by Janet Todd
Behn did not know but, rifling through secret papers, she may have begun to suspect. First they wanted Grey harmed as an instrument to destroy Monmouth; now, Monmouth gone, he might be useful to help destroy James and was to be rehabilitated. Could Sunderland really be looking beyond the King? Could he be the puppeteer of Grey, the puppeteer of Monmouth?11 Were there really no good noblemen but only cynical manipulators facing one or two foolishly honourable men who would inevitably lose in the political games? In which case, the heroic James II, with not an ounce of guile and cynicism in him, would inevitably fail. Behn had long believed that aristocrats were the bulwark of the monarchy. What if they should prove as treacherous or as flexible as commoners like herself had to be?
Sunderland, who was present at the interview of Monmouth and James, lifted no finger to save Monmouth, who yet proclaimed that he could save himself if he were to say the word. This word was presumed by some to be ‘conversion’. James himself later came to believe it was ‘Sunderland’, however. That Monmouth remained silent on politics suggests he expected reprieve even on the scaffold—had he been treacherously promised something to keep quiet?12 The treachery could spread backwards, too, over the last years. Could Sunderland, who had had little to do with the crushing of the Rye House Plot, have intervened to let Lord Grey slip nimbly away to involve himself fatally with Monmouth? The story of escape through a sleeping guard had always been difficult to swallow.
Behn’s book ends with Cesario-Monmouth mounting the scaffold, still prating about his Hermione, a political anti-climax analogous to the failed sexual climax of his follower Philander in Part I of Love-Letters: both are bungled critical moments, political or sexual.13 Pardoned by the King, Philander is back in the centre of the court. The exemplary moral tale promised at the end of Part II has not been delivered. In its place is a comic and cynical realisation of the corruption of personal and political life, both in aristocrats and in those who serve them.
Behn did not believe in huge Machiavellian plots such as Titus Oates had invented. Her description of the peripatetic English opposition in Europe under Monmouth, reminiscent of the useless Cavalier activity of the Interregnum, reveals her usual opinion, that politicians muddle through in a mixture of selfishness and opportunism, rather than strategy and plot. If she momentarily suspected the devilish plotting that the historian in James’s exiled court came to see, and so communicated it, codedly, in her work, she mainly apprehended in Sunderland flexibility, opportunism and avarice on a high level. The Earl flowed where power was or was likely to be, and he found in the rich Lord Grey both expedient treachery and rich pickings. So Behn’s novel ended:
Philander lay sometime in the Bastille, visited by all the Persons of great Quality about the Court; he behaved himself very Gallantly all the way he came, after his being taken, and to the last Minute of his Imprisonment; and was at last pardoned, kiss’d the King’s Hand, and came to Court in as much Splendour as ever, being very well understood by all good Men.
Known to ‘all good Men’ for what he is, Philander saves his skin, while Cesario, like Monmouth (and Stafford before), goes his simple way to death.14 Behn was suggesting what anyone of commonsense knows, that Grey’s type of man always flourishes, but she was giving some warning as well. She had begun Love-Letters in 1684, with the fear that Philander’s amorous plotting would destabilise family and kingdom; she finished it in 1687 with Philander at the centre of the realm, one ruled not by the cynical Charles but by the guileless James. In this interpretation, the last act would be both absurd and tragic, beyond the scope and sardonic tenor of the book. As in her plays, so in prose, farce was Behn’s predominant genre, not tragedy.
