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

by Fraser, Antonia

Thy Wretched Feet must tread …

  For there’s no Light

  But all is Night,

  And Darkness that you meet …19

  Throughout her poetry a thread of melancholy, even bitterness runs, particularly on the subject of female unrequited love, a hint that ‘Love the Softer Sex does sorriest wound.’ In one of her pastoral dialogues, Anne Killigrew portrays a maiden who has been betrayed. She exclaims:

  Remember when you love, from that same hour

  Your peace you put into your Lovers Power:

  From that same hour from him you Laws receive

  And as he shall ordain, you Joy, or Grieve.

  Anne Killigrew’s ‘Paragon’ was the beautiful and chaste Duchess of Grafton, wife of one of Charles II’s bastards and daughter of his minister Arlington. Here was a woman who for all her beauty kindled ‘in none a fond desire’; this virtuous wife, admired but not courted, bonded by reason not the chains of passion, was the type of heroine she envied.20

  In general there is a fastidious rejection of the worldly values of the court against the background of which Anne Killigrew led the whole of her short life. A very long and very pessimistic poem ‘The Miseries of Man’ pleads that reason, not passion, shall hold the reins of the chariot, so that anger, fear, hope and desire may be harnessed. The poem, singularly modern in its approach to nature, points out:

  The bloody Wolf, the Wolf does not pursue;

  The Boar, though fierce, his Tusk will not embrue

  In his own kind, Bears, not on Bears do prey:

  Thou art then, Man, more savage far than they.21

  ‘A Farewell to Worldly Joys’ rejects among other things ‘Ye Unsubstantial Joys, Ye Gilded Nothings, Gaudy Toys’. ‘The Discontent’ casts aside grandeur and fame, the pillars of the court, in favour of that repose which gold alone cannot purchase.22 All of this suggests that the resignation saluted in another elegy on her death, probably by the poet and theologian Edmund Elys, was not achieved without emotional cost:

  O Happy Maid, who didst so soon Espy

  In this Dark Life, that All is Vanity.23

  Anne’s father was Dr Henry Killigrew, Almoner to the Duke of York, Chaplain to the King, and Master of the Savoy, one of three brothers all of whom combined an interest in the arts, specially the dramatic arts, with the royal service: Thomas Killigrew was manager of the Theatre Royal and head of the troupe of actors known as the King’s Servants as well as Groom of the Bedchamber to the King; Sir William Killigrew, Vice-Chamberlain at court, also wrote plays. It was these connections which led Dryden to describe Anne as ‘A Soul so charming from a Stock so good.’24 However, the good stock also included Thomas’s son, dissolute Harry Killigrew, Groom of the Bedchamber to the Duke of York, whose bawdy exploits served to épater the court, as well as Sir William’s more conventional daughter Mary, who by marrying an illegitimate son of the House of Orange, established still closer Killigrew royal connections. Anne herself entered the household of the Duke of York, as Maid of Honour to his second wife, Mary of Modena.

  It was significant of the relative public attitudes to female painting (approved) and female authorship (suspected) that the recognition Anne Killigrew did seek during her lifetime was for her artistic talent, not her poetry. Applauded in royal circles as a portraitist, she was reckoned to be particularly successful in capturing the likeness of the Duke of York: ‘Her Hand drew forth the image of his Heart,’ wrote Dryden. From Dryden too we learn that Anne painted Greek and Roman scenes, and subjects such as Venus and Adonis, the Graces dressing Venus, and Judith and Holofernes.

  Anne Killigrew looks out of her own self-portrait, displaying what Dryden described with not too much flattery as a ‘well-proportion’d Shape, and beauteous Face’. In some ways this is the conventional late-seventeenth-century visage, so often painted by Lely, with its fine long nose, round cheeks, full mouth and lofty pure forehead, framed in thick curls; but there is something tighter and more disciplined here, compared to his flowering beauties (as well as a more restrained display of bosom). Anne Killigrew died of smallpox in the summer of 1685 and her father produced a memorial edition of her poems the following autumn. The modest yet firm self-portrait represents the public use of her talent. In private Anne Killigrew wrote poems like this On Death:

  Tell me thou safest End of all our Woe

  Why wretched Mortals do avoid thee so

  Thou gentle drier o’ th’ Afflicted Tears,

  Thou noble ender of the Cowards fears;

