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478J Ramsey, William (under the pseudonym “William Seymar”)

Conjugium Conjurgium: or, Some Serious Considerations on Marriage. Wherein (by way of caution and advice to a friend) its nature, ends, events, concomitant accidents, &c. are examined.

London: Printed for John Amery at the Peacock over against St. Dunstan’s Church in Fleet-Street, 1675. $2,800

Duodecimo (15 x 9 cm). Signatures: A-G¹² H⁸. Second edition, the text substantially identical to the 1674 first edition, differing chiefly in the title-page. Bound in modern full calf.

A lively and often surprisingly candid Restoration discussion of marriage, domestic authority, and the hazards of choosing a spouse. Published under the anagrammatic pseudonym “William Seymar,” the author was in fact the physician and controversial writer William Ramsey, whose views on matrimony oscillate between moral instruction and outright skepticism.

The work opens conventionally enough, presenting marriage as a divinely sanctioned institution and reiterating familiar expectations of female obedience and household order. Yet as the discussion progresses, the author’s attention shifts from the ideals of marriage to its disappointments. Page after page examines the practical difficulties of married life: incompatibility, jealousy, financial strain, mismatched expectations, domineering spouses, troublesome in-laws, and the particular dangers posed by remarriage. What begins as advice on how to marry well gradually becomes an extended meditation on why one might prefer not to marry at all.

Especially revealing are Ramsey’s observations on widows and second marriages, which provide a rare glimpse into contemporary domestic anxieties. He complains that widows frequently compare a new husband unfavorably with the old, memorably advising that any man determined to marry a widow should seek one whose first husband had been hanged. Beneath the humor lies a valuable record of the tensions, expectations, and negotiations that shaped actual marital relationships in seventeenth-century England.

Part conduct book, part social commentary, and part satire, Conjugium Conjurgium offers an unusually frank account of marriage in the decades following the Restoration. It remains one of the more entertaining and revealing discussions of the subject printed in the seventeenth century.

This book gives an interesting insight into the actual practice of marital relationships.  The book begins by advocating an ideal, and emphasizes the need for the wife to submit herself totally to her husband, however, the main argument of his book seems to be to discourage men from entering the state of matrimony. For they be often deceived in this point, because if anything dislike them in their own husband, whom they have, they call to remembrance only such points as pleased them in their first husband.”  William Ramsey was much blunter about the dangers of a widow taunting her second husband with the exaggerated virtues of the first: he warned any man that must marry a widow to “choose one whose first husband was hanged.”

Wing R-229; Macdonald’s Bibliography of Dryden # 172B; Arber’s Term cat.; I 208;  ESTC (RLIN),; R015779. https://datb.cerl.org/estc/R15779

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