The Weaker Vessel: Women's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England

  Dame Isabella gave birth to her last child, Charles, in 1655. The scene at her deathbed, two years later, is passionately described in his manuscript notebooks by Sir Roger. When the end was clearly near, she rallied briefly at three o’clock in the morning; although speechless she could still respond: ‘When I kissed her which was the last I ever did whilst she lived, she gave me many kisses together so as I told her “here is the old Kisses still”. She smiled as though she knew what she did use to do.’ After her death Sir Roger kissed Dame Isabella again – one last time.14

  In his notebooks Sir Roger praised his wife without stint – for her wisdom in her solicitations to the Committees: ‘with what magnanimity she went through these miserable times’, and for her courage later in facing death. A witness at Dame Isabella’s deathbed was so impressed by this fortitude that she told her – a significant comment – ‘she feared she was not a woman!’ But Sir Roger was well aware of the cost to Dame Isabella of combining the two roles of wife and solicitor. For him she had submitted to the ‘loathsomeness’ of prisons; for him she had undertaken, heavily pregnant, ‘great journeys in Kent’, saying all the while she would endure more, ‘much more for my sake’. ‘She was the saver of my estate,’ wrote Sir Roger, ‘never man had a better wife, never children a better mother.’15

  The pilgrimage of Mary Lady Verney to get the sequestration lifted from the estates of her husband, Sir Ralph, was arguably even more arduous than those of Dame Isabella since the Verney household had actually settled in France. Separation from her beloved spouse added a further distressing element to Mary Verney’s story.

  The marriage between the undergraduate Ralph Verney and the child heiress Mary Blacknall, described in the first chapter of this book (see p. 24 f£), had proved one of remarkable happiness. As we have seen, Ralph had completed with ‘the sweetness of a kiss’ what had been begun under more mercenary auspices. Mary was Ralph’s ‘Budd’, his ‘Mischiefe’ and he was ‘her dearest Rogue’. Of course Mary’s – and Ralph’s – life had contained its share of that endemic seventeenth-century sorrow, the death of a child. Mary’s first child, a daughter, was born and died in 1632 when she was only sixteen; another daughter died at birth the following year; the year after was born Anna Maria, who died just before she was four. However their next three children all survived: Edmund, born in 1636, Pegg, born in 1638, and Jack, born in November 1640.

  Ralph, who was knighted in 1640, sat in both Short and Long Parliaments as MP for Aylesbury. Unlike his father Sir Edmund, killed at Edgehill bearing the King’s standard, he was not a passionate Royalist, but he was a devout Anglican. This was an unhappy combination of views for any Member of the House of Commons to hold (we have seen the trouble it brought to Sir Roger Twysden) and in 1643 Sir Ralph Verney adopted that solution which Sir Roger Twysden had also sought – voluntary exile. By doing so, he certainly avoided taking the oath of the Covenant; but as an absent MP he also placed himself in that category of non-combatants whose estates were none the less liable to sequestration.

  At Claydon remained Sir Ralph’s pathetic unmarried sisters, together with the baby Jack, the ‘saucy child’, who was not yet three, so that Mary against her will was persuaded it would be safer to leave him; the real truth was that his aunts could not bear to let him go. To France went Mary, Ralph, seven-year-old Edmund and five-year-old Pegg. The ordinance for the sequestration of Claydon was duly dated 1644; Sir Ralph being named as a delinquent, and his tenants warned that rents in future should be handed over to the county Committee at Aylesbury. (Although it seems it was not totally carried through until September 1646.)16

  It is the lot of the exile to be plagued by aggravating domestic detail, quite apart from the central fact of displacement, and the Verneys were no exception to this rule. They did have with them that bright maid from Claydon, Bess, who managed to learn French with ease, and a superior attendant, Mary’s gentlewoman, Luce Sheppard; but in general French servants were violent and cheated them while ‘no English maid will be content with our diet and way of living’. It was a question of good red meat. The Verneys had no money to keep up great state: ‘Of late, I roast but one night a week for suppers, which were strange in an English maid’s opinion.’ As a matter of fact, Luce and Bess, although loyalty kept them at Mary’s side, did not care for her economical substitutes – un-English ‘potages’ and ‘legumes’ – either.17

