The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (43 page)

It was not until January 1648 that the Committee of both Houses at Westminster lifted the sequestration – and it seems that the Warwicks did in the end play some kind of helpful role, ‘My dearest Rogue, it joys my heart to think how soon I shall be with thee’, Mary wrote to Ralph in March, and she hoped to bring Jack safely to him. They were finally reunited in April.

The tenderness
–
and the teasing
–
of their married life was resumed. When Sir Pickering Newton, taking his wife abroad, asked Mary’s advice as ‘an old housekeeper in France’ Sir Ralph reported that his wife was cross. ‘Had you called her an old woman, she would never have forgiven you such an injury. You know a woman can never be old (at least not willingly, nor in her own opinion); did you dread her displeasure but half so much as I do, believe me you would run post hither to make your peace.’
²⁶

But Mary never did live to be old, neither in her own opinion nor in anyone else’s.

She died at the age of thirty-four. The cause was consumption; but her condition must have been aggravated by her sufferings during that eighteen-month period of privation and worry in London. Sir Ralph’s own calendar of his letters to Dr Denton in London (a list, combined with extracts, giving both Continental and English dating) relates the progress of his anguish:

15/5 May 1650
. I write Dr [Denton] word I received his letter, but could write of no business, Wife being so ill.

22/12 May 1650
. Oh my … my deare dear.

29/19 May 1650
. Friday the 20/10 May (at three in the morning) Was the Fatal day and hour. The disease a consumption … I shall not need to relate with what a Religious and cheerful joy and
courage this now happy and most glorious saint, left this unhappy and most wicked world … I entreat you presently to pay one Mr Preswell (a silk man in Paternoster Row) about forty shillings, which he said she owed for something taken up there, though she could never call it to her remembrance.
²⁷

Mary’s body was taken in its coffin for burial in England. Sir Ralph wrote: ‘every puff of wind that tosses it at sea shakes me at land’. ‘Ah Doctor, Doctor,’ he wrote, ‘her company made every place a paradise unto me.’

Later Sir Ralph wondered what sins he could have committed to deserve such punishments: the loss of two out of his three eldest children, his brother, his father and mother, and now his wife ‘who was not only willing to suffer for and with me here, but by her most exemplary goodness and patience both helped and taught me to support my otherwise almost insupportable Burden. But, alas,’ he concluded, ‘What shall I now do!’
²⁸

What Sir Ralph Verney did not do was marry again. Luce Sheppard and Bess cared for the children. Unusually for his time
–
and responsibilities
–
Sir Ralph remained for the rest of his long life a widower. He died in 1696, nearly half a century after Mary, still faithful to the memory of his ‘dear, discreet and most incomparable wife’. As with others who have tasted the matchless joy of a happy union, Sir Ralph worried over Christ’s words of the New Testament concerning a marriageless Heaven. In the end he worked out his own form of faith: ‘And although … in the Resurrection none marry nor are given in Marriage, yet I hope (without being censured for curiosity) I may piously believe, that we who ever from our very childhoods lived in so much peace, and christian concord here on Earth, shall also in our Elder years for the full completing of our Joys, at least be known to one another in Heaven.’
²⁹

It was this thought which comforted him during those terrible moments when he was ‘almost swallowed up’ by sorrow.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Sharing in the Commonwealth

‘Since we are assured of our creation in the image of God, and of an interest in Christ equal unto men, as also of a proportionate share in the freedom of this Commonwealth …’

PREAMBLE,
The Petition of Women
,
APRIL
1649

D
uring the Civil Wars and after, it was axiomatic that women were enjoying a new kind of freedom and strength, just as it was conventional in many quarters to deplore the fact. On the one hand biblical women who had assumed some kind of active role, such as Esther, Deborah and Jael, became popular images of liberty, without such images being attached to any precise notion of rights. On the other hand the idea of a Parliament composed of ladies was generally mocked: in January 1642 some 400 women presented a petition to the House of Lords on the subject of the decay of trade and their general distress:

‘Away with these women,’ cried the Duke of Lennox, adding sarcastically, We were best to have a Parliament of women.’
¹

