Aphra Behn: A Secret Life

by Janet Todd

  43. Some of the copying Aphra Behn may have done would have been legal, as well as literary. For a description of circulating manuscripts, see Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1993).

  44. An example is Mr Bevan’s school at Ashford. The curriculum consisted mainly of ornamental attainments, needlework, reading, writing and, increasingly, French. See L. A. Pollock, ‘Teach her to Live under Obedience: The Making of Women in the Upper Ranks of Early Modern England’, Continuity and Change, 4, 1989.

  45. Bathsua Makin, An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Women (London, 1673), p. 26. Sir Ralph Verney desired French for his goddaughter but was horrified by any notion she might learn Latin, Memoirs of the Verney Family during the Seventeenth Century, ed. F. P. and M. M. Verney (London, 1925), p. 501.

  46. Many new schools were being founded from which girls were sometimes explicitly excluded, as at Harrow, or in which they were confined to the lowest levels. See K. U. Henderson and B. F. McManus eds, Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England 1540–1640 (Urbana, 1985).

  47. Cavendish, Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1655).

  48. A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694).

  49. Works, vol. 1, no. 11.

  50. For an account of the pamphlets concerning Mary Carleton, see The Counterfeit Ladies, eds Janet Todd and Elizabeth Spearing (London, 1994).

  Chapter 2

  1. Thomas was son of Sir Thomas, the fifth of the twelve sons of Sir Anthony Colepeper of Bedgebury.

  2. The De L’Isle Papers C 82/14 1 Feb 1637, Kent Community Archives, Maidstone. The union started badly. In 1637 the Countess of Leicester wrote to the Earl, ‘This night your newe brother in law is come to visitt me wich is a verie extravagant sivilitie, for I never saw the mans fase in my life, and have not hard on word from your sister since her marieg wich makes me wonder the more at this caviliers complement. What shee finds in him I do not know but if he be not a verie ase I am deseaved’ (C82/14). Soon they learnt that ‘the poore man is very sadd for his two children [Thomas and Roberta] that att this instant lye dying here in London.’ Happily this did not happen and, through Sidney patronage, Colepeper was given a brigade to command after the previous incumbent was discharged as a Catholic. In fact, Sir Thomas Colepeper was not as lowly as the Sidneys liked to think since he had been one of the lieutenants of Dover Castle under Charles I, a position that would be taken by Algernon Sidney during the Interregnum, and he had flourished sufficiently to buy the estate of Hackington near Canterbury, which remained in his son’s possession.

  3. On the death of his parents, Strangford and his wealth had passed into the wardship of the Crown, and Charles I had sold the administration of it to Sir Thomas Fotherley for the sum of £2,000. Fotherley, who was described by the Countess of Leicester as ‘non of the honestest’, proved as unsatisfactory as his now dead mother and the boy appealed to his uncle, the Earl of Leicester, to be his guardian instead. On Fotherley’s death in 1649, Leicester became Strangford’s guardian. See CSP, Dom., 1640–1, 434, for a dispute of a petitioner with Fotherley. Strangford is called ‘his Majesty’s ward’.

  4. Strangford would charge that the Earl had been receiving some thousand pounds a year from his estates. He, however, had ‘neaver received any of my Rents my Selfe’.

  5. Eager to link herself with her famous uncle, Sir Philip Sidney, and to the Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, Wroth called her work of 1621 The Countess of Montgomerie’s Urania, Urania being a character in the Arcadia and the Countess being the sister-in-law of the Countess of Pembroke.

  6. The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth, ed. Josephine A. Roberts (Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1983).

  7. In an unpublished paper, Sharon Valiant speculates that Behn was physically connected with Wroth. Wroth had an illegitimate daughter who married Lovel. There was a Lovel tutoring in the Sidney household and Valiant considers that Behn might have been his daughter and therefore the granddaughter of Lady Mary Wroth. I have not followed this speculation since I imagine Behn would have boasted of such a tie to the aristocracy. As well as writing Urania, Wroth also composed a pastoral play called ‘Love’s Victorie’ rather on the lines of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The manuscript came into the possession of Sir Edward Dering, a Kentish gentleman known to Colepeper’s mother and a supporter of Katherine Philips. There is no proof that Behn knew the Dering family, but she used a variant of the name in one of her last plays, The Widdow Ranter. By that time one member of the family, Charles Dering, had become known as a rake and a duellist and the comic fight with a woman which she gives her character might just refer to this man’s obstreperousness in the theatre.

