6. Ready to Marry – Perhaps (1815–17)

THE BICKNELL SUMMER household at Putney Heath had an addition. Maria, who was fond of dogs, reported happily, ‘We have got a little terrier, Frisk is his name, a great torment, and a great pet, he bites & destroys every thing he can lay hold of, we flatter ourselves that as he grows older, he will leave off all these tricks, even in trifles hope befriends us, it is the rainbow of the shower.’ But the sunny period of the dog’s life was short. He wasn’t well, and this made Constable worry in East Bergholt. (Frisk died in December.) Moreover, when Constable got back to town for a few days in early November and saw Maria at Spring Gardens, he wasn’t happy with the cold manner with which her father greeted him. He also had no encouragement in the Academy elections for Associates: he got no votes at all; Mulready and Jackson were elected.¹ So it was back to Bergholt, to work on pictures for the next exhibition, and to be with his father, who was seriously ailing again. For once there is a hint that, despite saying he was anxious to hear from Maria, he got a strange reassurance from not being near her. Having her at a distance took away ‘the anxious desire … to meet, perhaps too often at least for each other’s comfort ’till we can meet for once, and I trust for good’. It was now he, not she, who advised patience. ‘We have certainly got the worst over – and as we have borne so much and so long, would it not be wiser yet to listen to the voice of prudence?’

He was worried about money, about being able to support her and a family. Her expectations from the rector might help in future, as might his from his father, but he wasn’t ‘quite at liberty on that subject’. And she – while knowing he was right in staying with his father – found at the cold turn of the year that exasperation broke in. Painting seemed to take all his time and attention. ‘How I do dislike pictures,’ she exclaimed three days after Christmas. ‘I cannot bear the sight of them.’ John, on the contrary, loved making pictures but found himself on the last day of the year distressed because he wasn’t able to paint. His father was once again in a ‘very dangerous state’, with all his children within a minute’s call of his bedside. Constable was beginning to wonder whether he would ever have children of his own. William Hurlock, fourth son of the former curate of Langham and ten years younger than Constable, was visiting Dedham with his family and called on the painter, who walked him back to Dedham and met Hurlock’s two lovely boys. Constable wrote enviously and gloomily to Maria about this, and it made her gloomy too. Meanwhile, Mr Travis continued to ease Golding Constable ‘down the hill of life’, bringing two bottles of medicine on each visit. On one such call Mr Constable was alert enough to ask, ‘Why two bottles?’ Travis replied, ‘One is to do you good, one to do me good.’

Bergholt was ‘quite in a bustle’, with the Common being enclosed and the resulting fields being reapportioned. Constable wrote to Maria, ‘Some amongst us have shown such extreme greediness and rapacity to “lay feild to feild” as to make themselves obnoxious.’ Some did well out of the enclosure, others did poorly; any immediate cash gain may have seemed acceptable but long-held grazing and growing rights were lost. During the long war with France arable land had greatly increased in value. The price of wheat had soared in a generation, from 45 shillings a quarter in 1789 to 102 shillings in 1814.² Landowners were correspondingly wealthier. Drawings and oil sketches which Constable had done of the Common were eventually put to use in one of a series of landscape engravings of his work; now he gave his tiny bit of allotted land near the Constable windmill to his brother Golding. He managed to get away for a weekend in London at the end of January when he saw Maria. On his return to Suffolk he had some books sent to her, one being a ‘beautifully written’ life of Claude Lorrain. He was also on the lookout for a spaniel for her to take the place of Frisk.

On the occasion of this London visit, Maria had apparently discussed the vexed question of her dearest’s friendship with John Dunthorne. She regarded the plumber/glazier/artist as an unfitting companion for John Constable. He was ‘destitute of religious principle’ – a verdict that may have reflected what her grandfather said about Dunthorne – and was in every way his inferior. This put Constable on the spot. He struggled with what to do. Old friend on one side, dearly beloved young woman on the other. At last he decided that as Dunthorne was ‘determined to continue in his perverse and evil ways’, he would get Mr Travis to tell him not to come to the Constable house again, except on business (possibly, as a close-at-hand plumber, Dunthorne could not be spared); their neighbourly and artistic relations were at an end. According to Constable, Dunthorne at this point was as upset with him as he with Dunthorne. ‘The sight of me became a monster to him, and he wished to be rid of me.’

