The Gentleman's Daughter (12 page)

One of the hardest areas for historians to explore is that of ordinary sexual and emotional relationships. Inevitably the most intimate thoughts and feelings go unrecorded. What follows is a discussion of five marriages based largely on letters exchanged by the couples themselves, but in one case on the letters a couple despatched to a relative in conscious celebration of their union. It is not claimed here that letters offer a window on the totality of matrimonial discourse. They represent only one of the myriad voices with which men and women addressed each other. Moreover, as a genre in its own right, the letter is subject to particular conventions and constraints; formal models in letter-writing manuals and epistolary fiction abounded. So letters are not in any simple sense an unmediated expression of the self, but, on other hand, our public performances are no less significant than our secrets. In fact, public performance was not as uniform as might be expected from the rigid and unchanging advice laid out in the available guide-books. Obviously the generic similarities are there, but far more striking is the variety of conjugal idioms in play in the Georgian era.
The Gossips of Thorp Arch expressed an extraordinarily tender companionship in their letters. The correspondence of the Stanhopes of Leeds conceded a respectful affection; that of the Parkers of Alkincoats a dignified love. The letters the Ramsdens of the Charterhouse sent to a cousin broadcast a jolly domesticity, while the Whitakers of Simonstone used their letters to ventilate some po-faced and prosy romanticism. The plot to a successful marriage may have broadly similar, but every couple wrote a different script.

The earliest marriage studied here, that of the Gossips of Thorp Arch, was one of the most emotionally expressive when it came to written prose. In material terms, it was also a splendid match. William Gossip inherited a fortune from his successful mercer father and through his marriage to the heiress Anne Wilmer in 1731 acquired estates in Yorkshire and Essex. Together William and Anne Gossip set about founding a dynasty and embarked upon the construction of a country seat.
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Yet their marriage was as securely founded in affection as it was shored up with fashionable bricks and mortar. William Gossip never left his wife's side without complaint. Even after fifteen years of marriage, he lamented a separation: ‘heartily tired of being so long absent from my dearest life. I am now entered upon the fifth week of my exile – this will be the longest separation we ever yet have had.’ He struggled to cover the breach with pen and ink:

16 Thorp Arch Hall, Wharfedale, Yorkshire. The fashionable seat of the rising Gossip family, designed by the Yorkshire architect John Carr in the 1750s. The family fortune was amassed by William Gossip's father, a West Riding mercer. Gossip himself was both a J.P. and Deputy-Lieutenant for the county. Of William Gossip's sons, one went to Edinburgh to study medicine, while the rest were apprenticed as hosiers in Leicester.

17 Philip Mercier,
William Gossip of Thorp Arch
, 1745.

‘I can't help persecuting my dearest nanny with my letters whenever I have a spare moment on my hands. My heart will open itself towards the object of its desires.’ The comfort he found in her arms was never far from his thoughts, and his bed was cold without her. ‘I am just going to tumble into a solitary bed, & dream if I can of my Dear’, he wrote in April 1734; ‘My little flock are all well & fast asleep as I hope I shall be immediately, for I am just going to my Solitary Bed where I have nothing to do but sleep’, he complained in August 1746. After twenty-six years of marriage, in 1757 he still teased ‘as for a bed you shall be welcome to half of mine without a compliment’.
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Anne Gossip was no less appreciative of her husband. She dated ‘all my happeness and sattisfaction’ from the day of her marriage, and caring for him was her first concern: ‘I don't want to stay hear, if you who I love a thousand [times] better than myself or anything in this world, are ill and want me at home.’ She too invoked the comfort of the matrimonial mattress: ‘I wish I had my poor Dear in his own bed with me. I think you would be beter …’ An unembarassed physical intimacy is a remarkable feature of their correspondence. When his bad shoulder ached, William Gossip longed for his wife's ‘dear hand to coax it a little’, while Anne Gossip confessed ‘I am fright'd about your Bowels’, and reported the state of her own troublesome piles. Warts and all they loved each other. William looked about him in fashionable company in London and still ‘saw none I liked half so much as my old wife. Don't blush, you know I hate flattery.’ To enjoy ‘the repose of my own fireside’ was his dearest wish.
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18 Philip Mercier,
Anne Gossip of Thorp Arch
. 1745.

