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

by Fraser, Antonia

  Of all the Levellers’ wives, Elizabeth Lilburne, born Elizabeth Dewell, excites at once the most sympathy for her sufferings and the most admiration for her endurance; these feelings being not unmixed with pity for the fate of anyone married to John Lilburne. (In general the story of Elizabeth Lilburne recalls that definition of a saint as one that is married to a martyr.) The kind of freedom which Elizabeth Lilburne shared with her husband was short-lived if it existed at all; the best tribute to her character being those words of Lilburne’s in 1646 from The Freemans Freedome Vindicated, quoted earlier, in which man and woman were declared equal alike in dignity and authority; these sentiments – so much in advance of Lilburne’s time – it must be plausible to ascribe to her husband’s intimate knowledge of one splendid woman. His later treatment of her is not so edifying.

  John Lilburne was about twenty-four when in 1638 he was sentenced by the Star Chamber. It has been suggested that Elizabeth Dewell, like Katherine Hadley, may have been among the women who visited him after his whipping. She certainly comforted him in the Fleet prison. Lilburne was released at the beginning of the Long Parliament and took to brewing. After his marriage, Lilburne described Elizabeth as ‘an object dear in my affections several years before from me she knew anything of it’. At least these early days must have been a sweet period, for John could write later: ‘I confess I partly know it by experience that divers months after marriage are most commonly a time of dotage.’32

  At the beginning of the Civil War, Lilburne joined the Parliamentary Army and fought at Edgehill; Elizabeth was probably present too, quartered with the other women at Kineton, along with those baggage trains which the dreaded ‘Prince Robber’ Rupert plundered. John Lilburne was subsequently captured at Brentford, and having been tried for high treason for bearing arms against the King, was shut up in Oxford Castle in danger of execution. From there he smuggled out a letter to his wife; whereupon she, although pregnant, set out for the Royalist headquarters, which she reached after ‘so many sad and difficult accidents to a woman in her condition, as would force tears from the hardest heart’. Lilburne’s liberty was secured by exchange: he wrote later that by her ‘wisdom, patience, diligence’ Elizabeth had saved his life.33

  On his release Lilburne’s thirst for agitation proved to be in no way quenched by his ordeal. Elizabeth had secured him a government position at £1,000 a year; to her ‘extraordinary grief’ he rejected utterly the possibility of an easier life: he ‘must rather fight for 8d a day’. It was true that Lilburne had an astonishingly quarrelsome nature, as well as passionate political convictions. He left the Army in the spring of 1645, refusing to take the oath of the Covenant. His contentiousness as much as his conscience soon led to further periods of imprisonment, this time at the orders of Parliament. Elizabeth, pregnant again, lived with him in Newgate prison in the autumn of 1645 until he was released in October; it was peculiarly painful to discover that when the Stationers’ Company’s agents had ransacked their house in Half-Moon Alley for seditious writings, they had also stolen the childbed linen which was carefully stored there (much as the Overtons had been robbed).

  During a further period of more severe imprisonment in the summer of 1646, Elizabeth occupied herself in active campaigning on her husband’s behalf. It was Elizabeth who undertook the presentation of John’s defence in a letter to the Keeper of Newgate prison which was later printed with a characteristic challenge: ‘as a free Commoner of England, I do here at your open Barre protest …’.34 On 10 July, Lilburne was committed to the Tower of London and not even allowed to receive food at his wife’s hands. With about twenty other women, Elizabeth visited the House of Commons in September to present Lilburne’s petition for justice, headed ‘For J. Lilburne from his wife and many women’, and she continued to protest at being barred from his side. Day after day this devoted body appeared at Westminster until a Committee of the House was appointed to hear Lilburne’s case and Elizabeth was permitted to join him.

