The curious commissions which great ladies in the seventeenth century gave to their male friends abroad, and the presents exchanged among members of noble families, show that many ordinary articles now in domestic use were then luxuries. In 1679, or thereabouts, the Countess of Sunderland writes to her brother, Mr. Sidney, envoy to Holland, in the following terms:—
“I desire you to lay out £20 for me in Dutch wax candles, which my Lady Temple says are very good. I would have them four to the pound, three parts, and the fourth part six to the pound; and some tea if you love me, for the last you gave was admirable.”
One would like to know what quantity of candles Mr. Sidney was able to buy for £20, which represented a much larger sum then, and whether the countess kept a private cupboard in which to lock up these precious articles.
Lady Chaworth, in 1676, writes to her brother, Lord Roos, at Belvoir Castle, to thank him, among other things, for a present of some oat-cakes and a pie. She sends him in return a peck of chestnuts and five pounds of vermicelli, some portion of which, she says, is of the same quality as that supplied to the king, who had a consignment of three hundred pounds’ weight. This seems a prodigious quantity, when it is remembered that farinaceous foods were not a staple article of diet. She also sends Lord Roos comfits, which she is pleased to hear that he likes, for she tells him—
“There is four pound of them, and made fresh for you of the purest sugar, though I gave a little more for them.”
Lord Roos had a sweet tooth, evidently, and it is to be hoped as sound as sweet, for our ancestors took very little care of their teeth. In 1650 we find Sir Ralph Verney sending to a friend at Florence a present of “teeth-brushes and boxes,” which were new-fangled Parisian articles, described by Sir Ralph as “inconsiderable toyes.”
As manners improved there was less separation of the sexes and more family life. In the absence of the husband, the lady of the manor, as she may still be called, for she often enriched her lord with the broad acres of her own inheritance, was much occupied with the management of the estate. The Lady Elizabeth Howard, already mentioned, who brought as her dowry the extensive Dacres property about which there was so much litigation, always attended to the business relating to the manors during her husband’s absences in London, whither she herself rarely travelled. Anne, daughter of the second Duke of Norfolk, being burdened with a husband very deficient in mental and physical parts—“Little John of Campes,” fourteenth Earl of Oxford—took the control into her own hands of all the affairs of the household and the estate. She corresponded about her difficulties with Wolsey, who advised her to return with her husband to her father’s roof, paying the duke a reasonable sum for the accommodation. The countess, who had no children to aid her, was sorely beset, after her husband’s death, by rapacious relatives, whom during his lifetime she had contrived to keep at bay. She complains that her park, and even her house, were broken into and her servants maltreated, and that, although the justices issued a writ against the offenders, it was not put into execution, and “doth nothing avail.”
Anne Countess of Warwick, wife of the king-maker, was shamefully robbed of her possessions by her sons-in-law, the Dukes of Clarence and Gloucester, and was obliged, she tells us, to write many letters with her own hand, in the absence of clerks. She finally got back all her property by Act of Parliament, but she did not keep it. She was either cajoled out of her estates, or her attachment to the king, whom her husband had assisted to the throne, was all-powerful; but, whatever the cause, she passed over one hundred and eighteen manors by private compact to Henry VII.
Another great lady, Margaret Countess of Salisbury, grand-daughter of Richard Earl of Salisbury, had a great deal of trouble in keeping a hold of her possessions. She was engaged in a suit against Henry VIII. to recover a yearly income of 5000 marks from certain of her manors. The rapacious king appears to have yielded, and she afterwards generously presented him with a year’s revenue as an aid in the prosecution of his wars. A revengeful lover whom she had rejected did his utmost to deprive her of her estates by filling the king’s mind with suspicions as to the legality of her claim. She also suffered much annoyance from marauders, who broke into her domain and cut down her woods.
Women of property were very liable to be preyed upon by grasping sovereigns and unscrupulous ministers like Wolsey, who actually led Elizabeth Dowager Countess of Oxford to endanger the cliff at Harwich, which formed part of her estate, in order to supply him with stone for his new college at Ipswich.