by Janet Todd
Whatever the paternal activities, until she reached her mid-teens at least, Aphra would have been caught in the female world. Despite the huge political events unfolding in the nation, the daily life for women inevitably went on as it always had, with the endless business of keeping the home, getting and preparing food, bearing and raising children. Canterbury was as fair a place to fulfil these tasks as anywhere. It was reasonably prosperous, with a good market-place and fairly well-ordered streets, though, like elsewhere, it lacked sanitation and a clean water supply and suffered from the frequent burnings of its wooden houses.
Perhaps in her early years, Aphra had her period of piety, as most children do who are raised on the edge of a religion. If she had, it was long passed by the time she wrote to publish, and in Oroonoko she conveyed two stages by portraying herself trying to teach the slaves about ‘the true God’ while making the hero Oroonoko ‘jest’ about the Trinity. In her works she showed no appreciation of the complex, beautiful devotional poetry of George Herbert or Henry Vaughan, and she made no mention of her contemporaries, Milton, Marvell or Bunyan. Later, in the Restoration, Edward Hyde, Charles II’s Lord Chancellor, looked back at the generation of young people born during the troubled years and noted their spiritual damage: ‘All Relations were confounded by the several Sects in Religion, which discountenanced all Forms of Reverence and Respect, as Reliques and Marks of Superstition....’ He spoke mainly of men of course: few women dared break the seemingly natural link between femininity and piety.33 Some managed to form the link into a kind of subverting force, but Behn was not among these; she disliked Puritans far too much to emulate or use them.34 As a dissatisfied girl of independent habit and thought, she would have provoked homilies from moralistic men and she abhorred sermons in or out of church. Those in church had become dry discourses on speculative and national issues; talk had replaced ritual, which alone might have reconciled her to religion. Although she complained that Puritans aimed to squash the joy from life, like most Cavaliers Aphra also accepted that their joylessness coated lust. When in her play, The Feign’d Curtizans, she created a dissembling and lusty chaplain, aptly named Tickletext, she made Kent his home.
The signs of the Puritan ideal were all around her. In the 1650s the great cathedral of Canterbury appeared like a ruined monastery. The reformers had torn out the decoration left over from Henry VIII’s earlier Reformation, desecrated many of the monuments, and stripped the choir of its hangings. They had left bare walls and roof, and even these had been neglected: the windows had been broken and the timber work had deteriorated. The organ had been damaged and the great library demolished, its books sold. So when Aphra visited as a child she could not have seen the once gilded shrine and tomb of Thomas à Becket, but she could have noticed the worn hollow made by the feet of the pilgrims who had once worshipped there. Roman Catholicism, the outward shows of which always attracted her, might have made its presence first felt as an emphatic absence.35
Throughout Behn’s work, church-going is seen not as a chance for piety but as the only sexual resource for a girl in a repressive society, whether in Southern Europe, London or Kent. In one of her last plays a young woman exclaims characteristically:
I have been at the Chapel; and seen so many Beaus, such a Number of Plumeys, I cou’d not tell which I shou’d look on most, sometimes my heart was charm’d with the gay Blonding, then with the Melancholy Noire, annon the amiable brunet, sometimes the bashful, then again the bold; the little now, anon the lovely tall! In fine, my Dear, I was embarrassed on all sides, I did nothing but deal my heart tout au toore.36
Beyond experience in family, shop, church or county, there was the world of literature and in this the young Aphra spent a large part of her time. If unmoved by Kent as countryside, she was inspirited by Arcadia, that mythical realm of pastoral literature existing in its peculiar Golden Age glow. The world she inhabited and which she herself later created so vividly was animated not by Nature or by God, but by human sexual desire and activity; it was not strange and sublime, simply responsive. Being pre-agricultural, this Arcadian world had no labourers or crops, only swains and untended fruit. These swains combined contented lower and upper classes without the economic realities of either. They inhabited a park of nobles, where nature simply supplied the necessary food and symbolic flowers twined themselves into bunches. No one had to struggle to town with produce or worry about price.37
