by Janet Todd
The story begins at the Restoration for Aphra Behn readers as well or, rather, with the shadow which the Restoration cast back on the past. All events before the 1660s Behn kept shrouded, although, like others needing to square a loyal present with a complicated or inadequate past, she threw out hints in her prefaces and short stories that fitted with her later image of court poet, dramatist to an aristocratic elite, and constant Royalist.
These hints were given substance by her first shadowy biographers who wrote after her death when, following a successful dramatisation of her famous short story, Oroonoko, she became current again in the late 1690s. It had become the fashion to inform the public about a writer’s life before his or her works and a respectable picture was wanted which would not entirely obliterate the naughty image which Behn and her theatrical friends had earlier exploited. No one who knew Aphra Behn in childhood seems to have stepped forward at this juncture. So Charles Gildon, a young man who had known her only in her last years and was left with one of her plays to edit and publish, probably himself composed the short ‘Account of the Life of the Incomparable Mrs. Behn’ which he affixed to the play. It did not say much because, clearly, Gildon did not know much. Behn, so famous for her garrulity, had not chatted about her distant past. At the same moment, another possible acquaintance of the final years, a colleague of Gildon’s called Samuel Briscoe, was eager to exploit and sensationalise the dead author. He wanted to publish a volume of the collected stories of which Oroonoko was the crown and he too needed a biography. So he commissioned ‘The Life and Memoirs of Mrs. Behn. Written by One of the Fair Sex’. In the third edition this was expanded into a patchwork by the inclusion of some love letters, thought of originally as a short story, and some comic letters purportedly written when Aphra Behn was in Flanders.8 Any one of Behn’s female friends might have written the ‘Memoirs’ or the impecunious Sam Briscoe himself might have supplied it, or Gildon in less austere mood may have performed again. About Behn’s early life, the ‘Memoirs’ like the ‘Account’ says almost nothing at all, except that she was the daughter of a gentleman from Kent. All the rest was lifted from Oroonoko.
Given her earliest alleged existence in hints within fiction, it is fitting that the Aphra Behn of this work should commence in marginalia and private jottings rather than in public disclosure of wills and banns. She begins, therefore, in a scribbled note of the aristocratic poet, Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea. After Aphra Behn’s death, Finch had written a contest poem, called ‘Circuit of Apollo’, of the sort popular at the time. In this she imagined the god of poetry, Apollo, searching through Kent for a female poet to crown. Finding few candidates, he stood on the banks of the River Stour and
... lamented for Behn o’re that place of her birth,
And said amongst Femens was not on the earth Her superior in fancy, in language, or witt,
Yett own’d that a little too loosly she writt....9
Aphra Behn would probably always have struck the exemplary wife Anne Finch as too frank and bawdy, but Finch may also have feared that the looseness would cause Behn’s great contribution to letters to be forgotten, as it did for a while.
Whatever her true opinion of the poetry, Finch was piqued by the fabricated ‘Memoirs’, where Behn had become the child of a Kentish gentleman. ‘Though the account of her life before her works pretends otherwise’, Finch wrote, probably with some hauteur, Behn was ‘Daughter to a Barber, who liv’d formerly at Wye a little market town (now much decay’d) in Kent’.10 The information came from those in a position to know—quite a likely claim, since Anne Finch’s husband had property round Kentish villages and Finch could easily have met acquaintances of Behn’s parents.
Probably Anne Finch believed what she wrote, but she admitted she had it at second hand. More important is the testimony of Colonel Thomas Colepeper, the only person who claimed to know Aphra as a child. He declared that her mother had been his wet-nurse and that his foster-sister Aphra—as such suckling relationships were termed—was ‘a most beautifull woman, & a most Excellent Poet’. Her father’s name was Johnson, he said, and she had a ‘fayer’ sister called Frances. Aphra was born ‘at Sturry or Canterbury’.11
Could Colepeper be telling the truth? Certainly he was a curious man. He had a passion for genealogy especially of the Colepepers, and for an idiosyncratic mix of magic, nature and science. In his later years, he grew litigious and pugnacious, even publicly assaulting the Duke of Devonshire in frustration over a lawsuit, and he spent much time composing eighteen volumes of an alphabetical ‘Adversaria’. It was in this vast manuscript, much of it compiled in the late 1690s, that he recorded the details of the ‘beautifull’ Aphra Behn.
