CHAPTER FIVE

Are You Widows?

Once widowed – the third stage of her projected life – a woman was expected to add a further virtue in the shape of fidelity to the long list of feminine virtues she already possessed, including modesty, meekness, patience and humility. The fidelity was to the memory of her deceased spouse, for the ideal widow did not seek to alter her state by marrying again. Instead, in a favourite comparison of the time, she emulated the turtle-dove by mourning her late husband in solitude; as Mary Countess of Warwick was thankful when she had married off her late husband’s nieces: her worldly duties being over she could spend the rest of her life a widow devoted to God’s service.¹ That at least was the theory of widowhood. The reality as we shall see was often very different.

Lettice Viscountess Falkland, on top of all her other virtues, was formally commended for being:

Eschewing ‘all second loves’ she displayed herself until her death ‘One made of ice toward Venus, and her doves’. Lady Alice Lucy, who died in 1648, was considered such an outstanding example of female virtue that Samuel Clarke chose her for one of his subjects in The Lives of Sundry Eminent Persons in this Later Age, published in 1683. Lady Alice began with a thoroughly submissive approach to her union with Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote: ‘She knew that her taking of a second self, was a self-denying work; and therefore she resigned both her reason, and her will unto her Head, and Husband …’ After Sir Thomas’s death, she never even contemplated remarriage, for the good reason that God ‘made himself her Husband, supporting her, comforting her, and enabling her prudently to manage her great Estate, and to order her numerous family’.²

Another ‘ideal of the true mourning turtle’ was Anne Lady Newdigate, she who as a widow boasted that all her children were ‘nursed of my own breasts’. Petitioning in 1600 to be allowed to have the wardship of her son and his lands during his minority, Lady Newdigate hotly denied that she should ever be so ‘accursed a woman [as] to marry again’. She kept her word, despite various offers for her hand, devoting her life to her children and their business interests. Her friend Lady Grey proposed a less severe attitude to remarriage – ‘I must needs tell you that your too infinite care may take away that happiness which might give much content to you and yours.’ Lady Newdigate’s constancy was nevertheless considered heroic. Here was the reverse of the Pygmalion image: ‘a fair woman’ was ‘turned into a marble stone’.³

Conversely, some very peculiar attitudes can be detected towards those widows who did take a second husband. There was an idea that marrying a widow might constitute ‘bigamy’, and if a widow had two spouses dead, it might even be termed ‘trigamy’. John Aubrey ascribed an even more complicated view to William Harvey, the physician who discovered the circulation of the blood: ‘He that marries a widow makes himself Cuckold’ (that is, by the woman’s dead husband). Harvey was supposed to have suggested that the children of the second marriage might even resemble the husband of the first, just as ‘a good bitch’, if first mated with a mongrel, would still bring forth ‘curs’ even after she had been mated with a dog of a better strain.⁴

The attitude of Edward Lord Herbert of Cherbury to his mother Magdalen’s second marriage was positively eccentric: in his autobiography he paid a glowing tribute to her character, how ‘she lived most virtuously and lovingly with her husband [his father] for many years … brought up her children carefully and put them in good courses for making their fortune …’ At no point did he mention that in 1608 the widowed Lady Herbert had married Sir John Danvers – she being forty and he twenty years old. Danvers himself is also mentioned by name, but the relationship between the two men is not. One might well wonder what this Hamlet was endeavouring to conceal on the subject of his mother’s second union, except that John Donne (who preached the funeral sermon for Lady Danvers in 1627) tells us the marriage was, in fact, a very happy one. It seems therefore that nothing more than a theoretical distaste for abandoned widowhood was at stake.⁵

This revulsion against the notion of remarriage could also take the form of sentimental surprise when it actually took place. Dorothy Countess of Sunderland was widowed at the age of twenty-five. As a girl Dorothy Sidney had been the idol of her generation, one who succeeded in her professed aim to her father, the Earl of Leicester, to be ‘the perfectest good child upon earth’. For her, his Sacharissa, Edmund Waller wrote that classic lover’s apostrophe:

Having rejected not only the poet (who then wishes on her that first curse of womankind, ‘the pains of becoming a mother’) but another aristocratic suitor for his addiction to debauched company, Dorothy Sidney made what seemed the ideal marriage to Henry Lord Spencer, later created Earl of Sunderland, a man who combined handsome looks with great taste – and great possessions. Four years later he was killed at the first battle of Newbury (that same Battle into which Lord Falkland rode looking ‘very cheerful’), leaving Dorothy with a son and two daughters, but also heavily pregnant: she gave birth to a second son a fortnight later.⁶

After Lord Sunderland’s death, Lord Leicester gave a classic piece of advice on the behaviour of a desolate widow to his ‘dear Doll’: she must cease damaging herself by her unhappiness since ‘you offend him who you loved, if you hurt that person he loved’. Her children remained – ‘those pledges of your mutual friendship and affection which he hath left with you’ – and if she did not recover enough to take care of them, she was betraying ‘their father’s trust’ which had been reposed in her: ‘For their sake, therefore, assuage your grief …’⁷ For the next ten years or so the young Dowager Countess did devote herself in approved widow’s fashion to the upbringing of her family, especially her son and the management of the Spencer family estates at Althorp.

