The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (7 page)

‘“Affection!” said the Queen, “Affection is false.” Yet her Majesty rose and danced; so did my Lady Marquess of Winchester.’

ROWLAND WHYTE TO SIR ROBERT SIDNEY, JUNE 1600

‘P
oor greenheads’, wrote the Puritan Daniel Rogers of those who married purely for love: when a year or two had passed and they had skimmed the cream of their marriage, they would soon envy the good fortune of those whose union was built on stronger foundations. In
Matrimoniall Honour
Rogers even went so far as to argue that over-passionate marriages might actually result in contaminated offspring: ‘What a cursed posterity such are likely to hatch … what woeful imps proceeded from such a mixture.’
¹

During this period, the emotion we should now term romantic love was treated with a mixture of suspicion, contempt and outright disgust by virtually all pundits. From the Puritans in their benevolent handbooks of domestic conduct to the aristocrats concerned to see that society’s pattern was reproduced in an orderly fashion, that tender passion which has animated much of the great literature of the world (including those plays of Shakespeare and the Jacobean dramatists familiar to theatre audiences of the time) received a hearty condemnation. Nor was this a revolutionary state of affairs in seventeenth-century England, the arranged marriage as opposed to the romantic union having been preferred by most societies in the history of the world.

Only briefly at the court of Henrietta Maria did the cult of Platonic love (imported from the Queen’s native France) hold sway. Then the elaborate paraphernalia of gallantry which attended this philosophy merely helped to underline the chasm which existed between the Queen’s small coterie and the rest of the country. In his play of 1629,
The New Inn
, Ben Jonson cheerfully mocked the cult. Lady Frances Frampul was a ‘Platonique’ who desired nothing more than ‘a multitude of servants’, i.e. platonic admirers to worship at her shrine. Love itself was defined as

… a spiritual coupling of two souls

So much more excellent, as it least relates

Unto the body …
²

Outside this make-believe little court
–
and the realms of satire which fed upon it – public advocacy of romantic love was unknown.

James Houblon was the son of a Huguenot refugee who rose to wealth and success in the City of London, identified with the new Royal Exchange. He married, in 1620, an eighteen-year-old girl also of Huguenot descent, Marie du Quesne – ‘in a happy day’ as he later described it. When Marie died nursing a child of plague in 1646, she left her husband with seven young sons to bring up, her daughters being already married. (One of these sons, Sir John Houblon, was the first Governor of the Bank of England.) In his old age James Houblon was quite clear how his daughters should ‘undertake the matching’ of their children. ‘Beg first the Assistance of God, and see that you match them in families that fear the Lord and have gotten their Estates honestly.’ There was nothing here about inclination or susceptibility.
³

It was not a question of rank. At roughly the same date as Jonson’s play appeared, Henry, ninth Earl of Northumberland, was appalled to discover that his son, Algernon Lord Percy, had secretly engaged himself to Lady Anne Cecil, daughter of the Earl of Salisbury
–
and all for love!

It was true that in 1628 the families of Northumberland and Salisbury stood in roughly the same friendly relationship to each
other as Montagues and Capulets in the opening scene of
Romeo and Juliet
. The ‘ancient grudge’ which existed between them, or as Lord Northumberland put it, the family wounds ‘fresh smarting in my sides to this day’, originated at the time of the Gunpowder Plot. Then Salisbury’s father had been instrumental in having Northumberland imprisoned in the Tower of London for several years, although nothing had been proved against him; Northumberland had also been forced to pay an enormous fine. Twenty years later it was particularly galling for Northumberland to find that his son had secretly chosen a bride in whose veins ran the hated Cecil blood; which in Northumberland’s opinion ‘would not mingle [with his] in a basin, so averse was he from it’.
⁴

The fact that Lord Percy had actually fallen in love with Lady Anne, far from being an extenuating circumstance, only made things worse. Lord Northumberland expostulated to Lord Salisbury: ‘My son hath abused your Lordship, himself and me too. If I had had a daughter and your son had engaged himself in this sort, I should not have trusted his words …
nulla fides est in amore
[there is no faith in love].’ While it is difficult not to detect a note of gloomy satisfaction in his prediction of Anne Cecil’s future: ‘Poor lady, [she] I fear, will have the least good in the bargain, how so ever pleasing for the present. Loves will weave out and extinguish when the knot that ties them will not do so.’
⁵

