The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (58 page)

In the Marquess of Dorchester, however, Frances Countess of Rutland had found a worthy adversary; she might be celebrated for her ‘most exalted passion’ but Lord Dorchester was notorious for his fits of irrational bad temper, sometimes accompanied by actual physical violence. In 1638 he had committed an assault within Westminster Abbey itself, and during a service; in 1641 he had been charged for the extremity of his language in the course of a debate in the House of Lords. A servant to Charles I – he had acted as one of his commissioners at the Treaty of Uxbridge – he had eventually come to terms with the Commonwealth regime; but he was back in the Privy Council of Charles II by August 1660.

Lord Dorchester’s other claim to the attention of his contemporaries was that he was an amateur chemist. This brought him more ridicule than respect. When someone observed in 1676 that a man of his age was either a fool or a physician, Lord Dorchester – being one for litigation when physical violence would not serve – promptly brought an action of
scandalum magnatum
against him.

When Lord Dorchester received notification of his daughter’s treatment at the hands of her husband and her family, he rushed into action. First he challenged Lord Roos to a duel, and when this was refused, an exchange of letters took place, subsequently published. Their tone was not temperate. Lord Dorchester referred to Lord Roos’s’ ‘Sottish and Clownish paper’, written no doubt in one of his drunken fits, and charged him with cowardice as well: ‘If I may see miracle, you with a Sword in your hand … but if it was a bottle, none would be more forward.’
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Lord Roos for his part excoriated gleefully on the subject of
Lord Dorchester’s chemical experiments: ‘Sir, sure you were among your gallypots and glisterpipes, when you gave your choler so violent a purge, to the fouling of so much innocent paper, and your own reputation (if you had any, which the wise very much doubt)!’ As for his own drunkenness, Lord Roos grandly dismissed it: how harmless were these ‘Tertian fits of mine, which are easily cured with a little sleep’ compared to Lord Dorchester’s evident dottiness. (To this Lord Dorchester replied that they were not Tertian but Quotidian, daily.) In general Lord Roos sneered at his father-in-law for his challenge: ‘If by your threatening to ram your sword down my throat you do not mean your pills, the worst is past and I am safe enough.’
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Lord Dorchester’s next action was to appeal to the King. He wanted to see justice done not only to little Ignoto, still kept from the care of the only parent who was undoubtedly his, but also to his daughter in whose innocence the indignant Lord Dorchester continued to believe. He still believed in it following the hearing in front of Charles II at which some very dubious evidence of Lady Anne’s conduct was produced. As well as Lady Anne, the Countess of Rutland and a host of other ladies appeared at the hearing, but there were ‘so many indecent and uncleanly particulars’ given, that many of the latter had to leave.
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A good deal of the evidence came from servants who sometimes contradicted indiscreet statements they were supposed to have made previously. Had Lord Roos ever said that ‘although he lay not with his wife [at night], he did in the day? Had Lord Roos ever observed that if only Lady Anne had arrived three weeks sooner or stayed three weeks longer ‘then he would have owned the child’? Both these remarks were now denied by the men who were supposed to have passed them on.
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Despite all this washing of dirty linen, at the end of the hearings Charles II ‘left it as he found it’. He refused to pronounce on the guilt of Lady Roos or the parentage of Ignoto. That is to say, although Lady Roos had clearly made some very rash statements to her husband, the King could not be sure that they had not been made out of a desire to provoke his jealousy (and thus perhaps secure that appropriate affectionate response which
Lord Roos had hitherto been so laggard in making). ‘He doth not find ground whereon to make judgement to condemn the lady.’ On the other hand Charles II, a worldly man, could see that there was absolutely no question of a further reconciliation. He therefore suggested a separation, and a proper settlement by which the Rooses could live peacefully asunder. As for the child, that ‘might be placed in the hands of some third person to be agreed on both sides, to prevent the apprehensions of either parties’. The King’s last word on the subject was that if this tactful solution was not accepted, then there would have to be recourse to the law.
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Lord Dorchester interpreted this decision as a triumph. He carried Lady Anne home with him, convincing himself that her virtuous life in the future would vindicate her in the eyes of the world, and so that the point should not be missed gave instructions to his steward that the King’s document should be read aloud, preferably in churches. As to the child, that should be restored to its mother; or if not to her, at least to someone on whom she could rely. Lady Anne should also be granted an allowance by her husband, and have her portion repaid (although she would relinquish the prospect of a jointure).
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Even if Lady Anne had been prepared to conduct herself discreetly as her father hoped, it is difficult to see how the situation could in fact have been resolved as Lord Dorchester and the King desired. There was the question of the boy Ignoto: either he was the legitimate issue of Lord Roos, in which case he stood in line for the earldom of Rutland, or he was not, in which case Lord Roos lacked a male heir, and needed to provide himself with one. Before he could do that, he needed to get rid of his present wife. At first Lord Roos hung on to custody of the boy, saying that ‘although the child be not of my begetting, so long as the law reputes it mine, I must and shall keep it’. But this, it is clear, was merely a manoeuvre in order to induce from Lady Anne a confession of the truth. The Earl of Rutland told Lord Dorchester that his son ‘knows best that the child is none of his’; once Lady Anne had admitted to the King what she had already confessed to her husband, then she could have the child and do what she liked with it. Money was another matter: the Rutland
family certainly did not take the line of Lord Dorchester that Lady Anne’s portion should be restored to her father despite her behaviour. As for an allowance, ‘I will give none but what the law determines’, declared Lord Roos. And then he required the vital confession first.
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The first of a long series of legal proceedings to get rid of Lady Anne Roos was instituted in the House of Lords by the Rutland family. Lord Dorchester was said to be quite exasperated by their attitude, which combined the mercenary and the moral: why should he relinquish any part of his estate, i.e. the money that had constituted her dowry, to make up for ‘the miscarriages of his daughter’?
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Implicitly the Rutland family was fining Lord Dorchester for having sold them a bad bargain in the shape of Lady Anne in the first place.