A more united couple it would be hard to find. Both strove to make the other happy. Which is not to say, however, that the Gossips were blithely unconventional when it came to the division of labour and authority. Their understanding of gender roles was utterly traditional. William Gossip praised his wife as a devoted mother and frugal housekeeper. His life was more mobile and more public than her's, but Anne Gossip deputized for him on the estate when necessary (paying the land tax, the window tax and so on), as had long been a sanctioned practice. William never quarrelled with her management. On the occasions when he asserted his authority, he offered respectful suggestions rather than orders: ‘I don't write this with an intent you should blindly follow my opinion herein, but I think this point is neglected.’
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Through William Gossip's respect and affection, and perhaps her own acceptance of prevailing norms, Anne Gossip wore her subjection lightly. Still they did not set romantic self-gratification on a pedestal; both were devastated when their son and heir, George, married in secret and beneath him. The pretty daughter of a Halifax mantua-maker was not their idea of a catch for a wealthy hosier. Indeed William Gossip reached out to punish the imprudence in his will.
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Love was no justification for a rash, demeaning choice.

The handsome Leeds merchant Walter Stanhope delayed marriage till almost forty. Legend has it that he cut a romantic swathe across the North, breaking at least one aristocratic heart with his casual indifference. ‘Long did the gay, the gen'rous Stanhope reign Unmov'd by Beauty, free from Love's soft chain’, versified an observer on the occasion of his wedding in 1742. But both his wife and baby son were dead by 1747, and just two years later he married again. His second wife was the twenty-seven year-old Anne Spencer of Cannon Hall, and theirs has been described as an ideal economic alliance, uniting a leading professional-mercantile family with a landowning family busy in the industrial production of iron.
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It was also a match of loyal attachment. Walter Stanhope showed concern for ‘My dearest Nanny’, ‘my poor wife’, in childbed, anxiety about her
health in general, solicitude for her comfort and routinely bought her presents when he went away. Still this couple never elaborated on their intimacy in their letters. They undoubtedly missed each other when separated, but their acknowledgements of this were always terse: ‘I want much to hear from you’, Walter conceded at the end of a letter in June 1757. By that August he admitted, ‘I begin to wish for our meeting, for realy the house does not look right without you’. ‘I do assure you I have thought it long’, Anne Stanhope returned.
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Though profoundly committed to each other, the Stanhopes disapproved of emotional exhibitionism and considered it a duty to quell any self-indulgent sadness. So it was that Walter chided his wife for a momentary weakness: ‘I have not had [the] least uneasyness since I left you, but [the] tenderness at parting, wch gave me pain, least you should not behave as you ought to do, & by that means detriment your health.’ While Anne apologized for her lapse: ‘I'm sorry my behaviour shd have given you so much ineasiness, but you'll excuse it, when I tell you I have been in good spirits ever since Bror Will brought me word of you performing yr first days journey so well.’
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On the whole, Anne Stanhope, who came from a powerful Yorkshire family and produced the requisite heir, presented herself as capable and collected, delivering her requests and receiving instructions with confidence. In this she contrasted starkly with her sister-in-law Barbara Stanhope, who could not tolerate the routine absences of her barrister husband and made a sorry spectacle of herself in letters: ‘ded [you] but know how uneasy I have bene sence you left me I am sure you wood petey me’, she wept in 1726 ‘my hart is so full I cannot right half I wood for sheding tears … I am going to Horsforth today: but not to finde you thear, is intolerabel. I know not how to bear it … ten thousand times Dear Jacke thy Duteyfull Wife tell Death.’
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Even if neither Walter nor Anne Stanhope was given to conjugal rhapsody, theirs was a respectful union and this matron did not feel the need to abase herself at her husband's feet.

As a married man with the obstacles of courtship behind him, Robert Parker was no longer expected to launch into declarations of courtly supplication and petitions for his wife's every favour. Nevertheless, Robert Parker proved to be a loyal husband, who identified with his wife's interests and beliefs. In courtship, he had ‘vowed the most religious Observance to [his betrothed's] commands’, and when newly married he still made light-hearted, but no less gratifying, play of courting her good opinion: ‘I got Home … on Sunday & was a good Boy in following yr directions by going to Church …’ Both Parkers had anticipated happiness and companionship in marriage; Robert sought a ‘partner’, while Elizabeth was ‘anxious … to share every circumstance in this life’ with her
betrothed. Once wed, they still set store by conjugal togetherness and were doleful in separation:

Writing ‘in bed’ one Wednesday morning he sent his ‘compts to the stale virgin’, and in complaining of insomnia confessed to emotional and physical need:

Every expression of the pain of parting, however, carried a coda that one had to make the best of a bad job. When Elizabeth confessed to any lowness of spirits herself, Robert urged her to bear up and throw off her melancholy. The cheerful resignation Robert Parker sought to achieve in matters matrimonial, was consistent with his stoical response to disappointment in general; in short, ‘Misfortunes must be made [the] most of & Bore [with]’. Thus, he remained suspicious of emotional self-indulgence and excessive romantic display.
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