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

by Antonia Fraser

  The siege of Basing House, magnificent dwelling of the great Catholic magnate John, fifth Marquess of Winchester, which lasted from August 1643 until October 1645, was one of the most famous and protracted of the war.15 When finally captured, Basing House was found to number amongst its contents not only riches and pictures and art works and furnishing – but also the engraver Wenceslaus Hollar and Inigo Jones himself (who was carried out naked, wrapped in a blanket). A passionate supporter of the King’s cause, Lord Winchester was said to have ‘Aimez Loyauté’ engraved on every window of Basing House.

  Honora Marchioness of Winchester was, as Clarendon wrote later, ‘a lady of great honour and alliance’, being the daughter of the Earl of St Albans and Clanricarde, and the granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth’s Machiavellian statesman, Sir Francis Walsingham.16 From the point of view of Parliament, however, it was more important that she was half-sister to their own general, the Earl of Essex (to whom one of the besiegers, Colonel Hammond, was also related). Here was the problem of a civil war in a nutshell. The Parliamentary besiegers were understandably anxious to have such a lady safely removed from Basing House.

  So Sir William Waller duly invited the Marchioness to lead out her own children (she was the mother of seven), and all the other women and children in the house, during a parley. He used exceptionally courteous terms, ‘excusing the rudeness of his disorderly guns’. The Marchioness’s answer was, like that of the Countess of Derby to Sir Thomas Fairfax, superbly scornful: ‘she thanked God that she was not in that condition to accept of fair quarter at Sir William Waller’s hands, being resolved to run the same fortune as her Lord, knowing that there was a just and all-seeing Judge above, who she hoped would have an especial hand in this business’. From this august judge, she added, Sir William Waller could ‘pretend no commission’.

  Then the Marchioness and her ladies set to with a will, casting bullets from lead hastily stripped from the roofs and turrets of the house. During a lull in the siege she also visited Oxford (where the King was) and solicited diligently for help for her husband.

  By the autumn of 1645 time had run out for Basing House, and its courageous defenders of both sexes. It was now the one remaining Royalist garrison guarding the south-west, and as such received the attentions of Oliver Cromwell himself, since the victory of Naseby that summer the hero of the Parliamentary forces. During the final bombardment, one of Cromwell’s shells ‘brake in’ to the Marchioness’s lodgings, killing a waiting-woman and a chambermaid (demonstrating how perilous might be the fate of such innocent anonymous females caught up in these great events).

  What happened to the Marchioness? Accounts vary. Either she escaped from Basing House before the final stage of the siege on 8 October, or she was captured and subsequently exchanged for another prominent (male) prisoner. Either way her name was specifically mentioned in the Articles of Surrender, as were those of other chatelaines. (At the surrender of Bletchingdon House to Cromwell in April 1645, the eighth Article read; ‘That the lady of the House [Mrs Windebank] shall enjoy her goods as before …’)17 Thus was war in its own strange way bringing the names of women to the fore. While the Marchioness of Winchester survived to bring comforts to her sick husband imprisoned in the Tower of London, Basing House was ‘slighted’, or razed to the ground, at the orders of Parliament and its gorgeous contents looted.

  Where the Countess of Derby and the Marchioness of Winchester were already illustrious figures before the war, through the panoply of their high lineage, ‘prudent and valiant’ Lady Bankes, defender of Corfe Castle, made her own name by the sheer courageous obstinacy of her resistance; and like Lady Derby, she gave every impression of enjoying her role, for all its perils. Mary Bankes came of a good if not a brilliant family, being the daughter of Ralph Hawtrey of Ruislip; her husband Sir John Bankes, described as ‘a grave and learned man in the profession of law’,18 had prosecuted John Hampden as Attorney-General, and later became Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas.

  The law had proved lucrative. It will be recalled that in 1617, at the time of the disastrous marriage of Frances Coke to Buckingham’s brother, Corfe Castle was part of the rich settlement Frances was expected to receive from her mother Lady Hatton; the failure of Lady Hatton to part with it resulted in the King creating the bridegroom Viscount Purbeck as a consolation (see p. 19). So Corfe Castle remained in the possession of Lady Hatton. About 1634, Sir John Bankes bought it from her.

