All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion (18 page)

How much impact ascetic Christian ideals had on everyday mores varied, of course, during the Church’s long history and across geographical locations and social strata. Up until the Reformation in northern Europe and a little longer in the Catholic countries, nunneries, monasteries and the priesthood had not only a moral, but also a practical social agenda. They provided the landed classes with vocational establishments for ‘excess’ sons and daughters whom family wealth couldn’t sustain. In countries where primogeniture didn’t hold, younger sons’ entry into the priesthood also allowed property to move undivided from generation to generation.

If Christian love was often tough love, its underlying forms of adoration and abjection, along with the difficulties put in the path to salvation, achieved or requited only through the magic of grace, were nonetheless mimicked and internalized in secular patterns of courtship. Indeed, the patterns of courtly and romantic love were deeply influenced by the redemptive Christian paradigm, as was the value placed on women’s chastity and virginity. Women’s purity and obedience are paramount because they ensure the legitimacy of the paternal line. In traditional societies, women’s purity also takes on symbolic weight and stands in for her husband’s and brothers’, a doubling still evident today in instances of so-called honour killings.

Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales
, written between 1387 and 1392, offers a revealing picture of the sexual and marital habits of everyday life. These hardly always conform to the normative aspirations of Church dogma. The Wife of Bath has had five marriages all at the church door, the first at the age of twelve, rather than the single marriage prescribed by the Church. Weren’t human beings made both for duty and procreation? she asks in self-defence, all the while singing the beauty of sexual parts and telling us that marriage is an economic and sexual union, whose secret to happiness lies in the wife’s dominion over her husband. The Wife of Bath may or may not have been altogether typical, but her tale does indicate that everyday practice was far more unruly than the religious prescriptions laid down. Then, too, the status of ‘widow’ brought many more benefits than that of ‘wife’, since widows had both legal and financial rights which wives, as their husband’s dependants, did not.

Marriage only very gradually came under the Church’s full legal aegis. Lawrence Stone, the great historian of marriage and divorce in England, points out that until the eighteenth century marriage was an engagement that ‘could be undertaken in a bewildering variety of ways’. Polygamy was widely practised, divorce a matter of consent, remarriage frequent, and cohabiting, or concubinage, widespread. Marriage was a private contract concerning property: it gave the woman some protection in case of the husband’s death or divorce. For those without property, the community acted as a monitor of the wedding contract and would instil in the partners a sense of what was largely approved or disapproved. Church ceremonies were for the rich.

If practices continued various, by the thirteenth century the Church had established itself fully enough to take over at least the
rules
governing marriage–‘to assert the principle of monogamous indissoluble marriage, to define and prohibit incest, to punish fornication and adultery, and to get bastards legally excluded from property inheritance’. Divorce was now prohibited, but annulments on a range of grounds were possible, though largely only available to the rich. The process of marrying could entail several stages. If propertied, the parents of the bride and groom would first enter into a contracted financial arrangement. A formal spousal–a kind of promissory note or engagement–took place before witnesses in which the couple made their vows to each other. This was considered to be a binding ‘marriage’ if the couple then consummated their relations, even if no church ceremony followed. If it did, banns were proclaimed three times, or a marriage licence obtained. Finally, the wedding was blessed in church and the mutual consent of both parties orally verified. Not until 1439 did the wedding ceremony itself become a sacrament in England–that is, a rite in which God was active and conferred his blessing or grace on the wedded couple. Only after the Reformation did the Catholic Church insist on the presence of a priest for a marriage to be made valid.

