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

by Antonia Fraser

  ‘He is not a pleasant man – very few are; neither is [he] the very next sort for entertainment. One thing pleased: when he said “With all my worldly goods I thee endow”, he put a purse upon the book with two hundred guineas.’

  DOROTHY DOWAGER COUNTESS OF SUNDERLAND ON HER NIECE’S BRIDEGROOM, 1680

  On the eve of the Restoration, Pen, Sir Ralph Verney’s second sister, wrote: ‘I pray God send we may live to see peace in our times and that friends may live to enjoy each other.’ Pen had been one of that melancholy galaxy of unmarried Verney girls who remained at Claydon while Ralph went into exile, their portions caught up in the legal tangles caused by their father’s death in the King’s cause. For such dowerless young ladies, there were no brilliant matches available: it was more a case of ‘thank heaven, fasting, for a good man’s love’1 – or any man’s hand in marriage.

  Sue Verney, for example, made do with a debt-ridden and drunken widower, spending her early married life at his side in the Fleet prison. Despite this, Sue loved her designated spouse most sincerely during their few years together, before she died in childbirth. Peg Verney was married off to Thomas Elmes – described as ‘a very humoursome cross boy’ who was soon to make her cry ‘night and day’. Peg’s own temper was not of the sweetest, and ultimately this cross-grained couple separated. Pen Verney, she who had quarrelled with Peg when asked to share a personal maid as an economy, drew her cousin John Denton; the best that could be said of him was that he had stopped drinking … But Pen was in no position to be critical. ‘Sir, she was sensible her portion lay in a desperate condition,’ wrote her brother Henry to Sir Ralph, ‘besides, she grew in years and was not to all men’s likings’.2

  That left Moll and Betty. Moll was said to be ‘the plainest of them all’, but blessed – or cursed – with ‘a great deal of wit’; in addition she was ‘wild as a buck’ and thus ‘too indiscreet to get a discreet man’. Moll, refusing the offer of an elderly bridegroom, ultimately made a disastrous match with one Robert Lloyd. (She was probably pregnant beforehand, for there was talk of shipping her to Ireland or even Barbados to avoid disgrace.) As for Betty, she was variously described as ‘of a cross proud lazy disposition’ and ‘so strangely in love with her own will’ that she loathed all efforts made on her behalf.3 She was undeniably too cross and wilful for anyone who knew her to be willing to take her.

  In 1662 cross-patch Betty bestowed herself privately upon a poverty-stricken curate named Charles Adams out of sheer despair. She had met him when he was preaching at church; none of her relations were asked to the marriage. Betty angrily rebutted charges that she had thrown herself away: ‘I am not so much lost, as some think I am, because I have married one as has the reputation of an honest man, and one as in time I may live comfortably with.’ All the same it was Betty’s family which was faced with the problem of the Adamses’ livelihood; meanwhile Betty managed to blame them not only for her present poverty but for almost everything that had happened to her since childhood. Her sister Peg Elmes wrote: ‘Sometimes I am weary of hearing it, how she was cast off and forsaken and left to herself… sent to a person’s house to a school, like a baby.’ Dr Denton referred to Charles Adams and Betty as ‘Adam and Eve’ in search of a living; it was not intended as a compliment. Only Betty’s most charitable sister Cary Gardiner reflected that there were other examples of ladies marrying clergymen … Lady Mary Bertie for example.4

  The mingled sulks and despair of Betty Verney on the subject of marriage highlighted one problem of post-Restoration society: it was even more difficult for an ill-endowed girl to find a husband than it had been before the Civil War. And in cases where the possibility of a good dowry did exist, more not less money was required from the father in return for an adequate widow’s jointure. It has been pointed out that the average ratio of dowry (given by the father) to jointure (settled on the girl by the bridegroom’s family) rose from 4 or 5 to 1 in the middle of the sixteenth century to between 8 and 10 to 1 by the end of the seventeenth.5

  The troubles of a gently-raised female at this period might be twofold. On the one hand her own portion was liable to have suffered from the effects of sequestration, confiscation and so forth like that of the Verney girls. Many different kinds of ruin had been brought upon families during the recent conflicts which made it difficult to provide a dowry for an unmarried daughter. At the same time these same families, or their equivalents, might well hope to remedy their fortunes by the time-honoured manoeuvre of capturing an heiress. But in this respect the daughters of the aristocracy and gentry were now meeting with what might be described as unfair competition from those richly-cargoed vessels, daughters of the City merchants.

