The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (66 page)

There was another talented ‘maid’ at court who was an almost exact contemporary of Anne Killigrew.
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That was Anne Kingsmill, later Anne Finch by marriage to Heneage Finch, a son of the third Earl of Winchilsea, and later still Anne Countess of Winchilsea when her husband succeeded to the title. (Heneage Finch was a great-nephew of that Sir Heneage Finch, Speaker of the House of Commons, who won the hand of the Widow Bennett in 1629.) Anne Kingsmill came of a good Hampshire family although both her parents died when she was very young; she began adult life as one of the six Maids of Honour to Mary of Modena, a body which included not only Anne Killigrew but also the witty and notorious Catherine Sedley, to whose very different use of her intelligence attention will be drawn in a subsequent chapter.

Anne’s marriage was also made within the purlieus of the royal (York) household: Heneage Finch was Captain of the Halberdiers and Gentleman of the Bedchamber to James II, then Duke of York. The closeness of the connection meant that King James’s flight from the throne threatened the Finch welfare: Heneage thought it prudent to take his wife to the family home
of Eastwell in Kent, where his nephew Charles, fourth Earl of Winchilsea, gave his relations a retreat.

The secluded circumstances in which Anne now found herself, however galling in political terms, might be described as ideal for a serious (female) author. For one thing Anne lacked the joyous but distracting surroundings of a young family: she was childless and remained so, despite therapeutic visits to the spa at Tunbridge Wells. This was a negative asset. Then she had the positive advantage of a husband who was not only affectionate – ‘They err, who say that husbands can’t be lovers’, she wrote – but also encouraging, making such gestures as asking her to write a poem for him ready for his return when he went to London. Heneage Finch was her ‘Dafnis’ and she was his ‘Ardelia’.
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Furthermore Heneage’s nephew Charles, their young patron, also extended encouragement to Anne, before his death in 1712 left Heneage Finch to succeed to the title as fifth Earl of Winchilsea.

Anne certainly did not miss the busy life of the city. She said of herself that fashion meant nothing to her, wanting merely a new gown once a year in the spring and nothing more; her scorn for the feminine ‘accomplishments’ with which the idle and uneducated beauties of society filled their hours has already been quoted (see p.394). What Anne enjoyed instead was the creative privacy of a country life, so much more conducive to the development of her poetry than the court where, as she pointed out, ‘everyone would have made their remarks upon a Versifying Maid of Honour’. She wrote some melancholy lines on this theme:

Did I my lines intend for publick view

How many censures, wou’d their faults pursue …

Alas! a woman that attempts the pen

Such an intruder on the rights of men

Such a presumptuous Creature, is esteem’d

The fault, can by no virtue be redeem’d.
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Anne Winchilsea was right in her instinct that privacy was a
further important asset to a she-author. For unlike Anne Killigrew, she lived out at least her natural lifespan, dying in 1720 in her sixtieth year. Chronologically if not stylistically (she was much influenced by Dryden) her poetry belongs to the eighteenth century; she first appeared in print in 1701, a small volume being published in 1713. Her reputation as a poet rests in consequence on more secure foundations: in the nineteenth century, Wordsworth fell in love with one of her poems, entitled ‘Noctural Reverie’, with its touching lines on the freedom of animals under cover of darkness:

Their short-liv’d Jubilee the Creatures keep

Which but endures, whilst Tyrant Man does sleep.

Commending its attitude to nature, he described ‘Noctural Reverie’ as ‘often admirable, chaste, tender and vigorous’.
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But this also meant that unlike Orinda, a generation her senior, Anne Winchilsea survived to be printed in the keen-bladed age of Pope. And once her poetry was made public, it was open season for the hunt, as it was for the ‘Female Wits’.

The trio of Pope, Arbuthnot and Gay together wrote a play,
Three Hours after Marriage
, in which Anne Winchilsea appeared as ludicrous Phoebe Clinket, ink-stained and with pens in her hair. Phoebe Clinket, unkempt as she might be, was also very much the lady of the house: she kept writing materials in every room in case inspiration seized her, and a compliant maid followed her about with a desk strapped to her back, so that Phoebe could even write on the move.
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Had Orinda been of a less charmingly tactful disposition, had Anne Killigrew cast modesty aside and made her secret feelings public, had both of them survived into the eighteenth century, one suspects that these ladies might have found themselves in the literary pillory along with ink-stained ‘Phoebe Clinket’.

