During the eighteenth century, one of the most important steps in the initiation and preparation for marriage among mercantile circles was the practice of buying wedding jewellery and valuable furniture for a new home. Indeed, during the entire early modern period, the practice of exchanging objects and love tokens in the course of initiating a marriage was “a key way for courting couples to negotiate the path to matrimony.”Footnote 1 At the heart of this article is the marriage between the Hamburg burgher's daughter Ilsabe Engelhardt and the wholesale merchant Nicolaus Gottlieb Luetkens, also Hamburg born.
Marriage was a decisive juncture in the life of early modern merchants and their wives.Footnote 2 It represented the home stretch of a merchant's establishment phase and heralded a new chapter in a merchant's life: becoming a settled merchant who had started a family with his wife. Marriage in commercial circles in the eighteenth century often meant the merger of two merchant families.Footnote 3 Not only did such mergers create requisite financial resources through the dowry and the merging of capital; they also expanded the involved families’ commercial networks and business opportunities, thus ensuring the continuity of the families and their businesses. Marriage often also set the course for social advancement, since it was a key to increasing one's opportunities.Footnote 4 “Marriage made people kin, and ink put that kinship to economic use.”Footnote 5 Thus, marriage was oftentimes the basis for the foundation of a new merchant house, as was the case for Luetkens's marriage. In November 1745, just after his wedding with Ilsabe, he opened the merchant house Luetkens & Engelhardt in Hamburg, together with his new brother-in-law.
Understanding the marriage patterns and practices of eighteenth-century merchants is essential to comprehend many aspects of the contemporary Atlantic business community and its networks. The smooth running of mercantile marriage initiation was crucial for mercantile families. For this reason, the process required long and arduous negotiations, often over several months or even years.Footnote 6 Indeed, marriage was part of a merchant's business agenda. From the perspective of a future wife and her family as well, marriage was an investment in the future, and one's options warranted careful weighing.
In the two years preceding his marriage, Nicolaus Gottlieb Luetkens was travelling on business in France. Before he left Hamburg, he and Ilsabe Engelhardt did not know each other personally. As was customary in eighteenth-century commercial circles, the Luetkens marriage was prearranged and primarily served business purposes.Footnote 7 Still, arrangement notwithstanding, this did not exclude the possibility that the spouses reciprocated affection for one another. During the early modern period, when initiating courtship and marriage there was often no “clear-cut distinction between strategic unions on the one hand and marriage for love on the other,” as Sally Holloway aptly summarises.Footnote 8 This also was the case for Ilsabe and Nicolaus Gottlieb.
Due to Luetkens's travels, all of the marriage preparations had to be settled long-distance by letter. Exchanging letters in the process of negotiating a marriage was common during the early modern period, when letter-writing was an “important stage of courtship in its own right.”Footnote 9 The steps of a merchant's marriage initiation and preparations are well documented in Luetkens's correspondence. As his letters show, while travelling abroad, he was able to make all the needed marriage preparations, including financial negotiations and renting a house in Hamburg. As was typical for the time, he entrusted his future wife and mother-in-law with furnishing and equipping the couple's home.Footnote 10 The letters also reveal Luetkens's mercantile agenda, with him postponing his marriage several times over a period of many months in order to finish up his business in France. As he argued, this would serve to ensure the financial security of the merger. Ultimately, Ilsabe Engelhardt had to wait for over a year before her future husband returned to his hometown to marry her in November 1745.
During the preparations for their marriage, Ilsabe Engelhardt and Nicolaus Gottlieb Luetkens developed a relationship, a process that is visible in their correspondence as well as in material culture. My aim here is to examine the role played by Ilsabe in these preparations, and thus the influence she had on the process, by embarking upon the path mapped out by the crucial works in economic history by Anne L. Murphy, Sheryllynne Haggerty, Sara T. Damiano, Susanah Shaw Romney, and Sophie H. Jones and Siobhan Talbott.Footnote 11 Jones and Talbott have recently stressed the “roles played by [. . .] extended families and the emotional impact of this activity,” particularly in mercantile networks, and have shown women to have been “autonomous players with the power and ability to make informed and independent decisions that directed the business interests of their families.”Footnote 12 I have been guided by a question regarding “acquisition and assemblage,” namely, what was bought for whom and why? This question has also been raised by Jon Stobart and Mark Rothery in their study on consumption and country estates.Footnote 13
In particular, I will show how Ilsabe upheld her position in the run-up to the marriage with Nicolaus Gottlieb, especially with regard to his delayed return. Ilsabe's patience had a price: Nicolaus Gottlieb had to make amends. The merchant was to spare no expense if he wished to ensure his future wife's good will despite his delayed return. Specifically, she instructed her future husband to buy expensive jewellery, including a gold ring and diamond earrings, as well as valuable furnishings, such as a card table, mahogany and walnut furniture, and large mirrors. These items not only served as tokens of appreciation with an emotional value, but were also material promises that were part of Luetkens's concrete marriage pledges to Ilsabe. To comply with her requests, and to do so as quietly as possible as dictated by the rules in mercantile circles of initiating a marriage, Luetkens had to mobilise an intimate network of close confidants in London and Amsterdam, who helped him to purchase the precious items and send them to Hamburg.