  8. In Reconstructing Aphra, p. 12, Goreau claims that Colepeper lived with his guardian, the Earl of Winchilsea’s steward, on their estate just outside Wye, p. 12. On p. 309 she also claims that Lady Elizabeth Finch was ‘the daughter of Sir John Fotherley, who had been Thomas Culpepper’s original guardian and was steward of the Earl of Winchilsea’. I have not been able to duplicate this information. Jane Jones has pointed out that on p. 284 of his thesis ‘The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion 1640–1660’ Alan Everitt mentions a John Fotherby and a Sidney Fotherby, Winchilsea’s ‘agent’. This man may have been confused with the Fotherley who was Lord Strangford’s guardian.

  9. The Roundheads (1682), Works, vol. 6. The prince’s tutor was Lovel, a man already involved in Royalist activities when at Penshurst. He travelled with his charge to the Continent.

  10. ‘Memoirs’ and William Oldys, ‘Choice Notes’, Notes and Queries, 2nd series, 11 (London, 1861), pp. 201–2.

  11. In the same letter L’Isle exposed more personal irritation against the energetic and favoured Algernon. He found it ‘very extrordenary that the younger sonne should so dominere in your house that.... it is not only his chamber but the greate roomes of the house, and purhaps the whole he commands’. In time Philip, though inevitably succeeding to the title, would be largely disinherited by his father. De L’Isle papers, C83/51, Kent Community Archives.

  12. In later life L’Isle was inclined to solitude, but a letter suggests it was not always so: a friend writes that he wishes he could send L’Isle ‘a little Spanish mistress’ to spoil his walks. Quoted in Julia Cartwright, Sacharissa, p. 129.

  13. Works, vol. 4, p. 170.

  14. Works, vol. 4, pp. 170–1.

  15. L’Isle may be too grand a figure and someone with learning further down the social scale may have functioned as Aphra’s mentor. Given Behn’s tendency in her late stories to suggest her codes by using the initial to indicate the real person on which a character was based (as in The Fair Jilt) the man hinted at might have begun with V. In which case candidates could come from the Verney family or from the Vernattys. Philibert Vernatty was a crooked treasurer and merchant connected with Tangiers where he ‘lived like a prince’; he greatly irritated Pepys (see BL Sloane MS 3509). Nicholas or Nathaniel Vernatty was mentioned as a friend of Behn’s Kentish friend, Jeffrey Boys, and appears to be referred to in her poem ‘Our Cabal’. The notion of Behn’s contact with a literary family comes largely from the background of the other writing women comparable to her, Katherine Philips and Margaret Cavendish. Cavendish was part of a largely literary group which included her writing daughters-in-law, women of her own age, Jane and Elizabeth Cavendish.

  16. When taken back into the fold, Strangford declared he had over £4,000 in debts but, when Algernon came to sort matters out, he found the indebtedness more like £6,000. For a full discussion of Algernon Sidney’s relationship with Strangford’s inheritance, see Jonathan Scott, Algernon Sidney and the English Republic, 1623–1677 and Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, 1677–1683 (Cambridge, 1988 and 1981).

  17. CSP, Dom., 1655.

  18. When the Strangfords returned for a short time to Kent in 1657 they were offered a small house nearby which ‘displeased them’.

  19. CSP, Dom., 1656, p. 4.

 
20. The meeting near Gray’s Inn was in early July 1659 and the uprising was intended for 1 August; ‘one called Lady Willoughby a Catholic’ heard of the plot and laid her knowledge before the chief of intelligence Thomas Scot, giving him particulars not only of the meeting of Royalists but also the intended day of rising. This was ironic since Thomas Scot’s son William just might have been implicated in the plot. Scot, ‘Confessions of transactions in the service of Parliament, 1660’, BM, Stowe MS. 189. fol. 73b.

  21. See Edward, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. Dunn Macray (Oxford, 1958), vol. VI, Book XVI, section 37.

  22. At the Restoration, Thomas Colepeper was sure he deserved a reward and in June 1666, he was claiming in a petition that he had lost £10,000 by his loyalty. It is not clear what was done for him but he was soon corresponding with the King’s minister, Lord Arlington, about subversive activities in Kent. As balance for Sidney arrogance in the Interregnum, it would be pleasant to think that he was the ‘young’ Colepeper who in 1663 had the pleasure of offering the now impecunious and exiled Algernon Sidney a foreign command.

