If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home by Lucy Worsley Page B

… that I had neither will nor courage to proceed any further.’
    But once Cromwell had contributed his ‘evidence’ that the marriage was invalid, and once the divorce from Anne was under way, Henry had no reason to keep his former favourite minister alive. He was executed on 28 July 1540.
    The undressing of a bride remained a semi-social bedroom ritual right into the early nineteenth century, and it involved throwing things around just as bouquets and confetti are still thrown today. The bride’s men would ‘pull off the bride’s garters’ and fasten them to their hats, while the bride’s maids would carry the bride into the bedchamber, ‘undress her, and lay her in bed … the bridemen take the bride’s stockings, and the bride maids the bridegroom’s; both sit down at the bed’s feet and fling the stockings over their heads’.
    In the seventeenth century, Lady Castlemaine, Charles II’s mistress, once had herself married to her friend Mrs Stuart as a saucy joke which mirrored the contemporary ceremony of getting the bride ready for bedding. Their ‘wedding’ was solemnised with the aid of a ‘church service, and ribbons and a sack posset in bed, and flinging the stocking’. At the end of all the titillation, though, it was said that ‘Lady Castlemaine, who was the bridegroom, rose, and the King came and took her place’.
    This idea that a newly married couple needed the encouragement of spectators persisted into the early nineteenth century, but by then it was starting to look old-fashioned. When Percy Bysshe Shelley eloped with and married Harriet Westbrook in 1811, he found himself blissfully alone at last with his bride in a bedroom in an Edinburgh lodging house. Suddenly there was a knock at the door. It was the landlord, with the unwelcome news that ‘it is customary here at weddings for the guests to come, in the middle of the night, and wash the bride in whisky’. The sight of Shelley brandishing his pistols convinced the disappointed landlord that no whisky-washing would be taking place that particular night.
    Only in the Victorian period does the bedroom door swing closed upon the newly married couple, though in her own journal Queen Victoria records her pleasure at having Albert, her new husband, help her on with her stockings. Once sexual matters had become a matter of private business for the couple involved, rather than a concern for their wider community and subject to open discussion, information grows harder to come by.
    This changed once more with the 1950s revolution in Britain’s bedrooms. In this decade, British marriage rates were at their highest ever. It was partly a result of the post-war housing shortage: young people forced to live with their parents saw marriage as a step on the way to finding a home of their own. The return of the men from the war to the workplace meant that manywomen lost their jobs, or found their earning power reduced. So they devoted themselves instead to home improvement and enthusiastic baking.
    The 1950s are often seen as a conservative, stable period, optimistic but with an undertone of prudery and repression. Despite this urge for conformity, though, a new model for marriage now emerged in which husband and wife were considered to be equals in a ‘companionate’ relationship. A mutually satisfying sex life began to be prized, and numerous authors went into print to help the nation achieve it.
    Helena Wright was a pioneer with books such as The Sex Factor in Marriage (1930) and More About the Sex Factor in Marriage (1947), and this kind of writing ended up in the Marriage Guidance Council’s famous series of 1950s pamphlets. They now seem quaint, gingerly administering rather limited advice, but they did give much-needed information about sex in a straightforward fashion. (‘Husbands and wives should get rid of the feeling that there is anything indecent, immodest, or wrong about their sex relationship.’)
    Additionally, books which actually