The Gentleman's Daughter Read online

  For the most part, Robert Parker presented himself in the role of the plain-speaking man of honour. Above all, he vowed his suit was sincere. He scorned flattery, dissimulation and the ‘Cant Phrases’ of his ‘great neighbours’, defining himself against those who revelled in empty language. Thus Robert Parker disavowed all claim to rhetorical skill: ‘But why [should] I torture my Invention for Eloquence I shall never be master off; & I utterly disclaim all pretentions to [the] latter willing rather to be miserable for ever, [than] gain my happiness by unjust means… .’ The proof of his sincere affection lay precisely in his verbal restraint: ‘You will Injure me very much, if you do not think me a truer friend & admirer [than] any Romantic Lover.’56 Reticence as a rhetorical device had wide currency. The love-letters an Exeter surgeon George Gibson wrote to Anne Vicary in the 1740s could almost be mistaken for Robert Parker's. Gibson rejected ‘artifice and dissimulation’ and professed himself an enemy to ‘violent protestations’, while his ‘esteem and affection … was not produced of a sudden, but is the effect of a long and intimate acquaintance’. Similarly, Charles Pratt, a rising young barrister on the home circuit, emphasized the reason and moderation of his love for the heiress Elizabeth Jefferys at mid-century. He scoffed at romantic affectation, stressed his true love for a woman of sense and urged a resolute cheerfulness in separation.57 All three men drew here on a modish suspicion of rapturous and exaggerated emotion. The elevated ‘half Theatrical, half Romantick’ style of late seventeenth-century lovemaking had been effectively ridiculed by the influential Richard Steele in 1712. A man should bring ‘his Reason to support his Passion’ argued Steele, and in his own love-letters to Mary Scurlock he struck out against rhetorical excess: ‘I shall affect plainnesse and sincerity in my discourse to you, as much as other Lovers do perplexity and rapture. Instead of saying I shall die for you, I professe I should be glad to Lead my life with you. …’58 By 1740 a self-conscious affectation could be laid down in some quarters as an emotional law. ‘The Motions of an honest Passion, are regular and lasting…’, decreed Wetenhall Wilkes, ‘its Elegance consists in Purity, and its Transports are the result of Virtue and Reason. It never sinks a Man into imaginary Wretchedness, nor transports him out of himself; nor is there a greater Difference between any two Things in Nature, than between true Love, and that romantic Passion which pretends to ape it.’59 Violent raptures and extravagant praises were to be suspected, for flash-fires burned out fast.

  Yet for all that Robert Parker disclaimed the hackneyed postures of overheated romance, he was not above striking melodramatic attitudes himself when circumstances absolutely demanded it. At the first refusal in April 1746, Robert Parker declared himself ready to undergo the ‘severest Pennance’ and assured his love ‘[Were] I to be plunged into the lowest Pit of despair, my Passion [would] still Emerge, all the Powers upon Earth are not able to stifle it. The Moon will sooner cease to move round her orbit, the earth round its axis than I to admire Pure Hippocrisie.’ When Elizabeth Parker first admitted that Robert's affections were returned, the revelation had ‘so great Influence ovr my spirrits, [that] I [could] not help appearing in confusion’. So, after the fact, he summoned up some lyricism to convey his ardour: ‘the poet I am sure had not half [the] sense of my affliction [when] he says Parting is worse [than] death & c.’ And when his affair met with seemingly unconquerable reverses, as here when Elizabeth Parker broke off the secret engagement in 1746, he could be driven to headlong prose: ‘Our parting, Parky I must never forget, but [that] was nothing to [what] I have undergone since, upon [your] telling me we must never meet again upon [that] head. For God sake, Parky, write & comfort my spirits [with] hopes at least, till you are made happy in anothers arms.’60 His performance of the role of honest, plain-speaking, true lover was far from seamless, though he did manage to convey the impression that his lapses were the result of genuinely overpowering emotion not an expression of cynical flattery.

