Stories from the Darker Side of Love: Tales of broken families and tangled relationships in Tudor England

By J. S. Block

My purpose in writing Stories from the Darker Side of Love is to show the real life situations of previously unnoticed people whose stories from the darker side of love are revealed by light from the archives of England’s early modern equity courts.
Archival material has shown us ordinary people brought to center stage by circumstance, and the stories such as those that comprise this book offer an effective way of looking at Tudor history from the bottom up. More importantly, they are good stories in their own right, and I am confident that you will enjoy reading them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781483573892

Book preview

2016

PROLOGUE

On a dark and stormy night

The last of the Tudors, Elizabeth I died in 1603. Her father, Henry VIII had lived from 1491 to 1547. Yet even centuries later, here we are in the midst of what has can only be described as a major revival of interest in the Tudors. It is difficult to attend a movie theater or to watch television without, sooner or later, running into a film or series about one or another of this most famous English royal family. In recent years this appetite and audience has grown exponentially. ‘The Tudors’ a recent series on HBO captivated millions. At the movies, Cate Blanchett and Helen Mirren brought us sharp images of Elizabeth struggling to deal with a host of political and personal challenges. And Hilary Mantel has fostered a Tudor industry with best sellers, two Man Booker Prizes for Fiction, a successful play, and a multi-part television series, all examining the life of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s chief minister during the 1530’s revolution in English religion and politics. More is certain to follow.

All of the above media hits have two common elements. They are all fictional creations and all highlight the lives of kings, queens, and their immediate circles of officials, courtiers, and aristocratic political elites. Unfortunately, the lives of ordinary people, are largely ignored in part because historians know very little of their lives in general and almost nothing of their family breakdowns and tangled domestic relationships,

My purpose in writing Stories from the Darker Side of Love is to show the real life situations of previously unnoticed people whose stories from the darker side of love are revealed by light from the archives of England’s early modern equity courts. The courts of Star Chamber, Requests, and Chancery offered for people from all levels of Tudor society their final opportunity to gain redress directly from the monarchs’ courts as the ultimate source of justice for what they felt was unfair treatment by England’s civil and ecclesiastical legal institutions. Although most verdicts from cases in the equity courts have been lost, we have discovered in what remains of the narratives of principals and witnesses the raw emotions that attended time spent in broken families and ruined lives. Archival material has shown us ordinary people brought to center stage by circumstance, and while we can never be certain when witness bias and outright lies mask ‘the truth’, stories such as those that comprise this book offer an effective way of looking at Tudor history from the bottom up.

The stories I have assembled constitute the substance of this work. They are all drawn directly from records of the equity courts and are all good stories in their own right. They are intended both for the general reading public as well as for academics. All may find them not unlike chapters from their own lives despite the centuries that have intervened from then until now. My aim is to tell these stories. They deserve to be told and told well. We all have vested interests in our own families, relationships, and intimate lives. The stories in this book encourage comparative thinking that embraces time and distance among real people from then to now. There is meaning to be made from this exercise and this book should prove a valuable tool for the task. Another important objective for me has been to emphasize the archival nature of the material, not inspired by, taken from, or based upon, but the authentic lives of genuine characters.

This collection of stories from the darker side of love presents cases that are provocative, capable of evoking strong images and the emotions of people who otherwise would remain nameless and faceless. Always fascinating, narrative accounts of family breakdowns, failed relationships, illicit and often violent sexual contact have engaged our attention from the first campfire on a dark and stormy night to the present. Whether in classical literature or today’s tabloids, calamitous unions and family breakdowns are familiar fare to all. Cases heard before Tudor courts of Star Chamber, Requests, and Chancery reveal a variety of actions from simple breach of promise suits to extremely complicated proceedings that must have challenged the judgment of the best legal minds in the realm.

Institutionally, the equity courts were ill equipped to take on broken relationships of whatever nature. That had never been envisioned as their remit. Common law, the law of England commanded the secular realm while a vast array of ecclesiastical courts ruled the spiritual domain with canon law backed by the authority of the Church. They had purview over formal agreements including marital contracts. The church supervised the content of domestic relationships. The equity courts had been developed to match justice to law, to insure that the guilty paid the price for their crimes and that plaintiffs in civil cases found legal remedy when the law did not satisfy their needs.