  Sir Ralph showed himself more accommodating by approving of French wine (although it is significant that when he had an opportunity to send for some ‘dear old English sack’ from Claydon, he did so). At least Mary could continue to make that good bread for which she was famous, and she had brought with her a portable oven for roasting apples. Meanwhile their friends at home took advantage of the Verneys’ residence at the centre of things in one sense of the word, by sending for details of the latest Paris fashions. An English correspondent was to be found inquiring for some costly new-fangled aids to beauty: ‘little brushes for making clean of the teeth, most covered with silver and some few with gold and silver twist’, together with some little boxes to keep them in.18

  The decision that Mary should return to England to get the sequestration lifted was, however painful for her husband, a natural one under the circumstances. Dr Denton, father and educator of Nancy, confirmed the increasing value of female solicitation in August 1646 in a blunt message to Sir Ralph: ‘women were never so useful as now, and though you should be my agent and solicitor of all the men I know … yet I am confident if you were here, you would do as our sages do, instruct your wife, and leave her to act it with committees’. He went on: ‘Their sex entities them to many privileges, and we find the comfort of them now more than ever.’ Earlier in the same year another friend, Sir Roger Burgoyne, had given precise advice as to how Mary should behave if she did venture across the Channel. This was no place for emulating the staunch ways of the male sex. On the contrary: ‘it would not do amiss if she [Mary] can bring her spirit to a soliciting temper and can tell how to use the juice of an onion sometimes to soften hard hearts’.19

  To this Sir Ralph had replied at the time, ‘I know it is not hard for a wife to dissemble, but there is like to be no need of that; for where necessities are so great the juice of an onion will be useless.’ Certainly by the time Mary arrived in London, in late 1646, she scarcely needed an onion to provoke her tears. Everyone in the capital seemed cheerful, she told Ralph, ‘yet I never had so sad a time in all my life’.20 Bess stayed in France to look after Edmund and Pegg; Luce Sheppard accompanied Mary. The sea journey was delayed because of bad weather and high seas. When they arrived, Mary had to look for lodgings; for two rooms up two flights of stairs she was charged the exorbitant sum of 12s a week, fire, candles, washing and ‘diet’ were all extras. Mary was also pregnant (since her baby was born the following June, she must have known of her condition when she left France). Both maid and Mary fell ill.

  Sir Ralph and Mary had arranged a code between them. This was the point at which their friend Eleanor Lady Sussex, newly married to that powerful Puritan grandee the Earl of Warwick and thus expected to play a crucially helpful role in the negotiations, was nicknamed ‘Old Men’s Wife’ (see p. 10 3). The other code names were equally appropriate: sequestration was ‘Chaine’, the sequestrators ‘Chainors’, the Covenant was ‘Phisick’, money was ‘Lead’, and Newcastle was ‘Coals’. Armed with this, Mary hoped to deal with the mountain of debts left behind by her father-in-law Sir Edmund Verney, and secure, like Dame Isabella Twysden, that vital certificate of sequestration from the Committee of the county in which Claydon lay – in this case Buckinghamshire. She then intended to petition the Committee of both Houses at Westminster ‘after we have made all the friends that we possibly can’, to get the sequestration lifted.21

  If that failed, then there was nothing for it but the dreaded Goldsmiths’ Hall. For all their praiseworthy endeavours, the experience of the Goldsmiths was much dreaded by the women petitioners (which made their
courage that much the greater). The jaunty Royalist ballad quoted earlier referred to wives encountering there ‘the devil and all’. We have Margaret Duchess of Newcastle’s description of her own experience when she appeared on the arm of her brother (her husband being abroad) to plead for her due allowance; on receiving ‘an absolute refusal’ before she had even begun to speak, she whispered to her brother to take her out of such an ‘ungentlemanly place’ and left in silence.22

