Elizabethan Popular Culture

Love and Marriage

Love and Marriage An Elizabethan couple from a broadside in the Roxburghe Ballads, Great little Cupid said, "Take thy Desire." Nora Epton in Love and the English (1960) pieces together useful information about wives in the Elizabethan period so expertly that perhaps we may be excused if we let her offer several items in our anthology, on the subject of love and marriage. She draws on the same sources we should have chosen and is able to hint at riches there she has not space to show more extensively. If I quote much of her work, she quotes much of others'. Sir Edward Coke, the Lord Chief Justice, a terror to the world at large, suffered much from his domineering wife Lady Russell, who pleaded her own cause in the Star Chamber at the age of seventy-eight and was rebuked by the judges for her "pryde and willfulness." Many of these ladies had a keen business acumen. They were as mercenary as their husbands. When Anne Savage, wife of the sixth Earl of Berkeley, was left a widow in 1534, Henry VII suggested she should marry Edward Dudley, but he had no money and she frowned on the proposal. And yet, as her suitor complained in a letter to Wriothesley, "She entertained me after the most loving sort at my first cummings to her as I could desire; for when she was in her chamber, sewing, she would suffer me to lie in her lap, with many other as familiar fashions as I could desire. But at my cumming with the King's letters [recommending the marriage] I was nothing so well welcomed." When Lady Compton's husband came into money, she set down her wishes very clearly in writing to her "Sweet Life," as she called her lord: "Now I have declared to you my mind for the settling of your estate, I suppose that that were best for me to bethink or consider with myself what allowance were meetest for me." Her demands follow: a yearly sum of£1,600, to be paid quarterly; a dress allowance of [600; three horses for her own saddle; two gentlewomen; six or eight gentlemen; two coaches, one lined with velvet with four very fair horses and a coach for her women "lined with sweet cloth," one laced with gold the other with scarlet and lined with watched lace and silver with four good horses; two footmen; [6,000 for jewels and [4,000 for a pearl chain; a house delicately furnished with hangings, couch, glass, carpet, chairs, cushions." She ends by urging her husband to purchase land and "lend no money as you love God to the Lord Chamberlain." Many wives, however, must have been of the patient Griselda type like Lady Southampton, who dared not make a move without first asking permission of her lord and master. Lady Rich must have waited with scornful impatience while the friend whose company she desired in London wrote off submissively to her husband in Ireland: "My deare Lord and only joy of my life, beseech you love me ever and be pleased to know that my lady Rich will nedes have me send word how important it is she go to London. She is most desirous 191 192 Elizabethan Popular Culture to have me with her. I protest unto you that your wil, either in this or anything else, shale be most pleasing to me. . .. Let me, I pray you, know your pleasure what I shall do, which no earthly power shall make me disobey.... Your faithful and obedient wife." Of course there were scores of horrid husbands. Lady Anne Clifford wrote sorrowfully: "I must confess ... that tho'... I was born a happy creature in Mind, body, and fortune, and that those two lords of mine, to whom I was afterwards by the Divine Providence marryed, were in their several kinds worthy noblemen as any then were in this kingdom, yet was it my misfortune to have contradictions and crosses with them both ... so as in both their lifetimes, the Marble Pillars of Knowle in Kent, and Wilton in Wiltshire, were to me oftentimes but the gay arbour of anguish." Relatives sometimes intervened when domestic strife became acute. In 1534, Lord Berkeley's sister, who was married to the Earl of Ormonde, in Ireland, complained to him of her husband's ill-usage, so he addressed a supplicatory note to...