Smith also reported a conversation with Powhatan that curiously echoes one of the themes of his exchange with Matoaka in London. As was so often the case, the occasion was a meeting where Smith attempted to coerce Powhatan into providing the colony with corn, as the settlers had proven unable to survive without native assistance. Smith told Powhatan he was acting as an emissary from Captain Christopher Newport. He pointedly reminded Powhatan that the English had a great advantage in arms, but assured him that they would not use them because of the fellowship they felt with Powhatan. To this the chief cogently replied,
Captain Newport you call father, and so you call me. But I see, for all us both, you will do what you list, and we must both seek to content you. But if you intend so friendly as you say, send hence your arms, that I may believe you.
All of this talk of fathers reminds us that the history of Virginia comes down to us from the Englishmen who recorded it. The paternalistic English society typically spoke of both religious and civil leaders as fathers. James I said, “Kings are compared to fathers in families: for a king is truly parens patriae, the political father of his people.” The position of women was distinctly subordinate; often, as with John Rolfe’s first wife, who died during the couple’s passage to Virginia, we do not even know their names. While the native Virginians also esteemed fathers, their society was matrilineal, and this led to confusion and misunderstanding. Friends of Smith, for example, proposed that “he would have made himself a king by marrying Pocahontas, Powhatan’s daughter,” but this was not the case. The English were mistaken in thinking her a princess. Upon Powhatan’s death his “kingdom” would fall first to his brothers and then to his sisters (the society was matrilineal not matriarchal — inheritance passed through the mother’s line, but it went to the sons before the daughters). Thereafter his nephews and nieces would be next in line. Since the mother of Pocahontas was not one of Powhatan’s important wives, neither she nor her brothers would ever be in the line of succession, despite his having been their father — in fact, with each succession her proximity to power would grow more distant. She was just an ordinary girl, though one whose bold and inquisitive personality found favor both with her father and with the newcomers to Powhatan lands.
Still the settlers persisted in their notion that the girl was a princess of the highest value. It appears that Powhatan played along with the idea, often sending his daughter along with messengers to the fort at Jamestown in a show of good will. Finally the colonists seized their chance and kidnapped her for use as a diplomatic pawn, though they rationalized the action as bringing her the benefit of the Christian religion. Kidnapping children was an explicit strategy of the English. Biblical precedents were cited in sermons in London, and the Virginia Company had issued a directive to the settlers “to procure from them some of their Children to be brought up in our language and manners if you think it necessary … by a surprise of them and detaining them prisoners and in case they shall be willful and obstinate, then to send us some 3 or 4 of them into England, we may endeavor their conversion here.” It is conceivable that the kidnapping was not unforeseen by Powhatan, who still hoped to convert the newcomers into vassals of his confederacy. Marriage of women into outsider groups was as much a component of diplomacy for the American natives as it was for the Europeans. Powhatan himself was reported to have had a hundred wives, and this created many kinship ties that enabled him to secure his base of power.
The Americans’ matrilineal system of succession helped to ensure that rule would not pass to an underage child. An entire set of siblings — including women — would be in line before succession passed to the next generation. This prevented governance by wards and counselors of child rulers, as had been the case with Powhatan’s contemporaries James I of England, Louis XIII of France, Michael Romanov of Russia, the Ottoman sultan Ahmed I, and the Wanli emperor of China.
A crisis that occurred in 1616 in the circumstances of Mary Wroth, a lady in Queen Anne’s circle, exemplified the consequences of the preference shown to male heirs by the Europeans. At the time of the Powhatans’ visit to London, she was working on a sequence of sonnets that she would include in the first published work of fiction by an English woman. One of the sonnets begins like this:
Like to the Indians, scortched with the sunne,
The sunn which they doe as theyr God adore
Soe ame I us’d by love, for ever more
I worship him, less favors have I wunn …
The book would be read in its time as a roman à clef. Wroth came from a distinguished aristocratic family. Her mother was a cousin of Walter Raleigh and her father the younger brother of Philip Sidney, the courtier poet. Her aunt Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, was an important patron of the arts, as well as a poet and translator. In the Banqueting Hall of Whitehall on Twelfth Night (January 6), 1605, Wroth danced — together with the queen herself — in Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones’s Masque of Blackness; she played the part of Baryte, an Ethiopian maiden. The masque, created at the queen’s request, was the first of many on which Jonson and Jones would collaborate. The queen and ladies, representing the twelve daughters of Niger, all performed in blackface — that they had painted their faces rather than worn masks occasioned criticism. Wearing pearls and feathers in their hair, they made a dramatic entrance on a giant seashell. They were accompanied by torchbearers representing nymphs, whose faces, hands, and hair were dyed blue. The performance created a stir. One scandalized observer complained that the ladies’ costumes were “too light and curtizan-like for such great ones.” But the performance ushered in a new era of spectacle for the court of James and Anne, and Lady Mary Wroth seemed well positioned for a central role among the queen’s circle.
Lady Mary Wroth with a Theorbo, ca. 1615–1620, possibly by John de Critz (1555–1641). Pemhurst Place, Kent.