The concept of intimate networks, as it has been introduced by Susanah Shaw Romney, involves the “intermingling of family and trade.”Footnote 14 It is a concept that has been overlooked in much current research on early modern merchants, despite the widely accepted fact, as argued by Jones and Talbott, that “family networks were an inherent part of early-modern business.” Nonetheless, “the ways in which family members were utilized, and the emotional as well as financial consequences of this, are less well understood.”Footnote 15 Therefore, to complement the other articles in this volume, this article aims to show the potential of the concept of intimate networks for research in a field where network analyses already have a long tradition: the field of merchant history. The concept of intimate networks provides a micro-perspective on the practices involved in creating and upholding the powerful structures of merchant networks. Intimate networks, including attempts to establish love bonds and shared activities such as buying furniture for a private home, were surely as important as the other business activities of merchants. As this article will show, love bonds and activities shared by the future spouses had an established place in the life and business of merchants, particularly during the establishment phase of their businesses. In contrast to the many networks that have been analysed in earlier research, these processes decidedly included women as crucial actors.Footnote 16
Nicolaus Gottlieb and Ilsabe's intimate network played a particularly important role during the early stage of the couple's life together. Ilsabe Engelhard was herself “deeply embedded in networks of exchange and credit,” delegating her wishes as a “responsible shopper” to her future husband and his brother.Footnote 17 The article will offer insight into the merchant couple's networks and letters, the consumer and material culture of eighteenth-century mercantile marriages, the benefits of the materiality of letter packets, the rules of secrecy, and, last but not least, the stoic calm of a bride who was left waiting for months.
The Marriage of Ilsabe and Nicolaus Gottlieb Luetkens
Ilsabe Engelhardt must have been in her early or mid-twenties when she married Nicolaus Gottlieb Luetkens, a typical marriage age for early modern women.Footnote 18 She had grown up in Hamburg, together with her mother and older brother Ehrenfried. Her father, a Hamburg merchant, had died in 1738, but bequeathed an immense “fortune of 70,000 Marks” to his wife and family, which allowed his widow and son to continue the business.Footnote 19 It also enabled Ilsabe to be courted on the marriage market. After her wedding with Luetkens, Ilsabe gave birth to four daughters. She died in 1760.Footnote 20 This is all that we know about Ilsabe. There are no other direct records of her in the Hamburg state archives, and while there is a family coat of arms, there is no portrait of Ilsabe.Footnote 21 As for many others, her story has been engulfed by the passage of time. The situation, however, is different regarding her husband, for whom extensive records exist, above all letters originating from his own quill pen, as well as those of his brother Joachim and Ilsabe's brother Ehrenfried. By also reading between the lines, the letters of these men help us to paint a more complete picture of Ilsabe, including a sense of how she exerted influence on her future husband.
