by Janet Todd
The other poems of Lycidus express a more everyday reality. Some time in an autumn, probably of 1687, Behn went to Tunbridge Wells again for her health, taking with her two women friends, Gloriana and Eliza, whose mundane identities are unknown. Perhaps one might be the generous Madam Welldon of the posthumous dedication to The Widdow Ranter, a dedication which Behn was said to have desired; perhaps Eliza was Betty Taylor, her old poetic friend with a tendency to tipple. The visit was recorded in several poems by herself and her friends. Apolitical and gently gallant, they tended to avoid the passion caught in ‘On Desire’, which was published with them, as well as the shaded final tone of Lycidus.
Behn’s group of friends is a muted older version of the one described in ‘Our Cabal’ many years before. Much of the society revealed in the poems is mild, quaint even, slightly absurd and intimate, and the hothouse sexual atmosphere caught in the earlier collections has diminished. One man sends a poem to Behn in thanks for a bottle of orange flower water; another dispatches a basket of fruit. Writing in verse from London to Tunbridge, a man complains that he cannot compose with Aphra Behn gone from the city and another moans of lethargy in her absence. Half London seemed to have disappeared to Kent and ‘general dulness has possest the Town.’ For one friend, the effort of rhyming has been too much and he will in future—that is if he cannot get down to Tunbridge himself—lapse into prose. Meanwhile, he salutes the three female friends, his ‘mistresses’, Gloriana, Eliza and Astrea. For all her years and ailments, Astrea is still the ‘Charming Nymph’, the ‘Goddess of the Spring’, ‘alwaies Airy, Witty, Gay’.
With her reputation as analyst of love, Aphra Behn seems to have become an adviser or ‘agony aunt’ for the young. One woman wrote that, having been disappointed in a man she was prepared to receive, despite his owning no ‘Sheep nor land’—a man to whom Behn may have introduced her—she was now planning to dedicate herself to Behn instead. Possibly her dedication included the writing of the ‘Memoirs’ some years after her friend’s death, with its paradoxical concern both to rescue Behn as a modest woman and to display her as she is here, the ‘gay and free’ doyenne of love.
As Lycidus and its attached poems function as a kind of farewell to Arcadia, so a Pindaric Behn wrote to the second Duke of Albemarle ‘on his Voyage to His Government of Jamaica’ concludes her line of political poems urging men from ease into business. The first one, written many years before, had been to ‘Celadon’, forced to leave for Ireland. By now, both the times and the characters have changed. The late 1680s had few Arcadian realms left and Christopher Monck, Duke of Albemarle, Granville’s cousin and son of the great Interregnum general George Monck, was not the witty Celadon of the 1670s, but simply a wealthy man, to many a ‘Scandal to that high name from whence he sprung’. Behn omitted the fact that he was a gambler who had run up vast debts to the Duchess of Mazarine, and a drunk called ‘brawny Kit’ in lampoons.27
During the Monmouth Rebellion, Albemarle had been given a chance to redeem himself, but James’s victory at Sedgemoor owed nothing to his confused deployment of the Devon contingent, and he seemed to have little future at court.28 But then he had the luck to become involved in an apparently hare-brained scheme: to set up a committee of Gentleman Adventurers to pay for an expedition to salvage a Spanish treasure ship, wrecked in the Caribbean. This had been in 1685 and, to popular amazement, in mid-June 1687 the expedition returned with vast quantities of treasure. Fabulously, he became £90,000 richer. Three months later, Albemarle was en route for Jamaica as governor. Between the revelation of money and his embarkation, Behn fired off her poem: he had become a possible patron. Recording the change in the times, herself and her subject, the effect of the verses was very different from those addressed to Celadon voyaging to Ireland. Celadon was going with reluctance, in no doubt that the leisured pastoral world he was quitting was more valuable than Irish politics to which he was called. Albemarle, however, is now urged to forsake an ease which seems more brutish than charming.
