"I'll Want My Will Else": The Changeling and Women's Complicity With Their Rapists

In the seventeenth century, marriage provided an important opportunity for propertied English families to form alliances, to build or repair their fortunes, to improve their social standing. When, in 1617, Sir Edward Coke began to negotiate a match between his youngest daughter, Frances, and Sir John Villiers, Coke’s principal motive was to save his career as a Chief Justice, an appointment he had lost by angering James I. ¹ Sir John Villiers was the older brother of James’s powerful favorite, the Duke of Buckingham. That John Villiers’s important family connections were Coke’s principle consideration in the proposed match is clear; as a prospective bridegroom, Villiers lacked anything else to recommend him. In fact, he was reputed to suffer from a sometimes violent mental imbalance and from recurrent, incapacitating seizures. ² Villiers’s insufficiency as a mate may have struck the daughter more forcefully than it did the father. In any case, Frances Coke refused to cooperate with her father’s plan for her marriage and became the center of a protracted dispute between her wealthy parents.

Coke’s wife, Lady Elizabeth Hatton, was an extraordinarily powerful woman in her own right. The daughter of Thomas Cecil, the Earl of Exeter and granddaughter of William Cecil, Lord Burghley (Elizabeth I’s leading minister), Lady Hatton was the widow of the extremely wealthy Sir Christopher Hatton when Coke married her for her money and connections. ³ In his negotiations with Villiers, Coke counted on using his wife’s considerable resources to provide an enticing marriage settlement. However, Lady Hatton (who continued to use that name and title despite her remarriage) was unwilling that any of her property should enlarge the Villiers family coffers, so she took her daughter into hiding outside of London in order to evade Coke’s plans for Frances’s marriage.

As reported by John Chamberlain in a letter to Sir Dudley Carlton dated 19 July 1617,

These eight or ten dayes here have ben great stirres twixt the Lord Cooke and his Lady about conveying away the younger daughter, which she will no wayes consent shold match with Sir John Villers... The daughter was first caried to the Lady Withipooles, from thence privilie to a house of the Lord Argiles by Hampton Court, whence her father with a warrant from Master Secretarie fetcht her; but indeed went further then his warrant and brake divers doores before he got her. His Lady was at his heeles and yf her coach had not tired in the pursuit after him there was like to be straunge tragedies. He delivered his daughter to the Lady Compton Sir Johns mother, but the next day Edmunds clarke of the counsaile was sent with a warrant to have the custodie of her at his owne house: the next day beeing all convented before the counsaile, she was sequestred to Master Atturny and yesterday upon a palliated agreement twixt Sir Ed: Cooke and his Lady she was sent home to Hatton House, with order that the Lady Compton and her sonne shold have accesse to win her and weare her.

(L, 2:88–89)

In this letter, Chamberlain captures the dramatic potential of the Cokes’ tug of war over their daughter. Contemporaries relished the idea of the notoriously curmudgeonly Sir Edward Coke being dragged before the same courts from which he had recently been expelled as a justice. ⁴ That he was brought to that pass and thus made a fool in public by his resourceful wife compounded his disgrace. Chamberlain’s account of the mother’s pursuit at breakneck speed in her coach, close “at his heeles,” suggests not only the tragic potential of the situation, but its rich comic aspects as well. Sir Edward Coke, England’s most formidable justice, was having his beard tweaked in public by an upstart wife and daughter.

However risible the proceedings may have seemed to others, Lady Hatton’s revolt against her husband’s authority was entirely in earnest. The conflict between the Cokes was a dispute over which of them would control...