The consternation of the world when Dorothy married Robert Smythe in 1652 may seem by modern standards ludicrous. He was a Sidney family connection, a neighbour to the Leicester property at Penshurst (where Dorothy had spent her first widowhood), and although some years younger than the Countess had probably been in love with her for years. The contemporary consternation was none the less real. The Countess tactfully suggested to Dorothy Osborne that she had been swayed by pity for Smythe, although the fact that Smythe was ‘a very fine gentleman’ was surely at least as relevant. Even though Dorothy Osborne admitted that the Countess of Sunderland – still only in her thirties – might be growing ‘weary of that constraint she put upon herself’, her verdict was unforgiving: ‘She has lost by it [the marriage] much of the repute she had gained by keeping herself a widow. It was then believed that wit and discretion were to be reconciled in her person that have so seldom been persuaded to meet in anybody else. But’, concluded Dorothy Osborne sadly, ‘we are all mortal.’⁸

This yearning for fidelity beyond the grave – the ideal of the devoted widow – makes strange reading put side by side with the nature of the society in which these men, women (and widows) lived. While there was general agreement, except by a few generous-minded or realistic spirits, that a second marriage for women was to be avoided, the facts about life in the first half of the seventeenth century give us a very different picture. Pepys, in one of the earliest entries in his diary, was much moved by a sermon he had heard on the subject of St Anne, mother of the Virgin Mary, only seven years married, who had lived to the age of eighty-four a widow. It neatly expressed the contrast between the ideal and the actual. The preacher ‘did there speak largely in commendation of widowhood, and not as we do, to marry two or three wives or husbands one after another’.⁹

This was, after all, an age in which the life expectancy at birth was not much more than thirty-five years.¹⁰ Each sex was subject to its own special threat. Women had to face the continuous peril of childbirth. Men on the other hand appear to have been more prone to disease, while the male population was also periodically decimated by war, whether at home or abroad.

Under these circumstances remarriage, far from being a distasteful aberration, was in fact a very common occurrence, it having been calculated that about a quarter of all marriages were a remarriage for either the bride or the groom. In the upper echelons of society – that is to say, those ranks where the interests of money and property were at stake in any given marriage – it has been further estimated that about 25 per cent of the population married again in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and about 5 per cent married three times. Four or even five marriages in a lifetime were as likely to be achieved then in a society with a high rate of mortality as they are today in a society with a high rate of divorce.¹¹

The career of Eleanor Wortley, who married in turn Sir Henry Lee of Quarendon in Buckinghamshire, the sixth Earl of Sussex, the second Earl of Warwick, and the second Earl of Manchester, was notable more for the fact that she married a series of aged husbands than for the number of her bridegrooms. Sir Ralph Verney (he was knighted in 1640 but made a baronet at the Restoration) actually used to refer to her in code in his letters as ‘Old Men’s Wife’.¹²

Lady Sussex was a woman of tempestuous character whose tribulations – as well as marriages – enlivened the existence of her friends. She also had a rather beguiling vanity. She recommended Mary Lady Verney (Mary Blacknall, the heiress, now a contented married lady) to use myrrh water for her complexion, explaining: ‘I have long used it and find it very safe. ’Tis good for the head and to make one look young long. I only wet a cloth and wipe my face over, at night with it.’ However, it says less for Lady Sussex’s artistic sense that when Van Dyck wanted to paint her she was torn between vanity and avarice: ‘I am loth to deny him, [but] truly it is money ill bestowed.’ (Van Dyck got £50 for the job.) Later Ralph Verney had to intervene, in a common problem, alas, with portraiture: he prevailed upon Van Dyck at Lady Sussex’s request ‘to make my picture leaner, for truly it was too fat.’¹³ Later, after her third marriage, Lady Sussex tried to get hold of the picture for her new husband, but perhaps deservedly, failed.

The ‘Old Men’s Wife’ was not, however, an unloving character. As the aged Lord Sussex lay on his deathbed at his estate at Gorhambury during the Civil War, she declared: ‘I will not stir from my good old Lord whatsoever becomes of me.’ She assured the Verneys: ‘Now I must tell you that which maybe you will hardly believe, that I heartily suffer for my good old lord who truly grows so very weak that I fear he will not hold out very long.’ She then spent a considerable sum of money – £400 – on his funeral as a mark of her respect. ‘Good man’, she wrote of Lord Sussex after his death, ‘I am confident he is happy.’¹⁴