Behn’s elegiac phase of poetry and translation was rounded off by a poetic death. Edmund Waller, the Cavalier poet who had made Penshurst into Arcadia for her and whose work she had admired when still a girl, the poet whose elegance, coupled with that of Abraham Cowley, had heralded the new age of smooth pastoral verse, died in October 1687 at eighty-one. It seemed the end of a literary era. A volume of elegies was planned and among the seven invited to write were Behn, her young friend Granville, and the Duchess of Mazarine’s noble French admirer, Saint-Évremond. She and Saint-Évremond were the only writers of distinction in the volume.
Like so much in these years of ill-health, her poem was self-revelatory, even self-pitying, albeit in the conventional mode of Pindarics:
How, to thy Sacred Memory, shall I bring
(Worthy thy Fame) a grateful Offering?
I, who by Toils of Sickness, am become
Almost as near as thou art to a Tomb?
While every soft, and every tender Strain
Is ruffl’d, and ill-natur’d grown with Pain.
She should write a work of fancy, wit and judgement to such a poet but, in her present sickly state, her verses ‘like Transitory Flowers, [will] decay’. Harping on her theme, that poet-prophets who, in the past, ‘got so great Renown’ were now ignored to the detriment of the state, she alludes to her other great evil: lack of money. Observing the decline of poetry, the richer Waller had yet been shielded from the effect, since ‘Fortune Elevated thee above / Its scanty Gratitude.’ So he could do what Behn could not: scorn ‘th’unthinking Crowd’.
Between allusions to her ill-health and her poverty, Behn described what Waller had meant to her in her youth. He had expanded her soul, taking her out of herself. Using her favourite biblical character of Moses, she made Waller into a poetic Charles II: Waller had led poets out of the dark morass of impenetrable style into the glories of clarity and elegance. Now, however, the darkness, poetic and political, was coming again: Waller in his ‘Circulary Course, didst see / The very Life and Death of Poetry’.
When she had written her poem, Behn sent it off to Abigail Waller, the poet’s daughter-in-law, with a covering note apologising for any weakness in the verse,
I can only say I am very ill and have been dying this twelve month, that they want those graces and that spirit which possibly I might have dress’d ’em in had my health and dulling vapours permitted me, however madam they are left to your finer judgement to determine whether they are worthy the honour of the press among those that celibrate Mr Waller’s great fame, or of being doomed to the fire.
Happily her poem was not so ‘doomed’. But, though it was the best in the volume, it might not entirely have pleased Mrs Waller. For, as Behn had ignored Rochester’s conversion, so now she omitted mention of Waller’s devotional verse. Close to death in her own apprehension, she was not preparing for it with Christian piety.
Chapter 27
Part III of Love-Letters and Court Poetry
‘very well understood by all good Men’
Aphra Behn’s sense that an era was coming to an end had much to do with her ill-health and perception of mortality. Where others yearned to retreat into childhood Christianity, she held to her scepticism: dissolution implied increase of pain followed by numbness and nothing. On a political level, her attitude also came from public events or, rather, a development in her understanding of them. This was codedly chronicled in the last, third, part of Love-Letters. What brought it about?
At the end of the second part, the intention of the work seemed to be in line with Behn’s darkening picture of the once-celebrated rake: that the libertine Philander would observe political misery and suffer personal failure. So the story would become a Restoration parable about the self-destructive nature of political and libertine desire. In fact, the third part of Love-Letters swerved from this trajectory into something more cynical and anarchic: instead of taking Grey to destruction as the fictional fable seemed to require, it followed
history and moderately rehabilitated him.1
The public image of Grey was clear. Long seen as the pimp for Monmouth, he was now, after Sedgemoor, both pimp and coward: ‘Gray turn’s Tails, with his Horne made away: / God Curse me quoth Gray, if longer I stay....’ None the less, he had pleaded for his life with more success than his leader Monmouth, cleverly weaving together confession and extenuation, admitting he had sinned against God in rebelling against his sovereign and confessing his role in the various plots and rebellions of the past years. Sensibly, he deflected blame on to the dead Earl of Shaftesbury and supported his confession with betrayal of his fellow rebels, at whose trials he testified. His great wealth also played its part: his price was apparently £40,000. Lampooners took note of the treachery: ‘...let there in his guilty Face appear, / The Rebells Malice, and the Cowards fear, / That future Ages in thy peice may see / Not his wife falser to his Bed, than to all Parties he.’2 This view had been lightly anticipated by Behn in her first two parts of Love-Letters. In Part III, however, it collapsed and Philander was allowed neither simple treachery nor simple cowardice.
