Through the Keyhole E-Book

Susan C. Law

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Scandal existed long before celebrity gossip columns, often hidden behind the closed doors of the Georgian aristocracy. But secrets were impossible to keep in a household of servants who listened at walls and spied through keyholes. The early mass media pounced on these juicy tales of adultery, eager to cash in on the public appetite for sensation and expose the shocking moral corruption of the establishment. Drawing on a rich collection of original and often outrageous sources, this book brings vividly to life stories of infidelity in high places – passionate, scandalous, poignant and tragic. It reveals how the flood of print detailing sordid sexual intrigues created a national outcry and made people question whether the nobility was fit to rule.

Leseprobe

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Researching this book has involved an extensive cast of characters, both living and dead. First, I should like to acknowledge the countless members of the Georgian aristocracy who have shared their lives with me during the past eight years. Second, I am indebted to the present Lord Cobham for access to papers held in the Hagley Hall private collection and permission to reproduce material from them; to the Earl of Denbigh for kind permission to quote from archive documents; and to Lord Ellenborough for his friendly interest in my research and the loan of family records. I would like to thank the following for permission to quote from their collections: The National Archives, Chatsworth House, Plymouth & West Devon Record Office, Bury St Edmunds’ branch of Suffolk Record Office, and Warwickshire County Record Office. I am also grateful to the staff at each of these archives and the Bodleian Library in Oxford, for their assistance with my research inquiries.

It has been a truly long and winding road which led to the production of this book, and along the way I have been lucky enough to draw on the support of numerous people who helped to make it happen. My thanks to academic staff and postgraduates of the history department at Warwick University, who shared a wealth of knowledge. And to my special brew Earl Grey for proving that a cup of tea can solve everything. I am grateful to all my friends and family who have each played their own unique part, especially my parents James and Penny for a lifetime of love and encouragement, and my husband, Clive Radford, whose steadfast support and home-baked bread have made it all possible.

CONTENTS

Title

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part One The Foundations of Aristocracy

1. Marriage for ‘Love or Gold?’

2. Land and Power

3. Duties and Pleasures

4. Lord Bully v. Lady Di

Part Two Vice and Virtue in Print (1760s–1770s)

5. ‘The Fashionable Vice’

6. The Black Duke

7. Noble Reputations

8. ‘The Good Old Peer’

9. Wicked Lord Lyttelton

Part Three Staging Adultery (1770s–1780s)

10. Courtroom Dramas

11. Adultery Trials for Sale

12. Secret Assignations

13. The Purity of Noble Blood

14. ‘A Prodigious Swarm of Trashy Writers’

Part Four Moral Reform and Scandals (1790s–1810)

15. Moral Reform

16. Scandalous Entertainment

17. Courtesans, Lords and Ladies

18. ‘A Sin of the Deepest Dye’

19. The Earl of Morley and ‘A Certain Liaison’

Part Five Changing Roles (1810–1830s)

20. Public Roles and Private Lives

21. Facts or Fictions?

22. ‘The Spell is Broken’

23. Pages ‘Dried With Diamond Dust’

24. Elephant Ellenborough, ‘A Dandy Among Politicians’

List of Illustrations

Bibliography

Plates

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

It was just after breakfast at nine o’clock on a bleak winter morning when the housemaid Elizabeth Hopping hesitated by the parlour door, torn between apprehension and curiosity. A muffled thudding sound was coming from the adjacent room, echoing through the stillness of the old manor house. She crept towards the oak-panelled door, heart pounding beneath her stays, and swiftly crouched down to peer through the keyhole. There was no mistaking what was going on next door.

With a horrified gasp Elizabeth instinctively drew back. Her hands were shaking, and she pressed both palms flat against the smooth polished wood to steady herself as she bent her head for another look. On the far side of the parlour by the gilded oval mirror, Lady Abergavenny was leaning back against the hall door, her petticoats bunched up as high as the garters on her stockinged legs. Pressed up against her in a passionate embrace was her husband’s friend Mr Lyddel, his coat unbuttoned, doing something that a man ought not to do. Dazed and shaken, Elizabeth scurried away down the back stairs, scarcely daring to think about what she had seen. She whispered her secret only to a laundrymaid, afraid that no one else would believe the shocking discovery.

Richard Lyddel, ‘a very civil, modest, well-bred gentleman’, living only seven miles from Lord Abergavenny’s country estate in West Sussex, was a regular visitor to the house, often riding over to stay for a week at a time as a welcome guest of the family. But as the months passed, suspicion grew among the servants about the unseemly intimacy between him and Lady Abergavenny. The house porter William Smith noticed that every time Mr Lyddel called, he was told by the mistress that she would not be at home to anyone else during his visit. Laundrymaid Mary Hodson saw the couple kissing at the window of an upstairs dressing room, then hurriedly closing the shutters, and on several occasions one of the housemaids was ordered to leave the room with the bed still unmade when Mr Lyddel came to her Lady’s chamber.

By the autumn of 1729, Matthews, who as his lord’s gentleman was entrusted with family business matters, was becoming increasingly worried that the couple were involved in a criminal correspondence. During the week of 13 October he was dealing with the engrossing of tenants’ leases, working in an apartment beneath the White Room where Mr Lyddel was staying. Seated at his usual writing table, he was absorbed in the task when a sudden noise from above made him stop abruptly halfway down a page, quill poised over the inkwell. He could plainly hear a man’s voice and the sound of the bed creaking in the White Room, and rushing out onto the main staircase he saw Mr Lyddel appear and call for his man. Running as hard as he could, Matthews found one of the house servants and told them to send up the valet, then ran up the back stairs through the long gallery just in time to see Lady Abergavenny emerging from the White Room looking very red and disordered. The next morning he again heard noises in the room above and, determined now to find out the truth, dashed up the back stairs, along to the end of the gallery, and removing his wig lay down out of sight to wait. Shortly he heard the bolt drawn in the White Room and Mr Lyddel appeared, looking around furtively, then the mistress came out carefully spreading her petticoats to prevent the silks rustling.