Lady Sussex’s third husband, Robert Earl of Warwick, was approaching sixty – a vast age by the standards of the time, when thirty was held to mark middle age. She was frank about her reasons for choosing him. ‘Wanting a discreet and helpful friend … made me think of marriage’, she told the Verneys, ‘being unable to undergo what I found continually upon me.’ The Earl of Warwick was not only ‘extreme kind’ as she put it, but in the view of his daughter-in-law Mary Rich one of the ‘cheerfullest persons’. He was also a grandee who did not allow his religious and political Puritanism to stand in the way of the great state he kept at Warwick House in Holborn. Nine months after his death in 1658 Eleanor married another Parliamentary leader, the fifty-six-year-old Earl of Manchester, a double which won for her the sobriquet of ‘the Peeress of the Protectorate’. She still, however, kept Warwick House, which had been willed to her by her third husband. It is a tribute to Eleanor’s warm character that Mary Rich, by now Countess of Warwick in her turn, wept bitterly at her death in 1667. ‘I was much affected for the loss of my poor mother-in-law’, wrote Mary; she found it no consolation that her husband would now at last be free to use the family residence of Warwick House.¹⁵

By her two matches with the Earl of Warwick and the Earl of Manchester, Eleanor had entered into a remarkably complex network of relationships. At the time the situation was summed up by the saying that the Earl of Manchester, following his first wife’s death had married ‘Warwick’s niece, Warwick’s daughter and Warwick’s wife’:¹⁶ that is to say his third wife, Essex Cheke, ‘Warwick’s niece’, that philoprogenitive lady who had fed seven children at the breast, was the daughter of Warwick’s sister; she was thus a first cousin of Manchester’s second wife, who had been ‘Warwick’s daughter’, Lady Anne Rich; Manchester’s fourth wife was of course Warwick’s widow, Eleanor. (After Eleanor’s death, the ever-game Lord Manchester went on to marry for a fifth time, the widowed Countess of Carlisle, who survived him.)

The marital career of the second Earl of Warwick, straightforward compared to that of the Earl of Manchester, was not without its own incidents. His first marriage, which had taken place as long ago as 1605, was to Frances Hatton, step-daughter of that spirited Lady Hatton who was the mother of Frances Coke. His second wife was Susan Halliday, the widow of a rich London alderman; of her Mary Rich wrote: ‘Because she was a citizen, she was not so much respected in the family as in my opinion she deserved to be.’ Warwick’s other daughter-in-law, Lady Anne Cavendish, a haughty scion of the house of Devonshire, had been particularly unpleasant to her. Mary, however, found her ‘as good as my own mother’, sympathized with her ill-health, and ‘when God called her away, [I did] much mourn for losing her’.¹⁷

Remarriage, then, was a fact of contemporary life and it was not only the great Parliamentary magnates, the leaders of their society, who indulged guiltlessly in this potentially acquisitive pastime.

That same Lord Herbert who refused to acknowledge in print the second marriage of his mother, relates in his autobiography a cold-blooded conversation with his own wife. When they had established a family of three, he called the children in front of their mother and asked her how she liked them. ‘Well’, she replied. In which case Herbert requested his wife to settle her estates on these children in her lifetime, because there was a strong possibility of one or other of them dying, and the survivor marrying again; he being young for a man and she ‘not old for a woman’ (she was thirty-one, four years older than he was). Future offspring of these hypothetical second marriages might damage the financial prospects of their existing family. Although Lady Herbert refused, on the grounds that she did not wish to find herself in the power of her own children – ‘she would not draw the cradle upon her head’ – her husband’s premise concerning death and remarriage was not in itself surprising or shocking to her.¹⁸

In reality it was more often the question of the children’s financial future – the children of the first marriage, that is – which bedevilled the prospect of a widow’s remarriage, than the notion of her fidelity to her first husband. William Blundell quoted with approval in his diary the Latin tag of a certain widower:

(‘I had married a wife for the sake of children; for the sake of my children I have not married again’). Widows too were adjured to bear in mind the consequences of a second marriage for those who had something to lose from it, such as their children. (Later the Quakers would make it a feature of their religion that proper provision should be made for the children of first marriages before a second marriage took place.) Brilliana Lady Harley summed up the two sides to the question with good sense in 1642 when she described herself as ‘glad’ that her cousin Catherine, widow of Oliver St John, was remarrying: ‘I believe it is for her advantage; tho’ in my opinion, when one has children, it is better to be a widow.’¹⁹

From the opposite point of view – those with something to gain from a woman’s remarriage, notably her prospective second husband – no spectacle was more stirring than that of a wealthy widow. A Tally-Ho would go up when one of these creatures was sighted, followed by a pursuit which can only be compared to the contemporary chase after an heiress; except that the fox in this case was older and therefore wilier.

‘If a widow happens to fall in the mean time she shall be kept in syrup for you’, wrote a correspondent to Framlingham Gawdy in 1637, at the end of a list of available widows which included their incomes. Sir John Eliot, the leading spirit in the forcing of the Petition of Right upon King Charles I, a man who was imprisoned for his opposition to arbitrary power, left the question of his second marriage entirely in the hands of his friend Sir Henry Waller, who knew of a wealthy widow who had recently ‘fallen’, i.e. become available. Eliot made no inquiries concerning his bride’s Moral character.²⁰

