by Janet Todd
Among English expatriates in Paris Behn may have met was an intellectual boy of seventeen called George Granville. He was the son of Bernard Granville, who had been Groom of the Chamber to the young Duke of Gloucester in the Interregnum and who, as a distant connection of the Sidneys and a close one of the Albemarles, might just have been known to her at that time. Having achieved his MA in Cambridge, where he had excelled at Latin verse, young George was enjoying France and running up debts. He was given to romantic enthusiasms for older women, having, at the age of eleven, dedicated his life to the winsome Mary of Modena, and he was fascinated by the theatre. The theatrical Aphra Behn was probably his next enthusiasm. For her he would become, with Creech, the first of the young men who enlivened the 1680s, as middle-aged men like Killigrew, Marten, Scot, Gascoigne and Ogniate had stimulated the 1660s when she herself was young.35
Back in England, Behn was lodging in St Bride’s in the house of a Mr Coggin, round the corner from Tonson’s shop in New Street, where both Shadwell and Sprat also lived. She appears as ‘Mrs. Bene’ in a list of lodgers drawn up after a precept of 28 June 1683, probably a government attempt to make a census of the shifting lodgings population of London. Although the document has no date, if it follows other listings it can probably be assigned to the end of June or July.36 That she was still not a head of household, like her fellow dramatists, Dryden, Shadwell and Tate, may have irked her, but she was never sufficiently well paid or frugal enough to set up in independent style.
When she contacted Tonson, Behn was not best pleased to discover that Creech had been so anxious about her commendation for his Lucretius that he had actually changed the most offensive lines. They now praised rather than denigrated faith, having been transformed into ‘Faith the Religious Souls Content / Faith the secure Retreat of Routed Argument’. She thought it presumptuous, but there was nothing to be done now—though she registered her feelings with Tonson: ‘As for Mr. Creech, I would not have you afflict him with a thing can not now be help’d, so never let him know my resentment.’ She did not want to offend the reputedly touchy Creech.
Behn realised she had come back to a new professional and personal scene. Her friend Ephelia was probably dead, since several miscellaneous and raffish poems by Behn, Rochester and others had been added to her original verses to form a new edition of her works, often a sign of an author’s absence. Killigrew too was gone, having lost control of his company long before his death. Professionally it was the change in the theatre that most touched her, however. Killigrew’s old King’s Company had been declining through the troubled period of the Popish Plot, and its demise was hastened through violent actors’ quarrels. Soon there was nothing for it but to amalgamate with the more successful Duke’s. For the rest of Behn’s life there would be only the United Company playing at two locations, Drury Lane mainly for drama, Dorset Garden for spectacle. Happily, most of the Duke’s Company actors survived the merger.
When competition between the two Companies was at its height, between twelve and twenty-five new plays had been staged each season. Now the United Company, needing to economise and having at its disposal all the old plays, expected to put on only three or four. Although Behn was an established playwright and could anticipate a number of revivals, inevitably the theatre could no longer be her major source of income. ‘The Poets lay dormant,’ one later recalled.37 It was well that, over the years, Behn had been dabbling in prose and poetry. Neither of these promised the easy money she was used to as a quick and efficient adapter of plays, but, for the moment, she had no choice but to use what skills she had.
The change coincided with another major shift in Behn’s thinking and mode. She had defeated tragicomedy with farcical comedy and social comment with political assertion. But, in the defeat, she had, to some extent, lost the opportunity of investigating the effects of social coercion on the thinking individual and of deeply probing female passion and sexuality. Now, as she moved out to include other discursive genres in her repertoire, she came to look more at woman in society and to face for them less theatrical solutions. Consequently, she darkened her once half-admiring presentation of the rake figure. What would such a man be like in ordinary social life? she asked.38
There were other questions too. What of the incipient ‘female rake’ she had created? How would the witty flirtatious woman comport herself outside comedy and inside or outside marriage? Although a female rake was not really possible within society, could she exist on the periphery? If so, would she have to pretend all the time? Would she have constantly to use the codes of the very femininity her sexual being denied? Was it possible for a woman to attract a man without playing the feminine game, a game deeply influenced by the absolute distinction of men and women which the spirited woman, aspiring to act and speak like a man, had been bridging? Was sexual pleasure for the woman at its height only when the game was not understood? Thereafter, was it the game, the masquerade, that became the primary pleasure, avoiding as it did the inconvenient outcome of pregnancy?
