Aphra Behn: A Secret Life
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Probably the Barbados ship owned by Erick Wrede was not the King David or King Davids trading between London and Boston in New England in 1653 and 4 and between London and Virginia in 1666 and 7.6 Happily not, since this London King David later had an unpleasant time with Native Americans who killed its passengers. Nor is it likely to have been the galliot of the same name which, in the winter of 1668, was commissioned to carry goods for Queen Henrietta Maria, the King’s mother, to Rouen. Nor is it very likely to have been the Scandinavian King David from Druntheim in Norway owned entirely by the inhabitants of this town, but bought in Holland where it was built in 1655.7 Mr Behn may, however, have served on the King David associated with the imperial free city of Hamburg—there is a Johan Behn born in Hanover in 1611.8 In this case the ship, if calling at English ports, was probably doing so under false colours.
Of whatever nationality and whether legal or illegal, the ship on which Aphra and her party travelled arrived in London around the middle of May 1664 (according to the London Port Books a King David was in London in August and this may have been the vessel). Her marriage to Mr Behn followed sharply.
His absence from mercantile records suggest that he was no great merchant, but Mr Behn may well have had some business as secret if less legal than his new wife’s. The risks of shipping were great and, to spread them, ships of the sort that travelled long distances were often owned by consortia like the West Indies Companies of England and Holland. They also relied on a rudimentary system of insurance, centred on Amsterdam or London. The captains could be shareholders or they could get a salary.9 The financial accounts for all involved would be settled at the end of the voyage. It was important that ventures withstand the political hostilities of trading nations and that all concerned do what was necessary to contribute to free trade. The masters might avail themselves of a variety of flags, the owners might rely on some subterfuge, as can be seen from the records kept by one of King Charles’s most efficient agents, William Blathwayt. He claimed that, in a dispute in a particular jurisdiction, it was common for a local person to pretend a part of a ship’s cargo was his or hers, so that the true foreign owners could be obscured. Judging from an implied reference to him in the case of another ship called The Abraham’s Sacrifice, it is likely that the otherwise largely unsuccessful Mr Behn lent out his services as a useful London resident to declare goods his when there was a dispute about the Dutch infringement of English navigation laws. Perhaps, then, husband and wife came together in their dissembling activities.
If so, this seems the extent of their compatibility. On board ship Mr Behn may have had some attractions, for Aphra admired a show of mastery, but on land he lost glamour. She had been too close to Colepeper’s grand relatives to be happy with any family her new husband produced for her and her persistent mockery of bourgeois pretensions and vulgarity suggests an unpleasant period of adjustment to middling-rank home life. She never ceased to denigrate the money-grubbing merchants of the City and, in her play Sir Patient Fancy, she ferociously depicted a merchant family as combining self-indulgence with censure. Always she scorned the merchant virtues of thrift, sobriety, moderation and wifeliness.
Preceding many of her characters, Aphra probably married partly for money. Her irritation when she discovered there was not as much as she had hoped and that Mr Behn’s property was shares in ships which it was impossible to realise may have fuelled her contemptuous descriptions of wedded sex. Having avoided earlier parental pressure, she had herself made the wrong choice. In later years Behn seems to have had no income except that which she procured for herself, and her husband appears not to have been an adequate provider. Pepys records the confusion which a merchant could leave: ‘it seems that nobody can make anything of his estate, whether he be dead worth anything or no, he having dealt in so many things, public and private, as nobody can understand whereabouts his estate is—which is the fate of those great dealers in everything’.10 It was fortunate that the Behns apparently had no living children.
Probably as agent ‘Astrea’ rather than the newly wed Mrs Behn, Aphra had an audience with the King after her return, to report on Surinam. No doubt she announced the shortcomings of Deputy Governor Byam and the ill-prepared defences of the colony. From her little experience of commerce, she could affirm that the natives were ready to be traded with and much to European advantage. Surinam, she insisted, was a colony to be kept safe, for it was more than itself—it was the gateway (England’s only one) to the rest of South America.
