Letters

The Verney Letters reveal the same dose-calculating approach to matrimony that characterized the Fastens, 200 years earlier. John Verney, who had formed realistic views on the value of women on his travels in Turkey, wrote:

If withal I marry one that hath no father, her clothes at wedding etc. must all be paid out of the portion and some people require so much expense in wooing and treating, carrying up and down to plays etc. that though they bring more smoke yet (in the end) there is less roast found.

It was a refreshing point of view.

From the letters of Dorothy Os borne to Sir William Temple, during the period of the Civil War, it is apparent that love marriages were becoming more frequent. Dorothy Osborne herself was determined not to fall into any such folly (or so she pretended), and equally to avoid being snared in an orthodox, contracted marriage. This famous courtship lasted seven years. When it began Sir William's father (who opposed the match) was a member of the Long Parliament and Dorothy Osborne's father held King Charles's commission in Guernsey.
Writes Dorothy Osborne:

To marry for love were no reproachful thing if we did not see that of ten thousand couples that do it, hardly one can be brought for an example that it may be done and not repented afterwards. Is there anything thought so indiscreet, or that makes one more contemptible?

And again:

I do not see that it puts any value on men when women marry them for love (as they term it); 'tis not their merit, but our folly that is always presumed to cause it; and would it be any advantage to you to have your wife thought an indiscreet person?

And yet again:

I know 'tis a fault in anyone to be mastered by a passion and of all passions love is perhaps the least pardonable in a woman.

What remedy for love does Dorothy Osborne suggest? Only a playful one-that all intending to marry ought to live some years of probation in the same house. 'They should then be permitted to marry if they pleased; but how few would do it then!' Indeed, she admits 'the world would end sooner than is expected'.

During her seven years' wait, Dorothy regales her lover with accounts of the men who have sought her hand, or who have been incited to woo her (including Henry Cromwell, son of the future Protector). One suitor liked her so well that he was very angry with her father for not offering £1000 more with her. For her part, she liked him so ill that 'if I had £1000 less I should have thought it too much for him'.

The hazard which threatened all courtships in those days overtook Dorothy Osborne; she caught smallpox and was seriously disfigured. It was the great test of love and honour. Sir William, who had long cherished her picture ('it must hang with the light on the left hand of it*, she said), passed the test; he married her.