Aphra Behn: A Secret Life

by Janet Todd

  It had been sailing past Galway in Ireland when it had been seized by men who assumed that, since England and Holland were at war and since the ship looked Dutch, it was a proper prize and they were acting as patriots not pirates. In the summer of 1667, some months after Behn had returned from Antwerp and was in the thick of her money troubles with Butler, the captain of the Abraham’s Sacrifice, a Genoese called Anthony Basso, petitioned the English authorities to remove the soldiers from his ship and return it to him. The seizure, he claimed, had been quite illegal: both vessel and goods were Genoese rather than Dutch. This claim was some embarrassment to the authorities since the ship with its cargo had been sold off in Ireland at a fraction of their value, an action for which the Governor of Galway and others found themselves ‘upon the carpet’; indeed Basso accused the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland of actually delaying an order from the King that the ship should not be sold. The Governor and others were therefore expected ‘to come but blewlly off’. In fact, as so often in these cases, nothing much happened.

  William Blathwayt, an official in the King’s Hague embassy, was put in charge of the case to represent the English interest and, in April 1669 when the Anglo-Dutch War was over, to defend it in the Dutch admiralty courts, to which Basso had now appealed. The sum involved was large—about £80,000—and Arlington himself had written to the English ambassador in Holland urging him to ‘apply all your Care and Diligence’ to prevent the goods being taken back on the pretext that they were Genoese, ‘for if it should prove so, His Majesty would be obliged to refund a great Sum of Money to them’.21 As ever, His Majesty had little spare cash.22

  For his case, Blathwayt was very eager to know if there were any insurers of the ship or its cargo. If these could be named or produced and if they were Dutch or in any way connected with Holland, it would go far to establishing his case: that the ship and cargo were legal prizes for the English in time of war. Even if not personally involved, Aphra Behn or her factor, Piers, could, Blathwayt had learnt, tell him something about the insurers of the vessel.23 So Piers was visited by the English authorities in an undercover operation. He prevaricated: he could not at present give the name of the insurers, he explained, but he left his visitors in no doubt that it was a matter of ‘would not tell’.24 He did, however, declare that the cargo was insured by several people. In Holland, poor Blathwayt had even less success, being denied access to the Dutch records, and he abandoned his efforts, thoroughly frustrated. Of course he went unrewarded for his trouble. The only clarity in the whole business, which Behn could have foreseen, was that the King did not propose to pay anyone for anything.

  Evidently Blathwayt and his agents did not find the widow Behn. If this widow is indeed Aphra Behn, she would be the spy Blathwayt probably knew about in Antwerp since he too dealt in espionage for Joseph Williamson. Undoubtedly she would be wary of anything involving payment or potential legal trouble: after all she had just been freed from prison for debt. Either she made herself unavailable in England or she had left the country, possibly en route for Italy, since it is conceivable that Mr Behn did have some financial involvement in the Abraham’s Sacrifice. Either he had commissioned goods to be loaded in Genoa or, as Blathwayt presumably suspected, was a launderer rather than an insurer, acting as cover in England for an essentially Dutch venture. In either case, his widow might have wished to pursue claims with merchants in Italy. If she did, she got little out of the enterprise, for the Genoese remained unhappy and continued to complain. By 1669, Aphra Behn was certainly in England ready to try a new venture.25

  She was sure that London should remain her arena of activity. It was an unhealthy choice. The ‘fumes, steams and stenches’, especially from the burning of ‘sea-cole’, stank the air.26 The Fleet River had become fetid; a new canal was finished in 1674, but, not being used by ships as expected, the river soon reverted to a rubbish dump and sewer. Alcohol was drunk everywhere and the diet was poor. Ailing children had a hard time of it—but there was no abundance of these for, though the town was regarded as licentious, there were fewer births than in the country.27 All the problems derived from the huge size of the population, now swelled by immigrants like Aphra Behn. Despite the depredations of the plague, London easily remained the largest city in the kingdom, with about one in fourteen or fifteen living there. Most dwelt in tenements, often carved out of once grand houses.

