The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (WOMEN IN HISTORY)

by Fraser, Antonia

  TEMPERANCE LLOYD: ‘No, no, Master, ’twas she’ (meaning Susanna).

  At this Susanna burst out in her turn that Temperance ‘lied’. And so after a prayer by the Rev. Mr Hann, Susanna Edwards suggested to Mary Trembles that they should sing part of the Fortieth Psalm (which ends, appropriately enough, ‘But I am poor and needy; yet the Lord thinketh upon me: thou art my help and my deliverer; make no tarrying, O my God’). As Susanna Edwards mounted the ladder, she said: ‘The Lord Jesus speed me; though my sins be as red as scarlet, the Lord Jesus can make them as white as snow; The Lord help my soul.’ In the words of the pamphlet, ‘Then was executed.’

  Mary Trembles went to her death with similar piety: ‘Lord Jesus receive my soul; Lord Jesus speed me.’ Then Mary too ‘was executed’.

  This left old Temperance Lloyd, whom the sheriff described to her face as ‘the woman that has debauched the other two’.

  SHERIFF: ‘Did you ever lie with the devil?’

  TEMPERANCE: ‘No.’

  And later:

  SHERIFF: ‘Did the devil never promise you anything?’

  TEMPERANCE: ‘No.’

  SHERIFF: ‘Then you have served a very bad Master, who gave you nothing. Well, consider you are just departing this world; do you believe there is a God?’

  TEMPERANCE: ‘Yes.’

  SHERIFF: ‘Do you believe in Jesus Christ?’

  TEMPERANCE: ‘Yes; and I pray Jesus Christ to pardon all my sins.’ ‘And so was executed.’

  It is quite possible, as was stated by a later pamphlet, that the judge actually tried to get Susanna, Mary and Temperance off: ‘these three poor old women [as he supposed] were weary of their lives and that he thought it proper for them to be carried to the Parish from whence they came, and that the Parish should be charged with their Maintenance; for he thought their oppressing Poverty had constrained them to wish for Death’. But in another version, the judge, while referring to the harmless effects of ‘melancholy or delusion’, regretted that mercy could not be shown to the old women in the present state of the Law: ‘we cannot reprieve them without appearing to deny the very being of witches.’39

  Not all old women witches who practised some form of primitive magic suffered as cruelly as the Bideford witches. The mysterious nature of ‘black’ witchcraft, as it was regarded in the seventeenth century, is underlined by the fact that ‘white magic’ co-existed with it, as indeed forms of ‘white magic’ had always been practised since ancient times (and are, in various forms from fortune-telling to herbal healing, still practised today). ‘Cunning folk’, who unlike witches were often male, existed in abundance: in The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton wrote that there were ‘Cunning men, Wizards and white-witches … in every village’. Their protection was quite simply that they were believed to do good. Thus a ‘cunning woman’, one with certain curative arts at her disposal from which black magic was specifically excluded, might pursue an active and even lucrative career, provided she kept herself carefully free from the taint of witchcraft. Sir Ralph Verney’s son and heir Edmund, generally know as ‘Mun’, had a ‘distracted’ wife called Mary. It was decided to send for a cunning woman called Old Judith.40

  First of all Mun Verney asked Old Judith to assure him that she did not ‘use any manner of Charms, Sorceries, or Magic whatsoever’. Old Judith hastily gave ‘devout assurances’ to the contrary. She was then permitted to carry out her experiment. This was to take a hare’s head – ‘Jack Hare’ – and wrap it in a cloth; she then bound the wrapped hare’s head round the patient’s own head for three days and three nights. When the hare’s head was finally removed, it was inserted into the patient’s pillow, amid the feathers, to lie there ‘so long as they live’. The idea of the cure was that there was a ‘sympathetical Virtue’ in a ‘melancholy Hare’s Brain’ which would ‘draw away all Melancholy out of that hare-brained people’ (i.e. the mad).

  The cure did not work. As Mun Verney wrote: ‘It would be very pretty if so slight a thing could cure.’ Poor mad Mary Verney never fully recovered her wits. All the same, Old Judith suffered no ill consequences for her efforts, while Mun Verney in his slightly sceptical attitude to the whole affair represented a kind of tolerance which not only co-existed with harsh prejudice but also grew as the century progressed.

