CHAPTER ELEVEN

A Soliciting Temper

‘In these late Times’, wrote Basua Makin after the Restoration, not only did women defend their homes and ‘play the soldier with Prudence and Valour’ but they also ‘appeared before Committees, and pleaded their own Causes, like men’. The necessity for women to make public appearances in their own interests was one of the most surprising developments of the wartime period. ‘The customs of England’ were changed as well as the laws, as Margaret Duchess of Newcastle expressed it, with women ‘running about’ and acting as ‘pleaders, attornies, petitioners and the like’.¹

What began as a necessity would later be regarded as an opportunity. A decade or so later, Basua Makin was advancing this type of wartime activity as evidence of the female’s fitness for that education generally denied to her. Yet ironically enough, women’s influential role as ‘solicitors’ actually developed out of their own supposed weakness.

The sequestration or confiscation of Royalist estates (and rents) had its origin in the Parliamentary side’s desperate need for money in the early stages of the war, lacking resources to acquire supplies and pay troops. On 27 March 1643, Parliament passed an ordinance which sequestrated the estates of all those giving assistance to the King; in practical terms, the property of such a ‘delinquent’ was to be sequestered by a committee of that county in which it was situated. In October of the same year, the lands and houses of those Members of Parliament who had absented themselves, or those who had neglected to pay Parliamentary taxation were ordered to be let, so that the rent might serve as a security for loans for Parliament.²

Women, however, were not delinquents, or if they were, it was a rare state, more likely to be connected with their Catholicism than their Royalism. Of the Kentish delinquents listed for example only 5 per cent were female, and of those who did feature, about 93 per cent were Catholic recusants; the tiny category of women sequestered in their own right, widows and spinsters, were accused of such offences as selling goods to Royalist garrisons.³

Women were not delinquents because of their own dependent legal status: there their dependency worked to their advantage. Technically, because all her rights at law were swallowed up in his, a woman’s husband was also responsible for her crimes. Conversely his delinquency could not be laid at her door; there could be no guilt by association. This principle however had the awkward effect of leaving the weaker vessel not responsible for the crimes of the stronger, yet enduring all the same their practical consequences. So, the Parliamentary ordinance being framed to raise money rather than to impose suffering, delinquents’ families had to be given some kind of protection from the complete destitution which would otherwise have been their lot following the sequestration.

For this reason, another ordinance was passed in August 1643 which set aside a special sum, not to exceed one fifth of the sequestered income of the delinquent, for the benefit of his wife and children. It was the right to this ‘fifth’, if she pleaded for it personally before the committee concerned at the Goldsmiths’ Hall in the City of London, which gave to the wife – the woman – a new and special importance in that society where her public silence had previously been rated an eminent virtue. A Royalist ballad saluted the change:

At the same time the jointures of wives and the settlements of heiresses were not supposed to be sequestered along with their husband’s own property, no matter how masterful a ‘malignant’ (as the Parliamentarians termed their adversaries) he had proved himself to be. It is a commentary on the postulated legal innocence of the weaker vessel that Lady Bankes complained bitterly – and with perfect justification – over the sequestration of her jointure along with the rest of her husband’s assets after the fall of Corfe Castle. Yet, as we have seen, no one could have shown a finer sense of the need to assist the King than the woman who held the upper ward of the Castle and poured stones and hot embers on the heads of the invaders.

As Protector, Oliver Cromwell harkened to the plea of Lady Ormonde, heiress of the Irish Desmond estates, but also wife to the Marquess of Ormonde, the arch-Royalist leader, and as such condemned to poverty-stricken exile. A lady, he decided, should not ‘want bread’ for the bad luck of having ‘a delinquent lord’; he ordered the Desmond inheritance to be restored to her. Indeed Cromwell, then the single dominant force in Britain, had ‘a very general fame’ for helping the weak, as Lady Ormonde pointed out hopefully in a letter from Caen; in most cases where he had made a personal intervention, the weak consisted of women, whom he regarded as innocent victims of their husbands’ or fathers’ wrongdoings.⁵

Of course the figure of the suppliant female being granted mercy by an all-powerful male was as old as history – or monarchy – itself. Cromwell as Protector was merely carrying on the tradition of the clement sovereign. As King James I passed graciously through his new dominion of England, to take up royal residence after the death of Queen Elizabeth, he presented an excellent opportunity for suppliance on the part of those whose relatives had offended under the previous regime. At Doncaster, a widow named Muriel Lyttelton flung herself at his feet and begged that the forfeited estates of her late husband might be returned, that she might somehow be able to raise and care for her children.

