TO PRESERVE LOVE
BETWEEN A HUSBAND AND WIFE
BOURNE, Immanuel.
A Gold Chain of Directions, with twenty Gold-Linkes of Love, to preserve Love firm between Husband and Wife, during their Lives. Profitable for all, that are already married, or that intend to take the honourable and holy Estate of Marriage upon them hereafter. Advising for a right Choice in Marriage, and how to keep from those sad Consequences have fallen out in too many Families, sometimes upon small dislike between Husband and Wife …
London, Printed by J. Streater, for George Sawbridge … 1669.
12mo, pp. [22], 189, [3], with a terminal blank but wanting the initial blank A1; a very good copy in early nineteenth-century polished calf, worn; authorial presentation inscription to title verso (cropped at foot).
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A Gold Chain of Directions, with twenty Gold-Linkes of Love, to preserve Love firm between Husband and Wife, during their Lives. Profitable for all, that are already married, or that intend to take the honourable and holy Estate of Marriage upon them hereafter. Advising for a right Choice in Marriage, and how to keep from those sad Consequences have fallen out in too many Families, sometimes upon small dislike between Husband and Wife …
First edition, very rare, of a charming work of marriage guidance, inscribed by the author ‘To my welbeloved sonn Mr Obadiah Bourne … daily prayinge to Gode for a blessing uppon him and upon the people under his charge … with mine and Deare mothers Blessinge I give this little book for a Remembrancer …’.
The writer and controversialist Immanuel Bourne (1590–1672) had published his first work, a sermon, in 1617. It was as chaplain to Sir Samuel Tryon that he met his wife, Jemima Beckingham, and that he received the living of Ashover in Derbyshire in 1621, which he later passed on to his son Obadiah (1634?–1710).
Bourne’s last work, A Golden Chain of Directions was addressed to the children of his later patron the Earl of Rutland, most pointedly to John Manners, the 1st Duke (1638–1711), who had been granted a legal separation from his first wife, Anne Pierrepont, on the grounds of her adultery, and then obtained private acts bastardising his children and getting permission to remarry in 1667.
Among the twenty links in Bourne’s ‘chain of love’ for a successful marriage are: agreement in religion, proximity in age (or at least not extreme difference), mutual affection, parental consent, ‘free Communication of mutual kindness, and conjugal engagements to and with one another’, love of soul as well as body, fidelity, respect, increase of estate, mutual care for the children, cohabitation, compromise, and the spiritual wisdom to be able discuss faults with equanimity. Though he is conventional on a wife’s subordination to her husband, there is as much here on a husband’s responsibilities to his partner: ‘a husband must not be like unto a Crab, Orange, or Lemon; fair on the outside to the shew, and soure and bitter within; pleasing, with sugared words abroad, Sweet-heart before Company, and of a froward and perverse Disposition at home’.
Wing B3853 (Bodley and CUL only).
