The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (78 page)

As well as the wit, the spirit was also undiminished in Catherine. Some of Catherine’s lands in the reclaimed Fens, granted to her in 1683 by the Duke of York, were granted after the Revolution by King William to the Earl of Torrington, more out of confusion than malice. Catherine took the case to the High Court of Chancery and won, but Torrington brought in a Bill by leave of the House of Commons to confirm his grant. At which Catherine ‘prayed’ the House of Commons in her turn, appearing on her own behalf at the Bar of the House. She was, however, not successful. Although the House added a clause to Torrington’s Bill granting the Countess of Dorchester £4,000 arrears in rents, and an annuity of £600, the bill was in the end ‘passed in the negative’; so Catherine never got her rents.
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Finally in August 1696, when she was thirty-eight years old, Catherine married Sir David Colyear, a veteran Scots soldier who had served under William III in Flanders. The Wits had a field-day: ‘Proud with the Spoils of Royal Cully’, they called her, adding: ‘The Devil and Sir David take her.’ The thick paint now
applied to the appearance of the ‘Wither’d Countess’ was also the subject of much comment, nor did Catherine’s sharp tongue escape censure:

Too old for lust and proof against all Shame

Her only business now is to defame.

Sixteen years before, Dorset had already gloated over her decline:

Tell me, Dorinda, why so gay …

Wilt thou still sparkle in the box,

Still ogle in the ring?

Canst thou forget thy age and pox?

Can all that shines on shells and rocks

Make thee a fine young thing?

But Dorset was premature in his rejoicing. Sir David was later created Earl of Portmore; Catherine bore him two sons, one of whom inherited the title. It seems that her style as a mother was no more hypocritical than her style as a mistress had been, for she told the boys: ‘If any body call either of you the son of a whore you must bear it for you are so: but if they call you bastards, fight till you die; for you are an honest man’s sons.’ At the court of Queen Anne, Dorinda was still to be seen sparkling away in ‘great splendour’, covered in diamonds. At the coronation of George I, when the Archbishop of Canterbury, according to custom, went round the throne formally demanding the consent of the people, it was Catherine who was heard to say: ‘Does the old Fool think that Anybody here will say no to his Question when there are so many drawn Swords?’
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Catherine was still tottering round Bath in her finery in 1717, and finally died in the October of that year. If a mis-spent life by most standards, hers could hardly be termed a wasted one.

The life of Mrs Jane Myddelton, like that of Catherine Sedley, was founded on masculine support in return for sexual favours,
although of Sir Charles Sedley’s categories Jane Myddelton was regarded as ‘a Beauty’ rather than ‘a Miss’. She performed the functions of a mistress, it was true, to a variety of eligible men – men eligible to keep a ‘great Mistress’, that is. But the role of a beauty, which Jane Myddelton was so admirably fitted by nature to play, somehow elevated her beyond anything contemptible in the popular esteem; her affairs were seen more as a tribute paid to her great beauty, as the affairs of certain very beautiful and essentially passive women have been seen all through history.

The daughter of Sir Robert Needham, Jane married Charles Myddelton of Ruabon in June 1660 when she was fifteen. He was ten years her senior and a widower, a man of good family but small fortune, being the sixth son of Sir Thomas Myddelton Kt. Jane bore her husband two daughters: another Jane, born the following year, and Althamia. At first the newly-married pair lived with Sir Robert Needham in Lambeth. There seems to have been some plan for settling in Plas Newydd or New Hall in the parish of Ruabon with the help of Sir Thomas Myddelton; in 1664 Charles Myddelton wrote to his father: ‘I long for nothing more than to be with you.’ But at Easter 1668 the Myddeltons settled in Charles Street, in the parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields, where they were still living nearly twenty years later.
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It was the court which was the centre of the Myddeltons’ life. Jane soon won a reputation as ‘the most beautiful woman in England – and the most amiable’, one which she preserved for the rest of her life: in 1683 when she was approaching forty, Evelyn was still able to write of her, the ‘famous and indeed incomparable beauty, Mrs Myddelton’.
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Jane never amassed a great fortune as did some of the avaricious royal mistresses, but the indisputable asset of the wife’s dazzling appearance enabled both Myddeltons to enjoy an agreeable life at the court, without any official position, quite beyond their normal financial expectations.