  Crucially, he was sensitive to the flimsy purchase of a letter: ‘Consider, Parky, tho I have numberless well wishers, yet I have no Proxy no Advocate or Confidant near you in my Absence, nothing in the world but [this] slip of Paper, wch can but convey a Poor Epitome of my Passion.’ He brooded ‘upon ye danger of abs[cence]’. Therefore he reminded her again and again of that which was unwritten: the powerful assurances and reassurances of their secret ‘evening conferences’, which had so many times brought his affair back from the brink. His practice in the 1740s had been to visit Elizabeth Parker incognito after the Browsholme household was abed, tarrying with her for two or three hours, departing before dawn to complete the three-hour ride back to Alkincoats unrecognized.61 Once he even tried to engineer a secret nocturnal meeting when both were house guests at Kirkland Hall, but farcically was foiled by uncertainty as to which was her chamber. When despondency or doubt threatened to weaken Elizabeth Parker's resolve, Robert Parker rushed to her side to fortify it. With what face-to-face intensity he persuaded her of his good faith, we shall never know, but of its ultimate effectiveness we cannot doubt. The letter, in the end, was possibly not the most potent weapon in the artillery of his persuasions. But his protestations, whether written, verbal or perhaps even physical, are redolent of the gratifications for women inherent in courtship. In supplication, Robert Parker dramatized the power Elizabeth Parker had gained over him through love. As he said himself, ‘a more submissive Slave breaths not Vital air’.62 No wonder a woman might seek to prolong the season of her supremacy.

  * * *

  After the excitements of the wedding came the monotony of the marriage; for ‘Wedding puts an end to wooing …’ as the Ladies Dictionary dismally put it. Men got up off their knees and, metaphorically at least, women got down on theirs. The young bluestocking Elizabeth Robinson considered it a general rule that marriage turned the obsequious lover into the imperious husband. Richardson's Pamela was appalled at the ‘strange and shocking difference’ for brides when ‘fond lovers, prostrate at their feet’ were transformed into ‘surly husbands trampling on their necks’. While Arabella in the Gentleman's Magazine thought the engaged woman should be forewarned in plain English that ‘when she has entirely given up her Fortune, her Liberty and her Person into [her husband's] keeping, She is immediately to become a Slave to his Humour, his Convenience, or even his Pleasure, and that she is to expect no more Favour from him, than he in great Condescencion thinks fit to grant’.63 They had a point. The legal, institutional and customary advantages of manhood were legion, while a virtual industry proselytized the relative duties of the married female. ‘You must lay it down for a Foundation in general, That there is Inequality in the Sexes’ was George Savile's firm counsel in 1688.64 For all the sweet idealizations of gentle womanhood that the next century produced, few self-appointed moral pundits found another base upon which to ground a vision of marriage and family. Obedience remained the indispensable virtue in a good wife. Marriage may have been celebrated as a cosy partnership across a wide range of media, but it was still an unequal partnership in the eyes of most commentators. Genteel wives took it absolutely for granted that their husbands enjoyed formal supremacy in marriage. After all, even the haughtiest bride vowed before God to love, honour and obey.

  However, it is possible to overstate the case. Even in the supposedly authoritarian seventeenth century, advice literature emphasized the mutual duties of husband and wife. Husbands were enjoined to offer kind consideration in return for wifely obedience and both partners were expected to conciliate and forbear. It is also worth noting that advice about the inner workings of these unequal partnerships was often written by inexperienced boys and bachelors who could claim no personal understanding of power behind closed doors.65 So how far real partnerships resembled the ideal hierarchy remains an open question. Historians who seek an answer have ultimately to wrestle with the complicated relationship of gender power and conjugal love. It has been argued for the seventeenth century that the actual balance of power in a particular relationship dep
ended upon the interplay of a variety of factors: wealth, prior property agreements, relations with kindred, age, skills, personality and attractiveness. The extent of conjugal compatibility and affection is seen to play a determining role in marital power relations. As Vivienne Larminie observed in the case of the Warwickshire Newdigate family, much depended upon a woman's ‘individual capacity to attract and therefore influence or dominate [her] husband’.66 Again and again, diaries, letters, wills and eulogies testify to the long-standing expression of love within marriage. Of course, the extent, or typicality, of warm conjugality even among the propertied cannot be established, but references abound in sufficient quantity to lead Keith Wrightson to posit ‘the private existence of a strong complementary and companionate ethos, side by side with, and often overshadowing, theoretical adherence to the doctrine of male authority and public female subordination’.67 This common-sense suggestion has much to recommend it, although it would be a mistake to see the existence of affection in marriage as a priori evidence for greater equality between the sexes. Defoe may have preached that ‘Love knows no superior or inferior, no imperious Command on the one hand, no reluctant Subjection on the other …’,68 but demonstrably, love could thrive within starkly unequal relationships. Certainly love sometimes empowered a woman to lead her husband by the nose, but it might just as easily encourage her to swoon submissively in his masterful arms. Love was no enemy to hierarchy; one need look no further than fairy tales for proof that inequalities of power might infuse a relationship with greater romantic and erotic charge. So even if Lawrence Stone's dubious assertion that love in marriage was on the increase could be proved, the impact of love on marital power relations would still be wildly unpredictable.