Behn would start to answer these questions in prose.
Chapter 22
Love-Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister
‘I have my tools about me’
While Aphra Behn was on the Continent she may have used her sleuthing powers to gain a meeting with a friend or servant who knew first-hand of the scandalous doings in the family of Monmouth’s most noble follower, Ford, Lord Grey. With her penchant for gossip, she would have probed and thus obtained the second chapter of a story begun in England in late September 1682.
At that time, along with a large proportion of the reading public, Behn had noticed an advertisement in the London Gazette for a runaway, Lady Henrietta Berkeley, ‘a young lady of a fair complexion, fair haired, full-breasted and indifferent tall’. A reward of £200 was offered for her return. Like the item in the Gazette on the failed beheading of Tarquini nearly twenty years before, it was the very thing to spark Behn’s literary interest: sex and rank worked into scandal.1
The event was made piquant by the relationship of the people involved. Lady Henrietta had eloped with her brother-in-law Ford, Lord Grey. Although ostensibly the Duke of Monmouth’s ardent supporter, Grey was said to have resented his wife Mary’s reputed affair with the Duke though lampoons portrayed him as pimp more than cuckold. The affair of Grey and Lady Henrietta had been public long before the elopement: as one gossip had written in June, Lord Grey ‘as the report goes, saith that he married the eldest sister and expected a maidenhead, but not finding it, hee resolved to have one in the family, if any be left’.2 Both young Berkeley women were libidinous ‘By nature or by education’, loving ‘the act of generation’.3
With Lady Henrietta still missing, Lord Grey was caught and arrested for conspiring ‘to commit whoredom, fornication, and adultery’. He was placed in the Tower. The scandal was by now ‘the talk of the Town’, while letters between aristocratic ladies bruited the news through the provinces. One wrote excitedly, ‘’Tis serrting he has delewded her and entised her from her father, but wheare she is not yet knowen... he must soon produce her, or his Lordship must remaine a prisner.’4 In fact, Henrietta was at a milliner’s house near Charing Cross and she emerged, pregnant, for the trial.5
This began in November 1682, with the crown represented by the future ‘hanging judge’, the infamous George Jeffreys. Lord Grey was accused of contriving by ‘impure ways...the final ruin and destruction of the lady Henrietta Berkeley, then a virgin unmarried, within the age of 18 years’.
The court scene was dramatic. Grey had an impudent, confident look through most of the proceedings, while Henrietta’s mother dissolved in tears of shame and grief; Lord Berkeley was so choleric he could hardly contain himself. Accorded little opening, Lady Henrietta demanded, ‘Will you not give me leave to speak for myself?’ The answer was a firm ‘No’. When ordered to return to her father, she had her moment, however, for she announced, ‘I will not go’ and dramatically proclaimed, ‘My Lord, I
am married.’ The husband was a William Turner. Satirists were surprised: they had thought she meant to marry someone called Forrester and then live a respectable life of vice.
There was no more to be done: Grey was released and, after a ‘great scuffle about the lady, and swords drawn on both sides’, Lord Berkeley went home without his daughter. Henrietta and Turner were taken to the King’s Bench prison but, when they proved their marriage, there was no detaining them either. After much debate as to which Turner Henrietta had married, it was concluded he was in fact Grey’s gentleman and that the marriage was clearly for the convenience of his lord. What sort of man he was is unclear, but a lampoon called him ‘grizly’.6
The trial had been sensationally summarised in the newspapers; then it was published in full. The diarist, Roger Morrice, was hooked, but admitted that both parties would have been wiser hushing the whole matter up.