  In February 1647 Elizabeth herself was arrested while at her husband’s side for dispersing his writings. Unlike Mary Overton she did not remain silent: in court she gave vent to a furious outburst on the subject of ‘a company of unjust and unrighteous Judges’. In this instance it was the quick-tempered John who demanded that what she had said should be overlooked: the court should ‘pass by what in the bitterness of her heart being a woman she had said’. It was a perfect example of the weak but protected role of the female at law: Lilburne secured Elizabeth’s discharge on the grounds that he, as her husband, must be held responsible for what had happened.35

  Elizabeth Lilburne remained free to haunt the Army headquarters at St Albans and Kingston, petitioning for her husband’s release and carrying messages to Leveller meeting places. But when Lilburne was offered bail in the autumn, his address to his family expressed the classic position of the man of conscience: ‘Shall I for love of them, sin against my soul …?’36

  Elizabeth even had an opportunity to protect her husband physically. In January 1648 Lilburne was brought before the Bar of the House of Commons to answer further charges; in the lobby the soldiers turned on ‘Freeborn John’ with their musket butts until Elizabeth flung herself in the way. Lilburne was subsequently taken to the Tower, from which he was released in August. The great Leveller petition of 11 September is thought to have been largely his work. It was signed by ‘Thousands of well-affected, dwelling in and about London’; in it the demands of The Agreement of the People were repeated, together with a demand for the abolition of the ‘negative voices’ of the King and the House of Lords.37

  By the end of 1648, however, Lilburne had become disillusioned with the Army and its leaders, including Cromwell, seeing in its control of Parliament after Pride’s Purge merely another face of tyranny. In the New Year, although he approved of the execution of the King in principle, he thought that an ordinary jury of the people should try him, following the establishment of a republic, rather than a High Court of Justice.

  At the beginning of 1649 therefore, thanks to John Lilburne’s temporary withdrawal from public affairs, a short period of domestic peace was enjoyed by Elizabeth and her family, now including three children, two of whom had been born while John was in prison (Tower was the unusual if appropriate name chosen for the youngest). But by the spring Lilburne, as the voice of the Levellers, had abandoned domesticity for strife once more. Once again Lilburne was demanding liberty of conscience, attacking the new Government. Once again he was clapped into prison. Once again it was necessary to petition for his release.

  The presentation of The Humble Petition of divers well-affected Women inhabiting the City of London, Westminster, the Borough of Southwark, Hamblets and places adjacent to the House of Commons in April 1649, and the events surrounding it, represented the high point of political female activity at this period; just as the ardent demonstration at the funeral of the executed Leveller soldier Robert Lockyer was the most overt instance of public Leveller sympathies. The coffin was decorated with sprigs of rosemary dipped in blood. The long column of mourners adorned with black and sea-green ribbons – sea-green was the adopted colour of the Leveller cause – was brought up by a body of women at the rear, sea-green and black ribbons mingled at their breast.

  The women petitioners for the release of Lilburne, Overton and the others, first tackled the House of Commons on 23 April, when they were simply told that the House was too busy to receive them. The next day the Sergeant at Arms dismissed them with the words that the matter was one ‘of a higher concernment’ than they understood. Besides the House had already given an answer to ‘their husbands’; therefore ‘you are desired to go home, and look after your own business, and meddle with your housekeeping’. Some angry repartee followed this condescending dismissal, in which the women gave as good as they got. One unwise Member attempted to say that ‘it was not for women to Petition, they might stay at home and wash the dishes’ only to be told smartly: ‘Sir, we have scarce any dishes left us
to wash, and those we have are not sure to keep.’ Another MP ventured the milder observation that it was strange for women to petition; ‘It was strange that you cut off the King’s head’, was the answer, ‘yet I suppose you will justify it.’38

  On 25 April twenty women were at last admitted to the lobby of the House of Commons bearing a petition, although the attendant soldiers threw squibs at them, and cocked their pistols. The women, with equal determination if not equal violence, grabbed Cromwell’s cloak and began to lecture him on their grievances.

  ‘What will you have?’ cried Cromwell in answer to their tirade. ‘Those rights and freedoms of the Nation, that you promised us …’ was the ominous reply. Whatever the public indignation of these furies, The Petition of Women was a considered document; it is likely that Lilburne had a strong hand in its production.39 It called on all women who approved it to ‘subscribe’ (that is, sign or mark) and then deliver their signatures to women who would be ‘appointed in every Ward and Division to receive the same’. Apart from the release of the Leveller leaders, grievances for which redress was sought included high taxes, lack of work, and arbitrary government in general.