  Among rational people, it had always seemed strange that the devil should choose the ‘poor and atrabilious’ and invest them with such colossal powers. As the newspaper The Moderate Intelligencer put it in 1645, it was ‘a great wonder’ that devils should be conversant with ‘silly old women that know not their right hand from their left’. In 1641 Henry Oxinden of Barham, father of the headstrong Peg, wrote with marked good sense about the case of one Goodwife Gilnot, who was accused by a man called Brake of having lost his sheep. Oxinden pointed out that he too had frequently lost sheep – without going to the trouble of thinking himself bewitched.41

  As for Goodwife Gilnot, who was accused of having a teat upon her upper body – actually a small wart – ‘Believe it’, he wrote, ‘there is none so familiar with her as to receive any sustenance from thence’. He went on: ‘Such deep root hath the fables of witchcraft taken hold in the heart of this and other silly men … they will not with patience endure the hand of and correction of God …’ It was being suggested ‘that certain creatures here on earth, called witches, be the authors of men’s miseries, as though themselves were innocents and had deserved no such punishments …’ Henry Oxinden concluded: ‘Moreover I cannot see how any rational man can persuade himself that a simple woman should do such things as these.’

  The progress in scepticism on the subject has been summed up by Christopher Hill in these terms: ‘In 1600 most respectable people believed in witches … by 1700 this was no longer true.’42 The last execution of a witch occurred at Exeter in 1685, three years after the deaths of the three ‘decrepid’ Bideford women: Jane Wenham, the last person to be condemned (in 1712) was reprieved. Yet as late as 1704 The Athenian Oracle, a magazine for answering popular queries whose view on life was otherwise quite enlightened, when asked whether it was permissible to kill a witch to preserve oneself, answered: as to those ‘wretched and malicious Creatures … we should make no scruple to strike or stab them’.43

  But these old women, wretched and malicious as they often were, might have framed on their own behalf the bitter question posed by the Witch of Edmonton:

  Cause I am poor, deform’d, ignorant

  And like a bow buckled and bent together …

  Must I for that be made a common sink

  For all the filth and rubbish of Men’s tongues

  To fall and run into?44

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Unlearned Virgins

  … But think you, Helen,

  If you should tender your supposed aid,

  He would receive it?…

  A poor unlearned virgin …

  COUNTESS OF ROUSILLON TO HELENA,

  All’s Well That Ends Well

  ‘Thou mayest perhaps think I have lost my labour’: thus Elizabeth Josceline to her husband in 1622 on the prospect of her giving birth to a daughter. The best way to palliate the blow would be to think of those biblical exemplars, Elizabeth, Esther, and chaste Susanna. Betty Viscountess Mordaunt was equally frank on her own account: ‘If it be thy blessed will, let it be a boy’ – this was her fervent prayer when she was once more pregnant in 1665, although she already had six sons. And when a seventh boy was indeed safely born, Betty Mordaunt apostrophized the Almighty in verse:

  To all the rest, thou hast this added more

  The blessing of a son, to increase my store.

  Anne, wife of the Royalist commander Sir Simon Harcourt, shared the primitive feelings of her husband who wrote back to her from the campaign in Ireland: ‘with God’s blessing bring me another lusty boy’. After his death Anne Harcourt married the Parliamentary general Sir William Waller, a widower with sons. Her diary, kept like that of Betty Mordaunt for spiritual reasons, i
s a long record of public and private trials and her own ‘transgressions’. Throughout, whenever pregnant, she pleads for the safe birth of a living child with all its parts and limbs – ‘and a son’.1

  The experience of Agnes Sim, a servant of East Brent in Somerset who had become pregnant by her master, was on a cruder level. She ‘asked him [her master] who should father the child. He said he would, if it was a boy, but if it was a maid, she should lack a father for it.’ (Servants did sometimes undertake the responsibility of providing their sonless masters with male heirs; the sex of the child being, it was believed, determined by the female.)2 Neverless Agnes Sim discovered for herself what Betty Mordaunt and Anne Harcourt expressed so eloquently in their spiritual diaries, that primitive desire for a boy which in a sense disadvantaged the girls of this period even before their birth.