One wonders how much this imbroglio was kindled by Constable’s desire to appease the rector. The episode leaves a sour taste, and didn’t in any event affect the state of things for the lovers. Dr Rhudde was again ‘entirely inveterate’ against Constable as a potential husband for Maria, and equally against was his daughter (and Maria’s aunt) Mrs Harriet Farnham. Banishing Dunthorne into outer darkness didn’t help. The rector’s attitude was further reinforced by a completely tactless act by Constable. He had learned from Maria that the Bicknells were looking for a new school for her fourteen-year-old sister Catherine. Miss Taylor’s school in East Bergholt was suggested as a possibility. Constable heard Miss Taylor saying she hadn’t got enough pupils and thereupon mentioned Catherine to her. He obviously thought Miss Taylor wouldn’t use his name; any sensible person should have known that the recommendation of John Constable would not be the way to Dr Rhudde’s heart. But Miss Taylor wasn’t sensible. The chance of a new pupil was all that mattered. She went at once to the rectory and canvassed the subject of Catherine joining her school. Dr Rhudde erupted. What had John Constable got to do with his family’s private affairs? With his granddaughter’s schooling? Surely Constable was still banned from visiting Spring Gardens? Dr Rhudde wrote a fierce letter to his son-in-law Charles Bicknell, and Maria had to tell Constable not to come to town just yet. His recent visits to the Bicknell house had been kept a secret from the rector, who was now fully apprised and furious about it. ‘How it will end,’ sighed Maria, ‘God only knows.’

Resolution was approaching faster than she knew. When Constable heard from Maria that ‘the kind Doctor says he “considers me no longer as his grand daughter” ’, it was all he needed; his nerve stiffened. He and Maria had done nothing blameable. ‘Our business is now more than ever (if possible) with ourselves.’ Moreover, he had been talking with his brothers and sisters about William Mason’s proposals for their father’s estate and doing his arithmetic, all the while Mr Constable inexorably declined. ‘I shall inherit a sixth part of my father’s property, which we expect may be at least four thousand pounds apeice, and Mrs Smith [his aunt in Nayland] will leave about two thousand pounds more amongst us – and I am entirely free of debt. I trust [-] could I be made happy [-] to make a good deal more than I do now of my profession.’ After this, ‘my dearest Maria’, he had nothing more to say, other than ‘The sooner we are married the better’. No more arguments! ‘We have been great fools not to have married long ago[,] by which we might perhaps have stopped the mouths of all our enemies.’ He didn’t mind who read this, including her father.

Constable had now stayed in East Bergholt longer than for many years and he remained another month, despite the need to get his pictures to the Academy and despite hearing from Maria that she had been ill. She had visited Greenwich, ‘a damp, unhealthy place’, and caught a cold. On 9 March she excused herself to him for not writing a long letter, ‘for thinking hurts my chest’, and then added lightly, ‘I really think it does me good to be ill for a day or two, one enjoys so much the more returning to one’s usual occupations, and the charm of breathing the fresh air.’ Chest – breath – air. Intimations. She in fact seemed a trifle rattled in late March, complaining when he wrote to her too often and when he wrote too little (a contrariness Constable pointed out to her).

The pictures he took to town at the end of March for the Academy exhibition were A Wheat Field and A Wood, Autumn. The wheatfield was part of his customary territory, land on the slopes below Bergholt with the Stour valley leading up to Stratford St Mary, with what looks like the remains of the ‘runover dungle’ in a far corner of the field and a closer than usual view of people harvesting: five men working around the walled edges of the wheat; a boy carrying an armful of wheat up the slope; a woman and two girls gleaning; and a boy with a dog sitting beside a pile of clothes and baskets, no doubt containing food and drink; above, a serene summer sky. Despite the human interest, it is a less focused picture than the Stour Valley and Dedham Village painting of a year before. As for A Wood, it is now lost to sight but was bought immediately by Constable’s uncle, David Pike Watts, for forty guineas; it may have illustrated Constable’s former haunts in Helmingham Park.³ Although he exhibited only two paintings at Somerset House, this year was to be his most productive ever. Among other pictures he had worked on were a long-promised copy of a Reynolds portrait for Lady Louisa Manners – a good patron who, however, kept interrupting his landscape work when he was in London and gave him added reason for staying in Bergholt as long as possible. Press reaction to his Academy exhibits was not wholehearted. Ackermann’s Repository of Art said, ‘From extreme carelessness this artist has gone to the other extreme, and now displays the most laboured finish.’ The Examiner’s critic thought differently, approving Constable’s eye for nature but believing ‘his execution is still crude’.⁴