  The city was also bustling, stimulating and transforming and Behn would have found more congenial men and women in London than anywhere else. Colepeper’s wild half-brother Lord Strangford was only one of the many bored provincials who had longed to experience metropolitan diversions. The standard of literacy was higher than in the country and even maids, like their ladies, habitually read romances. In decorous City circles women would be excluded from intellectual or free conversations, but, in the more advanced and risqué ones around the court and theatre, a ready wit such as Behn’s would be prized.28 She was already a political animal and she could see that the court and its hinterland in the town offered more scope for spirited women than the bourgeois world into which she had probably married and which kept its coffee-houses, clubs and stock exchanges exclusively for men.

  Behn likely settled in an area between the City of London and Westminster, her constant references being to Covent Garden and the Temple. She may have lived in Whitefriars or St Bride’s, mixed bohemian areas, part down-at-heel and part respectable, with colourful acting and writing inhabitants, bookshops and taverns. The young Earl of Rochester, who had already made a name for himself by kidnapping the woman he was shortly to marry, occasionally lodged there and a medical man who, according to his advertisement, could cure all ailments from sciatica to ‘Tortions in the Bowels’ made it his home. The area also housed actors and musicians, as well as clubs for sodomists, Catholics, and other ‘undesirables’; there were low dives in Fulwood’s Rents in Holborn nearby and, with its warren of tenements and passages, Alsatia was a sanctuary for debtors.

  Behn would have lodged, possibly still with her mother, rather than owned or occupied a whole house; it was a respectable enough action since professional men like lawyers did the same. The government listed Londoners who were houseowners or heads of households, so as to levy a hearth tax. Widows and spinsters were often amongst these; indeed some, such as the early seventeenth-century cross-dresser and confidence trickster, Mal Cutpurse, were eager to claim the status. Behn does not appear on the ten lists that are extant, however, and, throughout her life, seems to have been content or obliged to be a lodger. As such, she probably had enough room for herself and two or three servants, the elderly maid and a boy at least. She could write in shared space and a room of her own was not necessary.

  The closeness of her lodgings to the Inns of Court suited Behn. She liked young lawyers, witty not overly serious men. They drank and gossiped, went to the theatre, ‘adorn[ed] all their studies with the poets, and fill[ed] their heads with Lampoons, Songs, and Burlesque’.29 They were away from their roots, often adopting a libertine lifestyle, in stark contrast to Puritan fathers, and were usually unencumbered with wives or had wives safely tucked away in the country. Fancying themselves as a rival society to the courtiers, they occasionally tried to overtop them in misbehaving, especially in the theatre pit, and even Rochester called them ‘rakehells’.

  Behn had been out of the country much in recent years and could fashion what identity she liked. Rochester described the demeanour of ‘a waiting gentlewoman’ who, to prove her descent from ‘Sir Humphry’ her great uncle, had to affect high spirits and an inclination ‘towards a gentile convers’. There were many lampoons on the town miss who ‘talks high of her Family, and tells a large story how they were Ruined by the late Wars. But the true History of her Life, is generally to this Effect: She is only the Cub of a Bumpkin, lickt into a Genteel form by Town Conversation’ and now living ‘with a maid in noble rooms in Covent Garden’.30 No doubt Aphra Behn already knew that spiritedness was her way forward, and it was
sensible to combine unshockability and gentility.

  There was scope at court for a woman with beauty, wit and some means. Rochester’s friend, the courtier Sir Charles Sedley, is supposed to have asked a new arrival among the Maids of Honour whether she intended to set up as ‘a Beauty, a Miss, a Wit or a Politician’. Aphra Behn apparently had some beauty but perhaps not enough now to capture and captivate usefully. A wit she might have been or a she-politician, but both roles required money—it was costly to be seen at court.31 But she could enter the alternative court of the theatre and town tavern, that louche, frank society in which transvestism and buggery were openly mentioned and people could become what they would.

  In the gap between her return to England and her entry into recorded literature, Aphra Behn probably copied for money, helping to fulfil the huge demand for manuscript lampoons, political libels and any other material that people wanted to read but the government did not wish published. Throughout her life, she would be aware of this scribbling underworld, and many of her friends and enemies would emanate from it. She may also have done some legal copying since her addresses to the King suggested she knew the form of petitions, as well as some copying for the theatre.

  But copying alone would not have kept her in suitable style, and it is hard to imagine a woman’s finding time to write her own verses, as Behn did, without her being partly kept by a man or at least receiving substantial gifts. One ‘keeper’ or admirer from these years may be hidden in the name Amyntas which crops up in Behn’s early poems for a promiscuous worldly man. On his behalf, Behn showed some possessiveness in ‘To Mrs Harsenet. On the Report of a Beauty, Which she went to see at Church’.

