heiress [Murray-Prior History Wiki]

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====== Heiress ======


Being an heiress or a wealthy widow could be hazardous. Women could have money settled on them, but generally once married their husbands owned all their property and money. In the famous words of English judge [[wp>William_Blackstone|William Blackstone]], under common law husband and wife were one, and that one was the husband.((In NSW, it was not until the 1879 Married Women's Property Act (with another Act in 1893 to strengthen the provisions), that women had the right to retrain their own property on marriage - English women had to wait until 1882 for a similar Act)). Additionally, women's sexual reputation was all-important for themselves and their family. Impoverished fortune-hunters could resort to abduction: the unlucky woman was ‘ruined’ unless she married him. The story is that the first Earl of Bessborough, Brabazon Ponsonby, tried another tactic. To continue his extravagant lifestyle, he tried to woo a wealthy widow. After she refused him, he bribed her servants to let him enter her home early one morning, appearing at the window ‘in an elegant nightgown and cap decorated as was then the custom for bridegrooms to wear’, and having hired the city band which, again according to the custom, serenaded the supposed ‘newly-weds’. The wealthy widow had little choice but to marry the fortune-hunter.((Homan Potterton, //Irish Church Monuments//, Ulster Architectural Heritage Society, 1975)) A less successful fortune-hunter was Hervey Morres (Brabazon Ponsonby's and Francis Morres/Catherine Evans's grandson). The story is that he also tried to improve his finances by marriage to a wealthy woman. However, he was ‘clumsy’ when too obviously assessing the ‘extent and value’ of her property: in 1797 he committed suicide, still unmarried.((Art Kavanagh, //De Montmorency of Castle Morres ..., The Gentry & Aristocracy Kilkenny Series, 2013//.))