The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (13 page)

Marriage for love was usually the dubious privilege of those with little to lose: the poor. For the rest, love in marriage was its consequence rather than its cause. Marriage was too serious a matter to be left to sentiment and passion, for it not only altered the lives of the couple, creating new duties towards each other and their children, it also forged family alliances, ended or exacerbated local vendettas, and might be a means to political and tenurial aggrandizement. The warring Houses of York and Lancaster were united by the marriage of Henry VII to Elizabeth of York. Royal children were used as pawns in international diplomacy. Gentry families tended to make marital alliances within their localities, binding other families to their own.

The Church insisted that marriage be made by free consent, and recognized no parental right to determine children’s choices, but utterly dependent children, especially daughters, brought up in obedience and deference, were unable or unwilling to gainsay obdurate fathers and mothers, whose duty it was to marry them off. Henry VIII’s sister Princess Mary dutifully married, and buried, Louis XII of France. Bravely, she told her brother that she had married once to please him, but should he refuse to allow her now to marry Charles Brandon, ‘I will be there whereas your grace nor none other shall have any joy of me’: in a convent. They married in 1515, without his consent. For girls of gentry and noble families, there was little alternative to marriage. Sir William Ayscough ‘covenanted’ with his Lincolnshire neighbour, Kyme, ‘for lucre’ to marry his daughter to Kyme’s heir. This proved to be a hellish marriage from which Anne Ayscough [Askew] sought consolation in religion.

A couple were fortunate if love led to a match which accorded with prudence. In March 1497 Edmund Plumpton wrote in a fever of excitement to his kinsman, Sir Robert Plumpton. ‘Lovers and friends’ of Edmund’s in London had introduced him to a widow ‘good and beautiful, womanly and wise… of good stock and worshipful’. Her name was Agnes. She and he were ‘agreed, in one mind and all one’, but her friends demanded a jointure of 20 marks a year, and Edmund needed help in order to marry her. ‘It were otherwise my great undoing forever.’ This courtship contained many of the ritual elements: friends and ‘lovers’ as matchmakers, the exchange of gifts (she gave him a cross set with rubies and pearls), financial negotiations. Their marriage took place, but the couple did not live happily ever after. In 1501 Robert Tykhull, a gentleman of Holborn in London was pardoned for the
murder of Edmund Plumpton on the grounds that he had acted in self-defence.

Complicated financial negotiations attended the making of marriage for the nobility and gentry. Sir Francis Lovell wrote to Lord Lisle in September 1534, hoping that ‘your noble blood and my poor stock shall be by the grace of God confedered together’ by the marriage of his elder son to Lisle’s second daughter, Lady Elizabeth Plantagenet. If Lisle would provide a dowry of £700 in cash, Lovell would ensure an income for Elizabeth of £100 each year for life; her jointure. This was a typical financial arrangement. The immediate cost of the dowry might be huge, but it was the provision of the jointure which was the greatest gamble, because the widow could live long and independently, to the ruin of her husband’s family’s estate. Sir John Bassett of Devon sent two daughters, Anne and Thomasine, aged about ten and twelve, to live in Giles, Lord Daubeney’s household, intending that one should marry Daubeney’s son and heir; whichever of them Daubeney – rather than his son – chose. Should these daughters die, or fail to please, Bassett promised by indenture in 1504 to deliver another. Transactions such as these seem to tell more of property transfer than parental devotion, but parental love was not expressed in legal documents. Rather than being heartless marriage brokers, parents were finding ways to provide for children who might easily be left orphaned.