  The verses were printed in two versions in 1684 and 1707 but were probably composed now since the lady to whom they were addressed, Carola, daughter of Sir Roger Harsnett, appears in the 1707 version under her maiden name, changed in 1670.32 In the poem Behn and Carola Harsnett are visitors to the fashionable and scandalous watering place of Tunbridge Wells in Kent, Behn accompanied by Amyntas. The place had come some way since 1606 when the ailing Lord North had drunk from the springs and found himself rejuvenated. The springs or wells had been fenced in and paved round, and bowling-greens and houses for coffee-drinking, pipe-smoking and gaming had been established. When Charles II and his court arrived in 1663, the King occupied a house on Mount Ephraim, but his retinue was forced to encamp on the common. By the 1670s there were still few permanent houses, although visitors could stay in surrounding villages, as Behn and Amyntas might have done. Anthony Hamilton described Tunbridge Wells as ‘the most simple and rustic place in Europe, but the most delightful and entertaining’.33 The social constraint of London was laid aside and all was fresh flowers, fruit, love and dancing on the soft grass. It was Arcadia moved to England, the pastoral made actual, sophistication in an organised rural setting. Some took a more jaundiced view. The Earl of Rochester said it was full of the most ridiculous and unpleasant people imaginable and he preferred his horse.34 Others mentioned the fashionable ennui, the rampant envy and crime. Since she enjoyed artifice it was probably Behn’s kind of place.

  Behn had heard much of Carola Harsnett, the resplendent young woman who was a natural conqueror: ‘How many Slaves your Conqu’ring Eyes had won, / And how the gazing Crowd admiring throng.’ She was almost as susceptible to women as men and always paid tribute to female beauty: inevitably, she ‘a lover grew / Of so much Beauty’. Characteristically Behn was smitten in church, spying Carola ‘at the Altar’ where she had put the old minister off his duty. More significant for Behn was Amyntas’s stance of rapt adoration.

  Behn’s response was a tense verse letter mingling flattery and pique. It echoed the Shakespeare of the sonnets, when he cast himself as the ageing lover in a triangle with a flirtatious beloved and lovely rival. It sounds as though Carola (called Cloris in the poem) had got under Behn’s skin, both disturbing her into erotic feelings for another woman and attracting her male lover away from her. So she warned her off, telling her she was too remarkable a person to bother to entrap such a man as Amyntas. Youth and beauty deserved an exclusive ‘Virgin-Heart’, not that of a roué.

  Since Carola married Sir Samuel Morland in 1670, it is conceivable that Behn’s keeping friend or admirer was in fact Morland, whom she was afraid of losing to the younger woman. Sir Samuel was an old Royalist acquaintance of Colepeper’s, whom Behn may have met before the Restoration when, as Thurloe’s secretary and plain Sam Morland, he acted as an agent for the Royalists. After 1660, he was knighted and pleased the King by inventing instruments for opening and resealing letters so skilfully that no one could notice they had been tampered with. For this he received a pension from the Post Office, which had trouble convincing people that its service was confidential.35 In his private life, Sir Samuel had a penchant for pretty young wives (who tended to die young) and it is possible that he met Carola in Tunbridge Wells where he had gone with Behn. However, there are many other men who might have been keeping Behn and letting their eyes rove on to new beauties, and, for all his inventiveness, Morland was notoriously impecunious—indeed he had to sell his pension to pay his debts. The Amyntas of Behn’s poem, who ‘oft has Fetters worn’, sounds altogether more solvent and rakish.

  A more likely identification is, therefore, Jeffrey Boys, a law student from Gray’s Inn and distant relative of Thomas Colepeper. With Algernon Sidney, his father had taken Sir Thomas Colepeper’s place as lieutenant of Dover Castle in the Interregnum. Young Boys may have been acquainted with Behn from their shared past in Kent although, unlike Behn’s father, his was listed among the ‘Nobility and Gentrey’ of Kent along with Colepeper’s.36 He was probably now keeping his Kentish connections warm by meeting Thomas Colepeper and other compatriots at the Kentish Club in London. Jeffrey Boys had thrown off some of the cultural traditions of a Parliamentary family and was playing the Restoration gentleman in laced cuffs, ribboned hat, silk stockings and wig of fashionable light hair.37 That one version of Behn’s literary lover Amyntas can be identified with Jeffrey Boys is made plain in a long poem she finished later, some of which may date from this time. Called ‘Our Cabal’ and associating Amyntas with Je.B, it again tells Cloris to guard her heart against a man who is not free. Neither ‘To Mrs Harsenet’ nor ‘Our Cabal’ suggests very deep engagement on Behn’s side, but clearly Amyntas has had an amorous effect on the narrator and may have had a financial one as well.