Anne Finch, later Viscountess Conway, the little girl who had run about the gardens of Kensington House and worshipped her step-brother John, never did throw off those sick headaches which in her youth were ascribed to too much reading, unsuitable to her sex (see p.159). Yet despite a lifetime of crippling illness necessitating virtual social retirement towards the end, Anne Viscountess Conway survived to write a philosophical work admired after her death (when it was printed) by Leibniz; the editor of her correspondence describing her as ‘the most remarkable woman of that remarkable age’ and comparing her to that mystic of the twelfth century, the Abbess Hildegard of Bingen.
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It is too easy to say that Anne Viscountess Conway was able to develop her original intellect just because her illness cut her off from the world and enabled her to avoid the hostility generally shown to the learned lady. Just as it is far too simple to ascribe her torturing headaches merely to an unconscious desire to withdraw from the jovial society favoured by her husband; the pain which would cause her at one point to seek trepanning as the lesser of two evils was evidently real enough. Besides, diagnosis, whether medical or psychological, is notoriously dangerous in the absence of the patient, especially when all symptoms are described in the very different medical language of 300 years ago. Nevertheless the story of Anne Conway demonstrates that a perpetual acknowledgement of her own weakness was one way, albeit a very painful one, in which a clever woman could avoid disapproval; the physical doing very well in the judgement of the world as a metaphor for the intellectual.

Anne Finch, born in 1631, was the posthumous daughter of Sir Heneage Finch by the Widow Bennett. (She was thus linked to Anne Countess of Winchilsea by marriage not blood.) She had numerous intelligent and successful relations on her father’s side, including a formidable grandmother in Elizabeth Heneage, first Countess of Winchilsea. But if we seek a matrilineal descent for her intelligence, we may also turn to her mother, that pretty well-heeled Penelope who held off all suitors till she secured the one she wanted, and who proved to be a far more astute character than was generally suspected (see pp.108–112). Or perhaps it was
the cross between the two: the blood of the bright middle-class mother galvanizing into activity the more ancient strain of her father.

It was through her step-brother John that Anne first met the philosopher Henry More, and was introduced to his Cambridge Platonist circle, More being John Finch’s tutor at Christ’s College. Anne’s first letter to More, which precedes her marriage, enclosed her own translation of a piece of Descartes:
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for it was More who was responsible for introducing to England the Cartesian Rationalism which postulated that the general nature of the world could be established by demonstrative reasoning from indubitable premises (in contrast to the Empiricists like Hobbes, who held that knowledge of the world came through experience, and not through reason alone). Anne became for More ‘my Heroine Pupil’. Under his influence she read Plato and Plotinus, and studied such mystical works as the
Desiderata Kabbala
.

In 1651 marriage to Edward Conway made Anne into the chatelaine of Ragley Castle, Herefordshire: a position which enabled her, like Damaris Lady Masham, to dispense hospitality to her philosophical friends, principal among them More. For all Conway’s taste for London society, it would be wrong to regard Anne Finch and her husband as intellectually mismatched: here was no yoking of unhappy opposites. Edward, later third Viscount Conway, a man eight years older than his bride, was respected by More and himself a reader of Descartes. At Ragley he was happy to join in the discussions initiated by More on topics including spiritism and cabbalism as well as Rationalism. He was an early member of the Royal Society.

