The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (76 page)

By the August of 1663, Pepys heard that his patron doted on one of the Becke girls; his days were spent at court but he passed all his evenings with her, as well as dispensing a great deal of money. Lord Sandwich was at this point a man approaching forty, in a powerful official position; although Pepys was in a sense not surprised that Lord Sandwich should show himself ‘amorous’ when everyone else at court was busy doing so, in another way he was deeply shocked to see his patron ‘grossly play the beast and fool’. Lord Sandwich’s ‘folly’, he was horrified to discover, included taking Betty Becke out in public, playing on his lute under her window ‘and forty other poor sordid things’.
⁸

At this point Pepys was convinced that Lord Sandwich was dabbling with one who was ‘a Common Strumpet’. Another report spoke of Betty Becke as ‘a woman of very bad fame and very impudent’. In November therefore Pepys was moved to write his patron a magisterial letter of reproof on the subject: how the world took a grave view of Lord Sandwich’s continued sojourn in a house of ‘bad report’ when his health was clearly mended; Betty Becke was charged with being ‘a common Courtesan’ there being places and persons to whom she was all too well known; the notorious wantonness of ‘that slut at Chelsea’, as Pepys assured his patron Betty Becke was commonly known, was causing scandal to adhere to the name of Lord Sandwich.
⁹

The following June Lord Sandwich did try the well-known adulterous expedient of using his daughters as a cover for visiting Mrs Becke; unfortunately the girls in question were well able to ‘perceive all’. In consequence they hated the place, and complained that their father’s one aim was to ‘pack them out of doors to the park’; while he stayed behind with Betty Becke.
¹⁰

The next move – on the part of Lord Sandwich’s wife – was an equally time-honoured one in the great game of adultery. Lady Sandwich was suddenly inspired to go down to Chelsea herself in order to pay a call upon Mrs Becke the landlady. As Lady Sandwich told Pepys: ‘And by and by the daughter came in …’. By some extraordinary chance – ‘for she never knew they had a daughter’, let alone more than one – Lady Sandwich found herself feeling very troubled, and ‘her heart did rise as soon as she appeared …’ As for Betty Becke, by another surprising coincidence, she seemed ‘the most ugly woman’ that Lady Sandwich had ever seen. As Pepys commented tersely, all this, if it was true, was very strange; ‘but I believe it is not’.
¹¹

However when the Becke family – invited by Lady Sandwich – came to call upon the Sandwiches in London, Pepys found that his own view of Betty was radically altered. She was neither ‘a Common Strumpet’ nor remarkably ugly. Although she did not have one good feature, Betty was nevertheless ‘a fine lady’, with a good figure, altogether ‘very well carriaged and mighty discreet’.
Pepys made a point of trying to draw her out in the company of Lord Sandwich’s hostile young daughters. When she did contribute to the conversation, as she did from time to time, she spoke ‘mighty finely’. Pepys reversed his verdict. Betty Becke was now ‘a woman of such an air, as I wonder the less at my Lord’s favour to her’; he saw that Betty’s true charm lay in her intelligence – ‘she hath brains enough to entangle him’. Two or three hours were spent in her company, Pepys and the rest of the ladies adjourning to Kensington where, in the famous garden with its fountain where Anne Conway had played as a little girl, now belonging to her elder step-brother, they all enjoyed some ‘brave music’ and singing. All in all, Pepys was delighted with the day’s work: ‘Above all I have seen my Lord’s Mistress.’
¹²

Five years later, as the intimate record provided by the diary draws to a close, Pepys reported that one of Lord Sandwich’s daughters was recovering from sickness in her turn in the Becke house in Chelsea. Lord Sandwich intended to visit her; but Pepys still suspected that it was ‘more for young Mrs Becke’s sake than for hers’.
¹³

