The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (11 page)

In this connection ‘The Countess of Kent’s special Powder’, otherwise known as ‘Gascons powder’, must have been a useful household requisite: a child of five troubled with much phlegm, a gentlewoman of forty troubled with ‘crude and flatulous humours’, a girl of about eighteen troubled with ‘fits of the Mother’, a young woman of twenty-four ‘not without some suspicion of the Plague’, were all cured by grains of this powder dissolved in assorted liquids. It was also said to be good against smallpox, measles, spotted or purple fever, ‘good in swoonings and passions of the heart, arising from malignant vapours or old causes, as also in the Plague or Pestilent Fevers’. The Countess of Kent concluded with a sweeping recommendation worthy of her grandmother Bess: ‘These and many other Experiments have I with good success tryed, and with Gods blessing recovered divers severall Patients.’
¹⁷

Provision of her own necessities and medicines was only one part of the duty of the mistress of the household: the housewife in a financial position to do so must also act as ‘An Over-seer for the poor’. ‘She takes a Survey daily and duly of them,’ wrote Richard Brathwaite, ‘and, without any charge to the Hamlet, relieves them.’ A good housewife, he concluded, would think ‘that day wholy lost, wherein she doth not one good work at least’.’
¹⁸

That ‘crown and glory’ to her husband, Elizabeth Walker, was the daughter of a pharmacist in the City of London named Sadler, and was born in 1623 and married in 1650. Her husband in her biography did refer to the spiritual aspect of the marital partnership: let ‘man and wife be meet helps to one another’ in order to assist each other to reach Heaven. This was one refinement of the concept of the helpmate where Puritan thinking, with its stress on woman’s spiritual capacity, was in advance of its time. However, Elizabeth Walker was aptly described by her
husband as ‘both Martha and Mary’;
¹⁹
it was as Martha, with her conscientious housekeeping and her personally administered charities, that she exemplified the perfect wife of the time, whatever her religious persuasion.

True, it was as Mary that Mrs Walker began the day, at four o’clock in the morning, and sometimes as early as two or three, in order to obtain some hours of solitary meditation before the household was awake; in fact Mrs Walker was specially commended in the
Holy Life
for taking the trouble to light her own fire at that godly hour and not requiring some servant to do it for her! (The servants were first summoned at six for readings from the Bible, and prayers for the day-labourers came after breakfast.) After that Martha took over from Mary.

Indoors there was work with the needle, outdoors inspection of the dairy. Afternoons were spent visiting the sick, distributing salves and medicines. Mrs Walker would also visit women in childbirth, rising at any hour of the night, because of ‘the commands of the Litany’. She was an excellent businesswoman, referred to jokingly by Dr Walker as ‘my land-lady’ because he allowed her £19 worth of rents to handle a year. And he took particular pride in his wife’s skill at cookery; she was ‘clerk of her little kitchen, if I may so speak’, making her own pastry and cream cheeses.
²⁰

On the last wedding anniversary which they celebrated
–
honoured by the presence of ‘three coronetted heads’
–
this prodigious caterer managed to envelop thirty-nine pies in one dish which she had made herself. Afterwards the fragments were used to feast the many poor families who thronged to the house, pretending to seek Dr Walker’s advice, actually desiring Mrs Walker’s food. At Christmas everyone was offered hospitality, rich and poor; people were even encouraged to bring their children, for whom there was a special table: ‘Trouble not yourselves’, she would say, ‘I love to see this little fry.’
²¹

Mrs Walker also concocted ‘English wines’ and ciders to give away to her friends as presents. One is relieved to discover that this latter-day saint, who as a minister’s wife always wore black without a redeeming knot or ribbon of colour, reacted most
humanly when all the guests’ praise for the cider was directed towards her husband.