She was already an accomplished talker and the King enjoyed curiosities. Perhaps he liked the dried butterflies she showed him or the head of feathers. Or perhaps Aphra had already strung together the story of the slave prince, darker even than the ‘black’ Stuart king, and amused him with the first telling.
He may have been called Oroonoko already, after the mighty river Orinoco close to Surinam, a name that recalled one source of her inspiration.11 Like another source, La Calprenède’s princely Scythian, who saw the woman he loved, the black-haired and white-skinned Statira, ‘the most perfect workmanship of the Gods... Ivory and Ebony’, grabbed by an older king, Oroonoko becomes the victim of kingly concupiscence. Considering her audience, Behn may have included this part only when she came to publish, after the predatory King Charles’s death.
His Majesty no doubt listened to tales and observations with the attention he gave to many of his subjects when earnestly conversing with him, especially if they were, if not in the first youth, still plump and fair. But his span was short and perhaps she felt her hold slipping. Behn would have few other occasions to see Charles II, but she would speak loyally, if not reverentially, of him as a man throughout her life.12
After her royal audience she considered how best to lay out the curiosities she had brought. The dried butterflies and snakeskin probably went to the newly organised museum of the Royal Society, which collected such artefacts.13 The feathers went to Thomas Killigrew. So, with her gifts, Behn may have ingratiated herself with two of the most important institutions of the Restoration, the Royal Society and the theatre. Although excluded from one and embraced by the other, both would be important to her in providing her with many of her friends. With each group she would in time feel intellectually equal to arguing and debating.
If Behn had divulged her theatrical ambitions to the King, she may have been directed to Killigrew as the chief of the King’s Company of actors, or she may have been invoking a shared Interregnum past when she approached him. During the time of her possible visit to the Low Countries in the 1650s, the Cavalier Killigrew had been in Maastricht, having reneged on his debts in England, made a shrewd second marriage to a wealthy Dutch lady, and obtained a Dutch military appointment. As a young man about Europe before the Civil War he had been judged a perpetual adolescent, playing ‘the foole allwayes through the streets Like a Schoole-boy’, while shocking his elders with his ‘profaine and irreligious discourses’.14 His ten-act play Thomaso suggested he had not much changed, for in it he revealed his egocentric dreams of being beloved by many women, as well as his sufferings as an exile.15
Killigrew had a strain of melancholy, which often adheres to arrogant people who feel they have something to write but are blocked in expression. He had had little formal education and described himself as an ‘illiterate Courtier’. This usually meant unversed in the classics, but, in his case, it may have signified more. He was a great wheeler and dealer but he had trouble with writing; he could not spell or easily read ‘his own hand’; more unkindly his writing was called ‘Gibring’.16 It is just possible that, if he had met young Aphra with her clear handwriting on the Continent, he had found in her a useful amanuensis. Perhaps she had even helped put Thomaso in order in the way Dryden would help William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, tidy up a play for performance. In the process she would have learnt the possibility of making good theatre from other people’s inchoate material.17
In his forties, Killigrew was a man of some talents, ‘
a gentleman of great esteem with the King’ according to Pepys, politically slippery, and deeply cynical. With little qualification for it, he had been given charge of one of the two patent theatrical companies. Perhaps with his rather erratic career in the Interregnum, this had been less reward for loyalty than bribe to ensure it, for he had had complicated dealings.18 He remained a political force and dabbled in state affairs and in the secret service. Indeed Killigrew was possibly in part responsible for Aphra’s mission to Surinam. He had plantations in the West Indies and might have been eager to know how combustible the colonies were and whether William Scot, whom he knew to be there, might be the tinder.19
As head of the King’s Company of actors, Killigrew was a good recipient for Aphra Behn’s feathers, which proved to be a very opportune present. Depending on when she returned, Killigrew used them for the first production of Dryden’s and Robert Howard’s The Indian Queen, which began his theatre’s vogue for heroic dramas with exotic settings and elaborate props. Or they may have been first used for a revival towards the end of the 1660s. At either of these ‘speckled plumes brought such an audience’.20 The ‘plumes’ were used again for the sequel, The Indian Emperor. Presumably Behn hoped that she might benefit from her gift, perhaps by finding a home for her play, The Young King, and please the King and Killigrew all at once. Maybe she would have done so if the plague had not unluckily closed the theatres.
