A Problematic Solution:
Responses to the Marriage Reform Act of 1753

Three: Extraparliamentary Secular Reactions

The Marriage Reform Act was one of the best-known laws of its time. It, along with the Jews Naturalization Act, received far more press than the sum of all other Parliamentary legislation in 1753. The Marriage Reform Act also had a built in mechanism that ensured its notoriety, as it was required to be “read in all Parish Churches and publick Chapels by the Parson, Vicar, Minister, or Curate of the respective Parishes or Chapelries, on some Sunday immediately after Morning Prayer” four times each year from 1753 to 1755. Both newspapers and magazines did a great deal to explain the Act and its implementation, and to discuss its merits. Other Britons used different methods of making their voices heard, publishing pamphlets arguing their stance or petitioning to have the statute repealed. People recorded their reactions more privately, as well, in diaries and personal correspondence. Broadly speaking, commentary on the Act centered on three things: its motivations, its effects, and its legitimacy. It highlighted the assumptions made—about gender, social mobility, and the proper role of marriage in society—by both the act and its commentators. Taken together, the extraparliamentary discussions of the law communicate the misgivings that many had about the far-reaching implications of the laws and the lengths to which supporters went to defend it.

Both the Whitehall Evening-Post and the Daily Advertiser[1] published frequent reports about Parliament’s effort to end clandestine marriages. Their reports rarely provide any real information, though they do suggest that at least some portion of the London population of 650,000[2] had access to information about Hardwicke’s Marriage Reform Bill while it was still in Parliament. Monthly periodicals, such as the London Magazine and the Monthly Review, could not and did not provide immediate information on the development of the Bill, but their commentaries on the issue did eventually reach more people (get circulation estimates). The ability of both newspapers and magazines to report on the Marriage Act—and legislative proceedings generally—was severely hampered by the ban on Parliamentary reporting instituted in 1737. While it, strictly speaking, did not prohibit periodicals from publishing information about potential legislation, it made detailed reporting all but impossible by preventing journalists from taking notes during sessions in Parliament. The result was sporadic, brief news of legislative activity, almost always placed among the lengthier reports of the legislator’s activities outside the Palace of Westminster Hall, for which there must have been more readily available sources.

Newspaper reports of the Marriage Bill provide a skeletal outline of its development which, as we have seen, was not nearly as impersonal and easy as it was depicted in the newspapers of the day. The bill first appears in the London press at the beginning of February 1753, when the Daily Advertiser reported that “the Judges are preparing a Bill for preventing clandestine Marriages, by Order of the House of Lords.”[3] News of the bill’s imminent existence was complemented by another newspaper’s prediction for its fate: “It is believed a Bill will pass in Parliament this Session to prevent clandestine Marriages.”[4] As with the records of Parliamentary debates, newspaper coverage of the Bill almost completely ignores its passage through the House of Lords. The next word on it came after nearly six weeks of silence with a single sentence stating that “the Bill which is brought into the Hon. House of Commons against clandestine Marriages is ordered to be printed.”[5] After another three weeks silence, the Evening-Post offered the first concrete information about the proposed law in mid-April: “We hear that by the Bill to prevent clandestine Marriages it will be made Felony for any Minister to marry or register any Marriage in any private House, Chapel, &c as is now done at the Fleet, May-Fair, &c.”[6] It was another month before the paper offered specifics about the punishments associated with the law: “from and after the 1^st of January 1754, any Clergyman, &c. marrying any Persons in a Prison, or any other Place, but as by that Act directed, shall be deemed guilty of Felony, and be transported for fourteen Years to some of his Majesty’s Plantations in America.”[7] When the bill finally emerged from the House of Commons, the report did not include the specifics of its passage, but rather focused on the state of the Members of Parliament: “Last Night the Bill against clandestine Marriages was passed by the Hon. House of Commons. Several eminent Gentlemen of the Law are very much indisposed on Account of the great Fatigue they have undergone in relation to the Bill against clandestine Marriages.”[8] This report is indicative of the type of news that formed the bulk of such periodicals’ reporting. Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Reform Act received no more than a handful of mentions during its four months in Parliament, and was never specifically attributed to him. Still, those few brief reports put it in contention for most reported statute of the session, rivaled only by the unpopular and quickly-repealed Jews Naturalization Act.

