20 Messy Divorces That Rewrote The Rules Of Marriage Law

In 1533, King Henry VIII had spent 24 years in his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. She had borne him no son, and he wanted to marry Anne Boleyn instead. The pope, Clement VII, would not grant an annulment, so Henry broke England away from Rome. Thomas Cranmer, his new archbishop of Canterbury, declared the marriage void, and Parliament gave the Crown, not the Pope, final authority over marriage.

In January 1540, Henry VIII married Anne of Cleves, a German Protestant princess, to confirm an alliance. He wanted to end it again six months later, claiming that she’d previously signed a marriage contract with another duke and that he’d never had intercourse with her. Rather than appeal to Rome, Henry persuaded Parliament to pass an Act of Nullity in July 1540.

William Parr, a nobleman, had a wife, Lady Anne Bourchier, who ran off with another man in 1541. Parr managed to win a separation at church, and in 1551, Parliament passed an act that ended their marriage entirely. This allowed him to marry again, and it was one of the first cases to see if Parliament could allow people to remarry after committing adultery. The Catholic Queen Mary I briefly repealed the act in 1553, showing just how tenuous this new authority still was.

In 1670, Lord Roos, a nobleman named John Manners, asked Parliament to help solve a problem that church courts were powerless to resolve. His wife, Lady Anne Pierrepont, had committed adultery and given birth to children whose paternity was questionable, but since the church courts could not dissolve marriages and authorize new ones, Roos petitioned Parliament directly. The resulting private Act dissolved their marriage and allowed him to remarry, representing the first full parliamentary divorce in English history, setting a lasting precedent and a model for nearly two centuries afterward.

The Earl of Macclesfield, Charles Gerard, had the kind of grounds that most petitioners needed a church court to confirm first, because his wife Anne Mason had borne two children by another nobleman, Richard Savage. Rather than seek out a church court, Macclesfield brought his matter before Parliament in 1698. The Act of Parliament simply dissolved their marriage without reference to any previous decision of the church. This showed that Parliament’s jurisdiction over divorce did not depend on any action or declaration by the Church.

In 1692, Henry Howard, Duke of Norfolk, petitioned Parliament to be allowed to end his marriage to Lady Mary Mordaunt after discovering her infidelity with a certain John Germain. His plea was rejected, and Parliament ruled that he had to obtain a church separation and sue Germain for civil damages before Parliament would even consider his request. He won both cases, and in 1700 he obtained a parliamentary divorce bill. That sequence of events, going from the church courts, to a civil trial, and on to Parliament, became the standard route to an English divorce until 1857.

In 1777, the English heiress Mary Eleanor Bowes, Countess of Strathmore, was tricked by the man who would become her husband, Andrew Robinson Stoney, into marrying him. After the wedding, Stoney assumed power over her person and property. However, before they were married, she arranged a secret trust that prevented Stoney from accessing her fortune. Stoney charged that the trust cheated him out of his rights as a husband, but the High Court of Chancery in England ruled in Mary’s favor in 1789. This decision allowed her to leave her marriage with her wealth intact.

In 1801, Jane Addison found her husband, Edward Addison, having sex with her sister, Jessy Campbell, in their home. While men could get divorced through Parliament for ordinary adultery, women had to prove something more: “aggravated” adultery like incest. Jane said Edward’s affair with her sister qualified as such. It did, and Parliament granted her a full divorce and allowed her to remarry, making her the first woman to do so.

The English writer Caroline Norton had no legal right to divorce her husband, George Chapple Norton, even after he unsuccessfully sued the prime minister, Lord Melbourne, for adultery with her. Even so, he still barred her from seeing their three kids. Norton never got a divorce herself, but her crusade inspired Parliament to pass the Infant Custody Act of 1839, which gave mothers custody of children under seven, and contributed to the establishment of England’s first civil divorce courts in 1857.

In 1854, Effie Gray fled her six-year marriage to the art critic John Ruskin and asked a church court to annul it, claiming it had never been consummated. Ruskin agreed with this claim, adding that he was unable to overcome his personal aversion to her. Medical evidence corroborated the fact that Effie was still a virgin. The court declared the marriage to be void on the basis of incurable aversion and nonconsummation. Effie subsequently married the painter John Everett Millais.

