The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (62 page)

As a concession to their place in the Stuart family tree, it was thought important that these young Protestant hopes should be able to recite Anglican – as opposed to Catholic – prayers, but otherwise Mary and Anne could be safely abandoned to their favourite pastimes of whist and basset (another card game). Where education was concerned, the Princesses did learn French: Pierre de Laine’s French grammar, published in 1667 when she was five, was written for Princess Mary, and a second edition for Princess Anne. Otherwise they were taught to sing and draw and dance (Mary was an especially graceful dancer), but that was the limit of their preparation for life. When Basua Makin wrote in anguish that all young gentlewomen were taught nowadays was ‘to frisk and dance, to paint their faces, to curl their hair and put on a whisk’
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she might have been describing the princesses’ own fate.

Tragically late, it seems to have been borne in upon Queen Anne that she was lacking in some of the essential equipment of a monarch; it was said to be ‘an unhappiness’ to her that she was not much acquainted with English history and the reigns and actions of her predecessors: ‘she beginning to apply herself to it but a little while before King William died’. For all these last-minute efforts, Queen Anne as a monarch, with no magisterial co-ruler, no William III at her side, did display a lamentable ignorance of history and geography; while her grammar and spelling were both deplorable. (Only her good grounding in French, that traditional female accomplishment, but also of course the language of diplomacy, was to be admired.)
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As for Queen Mary, in effect a consort not a ruler, it was hardly surprising that in adult life she displayed few intellectual ambitions. Instead she concentrated on those gentle pursuits such as ‘knotting’, bugle-work to make bead bags, crewel-work and other forms of embroidery beloved of well-bred English ladies of her time. These were the refined accomplishments, the study of which Hannah Woolley advocated in order that a gentlewoman would appeal to her mistress: skill in such matters was certainly essential to the ladies surrounding Queen Mary. Celia Fiennes gives a picture of the Queen and her Maids of Honour embroidering away for dear life at Hampton Court.
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The poet Anne Countess of Winchilsea was aware that she was a scornful exception when she described herself as one who would not participate in such trivially pointless crafts:

… In fading silks compose

Faintly, the inimitable Rose,

Fill up an ill-drawn Bird, or paint on Glass,

The Sovereign’s blurred and undistinguished face.
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To many women, to Mrs Pepys for example, who adopted the new fashionable passion for decorating objects with shell-work, such accomplishments betokened the leisure to have mastered them, and such leisure, like the employment of a gentlewoman, was the outward symbol of their rising social status. In this way
amateur music publications rose as amateur singing extended, and the pursuit of painting – ever considered a suitable hobby for a lady – increased too. It was true that in certain rare cases painting might lead to professional employment. But the real motive which inspired a young lady to learn to paint or ‘limn’ as
The Ladies Dictionary
phrased it in 1694 (where ‘limning’ headed the list of a lady’s permitted recreations, followed by dancing and music and finally reading) was hardly to support herself; it was to bequeath ‘rare moments of her ingenuity to posterity’.
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The moments of her actual ingenuity may have been rare; but the hours of leisure which stretched about them were not. So the lady limner also bequeathed to posterity, along with her creative efforts, the message that she had been gracefully unsullied by any other occupation.