On Thursday of that week he heard similar suspicious noises in the bedchamber and decided to report the matter to Mr Osman, the house steward, as he could not bear to see his lord betrayed in this fashion. On Friday and Saturday morning the two men waited together for the lovers to meet, and both heard the White Room bed creak, the door unbolted and saw her ladyship come out holding up her petticoats as before. With such clear evidence now of a clandestine liaison, they knew Lord Abergavenny had to be told the truth; they initially asked his mother if she would break the terrible news, but she was too upset to confront him. Eventually on 6 November Mr Day, a neighbour and relation who managed the family estates in several counties, agreed to take on the difficult task and asked his lordship to take a walk in the fields with him as he had something to discuss. Clearly alarmed by his grave manner, Lord Abergavenny pressed him to speak out at once, and when he heard what had been going on between his wife and Mr Lyddel was at first too shocked to believe that his close friend could have done such a thing. But faced with the facts of his wife’s blatant infidelity, he agreed that the pair had to be surprised in the very act of adultery as final, incontrovertible proof.

At six in the morning on 8 November, Matthews, Mr Osman and Mr Day all squashed into a closet adjoining the White Room where Mr Lyddel slept and settled down to wait. Suddenly at nine o’clock they heard a noise, and peering through the keyhole Mr Osman saw her ladyship enter the room, slip over to the bed and say in a low voice, ‘I cannot stay with you now.’ Uncertain if she had left the bedchamber, they waited impatiently for a few more minutes to see what would happen next. Then, hearing sounds within, Matthews cautiously opened the door, and the three men tiptoed softly to the bedside and flung back the curtains.

Startled by the sudden intrusion, Mr Lyddel, wearing only a shirt, froze and cried out, ‘Oh God!’ Lady Abergavenny lay there beside him on her back in a very indecent posture, with her naked legs exposed. Even more shocking, she was heavily pregnant. ‘Dear Matthews, do not ruin me. Do not ruin me,’ she begged, hastily trying to cover herself. Matthews told her they had been sent at her husband’s direction, and to Mr Lyddel said in disgust, ‘Sir, I thought you would not have been guilty of so foul an act.’ Mr Osman said, ‘For you Sir, to come so frequently, in such a shew of friendship, and to wrong his Lordship after such a manner as you have done, is a crime for which you can make him no satisfaction.’ Mr Lyddel replied, ‘It is very true, I can make no satisfaction,’ and offered to take his horse and ride away, and never return to the house again. But they locked him in the room alone, and when Lady Abergavenny sent a servant to check on him later that morning he was full of remorse and greatly agitated, exclaiming, ‘I am a vile wretch; for God’s sake do not speak to me.’ Matthews set off immediately for London to instruct the family lawyer Mr Staples, and he swore an affidavit so that legal proceedings could be started against Mr Lyddel for criminal conversation.

