CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Worldly Goods

On the eve of the Restoration, Pen, Sir Ralph Verney’s second sister, wrote: ‘I pray God send we may live to see peace in our times and that friends may live to enjoy each other.’ Pen had been one of that melancholy galaxy of unmarried Verney girls who remained at Claydon while Ralph went into exile, their portions caught up in the legal tangles caused by their father’s death in the King’s cause. For such dowerless young ladies, there were no brilliant matches available: it was more a case of ‘thank heaven, fasting, for a good man’s love’¹ – or any man’s hand in marriage.

Sue Verney, for example, made do with a debt-ridden and drunken widower, spending her early married life at his side in the Fleet prison. Despite this, Sue loved her designated spouse most sincerely during their few years together, before she died in childbirth. Peg Verney was married off to Thomas Elmes – described as ‘a very humoursome cross boy’ who was soon to make her cry ‘night and day’. Peg’s own temper was not of the sweetest, and ultimately this cross-grained couple separated. Pen Verney, she who had quarrelled with Peg when asked to share a personal maid as an economy, drew her cousin John Denton; the best that could be said of him was that he had stopped drinking … But Pen was in no position to be critical. ‘Sir, she was sensible her portion lay in a desperate condition,’ wrote her brother Henry to Sir Ralph, ‘besides, she grew in years and was not to all men’s likings’.²

That left Moll and Betty. Moll was said to be ‘the plainest of them all’, but blessed – or cursed – with ‘a great deal of wit’; in addition she was ‘wild as a buck’ and thus ‘too indiscreet to get a discreet man’. Moll, refusing the offer of an elderly bridegroom, ultimately made a disastrous match with one Robert Lloyd. (She was probably pregnant beforehand, for there was talk of shipping her to Ireland or even Barbados to avoid disgrace.) As for Betty, she was variously described as ‘of a cross proud lazy disposition’ and ‘so strangely in love with her own will’ that she loathed all efforts made on her behalf.³ She was undeniably too cross and wilful for anyone who knew her to be willing to take her.

In 1662 cross-patch Betty bestowed herself privately upon a poverty-stricken curate named Charles Adams out of sheer despair. She had met him when he was preaching at church; none of her relations were asked to the marriage. Betty angrily rebutted charges that she had thrown herself away: ‘I am not so much lost, as some think I am, because I have married one as has the reputation of an honest man, and one as in time I may live comfortably with.’ All the same it was Betty’s family which was faced with the problem of the Adamses’ livelihood; meanwhile Betty managed to blame them not only for her present poverty but for almost everything that had happened to her since childhood. Her sister Peg Elmes wrote: ‘Sometimes I am weary of hearing it, how she was cast off and forsaken and left to herself… sent to a person’s house to a school, like a baby.’ Dr Denton referred to Charles Adams and Betty as ‘Adam and Eve’ in search of a living; it was not intended as a compliment. Only Betty’s most charitable sister Cary Gardiner reflected that there were other examples of ladies marrying clergymen … Lady Mary Bertie for example.⁴

The mingled sulks and despair of Betty Verney on the subject of marriage highlighted one problem of post-Restoration society: it was even more difficult for an ill-endowed girl to find a husband than it had been before the Civil War. And in cases where the possibility of a good dowry did exist, more not less money was required from the father in return for an adequate widow’s jointure. It has been pointed out that the average ratio of dowry (given by the father) to jointure (settled on the girl by the bridegroom’s family) rose from 4 or 5 to 1 in the middle of the sixteenth century to between 8 and 10 to 1 by the end of the seventeenth.⁵

The troubles of a gently-raised female at this period might be twofold. On the one hand her own portion was liable to have suffered from the effects of sequestration, confiscation and so forth like that of the Verney girls. Many different kinds of ruin had been brought upon families during the recent conflicts which made it difficult to provide a dowry for an unmarried daughter. At the same time these same families, or their equivalents, might well hope to remedy their fortunes by the time-honoured manoeuvre of capturing an heiress. But in this respect the daughters of the aristocracy and gentry were now meeting with what might be described as unfair competition from those richly-cargoed vessels, daughters of the City merchants.

Such brides could bring their husbands large and welcome amounts of cash. Few gentlemen’s daughters could compete with this. ‘Ours are commodities lying on our hands,’ wrote Sir William Morrice of his daughters shortly after the Restoration, while ‘merchants’ daughters that weigh so many thousands’ were sought out in marriage in their place. Sir William Temple blamed the first noble families ‘that married into the City for downright money’ for introducing ‘this public grievance’ by which the level of portions was raised all round, and landowners with many daughters were ruined. By the end of the century the agreeable whiff of good City money was to be detected in the grandest homes: the Widow Wheeler, she of the goldsmith’s shop at the sign of the Marygold who married her husband’s apprentice Robert Blanchard, would number the Earls of Jersey and Westmoreland among her descendants; in 1682 the prudent marriage of the Marquess of Worcester with a Miss Rebecca Child, aged sixteen, daughter of the East India merchant Sir Josiah Child, secured at least £25,000 for the future ducal house of Beaufort.⁶

But if the young gentlemen were prepared to sacrifice birth for the sake of wealth – and the evidence shows that such marriages across classes were on the increase – their impoverished sisters were by tradition inhibited from making the same social leap. Although Lady Sandwich, wife of Pepys’s patron, declared herself happy to settle for ‘a good Merchant’ for her daughter Jemima in October 1660, Lord Sandwich retorted that he would rather see her ‘with a pedlar’s pack on her back’ so long as she married a gentleman rather than ‘a citizen’. So the numbers of such girls’ potential bridegrooms diminished, and the number of unmarried females of this class rose with the century.⁷

There was a further dismal element in the growing excess of women over men in the population as a whole. At the end of the seventeenth century Gregory King stated that women outnumbered men by a ratio of 28 to 27 (on his figures there were 100,000 more females than males in England and Wales as a whole). In 1662 John Graunt, in ‘Natural and Political Observations … made upon the bills of mortality’, had noted that more males were born than females every year, and as a result ‘every woman may have an Husband, without the allowance of Polygamy’, notwithstanding the fact that men lived more dangerously than women, travelled more and adopted professions which demanded celibacy (such as Fellows of university colleges).⁸

Graunt was too optimistic. As Gregory King expressed it, the excess of males born annually – 7,000 – was ‘not much more than equal to the males carried off extraordinary by wars, the sea and the Plantations in which articles the females are very little concerned’; while females in general enjoyed a greater life expectancy. A pamphlet of 1690, Marriage Promoted in a Discourse of its Ancient and Modern Practice, thought the neglect of marriage threatened the destruction of ‘these Nations’. Nearly half the people of England were dying single and a third of the others marrying far too late: men should be obliged to marry at twenty-one.⁹

All this put a further premium on an heiress. Marriages were no more constructed on a basis of pure affection after the Restoration than they had been before the Civil War. During that wild period of the Commonwealth the Digger Gerrard Winstanley had actually declared that every man and woman should be free to marry whom they loved, with ‘the Common Storehouses’ as their portion:¹⁰ such sentiments expressed exactly that kind of frightening radicalism which the post-Restoration world was anxious to eliminate from its memory. Nobody now believed – if anybody ever had – in ‘the Common Storehouses’ or in free liberty to marry for love.