This notion also provided a convenient metaphor for satirists to use to attack other targets. The republican politician and pamphleteer Henry Neville wrote two pamphlets in 1647,
The Ladies Parliament
and
The Ladies, a Second Time, Assembled
, and another in 1650,
The Commonwealth of Ladies
, aimed at the
louche
morals of the Cavalier aristocrats in a series of
double entendres
in which the inherently absurd notion of such an assembly was taken for granted – as well as woman’s natural venality.
²

The ‘Rattel-head Ladies’ were stated to have assembled at ‘Kattes’ in Covent Garden – the notorious Oxford Kate’s, a hostelry already half-way to being a bawdy-house. The beautiful and dissolute Lady Isabella Thynne resolved ‘That no Roundhead dare to come into any of their Quarters.’ Ladies Montagu and Craven were thanked for favours to Cavaliers beyond the seas. A complaint was officially registered against Sir Henry Blunt, who was said to prefer the favours of common women to those of ‘Ladies of Honour’; other members of the Parliament discussed ‘the common enemy’, their husbands. And in attendance, to help with the ladies’ ‘pressing affairs’, were Doctors Hinton and Chamberlen – who were in fact fashionable obstetricians.

The Commonwealth of Ladies
began: ‘There was a time in England, when men wore the breeches … which brought many grievances and oppressions upon the weaker vessels; for they were constrained to converse only with their homes and closets, and now and then with the Gentleman-usher, or the Footman (when they could catch him) for variety …’ Now they have ‘Voted themselves the Supreme Authority both at home and abroad’. Lubricious details of their use of this new freedom followed.

Nor was this kind of gibing limited to Cavalier targets. The wives of the Army leaders were regularly and gleefully subjected to the scurrilous charge that they had ‘usurped the general’s baton’ – as it was said of Sir William Waller’s first wife, who was accused of being ‘ambitious of the popular favour’ and ‘predominant’ over her husband. Later Mrs Venables, wife of the commander of the disastrous West Indian expedition, would be arraigned in very similar language as one who had caused her husband to ‘lower his topsail to a petticoat’.
³
Not much could be made along these lines of Oliver Cromwell’s wife, a homebody if ever there was one (sneers at the economical housekeeping of ‘Protectress Joan’, as she was nicknamed, came closer to their target). But Fairfax’s spirited wife Anne, daughter of Lord Vere of Tilbury, was regularly known to pamphleteers as ‘Queen Fairfax’ (as Elizabeth Lilburne was known as ‘Queen Besse’). It
was suggested that his wife’s unfeminine ambition was causing Sir Thomas Fairfax to aim at the throne. ‘Tell me not of gowns or lace nor such toys!’, Queen Fairfax was supposed to have exclaimed to ‘Madam Cromwell’ in 1647, ‘Tell me of crowns, sceptres, kingdoms, royal robes; and if my Tom but recovers and thrives in his enterprise I shall not say pish to be Queen of England.’ When Fairfax later withdrew from the trial of the King, and in effect from the Parliamentary cause, it was once again conjectured – with more plausibility – that his wife had influenced him.
⁴

Some of this freedom was genuine enough, even if it had only developed through the breakdown of traditional social organization either during or after the war. A member of the older generation like Clarendon deplored the fact that ‘the young women’ at this date ‘conversed without circumspection or modesty’; that, perhaps, was only to be expected. Yet lack of chaperonage and in many cases lack of parents or at least fathers had led to the breeding of a rootless and thus independent generation. The Eure girls Peg and Mall, daughters of Ralph Verney’s ‘Aunt Eure’ (whose father had been killed in 1644) dealt very saucily with efforts to marry them off in the 1650s. Peg broke off one alliance and announced that she would marry no one with living parents who might order her about! Her forthright words on the subject would surely have made Sir Edmund Verney turn in his grave: ‘Sir, I am to lead my life with them [her possible in-laws] … and know so well my own temper that I fear I shall never be happy with them.’ She added that if dragged to the church, she would say no to her bridegroom at the altar. As for Mall, she turned down her cousin, Sir Ralph’s son and heir Edmund, on the extraordinary grounds that she found him personally repulsive; although ‘Mun’ professed himself madly in love with her.
⁵