At three o’clock that afternoon Lady Abergavenny was sent away in disgrace to her father General Tatton’s house in London. Less than a month later she was dead.

~~~

The shocking tale of Lady Abergavenny had all the right ingredients of a juicy scandal – illicit sex among the upper classes, betrayal, remorse and punishment of the guilty couple. It revealed a tantalising glimpse into the secret existence of the aristocracy, which was usually safely hidden from public gaze behind the forbidding stone walls of their country houses. The compelling story went on to be printed and reprinted for more than a century in newspapers, periodicals, books and pamphlets, to the delight of generations of readers who could enjoy the vicarious thrill of peeping through the keyhole at the personal lives of the rich and powerful. Even better, they could relish all the titillating details of a sexual intrigue presented in the guise of a morality tale.

It was Lady Abergavenny’s sudden death on 4 December 1729, shortly after childbirth, which gave the story extra dramatic resonance because it seemed like divine retribution for her sins. Already widowed after a brief marriage to his cousin Edward (the 13th baron) who died of smallpox, the 24-year-old Catherine had been married to William Nevill, 14th Lord Abergavenny, for four years at the time of her adultery. The couple already had two children, a boy of two who was a godchild of the king and a one-year-old girl, but the new baby died with his mother soon after birth.

Despite his wife’s death, Lord Abergavenny went ahead and sued her seducer in a civil action for criminal conversation (popularly known as ‘crim. con.’).1 At the hearing on 16 February 1730 at the Court of Common Pleas, he was awarded the enormous sum of £10,000 (the equivalent of £600,000 today) in damages against Lyddel, which reflected the heavy penalty inflicted in such cases where there had been a dishonourable betrayal of male friendship.2 Speaking in mitigation, Lyddel’s defence counsel told the court he could not afford to pay large damages as his estate was heavily mortgaged. In fact, he had more than ten years earlier been disinherited by his father, Dennis Lyddel, a former MP for Harwich, who took the unusual step of passing his estate, including the family home Wakehurst Place in West Sussex, to his wife rather than his eldest son, Richard, who was known as ‘a profligate rake’.3

Whether Lord Abergavenny was aware of his friend’s bad reputation is uncertain, but there was plenty of gossip that he knew about and had actually encouraged his wife’s extramarital affair with the intent of suing for financial gain. He was clearly a man quick to avenge any perceived slight to his honour, as the previous year he had actually sued his own aunt, Anne, the Dowager Lady Abergavenny (mother of his deceased cousin Edward), ‘for scandalous words spoken’. The action for Scandalum Magnatum, an ancient offence of slandering the nobility, was heard by Lord Chief Justice Eyre at the Court of Common Pleas in May 1729. He claimed £10,000 damages but was awarded the still considerable sum of £2,000 by the jury. The ‘remarkable trial’ was widely reported in the London press including the Daily Post, Fog’s Weekly Journal, London Evening Post and London Gazette. Whether the defamatory words concerned his wife’s infidelity or the legitimacy of their children we cannot be certain, though it would seem highly likely because only charges of this seriousness would be deemed to warrant legal damages of such a punitive nature.

Two years after the adultery trial Lord Abergavenny remarried and had an imposing mansion built for the family at Kidbrooke Park near East Grinstead. Catherine may have been genuinely in love with her seducer, or was she merely the careless debauched young wife of popular imagination? As for Lyddel, he did not end his days in the debtors’ prison where many thought he deserved to stay, but went on to lead a respectable public life as MP for Bossiney in Cornwall. How he managed to pay off his debt is unknown.

Whatever the actual facts of the case and motives of those involved, the sensational story took on a life of its own in the commercial press as publishers seized the chance to make a quick profit from the scandal. The first brief articles appeared in the Monthly Chronicle and Daily Post reporting Lady Abergavenny’s death at a lodging house in Soho. They were followed soon after by a deluge of print about the adultery trial, including lengthy coverage of all the smutty details in the Monthly Chronicle, the Grub Street Journal, the Whitehall Evening Post; pamphlets such as An Account of the Tryal of Richard Lyddel Esq, and The Whole Tryal of Richard Lyddel; and several verses including A Poem, Sacred to the Memory of the Honourable Lady Aber---y.

The case also inspired Henry Fielding’s play The Modern Husband, which opened at Drury Lane Theatre in February 1732 and criticised the law enabling husbands to claim damages for adultery. The story was then reprinted at intervals over the next century in various different forms, proving especially popular in books of collected adultery trials such as the seven-volume Trials for Adultery: or, The History of Divorces (1779–80), and later in the succinctly named Crim. Con. Gazette (1838–39).

Both at the time of the scandal and long afterwards, public opinion was divided about whether Lord or Lady Abergavenny deserved the most sympathy. Writing to a relative on 5 December 1729, the day after her sudden death, one observer remarked disapprovingly that everyone was talking about ‘the strange behaviour of Lady A … the woman is pitied – “poor thing!” her “stars” are blamed; she was unlucky, indiscreet not to manage more cunningly, and by the generality of the world she is more condemned for not hiding her fault than for committing it.’4 As ever, it was not so much the actual sexual indiscretion of a public figure but being found out that created the scandal and provided a lucrative target for publishers.

The potent allure of sex, money and power has always created a keen public interest in gossip and speculation about the hidden private lives of the English aristocracy. A complex mixture of envy, derision and curiosity seems to be at the heart of an enduring fascination with a glamorous world far removed from our own. Today it is the private lives of show business celebrities, politicians and wealthy public figures that fill our modern media of print, television, film and digital sources. But the origin of this public appetite for sensational tales of high-profile scandal lies at the birth of the commercial mass market for print in Georgian England.

In the late eighteenth century there was serious national concern that an epidemic of adultery threatened to destroy the whole structure of English society. Four separate anti-adultery bills were introduced in Parliament to try and tackle the problem as the number of divorces increased and a series of aristocratic lawsuits for crim. con. caused public outrage. Publishers cleverly exploited stories of adultery for commercial and political motives, but these attacks on the aristocracy’s moral fitness to rule ultimately undermined the traditional basis of hereditary power and marked the first steps in its decline.

Printed literature appeared in many different guises in Georgian England and proliferated so quickly that it seeped into the fabric of daily life. This rapid development of large-scale commercial publishing and the press meant that it soon became a powerful agent of social change, playing an active part in manipulating public opinion on important topics of the day. The fuel which fed this growing entity was of course cash, and publishers were constantly searching for new topics which would increase their readership. Stories of sex and power revealing the secret private lives of the aristocracy were guaranteed to be popular and saleable, so it was not surprising that their potential as a profitable commodity was quickly realised.

