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

by Antonia Fraser

  Second, Mulcaster was careful only to ‘allow them [girls] learning … with respect to their ends’. What were these ends? ‘I meddle not with needles nor yet with housewifery,’ wrote Mulcaster, ‘though I think it and know it to be a principal commendation in a woman to govern and direct her household … because I deal only with such things as be incident to their learning.’ Since these girls were to be in the future ‘the principal pillars in the upholding of households’ it was useful for them to learn to read; moreover reading was needful for the study of religion. But Mulcaster saw no point in the admission of girls to the public grammar schools or the universities.

  There were a rising number of girls’ boarding-schools, particularly in the environs of London (we have noted how the heiress Sara Cox was snatched from Mrs Winch’s school at Hackney in 1637). To these the prosperous middle classes began to send their daughters; at the school of Mr and Mrs Robert Perwick, also in Hackney, which flourished from 1637 to 1660, there were as many as 100 girls at a time. Other such schools have been traced at Westerham in Kent, Manchester (where there were two), Oxford, Exeter (two) and in Leicester.53

  The first public school actually recorded was the Ladies’ Hall at Deptford in Kent; here in 1617 the ‘Young gentlewomen’, fetchingly attired in loose green garments covered in silver and carnation lace, their shoulders bare, their arms half naked, their hair ‘dishevelled’ (but artistically so), wearing green pumps and gloves, were presented to Queen Anne, wife of James I. They bestowed on her examples of their needlework. The Queen was then hailed in delightfully zeugmatic terms;

  Then bright Goddess, with thy sweet smile grace all

  Our nymphs, occasion, and our Ladies Hall.54

  This emphasis on needlework and graciousness was characteristic. In 1647 Unton Lady Dering summed up what was expected for Peg and Elizabeth Oxinden, aged twelve and eleven, at Mr Beven’s finishing school at Ashford: ‘And besides the qualities of music both for the virginals and singing (if they have voices) and writing (and to cast account which will be useful to them hereafter) he will be careful also that their behaviour be modest …’ In these boarding-schools, as in the homes of Anne Halkett, Ann Fanshawe and Alice Thornton, it was the education ‘fit for her quality’ in Alice Thornton’s phrase, that is, ‘lady’s’ quality, which was being provided, rather than the sort of learning which Sir Thomas More had had in mind in the previous century when he wrote that a wife should be ‘learned if possible, or at least capable of being so’.55

  Some practical accomplishments were of course taught – a form of shorthand for example (not so much for secretarial purposes as suitable for taking notes on ‘good’ reading), enough arithmetic for household accounts as Lady Dering suggested, legible handwriting, even tolerable orthography was considered desirable – although any girl who actually succeeded in these achievements would find herself way ahead of most of her female contemporaries.2 At the same time all this was a world away from the kind of heavy grounding in Latin which was being automatically given to the girls’ brothers at the grammar schools: Latin being the key not only to entrance to the universities, but to all forms of serious scholarship at the time, as well as science and medicine (something Mary Ward had appreciated in her emphasis on the subject to her young nuns).

  As the boys’ grammar schools themselves improved with the progress of the century, the rift between male and female education grew into a chasm. Scholarship was not the only loss. By the Restoration, classical knowledge was a prerequisite of the cultivated gentleman. It was left to the playwright Aphra Behn to mourn on behalf of her sex:

  The God-like Virgil, and great Homer’s verse

  Like divine mysteries are concealed from us.57

  Dainty French was however thought to be a desirable female accomplishment at court and elsewhere. An early seventeenth-century French grammar was written to enable women to ‘parlee [sic] out their part with men’. The arrival of a French Queen – Henrietta Maria – in 1625 continued the trend. The influx of French Protestant (Huguenot) refugees into London resulted in the establishment of a few French schools, and provided a number of French teachers. French maids and French nurses were to be found in fashionable households. Later French romances began to flood into England and were read avidly, sometimes in the original: Brilliana Lady Harley, ordering a book from her son at Oxford, in 1638, asked for it in French: ‘for I would rather read that tongue than English’.58

  Humphrey Moseley, a leading bookseller, published a translation of Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s novel Artamenes or The Grand Cyrus ‘now Englished by F.C., Gent’ in 1653; he dedicated it to Lady Anne Lucas on the grounds that she was known to have a perfect command of French (thus presumably not needing the services of F.C., Gent). Moseley added: ‘Were it a Discourse of the most profound Learning that Humane Nature is capable of, and written in Greek or Hebrew, I would make its Dedication to your Noble Lord …’59

  That was the difference.