If he was a romancer of himself, a man of quaint theories and violent habits, brooder over lost inheritances, Colepeper was also a scientist and a fellow of the new Royal Society, founded on Baconian notions of empirical truth. He did experiments himself and took out patents with Samuel Morland, a projector who, despite a number of abortive inventions, did have some technical achievements to his credit.12 Colepeper was not much interested in literary figures and few appear in his ‘Adversaria’; so his recording of the life and death of Aphra Behn is strange if he were not connected with her. Given his obsession with rank and aristocracy, he is unlikely to have seen himself honoured by any tie to a literary lady, however ‘Excellent’. Genealogy was his mania and he was making a sort of claim on Behn by mentioning her.
If Colepeper’s memory is true, then it gives Aphra Behn an approximate birthdate, for he was born in Kent on Christmas Day, 1637, and his sister Roberta in 1639; in 1643 both Colepeper parents died. If Aphra’s mother indeed gave him suck and if she herself were the original infant suckled by her mother, then this provides her with a birth between 1637 and 1643.
For Aphra, the daughter of Colepeper’s wet-nurse and Finch’s barber, a likely candidate is a child, Eaffrey Johnson, daughter of a Bartholomew Johnson of Canterbury, who was, among other functions, a barber. He became the father of a Frances as well as an Eaffrey.13 He therefore accords with the Colonel’s memories and the Countess’s gossip. If Bartholomew Johnson was Aphra’s father, then Elizabeth Johnson, née Denham, must be her mother and wet-nurse to the infant Colonel—a likely possibility since Elizabeth had lived close to Colepeper’s mother during the latter’s first, more elevated marriage to Lord Strangford.
According to the marriage register, Bartholomew was from Bishopsbourne and Elizabeth from Smeeth, both villages in Kent near Canterbury, and the wedding was at St Paul’s, Canterbury, on 25 August 1638. Since Frances Johnson was baptised in Smeeth on 6 December, there had clearly been some urgency: the bride was five months pregnant.14
Two years later the Johnsons were at Harbledown, a village of under 200 inhabitants just outside Canterbury, known for its asylum for the disabled poor, when their next child, Eaffrey, was born on 14 December 1640. With its spelling variants of Affara and Affry, Afra, Eaffrey, Aphra was not uncommon in Kent; it was the name of a saint martyred under Diocletian, traditionally supposed to have been a Cypriot prostitute converted to Christianity. At least two other births followed, of George, buried at St Margaret’s in 1656, and of an unnamed boy.15
So how could the baby Colonel Colepeper have sucked Aphra’s mother’s breast? Possibly Elizabeth had an earlier child out of wedlock, perhaps stillborn, so allowing her to suckle the baby Thomas eight months before her marriage. Possibly, since suckling went on for a long time and involved a succession of wet-nurses, Mrs Johnson might have taken on Thomas Colepeper after the birth of Frances, when an earlier wet-nurse died or went dry. When Aphra herself was born, the Colepeper infants were in London, but Mrs Johnson might still have fed the young Thomas when he was returned later to Kent. Colepeper does not say she was his first or only nurse, merely that she ‘gave him suck for some-time’.16
Elizabeth herself had been born in 1613 at Faversham, a bustling and fairly prosperous Kentish town.17 Her family seems to have attained at lea
st a middling trade rank and her younger brother George, educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, became a doctor in Stamford, Lincolnshire, and claimed the status of a gentleman.18 To appear in the Lincolnshire Pedigrees for 1666 he had to provide four generations of ancestors, but he omitted his sister Elizabeth—possibly she was only a half-sister and not to be counted or possibly her indiscretion out of wedlock or the poor marriage made him reluctant to acknowledge kin. If so, the adult Aphra may have returned the disdain: throughout her life she inveighed against the foolish arrogant students of Oxford who mistook a little learning for sense.19
If not a gentleman, Bartholomew Johnson did try to better himself and he was granted the freedom of Canterbury in 1648.20 Little Eaffrey or Aphra would have been just eight. He was described as ‘this city barber’ and he was to pay an initial fee of £5 for the privilege. A few months later he was asked for a further £10.21 Four months on he had failed to pay and should lose the ‘benefit of the said order’ unless he immediately found £7 ‘of lawful Englishe money’.22 It sounds as though Bartholomew had ambitions but insufficient cash to support them. His daughter would follow in his steps.