  Such brides could bring their husbands large and welcome amounts of cash. Few gentlemen’s daughters could compete with this. ‘Ours are commodities lying on our hands,’ wrote Sir William Morrice of his daughters shortly after the Restoration, while ‘merchants’ daughters that weigh so many thousands’ were sought out in marriage in their place. Sir William Temple blamed the first noble families ‘that married into the City for downright money’ for introducing ‘this public grievance’ by which the level of portions was raised all round, and landowners with many daughters were ruined. By the end of the century the agreeable whiff of good City money was to be detected in the grandest homes: the Widow Wheeler, she of the goldsmith’s shop at the sign of the Marygold who married her husband’s apprentice Robert Blanchard, would number the Earls of Jersey and Westmoreland among her descendants; in 1682 the prudent marriage of the Marquess of Worcester with a Miss Rebecca Child, aged sixteen, daughter of the East India merchant Sir Josiah Child, secured at least £25,000 for the future ducal house of Beaufort.6

  But if the young gentlemen were prepared to sacrifice birth for the sake of wealth – and the evidence shows that such marriages across classes were on the increase – their impoverished sisters were by tradition inhibited from making the same social leap. Although Lady Sandwich, wife of Pepys’s patron, declared herself happy to settle for ‘a good Merchant’ for her daughter Jemima in October 1660, Lord Sandwich retorted that he would rather see her ‘with a pedlar’s pack on her back’ so long as she married a gentleman rather than ‘a citizen’. So the numbers of such girls’ potential bridegrooms diminished, and the number of unmarried females of this class rose with the century.7

  There was a further dismal element in the growing excess of women over men in the population as a whole. At the end of the seventeenth century Gregory King stated that women outnumbered men by a ratio of 28 to 27 (on his figures there were 100,000 more females than males in England and Wales as a whole). In 1662 John Graunt, in ‘Natural and Political Observations … made upon the bills of mortality’, had noted that more males were born than females every year, and as a result ‘every woman may have an Husband, without the allowance of Polygamy’, notwithstanding the fact that men lived more dangerously than women, travelled more and adopted professions which demanded celibacy (such as Fellows of university colleges).8

  Graunt was too optimistic. As Gregory King expressed it, the excess of males born annually – 7,000 – was ‘not much more than equal to the males carried off extraordinary by wars, the sea and the Plantations in which articles the females are very little concerned’; while females in general enjoyed a greater life expectancy. A pamphlet of 1690, Marriage Promoted in a Discourse of its Ancient and Modern Practice, thought the neglect of marriage threatened the destruction of ‘these Nations’. Nearly half the people of England were dying single and a third of the others marrying far too late: men should be obliged to marry at twenty-one.9

  All this put a further premium on an heiress. Marriages were no more constructed on a basis of pure affection after the Restoration than they had been before the Civil War. During that wild period of the Commonwealth the Digger Gerrard Winstanley had actually declared that every man and woman should be free to marry whom they loved, with ‘the Common Storehouses’ as their portion:10 such sentiments
expressed exactly that kind of frightening radicalism which the post-Restoration world was anxious to eliminate from its memory. Nobody now believed – if anybody ever had – in ‘the Common Storehouses’ or in free liberty to marry for love.

  In 1664 King Charles II wrote one of his racy, chatty letters about the scene at the English court to his sister in France: ‘I find the passion Love is very much out of fashion in this country, and that a handsome face without money has but few gallants, upon the score of marriage.’ At about the same date the Comte de Gramont, according to Anthony Hamilton, author of his Memoirs, was given a lecture on his arrival in England. ‘Young women here expect serious intentions and a husband with landed property,’ the exiled French writer Saint-Evremond told him sternly. You have neither.’ He also warned Gramont that it would be a ‘miracle’ if any gallant proposition he made (other than that of matrimony itself) was considered.11

  In the 1630s a cruel rhyme had celebrated the marriage of the rich but plain daughter of a Lord Chief Justice to John Lisle:

  Neither well-proportioned, fair nor wise

  All these defects four thousand pounds supplies.

