The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (73 page)

Women, as we have seen, had always had strong connection with the provision business, where their work naturally complemented that of their male relations. In June 1690, a certain Widow Long was discovered who was prepared to give evidence to explain the adulteration of the soldiers’ and sailors’ provisions the year before. ‘Bloody arts’ had been practised, as a result of which many had become sick. The widow would give her evidence so long as she was protected from the consequences, since ‘one of her nearest kindred was a practitioner of these arts; till his conscience troubled him’.
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Pepys, as Clerk of the Acts to the Navy Board, involved with the provisioning and equipping of the Fleet, came into contact with more than one ‘she-merchant’ in the course of his official duties, with pleasanter consequences. Mrs Elizabeth Russell had been the wife of a respected ship’s chandler named Robert
Russell. After his death in 1663, the widow took on the business – including the practice of sweetening those able to put business in her way. She sent Mrs Pepys a fine St George in alabaster, which the latter placed in her bedroom; Pepys himself received a case of knives with agate hafts, which he described as ‘very pretty’.
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Far from showing any prejudice against the female in such a role, Pepys seems to have been both impressed and pleased by the phenomenon. Sarah Bland was the wife of a provision merchant named John Bland to whom Pepys went in December 1662 in order to discuss supplies for Tangier, a newly-acquired possession, part of the dowry of Queen Catherine. After the official business was over, Pepys stayed on to eat a dish of anchovies, and drink wine and cider: ‘very merry’, he commented, ‘but above all, pleased to hear Mrs Bland talk like a merchant in her husband’s business very well; and it seems she doth understand it and perform a great deal’. Two years later he was once again ‘fain to admire the knowledge and experience of Mrs Bland, who I think as good a merchant as her husband’.
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Mrs Constance Pley was admired for her business sense and dealings not only by Samuel Pepys but by Colonel Bullen Reymes, a Dorset landowner and Member of Parliament, and a man with a reputation for financial acumen. He became Mrs Pley’s business partner and – as a result of these transactions – intimate friend.
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Bullen Reymes, a Royalist, had been brought up in the service of the Duchess of Buckingham – Catherine Manners, widow of the first Duke and only surviving child of the sixth Earl of Rutland. Reymes married the co-heiress to extensive properties in Dorset and Somerset. After the Restoration, he was made Charles II’s envoy to inspect Tangier after the Moorish invasion of 1664, and Surveyor of the Great Wardrobe (a financial post). At the time of the Dutch War he acted as the Portsmouth Commissioner for Sick and Wounded Seamen. A friend of John Evelyn, it was on the latter’s nomination that in 1667 Reymes was made a Fellow of the Royal Society. A man of the world in every
sense, charming, educated, well-travelled, Reymes paid no small compliment to Constance Pley at the end of his life; the first instruction which he left to his son, was to ‘keep fair with Mrs Pley … he is sure she will not wrong him’. Yet by upbringing Mrs Pley seemed destined merely for the obscurity of her own household in a Dorset town.

Colonel Reymes’s esteemed partner was born Constance Wise: a name of Bunyanesque appropriateness. In June 1635 Constance Wise married George Pley at Melcombe Church in Melcombe Regis, Dorset.
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George Pley fought in the Civil War, reaching the rank of captain on the Parliamentary side; later he was to become Puritan Mayor of Weymouth. Under the Commonwealth he had already begun to supply Cromwell’s fine new Navy with sailcloth, manufactured under his supervision in his cottages in and around Weymouth. Shortly after the Restoration Captain Pley was joined in business by Constance, their son George junior and Bullen Reymes. In the words of Bullen Reymes’s biographer, Constance Pley now became ‘the driving force of the enterprise’, which was expanded to include the manufacture of hemp and cordage, and the import of canvas and other ‘stuffs’ from France.
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These were good times to live in for those involved in the outfitting of ships – that is, until they came to present the bills for payment. The King himself, described by Bullen Reymes’s friend Evelyn as ‘a great lover of the sea’, took an obsessional interest in all the details of shipbuilding and naval fortification.
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English foreign policy after the Restoration, guided by hostility towards the Dutch and nervous rivalry with the French, demanded ships to implement it in either case, while the expanding empire – including the new jewel of Tangier – was sea-based. The Pleys, headed by Constance, were vigorous in their exploitation of this apparently favourable situation. In March 1664, and later in December, Constance Pley’s name features in a contract with the Navy Commissioners for different kinds of canvas – the only woman’s name to appear. Correspondence was however almost as much a feature of the business as supervision of the work and importation.