  In 1650 the Eure girls, Ralph Verney’s cousins, children of his aunt Margaret Poulteney’s romantic second marriage to William Eure, were taught ‘what is fit for them, as the reading of the French tongue and to sing and to dance and to write and to play of the guitar’. In contrast, when Sir Ralph heard that his god-daughter Nancy Denton, child of his friend and kinsman the learned Dr Denton, was going to be taught the classics, he read first the doctor, and then Nancy a lecture. ‘Let not your girl learn Latin’, he pronounced to the former, condemning shorthand too for good measure. ‘The difficulty of the first may keep her from that vice, for so I must esteem it in a woman; but the easiness of the other [i.e. shorthand] may be a prejudice to her; for the pride of taking sermon notes, hath made multitudes of women most unfortunate.’60

  Nancy, a girl of spirit, wrote back to her godfather that her cousins might out-reach her in their French, but she would outstrip them by learning ‘ebri grek and laten’(let us hope that knowledge of Hebrew, Greek and Latin improved Nancy’s spelling in English). Sir Ralph however refused to concede; in a further letter he condemned such unfeminine attainments once again: ‘Good sweet heart be not so covetous; believe me a Bible (with the Common Prayer) and a good plain catechism in your Mother Tongue being well read and practised, is well worth all the rest and much more suitable to your sex; I know your Father thinks this false doctrine, but be confident your husband will be of my opinion.’61

  Sir Ralph did put his seal of approval upon learning French. He offered to start a French library for Nancy on his next visit to Paris, since matters suitable for women’s perusal were often written in that language; he included in that category not only romances, plays, poetry, but also all manner of subjects suitable to good housewifery such as recipes and gardening hints. In French could also be read profitably the stories of ‘illustrious (not learned)’ women from the past, wrote Sir Ralph firmly.62 The distinction between the two was not one which would have been appreciated by that ‘dread Virago’, Queen Elizabeth I. Yet Sir Ralph was no fierce male brute: he was on the contrary a good husband, a loving and considerate brother to his five orphaned sisters, a caring father to his daughters. He was merely expressing the philosophy of his times; while Nancy Denton, the daughter of an enlightened father with a particular interest in female education, represented one of the fortunate exceptions.63

  1It was not until 1703 that Mary Ward’s congregation received papal approval, and not until 1877 that the then Pope officially described Mary Ward as its foundress. Finally, in 1951, Pius XII described Mary Ward, with St Vincent de Paul, as the outstanding pioneer of the lay apostolate of women. Today Mary Ward’s Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a mainly teaching foundation, spreads across five continents.

  2The editors of the Verney letters and Oxinden papers comment on the ‘evident decline’ in female education and ‘lack of advance’ in female literacy respectively in the seventeenth century as compared to the sixteenth.56

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Living under Obedience

>   ‘Teach her to live under obedience, and whilst she is ummarried, if she would learn anything, let her ask you, and afterwards her husband, At Home.’

  SIR RALPH VERNEY TO DR DENTON

  Susanna Perwick, daughter of those Perwicks who kept a fashionable girls’ school at Hackney, was one of the few Englishwomen of this time – the age following the death of Queen Elizabeth – to be glorified under the title of virgin. Susanna, an exceptionally talented musician if her biographer John Batchiler is to be believed, died in 1661 at the age of twenty-four. Batchiler called his work The Virgin’s Pattern: in the Exemplary Life and lamented Death of Mrs Susanna Perwick1 (‘Mrs’ was the title then applied to respectable unmarried females, ‘Miss’ except in the case of very young girls being reserved for the other sort). Her musical talents were early encouraged, since the Perwicks’ school staff included such luminaries as Simon Ives, the collaborator of Henry Lawes, as singing-master, and Edward Coleman the song-writer. Batchiler mentions that first Thomas Flood, then William Gregory, taught Susanna; others would gladly have taken their place, such as Albertus Bryne, the composer and ‘famously velvet-fingered Organist’ of St Paul’s Cathedral. Susanna’s proficiency at the violin quickly attracted favourable attention and she was also skilled at composing extemporary variations on a given theme; in addition she played the lute and harpsichord, sang, and studied books on harmony.