Although only a small proportion of peers were involved in trials for crim. con., adultery within the upper echelons of society developed into a prominent public issue as publishers effectively exploited the market demand for nobility by presenting salacious details of their personal lives as entertaining morality tales, often deliberately distorting reality by magnifying those aspects which would appeal to their readers. The publication of adultery cases as titillating entertainment magnified what was actually a minority activity into a perceived epidemic of immorality, and the scandalous private lives of a small number of peers came to be seen as emblematic of a morally corrupt class as a whole. This flood of print gradually helped to change perceptions of the aristocracy and acted as a catalyst for widespread public debate on their previously unquestioned status as leaders of society.

The public seems to prefer its aristocrats as entertaining stereotypes, presented as easily recognisable figures such as the scandalous duchess, the lecherous lord, the Regency rake and the eccentric earl. But what lies behind the lurid newspaper headlines and the bare facts of published exposés? I wanted to explore the stereotypes of aristocratic vice popularised by the commercial print culture of periodicals, pamphlets, newspapers and novels, and compare them with personal accounts written by those actually experiencing adultery themselves.

During the five years researching and writing this book, I spent many hours immersed in boxes of material at archives all over the country, sorting through bundles of musty old letters tied up with ribbon. I pored over the inkblots and scrawly handwriting of manuscript letters and read the yellowing pages of diaries in worn leather covers, trying to piece together the personal stories of some of those involved in complicated and deeply human dramas of infidelity – passionate, moving and often tragic.

One of the greatest pleasures of this historical detective work has also proved to be the greatest challenge, namely the enormously rich and sometimes daunting archival legacy of the aristocracy. The existence of this wealth of material has of course provided a mass of original documents to draw on, but the sheer volume of sources and their often fragmentary nature meant that the task of selecting and unearthing individual stories has been particularly difficult. Even the archive catalogue records of a single titled family and its estates over generations frequently run to many hundreds of pages. These family papers have now mostly been deposited in the safety of county record offices, although many collections still remain in private ownership.

Precisely which documents survive from the stacks of dusty boxes amassed by each family is to some extent an accident of fate, depending on both the actions of descendants and the historical priorities of earlier county archivists who were working to specific agendas. For peers, especially those with prominent political careers, extensive and assiduously catalogued collections of their papers, correspondence and journals exist, but extracting any evidence at all about their personal lives from this mass of public documentation can be almost impossible. For noblewomen the opposite problem exists, as few personal papers have been deemed interesting enough to be kept for posterity, and those that do still exist can be hard to locate within voluminous dynastic records, where they are frequently hidden in unclassified boxes of random ‘family’ or ‘miscellaneous’ papers.

When investigating the sensitive topic of infidelity, it is not surprising that some of the potentially most revealing material was destroyed by close relatives at the time or by morally censorious later generations, trying to ensure that such delicate family matters remained strictly private. Sexual misdemeanours are best kept as guilty secrets, locked safely in the comforting embrace of the country house. Because, as unlucky aristocrats who found themselves victims of the press discovered, public scandals can have dreadful and far-reaching consequences.

Notes

1. Trials for Adultery, Vol. 1, pp. 5–28.

2. Calculating equivalent present-day values is highly complex, so for simplicity I have used the traditional method of estimation by multiplying Georgian figures by sixty.

3. Cruickshanks, Handley and Hayton (eds), TheHistory of Parliament, The House of Commons 1690–1715, Vol 4, p. 715.

4. Delany, M., Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs Delany, Llanover, Lady (ed.), Vol. 1.

Part One

The Foundations of Aristocracy

‘Nobility at this period, is but a degenerated race of men, whom education hath only informed of new vices … [they] debauch themselves and their inferiors – ruin their own honour, and the kingdom’s.’

Rambler’s Magazine, 1822

1

MARRIAGEFOR ‘LOVEOR GOLD?’

The shocking number of extra-marital affairs among the aristocracy had become the subject of heated public debate by the late eighteenth century. Outraged critics protested that ‘this horrid vice’ of adultery ‘is at present become epidemical. It rages like pestilence – almost every newspaper furnishes us with repeated instances of this crime. Surely the air is become infectious and infection daily increases.’1 In another sermon, sold as a printed pamphlet, an irate Scottish clergyman thundered:

Adultery makes us brutes, or rather proves that we are so … [it] is a crime so odious and complicated, that it violates at once, the laws of God, and the laws of man, the harmony of nature, and the harmony of virtue, which is nature’s law. Adultery indicates the absence of every divine and social feeling … this vice is as common as it is base, as fashionable as it is odious.2

But such strong views were not confined to religious moralisers who might be expected to enlist such an apocalyptic vision in an attempt to chasten their congregations. Many others felt equally alarmed about the prevalence of infidelity. A series of sensational legal trials for criminal conversation and a rising number of aristocratic divorce cases were given extensive publicity in an expanding commercial print market which thrived on the popular appetite for scandal. Measures to curb the problem were debated during anti-adultery bills raised in Parliament during the 1770s and again in the early 1800s, highlighting the issue and deepening fears that the immoral behaviour of the ruling class would spread down the social hierarchy, corrupting the whole of English society and fatally undermining national stability.

Speaking during the Parliamentary debate on the 1800 Adultery Prevention Bill, the barrister and future Lord Chancellor Thomas Erskine said he believed ‘the crime of adultery … to be one of the highest public offences’. An earl’s son who had witnessed at first hand its far-reaching effects during his professional career over several decades acting as counsel in crim. con. actions, he argued:

All other injuries, when put into the scale with it, were as nothing. What, then, was wanting to compleat the definition of a criminal offence in a civilized nation? What but its public consequences? and was there any other private wrong which produced so many? The sanctity of marriage, a contract which was the very foundation of the social world, was violated.3