Economics apart, there was the subtler question of independence for the mistress. When the Duchess of Newcastle referred to the allurements of women who were wanton and free, she had in mind their conduct rather than their status. Nevertheless it was true of the seventeenth century as people imagined it had been in ancient Rome: it was possible in theory at least for a courtesan to enjoy a measure of independence denied to her married sister, for whom security and adherence to the social norm were accompanied by the need for absolute subordination to her husband, legally and in every other way. Courtesans were sympathetically and even admirably treated in Restoration plays: Otway’s Aquilina in
Venice Preserv’d
– ‘Nicky Nacky’ scornfully trouncing her elderly admirer at his own request – or Aphra Behn’s much courted Angelica Bianca in
The Rover
who vowed that ‘nothing but Gold shall charm my Heart’. (Although even the spirited courtesan Aquilina received a sharp put-down from
her lover Pierre when she attempted to discuss politics: ‘How! A woman ask Questions out of Bed!)
¹⁴

In 1695 Rachel Lady Russell wrote a long letter of maternal advice to her nineteen-year-old daughter Katherine Lady Roos, interesting because it reveals such a very low expectation of female happiness even for a nice young lady married to a highly eligible young man. ‘Believe me, child,’ wrote Lady Russell, ‘life is a continual labour, checkered with care and pleasure, therefore rejoice in your portion, 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.’
¹⁵
(Admittedly Lady Russell had endured an exceptional sorrow, but then she had also been granted an exceptionally happy marriage.) For most women of this time life was indeed a continual labour – literally as well as metaphorically so. Even so, there were deep springs of strength and independence within the nature of certain females in this as in every other age, which would continue to bubble inextinguishably forth whenever the circumstances were propitious. For some of these, taking the world as they found it meant something a good deal more high-spirited, if less moral than the noble but essentially passive course advocated by Lady Russell. For such a woman, the life of ‘that glorious insolent thing … almighty Curtezan’ brought rewards beyond the merely financial.

For this reason Catherine Sedley is the most personally fascinating among the numerous royal mistresses because as an heiress, the alternative of a good marriage was open to her in youth. Instead of the ‘dull manage of a servile house’ in Anne Countess of Winchilsea’s phrase, she chose the more testing career of mistress to James II, when Duke of York. Moreover the weapons at her disposal included neither beauty nor any other form of attraction evident to the outward eye; even in youth Catherine Sedley was not reckoned to be pretty. She had a long nose and an unfashionably big mouth at a time when the ideal was a delicate rosebud; her complexion was too pale, lacking the carmine tint which made the approved beauties a contrast of ‘white and red’; a cast in her eye enabled her enemies to describe her gleefully as squinting. Above all, she was considered much
too thin at a time when the contemporary taste ran to the luscious: ‘Fubbs’ – for chubby – was Charles II’s tender nickname for Louise de la Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth. ‘
D’une extrême maigreur
’, wrote the French envoy Barillon of Catherine, although he admired her vivacity.
¹⁶
Skinny as a girl Catherine Sedley became positively gaunt as the years passed.

Catherine Sedley conducted her campaign for a place – and a high place too – in society through her wits. In an age when both sexes combined to praise the dulcet female voice expressing softly modest feminine sentiments, Catherine Sedley triumphantly made herself feared by an exceptionally sharp tongue.

This strong vessel was born on 21 December 1657, the only child of the poet, playwright and Restoration Wit Sir Charles Sedley and Lady Catherine Savage, the heiress daughter of Earl Rivers. The mother was wealthy but she was also unstable; a few years after Catherine’s birth she was mad enough to be placed under the care of a doctor – a Catholic because she herself, unlike her husband and daughter, was a Catholic. Catherine’s mother began to suffer from delusions that she was the Queen, having to be addressed by those who attended her as ‘Your Majesty’. She was finally confined in a Catholic convent abroad.
¹⁷

What was to become of Catherine, her father’s sole legitimate heiress and, in the conditions which made divorce and remarriage virtually impossible, likely to remain so? It was decided to place the girl at court as a Maid of Honour; after an unsuccessful attempt to enter the Queen’s household, Catherine was placed in that of Mary of Modena, then Duchess of York. Catherine seems to have made her mark early on along the path on which she intended to travel; in June 1673, when she was still only fifteen, Evelyn described her when she visited him at home as ‘none of the most virtuous but a wit’.
¹⁸

