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In mid-century Members of Parliament gratefully seized an opportunity to air their views on love and marriage. The occasion was Lord Hardwicke's Bill of 1753 requiring banns to be called on three successive Sundays before marriage, and at the same time prohibiting the publication of banns if parents objected to the match. One purpose of the Bill was to put an end to the scandal of the Fleet marriages. Only the most strong-minded couples, it seems, were able to traverse some parts of London without being carried off and married. From rascally clergymen (some unfrocked) and their touts came the insistent, leering 'Would you like to be married, sir?' followed sometimes by more forcible inducements. Single men were offered widows with money, or girls of nineteen, according to taste. The Fleet marriages ramp, as Charles Knight tells in his London, was first conceived by a group of disreputable clergymen imprisoned for debt in the Fleet Gaol. Under common law such unions were legal and indissoluble. To the furtive parlours of the priests riotous sailors brought their chance-met brides, and caroused through the ceremony, such as it was. The clergyman was sometimes in no better shape than the parties he married. During the early years of the century these hiccuping priests did a brisk and lucrative trade. Not until the fashion of Fleet marriages began to spread upwards into fashionable society was there any active move for suppression. When the 1753 Bill was introduced the Opposition felt obliged to block it for party reasons. They represented the measure (in Knight's words) as one 'initiated by, and brought in for, the especial benefit of the tilled classes, enabling them to close their order, almost hermetically, against the approaches of any less privileged persons as wooers of their children-a kind of new game law to prevent poaching on their preserves'.
In the House of Commons Mr Charles Townshend described the Bill as one of the most cruel measures ever directed against the fair sex; 'if I were concerned in promoting it I should expect to have my eyes torn out by the young women of the last country town I passed through, for against such an enemy I could not surely hope for the protection of the gentlemen of our army'. Mr Robert Nugent said: 'It is certain that proclamation of banns and a public marriage is against the genius and nature of our people ... it shocks the modesty of a young girl to have it proclaimed through the parish that she is going to be married; and a young fellow does not like to be exposed so long before to the jeers of all his companions.' (In practice, only the poor published banns; the rich married by special licence.) Nugent went on to prophesy that if the Bill passed into law 'no commoner will ever marry a rich heiress unless his father be a Minister of State, nor will a peer's eldest son marry the daughter of a commoner unless she be a rich heiress'. A Captain Saunders recalled that he once gave forty sailors shore leave and all returned married; for this reason he opposed the Bill! Other Members wept tears, perhaps for the first time in history, over the hardships that would befall not only sailors but soldiers, wagoners and pedlars if obstacles to easy marriage were imposed.
One interested party who mocked the Bill was the Honourable Henry Fox (father of Charles James Fox). He himself, in dubious circumstances, had contracted a Fleet marriage with the daughter of the Duke of Richmond. This champion of liberty had his coach seized by the crowd and drawn in acclaim to the House.
Horace Walpole wrote in his memoirs that 'it was amazing to see a law promulgated that cramped inclination and discountenanced matrimony'. He thought the agitation for reform exaggerated. 'Unsuitable matches in a country where the passions are not impetuous and where it is neither easy nor customary to tyrannize over the inclinations of children were by no means frequent. . . .'
After the Bill was passed, one of the racketeering clergymen, the Reverend Alexander Keith, wrote a pamphlet asserting that 'from that day (fatal indeed to old England!) we must date the declension of the numbers of the inhabitants'. Yet Keith himself was soon solemnizing (legally) even more marriages than before. Commoners continued to marry heiresses, the only difference being that both parties had to wait until they were of age.
The Act had one major defect: it did not apply to Scotland. Infatuated couples could make a dash for Gretna Green, where a lucrative and frequently disreputable traffic in irregular marriages was to be conducted for nearly 200 years.
