The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

In early modern England the illegitimacy rate was remarkably low - perhaps as low as 2 per cent
- and illegitimate children were often born after broken betrothals, each one a private tragedy for
mother and child. Illegitimacy was rare, but bridal pregnancy very common. Trial marriages were
not countenanced in England, but they were in Gaelic Ireland, where marriage and divorce remained
secular matters, determined by secular rules, not ecclesiastical ones. Sir Thomas Cusack, Master of
the Rolls in Dublin, complained in 1541 that the Irish lived 'diabolically without marriage'.
Gaelic law was relaxed about marriage and divorce, and took little account of legitimacy. In the
Gaelic lordships men and women might have a succession of partners, and women could 'name' children as sons to men with whom they had fleeting liasions. These children were accorded the
same status and same relationship to their father as childern born within wedlock, and the same claim
upon the patrimony. In England, too, fathers who could afford it might show affection and care for
their illegitimate children, whom they acknowledged during life and death. William Ayloffe, a lawyer
in Hornchurch, dying in 1517, left his lands and goods to his legitimate children, but remembered
also 'William, my supposed bastard', who was to be kept at school to learn grammar and become
a priest, and a daughter Dorothy, who was to be 'put into a close nunnery, considering her sickness
and disease'. A less relaxed attitude to illegitimacy appeared by the end of the century. A marriage
is a secret place, a mutual society, an emotional world entered only by the couple. In their private
letters and public wills husbands and wives wrote of 'dearly beloved' spouses, as though the devotion
was real as well as conventional. After nearly five hundred years, how are we to tell? Elizabeth Grey,
widow of the 9th Earl of Kildare, nightly kissed his portrait. Were we told that because such devotion
was uncommon? Human emotions - love, grief, rage, jealousy - exist immemorially in marriage, but
ways of expressing, or not expressing, them change. For the upper orders, emotion was fettered by
convention, by the need for property and procreation. In 1537 Sir Thomas Wyatt wrote a letter of
advice to his newly married fifteen-year-old son, describing an ideal of fellowship in marriage:

Love well and agree with your wife, for where there is noise and debate in the house, there is unquiet
dwelling. And much more where it is in one bed. Frame well yourself to love, and rule well and
honestly your wife as your fellow, and she shall love and reverence you as her head. Such as you
are unto her such shall she be unto you.

Some turned ideal into reality. Not Wyatt. He wrote from the desolation of his own marriage.

And the blessing of God for good agreement between the wife and husband in fruit of many children,
which I for the like thing do lack, and the fault is both in your mother and me, but chiefly her.

Wyatt looked for love elsewhere, and, fleetingly, found it. Testament to his search is his most beautiful
and despairing love poetry. Romantic love was, for the upper orders, often reserved for the mistress
or the lover. But to love elsewhere than in marriage was forbidden, and in Wyatt's case punished by
his sanctimonious king.
Adultery was regarded by the Church as a sin, and treated as a crime to be formally punished.
Bishop Latimer dared to send Henry VIII a New Year's gift of a New Testament and the message
'The Lord will judge fornicators and adulterers'. The breach of marriage vows angered God, sundered
families, and broke the peace of the community. Because this was a society which insisted upon
the 'good and Catholic' behaviour of its members, neighbours brought accusations of sexual misconduct before the Church courts for trial. Midwives would demand of single women in labour
the identity of the child's father and report his name. Convicted adulterers were ordered to perform
public penance. Penitents, barefoot and bareheaded (a state of shocking undress in a society where
heads were always covered), dressed in a white sheet and bearing a candle to present to the priest
at the high altar, declared their guilt and shame before the congregation and sought forgiveness.
Before the Church courts, too, came a torrent of defamation suits, increasing as the century progressed, the overwhelming majority concerned with imputations of sexual misconduct. Women -
especially women - stood at doorways, arms folded, arguing from different premises, and hurling
abuse at their neighbours. The insults, often remarkably graphic, were usually variants on a single
theme: 'arrant whore', 'privy whore', stewed [brothel] whore', 'priest's whore', 'Lombard's whore',
'hedge whore', 'burnt [venerally diseased] whore'. The imputations might be true, or they might
spring from malice festering among neighbours living at close quarters, gossiping obsessively.