In Jane Myddelton’s features, in total contrast to those of Catherine Sedley, were to be found the ideal of seventeenth-century beauty as laid down in the rules of the time. Here was the perfect oval face with the lofty smooth forehead – ‘the high
temples’ of
The Ladies Dictionary
– completed by a neat little chin. Here was the nose neither too big nor too small, the little mouth with its cupid’s bow upper lip, the well-marked arched brows. Here too was the well-rounded figure, the milky white
décolletage
above the plump round high breasts – ‘two little worlds of beauty’ – which caused Pepys, admiring her from afar at the theatre, to rate her as having ‘a very excellent face and body, I think’.
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Above all Jane Myddelton was blonde.

Although men of course continued to fall passionately in love with dark women as they had always done, there was no doubt that the spectacle of a blonde beauty aroused a particular poetical reverence in observers, as though some extraterrestrial being, the Venus of the
Aeneid
perhaps, was passing that way: ‘a tint of rose glowed on her neck and a scent of Heaven breathed from the divine hair of her head’. This was the language used about the lovely blonde Maid of Honour Frances Jennings (sister of Sarah Duchess of Marlborough) by Anthony Hamilton: ‘To sum up in a few words – her face reminded one of the dawn, or of some Goddess of the Spring …’
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Dark ladies had to contend with the conviction that saturnine looks concealed a saturnine temperament: Sir Henry Cholmley of Scarborough was proud that his blonde mother had brought about ‘the whitening of black shadows’ in his family’s physical inheritance, while of Henry Oxinden of Deane’s intended bride Elizabeth Meredith it was written that her outward fairness was ‘a fair ambassador of a most fair mind.’
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Equally Hamilton wrote of Jane Myddelton that she was all ‘white and golden’, and that she was magnificently made. Her thick blonde ringlets surrounded a face which Lely loved to paint. ‘Fair and foolish’, wrote Margaret Duchess of Newcastle angrily of blondes in general (she was not one); Henrietta Maria Blagge, Margaret Godolphin’s sister, another blonde Maid of Honour, was accused of being ‘whey-faced’ and ‘yellower than a quince’ by the Comte de Gramont, who reserved praise for those ladies who accepted his advances. For all these jealous carpings, contemporary handbooks were full of recipes for dyeing the hair blonde as well as whitening the complexion. And from the point
of view of Jane Myddelton’s lovers, the warning of
The Ladies Dictionary
that yellow hair had been since the time of the Danes a sign of lustfulness – ‘golden Flames’ sparkling without might indicate similar flames burning within – was no doubt enticing rather than the reverse.
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All the same it must be said that a look of cow-like complacency stamps Jane Myddelton’s fair face, even at the deft hands of Lely. Despite her famous amiability, her air of redolent languor was not to everyone’s taste. Her refinement and her pretensions to intelligence irritated everyone not madly in love with her, and even a few who were – ‘she was the most tiresome when she wished to be most brilliant’ – being one of those who larded her talk with French expressions. A rival beauty also told Pepys (who was always fascinated to hear such details about the belles of the court) that Jane Myddelton gave off ‘a continued sour base smell’, especially if she was a little hot. Nevertheless her protectors included Ralph Montagu, that notable ladies’ man, who finally married another blonde beauty, but a wealthy one, Elizabeth Countess of Northumberland; Richard Jones, later Viscount Ranelagh, reprobate son of the esteemed Katherine Viscountess Ranelagh; and Francis Russell, brother of William, fifth Earl of Bedford, who took her to visit Evelyn at Sayes Court. She was after all, as Saint-Evremond’s epitaph declared of her, ‘
illustre entre les belles
’. She died in 1692 at the age of forty-seven. It was said of her decease that she died gracefully, as though she had studied how to do it; and so in a sense the ‘incomparable’ beauty had.
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For the women of the poor, the career of the common prostitute certainly promised the possibility of what the great Irish historian Lecky in his sonorous passage on her suffering figure – ‘the most mournful, and in some respects the most awful, upon which the eye of the moralist can dwell’ – described as ‘disease and abject wretchedness and an early death’. Compared to this, the style of Mrs Myddelton – all white and gold – was shimmering and luxurious indeed. Yet to be realistic the lives of ‘your common jilts
who will oblige everybody’ should be contrasted not with that of Mrs Myddelton but with the daily round of their social equals. Women who supported themselves as manure-gatherers, salt-spreaders and the like
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(not the pleasantest of jobs) might well envy the financial rewards of prostitution, even if their superior morals prevented them from turning to it.