In 1664 King Charles II wrote one of his racy, chatty letters about the scene at the English court to his sister in France: ‘I find the passion Love is very much out of fashion in this country, and that a handsome face without money has but few gallants, upon the score of marriage.’ At about the same date the Comte de Gramont, according to Anthony Hamilton, author of his Memoirs, was given a lecture on his arrival in England. ‘Young women here expect serious intentions and a husband with landed property,’ the exiled French writer Saint-Evremond told him sternly. You have neither.’ He also warned Gramont that it would be a ‘miracle’ if any gallant proposition he made (other than that of matrimony itself) was considered.¹¹

In the 1630s a cruel rhyme had celebrated the marriage of the rich but plain daughter of a Lord Chief Justice to John Lisle:

Half a century later, Anne Killigrew, that sensitive observer of a materialist court, bewailed exactly the same situation in her Invective against Gold:

The difference was the rise of a weariness, a cynicism on the subject; that too perhaps a legacy of the Civil War and Commonwealth period when some kind of liberty had been enjoyed simply through lack of parental supervision. As a result, the state of marriage was mocked as though by universal agreement, especially in literature. (The English young ladies, married off according to wordly principles, also proved very much more susceptible to illicit offers of ‘gallantry’ than Saint-Evremond had predicted to the Comte de Gramont, the Comte himself experiencing quite a few of these delightful ‘miracles’.)

‘I rather fear you wou’d debauch me into that dull slave call’d a Wife,’ observed Cornelia to Galliard in Aphra Behn’s The Feign’d Curtezans. Another of Aphra Behn’s spirited heroines, Hellena in The Rover, was equally forthright on the tedium of matrimony: ‘What shall I get? A Cradle full of Noise and Mischief, with a Pack of Repentance at my Back.’ Nor was a more romantic attitude to be expected from the other party to the contract. Willmore, Hellena’s lover, responded for his own sex that marriage was as certain ‘a Bane to Love’ as lending money was to friendship. Keepwell, in Sir Charles Sedley’s Bellamira, about to be married to the eponymous heroine, resolved to avoid ‘the odious names of Man and Wife, In chains of Love alone we will be tied.’¹³

Yet few women looked to another fate. When Mrs Hobart, the oldest of the Maids of Honour to the Duchess of York, told a younger colleague, Anne Temple, that ‘compared to the inconveniences of marriage, its pleasures are so trifling that I don’t know how anybody can make up their minds to it’, she was aware that her views were not commonly held. It might be ‘the stupidest condition for a sensible woman which you can possibly conceive of’, but Mrs Hobart was the first to admit that all the Maids of Honour were in fact desperately keen to get married. Besides, Mrs Hobart was in the words of Anthony Hamilton ‘susceptible only to the charms of her own sex’. It was all very well for such a plain and sharp-tongued woman to die unmarried in 1696 at the age of sixty-three (the title of ‘Mrs’ being honorific); Anne Temple on the other hand fulfilled a more normal feminine ambition for all Mrs Hobart’s warnings, by marrying the middle-aged widower Sir Charles Lyttelton in 1666 and giving birth to thirteen children thereafter.¹⁴

It was, however, no coincidence that the two Verney girls who ended their lives most happily did so as wealthy widows – as we have seen, an enviable position throughout the century. Cary lived at court cheerful and well provided-for, following her happy second marriage to John Stewkeley of Hampshire. Thus were memories of her early humiliation at the hands of her first husband’s family expunged by a life of good-natured and worldly ease in middle age. What troubles she had were caused by her passion for gambling, something which possessed many court ladies at the time.¹⁵

As for Pen, married life with John Denton scarcely seemed to justify the argument that any husband was better than none when one was growing older and ‘not to all men’s likings’. He too, like Sue’s husband, was debt-ridden and imprisoned for it. He also had a vicious streak: Dr Denton referred to him as Pen’s ‘brute of a husband’ who was apt to ‘lay her at his feet’ with his blows. After John Denton’s death, however, Pen made a far more satisfactory match to the elderly Sir John Osborn, finding to her surprise that by her settlement she was now worth £6,000. ‘I fear her good fortune will make all old women marry!’ exclaimed Cary. When Sir John died in his turn, Pen was able to enjoy twenty good years at Whitehall, housekeeping for her brother and gossiping and playing cards with a series of aristocratic female cronies. She also used her position to boss about her Stewkeley nieces, Cary’s daughters, in a way which added to her general enjoyment, if not to theirs.

In old age Pen boasted that she had lived her ‘Laborious life’ entirely to ‘make a fine show to the world,’ never wasting one shilling to give herself pleasure. She died in 1695 at the age of seventy-three. Her will certainly made a fine show, for she left a series of bequests to those grand ladies whose company she had so much appreciated, so that it reads like some roll-call of the peerage: ‘The Countess of Lindsay to have a silver scallop cup and grater, the Countess of Plymouth a serpentine cup with a silver cover, the Countess of Carnarvon a Silver Toaster to toast bread on’ and so forth, and so on.¹⁶

In one sense the climate of the times had changed after the Restoration: parents in general no longer believed in exercising absolute authority over their children in the making of a match, however unwelcome. The ideal union was now one arranged by the parents to which the young couple concerned were consenting. Such an attitude was however very far from representing a new endorsement of that tender passion of love, generally condemned before the Civil War. It was quite simply practical: most sensible people had come to the conclusion that marriages forged on the anvil of agreement caused far less trouble to society in the long run; as Margaret Duchess of Newcastle put it, no one should marry ‘against their own liking’ because it led directly to adultery.¹⁷

The pre-war Puritan handbooks of domestic conduct had first pointed out this fact (so obvious to us now, so revolutionary then). As the years passed, the aristocratic fathers too softened: in 1650 Algernon, tenth Earl of Northumberland wrote of the projected marriage of his daughter to the son of Lord Grey of Wark that he would never use ‘the authority of a father’ to press his children ‘to anything of this kind’; however ‘if she likes the man’, the parents on both sides were in agreement.¹⁸ (Lord Northumberland’s enlightened attitude proved a boon to his daughter, for this was the melancholy youth whose mind was distracted, as witness the fact that he had fallen in love with his mother’s chambermaid.) Twenty years earlier his father, the ninth Earl, had flashed fiery words when Algernon, then Lord Percy, had defied him to marry Lady Anne Cecil (see p.32).

