All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion (19 page)

Subtitled ‘An Act for the Better Preventing of Clandestine Marriage’, the legislation set out to outlaw bigamy and make it impossible for those under twenty-one to marry without parental permission. The period had seen a boom in clandestine marriages, popular with the poor from 1660 onwards. Elopements by under twenty-ones under the influence of ‘love’ were numerous: a rash of cartoons show girls climbing out of the windows of boarding schools into waiting carriages. The clandestine activity was abetted by the fact that marriages could be cheaply bought in London marriage shops and in the precincts of the Fleet Prison. There, too, partners for pregnant women could be found for a fee, and unions backdated to legitimize illegitimate children.

Equally troubling to the rising numbers of the bourgeoisie and the landed classes was the laxity of a marriage regime that permitted adventurers and courtesans–‘sharpers’, ‘bawds’ and ‘strumpets’, as the 1753 parliamentary debate had it–to marry the under-age children of the propertied classes. Men, but also women, on the make seduced the impressionable young of greater wealth and status into marriages rich families could not approve. A bigamist, having seduced a young woman in one part of the country and often got her with child, could move elsewhere and enter into a second marriage, with no one the wiser. Parish records could not instantly be tapped, while poor priests could easily enough be induced into falsifying them. Action had to be taken, as Attorney General Sir Dudley Ryder put it, ‘for guarding against the many artful contrivances set on foot to seduce young gentlemen and ladies of fortune, and to draw them into improper, perhaps infamous, marriages’.

The Act brought a law into being that legalized solely marriages performed in a public ceremony according to the Book of Common Prayer, in a local church where the parties would be known, and before witnesses. (Exceptions were made only for Jews, Quakers and the Royal Family.) Marriages had to be registered in a document signed by the parties, witnesses and a priest. For minors under twenty-one, paternal consent had to be given. The Act made all clandestine marriages null and void. Appeal to ecclesiastical courts–as had often been made by women promised marriage, seduced and then abandoned–was prohibited. ‘Young innocent girls’ under the age of consent led astray by ‘rakish young lords and squires’ could no longer sue for breach of promise. This was a law made for the privileged. Elite parents needed the state, it seems, to help them keep control of children who might contract ‘a scandalous or an infamous marriage’. It also prevented children from prior ‘secret’ marriages suing for inheritance. Property was paramount.

The Act’s opponents, as David Lemmings has argued, were hardly all the champions of love, of individual choice or of defenceless girls and the poor, despite their persuasive speeches. They may have decried ‘paternal authority’ as being ‘whimsical and selfish’, and indeed, often enough ‘abused by parents’. They may have criticized the Act for attempting to control ‘all the emotions of love and genuine affection in youth by the frigid maxims of avarice and ambition imbibed by age’. But amongst the Act’s most vocal opponents were instances of men behaving badly that would make today’s excesses pale by comparison. Robert Nugent, for instance, spoke in the House of that ‘tender and elegant passion we call love’ and pleaded the case for the ‘fair sex’ for whom the Bill would ‘prove a snare for entrapping many of them to their ruin… A young woman is but too apt by nature to trust to the honour of the man she loves, and to admit him to her bed upon a solemn promise to marry her.’ Yet this was a man who twenty years earlier had abandoned his cousin in Ireland, leaving her with a son he refused to recognize, and who had then married ever richer heiresses and a string of affluent widows, all the while ‘whoring’ elsewhere. Robert Walpole was inspired to coin the word ‘Nugentize’ to characterize such doings.

Marriages based on that troublesome entity, love, may have been both cultural wish and sometime practice in an eighteenth century that prioritized a degree of individual freedom. This is the period, after all, when for the first time men have their portraits painted with their wives–witness Gainsborough’s famous Mr and Mrs Andrews gazing out at their estate and Jacques-Louis David’s Lavoisier looking up at his wife with admiration. Yet little was put in place, either legally or through custom, to make women the loving, equal companions Daniel Defoe had in mind when he observed: ‘Love knows no superior or inferior, no imperious command on the one hand, no reluctant subjection on the other.’

Though greater and greater numbers of women, stretching to the daughters of artisans and shopkeepers, were taught in the course of the century to read and could take in the breadth of a magazine like Addison and Steele’s
Spectator
, alongside a burgeoning variety of novels and journals aimed specifically at women, their schooling was still largely a matter of learning ladylike ‘accomplishments’. Grace or deportment, a little piano, some French, and above all needlework and embroidery were skills calculated to allow them to please their husbands and at best run a household. Such an education was often less than sufficient to permit women to establish that ‘conjugal happiness’ for which it was essential ‘that the husband have such an opinion of his wife’s understanding, principles and integrity of heart as would induce him to exalt her to the rank of his first and dearest friend’. Though there was a marked improvement in women’s education by the end of the century, its aim was limited to turning girls into genteel ladies of leisure, at best mothers able to provide their toddlers with the rudimentary principles of good behaviour. In
The Subjection of Women
(1869) John Stuart Mill could still observe that women’s whole education had as its object to please men, their masters, who in the course of the nineteenth century added to the restrictions on women the presumption of an inferior ‘mental capacity’.