Soon after Behn returned from Surinam, news came to London that the plague had struck in Yarmouth on the Norfolk coast. By the winter of 1664 it had reached London and, by the summer of 1665, it was raging there. On 7 June, Pepys recorded ‘the hottest day that I have ever felt in my life’: this was just the condition in which the disease could flourish and, walking in Drury Lane, he had the shock of seeing for the first time ‘a red cross painted on the doors of several houses’. Three days earlier, an edict had been signed closing all theatres and places of public entertainment. On 14 June, the actors left town.
Deaths mounted from hundreds to over a thousand a day by September. The weather remained hot and the unsanitary nature of the capital, with its open sewers and contaminated rivers, made conditions almost intolerable. Many who could left and grass grew in the deserted streets, unflattened by dogs and cats who had been destroyed by the authorities in an attempt to prevent the disease spreading. The air was made thick by fires to burn off plague vapours.
By many, the plague was seen as an act of God, not so much aimed at themselves as at the licentious court. The plague was mainly confined to London and the Home Counties, so Puritans of other regions could denounce courtly lewdness and ungodliness. In which case, it was sadly unfair that, like the theatrical people with whom they were so associated, the King and his court had quitted London for Oxford—where Charles’s principal mistress, Lady Castlemaine, gave birth to her third royal bastard—thus leaving the less culpable inhabitants to bear the brunt of divine disfavour.
Perhaps Aphra Behn fled with many others to Kent down the Medway to stay with any of her family or friends left there; she had insufficient goods to worry about looters, who had a free hand during the exodus. Or perhaps she stayed and used the available remedies. A Constance Hall made plague water of woodsorrell, rosemary, sage, mint, wormwood, angelica, scabious, pimpernel, sundew, motherwort, snake wood and liquorice.21 Others indicated further combinations of roots and herbs simmered in vinegar. Still others suggested lancing the buboes, as they did in the Middle East. Since many of the more reputable physicians had quitted the city, there were a good number of charlatans and mystical medics around. Reports claimed that excess of eating and drinking brought on and brought out the plague. There was even a notion that venereal disease prevented it and the bawds of London were said to be seeking poxed whores for prophylactic duty.
There was commonsense too and some heroism. One doctor, Thomas O’Dowd, who ministered to the sick, died for his pains. Behn would have approved his rejection of the Puritan notion of illness as a divine chastising rod. Inevitably everyone must occasionally have felt the pestilence providential and taken comfort from the idea—even the pragmatic Pepys does—but, if the plague were seen as God’s hand, there was still no need to suffer without struggling. O’Dowd took the line that, if the disease was divine, so was his skill at healing. Perhaps like O’Dowd’s daughter, his memoirist Mary Trye, Behn had the plague and, taking sensible advice, recovered.
In November, the heat ended in a severe frost, which did more than all the tracts and fanciful remedies to hinder the disease. Deaths started to taper off. Hardly a doctor or chemist remained in the city, and the survivors had largely depended on their own resources. Quickly the living overcame their gratitude for survival and began to repine at the lack of entertainment. Not a play or puppet show was on offer. Taverns and inns had mostly closed and fuel had reached an exorbitant price. The court had decamped without paying its debts and there was hardship for those dependent on the desires and needs of this large parasitical body.
By January of 1666 deaths had declined to such an extent that the King could return to Whitehall. Oxford was as glad to be rid of its demanding, expensive and dirty tenants as London was to receive them back. But, despite the decreasing deaths, the theatres were not allowed to reopen until the summer, when they began a lengthy process of refurbishment.