Poorer couples, too, waited until they could set up an independent household before they married; and they waited a long time. Peasant couples needed a farm or smallholding and a cottage (a half-yardland, a farm of about fifteen acres, was the minimum holding upon which a family could support itself without other employment); artisans a craft; and labourers a steady demand for their labour. The wealthy, taking pity upon girls without dowries condemned to long spinsterhood, often left bequests towards ‘poor maidens’ marriages’. In times of particular deprivation and dislocation – as in the 1550s and 1590s – the rate of marriage declined altogether as people lacked the confidence and resources to marry and begin families. In mid-sixteenth-century London Robert Trappes and Ellen Tompkins ‘made merry gently and lovingly together’ and wanted to marry, but Ellen was a ‘poor wench and liveth only on her service’ and Robert was an apprentice, ‘a poor young man’, though with a rich father, with no certain prospects. How could they marry? Both men and women married very late, usually in their late twenties. And this was at a time when people were taught that all ‘fleshly
meddling’ outside marriage was a deadly sin. Early in the century, another apprentice, Anthony Pountisbury, a mercer’s son of Cheapside, had ‘an inward love to a young woman’, and tried to marry her, but his master had him arrested on his wedding day. Anthony claimed that this prohibition of apprentices to marry ‘causeth much fornication and adultery’.

In early modern England the illegitimacy rate was remarkably low – perhaps as low as 2 per cent – and illegitimate children were often born after broken betrothals, each one a private tragedy for mother and child. Illegitimacy was rare, but bridal pregnancy very common. Trial marriages were not countenanced in England, but they were in Gaelic Ireland, where marriage and divorce remained secular matters, determined by secular rules, not ecclesiastical ones. Sir Thomas Cusack, Master of the Rolls in Dublin, complained in 1541 that the Irish lived ‘diabolically without marriage’. Gaelic law was relaxed about marriage and divorce, and took little account of legitimacy. In the Gaelic lordships men and women might have a succession of partners, and women could ‘name’ children as sons to men with whom they had had fleeting liaisons. These children were accorded the same status and same relationship to their father as children born within wedlock, and the same claim upon the patrimony. In England, too, fathers who could afford it might show affection and care for their illegitimate children, whom they acknowledged during life and at death. William Ayloffe, a lawyer in Hornchurch, dying in 1517, left his lands and goods to his legitimate children, but remembered also ‘William, my supposed bastard son’, who was to be apprenticed, ‘John, my supposed bastard’, who was to be kept at school to learn grammar and become a priest, and a daughter Dorothy, who was to be ‘put into a close nunnery, considering her sickness and disease’. A less relaxed attitude to illegitimacy appeared by the end of the century.

A marriage is a secret place, a mutual society, an emotional world entered only by the couple. In their private letters and public wills husbands and wives wrote of ‘dearly beloved’ spouses, as though the devotion was real as well as conventional. After nearly five hundred years, how are we to tell? Elizabeth Grey, widow of the 9th Earl of Kildare, nightly kissed his portrait. Were we told that because such devotion was uncommon? Human emotions – love, grief, rage, jealousy – exist immemorially in marriage, but ways of expressing, or not expressing, them change. For the upper orders, emotion was fettered by convention, by the need for property and procreation. In 1537 Sir Thomas
Wyatt wrote a letter of advice to his newly married fifteen-year-old son, describing an ideal of fellowship in marriage:

Some turned ideal into reality. Not Wyatt. He wrote from the desolation of his own marriage:

Wyatt looked for love elsewhere, and, fleetingly, found it. Testament to his search is his most beautiful and despairing love poetry. Romantic love was, for the upper orders, often reserved for the mistress or the lover. But to love elsewhere than in marriage was forbidden, and in Wyatt’s case punished by his sanctimonious king.

Adultery was regarded by the Church as a sin, and treated as a crime to be formally punished. Bishop Latimer dared to send Henry VIII a New Year’s gift of a New Testament and the message ‘The Lord will judge fornicators and adulterers’. The breach of marriage vows angered God, sundered families, and broke the peace of the community. Because this was a society which insisted upon the ‘good and Catholic’ behaviour of its members, neighbours brought accusations of sexual misconduct before the Church courts for trial. Midwives would demand of single women in labour the identity of the child’s father and report his name. Convicted adulterers were ordered to perform public penance. Penitents, barefoot and bareheaded (a state of shocking undress in a society where heads were always covered), dressed in a white sheet and bearing a candle to present to the priest at the high altar, declared their guilt and shame before the congregation and sought forgiveness.