Further evidence of the focus on people rather than laws is offered by newspaper reporting during the final weeks leading up to the Marriage Reform Act’s becoming effective. In the Advertiser, three reports appeared tracking the Lord Chancellor’s brief illness. A week later two more appeared on his visit to court, where he “was created Earl of Hardwick [sic.] and Viscount Royston in the County of Hertford.”[9] Meanwhile, the paper only mentioned the imminent marriage law twice. Admittedly, both reports provide more substantial information than those which characterized the treatment of the Hardwicke’s illness (“the Right Hon. the Lord Chancellor is much better, but does not go abroad yet.”[10]) The limits of newspapers as sources of information about the Marriage Act or any legislation are readily apparent. The week before the Act’s implementation, the Advertiser assured its readers that the new statute would not significantly diminish access to marriage licenses: “Not withstanding the various Reports with regard to the Difficulty and Expence which will attend the obtaining Marriage Licenses after the 25^th instant, we are well assured…that Licenses will be granted, agreeable to the said Act, with as little Trouble, and at the same Expense, as heretofore.”[11] The newspaper also reported the reaction in the Fleet to the approaching ban on clandestine marriage: “Yesterday being suppos’d the last Day before the Marriage Act takes Place, there was a great Crowd at May-Fair Chapel of Persons to be join’d in Matrimony, near 100 Couples being married.”[12] Without a reference point, this number has little meaning. During debates in the Commons, however, Robert Nugent cited one popular parish church as marrying no more than fifty couples per year.[13] The examination of newspaper coverage, sparse as it was, provides unique insight into the information about the act that would have been available to the general public.

While newspapers offered immediate information about the Bill and its contents, they provided little commentary on it. In-depth discussion of the Marriage Act was reserved to more substantial, less-frequently published periodicals. Monthly magazines, for example, mixed news and letters with political, social, and artistic criticism. In the months and years following the passage of the Marriage Act, these monthly periodicals approached the subject on numerous occasions. Their treatment the Act was often in response to other people’s writings—political, religious, and literary—on the topic. Magazines also related events concerning the law in greater detail than did contemporary newspapers.

Occasionally, magazines even provided independent commentary on the Marriage Act, as did the London Magazine in August 1753. A brief article, occupying less than half of one of the magazine’s sixty pages for the month, was published anonymously as “Clauses proposed to be added to the late Act against Clandestine Marriages.” It offered a satirical critique of Hardwicke’s meddling in the private lives of British subjects. It was probably the most jovial criticism made against the law: its primary goal was to hyperbolize the law’s inconveniences and to portray is as absurdly restrictive. The list of proposed clauses included disproportionately harsh punishments, extending what many felt were the already reactionary punitive clauses of the act. For example, the article suggested that “when a rich old fellow marries a young wench, in her full bloom it shall be death without benefit of clergy”[14] and that “when a lady marries her servant, or a gentleman his cook-maid, (especially if there are children by a former marriage) they both shall be transported for 14 years.”[15]  Such punishments were actual consequences invoked by the Marriage Act against those who altered marital record books and clergy who knowingly performing invalid ceremonies. Still, the juxtaposition of poor choices in regards to marriage with extremely harsh punishment is questioned here. The article goes further, asking whether socially undesirable marriages should be grouped with other forms of crime at all. The article insists that “when two young thoughtless fools, having no visible way to maintain themselves, nor any thing to begin the world with, resolve to marry and be miserable; let it be deemed petty larceny.”[16] While not a felony charge, the implication here is that grouping a poor choice in marriage with even a crime such as petty larceny is inappropriate. The article also suggested that “when a man has had one bad wife, and buried her, and yet will marry a second, it shall be deemed a Felo de se.”[17] The benefit gained by the crown in this case is clearly unjust, as the author no doubt felt actual provisions of the Marriage Act were. The Marriage Act is represented as a case in which Parliament legislated beyond the boundaries of strictly criminal behavior. Furthermore, examples such as this highlight the misogyny that underscored contemporary ideas of marriage.

