the wardship at last settled in the spring, the widow was to be found ‘in a merry plight’, according to her cousin Mrs Norton. The two women were drinking beer and chatting together: ‘Well, Thomas,’ she said to her servant, ‘I must have one glass of beer more.’ The widow agreed to drink a toast to Sir Edward ‘as one that loved her’. And shortly afterwards in April 1629, a year after the death of her first husband, the Widow Bennett did duly marry again. She married however not patient aspirant Sir Edward, but the Finch.

  It has been suggested that Sir Heneage had been advising the widow all along on the provoking matter of the wardship. The Finch may have allowed Dering’s blatant courtship to conceal his own more discreet suit.28 Be that as it may, with the marriage the dramatic story of the Widow Bennett and her suitors ends. It remains only to say that though t
he Finch marriage was short-lived (Sir Heneage died in December 1631 and this time the widow did not venture to remarry), it lasted long enough for the new Lady Finch to bear one daughter and conceive an even more remarkable child, born after her father’s death. But the story of Anne Finch, Viscountess Conway, belongs to another chapter.

  The Widow Bennett, seen through the pages of Sir Edward Dering’s journal, was no pliable character on whom the masculine sex necessarily imposed: in the end she secured a distinguished second husband (of considerably higher social rank than her first) who supplied her need for ‘a discreet and helpful friend’, as Eleanor Lady Sussex had described her protective third husband the Earl of Warwick.

  This is where the figure of the wealthy widow, that contemporary object of desire, begins to emerge as one vessel who was in practice by no means quite so weak as the rest of womankind. Widows by their very nature presented considerable problems to those pundits who postulated that obedience was the female’s essential lot. If unmarried girls obeyed their fathers, and wives obeyed their husbands, whom should a widow obey? There was no clear answer to that question. Widows, indeed, could be held to be technically ‘masterless’, especially if their jointure or other form of inheritance was free from legal restraint.

  It was a point made by a headstrong young widow, Mrs Margaret Poulteney, who was actually Ralph Verney’s aunt, although only a year older than he. Enjoying a handsome jointure without encumbrances, Margaret Poulteney went and married herself secretly to a Catholic soldier named William Eure; this despite the prolonged negotiations for a conventional second marriage, made on her behalf by her family. Eure’s proscribed religion, the secrecy of the event, the embarrassment felt towards Margaret Poulteney’s other suitors who had been assured she was ‘a free woman’; all these contributed to a feeling of collective indignation in the Verney family breast.29