The reason there are surviving records of Nicolaus Gottlieb Luetkens is quite unusual. At the end of his extensive business travels in France from 1743 to 1745, Luetkens began to transfer his business back to Hamburg, loading his business and letter archive onto one of his ships, which departed from Brest heading towards the city on the Elbe. He instructed his men to hide the archive among the cargo. He himself returned to Hamburg by horse. The ship, however, was captured by English privateers during its voyage, and the archive was found and confiscated. Luetkens would never see it again. Today, the Luetkens archive is stored in the National Archives at Kew in London in its original condition, still including all the records from 1745, among them 2,480 letters.Footnote 22 This archive is a true time capsule. It allows us detailed insights into Luetkens's life, particularly during the important years in France preceding his marriage. These years saw the crucial phase of establishing a mercantile business, including investments in commission trade and shipping industry, taking part in high-risk trade, finding a business partner, finding a wife, and, last but not least, founding a merchant house. I have analysed these steps in the book The Power of Persuasion.Footnote 23 Here, however, I will concentrate on a small collection of letters in the archive that were written between October 1744 and May 1745. Numbering only fourteen, they nonetheless stand out, since they had a great impact on the final months of Luetkens's stay in France. This small group of letters pertain to Ilsabe Engelhardt. They are personal letters, letters that would have never survived if not for the unusual circumstances surrounding the Luetkens archive.Footnote 24 Despite their small number, they provide important information about a crossroads in a merchant's life: preparations for marriage.Footnote 25 I have examined these letters using what Lawrence Stone once aptly called the “searchlight method,” which involves “recording in elaborate detail a single event.” By ensuring “that it is very carefully set in its total context and very carefully analysed for its cultural meaning,” this small group of letters allows us to arrive at a number of general insights about the world of marriage and trade in the eighteenth century.Footnote 26
Most of the letters in question were exchanged between Nicolaus Gottlieb Luetkens and his brother Joachim. They also include correspondence with his future brother-in-law and business partner Ehrenfried, with Ilsabe's mother, and with Luetkens's long-time business partners Jobst Henning Hertzer, Christopher von Bobartt, and Albertus de Meyere. These men and the future mother-in-law represent Luetkens and Ilsabe's most intimate network. This inner circle of confidants was the only group of people privy to the details of the upcoming marriage. In one way or another, all of them helped Luetkens and supported the couple during their marriage preparations. Despite the ultimate business purpose of the marriage, the focus of this network was a more intimate level of shared activity: practical help in personal matters. This intimate activity would have strong repercussions in Luetkens's business career, allowing him to advance through this step to the ranks of established merchants.
The letters from Ilsabe Engelhard herself have unfortunately not survived, because Luetkens kept them with him in his private travel bag. This loss notwithstanding, the surviving letters clearly show that one of the most challenging steps of Luetkens's establishment phase was initiating and preparing for his marriage.
The challenge, however, was not the marriage settlement itself.Footnote 27 The negotiations with the Engelhardt family were settled rather quickly. Members of the Engelhard family were “close relatives” of David Speelmeyer, Luetkens's master during his apprenticeship in Hamburg.Footnote 28 Trust was thus easily established between Luetkens and Ehrenfried Engelhard, together with the latter's mother. The settlement was accompanied by a “yes and written consent” from Ilsabe.Footnote 29 Such consent by the bride was already a formative element in bourgeois marriages of the eighteenth century, and also in mercantile circles.Footnote 30 As Anne L. Murphy has shown, the “interference of friends and family in a match was typical of an Early Modern society in which couples were generally free to make their own choices but at the same time subject to the approval of these closest to them.”Footnote 31 The future spouses Ilsabe and Nicolaus Gottlieb were part of a very close “circle of potential partners,” a “social exclusivity” typical for merchants of the eighteenth century.Footnote 32
In the end, the marriage was beneficial for both. Ilsabe was able to ensure the continuity of her family's businesses after the death of her father, and her groom, in partnership with her brother, was to become Hamburg's third-largest sugar merchant and a wealthy senator. In return, Luetkens received a large sum from her dowry for his future business in Hamburg and, as he himself put it, counted himself lucky to get a wife “in such miraculous ways.” Her “corresponding humour,” as his contemporaries called it, genuinely seemed to please him.Footnote 33 A certain affection is also evident in the letters. Ilsabe's brother Ehrenfried described her as having “a true and genuine love in her heart.”Footnote 34 Joachim Luetkens felt his brother's future wife had a candid, “honest mind.” Moreover, his brother observed that he had noticed “a lot of good things” about her “outward appearance.”Footnote 35 Of course, these lines are typical formulae used in love letters of the time, mobilising a language register known and expected by the respective letter writers. We find the same sort of formulae, for instance, in contemporary letter-writing manuals and novels.Footnote 36 Although material interests still outweighed all other interests when initiating marriage negotiations, nonetheless these letters show that expressing and fostering an emotional bond was apparently also considered necessary for a prosperous shared future, a marriage ideal that became increasingly prevalent in the second half of the eighteenth century.Footnote 37