Over the next months, Grey was entangled in matters even more serious than incestuous sex—for so an affair between in-laws was regarded, man and wife having become one flesh. He had long been associated with Shaftesbury, joining him in denouncing James and taking part in the Accession Day pageants, and he had latterly been linked with Monmouth. Along with other disgruntled men including Shaftesbury and Colepeper’s cousin, Algernon Sidney, he busied himself collecting weapons and plotting an armed rising in the City. The story is succinctly told by the diarist Evelyn on 28 June 1683:
After the Popish plot there was now a new, and (as they called it) a Protestant plot discover’d, that certaine lords and others should designe the assassination of the King and the Duke as they were to come from Newmarket, with a general rising of the nation, and especially of the citty of London, disaffected to the present government; upon which were committed to the Tower the Lord Russell, eldest son of the Earle of Bedford, the Earle of Essex, Mr. Algernone Sydney, sone to the old Earle of Leicester, Mr Trenchard, Hampden, Lord Howard of Escrick, and others. A proclamation was issued against my Lord Grey, the Duke of Monmouth, Sir Thomas Armstrong, and one Ferguson, who had escaped beyond sea...7
The assassination attempt, which Grey and Monmouth probably condoned but did not organise, was foiled because a fire in Newmarket on 22 March 1683 meant that the King and his entourage returned from the races a week earlier than intended. They rode unscathed past Rye House where the shooting was supposed to have occurred.
The fall-out was bloody, since examination of the assassination uncovered details of earlier rebellious projects. The Earl of Essex slit his throat in the Tower, while the heroic William, Lord Russell, was painfully executed, though thought innocent by many. Thomas Armstrong was captured in Holland and executed at Tyburn without trial, while Algernon Sidney was condemned and killed mainly for his republican writings, neither completed nor published. Sunderland made no more move to save his cousin Algernon than he had his kinsman Stafford. Although her politics were by now so divergent from Algernon’s, Behn must have been affected by this Sidney death and seen its relevance to a writer: anyone might fall foul of a change of regime and she too could lose much by being known for the wrong sort of writing.
Monmouth fled to his mistress Henrietta Wentworth at her house in Bedfordshire, famous for its secret closets and trapdoors. Everyone knew where he had gone, for the affair, scandalously encouraged by her mother, was of long standing. In November he came out of hiding, confessed to his implication in plots, was taken back into favour, had second thoughts when the Duke of York insisted the confession be published in the Gazette, retracted it, and fled. Shaftesbury, ailing by now, left for Holland where he shortly died.
Arrested on 25 June 1683, Lord Grey denied his part in the assassination plot. Knowing his involvement in almost all other conspiracies, however, he prudently resolved not to join Essex and Russell in the Tower. So he organised an alternative and alerted Lady Henrietta. Conveniently for his plans, his guard fell asleep at the crucial moment and he nimbly escaped.8 He then crossed the Thames pursued by a soldier who, when his boat caught them up, was persuaded off, and Lord Grey landed at the Pickled Herring on the south side. From there he went to his home in Uppark, where he hid in the woods with a man called Ezekiel Everest, a former customs officer (later he would turn agent, betray Grey to the English authorities, and apologise for his help in the escape, the ‘only Crime I am guilty of against his Majestie’). Grey and Everest, with Lady Henrietta, Turner and one or two servants, then travelled to Chichester, where the Hare Pink captained by a woodenlegged Dissenting man was ready to take them out of England. They had, however, mistaken the tides and had to travel up and down the shore for six hours in one account, hide in the wood in another, before the crossing could be made.
The current head of intelligence, Sir Leoline Jenkins, who received all this immense detail from his agents, must have gnashed his teeth at the fecklessness of the authorities who failed to arrest the fugitives during all this time. No doubt the escape route was oiled by Lord Grey’s considerable wealth.
