The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (25 page)

Know ’tis a Slander now, but once was Treason.

Not only were men freed from the inhibition of the ‘dread Virago’s’ intellectual example by her death, but that male sovereign, James I, had himself a scant opinion of the female
intelligence. Perhaps the frivolity of his Queen, Anne of Denmark, had something to answer for; at any rate when it was suggested that his daughter, another Elizabeth, should learn Latin, the King replied that ‘To make women learned and foxes tame had the same effect: to make them more cunning.’ And he forbade it.
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Such sentiments would have come as a marked surprise to his English royal relations of yore: those Tudor princesses of the Renaissance, not only Queen Elizabeth herself who could translate Latin into Greek, and the famously erudite Lady Jane Grey, but Queen Mary Tudor, celebrated at the time for her knowledge of science and mathematics. For that matter James’s mother Mary Queen of Scots, whose intellectual attainments have been overshadowed by her dramatic life story was, as a princess, automatically instructed in the classics. We know from the English Ambassador to Scotland that she used to read Livy regularly for pleasure after dinner, with George Buchanan.
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In the sixteenth century Sir Thomas More had written: ‘I do not see why learning … may not equally agree with both sexes.’ At the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign a classical education was a mark of elegance in the circle round Mary Countess of Pembroke: William Wotton, in his
Reflections on Ancient and Modern Learning
, wrote of that period: ‘It was so very modish, that the fair sex seemed to believe that Greek and Latin added to their Charms: and Plato and Aristotle untranslated, were frequent Ornaments of their Closets.’ Such a tradition lingered on at a place like Little Gidding. Here the many daughters of the house, in the tranquil religious retreat founded by the Anglican theologian Nicholas Ferrar in the 1620s, were carefully educated in Latin, as well as arithmetic, writing and music (and such practical matters as book-binding). But it was in the seventeenth century that George Herbert was able to list among well-known proverbs: ‘Beware of a young wench, a prophetess and a Latin woman.’
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While women themselves were often contributing a note of ritual apology whenever they felt they had stepped outside the modest mental boundaries which circumscribed their sex.

Lady Elizabeth Hastings, carefully educated by her ‘Vigilant Mother’ Lucy Countess of Huntingdon to know French, Latin and Italian, was advised by her on marriage merely ‘to make herself fit conversation for her husband’. As a result, Lady Elizabeth showed herself so modest – that favourite epithet again – throughout her short married life with Sir James Langham that he never had ‘all those inconveniences which some have fancied, so necessarily accompany a Learned Wife’. She died still young in 1664. This model existence on the part of one who might otherwise have caused Sir James a great deal of trouble with her accomplishments, was summed up in a quatrain:

That Skill in Scripture, and in Tongues she got,

Made her a living Bible Polyglot.

These did not puff her up, she did descend

To the kind offices of Wife and Friend.
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It was not that women did not read the books where they had the ability or the opportunity to do so. In 1647 we find Adam Eyre of Yorkshire spending
IS
8d on a book at a fair at Wakefield for his scold of a wife – presumably to palliate her bad temper on his return. There was, as might be expected, a heavy bias towards what Lettice Falkland’s biographer called ‘good authors’. Mary Countess of Warwick’s tastes ran to the works of Jeremy Taylor, Foxe’s
Martyrs
, and Baxter’s
Crucifying of the World by the Cross of Christ
(which she described as her favourite book) as well as the poetry of George Herbert – who often features in ladies’ reading at this time. But Lady Anne Clifford read Turkish history as well as Chaucer, and had Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
read aloud to her by her cousin Maria. Lady Cholmley, wife of Sir Hugh, the Governor of Scarborough Castle during the Civil War, was ‘addicted to read and well versed in history’.
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Nevertheless an atmosphere of excuse was apt to prevail when a female achieved anything out of the ordinary of a literary nature. Mrs Dorothy Leigh, author of
The Mothers Blessing
, which had reached its seventh edition by 1621, dedicated it to her three sons (she was a widow). Writing, she admitted in this dedication,
was ‘a thing unusually among us’ since women generally used words to exhort. The book itself contained a lot of advice on the sort of wives her boys should marry, and the need to exhibit patience towards them subsequently: ‘Bear with the woman,’ she pleaded, ‘as with the weaker vessel.’
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It was not a coincidence that one of the few Englishwomen in the first half of the seventeenth century who believed, without apology, in the need to educate girls properly was a Catholic nun: Mary Ward.

