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  • Love, Madness, and Scandal: The Life of Frances Coke Villiers, Viscountess Purbeck by Johanna Luthman
  • Christina Luckyj (bio)
Love, Madness, and Scandal: The Life of Frances Coke Villiers, Viscountess Purbeck. Johanna Luthman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. 224 pp. $27.95. ISBN 978-0-19-875465-7.

All women "are understood either married or to be married, and their desires are subject to their husband," observes the author of The Law's Resolution of Women's Rights (1632), adding sympathetically, "I know no remedy, though some women can shift it well enough." He might well have been thinking of Frances Coke Villiers who, that same year, was living openly with her lover, Robert Howard, in his estate in the English countryside after flouting the enforced penance for adultery decreed by the Court of High Commission. Her story—vividly related in Johanna Luthman's enthralling biography—illuminates the ways in which real early modern lives challenged many of the prescriptions of the age. Because this meticulously documented book wears its scholarly apparatus lightly, it clearly appeals to general readers looking for the juicy salaciousness advertised in its title. But it delivers much more. As an important addition to the few existing biographies of non-royal early modern women such as David Lindley's biography of Frances Howard or Margaret Hannay's biographies of Mary Sidney and Mary Wroth, Luthman's study offers a window onto the contradictions of the age.

At the core of this book is the remarkable Frances Coke Villiers, whose adult life began at the tender age of fifteen when she became a pawn in her powerful parents' negotiations surrounding her marriage to John Villiers, the brother of the king's favorite. Only five or six years later, bitter experience had shaped her into a self-assured and desperate woman threatening to "beg her bread in the street" to shame her in-laws into providing the support she could not get from her mentally unstable husband (63). Boldly taking a lover, Frances concealed both her illicit pregnancy and illegitimate child until, summoned before the officers of the state, she defiantly "marvayled what those old cuckolds had to say to her" (86). [End Page 205] Later, faced with the prospect of doing public penance for her sins, Frances daringly cross-dressed as a man to flee first the city and then the country.

In this highly theatrical culture, Frances's choice is not surprising—one letter writer compared the wrangle over her marriage to a "Comedie" (34). Yet in many ways Frances's life is stranger than the fiction it eerily imitates: if her secret pregnancy and motherhood recall John Webster's much-admired Duchess of Malfi from his 1614 play of the same name, she more closely resembles his Vittoria from The White Devil (1612), an adulteress who invites social opprobrium even as she brilliantly defends herself. Indeed, Luthman's challenge resembles that faced by critics of Webster's notoriously difficult play: mired in a patriarchal culture that licenses the trade in women and punishes their expressions of desire, such transgressive women can elicit blame and exculpation in equal measure. Because Frances (unlike Vittoria) could never indict her society for its double standard or its misogyny, she resorted to noble privilege, attacked her enemies, and brazenly lied in her own defense. Accordingly, the censorious values of early modern culture sometimes infiltrate Luthman's own narrative: in her seeming disapproval of Frances's self-representation as a "wounded and wronged heroine" despite being "a convicted adulteress who had not yet performed her penance" (154–55) or in her assertion that Frances and her lover "were simply unable to stay away from each other despite their better judgments" (130). Yet the admiration that also clearly drives Luthman's vivid account of this extraordinary woman was in fact shared by some of Frances's contemporaries. Much like the mixed responses to Arbella Stuart's secret marriage or to Anne Clifford's protracted battle for her inheritance, public opinion about Frances was clearly divided: if some condemned her adultery and associated it with witchcraft, others pitied Frances for being forced to marry a mentally ill husband and applauded her repeated...

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