Fans and Masks
NOT the least reason why the English Puritans suppressed stage plays was because playwrights showed an improper attitude towards the institution of marriage. It was reprehensible that they should put subversive ideas into young people's heads, encouraging them to picture themselves as star-crossed lovers cruelly thwarted by their parents; but even worse were those ribald plays in which girls were married off by trickery, against the wishes of parents and guardians. As F. A. Inderwick tells in The Interregnum, the middle classes had suffered from the emulation of such stratagems in real life.
While the wealthy merchant or prosperous tradesman had to endure as best he might the entrapping of his daughter or the abduction of his ward, the gay cavalier or dashing spark who carried her off was the lion of the hour. Of this phase of society the Puritan party had long and loudly proclaimed their horror. . . . An extreme example of the sort of thing they were up against was the abduction, in 1649, of Miss Jane Pickering, daughter and heiress of Sir Thomas Pickering. While walking with her maids in Greenwich Park, the lady was waylaid by Joseph Walsh and confederates, thrown on to a horse, transferred to a ship, and carried to Flanders. There she was forcibly married to Walsh, who claimed her moneys. The plot did not succeed; after many months the Council of State succeeded in freeing the lady and bringing her back on a warship.
Yet life was no easier-indeed, it could be vastly more difficult-for the father whose daughters were not worth kidnapping. The age has no more unenviable figure than the indigent squire faced with finding husbands for a quiverful of moderately well-bred but not-too-prepossessing daughters, who show excessive fastidiousness or capriciousness in turning down potential suitors, perhaps because they have got it into their silly heads that they ought to be in love with their future husbands and their husbands in love with them. Yet sons could be as tiresome to match up as daughters. Sir Ralph Verney probably had more trouble with his son Edmund than with his five orphan girls. 'Mun' was handsome but churlish, and could not be brought to see that his plain duty was to marry money and save the family estates. Sir Ralph admitted that his son was 'not at all nice, either in beauty or breeding' and that little could be expected in the woman who married him. Reluctantly, he sent Mun some money in order to buy better clothes in which to do his courting. The exasperating Mun said he would not soil his blood by marrying a creature of low condition for the sake of her money: 'I would prefer to seek my fortune through my sword, with a noble and virtuous woman.' Relatives took a more realistic view of Mun's chances than he did. One of them wrote to say that she knew of an heiress of sorts who could be called on in emergency-'an ordinary man's daughter; her father was a kind of farmer, but he hath given her a kind of breeding, as I hear he hath had her taught to sing and to play and to dance, but I believe it is all old-fashioned'. Still, she was worth £5000 and her father more than £30,000.
Mun as it turned out, fell violently in love with a young woman whom he sought out for himself, Mary Eure. It seemed a promising match, but unfortunately for the family Mary despised her admirer. Knowing his limitations as a letter-writer, Mun enlisted the aid of a friend, Dr Thomas Hyde, a Fellow of New College, to whom he sent an outline of what he wished to say, with a request that the bare fabric be clothed with suitably ornate sentiments. Once Dr Hyde complained that it was hard to make bricks without straw, but he had 'raked together some rubbish' which Mun was at liberty to use or reject as he felt fit. Dr Hyde seems to have tired of the wooing long before Mun, who kept beseeching him to throw in passionate lamentations and pitiful moans, along with some suitable scriptural allusions. Still the lady refused to consider, or to see, Mun.
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