  Half a century later, Anne Killigrew, that sensitive observer of a materialist court, bewailed exactly the same situation in her Invective against Gold:

  Again, I see the Heavenly Fair despis’d,

  A Hag like Hell, with Gold, more highly ptiz’d…12

  The difference was the rise of a weariness, a cynicism on the subject; that too perhaps a legacy of the Civil War and Commonwealth period when some kind of liberty had been enjoyed simply through lack of parental supervision. As a result, the state of marriage was mocked as though by universal agreement, especially in literature. (The English young ladies, married off according to wordly principles, also proved very much more susceptible to illicit offers of ‘gallantry’ than Saint-Evremond had predicted to the Comte de Gramont, the Comte himself experiencing quite a few of these delightful ‘miracles’.)

  ‘I rather fear you wou’d debauch me into that dull slave call’d a Wife,’ observed Cornelia to Galliard in Aphra Behn’s The Feign’d Curtezans. Another of Aphra Behn’s spirited heroines, Hellena in The Rover, was equally forthright on the tedium of matrimony: ‘What shall I get? A Cradle full of Noise and Mischief, with a Pack of Repentance at my Back.’ Nor was a more romantic attitude to be expected from the other party to the contract. Willmore, Hellena’s lover, responded for his own sex that marriage was as certain ‘a Bane to Love’ as lending money was to friendship. Keepwell, in Sir Charles Sedley’s Bellamira, about to be married to the eponymous heroine, resolved to avoid ‘the odious names of Man and Wife, In chains of Love alone we will be tied.’13

  Yet few women looked to another fate. When Mrs Hobart, the oldest of the Maids of Honour to the Duchess of York, told a younger colleague, Anne Temple, that ‘compared to the inconveniences of marriage, its pleasures are so trifling that I don’t know how anybody can make up their minds to it’, she was aware that her views were not commonly held. It might be ‘the stupidest condition for a sensible woman which you can possibly conceive of’, but Mrs Hobart was the first to admit that all the Maids of Honour were in fact desperately keen to get married. Besides, Mrs Hobart was in the words of Anthony Hamilton ‘susceptible only to the charms of her own sex’. It was all very well for such a plain and sharp-tongued woman to die unmarried in 1696 at the age of sixty-three (the title of ‘Mrs’ being honorific); Anne Temple on the other hand fulfilled a more normal feminine ambition for all Mrs Hobart’s warnings, by marrying the middle-aged widower Sir Charles Lyttelton in 1666 and giving birth to thirteen children thereafter.14

  It was, however, no coincidence that the two Verney girls who ended their lives most happily did so as wealthy widows – as we have seen, an enviable position throughout the century. Cary lived at court cheerful and well provided-for, following her happy second marriage to John Stewkeley of Hampshire. Thus were memories of her early humiliation at the hands of her first husband’s family expunged by a life of good-natured and worldly ease in middle age. What troubles she had were caused by her passion for gambling, something which possessed many court ladies at the time.15

  As for Pen, married life with John Denton scarcely seemed to justify the argument that any husband was better than none when one was growing older and ‘not to all men’s likings’. He too, like Sue’s husband, was debt-ridden and imprisoned for it. He also had a vicious streak: Dr Denton referred to him as Pen’s ‘brute of a husband’ who was apt to ‘lay her at his feet’ with his blows. After John Denton’s death, however, Pen made a far more satisfactory match to the elderly Sir John Osborn, finding to her surprise that by her settlement she was now worth £6,000. ‘I fear her good fortune will make all old women marry!’ exclaimed Cary. When Sir John died in his turn, Pen was able to enjoy twenty good years at Whitehall, housekeeping for her brother and gossiping and playing cards with a series of aristocratic female cronies. She also used her position to boss about her Stewkeley nieces, Cary’s daughters, in a way which added to her general enjoyment, if not to theirs.