  It was no wonder that ambassadors and other foreign visitors attended the Hackney school as the fame of this paragon spread, lured further by her sweet face, and her conversation – which, unlike that of most women, was ‘rather sententious than garrulous’. According to Batchiler, Susanna had other skills beyond music: calligraphy, accountancy and cookery.

  Alas, at the age of twenty-four Susanna caught a violent fever from sleeping in damp linen on a visit to London from Hackney. When she realized she was dying, she bequeathed her belongings in the neat orderly fashion which had characterized her whole short life: her books went to the young gentlewomen of the school, with the dying wish that they would not read other ‘vain books’ or waste time dressing-up. Then in the course of her protracted deathbed, Susanna herself gave ‘small silent groans’, in between her ‘smiling slumbers’, while her family wept loudly around her. At her funeral, attended by the whole school, Susanna’s velvet-clad hearse was carried by six white-clad maidservants; while the pupils who had known her best, dressed in black, with white scarves and gloves, held up the mourning sheet. She was buried in the Hackney church, in the same grave as Mrs Anne Carew, a schoolfriend, ‘a fine costly garland of gumwork’ being placed on the coffin. Susanna’s epitaph made her ultimate destination clear:

  Here Beauties, Odours, Musicks Lie

  To shew that such rare things can die …

  From Heav’n she came with Melodies

  And back again to Heav’n she flies.2

  And it was highly satisfying to an age which particularly enjoyed the significance of a good anagram that the letters of Susanna(h) Perwick’s name could, with a little pious cheating, produce the words: AH! I SEE (C) HEAV’N’S PURE SUN.’1

  Although the title of his work, The Virgin’s Pattern, celebrated Susanna’s unmarried state, Batchiler was careful to make it clear that she had by no means rejected altogether that ‘blessed knot’ of matrimony which was the lot of dutiful (Protestant) womankind. Admittedly after the early death of her fiancé, Susanna had dismissed various other proposed bridegrooms as wanting in spiritual riches; but Batchiler announced that Susanna had made another ‘secret choice’ before her death, and died in the arms of the man concerned.4 It was a significant assurance in a work much closer to hagiography than biography; readers could feel confident that the conventional virgin’s pattern of the seventeenth century – which was in fact to eschew virginity and marry – had finally been followed.

  Yet Susanna Perwick’s character, as it can be discerned beneath the veil of Batchiler’s melancholy ecstasies, has something distinctly austere and as we should now say, nun-like about it; certainly her persistent rejection of her suitors, even if allayed by a deathbed change of heart, does not indicate any great enthusiasm for the matrimonial state. Like the Catholic Mary Ward, who suffered a similar loss, Susanna Perwick regarded the death of her betrothed as a significant affliction from God. For Susanna there followed a form of spiritual ‘conversion’; Mary Ward decided to devote her life to God and took the veil. The option of the convent was of course not open to the Protestant girl; indeed Susanna remained very much opposed to the ‘Romish’ religion, which she considered to be positively ‘anti-Christian’.5 Susanna was compelled to construct her own life of retirement within the confines of her parents’ busy boarding-school.

  Susanna also resembled Mary Ward in that she had the gift of beauty: Batchiler refers to the contrast of her brilliant complexion – ‘red and white, Mixed curiously gave great delight’ – with her ‘black, jetty, starry’ eyes. And for once the frontispiece to The Virgin’s Pattern does actually show a pretty face, although there is a hint of firmness as well as humour in the curved mouth, above the legend: ‘Here’s all that’s left.’ Nevertheless, after the death of her betrothed Susanna adopted a deliberately plain, neat garb, abhorring the black spots and patches which were just becoming the rage of fashionable London; not only for her own use, but also making her mother confiscate them from the giddy young ladies at the boarding-school. At least Susanna showed enough sympathy with adolescent frailty to wear the jewellery she would otherwise have eschewed in order to please the girls. Batchiler also eulogized her bosom – ‘Her pair of round crown’d rising hills’ – but these rising hills were, after Susanna’s conversion, sternly covered with a whisk or handkerchief, contrary to the usual custom of the time.

