Even with the right diagnosis there was little enough the doctors could have done. Mary’s case was ‘of the worst sort that could be seen’.21 By Christmas Day she was raving. ‘Small pox increasing & exceedingly mortal,’ John Evelyn recorded on 29 December with uncharacteristic heartlessness. ‘Queen Mary died thereof, full of spots.’
Purcell wrote the funeral music. He did not know that it would be played at his own funeral less than a year later. In a snowstorm on 5 March 1695, slow trumpets and a single beating drum accompanied the coffin which contained the Queen’s embalmed body to the Abbey, ‘so solemn and so heavenly,’ wrote one onlooker, ‘[it] drew tears from all; and yet a plain natural composition, which shews the power of Music’.22 Christopher Wren had ordered the railings wrapped in black cloth. As both Houses of Parliament had attended the joint monarchs’ coronation in the Abbey, so now they bore witness to Mary’s death.
‘Man that is born of woman
Hath but a short time to live and is full of misery.
He cometh up and is cut down like a flower;
He fleeth as it were a shadow.’
Normally buttoned-up, withdrawn and emotionless, William astonished everyone with his grief during Mary’s illness, ‘fainting often, and breaking out into most violent lamentations’. On her death ‘his spirits sunk so low, that there was great reason to apprehend that he was following her; for some weeks after, he was so little master of himself, that he was not capable of minding business or of seeing company’.23 When he had to face his Privy Council a week after the Queen’s death, he couldn’t stop his tears. It was, as Gilbert Burnet said, uncharacteristic. This chilliest of men told Portland that he kept imagining he was going to see Mary that evening at supper.
Politically, Mary’s unexpected death – she was only thirty-three – left both William and the Revolution exposed. If ever there was a point for James to return, this should have been it. Mary was the King’s daughter, after all, and (through confused logic but powerful emotion) somehow more rightful than her husband was. If the crisis had never blown up, if James had never abandoned his party and the English church, if he had never had his heir, Mary would one day have ended up on the throne. Now the usurper ruled alone.
William ruled a kingdom that was sailing into uncharted waters, a kingdom coming to terms with new finance, new manners, a new town and new ideas. England had embraced freedom at the Revolution, but was now learning that freedom could lead to some disturbing conclusions.
XII
‘A BLIND OBEDIENCE IS WHAT A RATIONAL CREATURE SHOULD NEVER PAY’
‘She will discern a time when her sex shall be no bar to the best employments, the highest honour; a time when that distinction, now so much used to her prejudice, shall be no more, but ... her soul shall shine as bright as the greatest hero’s.’1
Mary Astell, 1700
As Delarivier Manley accompanied Lady Castlemaine up the steps of Hortense Mancini’s house, she was being watched, although she did not know it, by a woman quite as unconventional as herself. Hortense Mancini’s neighbour had also been drawn to London at the time of the Revolution – but there all resemblance between herself and Delarivier came to an end. Both would become famous as writers, but while Delarivier would live a life of scandalous affairs and gossip, Mary Astell remained in chaste and pious seclusion behind the shutters of her house in Chelsea.
Mary Astell grew up as that perennial sufferer, an ambitious girl in a small provincial town who was blessed with neither looks nor wealth, and whose intellect and education only made her all the more aware of her narrow prospects. Her thirst for ideas would never be satisfied in Newcastle; nor would the ambition she confided to her private notebook:
‘What shall I do? not to be Rich or Great,
Not to be courted and admir’d,
With Beauty blest, or Wit inspir’d,
Alas! these merit not my care and sweat,
These cannot my Ambition please,
My high born Soul shall never stoop to these;
But something I would be that’s truly great.’2
Mary arrived in London in 1687 aged twenty-one. She found lodgings in Chelsea, the fast-growing riverside village which had become home to an unconventional society of artists and intellectuals. It was a pleasant enough haunt, but Mary Astell soon found how hard it was for a single woman to make her name as a writer. Pious, even priggish, in outlook, she was never going to follow the unconventional trail blazed by the playwright Aphra Behn; she would neither become someone’s mistress nor slip into the anonymous world of service. In June 1688, at the height of the Revolution crisis, she wrote to Archbishop Sancroft for help. He had just been released from the Tower but somehow found time to respond – charity must then have seemed easier than politics. In 1689 Mary sent him a book of handwritten poems, thanking him for ‘the condescension and candour, with which your Grace was pleased to receive a poor unknown ... when even my kinsfolk had failed’.3 With Sancroft’s kindly support Mary Astell could devote herself to writing.
