On Tuesday 6 April 1596, Elizabeth Blith of Butley in Suffolk, a twenty-three-year-old unmarried woman, was examined before three gentlemen of the county by virtue of a commission from the Court of Requests. Her testimony was given in the course of a suit brought by Robert Forth Esq. of Butley against his daughter-in-law Elizabeth Forth. Elizabeth Blith declared that she knew both the plain¬tiff and Elizabeth Forth and had known Robert's son Charles, then already deceased. She had been a chambermaid to Elizabeth Forth. She went on to describe how, some fourteen years before, Charles, then aged sixteen, had been lured into a clandestine marriage with Elizabeth, the daughter of Katherine Jerningham.

According to Elizabeth Blith

Katherine Jerningham's forecast proved over-optimistic. Robert Forth was deeply affronted by this underhand usurpation of one of the most cherished of all paternal rights of a gentleman of property – the arrange¬ment of, or at the very least strong influence over, his heir's marriage. As a staunch Protestant, who knew that men of his outlook were called puritans by their religious enemies (even though he repudiated this label), he was no doubt appalled that his son should have been lured into marriage with the daughter of John Jerningham, a man whom he probably regarded as a ruined Catholic, a ‘papist’. (However, nobody involved in the case as a party or a witness ever suggested that John Jerningham had had any part in the making of Elizabeth's marriage.) Distressed though Forth was, he eventually accepted the accomplished fact of the marriage, but his wholehearted consent was never ‘won’. Eleven of the witnesses examined on his behalf that Tuesday in Holy Week 1596 described different aspects of the making and eventual breakdown of the unfortunate marriage of Charles and Elizabeth Forth.