Elopement and Defiant Matches: Marrying Outside the Bounds of Propriety

Abstract

Throughout the early modern and modern periods, British society assumed that aristocratic women would marry in such a way as to further the interests of their natal families and preserve aristocratic rank identity. Some women, however, did not conform to these societal strictures and chose to pursue their desire for love in their marital relationships. In some instances, they defied their families and married according to their own will on their first marriage; that is, they eloped.¹ More often, they entered into defiant matches; that is, they exercised their agency when entering into subsequent unions, choosing a mate considered by their family to be unsuitable. Frequently both elopements and defiant matches resulted in hypogamy or exogamy (which explains in part why the couple’s families often opposed the marriages). This chapter focuses on elopements and defiant matches and the light that such matches shed on conceptions of rank. The relatively small number of elopements and defiant matches indicates that it was difficult — though possible — for aristocratic women to exercise agency in the matter of their marriages. Society nearly always disapproved of these matches, seeing them as violating deeply held strictures about appropriate unions. The marriages of aristocratic women were controlled so firmly because those marriages were vital to the preservation of noble rank identity. Simply the fact that the unions were so controlled was an important part of that rank identity. Women who chose to marry without the permission of their families posed a threat to the cohesion of the group and thus Society rarely was sympathetic to these women.