Muriel Lyttelton’s husband, a Catholic, had been convicted of high treason under Elizabeth for his part in the Essex conspiracy and died in prison. As a result of Muriel Lyttelton’s plea, the estates were returned and in the first year of James’s reign, the act of attainder reversed. A careful businesswoman (she had some of the steely prudence of her father, the Lord Chancellor Sir Thomas Bromley), Mrs Lyttelton then tended her children’s inheritance so well that she eliminated all debts. It was with some justice that an eighteenth-century history of Worcestershire wrote of this importunate widow that she ‘may be called the second founder of the [Lyttelton] family’. Sir Edward Digby was another Catholic executed for conspiracy. His widow, Mary Lady Digby, twenty-four years old at his death, did so well with her suits and begging letters that in 1608 she was able to reclaim his forfeited properties for her sons; as a result of her perseverance, Sir Kenelm Digby inherited £3,000 a year.⁶

In the rising drama of the King’s powers versus his subjects’ rights in the 1630s, some of the most vivid incidents occurred when the Star Chamber sentenced men to physical punishments for the sake of the words they had spoken, written or printed. Wives played their convenient role here in appealing for mercy.

Henry Burton was a Puritan minister, denounced to the Star Chamber for preaching ‘seditious sermons’ at the same time as William Prynne was accused for his work Histriomastix; like Prynne, Burton was sentenced to have both his ears cut off while confined to the public pillory, and after that to be imprisoned for life. Sarah Burton was not allowed to visit him while he lay in prison in London, his wounds healing; but when he was deemed recovered and dispatched to a new prison in Lancaster, she followed him in a coach. On 7 November 1640, after he was transported to Guernsey, Sarah Burton petitioned to the House of Commons (now feeling its mettle against the practices of the Star Chamber) to allow him to return. Her language was carefully modest: ‘as she knows not how to manage so weighty a business’ she asked the House of Commons to take ‘her distressed condition’ into their serious consideration. On 10 November Burton was released. The language of John Bastwick’s wife, asking at the same time to visit him in the Scilly Isles (he had been convicted of a scandalous libel under Archbishop Laud) because she could not provide for the children, was remarkably similar: ‘your petitioner being a woman [is] no way able to follow nor manage so great and weighty a cause’.⁷ Bastwick was released in December.

In January 1644, the Houses of Parliament at Westminster (as opposed to the King’s Parliament at Oxford, a body whose validity they did not recognize) offered pardon to all Royalists who would submit before a certain date; the condition was that they should compound for their delinquency by payment of a sum, to be assessed, towards the public relief. After October 1645 when the capture of Bristol meant that the whole of England (with the exception, as we have seen, of a few fortresses) was at Parliament’s mercy, this offer was renewed and extended.

The theoretical procedure was as follows: ‘delinquents’ who wanted to free themselves from sequestration by this method had to present themselves at the Committee for Compounding which sat at the Goldsmiths’ Hall in the City of London, in Gresham Street near the Guildhall. The delinquent took an oath before the Committee binding himself not to bear arms against Parliament, and another (religious) oath, that of the Covenant. He then had to declare the full value of his estate, any mis-statement making him liable to a heavy fine. Rates of payment varied: MPs might lose half their estates, lesser delinquents only a sixth.⁸

In practice these negotiations were very often bedevilled by local jealousies – not forgetting that the original sequestration was carried out by the Committee of that county where the estates lay – as well as the separate but hideous complications attendant upon all bureaucracies, but particularly newly instituted ones. Some Royalist husbands were in prison – how were they to arrive at accurate figures concerning an estate and its rents? Others were in exile, not wishing to return until the principle of the compounding had been securely established. This was where the ‘innocent’ wives, already having the right to their ‘fifth’, might well be in a better position than the husbands to arrange for the compounding or obtain the vital certificate of sequestration from the local county Committee.

Above all, women had a mobility denied to the male; even if the word mobility has an ironic ring applied to persons who were often sick, often pregnant, often some combination of the two, yet finding themselves undertaking journeys which involved considerable physical hardship even for the healthy.

All this was nothing compared to women’s peculiar fitness to play the suppliant role. As the imprisoned Thomas Knyvett wrote to his wife in 1644: ‘I think it will be fit for thee to come up and Appear in the business, for Women solicitors are observed to have better Audience than masculine malignants.’⁹ It was in keeping with the contemporary estimate of the so-called weaker sex that any member of it could entreat most plangently without being accused of more than fulfilling her own feminine nature. This implicit social approval of ‘Women solicitors’ was the reverse side of that attitude which found excessive martial courage in wartime disquieting because it was considered masculine.

