The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (51 page)

Some of it, which has been compared to the early hymns of the Methodists, touches with its simplicity:

I shall be enclosed and kept

I shall be very secure

Unto eternity itself

And through many strokes, endure.

Though many strokes of death doth pain

And make the body smart

Yet thy presence, dear Jesus, doth

Refresh and raise my heart.

Anna Trapnel did not however display much spirit of Christian forgiveness to her enemies:

… Bedone by as they did

O they have laid them on the rack

They have tormented by degrees

And as they have done, so shall it be

Saith Christ, done unto these …
⁴²

In
Voice for the King of Saints
of 1658 she developed the theme further:

O come with vengeance, come Dear Lord,

That their blood may drop out,

That do now rob and steal from thee.

Nor did she regard the godly and the ungodly as in any way equal in an ideal society: under the ‘Rule of the Saints’, the godly alone would have been constituted ‘earls and potentates’.
⁴³

Anna Trapnel was attacked in print as late as 1660, at which point, with the turn-about of the Restoration, she vanishes from history.
¹

After 1660 the voices of the prophetesses died away except for a few lonely exclamations; the female clamour of the Commonwealth, both sonorous and serious, gave way to the merry prattle of the ladies of King Charles II’s England. The bells rang out for the restored King on 29 May, the cannons roared, and over 20,000 people jostled to greet him in London, so that the noise of it all was so great that it made Charles ‘prodigiously dazed’.
⁴⁵
Women were amongst these 20,000, as there had been women watching the execution of his father eleven years earlier. But the age when the female voice might be listened to with general respect – at least if it claimed to come from God – was over.

Did nothing remain – except memories, painful or otherwise – of this time when women had been ‘stronger grown’?

It has been mentioned that among those women who caused public disturbances some of the wildest had been those ‘eerie spirits’ surrounding the strange Quaker enthusiast and preacher James Naylor. In some ways Quaker women, who were prominent in the sect from the start (giving rise to rumours that the sect was entirely composed of them), coincided in their behaviour with the worst prejudices concerning the uncontrolled female. Disruption of services, for example, by persistent crying out and ‘quaking’ during a minister’s sermon – hence the popular nickname for what was in fact the Society of Friends – whenever moved by the spirit to do so, was not calculated to win the respect of the male authorities.

‘Good Mistress Fell, go into your own pew, or else go your way’, exclaimed a local justice to Margaret Fell concerning her repeated interventions at the local ‘steeplehouse’, in the course of which she called him ‘a caterpillar’ to be swept aside (and she was the sect’s most respectable member).
⁴⁶

‘Little Elizabeth’ Fletcher, as she was generally known for her tiny physique, arrived in Oxford in June 1654 at the age of fourteen, on a self-imposed mission to speak to the undergraduates. After some ugly horse-play from her ‘flock’, which led to Little Elizabeth’s being pushed under the pump ‘with other shameful abuses’, this ‘virtuous maid of considerable family’, ‘contrary to her own Will or Inclination. In Obedience to the Lord’ ran naked through the streets of Oxford ‘as a sign of the Hypocritical Profession they made there’. In the end, since she still persisted in speaking, the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford had Little Elizabeth whipped for blasphemy.
⁴⁷

There was however another aspect to the Quaker religion at its inception which was of more profound importance to the weaker vessel than these manifestations of unrest. George Fox, the founder of the Society of Friends, was a weaver’s son from Leicestershire, whom William Penn described as ‘an original, being no man’s copy’. One of the marks of his originality was to face up to the uncomfortable implications of Christianity, that sex was not necessarily relevant where religion was concerned. Whereas an individual prophetess such as Anna Trapnel had
merely claimed a special position for herself, in 1656 George Fox published the first defence in English of the spiritual equality of women since the Reformation. As for testifying, wrote Fox in 1652, ‘I said that if the power of God and the Seed spoke in man or woman it was Christ.’
⁴⁸

Since Quaker testifying was dependent upon the arrival of the spirit of Christ in the breast, this doctrine of Fox’s cast an entirely new light on the whole subject of women speaking in public. We shall meet the heroic if turbulent Quaker women again, their voices at least unstilled, their steps vigorous and defiant in adversity, as they not only travelled their own land but ventured to the New World of Puritan Massachusetts and the old world of the Sultan’s Turkey. These women at least were confident that ‘in the restoration by Christ’ they were equal partners once again: ‘Man and Woman, as they were before the Fall’.
⁴⁹
Thus the most enduring claim made for woman during the period when the world was turned upside down proved to concern her soul, but that of course was invisible, as woman herself was sometimes supposed to be.

1
Although she is just possibly to be identified with Anna Trapnel who married in Woodbridge in Soffolk in 1661.
⁴⁴

PART THREE

Afterwards – A Continual Labour

‘Believe me, child, life is a continual labour, checkered with care and pleasure, therefore rejoice in your position, take the world as you find it, and you will I trust find heaviness may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.’

ADVICE OF RACHEL LADY RUSSELL TO HER DAUGHTER, 1695

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Worldly Goods

‘He is not a pleasant man – very few are; neither is [he] the very next sort for entertainment. One thing pleased: when he said “With all my worldly goods I thee endow”, he put a purse upon the book with two hundred guineas.’