  Mercurius Rusticus, the Royalist newspaper, would call Corfe Castle ‘one of the impregnable forts of the kingdom’. Its peculiar site close by the Dorset coast, on top of a steep hill which lay in ‘the fracture’ of another hill, guarding the only route inland, had ensured ‘Corph’ a place in history since Saxon times; it possessed its own kind of grim female tradition, for hereabouts had been the domus of Queen Elfrida and here her step-son King Edward the Martyr had been murdered, according to later allegations, at her instigation, that her own son Ethelred might succeed. The present massive structure, with its walls ten feet thick, was complete by the reign of Henry II. Later Henry VII had repaired Corfe Castle for his own mother, the Countess of Richmond.19

  Lady Bankes retired to Corfe Castle on the eve of the Civil War, leaving her husband to follow the political fortunes of the King, first in London, later at Oxford. We have some picture of how she lived there.20 There were suites of gilded green leather, and blue damask hangings, a silk quilted carpet for the withdrawing-room, a rich ebony cabinet with gilded fixtures, fine tapestries in the gallery and another tapestry in ‘my lady’s bedroom’ with a white dimity bed and hangings. In the large windows were embroidered satin cushions, and other cushions of crimson velvet. Everywhere there was crimson velvet – chairs and stools as well as cushions were covered in it – together with rich carpets from Turkey and Persia.

  For all the splendour of Lady Bankes’s circumstances, supported by her husband’s earnings as a lawyer, it was perhaps a pity that the previous owner, Lady Hatton, being, as a contemporary account put it, ‘one (you may imagine) rather of Venus than Mars his company’, had sold the ‘chiefest guns’ out of the castle. When it became obvious that a Parliamentary siege was imminent, Lady Bankes found herself armed with maidservants a-plenty, but as a garrison had a mere five soldiers. She was however not only ‘a virtuous’ but ‘a prudent lady’; in her portrait she shows an extremely determined face to the world, with her strong long chin, her well-chiselled nose, firm lips and fine brave eyes – and she clutches the keys of Corfe Castle in her hand. Lady Bankes had no intention of having these keys snatched from her, not by stealth and not by surprise.21

  Lady Bankes’s prudence was displayed in a number of ways: for example in acquiring a great store of provisions. Aware of the Parliamentary sympathies of the town, she also kept the castle gates securely locked: for example on May Day when the Mayor and ‘barons’ of Corfe had the right to course a stag on her domains. When some troops of horse from Dorchester thought of surprising her, Lady Bankes ‘very wisely and like herself’ called in a guard, although the commanders of the troops denied that any harm was intended. She bore the foul language used by the common soldiers outside the castle with stoicism – as the Countess of Derby endured the indignities and affronts of her own besiegers.

  When the local Parliamentary Committee at Poole demanded the four small pieces of ordnance left inside the castle, Lady Bankes’s prudence led her, like Lady Derby, to play for time, instead of indulging in the outright defiance for which she was not yet prepared. There was a great deal of questioning of the seamen’s warrants, and finally when the guns were placed on their carriages, Lady Bankes had them taken off; the seamen were beaten off by the five men of the garrison assisted by the ‘maidservants at their Lady’s command’ to ‘the small thunder’ of guns. Lady Bankes secured an additional and far more substantial garrison of over fifty men from the Royalist commander Prince Maurice, brother of Prince Rupert. This was headed by a Captain Lawrence.

  Despit
e the installation of these soldiers, her neighbours (like those of Lady Derby) did not match Lady Bankes in their stomach for a fight: ‘presently their wives came to the castle, there they weep and wring their hands and with clamorous oratory persuade their husbands to come home and not by saving others to expose their own houses to spoil and ruin’. In the end Lady Bankes did let the great guns go – and that was prudent too, because it gave her a respite in which she could revictual the castle; it also gave Parliament the false impression that the prizing of Corfe would present no problem.

  In fact Lady Bankes absolutely refused to surrender the castle at her enemies’ summons; and when she was informed that no quarter could now be expected for the women and children inside the castle, according to the rules of war, took that threat with equanimity too.

