The Weaker Vessel: Women's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England

by Antonia Fraser

  Nevertheless an atmosphere of excuse was apt to prevail when a female achieved anything out of the ordinary of a literary nature. Mrs Dorothy Leigh, author of The Mothers Blessing, which had reached its seventh edition by 1621, dedicated it to her three sons (she was a widow). Writing, she admitted in this dedication, was ‘a thing unusually among us’ since women generally used words to exhort. The book itself contained a lot of advice on the sort of wives her boys should marry, and the need to exhibit patience towards them subsequently: ‘Bear with the woman,’ she pleaded, ‘as with the weaker vessel.’13

  It was not a coincidence that one of the few Englishwomen in the first half of the seventeenth century who believed, without apology, in the need to educate girls properly was a Catholic nun: Mary Ward.

  The disappearance of the convents at the time of the Reformation had deprived English girls not only of convenient local places of learning, but also of a pool of women teachers in the shape of the nuns themselves. Indeed, when the convent of Godstow near Oxford was being disbanded, a petition for its preservation (unsuccessful) was mounted on the grounds that ‘most of the gentlewomen of the county were sent there to be bred’.14

  At home in England the position of the woman teacher had not recovered from the collapse of the nunneries. (Again, it was no coincidence that the Anglican Little Gidding, derided by opponents of its high church sympathies as a ‘Protestant nunnery’, also placed a value on female education.) Many of the daughters of the English Catholic families however continued to be sent abroad to convents in the Low Countries to receive their education. These girls – Knatchbulls, Gages, Vavasours, Blundells – embarked on journeys of much danger and difficulty, defying the authorities to reach their goal abroad.15

  It was their parents’ intention in sending them that they should be preserved in the ancient faith. A Petition of the House of Commons of 1621, which asked for all children of Catholics to be recalled from abroad and given Protestant teachers at home, also had in mind re-educating such children religiously. But these girls who wended their way to the Low Countries, often remaining there as nuns, also found a kind of independence unknown to their sisters still at home – paradoxically in view of the black reputation of such convents back home in Protestant England.

  Mary Ward’s obsession with women’s education (which has been shared by most people through history who have wished to improve the female lot in a permanent fashion) had as its ultimate objective the reconversion of her native England to Catholicism. But as a woman of remarkable independence of judgement, Mary Ward was quick to see that women in religious orders could not carry out their proper part in this apostolate, if they were not correctly prepared for it. As she told Pope Paul V, when she pleaded with him to be allowed to found an order of ‘English Virgins’: ‘the education of girls is congruous to our times’. Nor was this education intended to fit girls solely for the religious life. Mary Ward’s memorandum to the Pope on the subject of the ‘English Virgins’ described their aim as being to instruct young girls in ‘piety, Christian morals and the liberal arts’ so that they could ‘profitably embrace either the secular or the religious life’.16

  Mary Ward was born in Yorkshire near Ripon in 1585: her baptismal name was Joan (she took Mary at her confirmation).17 She came of a prominent recusant family, related to half the other Catholics in England: two of her Wright uncles were involved in the Gunpowder Plot and her father was one of the many Catholic gentlemen arrested on suspicion immediately afterwards. On Mary herself the influence of her grandmother, with whom she lived for five years, was probably even more powerful since Mrs Wright was famous for being ‘a great prayer’. As a young girl, Mary became engaged to a member of the Redshaw family, but on his premature death, despite her ‘extreme beauty’ which attracted new suitors, she abandoned all thoughts of marriage. Instead she joined the Poor Clares at St Omer.

  It was at this point that Mary encountered a completely new world from that of the hunted recusant Catholics in which she had been brought up. Women as a whole, and particularly women of rank – whether in religious orders or not – led much freer lives in the Low Countries. This was something on which travellers commented, including the fact that women here participated equally in conversation and argument with men. At the same time the generally passive or secluded role of women within the Catholic Church itself had begun to be questioned in certain quarters after the Council of Trent. The spirit of the Counter-Reformation, incarnated by the career of the great Spanish nun, St Teresa of Avila, suggested that women could achieve much not merely by prayer and contemplation but by direct participation in the worldly work of the Church. As Mary Ward was to put it later, women were proposing ‘to follow a mixed kind of life, such as Christ and his Blessed Mother lived on earth’.18

