ABSTRACT
Whenever the annulment of the marriage of Frances Howard and Robert Devereux is mentioned by historians or literary critics it is described as 'squalid' , 'sordid' , 'disgusting' or, most frequently, 'scandalous' . 1 It was certainly a notorious event in 1 6 1 3 , but, as with so much else in the story of Frances Howard, the responses of subsequent commentators seem to reduplicate with disconcerting complacency the attitudes of the sev enteenth century. Heather Dubrow, for example, associates herself directly with the moral distaste of a nineteenth-century chronicler when she writes:
In reviewing the background to this marriage [of Frances Howard and Robert Carr] one is tempted to sympathize with the fastidious descendant of the bride who is said to have declared, "Nor shall I dwell on the disgusting particulars" , for an account of those particulars makes the National Enquirer seem restrained and elliptical. 2
It is curious that a writer in the late twentieth century should find abhorrent the discussion of erection and impotence and of the inspection of a woman to establish her virginity that are the 'particulars' of the case, but Dubrow's comment, in averting its eyes from the examination of those details, typifies the way in which so many scholars have refused to confront what was actually at stake in the divorce hearings . One strand of the argument of this chapter is that the assumptions which prompted the disapproval of Frances Howard's contemporaries need to be interrogated, rather than merely parroted.