  The first siege of Corfe began on 23 June 1643. The castle had to stand an assault of 500 or 600 men, armed with a demicannon, a culverin and two sakers (small forms of cannon). In order to approach the walls in safety, the besiegers constructed two engines, known as the Sow and the Boar: however the marksmen found their legs entangled in these structures and abandoned them. The besiegers, headed by Sir Walter Erle, were also able to fire at Corfe with great impunity from the neighbouring church. According to the Royalists, Sir Walter conducted the entire siege wearing a bearskin coat for fear of musket-shot, and since it was summer and since he additionally crept about on all fours to avoid stray bullets he must have presented a bizarre spectacle.

  As with the siege of Lathom House, there were sallies; food, not a mortar, was the object here – in the course of one of them, the defenders captured eight cows and a bull. The final assault came on a misty morning and the besiegers divided themselves into two parts to attack the upper and lower wards of the castle. By this time their numbers had been swelled by a rabble of sailors, dispatched by the Parliamentary Admiral the Earl of Warwick (Mary Rich’s father-in-law) who brought with them the dreaded fiery granadoes and also scaling ladders. These bellicose fellows were fortified with alcohol to make them ‘pot-valiant’ (£1 12s od features in the accounts for ‘a firkin of hot waters’ )22 and assured that Corfe Castle would provide rich booty. Among their number were former felons, released from the prisons (the brands on their limbs were visible), but the courage of these ‘silly wretches’ gradually diminished in view of the fierce nature of the defence. The watchword for the attack was to be ‘Old Wat’, an allusion to their commander Sir Walter Erle; but ‘Old Wat’ was also the hunter’s traditional nickname for a timorous hare which would not leave the cover of the bushes, a coincidence which the defenders at least thought highly appropriate.

  Lady Bankes herself – ‘to her eternal honour be it spoken’23 – defended the upper ward of the castle, with her daughters, her women and five soldiers. This motley but determined force heaved stones and hot embers over the battlements so successfully that the soldiers were prevented from scaling their ladders.

  Finally the strength of the assault wavered and gave way: hearing a report that the King’s forces were coming, the besiegers ‘ran away crying’. Corfe had been saved, as Mercurius Rusticus reported, by a combination of ‘the fears of Old Sir Wat’ and ‘the loyalty and resolution of this honourable Lady’.

  For some time after that Lady Bankes lived unmolested. Sir John Bankes (still absent from her side) died in December 1644. It was not until 1645, in the collapse of the Royalist side following Naseby, when other isolated centres of resistance such as Basing House and Lathom House were also captured, that Lady Bankes found herself once again besieged. In December Sir Thomas Fairfax sent a regiment of horse and two of foot to take Corfe. Even so, Lady Bankes was still stoutly holding out in February of the following year. It also seems that the final surrender of the castle was in fact due to treachery, although the long blockade must have contributed to it.24

  One of her officers, a Lieutenant-Colonel Pitman who had served in Ireland under the Earl of Inchiquin, was by now ‘weary of the king’s service’. Proposing to fetch reinforcements from Somerset, he left the castle and contacted the enemy’s commander on the pretext of arranging an exchange for his brother, then a Parliamentary prisoner. ‘Under this colour’ between 50 and 100 men were introduced into the castle disguised as supporters, many of whom knew its lay-out extremely well. So Corfe Castle fell at last, the prey to Colonel Pitman’s Trojan horse.

  Lady Bankes and her children were allowed to depart in safety. The gallant lady lived on until 1661; her son Sir Ralph Bankes enjoyed a long political career as well as enriching Dorset by building the noble house of Kingston Lacey. It was typical of Lady Bankes’s resolve that her son actually got married on the day of her death – because she had concealed her pangs so successfully. She was buried at her native Ruislip where a tablet in the church still records that she ‘had the honour to have borne with a constancy and courage above her sex, a noble proportion of the late Calamities’.

