The Politics of Marriage and the Good Mother in Oliphant’s Madonna Mary

Elizabeth Winston

Though never directly mentioned in Margaret Oliphant’s 1866 novel, Madonna Mary, Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act of 1753 provides the political backdrop for this domestic tragicomedy. Madonna Mary follows an English couple of good family—a younger son with a commission in the Indian army and his eighteen-year-old sweetheart—as they run away to Scotland to wed without parental consent. Hugh Ochterlony and Mary Seaton resort to this “border marriage” because of Lord Hardwicke’s law. It stipulated that a marriage in England was legal only when couples under age twenty-one had their elders’ permission, banns were published for three Sundays preceding the wedding, and the ceremony was “performed by an ordained priest according to the Anglican Liturgy” (O’Connell 2002).

The debates in the House of Commons over Lord Hardwicke’s bill to prevent “clandestine marriages” like the Ochterlony’s exposed the competing interests of old and new wealth. Aristocratic landed families supported the bill to ensure the orderly inheritance of their estates by eldest sons. Mercantile interests opposed the bill for blocking the free “circulation of wealth by . . . ‘tyrannical power in the father’” (Harth 1988).

Years after his Scottish marriage, a worried Major Ochterlony seeks to guarantee his eldest son’s recognition as rightful heir by persuading Mary to renew their vows in an Anglican ceremony. In Mary, Oliphant develops a favorite character-type—“the good mother”—who, as a widow, faces the consequences of her well-meaning husband’s error in judgment, his insistence on the need for English law to confirm the legitimacy of their Scottish union. Through Mary’s youngest son, Will (born after the couple’s “re-marriage”), Oliphant challenges the primogeniture that Lord Hardwicke’s Act was passed to protect. Will’s questioning of a system that awards an Oxford education based on birth order rather than aptitude prompts his mother to suggest that he must have been listening to some “Radical.” When this seventeen-year-old boy enlists the aid of his maternal Uncle Penrose, a Liverpool merchant, in pursuing his claim as the only legitimate heir to the Ochterlony estate, he dramatizes for Oliphant the danger of reason and business interests alienated from feeling. Will is seemingly blind to how his action dishonors his mother. Mary’s response is to offer to appear in court where all the evidence of her case may be examined. Yet, ultimately, Oliphant identifies redemptive mother love, not law, as patriarchy’s true support. What proves to be “the one thing needful” in marriage and in wider social relations is not “money,” as Uncle Penrose would have it, but self-forgetting love.