Olivia Colman reads a hilarious seventeenth century letter from a wife to her husband

On March 3rd, 1610, the one time Lord Mayor of London Sir John Spencer died, leaving behind a vast fortune to be inherited not by his daughter, Elizabeth, whom he had often treated terribly, but to her husband, Lord William Compton—an amount so large, in fact, that Compton was said to have “lost his way” for some time. It was in 1618, when Compton’s health was restored, that Elizabeth wrote him the following letter and listed the many ways in which was to spend some of her late father’s money. Olivia Colman joined us to read this letter at Letters Live at the Union Chapel in 2019.