Lady Cholmley, she who had shown ‘a courage above her sex’ in her husband’s estimation during the siege of Scarborough Castle, remained firmly in Yorkshire after its surrender.¹⁰ Sir Hugh Cholmley was allowed to sail away to the Continent by the besieging commander Sir Mathew Boynton; Lady Cholmley however declined a pass to go abroad. It was important to establish that the Cholmley house at Whitby was hers, in order to avoid its sequestration with the rest of her husband’s property.

Lady Cholmley’s instinctive fear that in this case possession was nine if not ten points of this law was certainly right: the Roundhead Captain at Whitby refused to leave the house, despite Lady Cholmley’s authority. Homeless, Lady Cholmley was obliged to take lodgings in Malton, with her young daughters, and wait on events. Fortunately for her – if not the Captain – plague broke out in Whitby, and one of the Captain’s servants died; the Captain promptly fled. Seeing her opportunity, and unlike the Captain, careless of her own safety (although she left her daughters at Malton), Lady Cholmley then undertook a remarkable journey from Malton to Whitby, in the depths of winter. She was now in her late forties, but she went on foot ‘over the bleak and snowy moorland’ of North Yorkshire, a distance of some twenty miles as the crow flies, and rising to nearly a thousand feet. Attended by only one manservant and one maid, she took possession of her house again.

The plague vanished, the Captain tried to return. Lady Cholmley declined to be ousted. Finally, with the help of her brother-in-law, she secured officially that ‘fifth’ of Sir Hugh Cholmley’s estate which was her legal right; the following February her son William Cholmley (upon whom the manor of Whitby had in fact been settled by his father) arrived to look after it. So at last Lady Cholmley was able to go to her husband abroad; at Rouen in March 1647 joyfully she re-encountered her son, another Hugh, whom she had not seen for five years.

A period of Cholmley family peace – albeit in exile – followed. However, in February 1649, shortly after the execution of Charles I had put an end to one set of Royalist hopes, it was Lady Cholmley who returned to England and arranged, with the help of some Yorkshire friends, composition of favourable terms for her husband’s estate. Once the first instalment had been paid, Sir Hugh himself was able to come back in June 1649. After a period of helping William at Whitby, Lady Cholmley returned to her native south (she had been born Elizabeth Twysden, daughter of the grand Lady Anne Twysden, of East Peckham in Kent) and spent the rest of her days with Sir Hugh, mainly at her brother’s home of Roydon Hall. She died in 1655. As a tribute to her fidelity Sir Hugh Cholmley, who died two years later, elected to be buried with his wife in the south, rather than with his own forebears in Yorkshire.

Lady Cholmley’s sister-in-law Isabella was another indomitable helpmate. We last heard of Isabella, the model daughter-in-law to Lady Anne Twysden, nursing the older woman with devotion through her last illness, having been picked by Lady Anne from amongst her gentlewomen, at the somewhat advanced age of thirty, as a bride for her son Sir Roger Twysden, the antiquary and MP (see p. 114). Sir Roger was a politician of independent mind: he had been sure that the demand for ship money had been wrong because the King had not acted in Parliament. But in the spring of 1642 he was one of the so-called Kentish Petitioners who protested to Parliament, amongst other things, on behalf of episcopal government and against religious ‘heresy’ in any form, a gesture which was extremely ill-received by the Puritan element in the House of Commons. According to Sir Roger, it was however owing to the private malice of his Kentish rivals Sir John Sedley and Sir Anthony Weldon that he was then imprisoned.¹¹

Dame Isabella Twysden was now a woman of thirty-seven, her physique already wearied by child-bearing.¹² Nevertheless on hearing the ill news concerning Sir Roger she sent her babies to an aunt at West Mall and set off for London. It was not until Sir Roger was freed on bail that she returned to Roydon Hall with him. In the April of the following year, Roydon Hall was ransacked by soldiers. Sir Roger, having no wish to stand by while the extremists fought each other, tried to set out for a self-imposed exile in France with his son William; he was stopped. On 17 May 1643 the order was given for the sequestration of his estate, and Sir Roger himself was immured in the Compter Prison in Southwark.

It was now the melancholy duty of Dame Isabella to appeal to the county Committee – that of Kent – for that fifth which was her due for maintenance. But at this point the Kent Committee demanded that Sir Roger had first to acknowledge his own delinquency and thus by implication the justice of the sequestration, otherwise she would get nothing at all. This message, which was in effect an attempt to get Sir Roger to throw in his lot with Parliament, was duly passed on by Dame Isabella. Sir Roger refused to make the acknowledgement.