In 1673 the most influential book on domestic conduct published after the Restoration – The Ladies Calling, the work of a divine named Richard Allestree – summed up the prevailing view as follows: ‘As a daughter is neither to anticipate, nor to contradict the will of her Parent, so (to hang the balance even) I must say she is not obliged to force her own, by marrying where she cannot love; for a negative voice in the case is sure as much the Child’s right, as the Parents’. ’Allestree even went so far as to say that it would be sacrilege for a maiden to make a vow of marriage where she hated. This was the principle to which Mary Countess of Warwick adhered, when arranging a match for her husband’s orphaned niece Lady Essex Rich: having rejected certain suitors in advance for not being sufficiently ‘viceless’, Lady Warwick then allowed Lady Essex ‘her free choice or not, to do as she liked or disliked’ out of those she had already vetted. (The consequent match with Daniel Finch was, as we have seen on p.64 extremely happy, but was cut short by Lady Essex’s premature death.)¹⁹

In the 1670s it was the dearest wish of the childless Sir John Brownlow of Belton that his nephew and heir should marry his wife’s niece Alice Sherard, a girl who was trained by her in household matters and whom she had virtually adopted.²⁰ Nevertheless in the codicil to his will Sir John was careful to make it clear that this pet plan should only be carried out if the young couple ‘shall affect one the other’ – there was to be no duress. In the event, eight months after this will was written, the couple did marry. Although Alice was only sixteen and her bridegroom was dispatched probably on the same day, to his studies at Cambridge, the foundations had been laid for a stable dynastic union, to the satisfaction of all parties, old and young.

What would have happened to Alice Sherard if she had declined the honour of being chatelaine of Belton, for which she had been carefully groomed by her aunt? Nothing drastic certainly; but Sir John Brownlow’s codicil also stated: ‘if the said Alice Sherard shall dislike the said Match and by any refusal on her part the said Match shall not take place then this legacy to be void’ – the legacy in question being 1,000 pieces of gold in a special box marked with the initials A.S.

That was the point. In the language of Hannah Woolley in The Gentlewomans Companion, published the same year as Sir John Brownlow’s will was made, nothing, not ‘affluence of estate, potency of friends, nor highness of descent’ could make up for ‘the insufferable grief of a loathéd bed’.²¹ That might be so; but money, connections and birth were still the values which prevailed in the marriage market. While many parents had come to agree with Hannah Woolley both in principle and in practice about the need for consent, nobody seriously thought of substituting different values where the initial selection of partners was concerned.

Over children too, the theoretical authority of the parent remained intact in the second half of the century even if custom asked that it should be exercised more kindly. There was a pretty to-do in May 1667 when the eligible young Viscount Maidstone, heir to the third Earl of Winchilsea, was secretly married off at the age of fourteen to one Elizabeth Windham, without his father’s knowledge, let alone his permission.²² The whole affair sounded extremely dubious – at least to the ears of the outraged Earl of Winchilsea, then absent on a diplomatic mission in Belgrade. The boy had lived in the same house as his bride for some time while at Cambridge, and was encouraged by her relations to make advances to her. Still, the young Lord kept his head sufficiently not to consummate the marriage after the ceremony (or else was too frightened of his father to confess it). Writing back to King Charles II in a state of righteous indignation on the subject, Lord Winchilsea passed on his boy’s account of the fateful afternoon: how he had been made drunk ‘by their putting of wine into his beer’ at the time of the marriage, but that as soon as the bride’s mother left the chamber ‘he ran out of the room’. Lord Winchilsea concluded triumphantly ‘Nor doth he know whether she [the bride] be a man or a woman.’

To the Earl of Clarendon, Lord Winchilsea summed the matter up: this ‘foulest piece of fraud and abuse’ would shock all parents who claimed a title in ‘the happy disposal of their children’. Still, a year later Lord Winchilsea had not succeeded in getting the marriage annulled. At some point the marriage was evidently consummated: Lord Maidstone died young, but left a posthumous son Charles behind him, the child of his Cambridge bride, who in time inherited his grandfather’s title to become the fourth Earl of Winchilsea. When the time came for this boy to be married in the 1690s his widowed mother, Elizabeth Viscountess Maidstone, wrote a careful letter to his guardian Lord Nottingham about the possible choices: ‘He has seen both these ladies and thinks them very beautiful, but if we were permitted to make choice, your Lordship knows our first desire …’ Lord Nottingham’s eventual choice of Sarah Nourse, an heiress worth £30,000 in money and land, as the bride was acceptable to Lady Maidstone not only for financial reasons but also because ‘My son has seen the lady and likes her very well.’ Unlike the earlier Maidstone match, therefore, which had flouted the conventions, this projected union had everything to be said for it by the standards of the time.

In 1701 The Athenian Oracle, one of the early magazines for answering young ladies’ queries, came down firmly on the side of parental authority. The questioner had vowed to leave her father and mother as soon as possible because they treated her so unkindly, and an opportunity presenting itself, wondered which obligation came first, her vow or her duty to her parents. The answer came back: ‘Your Vow does not oblige you, for your Body is the Goods of your Father, and you can’t lawfully dispose of your self without his knowledge and consent, so that you ought to beg God Almighty’s Pardon for your Rashness’ (in making the vow in the first place).²³

Similarly the wife’s legal position remained humble, as it had been at the beginning of the century. In the categorical words of John Evelyn to Margaret Godolphin on the subject: ‘marriage entities [the husband] to your person, and to all you bring with it of worldly goods, and he can do with it what he pleases without your consent’.²⁴ (The exception to this, already noted, was the development of the concept of the trust in Chancery, which if held for an heiress could not be swallowed up in the husband’s property – see p.14; but this of course only applied to a tiny percentage of women.)

The wedding of Lucy Pelham and Gervase Pierrepont at East Hoathly in Sussex in March 1680 celebrated a match made very much in this world; as a result it was not a very cheerful affair. The choice of Halland, the ancient seat of the Pelhams, was dictated by a mixture of economy and family pride. The bride’s mother would have preferred the fun of a jaunt to London, but Sir John Pelham ‘thought it would be more expense, and not handsome because of his great relations’.²⁵

Gervase Pierrepont himself represented no maiden’s dream. The bride’s aunt was the former Dorothy Sidney, now styled Dowager Countess of Sunderland (her second marriage to Sir Robert Smythe was conveniently swallowed up in the senior title). Lady Sunderland wrote tardy: ‘He is not a pleasant man – very few are; neither is [he] the very next sort for entertainment.’ The high point of the ceremony was that moment when the groom, by tradition, placed a purse upon the prayer book to accompany his vow: ‘With all my worldly goods I thee endow.’ A few years earlier at court the young William of Orange had deposited his own little heap of symbolic gold when wedding his cousin Princess Mary of York. King Charles II, the bride’s uncle, had been in a merry mood and had commanded the fifteen-year-old Mary: ‘Take it up, take it up. It’s all clear gain to you.’ In this case the congregation at East Hoathly was enchanted to see that Mr Pierrepont put down a purse containing 200 guineas! As Lady Sunderland commented: ‘Everybody puts somewhat, but this is the most I have heard.’²⁶

Whether this large sum was all clear gain to the new Mrs Pierrepont depends on one’s attitude to that other sort of price she had to pay for it. At the time, commented Dorothy, she seemed pleased enough by events: ‘but she loves more compliments and mirth than she will ever find. I prepared her, as well as I could, not to expect it …’²⁷

Lucy Pelham, one of the two daughters of Lady Lucy Sidney by her marriage to Sir John Pelham, a Member of many successive Parliaments, was born beneath that glittering net of aristocratic family relationships which spangled English society after the Restoration and onwards. When the time came for Lucy herself to be woven into this net by means of marriage the negotiations were entrusted to her mother’s sister Dorothy – since both Pelhams were kept in the country, the one by inclination and gout, and the other by illness alone.