Lady Mary Wroth is pictured here with a long-necked lute. The instrument has often been identified as an archlute, but this appears to be a larger instrument, developed around the end of the seventeenth century, called a theorbo. The theorbo’s strong bass register made it useful in the emerging art form known as opera; some scholars consider Florentine composer Domenico Belli’s L’Orfeo Dolente (1616) the first true opera.
Lady Wroth’s choice of instrument expresses her rounded sensitivities, her familiarity with current cultural trends, and also her ability simply to afford such a refined and elegant large-scale instrument.
Only a few months before this performance she had been married (by James himself) to Sir Robert Wroth; the marriage was the culmination of negotiations that had begun when she was twelve. Her husband shared with the king an interest in hunting, and James promoted him to the position of Riding Forester, responsible for flushing out game. An avid keeper of hounds and spaniels, he had few literary interests. While many men in his position, because of their roles as patrons of the arts, could boast of several books dedicated to them, Wroth had but one — a study of mad dogs. He seems to have led a dissolute life, and it was soon apparent that neither party was happy with the marriage. Robert may have nursed some grudge about the nature of the dowry (a concept that would have seemed strange to the Powhatans, who instead paid “brideswealth” to the wife’s family), while Mary must have watched in alarm as he burned through their resources. Ben Jonson (who boasted that he preferred love affairs with married women to those with unmarried women) observed that “my Lady Wroth is unworthily married on a Jealous husband.” He dedicated his play The Alchemist to her — his only First Folio play dedicated to a woman — but no one seems to have suggested anything beyond a literary relationship between them.
Jonson also took an interest in Mary Wroth’s cousin Elizabeth, Countess of Rutland, for whom he wrote several poems, and whose writing he also praised. One writer reported a scene in the Rutland household: “Ben one day being at table with my Lady Rutland, her husband coming in, accused her that she kept table with poets, of which she wrott a letter to him which he answered. My Lord inte
rcepted the letter, but never challenged him.” Jonson was a dangerous man to challenge, having once slain a theatrical associate with a sword during a quarrel on a London street.
Jonson praised Wroth’s skill as a love poet in a sonnet (one of only five in his collected works, it pays homage to her preference for the form):
A Sonnet,
to the noble Lady, the Lady
MARY WROTH
I that have been a lover, and could shew it,
Though not in these, in rithmes not wholly dumbe,
Since I exscribe your Sonnets, am become
A better lover, and much better Poet.
Nor is my Muse, or I asham’d to owe it
To those true numerous Graces; whereof some,
But charme the Senses, others over-come
Both braines and hearts; and mine now best doe know it:
For in your verse all Cupids Armorie,
His flames, his shafts, his Quiver, and his Bow,
His very eyes are yours to overthrow.
But then his Mothers sweets you so apply,
Her joyes, her smiles, her loves, as readers take
For Venus Ceston, every line you make.
In 1614, after ten years of marriage, Wroth gave birth to a son; one month later her husband died of gangrene, leaving her with the staggering sum of £23,000 of debt. Catastrophically, when her son died, in 1616, the Wroth estate passed not to Mary (because of her gender) but to her husband’s nearest male relative, his uncle John Wroth. For the rest of her life Wroth would struggle with debt, constantly responding to a never-ending barrage of demands from creditors. This fate would continue to befall women into the nineteenth century — a similar case of distant male inheritance is a key story element in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
Around this time Mary consummated a relationship with her first cousin William Herbert, with whom she had two illegitimate children. A dashing figure, and a womanizer (but not, apparently, one who shared Jonson’s preference for married women), Herbert had been imprisoned by Elizabeth in 1601 for refusing to marry one of her ladies-in-waiting whom he had gotten pregnant. He nonetheless became a favorite of Queen Anne. In her long romance The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania, the first published work of fiction by an Englishwoman, Wroth describes a queen who exiles a rival from her court in order to obtain her lover. Wroth seems herself to have been, if not exactly banished from the court, at least much reduced in prominence following the downturn in her fortunes.
Wroth published her book in the large folio format, which asserted its importance in a way that underlined her subversion of the conventional prescription that women should be silent and self-effacing. Book formats were determined by how many times a sheet of paper — most often about 19 × 25 inches — was folded. One fold produced a folio, two a quarto, three an octavo, and so on. The quarto — about 9.5 × 12.5 inches — was the most common size; sizes smaller than octavo were intended for pockets and purses. The folio format (sometimes known as foolscap, from a watermark sometimes used that showed a fool’s cap and bells) was expensive and, at about 8.5 by 13.5 inches after trimming a large folded sheet, awkward to carry. Such books — Bibles, songbooks, publications by monarchs and the upper nobility — were generally intended for display in large rooms or public places. Ben Jonson’s publication of his Collected Workes in the folio format in 1616 was a gesture expressing an elevated estimation of the literary value of drama; the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays would not be published until seven years later. By the same token, Wroth’s book, which preceded the First Folio by a couple of years and was the first publication in this format by a single woman author (contributions by women had occasionally appeared in anthologies), asserted her right to be raken as seriously as an male writer.
