The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (36 page)

To most ’tis known

The weaker vessels are the stronger grown.

The vine which on the pole still lean’d his arms

Must now bear up and save the pole from harms.

Joanereidos
was to be much satirized in later years:

Which I should most admire, I know not yet

The womens valour, or the Poets wit.

He made the verses, and they threw the stones …

O happy stones which those fair fingers gripped!
⁴⁸

Even at the time it was not altogether clear that the masculine pole relished the principle of the female vine’s assistance – even if he enjoyed it in practice. (Never mind the fact that these intrepid women were already well equipped to defend themselves by the lives of physical endeavour they led at home or in the fields
–
war was different.) An uneasy impression that women were ‘stronger grown’ was one of the many disquieting feelings produced in the masculine breast by the course of the Civil Wars in England.

Camden in
Britannia
described Lyme as ‘a little town situate upon a steep hill … which scarcely may challenge the name of a Port or Haven town, though it be frequented by fishermen’ being ‘sufficiently defended from the force of winds with rocks and high trees’. And then there was its Cobb, a long spit of stone cutting off the harbour from the open seas. In 1643 Prince Maurice paid his own kind of tribute to the town which managed to frustrate his advance by referring to it as ‘the little vile fishing village of Lyme’.
⁴⁹
The fact was that Lyme (the Regis came later, ironically enough for the town’s loyalty in aiding the escape of Charles II after Worcester) held off Prince Maurice against all expectations; and contemporaries were agreed that this was owing to the exceptional enthusiasm of the defence.

On their arrival in the area in April, the Royalists had described the capture of Lyme as ‘breakfast work … they would not dine till they had taken it’.
⁵⁰
Thomas Bullen captured
Stidecombe House, three miles from Lyme, and on 20 April Prince Maurice took some nearby dwellings. Weeks later ‘little vile … Lyme’ still held off the invader, although cut off from the interior by the Prince’s forces.

The defenders consisted of some 1,100 men on day and night duty; but they were far from being well-equipped
–
they had not, for example, sufficient shoes and stockings to go round. Nevertheless their ferocity in their own defence was so great, and so many of the besiegers were slaughtered, that at one point their water supply was coloured rusty brown with blood. Some of the more affluent ladies inside Lyme when the blockade began were taken off – ‘to the ease of the town’ – in the Parliamentary ships of Lord Warwick, lying off the coast. It was left to the rest to suffer their casualties with the men. Following the bombardment, fire arrows were shot into the town, setting alight twenty houses. One maid lost her hand while carrying a pail to put out the conflagration, and another lost both her arms. A woman was killed while drying clothes on the strand near the Cobb-gate.
⁵¹

This was suffering in the pursuit of ordinary domestic duty. The women of the town also filled the soldiers’ bandoliers as they fought, which meant they shared the dangers equally with the men. They acted as look-outs, especially at night, work commemorated by Strong as follows:

Alas! who now keeps Lime? poor female cattell

Who wake all night, labour all day in Battle

And by their seasonable noise discover

Our Foes, when they the works are climbing over.

(The satirists later compared these faithful women to the geese who saved the Capitol:

Geese, as a man may call them, who do hiss,

Against the opposers of our Country’s bliss.)
⁵²

In fact the women of Lyme threw stones with the best of the
defenders; and with the best of the defenders it seems they too cursed the besiegers.

Finally, on 14 June the siege was raised and the Royalists departed. Then it was the women of the town, 400 of them, who fell upon Prince Maurice’s earthworks and fortifications, and with spades, shovels and mattocks, levelled them. As a result of their efforts in ‘throwing down ditches’, the fortifications which had threatened them were removed in a week.
⁵³

Three years later, Parliament, by now in control, ordered £200 a week to be set aside for the relief of the wounded of Lyme, and of the widows and children. This the Puritan John Vicars, in his history
Gods Arke
, described as ‘a good piece of State-Charity’. And Vicars gives us too the reaction of that unfortunate maid who lost her hand in the fire. When asked how she would now earn her livelihood, she is said to have replied: ‘Truly, I am glad with all my heart that I had a hand to lose for Jesu Christ, for whose Cause I am as willing and ready to lose not only my other hand but my life also.’
⁵⁴

Vicars described this as ‘A sweet and most Saint-like speech indeed’, and perhaps it was. Or perhaps the tone, far from being one of sweet submission, was one of belligerence, new belligerence.

1
In 1774 John Hutchins wrote of Corfe Castle in his
History of Dorset
, ‘The vast fragments of the King’s Tower, the round towers, leaning as if ready to fall, the broken walls and vast pieces of them tumbled down into the vale below, form such a scene of havock and desolation as strike every curious spectator with horror and concern.’
²⁵
The curious spectator today will find the scene scarcely changed.

2
Ned’s subsequent distinguished career – as Sir Edward Harley – eschewing the extremism of both Roundheads and Royalists, and sitting for Parliament throughout the reign of Charles II. would have heartened his adoring mother. It was his son and Brilliana’s grandson, another Robert Harley, who was that celebrated Tory politician of the reign of Queen Anne.

CHAPTER TEN

His Comrade

Her Husband was a Souldier, and to the wars did go,

And she would be his Comrade, the truth of all is so.