Dorothy Sunderland’s life had changed. Gone was the delicious magic of her youth which had led the poet Waller to make her his Sacharissa. Robert Earl of Sunderland, the ambitious rising politician, and his clever wife Anne, reigned at Althorp. Dorothy Sunderland was now in her sixties, living as she put it ‘in twilight’ in a little house in Whitehall. Gone too were the days when her own daughter Dorothy Spencer had reigned at Rufford in Lancashire as wife of Lord Halifax. Dorothy Spencer had died in 1670 and two years later Lord Halifax took Gertrude Pierrepont as his second wife. (Betty, for whom he wrote the famous Advice to a Daughter, was the fruit of this second union.) There is a story that Dorothy in these latter days asked Waller when he would write some more poetry for her. The poet is said to have replied: ‘When you are as young again, Madam, and as handsome as you were then.’ If true, the sourness was all on Waller’s side – his poetry had gone sadly out of fashion. Dorothy, who described herself lightly as ‘the poor old dolt in the corner’ can hardly have been much put out by the rebuff; her correspondence shows that her humour and common sense remained pristine, with her Halifax grandchildren, Nan Savile in particular, close to her, and her friendship with their father uninterrupted despite his second marriage.²⁸ Indeed, far from living ‘in twilight’ Dorothy the Dowager Countess acted as the secret matriarch of this golden world, reconciling in herself the political differences which existed between its various members.

Romantic figure as she may have been in the past, Dorothy in old age displayed a brisk attitude to the whole subject of marriage. The selected bridegroom was a grandson of the Earl of Kingston and a first cousin of Halifax’s second wife. Even more to the point was the fact that Gervase Pierrepont was rich. Apart from that, frankly there does not seem to have been much to say for him; and it is significant that Dorothy did not try to say it.

She wrote approvingly of Pierrepont’s ‘good fortune’ – £200 a year and £5,000 more in ‘money’ – besides which there was an aunt of seventy in the offing, from whom more was expected, one who was conveniently suffering from a quartan ague. As to the rest: ‘One finds that he does not talk … another finds fault with his person who have little reason, God knows, to meddle with that.’ In Dorothy’s own opinion ‘the worst of him is his complexion, and the small-pox is not out of his face yet; he had them but eight months ago.’ His person was certainly not ‘taking’. On another occasion she wrote even more straightforwardly that it was ‘ugly’. Nor was this wealthy pock-marked Beast endowed with the kind of sparkling wit which would make up to Beauty for his appearance. He was ‘well enough dressed and behaved’, said Dorothy, but ‘of few words’, otherwise ‘very bashful’, certainly too bashful to speak to strangers. Nevertheless Dorothy was optimistic about the success of the match. After all Mr Pierrepont was no more ill-favoured than Edward Montagu, Lucy Pelham’s sister’s bridegroom; ‘and his wife kisses him all day, and calls him her pretty dear’.²⁹

What was Lucy Pelham’s reaction to all this? Dorothy, who had a special fondness for her Pelham nieces, made it clear that she had no wish to ruin Lucy’s life for the sake of a good fortune: ‘I desired her to tell me if she had any distaste to him, and I would order it so it should not go on, and her father should not be angry with her. But,’ Dorothy added, ‘she is wiser than to refuse it.’

Nor did Lucy refuse the match negotiated by her clever aunt – which included a splendid jointure for the widow after her husband’s death: ‘I demanded a thousand a year and his London house and I have got it’, wrote Dorothy triumphantly. The girl’s father would never have thought of asking for the house as well: ‘but a very pretty house so furnished as that will be very considerable to a woman’. Then there were six coach-horses to be bought, with Lady Halifax, Mr Pierrepont’s cousin, to choose the coach. Lucy was to have her own page as well. In return the bride’s father engaged to give a dowry in a ratio of 7 to 1 to the jointure: £7,000 pounds, £1,000 of which was payable on his death. Even Lucy’s brother Tom, who disapproved of some of the financial clauses, admitted that his sister needed ‘no persuasion’ to marry Mr Pierrepont; although it should perhaps be mentioned, as an example of Dorothy Sunderland’s famous wisdom, that she did not allow the pock-marked Mr Pierrepont to call on his future bride until her father had come to town to complete the arrangements.³⁰

The only hitch which occurred concerned high politics, not the humble affections. It was unfortunate that the marriage negotiations, in early 1680, were taking place at a time of mounting tension over the possible ‘Exclusion’ of the Catholic Duke of York from the royal succession. In a complicated situation, Robert Earl of Sunderland and Lord Halifax represented roughly speaking, rival political views. Sunderland naturally raised his eyebrows at the thought of his kinswoman marrying into the Halifax set. From the other point of view, Lucy’s brother Tom Pelham, who had ranged himself far more violently against the King than the moderate Halifax, found the marriage equally unwelcome.

However, Dorothy Sunderland’s granddaughter Nan Savile was said to be ‘very comical’ about the whole business, dangling invitations to Rufford before Mr Pierrepont’s eyes.³¹ Somehow all this was smoothed over, perhaps because Dorothy Sunderland’s own political sympathies lay with her erstwhile son-in-law Halifax. Finally the wedding was allowed to take place.