First the Court of Chancery, followed by the Court of Star Chamber and the Court of Requests emerged from the accurate perception that people unsatisfied by law would not remain quiescent forever. The belief in the king as the fount of justice sponsored the demands of subjects for the king’s justice to be supreme in their lives. And so, the equity courts became the legal holders of power that most suppliants believed would furnish them a fair hearing at a reasonable price and would judge cases on their merits, although I’m not certain that the losers would share in this opinion. Nevertheless, the faster and thorough airing of cases and the clearer and theoretically inescapable results proved popular with most litigants.

Those of us interested in understanding and sharing narratives from the lives of ordinary people find court records remarkably abundant storehouses of material, but these sources must be approached modestly and with care. People have been known to lie, even under oath, and we must remember always that lawyers ruled the roost. Stories told in court, then, for all their complex richness carry with them the potential for untruth, overstatement, misunderstanding, and multiple levels of meaning. Their stories remind me of our stories, and I like that.

The three courts followed similar basic procedures. Plaintiffs would submit a Bill of Complaint in which they set out their case. Defendants would be cited to answer the complaint in writing. Additional rounds of back and forth ensued. If the suit persisted, the next phase consisted of interrogatories prepared by both sides, highly partisan questions directed at witnesses called to testify to the substance of accusations and denials contained in the interrogatories. With all evidence in, members of the courts considered and rendered their verdicts. There is, without doubt, much more than this fast and minimal précis has allowed. Whole libraries are devoted to the subject. I’ve tried to offer enough to make the stories intelligible, and I will expand some of the material as necessary to the specific narratives emerging from the records of the equity courts as we enter into the pages of this book.

We start with this tale from the Isle of Jersey, the largest of the Channel Islands.¹ Closer to France than to England, Jersey lies just off Normandy and Brittany, more than eighty miles from the southern English coast. Aside from dairy products produced by namesake cows, Jersey now is a tourist venue noted for quaint streets, good hotels, and warm bathing places. In the 1530s, however, the island had little charm, sustaining with difficulty a small, hardy population of farmers and merchants. Among this group, a hard-working husbandman, Laurence Prowden, a widower, lived in his small house, cared for by his daughter Phylyppyn. There may have been other children, but if so they had left home to start their own families. After her father’s death, Phylyppyn continued to live by herself in their isolated cottage. Poor, but known as honest and of good reputation, she almost certainly had been warned of the dangers that lurked in the night far from family, friends, and neighbors. Yet even so, few could have expected that their worst fears for Phylyppyn’s safety would come in the form of a priest, called Thomas Arthur.

Our information about this slice of life from the darker side is contained in a Bill of Complaint submitted on her behalf to the Court of Chancery, the English equity court presided over at this time by then chancellor, Thomas Audley. According to the complaint, Thomas Arthur, priest and alleged perpetrator raped and detained the young woman. He broke into her home, violently seized and dragged Phylyppyn off to his house, also quite isolated and far from any nosy neighbor. And when he had her there of his voluptuous mind did then and there deflower her and of her she not being able to resist him took his pleasure of her and after that done kept her still with him perforce a long time.²

The priest kept her a virtual prisoner, not allowing her to see or be seen by anyone. Time passed, and the two of them must have settled into some kind of routine. Arthur continued to have sex with Prowden, and while she was unhappy and repeatedly protested her confinement, we don’t read in the documents about any escape attempts. Arthur blocked all moves in the direction of flight, we are told, with a combination of threats and promises of certain sums of money to be given toward her marriage - some day.³

Pie in the sky, however, remained just that. Instead, Phylyppyn became pregnant, and Thomas Arthur, priest, responded by turning his victim out of his house after taking all her worldly goods. Phylyppyn Prowden felt, apparently, that she could not return home and could not for shame, rejoin community and friends. Rather, somehow (we are not told the details), she secured passage on a boat that took her to England, to a place identified only as St. Katherine’s, probably the religious hospital in London. There, she found little beyond bare sustenance with no comfort nor relief to her utter undoing in this world to great pity. It must have been one of the hospital officials, hearing Phylyppyn’s story, who decided to write to the chancellor in hopes of obtaining remedy.⁴ As with most of our equity court cases, however, the verdict has not survived, thus obliging us to leave the story there, or to complete it as we would have it.

You will encounter in the course of this book a number of authentic stories from real people such as Phylyppyn Prowden. Beyond the narrative power revealed in material from England’s equity courts, I think that you will find that the cases themselves furnish a fertile source of evidence about how relationships were formed and maintained. They also demonstrate, all too clearly, the pitfalls that entrapped the unlucky. In addition, the narrative structures of the cases, drawn up by lawyers, reveal contact points between the private lives of individuals and the legal institutions of the society, all of this reflective of cultural values. If more emerges, so much the better. There is much to be learned from narrative presentations. I have reserved the academic discussion for the Epilogue, because the stories and those who told them are the principal characters of this work.

