The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (48 page)

On 14 January 1646 aldermen and common councillors of the City of London delivered a petition to the House of Commons concerning the multitude of religious schisms in the City which they wanted eliminated. They claimed that in one parish there were ‘eleven private congregations and conventicles who deserted the parish churches and have tradesmen and women preachers’. As a result, later that month several women preachers were committed to custody and others were brought before the Committee of Examinations of the House of Commons. Then in December 1646 the House resolved that no person should expound the Scriptures unless he be ordained in ‘this or some other Reformed Church’.
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With due respect to St Paul, why did the question of women preaching arouse such extreme apprehension? A popular rhyme of 1641 entitled ‘Lucifer’s Lackey or The Devil’s New Creation’ ran:

When women preach and cobblers pray

The fiends in hell make holiday.

At the bottom, it was woman’s demand for freedom of conscience rather than for freedom to ‘prate’ which caused concern. The crude mockery of ‘Lucifer’s Lackey’ masked a real dread that a woman who placed conscience above husband and family might consider herself outside the former’s control. The question as to whether a woman sectary had the right to leave a husband who was ‘unsanctified’ was never officially settled, though much discussed in the early 1650s. But the fact that some women sectaries such as Mrs Attoway did cast out or abandon ‘unsanctified’ husbands in the 1640s did nothing to relieve such fears.
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For this reason those women who were not ‘eerie spirits’ –
and thus were in control of what they said – generally took care to emphasize their own weakness in advance of their message. This self-deprecation might be expected to win the sympathy of a masculine audience, or at very least avoid arousing its hostility. Elizabeth Warren, a pamphleteer, declared herself fully conscious of her own ‘mental and sex-deficiency’ in her preface to
The Old and Good Way vindicated
of 1645, which bewailed the troubles of the times and defended a certain persecuted clergyman. In
Spiritual Thrift
she even went so far as to acknowledge that ‘we of the weaker sex, have hereditary evil from our grandmother Eve’. Claiming for herself in general a ‘silent Modesty’, she defended her action in having her sentiments printed, aware that she might be accused of having deserted both this silence and this modesty.
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As we shall see, even the redoubtable Katherine Chidley was not above pleading the weakness of her sex on occasions when it seemed politic.

Katherine Chidley lived in Soper Lane, off Coleman Street, a centre of Brownist activity, where St Pancras was one of the most famous of the Independent churches. Her son Samuel Chidley was also a leading sectary and later one of the treasurers of the Leveller party, hence Katherine Chidley’s prominence among the women who had tried to secure John Lilburne’s release. In the eighteenth century Ballard described Katherine Chidley as fighting as violently as Penthesilea, the Amazonian Queen, for the cause of Independency. The language in which she was described in her own time was less romantic if equally evocative. Thomas Edwards, a fanatical Presbyterian supporter, called her ‘a brazen-faced audacious old woman’, both ‘talkative and clamorous’, qualities as undesirable in a woman as they were in a witch.
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There is no reason to doubt the essential features of Edwards’s picture (although it may be pointed out that the language of Edwards’s attacks on the Independents certainly far exceeded in virulence anything the most ‘clamorous’ old woman could achieve). With Samuel, Katherine Chidley journeyed
through England in 1641, and founded ‘a small gathered church’ at Bury St Edmunds where eight adults signed the Brownists’ covenant. That took persistence and presumably a certain stridency too. In 1641 also Katherine Chidley wrote
The Justification of the Independent Churches of Christ
, to combat Thomas Edwards’s attack upon Independency.
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It was a sharply worded document. When Edwards argued that Independency would breed divisions within families, setting husband and wife against each other, Katherine Chidley countered that there had been a division in the first family, but that had been caused by Satan, not by toleration.

She wrote: ‘Next you will say: “Oh! How will this take away that power and authority which God hath given to Husbands, Fathers and Mothers, over wives, children and servants.”’ To this Katherine Chidley answered that St Paul in the First Epistle to the Corinthians had plainly declared that the wife could be a believer in her sense (‘sanctified’), and the husband an unbeliever (‘unsanctified’). Why would he have advised husband or wife not to leave an unbelieving spouse if the Apostle had not at least envisaged the possibility? Furthermore St Paul also envisaged some unbelievers wishing to depart and added: ‘A brother or a sister is not under bondage in such cases.’