This was the kind of behaviour to which Margaret Duchess of Newcastle drew attention in 1650 when she discussed women ‘affecting a Masculinacy … practising the behaviour (but not the spirits) of men’. Margaret Newcastle did not hesitate to ascribe this new confidence and boldness, or even impudence, as women began ‘to Swagger, to Swear, to Game, to Drink, to Revell, to
make Factions’ to the evil effects of the recent conflict. Civil wars were, she wrote, ‘the greatest storms that shipwreck honest Education’, and especially for women, that are ‘Self-admirers’.
⁶

Unfortunately this new liberty enjoyed by women in the Civil War and Commonwealth period was frequently associated with two phenomena dreaded by sober citizens of whatever politics. The first of these was sexual licence. Certain extreme religious sects were accused of preaching sexual licence although such scandals were often the product more of rumour and prurient imagination than of knowledge. One hundred members of the Family of Love (a sect founded in Münster in the sixteenth century) were said to be living in Bagshot, in a broadsheet of 1641; the feast of Priapus being celebrated among their calendar of saints. The Familists
did
have their marriages arranged for them by elders, hence rumours spread that they practised sexual communism. And because the Anabaptists practised ‘dipping’ as a form of baptism, and sometimes ‘dipped’ at night, they were accused of public nudity and thus immorality.
⁷

Not all the accusations were the product of misunderstanding or ill will. Some of the women among those sectaries known as the Ranters were unbalanced and hysterical. James Naylor was not a Ranter – he condemned them – but an extreme form of early Quaker who was at one point tried for blasphemy. Some of the women surrounding him were very wild in their behaviour, such as a couple known merely as Mildred and Judy, or Martha Simmonds, in whom ‘an exceedingly filthy spirit … got up; more filthy than any yet departed …’ None of this was reassuring to those who feared excess in women in the first place.
⁸

Ironically enough the few instances where free love was publicly advocated benefited in practice the male rather than the female. A Wiltshire rector named Thomas Webbe believed that he had rights to all women: ‘there is no heaven but women, nor no hell save marriage’ was the motto. Abiezar Coppe, a scholar of Oxford University, claimed that property was theft and pride worse than adultery: ‘I can kiss and hug ladies and love my neighbour’s wife as myself without sin.’ One Laurence Clarkson preached that to the pure all things were pure, moving from place
to place lying with ‘maids’ until he founded a little group in London called ‘My One Flesh’, a cooperative of willing maids; Clarkson justified himself by the example of Solomon. After returning to his wife in the country, Clarkson proceeded to travel England with another woman, a Mrs Star, until arrested by the Privy Council in 1650 for preaching the doctrine of free love.
⁹
Yet by seventeenth-century standards such incidents were as much to the discredit of the female sex as to that of the male sex, if not more so.

The second dreaded phenomenon was that of the ‘Amazonian’ all-female mob. This fear was not totally without reasonable basis: hopeful praise of female modesty and gentleness notwithstanding, such a force had a long history. To go back no further than the beginning of the century, women had led a successful revolt in 1603 at Market Deeping in Lincolnshire, against the draining of Deeping Fen, which threatened their own livelihoods. About 200 women had emerged from Langton and Baston ‘and did cast down a great deal of the captain’s ditch on the north side of the fen, threatening further to burn his houses, drown his servants, and if they had himself, to cut off his head and set it upon a stake’. It was only the intervention of ‘a gentlewoman’ who happened to be passing which dissuaded the women from their violent course, otherwise they would have done the captain, Thomas Lovell, ‘some great mischief’. Thirty-four years later the women of the Fens had lost none of their vigour in defence of the lands on which their cattle grazed, when threatened with enclosure, and were among those who resisted the work of the ‘overseers’ at Holme Fen with scythes and pitchforks. Again in 1641, the crowd which broke into an enclosed fen at Buckden consisted mainly of women aided by boys.
¹⁰