  At Gravelines Mary Ward attempted to found a Poor Clare convent for Englishwomen out of her own resources, and later she did found a boarding-school for English girls at St Omer, where she was aided by five English friends, including her sister Barbara. On one occasion at St Omer the nuns’ confessor made an unwise observation, ascribing their diminishing religious fervour to the weakness of their sex. Mary Ward strongly rebutted him. Was their failure ‘because we are women? No, but because we are imperfect women. There is no such difference between men and women’, she went on, ‘that women may not do great things!…’ As for the Catholic religion, ‘It is not Veritas hominis, verity of men, nor verity of women, but Veritas Domini’ – the truth of God. Mary went on to quote the example of the (female) saints: ‘And I hope in God it will be seen that women in time will do much.’19

  Certainly Mary Ward herself fulfilled her own prophecy that women in time would ‘do much’. Her life story was one marked by unusual reverses and dangers even by the standards of the seventeenth century; she was also dogged by ill-health. None of this stood in the way of her determination to prove that the education of girls was ‘congruous’ to the times in which she lived.

  As time went on, an increasing number of English girls were sent abroad to be taught under the auspices of Mary Ward and her friends. This had the double effect of increasing Mary Ward’s contacts with the English Catholic world she had left behind via these young ladies, and also necessitating journeys to England itself to seek out new pupils, or in certain instances annuities to pay for their board and tuition.

  The account of these travels, made by Mary Ward between 1608 and 1618, makes exciting reading: a sort of Westward Ho! in reverse. London at that period was a honeycomb round which government informers buzzed, seeking to rout out secret Catholics. The ‘English Virgins’ came to be nicknamed the Apostolicae Viragines or the Galloping Girls by their pursuers. The technique of Mary Ward and her friends was to come in plain clothes, as it were, and blandly to hold open house, as though there was nothing to hide. Then they pursued their mission under the noses of the Government and its spies. But the ‘plain clothes’ were in fact deliberately splendid garments such as ladies of quality would have worn if they had not been nuns. We have a description of Mary’s sister Barbara ‘in a bright taffeta gown’ with a starched yellow ruff ‘à la mode’ and richly embroidered petticoats.20 When Mary Ward herself was hauled to the Guildhall to answer for her missionary work, she abandoned concealment and carried a rosary in her hand in defiance of the law – and her own safety. In the court she denounced the magistrate for blasphemy, and recited the litanies of the Blessed Virgin Mary in her coach on her way to prison.

  It would be nice to be able to record that Mary Ward, allowed to vanish beyond the seas once more, was warmly received on the Continent. Unfortunately, for all her energies and perseverance in the cause of female education there, she was destined to arouse quite as much – and in a sense more – damaging hostility abroad. Here her enemies lay within her own Church. ‘Runaway nun!’, ‘Visionary!’, and worst of all, ‘False Prophetess!’ had shouted the townspeople of Gravelines. The spirit of the Counter-Reformation, where women were concerned, had its ardent s
upporters and also its furious detractors. While the immediate reaction of Pope Paul V to Mary’s idea of a new Institute of women following ‘a mixed kind of life’ in the world had been favourable, and his successor Gregory XV received her kindly in 1621, the atmosphere in Rome soon changed for the worse.

  It was Mary’s intention to place her Institute under a superior general directly dependent on the Pope (on the model of the Jesuits). That was an unpopular notion with the Catholic Church as a whole, and in particular the bishops. But her conviction that women could ‘do much’ was equally unpopular with that section of the Catholic Church which remained convinced that women could do much – at home or in a secluded convent. Exaggeration is always a skilful weapon of attack. Mary Ward was accused of wishing women to rival men in the ministry, that is to say, usurp their functions as preachers; Mary Ward had in fact deliberately made the point that women could not and should not preach or administer the sacraments, and wives should also be subject to their husbands.21 Yet the unfair charge succeeded in its aim.

  Mary Ward’s convents and schools, founded as far apart as Liège and Cologne, Vienna and Prague, Rome and Naples, flourished. But opposition to the new Institute intensified until in 1631 a decree was issued by Pope Urban VIII dissolving it; its members were only allowed to continue their ordinary work of religious education if they took purely private vows.1

  Mary Ward herself was imprisoned in Germany, in a tiny airless filthy cell at the orders of the Church (but not the Pope – who had her released when he heard the news). Subsequently she lived quietly in Rome, and in 1639 she returned to England.