As she watched the comings and goings at Hortense Mancini’s house, heard the noise of carriages leaving at dawn, and the shouts of drunken gamblers, Mary Astell could have been forgiven for writing a furious tirade against her neighbour. Hortense Mancini was everything, after all, that the pious Astell most despised: louche, extravagant, vicious and debauched. Mary Astell did, indeed, put pen to paper on the subject of this most spectacularly fallen of women. But she did not blame Hortense. She blamed, instead, the institution of marriage.
‘To be yoked for life to a disagreeable person and temper; to have folly and ignorance tyrannise over wit and sense ... to be denied one’s most innocent desires, for no other cause than the will and pleasure of an absolute Lord and Master, whose ... commands she cannot but despise at the same time she obeys them, is a misery none can have a just idea of, but those who have felt it.’4
Mary Astell avoided the miseries of marriage by remaining a spinster, but her anger was born out by many who did marry, who, if they were not cursed with a bully or fool as a husband, could still be ground down by the frustration and boredom which were the lot of so many intelligent women. ‘Matrimony and family cares have alter’d me very much’, Damaris Masham wrote to John Locke in wretched depression after her own marriage.
‘Though I was always dull ... I am now a thousand times more so than formerly; and the little knowledge that I once had, is now exchanged for absolute ignorance ... Know that I am at present all alone ... except ... a young man of 16, a child of 5, and a girl ... that speaks not yet a word of English ... I cannot help telling you that there is scarce any thing I would not give to see you here in my closet where I am now writing to you; I can but think how you would smile to see ... my receipts and account books [jumbled together] with Antoninus’s ... Meditations, and Descartes’s Principles with ... my spinning wheel ... ’5
Even before marriage, girls often found themselves trapped in lives of numbing tedium. William Temple asked Dorothy Osborne for an account of her days during their courtship. ‘I can give you a perfect account,’ she replied, ‘not only of what I do for the present, but what I am likely to do this seven year, if I stay here so long.’6 Planning meals, managing linen, washing, mending, preserving, cleaning: this was the habitual life of wealthy women. The educated carried the additional burden of frustration; the poor, of physical drudgery. The only prizes society awarded women in recompense were dancing and clothes; their sole end was marriage.
This was what Mary Astell had come to Chelsea to escape. She could not believe that nature had endowed her with talent and ambition only to become the slave of a Newcastle merchant. Her first outburst against this injustice, published in 1694, would bring her fame not unmixed with notoriety, and call into question yet another of the fundamental assumptions which underpinned traditional society. She called her book A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, and in it Mary Astell raised the standard of rebellion.
‘[We should] not entertai
n such a degrading thought of our own worth, as to imagine that our souls were given us only for the service of our bodies, and that the best improvement we can make of these, is to attract the eyes of men. We value them too much and our selves too little, if we ... don’t think ourselves capable of nobler things than the pitiful conquest of some worthless heart.’7
She preached rebellion against a world which taught women to undervalue themselves, which debarred women from education and then mocked them for being silly. Astell had won her own education by sheer willpower, which was a common enough struggle for intelligent women. The poet Jane Barker cajoled Greek lessons out of her brother, but had to put up with him teasing her that irregular verbs were harder than make-up. Women who did manage to educate themselves encountered yet more hostility. ‘A studious woman [is] as ridiculous as an effeminate man’8 was a common enough prejudice. John Evelyn’s daughter Mary concealed her learning even from her father, and when she died Evelyn was heartbroken to find her commonplace book full of theology and history she had been too shy to discuss with him.