  The most interesting passage came in The Petition of Women’s preamble when the issue of women taking such an apparently unnatural step as to petition was squarely faced, There was a token reference to the ‘weak hands’ of women; but this was followed by the counter claim that ‘God had wrought many deliverances for several stations from age to age by the weak hand of women’ as they knew for their own ‘encouragement and example’. Deborah and Jael were quoted in this context, as were the ‘British’ women who delivered the land from the Danes, and more recently the Scotswomen who fought against ‘episcopal tyranny’. As for the charge that it was not the custom for women to address themselves publicly to the House of Commons, the Preamble began with the bold words: ‘Since we are assured of our creation in the image of God, and of an interest in Christ equal unto men, as also of a proportionate share in the freedom of this Commonwealth …’

  Was there perhaps, as has been suggested, an implicit demand here for a share in the franchise as well as the freedom? If implicit, it was once again not explicit. Two more petitions on behalf of Lilburne were presented at the beginning of May by ‘bonny Besses in sea-green dresses’ as Mercurius Pragmaticus picturesquely termed them. There were satirical mentions of ‘my brave Viragoes, the Ladyes-errants of the Sea-green order … so lately fluttering like flocks of wild Geese about the Parliament ears, for the liberty of their champion Jack and his confederates’.40 Then the brutal quelling of the Burford mutiny in the middle of the month led to the collapse of the Leveller cause as a political force.

  Petitioning on the part of Leveller women did not, however, fade away altogether. In October 1651 women were included in a Leveller petition that debtors should be released from prison to work off their debts (a favourite Leveller proposal and one of the many in which they were excitingly in advance of their times). In June 1653, a body of women, including the ‘clamorous’ Katherine Chidley, presented still further petitions for the release of John Lilburne, enduring yet another spell of imprisonment.

  In July Katherine Chidley got into the pulpit at Somerset House and along with another sectary – a young man – ‘preached to the people very much in Lilburne’s behalf’. In the same month about a dozen women, headed by Katherine, presented a petition to Parliament on behalf of Lilburne, said to have been ‘subscribed by above six thousand of that sex’.41 This was that Little Parliament (sometimes known as the Barebones Parliament after one of its members, Praisegod Barebones, an Anabaptist leather-merchant) which was created following Cromwell’s purge of the Rump Parliament of April 1653; it was disbanded when he became Protector in the following December.

  The Leveller women ‘boldly knocked at the door, and the House taking notice that they were there, sent out Praisegod Barebones to dissuade them from their enterprise, but he could not prevail; and they persisting in their disturbance, another Member came out and told them, the House could not take cognizance of their petition, they being women, and many of them Wives, so that the law took no notice of them’. The women issued a reasonable challenge to the notion of total female dependency based on wifehood by replying that ‘they were not all wives, and therefore pressed for the receiving their petition’. The rest of the conversation was not quite on this high level. If their petition was refused, the women went on, the Members of Parliament ‘should know that they [the women] had husbands and friends’, who ‘wore Swords to defend the liberty of the people etc.’. The members should ‘look to themselves, and not to persecute that man of God [Lilburne] lest they were also destroyed, as the late King, Bishops, Parliament and all others that ever opposed him, who were all fallen before him’.42

  But Lilburne was not released.

  The story of Elizabeth Lilburne continued on more poignant if less dramatic lines as the petitioning woman of the 1640s gave way to the despairing – but still soliciting – wife of the 1650s; having much in common with Dame Isabella Twysden and Mary Lady Verney, despite the difference in their husbands’ politics. To retrace our steps in John Lilburne’s story: at the end of the Burford mutiny, he was still held in prison in the Tower of London. Elizabeth Lilburne therefore was still holding together the little household in London as well as she might in her husband’s absence. At this point the family received ‘a melancholy visitation’ in the shape of smallpox; hardly an uncommon seventeenth-century occurrence, but the consequences in this particular case were heart-rending. Both of Elizabeth’s sons died – ‘the greater part of his earthly delight in this world’, as John Lilburne would later describe them.43 Elizabeth herself and her daughter hovered on the brink of death. Under these circumstances Lilburne was at least allowed to visit them from prison. Finally in November 1649 he was released.