  Rather more feeling emerges from another poem that may date from this time, ‘On the first discovery of falseness in Amintas’, in which Behn either transposed her urban misery into a pastoral retreat or was writing again of the miserable time at Tunbridge Wells. Although so gregarious, when miserable she longed for solitude, a place where she could grieve, ‘Where no dissembl’d complisance may veil / The griefes with which, my soul, thou art opprest’. The writer was aware that she was not being cunning and was too openly revealing jealousy, that infallible test of love. So she imagined herself fading out as Amintas courted another. Possibly it was Carola again, since the rival seems to be a younger woman: for, as Behn lay in the fallen leaves, she saw ‘springing beautyes’ on the boughs.38 Apart from a therapeutic writing of it, the way to combat this sort of melancholy and suspicious mood was through work.

  With her interest in poetry and drama, Behn had known of the early opening of the theatre in London and of the King’s enthusiasm. Within the palace of Whitehall, the Cockpit had been fitted out even before the royal bedroom—while the coronation robes had gone from Westminster Abbey direct to the theatre. After some quarrelling over patents and power, Killigrew had obtained the King’s Company and the playwright and impresario Sir William Davenant, the Duke’s; with hindsight, it is comic that they were enjoined to ‘Expunge all prophaneness and scurrility’ from the old plays performed. These works were divided between the two patent companies and, because it was technically the heir to an old Elizabethan troupe, Killigrew’s company had the rights to a good many of the be
st early dramas, such as those by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher. The Duke’s Company would have to be more aggressive in finding new plays.

  Both companies had introduced a new sort of stage to the London public, with a backstage, proscenium arch and a platform jutting into the audience. Both provided scenery of backcloth and shutters which allowed ‘discoveries’ when these shutters were removed. Many of the discoveries were of the alluring female body, for both troupes innovated by allowing women to act on the public stage. Whatever new plays came forward, they would need to take account of all these changes.

  Growing up in Kent, Behn had had only a few chances of watching plays. Theatricals in the Interregnum included the notorious production of Julius Caesar at Penshurst by Algernon Sidney, to which a large audience had been invited. In Ghent, while swooning over Catholic ritual, she might also have laughed at the itinerant English actors who came to the city and played first at the Town Hall before the councillors and then in rooms in inns or taverns.39 In London after the Restoration, she would have had opportunities as long as she had money—or charm enough to have herself treated.

  Could a woman write for the commercial stage? Behn knew that she could when she heard of the staging of a translation of the French dramatist, Corneille, by the poet, Katherine Philips. Philips had been born a decade before Behn into the family of a London Puritan merchant. She had had some education at a girls’ school in Hackney, where she made intense friendships with other pupils, which survived her marriage at sixteen to a Parliamentary man much her senior. Over the next years, Katherine Philips remained quietly at home in Cardigan in Wales, writing poetry, ardently Royalist and ardent in friendship. In these verses, she preserved some of the ideals of the court of Charles I’s queen, Henrietta Maria, which proclaimed a ‘love abstracted from all corporeal gross impressions and sensual Appetite’, consisting rather ‘in Contemplations and ideas of the Mind, not in carnal Fruition’.40 When her poems were published, the image which they and Philips (now called ‘Orinda’) conveyed had considerable influence, for she made the woman poet into a sensitive lady, writing of refined unphysical emotions in clear, elegant English. Praised by such poetic greats as Abraham Cowley, Philips became a modest corrective to the passionate and ambiguous Greek Sappho, the only other widely known female poet before her, and to the much scorned Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, who had published her verses herself and been mocked for her pretension.41 Philips achieved this feat by accommodating herself to her readers’ desires and displaying an elaborate feminine modesty: despite pleasure in publication, she insisted that she ‘never writ a Line...with an Intention to have it printed’.