  Thou sweet Repose to Lovers sad despair …25

  But then painting and drawing were the agreed feminine accomplishments, were they not? Psychologically, it was always possible to regard the female artist as merely extending the talents of a refined education into a wider sphere, even when as in the case of Mary Beale, who was influenced by Robert Walker and Lely, she was actually earning a good professional income from her efforts. Joan Carlile seems to have been the first of such female artists, said to have been presented with artist’s materials (ultramarine) by King Charles I, and by 1658 known as ‘a virtuous example’ of painting portraits in oils, as well as copying Italian masters in miniature.26 Mary Beale, born before the Civil War, the daughter of a clergyman called Craddock, lived to the end of the century; she produced watercolours and crayon drawings, portraits amongst others of Milton, Lord Halifax, the Duke of Norfolk and Bishop Wilkins. With a house in Pall Mall, her earnings rose from £200 in 1672 to a peak of £429 pounds – from eighty-three commissions – in 1677; although as Lely’s pupil, her popularity declined with his death.27

  Mary Beale, like Anne Killigrew, wrote poetry; not for her however the kind of hostility which might be shown to the more ostensibly learned ‘Scarecrow’. Her brother-in-law Samuel Woodforde, a Prebendary of Winchester and himself a poet, described her with affection as ‘that absolutely compleat Gentlewoman … the truly virtuous Mary Beale’, and Woodforde included two of her works in his Paraphrase to the Psalms, saying that she had made ‘Painting and Poetrie … to be really the same’.28 Where painting was concerned, the distinction between the professional and the amateur was not really perceived; no modest apologies were felt necessary for the presumptuous female pen so long as it was wielded in the cause of art not literature.

  Elizabeth Capel, Countess of Carnarvon, who died in 1678 at the age of forty-five, was one of the large family of that Royalist hero Arthur Lord Capel, executed in 1648. All the Capels loved flowers (as the great family portrait of 1637 bears vivid witness): another sister, Mary Duchess of Beaufort, a keen botanist and a friend of Sir Hans Sloane, developed the gardens at Badminton and commissioned an important florilegium by Everhardus Kickius. Flower-painting, inspired by her parents’ garden at Little Hadam, was Lady Carnarvon’s speciality. There is a small gouache in the Royal Collection dated 1662 (which may however be a copy of an existing flower-piece), and Lely’s double portrait with the Duchess of Beaufort shows Lady Carnarvon holding one of her own works. In both cases the signature reads ‘E. Carnarvon fec …’ under a coronet.29 Here was a pursuit which no one resented: ‘E. Carnarvon’ would have many ladylike and floral-minded followers in the future, coroneted and otherwise, whom no one would think to criticize for being petticoat-painters.

  There was another talented ‘maid’ at court who was an almost exact contemporary of Anne Killigrew.30 That was Anne Kingsmill, later Anne Finch by marriage to Heneage Finch, a son of the third Earl of Winchilsea, and later still Anne Countess of Winchilsea when her husband succeeded to the title. (Heneage Finch was a great-nephew of that Sir Heneage Finch, Speaker of the House of Commons, who won the hand of the Widow Bennett in 1629.) Anne Kingsmill came of a good Hampshire family although both her parents died when she was very young; she began adult life as one of the six Maids of Honour to Mary of Modena, a body which included not only Anne Killigrew but also the witty and notorious Catherine Sedley, to whose very different use of her intelligence attention will be drawn in a subsequent chapter.

 
Anne’s marriage was also made within the purlieus of the royal (York) household: Heneage Finch was Captain of the Halberdiers and Gentleman of the Bedchamber to James II, then Duke of York. The closeness of the connection meant that King James’s flight from the throne threatened the Finch welfare: Heneage thought it prudent to take his wife to the family home of Eastwell in Kent, where his nephew Charles, fourth Earl of Winchilsea, gave his relations a retreat.

  The secluded circumstances in which Anne now found herself, however galling in political terms, might be described as ideal for a serious (female) author. For one thing Anne lacked the joyous but distracting surroundings of a young family: she was childless and remained so, despite therapeutic visits to the spa at Tunbridge Wells. This was a negative asset. Then she had the positive advantage of a husband who was not only affectionate – ‘They err, who say that husbands can’t be lovers’, she wrote – but also encouraging, making such gestures as asking her to write a poem for him ready for his return when he went to London. Heneage Finch was her ‘Dafnis’ and she was his ‘Ardelia’.31 Furthermore Heneage’s nephew Charles, their young patron, also extended encouragement to Anne, before his death in 1712 left Heneage Finch to succeed to the title as fifth Earl of Winchilsea.