In tune with this Arcadian pastoral world was French romance, that great love of bookish (and Royalist) girls.38 Avidly they read the huge fantastic pseudo-historical works of Gauthier de La Calprenède and Madeleine de Scudéry, full of extreme and refined emotion, propriety and heroism, of derring-do carried out by both men and women, as well as women sold and exchanged as slaves between men. From 1652 to 1665, the many volumes of La Calprenède’s Cassandra and Cleopatra came out in English. Dorothy Osborne, who chronicled a bright girl’s reading in her letters to her fiancé, lapped the French versions up at once, seeing them as a fine test of her lover. She had, she exclaimed, ‘six tomes’ of Cleopatra and intended to lend them to him. When he was unresponsive, she wrote again, ‘since you are at leisure to consider the moon, you may be enough to read Cléopâtre, therefore I have sent you three tomes...’. And again, ‘I have sent you the rest of Cléopâtre.... You will meet with a story in these parts of Cléopâtre that pleased me more than any I ever read in my life; ’tis of one Délie, pray give me your opinion of her and her prince.’39
Dorothy Osborne was not alone in her enthusiasm for this potent prose. Another contemporary, Mary North, ‘diverted her sisters and all the female society at work together...with rehearsing by heart prolix romances, with the substance of speeches and letters as well as passages; and this with little or no hesitation but in a continual series of discourse’.40 Meanwhile the conduct-and cookery-book writer, Hannah Woolley, described a noble patroness making her read ‘Poems of all sorts and plays, teaching me as I read, where to place my accents, how to raise and fall in my voice, where to lay emphasis on the expressions. Romances of the best sort she took great delight in.’41 Aphra was similarly hooked. She read avidly—and listened too, for many of her later allusions to the great heroes of romance are spelt phonetically, as if from something heard, not read, long ago as a girl.
Since she had good clear handwriting, the kind from which the modern variety has derived, Aphra must also have spent some of her childhood copying the Royalist poems, which, along with romance, coloured her mind.42 She had not so much money to lay out on printed works and, besides, many verses circulated only in manuscript. Girls spent much time on this activity, servicing quills, usually the second wings of geese or ravens, and licking them clean when greasy, ruling lines and rubbing them out with bread when the letters had been formed. The young Elizabeth Thomas, an admirer and imitator of Behn in the early years of the next century, remembered long hours of writing out chapters and compiling commonplace books. She also practised various scripts, as Aphra probably did. The skill Aphra acquired would have been useful in later life when she probably did copying for money. There was a huge industry of such work in London, since handwritten newsletters and poems were much in demand—as was the good-looking copying girl: rakish letters mention ambiguous visits to lady copyists in garrets.43
Aphra’s background is not far from that of another Canterbury child, the sixteenth-century dramatist, Christopher Marlowe, son of a shoemaker. The difference of course comes from his sex. As a clever boy, Marlowe had the advantage of formal education provided by the King’s School. There were boarding schools for girls in Kent, but they were rather like finishing schools, fashionably aiming pupils towards marriage and the managing of a man in a domestic setting, although they could provide a start for an ambitious girl.44 The poet Katherine Philips, Behn’s most important literary predecessor, was largely self-educated and may have been influenced by her grandmother who wrote poetry, but she also attended a ladies’ academy.
Some women wan
ted more. Hannah Woolley required girls to read edifying works and romances, but she also suggested that they learn Latin, so that they could go beyond reading Plutarch’s Lives made English, the closest most girls came to classical learning. She did, however, recognise that men often mocked women’s ambition and the smattering of knowledge to which it usually led. ‘A learned woman is thought to be a comet that bodes mischief whenever it appears.’45 Quite clever women still lamented their lack of formal schooling. The poet and science writer Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, never ceased to bewail her insufficient training, which revealed itself in both a beguiling spontaneity and an appalling spelling. She understood the tie of learning and power when she wrote of men, ‘They hold books as their crown by which they rule and govern.’ Behn’s spelling, like her handwriting, was more ordered suggesting some training in script.
