After their wedding Charlotte and Henry lodged in a country cottage owned by Henry's father at Lang ham Moor, near Colchester. Henry had promised to design and build Charlotte a house, but he was busy and distracted, attending to the dissolution of the family brewery company. He and his brother Arthur had taken over the partnership from their father a couple of years earlier but were quickly at loggerheads. Henry was now keen to set up his own firm, with offices in London. More uncomfortably for Charlotte, the family did not approve of Henry marrying a woman who was so much older. Although the surroundings were pretty, she recalled, ‘my new relations did not attract me’. She was left alone in the cottage for much of the week, and on Sundays Henry ‘drove me in his Oxford Cart to his own pew at the Congregational Church’.

Henry's mother had been a pillar of the Congregational Church before her death, and he enjoyed his special status among the community as one of the architects of the new church. A Quaker elder, Henry's father must have seemed old-fashioned and cheerless to Charlotte, who was used to the lively debates and encouragement of her Edinburgh friends. Out of her element, already missing Edinburgh, Charlotte nursed regrets. Sensing her loneliness and boredom, Henry cheered her up by taking her on long romantic walks through the woods near their cottage. Charlotte concluded cheerlessly, ‘it was too late to mend it so I resolved to make the best of it’.

Her new routine amidst the Essex countryside was happily interrupted four months after her marriage, when Henry decided to take Charlotte with him on a combined research and ‘honeymoon’ tour. Under strain at home and at work, he was constantly unwell, ‘and he resolved to go abroad to try to cure it’. Always restless, Henry seems to have been happiest when travelling. They set off for the continent from Harwich, landing in Antwerp after a calm passage.