The disappearance of the convents at the time of the Reformation had deprived English girls not only of convenient local places of learning, but also of a pool of women teachers in the shape of the nuns themselves. Indeed, when the convent of Godstow near Oxford was being disbanded, a petition for its preservation (unsuccessful) was mounted on the grounds that ‘most of the gentlewomen of the county were sent there to be bred’.
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At home in England the position of the woman teacher had not recovered from the collapse of the nunneries. (Again, it was no coincidence that the Anglican Little Gidding, derided by opponents of its high church sympathies as a ‘Protestant nunnery’, also placed a value on female education.) Many of the daughters of the English Catholic families however continued to be sent abroad to convents in the Low Countries to receive their education. These girls – Knatchbulls, Gages, Vavasours, Blundells
–
embarked on journeys of much danger and difficulty, defying the authorities to reach their goal abroad.
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It was their parents’ intention in sending them that they should be preserved in the ancient faith. A Petition of the House of Commons of 1621, which asked for all children of Catholics to be recalled from abroad and given Protestant teachers at home, also had in mind re-educating such children religiously. But these girls who wended their way to the Low Countries, often remaining there as nuns, also found a kind of independence unknown to their sisters still at home – paradoxically in
view of the black reputation of such convents back home in Protestant England.

Mary Ward’s obsession with women’s education (which has been shared by most people through history who have wished to improve the female lot in a permanent fashion) had as its ultimate objective the reconversion of her native England to Catholicism. But as a woman of remarkable independence of judgement, Mary Ward was quick to see that women in religious orders could not carry out their proper part in this apostolate, if they were not correctly prepared for it. As she told Pope Paul V, when she pleaded with him to be allowed to found an order of ‘English Virgins’: ‘the education of girls is congruous to our times’. Nor was this education intended to fit girls solely for the religious life. Mary Ward’s memorandum to the Pope on the subject of the ‘English Virgins’ described their aim as being to instruct young girls in ‘piety, Christian morals and the liberal arts’ so that they could ‘profitably embrace either the secular or the religious life’.
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Mary Ward was born in Yorkshire near Ripon in 1585: her baptismal name was Joan (she took Mary at her confirmation).
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She came of a prominent recusant family, related to half the other Catholics in England: two of her Wright uncles were involved in the Gunpowder Plot and her father was one of the many Catholic gentlemen arrested on suspicion immediately afterwards. On Mary herself the influence of her grandmother, with whom she lived for five years, was probably even more powerful since Mrs Wright was famous for being ‘a great prayer’. As a young girl, Mary became engaged to a member of the Redshaw family, but on his premature death, despite her ‘extreme beauty’ which attracted new suitors, she abandoned all thoughts of marriage. Instead she joined the Poor Clares at St Omer.