The devoutly Evangelical William Wilberforce became better known for his anti-slavery campaigning, but he also believed adultery to be the single most important issue facing the country at the time, and ‘of much more importance than any question about peace or war, or any constitutional question; for … if the crime is suffered to go on unchecked, nothing could have a greater tendency to destroy the whole fabric of society.’

Aristocratic adultery was seen as such a serious threat to national stability because it undermined not only the institution of marriage, which was the cornerstone of society, but also the authority of the aristocracy as its natural leaders, whose inherited power depended on a legitimate bloodline and exemplary personal behaviour. The importance of marriage as the foundation of hereditary landownership and power meant that adultery within elite ranks had immense implications, not only for married couples and their family dynasties but for wider society also.

No one was really interested in the sex lives of ordinary folk or adultery cases within the lower ranks of society, by shopkeepers, lawyers or farm labourers. They may have caused a fleeting local scandal, and the few cuckolded husbands able to afford legal action may have found the trials reported in the local press, but they did not threaten the existence of the State or affect the entire structure of society. Adultery had many different meanings (personal, legal, religious, social and, ultimately, political) but was technically defined as voluntary sexual intercourse by a married person with someone other than their spouse. In his definitive Commentaries on the Laws of England, William Blackstone used the phrase ‘the crime of adultery’, but explained that adultery as a public crime was left to the jurisdiction of the spiritual courts, while temporal courts recognised it only as a civil injury as an action of trespass by the adulterer against the husband.4 In the eyes of the Church, adultery was a sin which contravened the seventh commandment and was one of the grounds for marital separation, along with extreme cruelty, granted by the ecclesiastical courts. Adultery cases could also be brought under common law, following the introduction in 1670 of the legal action for crim. con. which awarded monetary damages to cuckolded husbands.5

Marriage was regarded as the basic unit of society and was therefore vital as a stabilising force: ‘Marriage … though it be in itself one of the smallest societies, is the original fountain from whence the greatest and most extensive government have derived their beings … the good of the whole is maintained by a harmony and correspondence of its several parts.’6 The philosopher John Locke argued in his Two Treatises of Government that man and wife formed the first society given by God, who decreed that this ‘conjugal society’ should be a lasting union in order to nurture the resulting offspring.7 Maintaining the happiness of both partners was essential for a long marriage, and anything that disrupted marital harmony was ultimately a threat to the wider social order.

A widespread belief that all was not well with English marriage existed throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as reflected in the repeated and often vehemently expressed opinions published in periodicals, essays, books and pamphlets. In 1772 an essay contributor to the London Magazine observed, ‘At the amazing rate adultery has prospered of late, men will be afraid to venture upon matrimony … At the best, it is but a losing game … our women have advanced a degree farther in the science of adultery than ever women did before.’8 Although written with more than a tinge of irony to raise a smile in the reader, it effectively highlighted the potential consequences of popular trends in behaviour. By 1799, a serious pamphlet penned by the anonymous ‘Friend to Social Order’ regretted ‘the present lamentable state of the malady, in this civil war of lust’.9

This public debate referred to the prevalence of infidelity in all ranks of society, not only within the aristocracy, and such perceptions of rampant adultery continued into the next century. In 1821 a contributor to the letters column of the Ladies’ Monthly Museum summed it up in graphic rhetoric, writing:

In an age like the present, when the scorpion of infidelity … boldly raises its head in our streets and high places … the heart of every true Briton, patriot, and Christian, must view with abhorrence the dissemination of principles, which, if not timely checked will eventually destroy every social tie, and plunge the country in all the horrors of anarchy and confusion.10

As in the earlier sermon which had envisaged adultery as an epidemic, this writer also imagined adultery as an alarming aspect of predatory, untameable nature, here in the vivid metaphor of a dangerous scorpion.

So what exactly had gone wrong with English matrimony, and why did more couples appear to be unhappy with their relationships? One of the main problems was a subtly changing attitude to the actual meaning of marriage, and the thorny issue of whether love or money mattered most in the choice of a spouse. Marriage itself was basically an economic institution, but during the eighteenth century a growing awareness of the concept of romantic love brought higher expectations that partnerships should also provide emotional fulfilment and companionship. Finding the ideal spouse could therefore be especially difficult in aristocratic families where, prior to the early 1700s, parents had arranged matches mainly for dynastic and financial advantage. Despite changing attitudes, however, romantic love matches did not completely replace arranged marriages.11 The unpredictability of human nature and the complexity of mixed motives meant there was always far more to the choice of spouse than a simple love versus money calculation.

During the eighteenth century there was a decline in peers’ sons marrying heiresses from 40 per cent to 10 per cent, although this was not due to any major shift from economic to personal reasons dictating choice. On the contrary, marrying girls from titled families as a way of enlarging estates became less popular because promises of future inheritance did not always materialise, and the certainty of a large marriage portion paid upfront was more attractive. A marriage could not be described simply as being either arranged or romantic, because it may have felt like a very different experience for bride and groom, with one choosing for romantic reasons and the other for family duty. The reality seems to have been that there was no radical change in the motives for marriage during the Georgian period, and most alliances probably continued to mix financial and personal motives, finding a balance that could be anywhere on the scale between coldly utilitarian and deeply romantic. Regardless of more rose-tinted notions of love which some thought were being fostered by literature, the actual experience of marriage was not exempt from the pragmatic financial considerations governing many other aspects of life. This was especially true in people of rank and fortune whose main priority was the continuity of landed estates, but also for those of the lower orders who aspired to rise socially and coveted the prestige of marrying a title, which was a valuable asset in the competitive marriage market.