Behn began her volte face by reversing the relations of Monmouth and Grey. Cesario’s mistress pimped for Philander rather than Philander pimping for his leader, as Grey was alleged to have done. Then Behn depicted Philander not as a selfish opportunist, but as a divided man within the rebel camp, in the thick of the invasion though, sadly, no longer believing in the cause. His actions at the ensuing Battle of Sedgemoor were then glossed:
Some Authors in the Relation of this Battle affirm, That Philander quitted his Post as soon as the Charge was given, and sheer’d off from that Wing he commanded... he disliked the Cause, disapproved of all their Pretensions, and look’d upon the whole Affair and Proceedings to be most unjust and ungenerous: And all the fault his greatest Enemies could charge him with, was, That he did not deal so gratefuly with a Prince that loved him and trusted him; and that he ought frankly to have told him, he would not serve him in this Design; and that it had been more Gallant to have quited him that way, than this; but there are so many Reasons to be given for this more Politick and safe Deceit, than are needful in this place....3
Whatever readers might think of Grey after this treatment of Philander, they would surely judge the narrator of Part III of Love-Letters unprincipled. Behn was running out of invention and this passage was the nearest she came to expressing embarrassment publicly and to displaying her own complicity in unscrupulous politics.
As befitted a playwright of many voices, Behn could express a predominant view while holding various other ones balanced in her mind. The ability was surely embodied in the men with whom she had been friendly over the years, William Scot, George Marten, Jack Hoyle, Thomas Killigrew, Thomas Dangerfield and Henry Nevil Payne. All were ambiguous, unclear, flexible, two-or three-faced, possibly treacherous and violent men. It was as if Behn’s own complex protean personality, as well as her outsider status in the aristocratic society she hymned, demanded such friends. As a professional writer and a hanger-on of the upper orders, she had to project a single image; yet, while publicly expressing political clarity as part of this image, she might also have communicated other murkier aspects of herself by consorting with those whose views and personalities were decidedly unclear or subversive, sometimes even opposite to her publicly professed ones. Behn was a rational Tory Royalist on the hustings and in the theatre, but, in more secretive moments, alone with her pen, she was also something that defied single labels. In the case of Love-Letters, however, her ambiguities were probably exploited (anonymously) by her commissioner into something close to conscious perfidy. In Part III more than the other parts, it was becoming clearer that this commissioner was the slipperiest man with whom she had had dealings, the Earl of Sunderland.
In 1683 and 1684, Monmouth had been a threat which needed controlling by Sunderland, so the discrediting of Grey could have been a means. By now, the oppositional politics that the dead Monmouth and the living Grey stood for was less immediately threatening, but, paradoxically, more powerful and potentially more invasive. After the treatments of Parts I and II and the known public scandals, Lord Grey would have to remain a dubious and ambiguous figure in Behn’s work, but, to make the new political point, he would also need to be rehabilitated from downright villainy as much as possible. This interpretation may seem far-fetched, but intelligence activities included the disinformation and control of information through lampoons and fictions, just as much as spying.
An extraordinary feature of the later sections of Love-Letters is that, allowing for transformations and amalgamations of people and happenings, the events Behn chronicles for Philander follow so closely those of history. The actions of the first part had been common currency in London where the transcripts of Grey’s trial for seduction were sold in the streets. The second part had been like a theatrical intrigue comedy and the plot had almost written itself with little help from history. But, with elongations, shortenings and re-arrangings of place and time, what she wrote in Part III followed in the actual rebel footsteps of Grey and Henrietta as they trundled around the Low Countries and Germany.