In our case, settling the marriage plan seems not to have been a problem. At issue was the period that was to pass between the agreement and Luetkens's return from France. In the end it grew to several months. The reason for his delayed return is vividly encapsulated by the Hamburg merchants Hertzer and von Bobartt, who expressed in a letter dated 5 March 1745 that they could “see from your letter, dear friend, that love on the one hand and the pursuit of profit on the other fight a battle in your heart.”Footnote 38 Indeed, Luetkens postponed his marriage several times before finally returning to Hamburg in the cold “harsh autumn” of 1745.Footnote 39 The Engelhard family reacted to the delays “with astonishment” and great concern, and deemed interventions to be necessary.Footnote 40 In particular, the delays led to a certain amount of resentment on the part of Ilsabe, who demanded compensation and a sign of commitment.Footnote 41 This is highly informative about the role played by future wives in mercantile marriages of the eighteenth century: brides had a say in their marriage preparations, resisting the passivity imposed on them, at least to the degree possible.Footnote 42 Allyson M. Poska has coined the expression “agentic gender norms” when referring to this kind of behaviour in the early modern period.Footnote 43 In the case of Ilsabe, she pushed the envelope, in the truest sense of the word, of what was possible within the traditional sphere of marriage.Footnote 44 Ilsabe ultimately relented and agreed with her groom's delays. But this came with a caveat of her and her mother's own making, and with a high price for Luetkens. His response was a mercantile solution. He outsourced the problem to his intimate network, in particular, to his brother Joachim in London, who took charge of all the necessary procurements, a task that occupied the latter for several weeks. It was a wise strategy: by delegating this work, Luetkens saved time and thus could concentrate on finishing his other business dealings in France. He also took advantage of the fact that his brother was travelling through England and was thus in London anyway.
Marriage Preparations and Intimate Networks
A merchant marriage in the early modern period was a “highly commercial business,” as David Hancock succinctly puts it.Footnote 45 In many ways, marriage negotiations resembled negotiations in other areas of the mercantile trade.Footnote 46 For Nicolaus Gottlieb Luetkens, marriage was definitely part of his business plan, and he thus invested several months in his courtship negotiations. Contemporaries regarded reaching the “status of patched trousers,” in other words, finding a caring wife, as we read in a letter, to be an important crossroads in a merchant career.Footnote 47 Marriage even outweighed other business factors during a merchant's establishment period, because it could take a career to the next level. Still, as the Luetkens letters show, strategic thinking did not exclude the possibility of affection. Indeed, we are dealing with a “broad grey area in which both sentiment and prudence interplayed.”Footnote 48 Luetkens understood that to gain the affection and trust of his bride it was indispensable to “toss around love letters,” as he described it.Footnote 49
For Ilsabe and her family, her marriage was also an investment, both in terms of promised financial gain and social prestige, as made apparent by the fact that the family chose Luetkens despite several other “rivals” in Hamburg.Footnote 50 As Margrit Schulte Beerbühl has pointed out, the aim of “marriage between commercial offspring was still a proven method for strengthening, expanding, and sustaining the business.”Footnote 51 Hence, similar to other mercantile dealings, certain strategies were required when initiating, arranging, and preparing a marriage. This demanded business acumen on both sides of the negotiations. Indeed, I would add to Hancock's assessment by noting that the steps involved in initiating and preparing a marriage were a special form of commercial business dealing, one that required strategies and precautions over and above normal business practices. Most notably in Luetkens's case, it was only during his marriage negotiations that he included women in his correspondence network. Noticeably, there were clear differences in the tone of the letters when compared to his letters regarding other business dealings. There were also differences in the network he mobilised and how the individual issues were settled, namely, exchanging information and objects in confidentiality.
The letter episode in question is reconstructed in the following as a polyphonic letter conversation among several correspondents.Footnote 52 Both sides of Luetkens's story, the commercial as well as the more intimate sphere of marriage preparations, can be found. On the commercial side, the letters show how financial considerations played a part during marriage initiation and preparations. For example, bridal dowries were budgeted into merchants’ career plans: Luetkens expected a “nice sum of money from the dowry” to invest in his business.Footnote 53 And as discussed above, there were also commercial aspects with regard to the future bride and her family, whose financial interests were also expected to make gains. For Ilsabe and her family, the marriage was a concrete investment in their future with expected returns.