It will be seen that the Princess Mary was indeed an inappropriate dedicatee for Basua Makin’s
Essay
of 1673, a work in which she was much concerned to break the tacit embargo by which women were not allowed to study the classical languages. ‘Tongues are learnt in order to [learn] things’, she cried. As for the old witticism: ‘Many say that one tongue is enough for a woman’, Basua described that angrily as ‘but a quibble upon the word’. Furthermore Basua pleaded for education so that women could ‘understand Christ’. She did not suggest that women of ‘Low parts’ (the poor) should be educated; what she was anxious to do was to break down that dreadful idle way of life common to women in society, by which they learnt when young ‘merely to polish their Hands and Feet, to curl their Locks, to dress and trim their Bodies …’ and so were incapable of any finer way of life, including the enrichment of their own souls, when older.
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Moreover in her
Essay
, Basua Makin was already toning down considerably her original demands concerning the scope of female education. In 1663 she had called for a curriculum based on that of the celebrated Dutchwoman Anna van Schurman, with whom Basua Makin had kept up a correspondence (in Greek). This included the study of grammar, rhetoric, logic, physics, mathematics, geography, history, and all languages, with Greek and Latin stressed, as well as painting and poetry. Anna
van Schurman, the friend of Descartes and Richelieu, as well as the exiled Elizabeth of Bohemia, was another Helena who had been well instructed by her father; the vigour of her intellect equalled its emancipation: ‘By what right indeed are certain things alone apportioned to us? Is it God’s law or man’s?’ she wrote. Her influential work appeared in England in translation in 1659 as
The Learned Maid
, in which Anna van Schurman even suggested that women should be able to study the theory of military discipline if they so desired.
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In one respect however the great Anna van Schurman was mistaken. Citing the celebrated women of the previous century, such as Queen Elizabeth I and Lady Jane Grey, she supposed Englishwomen to enjoy exceptional freedom. In fact this kind of high-born female concentration on learning and learned discussion, and thus by implication on the preparatory education necessary, was by this period to be found far more widely on the Continent than in England.

Madame de Maintenon, the austere mistress of Louis XIV whom he married privately after his Queen’s death, was as keen an advocate of the education of poor girls of good family as Hannah Woolley or Basua Makin, but with a great deal more influence to bring to bear on the subject. She had set up several little schools before the famous school for 250 girls at Saint-Cyr was founded under royal patronage in 1686, Louis XIV taking a keen interest in the details. After the King’s death in 1715, Madame de Maintenon chose Saint-Cyr as her own place of retirement.
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A passionate interest in female education was not a marked characteristic of any of the mistresses of King Charles II, nor would it be appropriate to regard the King himself as obsessed by this particular aspect of the female development (although he did patronize the education of poor boys, particularly in mathematics, leading to his own pet topic of navigation).
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In the end Basua Makin herself was forced to compromise. When she founded her new school at Tottenham High Cross, described as ‘four miles out of London on the Ware road’, for which the fees were to be £20 a year, she found that it simply was
not viable without the inclusion of numerous pretty arts on the syllabus. Basua Makin’s new proposition was that half the time was to be spent studying ‘Dancing, Music, Singing, Writing and Keeping Accounts’, with the other half dedicated to Latin, French, Greek, Hebrew, Italian and Spanish – but those who insisted might ‘forbear the languages’ and learn only Experimental Philosophy.
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Unfortunately most people did wish that their daughters should ‘forbear the languages’. The accomplishments which would enable a single woman to survive in the world remained, however, regrettably from the point of view of female learning, those of Hannah Woolley. Where marriage was concerned the same standards prevailed. In vain Basua Makin protested against the contemporary belief that no one would marry an educated woman. Rather desperately she advanced the counter-proposition that learning in a wife was no disadvantage to a husband. Few gentlemen – and thus few parents – of the time would have agreed with her. In vain too Basua Makin denied that she was asking for ‘Female Pre-eminence’ and pleaded on the contrary that education would help women to understand even better that God had made Man ‘the Head’. It was significant that she also denied that education would make women so proud that ‘there will be no living with them’. Only in her proposition that since evil had begun with Eve and been propagated by her ‘daughters’, special care should be taken with their education, did Basua touch some kind of contemporary nerve.
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Even so, not many felt that Eve’s daughters would be improved by a study of the classics or other serious topics. John Evelyn had his daughter Susanna taught Greek and Latin. Yet to his beloved Margaret Godolphin he gave the advice that she should read the Lives of Plutarch, Cyrus, Seneca, Epictetus, Virgil and Juvenal in English and French – ‘More than this unless it be a great deal more, is apt to turn to impertinence and vanity.’
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John Locke benefited richly from the friendship of an educated woman: Damaris Cudworth, Lady Masham was the daughter of Ralph Cudworth, Master of Christ’s College, Cambridge
and Regius Professor of Hebrew (and incidentally the stepmother of Samuel Masham). She was Philoclea to Locke’s Damon in a long personal and philosophical correspondence. She also provided him with a comfortable country retreat, despite a professed indifference to what she called ‘the Impertinent Concerns of a Mistress of Family’, which she assured Locke would never have ‘Any place in my Heart; and I can at most do no more than submit to them’. As if in proof of this indifference, Lady Masham wrote two books herself as well as some very long letters indeed; ‘you know I cannot write short letters’. It was Locke also who engaged Elizabeth Birch, who could speak Latin and Greek fluently, as governess to Lord Shaftesbury’s grandson – another example of paternal encouragement to learning, for Elizabeth Birch’s father had been a schoolmaster. Yet Locke did not believe in the female need to study grammar. Lady Masham, deploring women’s lack of real educational attainments in one of her books, put her finger correctly on the reason: ‘so few Men … relishing these Accomplishments in a Lady’.
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Basua Makin, citing the usual historical stage army of eminent ladies to demonstrate the female’s essential worth – Deborah and Hannah, down to Queen Elizabeth ‘the Crown of All’ – ended on some more recent examples including Rachel Lady Russell and Anne Bradstreet in America. Her reference to Margaret Duchess of Newcastle who ‘by her own Genius rather than any timely Instruction, over-tops many grave Grown-Men’ was perhaps in danger of destroying her own argument. Her tribute to her own pupil, Lucy Countess of Huntingdon, was more to the point, suggesting she was unique:

A president for Ladies of this age,

So noble, humble, modest and so sage;

For French, Italian, Hebrew, Latin, Greek

The ornament of our Sex; where may we seek

Another like her self?
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It was generally felt that the rest of Eve’s daughters, given
Lady Huntingdon’s accomplishments, would sacrifice in modesty what they gained in learning. Better far to take no risks and educate the softer sex more softly.

Although the quality of education declined, the number of girls’ schools increased after the Restoration as the middle classes increasingly made use of them. School under these circumstances was a worldly rather than an instructive experience. Of course there were exceptions – the Quaker schools were an exception, as the Quakers were the exception in so many things. There were the Quaker ‘women’s schools’ (after all, if women were to be allowed to speak at Meetings they needed to be educated to do it), and there was also a Quaker co-educational boarding-school at Waltham Abbey, later moved to Edmonton, which George Fox visited in both localities. A Quaker school at Shacklewell in Hertfordshire under Jane Bullock was founded in 1667 on the advice of George Fox, for instructing ‘young lasses, and maidens in whatsoever things were useful and civil in creation’; Rachel Fell attended it. There was another Quaker school at Chiswick under Ann Travers. Quakers apart, the overall figures for female literacy itself based on all classes also improved.
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Nevertheless the ludicrously sketchy nature of lessons learnt in most schools provided the butt for satire in many Restoration plays.

A solemn young female cousin of Oliver Cromwell, born in 1654, who kept a private diary for ‘the help of my Memory, concerning the work of God on my Soul, which I desire thankfully to commemorate’, was placed by her father at school in London; she recorded that the sparks of religious life were almost extinguished within her as a result of this experience.
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Little Molly Verney, on the other hand, daughter of Edmund Verney by his poor ‘distracted’ wife, who was sent to Mrs Priest’s school at Chelsea at the age of eight, found there exactly the training she wanted.

She desired to learn to ‘Japann’, a special course which cost a guinea entrance and about 40s for materials. Edmund was quick to extend the paternal blessing: ‘I approve of it; and so I shall of
any thing that is Good and Virtuous, therefore learn in God’s name all Good Things, and I will willingly be at the Charge so far as I am able – tho’ they come from Japan and from never so far and look of an Indian hue and colour, for I admire all accomplishments that will render you considerable and Lovely in the sight of God and man …’ But then Molly’s fate, as planned by her father, was to be placed in the household of a lady of quality, with her own maid and her board paid, as a kind of finishing process; then she would be married off to a country squire.
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