Unfortunately Lord Dorchester’s faith in his daughter’s virtue was not justified. Lady Anne, growing bored with a discreet but dull existence under her father’s roof, fled from his protection. Reverting to her former defiant ways, she led a life which became a public scandal. (Given her situation, one has to admire her courage if not her morals; or perhaps it was sheer miscalculation, based on her original contempt for her husband, which induced her to take such risks.) At some point she secured custody of Ignoto and she also gave birth to another child, also a son. These two boys went through life known as John and Charles Manners respectively, the family name of the man who was still in the early 1660s their legal father.
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Lady Anne’s behaviour disgusted and infuriated Lord Dorchester. In one of those sudden volte-faces to which this passionate and peppery man was prone, he abandoned her cause altogether. He flung himself urgently on the side of the Rutland family and was henceforth prominent among his daughter’s attackers. It was certainly bad luck for Lady Anne that as well as having an inadequate husband, she was also saddled with a half-crazy father. Supposing as we must that she had inherited her own share of instability from Lord Dorchester, it was also bad luck that it manifested itself in her reckless sexuality; so much less socially permissible in a woman than violent arguments and ridiculous chemical experiments in a man.

At this point a divorce from bed and board was secured in the ecclesiastical courts, on the grounds of Lady Anne’s adultery, without too much difficulty. The next step was to illegitimate Lady Anne’s sons and any other children she might bear. This needed an Act of Parliament and a Bill was duly prepared relating details of Lady Anne’s ‘foul carriage’ in full. This Bill was given its first reading in October 1666.

By this time Lady Anne herself had retreated to Ireland, When the Bill to illegitimate the children came to have its second reading in the House of Lords in November 1666, Lady Anne was summoned ‘at the last place of her abode that can be discovered’, but failed to appear.’
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The Bill seemed all set to go through when suddenly the ancient quarrel concerning the Roos title blew up again.

