Although the widowhood of Dame Hester Temple necessarily did not occur within the marital partnership with Thomas, it seems appropriate to include a short chapter treating it within the context of that relationship and that with her children, grandchildren and servants. Indeed, Hester's married life until her husband's death usefully may be viewed as an apprenticeship for her life as his widow.

Historians and the history of widowhood

Scholars writing about medieval and early modern England have adopted varying approaches to and views on the subject of widowhood. For example, Joel T. Rosenthal, on the basis of research into the percentage of peers summoned to Parliament between 1399 and 1500 who left widows (68 per cent), argued that support of these women constituted a huge drain on the resources of great estates, and led to the extinction of many peerages; Barbara Harris, however, argued that most aristocratic widows profitably managed their jointure estates, on death distributed their wealth amongst family members, and ‘collectively their activity ensured the survival and continued prosperity of their class’. In my own earliest work on the subject of widows, in 1982 and 1983, the emphasis was laid upon the fact that during widowhood married women were at their most powerful. Certainly it was during widowhood that women from all social classes gained an independent legal identity, and often exercised power and authority as heads of household where there was no adult male heir. Even when only briefly widowed, such women would often seek to protect the interests of themselves and their children before remarrying. On average, at any one time, 20 per cent of households in an English community were headed by widows. This said, I, among others, have come to realize that widowed women were also extremely vulnerable. They were frequently subject to pressure from male kin, for example. Yet at the same time they were often dependent upon close male kin of their birth families for protection against marauding attacks by a deceased husband's male relatives. Garthine Walker, in an insightful study of ‘crime and the early modern household’, has observed that when a woman's wealth and household position were changed through death or otherwise, the hierarchy of family relationships was destabilized ‘in distressing ways’.