At this the Kent Committee set to and not only had Sir Roger’s coppice woods felled – which if the sequestration order was accepted, was their right – but also certain trees which Sir Roger considered to be his standing timber. Sir Roger was convinced – no doubt with justice – that his old enemy Sir Anthony Weldon as Chairman of the Kent Committee was responsible; so that he in his turn decided to petition the central Committee of the Lords and Commons for Sequestrations, which sat at Westminster. For his emissary Dame Isabella, who was ill at the time, this involved daily journeys between Westminster and the Compter prison.

In late February 1644 Sir Roger was allowed to leave the Compter for a less formal confinement in Lambeth Palace, in the rooms of the former chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Moreover Dame Isabella was permitted to share with him the three rooms and a study, the latter ‘a fair chamber with a chimney’ in which Sir Roger was able to write and copy, following his antiquarian bent. The Westminster Committee also decided at last that the Kent Committee was not justified in their behaviour. However when Dame Isabella returned to Kent with this news, the local Committee merely greeted her with a yet more violent denunciation of her husband.

Sir Roger’s petition was heard by the Westminster Committee in August: bitterly hostile witnesses from Kent testified against him, and Dame Isabella, with her counsel, was not allowed to remain in the room while judgment was reached. It was hardly surprising that the decision went against Sir Roger. Dame Isabella was privately informed of the reason: that ‘for one man’s sake’, it would not do to disoblige the entire county of Kent. At least the Westminster Committee made an order to the Kent Committee at the beginning of September that they ‘do allow the said lady a fifth part of her husband’s estate’; a recommendation was added that Dame Isabella should be allowed the mansion house and the lands adjoining.

Dame Isabella’s health was worse; she was also, in her fortieth year, in the early stages of pregnancy (altogether she bore six children between her early thirties and late forties). Nevertheless she battled down to Kent, and presented the order. All that happened was that the Kent Committee, under the hated Sir Anthony Weldon, refused outright to give her the lease, and furthermore put off granting her her fifth, on the pretext of requiring certain rentals from her – as Dame Isabella pointed out, they were in a better position than she was to supply these rentals, since they had confiscated the land concerned. So that it was back to Westminster, to the Committee of the Lords and Commons, and to Sir Roger; but the members of the Westminster Committee, saying frankly they had done all they could, ended by recommending her to return to Kent.

On 2 November the Committee of Kent treated Dame Isabella courteously. However, she was told now that she could not receive her fifth until she had supplied those vital details of the estate, which, it will be remembered, it was the duty of the owner of a sequestered property to provide. This was all very well in theory, but in practice was a prodigious labour since the estate had already been sequestered for eighteen months, with its master in prison, unable to keep a record of rents. Dame Isabella was undeterred. She set about visiting all the tenants herself and constructing a proper return. In this manner she was able to go back to the Committee of Kent on 2 December although it was not until 18 December that the certificate was finally made out. Ten days later the Committee of Kent allowed Dame Isabella one fifth of the rents and profits of the estate, and an allowance from the receipts of the rents since Michaelmas (which in fact constituted another piece of meanness, since most people were allowed a fifth of the total rents received since sequestration). But Dame Isabella was not to be permitted to occupy Roydon Hall; and the felling of the timber went on.

It was the latter injustice which caused Sir Roger, fretting impotently in his London confinement, particular pain. Once again it was the task of Dame Isabella to petition the Westminster Committee: ‘… the woods adjoining to the said house, being as she conceived in her fifth part, were then in felling …’ Westminster did give out an order for this to stop; although privately once again they confessed that they could do little more to help her against the Committee of Kent.

At this point Dame Isabella started to keep a diary, which lasted for the next six years;¹³ this document, besides charting the political rigours of the life of a ‘Woman solicitor’, gives small intimate glimpses of that domestic existence from which ‘soliciting’ distracted her. Thus are chronicled the coming and going of nurses, or matters such as the ‘breeching’ of young Roger Twysden at the age of six: this was a miniature nursery ceremony of the time, when the boy child officially deserted the ‘skirts’ of his sisters for masculine attire; on this occasion Roger’s mother noted regretfully that although he was six years old, he was ‘very little of growth’.

The return to Kent with the new order, on 8 February 1645, was recorded as follows (her own spelling): ‘I came to Peckham great with child, and ride all the way a hors back, and I thank God no hurt.’ Dame Isabella must have been in fact eight months pregnant, for her son Charles was born at the beginning of March; she rode pillion behind the loyal tenant George Stone, with whom the children had been boarded. At the beginning of the sequestration, her husband had kept a man for her but now he could no longer afford to do so. Her endurance was however fruitless, for the Committee of Kent simply nullified the Westminster order. Thereafter Dame Isabella’s health took a long time to recover from the twin ordeal of childbirth and the journey. It was not until the end of May that she was well enough to return to London.

