The Curious Case of Lady Purbeck | Page 3

Bacon, and she was backed up
in this disinclination by her relatives, the Cecils. The head of that
family, Lord Burghley, Queen Elizabeth's Lord High Treasurer, was
particularly proud of his second son, Robert, whom he had succeeded
in advancing by leaps and bounds until he had become Secretary of
State; and Burghley and the rest of his family feared a dangerous rival
to Robert in the brilliant Bacon, who had already attracted the notice,

and was apparently about to receive the patronage, of the Court. If
Bacon should marry the famous beauty and become possessed of her
large fortune, there was no saying, thought the Cecils, but that he might
attain to such an exalted position as to put their own precocious Robert
in the shade.
Bridget had not been in her grave four months when the great Lord
Burghley died. Coke attended his funeral, and a funeral being
obviously a fitting occasion on which to talk about that still more
dreary ceremony, a wedding, Coke took advantage of it to broach the
question of a marriage between himself and Lady Elizabeth Hatton. He
broached it both to her father, the new Lord Burghley, and to her uncle,
the much more talented Robert. Whatever their astonishment may have
been, each of these Cecils promised to offer no opposition to the match.
They probably reflected that the Attorney-General was a man in a
powerful position, and that, with his own great wealth combined with
that of Lady Elizabeth Hatton, he might possibly prove of service to the
Cecil family in the future.
How the match, proposed under such conditions, came about, history
does not inform us, but, within six months of Bridget's funeral, her
widower embalmed her memory by marrying Elizabeth Hatton, a girl
fifteen years her junior.
If any writer possessed of imagination should choose to make a novel
on the foundation of this simple story, he may describe to his readers
how the cross-grained and unattractive Coke contrived to induce the
fair Lady Elizabeth Hatton to accept him for a husband. The present
writer cannot say how this miracle was worked, for the simple reason
that he does not know. One incident in connection with the marriage,
however, is a matter of history. Elizabeth was not sufficiently proud of
her prospective bride-groom to desire to stand beside him at a wedding
before a large, fashionable, and critical assemblage in a London church.
If he would have her at all, she insisted that he must take her in the only
way in which he could get her, namely, by a clandestine marriage, in a
private house, with only two or three witnesses.
Now, if there was one thing more than another in which Mr. Attorney

Coke lived and moved and had his being, it was the law, to all
offenders against which he was an object of terror; and such a great
lawyer must have been fully aware that, by making a clandestine
marriage in a private house, he would render himself liable to the
greater excommunication, whereby, in addition to the minor annoyance
of being debarred from the sacraments, he might forfeit the whole of
his property and be subjected to perpetual imprisonment. To make
matters worse, Archbishop Whitgift had just issued a pastoral letter to
all the bishops in the province of Canterbury, condemning marriages in
private houses at unseasonable hours, and forbidding under the severest
penalties any marriage, except in a cathedral or in a parish church,
during the canonical hours, and after proclamation of banns on three
Sundays or holidays, or else with the license of the ordinary.
Rather than lose his prize, Coke, the great lawyer, determined to defy
the law, and to run all risks, risks which the bride seemed anxious to
make as great as possible; for, at her earnest request, or rather dictation,
the pair were married in a private house, without license or banns, and
in the evening, less than five months after Coke had made the entry in
his diary canonising Bridget. As the Archbishop had been his tutor,
Coke may have expected him to overlook this little transgression.
Instead of this, the pious Primate at once ordered a suit to be instituted
in his Court against the bridegroom, the bride, the parson who had
married them, and the bride's father, Lord Burghley, who had given her
away. Lord Campbell says that "a libel was exhibited against them,
concluding for the 'greater excommunication' as the appropriate
punishment."
Mr. Attorney now saw that there was nothing to be done but to kiss the
rod. Accordingly, he made a humble and a grovelling submission, on
which the Archbishop gave a dispensation under his great seal, a
dispensation which is registered in the archives of Lambeth Palace,
absolving all concerned from the penalties they