12 - Snips and repairs: small steps to reform, 1753–1813

Summary

THE MARRIAGE ACT OF 1753

In 1733, in the wake of Robert Wilmot's complaints about his daughter's clandestine marriage, the House of Commons ordered the preparation of a bill to prevent such unions. The heads of a bill were duly reported, but the initiative came too late in the parliamentary term to make further progress. Pressures to reform the laws that made such unions possible continued, however, with further bills being introduced in the Commons in 1736 and in the Lords in 1740. Both were unsuccessful. Thirteen years later the Commons finally achieved the desired result after considerable debate, with the passage of An Act for the Better Preventing of Clandestine Marriages, a measure inextricably associated with then Lord Chancellor, the earl of Hardwicke, a distinguished and active lawyer who had persistently complained about the legal tangles that arose from clandestine unions, especially those that took place in London in the liberties of the Fleet prison, which from the late seventeenth century occupied the type of position in relation to marriage in England that Las Vegas once occupied in relation to divorce in the United States.

Background to the act must take in not only long-standing complaints about the Fleet and other centres for clandestine marriage, but also the publication in 1748–9 of An Apology for the Conduct of Mrs Teresia Constantia Phillips, a three-volume autobiography by a serial bigamist who seems also to have slept with a large section of the British peerage.