But Conway was also a man of action. The son of one of the principal Secretaries of State to James I and Charles I, he had distinguished himself in the north of Ireland in the recent wars. He could not see his own horizon, like that of his ailing wife, bounded by life at Ragley, whatever the stimulus of More’s company. As a man pursuing a public career, his devotion to the social life at Whitehall was certainly defensible; one can also understand only too easily how a man with a taste for late-night suppers with the King and Nell Gwynn would not necessarily
wish to spend every evening discussing Platonism in the country with a wife either crippled with or about to be crippled with a headache, a visiting philosopher and perhaps his wife’s intellectually-minded gentlewoman – ‘your library keeper Mrs Sarah’.
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Yet on the subject of Anne Conway’s health, it should be remembered honourably in favour of Lord Conway, that he showed admirable stoicism when their only child, Little Heneage Conway, died at the age of two and a half of smallpox. (Anne caught it too, enduring still further impairment of her fragile health.) He was advised that his wife would suffer agonies if she ‘bred’ again, and therefore trained himself not to wish for children: a piece of self-denial most uncharacteristic of his age. When the news was brought that Anne was possibly pregnant again, Lord Conway commented: ‘My thoughts were long since sealed against any impetuous desires after children, and my mind disposed to that which was more diffusive than gathering together an estate for an heir, and this [news] will not alter me.’
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His stoicism stood him in good stead, for Anne Viscountess Conway never did bear children.

It was fortunate for Anne Conway that she also had the benefit of those other affectionate relationships – in both of which she was encouraged in her learned studies – with her brother John and with More. Her intimacy with More lasted thirty years and was both platonic and ‘Platonick’. Early on, More dedicated
An Antidote against Atheism
to Anne, as one who in ‘penetrant Wit’ and ‘speculative Genius’ had so far outstripped all her sex. To More, Anne Conway was not only his ‘Heroine Pupil’ but also ‘Virtue become visible to his outward sight’. Sir John Finch, a physician at Cambridge who ended his life there with his lifelong friend and ‘chevalier’ Sir Thomas Baines (they were buried in the same grave) led in between a successful life as a diplomat. Anne Conway’s girlhood attachment to her brother never waned. Here More consoles her for her grief at his departure: ‘What you speak concerning friendship in reference to your brother, and in the behalf of a more passionate kind of affection as an inseparable concomitant of it [that is, grief], is true’, he wrote. All the same the philosopher felt bound to point out: ‘reason moderates these emotions’.
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Today Anne Conway’s recurring headaches would certainly be regarded as migrainous in nature, particularly as they were often accompanied by sickness (but migraine today, even if understood, is still something for which no absolute cause, let alone an absolute cure, can be given). In those days, as the Conway correspondence amply demonstrates, Anne Conway’s existence was bounded by remedies tried and failed, doctors approached and abandoned, healers of infinite variety solicited, whose increasingly bizarre nature indicates all too eloquently the desperation of the uncured – but surely not incurable? – patient with the passing of the years.

There was ‘a red powder’ and ‘a blue powder’. Mercury was resorted to three times (something which worried More), once in the form of an ointment prescribed by the celebrated physician Sir Theodore Mayerne, twice in the form of a powder taken orally, made up by Charles Huis, a well-known chemist. Robert Boyle made up another powder, to be taken in a solution of sack and canary, which he prepared himself. Opium – probably laudanum, at that time a novelty in England – was tried at the suggestion of Thomas Sydenham. Other doctors consulted included William Harvey and Sir Francis Prujean.

At one point Henry More proposed tobacco, which had a therapeutic reputation at that time and was not infrequently prescribed for headaches; he also suggested coffee.
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Anne Conway’s coach had to be stuffed with the softest down since even feathers threatened her acute sensibilities. She tried a special diet of ‘husbandman’s fare’: woodcocks, pheasants and baked turkeys, and at the other extreme ‘the experiment of water falling on your head.
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The gruesome suggestion of trepanning actually originated with Harvey in 1656 (although he did refer Lady Conway to a board of specialists). Nevertheless the patient, in what state of torment one can only guess, took a sudden decision to go to France and have the operation, involving the sawing open of a hole in the skull to relieve pressure, performed forthwith. In the
event the French physicians did no more than open Lady Conway’s jugular arteries, although it is not clear whether the doctors drew back or in the end the patient shrank from the ultimate ordeal. In any case, there was a further ordeal to be endured of quite a different nature: Lord Conway, coming to join his wife, was captured at sea by the Dutch and thrown naked into a filthy prison until such time as he was ransomed.
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