The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (8 page)

Or was it on the contrary Lettice’s natural seriousness
–
a sense of the sadness at the centre of things – which struck an answering chord in Falkland’s heart? There had been a streak of melancholy in her make-up even as a girl, when some had criticized her ‘lack of joy’. Aubrey tells us that during her married life she deliberately used her ready tears to obtain favours for her servants; but then Aubrey disapproved of a man of Falkland’s reason and judgement being ‘stormed’ by a woman’s tears for what he deemed an unworthy purpose.
¹⁶

At the onset of the war, Falkland’s own ‘natural cheerfulness and vivacity’ grew clouded. Having believed in the possibility of a simple Royalist victory, he watched instead the country being torn apart. Clarendon paints an unforgettable picture of the agonies of a man of conscience in a world of war: ‘Often, after a
deep silence and frequent sighs, he would, with a shrill and sad accent, ingeminate the word Peace, Peace.’ Falkland was killed at the age of thirty-three at the first Battle of Newbury: he rode into the heart of the fighting
–
looking at last ‘Very cheerful’, as he always did ‘upon action’
¹⁷
– and was shot down.

Lettice Falkland never recovered from the blow. ‘The same sword which killed
him
, pierced
her
heart also’, wrote her chaplain. She lived another four years, spending her time in rigorous works of philanthropy, not all of which commended themselves to her friends. Her scheme for helping widows was one thing, but she was much criticized for encouraging layabouts by her charity.

‘I know not their hearts’, Lettice replied with spirit. ‘I had rather relieve five unworthy Vagrants than that one member of Christ should go empty away.’
¹⁸
Her desire, as a Royalist, to help Roundhead prisoners in Royalist gaols aroused further suspicion.

Examples of her growing melancholia were more disquieting. Lettice became increasingly scrupulous in her piety, full of fears of the devil. Having already banned all rich clothing on her husband’s death, and even looking-glasses, in order to extinguish personal vanity, she further abandoned that household pomp ‘which her quality might have excused’. Lastly she turned on that very affection which had been the foundation stone of her own life. Urging other wives not to be too fond of their husbands, she insisted that there was ‘no real comfort from any espousals but from those to Christ’.
¹⁹

Lettice Viscountess Falkland died in 1647 at the age of thirty-five ‘without twitch or groan or gasp or sigh’ of what was surely a form of broken heart. (Her two surviving sons succeeded in turn to the title of their father.) It was notable that even in the elegy on her death the strange circumstances of her marriage, including Lord Falkland’s waiving of a dowry, were solemnly commemorated:

Nor did He wed her to join Fortunes and

Lay Bags to Bags, and couple Lands to Land

Such Exchange Ware he scorn’d, whose Noble eye

Saw in her Virtues, Rich Conveniency.
²⁰

It would be quite wrong, however, to describe the general distrust of love among the upper classes as a purely masculine conspiracy. Those few women before the Restoration with the opportunity for self-expression did not hesitate to join in the chorus. Both Margaret Duchess of Newcastle and Dorothy Osborne, whatever the reality of their private lives, shuddered away from the concept of love, and above all from its devastating consequences.

The Duchess of Newcastle was that extravagantly dressed woman of letters who in later life would alternately fascinate and appal Restoration society. As a young woman, she prided herself on never having felt ‘amorous love’ for her husband. ‘I never was infected therewith’, she wrote. ‘It is a disease, or passion, or both, I know only by relation.’
²¹
This was not a matter of mere cynicism towards the state of marriage
–
for the Duchess also prided herself with justice on her devotion to her husband; condemnation of ‘amorous love’ was a matter of principle.