When Sunderland read Part III of Love-Letters, he perhaps saw a use for it beyond state politics. Like King Charles, he had an ungrateful son, Robert Spencer. As early as 1681 when the lad was only fifteen, Evelyn thought he would ‘prove an extravagant man; for though a youth of extraordinary parts, & that had all the Education imaginable to render him a worthy man; yet his early inclinations [are] to vice’.15 As Behn knew from lampoons, he was called ‘Lewd rakehelly Spencer’.16 Sunderland blamed his wife for spoiling the boy but his own excessive gambling made him no great parental model. In one action, however, Robert upstaged his father. James II’s policy of appointing or promoting Catholics to high office was in full swing and Sunderland was embarked on one of the longest conversion processes in history, each year taking one step away from Canterbury and one small one nearer to Rome. Then in April 1687 Robert was gravely wounded by the congregation of a church in Bury St Edmunds after he had drunkenly assaulted a clergyman, and his family learnt the astounding news that he had, on his expected deathbed, become a Catholic. It was a piece of statecraft worthy of his father and it was all James needed: when recovered, young Robert was employed on state business, sent to deliver condolences on the death of Queen Mary of Modena’s mother. He sank to the occasion and was so drunk when presented to Louis XIV in Paris that he could not speak a word.17
Sunderland continued his advice and threats to his son, but neither worked. In Behn’s Part III of Love-Letters he may have seen another opportunity for admonition, qualified by a woman’s tact. The book was not coming out under her name and she agreed to dedicate it to Robert Spencer, probably with a fee from Sunderland; so she gave the profligate and violent young man her usual fulsome treatment, along with some advice. In response to his drunken brawling, Behn suggested Spencer take more care of himself, while she sugared over his appalling record of crimes as ‘youthful sallies’ which he must try to curtail. Probably her advice had little effect, but, happily for Sunderland, he was relieved of his trying son the following year, through an overdose of brandy.
In public politics, Behn continued to hymn the increasingly doomed King and Queen. She also continued writing coded fables of absurdity and treachery that followed on from Love-Letters. The illiterate and foolish Monmouth, the ultimate dupe of the novel brought closer to his uncle in his sincerity and gullibility, would be replaced by similarly doomed but more heroic men and women, by Oroonoko, Bacon, and Isabella, set far from England but also deep in its heart.
Like Part III of Love-Letters, the short story The History of the Nun drew on Behn’s memories of Flanders and touched on real events such as the French invasion at the end of the Dutch war and on the Turkish siege of Crete. Unlike Love-Letters, it claimed to be true.18 The story unsettles judgement with its divided message, being easy to read but difficult to assimilate and, as in Part III of Love-Letters, the effect is partly due to the use of an unstable, even duplicitous narrator, and to the multiple purposes of the tale.
The plot of The History of the Nun is of a broken vow to the cloister, followed by inadvertent bigamy. The heroine Isabella, once a wholehearted nun, elopes with a man whom she marries. Then, believing her first husband dead in war, she marries a second, only to be confronted with the first. She kills him and persuades the second husband to dispose of the body, but, in a moment of panic at the shame of it all, she sews the corpse of the first husband to the coat of the second; so he drowns when he pitches the dead bundle into the river and Isabella becomes a double murderess. She is caught and nothing remains but to make a good show on the scaffold, which, unlike Monmouth, she does. Isabella eroticises the space in such a way that the final effect, like that of Love-Letters, is sardonic rather than tragic.
The overwhelming message that emerges from The History of the Nun is Behn’s conviction that inclinations change: Isabella’s suffering follows from feelings pent up by a culture that refuses to acknowledge the Lucretian truth, that change is the only constant in human nature. From being prevented from following ordinary and natural desires and changing her mind as her body matures, Isabella is led into real crime. In this way, the story is in dialogue with both Love-Letters and The Fair Jilt, written at about the same time. The heroines of the last two respond to their culture by becoming knowing, manipulative women; desperately wanting to live by the piou
s fixed standards she has internalised, the good Isabella ends doing more damage than either of her wicked sisters, Silvia and Miranda. The stated message of the story is, however, quite different and is stridently political. More strenuous with a point of view than in Love-Letters, the narrator insists on seeing the tale of profound sexual emotion as a caution against the heinous act of disloyalty or vow-breaking. The Church here stands in for the King, whose subjects would follow Isabella at their peril.
The messages of The History of the Nun both suit and do not suit Behn’s dedicatee, the Queen’s cousin and Charles II’s old mistress. Routinely called the ‘Queen of Lust’, Hortense Mancini, Duchess of Mazarine, had famously broken her marital vows and entered and exited a good many convents.19 So she was a curious recipient for a cautionary tale against vow-breaking, although more suitable for a psychological one of unnecessary damage, especially considering the distinction between her present, pleasant life and that of the tragically fated Isabella. For the tale as political warning, she was, perhaps, more appropriate and in the dedication she became the sort of loyal figure that Behn could drench in hyperbole.