Between June 1660 and August 1672 nearly 100 letters were written on behalf of the joint enterprise to correspondents who included the Navy Commissioners such as Sir William Coventry and Thomas Middleton at Portsmouth, Sir John Mennes, the Comptroller of the Navy, and Sir George Carteret, the Navy Treasurer, as well as Pepys. Constance Pley herself wrote most of the letters – fourteen to Pepys alone are recorded, although only one of his has survived.
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Bullen Reymes wrote of Mrs Pley’s style; ‘her oil will be better than my vinegar’. But if Mrs Pley’s tone was never vinegary, it was sometimes highly charged. Most of the letters are pleas of varying degrees of urgency for payment, in order that the Pleys and Bullen Reymes should be able to pay their own workmen and suppliers.

In September 1664 Bullen Reymes himself fired off a furious letter to the Navy Commissioners, having discovered some patterns of canvas known as Noyals (for sails) at the docks supplied by Mr Browne and Le Texer, said to be the same as that used by the French King. It was, he pointed out bitterly, not a jot better than their own – and in any case the partners were owed £20,000! Under the circumstances, Parliament should at least see that they continued to buy the Pleys’s sailcloth and cordage; whose business ‘would have been aground long since but for his woman partner’.

The precarious finances of the King’s administration were not improved by the prospect of war with the Dutch; this war itself, which broke out in March 1665, plunged the Government’s credit downwards while elevating its expenses. The result was catastrophic, at least in financial terms (at the Battle of Lowestoft in June a naval defeat was inflicted on the Dutch by a fleet headed by the Duke of York). Everyone involved in the war, who depended in some way upon payment from a depleted Exchequer, suffered.

The sufferings of the seamen and their dependants, denied their promised pay and given ‘tickets’ or IOUs, were so acute that in July the following year a maddened mob of women demonstrators – over 300 of them – surged into the yard of the Navy Office, and stayed there, in Pepys’s words ‘clamouring and
swearing, and cursing us’. Then the women broke into the garden which gave them access to Pepys’s closet window ‘and tormented me’. Many were demonstrating on behalf of their husbands, who had been taken prisoner and were lying penniless and starving in foreign prisons.
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The extent to which those complaints were justified can be seen by the fact that this was one female mob from which officialdom did not shrink in disgust. Pepys himself felt sorry for the women and called one back to give her extra money as they were departing; she blessed him. When the Navy Board ordered the relief of the prisoners, it was to be done ‘without any trouble to be given to any of their relations in attendance here (demonstrating) for the same’.
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In 1665 the plight of the sail-makers, desperate for payment for work done for which the Pleys had no money to give them, was not much better; then there was the question of paying for goods imported from France (George Pley junior was now at St Malo supervising that end of the business). Mrs Pley bombarded Sir George Carteret with requests for payment, couched in language which would surely have brought forth recompense, had any recompense been available. At one point she worked out that the Navy Board owed her well over £8,000 and she invoked God himself to move Sir George Carteret’s hard heart.
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Young George Pley’s position at St Malo also concerned her as the ‘breach’ with France was seen to be approaching: Constance Pley wrote to Pepys demanding a convoy home for £10,000’s worth of hemp and other goods, lest they become the object of ‘nefarious plundering’. But when the precious cargo did arrive, still Constance Pley was not paid for it – as she told Sir John Mennes on 3 August, this was a poor requital for all her tedious waitings, the great risk she had taken, and the care. In the absence of payment, she had to draw £500 upon her son’s credit, something she was loath to do, but ‘necessity hath no law’.
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The twentieth of August brought an anguished letter from Constance Pley to Pepys; £15,000’s worth of goods delivered, and still no payment! From this she ‘can apprehend nothing but an approaching ruin, unless speedy relief be granted; £6,000 owing is wanted this month and next’. She ‘must end her days in
sorrow for meddling in this affair, and bringing in Colonel Reymes and other friends to suffer with her’.
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The summer of 1665 was one of gathering crisis, and not only for the Government’s many creditors. The first ominous signs of plague were seen in London in June; by August the capital was paralysed. Pepys, making his will, wrote on the tenth that the town was so ‘unhealthy’ that a man could not reckon on surviving more than two days. The King and the court had already gone to Oxford; even more to the point the Exchequer had moved to the old palace of Nonsuch in Surrey. The King’s minister, Arlington, engaged in finding funds for a spring campaign, complained of the difficulty of raising money at that distance.
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For Mrs Pley it was the difficulty of getting paid.