The forms in which Wroth worked, the pastoral romance and the sonnet sequence, were falling out of favor at the time she was writing, but both were associated with her uncle Philip Sidney; her authorship as a woman and her female characters give them a fresh twist. The romance’s title character is a woman raised by shepherds, who, she learns, are not her biological parents (she is actually the daughter of the king of Naples). This discovery initiates a kind of quest for self-discovery — “to know my own selfe” — that some have seen as a search for feminine identity. Along the way she forms female friendships that, in the words of scholar Naomi J. Miller, are “not cut off by the traditional terminus of romantic couplings so common to the works of many of her predecessors.” The sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, part of Urania, expresses the emotions of a faithful woman in love with an inconstant man. Pamphilia (Greek for “all loving”), a character usually seen as modeled on Wroth herself, loves the unfaithful Amphilanthus (Greek for “having multiple loves”).
In the estimation of Germaine Greer and the other editors of Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women’s Verse, “the intensity of her poetry comes from its casting and recasting of several key concepts, as if it were writhing in the bonds of the rigid forms she chooses.” For example:
Griefe, killing griefe: have nott my torments binn
Allreddy great, and strong enough: butt still
Thou dost increase, nay glory in mine ill,
And woes new past afresh new woes beeginn!
Am I the only purchase thou canst winn?
Was I ordain’d to give dispaire her fill
Or fittest I should mounte misfortunes hill
Who in the plaine of joy can-nott live in?
If itt bee soe: Griefe come as welcome ghest
Since I must suffer, for an others rest:
Yett this good griefe, lett mee intreat of thee,
Use still thy force, butt nott from those I love
Let mee all paines and lasting torments prove
So I miss these, lay all they waits on mee.
Ben Jonson notwithstanding, many in the established community of male authors did not approve of Wroth’s publication. One writer, perceiving an unflattering portrayal of himself in the work, accused her of slander and tarred her with the labels “hermaphrodite” and “monster” — confirming Virginia Woolf’s assertion that if Shakespeare had had a talented sister who had sought to become a playwright she would have been called a monster. Wroth was compelled to withdraw Urania from circulation by the end of the year, and a follow-up volume would go unpublished until the late twentieth century.
Not until 1630 would another woman publish in the folio format, when Elizabeth Cary’s translation The Reply of the Most Illustrious Cardinall of Perron appeared. It too would be suppressed.
To publish books was for a woman an indiscretion suggestive of immodesty. From John Knox’s mid-sixteenth-century The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, through the advice of the Earl of Morton, chancellor of Scotland under Mary Queen of Scots, that it is “a thing against nature that the hen should crow before the cock; yea against the commandment of the eternal God, that a man should be subject to his wife, the man being the image of God,” women were urged to be chaste, silent, and obedient. Around 1616 a preacher named William Whately preached a wedding sermon that advised:
The whole duty of the wife is referred to two heads. The first is to acknowledge her inferiority, the next to carry herself as inferior. First then, the wife’s judgement must be convinced that she is not her husband’s equal, yea that her husband is her better by far: else there can be no contentment, either in her heart or in her house. If she stand upon terms of equality, much more of being better than he is, the very root of good carriage is withered, and the fountain thereof is dried up…. If ever thou propose to be a good wife, and to live comfortably, set down this with thy self. Mine husband is my superior, my better: he hath authority and rule over me: nature hath given it him….
Around the same time, in France, Jacques Olivier published An Alphabet of Women’s Imperfections, a popular book that would see seventeen reprintings over the next hundred years. A brief ex
cerpt will suffice. Addressing women, he writes: “You live here on earth as the world’s most imperfect creature: the scum of nature, the cause of misfortune, the source of quarrels, the toy of the foolish, the plague of the wise, the stirrer of Hell, the tinder of vice, the guardian of excrement, a monster in nature, an evil necessity, a multiple chimera, a sorry pleasure, Devil’s bait, the enemy of angels …” and so on, and on, and on. The reason for women’s imperfection could be found in medical theory, according to Helkiah Crooke in his book on the human body, Microcosmographia, published in 1618. “Nature ever intendeth the generation of a male, and … the female is procreated by accident out of a weaker seed which is not able to attain the perfection of the male,” he explained. “That females are more wanton and petulant than males, we think happeneth because of the impotency of their minds: for the imaginations of lustful women are like the imaginations of brute beasts which have no repugnancy or contradiction of reason to restrain them.”
Who would want to marry the scum of nature? Thomas Overbury thought it a bad idea. Overbury, a poet and essayist, was an intimate friend of King James’s early favorite, Robert Carr. In 1612 Carr began an affair with a married woman, Frances Howard, Countess of Essex. Motivated in part by jealousy and in part by political considerations, Overbury sought to turn his companion away from the affair, arguing that the woman was “noted for her injury and immodesty.” Nonetheless, she secured an annulment by the king of her marriage, and the two made plans to marry. In response Overbury wrote a poem called “A Wife,” which detailed the virtues that he believed were to be sought in a woman. Among his advice:
As good and wise; so be she fit for me,
That is, to will, and not to will, the same:
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