The gentleman's mistress

Illegitimate relationships and children, 1450–1640

Tim Thornton, Katharine Carlton

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781526114068
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526114099
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This study explores pre- and extra-marital relationships among the gentry and nobility of the north of England from 1450 to 1640: the keeping of mistresses, the taking of lovers, the birth of illegitimate children and the fate of those children. It challenges assumptions about the extent to which such activities declined in the period, and hence about the impact of Protestantism and other changes to the culture of the elite. A major contribution to the literature on marriage and sexual relationships, family, kinship and gender, it is aimed at an academic readership in the fields of social and political history.

1
Background and legal framework

‘[I]t is not (as I do take it) to be lightly regarded, yt we have in so short a time so many examples of those that have entered upon that libertie in these parts of ours more I think … than any where els in al England … in which case the censure of the Church is drawn forth against them to their own reformation and example of others.’¹ Thus Edmund Bunny, the rector of Bolton Percy in 1595, referred to the incidence of adultery-driven divorce followed by remarriage in Yorkshire during the late sixteenth century. His subsequent discussion of doctrinal arguments was informed by thinkers such as Calvin, Bucer and Erasmus and reflected Protestant debates centred upon the dissolution (or not) of marriage bonds. Such debates had been given political significance in England by the matrimonial difficulties of Henry VIII, but arguably the pace of religious change, in terms of reforms to ritual and the suppression of monasticism, for example, have masked the fact that throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries canon law in relation to adultery and marriage remained conservative.² Essentially, the legal position in 1630 was the same as it had been in 1530, and hence as it had been a hundred years before that. The definitions of adultery and fornication, and the treatment of their consequences remained the same. Efforts to reform canon law with specific implications for sexual immorality made no progress in the middle years of the sixteenth century, and suggestions that the criminal law might be brought into play, for example in making adultery a secular crime punishable by death, were similarly unsuccessful.³ And yet in the north of England the phenomena represented by sexual relationships of the elite outside the conventional bounds of marriage and the offspring that resulted produced new regulatory responses in the early modern period in new and revised court structures and varying patterns of enforcement through those structures. Although the behaviour of the elite was not the sole target of this regulation, it was of leading significance; it is important to consider how elite behaviour prompted these changes, how it was shaped by them, and the other consequences of these efforts to reform elite sexual behaviour. This chapter therefore assesses some of the arguments for the way that the regulation of manners, broader questions of state-building, and more specific ones of religious change might intersect with the pattern of elite immorality and bastard-bearing during the period.

The theoretical definitions at the heart of the largely unchanging legal and judicial understanding of what constituted sexual immorality are, in their most essential aspects, relatively simple. Fornication was sexual intercourse by a man with an unmarried woman and adultery was committed with a married woman, irrespective of the marital status of the man.⁴ In two Durham cases, separated by nearly a century, Robert Liddell was accused of adultery with his ‘harlot’ in 1532, while in 1620, John Errington was charged with adultery ‘with _ the wife of _ Lawley of Symondburne’, with the marital status of the woman clearly more important than any other aspect of her identity.⁵ Yet, while Helmholz argues that there was a delineation between adultery and fornication, he admits that ‘incontinence’ was used to cover most sexual offences.⁶ As Ingram has asserted, the wording used in court documents can be inconsistent, with adultery and fornication used interchangeably, along with references to living arrangements and further outrageous behaviour.⁷ It was said of Ralph Elstobb in court that he ‘keepeth Ann Martindell suspiciously in his house’ resulting in the birth of a child.⁸ The case against Michael Dixon that ‘he had the use of the bodie of the wife of Sir John Smith, curat there 19 severall tymes, And that the bastard she did beare some 13 years agoe was his the said Dixons and not Henry Liddells who took to be the father thereof’, did not specify adultery, fornication or bastardy at all, although the general immorality is clear.⁹

Incest cases involving blood relationships were rare, but did occur. Edward Paylor and Elizabeth Bulmer were uncle and niece cited to appear before York High Commission in 1631–32, and Anthony Huddlestone was accused of ‘incontinency with Anne Latus, wief of Rauff Latus being the naturall sister of the said Anthony’ and ordered to abstain from her company in 1571–72.¹⁰ In Durham, the problem seems to have been on a similar scale, with William Orde accused of incest with his wife's sister's daughter, Agnes Mathew, in 1591, and John Collingwood summoned for incest with an unnamed partner in 1622.¹¹ Yet there was another, more frequently occurring, type of case which bordered between incest and matrimonial and that was marrying the sister of a deceased wife. Technically, this fell under the degrees of prohibition, but a remarkable number of gentlemen pursued such relationships, and were prepared to go to some lengths to defend them. One of the first cases heard by York High Commission in 1562 considered the allegation that

