More sinned against than sinning

When I saw the title of this book, then read that it only covered the period 1600-1800 I hoped this would be a riot of comedy, something along the lines of the most wonderful sentence in the English language. This is in Havelock Ellis’s Psychology of Sex and concerns a discovery made by the doctor Realdus Columbus: in 1593, a century after his namesake discovered the New World, this great man claimed to have discovered the clitoris.  

But no, there is no comedy, apart from the doings of one Frances, Lady Purbeck, who in 1635, with the son of the Earl of Suffolk, lived happily and ‘adulterously’ in what the author calls ‘the depths of Shropshire’. Unfortunately the couple for some reason decided to visit London, where the prim little meddler Charles I, alerting the Archbishop of Canterbury, got them slapped in gaol. But Frances, disguised as a man, escaped to Paris, where, with the Archbishop’s posse still on her trail, she converted to Catholicism and entered a convent.