  Anne certainly did not miss the busy life of the city. She said of herself that fashion meant nothing to her, wanting merely a new gown once a year in the spring and nothing more; her scorn for the feminine ‘accomplishments’ with which the idle and uneducated beauties of society filled their hours has already been quoted (see p.394). What Anne enjoyed instead was the creative privacy of a country life, so much more conducive to the development of her poetry than the court where, as she pointed out, ‘everyone would have made their remarks upon a Versifying Maid of Honour’. She wrote some melancholy lines on this theme:

  Did I my lines intend for publick view

  How many censures, wou’d their faults pursue …

  Alas! a woman that attempts the pen

  Such an intruder on the rights of men

  Such a presumptuous Creature, is esteem’d

  The fault, can by no virtue be redeem’d.32

  Anne Winchilsea was right in her instinct that privacy was a further important asset to a she-author. For unlike Anne Killigrew, she lived out at least her natural lifespan, dying in 1720 in her sixtieth year. Chronologically if not stylistically (she was much influenced by Dryden) her poetry belongs to the eighteenth century; she first appeared in print in 1701, a small volume being published in 1713. Her reputation as a poet rests in consequence on more secure foundations: in the nineteenth century, Wordsworth fell in love with one of her poems, entitled ‘Noctural Reverie’, with its touching lines on the freedom of animals under cover of darkness:

  Their short-liv’d Jubilee the Creatures keep

  Which but endures, whilst Tyrant Man does sleep.

  Commending its attitude to nature, he described ‘Noctural Reverie’ as ‘often admirable, chaste, tender and vigorous’.33 2 But this also meant that unlike Orinda, a generation her senior, Anne Winchilsea survived to be printed in the keen-bladed age of Pope. And once her poetry was made public, it was open season for the hunt, as it was for the ‘Female Wits’.

  The trio of Pope, Arbuthnot and Gay together wrote a play, Three Hours after Marriage, in which Anne Winchilsea appeared as ludicrous Phoebe Clinket, ink-stained and with pens in her hair. Phoebe Clinket, unkempt as she might be, was also very much the lady of the house: she kept writing materials in every room in case inspiration seized her, and a compliant maid followed her about with a desk strapped to her back, so that Phoebe could even write on the move.35

  Had Orinda been of a less charmingly tactful disposition, had Anne Killigrew cast modesty aside and made her secret feelings public, had both of them survived into the eighteenth century, one suspects that these ladies might have found themselves in the literary pillory along with ink-stained ‘Phoebe Clinket’.

  Anne Finch, later Viscountess Conway, the little girl who had run about the gardens of Kensington House and worshipped her step-brother John, never did throw off those sick headaches which in her youth were ascribed to too much reading, unsuitable to her sex (see p.159). Yet despite a lifetime of crippling illness necessitating virtual social retirement towards the end, Anne Viscountess Conway survived to write a philosophical work admired after her death (when it was printed) by Leibniz; the editor of her correspondence describing her as ‘the most remarkable woman of that remarkable age’ and comparing her to that mystic of the twelfth century, the Abbess Hildegard of Bingen.36

  It is too easy to say that Anne Viscountess Conway was able to develop her original intellect just because her illness cut her off from the world and enabled her to avoid the hostility generally shown to the learned lady. Just as it is far too simple to ascribe her torturing headaches merely to an unconscious desire to withdraw from the jovial society favoured by her husband; the pain which would cause her at one point to seek trepanning as the lesser of two evils was evidently real enough. Besides, diagnosis, whether medical or psychological, is notoriously dangerous in the absence of the patient, especially when all symptoms are described in the very different medical language of 300 years ago. Nevertheless the story of Anne Conway demonstrates that a perpetual acknowledgement of her own weakness was one way, albeit a very painful one, in which a clever woman could avoid disapproval; the physical doing very well in the judgement of the world as a metaphor for the intellectual.