  It is understandable that the stricken Elizabeth now hoped that her husband would make his peace with the new Commonwealth and settle with what remained of his little household. (Another son, John, was born in October 1650.) She hoped in vain. As a result of a vendetta against Sir Arthur Haselrig, Lilburne was banished for life by an Act of Parliament in January 1652, and a huge fine was imposed. While he was in exile, Elizabeth found herself in great hardship, having to sell or pawn most of her household goods; she also suffered a miscarriage, and her other children were ill. Under the circumstances, she refused to send him papers which she believed would merely lead to more fruitless troubles. Lilburne referred to her letters as ‘new paper skirmishes … filled with womanish passion and anger’.44 Outsiders may find it easier to comprehend the element of despair which was now creeping into her dealings with her intractable husband.

  All the same, by May 1653 Elizabeth had scraped together enough money to visit John at Bruges; Lilburne had expected her to bring a pass for England from the newly installed Protector Cromwell. He was furious it was refused. Relations between husband and wife were evidently cool: in a letter to the Protector Lilburne blamed Cromwell for the fact: ‘Your late barbarous tyrannical dealing with me hath exposed her to so much folly and lowness of spirit in my eyes, in some of her late childish actions, as hath in some measure, produced an alienation of affection in me to her …’ He referred ominously to ‘that tenderness of affection that I owe to her whom I formerly entirely loved as my own life’.45 Lilburne sent Elizabeth to England once more for the pass and awaited her return at Calais. On hearing the news of a second refusal, he returned to England anyway, whereupon he was arrested, imprisoned once more in June 1653 and finally tried in July.

  This was the celebrated trial which had the people roaring in chorus:

  And what, shall then honest John Lilburne die!

  Three score thousand will know the reason why!

  John lilburne did not die; in effect he was acquitted; but the Government declined to release him (provoking those petitions on the part of the Leveller women to which reference has already been made). By July 165
5 he was in prison on the island of Guernsey. Elizabeth, her soliciting temper unabated by her privations – and John’s recriminations – petitioned Cromwell that he should be released: ‘Our grievous afflictions have obtained no remission!’ she wrote. ‘I beg you take away all provocation from his impatient spirit, weared out with long and sore afflictions. I durst engage my life that he will not disturb the state.’ John’s own poor health lent plausibility to Elizabeth’s last statement: it was probably she who got Fleetwood, Cromwell’s brother-in-law and colleague, to persuade the Protector of Lilburne’s newly pacifist frame of mind.46

  When lilburne reached Dover Castle, Elizabeth was living at the house of a friend who kept an inn at Guildhall; after years without a proper home life, or even a proper income, she had fallen into a state of depression, indicated by the fact that her newest baby, Benomy, had been a year old when she had had him baptized.47 In London she received another startling piece of news concerning her husband’s spiritual odyssey. He had now become a Quaker.

  It was one thing for John to require Elizabeth to send him Quaker books down from London. But the language in which he hoped for Elizabeth’s own conversion was scarcely such as to bring comfort to the weary homeless woman. He spoke of self-denial: ‘even to a final denial of father, kindred, friends, my sweet and beloved (by me) babes’. Above all her conversion would enable her ‘to go cheerfully and willingly along hand in hand’ with her husband. Such a step, he wrote, ‘abundantly would render thee more amiable, lovely and pleasant in mine eyes although thou wert then clothed in rags …’ Elizabeth had just escaped death by drowning in the Thames – John’s sympathy with her plight was cursory. The fact that Elizabeth and the children were to all intents and purposes clothed in rags, John Lilburne treated with equal shortness, He wrote: ‘I am also sorry that thou art so straitly put to it for money, but to live upon God by faith in the depth of straights, is the lively condition of a Christian: O that thy spirit could attain to it!’48