Golding Constable was given a private view of the Wheat Field before his son took the paintings to town. The older man was failing: his dropsy had increased and Mr Travis was powerless to help. For several months Constable was a shuttlecock. At the end of February he made a trip to London on art business and to see his ‘beloved and ever dearest’ Maria, then returned to Suffolk to be with his father and was joined by his sister Martha Whalley who came to Bergholt to cheer up the family. At the end of March he returned to town, where, according to Maria, there was much sickness and ‘horrid black, cold, raw, easterly winds’. But in early May he was called again to Suffolk by Abram, to the bedside of their father who said he was ready ‘to be released’. The brief visit of his artist son pleased the old man. Constable was back in Charlotte Street when on 14 May his father died. He wrote to Maria when he got to East Bergholt on 19 May, the day before the funeral, to say:

My dear Father’s end was so happy – he died whilst sitting in his chair as usual, without a sigh or a pang, and without the smallest alteration of his position or features, except a gentle inclination of his head forwards – and my sister Ann who was near had to put her face close to his to assure herself that he breathed no more. Thus it has pleased God to take … this good man to Himself – the rectitude of his conduct through life had disarmed the grave of its terrors, and it pleased God to spare him the pang of death.

Constable now had few doubts as to what his course of action must be. His father’s death left him an equal share with his brothers and sisters in the Constable estate. Abram would continue to run the family business and would hand out to his siblings equal parts of the annual profits; John Constable reckoned he would be getting roughly two hundred a year from this, twice the allowance he had been receiving from his father. Moreover, he could expect a share in what East Bergholt House fetched when sold, there were other well-to-do relatives who might leave him something, and his paintings were starting to bring in regular money. He and Maria might count on at least four hundred a year and that, with careful housekeeping, should be enough. His expectations from David Pike Watts were greater in the eyes of some beholders than in Constable’s, which was as well, for when Uncle David died at the end of July, aged sixty-two, the bulk of his fortune of nearly £300,000 went to his daughter.⁵ Dr Rhudde was said to be ‘full of indignity’ about this, partly because he had decided that Mr Watts had been a greater monetary benefactor to Constable over the years than was in fact the case. In mid-August, reporting from East Bergholt this sub-plot to Maria in Putney, Constable added wryly that, still, ‘the Doctor is quite well & may live to see things in their right light yet’.

It appeared that Dr Rhudde’s reactions had ceased to matter as much as before. Another factor that had impelled Constable was the wedding of his friend John Fisher, a ceremony conducted on 2 July by Fisher’s uncle the Bishop of Salisbury. Constable saw Farington that day, told him of Fisher’s marriage, and said that ‘under all the circumstances He had made up his mind to marry Miss Bicknell without further delay & to take the chance of what might arise’.⁶ With his heels dug in, Constable was not about to put up with any further harasssment from Maria’s father. He had been visiting Spring Gardens fairly frequently and on one such occasion was seen by Mr Bicknell holding hands with Maria. Mr Bicknell said, ‘Sir, if you were the most approved of lovers, you could not take a greater liberty with my daughter.’ Constable replied, ‘And don’t you know, Sir, that I am the most approved of lovers?’⁷

Though unapproved by Mr Bicknell, Constable with his mind made up was ‘happy in love’. Close at hand in East Bergholt he kept a portrait he had done of Maria, which was the first thing he saw in the morning and the last at night; he said it calmed his spirits. He sent Maria a book of the letters of Saloman Gessner, the Swiss poet and painter, whose essay on landscape had been given him by J.T. Smith nineteen years before and provided early encouragement. And he gave her a new dog, Dash, from his sister Ann’s kennels in East Bergholt. His instructions to Maria were that Dash should be fed ‘bread or a little barley meal well scalded with extream boiling water, and a bit of fat mixed with it’, and he should have very little meat. This made for a healthy dog. (Dash turned out to be not fond of barley meal, though he choked it down.) Constable’s bad news from Bergholt in mid-August was the weather, with the hay and corn a month late. Mount Tambora, a volcano in Indonesia, had erupted the previous year and its spreading ash clouds made 1816 in Europe ‘the year without a summer’.