‘The Gallant She-Souldier’, 1655

‘I
n my poor judgement these times can bring no good end to them’, wrote Sir Ralph Verney’s aunt, Margaret (Poulteney) Eure on the eve of the war: ‘all that women can do is to pray for better, for sure it is an ill time with them of all creatures, for they are exposed to all villainies’. Three years later, when the first phase of the hostilities was ending, a pamphlet entitled
The Scourge of Civil War and the Blessing of Peace
seemed to indicate that Margaret Eure’s gloomy prophecy had been fulfilled: war was said to have enforced the mother to behold the ravishment of her own daughter, and made the sister mingle her tears with her brother’s blood; on a more mundane level, it was said to bring ‘A Famine of Bread, Virtue scarce and nothing public but disorder’.
¹

The helplessness of the female in wartime – falling on her knees in prayer for want of anything better to do to protect herself – was another article of conventional belief like her lack of courage; her passive suffering was colourfully, even gleefully, described by both sides in the usual propagandist style.

In fact the women who lived through the period of the Civil Wars were far from passive. Fund-raising was one activity: women brought their jewellery to the Guildhall to aid the Parliamentary cause. In London, Canterbury, Coventry and
Norwich, women formed committees to raise funds for troops of horse for Parliament. These were known in consequence as Virgin or Maiden Troops: Cromwell took the Norwich Maiden Troop into his own regiment in August 1643; ‘I thank God for stirring up the youth (your men and maids) to cast in their mite’, he wrote.
²

Then as spies or ‘intelligencers’, or simple emissaries, women had a mobility often denied to the other sex. Lady Byron, for example, was able to escape from the siege of Chester in December 1645 and ask the King (then at Oxford) for assistance. An unknown ‘poor woman’ at Portsmouth acted as an agent between Charles I and Henrietta Maria at the beginning of the war. The handsome red-haired Jane Whorwood played a more sustained part in the efforts to free the King from his various places of detention and imprisonment. As such she earned the praise of Anthony à Wood for being ‘the most loyal person to King Charles I in his miseries, as any woman in England’.
³
Indeed Jane Whorwood’s various attempts to come to the King’s assistance, by their very nature, could hardly have been undertaken by a member of the opposite sex.

At the beginning of the war Jane Whorwood was twenty-seven years old. Red hair was generally censured in the seventeenth century (traditionally it was a witch’s colour; it was also to be avoided in a wet-nurse for fear of sour milk) but Jane Whorwood was generally held to be ‘well-languaged’, ‘tall’ and ‘well-fashioned’ – even if she did have pock marks on her face. She had strong, even intimate Royalist connections: her father had been Surveyor of the Stables to King James, and her
step-father, James Maxwell, was one of the Grooms of the Bedchamber to Charles I. In 1634 Jane had married Brome Whorwood, eldest son of Sir Thomas Whorwood of Holton in Oxfordshire, and had given birth to a son (also red-headed, according to Anthony à Wood) the next year.
⁴

In 1647, when King Charles I was held at Holdenby in Northamptonshire by orders of the English Parliament, Jane Whorwood, ‘bold’ as well as handsome, visited him in order to convey funds which had probably originated with her step-father. She was seized and searched, but released; later a letter in cipher was found behind the hangings where she had stood in the King’s chamber.
⁵

From Holdenby, the King was conveyed to Hampton Court, having been transferred into the power of the English Army from that of Parliament. Here again Jane Whorwood visited him, bringing money. She also took an enthusiastic interest in the possibility of the King’s escape from the Army’s ‘protection’, consulting the celebrated astrologer William Lilly as to his best destination. From Lilly came the suggestion of Essex, where he was ‘certain he might continue undiscovered’. Unfortunately the King had already fled ‘in the night-time westward’.
⁶
(In view of the disastrous consequences of the King’s choice, Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight, one should not perhaps scoff at the workings of astrology.)

To Carisbrooke too came the faithful Jane Whorwood after more consultations with Lilly. Here the King found himself far more securely incarcerated under the control of the Puritan Colonel Hammond; at the same time the need for liberty in order to resume the royal juggling act between Army, Parliament and Scots was yet more urgent. Neither Jane Whorwood – nor anyone else – secured the King’s escape; but Jane kept up a barrage of attempts, including an effort to get him secretly on to a ship ‘to waft him to Holland’. On the advice of Lilly, she purchased aqua fortis, or nitric acid, to weaken the bars on the royal windows, so that they might be pulled from their sockets. Most of that was spilt on the way to the Isle of Wight; but at least Jane got as far as the King’s stool-room with a file also procured by the astrologer. Throughout the autumn of 1648 Jane Whorwood conveyed messages to and from the King at Carisbrooke and according to Lilly, also advised him of the most favourable astrological hour to receive the Scottish Commissioners. ‘I cannot be more confident of any’, wrote Charles I. Since Colonel Hammond was warned of the intentions of this ‘well-languaged’ gentlewoman, it must have been her sex which protected her and allowed her the immunity of these frequent – if in the end unavailing – journeys.
⁷

The disadvantage of Jane’s sex lay in the fact that sooner or later she was accused of being the King’s mistress. There is no evidence to support such a suggestion, which in any case would have been quite outside the King’s character: Charles I was blamelessly uxorious. That however was the penalty Jane Whorwood paid for being an active helper to her sovereign – and at the same time a woman. Afterwards Anthony à Wood innocently increased the rumours by stating the King had bestowed a casket of ‘precious jewels’ upon Jane Whorwood – in fact they went to Lady Wheeler, the King’s laundress. What was true was that Jane Whorwood ran forward to greet the King as he went to his execution
⁸
– but then that was in her ‘bold’ and loyal nature.