At first Lucy seems to have been most contented with her new life. She was a giddy young woman wrote her aunt, and ‘delighted with liberty and money’. Of Mr Pierrepont she said that he was as kind as she could desire, allowing her to have everything ‘to the uttermost of his fortune’, and begging her to buy whatever plate or furniture she wanted, and he would pay for it. Dorothy was not quite as happy about all this extravagance as her earlier matchmaking might have indicated. She intended to advise her niece not to abuse her husband’s generosity, for his grand relations would not think well of her if she proved herself too ‘expensive’. She was also surprised – ‘Pierrepont blood’ not being famous for its open-handedness. Altogether it was a worrying situation, with Lucy ‘a little too free and too merry in appearance’, and Mr Pierrepont in contrast very grave and lacking altogether in self-confidence; he had ‘an ill opinion of his own opinion’, wrote Dorothy.³²

Alas, poor Lucy. Mr Pierrepont, for all his wealth, was but a gilded sepulchre. By June, only a few months after the marriage, Dorothy feared that he would not prove a good husband. He was fond enough of his wife, but ‘so unquiet in the house’: that is to say he meddled with everything in the kitchen, and interfered with the servants, abusing them to such an extent that they had wearied of their positions and were all leaving. For his part, Mr Pierrepont was threatening to sack Lucy’s personal maid, who had been overheard saying: ‘God bless her mistress, she would be glad never to see her master again.’ Above all, his Pierrepont blood had asserted itself and he was now very mean in everything that was not for show – so much for the visible splendours of the plate and furniture which Lucy had been encouraged to buy.

Lucy herself, according to Dorothy, was very depressed by this turn of events; still, she showed no signs of revolting against her fate. No great natural housekeeper, somewhat bewildered by that side of life, she was generally felt to have ‘a hard task’ coping with the demands of Mr Pierrepont. Yet she neither complained to nor confided in her aunt on the subject – rather to the latter’s annoyance. On the contrary: ‘she does observe him [Mr Pierrepont] as much as possible’. Dorothy added: ‘Severity not well understood has no bounds.’³³

Dorothy had originally been waspishly worried that this new ‘fond’ couple might take to kissing each other in public, and calling each other ‘pretty dear’ in the manner of Lucy’s sister Elizabeth and her unprepossessing husband Edward Montagu. If so, she had intended to exercise her authority over her niece to put an end to such tasteless public exhibitions. In fact, the Pierreponts’ married life was more reminiscent of the sad disgruntled marriages of late Restoration drama, that of Squire Sullen and Mrs Sullen in The Beaux’ Stratagem perhaps (‘O matrimony!’ cries Mrs Sullen, ‘Oh the pleasure of counting the melancholy clock by a snoring husband’);³⁴ except that the Pierreponts’ union was less colourful – no scandal smirched Lucy’s name. Her earlier giddiness and love of liberty was presumably extinguished by the strain of housekeeping for Mr Pierrepont. Her husband was created an Irish peer – Lord Pierrepont of Ardglass – in 1703, and Lord Pierrepont of Hanslope in Buckinghamshire, in 1714. But Lucy Pierrepont never had any children, so the titles died out on his death.

The story of Elizabeth Percy, that child known as ‘my lady Ogle’, if its dénouement was less tragic than that of Frances Coke, Lady Purbeck (see p.i 5ff), showed that the notion of the heiress had lost none of its power to lure in the intervening half-century. This was after all a venturesome – and mercenary – age in which the rumour of a girl’s fortune was enough to incite some coarse spirits to extraordinary acts of boldness.

There was that Cornet Wroth who, dining with Sir Robert Vyner at his country house, took the opportunity to carry off an heiress named Miss Hyde in a coach after dinner. When a wheel broke, the egregious Cornet was still not checked: he put the girl across his horse and got as far as the Putney ferry, where another coach-and-six awaited, before his pursuers finally caught up with him. The girl, speechless after her ordeal, was recovered; but Cornet Wroth escaped. In February 1680 the mere rumour that one of Lady Tirrell’s daughters possessed a considerable fortune was enough to encourage certain ‘robbers’ to break into her house in Buckinghamshire. The motive, it was explained afterwards, was not robbery at all, but the desire to lay hands on Miss Tirrell. One of the housebreakers, fearing not to be able to accomplish his design by ordinary means, ‘did endeavour to have carried her away under some crafty pretence and to have married her’.³⁵ Matters had not really progressed very far since the presumptuous Roger Fulwood abducted the schoolgirl Sara Cox from Newington Common in the reign of Charles I (see p.27).

The matrimonial affairs of ‘my lady Ogle’ were on an even more sensational level, owing to the particular combination of enormous wealth and high position in society. John Evelyn quoted a contemporary opinion: she was ‘one that both by birth and fortune might have pretended to the greatest prince in Christendom’. This child’s father was Joceline Percy, eleventh and last Earl of Northumberland of the ancient Percy creation. Her mother, Elizabeth Wriothesley, Countess of Northumberland – ‘a beautiful lady indeed,’ wrote Pepys goggling at her in court in 1667 – was seldom mentioned without some allusion to her celebrated looks.³⁶ Certainly Lely’s portrait of her among the Hampton Court beauties shows an angelic blonde docility; an impression borne out by the blameless quality of her personal life. A daughter of the Earl of Southampton by his second marriage, Lady Northumberland was one of the co-heiresses of the Southampton fortune with her step-sisters Rachel Lady Russell and Lady Noel. But through her mother, a Leigh, who had been the sole heiress of her father, the Earl of Chichester, Lady Northumberland was also extremely rich in her own right. Elizabeth Percy was her only surviving child.

At the death of the Earl of Northumberland in 1670, it was possible to see in Elizabeth Percy merely a little red-headed girl of three years old. More romantically, one could see in her ‘the last of the Percies’ (she inherited all those ancient resonant Percy baronies which could pass through the female line). It was also possible to envisage this small child as a prize to be captured. On the whole society took the latter view.

Still in her early twenties and quite apart from her beauty said to be worth £6,000 a year, Lady Northumberland was also now herself a natural target for a stream of suitors. In September 1671 bold Harry Savile found himself staying at Althorp at the same time as the lovely widow. Finding her door open, he entered in his nightgown, went right up to her bedside, and started to call ‘Madam! Madam!’ until Lady Northumberland awoke. He then acquainted her with the passion he had long nourished for her but had somehow been unable to confess in the hours of day-light. Lady Northumberland, in a fright, called her women, and Harry Savile was advised to leave Althorp as soon as possible. He did so, and subsequently went abroad rather than fight the duel which would have been proposed to avenge Lady Northumberland’s honour.³⁷

Thereafter the young Lady Northumberland resided chiefly in Paris, her valuable affections having been secured by Ralph Montagu, Charles II’s Ambassador to the French court, who married her three years after her first husband’s death. In 1696 Francis Viscount Shannon would dedicate the second edition of his Discourses and Essays, in which he strongly advocated against marrying for ‘mere love’, to Lady Northumberland, then keeping herself ‘in a kind of religious retirement’; but there seems to have been something of love implicit in the widow’s selection, for the unprincipled but fascinating Ralph Montagu had the knack of attracting the opposite sex. Ralph Montagu’s motives were more cynical and the marriage was not a very happy one, any more than Lady Northumberland enjoyed her sojourn in France. Here the tart wit of Madame de Sévigné found an ideal target in the appearance of this famous English beauty – her features were not good, she looked surprisingly old and careworn and in case her dress might be supposed to atone for these defects: ‘elle est avec cela mal habillée, point de grâce’.³⁸ One of Lady Northumberland’s problems abroad was not understanding the French language; one hopes that as a result she was at least spared knowledge of Madame de Sévigné’s chauvinist criticism.