The fortunes of Sir Roger Twysden too mended slowly. In February 1646 he was allowed to leave his confinement for his London lodgings; in August 1647 he was further permitted to return to East Peckham, except that troops billeted there arrived the following week. In May 1649 Sir Roger was finally allowed to compound, at a rate of a tenth of his estate: and by this time ‘a thousand oaks’ had been felled. Dame Isabella reflected painfully in her diary how great her husband’s sufferings had been; and all for that one ‘Kentish’ petition to Parliament before the outbreak of war. Even then their lives were not immune from brutal interruption: in April 1651 troopers burst into Roydon Hall at four o’clock in the morning. They took Sir Roger away, with his brother-in-law Sir Hugh Cholmley, to nearby Leeds Castle, in order to search ‘as they said, for arms, and letters’. Dame Isabella commented: ‘For no cause, I thank Christ.’ Sir Roger Twysden was released, but Sir Hugh Cholmley, a more suspect figure, as the former Governor of Scarborough Castle and a returned exile, was kept shut up until June.

Dame Isabella gave birth to her last child, Charles, in 1655. The scene at her deathbed, two years later, is passionately described in his manuscript notebooks by Sir Roger. When the end was clearly near, she rallied briefly at three o’clock in the morning; although speechless she could still respond: ‘When I kissed her which was the last I ever did whilst she lived, she gave me many kisses together so as I told her “here is the old Kisses still”. She smiled as though she knew what she did use to do.’ After her death Sir Roger kissed Dame Isabella again – one last time.¹⁴

In his notebooks Sir Roger praised his wife without stint – for her wisdom in her solicitations to the Committees: ‘with what magnanimity she went through these miserable times’, and for her courage later in facing death. A witness at Dame Isabella’s deathbed was so impressed by this fortitude that she told her – a significant comment – ‘she feared she was not a woman!’ But Sir Roger was well aware of the cost to Dame Isabella of combining the two roles of wife and solicitor. For him she had submitted to the ‘loathsomeness’ of prisons; for him she had undertaken, heavily pregnant, ‘great journeys in Kent’, saying all the while she would endure more, ‘much more for my sake’. ‘She was the saver of my estate,’ wrote Sir Roger, ‘never man had a better wife, never children a better mother.’¹⁵

The pilgrimage of Mary Lady Verney to get the sequestration lifted from the estates of her husband, Sir Ralph, was arguably even more arduous than those of Dame Isabella since the Verney household had actually settled in France. Separation from her beloved spouse added a further distressing element to Mary Verney’s story.

The marriage between the undergraduate Ralph Verney and the child heiress Mary Blacknall, described in the first chapter of this book (see p. 24 f£), had proved one of remarkable happiness. As we have seen, Ralph had completed with ‘the sweetness of a kiss’ what had been begun under more mercenary auspices. Mary was Ralph’s ‘Budd’, his ‘Mischiefe’ and he was ‘her dearest Rogue’. Of course Mary’s – and Ralph’s – life had contained its share of that endemic seventeenth-century sorrow, the death of a child. Mary’s first child, a daughter, was born and died in 1632 when she was only sixteen; another daughter died at birth the following year; the year after was born Anna Maria, who died just before she was four. However their next three children all survived: Edmund, born in 1636, Pegg, born in 1638, and Jack, born in November 1640.

Ralph, who was knighted in 1640, sat in both Short and Long Parliaments as MP for Aylesbury. Unlike his father Sir Edmund, killed at Edgehill bearing the King’s standard, he was not a passionate Royalist, but he was a devout Anglican. This was an unhappy combination of views for any Member of the House of Commons to hold (we have seen the trouble it brought to Sir Roger Twysden) and in 1643 Sir Ralph Verney adopted that solution which Sir Roger Twysden had also sought – voluntary exile. By doing so, he certainly avoided taking the oath of the Covenant; but as an absent MP he also placed himself in that category of non-combatants whose estates were none the less liable to sequestration.