  One of the hardest areas for historians to explore is that of ordinary sexual and emotional relationships. Inevitably the most intimate thoughts and feelings go unrecorded. What follows is a discussion of five marriages based largely on letters exchanged by the couples themselves, but in one case on the letters a couple despatched to a relative in conscious celebration of their union. It is not claimed here that letters offer a window on the totality of matrimonial discourse. They represent only one of the myriad voices with which men and women addressed each other. Moreover, as a genre in its own right, the letter is subject to particular conventions and constraints; formal models in letter-writing manuals and epistolary fiction abounded. So letters are not in any simple sense an unmediated expression of the self, but, on other hand, our public performances are no less significant than our secrets. In fact, public performance was not as uniform as might be expected from the rigid and unchanging advice laid out in the available guide-books. Obviously the generic similarities are there, but far more striking is the variety of conjugal idioms in play in the Georgian era. The Gossips of Thorp Arch expressed an extraordinarily tender companionship in their letters. The correspondence of the Stanhopes of Leeds conceded a respectful affection; that of the Parkers of Alkincoats a dignified love. The letters the Ramsdens of the Charterhouse sent to a cousin broadcast a jolly domesticity, while the Whitakers of Simonstone used their letters to ventilate some po-faced and prosy romanticism. The plot to a successful marriage may have broadly similar, but every couple wrote a different script.

  The earliest marriage studied here, that of the Gossips of Thorp Arch, was one of the most emotionally expressive when it came to written prose. In material terms, it was also a splendid match. William Gossip inherited a fortune from his successful mercer father and through his marriage to the heiress Anne Wilmer in 1731 acquired estates in Yorkshire and Essex. Together William and Anne Gossip set about founding a dynasty and embarked upon the construction of a country seat.69 Yet their marriage was as securely founded in affection as it was shored up with fashionable bricks and mortar. William Gossip never left his wife's side without complaint. Even after fifteen years of marriage, he lamented a separation: ‘heartily tired of being so long absent from my dearest life. I am now entered upon the fifth week of my exile – this will be the longest separation we ever yet have had.’ He struggled to cover the breach with pen and ink:

  16 Thorp Arch Hall, Wharfedale, Yorkshire. The fashionable seat of the rising Gossip family, designed by the Yorkshire architect John Carr in the 1750s. The family fortune was amassed by William Gossip's father, a West Riding mercer. Gossip himself was both a J.P. and Deputy-Lieutenant for the county. Of William Gossip's sons, one went to Edinburgh to study medicine, while the rest were apprenticed as hosiers in Leicester.

  17 Philip Mercier, William Gossip of Thorp Arch, 1745.

  ‘I can't help persecuting my dearest nanny with my letters whenever I have a spare moment on my hands. My heart will open itself towards the object of its desires.’ The comfort he found in her arms was never far from his thoughts, and his bed was cold without her. ‘I am just going to tumble into a solitary bed, & dream if I can of my Dear’, he wrote in April 1734; ‘My little flock are all well & fast asleep as I hope I shall be immediately, for I am just going to my Solitary Bed where I have nothing to do but sleep’, he complained in August 1746. After twenty-six years of marriage, in 1757 he still teased ‘as for a bed you shall be welcome to half of mine without a compliment’.70 Anne Gossip was no less appreciative of her husband. She dated ‘all my happeness and sattisfaction’ from the day of her marriage, and caring for him was her first concern: ‘I don't want to stay hear, if you who I love a thousand [times] better than myself or anything in this world, are ill and want me at home.’ She too invoked the comfort of the matrimonial mattress: ‘I wish I had my poor Dear in his own bed with me. I think you would be beter …’ An unembarassed physical intimacy is a remarkable feature of their correspondence. When his bad shoulder ached, William Gossip longed for his wife's ‘dear hand to coax it a little’, while Anne Gossip confessed ‘I am fright'd about your Bowels’, and reported the state of her own troublesome piles. Warts and all they loved each other. William looked about him in fashionable company in London and still ‘saw none I liked half so much as my old wife. Don't blush, you know I hate flattery.’ To enjoy ‘the repose of my own fireside’ was his dearest wish.71