One of the casualties of the plague might have been Mr Behn for, if the marriage was not successful, it seems at least to have been short—Mr Behn disappeared between the return from Surinam and the summer of 1666.22 His demise was happy for literature, since a seventeenth-century husband is unlikely to have accepted a commercially play-writing wife.
It is of course just possible that Mr Behn simply tired of matrimony: Aphra had a quick and busy tongue and the contemporary conduct-book writer, Lord Halifax, warned against marriage to talkative women. Also, as Mary Carleton proved, it was easy to lose a spouse in these scantily recorded times.23 From her later plays it is clear that Aphra Behn felt that mistaken marriages had better be ended quickly, although her fiction was not so sanguine about the possibilities. Most likely, however, Mr Behn’s disappearance was less colourfully caused and he simply died. He could, then, have perished in any of the many encounters a merchant-mariner would face at sea, but the plague is as good a termination as any.
After his ‘death’, the widow Aphra Behn was in need of money. She had to keep herself well dressed, for a bedraggled woman had little worth and little chance to use others to promote her interests, the only way to flourish. Thus she could not afford any lengthy period without income. Her immediate family were not of much assistance. After Behn had returned from Surinam, her brother had entered the Duke of Albemarle’s regiment, the Coldstream Guards (the only Cromwellian regiment not to be disbanded). This was probably with the help of Colepeper, for his Sidney relatives had acted as Albemarle’s patrons in his extraordinarily successful career. The young man’s love of finery could be indulged in this regiment but, since he is not listed among the officers, he probably held a lowly position, far from lucrative. Aphra Behn must help herself. The theatre on which she might have had designs remained firmly closed.
When in 1665 the plague had emptied the playhouses, the process had been aided by the growing hostility between the Dutch and the English, which had flared up into the Second Dutch War. The gallants who frequented the theatre were signing up for naval service and the prudent were leaving London for country estates. In June, the Duke of York sailed his fleet up the English coast to Lowestoft where he engaged with the Dutch in a battle which cost both sides a great deal in men and ships. The English victory was much celebrated in London and Behn would later write of her hero:
Behold His single wonders of that Day,
When o’re the liquid Plain He cut His way;
Through show’rs of Death and Clouds of dark’ning smoke,
Like fatal Lightening the fierce Victor broke,
And kill’d, where e’re he dasht th’ unerring stroke.24
In many ways, the Dutch and English should have been natural allies. Helped by England in their struggle for independence from Catholic Spain, the Dutch were appreciated as strong Protestants, potential victims of the expansionist French Catholics under the most powerful ruler in Europe, Louis XIV. With Holland the royal family had close ties, since the young William, Prince of Orange, was a nephew of Charles through his sister, Mary. Because of its wealth, status and connections, the House of Orange tended to provide the stadholder or ruler for the whole country, although this was in fact an elected rather than an hereditary position. The Cromwellian government had heartily disliked the royal link and had made it a condition of peace after the First Dutch War in the 1650s that the Prince of Orange should never again be the stadholder. Naturally the new English government removed this element from the treaty, but there were many in Holland who favoured the prohibition; they considered that the overweening House of Orange made their republic a monarchy in all but name. At the time of the Restoration, the young William of Orange was ten. He had little significance in England, since the virility of his uncles, Charles II and James Duke of York, was proven. No one could know that the royal brothers would produce a great many more healthy children out of wedlock than within.
Politically, Holland appeared more stable than the country that had recently changed from a monarchy into a commonwealth, then into a protectorship, then back into a monarchy, but it had its own factions and parties, and the various provinces were often at odds. Wealthy Amsterdam, for example, with its resolute interest in trade above politics and prestige, was often out of step with the other towns and provinces. Since 1654, Holland had been ruled by the astute statesman and anti-Orangist, John de Witt, who, with the help of his brother Cornelius and Admiral de Ruyter, did much to advance the country’s commercial and military power.