Still, Katherine Chidley was careful to make it clear that an ‘unsanctified’ husband was not robbed of his ordinary rights, only of control of his wife’s beliefs: ‘It is true he hath authority over her in bodily and civil respects, but not to be a Lord over her conscience.’ On the primacy of conscience, Katherine Chidley was unalterably strong, denying utterly the claims of the ‘magistrate’ to rule over it: ‘I know of no true Divinity that teacheth men to be Lords over the Conscience.’ (Although she herself would not tolerate the Catholics – but that, she declared, was because they had attempted by plots and treachery to ‘ruinate the land’.)

At the end of the
Justification
Katherine Chidley challenged Edwards to a parley on the subject of Independency, each speaker to choose six people who in the presence of a moderator would thrash out the matter in ‘fair discourse’. The sting was in the tail. Katherine Chidley was confident that she would defeat
Thomas Edwards, but if by any chance she did not, that would represent no triumph for him: ‘for I am a poor woman and unable to deal with you’. It was perhaps that thought which led Edwards to reject the encounter.

Katherine Chidley’s second pamphlet,
A New Yeares Gift
,
Or A Briefe Exhortation to Mr Thomas Edwards
, contended that Independency alone followed the primitive pattern of Christ, and she argued that it should thus be instituted as the State religion, controlled by Parliament (not the Westminster Assembly of Divines) to form ‘one entire government established upon sound principles, unalterable’.
Good Counsell to the Petitioners for Presbyterian Government that they may declare their faith before they build their Church
, of November 1645, which suggested that ‘there is but one true Religion’, attacked Presbyterianism for not being according to God’s Word. The Chidleys, mother and son, were also said to have written the famous independent tract
Launseters Launse
together; and Katherine Chidley may have had a hand in the composition of
The Petition of Women
in 1649.
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Unlike the retiring Elizabeth Warren, who said of herself that she disliked controversy (and about whom as a result nothing is known beyond her pamphlets), Katherine Chidley led a robust existence outside the confines of the printed page. In August 1645, for example, she rose up in church in Stepney, preached the tenets of Brownism and attacked various ministers ‘with a great deal of Violence and bitterness’. Her particular grievance was the meeting of people in churches and other places where ‘idolatrous services’ had previously taken place. The incumbent minister, a Mr Greenhill, tried to rebuke her. Was no worship to take place in a church just because it had once been dedicated in the name of saints or angels? Did that imply that this church had been for ever ‘set apart’ for ‘idolatry’? This encompassed the whole of England, which had been ‘set apart’ or dedicated to St George. At this Katherine Chidley’s outburst of indignation was so overriding that Mr Greenhill was obliged to retire.
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In 1646 when Thomas Edwards issued his celebrated attack on Independency,
Gangraena
, he spared time to denounce the whole idea of women preaching, as well as the audacious
Katherine Chidley in particular. As for claims of spiritual equality, this would mean that ‘all women at once were exempt from being under government’.
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In fact, as we have seen, Katherine Chidley had specifically excepted such a claim from her demands; nevertheless the fear remained and Edwards, in voicing it, exercised a more potent influence on public opinion than Katherine Chidley in denying it.

In contrast to the ‘preacheress’, the prophetess had always been treated with a certain nervous respect by society – remember Jane Hawkins, ‘a poor woman (and she but a pedlar)’, who in 1629 had for a period prophesied before 200 people (see p. 187). Claiming direct inspiration from God, the prophetess might challenge accepted notions concerning religion and society but she did not necessarily in her own person challenge the accepted order. What differentiated the Civil War period was the substantial increase in the number of prophetesses and allied female seers. In this time of hopes and dreams and visions, the attitude of authority itself – the new authority: Army, Council, new Parliament, new rulers such as Cromwell – was equally more responsive.