On 30 August Constable wrote to Maria in Putney Heath from Wivenhoe Park, near Colchester, where he was making a painting for General Rebow, to tell her ‘I live in the park and Mrs Rebow says I am very unsociable’. On 6 September he wrote to her again from the Rebows’, enclosing a letter from his friend Fisher. Fisher told Constable he would be in London on 24 September happy to marry them – so stop shilly-shallying. ‘Follow my example, & get you to your lady, & instead of blundering out long sentences about the “hymeneal altar” &c., say that on Wednesday September 25 you are ready to marry her. If she replies, like a sensible woman as I suspect she is, well, John, here is my hand I am ready, all well & good … I am at her service.’ Fisher wanted them to spend their honeymoon at Osmington, near Weymouth, where he was vicar. The supporters of the couple included Mr Driffield, who had christened Constable and now said he would marry them if Fisher couldn’t. Mr Driffield picked up Constable from the Rebows and drove him to East Bergholt.

Maria was indeed as sensible as Fisher suspected, and although she thought a wedding date a few days later than that proposed by Fisher suited her better, she wasn’t thinking in terms of postponements. She wanted Constable to put himself on the line and undertake the unpleasant task of letting the Doctor know their plans. She had shown Fisher’s letter to her father, ‘in hope they would make some impression upon him, [but] he merely says that without the Doctor’s consent, he shall neither retard, or facilitate it, complains of poverty & so on’. Constable wrote to Dr Rhudde in ‘the most respectful manner’. The Doctor had recently been sending mixed messages, one moment calling Constable an ‘infidel,’ the next – according to Abram – suggesting via Mr Travis that Constable should go into the Church. It was easy to get into, the Doctor said, and being a clergyman was less objectionable than being an artist. When Dr Rhudde returned from his annual trip to Cromer, he actually bowed graciously to Constable from his coach, while his coachman Thomas, holding the reins, gave Constable a knowing grin from the seat above.

Through this closing period of his bachelorhood, Constable seems to have been a good deal distracted. Was he in fact ready to marry Maria? Should the wedding be postponed? He now gave the impression of putting his professional obligations before her. Excusing himself, he told her he had been busy on pictures which he hoped would provide funds for their future together. A few portraits might assist with living expenses through the winter. The Rebows obviously intended their commission – they hoped for several paintings – to help the couple on their way. Constable had been working on a large picture of Flatford Mill for the next Academy exhibition, and his mind was much on the problems of painting Wivenhoe Park. As if hoping she would understand, he wrote to Maria that he was getting on well with it, albeit with a struggle: ‘The great difficulty has been to get so much in as they wanted … On my left is a grotto with some elms, at the head of a peice of water – in the centre is the house over a beautiful wood and very far to the right is a deer house, which it was necessary to add, so that my view comprehended too many [distances]. But to day I have got over the difficulty, and begin to like it myself.’ Possibly the Rebows wanted some of these ‘necessities’, perhaps he wanted them himself. The painting needed to be wider to accommodate things and so he added strips of canvas at each side. He seemed to have been taking note of how grassy the grass looked, and how bright green and how almost edible it could be. He was painting a natural scene, painting ‘from nature’, but also transfusing the scene with light. Wrestling with the real, he heightened the actual into the ideal.⁸

Far from wanting the marriage put off, Maria asked for Constable’s opinion of what she should wear on the day. She wasn’t pleased when he replied that he always wore black and thought she looked well in that colour. This apparent lack of nuptial enthusiasm made her remind him that, even now, if he wanted to, it wasn’t too late to follow her father’s advice and wait. But as she probably guessed it would, resolution once again seized Constable. Fisher wrote to suggest the first of October. In East Bergholt the village was abuzz with the impending union and Constable was congratulated as though he were already a married man. Then, of course, came a late difficulty: a portrait to be done of an elderly clergyman in Brightwell who was expected to die at any minute and a sitting requested; Constable couldn’t say no. However, on Saturday 28 September, only a day later than promised, he went up to London on the ‘Times’ coach, and on the following Monday Maria and her aunt Mrs Charles Arnold – a stalwart supporter of Maria in her proposed union – called in Charlotte Street to discuss final arrangements. Maria had told him to make his own invitations to family and friends, and although he now wrote to his sister Martha Whalley to ask her to attend the ceremony, he had left it too late; she couldn’t come. Constable sent his kindest love to Maria’s sister Louisa, who he hoped forgave him for taking Maria from her family. After this Maria had a last talk on the subject with her father, and ‘warm words’ were exchanged. Did she make a final, fruitless attempt to get Papa’s blessing? For whatever reason, the wedding was put off one more day.