It was at this point that Mary encountered a completely new world from that of the hunted recusant Catholics in which she had been brought up. Women as a whole, and particularly women of rank – whether in religious orders or not – led much freer lives in the Low Countries. This was something on which
travellers commented, including the fact that women here participated equally in conversation and argument with men. At the same time the generally passive or secluded role of women within the Catholic Church itself had begun to be questioned in certain quarters after the Council of Trent. The spirit of the Counter-Reformation, incarnated by the career of the great Spanish nun, St Teresa of Avila, suggested that women could achieve much not merely by prayer and contemplation but by direct participation in the worldly work of the Church. As Mary Ward was to put it later, women were proposing ‘to follow a mixed kind of life, such as Christ and his Blessed Mother lived on earth’.
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At Gravelines Mary Ward attempted to found a Poor Clare convent for Englishwomen out of her own resources, and later she did found a boarding-school for English girls at St Omer, where she was aided by five English friends, including her sister Barbara. On one occasion at St Omer the nuns’ confessor made an unwise observation, ascribing their diminishing religious fervour to the weakness of their sex. Mary Ward strongly rebutted him. Was their failure ‘because we are women? No, but because we are imperfect women. There is no such difference between men and women’, she went on, ‘that women may not do great things!…’ As for the Catholic religion, ‘It is not
Veritas hominis
, verity of men, nor verity of women, but
Veritas Domini
’
–
the truth of God. Mary went on to quote the example of the (female) saints: ‘And I hope in God it will be seen that women in time will do much.’
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Certainly Mary Ward herself fulfilled her own prophecy that women in time would ‘do much’. Her life story was one marked by unusual reverses and dangers even by the standards of the seventeenth century; she was also dogged by ill-health. None of this stood in the way of her determination to prove that the education of girls was ‘congruous’ to the times in which she lived.

As time went on, an increasing number of English girls were sent abroad to be taught under the auspices of Mary Ward and her friends. This had the double effect of increasing Mary Ward’s contacts with the English Catholic world she had left behind via these young ladies, and also necessitating journeys to England
itself to seek out new pupils, or in certain instances annuities to pay for their board and tuition.

The account of these travels, made by Mary Ward between 1608 and 1618, makes exciting reading: a sort of
Westward Ho!
in reverse. London at that period was a honeycomb round which government informers buzzed, seeking to rout out secret Catholics. The ‘English Virgins’ came to be nicknamed the Apostolicae Viragines or the Galloping Girls by their pursuers. The technique of Mary Ward and her friends was to come in plain clothes, as it were, and blandly to hold open house, as though there was nothing to hide. Then they pursued their mission under the noses of the Government and its spies. But the ‘plain clothes’ were in fact deliberately splendid garments such as ladies of quality would have worn if they had
not
been nuns. We have a description of Mary’s sister Barbara ‘in a bright taffeta gown’ with a starched yellow ruff ‘à la mode’ and richly embroidered petticoats.
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When Mary Ward herself was hauled to the Guildhall to answer for her missionary work, she abandoned concealment and carried a rosary in her hand in defiance of the law
–
and her own safety. In the court she denounced the magistrate for blasphemy, and recited the litanies of the Blessed Virgin Mary in her coach on her way to prison.

It would be nice to be able to record that Mary Ward, allowed to vanish beyond the seas once more, was warmly received on the Continent. Unfortunately, for all her energies and perseverance in the cause of female education there, she was destined to arouse quite as much – and in a sense more – damaging hostility abroad. Here her enemies lay within her own Church. ‘Runaway nun!’, ‘Visionary!’, and worst of all, ‘False Prophetess!’ had shouted the townspeople of Gravelines. The spirit of the Counter-Reformation, where women were concerned, had its ardent supporters and also its furious detractors. While the immediate reaction of Pope Paul V to Mary’s idea of a new Institute of women following ‘a mixed kind of life’ in the world had been favourable, and his successor Gregory XV received her kindly in 1621, the atmosphere in Rome soon changed for the worse.

It was Mary’s intention to place her Institute under a superior
general directly dependent on the Pope (on the model of the Jesuits). That was an unpopular notion with the Catholic Church as a whole, and in particular the bishops. But her conviction that women could ‘do much’ was equally unpopular with that section of the Catholic Church which remained convinced that women
could
do much – at home or in a secluded convent. Exaggeration is always a skilful weapon of attack. Mary Ward was accused of wishing women to rival men in the ministry, that is to say, usurp their functions as preachers; Mary Ward had in fact deliberately made the point that women could not and should not preach or administer the sacraments, and wives should also be subject to their husbands.
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Yet the unfair charge succeeded in its aim.