William Cavendish, in turn Earl, Marquess and Duke of Newcastle, was over fifty and a grandee at the court of Charles I, when he began to woo Margaret Lucas, thirty years his junior, as his second wife. For all his seniority – he was well past middle age by the standards of the time – Newcastle displayed surprising vigour in his suit. It was his very enthusiasm which Margaret regarded with suspicion. First she was concerned that her own declarations should not be too explicit: ‘I am a little ashamed of my last letter more than the others,’ she wrote on one occasion, ‘not that my affection can be too large but I fear I discover it too much in that letter, for women must love silently.’ Then she was obsessed by the essentially ephemeral nature of any ardent protestation: ‘If you are so passionate as you say,’ she continued, ‘and I dare not but believe [it], yet it may be feared it cannot last long, for no extreme is permanent.’
²²

Another lively and articulate young lady, Dorothy Osborne of Chicksands, never ceased to identify ‘passion’, that is, strong feeling, as the enemy of all mankind
–
and womankind in particular. Yet her beguiling and chatty love letters to William Temple, later an important diplomat in the reign of Charles II, seem to us
to breathe a very romantic form of affection.
²³
This was another star-crossed match, for Dorothy was the daughter of the Royalist Governor of Guernsey, while William Temple’s father sympathized with Parliament. Even the lovers’ first meeting was suitably exotic. On the Isle of Wight, on his way to France, Dorothy’s brother rashly inscribed a piece of pro-Royalist graffiti on a window pane in hostile territory: Temple witnessed with admiration how the sister saved the brother from the consequences of his audacity by taking the responsibility for the inscription upon herself. Then family opposition to the marriage confined Temple and Dorothy to an apparently eternal courtship, while Temple travelled abroad, and pretty witty Dorothy was courted by a series of other men.

Through all this, the lovers remained true to each other. As this seventeenth-century Penelope rejected a number of eligible suitors, including the Protector’s son, Henry Cromwell, she had to endure the vehement reproaches of her family, led by her youngest brother. Then Dorothy was struck down by that dreaded scourge of female beauty, smallpox, and much of her early physical charm vanished. Still William’s fidelity held him to his vows. Finally in 1655 they were married.

The romantic elements in this story, including the constancy under trial of both parties, make an interesting contrast to Dorothy’s oft-professed scorn for ‘passion’. As much as Margaret Duchess of Newcastle, Dorothy prided herself that she had not been seared by that awkward emotion, amorous love. In her letters she was quick to denounce those who, by coming too close to its perilous flames, had been burnt or branded. When Lady Anne Blount, daughter of the Earl of Newport, ran off with one William Blunt (no relation), Dorothy bewailed her fate to Temple. She was also quite clear where the responsibility for Lady Anne’s ‘fall’ lay.

‘Ah! if you love yourself or me’, she wrote to Temple, ‘you must confess that I have reason to condemn this senseless passion; that whereso’ever it comes destroys all that entertain it; nothing of judgement or discretion can live with it, and [it] puts everything else out of order before it can find a place for itself.
What has it not brought my poor Lady Anne Blount to?’, Dorothy went on. ‘She is the talk of all the footmen and boys in the street, and will be company for them shortly, who yet is so blinded by her passion as not at all to perceive the misery she has brought herself to …’ As for William Blunt, Lady Anne’s partner in the affair, ‘if he had loved her truly he would have died rather than been the occasion of this misfortune to her’.
²⁴
Once again we hear the Cassandra-like voice of Lord Northumberland, condemning his son’s infatuation for Anne Cecil, because it would certainly lead to her undoing.

As it happened, Dorothy Osborne was probably right about the peripatetic Lady Anne Blount. By the next year William Blunt, her erstwhile partner, was petitioning against her, saying that she had only run off with him to obtain some money, so that she was presumably home again. The year after that Lady Anne had taken flight once more without her father’s consent – this time with Thomas Porter, son of Endymion Porter, who had been Groom of the Bedchamber to Charles I. Yet Dorothy’s own fear of ‘this senseless passion’ obviously runs deeper than mere condemnation of a flighty young lady’s self-destructive behaviour.

There is a malaise here, seen again in her yearning for a peaceful life in another letter to Temple: ‘Do you remember Herm [a Channel island]’, she wrote, ‘and the little house there? Shall we go thither? That’s next to being out of the world. There we might live like Baucis and Philemon, grow old together in our little cottage, and for our charity to some ship-wrecked strangers obtaining the blessing of dying both at the same time.’
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Some of this desire for an existence dominated by tranquillity
–
as opposed to some more excitable emotion
–
even with her lover, can of course be attributed to the troubled nature of the times. Nevertheless Dorothy and the rest of her generation, whatever the political strife about them, still drew back in apprehension from love itself, especially love in marriage.