Luetkens first had to offer to Ilsabe and her family a house in Hamburg with a “stately interior.”Footnote 54 This house was also to become the merchant house he opened together with his brother-in-law. Luetkens arranged for its renting from France. Secondly, he had to offer financial safeguarding, a crucial prerequisite of marriage in the eighteenth century.Footnote 55 Thirdly, Luetkens's future wife demanded the right and financial means to furnish and equip their future home. Luetkens acquiesced, allowing Ilsabe “every freedom to do whatever you want with regard to the furnishing of the house.”Footnote 56 As Amanda Vickery has prominently shown, in the eighteenth century this was one way women from the middle and upper ranks of society upheld their agency, not only during marriage preparations but also within their marriages.Footnote 57 Purchases for a future home were in this regard “not a degraded female hobby,” but a means of autonomy.Footnote 58 It was exactly in this sense that Ilsabe Engelhard acted. She requested and was eventually given, together with her mother, complete control of furnishing and decorating her future home—as Luetkens writes, after “[your] fancy and how you like it.”Footnote 59
The group of letters in question also highlight something still more significant, namely, the love tokens demanded by Ilsabe as compensation for her future husband's oft-delayed return and postponement of their marriage. She requested specific pieces of valuable jewellery, including a ring and diamond earrings, as well as kitchenware and valuable mahogany and walnut furniture, “gifts typically selected by courting men.”Footnote 60 These requests can be seen as conspicuous hints to her future husband that her upcoming marriage and new house were to be “key sites for luxury consumption.”Footnote 61 They were also items with an emotional value, since several were specifically fancied by Ilsabe, such as a table for a card game she liked. This meant that Luetkens went to some effort to avoid disgruntlement on her side.
This group of letters also reveals information about the couple's intimate network and how the individuals in this network cooperated for the special purpose of their marriage. While this intimate group was part of Luetkens's larger mercantile network, a network typically already based on trust relationships, within the intimate group a deeper level of trust and greater steadfastness is apparent.Footnote 62 This is made particularly clear by the fact that letters about these more personal matters are marked with the note “particular letter,” or “special letter.”Footnote 63 They were usually found enclosed in normal business letters, or in packets of business letters addressed to the same person.
The objective driving the intimate network's collaboration was of a different nature, and the people involved in this group had closer and stronger ties: Luetkens's brothers, his long-standing friends and business partners, his future family members. Yet these people were ultimately collaborating with an economic goal in mind: the merger of two mercantile families. As Susanah Shaw Romney has defined it, such intimate networks “consisted of a web of ties that developed from people's immediate, affective, and personal associations,” and influenced the formation of “specific modes of economic engagement employed by women and men.”Footnote 64 Through the “essential personal and familial bonds” created while “find[ing] a marriage partner,” the institution of marriage “structure[d] women's intimate and economic lives.”Footnote 65 Thus the driving force was an emotional association, a level usually carefully avoided in other forms of mercantile business.
Luetkens was able to procure all the items demanded by Ilsabe for their future home and their marriage. He did this with the help of his brother, close family and business friends in London, Amsterdam, and Hamburg, a benevolent friend of his uncle and even that man's daughter, his future mother-in-law, and his future business partner and brother-in-law. During the early modern period, preparations for a marriage were usually accompanied not only by the exchange of gifts, but also larger items to seal the family connection, items that would “give honour to a marriage,” as Nicolaus Gottlieb's brother Joachim Luetkens observed.Footnote 66 Indeed, while it was typical that “during marriage initiation gifts played a major role, during the subsequent courting phase, it was often concrete material goods [such as furniture] that were exchanged on a large scale,” as has been pointed out by Richard van Dülmen.Footnote 67 In the case of our Hamburg couple, we see both forms of material culture. Intriguing about the episode portrayed in this group of letters is that Ilsabe knew exactly which buttons to press to receive the goods she desired, and her future husband knew exactly whom to approach to fulfil her wishes. Ilsabe and Nicolaus Gottlieb seem to have been a well-coordinated team even before their wedding.