In 1653, about the time of Dorothy Countess of Sunderland’s second marriage, Dorothy Osborne went to dinner with a rich widow, middle-aged and ‘never handsome’, who had ‘broke loose from an old miserable husband’ with the avowed intention of spending all his money before she died. Whereas Sacharissa’s fall from grace had shocked Dorothy, the widow’s palpable state of siege thoroughly amused her. For all the widow’s frank words concerning the use to which she intended to put her late husband’s money, and despite her lack of physical attraction, she was, wrote Dorothy, ‘courted a thousand times more than the greatest beauty in the world that had not a fortune’. They could hardly get through dinner for the disturbance caused by letters and presents pouring through the door in order to persuade the widow to change her mind.²¹

Other widows made a different use of their opportunities. Francis Kirkman described in his autobiography how his thrice-married stepmother had had a dubious past, diddling another step-son out of his estate by forging her first husband’s seal on a will. But Francis Kirkman’s father was hardly interested in such details. ‘My father married her upon small acquaintance’; he only knew that she had a considerable estate, ‘that being the chief care of most thriving citizens to inquire into that’.²²

City widows (like Susan Halliday, the second Countess of Warwick) were a particular target, because the Custom of London concerning the disposition of a man’s estate was so favourable towards his relict. Marriage to an important widow (in the commercial sense) was the basis of one of the most successful businesses built up in the City in the seventeenth century. William Wheeler was a goldsmith; a profession incidentally where there was a tradition of bright-eyed and quick-witted wives, including that famous mistress of Edward IV, Jane Shore, who displayed her ‘beauty in a shop of gold’. Wheeler transferred the Cheapside shop inherited from his father to the Marygold, formerly a tavern, in Fleet Street near Temple Bar. When Wheeler died his widow Martha married one of his two apprentices, named Robert Blanchard, who then succeeded to the business. (Wheeler’s daughter Elizabeth married another apprentice, Francis Child; he later inherited the business in his turn, and as Sir Francis Child, was reckoned ‘the father’ of the banking profession.) It was appropriate that Blanchard, who owed so much to the Widow Wheeler, should leave £200 in his will to the Goldsmiths’ Company to pay £4 a year to two widows of good repute, over the age of fifty, who were less well endowed.²³

When Sir William Craven died in 1618, his was the largest fortune known at the time from a will – at least £125,000. In turn Lady Craven at her death was reputed by John Chamberlain to be ‘the richest widow (perhaps) that ever died, of London lady’; she was said to have left an income derived from land worth £13,000 a year between her two sons. The Vyners were another remarkable City dynasty. Pepys gazed in awe at Mary, wife of Sir Robert Vyner, but for once not for her looks; it was true she was still handsome but from having been ‘a very handsome woman’ he reckoned her at the age of thirty-four ‘now old’. No, Pepys’s awe arose from the fact that Lady Vyner, a wealthy widow at the time of her marriage, was reputed to have brought her husband ‘near £100,000’.²⁴ The prize did not however have to be on quite such a lustrous scale for the competition to be keen, as is manifested by the case of the Widow Bennett.

Elizabeth Cradock – the Widow Bennett of the story – came of a decent Staffordshire family and her father had probably been some form of mercantile agent.²⁵ She was still a young and attractive woman when her husband, Richard Bennett, a well-off merchant and son of a former Lord Mayor of London, died in April 1628. The widow was left with a four-year-old son, Simon, doubtless named for her husband’s brother Sir Simon Bennett, who had been created a baronet the previous year. With respectable if not brilliant connections, the Widow Bennett was certainly well placed to make a sound second marriage, especially as she was the sole executrix of her husband’s will, under which she received two-thirds of his estate. That was not all. She also inherited her husband’s coach with its four grey coach-horses (mares and geldings), to say nothing of jewels which included chains of pearl and gold, and diamond rings. In short, the Widow Bennett was in a position to cut just that type of ‘ladyfied’ figure alluded to by Massinger in his satirical play The City Madam who wore:

Only six months after her husband’s death the Widow Bennett had acquired three established suitors. Like some latter-day Paris, the widow was expected to bestow the golden apple of her fortune on one of the trio. There however the mythical comparison ends and a more homely note is struck, for, to the general amusement of society, these three suitors happened coincidentally to bear the names of Finch, Crow(e) and Raven.

Finch was undoubtedly the best of the flock. Sir Heneage Finch came of an excellent Kentish family, he had been Speaker of the House of Commons in 1626 and was now Recorder of London, and his establishments included a handsome house and garden in that countrified outpost of London called Kensington (where Kensington Palace and Kensington Gardens now lie). Crow, in the shape of Sir Sackville Crowe, was embarrassingly eager that this ‘Twenty thousand pounds widow’ should help him to make up that gap in the public accounts which would shortly cause him to retire from his office of Treasurer of the Navy. Raven was a doctor, and a dashing fellow – but as it proved, rather too dashing a fellow for the widow’s taste.

One night Dr Raven bribed the widow’s servants to let him secretly into her house. He then entered her bedroom, where the widow was sleeping, and proceeded to make passionate love to her. It was a commonly-held assumption of the time that a ‘lusty widow’, as the Duchess of Malfi was termed by her brother Ferdinand, must be ever on the look-out for sexual fulfilment. Ferdinand expressed the reason thus: ‘You know already what man is.’ Joseph Swetnam, for example, in The arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward and Unconstant Women laid it down that no widow, ‘framed to the conditions of another man’, could possibly ‘forbear carnal act’ if an opportunity came her way, since she was habitually deprived of it.²⁷ One can only observe that the Widow Bennett’s behaviour would have proved a sad disappointment to anyone proceeding on this assumption.

