It is not uncommon, even these days, for a woman’s worth to be overshadowed by a brilliant, but quixotic, husband: the wife often the solid, reliable partner who just gets on with the everyday things in life. This was Martha Clare’s fate in the first half of the 1800s. History has paled her into insignificance beside her husband, John Clare, the Northamptonshire peasant poet. Had it not been for him – the relentless pursuit of his Muse, his indefatigable writing and his determination to become ‘somebody’ through his poetry – Martha would have remained barely even a legible name in a graveyard. As it is, she married John Clare at the age of 20, bore him nine children, looked after his father and kept the family together when rural Northamptonshire (as it was then) was going through the convulsions of enclosure and its aftermath. She was a strong, remarkable woman who lived the last 40 years of her life and died in Northborough.

Martha Turner was born in Tickencote in Rutland on 3 March 1800, the daughter of ‘cottage farmers’ with six rented acres and a few livestock. Martha herself was an unlettered milkmaid from Walkherd Lodge (now Walk Farm). Her meeting with John Clare in 1817 was fortuitous as he had had to find work as a lime-burner in Bridge Casterton, some seven miles from his home in Helpston. Although he had caught a glimpse of her before, they met, predictably enough given John Clare’s predilection for alcohol, in the Flower Pot pub in Tickencote. It is difficult, reading around his poems and his autobiographical sketches, to form a clear view of how fond John Clare really was of Martha, whom he came to call ‘Patty’. His infatuation for Mary Joyce, a wealthy farmer’s daughter from Glinton, seems to have petered out by the time he met Martha and, at the age of 24, he was ripe for love. He appears to have fallen in love with Martha at first sight and penned numerous poems to and about her. Nevertheless, he did not regard himself as the marrying type until Martha found herself pregnant late in 1819. They were married on 16 March 1820 in the Church of St Peter and St Paul in Great Casterton.  Martha’s parents were not keen on the marriage and did not attend the wedding. Martha went back to live with her parents after the ceremony as her husband could not afford a rented home for her and there was certainly no room at that time in his parents’ tiny cottage in Helpston. It must have been a daunting time for Martha not knowing what the future held, but holding firm to her love for John and, on 2 June for their new daughter, Anna Maria.