Some seeds of rebellion had already been sown. Female ignorance was an assumption French Moderns had attacked. Poulain de la Barre’s De l’egalite des deux sexes appeared in English in 1677 under the rather racier title The Woman as Good as the Man. John Locke was asked by his friend Mary Clarke for advice on how to educate her daughter Betty, and wrote back that Betty should have the same teaching as her brother, for ‘I acknowledge no difference of sex in your mind relating ... to truth, virtue and obedience.’9 That was far from typical, though. As Mary Astell complained, most girls came out of childhood with minds ‘as light and frothy as those things they are conversant about’,10 fit only for the trivial pursuits of clothes and courtship. And this was what Mary Astell attacked in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies. She proposed that women should withdraw from this man’s world en masse. In Christian convents, single sex havens, they could forget about clothes, mirrors, dances and French fashions, and instead educate and nourish their minds.
Mary Astell was a protégée of William Sancroft, an intimate of High Tories and non-jurors, moral in her conduct and impeccably orthodox both in religion and politics – perhaps she could never otherwise have produced so devastating a document while causing so little offence. It helped that she cut men down to size with such mocking good nature, such sly wit, that they barely felt the knife go in. There had already been a certain amount of ribald comment on the stage about this feminist rebellion.
‘Hippolita Ha, what’s this comes here?
Ariadne By all that’s good, a man. Shall I shoot him?’11
Mary Astell somehow managed not to be labelled virago, lesbian or whore even when she renewed her attack on marriage. ‘She must be a fool ... who can believe a man ... He may call himself a slave a few days, but it is only in order to make her his all the rest of his life.’ It was marriage, she suggested, which began Hortense Mancini’s slide into scandal. Men contracted marriages out of greed or lust. When immediate attractions had worn off, women found themselves transformed – trepanned was the emotive word Mary Astell used – into housekeeper, upper servant, child-bearer and – worst of all – the ever-loving helpmeet of a spoiled child.
‘Who will ... sooth his pride and flatter his vanity ... who will not ... contradict his will and pleasure ... to whom he may safely dispose his troublesome thoughts, and in her breast discharge his cares, whose duty, submission and observance will heal those wounds other people’s opposition or neglect have given him. In a word, one whom he can entirely govern.’12
In Mary Astell’s feminist writings the spread of freedom, an intoxicating strain, was clearly to be heard. Somehow Astell managed to insulate her own politics from the subversive ideas in her books. She remained a staunch Tory, a believer in the divine right of Kings and the High Church. She had no mercy, though, for the absolute monarchs in households up and down the land, front parlour tyrants whose authority, like King James’s at Faversham, soon shrivelled in the harsh light of reason.
‘Strip him of equipage and fortune ... and the poor creature sinks beneath our notice, because not supported by real worth ... Is it possible for her to believe him wise and good who by a thousand demonstrations convinces her and all the world of the contrary? ... A blind obedience is what a rational creature should never pay ... GOD himself does not require our obedience at this rate.’13
If even that most enduring constant of society, the subjugation of women, was being questioned, then traditional values were indeed under attack. In the years since 1688 writers had challenged the authority of King, family and church. The supremacy of landed wealth had been undermined by risk culture, traditional economic values by the free market, traditional social values by the raucous new town. These were offences to stability, to continuity, which any government or church might have been expected to rebuff. Many, indeed, would attempt to close the Pandora’s Box which the Revolution had opened. Their task, though, was about to be made impossible by a change in the law. The year 1695 would see perhaps the most crucial extension to freedom of all, for that spring the Licensing Act lapsed and press censorship in England came to an end.