Needless to say, not all marriages followed these various steps. Given Christianity’s focus on the individual, all that was fundamentally necessary for marriage was the free consent of bride and bridegroom–as long as the two were of sound mind and of age, which was twelve for a woman and fourteen for a man. This had the effect of liberating the young from parental authority: so-called secret marriages entered into without parental consent and purely by verbal contract in front of a witnessing priest or by licence abounded, since verbal consent by the parties alone was binding. Willing priests, for a fee, were not difficult to find: Shakespeare’s Romeo managed to find one easily enough; and despite the tightening of the Church regime in 1604 (which made banns essential and raised the age of consent to twenty-one), they continued to be. The great metaphysical poet of love and later Dean of St Paul’s, John Donne, in 1601 secretly married his beloved, Ann More, against the wishes of both her father and her uncle, Donne’s own patron. The marriage cost him (and the attending priest and witness) a stay in the Fleet Prison, as well as his post as chief secretary to the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, Sir Thomas Egerton. It was not until eight years–and almost as many children–later that Ann’s father recognized the marriage and offered up her dowry.

The incidence of runaway couples who defied their parents to find an obliging parson rose through the late seventeenth and into the early eighteenth century: if Restoration comedy bears any relationship to the real, parsons could be as obliging as the proverbial French hotel receptionist. In George Farquhar’s
The Stage Coach
, Captain Basil talks of a parson who ‘first gave us his blessing, then lent us his bed’. ‘Common law’ marriages–a partnership by mutual agreement and for which no ceremony was necessary–were also plentiful: in America, certain states still recognized these until the 1970s, and some eleven still do so today. In England, common law unions were prohibited only by the Marriage Act of 1753, when the Church of England was put in charge of marriage.

The splits in Christianity that came with the Reformation greatly affected regimes of marriage. Luther championed marriage as a state ‘divinely ordained’: man and woman were ‘created to multiply’, and only very few of them made for a chaste spiritual calling. His own marriage to Katarina von Bora in 1525, a nun he had helped after her escape with eleven others from a convent, set the seal on clerical marriage. Katarina bore him six children, and his marriage to this feisty, enterprising and hardworking woman was as influential an affair as Henry VIII’s divorce.

By abandoning the concept of original sin and emphasizing the significance of individual conscience as well as private communion with God, Protestantism gave weight both to personal autonomy and to that inner life where love plays so major a part. In England and America, where Puritanism had such a strong hold in the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries, conflicting trends emerged. On the one hand the Puritans, taking their cue from the Bible, insisted on patriarchal authority, that respect and obedience due to the father as head of the family: this underscored paternal power in the choice of a marriage partner and obedience to the husband from both wife and children. On the other hand, the Puritans rebelled against the Catholic ideal of chastity, not only for the priestly classes but as a virtue for all Christians. In his ‘wedding sermon’ or ‘direction for married persons’ of 1619,
A Bride-Bush
, the preacher William Whately encourages ‘mutual dalliances for pleasure’s sake’. Not only is marital sex condoned by the Puritans for the sake of generation, but it is intended for the equal satisfaction of both husband and wife. In the bedchamber, the wife is ‘both a servant and mistress, a servant to yield her body, a mistress to have the power of his’.

Amongst many others, the leading Elizabethan Puritan clergyman William Perkins declared marriage ‘a state in itself far more excellent than the condition of a single life’. Marriage was now sanctified into ‘holy matrimony’, a union which not only permitted fornication to be avoided and legitimate children to come into the world, but which according to the Prayer Book of 1549 was conducive to a better life, enabling ‘mutual society, help and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and in adversity’. These words are an early version of those still used by the Anglican Church today in wedding ceremonies. They are evidence of a general Protestant endorsement of the need for mutual affection in marriage.

Milton, in that great defence of marriage embedded in his
Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce
, takes us one step closer to modernity. He argues that God’s intention in creating a ‘helpmeet’ for Adam was based on the understanding that ‘It is not good that man should be alone.’ The only conclusion to be drawn from this, Milton goes on to write, is that ‘a meet and happy conversation is the chiefest and noblest end of marriage, for we find no expression so necessarily implying carnal knowledge as this prevention of loneliness to the mind and spirit of man’. It is worth noting, in thinking about marriage, how often conversation, another version of that many-faceted word ‘intercourse’, recurs as one of the underpinnings to its happy state.