Far from showing herself unable to forbear carnal act, the widow immediately sprang out of bed, and began to shriek such unamorous words as ‘Thieves!’ and ‘Murder!’ She managed to summon her venal servants, and in the course of time the dashing doctor was arrested by the parish constable. Haled before the Recorder of London the next day, the Raven found himself facing none other than the Finch. The latter having sent him into custody until the next sessions, it was some time before the unfortunate Raven, having pleaded guilty to ‘ill-demeanour’, was finally set free.

At this point a fourth bird joined the flock, in the shape of a recent widower called Sir Edward Dering. Much of Dering’s journal of his campaign to secure the widow’s hand survives; it supplies vivid details of all the necessary preparations for such an assault. Here are the Widow Bennett’s servants bribed (again! it must have been a lucrative position) and supplying Sir Edward with tit-bits of encouraging gossip to spur him on. One servant would whisper ‘Good news! Good news!’ and Sir Edward’s heart would leap. There would be a hint that ‘the widow liked well his carriage and … there was good hope’, provided that Sir Edward’s land was not already settled on his son by his first marriage.

Sir Edward’s own efforts included the dispatch of rich presents for the widow herself, as well as her servants, and visits to the church where he might spy her – and presumably be spied. These could be quite demanding, for the good widow was a great church-goer: ‘Nov 30: I was at the Old Jewry Church, and saw her, both forenoon and afternoon.’ Then there were his advisers, who included the Widow Bennett’s cousin Cradock, and even Sir Heneage Finch (who appeared at this point to have withdrawn from the campaign). The two men had dinner together. Others who interested themselves in Sir Edward’s cause were his cousin, the Dean of Canterbury, and his late wife’s mother and sister (who far from advocating any form of fidelity to his dead wife had clearly decided that Sir Edward’s family would benefit generally from the supplement of the Widow Bennett’s estate). When Sir Henry Wotton, the Provost of Eton, happened to meet Sir Edward in the Privy Chamber, he expressed the general interest in the pursuit by genially wishing Sir Edward ‘full sail’.

Of course there was the continuing anxiety of the other suitors. Front-runners were the newly created Viscount Lumley and a Mr Butler. The latter was rejected by the widow for being ‘a black blunt-nosed gentleman’, but Lord Lumley also prosecuted his suit by going to the widow’s church. In all of this, Sir Edward’s interviews with the widow, as opposed to ecclesiastical sightings of her, were really rather disappointing, but somehow no one seems to have noticed this fact in all the excitement of rumour and counter-rumour. At one interview Sir Edward could get ‘no answer of certainty, nor yet indeed any denial’. At another the widow protested that she would not marry at all, or at any rate she would make no answer to his proposal at the present time. At yet another meeting, in February, Sir Edward ‘intreated of her’ to grant him at least one suit: ‘viz., to love herself … viz., to choose that man with whom she might live happiest’. The widow’s reply was scarcely encouraging: ‘Say that you left me, and take the glory of it.’

When the dreams of the Widow Bennett – and of Sir Edward – were introduced into the proceedings as relevant evidence by her cousin Mrs Norton, another of Sir Edward’s informants, they were not exactly encouraging either. The Widow Bennett dreamt that as Mrs Norton was bringing her ‘a mess of milk’ in bed, Sir Edward came into the room behind her, at which the Widow Bennett sprang out of bed – with that same strange lack of carnality with which she had eluded Dr Raven – and ran out of her bedroom into the parlour ‘in her smock’, whereupon she caught cold. Sir Edward, more prosaically, dreamt that the widow had sent him a Twelfth Night cake.

But what were these lack-lustre portents compared to the glittering prospect of her fortune? Sir Edward gloated over it: ‘George Newman [her servant] says she hath suits of silver plate, one in the country and the other here, and that she hath beds of £100 the bed.’

The trouble was that the widow herself was not totally without cares in her new state. It has been mentioned that she had a small son, Simon. The wardship of this boy had been sold by the Crown to a man named Steward, according to the custom – so much resented – of the time. Throughout Sir Edward’s courtship, the widow was engaged in trying to buy back the wardship of her boy into her own hands for £1,500; but having paid the amount, she then discovered that Steward himself had already sold the wardship into another’s hands. Was it this problem which was causing the widow to hang back so unconscionably from matrimony? Sir Edward, like many would-be second spouses, was well aware of the importance of little Simon in his mother’s favours. He ambushed the child at his daily walk, when he was out with his nursemaid Susan and George Newman. ‘Susan professed that she and all the house prayed for me, and told me the child already called me “Father”’, Sir Edward reported joyfully in his journal.