Maria Bicknell, 1816

But at last, on Wednesday 2 October, according to the parish register of St Martin-in-the-Fields, ‘John Constable of the Parish of Saint Pancras a Bachelor and Maria Elizabeth Bicknell of this Parish a Spinster were married in this Church by Licence …’ It was the first wedding solemnised that day in St Martin’s; the others all conducted by the church’s curate John Tillotson, this by ‘John Fisher, Prebendary of Sarum’. The long-term bachelor groom was forty, the bride twenty-eight. If Maria had hoped to the last minute the church doors would swing open and a procession of Bicknells would come in, she was disappointed; her immediate family, who lived a few hundred yards away, were noticeably absent, and apparently none of his family showed up either. The witnesses in the great near-empty church were his close neighbours from Charlotte Street the apothecary William Manning and his wife Sarah. In the absence of other well-wishers, the Mannings were left to bid the happy couple long life and good fortune.⁹

At the end of May 1816 Constable had put his name forward once again for election that autumn as an Associate of the Academy; thirty-six other artists did so too. Farington told him that he intended to suggest to several influential members that the Academy ‘fill at least 4 of the 5 vacancies by electing such Artists as had been sometime on the list and were of considerable standing in years’.¹⁰ Constable certainly qualified on both counts. Moreover, now that Constable’s marriage was an accomplished fact, his father-in-law felt he had a stake in his success. Mr Bicknell met the Academician William Owen at Putney and, knowing how some naval officers were advanced by the Admiralty, asked him if any outside influence would be useful in getting Constable elected. Owen, so Farington reported, said ‘nothing of the kind would have any effect, but that the general feeling was so much in favor of Constable that whenever it could be done with propriety He would have friends ready to support him’.¹¹ But despite Farington and Owen, once again at the November elections Constable got no votes.¹²

For the moment Constable had other things on his mind. He was on an extended honeymoon and happily drawing, painting and making up for lost time with Maria. They went first to stay with Bishop Fisher and his wife in Salisbury, then to his aunt Mary Gubbins and her family in Southampton. From there they made an excursion to the picturesque ruins of Netley Abbey.¹³ After that they joined Prebendary Fisher and his wife in Osmington, a small Dorset village tucked into a cleft of the land half a mile from the sea. They stayed for seven weeks. In his invitation Fisher had commended the place: ‘The country here is wonderfully wild & sublime & well worth a painters visit. My house commands a singularly beautiful view & you may study from my very windows. You shall [have] a plate of meat set by the side of your easel without your sitting down to dinner: we never see company: & I have brushes paints & canvas in abundance.’ He knew Constable’s obsessiveness and apparent unsociability. But in the small vicarage there wasn’t room for much except the contentment of the two newly-married couples.

From the wooded valley of Sutton and Preston, a small amphitheatre formed by hills, you could see (so Fisher said) ‘a peep of the blue sky in the distance with Portland: and two old forlorn ash trees in the foreground. The place is very sequestered & is frequented by kingfishers & woodcocks.’ From Osmington Mills, where fishing boats were hauled up, they walked along the shore westward to Redcliff Point and round the end of it into Weymouth Bay and Bowleaze Cove. There, Constable painted an oil showing a stream called the Jordan snaking across the beach to the sea. The Constables and Fishers also took higher walks on the downs above, where old drystone walls enclosed the grassy fields and there were far views along Chesil Beach to Portland Island. Monarchical enthusiasts among the locals had carved in the chalk hillside overlooking Weymouth an image of George III on horseback – but that wasn’t conspicuous from Osmington and Constable’s royalist sympathies weren’t put into conflict with his tangible sense of the Dorset landscape. Indeed, any assumption that he could only paint Suffolk or Stour valley scenes would now have been quickly overturned. Channel clouds, Channel skies. Wide views with lonely figures and small flocks of sheep. Fisher – as he had said he would – provided canvases and paints. Constable carried a sketchbook everywhere and painted daily, mostly in fair weather but sometimes in foul. When conditions were really bad he moved indoors and kept on painting: a portrait of a buxom, ringletted Mary Fisher, wearing a low-cut dress and a pearl necklace with a pendant crucifix, was one from this time. Fisher had promised in his letter of invitation, ‘My wife is quiet & silent & sits & reads without disturbing a soul & Mrs Constable may follow her example. Of an evening we will sit over an autumnal fireside[,] read a sensible book perhaps a Sermon, & after prayers get us to bed at peace with ourselves & all the world.’ One suspects that Fisher spoke with his ecclesiastical tongue slightly in cheek, and the two newly-wed pairs had other things to occupy and amuse them. Certainly Fisher and Constable discussed each other’s drawings. Any pensiveness on Mary Fisher’s part may have been prompted by occasional thoughts of her cousin John Wordsworth, brother of the poet, whose ship the East Indiaman Abergavenny had been wrecked off this shore in February 1805. Seeking shelter after a partial dismasting, the vessel had run aground and several hundred men had been lost, including John Wordsworth. Toll for the brave.