Several months later, London Magazine published another critique of the Act. In this case, it took the form of a set of questions about the propriety of legislation on marriage. As with other published critiques, most of the questions were aimed at the motivation, effects, and legitimacy of the statute. A few, however, simply dismissed the need to legislate the matter, at all. The Marriage Act is again depicted as an improper disruption of the social and moral order established by the people.  Some questions, for example, asked “whether any truly worthy and valuable part of either sex ever were joined by clandestine marriages in an improper, unequal, or infamous match?”[18] Many of the questions were taken up at various points by other authors. They bear mention here primarily to introduce the issues seen as being at stake in the secular debates over the Marriage Act. As to motivation, the article asked “Whether the act for preventing clandestine marriages was not more immediately calculated to gratify the ambition, vanity, and avarice of parents, (exorbitances that want rather to be checked) and for investing them with a power of making their families rich, rather than happy” and

Whether this act was not calculated almost wholly to serve the purposes of the great ones, without any regard to the convenience and good of the publick in general, that in case the raking booby son of a ’squire or lord, under age, should, forsooth, marry a creature as worthles as himself; he might then, to gratify the vanity and sordidness of a father, have his marriage anulled, and be married again to a rich heiress, for the laudable purpose of making her miserable by being joined to a worthless fool, or abandoned debaucher?[19]

The latter question, in particular, voiced a fear the recurred throughout popular criticism of the law: that instead of protecting children from the threat of being suddenly bastardized by a two-timing father, the Act would simply bring about the same problem through different means. Other questions express concern about female infidelity specifically, which would be fostered by the law. At one point the article asked “whether a woman, compelled to marry a man she hates, will not, with less scruple, and frequently out of revenge, gratify her passion with the one she loves?”[20] Another question focused on the long term effects of a law that fosters the habits of unscrupulous women, asking “whether cuckolds, in a few years, will not be reckoned an honourable order, and be ranked amongst the great?”[21] While concern was shown for the husbands of unfaithful wives, no question in the article expressed similar sympathy for the wives of unfaithful husbands. Children, on the other hand, are only occasionally considered, though they had the most to lose by the discovery of a parent’s clandestine marriage.

One last group of questions focused on the legal theory behind the law rather than the personal motives behind it or the difficulties in enacting it. These questions reflect a few of the many concerns raised by legal scholars of the time. The theoretical debates between critics and supporters of the Marriage Reform Act were more comprehensive and less rhetoric-filled than other discussions of the law. The scope of questions about the statute’s legitimacy was very broad. Some related to Parliament’s interference in private contracts. The article asked, for example “Whether the legislative authority can declare void and null a marriage vow, or indeed any vow, that has nothing irreligious or immoral in the performance?”[22] The suggestion that marriage was an entirely private institution in which the government should avoid meddling was strongly defended by many of the law’s critics. Unfortunately, they ignored the fact that there were very public consequences of marriage, particularly where inheritance became involved. Another type of attack against the act questioned “Whether a clergyman solemnizing matrimony with a common license, price 1 l. 1 s. in any other place than a church or chapel, is really in the sight of God, or judgment of any sober, understanding man, more criminal and faulty than he that marries an any other place than a church or chapel with a special licence, that costs 12 or 14 l.”[23] This question encompasses two other areas in which the act was critiqued. It challenges the conflation of ecclesiastical and secular law, leaving the question open whether marriage can fall under the jurisdiction of both. It also appeals to reason by suggesting that variation in location or license may not be enough to change the validity of a marriage.