Meanwhile at home the child Elizabeth Percy fell into the care of her strong-minded paternal grandmother, widow of Algernon, tenth Earl of Northumberland. (She was his second wife; Lady Anne Cecil, that bride he had insisted on marrying for love, had died in 1637). Indeed, old Lady Northumberland seized the opportunity of her daughter-in-law’s second marriage to insist that the marrying off of Elizabeth Percy was to be her, grandmother’s, sole concern.³⁹ The younger woman, being of a far gender character, made no exaggerated counter-claim but protested that it was very hard that her own child ‘should be disposed of without her consent’ – especially since Elizabeth Percy ‘if she had no other children must be her heir’. In the end some kind of accommodation was reached between the two Countesses of Northumberland on this important subject, by which the ladies both agreed not to marry off the girl without each other’s consent – and without her consent as well. (It was also incidentally agreed that Elizabeth Percy should not be married below the age of legal consent.)

Nevertheless it was the old Countess, a redoubtable and scheming character, who in effect won out, since she retained control of the girl in England. The first match she arranged, in 1679, when Elizabeth Percy was only twelve, had at least the merit of dynastic suitability: this was with the thirteen-year-old Lord Ogle, heir to the Duke of Newcastle. Immediately on marriage, he assumed the surname of Percy. Dorothy Countess of Sunderland, however, thought him ‘as ugly as anything young can be’.⁴⁰ Either for this or some more worldly reason connected with old Lady Northumberland’s intrigues and Elizabeth Percy’s tender age, her mother did not approve of the match. This led to a quarrel between young Lady Northumberland and the new Lady Ogle.

Rachel Lady Russell, Lady Northumberland’s wise step-sister, tried to effect a reconciliation between the two in a letter to her niece on the subject of her marriage: ‘You have my prayers and wishes, dear Lady Ogle, that it may prove as fortunate to you as ever it did to any and that you may know happiness to a good old age; but, Madam, I cannot think you can be completely so, with a misunderstanding between so near a relation as a mother …’ Lady Russell begged Lady Ogle to seek her mother’s pardon. After all Lady Northumberland’s advice had had but ‘one aim and end … your being happy’.⁴¹

But Lady Ogle did not enjoy happiness to a good old age, at least not just yet, and not with this bridegroom.

A few months later Lord Ogle died. What was to happen to ‘my Lady Ogle’ now? Rumours abounded, correspondence of the period avidly reported the latest supposed developments in her situation as though the fate of ‘my lady Ogle’ was some major matter of State. Everyone was talking ‘about Lord Ogle’s death and Lady Ogle’s position’.⁴²

The person soon selected for Lady Ogle by old Lady Northumberland was Thomas Thynne Esquire of Longleat Hall in Wiltshire, and some kind of contract between the two was signed. This produced consternation in more than one quarter. The match was not considered worthy of Lady Ogle by the world at large, she whose name had been coupled with a bridegroom as august as the Prince of Hanover. Nor was Mr Thynne himself a specially savoury character, having seduced another girl under promise of marriage, before abandoning her for the lure of Lady Ogle. Lord Essex, Lady Ogle’s uncle by marriage, believed that her grandmother had ‘betrayed’ her ‘for money’; the Earl of Kingston or Lord Cranborne (Lord Salisbury’s heir) would have been far more suitable.⁴³ Another unsavoury participant in the whole affair was the financier Richard Brett, who was rewarded by Thynne with valuable property for helping to bring about the ‘sale’ of Lady Ogle; Brett’s wife being a connection of the heiress.⁴⁴

As for Lady Ogle herself, it was said that ‘the contract she lately signed rises in her stomach’. It may be that Lady Ogle had encountered a powerful counter-attraction in the shape of the handsome Count Königsmarck, who had been paying her court. At this point the drama increased when Lady Ogle herself vanished from her grandmother’s house. On 10 November 1681, as Sir Charles Hatton wrote excitedly, no one yet knew with whom or to where she had fled. But it was generally believed that ‘she went away to avoid Mr Thynne, whom she sometimes [that is, previously] married’. This marriage, which took place in the summer, had not been consummated before Lady Ogle’s flight. There was now a rumour that it would be made void and that Lady Ogle would be wedded to George Fitzroy, one of Barbara Duchess of Cleveland’s sons by Charles II, who had recently been granted that Northumberland title which had become extinct at Lady Ogle’s father’s death.⁴⁵

The next stage of the drama took place when Mr Thomas Thynne, the unsuccessful husband – or suitor – of Lady Ogle was shot by a posse of Count Königsmarck’s men; with five bullets in his belly he died next morning. Now the furore reached new heights. Had there been a duel? Duelling was against the law, and the King did all he could to enforce the prohibition but it was at the same time a recognized social procedure where honour was concerned. Murder hardly came into the same category. Count Königsmarck’s men tried to maintain that one of them – a Pole – had challenged Mr Thynne to a duel, but unfortunately this man was known to have asked the Swedish Ambassador the night before ‘whether if Mr Thynne was removed, his master might not marry the Lady Ogle according to the law of England’. The girl Thynne had betrayed was said to have played some part in the conspiracy, hence the satirical epitaph:

The responsibility of the Count himself – who had fled – was another much debated point.

In fact the Count only got as far as Gravesend where he was found in a boat ‘disguised in a poor habit’. He was taken to Newgate and subsequently put on trial. However, his men loyally stuck to the story that there had been a challenge to a duel. It had actually been refused but one of their number, ‘the Polander’, had failed to appreciate this fact and thus fired the fatal shot.⁴⁷ So the Count was acquitted. (His men were hanged.)

None of this of course had improved the Count’s chances of marrying Lady Ogle although, imperviously, he did renew his suit. In any case on 30 May 1682, the exciting chase was ended. Steps had been taken earlier in the year to render the Thynne marriage contract void at the Court of the King’s Bench. In May Lady Ogle was married to the nineteen-year-old Charles Seymour, sixth Duke of Somerset. No one could deny that that was a splendid match: the latest bridegroom was dark and handsome, generous and cultivated. His only defect – an overweening arrogance on the subject of his ancestry, which led to his being termed ‘the Proud Duke of Somerset’ – was perhaps not such a defect after all for one who was herself ‘the last of the Percies’. It showed tact on the part of the new Duchess that she did not finally hold the Proud Duke’ to that promise which was part of the marriage contract, to change his surname from Seymour to Percy.

