Stuart life / Breaking the mould
Nicolaes Maes’s Lady In Red
is a study in self-assurance.
Similarly, the Verney archive
shows womens’ lives as far
removed from the conduct
desired by 17th-century societyA
ugust 1654 and Mall
Verney was alone in
London, in debt and six
months pregnant. Her
letters, which still
survive, offer a vivid
picture of a girl with
nowhere to turn.
The father of her child, an apothecary’s
assistant named Robin Lloyd, showed no
sign of wanting to make an honest woman
of her. So she explained her belly by saying
she was suffering from colic; then she took
a massive dose of purgatives in the hope
that it might bring on an abortion. That
failed so she put herself in the hands of
a local brothel keeper with experience in
managing unwanted pregnancies. And
finally, when she discovered this was going
to cost more money than she had, she
confessed everything to her brother Sir
Ralph Verney, the head of the family. If
Sir Ralph would only give her £20 to pay
for her expenses, she would do anything.
“Truly brother,” she wrote, “if you please
but to disburse so much for me I shall ever
acknowledge myself obliged to you; and if
[it] please God to send me recovered, I will
go to any place that you shall desire me; or
do anything that you think fitting for me.
I will refuse no offer of yours.”
Even as a teenager Mall was described as
being plain but “wild as a buck”, and was
once thrown out of her pregnant sister’shouse after making a pass at the woman’s
husband. Now, as friends and relations
speculated over the way she “so publicly
showed her great belly” around town, there
was debate about which of her many
admirers might be responsible. When the
truth came out, the Verney men-folk were
appalled. She faced “shame, imprisonment,
beggary (not having wherewithal to buy
rags to wrap a child in), alienation from all
her friends,” said an uncle. “And I want
foremost to express the ugliness of it
towards God and man.”Avoiding scandal
Sir Ralph Verney reluctantly agreed to
stump up the £20 to avoid scandal. He also
arranged for Mall to give birth in a more
salubrious setting than a whore-house – on
condition she gave away the baby and left
London to make a new life for herself where
people didn’t know about her past. “The
Bermudas is much better than Ireland,”
suggested her uncle, helpfully. In November
she was delivered of a healthy boy, who was
taken in by Robin Lloyd’s married brother.
But now her predicament was behind her,
wild-as-a-buck Mall decided she didn’t
want to swap London for Ireland or
Bermuda. What she wanted was more
money from her brother, so she could pay
off her debts and continue to see her lover.
And she got it. When Sir Ralph refused
to let her keep her maid, she announced BURSTEIN COLLECTION/CORBISBreaking the
mould
Delving into the rich records of the
Verney family, Adrian Tinniswood
shows how women broke the rules in
17 th-century England
that she was finding the girl a post in the
Hampshire village where their sister Cary
lived. If that happened, Mall’s shameful
secret would be all round the village in no
time. “I would not have her come down
by no means,” a panic-stricken Cary told
Sir Ralph. So she was allowed to keep the
maid. When Ralph refused her money for
clothes, she told him that “if you do not
please to help me I am confident I must
go naked”. She got the clothes.
This gentle blackmail went on for
two-and-a-half years, during which time
Mall married her Robin, conceived another
child and promised to leave London so
often that Sir Ralph stopped believing
anything she said. Finally, in the spring of
1657, Mall and “he whom she calls her
husband” (Ralph refused to write Lloyd’s
name) decamped for Wales, having secured
a promise her allowance would continue.
Mall Verney’s story is intriguing not only
for the light it sheds on gentry illegitimacy
in the mid-17th century, but for what it
tells us about the extent to which women
were prepared to stand up to male
authority. And she was far from being the
only female member of the Verney clan to
take control of her life. In 1639, her aunt, a
wealthy widow named Margaret Pulteney,
ignored the courtiers and nobles who were
being lined up as potential husbands by her
male relatives – and married a Catholic.
No-one in her fiercely Protestant family