The new law, as we have seen, was of particular interest to the upper classes. Their reactions, however, were not so simply expressed as those published in the press. Horace Walpole stood firmly opposed to the statute. In a letter to Conway, he expressed the dismay of another member of the nobility, though based on a different concern: “Lady Anne Powlett’s daughter is eloped with a country clergyman: the Duchess of Argyle harangues against the marriage bill’s not taking place immediately and is persuaded that all the girls will go off before the next Lady Day.”[24] Walpole offered his own ironic insight into the limitations of the new law, expressing his concerns about Conway’s moving to Ireland with his infant daughter, since “it would hurt you both extremely to have her marry herself idly; and I think my Lord Chancellor has not extended his matrimonial foresight to Ireland.”[25] Not surprisingly, Walpole also had strong words about Hardwicke’s continued interest in marriage laws. He had little faith in the Chancellor’s selflessness in that matter, and suggested that his ambition in improving his family’s prospects compromised his commitment to justice:

Colonel Yorke is going to be married to one or both of the Miss Crasteyns, nieces of the rich grocer that died three years ago. They have £260,000 apiece. A Marchioness Grey or a grocer, nothing comes amiss to the digestion of that family. If the rest of the trunk was filled with money, I believe they would really marry Carafattatonadaht—what was the lump of deformity called in the Persian Tales, that was sent to the Cady in a coffer?—and as to marrying both the girls, it would cost my Lord Hardwicke but a new Marriage Bill; I suppose it is all one to his conscience whether he prohibits matrimony or licenses bigamy.[26]

Certainly, Hardwicke’s life was one of amazing social advancement. To Walpole, his insistence on passing the Marriage Act was a direct attack on the means through which others could achieve similar feats. This righteous attack on the Chancellor’s hypocrisy was no doubt complemented by his familial reasons for disliking him, giving Walpole’s criticism both as much personal as Parliamentary significance.

Criticism of the Marriage Reform Act followed the same general classifications as the queries published in London Magazine. Of those, attacks on the motivations behind the statute were the most straightforward, the most undeveloped, and the least refuted. The lack of debate surrounding the motives behind the act is understandable. Attacks on Hardwicke himself were either anonymous or published much later, and criticisms of the anathema with which the upper classes viewed unequal matches were addressed so generally that no single defender of the act must have felt compelled to rebut. Not surprisingly, Walpole offered strong words about the Lord Chancellor’s goals in passing the Bill. In his Memoirs he characterized Hardwicke as having given “all his attention to a statute into which he had breathed the very spirit of aristocracy and insolent nobility.”[27] Other contemporaries echoed the criticism of Hardwicke, though they spoke of it in terms of popular hostility toward the him: “the vulgar said out of doors that the Chancellor was afraid his own children would form some low connection in marriage”[28] Private interest in the passage of the bill aside, some critics made much harsher claims. According to Richard Cooksey—who authored brief biographies of both Hardwicke and another peer—his behavior “made him obnoxious above any other member of the administration to the people at large, though his power and influence in the house of commons, debased by the grossest corruption, and lost to all natural and manly spirit, remained in its full force.”[29] Clearly, Hardwicke’s continued influence was, in the eyes of his harshest critics, lamentable. Some of the law’s other opponents avoided attacking its author personally, though they challenged the supposed problems that arose from ‘unequal matches.’ Suggesting that status or wealth differentials within a couple were not the public evil suggested by Daniel Defoe or members of the peerage, such criticisms offered an alternate explanation for the demonization of such marriages: “The general Outcry against unequal Matches arises more from either private Interest or the Pride of Family (a Disposition in no way worthy of publick Encouragement) than from a regard to the Commonweal. The Disproportion in the Fortunes of the married Couple, is what the Government has no Reason to object to.”[30] If the government itself had no reason to object to such matches, then clearly such objections were raised because of the personal biases of individual legislators. The entrenchment of social stratification was seen by many critics as an inevitable result of the new law, and one that would benefit the few who created it more than the many bound by it. According to one anonymous author, the statute, “by which the propriety of them [marriages] is preferred to their ease and frequency,” would favor the preexisting aristocracy “in the benefit which arises to them from the fondness shewn by men who have acquired large fortunes in trade or professions, to contract alliances with them, or with the heirs of their peerages.”[31] This attack seems at first glance to be leveled against the House of Lords alone. In reality, the composition of the Commons was at the time almost as aristocratic as that of the upper House. A large proportion of the Commons stood to inherit peerages or was otherwise dependent on one lordship or another.