  Here, the patronage of the Catholic Queen Henrietta Maria seemed to promise her the opportunity of continuing her work of female education. There were ‘common schools for girls in London’ to be founded, and young women needed to be taught Latin; unlike King James I, Mary Ward was a fervent believer in the importance of Latin studies for girls. Or perhaps it would be accurate to say that Mary Ward approved of such studies for exactly the same reason as King James disapproved of them: she thought it important that women should become ‘more cunning’ – in the service of God. As Mary Ward wrote of a young nun in her care: ‘let Kate perfect her Latin with all possible care, without loss of health.’ She added: ‘no talent is so much to be regarded in them [young nuns] as the Latin tongue’.22

  The outbreak of the Civil War and the flight of the English royal family from London put an end to Mary Ward’s new London apostolate. She went north to her native Yorkshire, and died in 1645, having lived through the siege of York. Most of her adulthood she had suffered torments probably from stones, and the last twenty years of her life she was in such pain that she could not lie down, but had to sleep in a rocking-chair. Yet in her last hours, with characteristic spirit, she insisted on the sisters round her singing to stop their tears, and managed to sing with them. Her last recorded words were firmly practical: ‘It matters not the who, but the what.’23

  In general, with her independence and her gallantry, as well as her excellent sense of humour in the most trying circumstances, Mary herself stands for the best kind of English spinster. ‘From my palace’, she headed a letter written in her filthy German cell. The Elector of Bavaria, in her private code, was known as ‘Billingsgate’, a slang term of the time for bad language. ‘When she travelleth she is extraordinarily jovial’, complained one of her contemporaries, who was shocked by her apparent lightheartedness. But Mary Ward had her answer: ‘Mirth at this time is next to godliness’, she observed of one particular tight corner. When she did travel – crossing the Alps four times, frequently in winter and through snow – Mary Ward retained a kind of splendid English curiosity which sent her sightseeing in Prague and buying silks in Venice. She was notably fond of ‘a fine view’, yet shocked the fashionable Romans by proceeding on foot all the way to Perugia, wearing old clothes and leading a sick sister on her own donkey.

  Above all education, and the need for education in women if they were to perform God’s work, aroused her fervour. ‘She was a great enemy of ignorance’, wrote a contemporary.24

  In general, if an English girl, regardless of rank, did receive a good education, it was very much a matter of individual luck. Alice Heywood, Oliver Heywood’s saintly mother, made herself responsible for sending the children of her neighbourhood to school as a work of charity, buying the ‘poor ignorant sottish creatures’ books. A maidservant might become an accomplished reader if she happened to fall into the employment of a benevolent mistress, such as Elizabeth Walker or Mary Countess of Warwick, both of whom saw it as their evangelical duty to instruct their maids to read (so that they could at least read the Bible and Psalms). A forlorn creature came to Elizabeth Walker’s door, who only knew her name was Mary Bun, ‘almost eat up with scabs and vermin, with scarce rags to cover her, and as ignorant of God and Christ as if she had been born and bred in Lapland or Japan’. Elizabeth Walker decided to save her not only by stripping her, washing her and curing her of ‘The Itch’, but also by teaching her to read, so that finally a rich farmer took Mary Bun as his apprentice. The formidable Lady Anne Clifford also delighted in giving her maids ‘such a book as they had not before’.25

  As a result intelligent and forceful maids often feature prominently in the life stories of their mistresses: as ‘Honest Dafeny’ Lightfoote, Alice Thornton’s maid inherited from her mother, who both could and did write and became as a result the mainstay of the beleaguered Thornton household after Mr Thornton’s death as a bankrupt. ‘God hath sent me a friend after my own heart’, wrote Alice Thornton. Bess, maid to Sir Ralph and Lady Verney, who accompanied them into exile in France at the time of the Commonwealth, learnt French easily.26