How to Buy Patience
On Wednesday, 16 December 1744, Nicolaus Gottlieb Luetkens wrote a letter to Ilsabe Engelhardt.Footnote 68 The letter could be categorised as a love letter in the contemporary sense of the word. It is brimming with typical eighteenth-century love phrases invoking his “restless heart,” his “faithfulness and true love,” his hope to “embrace his future wife” and to “to hug her” soon.Footnote 69 However, the letter was also, if not primarily, about business. In this letter, Luetkens postponed his return to Hamburg for several months. His justification was that unfortunately “every time new obstacles come in my way and hinder me to return home earlier. I don't see that I will be in Hamburg before next spring.”Footnote 70 The obstacles being referred to, were his flourishing business in France, to which he gave priority. While he did not forget to mention the benefits for the family that supposedly came along with his delay, it would not be the last time that the “news and the intention of the late return [was received] with astonishment” by the Engelhardt family.Footnote 71 Later, his future partner Ehrenfried Engelhardt was even so frank as to state that Luetkens's ever-later return might make a mockery of their business, which shows how strongly the preparations for marriage were intertwined with the presumed success of the future merchant house. While Ehrenfried could only wait for his future business partner's return, Ilsabe found a way to gain her future husband's attention during his final months in France. Love letters notwithstanding, she most likely did not approve of his late return either. But her reaction was more pragmatic. In her replies to Luetkens, she requested diamond earrings, a golden ring, a valuable mirror, mahogany furniture—all luxury items.Footnote 72 Since her letters have been lost, we do not know the exact tone she struck when making these requests. Nor can we be entirely sure that they were only made out of resentment. Some requests may have also been due to necessity, or simply because she preferred furniture from London.Footnote 73 Taking into consideration the types of items she requested, one could assert that these two sides were at least in balance. Nonetheless, I am certain that by ordering these items, Ilsabe was seeking some form of compensation for the time she had to wait. I strongly assume that Ilsabe's requests were subtle and gentle. She could not manage all of the preparations on her own, her future husband also had to do his part; she simply could not wait any longer to begin making a home for herself and their future family. Following Amanda Vickery, this was her way to maintain her voice in the marriage preparations, an intrinsic part of her “agentic gender norms.”Footnote 74 For a bride the task of furnishing and equipping a home was particularly relevant, since “houses and household products became an important status symbol during the [. . .] eighteenth century,” as Lisa Sturm-Lind has noted.Footnote 75 Vickery speaks of a “gender division of domestic purchases” that fits perfectly with Ilsabe's behaviour.Footnote 76 The same is emphasised by Stobart and Rothery, who refer to “distinctive female modes of consumption,” also linking women to the buying of luxury items for stately family homes.Footnote 77 By furnishing and equipping a new house, a future wife could demonstrate “proper taste and elegance” before the public eye of the Hamburg elite.Footnote 78 While her demands came at a high financial price for Luetkens, they underlined her vested rights and also foreshadowed her future role as a wife and a women of fashion in eighteenth-century Hamburg.
In his letter of December, Luetkens fully agreed to her conditions. In my view, this is the most important passage and actual message of the letter. He confirmed that he will “order the demanded items from London,” adding immediately in the letter to his “dearest love” that he allowed her every freedom with regard to furnishing the house, because ultimately her “heart is what I am aiming at and want to win my dear.”Footnote 79 It is difficult to determine to what degree he could have rejected her demands. More important is the fact that he clearly gave in to them without any objection, perhaps seeing this as an appropriate way to mollify Ilsabe about his postponed return. Most certainly, his response confirmed the emotional bond between the two. However, the efforts he actually undertook himself to procure the desired items were relatively modest. As mentioned above, he outsourced this task to his brother Joachim, who was in London, not as a merchant, but as a prospective priest. In turn, Joachim received help from a business partner of the brothers’ merchant uncle, as well as several other people in their intimate network of confidants.
The subsequent process is especially illuminating with regard to marriage preparations during the eighteenth century. As has been mentioned, intimate networks were an intrinsic part of larger mercantile networks. However, in contrast to the larger networks, these intimate networks were used for more informal purposes. While the same people could be found in economically driven enterprises, when part of intimate networks they formed new constellations to deal with more practical or emotional matters, and were committed to absolute secrecy.