In 1870, Sir Charles Mordaunt sued for divorce when his wife, Lady Harriet Mordaunt, admitted to having had several lovers. Her relatives claimed that she had gone insane following childbirth and urged the court to stay the action on the ground that she was unable to mount a defense. In 1874, the House of Lords rejected that argument and held that the insanity of the respondent does not preclude or delay a divorce petition for adultery. Insanity was now to be a medical issue for the courts to consider.

In 1895, American heiress Anna Gould, daughter of railroad baron Jay Gould, wed the French nobleman Count Boni de Castellane. Boni quickly squandered much of her fortune, and in 1906, she obtained a civil divorce in Paris that shielded her remaining wealth. Boni wasn’t about to give up, and over the next 18 years he lobbied the Vatican’s own marriage tribunal for a canon-law annulment that would allow him to gain her property. The Vatican shut him down permanently in 1924. Anna’s divorce and her fortune remained intact.

In 1895, American heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt married Charles Spencer-Churchill, the ninth Duke of Marlborough, on the insistence of her mother, Alva Vanderbilt. They divorced in 1921 under British civil law, but Consuelo sought something more radical. In 1926, she petitioned the Vatican’s marriage court to declare her marriage to the duke null. Alva testified that she had coerced her daughter into the marriage. The Vatican accepted her argument and granted the annulment. In effect, it recognized that parental pressure had invalidated a legal agreement between the parties three decades earlier.

In 1856, Ellen Ditson filed for divorce in Rhode Island on the grounds that her husband, Daniel Ditson, had abandoned her and left the state. In a landmark decision, Chief Justice Samuel Ames ruled that marriage is a legal status a state court has authority to modify for a spouse domiciled within its jurisdiction, even if the other spouse cannot be reached by the court’s process. As a result, a deserted wife was entitled to a divorce without searching for her absent husband, which established the basis for decades of disputes over which court had ultimate authority.

Mary Atherton fled her husband, Louisville businessman Peter Lee Atherton, claiming his cruelty, and went to New York from Kentucky. He obtained a Kentucky divorce on the basis of notice he mailed to her. When she subsequently sued for separation in New York, the US Supreme Court held in 1901 that, because Kentucky was their true matrimonial home, the state’s decree deserved full faith and credit elsewhere. This case established the rules regarding what notice an out-of-state spouse was owed.

In 1868, John Haddock left his wife, Harriet Haddock, on their wedding day and went off to live in Connecticut. There, he obtained a divorce without Harriet’s presence or notice, which was an ex parte divorce. When Harriet sought support in New York, John contended that New York was obligated to accept the validity of the Connecticut decree. The US Supreme Court rejected his argument in 1906 and ruled that states were not bound to recognize ex parte divorces. For the next 36 years, this ruling shielded states’ right to regulate marriage within their borders.

Otis Williams and Lillie Hendrix left their spouses in North Carolina and headed to Nevada. After residing there for six weeks, they obtained rapid ex parte divorces and were subsequently married. North Carolina convicted them of bigamy for doing so. In 1942, the Supreme Court relied on this case to overrule the 36-year-old Haddock decision, saying states must recognize true out-of-state divorces. And a second ruling, three years later, said a home state could still examine the validity of that residency.

Gertrude Estin had already won a legal separation and permanent alimony from her husband, Joseph Estin, in New York. He then moved to Nevada, got his own ex parte divorce there, and stopped paying her entirely. The Supreme Court sided with Gertrude Estin in 1948 and established the concept of divisible divorce: a divorce decree can terminate the status of a marriage, but not the obligation of one party to support the other, if the divorcing state lacks jurisdiction over the parties.

When Margaret Sherrer left Massachusetts for Florida and initiated a divorce proceeding against her husband, Edward Sherrer, he traveled down and contested the custody of their children in person in a Florida court. When Florida granted the divorce, Margaret remarried. Years later, Edward sued her in Massachusetts, contending that Florida never had jurisdiction over the divorce. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled against him in 1948, holding that because he had voluntarily appeared in person and contested the case, he could not later challenge its validity elsewhere. Unlike Haddock or Williams, this was not a one-sided affair.

In 1948, actress Jane Wyman filed for divorce from her husband, actor Ronald Reagan, citing “mental cruelty” as the cause. It was the kind of accusation California’s fault-based divorce law often required back then, since no-fault divorce wasn’t a thing anywhere in the country yet. Reagan was said to have been irritated by the public fault-finding the divorce required. This has been cited as one reason why, as governor of California, he signed the nation’s first no-fault divorce law in 1969.

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