  23. The difficulty of tracing women can be exemplified by a ‘Margaret Smith’ in A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe. She provided intelligence from Bruges to Thurloe in July 1657 concerning the King’s troops and vessel-building for an invasion of England. The name may be a code for a man since there seems some evidence that he or she was at sea, but its use would suggest that a woman spy was not unthinkable. Later s/he writes again as from Blanck Marshall, while signing Margaret Smith, Antwerp, 28 June 1658. In July Blanck Marshall is writing from Bruges in desperate need of money; s/he has assumed the name Jo. Harrison. On 12 August Jo. Harrison or Blanck Marshall writes several times from Bruges, on one occasion almost entirely in code. In November the name is again Margaret Smith. In the index to the Thurloe papers, this agent is listed as Elizabeth Smith, spy on the king. For Aphra, the problem is exacerbated by her surname: among the spies, Johnson was one of those easy common names turned to in haste—even the King used it on occasion. But it is possible that one of the many male Johnsons mentioned in the secret service papers of Thurloe and Hyde in the early 1650s was her father, e.g. December 1657, William Lockhart, ambassador in France, wrote to Thurloe ‘on behalfe of one Johnson, a prisoner in the custody of one of your messengers, who was taken about twelve months since at Rye, upon suspition of his being an intelligencer’. A John Johnson, possibly a Scot, was an agent in Rotterdam; he sent a letter in April 1658 suggesting that Monck’s army had gone over to the King and renounced Parliament.

  24. Although, happily for them, both Willoughby and Killigrew were loud Royalists at the Restoration, neither was impeccable politically and there is evidence that each either changed or played on both sides. Such acquaintances, therefore, suggest political activity but not clear-cut political principles. The early Aphra was not necessarily a confirmed and single-minded monarchist.

  25. Occasionally there would be a lull in the opposing documents collected by Thurloe in London and Hyde across the Channel. When this happened, as it did on 29 May 1654, Hyde exclaimed, ‘We are at a dead calm for all manner of intelligence,’ CSP, III 244. But such exclamations were rare.

  26. See The Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett and Ann, Lady Fanshawe, ed. John Loftis (Oxford, 1979).

  27. The English Augustinian nuns settled in Louvain at St. Monica’s, another convent Behn may have known. For an insight into the nuns’ life see The Tixall Letters; or, the Correspondence of the Aston family, and their friends, during the 17th century, ed. A. Clifford (Edinburgh, 1815). Other laxer groups called the ‘Gallopping Nuns... Chanonesses, Begines, Quest’s, Swart-Sisters, and Jesuitesses’ are mentioned in Behn’s short story, The Fair Jilt.

  28. The archives in Ghent have some details of finance and personnel of the English convent, but little else. See Sint-Baafs Reeks B no. 2773, Rijkarchief Gent, and Reeks XXI and XXXV, Stadsarchief Gent.

  29. Thomas Killigrew, Thomaso, Or The Wanderer: A Comedy, Comedies and Tragedies (London, 1664).

  30. CSP, III, p. 607. It rather sounds as though Mary Knatchbull kept up some of her political activities, for an account of her a few years later refers to her moving when the ‘new stormes in England began’ as though she would be sure to be involved. See vol. XVII, Publications of the Catholic Record Society.

  31. In the Ghent archives, Mary Knatchbull describes the poor financial state of the convent during the Interregnum when it was in debt of almost two years’ income. On 1 April 1661 it was claimed that the convent ‘subsists by the portions of such as proffess a moungst us’, Reeks B, 2773, Rijksarchief Gent. Other possibilities are that Behn went to a convent briefly as a child; Elizabeth, Pepys’s wife, born the same year as Behn of a Kentish mother, was according to her brother briefly in an Ursuline convent at the age of twelve. Or that she was in a lowly position in one: in Love-Letters, Works, vol. 2, p. 217, the maid Antonet says that at the age of six she went to a convent as the playmate of a noble girl and that the pair stayed there for seven years. To girls without money, there were also subordinate serving positions available, but Aphra Behn seems not to have been the type for this sort of role. A final possibility is that Behn considered entering a convent later as an adult, perhaps in Antwerp in the mid-1660s. Many older women did so, including one of Winefrid Themelby’s relatives. But again Behn would have needed funds.