John and Agnes Hart accused John Malyard with impregnating their servant, Elizabeth Jefferey. Malyard denied the charges and brought a successful action of defamation in the Consistory Court of the diocese of London. The Harts, however, managed to secure a prohibition against the bishop’s sentence in the Court of Chancery and followed up by bringing an action of trespass against Malyard in the Guildhall of the city of London. The case went to trial, and Malyard held that he should have been acquitted, He agreed that Elizabeth Jefferey had said that he had fathered her child, whereof very truth it was that the same Elizabeth did say and confess at divers other times that the said John Hart himself was father to the said child. And at other times she accused two tailors in London with responsibility. The court, nevertheless, found Malyard guilty, he believed, because your poor subject is a Frenchman and hath no manner of friends to speak for him. His appeal to Thomas Audley, then Lord Chancellor, carried his last hope for an equitable result.⁵

The equity courts all heard cases in which complainants alleged that they had not found fairness in common law or ecclesiastical courts and now sought redress directly from the monarch as the ultimate source of justice. I am confident that stories I have taken from these court records have much to disclose about the ways in which early modern men and women ordered their domestic lives. Obviously, there will be problems of perspective. I have purposefully selected material from legal records generated exclusively from failed unions. Since happily married people rarely shared their stories in legal forums, it would be a mistake to expect a balanced representation of the spectrum of possible domestic partnerships.

Nevertheless, it seems to me that the public display of stories that show us the breakdown of relationships has its own importance. These stories from the past, of love unrequited, of lust masquerading as love, of marriages gone wrong, or of unhappy families all help us to understand how it should have been, how people might have lived in an ideal world. In addition, court cases were public events, and the lawyers who put the narratives together surely knew their audiences. Shared experiences, thus, as well as cultural assumptions and expectations emerge quite clearly in these stories from the darker side of love. They continue to resonate, as this next narrative amply illustrates, this one from the Court of Star Chamber.

In 1529, A London physician, Peter Ferdynandy complained to Chancellor Thomas Wolsey, that Thomas Clerk, a priest serving as steward of St. Anthony’s in London, had procured and enticed Ferdynandy’s wife to avoid and depart his house and company, and to be at his commandment instead of that of her husband. Ferdynandy also charged Clerk with counseling his wife to take away with her £500 worth of jewels and other moveable goods – anything that could be carried away. This scandalous clerical behavior, Ferdynandy argued, had undermined his reputation, made him appear a fool before his neighbors. He wanted a court-appointed commission to examine the premises, to render a just verdict that would bring him relief from his present condition.⁶

Clerk’s defense argued that Ferdynandy had already received and continued to receive more than enough relief – from a woman named Margaret Blessington. The priest claimed that he had done his best to reconcile husband and wife, but his exhortations to Peter to mend his evil ways fell on deaf ears. Claiming to be in fear and danger of her life, Peter’s wife left her husband, moved in with her brother, and sued to the chancellor of the archbishop of Canterbury, to obtain a separation from bed and board from her adulterous spouse. Clerk wanted Ferdynandy charged, with maliciously slandering him, and he asked the court to dismiss him with his reasonable costs and damages for his wrongful actions and false slanders by him suffered on this behalf.⁷

The problem we face is obvious. Who is telling the truth? Are we to believe Thomas Clerk, the priest, really tried to reconcile irreconcilable differences? Or did he have prurient or pecuniary interests in the Ferdynandys’ failing marriage? Even a short time spent among legal records makes any simple statement about truth appear absurd, tangled up in the many variations of ‘she said, he said’. As we shall see time and time again, ‘true’ can be a tricky concept even in the best of circumstances, and our final example from the Court of Chancery makes this all too obvious.

The least revealing of the equity courts, Chancery in the Tudor period rarely provides researchers more than a scant Bill of Complaint and an Answer. But even these invariably yield more than some might sanction, certainly more than mere sequence. In this case, we could simply note here that a Court of Chancery document addressed to Thomas More, then Lord Chancellor, indicated that one Richard Funch submitted a Bill of Complaint and one Alice Jelyan filed an Answer. No one could or would think of challenging the truth of that material as presented, but I favor the story over the objections of Charles Dicken’s Gradgrind or Dragnet’s Joe Friday, both of whom