DOROTHY DOWAGER COUNTESS OF SUNDERLAND ON HER NIECE’S BRIDEGROOM, 1680

O
n the eve of the Restoration, Pen, Sir Ralph Verney’s second sister, wrote: ‘I pray God send we may live to see peace in our times and that friends may live to enjoy each other.’ Pen had been one of that melancholy galaxy of unmarried Verney girls who remained at Claydon while Ralph went into exile, their portions caught up in the legal tangles caused by their father’s death in the King’s cause. For such dowerless young ladies, there were no brilliant matches available: it was more a case of ‘thank heaven, fasting, for a good man’s love’
¹
– or any man’s hand in marriage.

Sue Verney, for example, made do with a debt-ridden and drunken widower, spending her early married life at his side in the Fleet prison. Despite this, Sue loved her designated spouse most sincerely during their few years together, before she died in childbirth. Peg Verney was married off to Thomas Elmes – described as ‘a very humoursome cross boy’ who was soon to make her cry ‘night and day’. Peg’s own temper was not of the sweetest, and ultimately this cross-grained couple separated. Pen Verney, she who had quarrelled with Peg when asked to share a personal maid as an economy, drew her cousin John Denton; the best that could be said of him was that he
had
stopped drinking
… But Pen was in no position to be critical. ‘Sir, she was sensible her portion lay in a desperate condition,’ wrote her brother Henry to Sir Ralph, ‘besides, she grew in years and was not to all men’s likings’.
²

That left Moll and Betty. Moll was said to be ‘the plainest of them all’, but blessed – or cursed – with ‘a great deal of wit’; in addition she was ‘wild as a buck’ and thus ‘too indiscreet to get a discreet man’. Moll, refusing the offer of an elderly bridegroom, ultimately made a disastrous match with one Robert Lloyd. (She was probably pregnant beforehand, for there was talk of shipping her to Ireland or even Barbados to avoid disgrace.) As for Betty, she was variously described as ‘of a cross proud lazy disposition’ and ‘so strangely in love with her own will’ that she loathed all efforts made on her behalf.
³
She was undeniably too cross and wilful for anyone who knew her to be willing to take her.

In 1662 cross-patch Betty bestowed herself privately upon a poverty-stricken curate named Charles Adams out of sheer despair. She had met him when he was preaching at church; none of her relations were asked to the marriage. Betty angrily rebutted charges that she had thrown herself away: ‘I am not so much lost, as some think I am, because I have married one as has the reputation of an honest man, and one as in time I may live comfortably with.’ All the same it was Betty’s family which was faced with the problem of the Adamses’ livelihood; meanwhile Betty managed to blame them not only for her present poverty but for almost everything that had happened to her since childhood. Her sister Peg Elmes wrote: ‘Sometimes I am weary of hearing it, how she was cast off and forsaken and left to herself… sent to a person’s house to a school, like a baby.’ Dr Denton referred to Charles Adams and Betty as ‘Adam and Eve’ in search of a living; it was not intended as a compliment. Only Betty’s most charitable sister Cary Gardiner reflected that there were other examples of ladies marrying clergymen … Lady Mary Bertie for example.
⁴

The mingled sulks and despair of Betty Verney on the subject of marriage highlighted one problem of post-Restoration society: it was even more difficult for an ill-endowed girl to find a husband than it had been before the Civil War. And in cases
where the possibility of a good dowry did exist, more not less money was required from the father in return for an adequate widow’s jointure. It has been pointed out that the average ratio of dowry (given by the father) to jointure (settled on the girl by the bridegroom’s family) rose from 4 or 5 to 1 in the middle of the sixteenth century to between 8 and 10 to 1 by the end of the seventeenth.
⁵

The troubles of a gently-raised female at this period might be twofold. On the one hand her own portion was liable to have suffered from the effects of sequestration, confiscation and so forth like that of the Verney girls. Many different kinds of ruin had been brought upon families during the recent conflicts which made it difficult to provide a dowry for an unmarried daughter. At the same time these same families, or their equivalents, might well hope to remedy their fortunes by the time-honoured manoeuvre of capturing an heiress. But in this respect the daughters of the aristocracy and gentry were now meeting with what might be described as unfair competition from those richly-cargoed vessels, daughters of the City merchants.

Such brides could bring their husbands large and welcome amounts of cash. Few gentlemen’s daughters could compete with this. ‘Ours are commodities lying on our hands,’ wrote Sir William Morrice of his daughters shortly after the Restoration, while ‘merchants’ daughters that weigh so many thousands’ were sought out in marriage in their place. Sir William Temple blamed the first noble families ‘that married into the City for downright money’ for introducing ‘this public grievance’ by which the level of portions was raised all round, and landowners with many daughters were ruined. By the end of the century the agreeable whiff of good City money was to be detected in the grandest homes: the Widow Wheeler, she of the goldsmith’s shop at the sign of the Marygold who married her husband’s apprentice Robert Blanchard, would number the Earls of Jersey and Westmoreland among her descendants; in 1682 the prudent marriage of the Marquess of Worcester with a Miss Rebecca Child, aged sixteen, daughter of the East India merchant Sir Josiah Child, secured at least £25,000 for the future ducal house of Beaufort.
⁶