Other contemporaries outside Parliament attacked the law as causing more harm than good. Some acknowledged the difficulties that accompanied such marriages, but held that since “there are many degrees between a breach in respect and an infamous violation of duty”[32] the Marriage Reform Act was unnecessary. Similarly, some critics questioned whether clandestine marriages were a large enough problem to merit such specific attention from Parliament: “Unsuitable matches in a country where the passions are not impetuous, and where it is neither easy nor customary to tyrannize the inclinations of children, were by no means frequent.”[33] Critics did not stop by arguing that the act was unnecessary. Many went farther, suggesting the new bill wouldn’t even prevent the evils against which it was purportedly aimed: “The most disproportioned alliances, those contracted by age, by dowagers, were without the scope of this Bill. Yet the new Act set out with a falsehood, declaiming against clandestine marriages, as if they had been a frequent evil.”[34] Walpole sympathized with such criticism of the Act. He found marriage under the law to be entirely too difficult to achieve. In a letter to a close friend, Walpole claimed “that every Stephen and Chloe, every dowager and her Hussey, will have as many impediments and formalities to undergo as a treaty of peace”[35] in order to be married. Walpole, like many others, supported free marriage as a means to strengthen the nation, and saw Hardwicke’s Bill as a threat to both the British nation and the British way of life:

It is amazing, in a country where liberty gives choice, where trade and money confer equality, and where facility of marriage has always been supposed to produce populousness,—It was amazing to see a law promulged, that cramped inclination, that discountenanced matrimony, and that seemed to annex as sacred privileges at birth, as could be devised in the proudest, poorest little Italian principality.[36]

Many critics of the law shared Walpole’s fears and feared the Marriage Act’s long-term effects on matrimony. An anonymous critic, for example, claimed that in the statue’s aftermath, marriages would decrease by one-third.[37]

The act had its supporters, too, who steadfastly refuted the claims of critics. The months which separated the publication of objections from that of rebuttals, however, gave many of the act’s defenders the advantage of speaking from hindsight. One author, who classified clandestine marriages as ‘demons,’ claimed that Hardwicke “saved thousands from the misery and disgrace which would be entailed by these extemporary thoughtless unions.”[38] Another supporter of the Act criticized those who acknowledged “that such marriages are productive of many mischiefs, and that the suppression of them would be advantageous to society”[39] but refused to support it on other grounds. He went on to claim that “scarce an advocate was, till of late, found, who had courage enough to appear in its defence. This law has now been in force upwards of twelvemonths, and it is now possible that experience may have dissipated the apprehensions of these presupposed dangers.”[40] His claim that the Bill had little support is necessarily suspect, given the margin by which it passed in Parliament, but his claim about problems with the law a year later are not contradicted by any contemporary source.

Even those speaking before the law took force criticized those who made grave predications about the statute’s corollary effects. Such supporters frequently just dismissed the prophecies of critics without directly addressing them: “As to the bad consequences apprehended from it, they are, in my opinion, altogether chimerical. There is not the least ground to imagine, that it will any way tend toward introducing an aristocracy.”[41] Of course, many critics in Parliament had offered specific ways in which the statute may do so. Burrhus, as a member of a political club, would have been well aware of the arguments raised in the Commons against the Bill, but he makes no attempt to argue against specific claims. Among the few who actually engaged in debate with the law’s opponents was Joseph Sayer, who published his Vindication of the power of Society to annull the marriages of minors in direct response to several arguments advanced by critics of marriage reform. Sayer offered a standard against which the effects of the Marriage Reform Act could be measured. He compared the preexisting abuses of matrimony to the inconveniences imposed by the new statute: “It was agreed on all hands that certain abuses had crept into this institution, and that, the old laws being in some things deficient in others eluded, it was high time to put a stop to these by a new one: yet was the utmost attention necessary that, so far as human prudence could foresee and guard against it, no new inconvenience should introduced.”[42] Sayer felt that the balance between prior abuses and new inconveniences is a testament to Hardwicke’s success in crafting a good and legitimate law.