In 1654 an Independent church congregation would debate at length whether the average man had that dominion over prophetesses such as he had over ‘all Widows and Maids that are not Prophetesses’. The eventual conclusion relied upon St Paul’s remark in his First Epistie to the Corinthians that ‘every woman that prayeth or prophesieth with her head uncovered dishonoureth her head’; from this admonition it was deduced that St Paul, since he did not explicitly forbid them, conceived of and tolerated the existence of prophetesses, so long as their heads were covered. So it was decided that ‘a Woman (Maid, Wife or Widow) being a Prophetess may Speak, Prophesy, Pray with a Veil. Others may not.’
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It was the good fortune of Lady Eleanor Davies, she whose desperate rambling prophecies concerning the fate of King Charles I had brought her first to the Gatehouse prison and then
to Bedlam (see p. 191 ff.), to survive into this more imaginative age. In 1648 she sought out Oliver Cromwell. With her predilection for anagrams, Lady Eleanor was from the first well disposed towards a man whose very name –
O. CROMWEL
– suggested the words
HOWL ROME
. The ‘O’ of Oliver she envisaged hopefully as the splendid round sun, in contrast to the sickly crescent moon which was the ‘C’ of Charles I. When the Army was at its headquarters at St Albans in 1648, Lady Eleanor presented to him a book of her prophecies first printed (with dire results) in 1633. She superscribed the book
The Armies Commission
, adding the verse: ‘Behold he cometh with ten thousand of his Saints to execute judgement on all.’ The splendid sun showed not only more tolerance but more humour than the sickly moon – but then of course Cromwell was not compared to Belshazzar as Charles I had been. Smiling at the superscription, and putting on his ‘specticles’ [sic], Cromwell gently observed: ‘But we are not all Saints.’
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As a result of this newly permissive atmosphere towards prophetesses, Lady Eleanor was able to spend her last years in a state of happiness and honour she can scarcely have expected in the bad old days of the King’s reign. She also had the sweetness of revenge; her old enemy Archbishop Laud, ‘horned like the lamb’, was executed in 1645. When Charles I was in prison in January 1649, shortly before his own execution, Lady Eleanor took it upon herself to write to him: ‘For King Charles, Prisoner, These’. She reminded him of her sufferings at his behest ‘because [I] took upon me to be a Prophetess’ and suggested that he make public acknowledgement of his ‘high offence’. He should also implore her forgiveness, ‘if so be you expect to find Mercy in this world or the other’.

In August that year, when the King, for better or for worse, had long exchanged worlds, Lady Eleanor’s pamphlet was reprinted. In 1651 appeared
The Restitution of Prophecy
, restoring all her original revelations, and at her death in 1652 the Anglican divine Peter Du Moulin suggested she had indeed been ‘favoured with some beam of divine knowledge of future things’, while being in general ‘
erudita supra Sexum
,
mitis infra Sortem
’: learned
above her sex, humble below her fortune. The official epitaph put up by Lady Eleanor’s family congratulated her on having ‘in a woman’s body, a man’s spirit’.
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What was more, despite these Cromwellian connections, a dutiful daughter saw to it that Lady Eleanor’s reputation was not blackened for ever after the Restoration. Lucy Countess of Huntingdon and her friend Katherine Stanley, Marchioness of Dorchester joined together to protest to Thomas Dugdale over the historical inaccuracies in his 1660
Continuation
of Sir Richard Baker’s
Chronicle
.
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As has been noticed (see p.204), Lady Dorchester succeeded in removing the slur against the courage of her own mother, Charlotte Countess of Derby, based on false Parliamentary reports. Lady Huntingdon’s task was more delicate. Lady Eleanor Davies could hardly be whitewashed entirely but it was a matter of just how she was presented. Dugdale’s statement that she was ‘generally reputed little better than a mad woman’ caused much distress; in particular Lady Huntingdon was anxious to rescue her mother from the charge that in predicting the death of the Duke of Buckingham she had been associated with the notorious popular astrologer of the time, Dr Lambe.