As we read in a letter from Nicolaus Gottlieb to his brother Joachim, Ilsabe must have been very clear about what items Luetkens was to procure: “a pair of diamond earrings and a [. . .] ring for women. The diamonds shall be white, brilliant-cut diamonds. [. . .] I strongly recommend that it must be cut diamonds and not raw diamonds. Mr Well can help you with that because he knows many jewellers. I also ask you to purchase for me and to send to Hertzer & von Bobartt in Hamburg under the name of Well or of our uncle at your earliest convenience the following items: a nice big mirror circa 2 cubits high and proportionally wide with 6 corresponding sconces, a Lombre table which is collapsible, 6 dozen tin plates, 24 bowls large and small, [. . .] 2 ditto [tin] flat soup plates, 6 metal candleholders with snuffers, 2 dozen good knives and forks for men, 2 dozen small knives and forks for dames [. . .]. In order to cover the expenditures you can draw a bill on Hertzer & von Bobartt à 2 uso to the order of Mr Well or our uncle. Please purchase these items only yourself when you are in London.”Footnote 80
London was well known at the time for a booming domestic and export market of elegant mahogany furniture as well as for other luxury goods and even for everyday items such as kitchenware.Footnote 81 It was thus the perfect place to buy these goods. For Nicolaus Gottlieb's brother Joachim, this task was, of course, not without challenges. Many of the desired objects were luxury items that required careful selection and handling. Since it was an immense testimony of trust from his older brother, Joachim accepted the task with “the greatest conceivable pleasure” and made “every effort to take care of the purchase and transport of the requested items with the available ships.”Footnote 82 As advised, Joachim worked with the London merchant Mr Well, who was acquainted with London jewellers “whom he trusts,” and who was also experienced in the trade with mahogany furniture. In the end, Joachim was able to procure all the desired items. For the furniture, he made sure to “follow the latest fashion” and that it was all handmade and in the “most elegant style [. . .], made of mahogany or walnut [. . .].”Footnote 83 Particularly the card table for the game Lombre, a game popular among eighteenth-century middle-class women and, as we know from the letters, one that Ilsabe enjoyed and was experienced at playing, will have met her expectations.Footnote 84 But even with regard to the kitchenware Joachim chose the most precious items like the requested knives for “dames” with ivory handles. As for the wedding jewellery, they chose earrings that had “4 diamond pendants which makes them look fabulous. The ring looks equally beautiful and fits perfectly with the earrings, it was newly made. The ring is golden.”Footnote 85 The earrings and the ring certainly represented appropriate items advocating for and honouring a marriage.
As is apparent from Joachim's letters, the thought of Ilsabe was omnipresent during his shopping trips. Joachim knew what was at stake, so he did his best to find the right items. In this regard, and with a certain amount of regret, he noted that “it would have been good if you or your beloved had described some of the items you wish in more detail,” but he still managed to fulfil his task by choosing “many of them after my own and Mr Well's fancy.” He also often “dared to take the role of the husband here for a moment”, a phrase that alone indicates the strong and intimate bond between the brothers.Footnote 86 It was indeed a bond that exceeded the character of mere trust that was typical for merchant families or networks. Luetkens not only trusted his brother, he allowed him access to his relationship and to his most personal decision-making processes. In fact, he allowed his brother to stand in for him and act in his name.
Joachim also tried to imagine Ilsabe, whom he held in high regard, when choosing the golden ring, noting that “she has very delicate hands.” He even made sure that the appearance of the rings was given a dress rehearsal: “the oldest of the Well's daughters has tried them on so that we can see how it looks and they did not seem oversized.” Quite the contrary, the jewellery was “finely crafted, the diamonds fine and clean.”Footnote 87 Joachim Luetkens seems to have gone about his brotherly duties with diligence.Footnote 88 In the end, he passed the test of trust with flying colours.
The subsequent process of transporting these items to Hamburg required tact, secrecy, and support from further helping hands. The bills were paid by Luetkens's uncle Anthony and his friends Hertzer and von Bobardt in Hamburg. These friends would also await the shipments in Hamburg. The transport itself was handled by another intimate friend in Amsterdam, Albertus de Meyere, as well as Luetkens's youngest brother in Hamburg, Anton.
As for the transport of the jewellery, Joachim chose a practice typical of the eighteenth century: hiding rings by enclosing them in a letter packet and sending them via the reliable and trusted postal route London–Amsterdam–Hamburg.Footnote 89 Joachim noted that, admittedly, “this is still hazardous,” but still the “best way to transport and the usual way to send such precious items, as they choose here [in London] to first send them to Holland. That is why I will send them to the de Meyere family first, and ask them to forward them to Hertzer & von Bobartt.” He made sure that “the brilliants are safely packed,” having them “wrapped in cotton and enclosed in a piece of corduroy which will be cut in the form of a letter which will be enclosed and sent in a letter packet.”Footnote 90
Over the next two months, the furniture left London on several ships which were part of convoys, that is, guarded by other ships. This was also a relatively safe method for transport. In Hamburg, Anton Luetkens, for his part in the procurement procedure, kept a neat “Nota von Mobilien,” an inventory of all the furniture that reached Hamburg. On this list we find all the items Ilsabe desired, as well as “2 tin teapots, 6 metal candleholders for the [dining] table, 1 walnut commode to be placed under the mirror [. . .], [and a] tea commode.”Footnote 91 It seems that Ilsabe had continued to make requests.
