Manhood in Early Modern England by Elizabeth A Foyster

Author:Elizabeth A Foyster [Foyster, Elizabeth A]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9781317884279
Google: XVCgBAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-09-25T16:15:24+00:00

Paternity

Jokes about unchaste women bearing illegitimate children are abundant within ballad literature of the seventeenth century. Their comedy centres on the foolish gallant or husband who ends up supporting a child which is not his own. In 'The Jolly Widdower' the man warns bachelors against marriage, telling them that when he was married 'I often rock'd another man's child'.118 Maids pretend virginity and trick young men into marriage or into maintaining a bastard in both 'Children after the rate of 24 in a year' and 'The Country Girl's Policy'. The chorus of the former ballad runs,

Rock the Cradle, rock the Cradle,

rock the cradle John,

There's many a man rocks the cradle,

when the child's none of his own.119

Evidence from separation cases suggests that in reality men took this consequence of their failure to exert sexual control over their future brides or wives very seriously. For even though legal theory held that all children born by a married woman were legitimate, in practice when the paternity of a child was in doubt rightful inheritance of property was immediately at stake.120 It becomes obvious why so many contemporary writers described adultery as an act of theft when we understand that bastards were thought likely to rob other children of estate and property. The double standard of morality is justified by contemporaries because the consequence of a woman's adultery is that, 'she may bring into her Husband's house strange children, to wipe her husband's own children's nose of their share in his goods, and falsify all whatsoever'.121 Women's power to disrupt the rightful inheritance of property by mixing it with blood of lower social status was recognised by John Taylor, the Water Poet:

The greatest females underneath the sky

Are but frail vessels of mortality . . .

Lust enters, and my lady proves a whore:

And so a bastard to the world may come,

Perhaps begotten by some stable groom;

Whom the fork-headed, her cornuted knight

May play and dandle with, with great delight,

And thus by one misbegotten son,

Gentility in a wrong line may run:

And thus foul lust to worship may prefer

The mongrel issue of a fruiterer.122

An illegitimate child could also be regarded as the long-term living proof of a husband's shame. Even if, as Chapter 2 argued, ideas of inherited lineal honour were being gradually replaced by those that placed more emphasis on individual virtue, concern about illegitimate children shows that the concept of inherited dishonour continued. As Gibbon wrote in 1594, 'An ill Name doth not only disparage and impeach the Agent, but such as be allied to him; not only the party, but his progenitors, and such as belong or be anyway derived from his lineage.' When Hermione in The Winter's Tale (c. 1609) stands trial for adultery, she points straight to her husband's concerns about his succession when she recognises of honour, ''Tis a derivative from me to mine.'123

It is little wonder, given this context of ideas, that when Alexander Denton discovered that his wife had suffered a miscarriage after he claimed not to have had sex

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.