  Cary Verney was one of the five sisters of Ralph Verney and as a child had been the ‘she-darling’ of her father Sir Edmund. Married at fifteen, but with the settlement never completed owing to the difficulty of wartime conditions, Cary found herself at the age of eighteen a pregnant widow, when her husband Captain Gardiner was killed in 1645. Then, ‘My sister was brought to bed of a girl to all our griefs’, wrote Ralph Verney. Having provided no male heir, with no proper marriage settlement, even her own jointure in peril, poor Cary was grudged her very food at the Gardiner home at Cuddesdon; finally she fled back to her own family. Cary Verney did enjoy an exceptionally happy second marriage to John Stewkeley of Hampshire; but it was no wonder, as one of the jolly, gambling, gossiping ladies of the Restoration court, that she regretted hearing the news that her nephew John Verney’s wife (already the mother of a son) had given birth to a daughter: ‘for I find our sex is not much valued in our age’.3

  One of the primary reasons why the average female was ‘not much valued’, as Cary Verney lightly but aptly expressed it, was that she was not much educated – in comparison, that is, with the average male, her brother as it might be, that child who had fulfilled his parents’ primitive expectations by being born of the favoured sex.

  Even women despised other women for their silliness. Margaret Duchess of Newcastle was sharp enough to see the reason for this foolishness: in 1655 in The Worlds Olio she wrote that ‘in Nature we have as clear an understanding as Men, if we were bred in Schools to mature our Brains’. Nevertheless in practice she found the tittle-tattle of women intolerable.4 Conversely, even those women who did for a number of individual reasons receive a proper education might well be scorned for their attainments. In principle, society rewarded the learned woman with disapproval or at best suspicion.

  Anne Lady Newdigate, that devoted mother, unconsciously summed up the contemporary attitude to the education of the sexes when she wrote in her will, dated 1610: ‘that my boys may be brought up in good learning and both they and my daughters to be bred up in virtuous and godly life’. Elizabeth Josceline, laying down instructions in The Mothers Legacy to her Unborn Child for the education of that hypothetical daughter for whose arrival she had apologized in advance, hoped she would be taught ‘The Bible, housewifery, writing and good work’. (She herself, incidentally, had been highly educated by her grandfather, learning both languages and history in the enlightened tradition of the late sixteenth century.) Elizabeth Josceline added: ‘other learning a woman needs not, though I admire it in those whom God hath blest with discretion yet I desire it not much in my own, having seen that sometimes women have greater portions of learning than wisdom’. And if her husband himself wanted to have ‘a learned daughter’? At least: ‘my dear … I pray God give her a wise and a religious heart’.5

  Where a highly educated woman did escape censure, it was generally for some extraneous reason which might be exceptional piety, of the sort which Elizabeth Josceline hoped would redeem her own ‘learned daughter’. Or it might, in a more worldly fashion, be due to her high position in society. In private Dorothy Osborne poked fun at Margaret Duchess of Newcastle, who admittedly did cut a fairly weird figure in society, at any rate where her costume was concerned. In 1653, Dorothy was ‘satisfied that there are many soberer people in Bedlam’, and she wrote that the Duchess’s friends were ‘much to blame to let her go abroad’.6 In public, however, Margaret Newcastle’s rank (that of a very rich Duchess, wife of a Royalist grandee who had been Governor to Charles II as a boy) obtained for her some handsome tributes from academics at both universities.

  The Duchess used to present favoured colleges with her own works. Expressions of gratitude were published after her death in a special volume: Letters and Poems In Honour of the Incomparable Princess Margaret, Dutchess of Newcastle. A letter from the Master and Fellows of St John’s College, Cambridge, sets the tone: ‘In your Poesy we praise that Life and native Verdure, every way Confident with its self, Castilian like, it stands not still, nor boils over, but with a gentle stream doth touch our Ears and slide into our Minds. In your Philosophy we praise that lightsome and piercing acuteness, nothing constrained, nothing obscure; you render all things clear and genuine …’ However, Trinity College, in wondering aloud ‘how it came to pass that Eloquence, Poetry, Philosophy, things otherwise most different, should without the help of a Tutor, without the Midwifery of a University, at length, agree in a Woman’ showed that the Duchess was very much the high-born exception to the general rule.7

  It was not a rule which showed signs of lapsing as the century progressed. On the contrary, the prejudice against education for girls – and its dreaded end-product, the learned woman – had derived fresh impetus from the presence of a male sovereign after 1603. It had always been rather tactless to attack the learned woman with too much zest so long as that paragon of female erudition Queen Elizabeth occupied the throne. As the poet Anne Bradstreet wrote in memory of ‘our dread Virago’ forty years after her death:

  Let such as say our Sex is void of Reason,

  Know ’tis a Slander now, but once was Treason.