Lord Percy’s reckless behaviour had also of course made it difficult for Lord Northumberland to strike that kind of hard bargain over the marriage settlement on which a father might pride himself – one excellent reason for distrusting love in the first place. Beauty, because it might incite a susceptible Romeo to love, as Lady Anne’s beauty had won Lord Percy, was not to be trusted either. Joseph Swetnam, in that violent attack on women first printed in 1615, paid particular attention to the turpitude of beautiful women who represented traps for men. ‘The fairest woman’, he declared, had ‘some filthiness’ in her; beautiful women in general he compared to glow-worms, ‘bright in the hedge, black in the hand’. Even the far more temperate Thomas Gataker referred to beauty as having ‘a bait to entice’ while adding that it had ‘no hook to hold’.
⁶
Certainly Lord
Northumberland, who had already given his views on the likely impermanence of his son’s ‘hooked’ affections, would also have agreed with Gataker that beauty was ‘a bait to entice’. Throughout his negotiations with Lord Salisbury before the marriage finally took place, he constantly bewailed the expensive settlement he was obliged to make because ‘the beauty of your daughter fettered my son’. (The marriage was however a happy one, cut short by Anne Cecil’s death ten years later.)

Another celebrated infatuation of the time aroused echoes not so much of an ancient ‘grudge’ as of an ancient scandal. In 1634 the twenty-one-year-old William Lord Russell was described as being ‘all in a flame of love’ with the nineteen-year-old Lady Anne Carr.
⁷
Unfortunately this modest and charming young girl was the daughter of that notorious beauty of the Jacobean court, Frances Countess of Somerset, her father being Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, yet another of the favourites of King James I. The fact that the ancient scandal – almost too light a word – concerned the bride’s mother in this case made Anne Carr’s descent even more unfortunate than that of Anne Cecil. Anne Cecil’s grandfather might have had Lord Northumberland imprisoned, but Anne Carr’s mother was a self-confessed murderess – and an adulteress too – who had spent some years in the Tower of London for conspiring to poison Sir Thomas Overbury.

‘Cat will after kind’
–
so ran a popular saying of the day. There was a dire suspicion that a girl’s moral character was inherited directly from her mother (it was the same kind of logic which held that all women were contaminated by their descent from Grandmother Eve). Anne Carr could be held to have been bred for depravity
–
for her maternal grandmother Katherine Countess of Suffolk had been another notorious woman.

Lord Russell’s father, the Earl of Bedford, a leading Puritan, was of a notably harsh character. He had himself been present in the House of Lords on that fatal occasion in January 1616 when the lovely Countess of Somerset, all in black with ‘cobweb lawn ruff and cuffs’, had confessed her guilt ‘in a low voice, but wonderful fearful’.
⁸
Only a few weeks earlier she had given birth to a child. That child was Anne Carr. Subsequently the Countess was
imprisoned in the Tower of London. Who would welcome a girl of such flagrantly unfortunate antecedents as a daughter-in-law?

Yet this was the bride on whom William Lord Russell, ‘a handsome genteel man’ wrote the Rev. George Garrard, a contemporary observer, had set his heart. When William came back from the Grand Tour in 1634 he announced to his father that he would have Anne Carr or no one; this despite the fact that there was, in the words of the same observer, ‘much looking on’ the handsome and eligible young man
–
the names of the far more suitable Dorothy Sidney and Elizabeth Cecil (Anne Cecil’s cousin) being mentioned in this connection.
⁹

Lord Bedford utterly refused to entertain the idea of the marriage. With regard to Anne Carr he had given his son instructions ‘to choose anywhere but there’. Equally William Russell refused to give way. Then Lord Bedford, faced with an only son who threatened not to marry at all, tried to scupper the match in another way by demanding a portion from the bride’s father, which he believed Somerset
–
who was known to be financially embarrassed
–
would not be able to pay. Heroically, the Earl of Somerset decided that if ‘one of the two must be undone’, he would rather it was himself than his daughter, and he decided to pay the price asked.
¹⁰
Still the match lagged. Even King Charles I, on a visit to the Earl of Bedford at Woburn Abbey, failed to persuade the angry father to give way.