Crucially, women once married had no status in law. As the jurist Sir William Blackstone put it in his
Commentaries on the Laws of England
(1765–9), ‘the husband and wife are one, and the husband is that one’. A wife gave up her entire legal person to her spouse, a fact Daniel Defoe bemoans in
Roxana
(1724): ‘the very nature of the marriage contract was… nothing but giving up liberty, estate, authority and everything to a man and the woman was indeed a mere woman ever after–that is to say a slave’. Little of substance had changed when Mill came to write 145 years later. Property, children, the wife’s very body belonged to her husband, the first two even after his death, unless he bequeathed otherwise. If she left him, he could compel her to return. Any earnings or gifts she might receive were his. Beatings were no crime. During the nineteenth century there were some slight improvements, but these pertained only to wealthy women who could afford legal interventions. The marriage contract could include a clause about a regular sum of pin money being put at the wife’s disposal. Formal separations in which the wife was granted a financial settlement and possibly allowed to take one of the children with her became slightly more common amongst the upper classes. But husbands, unless they were otherwise inclined, had absolute authority over their wives.

Yet, despite these long-lasting legal and social inequities, the eighteenth-century ideal of a companionate marriage, one that was sparked by love and went on to include friendship, mutual respect, sexual pleasure and the possibility of ‘happiness’, wore a decidedly modern loving face.

So much so that, seen from Catholic Europe, this marriage based on love seemed a decidedly odd beast. It could be said that Catholicism, by allowing sin to be easily absolved through the simple recourse to a confessional, had an easier relationship to individual conscience and transgressions of the flesh and helped to excuse adultery. As Oscar Wilde quipped, the Roman Catholic Church is ‘for saints and sinners alone–for respectable people, the Anglican Church will do’. In Catholic Europe, marriage long maintained its primary relationship to family, progeny and property, while love resided elsewhere. The Duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, travelling through England in 1785, observed with great surprise that here ‘husband and wife are always together and share the same society’, something that would be ridiculous in France. ‘Three marriages out of four are based on affection.’ Couples had an ‘appearance of perfect harmony’ and the ‘wife in particular has an air of contentment’. Comparing mores, he reflected: ‘To have a wife who is not agreeable to you must, in England, make life a misery.’ In France, as long as her wealth was intact, it presumably made little difference.

France: From Old Regimes to New

Montaigne, that supreme analyst of his own and the human condition, who bridges the classical past with modernity, was no great believer in conjugal love. In his famous essay ‘
De l’amitié
’, ‘On Affectionate Relationships’, he ranks marriage lower than friendship on the scale of affection, though allows that it could be otherwise, if conditions were different.

Under France’s
ancien régime
, marriages of whatever class were largely made for the economic convenience of parents and had little to do with the personal feelings or wishes of offspring. Young girls–those subordinate beings, in the eyes of both religious authority and natural philosophy–could be wed to men three times their age, gave over their dowries and all property to the husband’s management, and had no separate legal power, aside from what inheritance rights might have been formalized in a prior marriage contract. By a
lettre de cachet
, a secret indictment, the husband could have his wife committed to a nunnery for life.

Ardent critics of a status quo that imprisoned children in parental choices based on status and property, Enlightenment thinkers attacked marriage as a tyrannical sacrament:
indissoluble
, it was an insupportable form of bondage foisted on society by a corrupt and superstitious Church. But the impetus of the
philosophes
was an anticlerical one. Condorcet apart, who was married to the brilliant
salon
hostess Sophie de Grouchy, they were hardly proponents of marriages based on love.

Rousseau may have thrown the thousands across Europe who read
La Nouvelle Héloïse
(1761), in one of its seventy editions before 1800, into ecstasies and torments. He may have taught them the new romantic language of the emotions and shown them in
Émile
(1762), his treatise on education, that in adolescence the troubled boy turns into that ‘loving and feeling being’ who becomes a man only by learning ‘sentiment’. But Rousseau’s lovers, who in
La Nouvelle Héloïse
recast the great twelfth-century love of Abelard and Héloïse, were never permitted marriage. Rousseau’s heroine Julie, rather than marry her beloved tutor Saint-Preux, engages in a paternally sanctioned union. She grows ‘virtuous’–that word that had migrated from the ancients into the different register of Christianity, to return in this period and take on republican notions of heroism once more–through motherhood and devotion to duty, before dying as the result of trying to save her child from drowning. Meanwhile her heart-broken lover weds her best friend. Old marital conventions remain intact in Rousseau. Like many of the Enlighteners, he kept marriage and romantic love or passion decidedly separate.

The atmosphere of the
salons
the
philosophes
attended in some ways paralleled the old courts of love. Here dazzling, intellectual and married women were at the helm. Madame d’Épinay’s
salon
was attended by Rousseau, Diderot, Holbach, d’Alembert and Baron von Grimm. Her intimate, Madame de Necker, entertained both the
philosophes
and writers such as Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. Madame de Condorcet, reputedly the most brilliant of all, entertained amongst many other notables Benjamin Franklin, Adam Smith, whom she translated, and the feminist Olympe de Gouges who early in the Revolution was to write the
Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Female Citizen
. These women were courted and paid heed to. Affairs, even long-lasting ones, were engaged in: Voltaire’s with the formidable Marquise du Châtelet, translator of Newton, and his companion in scientific and philosophic pursuits, spanned more than a decade. But the
philosophes
’ sense of the appropriate role for the huge mass of women within marriage was one that enshrined virtue, piety and obedience to their husbands. Double standards were emphatically in place. Even the notorious Madame de Staël–three times exiled by her fierce, tyrannical opponent Napoleon; a woman known to all the intellectuals of the continent and a mass of readers; a woman whose many passions were open and vociferous and included Benjamin Constant, and who, as she turned fifty, married a handsome young hussar (though, as she herself said, her father was her greatest love and the man she would have married)–could do little to change that hard fact.