‘His cider!’, she would exclaim, according to Dr Walker half way ‘betwixt jest and earnest’, ‘’Tis my cider: I have all the pains and care, and he hath all the praise who never meddles with it.’ But then on many counts Elizabeth Walker showed herself a woman of independent view. Dr Walker also tells us
–
‘however much it might lessen her in people’s esteem’
–
that his wife was in the habit of observing that ‘Blacks and Tawnys as well as Whites were descendants of the first Adam’.
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The household routine of Mary Rich, although on a far grander scale, particularly after she became Countess of Warwick, conformed to the same ideal. Here, like Mrs Elizabeth Walker, is Brathwaite’s paragon of domestic energy. It is true that her autobiography was ostensibly written as a record of the ‘providences’ in her life after she had undergone a ‘conversion’ and embraced the stricter Puritan faith of her husband’s family (charting spiritual progress in written form, what Isaac Ambrose called ‘a Register of God’s dealings’, was a popular task with Puritan ladies).
²³
However, so many of these ‘providences’ occurred within the household, such being the intimate pattern of her existence, that we have here a picture that is as much domestic as spiritual.

Even her avowedly spiritual writings have a charmingly domestic flavour, an appreciation of the small mercies of life in terms of the small beauties of the daily round: ‘Upon walking in autumn among dead leaves’, ‘Upon seeing a silk worm spin’, ‘Upon seeing a hog lie under an acorn tree, and eat the acorns, but never look up from the ground to the tree from which they fell’. ‘Upon a Hen of my Lady Essex Rich’ described a chick which was hatched in the stillroom by her niece and afterwards ‘this poor grateful creature’ persisted in returning to the house to lay its eggs there (a lesson to those less thankful for benefits received). Fish, mowers in the fields, her pet dog, canary birds and linnets that learnt to sing like canaries, these were the kind of domestic sights seen at Leighs Priory, the Rich family property in Essex, which provoked edifying reflections from Mary.
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A typical day, on which Mary would rise at about six for two hours of solitary meditation, would include not only a lengthy ordering of her household with all its ramifications between breakfast and dinner, but also a visit to the sick servants, and another visit to the village girls’ school. These activities were not purely gracious. On the contrary, the cure of the sick (as Mrs Walker had distributed salves) and the administration of medicines generally, were an important duty on a level with the relief of the poor; most of the remedies, of a herbal nature, being prepared at home in the stillroom.

As for education, Mary Warwick was in the habit of catechizing her maids daily and reading to them books of devotion, in addition to her diurnal visits to the village girls’ school. The educative abilities of a mistress of a household
–
including those on a much smaller scale than Leighs Priory
–
were of enormous potential importance in an age when girls’ schooling as such hardly existed since the disappearance of the Catholic convents in the previous century (the Leighs Priory neighbourhood being fortunate in their patrons). Obviously the Puritans, with their emphasis on Bible reading, had a particular incentive to increase the spiritual capacity of their dependants by teaching them to read: Mrs Walker had her maids read holy texts to her. But in general, as we shall see when we return to the subject of educational opportunities for women, any conscientious housewife would expect to exert some kind of good influence in this respect
–
that is, when she could read herself.

‘Dost thou love me?’, Elizabeth Walker would ask of her husband, smiling.

To which he would reply: ‘Most dearly.’

‘I know it abundantly,’ she would answer, ‘to my comfort; but I love to hear thee tell me so.’

On another occasion Dr Walker was telling Elizabeth why he loved her and began: ‘First for conscience–’. She stopped him:

‘I would have thee love me, not because thou must, but because thou
wilt
, not as a duty but delight. For,’ she added, ‘we
are prone to reluctate against what is imposed, but to take pleasure in what we choose.’

‘Our mutual compellation’, wrote Dr Walker, ‘Was always “My dear”, not spoken automatically nor as an empty compliment, but the sincere interpretation of the language of our hearts.’
²⁵
This affectionate, even slightly flirtatious relationship between the Walkers, which emerges so beguilingly from the pages of the
Holy Life
, serves as a salutary reminder that the ground rules of seventeenth-century marriage, while they threw up a number of hard cases, did not preclude the formation of many very happy unions.