Before the Church courts, too, came a torrent of defamation suits, increasing as the century progressed, the overwhelming majority concerned with imputations of sexual misconduct. Women – especially women – stood at doorways, arms folded, arguing from different premises, and hurling abuse at their neighbours. The insults, often remarkably graphic, were usually variants on a single theme: ‘arrant whore’, ‘privy
whore’, ‘stewed [brothel] whore’, ‘priest’s whore’, ‘Lombard’s whore’, ‘hedge whore’, ‘burnt [venereally diseased] whore’. The imputations might be true, or they might spring from malice festering among neighbours living at close quarters, gossiping obsessively. The victim of the slander would take her case before the judge, often bringing neighbours to court with her to swear their belief in her innocence. Women had to guard their reputation for sexual ‘honesty’, not least because they feared being charged with adultery themselves. The most common insult for men was ‘whoreson’. Husbands were often called ‘cuckold’ – the logical counterpoint of their wives’ alleged infidelity – and taunted by signs of horns. A double standard prevailed. When, in 1601, Sergeant Harris proposed in the House of Commons (all male, of course) that the penalty for women taken in adultery should be lowered to equal that of men guilty of the same offence, ‘all the House cried “Away with it” ’ and ‘gave a monstrous great “No” ’.

Death, not divorce, was the quietus of a marriage. Only in the rarest cases would the Church annul a marriage; where it was judged invalid from its beginning. Every way was sought to bring reconciliation. Priests would ask soul-searching questions in confession, because they were ordained to be parish peace-makers, the arbiters of quarrels. In 1527–8 the wife of Peter Fernandez, a London physician, came often to her confessor, telling him of her husband’s threats. The priest sought to make peace between them, unavailingly. The Church could not grant divorce on account of infidelity or cruelty, but could offer a decree of separation which allowed neither party to remarry. Happily or unhappily, a couple might be a long time married, for those who lived to be old enough to marry might expect to live on for another three decades. Till death us do part. In Ireland, however, divorce was lightly granted under the secular custom of the brehon law. When Richard Burke of Clanrickard died in 1582 he left five wives behind, and a sixth had predeceased him.

Catholics were exhorted constantly to remember the four last things – death, judgement, hell and heaven; ‘in all thy works remember thine ending day’. Inscriptions on tombs adjured passers-by to consider ‘I am what you shall be. I was what you are. Pray for me, I beseech you.’ Woodcuts showed angels and demons at the deathbed, vying for the sinner’s soul. Death was the last chance to repent and make amends for a life misspent, to cast off sin. All Catholics were taught the art of dying well, although not everyone learnt the lesson. ‘Some have I seen,’ wrote
Thomas More, ‘sit up in their deathbed underpropped by pillows, take their playfellows to them, and comfort themselves with cards.’ They gambled with their immortal souls. Yet even the wicked would be saved, if penitent at the last, for God’s mercy is infinite. Shortly before his execution in the aftermath of Bosworth, Richard III’s counsellor, William Catesby, made a last will full of requests for prayers for his sinning soul and pervaded by a spirit of repentance and remorse for wrongs done during a ruthless and treacherous career.

All Catholics prayed that death would not take them suddenly – they prayed especially to St Barbara for this grace – so that they might have time to repent and confess. Desperate deathbed confessions were made to priests hurriedly summoned. The priest carried the Blessed Sacrament and a crucifix through the streets to the dying, and hearing the last confession gave final absolution and ministered the last rites – the sacraments of unction, confession and Communion. At this rite of departure dying Christians were expected to forgive all who had wronged them and seek forgiveness of those whom they had wronged, affirming their faith and hope for reconciliation with God and the world. Never was the need to be in charity so urgent. The desperation that good Christians should die reconciled with the Almighty was clear at Alice Grisby’s deathbed in Aldermanbury, London in 1538. While she lay dying, too ill to speak, her curate and women friends sat anxiously about her, imploring her to look upon the blessed sacrament, to remember the passion of Christ. They pleaded, ‘What, will ye die like a hellhound and a beast, not remembering your maker?’ At the last, Alice lifted her eyes and held up her hands ‘until the extreme pains of death’. So she died a Christian death. The inordinate relief of her friends at the propriety of her manner of dying says much about the anxiety of the community for the Christian life of others as well as about the obsession with dying well.