The great Lord Bacon, when a young man plodding at the bar, but with a very small practice, cast about his eyes among the desirable matches of the day, and selected the handsome widow of Sir William Hutton (nephew and heir of Lord Chancellor Hutton), who had a large fortune at her own disposal. But another legal gentleman had been beforehand with him; and when he proposed he was rejected. His favored rival was Sir Edward Coke, a crabbed widower, but attorney-general, rich and of large estate, as well as of large family. The widow who valued wealth as much as Bacon did, married the old man, running off with him, and entering into an irregular marriage, for which they were both prosecuted in the Ecclesiastical Court. Bacon had reason to rejoice at his escape, for the widow was of capricious and violent temper, and led Coke a most wretched life, refusing to take his name, separating from him, doing every thing to vex and annoy him, and teaching his child to rebel against him. Bacon was however shortly after consoled by a rich and handsome wife, in the daughter of Alderman Barnham, whom he married. But the marriage seems at best to have been one of convenience on his part. They did not live happily together; she never was a companion to him; and not long before his death, a final separation took place, and the great Lord Chancellor died without the consolations of female tenderness in his last moments. When the separation took place, "for great and just causes," as he expresses it in his will, he "utterly revoked" all testamentary dispositions in her favor. But she lost nothing by this, for his costly style of living during his official career left him without a penny, and he died insolvent.
Sir Thomas More, when twenty-one, married the eldest daughter of one "Maister Coult, a gentleman of Essex," a country girl, very ill-educated, but fair and well-formed. Erasmus says of the marriage—"He wedded a young girl of respectable family, but who had hitherto lived in the country with her parents and sisters; and was so uneducated, that he could mould her to his own tastes and manners. He caused her to be instructed in letters; and she became a very skillful musician, which peculiarly pleased him." The union was a happy one, but short, the wife dying, and leaving behind her a son and three daughters; shortly after which, however, More married again, this time a widow named Alice Middleton, seven years older than himself, and not by any means handsome. Indeed, More indulged himself in a jest on her want of youth and beauty—"nec bella nec puella." He had first wooed her, it seems, for a friend, but ended by marrying her himself. Erasmus, who was often an inmate of the family, speaks of her as "a keen and watchful manager." "No husband," continues Erasmus, "ever gained so much obedience from a wife by authority and severity, as More won by gentleness and pleasantry. Though verging on old age, and not of a yielding temper, he prevailed on her to take lessons on the lute, the viol, the monochord, and the flute, which she daily practiced to him." Her ordinary and rather vulgar apprehension could not fathom the conscientious scruples of her husband in his refusal to take the oath dictated to him by Henry VIII.; and when he was at length cast by that bad monarch into the Tower, then the grave of so many royal victims, his wife strongly expostulated with him on his squeamishness. "How can a man," she said to him on one occasion, "taken for wise, like you, play the fool in this close filthy prison, when you might be abroad at your liberty, if you would but do as the bishops have done?" She dilated upon his fine house at Chelsea, his library, gallery, garden, and orchard, together with the company of his wife and children. But to all he opposed the mild force of his conscience and religious feelings. "Is not this house," he asked, "as nigh heaven as my own?" to which her contemptuous ejaculation was—"Tilly vally, tilly vally!" He persisted in his course, and was executed, after which we hear no more of his wife.
Among the few great lawyers who have married "for love," Hyde, Lord Clarendon, deserves a place. While yet a young man, he became desperately enamored of the daughter of Sir George Aycliffe, a Wiltshire gentleman of good family, though of small fortune. A marriage was the result, but the beautiful young wife died only six months after, of the malignant small-pox (then a frightful scourge in this country), and Hyde was for some time so inconsolable, that he could scarcely be restrained from throwing up his profession and going abroad. Two years after, however, he married again into a good family, his second wife being the daughter of Sir Thomas Aylesbury, Master of the Mint; and the marriage proved highly auspicious. This worthy lady was his companion in all his vicissitudes of fortune—lived with him for many years in exile—shared all his dangers and privations, when at times the parents could with difficulty provide food and raiment for their children; but the wife was yet preserved to see her husband Earl of Clarendon, Lord Chancellor and Prime Minister of England. As an instance of the straits to which the family was occasionally reduced, we may quote the following extract from a letter written by Hyde to a friend, when at Madrid in 1650, in which he says: "All our money is gone, and let me never prosper, if I know or can imagine how we can get bread a month longer;" and again, "Greater necessities are hardly felt by any men than we for the present undergo, such as have almost made me foolish. I have not for my life been able to supply the miserable distress of my poor wife."
Francis North, afterward Lord-Keeper Guildford, went about marrying in a business-like way. He was a reader at Lincoln's Inn, but much desired to wed, because he had "grown tired of dining in the hall, and eating a costelet and salad at Chateline's in the evening with a friend." Besides, he wished to mend his fortune in the most summary way. He first tried a rich, coquettish young widow, but she jilted him. Then he found out an alderman who was reputed to be rich, and had three marriageable daughters with a fortune of £6000 each. He made his approaches, was favorably received, and proceeded to broach the money question to the alderman. The sum named as the young lady's portion was £5000; but as North had set his heart on the £6000, he was disappointed, and at once took his leave. The alderman, running after him (at least so relates Lord Campbell), offered him to boot £500 on the birth of the first child. But North would not take a penny under the sum he had fixed upon, and the match fell through. At last he found a lady with £14,000, one of the daughters of the Earl of Devon, whom he courted in a business style, and ultimately married.