Yet Mazarine seems to be more than simply a court lady and loyal Royalist, and the dedication is suffused with a greater homoerotic yearning than Behn usually allowed herself. As with the Nell Gwyn epistle, she stressed that she and Mazarine shared a sex. Nell Gwyn was the cynosure, the woman who proved misogyny wrong, but she had died soon after Charles II and Mazarine was now simply the brightest and best. She had cost Behn some ‘Inquietude’, but the author wanted, all the same, to tell her ‘how infinitely one of Your own Sex ador’d You’. Behn insisted that her love surpassed that of men: nowhere had the Duchess ‘subdu’d a more intire Slave’.
During James II’s rule, Mazarine was living comfortably out in Chelsea, a lampoonist noting that her old age and grey hair were not quenching her amorous or gaming desires. Together with her admirer, the French noble Saint-Évremond, she supported the remnants of the Cavalier court culture the Stuarts represented for Behn, her male and female outfits and independence gaining her the name of an Amazon. Mazarine enjoyed the musical entertainments put on by Saint-Évremond using James Paisible, Rochester’s delicious musician, for whom Behn herself had written words in the 1670s. Many attended soirées, including Behn’s young friend George Granville. For years Behn had desperately wanted to be of the royal court. Perhaps, now that her hopes of this were fading, she set her sights on this more louche, ambiguous and achievable one in Chelsea. If she came closer, however, she was never close enough and there is no evidence that she was ever of Mazarine’s company; the intense dedication was speculatively written. The social yearning expressed in the Nell Gwyn dedication appears again, then, but where in the earlier address it was ambitious—the future was still before her—here, after a decade of sustained pleading to be let in, it was elegiac: ‘Fortune has not set me in such a Station, as might justifie my Pretence to the honour and satisfaction of being ever near Your Grace.’ It was a poignant admission of failure. The witty entertainer does not join the society she amuses.
Behn’s next (and most literal) French translation, Agnes de Castro, was a précieux and macabre tale of close female friendship standing against male sexual obsession. It was based on a mythical story from Portugal and, given the wide circulation of Lettres portuguaises which had promoted Portugal as the land of passion, it was not surprising that Behn had competitors in her hurried work.20 Considering the strictures against vow-breaking in The History of the Nun and the theme of male and female ties in Agnes de Castro, the latter might have been a more appropriate story to have dedicated to the errant and bisexual Duchess of Mazarine. For her dedicatee Behn chose, however, not a privileged court figure but another outsider like herself, Sir Roger Puleston, who, before the Restoration, had taken part with Colepeper, Willoughby and Strangford in Sir George Booth’s Royalist rising. In Behn’s political frame, he was successor to her earlier dedicatee, Sir William Clifton, loyally affecting the country around him and shedding gentlemanly beneficence. Puleston had delivered a lifetime’s support to the Stuarts, but, as he had been little concerned with recent politics and lived far from London, he was not part of the caballing and lewd town like Mazarine and Sunderland. Behn did seem to know him a little, however, since she referred to his easy conversation and affable temper, while the praise of his generosity sounds as if she had benefited from it.
As so frequently in these late dedications, Behn’s main interest was herself. She had not been taken up by the court, had not been significantly patronised by any of the great:
It would be a happy World for us Traders in Parnassus, if, like those in the Moon...we cou’d Barter, pay Debts, and obligations with Poems and Dedications: But this is a World not Generous enough for such noble Traffick. Like Homer, we may sing our Verses from Door to Door, but shall find few List’ners that understand their Value, and can recieve ’em as they ought.... In our Age the Noble Roman Poets wou’d have Starv’d....
Yet she noted darkly that ‘The Building of the Halcyon points us not out more certainly to Calmest Seas, than the Flourishing of the Muses does to a Happy State.’ Sir William Davenant had made much the same observation in a republic and it was sad that under a monarchy she had to reiterate it.