In 1654, when Aphra would be thirteen, Bartholomew was appointed one of the Overseers of the Poor for St Margaret’s, a parish in central Canterbury.23 These officers had been created by the Poor Law of Elizabeth I to look after paupers, keep them from the affluent, and administer the monies levied from a reluctant parish. They had a shoddy reputation, but then they had much to fear: if they did not contain matters and cope with the poor relentlessly pushing in from the countryside, they themselves might become paupers rather than keepers. The post suggests that Bartholomew was a Protestant, although Catholics did surreptitiously hold offices, and that he could write.24 The same could not be said of his wife Elizabeth, since she marked the marriage register with an E.
Such a background cuts a swathe through the social respectability of the ‘Memoirs’ and the grand claims of gentlemanly status for Behn in the fictions. The rank of gentleman was clearly outlined in Britannia: or, a Geographical Description of the Kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland... (1673) by Richard Blome. To be a gentleman without title, a man had to have either good descent from an ancient family or, through education and estates, earn suitable respect. Blome listed the gentlemen of the English counties over the previous decades; there are many Colepepers but no Johnsons among those of Kent. Bartholomew Johnson was, then, not a gentleman. Indeed he was probably the son of another Bartholomew, buried in Smeeth near Wye in November 1617 and described as ‘a poore man’. This makes amusing Aphra Behn’s later sneer at people of whom not even ‘a Parish Book makes mention or cou’d show there was any such Name or Family’.25
Confirmation of the lowly birth comes from a glancing remark of John Dryden, who certainly knew Aphra as an adult. Writing to an intended poet, Elizabeth Thomas, in 1699, he told her she was ‘too well-born’ to fall into the ‘mire’ of loose writing, into which Aphra Behn had tripped. Since Elizabeth Thomas was a lawyer’s daughter and spent some years in prison for debt, Dryden cannot have located the presumably less well-born Behn far up the social scale.
Aphra, daughter of a barber and a wet-nurse, seems a surprising candidate for England’s first all-round professional woman writer, author not only of numerous plays and stories but also of court pindarics, scientific translations and Latin paraphrases. Her background had some advantages, however.
First, George’s snobbishness should not lower the status of Mrs Johnson too far. A wet-nurse was not of the highest order, but nor was she the lowly cow she would become in the eighteenth century. There are records of many middle-ranking women, even aldermen’s wives, serving as wet-nurses and making on occasion a very good living. The tie between the suckled children and her own was honoured, especially if, as in the case of Thomas and Roberta Colepeper, the natural parents died so soon.26 Sometimes the wet-nurse took her charge to her own home and both suckled and cared for it during the early years.
Second, although a barber—or barber-surgeon, as Bartholomew might have been—had little status, and was from what Robinson Crusoe’s father called ‘the Upper Station of Low Life’ he did have interesting opportunities, whether in Canterbury or Seville. He met many people, could know the world, and might encounter the immigrants who came to and through Kent, the French Huguenots or Protestants who wove silk and made paper, the French-speaking Walloons from the Low Countries, and even the Dutch religious refugees who settled in nearby Sandwich. The daughter of such a man, if she had some linguistic talent, might gain a smattering of languages without stepping far from home. There was too always music around: a flageolet, gittern or lute was left out for waiting customers to play or accompany singing—as Behn mentioned in one of her early plays, The Dutch Lover. Like the narrator in Oroonoko, the child Aphra may have become adept at the flute; as a not-quite-elegant accomplishment (it drew attention to the mouth) it would not have formed part of a well-bred girl’s education, but was acceptable for one of her rank.