  32. The History of the Nun, Works, vol. 3, p. 214. In another story Behn describes a Protestant young girl believing she ‘had happily got into the company of Angels’ and having ‘heard talk of Nunneries, and having never been out of her own Country [county] till within four or five days, she had certainly concluded she had been in one of those Religious-houses now, had she but heard a Bell ring, and seen ’em kneel to Prayers, and make use of their Beads, as she had been told those happy people do’, vol. 3, p. 370.

  33. Works, vol. 2, p. 382.

  Chapter 3

  1. A continuation of their work might have been necessary for many agents who expected reward at the Restoration since it soon became clear that royal largesse could not extend to all who had served the King in exile. A few days into the reign found Pepys worrying where to find the month’s pay promised by the King to the ship’s crew that ferried him to England.

  2. James A. Williamson, English in Guiana 1604–68 (Oxford, 1923).

  3. See William Byam, ‘The Description of Guyana’, BL Sloane MS 3662.

  4. With the help of Byam, Willoughby had shifted from his initial support of Parliament and had tried to hold Barbados for the royal cause. He failed and, after his defeat, was restricted to his estates in Surinam. But he was eager to return to England. So, after a short time, he left Surinam to Byam. In England Willoughby was imprisoned and released only on condition that he return to Surinam. He was by now too deep into plotting and he did not set out until well after the Restoration. Having backed the winning side, Willoughby was confirmed in a large portion of the proprietorship, now shared with Clarendon’s son, Laurence Hyde, under whom Byam continued as Deputy or Governor.

  5. Adriaan van Berbel, Travels in South America, between the Berbice and Essequito Rivers and in Suriname (1670–1689), trans. Walter E. Roth (Georgetown, Guyana, 1925).

  6. This absence of sheep did not prevent Aphra from ‘seeing’ them in the colony when she came to write Oroonoko. Although it was only after James Lind’s work in the mid 18th century on the effect of citrus fruit on scurvy that the connection of Vitamin C and the disease was widely known, the discovery had often been made and forgotten in the past. An authoritative recommendation of the juice of lemons is to be found in James Lancaster’s account of his voyage to the Indian Ocean in 1601, see Purchas His Pilgrimes, vol. 2, 393.

  7. Thomas Tryon, Friendly Advice to the Gentlemen-Planters of the East and West Indies (1684).

  8. Plantation Justice (1701).

  9. Colonising Expeditions to the West Indies and Guiana, ed. V.
T. Harlow, Hakluyt Society, 2nd ser., 56 (London, 1925), pp. 174–7.

  10. Henry Adis, A Letter Sent from Syrranam, to His Excellency, the Lord Willoughby of Parham, General of the Western Islands, and of the Continent of Guianah, &c. Then residing at the Barbados...dated 10 December 1663, printed in London in 1664. Adis was perhaps not an entirely reliable witness: he wrote such pamphlets as A Fannaticks Alarm (1661) in which he called himself ‘a Baptized Believer, undergoing the Name of a Free-willer; and...called a Fannatick or a mad man’.

  11. Othello was the most popular Shakespearean tragedy of the Restoration, allowed on the stage in its original form. With its domestic drama, it was considered especially appealing to women. When the playwright Southerne later made his Imoinda white, he drew on the image of Othello with its exotic, erotic tie of black man and white woman. That coupling with a black man was regarded as a trait of a prostitute in the Restoration can be seen from the lampoons on Charles II’s mistress, the Duchess of Mazarine, and his daughter, the Countess of Sussex. A satirist described a ‘loathsome filthy Black. / Which you & Sussex in your arms did take’ (‘Rochester’s Farewell’, BL Harley MS 7317).

  12. The most famous proponent of the theory that Behn took all her description from books is Ernest Bernbaum in ‘Mrs. Behn’s “Oroonoko”’, George Lyman Kittredge Papers (Boston, 1913), pp. 419–33.

  13. George Warren, An Impartial Description of Surinam upon The Continent of Guiana in America. With a History of several strange Beasts, Birds, Fishes, Serpents, Insects, and Customs of that Colony etc. (London, 1667). For further information on Behn in Surinam, see J. A. Ramsaran, ‘“Oroonoko”: A Study of the Factual Elements’, Notes and Queries (1960), p. 144, and Bernard Dhuicq, ‘Further Evidence on Aphra Behn’s Stay in Surinam’, Notes and Queries (December 1979), pp. 524–6.

  14. Banister was much involved with the English settlers and their new Dutch masters after the second loss of Surinam following the Treaty of Breda. See CSP, Col., 1668.