Perhaps little Simon was the key to the situation. With the question of the wardship at last settled in the spring, the widow was to be found ‘in a merry plight’, according to her cousin Mrs Norton. The two women were drinking beer and chatting together: ‘Well, Thomas,’ she said to her servant, ‘I must have one glass of beer more.’ The widow agreed to drink a toast to Sir Edward ‘as one that loved her’. And shortly afterwards in April 1629, a year after the death of her first husband, the Widow Bennett did duly marry again. She married however not patient aspirant Sir Edward, but the Finch.

It has been suggested that Sir Heneage had been advising the widow all along on the provoking matter of the wardship. The Finch may have allowed Dering’s blatant courtship to conceal his own more discreet suit.²⁸ Be that as it may, with the marriage the dramatic story of the Widow Bennett and her suitors ends. It remains only to say that though the Finch marriage was short-lived (Sir Heneage died in December 1631 and this time the widow did not venture to remarry), it lasted long enough for the new Lady Finch to bear one daughter and conceive an even more remarkable child, born after her father’s death. But the story of Anne Finch, Viscountess Conway, belongs to another chapter.

The Widow Bennett, seen through the pages of Sir Edward Dering’s journal, was no pliable character on whom the masculine sex necessarily imposed: in the end she secured a distinguished second husband (of considerably higher social rank than her first) who supplied her need for ‘a discreet and helpful friend’, as Eleanor Lady Sussex had described her protective third husband the Earl of Warwick.

This is where the figure of the wealthy widow, that contemporary object of desire, begins to emerge as one vessel who was in practice by no means quite so weak as the rest of womankind. Widows by their very nature presented considerable problems to those pundits who postulated that obedience was the female’s essential lot. If unmarried girls obeyed their fathers, and wives obeyed their husbands, whom should a widow obey? There was no clear answer to that question. Widows, indeed, could be held to be technically ‘masterless’, especially if their jointure or other form of inheritance was free from legal restraint.

It was a point made by a headstrong young widow, Mrs Margaret Poulteney, who was actually Ralph Verney’s aunt, although only a year older than he. Enjoying a handsome jointure without encumbrances, Margaret Poulteney went and married herself secretly to a Catholic soldier named William Eure; this despite the prolonged negotiations for a conventional second marriage, made on her behalf by her family. Eure’s proscribed religion, the secrecy of the event, the embarrassment felt towards Margaret Poulteney’s other suitors who had been assured she was ‘a free woman’; all these contributed to a feeling of collective indignation in the Verney family breast.²⁹

Sir Edmund Verney hoped gloomily that ‘some lucky bullet may free her of this misfortune’. Margaret Poulteney was felt to have behaved particularly badly because she had tricked Ralph’s wife Mary into buying her a form of trousseau – a black taffeta waistcoat and petticoat trimmed with handsome lace – and delivering Margaret’s favourite red damask petticoat and waistcoat from Claydon. Margaret used the excuse that she needed a new outfit for a christening. Instead she rushed off with her finery to meet William Eure on his way back from Scotland, where he had been serving in the King’s Army.

To all these reproaches Margaret, now Mrs Eure, had an irrefutable as well as disdainful reply: ‘The town makes havoc of my good name, but let them do their worst, I defy them all. None in the world can call me to account for my actions; for I am not in any one’s tuition.’³⁰

By the 1670s The Ladies Calling was trying to get round this awkward possibility by suggesting that God did not set the same value upon their being ‘masterless’ as some over-independent widows did: ‘He [God] reckons them most miserable when they are most at liberty.’³¹ This last shot was presumably mere conjecture on the part of the Anglican divine who wrote The Ladies Calling; the feelings of the widows themselves, which can be established with more certainty, were very different. Liberty, if accompanied by affluence, could be very sweet.

Lady Anne Twysden was a widow with two fine houses, one in London and the other at East Peckham, Kent. In her youth she had been a beauty, tall but very slender. Her own son, Sir Roger Twysden, paid this tribute to her: ‘She was the handsomest woman (at least as handsome) as I ever saw’, with ‘skin exceeding fair’ and ‘light brown hair’. After forty, although she continued to look young for her age, ‘fatness’ was ‘much trouble to her’.³² Despite this hampering weight, ill-health generally and a lame foot where she had been dropped by her nurse as a child, Lady Anne ruled her domains with a rod of iron. Endowed with an excellent business brain, aided by a fluent epistolary style (and that female rarity, good handwriting), Lady Anne Twysden hardly accorded with the prevalent notion of woman as the helpless sex. At the time of the ship-money crisis in the 1630s, Lady Anne at one juncture had the courage to refuse to pay the tax – a development which deeply worried her son on her behalf, but which he could not affect.

Even though she was physically unable to move about the house, somehow Lady Anne, according to her son, managed to know ‘every egg spent in it’. Her thriftiness was combined with a chastity, one might almost say, prudery, which prevented her from being alone with a man – even her own son when grown up – without a maid present. Thrifty and prudish as she might be, Lady Anne was also, wrote Sir Roger, ‘full of motherly affection’.³³ She must have been warm-hearted, for she managed to make herself beloved to those around her, including the young gentlewomen of little fortune whom she employed as attendants (no doubt to report on the egg-spending).

