o. You have a daughter. And you want her to live reasonably well. But you don’t know who she’ll marry, and a husband could leave her destitute. What do you do?

At law, everything the wife has is the husband’s. But that is something that is only true at law–note the preposition. I don’t say by law, because in Regency England, there’s more than one way to skin a cat. You can skin a cat at law. Or you can skin a cat at equity. The courts of Chancery were the courts of equity. And so what people did–almost entirely–was settle property on the daughter–that is, give her the property conditionally, with the property being held in trust by trustees.

Here’s a relatively simple case from 1703. The eldest son of Baskervile was supposed to marry Mrs. Reyner, a widow (the High Court of Chancery doesn’t mention whether Mrs. Reyner was a virgin widow, but we’re romance authors–we’ll assume so. )

Thus, in Baskervile, the parties had agreed to give up property “for the use of defendant Richard Baskervile for life, without impeachment of waste, then charged with 250l per ann. free from all taxes to the defendant Jane for life, for her jointure; remainder as to the whole to the children of the marriage as therein mentioned; remainder to the right heirs of the said defendant Richard forever.” Whew! What just happened?

In other words: the husband gets the property for the duration of his life. “Without impeachment of waste” means that if he screws it up–bad planning, selling off furniture in the estate–they can’t go after him. Then his wife gets the property if she’s still alive. She doesn’t get all of it; she just gets 250 pounds per year. When she dies, their joint children get it, but if they don’t have any children, it goes to the heirs of her husband.

That was easy. But what was the holding point? The wife’s family didn’t actually have the property in question. You see, the property had been settled in the wife’s prior marriage and so was “lodged in the hands of trustees to be invested in lands, and settled on Reyner & ux [his wife] for life, remainder to their issue, remainder to her children by any other husband, remainder to the heirs of Reyner.” The trustees wouldn’t (in fact, couldn’t) budge. Even though his wife had the property settled on her for life, the new husband couldnt touch it, because it was lodged in the hands of trustees, to be invested in lands. Not to be paid out at 520l per year. (There are other problems, too.)
So what’s a girl to do? Well, Lady Strathmore (this was in 1789) had a brilliant idea. She personally owned huge properties. She was engaged to a man–one Mr. Grey. Mr. Grey allowed her to convey her many properties, both real and personal, to trustees “for her sole and separate use, notwithstanding any future coverture.” Because Mr. Grey consented before marriage, this would have been enough to effectively make the property hers–NOT his.

Lady Strathmore got into problems, though. You see, shortly after conveying all her property to trustees, one Mr. Bowes fought a duel with a newspaper editor over Lady Strathmore’s honor. This was very romantic, and so Lady Strathmore married Bowes. Bowes didn’t know that Lady Strathmore had conveyed all her property into a trust, and the general rule was that if a lady conveyed her property into a trust for her separate use shortly before her marriage, without telling her husband, the conveyance was fraudulent. Lucky Lady Strathmore got off, though–she’d never intended to deceive Bowes, because she hadn’t really planned on marrying him.

So there you have it: married women can’t own separate property at law. But as a matter of equity, other people can own property for married women. So women who wanted to protect their separate property set up trusts (or had trusts set up for them by their fathers), which specifically stated that the property was “for her sole and separate use, notwithstanding any coverture.” (Courts were very, very strict about this: you had to make it very clear you intended it to be for her separate use aside from marriage.)

Oh; and all this had to be done before she got married.

But do you want to know the best part?  Suppose our dear friend the Lady Strathmore decided she really, really wanted to give up her separate property to Mr. Bowes.  Could she?  Answer: No.  Because once she conveys it to the trustees, it’s not hers any longer.