Trade was of course as adversely affected as everything else dependent on the busy working hum of a capital city. The rich merchants and their families, like the courtiers, fled. Many of them took refuge on ships moored on the river Thames from Greenwich to Limehouse.
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Mrs Pley heard from one of her correspondents, Richard Fuller, that every day was like Sunday in the City of London; not one merchant in 100 was left. She enclosed Fuller’s letter with her own, since Fuller was one of those who protested that health and rest were being ‘snatched from him’ because Mrs Pley could not meet her obligations, and that she was ‘going about to murder him’. At all points Mrs Pley took the responsibility for the business upon herself; payment
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be forthcoming, so that ‘the reputation of her husband and Colonel Reymes, who were drawn into the business by her advice, were not shipwrecked’.

In the meantime George Pley at St Malo, animated by something of his mother’s determined spirit, seized every opportunity to trade despite the French ‘vapour’ or threat of impending war. A small English ship which had sailed on to the French rocks in error, and thus had the right to ask for help to get on its way, was used to send canvas, yarn and hemp back to England. But as Constance Pley told Pepys in December, things brought in by ‘stealth’ inevitably cost most; she must be paid something out of the Prize Office, for that at least was enriched by the proceeds of wartime capture at sea.
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At last some payment came. Mrs Pley’s immediate ambition, after she had recovered from her abundance of joy, was ‘once more to fill the King’s storehouse which is very empty’. But the new year brought with it no halcyon period either for England or the Pleys. In January 1666 Mrs Pley was once more begging on her knees for £500 out of £2,000 owed for goods manufactured in the West Country, to ‘stop the mouths of the poor people in her employ’. By late February she described herself as so short both in purse and credit, that she ‘scarce dares show her face’. She suffered from a conviction that her appeals were being neglected just because they were so perpetual, but necessity left her no choice. As she told Pepys, if only a special clerk could deal with her on business matters, she could avoid these endless personal applications. Her ultimate threat was that she would come up to London herself and sort matters out.
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All the time the people at the centre were not without sympathy for Mrs Pley’s case: in the middle of April Thomas Middleton wrote to Pepys, ‘Madam Pley complains much for want of money; it would be a pity to let so good a manufacture of English canvas fail for want of encouragement.’ The trouble was that the King’s financial situation, and that of the country as a whole, was parlous; the Fire of London, coming in high summer to cleanse away the dreaded plague, was in a financial sense a further disaster. In the summer of 1667 the Dutch successfully raided the Medway. Mrs Pley was given ‘assignments’, i.e. first call, on the Navy tallies at the Guildhall; but in March 1668 Sir William Coventry was telling Pepys that Mrs Pley had written in despair that she could not even secure these payments. Surely ‘the burning of London cannot go so deep in the Royal aid … as to hazard her money’, Coventry commented. In 1669 there appear to have been some orders to pay.

The business intimacy between Colonel Reymes and Constance Pley, the respect which he felt for his ‘woman partner’, led to another venture being arranged between them. In the spring of 1666, a marriage was brought about between Tabitha Reymes and George Pley junior, the girl receiving a portion of £1,000. Public prosperity came to the Pley family
following Colonel Reymes’s elevation as Vice-Admiral of Dorset. Captain Pley was made his deputy; George Pley junior Collector of Customs at Lyme.