BLOG: Mistresses and Marriage~It's Complicated!

While recovering from a recent respiratory illness, I found the first season of MARIE ANTOINETTE on Masterpiece Theater. I seldom turn down a series on Masterpiece. Superb acting, script-writing, costuming... Indeed, this show was no different. It was a worthy bing-watch! The cast was exceptional, the court attire a colorful pleasure, with over-the-top coiffures and make-up that summed up the latter half of the 18th century extremely well.

One of the sub-plots involved Louis XV and his mistress, the Countess du Barry, and the dynamic between du Barry and Antoinette. Youthful and capricious, Marie Antoinette snubs the King's mistress, and a rivalry is born. Toward the end of the season, Louis XV--still very much the powerful monarch, demands that the young Dauphine show respect to du Barry--meaning a public curtsy. Every courtier breathlessly clutched their canes and fans, as Marie Antoinette paused at a party, humbled and compelled to curtsy to the King's mistress.

This week, I have a special treat. Author Katherine Mezzacappa has prepared a fascinating look at late 18th century Ireland and how mistresses who married high-born lovers were received in society. So scroll down and let's learn about risks a woman might take by either being a mistress or marrying outside of her designated "class". This one is all about social mores and how a lady might be treated. Really intriguing stuff!

Please welcome Katherine and read ON, everybody!

Mistresses & Marriage~It's Complicated!

By Katherine Mezzacappa

Brook, thank you for inviting me onto your blog today to talk about my new book, The Ballad of Mary Kearney.

You asked me to discuss the risks a woman would run in 18th century Ireland in marrying outside her class. In the case of my character, they were considerable, because of the additional complication of religion. The real-life woman who inspired Mary’s story was in fact English. Her name was Mary Milner (1787-1860), a gardener’s daughter from Gainford, County Durham, employed as a servant by John Bowes, 10th Earl of Strathmore. In 1811 she bore her employer a son, also named John, but the couple did not marry until 1820 when the Earl was dying. He was carried on a litter into St George’s, Hanover Square, a fashionable London church, but expired hours later. Even if the marriage were legal (there was some argument that it wasn’t, as it hadn’t been consummated post-ceremony) it did not, under English law of the time, legitimise their child. The younger John Bowes later tried to argue that his father had also a domicile in Scotland, where the law was different, but the case failed and he could not inherit his father’s title, though he did inherit significant wealth.

During their long relationship, the Earl of Strathmore and his Mary lived as man and wife although if relatives or friends of his visited, she would make herself scarce. But after the marriage and her husband’s death, she was legally the Dowager Countess of Strathmore. She led a secluded life of good works, though she did eventually marry again, to her child’s former tutor, an ambitious man quite a few years her junior, a Member of Parliament who rose to become Paymaster General.

Mary Milner provided the initial inspiration for the story of my Mary, but pretty quickly I saw wider opportunities for a master and servant relationship if this love story took place in Ireland, where at the time when James Goward and Mary Kearney meet, a marriage between a Protestant and a Catholic was illegal, tantamount to treason, and a Catholic priest who officiated could pay for it with his life. It occurred to me that my Mary, as a devout Catholic, would not countenance being James’s mistress, anymore than Mrs. Fitzherbert accepted the Prince Regent without a wedding ring (though he later repudiated her). If James Goward, in my novel, had turned Catholic to marry Mary publicly, he would under the Penal Laws in all probability have lost all his lands. So the marriage would have to be secret, and illegal, and their child illegitimate. Even when things were sorted out publicly with a second, Anglican marriage (in St George’s, Hanover Square, of course) their boy would still be illegitimate because he’d been born such, and Mary would be generally avoided or snubbed by people of her husband’s class (as I show in the book in the visit to Mountlyon), just as she had been by her own class (as in the visit to Struell Wells) because everyone thought she was a kept woman. Had events not overtaken them, then Mary Kearney, if left a widow in the normal way of things, could have lived as did Mary Milner, titled, but withdrawn quietly from the world. What happens instead… no, that would be a spoiler.

There was one notorious marriage of the time in the other direction that links to my novel. In 1764 the pregnant Lady Henrietta Alicia Watson-Wentworth, daughter of the 1st Earl of Rockingham, quietly left her father’s London town house with her Irish footman, William Sturgeon, to marry him in (you’ve guessed it), St George’s, Hanover Square. Remarkably, Henrietta drew up her own pre-nuptial agreement to protect her inheritance, but put away her fine clothes, saying she would need to dress more simply as the wife of a servant. But it was an undoubted love match and her widower was inconsolable at her death fifteen years later. In my story there is a dramatic trial scene featuring the real-life Irish lawyer John Philpot Curran. Curran disowned his daughter Sarah for her romantic attachment to the United Irishman Robert Emmet, hanged in Dublin in 1803. But in 1805, Sarah married a talented army officer, Captain Henry Sturgeon, Henrietta and William’s son, only to die of tuberculosis in Sicily three years later. 

ALL ABOUT THE BOOK

‘I am dead, my Mary; the man who loved you body and soul lies in some dishonorable grave.’

In County Down, Ireland, in 1767, a nobleman secretly marries his servant, in defiance of law, class, and religion. Can their love survive tumultuous times?

‘Honest and intriguing, this gripping saga will transport and inspire you, and it just might break your heart. Highly recommended.’ Historical Novel Society

'Mezzacappa brings nuance and a great depth of historical knowledge to the cross-class romance between a servant and a nobleman.' Publishers Weekly.

The Ballad of Mary Kearney is a compelling must-read for anyone interested in Irish history, told through the means of an enduring but ultimately tragic love.

Katherine Mezzacappa

ALL ABOUT KATHERINE

Katherine Mezzacappa is Irish but currently lives in Carrara, between the Apuan Alps and the Tyrrhenian Sea. She wrote The Ballad of Mary Kearney (Histria) and The Maiden of Florence (Fairlight) under her own name, as well as four historical novels (2020-2023) with Zaffre, writing as Katie Hutton. She also has three contemporary novels with Romaunce Books, under the pen name Kate Zarrelli.

Katherine’s short fiction has been published in journals worldwide. She has in addition published academically in the field of 19th century ephemeral illustrated fiction, and in management theory. She has been awarded competitive residencies by the Irish Writers Centre, the Danish Centre for Writers and Translators and (to come) the Latvian Writers House.

​​Katherine also works as a manuscript assessor and as a reader and judge for an international short story competition. She has in the past been a management consultant, translator, museum curator, library assistant, lecturer in History of Art, sewing machinist and geriatric care assistant. In her spare time she volunteers with a second-hand book charity of which she is a founder member. She is a member of the Society of Authors, the Historical Novel Society, the Irish Writers Centre, the Irish Writers Union, Irish PEN / PEN na hÉireann and the Romantic Novelists Association, and reviews for the Historical Novel Review. She has a first degree in History of Art from UEA, an M.Litt. in Eng. Lit. from Durham and a Masters in Creative Writing from Canterbury Christ Church. She is represented by Annette Green Authors’ Agency.

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Click on the book-cover for the buy-link.