Addison's Aristocratic Wife

Abstract

During the eighteenth century it was generally assumed that Addison's marriage to the Countess of Warwick had been an unhappy one. Pope's caustic words in An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnol (1. 393) about “marrying discord in a noble wife” were supposed to refer to Addison and his countess. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, on hearing of Addison's appointment as Secretary of State, had sarcastically remarked: “Such a post as that, and such a wife as the Countess, do not seem to be, in prudence, eligible for a man that is asthmatick, and we may see the day when he will be heartily glad to resign them both.” The tradition came to full flower in Johnson's Lives of the English Poets: “... at last the lady was persuaded to marry him on terms much like those on which a Turkish princess is espoused, to whom the Sultan is reported to pronounce, ‘Daughter, I give thee this man for thy slave.‘ The marriage, if uncontradicted report can be credited, made no addition to his happiness: it neither found them nor made them equal. She always remembered her own rank, and thought herself entitled to treat with very little ceremony the tutor of her son.” Johnson gave no authority for his “uncontradicted report,” and it seems likely that the Great Cham was supplementing the available evidence with a liberal use of imagination—a faculty which he elsewhere so strongly deprecated. Still the tradition continued, and at the beginning of the next century, Richard Phillips, in Addisoniana, related as a current anecdote, “that though Holland-house was so large a mansion, yet it could not contain Mr. Addison, the Countess of Warwick, and one guest, Peace.”