The Case of Mistress Mary Hampson by Malay Jessica;

Author:Malay, Jessica; [Malay, Jessica L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 2

AFTERLIFE OF A MARRIAGE

Accusations and Recriminations

In the years that followed Mary and Robert’s legal separation, the couple continued to be locked in a cycle of conflict over the payment of Mary’s alimony. Her attempts to collect her alimony, and his violent determination to pay her nothing, had unintended consequences for them both. Mary continued to petition the High Court of Delegates to force Robert to pay, while he claimed more and more widely that she was dead and increasingly used violence in his attempts not to pay—including beating a gentleman acting on Mary’s behalf, and having her thrown among a mob. She also believed that he hired the notorious spy Edmund Everard to follow and threaten her. She finally felt compelled to put her story in print, and Robert responded with his own pamphlet. At the time of his death, his reputation and finances were in tatters, while Mary lingered on in poverty. Many of the details of these later years come from her pamphlet, but other pamphlets, court documents, and letters add many details not found in the published story. These create an even richer, if somewhat more complicated, picture of the Hampsons’ life in the aftermath of their marriage.

After coming to an agreement in the Hampsons’ High Court of Delegates case in May 1671, Mary traveled to France almost immediately. She explains in a letter to the eminent lawyer and later ambassador Sir William Trumbull why she chose to leave England:

I [live] in a strange country, for if it be possible I would not live in England where my husband by his false reports hath so stained my reputation that I think it not safe for me to live there, for what ever affront is put upon me I find no justice therefore I desire to live where I am judged by my life and conversation and not by the report of a second Mahomet whom would do as the first did, destroy me.1

Despite the fact that the Court of Arches and the High Court of Delegates upheld Mary’s rights as Robert Hampson’s wife, her reputation was irreparably harmed within the gentry community. This made life in England uncomfortable at best and treacherous at worst. In France, and later the Netherlands, Mary tried to live quietly as a respectable, if impoverished, English gentlewoman. Two sources agree that she resumed using her maiden name of Wingfield when she began her new life in France. Francis Burke, a London merchant who acted for her on business matters, would testify in a later court action that Mary called herself Wingfield in France because it was the custom there “for women though married to write their maiden names.”2 She was also identified as “Mrs Wingfield alias Hampson” in a pamphlet published in 1679.3

Mary tells us that after her separation from Robert she lodged in the house of a Mademoiselle de La Porte in Paris. Here she was likely serving as a type of gentlewoman servant, a position for which she was well suited given her family status, her education, and her fluent French.

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