Not only the purchases, but also the transport and arrival of the furniture in Hamburg had to happen in secrecy, since the news of founding a new merchant house was always accompanied by rumour mongering. A merchant wedding changed the existing business community in a city; a new competitor entered the stage. Luetkens's marriage was “a thing of consequence,” as he wrote to his brother Anton.Footnote 92 Joachim assumed that it would lead to “humming and mumbling,” to “noises” comparable to “the ringing of a beer bell, as they call it in Hamburg,” the bell that was rung when it was no longer allowed to serve beer.Footnote 93 Both the Luetkens and Engelhardt families tried to keep the merger a secret as long as possible.
In the end, all of the furniture was moved into a stately Hamburg burgher house in the famous Katharinenstrasse, in Hamburg's merchant quartier. Luetkens moved in together with Ilsabe in 1745 and opened the merchant house Luetkens & Engelhardt there. Today, the golden Louis XVI bel étage of Luetkens's merchant villa is on display at the Hamburg Museum of Arts and Crafts, a testimony to the later success of his trading house.Footnote 94
Conclusion: The Importance of Letters and Tokens of Affection
While we have heard the voice of Ilsabe Engelhardt only indirectly in this story, her voice was clearly not a passive one. As seen in the letter episode above, Ilsabe's influence in her relationship with her future husband Nicolaus Gottlieb Luetkens was unmistakable. Historians such as Anne L. Murphy have shown on the basis of mercantile family records that one does not always need direct sources to derive information about the lives of societally positioned women.Footnote 95 Even if surviving sources are sparse, in many instances it is possible to gain information through documents connected to their merchant husbands. Murphy has investigated the early modern Jeake family and edited their letters in an important volume that in many ways resembles the story of Ilsabe and Nicolaus Gottlieb Luetkens. In fact, in the courtships examined by Murphy there is also a case of a bride demanding tokens of affection from her future husband in the same way as Ilsabe did, including “a ring with a diamond in it.”Footnote 96 This not only shows how common it was to exchange gifts during the preparations for a marriage, but also the corresponding expectations on the part of wife and husband and their families. This also underlines that “material objects [. . .] held a central place in rituals of courtship.” Material tokens and letters “were used to negotiate, cement, and publicize” the match, as it has been described by Sally Holloway.Footnote 97
Thus, although only a handful of the more than 2,400 letters in the Luetkens archive pertain to Ilsabe, these letters were highly informative about the later life of the couple. These few letters contain important information about the relationship between Nicolaus Gottlieb and Ilsabe, as well as between their families. Moreover, albeit indirectly, they provide information about Ilsabe's agency, her means of empowerment, and her powers of persuasion.Footnote 98 In the preparations for her marriage, she maintained her assertiveness in a manner typical of her time: furnishing the new family home while her husband was abroad. As I have shown in this article, this was in part compensation for her future husband's long absence and numerous marriage postponements. Despite his excuses and affirmations of love, she demanded concessions from her future husband: precious jewellery and valuable furniture. By purchasing these items, not only did the merchant buy time to continue his business dealings, he also won his future wife's patience.
The responsibility for their future home, the merchant house in the Katharinenstrasse, clearly rested to a large extent with Ilsabe and her mother. Luetkens's brother summed it up in a later letter quite succinctly by congratulating his brother on his new “home, where you find everything arranged.”Footnote 99 The most important precondition of arranging a mercantile marriage was keeping all the preparations secret. In our story this was done by mobilising the couple's most intimate network through letter correspondence, and by using special transport means. In the end, it can be hoped that all the arrangements satisfied both Ilsabe and Nicolaus Gottlieb. The only thing we know for sure is that on 22 November 1745, they celebrated their wedding in Hamburg.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express special thanks to Aske Brock, Gudrun Andersson, Robert Mitchell, Cynthia Peck-Kubaczek, and the two reviewers for their help with this article, and also to the speakers at our 2021 European Social Science History Conference (ESSHC) panel, Margaret Hunt, Misha Ewen, and Annika Raapke, for a lively discussion and their useful comments.
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