The Life And Times Of The Stuarts 79Adrian Tinniswood is the author of The Verneys:
A True Story of Love, War and Madness in
COURTESY OF SIR EDMUND VERNEY/CLAYDON HOUSE TRUST, GETTY IMAGES 17th-Century England (Vintage, 2008)
“‘Let them devise their worst,’ she said.
‘I defy them all. None in the world can
call me to an account for my actions’”
had a good word
to say for Papists,
and their
reactions were
predictable: her
mother asked for
a dress of
sackcloth – “and
line it with ashes”;
and her brother-in-law
(Mall’s father), prayed
that the groom would see
action against the Scots, since “if
he does, some lucky bullet may free her of
this misfortune”. Margaret, however, was
superb: “Let them devise their worst,” she
said. “I def y them all. None in the world
can call me to an account for my actions”.A reputation for drink
Mall’s five sisters were just as determined.
Their mother died in 1641 and their father
was killed at the battle of Edgehill in
October 1642, leaving brother Ralph as
head of the family. At this point, only Cary
Verney was married, to a Royalist officer,
and a skirmish near Oxford would soon see
her widowed. The other five girls – Susan,
Pen, Peg, Mall and Betty – had little to offer
suitors in the way of financial inducement
and, when Sir Ralph fled to the Continent
in 1643, leaving a mountain of debt behind
him and not returning until 1654, their
options became more limited still.
Nevertheless, in 1646 three of them
managed to find husbands. Peg, who was
22, chose a wrong ’un: within weeks of her
wedding she was struggling to cope with
her husband’s temper, which grew worsewith every passing
month. Susan found
a childless widower
who was kind, but
poor – so poor, in
fact, that the couple
honeymooned in the
Fleet Prison. Pen, 24,
married a cousin with
a reputation for drink and
violence. She soon regretted
her decision. On one occasion,
he chased her round the house with a
knife, swearing he wouldn’t rest until he
had washed his hands in her blood.
But like Mall, the other Verney women
could show a less compliant side when the
occasion presented itself. There was an
embarrassing scene in the middle of
Aylesbury one day when Pen and her
husband were waiting to board the London
coach. It was raining and Denton pushed
his wife out of the way in his haste to
secure an inside seat; she punched him
in the face and he was left to ride behind
the carriage, soaked to the skin, nursing
a black eye. Peg, having put up with her
violent husband for years, walked out on
him in 1657 and never went back.
Seventeenth-century England was
pretty clear about how its women should
behave. Modesty, meekness, compassion,
courtesy and piety were “those general
qualifications, which are at once the duty
and the ornament of the female sex”. If
a woman’s husband fooled around, and
many did, her best course of action was
to maintain a dignified silence and use
his guilt to get something out of him.“Whether it be to cover or redeem his
offence, you may have the good effect of
it whilst it lasteth.”
But the more we come to know the
Verneys, the more we realise how far
divorced from reality was the ideal of
compliant womanhood constructed
by male writers. In the early 1690s, Sir
Ralph Verney arranged a match between
his grand-daughter Molly and a well-off
lawyer named Dormer. Molly, whose father
was dead and whose mother was mad,
generally deferred to her grandfather’s
wishes, but was unable to summon up
much enthusiasm for the marriage. In the
in summer of 1693, everyone found out
why. She was already married. “I hope you
will excuse my not giving you notice of this
before”, she said in the note she left when
she walked out of the family home. “I was
in fear of putting you in a passion, the sight
of which my temper cannot very well bear.”Shame and infamy
Our final example of non-compliant Verney
womanhood is Sir Ralph’s niece, Pen
Stewkeley. After Cary Verney’s husband was
killed in the Civil War, she married a
widower, John Stewkeley. Pen was one of
their daughters and, in the early 1690s, she
went to live with her godmother, washing
and mending and generally making herself
useful. Like many unmarried girls in her
position, she was nudged into the role of
poor relation, dependent for the rest of her
life on the whims of others. So it came as a
shock to her family when, at the beginning
of August 1695, she suddenly announced
that she had slept with her sister’s fiancé, a
young clergyman named William Vickers.
Not once, not twice, but often. Very often.
The family was appalled, but Pen got her
way, married the clergyman and they lived
happily until his death 24 years later.
How typical were the Verney women?
It is hard to say. But the most delightful
thing is that the Verney women did
confound expectations of polite female
behaviour with such cheerful vigour.
Driven by love, passion, courage,
stubbornness and a fear of spinsterhood,
they refused to do as they were told. They
may not have been typical, but if Mall and
the rest teach us nothing else, they show
that no matter what commentators said
about the submissive position of women in
17th-century England, the reality of
individual experience was more
complicated and more compelling.In 1654, Cary (above) was terrified
that news of her ‘wild’ sister
Mall’s illegitimate pregnancy
would get outHIGHWAYMEN AND BLACK SHEEP
It wasn’t just the women, Verney men were troublemakers, too
It wasn’t only the Verney women who explored the boundaries of acceptable
gentry behaviour. Cousin Dick was a highwayman and a house-breaker. “I have no
great news,” he wrote nonchalantly from Newgate Prison in 1685, “but only that I
think to die next week.” And so he did.
The real black sheep was Sir Ralph
Verney’s brother Tom. He forged bills,
deserted wives, engaged in cowardly
backstreet assaults and quoted the Bible at
every opportunity. On one occasion he told
Ralph it was his duty to buy him some new
clothes, since God “promised Abrasham to
grant him his suit for the righteous’ sake”.
His high point as a villain came in 1649,
while he was on the run in France after
breaking into his brother’s study and
stealing money. He sought refuge in a
monastery, pretending to be a zealous
Catholic, and repaid the monks by filling his
bags with vestments, pictures and altar
plate and selling the lot in Calais.One of the Verney men was a
highwayman who died in prison