  A good Free School or benevolent patronage or both might account for sudden unexpectedly high figures of local literacy. A recent study by David Cressy quotes women as a whole (they are not analysed by class) as displaying the same high level of illiteracy as labourers and husbandmen; a figure of 90 per cent illiteracy amongst women is given for London – the most favourable area – in 1600, declining in 1640 quite sharply to around 80 per cent; in East Anglia at the same period female illiteracy is given as nearly 100 per cent.27 The accounts of the Russell family headed by the Earls of Bedford at Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire, over a considerable period during the seventeenth century show that the skills among the maids varied. One year, out of seven or eight maids there would be two or three who could write well, another year none (whereas amongst the male footmen there would always be two or three who could write well). One housekeeper, Ann Upton, wrote well; her predecessor could not write at all. Apart from contact with the Russell family themselves, some of these literate servants had probably been educated at the local Free School founded by the second Earl of Bedford.28

  Where a girl of the upper classes was concerned, it was a happy accident if she came from a large family of brothers spread out over a number of years; she might then enjoy the services of their tutor, who would not automatically vanish when the eldest boy went away to school or university. In this way the disparity between the education offered to brother and sister might be somewhat lessened. The Ladies Diana and Margaret Russell were the daughters of William, fifth Earl of Bedford, he who married Anne Carr, worthy daughter of the unworthy Frances Somerset, for love. The education of these little girls, like the literacy of the maids, can also be traced in the accounts for Woburn Abbey.29

  Anne Countess of Bedford, like Betty Mordaunt, was the proud mother of seven sons, as well as four daughters. As a result, for a number of years Diana and Margaret were taught by their brothers’ tutor, the Rev. John Thornton, a remarkable pedagogue and a man of formidable intellect who came straight to the services of the Russell family from Cambridge in 1646. The influence of this dissenting divine on the character of the girls’ brother William Lord Russell (the celebrated Whig martyr of the reign of Charles II) is a matter for the history books; but for the Russell girls, especially Lady Diana, who was Mr Thor
nton’s favourite, a rare opportunity occurred for instruction.

  Mr Thornton believed in the new principles of education introduced by Comenius, which amongst other things supplemented teaching by pictures. One entry in the accounts reads:

  Pictus Orbis Comenii for Mr Robert 2s

  The Assemblies Pieces in Latin for Mr Robert 2s 4d

  Small Catechisms at several times for them

  and for Lady Diana 2s 6d

  Paper and Quills for them all for these five years 3s 6d

  It will be seen that even under Mr Thornton’s care Lady Diana did not learn Latin (something which would have grieved Mary Ward). However, Lady Diana did receive the best Bible: an edition in ‘fair minion print’ costing 12s 6d where the other children’s Bibles cost 3s 6d.

  Ultimately the gorgeous brothers departed – for Westminster, for university, for the Grand Tour – and when the last of them was gone, it was time for the Ladies Russell to be given over to the dancing master, music teacher and French master who would give them that education deemed in principle suitable for young ladies of their station. Lady Diana grew from the beguiling little girl painted by Lely with another sister Anne (who died of eating poisonous berries at the age of five) into a woman of resolute character. She married twice: first at the age of fifteen, being left a childless widow a year later, and secondly to Lord Alington of Wymondley. Lady Diana maintained however a lifelong friendship and correspondence with Mr Thornton. In later life Lely’s charming child came to believe sternly in total abstinence from food as a cure-all for sickness. ‘If he would come down to me, I should quickly cure him by fasting’, she wrote of one troubled member of the family.30

  Outside the aristocracy both the educationalist Basua Makin and the scholar Elizabeth Elstob benefited from early association with gifted brothers. Basua Makin was born in 1612, the daughter of the rector of Southwick in Sussex, and the sister of the astonishing scholar John Pell – at the age of twenty he was reputed to know Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Italian, French and both High and Low Dutch. Influenced by his example, Basua herself by the age of nine was said in some measure to understand Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French and Italian; we shall consider the conclusions she drew for female education as a whole from this exceptional upbringing in a subsequent chapter. At the end of the century Elizabeth Elstob, the pioneer of Old English studies, was able to work in Oxford because she had accompanied thither her brother William, who was at the university. The antiquary George Ballard, who knew the Elstobs at Oxford and included Elizabeth among his celebrated ladies, was another with an erudite sister who at the age of fourteen had ‘an extraordinary genius for Coins’ and had made a collection of them.31