It is clear from personal letters, and the printed advice literature, pamphlets, essays, periodicals, novels, poems and plays of the era, that hard-headed mercenary motives for marriage were widespread, continuing throughout the eighteenth century and on into the 1830s. Contemporaries repeatedly voiced deep anxiety about the prevalence of the wrong motives for marriage based on ‘ambition’, which they blamed for the rising number of separations, adultery and divorce cases plaguing society.

Some of the major concerns were deftly summed up by the humorous Dictionary of Love, which was reprinted through four editions between 1776 and 1795. Words listed under M included ‘money’ and ‘matrimony’, with money defined as a ‘term of infinite power in the present modern System of Love. The possession of it alone confers the title of lover, as it does a Lord. A bank-bill genteelly conveyed, beats all the fine things a Catullus or Tibullus could say.’12 This clever satirical contrast between the old classical ideals and the hard facts of life continued for the term matrimony, where ‘Sordid interest is now the great master of ceremonies to Hymen, of which it pollutes the sanctuary.’ The anonymous author launched a scathing attack on parents who sacrificed their children to money, claiming they were worse than an ancient tribe who burnt their offspring to honour the Canaanite idol Moloch, because ‘the pain of those sold for interest is a lingering one, and often as sure as death’. The dictionary explained that, ‘At present, the fashion is to commit matrimony; since … it is rather a crime than a virtue; many enter into it with no better design than a highwayman on Hounslow-heath, to take a purse.’ It described love as a business transaction under the definition of Rival, as an ‘out-bidder’ for the hand of a lady by a man of fortune wanting to ‘beat down her price’. The enticements needed to win a woman were in proportion to her personal worth, so that a duchess ‘may fall to a diamond necklace, and a chambermaid to a taudry ribbon’.

Whatever the motives, marriage remained a perennial challenge, and in an age fascinated by gaming many people accepted that marriage was the biggest gamble of all. In a letter dismissing the congratulations of a friend on his recent wedding Thomas, 2nd Baron Lyttelton, explained, with characteristic frankness, ‘Marriage is the grand lottery of life; and it is as great a folly to exult upon entering into it, as on the purchase of a ticket in the State wheel of fortune. It is when the ticket is drawn a prize that we can answer to congratulations.’13 And another correspondent, referring to the notorious Lady Abergavenny scandal, remarked, ‘My Lady A’s behaviour, and some more wives of the same stamp, has so disgraced matrimony, that I am not surprized that men are afraid of it.’14

In The Forced Marriage, a play written in 1770 by a well-known and widely published London doctor, the reluctant bride’s servant pointed out that as marriage was ‘a lottery at the best’, it had ‘little chance to prosper’ if love was sacrificed to a father’s avarice.15 The play picked up on the popular debate about marriage motives by charting the tragic consequences of a match between a lord’s daughter and a rich elderly nobleman, who the father thought was ‘above her proudest hopes – a prize scarce to be dreamt of’. It dramatised the conflicting viewpoints of the father (who claimed his motive was paternal love, with age and life experience giving a more reasoned basis for choice than youthful passion) and the girl, who dutifully refused to elope with her real love, went mad and died at the prospect of this forced match. The loyal maid, a character embodying the voice of reason, protested that, ‘it looks so like base prostitution, that the more I think on’t, the more it shocks me’. And in the preface, the author declared that he wrote the play ‘to expose a most cruel and absurd tyranny too common in life’.

It is significant that neither this play, nor other writings, used the term ‘arranged marriage’ as it was understood that all matches involving legal settlement of land or money required arrangement by relatives and lawyers, but this had no relevance to any personal emotions involved. Couples distinguished by their notable lack of feeling could be described as marrying for ‘interest’, ‘ambition’ or ‘fortune-hunting’, while marriages of substantial mutual affection were ‘love-matches’, although this particular phrase was mainly found in novels and periodicals.

Men and women were equally likely to harbour mercenary motives, as were people of all social classes who saw marriage as the best means of securing status and wealth. The American philosopher Benjamin Franklin condemned ‘muckworms’ with a ‘thirst for riches’ in the opening section of his Reflections on Courtship and Marriage entitled ‘Many unhappy matches are occasioned by mercenary views’.16 He harshly criticised the ‘abominable prostitutions’ seen daily in so many marriages and asked, ‘How many play the harlot for a good settlement, under the legal title of a wife! and how many … to repair a broken fortune, or to gain one!’ First published in 1746, the hard-hitting essay was reprinted three times in England where it obviously struck a chord with a largely middle-class readership, by arguing that marriage should be founded on mutual friendship and esteem, not based on ‘mere motives of interest’ which were ‘repugnant to reason and nature’.

English authors who themselves frequently came from the moral middle classes could also argue self-righteously that ‘love alone shall regulate thy choice’, although they too were not immune from the financial priorities of a commercial and aspirational society.17 The barrister Richard Fenton was an affluent young gentleman who could afford to be scathing of social climbers in his poetry but in real life actually married a baron’s daughter, whose money conveniently helped to fund his antiquarian and scholarly ambitions. One of his poems decried those heartless people who marry upwards:

Base, let them suffer to be bought and sold,

And barter all their happiness for gold;

Or, lur’d by grandeur, for a title wed,

And risque their peace to share a noble bed.

It was obviously easier to ascribe base motives in other people’s marriages than to admit that your own motives might not be entirely pure or disinterested.

Ambition was present in all social classes but the mercenary motive was believed to rise in proportion to rank, so it was noticeable in the landed gentry and especially prevalent among the nobility, who had the most at stake in terms of land and fortune, as well as the bonus of a title. Far greater economic and parental pressure was therefore imposed on aristocratic children, particularly eldest sons who would inherit and daughters who depended on a generous marriage portion for future security. The different meaning and practice of marriage for the aristocracy meant that they were thought to be most likely to marry for the wrong reasons and therefore to have unhappy marriages.

These imperatives of inheritance and lineage were reflected in the correspondence between Basil, 6th Earl of Denbigh, and various family friends. Among many letters of congratulation on the birth of his grandson in 1796 was one which commented, ‘I hope … that the House of Denbigh will never want plenty of lineal successors.’18 The acceptance that financial matters were a natural component of aristocratic marriage was illustrated in another letter to Denbigh from Charlotte, Marchioness of Bute, who had herself been a wealthy heiress as a bride. Summing up the recent union of her husband’s brother William Stuart, Bishop of St David’s, she tellingly linked happiness and cash in the same short sentence, ‘The Bishop and his wife seem very happy, she had twenty thousand pounds.’19

