More sinned against than sinning

When I saw the title of this book, then read that it only covered the period 1600-1800 I hoped this would be a riot of comedy, something along the lines of the most wonderful sentence in the English language. This is in Havelock Ellis’s Psychology of Sex and concerns a discovery made by the doctor Realdus Columbus: in 1593, a century after his namesake discovered the New World, this great man claimed to have discovered the clitoris.

But no, there is no comedy, apart from the doings of one Frances, Lady Purbeck, who in 1635, with the son of the Earl of Suffolk, lived happily and ‘adulterously’ in what the author calls ‘the depths of Shropshire’. Unfortunately the couple for some reason decided to visit London, where the prim little meddler Charles I, alerting the Archbishop of Canterbury, got them slapped in gaol. But Frances, disguised as a man, escaped to Paris, where, with the Archbishop’s posse still on her trail, she converted to Catholicism and entered a convent. Here, naturally, she fell out with the nuns and did another runner, disappearing this time not just from the convent but from history. She must have been a real goer, this Frances, for she provides the one moment of daylight in this book.

The Origins of Sex is about the legal and religious attempts to regulate sex outside marriage. It is thus social history, only, as you might expect, it becomes a social history of cruelty and lunacy. In 1650, under the Saints, Parliament passed an act which made adultery a capital offence, and Cromwell’s own brother-in-law supervised the hanging of an adulteress in Taunton, women being then regarded as the more culpable agents, leading men by the nose, or whatever, into sin.