As the century progressed, the unscrupulous, the timorous and the idle began to use the advertising columns of the newspapers in an effort to find suitable (and suitably endowed) partners in matrimony. The techniques of courtship in the persona! column were varied. There was the purely financial approach:
An agreeable gentleman between 40 and 50 is desirous of marrying an agreeable gentlewoman of £800 or £1000 in ready money and would settle on her a very good estate of £200 a year. Any gentlewoman liking the above proposal is desired to send a letter between this and next Tuesday night directed to R. F. at the Apollo Coffee House. A frank enough proposal; yet the fact that this agreeable gentleman wanted all applications to be delivered by the following Tuesday suggests that his need for money was greater than his need for a wife.
Other advertisers sought beauty and a gentle disposition in their future wives, as well as wealth. One of them stipulated a woman with soft lips, expressive eyes, sweet breath, 'bosom full, plump, firm and white', lively conversation, humane temper and 'to look as if she could feel delight where she wishes to give it'.
In the personal columns, too, were the solicitations of those cautious amorists who had seen young women they fancied at the play or in the pleasure-gardens, but who had lacked the opportunity, or courage, to establish contact at the time (doubtless because the women were strongly escorted). Two typical examples:
If the beauteous Fair One who was in the front boxes at the play Romeo and Juliet last Wednesday night dressed in a pink satin gown with a work'd handkerchief on, and a black feather in her hair with bugles; also a black ribbon round her neck and a solitaire; has a soul capable of returning a most sincere and ardent love to one who thinks he had the honour of being taken notice of by her as he sat in the side box; let her with all the frankness of a Juliet appoint in the paper or any other when, how and where she will give her Romeo a meeting. A young lady who was at Vauxhall on Thursday night last in company with two gentlemen could not but observe a young gentleman in blue and a gold laced hat who, being near her by the orchestra during the performance, especially the last song, gazed upon her with the utmost attention. He earnestly hopes (if unmarried) she will favour him with a line directed to A. D. at the bar of the Temple Exchange Coffee House, Temple Bar, to inform him whether fortune, family and character may not entitle him upon a further knowledge to hope an interest in her heart. It must have been a gratifying moment for a young lady to recognize herself in the personal column of the Public Advertiser or the Morning Chronicle. Sometimes a lady did reply, warily or indignantly; occasionally it was left to her escort to insert a waspish warning-off paragraph.
If a gentleman could advertise in the hope of establishing a rendezvous with his beauteous fair one, a lady could equally advertise to catch the eye of a gallant. For instance:
A Gentleman with a Spencer Wig who marched in the first rank of the Volunteers last Tuesday was particularly taken notice of by a lady of easy fortune and the world says has some small share of beauty. If the said Gentleman is single and is disposed to send a line direct to D. Z. at the Somerset Coffee House in the Strand intimating his name and place of abode; if upon inquiry the lady finds his character answerable to his outward appearance she will then appoint him a meeting.
Doubtless, many of the advertisements by women were the camouflaged overtures of prostitutes, just as many of the offers by men were those of lechers and fortune-hunters. How much sincerity, for instance, is there in this: If any Lady not yet past her Grand Climacterick, of a Comfortable Fortune in her own Disposal, is desirous of spending the Remainder of her Life with a tolerably handsome young Fellow of great Parts, about five feet six inches, she may hear of such a one to her mind by inquiring at the Theatre Coffee-House for Mr F., a Sophister of-- College, Cambridge. Or in this: Whereas four young gentlemen, bachelors, in a pretty way of business, capable of rendering any four agreeable young ladies happy, lately disappointed in their amours, are resolved upon a matrimonial state by New Year's Day. If any Ladies (Milliners excepted) have a mind to enter into the said state let them enquire at the bar of Grigsby's Coffee House near the Royal Exchange between the hours of four and five for H. ]., B.P,,P.J.orC.J. As the years went by, personal columns became more and more disreputable though in the next century many innocent-seeming courtships were to be conducted in the Agony Column of The Times, many of them in code. |