The extraordinary humanist education given to only a small group of aristocratic girls under the Tudors, with the notion that the classics combined with Christianity could breed virtue, was far in the past and the perennial dislike of intellectual women had intensified in the early seventeenth century. But, however illusory a past of general female achievement, thinking Englishwomen like Behn were irritated by a sense of increasing exclusion from male learning, at the very time when education in the classics and the new sciences was broadening to take in a far wider spectrum of young men than ever before—and for a long time after.46 ‘We are become like worms that only live in the dull earth of ignorance, winding ourselves sometimes out by the help of some refreshing rain of good educations, which seldom is given us,’ wrote Margaret Cavendish bitterly.47 Women yearned to be ‘book-learned’ and felt that their possible weakness by nature was being enhanced by nurture. Mary Astell, the major feminist thinker of the seventeenth century, roundly declared that female incapacity, ‘if there be any, is acquired not natural’.48
All her life Behn felt, simultaneously, that she had missed something of importance in not knowing Latin and Greek well and that what she was missing was unnecessary, since its primary result seemed an unwonted sense of superiority in its owners. Perhaps Uncle George Denham had started her prejudice. Francis Kirkman, a contemporary writer and publisher, who, like Aphra, felt he had been deprived of the code of Latin that defined a gentleman, wrote defiantly in his autobiographical The Unlucky Citizen (1673):
you shall not find my English, Greek, here; nor hard cramping Words, such as will stop you in the middle of your Story to consider what is meant by them; you may read all that is here written without the use of a Dictionary; you shall need none, no not so much as an English one; and the Truth is, if I had a mind to confound you with hard Terms; I’le assure you I cannot, having not been bred so good a Scholar....
Aphra would later make this sort of truculent, envious gesture towards her absent formal education. That both she and Kirkman had to some extent to be autodidacts inevitably made them belligerent and resentful.
Years later, Behn spoke for many ambitious and intellectual girls when she claimed she had all her life ‘curst’ her ‘Sex and Education’,
And more the scanted Customs of the Nation,
Permitting not the Female Sex to tread
The Mighty Paths of Learned Heroes Dead.
The Godlike Virgil and Great Homers Muse
Like Divine Mysteries are conceal’d from us,
We are forbid all grateful Theams,
No ravishing Thoughts approach our Ear;
The Fulsom Gingle of the Times
Is all we are allow’d to Understand, or Hear.49
Sensibly, however, she let the ‘Fulsom Gingle’ resound in her mind. She later became adept at mimicking and mocking it.
If the male Christopher Marlowe is no real analogy, ‘the German Princess’, Mary Carleton, a great female ‘rogue’ who passed herself off as a German noblewoman, may be one. Mary Carleton was born about the same time in roughly the same place into roughly the same rank as Aphra Behn, and was one of those witty and pretty girls of the lower orders with some genteel manners who occasionally amused their betters.50 All girls were raised to please men, a tendency exaggerated in themselves by the lowly-born who yearned to enter privileged educated ranks. The dual need produced a consummate ability to entertain—in Behn’s case a play-writing career was pleasing on a large scale—and to counterfeit. Such quick, pretty and ambitious girls might be taken into grand homes for long periods where, as playmate or companion for the daughters, they could acquire a patina—or more than that—of education. In the words of Francis Kirkman, her biographer, Mary Carleton intruded herself
into the company of the best Children in the City, with whose Relations, her winning Deportment, and ingenious answers on all occasions, soon did ingratiate her, insomuch that several persons of good quality frequently took her home as a Play-mate for their little ones for a week together. Thus she learnt some genteel accomplishments such as singing and dancing and acquired an educated way of speaking above her station. She read English perfectly and played the virginal and violin at the age of five….
