The Courtship Letters and Poems of Philip Wodehouse (1633)

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.)In early January 1633 Philip Wodehouse, of Kimberley, Norfolk, courted Mistress Anne Bacon, of Culford, Suffolk. He was twenty-five and she was eighteen years old. There remain in manuscript a few letters and poems which, whilst they engage briefly with the conventions and formal approaches of the prospective seventeenth-century suitor, also provide evidence of the poetic devices of a witty lover anticipating both frustration and failure. They are to be found amongst the correspondence of Anne's mother, Lady Jane Meautys Cornwallis Bacon (c.1581-1659).1 Although the verse is addressed to the daughter, the letters, dating from 2 February to 1 July 1633, are to the mother and to Mr Pead, a gentleman intermediary whose help Wodehouse tried to enlist. Much as the young man longed for a union with Anne, it was to his greatest regret that his advances were considered unwelcome. Not only did he lack the necessary financial resources to marry the daughter of the wealthy Lady Bacon, but he had already been rejected by another aristocratic family, for reasons she sought to ascertain through her brother-in-law, Sir Edmund Bacon. Wodehouse's reluctant acceptance of defeat is held in check by the restrained politeness of his correspondence, and there is an underlying wit in the poems which, together with the letters, indicate a young man of some civility, grace and good humour.We know little of Anne Bacon at this time, except that she was born in 1615, the first daughter of Lady Bacon and her second husband, the gentleman painter Sir Nathaniel Bacon (1585-1627). The fact that the love poems had been hidden away gives some indication as to Lady Bacon's desire to keep control of her daughter's marriage, but there was reason for this. Two years earlier Frederick, her elder son and heir to the Cornwallis estates, had upset delicate negotiations she had set in train by secretly choosing and marrying, without his mother's knowledge or consent, a lady-in-waiting to the court of Queen Henrietta Maria. A rift had developed with the angry Lady Bacon, healed only through the good auspices of the king and queen. Evidently fearing that her daughter might lose her own large 'portion' to a bounty hunter, she did not wish for a repetition of this kind.The brief courtship between Anne and Philip was therefore over by the summer of 1633 when he realised that, even if she returned his affection, a union must be out of the question. We can only venture to guess her sentiments, but the light-hearted poems do give some hint as to the warmth of friendship and probable fondness shared by the young couple.Six years later Anne married her mother's cousin, Thomas Meautys (c.1592-1649), whom she had known since childhood. He was twice her age and a high-ranking civil servant. Formerly the private secretary to his distant cousin Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, he had been made Clerk to His Majesty's Council in 1619, and had entered Parliament for Cambridge Borough in 1621. When his patron died in 1626 he inherited Gorhambury, Hertfordshire, and subsequently succeeded to the Clerkship of the Writs and Processes in the Star Chamber. In 1634 he became Clerk to his Majesty's Privy Council Extraordinary, the duties of which he performed until August 1645 when the office became virtually extinct. Anne lived with her husband at Gorhambury and, in February 1641, he was knighted at Whitehall. On his death the estate was inherited by their only daughter, Jane, who died at the age of ten years in 1652. Gorhambury then passed to Thomas's elder brother, Henry Meautys.2 Anne married again, to Sir Harbottle Grimston (Speaker of the House of Commons and Master of the Rolls, 1660) who bought back Gorhambury with the aid of his mother-in-law, Lady Bacon. They had one daughter, Anne, who also died young, being only four years old.Philip Wodehouse entered Parliament for Norfolk in 1654, and succeeded to the Baronetcy of Kimberley in 1658. …