Broken Lives: Separation and Divorce in England, 1660-1857.

BROKEN LIVES 3

Separation and Divorce in England

1660-1857

Lawrence Stone 

Oxford University Press, $35,355 pp.

With the publication of Broken Lives, Lawrence Stone's massive, three-volume study of the making and breaking of marriage in England has reached completion. The first volume, Road to Divorce, offers a grand theoretical overview of changes in attitudes toward marriage and divorce during the course of four-and-a-half centuries. In early modern England, for most people there were only two ways to get out of a valid marriage: one's own death or the death of a spouse. By contrast, divorce is expected to end a third of all present-day marriages in England, and half of all marriages in the United States. Stone poses the question, "How did we get this way?" The search for an answer leads him to trace the evolution of divorce through popular attitudes, operations of the courts, parliamentary acts, legal judgments, and statistical fluctuations in the frequency of marriage breakups.

For all of his numbers and tables, though, Stone retains many of the qualities of the old-fashioned narrative historian. He is interested in how the changes affected fleshand-blood actors, and in how human demands brought about these changes. The second and third volumes, therefore, present case studies that provide the raw material for the explanations in Road to Divorce. The cases in Uncertain Unions illustrate the ill-defined nature of English marriage before the Marriage Act of 1753. Broken Lives offers a similar series of detailed stories that show how individuals attempted to extricate themselves from unhappy partnerships before the Divorce Act of 1857.

England was later than other European countries in reaching a satisfactory legal definition of marriage, and it lagged behind the other Protestant nations in allowing divorce. This made marriage an easy, if ambiguous, state to enter, and a difficult one to leave. Church weddings, following the reading of banns, provided the most definite and indisputable, as well as the most expensive, way of establishing a marriage. But there were cheaper and more convenient ways. Vows before witnesses, written contracts, and clandestine marriages performed quickly, secretly, and inexpensively by shady clergymen could also suffice.

The Commonwealth, the Puritan government established in 1649 after the English civil war, contributed an added measure of confusion. Puritan opposition to the religious establishment led to the attempt to make the performance, registration, and regulation of marriage an entirely secular affair. The ecclesiastical courts that decided issues of canon law, including questions of marriage and divorce, were abolished in 1646, and Church of England weddings were forbidden in 1653, giving a boost to the practice of clandestine marriages.

This diversity often made it difficult to establish that a valid marriage had, in fact, been enacted, and it offered a defacto form of divorce long before actual divorce was commonly available. The ambiguity of early modern unions made it possible to dissolve them by denying that they had ever really existed.

Divorce or separation, like marriage, could take several forms. In the mid-to-late seventeenth century private deeds of separation developed as a result of the temporary abolition of the ecclesiastical court system. Judicial separation in the ecclesiastical courts could be used by wives to improve the financial terms of an existing separation or by husbands to avoid paying alimony to an adulterous wife, and a judicial separation became one of the necessary steps to obtain a parliamentary divorce, a full divorce with right to remarry granted to an individual by an act of Parliament as an exception to the role of the indissolubility of marriage. The other, necessary step was the suit for criminal conversation, or "crim. con.," a civil suit for monetary damages brought by a cuckolded husband against a wife' s lover, a commereialization of the marital state that evoked increasing revulsion through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Stone devotes considerable attention to the development of the parliamentary divorce, from the time the power of Parliament to dissolve marriages was first recognized, when a divorce was granted to Lord John Roos in 1670, to the acceptance of divorce as a normal part of English law with the Divorce Reform Act of 1857. He offers statistics to show the steadily increasing number of divorce bills over the entire period and the shift in social composition of those petitioning for acts of divorce, from titled men and landed squires to "richer men of the middling sort," after about 1750. He does not, unfortunately, discuss the broader socioeconomic changes in English society underlying this shift. He does, however, make some interesting observations about the changes in purpose and function of these legislated breakups. He suggests that they began as exceptions to the rule of lifelong marriage, each exception made for the preservation of patrilineal descent of property, usually from the danger of adulterous wives. They ended in collusive arrangements between spouses to allow each to remarry in the pursuit of personal happiness. The author would have done well to pursue this line of thinking further, since these changes in the purpose of divorce point to much more fundamental cultural changes reflected in attitudes toward family life.