Marrying well was viewed as an important family and social duty for young aristocratic men and women. Parents went to great lengths to achieve a match that would be mutually satisfactory to both families in terms of status and fortune, and therefore lengthy legal and financial transactions were required when large amounts of inherited land and money were involved. The vast ten-page marriage settlement document signed and witnessed at the Old Bailey in 1747 for the marriage of Lady Mary Bertie, daughter of the 2nd Duke of Ancaster, and Samuel Greatheed, the wealthy son of a St Kitts sugar plantation owner, showed how the interests of both parties were carefully protected. Lady Mary’s £15,000 marriage portion (roughly £900,000 today) was specified as providing £5,000 to Greatheed ‘to and for his own use and benefit’, plus a further £10,000 to be kept in trust for the bride and her future children.20 In addition, a parcel of land on the St Kitts plantation was granted to Lady Mary’s trustees to assure her future income in the event of Samuel’s death. This family alliance of new money and ancient pedigree clearly brought benefits to both parties, with the consolidation of rank and two fortunes. While Lady Mary secured a wealthy husband who had lucrative West Indies investments and prospects in public life as a newly elected MP, Greatheed gained the social prestige of marrying into a duke’s family and a cash settlement he could invest in his estate. During the eighteenth century a portion of around £25,000 in cash (around £1.5 million now) rather than land was the norm from girls marrying a peer, though adjustments were made to take account of inequalities in rank. Untitled brides or those outside the landed gentry were required to bring a larger sum when marrying up the social scale, while the widow’s jointure would be more generous for noblewomen marrying down. At the pinnacle of society, the marriage portion of HRH the Princess Royal was a staggering £80,000 (£4.8 million today) in 1797.21

Many parents were naturally hoping for a judicious blend of the practical and emotional when arranging their children’s marriages, such as the politician and author George Lyttelton, 1st Baron. He had spent considerable effort in 1763 negotiating a suitable match for his only son, Thomas, with Anne, daughter of Lieutenant-General Warburton, who would inherit £50,000 on her father’s death.22 But eighteen months later the marriage settlement had still not been finalised; Thomas, travelling in Europe on the Grand Tour, expressed his frustration to his uncle, writing, ‘I am betrothed to a woman whom I would give the world to enjoy, and whom I cannot marry until … the General has sold his estate … I prefer Miss Warburton’s love to that of any other woman.’23 He was delighted that Anne seemed to be equally smitten, ‘my sweet girl … professes herself, in the language of desiring love, to be mine, and only mine.’24 However, after reports of his gambling and youthful misconduct in Italy, the match was called off, and his father took a largely pragmatic view: ‘Upon the whole, I flatter myself he may do better elsewhere, as Miss Warburton’s present Fortune was rather too scanty to make him easy; and no-one can tell how long her Parents may live’, adding that the union might have been ‘less happy than I could wish’.25

Despite the apparent mutual affection of the couple expressed in their letters, in later life Thomas had a very different view of the match, rationalising that youthful obedience to paternal authority had made him consent to a marriage in which he and Anne were mere pawns in a family negotiation: ‘A rich and amiable young lady was chosen to the happy and honourable task … to shape me into that perfection of character which was to verify the dreams of my visionary relations.’26 It is difficult to be sure whether this cynical viewpoint had some truth or if the power of hindsight had distorted his memories of genuine youthful feelings. But the case shows how there could be several different interpretations of an apparently ‘arranged’ marriage.

Older couples free of parental interference had greater personal freedom to choose, but they too needed to be aware of the delicate balance between emotional and practical considerations. The second marriage of Basil, 6th Earl of Denbigh, showed the complex and shifting motivations of both partners. Although proudly proclaiming noble descent from the princely line of Hapsburg, the family had a long history of financial problems, which had led to the loss of an estate in Rutland after Denbigh’s accession to the title.27 A major motivating factor throughout his life was therefore the need to secure extra income, which he managed via a series of generous court sinecures including lord of the bedchamber and by marrying twice, both times to an heiress. The first was a traditional arranged marriage to Mary Cotton, a baronet’s daughter with a substantial marriage portion.28 From their remaining letters, the couple appeared to have been ill-matched in terms of temperament, his being a lively nature enjoying bawdy jokes and drinking, and hers governed by devout religious belief. In one letter to a relative, Denbigh joked about ‘the diversions of London’ and its opportunities for adultery, adding, ‘Ho! ho! – lay in a good Hock of Wine, for we intend to pass many a merry day with you this Winter.’29 In contrast, one of Mary’s earnest letters, which was left to be opened after her death, urged her husband to consider his immortal soul and reminded him of ‘my repeated attempts during Life to awaken you to a Sense of the imminent Danger you run’.30

Only nine months after her death in 1783, the earl was remarried at the age of 64 to Sarah, Lady Halford, the rich widow of a neighbouring Leicestershire baronet, whom he already knew from social events in the elite county circle. The match was a considered two-way financial deal to which the bride brought substantial estates but retained all rents and profits ‘in her full and entire possession’, while the earl settled on her both land and his London house.31 Denbigh’s initial comments expressed his practical rather than emotional requirements of marriage, when he wrote to a friend, ‘If good sense, chearfulness, and an amiable Disposition in a Wife can conduce to Happiness, I think I have every prospect before me of being so.’32 But there was also great affection between the couple, and he wrote later, ‘Lady D … has been my only comfort for nigh this two year’.33 On superficial appearances, the marriage could be described by observers either as a pragmatic marriage made for financial considerations to a baronet’s widow of independent fortune, or as a love-match by two older people of independent means who had known each other for some time. Neither of these interpretations would be entirely accurate, as it was a far more complex picture in which affection, rank and money all played a part in the decision for both partners. Mercenary motives could co-exist with real attraction or develop later into a genuine marriage of affection.

Although a couple’s personal considerations could be less clear-cut than the public façade of a marriage might indicate, commentators reflected a society where mercenary motives did now seem to predominate and many people believed that ‘a woman in this country has very little probability of marrying for love’.34 The situation was especially difficult for girls because ‘men chuse, and women only accept’ and sometimes the best they could hope for was that esteem might later develop into limited affection.35 Parents overcome by ruthless ambition were thought to be the main cause of unhappy marriage, and writers repeatedly used the term ‘prostitution’ for this heartless trade in daughters, which they warned could lead to adultery.