At Claydon remained Sir Ralph’s pathetic unmarried sisters, together with the baby Jack, the ‘saucy child’, who was not yet three, so that Mary against her will was persuaded it would be safer to leave him; the real truth was that his aunts could not bear to let him go. To France went Mary, Ralph, seven-year-old Edmund and five-year-old Pegg. The ordinance for the sequestration of Claydon was duly dated 1644; Sir Ralph being named as a delinquent, and his tenants warned that rents in future should be handed over to the county Committee at Aylesbury. (Although it seems it was not totally carried through until September 1646.)¹⁶

It is the lot of the exile to be plagued by aggravating domestic detail, quite apart from the central fact of displacement, and the Verneys were no exception to this rule. They did have with them that bright maid from Claydon, Bess, who managed to learn French with ease, and a superior attendant, Mary’s gentlewoman, Luce Sheppard; but in general French servants were violent and cheated them while ‘no English maid will be content with our diet and way of living’. It was a question of good red meat. The Verneys had no money to keep up great state: ‘Of late, I roast but one night a week for suppers, which were strange in an English maid’s opinion.’ As a matter of fact, Luce and Bess, although loyalty kept them at Mary’s side, did not care for her economical substitutes – un-English ‘potages’ and ‘legumes’ – either.¹⁷

Sir Ralph showed himself more accommodating by approving of French wine (although it is significant that when he had an opportunity to send for some ‘dear old English sack’ from Claydon, he did so). At least Mary could continue to make that good bread for which she was famous, and she had brought with her a portable oven for roasting apples. Meanwhile their friends at home took advantage of the Verneys’ residence at the centre of things in one sense of the word, by sending for details of the latest Paris fashions. An English correspondent was to be found inquiring for some costly new-fangled aids to beauty: ‘little brushes for making clean of the teeth, most covered with silver and some few with gold and silver twist’, together with some little boxes to keep them in.¹⁸

The decision that Mary should return to England to get the sequestration lifted was, however painful for her husband, a natural one under the circumstances. Dr Denton, father and educator of Nancy, confirmed the increasing value of female solicitation in August 1646 in a blunt message to Sir Ralph: ‘women were never so useful as now, and though you should be my agent and solicitor of all the men I know … yet I am confident if you were here, you would do as our sages do, instruct your wife, and leave her to act it with committees’. He went on: ‘Their sex entities them to many privileges, and we find the comfort of them now more than ever.’ Earlier in the same year another friend, Sir Roger Burgoyne, had given precise advice as to how Mary should behave if she did venture across the Channel. This was no place for emulating the staunch ways of the male sex. On the contrary: ‘it would not do amiss if she [Mary] can bring her spirit to a soliciting temper and can tell how to use the juice of an onion sometimes to soften hard hearts’.¹⁹

To this Sir Ralph had replied at the time, ‘I know it is not hard for a wife to dissemble, but there is like to be no need of that; for where necessities are so great the juice of an onion will be useless.’ Certainly by the time Mary arrived in London, in late 1646, she scarcely needed an onion to provoke her tears. Everyone in the capital seemed cheerful, she told Ralph, ‘yet I never had so sad a time in all my life’.²⁰ Bess stayed in France to look after Edmund and Pegg; Luce Sheppard accompanied Mary. The sea journey was delayed because of bad weather and high seas. When they arrived, Mary had to look for lodgings; for two rooms up two flights of stairs she was charged the exorbitant sum of 12s a week, fire, candles, washing and ‘diet’ were all extras. Mary was also pregnant (since her baby was born the following June, she must have known of her condition when she left France). Both maid and Mary fell ill.

Sir Ralph and Mary had arranged a code between them. This was the point at which their friend Eleanor Lady Sussex, newly married to that powerful Puritan grandee the Earl of Warwick and thus expected to play a crucially helpful role in the negotiations, was nicknamed ‘Old Men’s Wife’ (see p. 10 3). The other code names were equally appropriate: sequestration was ‘Chaine’, the sequestrators ‘Chainors’, the Covenant was ‘Phisick’, money was ‘Lead’, and Newcastle was ‘Coals’. Armed with this, Mary hoped to deal with the mountain of debts left behind by her father-in-law Sir Edmund Verney, and secure, like Dame Isabella Twysden, that vital certificate of sequestration from the Committee of the county in which Claydon lay – in this case Buckinghamshire. She then intended to petition the Committee of both Houses at Westminster ‘after we have made all the friends that we possibly can’, to get the sequestration lifted.²¹

If that failed, then there was nothing for it but the dreaded Goldsmiths’ Hall. For all their praiseworthy endeavours, the experience of the Goldsmiths was much dreaded by the women petitioners (which made their courage that much the greater). The jaunty Royalist ballad quoted earlier referred to wives encountering there ‘the devil and all’. We have Margaret Duchess of Newcastle’s description of her own experience when she appeared on the arm of her brother (her husband being abroad) to plead for her due allowance; on receiving ‘an absolute refusal’ before she had even begun to speak, she whispered to her brother to take her out of such an ‘ungentlemanly place’ and left in silence.²²