“No passion could be long lived, and such as were most in love forgot that ever they had been so within a twelvemonth after they were married.’
²⁶
The words are those of Dorothy’s brother
Henry, trying to convince her that the very nature of this type of affection was to be impermanent. Dorothy, by her own account, was puzzled at the want of examples to bring to the contrary. Throughout the whole of Dorothy’s correspondence, one detects a wistful hankering that Temple himself should somehow represent the settled convenient match of her family’s desires. He did not. He represented something more dangerous. And in the end she married him.

At the marriage of William Herbert and Anne Russell in 1600, in the time of Queen Elizabeth, the traditional masque followed: ‘delicate it was to see eight ladies so prettily and richly attired’. Mary Fitton, a lady-in-waiting, led the masquers. After they had finished, and it was time for each lady to choose another to tread the measure with her, Mary Fitton went up to the Queen and ‘Wooed her to dance’. The Queen asked Mary Fitton what allegorical character she represented; Mary Fitton replied that she was Affection.

‘Affection!’ said the old Queen. ‘Affection is false.’ Yet all the same Queen Elizabeth rose up and danced.
²⁷
Many of the dancers in the pageantry of marriage in the seventeenth century believed that affection was false; yet trod to its measure all the same.

For love, like cheerfulness, kept breaking in, and ever with love came guilt. In July 1641 the fifteen-year-old Mary Boyle, daughter of the great Earl of Cork, made a match which at the time was conspicuous for its unworldliness. She married, very privately, Charles Rich, a ‘very cheerful, and handsome, well-bred and fashioned person’. Then merely a younger son without prospects, he promised to make up for ‘the smallness of his fortune’ by the ‘kindness’ he would ever have for Mary. Previously ‘unruly Mary’, in her father’s disapproving phrase, had rejected the suitor chosen by him in Ireland, the wealthy Mr Hamilton ‘who professed great passion for her’, on the grounds that her ‘aversion for him was extraordinary’.
²⁸

It was unexpected that (by the deaths of several relations)
Charles Rich should eventually succeed to the title and property of the Earl of Warwick, establishing Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick, as the great lady her father had always intended her to be. Despite this fortunate occurrence, and despite an affection for her husband which persisted throughout their married life, Mary Countess of Warwick still felt it necessary to apologize for the circumstances of her marriage in her autobiography. ‘My duty and my reason having frequent combats within me, with my passion’, she wrote, she had acceded to the latter. In so doing she had gone against her father’s wishes, and years later she still regarded this piece of defiance as ‘an ill and horribly disobedient answer’ for a daughter to give to a father.
²⁹

Not all stories where love and duty tugged in different directions ended as happily as that of Mary Countess of Warwick, especially when the financial arrangements could not be satisfactorily sorted out (finally the Earl of Cork did give his daughter her large dowry). From the Oxinden papers, the intimate records of a family living in East Kent, emerges the sad story of Dorothy Denne, who fell in love with a personable serving-man.
³⁰
Dorothy Denne, an Oxinden cousin, was one of the five daughters of the Recorder of Canterbury; William Taylor worked for her brother Captain John Denne.

Propinquity led to a mutual attraction, but the question of privacy for the courtship was another matter. A rendezvous indoors was virtually impossible at a time when even the wealthy lived without any privacy in the modern sense. Under the circumstances ladies such as Mary Countess of Warwick and Dorothy Osborne turned to nature for spiritual retirement. Mary Warwick’s ‘wilderness’, an artificial creation of trees and shrubs which she called her ‘sweet place’, was her favourite resort for meditation. Dorothy Osborne would dream of William Temple at night alone in the garden
–
‘a place to roam in without disturbance’; with the jasmine smelling ‘beyond all perfume’.
³¹
Dorothy Denne and William Taylor too were compelled to turn to the outdoors, in a series of trysts.