So the former Elizabeth Percy, Lady Ogle, lived in splendour for forty years as Duchess of Somerset, bearing her husband thirteen children, and ornamenting the court of William and Mary. Later her political influence was feared by the Tories under Queen Anne, when she became First Lady of the Bedchamber following the fall of Sarah Duchess of Marlborough. This incurred for her the enmity of Swift and thus was her red hair (and her dramatic past) angrily mocked:

For all the Sturm und Drang which had surrounded the early years of ‘my lady Ogle’, it is appropriate to note that her aunt Rachel Lady Russell, the tragic much admired heroine of the same period, was herself an heiress and as such made a supremely happy marriage. It was possible in the second half of the seventeenth century, as it had been in the first, for love to flourish under rich bedcovers. The sorrows which came to Lady Russell, came from her husband’s political convictions and his defeat at the hands of the established order. Her pleasures were on the contrary produced by her acceptance of the rules of society, within which framework she brought her own remarkable character and intelligence to play.

Rachel Wriothesley was born in 1636, the daughter of the Earl of Southampton by his first wife, a French Protestant noblewoman named Rachel de Ruvigny. Where her education was concerned, like her future sisters-in-law the Ladies Diana and Margaret Russell, she benefited from a domestic chaplain, Dr Fitzwilliam; at the age of seventeen she was married to Lord Vaughan, heir to the Earl of Carbery, a match later referred to as ‘acceptance without choosing on either side’. In later years Lady Russell would describe herself as having been at this period fond of ‘a great dinner and worldly talk’, following a sermon which was not too long.⁴⁹ The only child of this marriage was born and died in 1665, in which year died also Lord Vaughan.

In a financial sense, however, the important event in the life of Rachel Lady Vaughan was the death of Lord Southampton two years later without a male heir. The three daughters who were his co-heiresses – ‘my sister Noel, my sister Northumberland and myself’ as Rachel described them – now cast lots for the valuable properties which formed part of his fortune. It was in this historic manner that Rachel acquired Southampton House and that area known then as ‘the manors of Bloomsbury and St Giles’ which was to provide the foundations of the great London property holdings of the Russell family. Rachel Lady Vaughan was now in the vastly desirable situation of being a wealthy and childless widow in her early thirties who had complete control over her fortune – and thus over her future. Although her fortune could not perhaps be compared with that of her step-niece ‘my lady Ogle’, certainly her immediate fate was likely to be preferable. And so it proved.

William Russell was in fact the second son of the Earl of Bedford, one of his immense brood of children by Anne Carr, the good Countess sprung from the bad mother, but his eldest brother was sickly and it was tacitly assumed that William was the heir; this brother died in 1678 and William then succeeded to the courtesy title of Lord Russell. Otherwise he was intelligent and charming if also, as time would show, of that steely stuff of which political martyrs are made. He was, however, a few years younger than Rachel Lady Vaughan. Still, a fortune glossed over such matters wonderfully. Although the wooing took some two years to complete, in view of the vested interests on both sides, it was finally successful. Rachel Lady Vaughan and William Russell were married on 31 July 1669. From his family accounts we know that William Russell spent lavishly on his own clothes for the occasion: £ 250 on cherry-coloured silk, scarlet and silver brocade and gold and silver lace.⁵⁰ (We do not know what the bride wore.)

William Russell now happily acquired control of Rachel’s Bloomsbury properties, according to the laws of the time, just as her father’s residence of Southampton House became their family home in London. In personal terms an equally blissful union was inaugurated. Two daughters – Rachel and Katherine were born in 1674 and 1676; the Russells’ joy was completed when a son, named Wriothesley in compliment to his mother’s family, was born in 1680. Since Rachel Lady Russell was by now forty-four, there must have been some anxiety about the prospect of a male heir. Certainly the old Earl of Bedford at Woburn Abbey gave the messenger who brought him the news a present of sixteen guineas, nearly twice as much as had greeted the news of the arrival of the girls.⁵¹

The Russells were seldom apart, except when William went to visit the family estates at Woburn, and even then, as Rachel quaintly expressed it in 167 5, she did not like to let ‘this first post-night pass without giving my dear man a little talk’, in the shape of a letter. Both were particularly fond of their own house (part of Rachel’s inheritance) at Stratton in Hampshire. Rachel painted a placid domestic picture to William away at Woburn: the little boy asleep as she wrote, the girls singing in bed, with little Rachel telling herself a long story, ‘She says, Papa has sent for her to Wobee, and then she gallops and says she has been there, and a great deal more.’ Lady Russell ended her letter on a cheerful gourmet note: ‘but’, she wrote, ‘boiled oysters call’. In June 1680 she told her husband more spiritually: ‘My dearest heart, flesh and blood cannot have a truer and greater sense of their own happiness than your poor but honest wife has. I am glad you find Stratton so sweet; may you live to do so one fifty years more’. On another occasion she was writing with ‘thy pillow at my back; where thy dear head shall lie, I hope, tomorrow night’.⁵²

‘I know, as certainly as I live, that I have been, for twelve years, as passionate a lover as ever woman was, and hope to be so one twelve years more.’ Thus Rachel Lady Russell in September 1682. Less than one year after this declaration of an ideally happy wife, William Lord Russell was on trial for conspiring to kill the King and the Duke of York in what was known as the Rye House Plot. His specific guilt remains doubtful although with the other extreme Whig, Algernon Sidney, William Russell admitted he had declared it was lawful to resist the King on occasion. Significantly, when reasons were given to Charles II for leniency towards Lord Russell, the monarch tersely replied: ‘All that is true, but it is as true that if I do not take his life he will soon have mine.’⁵³ In a test of strength between the King and the Whigs therefore, William Lord Russell was cast in the role of the Whig martyr, a role he was not unwilling to fulfil.

During the period between Lord Russell’s arrest on 26 June 1683 and his trial which began on 3 July it was Rachel who beavered away, seeking support. And at the trial itself she caused a thrill of anguish by her appearance at her husband’s side in the courtroom. Officially, the defendant in a treason trial at this date was not allowed a legal adviser; the Attorney-General, to anticipate Lord Russell’s protests, declared that he could have a servant to take notes for him. A sensation of a different sort was caused when Lord Russell announced: ‘My wife is here to do it’, or in another version: ‘I require no other assistance than that which the lady can give me who sits by my side.’⁵⁴

‘If my lady will give herself that trouble’, was the embarrassed reply of the Chief Justice. The Attorney-General then offered two persons to write for Lord Russell if he so wished; the astonishment caused by Lord Russell’s announcement being a striking commentary on the low level of female literacy at the time.

The predictable verdict was guilty and the sentence execution. Rachel’s frantic efforts to bring about a reprieve, her own desperate pleas for mercy, the pleas of her relations and those of Lord Russell were all unavailing. The date was set for Friday 21 July. On the Thursday, Lord Russell told Gilbert (later Bishop) Burnet he wished for his own sake that his wife would cease ‘beating every bush’, and ‘running about so’ in the useless task of trying to save him; and yet when he considered that ‘it would be some mitigation [to her afterwards] that she had tried everything he had to let her continue’. And there was a tear in his eye as he turned away. But he received his beloved children for the last time, according to Bishop Burnet, ‘with his ordinary serenity’ and Rachel herself managed to leave without a single sob.⁵⁵1

Late that night the husband and wife said goodbye for the last time. Lord Russell expressed ‘great joy’ at that ‘magnanimity of spirit’ which he found in Rachel to the last; parting from her was of all things the hardest one he had to do. As for her, he feared that after he was gone and she no longer had the task of his reprieve to buoy her up ‘the quickness of her spirits would work all within her’. They kissed four or five times and still both managed a stoical restraint.