Still, the witty Catherine did have a portion of £6,000, according to popular repute, and a further £4,000 at her father’s death; there would have been more but for her father’s liaison with Ann Ayscough. Catherine Sedley’s arms when she reached the age of twenty-one described her as ‘sole daughter and heir’ of her father.
¹⁹
Yet after a series of affairs Sir Charles had formed a
permanent liaison with Ann, the penniless daughter of a Yorkshire gentleman, which resulted in the birth of an illegitimate son. Catherine’s mother outlived her husband but Sir Charles firmly termed his relationship with Ann Ayscough a ‘marriage’ and called the boy his heir. In his own words:

What a priest says moves not the mind

Souls are by love, not words, combined.

All the same £10,000 was no small sum as a portion. In 1677, for example, Sir Winston and Lady Churchill were interested in the prospect of Catherine as a bride for their son John (later first Duke of Marlborough), to the disgust of his sweetheart and eventual wife Sarah Jennings. Barillon described Catherine then as very rich and very ugly; but Sarah, after Marlborough’s death, called her a ‘shocking creature’.
²⁰
This however being eminently an age when cash counted more than scandal, such a wealthy young woman, however provocative, could easily have secured a husband had she so wished.

Instead, Catherine Sedley remained unmarried. When she did eventually take a husband nearly twenty years later, it was as a mature woman approaching forty with a remarkable past behind her; she also had a further sizeable fortune to accompany her, as a souvenir of that past. As an unmarried girl she was entitled to keep her post as Maid of Honour to the Duchess of York and that was certainly a position of which Catherine Sedley, unlike those other more sensitive plants in the same household, Anne Killigrew and Anne Countess of Winchilsea, made full worldly use. By the time she was twenty ‘Dorinda’, as she was nicknamed in satiric verse, was a celebrated if not popular character at court.

Dorinda’s sparkling Wit, and Eyes

United, cast too fierce a Light,

Which blazes high but quickly dies

Pains not the Heart but hurts the Sight …

wrote the poet and Wit Lord Dorset, playing on her alleged
squint. Dorinda’s personal Cupid was said to be no ‘wingéd God’ but ‘a Black-Guard Boy’ – one of the troop of insolent urchins loosely attached to the lower ranks of the royal household.
²¹

Most important of all, at the beginning of 1678, Catherine Sedley became the mistress of the Duke of York, supplanting Arabella, the sister of her proposed suitor, John Churchill. The mistresses of the Duke became a legend for their ugliness, once King Charles II had ventured the sly opinion that they must have been prescribed for his brother by his confessors. In fact several of those favoured by the Duke gave the lie to the joke: Susan Lady Belasyse was an acknowledged beauty, while the doe-eyed Elizabeth Countess of Chesterfield (she whom her jealous husband carried off to The Peak) was one of the loveliest women ever to be painted by Lely. It was a combination of the King’s wit with Catherine Sedley’s own which gave rise to the legend. For Catherine was one of those clever women who created a style out of her own lack of conventional attractions. Dorset hammered the point of her plainness in verse (Dorset’s especial venom towards Catherine Sedley was probably due to the fact that she rejected his advances, hell having no fury like a satirist scorned):

For tho’ we all allow you Wit

We can’t a handsome face.

Then where’s the pleasure, where’s the Good,

Of spending Time and Cost?

For if your Wit be’ent Understood

Your Keeper’s Bliss is lost.

But Catherine made the same joke herself with more economy: ‘We are none of us handsome,’ she declared of the Duke’s harem, ‘and if we had wit, he has not enough to discover it.’
²²

The crudity of some of the Wits’ printed attacks on women of the court who had incurred their displeasure make them literally unprintable: Sir Carr Scroope, merely describing Catherine as being ‘as mad as her mother and as vicious as her father’, was using language which under the circumstances was comparatively mild.
²³
A vein of morose dislike for womankind – ‘the silliest part
of God’s Creation’ in Rochester’s words – except during the act of sexual congress, runs through their works, including poetry as well as lampoons. And if it can be argued that the maddening feminine silliness referred to earlier (see p.401) provoked some of it, it is noticeable that Catherine Sedley, an undeniably intelligent woman, provoked even more.