Woman’s influence and interference in these matters have proved an unmixed evil. It would be hopeless, however, to convince her of error: as well might one attempt to hustle an elephant.
Political women are, fortunately, rare in England. A Duchess of Devonshire, a Lady Palmerston, and the politico-social Dames of the Primrose League, these are all the chiefest and most readily-cited female politicians: and their interest was, and is, not so much in the success or defeat of this party or the other as in the return of their favoured candidate or the failure of a pet aversion. Politics have no real meaning for women: their natures do not permit of their comprehension of national and international questions. What does Empire signify to woman if her little world is distracted? and what is a revolted province to her as against a broken plate?
The Fates preserve us from Female Suffrage; for give women votes and patriotism is swamped by the only women who would care to exercise the privilege of voting: the clamorous New Woman, all crotchets, fads and Radical nostrums for the regeneration of the parish and the benevolent treatment of subjugated races in an Empire won by the sword and retained by might.
IV.—Some Old-time Termagants and Ill-made Matches of Celebrated Men.
The ‘strong-minded woman,’ as the phrase goes, we have always with us nowadays; and as this species of strength of mind seems really to be a violent and uncertain temper, there can be little doubt but that the strong-minded woman has always been more frequent than welcome. Certainly shrewishness and termagancy have been too evident throughout the ages, from the days of Xanthippe to the present time. That much we know from the lives—or shall we say, under the painful circumstances, the ‘existences?’—of public men who have been cursed with scolding wives. But what Asmodeus shall unveil the private conjugal tyrannies, the hectorings, and the curtain-lectures that make miserable the undistinguished lives of men of no importance for good or evil in the State? How many women, in fine, ‘wear the breeches’ through the ‘strength of mind’ which may be justly defined as readiness of that impassioned invective which in its turn may be reduced (like a vulgar fraction) to its lowest common denominator of ‘nagging.’ Not a pretty word, is it? And it is a practice even less pretty than that cross-grained definition would warrant. We cannot, however, lift the veil that hides the domestic infelicities of the lieges, but must be content to recount the troubles and oppressions that have befallen historic Caudles, who bulk a great deal larger in the history of England than they did, in their own homes, to their wives.
Sir Edward Coke, the great law officer of James the First’s reign—the revered ‘Coke upon Lyttleton’ of the law-student—was little enough of an authority in his own household after he had married his second wife, herself a widow—the ‘relict,’ in fact, of Sir William Newport-Hatton. He married her but a few months after his wife’s death, privately and in haste; probably urged to such an indecent speed by the necessity of forestalling the Lord Keeper Bacon in the lady’s affections. But he had not been wise in his haste; for affection—for him, at least—she had none. She had probably buried all her kindly feelings in the grave with Sir William Hatton, for she would never be known as Lady Coke, but always as Lady Hatton, and, in truth, she led that distinguished and bitter lawyer the life of a dog. One wonders, indeed, why she married him at all, who was old enough to be her father. It was not ambition, for she was by birth a Cecil and daughter of the second Lord Burleigh; nor the want of money, nor the need of a protector, for she was very well able to take care of herself, as Sir Edward presently discovered, and she was sufficiently wealthy. They quarrelled incessantly—about property, about the marriage of their daughter, about anything and everything. Sir Edward Coke was only suffered to enter her house in London by the back door, and she plundered his residence in the country. She sent her daughter away to Oatlands to prevent a marriage with Sir John Villiers, which Sir Edward was pressing forward; and he, ‘with his sonne and ten or eleven servants, weaponed in violent manner,’ repaired thither, broke open the door, and took her away. Lady Hatton intrigued at Court against the distracted Coke, who was already in disfavour at St. James’s, and procured an interference by the Star Chamber, which condemned his ‘most notorious riot;’ but Coke eventually gained the upper hand in this matter at least, and the girl was married to the man of his choice. This did not end the enmity. For years they contended together until death parted them. But she survived him by ten years.
Legal subtlety and ability had no terrors for Lady Hatton, and martial prowess daunted the wife of Monk as little, for, in very truth, Lady Albemarle, the famous Nan Clarges, wife of that General Monk who was created first Duke of Albemarle, was so awe-inspiring a termagant that her husband declared he would rather fight a battle than dispute with her, and that the roar of a whole park of artillery was not so terrible to him as her tongue loosened in floods of abuse. There is no doubt that he regretted his union with the washerwoman’s daughter whom he had married, who was neither beautiful nor witty. Nan Clarges had all the ancestry and upbringing that made for shrewishness. Her mother was one of the five women barbers who gained notoriety by their vulgarity even in that age, and her father was a blacksmith and farrier, one John Clarges, who lived at the corner of Drury Lane and the Strand, over his forge. Her mother became afterwards a laundress, and she herself dabbled in the soapsuds before and after her marriage to Thomas Ratford, whose father was also a farrier. This marriage took place in 1632, and she and her husband occupied a shop in the New Exchange in the Strand, where they sold gloves, powder, and cosmetics. Her parents died in 1648, and she and her husband separated in the following year. Three years later she married Colonel Monk, whose laundress she had been. Although the tongue of scandal was not idle when one re-married who was not a widow, the farrier never reappeared to claim his wife, and when the Restoration was accomplished (partly, it is said, owing to her Royalist sympathies), and General Monk became Duke of Albemarle, none were found to question her title of Duchess. But she became the laughing-stock of the Court and gave general disgust to Pepys, who calls her in good faith ‘a plain, homely dowdy,’ and ironically ‘that paragon of virtue and beauty.’ On one occasion he ‘found the Duke of Albemarle at dinner with sorry company; some of his officers of the Army; dirty dishes and a nasty wife at table, and bad meat.’
But she was mildness itself compared with that ‘she-devil,’ Bess of Hardwicke, who was wedded and a widow before her sixteenth year, and saw four husbands into the grave. She was the daughter of a rich Derbyshire gentleman, who died and left her his sole heiress at an early age. She fascinated and married a neighbour, the young and invalid Mr. Barley, whose property ranged with her own. He lived but a short while, and left her a charming widow with a great access of wealth.
Her second venture was Sir William Cavendish, a Suffolk gentleman of good family and great property, whom she married and constrained to sell his Suffolk lands and settle with her in Derbyshire. She ruled him thoroughly, and he seems to have been little better than her chief director of works in the building operations that were a passion with this singular woman through the whole of her long life. Her home was at Hardwicke Hall; but she now began to build a very much more magnificent house at Chatsworth. She had not proceeded very far with this work before Sir William Cavendish, probably wearied out with being ruled in all things, followed her first husband to the grave. Lady Cavendish mourned him for a decent period, keeping her eye open the while for another eligible, whom she presently found in the person of the widower, Sir William Saint Lo, a captain in Queen Elizabeth’s guard and a gentleman of considerable property in the neighbourhood of Bath. But Sir William had a family, and she could not think of wedding him until he had made a settlement upon her of all his lands. He did so readily, this bluff soldier; for he was absurdly fond of her, as his letters show. He was, however, detained much in the service of the Queen, in London and at Windsor, and died very soon.