After Rachel’s departure, William mused aloud on his great blessing in having had such a wife, one who had never begged him to turn informer and thus save his own life. How terribly this last week would have passed, he told Bishop Burnet, if she had been ‘still crying at me’! God had showed him a ‘signal providence’ in granting him a wife of ‘birth, fortune, great understanding, great religion, and a great kindness to him’ – note the order even at the last in which these benefits were listed – ‘but her carriage in this extremity went beyond all’.

After Lord Russell’s death, Rachel Lady Russell’s conduct in her bereavement justified her husband’s fears for her. Through the intercession of Lord Halifax, she was allowed to place a public escutcheon of mourning over the door of Southampton House; this permission indicated that the King did not intend to profit from the forfeiture of Lord Russell’s personal estate (a penalty which was generally exacted after the death of a traitor). In other ways Lady Russell withdrew into a more private world of lamentation. No visitors were ever allowed to call at Southampton House on Fridays – the fatal day – and in addition 26 June, 3 July and 21 July were kept sacred to commemorate his arrest, trial and execution.

A few months after Lord Russell’s death, Rachel’s old mentor Dr Fitzwilliam advocated a recourse to the Scriptures for comfort. In reply, Lady Russell burst out that nothing could comfort her because of her lack of him. ‘I want him to talk with, to walk with, to eat, and sleep with. All these things are irksome to me. The day unwelcome, and the night so too …’⁵⁷ Even her children made her heart ‘shrink’ because she remembered the pleasure their father had taken in them. Two years later she was still torturing herself with thoughts that she could have done more to save him.

At the death of Anne Countess of Bedford (an event probably brought forward by the shock of her son’s execution) Rachel took the opportunity to visit the family vault at Chenies in Buckinghamshire where her husband’s body was entombed. She defended her decision to Dr Fitzwilliam. ‘I had considered. I went not to seek the living among the dead. I knew I should not see him anymore, wherever I went, and had made a covenant with myself, not to break out in unreasonable fruitless passion.’ She went deliberately to ‘quicken my contemplation’ as to ‘whither the nobler part was fled, to a country far off, where no earthly power bears any sway, nor can put an end to a happy society.’⁵⁸

When Lady Russell went to London for the sake of her little boy’s future, she determined to be brave about visiting Southampton House: ‘I think (by God’s assistance) the shadows will not sink me.’ Yet every anniversary destroyed her resolution by ‘breaking off that bandage, time would lay over my wound’. In 1695, suffering in fact from cataract of the left eye, she was said to have wept herself blind. In extreme old age, listing her sins in shaky handwriting, Rachel included the fact that she had been inconsolable for the death of him who had been ‘my dear Mr Russell, seeking help from man but finding none’.⁵⁹

It was natural that this tragic widow should resolve never to marry again; instead she resolved to see ‘none but lawyers and accountants’ in the interests of her children. Both decisions were much applauded by a society which admired Lady Russell’s heroism in adopting such a stern and secluded way of life. So by degrees Lady Russell fulfilled the highest expectations of her time for a great lady.²

Her future efforts were entirely for her family. She succeeded in getting the attainder on her husband’s title reversed so that her son Wriothesley could bear it. She carefully arranged, as we shall see in the next chapter, important worldly matches for her daughters. As for Wriothesley, he was not yet thirteen when old Sir Josiah Child, the magnate of the East India Company, described by John Evelyn as ‘sordidly avaricious’, but doubtless with compensating qualities, proposed the boy a bride in the shape of his granddaughter; this was Lady Henrietta Somerset, offspring of Lord Worcester and Miss Rebecca Child. Although Sir Josiah used a clergyman as his envoy, he found Lady Russell’s reply disappointingly cold. As for the tactful response that the young lord was still being educated, that made Sir Josiah indignant: he wrote back that that had never been ‘a bar to parents discoursing of the matching of their children, which are born to extraordinary fortunes’. City money was evidently not the problem, nor necessarily youth: for only two years later the young lord was duly married off to another Child granddaughter. Elizabeth Howland. This granddaughter was even richer, which may have been the point. The sum of the young couple’s ages came to twenty-eight years, wrote a contemporary; the bride alone, however, was worth a total of £100,000, a new Howland title being created for the Russell family as a compliment to her possessions.⁶¹

Rachel was clearly determined to show herself a sympathetic mother-in-law to the girl, only just in her teens; a year after the marriage she approved the news that Mr Huck the dressmaker had taken her in hand. While Lady Russell herself believed fashion to be ‘but dross’, she prayed constantly that her daughter-in-law might be ‘a perfect creature both in mind and body; that is, in the manner we can reach perfection in this world’. In this perfection, Lady Russell was wise enough to see that Mr Huck the dressmaker had his place.⁶²

As for Wriothesley, Marquess of Tavistock after the elevation of his grandfather to the dukedom of Bedford, when he turned out to be weak and an inveterate gambler – with a dead hero for a father and a doting mother did he ever have a chance? – Rachel Lady Russell was there to act as an intermediary in confessing his gambling debts to his dreaded grandfather

At the death of the old Duke in 1700, Rachel only waited a few days before writing to King William and asking for the Garter ‘his grandfather so long enjoyed’ on behalf of her twenty-year-old son. ‘Sir, I presume on your goodness to forgive a woman’s troubling you,’ she wrote: not only the new Duke ‘but I know the whole family would always look upon it as a mark of your grace and favour to them’.⁶³ Even in her sixties with problems of eyesight Rachel could be relentless where the advancement of her family was at stake.

‘Grandmamma Russell’, as Rachel was ultimately known, lived to be nearly ninety, still keeping Fridays as a day of recollection. She died in 1722. The Weekly Journal commemorated one who had been the heroine of her age, as well as being married to a hero, as follows:

She was in short, like her husband, ‘Proof against all, inseparably good.’⁶⁴

1 This touching family scene, together with ‘The Parting of Lord and Lady Russell’ and Lady Russell pleading for mercy from King Charles II, was to become a favourite subject among Victorian painters, figuring in exhibitions at the Royal Academy throughout the nineteenth century.⁵⁶

2 This admiration for Lady Russell’s thoroughly feminine withdrawal did not fade. In 1815 Mary Berry, Walpole’s friend, editing her letters, referred to Lady Russell with approval as having spent the rest of her existence, unlike most heroines, ‘within the pale of private life and female duties’; an example which should be more widely followed.⁶⁰