  Thereafter Margaret was inclined to deride women who had done better, and expressed herself as indignant at reports that she had in fact pleaded before this and that committee. Women were chatterboxes – this was one of her favourite themes – and life at the Goldsmiths’ Hall encouraged them in this regrettable tendency: ‘if our sex would but well consider and rationally ponder, they will perceive and find that it is neither words nor place that can advance them but worth and merit’. But this was writing with hindsight ten years later, and perhaps with a little mortified pride. In fact a woman like Mary Verney by words – her own solicitation – and place – a London ‘exile’ far from her husband’s side – stood to achieve a great deal more than by ‘worth and merit’ in France. Nevertheless she was human enough to dread the prospect of the Goldsmiths’ Hall: ‘where we must expect nothing but cruelty, and the paying of more Lead [money] than I fear we can possibly make’.23

  Under the circumstances it was peculiarly distressing to find that ‘Old Men’s Wife’, Eleanor Lady Warwick, was not prepared to exert that favourable influence with the new regime on which the Verneys had counted. ‘I told her many times that it was friends which did all’, Mary reported back to Ralph with indignation; and she proposed to sell the valuable watch which she had brought with her with the idea of rewarding Lady Warwick for her intervention. How differently the Verneys themselves had behaved to Eleanor, then Lady Sussex! They had even lent her the famous black Verney mourning bed with all its doleful trappings to mark one of her earlier widowhoods. This bed, used amongst others by Ralph’s aunt Margaret Eure at the death of her husband William in battle, was accustomed to travel about England like an enormous raven, croaking its melancholy message. Now the new Lady Warwick, no longer having any such gloomy need, dispatched the raven back to its owners; but she made the Verneys pay for the carriage, which as Mary observed was ‘not so handsomely done’. It is true that Lady Warwick subsequently explained to Mary that her life with her new husband was not quite the bed of roses that she had expected at her marriage: she lived in Lord Warwick’s house ‘like a stranger’ and had to pay two thirds of her estate for her keep, receiving in return from her husband merely a diamond ring, no proper jointure. At the time, about the best thing which Lady Warwick did was to send round a pheasant and two bottles of wine when Mary and her maid were ill.24

  The course of events for Mary Verney before the Committee of the two Houses in London followed the same dreary pattern of delay and frustration as it had for Isabella Twysden, and like Dame Isabella, Mary was tormented by a Committee in Buckinghamshire whom she described as ‘very malicious and extremely insolent’.25 The villains in the county might have given me a certificate if they had pleased’, she told her husband, ‘without putting me to this trouble.’ When Mary visited Lady Warwick, her husband, the powerful Earl, sat ‘like a clown’ and said nothing. He did promise to turn up on Mary’s behalf at the vital Committee but then failed to do so. It was not until April that Mary secured the all-important certificate giving the cause of the sequestration: ‘it is for nothing but absence’ she told Ralph – because Ralph Verney as an MP, had vanished abroad.

  By now Mary’s pregnancy was far advanced; the prospect of childbirth alone in London further appalled her: ‘to lie [in] without thee, is a greater affliction than I fear I shall be able to bear’, she told Ralph. Already the Verneys had argued by post over the baby’s name, Mary wanting Ralph if it was a boy, but Sir Ralph choosing Richard. They both agreed on Mary for a girl (the three little daughters who had died young or at birth when Mary was still in her teens had all been called some variant of Mary). Mary also had orders from Ralph to get a minister to the house to christen the baby as soon as possible in the old way; for this type of christening, together with godparents, had vanished under the new dispensation: the father was merely supposed to bring the child to the church ‘and answer for it’. Mary complained: ‘Truly one lives like a heathen here.’ She found it impossible to find a decent service to attend in a London church.

  On 3 June the child was born; it was a boy and Mary did call it Ralph. In France nine-year-old Pegg expressed herself dissatisfied because she had wanted a sister. But Ralph was thrilled to see Mary’s own handwriting as a postscript to Dr Denton’s letter breaking the news. ‘I have borne you a lusty boy.’ He fussed over her health: knowing that Mary being delivered would now try and get down to Claydon to sort out matters there, he begged her to go by coach, regardless of the cost; or if she insisted on going on horseback to save money, at least to lodge somewhere on the way. (Later when Mary visited ‘Aunt Eure’ in Leicestershire she reported the ordeal of ‘a cruel trotting horse’ because the coach was too expensive.) It was true that Mary was far from well: the ‘lusty boy’ was in fact quite weak, and Mary suffered from pains in the head.