  Not only were men freed from the inhibition of the ‘dread Virago’s’ intellectual example by her death, but that male sovereign, James I, had himself a scant opinion of the female intelligence. Perhaps the frivolity of his Queen, Anne of Denmark, had something to answer for; at any rate when it was suggested that his daughter, another Elizabeth, should learn Latin, the King replied that ‘To make women learned and foxes tame had the same effect: to make them more cunning.’ And he forbade it.8

  Such sentiments would have come as a marked surprise to his English royal relations of yore: those Tudor princesses of the Renaissance, not only Queen Elizabeth herself who could translate Latin into Greek, and the famously erudite Lady Jane Grey, but Queen Mary Tudor, celebrated at the time for her knowledge of science and mathematics. For that matter James’s mother Mary Queen of Scots, whose intellectual attainments have been overshadowed by her dramatic life story was, as a princess, automatically instructed in the classics. We know from the English Ambassador to Scotland that she used to read Livy regularly for pleasure after dinner, with George Buchanan.9

  In the sixteenth century Sir Thomas More had written: ‘I do not see why learning … may not equally agree with both sexes.’ At the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign a classical education was a mark of elegance in the circle round Mary Countess of Pembroke: William Wotton, in his Reflections on Ancient and Modern Learning, wrote of that period: ‘It was so very modish, that the fair sex seemed to believe that Greek and Latin added to their Charms: and Plato and Aristotle untranslated, were frequent Ornaments of their Closets.’ Such a tradition lingered on at a place like Little Gidding. Here the many daughters of the house, in the tranquil religious retreat founded by the Anglican theologian Nicholas Ferrar in the 1620s, were carefully educated in Latin, as well as arithmetic, writing and music (and such practical matters as book-binding). But it was in the seventeenth century that George Herbert was able to list among well-known proverbs: ‘Beware of a young wench, a prophetess and a Latin woman.’10 While women themselves were often contributing a
note of ritual apology whenever they felt they had stepped outside the modest mental boundaries which circumscribed their sex.

  Lady Elizabeth Hastings, carefully educated by her ‘Vigilant Mother’ Lucy Countess of Huntingdon to know French, Latin and Italian, was advised by her on marriage merely ‘to make herself fit conversation for her husband’. As a result, Lady Elizabeth showed herself so modest – that favourite epithet again – throughout her short married life with Sir James Langham that he never had ‘all those inconveniences which some have fancied, so necessarily accompany a Learned Wife’. She died still young in 1664. This model existence on the part of one who might otherwise have caused Sir James a great deal of trouble with her accomplishments, was summed up in a quatrain:

  That Skill in Scripture, and in Tongues she got,

  Made her a living Bible Polyglot.

  These did not puff her up, she did descend

  To the kind offices of Wife and Friend.11

  It was not that women did not read the books where they had the ability or the opportunity to do so. In 1647 we find Adam Eyre of Yorkshire spending IS 8d on a book at a fair at Wakefield for his scold of a wife – presumably to palliate her bad temper on his return. There was, as might be expected, a heavy bias towards what Lettice Falkland’s biographer called ‘good authors’. Mary Countess of Warwick’s tastes ran to the works of Jeremy Taylor, Foxe’s Martyrs, and Baxter’s Crucifying of the World by the Cross of Christ (which she described as her favourite book) as well as the poetry of George Herbert – who often features in ladies’ reading at this time. But Lady Anne Clifford read Turkish history as well as Chaucer, and had Ovid’s Metamorphoses read aloud to her by her cousin Maria. Lady Cholmley, wife of Sir Hugh, the Governor of Scarborough Castle during the Civil War, was ‘addicted to read and well versed in history’.12