chard Cox excused his second
marriage, at an advanced age, by an absurd letter lamenting that he had
not the gift of chastity. Willibrandis Rosenblatt married in
succession Louis Keller, Oecolampadius, Capito and Bucer, the
ecclesiastical eminence of her last three husbands giving her, one
would think, an almost official position. Sir Thomas More married a
second wife just one month after his first wife's death.

{509} [Sidenote: Treatment of wives]

Sad to relate, the wives so necessary to men's happiness were
frequently ill treated after they were won. In the sixteenth century
women were still treated as minors; if married they could make no will;
their husbands could beat them with impunity, for cruelty was no cause
for divorce. Sir Thomas More's home-life is lauded by Erasmus as a
very paragon, because "he got more compliance from his wife by jokes
and blandishments than most husbands by imperious harshness." One of
these jokes, a customary one, was that his wife was neither pretty nor
young; one of the "blandishments," I suppose, was an epigram by Sir
Thomas to the effect that though a wife was a heavy burden she might be
useful if she would die and leave her husband money. In Utopia, he
assures us, husbands chastise their wives.

[Sidenote: Position of woman]

In the position of women various currents crossed each other. The old
horror of the temptress, inherited from the early church, the lofty
scorn exhibited by the Greek philosophers, mingled with strands of
chivalry and a still newer appreciation of the real dignity of woman
and of her equal powers. Ariosto treated women like spoiled children;
the humanists delighted to rake up the old jibes at them in musty
authors; the divines were hardest of all in their judgment. "Nature
doth paint them forth," says John Knox of women, "to be weak, frail,
impatient, feeble and foolish, and experience hath declared them to be
unconstant, variable, cruel and void of the spirit of council and
regimen." "If women bear children until they become sick and
eventually die," preaches Luther, "that does no harm. Let them bear
children till they die of it; that is what they are for." In 1595 the
question was debated at Wittenberg as to whether women were human
beings. The general tone was one of disparagement. An anthology might
be made of the {510} proverbs recommending (a la Nietzsche) the whip as
the best treatment for the sex.

But withal there was a certain c