The effects of press freedom had already been demonstrated in the United Provinces. The international network of virtuosi, the ‘Commonwealth of Learning’, thrived on information channels which no one King or Church could control, many operating through the Huguenot diaspora, like Pierre Bayle’s Nouvelles de la République des Lettres, started in Rotterdam in 1684. It was in the Bibliothèque Universelle et Historique of John Locke’s Remonstrant friend Jean Le Clerc* that the Essay on Human Understanding first appeared in abridged form. Down these canals the pioneering texts of the Enlightenment were disseminated across Europe. A Huguenot pastor in Holland, David Mazel, translated the Second Treatise of Government into French in 1691; in the century before the French Revolution it would always be available to émigrés and dissidents from the ancien régime.
That the press was a dangerous, perhaps subversive, force was acknowledged by Charles II’s imposition of censorship after the Restoration. Never again, it was hoped, would England’s fragile politics be blown off course by the torrent of invective and rebellion which had emerged during the Civil War. For the next quarter century no pamphlet, poem, play or newspaper would leave the press without authority.
Censorship broke on the day James fled London. Overnight, streams of unofficial newspapers appeared, carrying to their readers the news the official Gazette so signally lacked. William reimposed censorship, but pressure to add the press to other English freedoms soon began to build. One critic likened censorship to a Spanish inquisition. To have a censor vetting what men might or might not read was no different, wrote another,
‘from that policy wherewith the Turk upholds his Alcoran [Koran] by the prohibition of printing. Though all the winds of doctrine should be let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength: Let her and falsehood grapple.’
The importance of the press had been demonstrated during the Revolution itself. Fagel’s Letter and William’s own Declaration were both skilfully manipulated to prepare the English for his descent. Upbeat bulletins on his progress were run off the printing machine he brought over in his baggage. It was the free printers after James’s flight, one writer said, ‘who by their unlicensed books ... first cured that cataract that blinded our eyes, and enabled the people to see day’.’14 Censorship seemed increasingly inappropriate to a country which prided itself on its freedoms. Inappropriate – and perhaps impossible. There was no longer a single centre to impose official beliefs, neither a unified state, nor a unified church. England had become the country where alternatives could coexist.
No one so well understood the difficulties of censorship in such a world as one of the last of English press censors, Edmund Bohun.
It was Bohun’s final appointment before retreating into the poverty which
darkened his last days. He was given the job by John Moore, Bishop of Norwich, who not only commissioned him in September 1692, but forwarded him £25 to spruce up his ‘shamefully mean’ clothes. With a salary of £200 a year, the future looked better for Bohun than it had for many years. Unfortunately, Bohun was one of those for whom fortune seems to have taken a persistent and irrational dislike.* That was the winter his son died at Cambridge. And the censor’s life proved far more difficult than this former editor of Filmer could ever have imagined. Bohun had never lost his faith in the argument that William and Mary had won their throne by right of conquest. When he found himself reading a tract which appeared to espouse that argument, he passed it for publication. The storm which followed took him completely by surprise. Bohun was subjected to a furious tirade from the bishop. ‘I replied ... I had no more prudence than I had, which he said was true.’ Even then he wasn’t quite sure what he had done wrong. Enlightenment only came through the House of Lords resolution which formally censured him. ‘This vote opened my under-standing, and shewed me the fault I had committed; which I understood no more than the Great Mogul, before.’ Thankfully, Bohun was spared the worst of a House of Commons reprimand, ‘not having heard it, by reason of my distance and deafness’,15 but his short career in public life was over.
The days of censorship were numbered as well. When it was next debated, in March 1695, High Church bishops opposed the end of licensing as an attack on their property (‘by which,’ Edward Clarke wrote to Locke, ‘[they] mean I know not what but ... they think Property a very popular word, which Licenser is not’16). Monopoly interest groups like the College of Physicians felt threatened by a free press because they thought it would circulate knowledge which had once been their own. Neither bishops nor doctors got their way. By now, in any case, presses were springing up all over England. In 1695 the Licensing Act lapsed and an information revolution began.
The Last Revolution Page 38