Those who debated the legitimacy of the legal theory on which the Marriage Act rested put forth the most nuanced arguments. The critics’ claims were based on rational thought rather than projections of possible effects, and their rhetoric was beyond the critique of the general population. Nevertheless, many outside their circle felt that legal theorists were wasting their breath. John Campbell criticized their efforts in his Lives of the Lord Chancellors, first published in 1779, fifteen year’s after Hardwicke’s death: “Instead of pointing out its real defects, which in practice were found oppressive and mischievous, they absurdly denied the right of Parliament to legislate on the matter.”[43] It is not that Campbell supported the law—he obviously did not—but he felt that the debate should have been limited to the practicalities of its implementation, and not the theoretical underpinnings of its legitimacy. Those who criticized the act from theoretically took many approaches. Some saw the law as among the “specious evils”[44] enacted against the general populace, “those for whom government is made”[45] The legitimacy of the statue is here attacked based on its complete lack of regard for the interests of the public.

Other theoretical discussions of the law focused on its necessity, the general ability of legislature to meddle in marriage, or the specific changes enacted by the statute.

Critics saw the law as limiting freedoms without due cause. According to the anonymous ‘bystander,’ the legislature ought to “be very careful to examine into the Propriety of every proposed Alteration in the Laws, and will be more particularly cautious in creating new Species of Felony, since nothing less than the highest Necessity, and most evident publick Utility, can justify the multiplying penal or restrictive Acts of Parliament.”[46] Attacks of this sort assumed that the creation of a new law—particularly one that restricted liberty—required explicit justification. In the absence of such justification, the law was suspect. Other opponents felt that the amendment of any law required substantial explanation: “a considerable part of the perfection of political œconomy, consists in the stability of regulations once received, and that every deviation from these not founded on solid reason, and on strong necessity, is in itself an evil.”[47] Such a belief does not entirely prohibit the modification of laws. It does, however, require that such changes be shown as absolutely necessary to the protection of the common good. The bystander felt that this was not the case with the Marriage Act, which challenged one of the core aspects of freedom. “Personal liberty,” he argued, “consists in the power of doing every thing we chuse that is not unjust, and suffers by ever circumscription of the natural rights we bring into society: of these the most ancient, and the most easy to prove is the freedom of choice in that union which must have proceeded even the formation of families.”[48] Opponents outside Parliament, like those in the House of Commons, felt strongly about the limits the act placed on individual freedom—it made sense for vocal critics on the matter to approach the law theoretically rather than practically.

Secular criticism of the new law was not limited to direct written attacks. In several specific cases, individual actions or sentimental recollections were offered to highlight the injustices the act would propagate. One such example come from the 21 June 1753 issue of the weekly periodical The World. In it, editor Adam Fitz-Adam includes a letter from a woman calling herself Parthenissa. Without directly mentioning the Act, she relates her own story as evidence of the potential dangers that accompany the new law. The newly-established mandatory waiting period before marriage left women vulnerable to the duplicity of their fiances: “In short, sir, a month was not past before he pressed for what he called proof of my passion…I yielded, it is true; but it was to sentiment, not to desire.”[49] Abandoned and betrayed, Parthenissa offers her story as a warning to other young women to guard their virtue.