One of these, the thirty-year-old Isabella Saunders, was finally selected by Lady Anne as a bride for Sir Roger, still a bachelor at the advanced age of thirty-seven. Isabella tended her mother-in-law with devotion and wept copiously at her deathbed in 1638, although after her marriage it was still Lady Anne, not the new Lady Twysden (generally termed Dame Isabella, perhaps to differentiate her), who ran Roydon Hall. Sir Roger Twysden’s notebooks also leave us an exact record of the financial restraint which Lady Anne imposed upon him under the heading ‘Reckonings between me and my mother’; as for example, ‘The 6th July 1629 I owed her £46.12.10. pd her £20. 20 July and pd. her £40. 10 Sept and told her where she cd have another £100 in London.’³⁴

The reason that Lady Anne Twysden was able to exercise such command over every aspect of life surrounding her, including the life of her son, was simple. It was not connected with her beauty, motherly affection, or even her thriftiness. It was because Anne Twysden had been born Lady Anne Finch, another member of that large Kentish family to which Sir Heneage Finch belonged. Her mother was the heiress Elizabeth Heneage, ‘a Lady of great Fortune; and having a mind suitable to it’,³⁵ who married Sir Moyle Finch and after his death was created Viscountess Maidstone and Countess of Winchilsea in her own right as a mark of her status. Anne Finch’s husband, Sir William Twysden, died in 1629. After that, as a widow with an unencumbered estate, Lady Anne Twysden was able to enjoy personally that very fortune which she had brought to her husband on marriage.

Lady Anne Clifford, like Anne Twysden, was an heiress, but on a vastly grander scale. She was born in 1590 but true happiness only came to her late in life in her role as a magnificent widow, mother and grandmother, one of whom V. Sackville-West, the editor of her autobiography, aptly wrote that she was ‘born to matriarchy’. After Anne Clifford’s first marriage to Richard Sackville, Earl of Dorset, in 1609, Emilia Lanier serenaded her as

However, much of life with ‘honourable Dorset’ turned out to be torment for his young wife.

Her role as chatelaine of the historical Sackville palace at Knole was often invidious since Lord Dorset was openly unfaithful – even bringing his inamorata Lady Penistone – ‘a dainty fine young lady’ – to stay at Knole. Almost worse from Anne’s point of view was the fact that Dorset refused to support her in her struggle to claim her own northern inheritance from her father’s brother (since the estates had been entailed in her father’s will on a child of either sex). Lord Dorset wanted to commute these rights for cash; his wife wanted to cling to the lands. Most people blamed her for her obstinacy and at one point during the row her son was removed from her care. Anne described herself in her autobiography as being ‘like an owl in the desert’; while Lord Dorset went to ‘Cocking, to Bowling Alleys, to Plays and Horse Races … I stayed in the country having many times a sorrowful and heavy heart, and being condemned by most folks because I would not consent to the agreements.’³⁷

Death removed Lord Dorset in 1624, but Lady Anne Clifford’s second marriage, in 1630, to Philip Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, owner of sumptuous Wilton House near Salisbury, was no happier. Notorious for his rough ways in youth, Lord Pembroke sided with Parliament in later life – possibly to secure his possessions – and was much pilloried by the Royalist pamphleteers in consequence. Fortunately – from Anne’s point of view – his death in 1649 left her a widow for the second time. From now until her own demise nearly thirty years later at the age of eighty-six, she was able to enjoy not only the fruits of two rich jointures, but also those northern properties she had so much desired, released to her at last by the death of her uncle.

‘The marble pillars of Knole in Kent and Wilton in Wiltshire were to me oftentimes but the gay arbours of anguish’, wrote Anne of her two marriages. How different, how formidably different was the life of the Dowager Countess! Clad usually in black serge, ‘her features more expressive of firmness than benignity’, as a nineteenth-century local historian tactfully expressed it after studying her portraits, ‘the Lady Anne’, as she is still remembered in the north, gave full vent to all her tastes in a way she could never do throughout two unhappy marriages.³⁸ Her two surviving children being daughters, by her first marriage, they offered no impediments to her will.

These tastes included the restoration of ancient castles and chapels, part of her inheritance, on which it has been estimated that she must have spent at least £40,000. ‘The Lady Anne’ also took particular pleasure in raising monuments in stone: among others she was responsible for the classical monument to the poet Spenser in Westminster Abbey executed by Nicholas Stone, and a medieval type of altar tomb to her own mother which can still be seen in the Church of St Lawrence, Appleby, in Cumbria, alongside the monument which she erected to herself. John Donne had paid tribute to her conversation in youth: she was a woman who ‘knew well how to discourse of all things, from predestination to flea-silk [a plant], a wonderful housekeeper who could still open her mouth with wisdom’. In later life the Lady Anne shared the conversational gifts which had so much impressed Donne with those poorer widows whom she had installed in a residence at Appleby in Westmorland; she made a point of dining with them once a week and talking as freely ‘as with persons of the highest rank’.³⁹

The Lady Anne was a great reader; as she grew old, she kept two ‘Well-educated females’ constantly at her side to read aloud. The Psalms and the Old Testament were favourites, but she also enjoyed classical authors and had a particular love of Chaucer. When engrossed in his works, she wrote, ‘a little part of his bounteous spirit infuses itself into me’. Bounteous she certainly was, and not only in spirit. She made the giving of presents her hobby, buying books of devotion, for example, in bulk – up to fifty at a time – to give away. And she was a prodigious tipper: £3 to a man who brought her a letter from her daughter, a sum which represented something like the man’s annual wage. Even if her autobiography gained a good deal from the work of certain literary ghosts,⁴⁰ that in itself was a form of patronage which few women of the time other than a very rich widow could have exercised.