  Furthermore her journey to Claydon brought her small comfort, apart from the wonderful reunion with little Jack, whom she had not seen for four years. He trotted round after her as she made the inventories, enchanting her with his funny sayings and little songs: ‘he is a very ready witted child and is very good company’, she told Ralph, ‘he is always with me from the first hour that I came’. Alas, Jack was also suffering from crooked legs due to rickets: a fate of many seventeenth-century children, however grand the nursery, including King Charles I. Jack also stammered and had been totally spoilt by his aunts. ‘He would very fain go into France with his father’, Mary told Ralph, and this time Mary was determined to take him with her.

  Claydon itself was however in a disastrous state: the linen worn out, the feather-beds eaten by rats and the fire-irons corroded by rust. The soldiers quartered there had committed a series of crimes liable to grieve the heart of a careful housewife, such as ruining the cloth on the musk-coloured stools. Far worse than any of this was the death of baby Ralph from convulsions. Mary was delirious with sorrow for two days and two nights. It was fortunate that she did not then know that her daughter Pegg had died too about the same time in France; it was when the news finally reached her that Mary turned away in agony from those two other little girls, Peg and Mall, the children of ‘Aunt Eure’ and for the time being could not bring herself to care for them.

  It was not until January 1648 that the Committee of both Houses at Westminster lifted the sequestration – and it seems that the Warwicks did in the end play some kind of helpful role, ‘My dearest Rogue, it joys my heart to think how soon I shall be with thee’, Mary wrote to Ralph in March, and she hoped to bring Jack safely to him. They were finally reunited in April.

  The tenderness – and the teasing – of their married life was resumed. When Sir Pickering Newton, taking his wife abroad, asked Mary’s advice as ‘an old housekeeper in France’ Sir Ralph reported that his wife was cross. ‘Had you called her an old woman, she would never have forgiven you such an injury. You know a woman can never be old (at least not willingly, nor in her own opinion); did you dread her displeasure but half so much as I do, believe me you would run post hither to make your peace.’26

  But Mary never did live to be old, neither in her own opinion nor in anyone else’s.

  She died at the age of thirty-four. The cause was consumption; but her condition must have been aggravated by her sufferings during that eighteen-month period of privation and worry in London. Sir Ralph’s own calendar of his letters to Dr Denton in London (a list, combined with extracts, giving both Continental and English dating) relates the progress of his anguish:

  15/5 May 1650. I write Dr [Denton] word I received his letter, but could
write of no business, Wife being so ill.

  22/12 May 1650. Oh my … my deare dear.

  29/19 May 1650. Friday the 20/10 May (at three in the morning) Was the Fatal day and hour. The disease a consumption … I shall not need to relate with what a Religious and cheerful joy and courage this now happy and most glorious saint, left this unhappy and most wicked world … I entreat you presently to pay one Mr Preswell (a silk man in Paternoster Row) about forty shillings, which he said she owed for something taken up there, though she could never call it to her remembrance.27

  Mary’s body was taken in its coffin for burial in England. Sir Ralph wrote: ‘every puff of wind that tosses it at sea shakes me at land’. ‘Ah Doctor, Doctor,’ he wrote, ‘her company made every place a paradise unto me.’

  Later Sir Ralph wondered what sins he could have committed to deserve such punishments: the loss of two out of his three eldest children, his brother, his father and mother, and now his wife ‘who was not only willing to suffer for and with me here, but by her most exemplary goodness and patience both helped and taught me to support my otherwise almost insupportable Burden. But, alas,’ he concluded, ‘What shall I now do!’28

  What Sir Ralph Verney did not do was marry again. Luce Sheppard and Bess cared for the children. Unusually for his time – and responsibilities – Sir Ralph remained for the rest of his long life a widower. He died in 1696, nearly half a century after Mary, still faithful to the memory of his ‘dear, discreet and most incomparable wife’. As with others who have tasted the matchless joy of a happy union, Sir Ralph worried over Christ’s words of the New Testament concerning a marriageless Heaven. In the end he worked out his own form of faith: ‘And although … in the Resurrection none marry nor are given in Marriage, yet I hope (without being censured for curiosity) I may piously believe, that we who ever from our very childhoods lived in so much peace, and christian concord here on Earth, shall also in our Elder years for the full completing of our Joys, at least be known to one another in Heaven.’29