After four years of wrangling, the marriage finally took place in July 1637. It was a victory for love – not heredity – that Anne, Countess of Bedford and chatelaine of Woburn Abbey after her father-in-law’s death, proved a pattern of gentle virtue; she was blessed with nine surviving children and enjoyed nearly fifty years of happy marriage. (Only her own life ended in a tragedy, as dramatic in its own way as her beginnings in the Tower of London – with the execution of her son William Lord Russell for treason – but to that we shall return.)

So for all the fulminations of fathers and the directives of hand-books, love, as it always has done, did find a way. What the
prevailing climate of opinion on the subject did induce, however, was a distinct feeling of guilt on the subject, even when romantic love triumphed over such normal considerations as financial prudence and personal suitability.

Lettice Morrison was eighteen years old when she captured the heart of Sir Lucius Cary, later Viscount Falkland. The daughter of Sir Richard Morrison of Tooley Park, Leicestershire, she was an exceptional character, not only for her beauty, but also for a genuine love of study, which marked her out from most girls of her time: ‘oft-times at a book in her Closet when she was thought to be in bed’. After Lettice Falkland’s death, her chaplain wrote a eulogistic biography of her: here at last was one descendant of Eve who ‘in her cradle’ had ‘strangled the serpent’.
¹¹

Scorning the contemporary fashion of wearing her hair ‘in loose braids’ in order to ensnare men, Lettice did none the less unwittingly ensnare Sir Lucius Cary; for she offered a far more unusual attraction than floating hair: a character which combined ‘Piety, wisdom, quickness of wit, discretion, judgement, sobriety and gravity of behaviour’. Unfortunately, as her chaplain succinctly put it, Lettice brought with her no dowry beyond these ‘riches’.
¹²
Such qualities might be portion enough for her lover, but her lover’s father took a more worldly view and expressed strong disapproval. Father and son quarrelled. Even so Cary persisted in his suit
–
helped by the fact that he, not his father, had been made heir to his rich grandfather Lawrence Tanfield. Shortly after Easter 1630 Cary was married to this lovely but penniless girl. A short while after that Cary succeeded to the Falkland title; under which name his story, with that of the wife at his side, became woven into the political, religious and literary life of England on the eve of the Civil War; whether at his estate of Great Tew near Oxford, or in Parliament itself.

Despite Lettice’s admirable character, Falkland’s contemporaries were amazed that this ‘incomparable young man’ should marry in this rash way. Clarendon, who adored Falkland and thought that his death alone was enough to make the whole Civil War accursed, summed up the general feeling: Falkland had ‘committed a fault against his father in marrying a young lady
whom he passionately loved’.
¹³
Others, for whom mere love seemed an insufficient explanation, developed a theory that Falkland had married Lettice for her strong resemblance to her brother Henry, Falkland’s friend, who had died young.

Interestingly, Falkland himself clearly felt a kind of honourable guilt about the whole matter. He was prepared to stand by his affections: at the same time he did not pretend he had behaved altogether correctly. According to Clarendon, he offered to resign the estate inherited from his grandfather and depend solely on maintenance from his father in order to atone ‘for the prejudice he had brought upon his fortune, by bringing no fortune to him’. But his father’s anger caused him to refuse this handsome offer.
¹⁴

Had Falkland been influenced in his choice of Lettice Morrison by the example of his own mother? Elizabeth Tanfield, Viscountess Falkland, accorded the supreme compliment of having ‘a most masculine understanding’,
¹⁵
was one of those remarkable late Tudor women, educated in the great tradition of female learning of that time. Her accomplishments included a knowledge not only of French, Italian, Spanish, Latin and Greek but also of Hebrew and Transylvanian. Perhaps Falkland had early discovered in his mother the charms of the company of a well-educated woman.