The figures for these financial rewards are of course so infinitely variable, and also obtained in such a random fashion from the records and literature of the time, that it is difficult to be precise. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, 6d a ‘bout’ – Pepys’s word – was quoted in the country, and up to 20d in the city. In 1649 Ann Morgan of Wells was overheard being offered 1s by a client to ‘lie with thee’; she proceeded to demand 18d because he had torn her coat and ‘hindered me the knitting of half a hose’. But Ann Morgan was known to charge 2s 6d, double the usual fee, to soldiers. Robert Hooke, picking up a ‘call girl’ as he termed her, at a coffee-house in Change Alley, Cornhill, in the 1670s, paid her 5s. If an average rate for a female weeder or spinner of between 2d and 4d a day is borne in mind, or for a domestic servant between £2 and £4 a year, it will be seen that under certain circumstances prostitution was at least financially tempting. Most tempting of all economically was the prospect of trade in the New World: when conditions were bad (the Fire of London, for example, had a most depressing effect on the market and the whores had to lower their prices) enterprising ladies set off for Barbados or Virginia where the general shortage of women aided business.
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Returning to Lecky’s picture, it must be said that disease and abject wretchedness and an early death at this level were not solely the fate of the prostitute, nor indeed of the female sex as a whole. Venereal disease was so widespread – having been spreading since the late fifteenth century – that the dreaded ‘pox’ received a certain amount of social tolerance. After the Restoration the poet and courtier Dorset wrote a good-humoured letter on the subject to one of his ‘Misses’ – probably a well-known prostitute called Moll Hinton – enclosing a small sum of money: ‘a Little Advice’, he wrote, ‘and a great deal of
Physick may in time restore you to that health I wish you had enjoyed a Sunday night instead of – your humble suffering servant’. Remedies and recipes against the pox would be given where in the same publication measures against conception were not mentioned.
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Furthermore, for the harlot there was always the possibility of upward social mobility, another prerogative following her traditional one of power without responsibility. Nell Gwynn, for example, was the daughter of old Madam Gwynn, who kept something very close to a bawdy-house. Her original profession, that of an orange-girl at the theatre, was one distinguished from prostitution more by its additional duties of fruit-selling than anything else; but her son by Charles II was created a duke. (And from pretty witty Nelly, who towards the end of her life could barely manage the two letters E.G. as a signature,
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an English ducal house descends today.) This was an encouraging story, if not to the chaste.

In 1660 a list of common whores in London mentioned Orange Nan and Mrs Watson an orange-seller, as well as Betty Orange, prepared to do business at home at Dung Wharf. Where Nell was concerned, it was relevant that the orange-girls at the theatre needed a good deal of natural wit and spirit to ply their trade. There was considerable competition: from the women known as ‘vizard masks’ for example, from the accoutrement which became the badge of their calling, who also used the pit to pick up their clients; to say nothing of the actors on the stage, whose spectacle generally took place in competition with, rather than as an alternative to the activities of the orange-girls. Disease apart, the profession was not without its dangers: in 1679 the playwright Thomas Otway challenged the young John Churchill to a duel for ‘beating an orange wench’ in the Dorset Garden Theatre; ‘and both were wounded, but Churchill most’ (we do not learn the fate of the orange wench). At the Theatre Royal, however, few would have ventured to tackle the regular orange-girl, ‘Orange Betty’ Mackarel, alluded to as ‘the Giantess Betty Mackarela’ and a byword not only for her strength and her promiscuity but also for her impudence: the Wits jostling with her in the pit would be ‘hot at repartee with Orange Betty’.
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