A month after arriving on the Continent with Henrietta Berkeley, the real Lord Grey, who according to lampoons had grown ‘desperately poor’, had sought employment with the Duke of Brandenburg in his territory of Cleve. Behn, however, held back Philander’s move there until towards the end of Part II to elaborate on the relationships of both Silvia and Philander with Octavio within a context of absences and arrivals.4 For the later Continental movements of Grey and Henrietta there were no pamphlets to hand and no reports in the Gazette.
During the Popish Plot, news had been disseminated as never before in unlicensed news sheets, but these had been largely suppressed in the Tory backlash after the Exclusion Crisis. To gain any reliable information, one had to be on the mailing list of the manuscript newsletters compiled by the clerks in Scotland Yard for the Secretaries of State; these had a monopoly of licensed news from spies, intercepted letters, and weekly reports from domestic and foreign correspondents. Behn was not one of the agents and ambassadors having access to these newsletters, although she might have seen them. Even this source, however, would not give her quite the detailed knowledge she evidently had. How did she come to know what she knew?
She may of course have had informants who travelled to the Continent at this time. The narrator speaks of talking to a page who is in love with Silvia, for example. Or she might have been used again for more espionage. If so, there is a delicious possibility that Behn took her Parts I and II of Love-Letters with her to the Low Countries and that Lady Henrietta read the book which made her notorious and came to know the author between Parts II and III. It is unlikely, however. Bampfield was back in place as an agent, garrulous as ever, and he mentioned no middle-aged ‘shee spy’. Mainly, Behn’s poor health argues against travel, as does the regularity of her productions in London.
A further, more likely possibility is that Behn read or heard of Grey’s unpublished confession, to which Sunderland of course had access.5 In addition, she may have seen secret-service documents which minutely recorded the activities of Grey and his entourage as they travelled round Holland, Flanders and Brandenburg.6 Were Sunderland her commissioner, he could authorise Behn to inspect the original writings.7 If she did read Grey’s long-winded confession, she would have found no trace of Lady Henrietta, for her lover glossed over her seduction and elopement as a period of his own illness, and his escape from England became a solitary matter. Grey presented himself as a lonely and impecunious exile on the Continent, like Killigrew’s Thomaso. He downplayed his part in the Monmouth preparation, concentrating on his simple desire to find somewhere he ‘might live cheap’ as he faced a prospect of ‘being always a vagabond, and that a poor one too’.8 Did Behn perhaps feel here the first stirrings of sympathy for a man who was undoubtedly a rogue but one not so far removed from her Willmore except in politics, driven to expedients not far
from her own?9
Behn could not have been much surprised by anything she read. As far back as 1684, she had already been creating an unstable, fickle and deceitfully self-indulgent figure to stand in for the austere Lord Grey. There were not many who would at that time have portrayed Grey as already unfaithful to Monmouth, as she had. But she could have known nothing. Now, as she considered the facts, she may have started to wonder at history and quiz its prime movers. How could Monmouth have been so speedily snuffed out? She had understood his appeal, his handsomeness, his affability, and the charm that not even she could give his uncle. Why had he presented in the end so little challenge to James? Many would have benefited from a tame Protestant prince with legitimate issue. Who wanted Monmouth to make trouble but not succeed?
The Earl of Sunderland had been the assiduous follower of William of Orange before the Exclusion Crisis and he had always preferred him as a candidate for the throne over Monmouth (although he had made some overtures to Monmouth when life at court became especially tough). Indeed, in 1680, William of Orange admitted ‘he had more obligations to my Lord Sunderland, and more marks of his friendship, than he had from all the ministers these ten years’.10 Falling foul of Charles II through his mistimed support of Exclusion, Sunderland had apparently abandoned William’s interest and regained the trust first of Charles and then even of James. Perhaps, however, he had not abandoned his first allegiance after all. Could it be that Sunderland and William were playing a deep game, hoping to destroy Monmouth first and then James?