Also something must be allowed to the times, when status was not as rigid as it had been or would be again. The 1640s and 1650s, the Interregnum between the fall and death of Charles I and the Restoration of his heir in 1660, formed one of the most turbulent periods of English history. Old boundaries were crossed and hierarchies overturned. Unlike earlier civil wars, the struggles were not between competing families or power groups of more or less similar composition, but between competing ideologies, ways of life and thinking. One group of Puritans, Roundheads, supporters of the ‘Good Old Cause’, saw law, Parliament and godly reformation as primary; the other, Royalists or Cavaliers, looked to the King and the ancient constitution as supreme. The conflict between these two threatened to overturn the whole traditional hierarchy of church and state, King, government and governed. When the country witnessed the executions of the Earl of Strafford, King Charles I’s most trusted servant, the Archbishop of Canterbury and, finally, in 1649, the King himself, it knew that identity and rank were not secure. ‘The English people are a sober people, however at present under some infatuation,’ wrote the King to his son. When the father was beheaded, the son, now Charles II, became ‘The poor King, who has nothing of it but the name...’.27
Further down the scale, too, times proved volatile. One gentleman was amazed to find that the mother of a servant and the grandmother of another were daughters of knights. Philip Skippon, the poet Katherine Philips’s stepfather, rose from common pikesman to major-general under Cromwell. But great upward changes in status happened mainly when a family received sequestrated lands from the losing Royalist side. There appears no land in Aphra Behn’s background and she would be very tart about those who gained from Royalist misery. None the less, in an unsettled time Bartholomew, with only a fraction of his daughter’s proven energy and drive, may well have bettered himself. Or his widow may have done so. Or Aphra, twenty in the year of Restoration, may have done most of the bettering herself.
Aphra Behn’s works suggest little sentiment about parents and home. Her mother outlived her father and was present in her adult years, but for some reason—drink perhaps or foolishness, even perhaps illiteracy—she was not entirely trusted by her daughter.28 Certainly she was no financial support. As for fathers, Aphra seems pretty defiant of them, or indeed of anyone who would dictate to her, and she sounds an insubordinate child. Possibly Bartholomew unwisely tried to marry her off without proper consultation. Only royal parenthood appealed to her; then there entered a curious erotic quality, which just might echo something in her relationship with her actual father.29 Where she constantly mocked the sexual desires and designs of rich old age on youth, she found sexuality coupled with power a heady combination. As for barbers, Aphra tended in her works to mock them less than their customers; perhaps she remembered the comic vulnerability of the latter when soaped and ready for shaving by a man with a sharp knife.30
She was similarly unsentimental about Kent, its fertile hilly la
nd, some suitable for fruit, grain and cattle, the occasional wooded parts round Canterbury and the waste and barren ground beyond. She was unmoved by its political traditions that made much of its settlement by Jutes rather than Saxons and of its independent history. Though it supposed itself to be full of heroic, liberty-loving people, it bred few important republicans of the sort Aphra Behn might have found heroic and it showed its libertarian spirit mostly by avoiding taxes and disobeying the Puritan injunctions to ignore Christmas and stop cock-fighting.31 For most of the time, Kentish people were prepared to accept St Paul’s useful injunction to obey ‘the powers that be’. Consequently there was not much squealing as the ‘Good Old Cause’ of Parliament and Protestantism was overtaken in the late 1640s by the more radical and orderly power of the army dominated by Oliver Cromwell. What was left of Parliament after Cromwell’s purges was a ‘rump’ of 240 members. In the future Behn would mercilessly mock this mutilated group, but she was never contemptuous of ‘the great Oliver’ from East Anglia.32 She admired the politically tough just as much as she despised the weakly poor.
During the republican years, some Royalists compromised, wanting ease or losing patience with the young Charles II as he began dealing with Scots Presbyterians and other uncongenial groups. Few of his English followers wished to join an invasion from Scotland, and, when it began to happen, Cromwell easily crushed it. As a child of ten, Aphra would have heard of the disaster of the Battle of Worcester at which Cromwell thoroughly routed the Royalists and Scots, a major defeat which paradoxically became Charles II’s most glamorous moment. Perhaps, in the duller years that followed, Bartholomew spiced his daughter’s provincial life by a covert and not very strenuous Royalism. As a barber, he could pass messages to the few wandering spies and agents in England who had just arrived from the Continent and serve as a useful repository of information, without necessarily moving from Kent. Such activity would help make Aphra’s childhood a suitable preparation for a life of counterfeiting and secrecy. Or, of course, he may have done nothing more than shave and trim customers. Or he may have worked for the other side—the county was riddled with government agents.