Even for the less privileged, widows’ rights were one area where the law was by no means so unfavourable to women as it was elsewhere. For those outside the wealthier world of the marriage settlement made in advance of the ceremony, there existed the traditional widow’s ‘thirds’, that is, a third share in the husband’s estate which under common law was her due.⁴¹ A widow’s inheritance could take many different forms, some of which could enable her to make a convenient second marriage on her own terms if she so wished, while others allowed her a position of her own in commercial society.

In cases of trouble a widow’s dower lands were protected if the late husband’s creditors fell upon the rest of the estate. These lands could only be forfeited by the widow voluntarily. There were other perquisites: Alice Thornton, dealing with her husband’s virtually bankrupted estate, was advised by her brother to cling on to her valuable ‘widow-bed’ instead of selling it to pay the debts. Unlike the beds left to her by her mother, which formed part of her estate – and thus part of her husband’s – and so could be ‘prized’ away by creditors, the ‘widow-bed’ could not be touched.⁴²

Manorial court rolls show that it was customary for a widow of a copyhold tenant to remain in occupation of his land until she remarried or died – this was called her ‘widow’s estate’.⁴³ As a new grant of a piece of copyhold land was customarily made for three lives, the widow of the first named – if she did not remarry – might survive the other two. (The fact that remarriage meant loss of the copyhold kept many widows from remarrying.) But women were also copyhold tenants in their own right in some of those manorial court rolls that have survived from the seventeenth century: thus one Henry Hellier put his wife and son’s name into the copy in 1626 – a demonstration of equality. This meant that Anne Hellier could enjoy the copy after her second marriage.

Certain corporations of the period still recognized the wife’s position as a business partner (even if that recognition was dwindling as the century progressed).⁴⁴ In contrast to unmarried girls who were rarely allowed to be apprenticed to the guilds, the wives of guild members could have their husbands’ rights and privileges conferred upon them: as widows, they were thus often in a position to run the business, for the assistance of a journeyman still meant that the widow was in practical control. Carpenters’ widows, for example, could receive apprentices. Weavers’ widows were especially well treated, being able to continue to work in their own right. After the Restoration, when many similar privileges were vanishing, Charles II still upheld the rights of the weaver’s widow by decree ‘to use and occupy the said trade by herself’.

Widows’ names appear in the contracts of the shipping trade: in 1636 Susanna Angell and her daughter Elizabeth petitioned to land fourteen barrels of powder, and another thirty-eight barrels expected to arrive in the ship Fortune, and either sell it or send it back to Holland, from whence it came. In Tom of all Trades, published in 1631, Thomas Powell recommended young men not to seek employment in the provision businesses which he termed ‘the housewives’ trades (as brewer, baker, cook and the like)’ because the wife so often acted as her husband’s business partner. Where the wife had demonstrably shared the work during the husband’s lifetime, her position was often entrenched on his death. The names are known of brewers’ widows, bakers’ widows, and butchers’ widows still plying the family trade (not all, one hopes, of the type of Elizabeth Chorlton, who was fined in the 1650s for selling ‘stinking meat’). A widow could even be a vintner, if she inherited the business, an unlikely opportunity for a woman on her own account.⁴⁵

Strongest of all was the position of the printers’ widows. Membership of the Stationers’ Company, which included booksellers, binders and printers, was strictly limited to twenty-two persons. Widows actually retained their freedom of the Stationers’ Company not only after their husband’s death, but following remarriage. In this way a printer’s widow presented an eligible match for an aspirant printer, printers’ businesses frequently travelling sideways in this manner, as when the widow of Francis Simson married in turn Richard Read and George Elde, carrying the vital membership of the Stationers’ Company with her.⁴⁶

These energetic women were certainly not carrying out the ideal of the widow’s conduct proposed by Richard Brathwaite in The English Gentlewoman: ‘Again, are you widows? You deserve much honour, if you be so indeed … Great difference then is there betwixt those widows who live alone, and retire themselves from public concourse, and those which frequent the company of men. For a widow to love society … gives speedy wings to spreading infamy … for in such meetings she exposeth her honour to danger, which above all others she ought incomparably to tender.’ What if a widow needed to plead in a law court for her inheritance, family fortunes which might ‘all lie a-bleeding’? Here widows were simply reminded of the promises of Christ: ‘Your Lord maketh intercession for you, rendering right judgement to the orphan and righteousness unto the widow.’⁴⁷

The women described in this chapter would have preferred to take Christ’s parable of the importunate widow as their text; which advocated a far less passive code of behaviour.