  Anne Finch, born in 1631, was the posthumous daughter of Sir Heneage Finch by the Widow Bennett. (She was thus linked to Anne Countess of Winchilsea by marriage not blood.) She had numerous intelligent and successful relations on her father’s side, including a formidable grandmother in Elizabeth Heneage, first Countess of Winchilsea. But if we seek a matrilineal descent for her intelligence, we may also turn to her mother, that pretty well-heeled Penelope who held off all suitors till she secured the one she wanted, and who proved to be a far more astute character than was generally suspected (see pp.108–112). Or perhaps it was the cross between the two: the blood of the bright middle-class mother galvanizing into activity the more ancient strain of her father.

  It was through her step-brother John that Anne first met the philosopher Henry More, and was introduced to his Cambridge Platonist circle, More being John Finch’s tutor at Christ’s College. Anne’s first letter to More, which precedes her marriage, enclosed her own translation of a piece of Descartes:37 for it was More who was responsible for introducing to England the Cartesian Rationalism which postulated that the general nature of the world could be established by demonstrative reasoning from indubitable premises (in contrast to the Empiricists like Hobbes, who held that knowledge of the world came through experience, and not through reason alone). Anne became for More ‘my Heroine Pupil’. Under his influence she read Plato and Plotinus, and studied such mystical works as the Desiderata Kabbala.

  In 1651 marriage to Edward Conway made Anne into the chatelaine of Ragley Castle, Herefordshire: a position which enabled her, like Damaris Lady Masham, to dispense hospitality to her philosophical friends, principal among them More. For all Conway’s taste for London society, it would be wrong to regard Anne Finch and her husband as intellectually mismatched: here was no yoking of unhappy opposites. Edward, later third Viscount Conway, a man eight years older than his bride, was respected by More and himself a reader of Descartes. At Ragley he was happy to join in the discussions initiated by More on topics including spiritism and cabbalism as well as Rationalism. He was an early member of the Royal Society.

  But Conway was also a man of action. The son of one of the principal Secretaries of State to James I and Charles I, he had distinguished himself in the north of Ireland in the recent wars. He could not see his own horizon, like that of his ailing wife, bounded by life at Ragley, whatever the stimulus of More’s company. As a man pursuing a public career, his devotion to the social life at Whitehall was certainly defensible; one can also underst
and only too easily how a man with a taste for late-night suppers with the King and Nell Gwynn would not necessarily wish to spend every evening discussing Platonism in the country with a wife either crippled with or about to be crippled with a headache, a visiting philosopher and perhaps his wife’s intellectually-minded gentlewoman – ‘your library keeper Mrs Sarah’.38

  Yet on the subject of Anne Conway’s health, it should be remembered honourably in favour of Lord Conway, that he showed admirable stoicism when their only child, Little Heneage Conway, died at the age of two and a half of smallpox. (Anne caught it too, enduring still further impairment of her fragile health.) He was advised that his wife would suffer agonies if she ‘bred’ again, and therefore trained himself not to wish for children: a piece of self-denial most uncharacteristic of his age. When the news was brought that Anne was possibly pregnant again, Lord Conway commented: ‘My thoughts were long since sealed against any impetuous desires after children, and my mind disposed to that which was more diffusive than gathering together an estate for an heir, and this [news] will not alter me.’39 His stoicism stood him in good stead, for Anne Viscountess Conway never did bear children.

  It was fortunate for Anne Conway that she also had the benefit of those other affectionate relationships – in both of which she was encouraged in her learned studies – with her brother John and with More. Her intimacy with More lasted thirty years and was both platonic and ‘Platonick’. Early on, More dedicated An Antidote against Atheism to Anne, as one who in ‘penetrant Wit’ and ‘speculative Genius’ had so far outstripped all her sex. To More, Anne Conway was not only his ‘Heroine Pupil’ but also ‘Virtue become visible to his outward sight’. Sir John Finch, a physician at Cambridge who ended his life there with his lifelong friend and ‘chevalier’ Sir Thomas Baines (they were buried in the same grave) led in between a successful life as a diplomat. Anne Conway’s girlhood attachment to her brother never waned. Here More consoles her for her grief at his departure: ‘What you speak concerning friendship in reference to your brother, and in the behalf of a more passionate kind of affection as an inseparable concomitant of it [that is, grief], is true’, he wrote. All the same the philosopher felt bound to point out: ‘reason moderates these emotions’.40