Thereafter Margaret was inclined to deride women who had done better, and expressed herself as indignant at reports that she had in fact pleaded before this and that committee. Women were chatterboxes – this was one of her favourite themes – and life at the Goldsmiths’ Hall encouraged them in this regrettable tendency: ‘if our sex would but well consider and rationally ponder, they will perceive and find that it is neither words nor place that can advance them but worth and merit’. But this was writing with hindsight ten years later, and perhaps with a little mortified pride. In fact a woman like Mary Verney by words – her own solicitation – and place – a London ‘exile’ far from her husband’s side – stood to achieve a great deal more than by ‘worth and merit’ in France. Nevertheless she was human enough to dread the prospect of the Goldsmiths’ Hall: ‘where we must expect nothing but cruelty, and the paying of more Lead [money] than I fear we can possibly make’.²³

Under the circumstances it was peculiarly distressing to find that ‘Old Men’s Wife’, Eleanor Lady Warwick, was not prepared to exert that favourable influence with the new regime on which the Verneys had counted. ‘I told her many times that it was friends which did all’, Mary reported back to Ralph with indignation; and she proposed to sell the valuable watch which she had brought with her with the idea of rewarding Lady Warwick for her intervention. How differently the Verneys themselves had behaved to Eleanor, then Lady Sussex! They had even lent her the famous black Verney mourning bed with all its doleful trappings to mark one of her earlier widowhoods. This bed, used amongst others by Ralph’s aunt Margaret Eure at the death of her husband William in battle, was accustomed to travel about England like an enormous raven, croaking its melancholy message. Now the new Lady Warwick, no longer having any such gloomy need, dispatched the raven back to its owners; but she made the Verneys pay for the carriage, which as Mary observed was ‘not so handsomely done’. It is true that Lady Warwick subsequently explained to Mary that her life with her new husband was not quite the bed of roses that she had expected at her marriage: she lived in Lord Warwick’s house ‘like a stranger’ and had to pay two thirds of her estate for her keep, receiving in return from her husband merely a diamond ring, no proper jointure. At the time, about the best thing which Lady Warwick did was to send round a pheasant and two bottles of wine when Mary and her maid were ill.²⁴

The course of events for Mary Verney before the Committee of the two Houses in London followed the same dreary pattern of delay and frustration as it had for Isabella Twysden, and like Dame Isabella, Mary was tormented by a Committee in Buckinghamshire whom she described as ‘very malicious and extremely insolent’.²⁵ The villains in the county might have given me a certificate if they had pleased’, she told her husband, ‘without putting me to this trouble.’ When Mary visited Lady Warwick, her husband, the powerful Earl, sat ‘like a clown’ and said nothing. He did promise to turn up on Mary’s behalf at the vital Committee but then failed to do so. It was not until April that Mary secured the all-important certificate giving the cause of the sequestration: ‘it is for nothing but absence’ she told Ralph – because Ralph Verney as an MP, had vanished abroad.

By now Mary’s pregnancy was far advanced; the prospect of childbirth alone in London further appalled her: ‘to lie [in] without thee, is a greater affliction than I fear I shall be able to bear’, she told Ralph. Already the Verneys had argued by post over the baby’s name, Mary wanting Ralph if it was a boy, but Sir Ralph choosing Richard. They both agreed on Mary for a girl (the three little daughters who had died young or at birth when Mary was still in her teens had all been called some variant of Mary). Mary also had orders from Ralph to get a minister to the house to christen the baby as soon as possible in the old way; for this type of christening, together with godparents, had vanished under the new dispensation: the father was merely supposed to bring the child to the church ‘and answer for it’. Mary complained: ‘Truly one lives like a heathen here.’ She found it impossible to find a decent service to attend in a London church.

On 3 June the child was born; it was a boy and Mary did call it Ralph. In France nine-year-old Pegg expressed herself dissatisfied because she had wanted a sister. But Ralph was thrilled to see Mary’s own handwriting as a postscript to Dr Denton’s letter breaking the news. ‘I have borne you a lusty boy.’ He fussed over her health: knowing that Mary being delivered would now try and get down to Claydon to sort out matters there, he begged her to go by coach, regardless of the cost; or if she insisted on going on horseback to save money, at least to lodge somewhere on the way. (Later when Mary visited ‘Aunt Eure’ in Leicestershire she reported the ordeal of ‘a cruel trotting horse’ because the coach was too expensive.) It was true that Mary was far from well: the ‘lusty boy’ was in fact quite weak, and Mary suffered from pains in the head.