  In old age Pen boasted that she had lived her ‘Laborious life’ entirely to ‘make a fine show to the world,’ never wasting one shilling to give herself pleasure. She died in 1695 at the age of seventy-three. Her will certainly made a fine show, for she left a series of bequests to those grand ladies whose company she had so much appreciated, so that it reads like some roll-call of the peerage: ‘The Countess of Lindsay to have a silver scallop cup and grater, the Countess of Plymouth a serpentine cup with a silver cover, the Countess of Carnarvon a Silver Toaster to toast bread on’ and so forth, and so on.16

  In one sense the climate of the times had changed after the Restoration: parents in general no longer believed in exercising absolute authority over their children in the making of a match, however unwelcome. The ideal union was now one arranged by the parents to which the young couple concerned were consenting. Such an attitude was however very far from representing a new endorsement of that tender passion of love, generally condemned before the Civil War. It was quite simply practical: most sensible people had come to the conclusion that marriages forged on the anvil of agreement caused far less trouble to society in the long run; as Margaret Duchess of Newcastle put it, no one should marry ‘against their own liking’ because it led directly to adultery.17

  The pre-war Puritan handbooks of domestic conduct had first pointed out this fact (so obvious to us now, so revolutionary then). As the years passed, the aristocratic fathers too softened: in 1650 Algernon, tenth Earl of Northumberland wrote of the projected marriage of his daughter to the son of Lord Grey of Wark that he would never use ‘the authority of a father’ to press his children ‘to anything of this kind’; however ‘if she likes the man’, the parents on both sides were in agreement.18 (Lord Northumberland’s enlightened attitude proved a boon to his daughter, for this was the melancholy youth whose mind was distracted, as witness the fact that he had fallen in love with his mother’s chambermaid.) Twenty years earlier his father, the ninth Earl, had flashed fiery words when Algernon, then Lord Percy, had defied him to marry Lady Anne Cecil (see p.32).

  In 1673 the most influential book on domestic conduct published after the Restoration – The Ladies Calling, the work of a divine named Richard Allestree – summed up the prevailing view as follows: ‘As a daughter is neither to anticipate, nor to contradict the will of her Parent, so (to hang the balance even) I must say she is not obliged to force her own, by marrying where she cannot love; for a negative voice in the case is sure as much the Child’s right, as the Parents’. ’Allestree even went so far as to say that it would be sacrilege for a maiden to make a vow of marriage where she hated. This was the principle to which Mary Countess of Warwick adhered, when arranging a match for her husband’s orphaned niece Lady Essex Rich: having rejected certain suitors in advance for not being sufficiently ‘viceless’, Lady Warwick then allowed Lady Essex ‘her free choice or not, to d
o as she liked or disliked’ out of those she had already vetted. (The consequent match with Daniel Finch was, as we have seen on p.64 extremely happy, but was cut short by Lady Essex’s premature death.)19

  In the 1670s it was the dearest wish of the childless Sir John Brownlow of Belton that his nephew and heir should marry his wife’s niece Alice Sherard, a girl who was trained by her in household matters and whom she had virtually adopted.20 Nevertheless in the codicil to his will Sir John was careful to make it clear that this pet plan should only be carried out if the young couple ‘shall affect one the other’ – there was to be no duress. In the event, eight months after this will was written, the couple did marry. Although Alice was only sixteen and her bridegroom was dispatched probably on the same day, to his studies at Cambridge, the foundations had been laid for a stable dynastic union, to the satisfaction of all parties, old and young.

  What would have happened to Alice Sherard if she had declined the honour of being chatelaine of Belton, for which she had been carefully groomed by her aunt? Nothing drastic certainly; but Sir John Brownlow’s codicil also stated: ‘if the said Alice Sherard shall dislike the said Match and by any refusal on her part the said Match shall not take place then this legacy to be void’ – the legacy in question being 1,000 pieces of gold in a special box marked with the initials A.S.

  That was the point. In the language of Hannah Woolley in The Gentlewomans Companion, published the same year as Sir John Brownlow’s will was made, nothing, not ‘affluence of estate, potency of friends, nor highness of descent’ could make up for ‘the insufferable grief of a loathéd bed’.21 That might be so; but money, connections and birth were still the values which prevailed in the marriage market. While many parents had come to agree with Hannah Woolley both in principle and in practice about the need for consent, nobody seriously thought of substituting different values where the initial selection of partners was concerned.