The Mazarine and Puleston dedications reveal that matters had not gone as swimmingly for Behn as the Coronation Ode of 1685 had hoped. Less flippant and intelligent than his brother, James II showed no sign of being impressed anew with her theatrical wit, and he had not become her special patron. Indeed he had hardly patronised any significant author. Obsessed with his Catholic mission, the King had offended not only his former allies at court and in the nation—the gentry and the Anglicans—but also the needy artists. Most court writers fell silent or departed. It was some comfort for Behn to be able to write collective disappointment as the decline of literature and the downfall of the state. None the less, if as playwright and fictionist she was not in royal demand, as poetic propagandist she could still be useful in the trying months to come.
Chapter 28
A Discovery of New Worlds and Poems for James II
‘And POETS shall by Patron PRINCES live’
Aphra Behn’s ill-health was by now expensive and constraining and, with royal patronage sluggish, she turned to further translations from the French as the quickest literary task. It was a common manoeuvre; as an anonymous satire unkindly expressed it, after despairing of ‘eating at a full third day’, playwrights left ‘stage-practice, chang’d their old vocations, / Attoning for bad plays, with worse translations’.1 Despite Behn’s wonderful facility with verse, prose was easier than poetry and she resolved to continue in the mode, but, after so much amorous hyperbole with Lycidus and La Montre, she must have fancied something more weighty.
Behn may have turned to Fontenelle’s A Discovery of New Worlds after some prodding from her young friend Charles Gildon who, raised for the Catholic priesthood, had grown increasingly irreligious. At the same time, the work was probably commissioned by the publisher William Canning, who seems to have been largely living off Behn during these years.2 She had to work fast, for the playwrights and literary hacks were scraping round for projects—she had acknowledged the competition in her hurried publication of Agnes de Castro.3 Now she heard that, yet again, a rival translation was ‘doing by another hand’. To get her book out first, she had no time to ‘supervise and correct the Sheets before they were wrought off; so that several Errata have escaped’.4 Bluntly she announced that she could ‘either... give you the French Book into English, or... give you the subject quite changed and made my own’; since she had ‘neither health nor leisure for the last’ she would ‘offer you the first such as it is’.
This candour concluded a long and possibly derivative preface to A Discovery of New Worlds entitled ‘Essay on Translated Prose’, indicating that, as usual, Behn had been thinking about her practice. In the past, her ignorance of Latin had prevented her from c
ommenting much on translation theory, but her competence in French was emboldening. She was aware of the Earl of Roscommon’s work on poetry, pleased to see him taking issue with Shadwell’s demand for literal translation. Roscommon had respect for the translator’s skill: ‘Composing is the Nobler Part / But good Translation is no easie Art’; a translator must be ‘Discreet, and Bold’.5 Behn was also aware of Dryden, although she chose to omit mention of him here. In fact, however, neither from Roscommon nor from Dryden could she have received much comment on prose. She was one of the few English writers to take up this subject.
The ‘Essay’ treated the idiosyncrasies of particular languages and made the common patriotic point that French sounds well but English means more.6 Commenting on linguistic change, the necessary acceptance of immigrant words, Behn claimed she would use the term ‘Tourbillion’ instead of ‘Whirl-wind’ because the English equivalent was not exact. People were cautious about employing a French word, tending instead to paraphrase it, but slowly the foreign word became current. She was helping the process. She had recently read Higden’s ‘Preface to the Reader’ before his Juvenal satire, noting his point that some cultural adaptation was necessary in translation. Yet she decided that Paris was not London and that she would keep the French allusions rather than anglicising them. Her work in the last years had given her a thorough competence in French and she could risk declaring, ‘I have endeavoured to give you the true meaning of the Author, and have kept as near his Words as was possible.’7
Any modesty suggested by the ending of the ‘Essay’, which remarked on her ill-health and lack of time, was much belied by what preceded it: in the ‘Essay’, Behn corrected scientific errors and commented on the original author with learned reference to the philosopher Descartes, whom she thus implied she had read.8 It was audacious for a non-aristocratic woman to take issue with learned men and make authoritative comments on areas usually reserved to them (although Fontenelle himself was regarded by original scientists as something of a lightweight). But, if she had not the physical stamina to write an original work of science, as she confessed, Behn wished it well known that she had the mental equipment. In this, she went rather further than her predecessor, the scientific Margaret Cavendish, who frequently stressed her incompetence in learning.9 Even more audaciously, she also stuck out her literary neck by hinting that much of what she was writing was parody.