Furthermore her journey to Claydon brought her small comfort, apart from the wonderful reunion with little Jack, whom she had not seen for four years. He trotted round after her as she made the inventories, enchanting her with his funny sayings and little songs: ‘he is a very ready witted child and is very good company’, she told Ralph, ‘he is always with me from the first hour that I came’. Alas, Jack was also suffering from crooked legs due to rickets: a fate of many seventeenth-century children, however grand the nursery, including King Charles I. Jack also stammered and had been totally spoilt by his aunts. ‘He would very fain go into France with his father’, Mary told Ralph, and this time Mary was determined to take him with her.

Claydon itself was however in a disastrous state: the linen worn out, the feather-beds eaten by rats and the fire-irons corroded by rust. The soldiers quartered there had committed a series of crimes liable to grieve the heart of a careful housewife, such as ruining the cloth on the musk-coloured stools. Far worse than any of this was the death of baby Ralph from convulsions. Mary was delirious with sorrow for two days and two nights. It was fortunate that she did not then know that her daughter Pegg had died too about the same time in France; it was when the news finally reached her that Mary turned away in agony from those two other little girls, Peg and Mall, the children of ‘Aunt Eure’ and for the time being could not bring herself to care for them.

It was not until January 1648 that the Committee of both Houses at Westminster lifted the sequestration – and it seems that the Warwicks did in the end play some kind of helpful role, ‘My dearest Rogue, it joys my heart to think how soon I shall be with thee’, Mary wrote to Ralph in March, and she hoped to bring Jack safely to him. They were finally reunited in April.

The tenderness – and the teasing – of their married life was resumed. When Sir Pickering Newton, taking his wife abroad, asked Mary’s advice as ‘an old housekeeper in France’ Sir Ralph reported that his wife was cross. ‘Had you called her an old woman, she would never have forgiven you such an injury. You know a woman can never be old (at least not willingly, nor in her own opinion); did you dread her displeasure but half so much as I do, believe me you would run post hither to make your peace.’²⁶

But Mary never did live to be old, neither in her own opinion nor in anyone else’s.

She died at the age of thirty-four. The cause was consumption; but her condition must have been aggravated by her sufferings during that eighteen-month period of privation and worry in London. Sir Ralph’s own calendar of his letters to Dr Denton in London (a list, combined with extracts, giving both Continental and English dating) relates the progress of his anguish:

15/5 May 1650. I write Dr [Denton] word I received his letter, but could write of no business, Wife being so ill.

22/12 May 1650. Oh my … my deare dear.

29/19 May 1650. Friday the 20/10 May (at three in the morning) Was the Fatal day and hour. The disease a consumption … I shall not need to relate with what a Religious and cheerful joy and courage this now happy and most glorious saint, left this unhappy and most wicked world … I entreat you presently to pay one Mr Preswell (a silk man in Paternoster Row) about forty shillings, which he said she owed for something taken up there, though she could never call it to her remembrance.²⁷

Mary’s body was taken in its coffin for burial in England. Sir Ralph wrote: ‘every puff of wind that tosses it at sea shakes me at land’. ‘Ah Doctor, Doctor,’ he wrote, ‘her company made every place a paradise unto me.’

Later Sir Ralph wondered what sins he could have committed to deserve such punishments: the loss of two out of his three eldest children, his brother, his father and mother, and now his wife ‘who was not only willing to suffer for and with me here, but by her most exemplary goodness and patience both helped and taught me to support my otherwise almost insupportable Burden. But, alas,’ he concluded, ‘What shall I now do!’²⁸

What Sir Ralph Verney did not do was marry again. Luce Sheppard and Bess cared for the children. Unusually for his time – and responsibilities – Sir Ralph remained for the rest of his long life a widower. He died in 1696, nearly half a century after Mary, still faithful to the memory of his ‘dear, discreet and most incomparable wife’. As with others who have tasted the matchless joy of a happy union, Sir Ralph worried over Christ’s words of the New Testament concerning a marriageless Heaven. In the end he worked out his own form of faith: ‘And although … in the Resurrection none marry nor are given in Marriage, yet I hope (without being censured for curiosity) I may piously believe, that we who ever from our very childhoods lived in so much peace, and christian concord here on Earth, shall also in our Elder years for the full completing of our Joys, at least be known to one another in Heaven.’²⁹

It was this thought which comforted him during those terrible moments when he was ‘almost swallowed up’ by sorrow.