Inevitably, ‘the meanness of her quality did not suit with her spirit’ and she loathed the notion of ‘laborious drudgery’.
Often the result of such patronage was that the girl, when grown and not as amusing, might make a modestly satisfactory marriage. Or, if less lucky, she might enter a life of dissatisfied upper service as a companion or lady’s maid. Or she might fall into the ranks of the genteel courtesans, or, as in the case of Mary Carleton, a life of trickery and crime to procure those advantages seen at too close quarters when young. Or, if exceptionally intelligent, as Aphra certainly was, she might become a resourceful and witty woman of learning who had to earn a living and could not afford too many principles. There was no reason why, having survived such a background, a woman should discuss it.
After being accused of bigamy before the austere and stern justice, Sir Edmund Bury Godfrey, Mary Carleton awaited trial in prison. There she was visited by people of rank and position including, on 29 May 1663, the diarist Samuel Pepys, highly susceptible to the charm that had—so it later came out—procured three husbands, at least two of them living. He was ‘high in the defence of her wit and spirit’. Aphra seems not to have shared the opinion. Years later, when Mary Carleton had made her ‘untimely Exit’ on the scaffold, a friend wrote an epilogue for one of Behn’s plays which then flopped on the stage. It made a clever comparison between the playwright trying to cozen an audience and Mary Carleton, the ‘German Princess’, trying to cozen her husband, each being cheats in their own ways. Behn was clearly not amused and her reference to it was thoroughly ungracious. Was the comparison of the two upwardly mobile Canterbury girls too close?
Chapter 2
Sir Thomas Colepeper and Lord Strangford
‘born for greater things than her Fortune does now promise’
Something more than time and place was needed to transform Aphra Johnson, daughter of a barber and wet-nurse, into the acquaintance and entertainer of courtiers, some role that would bring her to the attention of men she could hardly have met at home in Canterbury. Beyond the obvious sexual one, functions available to a girl in restless times were of messenger, courier and, just possibly, spy. These Thomas Colepeper, her foster-brother, could have facilitated, for, as a well-off young man with no parental constraint, he was soon deeply entangled in Royalist activity. He may, also, have provided Aphra with some relations on whom to practise social and investigative skills.
The family of Thomas Colepeper was important in Kent, but not as grand as the Sidney family—as the relatives of his mother, Lady Barbara, noted when she proposed, after a whirlwind courtship of ten days, to bestow herself on Sir Thomas Colepeper.1 She was the daughter of Robert Sidney, Earl of Leicester, and sister of the present Earl.2 Their son Thomas was, then, related through his mother to the Sidneys, one of the most prominent families in the kingdom, in turn closely allied to the great ducal family of the Howards.
The Howards included Protestants and Catholics, dukes and playwrights, and for them Behn always had the greatest respect; indeed, in one of her seemingly autobiographical remarks, she declared she had come ‘into the World with a Veneration for your Illustrious Family, and being brought up with continual Praises of the Renowned Actions of your glorious Ancestors’. Her first published poem was written to encourage a play-writing Howard; fifteen years later she eulogised the Howard Duke of Norfolk as her patron. After a Catholic Howard, Viscount Stafford, was executed during the Popish Plot in 1680, she made him into an English saint and martyr. Colepeper was impressed with the Howards too: in his ‘Adversaria’, their family tree appears almost as frequently as his own.
Before her second marriage to Colepeper’s father, Lady Barbara had been wife to the rich Lord Strangford. On his father’s early death, their eldest son, Philip, became Lord Strangford, inherited a huge income of some £4,000 a year, and was made a ward of the crown. After much unseemly haggling, his maternal uncle, the Earl of Leicester, became his guardian and Strangford moved to the Sidney house of Penshurst.3 At fifteen he had made a plausibly pleasant impression; only later did Dorothy Osborne, a close friend of the Sidney girls, term him ‘the beast with... estates’. Soon the Earl regarded his nephew as extravagant and spoilt, while Strangford came to judge his uncle devious and greedy.4