Thomas Standish was first married to one Elizabeth Houghton … And that he and she continued and dwelt together as man and wife by the span of two or three years … he had carnal knowledge with her. And after her death [Thomas] was likewise married to one Margaret Houghton being her natural sister to the aforesaid Elizabeth and both born of one woman called Elizabeth Warmsley and hath continued with her as his wife by the space of four years last past or thereabouts and hath sundry children with her, whereby he hath committed the horrible crime of incest not only against God's Laws and the Laws Ecclesiastical established and set forth by ancient fathers in all Council's times and ages since the birth of Christ as well when this realm of England as in all other realms and dominions throughout all Christendom. But also against all good order and custom frequented and used when the same and specially when this realm of England and the dominions of the same to the great danger of his own soul and most perilous example of others.

Despite the attempts of Archbishop Thomas Young, this case was still in High Commission ten years later.¹² At the same time, Henry Neville, fifth earl of Westmorland faced the same charge, appearing in court to account for his marriage to Margaret, widow of Sir Henry Gascoigne – and sister of his previous wife, Jane (this being pursued with greater vigour than his paternity of his bastard daughter Margaret Watson).¹³

Apart from adultery, fornication, incest and their consequences in bastard-bearing, the church courts also sought to prosecute those who enabled or sanctioned immorality, a category of offence referred to as ‘bawdry’. Two cases involved extreme examples of husbands actively encouraging their wives’ liaisons with other men. William Nelson initiated a suit against his wife Frances for her adultery with Charles Barnby, only to find himself having to perform penance for bawdry. Edward Awde was prosecuted for allowing his wife Margery to dwell with Peter Maddyson, gentleman. Awde's comment in court ‘that neither Bishop nor Chancellor should nor coulde call or have anything to doe with his wif so longe as he himself is not displeased therewithe and shall permit the same’, could be construed as contempt.¹⁴ More typical of this type of offence was the archdeaconry of Richmond's prosecution of Leonard Richardson in November 1577 for harbouring Margaret Whytwell and her base child by Robert Layton, gent. The court was not effective in bringing him to justice, as four years later, the archdeaconry court was still pursuing Richardson for his support of Whytwell, which it was alleged took place eleven years previously.¹⁵ Even churchmen could be prosecuted: in October 1592 George Clerk, the vicar of Featherstone faced accusations that ‘he had secretly baptised a bastard child begotten by one Paul Hamerton, gent of the body of Elizabeth Stanford alias Peniston, in one John Packington's house in Featherstone, not brought to the Church’, and this was closely followed by action against Hamerton himself for fathering the child.¹⁶

Others aspects of definition and categorisation were inevitably more complex, however. Judicial separation or divorce a mensa et thoro could be granted by the ecclesiastical courts on the grounds of adultery, cruelty or heresy, but the parties could not remarry.¹⁷ This was reinforced by The Constitutions and Canons Ecclesiastical of the Church of England, issued in 1604, which declared ‘that the parties so separated will live chastely and continently; neither shall they, during each other's life contract matrimony with any other person.’¹⁸ Edmund Bunny's choice to write about the incidence of adultery causing the dissolution of marriages and the dedication to Archbishop Matthew Hutton in the passage which began this chapter is significant; as chaplain to Archbishop Grindal, he had been at the centre of ecclesiastical power in the province of York, and was therefore in a unique position to comment upon the moral welfare of the north of England, knowing that, whatever the theoretical arguments, it was one of the responsibilities of the ecclesiastical courts to impose the church's authority upon the moral welfare and conduct of the local population, including the nobility and gentry.

The legal position surrounding the dissolution of a marriage might have been consistently unequivocal across the period in question, but it was difficult to sustain in rea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Explanatory notes
• Introduction
• 1 Background and legal framework
• 2 The extent of bastardy among the elite
• 3 The role and status of the mistress
• 4 Gentlewomen and their lovers
• 5 The ‘wronged’ partner
• 6 The bastard children
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index