Judge Jeffries, when a dissolute youth, courted an heiress, and in spite of her father's interdict, the young lady encouraged Jeffries, and corresponded with him. The father fell upon a heap of love-letters which had passed between Jeffries and his daughter, and in a savage manner turned the young lady from his doors. She was suffering great distress in some house in Holborn, in which she had taken shelter, and where Jeffries sought her out. Perhaps his marrying her under such circumstances was the one generous act of that infamous man's life. She made him an excellent wife while she lived, but before she died, Jeffries was already courting another wife, and married her three months after; and in about three months after that, his new wife presented him with certain marital fruits rather prematurely. This woman caused much scandal during her life, and seems to have been as great a disgrace to the domestic conditions of life, as her husband was to the bench he occupied.
Neither Lord Somers nor Lord Thurlow were married—both having been disappointed in attachments in their younger years. The latter proposed to a young Lincolnshire lady, a Miss Gouch, but she protested "she would not have him—she was positively afraid of him;" so he forswore matrimony thenceforward. We do not remember any other of the Lord Chancellors who have led a single life.
Strange that Lord Chancellor Eldon—a man of so much caution and worldly providence, should have been one of the few great lawyers who married "for love;" but it was so. His choice was nearly a penniless beauty, and he had nothing; she was only eighteen, and he twenty-one. Scott induced the fair damsel to elope with him; she stole away from her father's home by night, descending from her window by a ladder planted there by her impatient lover; they fled across the border, and got married at Blackshiels. The step was an important one for Scott—fraught with great consequences; for it diverted him from the church, for which he had been studying, and forced him to the bar, thus compelling him to enter upon a career which ended in the highest honors. William Scott, his elder brother, afterward Lord Stowell, helped the young couple on, and the young lawyer worked with a will. "I have married rashly," said he, in a letter to a friend, "and I have neither house nor home to offer to my wife; but it is my determination to work hard to provide for the woman I love, as soon as I can find the means of so doing." He was shortly after engaged by Sir Robert Chambers, as his deputy, to read lectures on law at Oxford; and in after years he used to relate the following story respecting his first appearance in the character of a lecturer. "The most awkward thing that ever occurred to me was this: immediately after I was married, I was appointed Deputy Professor of Law, at Oxford; and the law professor sent me the first lecture, which I had to read immediately to the students, and which I began without knowing a word that was in it. It was upon the statute of young men running away with maidens. Fancy me reading, with about one hundred and forty boys and young men giggling at the professor! Such a tittering audience no one ever had."
It remains for us to notice the wives of two other great lawyers, who, though not equal in rank to those we have named, were equal to any of them in professional merit, and in true nobility of character. We allude to the late Sir Samuel Romilly and Sir James Mackintosh, both of whom were blessed in their married state, and have left behind them memorials of the most touching kind in memory of their wives.
"For fifteen years," says Sir Samuel Romilly, writing in 1813, "my happiness has been the constant study of the most excellent of wives; a woman in whom a strong understanding, the noblest and most elevated sentiments, and the most courageous virtue, are united to the warmest affection, and to the utmost delicacy of mind and tenderness of heart; and all these intellectual perfections are graced and adorned by the most splendid beauty that human eyes ever beheld. She has borne to me seven children, who are living, and in all of whom I persuade myself that I discover the promise of them, one day, proving themselves not unworthy of such a mother."
The noble woman here referred to was Anne, the eldest daughter of Francis Garbett, Esq., of Knill Court, Herefordshire, whom Romilly married in January, 1798. He first accidentally met the young lady when on a visit to the Marquis of Lansdowne, at Bowood. He gives the following charming account of the circumstance in his diary: "The amiable disposition of Lord and Lady Lansdowne always renders the place delightful to their guests. To me, besides the enjoyment of the present moment, there is always added, when I am at Bowood, a thousand pleasing recollections of past times; of the happy days I have spent, of the various society of distinguished persons I have enjoyed, of the friendships I have formed here; and above all, that it was here that I first saw and became known to my dearest Anne. If I had not chanced to meet with her here, there is no probability that I should ever have seen her; for she had never been, nor was likely, unmarried, to have been in London. To what accidental causes are the most important occurrences of our lives sometimes to be traced! Some miles from Bowood is the form of a white horse, grotesquely cut out upon the downs, and forming a landmark to wide extent of country. To that object it is that I owe all the real happiness of my life. In the year 1796 I made a visit to Bowood. My dear Anne, who had been staying there some weeks, with her father and her sisters, was about to leave it. The day fixed for their departure was the eve of that on which I arrived; and if nothing had occurred to disappoint their purpose, I never should have seen her. But it happened that, on the preceding day, she was one of an equestrian party which was made to visit this curious object; she overheated herself by her ride; a violent cold and pain in her face was the consequence. Her father found it indispensably necessary to defer his and her journey for several days, and in the mean time I arrived. I saw in her the most beautiful and accomplished creature that ever blessed the sight and understanding of man—a most intelligent mind, an uncommonly correct judgment, a lively imagination, a cheerful disposition, a noble and generous way of thinking, an elevation and heroism of character, and a warmth and tenderness of affection, such as is rarely found even in her sex, were among her extraordinary endowments. I was captivated alike by the beauties of her person, and the charms of her mind. A mutual attachment was formed between us, which, at the end of a little more than a year, was consecrated by marriage. All the happiness I have known in her beloved society, all the many and exquisite enjoyments which my dear children have afforded me, even my extraordinary success in my profession, the labors of which, if my life had not been so cheered and exhilarated, I never could have undergone—all are to be traced to this trivial cause."