Such a story of rebellion and sex demanded treatment and someone in the government—perhaps the politically ambiguous Sunderland—wanting to discredit Monmouth through his henchman Grey, persuaded an astute and speedy author, most probably Aphra Behn, to write it.9 The theatrical Whigs were in retreat and Behn had herself admitted, in the dedication to The Roundheads, that the Tories had won the stage battle. In the dedication of The Duke of Guise, however, Dryden and Lee declared the ‘glorious Work’ of Tory revenge ‘yet unfinished’. Propaganda was always needed and the theatre was not the whole country. The campaign had to move from drama into fiction.10
The letter form had been used for propaganda in the Interregnum, persuading in ‘a more gentle, and familiar way’ than satire.11 In this genre, which caught the reader alone, Behn, already known for her anti-Monmouth sentiments, could provide something more subtle and oblique than her direct attacks. She could make the Duke a corrupting presence, not a rather foolish actor, and connect him with a politics that moved from laughable farce to disturbing erotics.
Behn had kept up her fiction-reading, but, over the cynical 1670s, her love of La Calprenède had diminished. She had not taken to his English imitators and now preferred the Spanish rogue narratives, such as Alemán’s Guzman and Lazarillo, to which she referred in her plays. Her interest in romantic fiction was rekindled, however, when she read a new translation by her admired Roger L’Estrange of Lettres portuguaises, rendered as Five Love-Letters from a Nun to a Cavalier.
In the manner of La Calprenède’s romances, this work purported to be historical, real letters from a nun in Portugal who had been abandoned by her lover, a French officer. But it was different from La Calprenède, more psychologically interesting and faster-paced. Like Ovid’s epistles, with which Behn had so recently been working, Lettres portuguaises gave voice to the loving, abandoned woman, but it also allowed her to be fascinated by her own extreme emotions. Since Behn was always on the lookout for ways of making a better living, she undoubtedly noted its popularity.12
Other works would also have influenced her form. In 1679, her three plays, The Forc’d Marriage, Abdelazer and The Town-Fopp, were advertised by her old publishers, J. Magnes and R. Bentley, in a volume purporting to be the Apology: or, the Genuine Memoirs of Madam Maria Manchini... eldest Sister of the Duchess of Mazarin.... This was actually by a French fiction writer in exile in Holland, Gabriel de Brémond, though based on the Mancini sisters’ experiences. Brémond was eager to gain patronage in England, and it is just conceivable that his usual publishers, whom he shared with Behn, Richard Bentley and James Magnes, asked her to translate the anonymously published work. She was an admirer of the King’s mistress, the witty, well-read, vain and cross-dressing Hortense Mancini, Duchess of Mazarine, and Hortense was the sister of Maria and joint heroine of the narrative.13
Behn possibly caught up with the other work by Brémond during her stay in France, if she had not already read Bentley’s Englished version from 1676. This was Hattigé, a shor
t novel commenting on the amorous doings of Mazarine’s predecessor, Barbara, Duchess of Cleveland, the first important mistress of Charles II.14 La Calprenède had woven fiction into what he regarded as history; but Brémond was, like the unfortunate Lady Mary Wroth in James I’s reign, making a story of contemporary scandals which everyone knew.
For Behn, Hattigé was inspiring, with its hothouse atmosphere of odorous love amongst jasmine and tuberoses, its hints of naughty doings, and its theme of expanding desire. Yet Hattigé veiled sexual activities. Behn was planning something longer and more erotic. A large part of her life had already been spent describing love in pastoral Edens or in modern brothels. She had, however, rarely treated sexual obsession, except perhaps in the ‘Love-Letters to a Gentleman’, which had concentrated on psychological enthralment, and in the depiction of the Queen in Abdelazer. Both writings were now far in the past. The infatuated Angellica in The Rover was not the central character in her play, nor was Lady Galliard of The City-Heiress, who caught something of the predicament of an older woman in love. Neither fell outside her society for the sake of sex.