  18 Philip Mercier, Anne Gossip of Thorp Arch. 1745.

  A more united couple it would be hard to find. Both strove to make the other happy. Which is not to say, however, that the Gossips were blithely unconventional when it came to the division of labour and authority. Their understanding of gender roles was utterly traditional. William Gossip praised his wife as a devoted mother and frugal housekeeper. His life was more mobile and more public than her's, but Anne Gossip deputized for him on the estate when necessary (paying the land tax, the window tax and so on), as had long been a sanctioned practice. William never quarrelled with her management. On the occasions when he asserted his authority, he offered respectful suggestions rather than orders: ‘I don't write this with an intent you should blindly follow my opinion herein, but I think this point is neglected.’72 Through William Gossip's respect and affection, and perhaps her own acceptance of prevailing norms, Anne Gossip wore her subjection lightly. Still they did not set romantic self-gratification on a pedestal; both were devastated when their son and heir, George, married in secret and beneath him. The pretty daughter of a Halifax mantua-maker was not their idea of a catch for a wealthy hosier. Indeed William Gossip reached out to punish the imprudence in his will.73 Love was no justification for a rash, demeaning choice.

  The handsome Leeds merchant Walter Stanhope delayed marriage till almost forty. Legend has it that he cut a romantic swathe across the North, breaking at least one aristocratic heart with his casual indifference. ‘Long did the gay, the gen'rous Stanhope reign Unmov'd by Beauty, free from Love's soft chain’, versified an observer on the occasion of his wedding in 1742. But both his wife and baby son were dead by 1747, and just two years later he married again. His second wife was the twenty-seven year-old Anne Spencer of Cannon Hall, and theirs has been described as an ideal economic alliance, uniting a leading prof
essional-mercantile family with a landowning family busy in the industrial production of iron.74 It was also a match of loyal attachment. Walter Stanhope showed concern for ‘My dearest Nanny’, ‘my poor wife’, in childbed, anxiety about her health in general, solicitude for her comfort and routinely bought her presents when he went away. Still this couple never elaborated on their intimacy in their letters. They undoubtedly missed each other when separated, but their acknowledgements of this were always terse: ‘I want much to hear from you’, Walter conceded at the end of a letter in June 1757. By that August he admitted, ‘I begin to wish for our meeting, for realy the house does not look right without you’. ‘I do assure you I have thought it long’, Anne Stanhope returned.75 Though profoundly committed to each other, the Stanhopes disapproved of emotional exhibitionism and considered it a duty to quell any self-indulgent sadness. So it was that Walter chided his wife for a momentary weakness: ‘I have not had [the] least uneasyness since I left you, but [the] tenderness at parting, wch gave me pain, least you should not behave as you ought to do, & by that means detriment your health.’ While Anne apologized for her lapse: ‘I'm sorry my behaviour shd have given you so much ineasiness, but you'll excuse it, when I tell you I have been in good spirits ever since Bror Will brought me word of you performing yr first days journey so well.’76 On the whole, Anne Stanhope, who came from a powerful Yorkshire family and produced the requisite heir, presented herself as capable and collected, delivering her requests and receiving instructions with confidence. In this she contrasted starkly with her sister-in-law Barbara Stanhope, who could not tolerate the routine absences of her barrister husband and made a sorry spectacle of herself in letters: ‘ded [you] but know how uneasy I have bene sence you left me I am sure you wood petey me’, she wept in 1726 ‘my hart is so full I cannot right half I wood for sheding tears … I am going to Horsforth today: but not to finde you thear, is intolerabel. I know not how to bear it … ten thousand times Dear Jacke thy Duteyfull Wife tell Death.’77 Even if neither Walter nor Anne Stanhope was given to conjugal rhapsody, theirs was a respectful union and this matron did not feel the need to abase herself at her husband's feet.