Another interesting case came from the December issue of London Magazine, which relates the story of a number of women who felt so strongly about the Marriage Act that they banded together in protest. Their demands were billed as “The humble Remonstrance and Petition of Several Spinsters of the County of Kent…on behalf of themselves and many Thousand other distressed Damsels of the said County.”[50] According to the magazine, “the petitioners, being at church, were struck with grief and astonishment on hearing the doctor read a paper, called, An Act to prevent clandestine Marriages.”[51] Their response was grounded in a religious understanding of marriage, but their apprehensions about the law focused on its negative effects on unmarried women. The petitioners “did turn to the marriage ceremony in their prayer books, where they did not find that matrimony was instituted for the pleasure of their parents, but that it was ordained for the procreation of children, and for a remedy against fornication.”[52] This understanding of marriage was very common; it was, no doubt, more so among those who had no real property to pass on to their children. For these women, the maintenance of virtue and stability formed one of the primary motivations behind marriage. Their future prospects of marrying were made more bleak by the new statute: “These petitioners upon the whole think this act much better calculated for the encouragement of common prostitutes, than to make the honest, but poor, petitioners happy mothers of lawful children.”[53] How, precisely, they envisioned themselves becoming prostitutes as a result of the law is never fully explained, though they do expand on their fears about men seducing women outside the bounds of marriage as a result. Their fears seem to echo the experience of Parthenissa:

How often has the cruel spoiler, by a well-dissembled passion, by swearing that the priest should at the holy altar join their hands, by sighs, and tears, and vows, and all the soft, but strong artillery of love, forced the tender virgin’s heart, broke thro’ the seal of virtue, cropp’d the sweet flower; then fled, and left her to bewail the loss for life![54]

Clearly, among those with few physical possessions to bring to the marriage bed, virginity was a valuable commodity. The Kentish women foresaw the Marriage Act as increasing the frequency of fornication, to the greater detriment of young women than young men.

More complex criticism was offered by a Sussex man, whose diary begins shortly after the passage of the Act. In the nine years spanned by his journal, he only alludes to the Marriage Act on three occasions. While infrequent, then, his references suggest that the law was widely known and remind us that its effects were felt outside London as well. Turner’s diary offers a fresh perspective on the law, from outside the ruling class. His first allusion to the statute suggests that it did not completely excuse fornicators for their actions. Turner relates the story of a marriage postponed indefinitely after the second reading of banns, when a former lover of the young bridegroom: “The poor girl, whose name was Anne Stevenson, declared that about 3 years ago she had a child by him, and that he had many times promised her marriage, which she was ready to make oath of at any time (if ever she should be called upon to do it).”[55] Before the law took effect, the man’s promise, coupled with sexual intercourse, would have amounted to a legally binding marriage. Miss Stevenson, however, could make no claim on him as her husband in 1757, when this incident took place. Clearly, though, she retained some power to affect his future marriage prospects. The following year, Turner actually mentioned the law in his diary. He explained his donation to the prisoners of a local jail by challenging the grounds on which they were imprisoned: “Weds. 11 Jan. [1758] This day I gave a man 6d., who came about abegging for the prisoners in Horsham gaol, three of which are clergymen; two of them in for acting contrary to the laws of man (but, in my opinion, not to the laws of God), that is, for marrying contrary to the Marriage Act.”[56] The implication is clear: the laws of God, where they could be discerned, should be respected. In Turner’s view, the incarceration of the two ministers was unjust. His next allusion to the statute came six years later. In this final critique of the Act, Turner explains that, “instead of making laws to restrain knowledge it would be more to the advantage of the nation in general to give encouragement to it, for by that means a greater deal of debauchery would in probability be prevented and a greater increase of people might be the consequence.”[57] Turner’s argument here echoes those made by Londoners immediately after the bill’s passage. While it is impossible to know whether Turner’s opinions were shaped by those critics, the fact that he felt that it was a worthwhile topic more than a decade after the law took force suggests that the Marriage Reform Act continued to make its presence felt long after it came into being. As importantly, Turner’s diary indicates that the separation of the secular and religious worlds was not always as tidy as the London elite tried to make it. Throughout England, laypeople and religious interacted with each other on a daily basis. The effects of the Marriage Act on clerics were therefore witnessed by their flocks, and its effects on church members were seen by their pastors. On occasion, those pastors recorded their reactions to the act, as well.