  It was easy for Susanna to refuse to attend public revels where there would be dancing; it was more difficult to find peace at home for prayer and meditation, with 100 girls, to say nothing of the servants, perpetually ‘going up and down’. So Susanna, like so many of her serious-minded contemporaries such as Mary Warwick and Dorothy Osborne, turned to the garden and there would read her Bible for an hour or so, secure from interruption (she had read the whole of the New Testament twice in the year of her death). For Susanna too, like Elizabeth Walker, there was the period of early morning prayer which would leave her red-eyed; before supper she would regularly meditate on death. Even if complimented on her music in later years, Susanna was liable to reply – rather off-puttingly – that music was as nothing compared to the joys of heaven.6

  Throughout the seventeenth century it was customary for stout English Protestants to condemn the Catholic convents with horror as barbarous concomitants of the ‘Romish’ religion. Yet one cannot help noticing how much easier it was for a Catholic young woman, a Mary Ward for instance, to construct a life of serious purpose on her own terms, than it was for a Susanna Perwick.

  ‘Convenient storage for their [the Catholics’] withered daughters’ was how Milton dismissed the convents. Lettice Countess of Leicester was struck with horror when ‘a Popish orphan’ named Mary Gunter, whom she had taken into her household, persisted in wanting to go ‘beyond the seas, to become a nun’ on the grounds that this was ‘the surest and most likely way to go to Heaven … the nearest way’. There was however nothing withered about Mary Pontz, an associate of Mary Ward. She was an acknowledged beauty who was on the point of marriage when Mary Ward’s mission captured her spirit; she sent her cavalier a bizarre form of dismissal in the shape of her own portrait in which one half of the face had been eaten by worms!7 For Protestant girls who experienced these or similar urges there was little outlet; and Milton’s derisive comment omitted to state that for the withered daughters of Protestants – those who had probably been allowed to wither on the bough unmarried because they lacked dowries – there was no convenient refuge at all.

  Some Protestant women, who thought for themselves, could see that it was by no means fair to condemn the Catholic nunneries wholesale. Mar
garet Duchess of Newcastle, for example, with her usual gift for stating the truth, however uncomfortable, thought it better for a girl to be ‘walled up’ in ‘a monastery’ than unhappily married. Margaret Godolphin, herself so earnest, so reserved, so worried by the implications of matrimony, went further. She was impressed by the convents she visited in France: ‘Their Nunneries seem to be holy Institutions,’ she reflected. ‘If they are abused, ’tis not their (the nuns’) fault; what is not perverted? Marriage itself is become a snare.’ Earlier she had wished that there might be some kind of similar Protestant refuge to which she might fly and eschew the claims of the world.8

  It was a desire echoed by the youthful Anne Murray, at the end of her unhappy love affair with Mr Thomas Howard.9 As a girl without a fortune (her portion was ensnared in a legal tangle), Anne was aware that her marriage to Howard would not be permitted by his parents, and she honourably refused the young man’s passionate request for a secret ceremony. Despite this evidence of rectitude, even Anne’s own mother poured fury on her daughter for her behaviour, on the grounds that it was financially necessary for Howard to marry a rich citizen’s daughter. She made Anne promise not to see her lover again. Anne kept her promise to the extent of saying goodbye to Howard blindfold, when he was packed off by his own relations to France. Even so, the disgust of the mother was so great, that she refused to speak to Anne except in anger for fourteen months.

  It was at this point that Anne inquired privately from her cousin Sir Patrick Drummond, who was Conservator (consul) in Holland, whether there was not some Protestant nunnery there, consistent with her religious principles, because if so she would retreat thither immediately. But Sir Patrick addressed his answer to the angry mother, leaving Anne to explain herself: ‘for since I found nothing would please her that I could do, I resolved to go where I could most please myself, which was in a solitary retired life’. A further blow was in store for Anne when Howard returned from France and married another lady, having cut Anne publicly: ‘Is this the man for whom I have suffered so much?’ she cried, falling on her bed. Her unfeeling mother laughed. It was no wonder that Anne secretly approved when her maid Miriam, as it will be remembered, called down a curse of barrenness upon Howard’s bride.