One author argued that as ‘marriages are generally made by the … authority of parents; and their children are only actors who have parts given them, sometimes very difficult … to perform’, it was as unjust to blame them for the consequences, as to blame a player who recited a bad part for the faults of the dramatist.36 The writer viewed crimes of adultery as the ‘probable and necessary consequences’ of matches created by avaricious relatives, and urged legislators to punish parents ‘for the profligacy of children they had … inhumanly prostituted’. In similar vein, the aptly pseudonymed Augustus Lovemore warned that a girl ‘hurried by her parents into a wealthy marriage, drawn by variety and dissipation … into innumerable temptations, may … fall into the most fatal error’.37 A writer in the London Magazine of April 1770 remarked that both men and women were real fortune-hunters, but young ladies were ‘too often the dupes of their own, or their parents’ ambition’.38 A pretty girl with a portion of £500 would turn down a mere tradesman in the expectation of a carriage, while more than £1,500 meant that she ‘sets her cap at a coronet’.39

Mercenary marriage was seen as a growing problem right through into the mid-nineteenth century, with regular warnings about the perils of fortune hunters appearing in print. Writing in 1829, the political reformer William Cobbett described those who love ‘according to the rules of arithmetic’ as ‘despicable’ and propagating ‘a species of legal prostitution’.40 Women’s magazines took a particular interest in the debate, publishing essays such as ‘Which should a young lady prefer in matrimony – love or gold?’ in 1815 and ‘The calamities of heiresses’ in 1828, both of which argued strongly against bartering personal happiness for wealth.41 The extent to which these ideals were actually reflected in real marriages is of course difficult to gauge, but a combination of personal and strategic familial interest, depending on individual couples and their social rank, is the most realistic assessment. For the aristocracy, family duty usually remained more important than individual preferences.

Because the choice of partner and the experience of matrimony had a major impact on most people’s lives, the topic had strong market appeal that was exploited by the commercial press in popular formats including pamphlets, books and essays giving both serious and satirical views of marriage, alongside novels, plays and poetry. Outside the confines of stern religious tracts, writers took an entirely realistic view of marriage, offering practical advice on how to cope with difficulties and citing the power of reason as the guide to conjugal harmony. This pragmatic approach was exemplified by A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters, a popular work by the eminent physician Dr John Gregory which went through fifteen editions between 1774 and 1796. It outlined the considerations in choosing a husband, warned against the false expectations raised by romantic novels and wisely summed up the secret of a lasting marriage in which the ‘tumult of passion will necessarily subside; but it will be succeeded by an endearment that affects the heart in a more equal, more sensible, and tender manner’.42

The habit of novel reading was repeatedly criticised for corrupting morals and setting up distorted, overly dramatic expectations of real-life romance. One popular publication warned girls to ‘shun as you would do the most fatal poison, all that species of reading … which warms the imagination … and raises the taste above the level of common life’ or it will ‘embitter all your married days’. In the cautionary memoir and conduct manual describing the causes of her own scandalous marital separation, Lady Sarah Pennington recommended plays as being morally instructive, but said that novels and romances should be avoided for their ‘pernicious consequences’ in real life. Not only were their moral parts ‘like small diamonds amongst mountains of dirt and trash’, but they ‘give a romantic turn to the mind, which is often productive of great errors in judgment, and of fatal mistakes in conduct – of this I have seen frequent instances’.43

Sensible guidelines for husbands based on ‘reason, virtue, and honour’ were also laid out in A Letter from a Father to a Son on his Marriage, which advised men not to discard all the little attentions of courtship: ‘Be … as you were before marriage; polite and complaisant … tender and attentive’.44 It gave guidance on behaviour in married life including care in personal cleanliness, avoiding food disliked by the wife and how to cope with ‘diversities of temper’.

An amusingly cynical but widely held idea of marriage was encapsulated in Cupid and Hymen; a Voyage to the Isles of Love and Matrimony, an ingenious tale which described marriage as a beautiful island of illusion tempting unwary travellers, who found instead when they arrived a threatening landscape of briars, precipices, morasses and serpents.45 The island had two ports named Love and Interest, the latter a trading port ‘full of immense Riches, where Fathers and Mothers … put off their Daughters, who are set out for Sale in their Warehouses’. It was divided into provinces inhabited by the Discreet, the Ill-matched, the Ill-at-Ease and the Jealous, while the capital of the head province Cuckoldshire, named Hornborough, was a city ‘as large as London, to which it bears a very great Resemblance’, peopled mainly by the wealthy elite.

The book also included several ironic portrayals of marriage, including a bachelor’s financial estimate of the expenses of married life, and a married man’s reply which jokingly quoted the justification of wedded love as being the ‘perpetual fountain of Domestic Sweets’ from Paradise Lost, Book Four. Very few serious references were made to Milton’s famous passage ‘Hail, wedded Love’ in literature discussing matrimony in this period. Instead, it often cropped up as an ironic commentary on the contrast between the pure sexual married love in the Garden of Eden, and the wanton behaviour of modern lovers. These included the use of Milton’s opening lines in a pamphlet about the adultery of the Duke of Cumberland, and in a satirical guide to seducing young ladies.46 Most readers would have been familiar with the passage and picked up on the implied reference to its well-known fourth line, ‘By thee adulterous lust was driven from men’. Milton may have shaped more traditional aspirations for marriage, but for most people this proved to be an unattainable Protestant ideal of perfection which was sadly confined to sermons and religious essays.

Contemporaries strongly believed that the high incidence of marriage for the wrong motives posed a serious problem in society generally, but particularly in the upper echelons where far more was at stake. In her novel The Sylph, published in 1779, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, expressed the fashionable cynical opinion of the reasons for marriage in a letter from the libertine Sir William Stanley to Lord Biddulph asking, ‘don’t every body marry? those who have estates, to have heirs of their own; and those who have nothing, to get something’.47 Later in the novel, the bitter words of the heroine, Julia, reflected the author’s own experiences in an emotionally stunted marriage to the 5th Duke of Devonshire: ‘Marriage now is a necessary kind of barter, and an alliance of families; – the heart is not consulted; – or if that should sometimes bring a pair together … love seldom lasts long.’