The intimacy which flourished in the ‘sturdy oaken’ matrimonial bedstead, destined to last ‘one whole Century through’ in Mary Evelyn’s phrase in
Mundus Muliebris
, could be passionate and idyllic as well as fulfilling God’s ‘own holy and sacred ordinance’. (The importance of the marriage bed as a symbolic and enduring piece of furniture was attested by Henry Oxinden when he took the seventeen-year-old Kate Culling as his second wife, and had no bedstead of his own to share with her: he commissioned his cousin Eliza Dallison who lived in London to have a vast bed made, seven foot seven inches in breadth, six foot three inches long, with four posts at the corners one foot round. ‘We would willingly have of the latest fashion,’ he wrote, ‘for this is all the beds we are like to make in our time.’)
²⁶
Marital sex, far from being frowned upon, was generally approved as leading to health and happiness in the husband; while the generally straightforward attitude of the time included the sensible notion that women too, once introduced to the pleasures of the marriage bed, could and would enjoy them.

‘Dear Niece, Now that you know what’s what, and the best and worst that man can do unto you, you will give me leave to wish you joy’, wrote Lord Monmouth cheerfully to his niece Philadelphia Carey, now Lyttelton, Shortly after her marriage. Philadelphia’s sister was ill at Winchester: Lord Monmouth went on to suggest the same remedy for her: ‘You may tell her that such an ingredient as you have had of late would do her more good than any physick she can take. But she is too good and too
handsome to lack it long if she have a mind to it; and therefore she may thank herself if she continue to be ill. But you will be better to preach this doctrine to her than I, now that you have tried it yourself. Well, sweet niece, to leave raillery…’
²⁷

Jane Sharp, the midwife, writing for popular consumption agreed with Lord Monmouth that the ‘Green Sickness’ which occurred in unmarried girls would be cured by the physical delights of marriage. What was more, this was an age when the possibility of the female orgasm was not only appreciated and encouraged, but also, in the rather muddled state of thinking on the subject of the procreative process, believed by some people to help it along. Jane Sharp, for example, writing quite frankly about the private parts of a woman’s body such as ‘a little bank called a mountain of pleasure near the well-spring’, thought that a woman’s imagination, when aroused, helped her to produce the seed. The French believed that the womb then opened to enable conception.
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The Puritan handbooks were equally forthright, seeing in marital sex part of the divine plan which helped to save the soul as well as keep the marriage together. As William Gouge wrote in
Of Domesticall Duties:
‘To deny this duty being justly required, is to deny a true debt and to give Satan a great advantage.’ Milton, declaring that there was nothing inherently sinful about sex itself ‘whatever hypocrites austerely talk’, envisaged in
Paradise Lost
an Adam and Eve before the Fall who did not want for ‘youthful dalliance as beseems Fair couple, linkt in happy Nuptial league’.
²⁹

There were prohibitions: excessive ‘dalliance’ even in marriage was to be avoided. Evelyn, in his advice to his son John on his wedding-night, particularly advised against the kind of ‘intemperance’ that would exhaust him (and might also create ‘unfortunate expectations’ in his bride…). But then Evelyn also advised against making love on a full stomach, by day and in very hot or very cold weather: in short ‘too frequent embraces dulls the sight, decays the memory, induces the gout… and shortens life’.
³⁰
The recommendation against sex in hot weather was general
–
in advice given in the almanacs the dog days of July and August were thought to be particularly hazardous. However, recent
research into baptismal registers, while it does show a correlative drop in baptisms in May and June, has not yet pin-pointed the cause, which may have been simply due to the exhaustion of the harvest work. Even here the point was well taken, that ‘if husband wont, another must’.
³¹
Although we must depend on guesswork, there is no reason to suppose that in a frank and earthy age these recommendations to sexual moderation in marriage were heeded by any who were not physically predisposed to it in the first place.

Married love is a more difficult subject to chronicle with certainty than the lack of it – if easier than married sex. Yet there are revealing vignettes such as that of Lady Oglander, the wife of Sir John Oglander, Deputy Governor of the Isle of Wight, who would rush eagerly out to meet her husband under the oaks on Matthew’s Green when he returned to London from the Isle of Wight; merely to ‘live lovingly’ with his wife was Sir John Oglander’s declared public ambition.
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And true conjugal felicity can certainly be glimpsed obliquely through the conventional public tributes.