The horrors of the Civil War, which had split families apart, often leaving women to fend for themselves and their children, had empowered women as ‘helpmeets’ in a new way. Some, like the Leveller women, had even engaged in direct political action. It could be argued that in England the ideal of a companionate marriage came early because of the shift not only in political but in sexual power instigated by civil war.

The Companionate Marriage

Following the trauma of the Civil War, and the brief excesses for the privileged few of the Restoration, the Glorious Revolution initiated an epoch of growing secularism alongside economic and political liberalism in England. The end of absolute monarchy brought a diminution of paternal power in its wake. Self-interest, the pursuit of individual happiness, which John Locke had defined in his
Two Treatises on Government
(1690) as the basis of liberty, was now understood as something which extended to the good of the community as a whole. As Alexander Pope put it in his
Essay on Man
(1733): ‘That reason, passion, answer one great aim/That true self-love and social are the same.’ Individual gratification was edging away filial duty in the hierarchy of values.

In America, Locke’s idea of the ‘pursuit of happiness’ would find its way into the Declaration of Independence of 1776. Abigail Adams, wife of John Adams, who was to become the second president of the United States, urged him during the process of drafting the legislation to ‘remember the ladies’ and the state of marriage. He dismissed her request, even though their own union had been based on a loving courtship, while respect, mutual care and friendship characterized their long lives together. But this highly intelligent woman’s description of the balance of power in an affectionate marriage, her use of the term ‘happiness’, point to the new understanding that had grown up through the century: ‘Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands,’ Abigail writes. ‘Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could… give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of friend… [R]egard us then as Beings placed by providence under your protection and in imitation of the Supreme Being make use of that power only for our happiness.’

It is clear from fiction and drama from the late medieval period on, that love had long played its part in the making of marriages, despite familial opposition: families ever ranked property, financial gain and enhanced status above the mere matter of love. But, as Lawrence Stone has argued, from the late seventeenth century on in Britain there was a far more general trend towards ‘affective individualism’ and the ‘companionate family’. Love, gradually even romantic love, now took on a central role in the making of marriage. Affection between partners, which includes sexual affection, became widely understood as a good. The statesman and essayist Sir William Temple, whom Jonathan Swift served as secretary during the 1690s, was one prominent voice to put the case for love, decrying materialistic marriage as a ‘popular discontent’: ‘our marriages are made just like other common Bargains and Sales, by the mere consideration of Interest and Gain, without any Love or Esteem, of Birth or of Beauty itself, which ought to be the true Ingredients of all Happy Compositions of this kind, and of all generous Productions’.

Four vying arrangements exist in the making of marital matches. The choice of a mate can rest entirely with parents and kin: this is the order of the day in patriarchal societies amongst the property-owning classes. A second option has parents making the choice, but with a right of veto by the child. There is an underlying assumption here that compatibility is necessary for a good marriage and that a child’s antipathy to the parental choice will prevent a reasonable outcome. The next option is that the choice is made by the child, but now the parents have the right to veto a mate made unacceptable by reason of either financial or social place. This is the version of match-making that gains pre-eminence, though is hardly universal, during the eighteenth century in England and some other parts of Europe, as well as in North America. The final option, in which children make their own choice and then inform their parents, is the one which largely reigns today in the West, except in enclaves where arranged marriages are still the rule.

Marriage based on individual choice and love was on the ascendant during the Enlightenment. But the trend did not go unopposed, in the first instance by parents of the propertied classes themselves. The heated public debates which led to the controversial English Marriage Act of 1753 paint a various and conflicted picture of everyday marital mores, which the Act sets out to tidy in the best interests of the governing class. They indicate, as do the growing number of diaries and autobiographies in this period of increasing individualism, that the course of true love was decidedly bumpy, with steep precipices on both sides.