It is a bit disappointing to find the century of divorce law reform from 1857 to 1987 hurried through in an epilogue to Road to Divorce, given the author's goal of explaining "how we got this way." In accounting for the steady growth in divorces following 1857, moreover, Stone tends to round up the usual suspects: increases in life expectancy, weakening of traditional systems of social support, and more and better employment for women outside the home. In the second two volumes, the abstract historical patterns blossom into skillful narratives. The historian Simon Schama has defended narrative history with the remark that written narratives "... often correspond to the ways in which historical actors construct events." The gossipy, tabloid quality of Stone' s stories about couples is precisely what gives them their value as historical reconstructions of sex and romance seen through the eyes of their times.

The twenty-five stories of Uncertain Unions often read like graphic versions of Defoe or Richardson. They are organized into three sections, as illustrations of three themes: courtship and contract, forced marriage, and clandestine marriage. This method of presentation leaves Stone open to the common criticism of case studies: the question of generalizability. Does the attempt of the adventurer Jean-Jacques Fazas to kidnap, drug, and marry an unwilling wealthy widow really show that "between 1675 and 1710 relations between the sexes seem to have been at their most brutal," or is this simply a timeless story of ruthlessness?

While we cannot say how normal or exceptional these accounts are, their detail manages to convey the pressures and prejudices of their times. Lady Bridget Osborne's efforts to establish as valid her clandestine marriage with a common chaplain against the will of her aristocratic family offer a fascinating picture of a human being caught in the rigidity of social hierarchy. The machinations of serial bigamist Constantia Phillips show how a clever woman might scheme to come out ahead in a misogynous system.

Broken Lives lets us eavesdrop on even juicier bits of gossip from centuries past. Since adultery and extremes of cruelty were the most common reasons for seeking divorce before the Divorce Act made it more widely available, these cases have some of the prurient appeal of keyhole peeping. They also offer fascinating insights into the households of the English elite. The omnipresence of servants made them witnesses and potential allies in any marital rift, so that, in divorce cases like that of William and Clara Louisa Middleton, servants might be polarized into two camps, with master and mistress both seeking their testimony.

It remains clear throughout that parliamentary divorces were devised by men for men. In the twenty-year straggle of Lord Salisbury' s daughter Emily with her husband, the Earl of Westmeath, the battered wife sought maintenance and child support in chancery, common law, and consistory courts, after the husband had imprisoned her, beaten her, taken her money, and committed numerous acts of adultery. Her ultimate defeat became, in the eyes of fighters for women' s rights like Caroline Norton, evidence for the need to introduce a divorce law that could protect the rights of separated women.

Stone's trilogy achieves an impressive blend of social analysis, humane insight, and storytelling. One may carp at some of the numbers in the first volume, since early modern statistics are notoriously unreliable, and one may object that he is too quick to leap to generalizations, such as his claim that parliamentary divorces in the later period were generally collusive. There is also a tendency in the narratives for lawyers to appear in minor, supporting roles, when it is more likely that lawyers were frequently the chief architects of allegations and strategies of defense. But few other historians have so successfully combined analytical and narrative approaches, and few works of history have offered such an intimate and detailed view of the social customs of early modern England.

Still, Stone never manages to provide an entirely satisfying answer to his original question, "how did we get this way?" Questions of causation are usually dealt with most handily by abstract and reductionistic techniques, such as causal diagrams, that attempt to boil the complexity of human life down to a single, rather simple set of theoretical relations. Stone's rich trilogy does not explain the modern era's increase in divorce so much as it &scribes this increase. These fascinating reconstructions of English private life make a unique contribution to historical literature, offering readers a profounder understanding of the nature of marriage before the twentieth century and providing a marvelous overview of historical trends in the formation and dissolution of family life. At the end, however, we find ourselves more knowledgeable, but still wondering just what happened to lifelong marriage.