The Duke of Buckingham complained that the language of the Bill was prejudicial to his own claim to the Roos title. Lord Dorchester, now a fierce Roos partisan, first insulted Buckingham and then had a physical fight with him in the Painted Chamber (although he was nearly twenty years his senior). In the course of this Lord Dorchester had his periwig pulled off and the Duke had a handful of his hair pulled out. Both the fuming peers were clapped into the Tower to cool off, and only released on petitions of apology. The question of the Roos title was not so easily settled. The committee could not find a way of satisfying both parties, and the Bill as a result got further delayed.
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It was not until 8 February 1667 that the Act making the children of Lord Roos illegitimate finally received the royal assent.
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In the meantime, in late January, the active Rutland family had seen to it that no trouble was experienced with the Bill in the House of Commons: no fewer than forty-six Members were entertained at their expense to a dinner at the Dog Tavern, and although Lord Roos himself had a fit of colic and had to rush away (festivities do not seem to have been his strong point), the Members stayed on. Then, ‘as soon as they had dined, we carried them to the House of Commons’, where the Bill was passed without amendments.
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As for the debated Roos title, that matter was not finally settled for a further 200 years.
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The Duke of Buckingham died in 1687 leaving no children of either sex; as a result the ancient barony of Roos or de Ros (which could pass through the female line) fell into abeyance between the descendants of his aunts; to one of these the barony was allowed in 1806. On the other hand the Earls and later Dukes of Rutland were permitted to bear the Roos title by both Parliament and sovereign until the late nineteenth century when it was quietly dropped.
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Lord Roos was now once more in the happy position as it seemed to him, of being without a legal heir. He was also separated from Lady Anne in the ecclesiastical courts. But the enormous hurdle of the divorce
a vinculo matrimonii
remained to be cleared. Even assuming that this type of divorce was secured by Act of Parliament, it was still by no means clear at this date that Lord Roos would be able to remarry in such a way that the offspring of such a second marriage would be unquestionably legitimate. And that after all was the whole object of the exercise. What point was there in dragging the family name through Parliament to obtain an expensive and controversial divorce if at the end of the day Lord Roos was simply free from Lady Anne? In most senses he was free from her already and he was certainly free from the presumptuous claims of her cuckoo sons. From the point of view of the Rutland family then, the Roos case in Parliament was entirely about remarriage, not divorce.

It was also in the nature of a test case, in quite a different respect. By the late 1660s hopes that Catherine of Braganza, the Portuguese wife of Charles II, would bear a living child were fading (she had suffered two miscarriages). The King however already had a large brood of illegitimate children, and was clearly capable of begetting a great many more (in fact several of his
bastards were born in the 1670s). One way to solve the problem of the royal succession – his brother James Duke of York, already suspected of Catholic sympathies, was heir presumptive to the throne – would be for the King to divorce Queen Catherine and marry again. There is evidence that Charles II did at least passingly consider this solution; he certainly paid keen attention to the debates over the Roos case in the House of Lords, attending them sedulously, and observing in one of his characteristic asides that the whole thing was as good as a play. Once again, it was the question of the legitimacy of the children of a second marriage which obsessed the monarch: heirs to the throne of dubious legitimacy threatening a national disaster where for the Earls of Rutland it was merely a personal misfortune.

There were other interests at stake. Lords Anglesey and Ashley (the latter soon to be created Earl of Shaftesbury), whose sons had married Lord Roos’s two sisters, ‘drove in on the bill’; it was not in their sons’ best interests that Lord Roos should be allowed to remarry, since if he could not both their wives were potential beneficiaries. Lord Castleton took the opportunity to demand a fourth part of the lands settled on his mother, sister to the Earl of Rutland, but later withdrew the claim.
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