Weymouth Bay

John and Maria Constable stayed longer than they had intended. The couples got on well and the two men shared confidences about the Established Church and the art establishment whose heart was the Royal Academy. Fisher, even more than his helpful uncle, the Bishop, perceived qualities of genius in the often self-doubting Constable. He overrode the artist’s moments of low esteem with intelligent praise and criticism. He helped Constable set a higher value on his own worth and eventually – by buying paintings at good prices – became Constable’s first major patron. On the last Sunday of his extended honeymoon Constable sat in a choir stall of Preston church, near Osmington, where Fisher also performed parish duties, and sketched his friend in the pulpit as he delivered a sermon.¹⁴

Married life began properly back in Charlotte Street in mid-December. Maria was married to a painter, and these were his working quarters. Constable had got his landlord Richard Weight to repaint the staircase and front rooms; a new wallpaper was still to be selected for the back drawing room, for which Lady Heathcote had earlier approved a salmon colour – a good choice as a background for pictures. Constable’s sister Ann invited them to spend Christmas in Bergholt, sister Mary wrote sending her affection and congratulations on their marriage, and Abram turned up in town in person to do the same. But Bergholt itself raised the question: how did the great Caesar, Dr Rhudde, feel about them now?

He was still blowing hot then cold. Mr Travis ‘sounded’ the rector when he encountered him and mentioned that ‘Mr and Mrs Constable would much like to visit Bergholt’. The rector, seemingly relishing his power, replied, ‘If they do, and call upon me, I will not see them.’ The couple postponed their trip. Nevertheless, other signs suggested hope. Dr Rhudde’s servant Thomas brought Abram a fine turkey for Christmas, with the Doctor’s compliments, and this was seen as a peace offering. Mary sent news on 12 January 1817 that Mr Travis understood that the rector simply wanted Constable ‘to make a proper apology’ to Mr Bicknell and himself, presumably for Constable’s conduct in general and in particular for stealing away Maria; then ‘all would be well’. So Constable wrote a letter to Mr Bicknell, which did the trick, and another to the rector, which did not. Abram reported that Dr Rhudde told Mr Travis, ‘If you can see a simple apology in that letter it is more than I can.’ The Doctor further accused Constable of laughing at him in church and drawing caricatures of him. It was obviously time to bow and scrape, never easy for Constable, but Abram and Mr Travis advised it, and for Maria no concession was too great. Constable did his humble duty and wrote again to the rector, sending a copy of his submission to Abram. On 19 January Abram met Dr Rhudde who said he had had a letter from John. Would Abram tell his brother the Doctor would be coming to town in February and would have come to a decision by then? He wasn’t displeased by Constable’s second letter; in fact, ‘I wish them both happy and shall try to make them so.’ Abram thought the rector was softening: ‘He must have his way, it is no use to oppose him, & by giving way & humoring him, any thing may be got over.’

Dr Rhudde was eighty-four and cranky; he was seen to have trouble getting up to and down from the pulpit. The Constables’ suspense continued. The Doctor’s February trip to town didn’t help and he returned home, so Constable told Farington, ‘in as ill a humour as ever’. But, Constable added, the rector had had a new will drawn up in which he had made provision for any children Constable might have. In that respect Constable and Maria had apparently been doing their natural best since John Fisher joined their hands at St Martin-in-the-Fields. Although Maria unfortunately had a miscarriage in mid-February, she was soon pregnant again. In April, sister Ann sent Maria her good wishes and love, and recommended for her condition the remedy of Bergholt air. First, however, Maria tried East Ham air at the Whalleys’, and Constable made a quick and almost undercover trip to Bergholt on his own. While there he wrote Dr Rhudde a ‘most respectful’ letter which was counter-productive: in fact, the Doctor was made really miserable by it. Ann, Mary and Abram all made a point of calling at the rectory but no progress was achieved.