  Corfe Castle, and its luxurious contents, fared less well than Lady Bankes and her reputation. Like Basing House, it was ‘slighted’.1 As for the trunkfuls of Bankes belongings carted away so joyfully by the besiegers during the sack of the castle, those would take Lady Bankes’s descendants many years to recover after the Restoration. A broker named Stone in the Barbican in the City of London seems to have bought £1,000 worth of goods, including some tapestry hangings which he sold ‘to a fine lord’. As for Sir Walter Erle – ‘Old Wat’, that timorous hare – in 1661 he was to be found writing to Ralph Bankes in the following terms concerning the missing building materials of Corfe, in which injured innocence and innocent surprise were oddly mixed: ‘And when the spoil was made, and the materials were carried away, I never gave any direction by letter or otherwise for bringing any part of it to my house, nor knew any such thing done more than the child unborn, until a good while after, coming down into the country, I found some part thereof among other things remaining of the ruine of my own house, laid by for future use.’26

  Compared to such an iron character as Lady Bankes, Brilliana Lady Harley, who conducted the defence of Brampton Bryan Castle near Hereford, presents an altogether gentler image. Indeed, with her touching modesty of character combined with her strong sense of duty towards her absent husband’s interests and property (which inspired her to a defiant course she would not otherwise have contemplated), Brilliana Lady Harley is really the seventeenth-century masculine ideal of a wartime heroine. She played her martial role with genuine reluctance but play it she did, most honourably, and to the death. And then there was that other aspect of her militarism, which might be termed the chivalry factor. Brilliana Lady Harley, whose husband Sir Robert supported Parliament, had Royalist relations herself, and as we shall see, her very sex made King Charles I notably reluctant to press against her, where he would have moved mercilessly against a male commander. At the same time, Parliamentarian propaganda waxed indignant against the Royalist besiegers: ‘those capon-faced cowards who have unmanned themselves in offering violence to so noble a lady’.27

  Brilliana Conway was born in 1600; her unusual Christian name reflected the fact that her father was Lieutenant-Governor of the Netherlands town of Brill at the time of her birth. In 1623 she married, as his third wife, Sir Robert Harley; a marriage, as has been mentioned (see p. 6 5), which was characterized by tenderness from its inception. Thereafter her life appeared to be punctuated by childbirth, for she bore her husband seven children between 1624 and 1634 (her predecessor, Sir Robert’s second wife, had borne nine). However, Brilliana’s letters which have survived show her to have been a woman of education as well as piety: she knew not only French but also Latin.28

  Brilliana’s maternal affections were concentrated on her son Ned, to whom, when at Oxford University, she directed a stream of rather touching advice. She sent Ned liquorice for his cold, ‘eye water’ for sore eyes, recommended beer ‘boiled with liquorice’ first thing in the morning for the kidneys. She would also have sent him a cold pie, except for two thin
gs: first, his father had assured her that Ned did not want it and second, and more cogently, Mrs Pierson (wife of the rector at Brampton) told Brilliana that when her son was at Oxford, she too sent him such things, until ‘he prayed her that she would not’. A little purse of money – ‘if only so he will think of her’– was presumably a more welcome present.29

  An occasional flash of spirit does however remind one that Brilliana, for all her douce maternal femininity, had another side to her nature. Ned’s letters have not survived, but we can imagine the one which provoked this retort, in a postscript: ‘Dear Ned, My age is no secret; tho my brother Bray is something mistaken in it.’30

  All this while Sir Robert Harley, who was one of the MPS for Herefordshire, was busy with parliamentary affairs in London. In his absence his business became somewhat neglected; it is noteworthy that Brilliana made no attempt to gather the reins into her own hands at this juncture. She contented herself with sending him veal pies and pairs of shoes from the country. Sharing her husband’s Puritan sympathies, in many respects Brilliana found the year 1642 highly exciting: ‘It is the Lords great work that is now a-framing,’ she wrote to Ned in May. Yet she agonized over her growing responsibilities: ‘what is done in your father’s estate pleased him not, so that I wish myself with all my heart, at London, and then your father might be a witness of what is spent’. The plumbers who were mending the house, for example, were charging 5s a day! (although Brilliana thought the cost worth it). In July Brilliana the good housewife sent off the Harley silver plate to London for safe keeping in a trunk marked as containing cake. On 19 July, barely a month before the outbreak of the war, Brilliana also wrote off desperately for instructions as to how to guard Brampton Bryan; she was particularly concerned about treachery within and without since so many of her neighbours in Royalist Herefordshire favoured the King’s cause. One ‘roguish boy’ working at the castle was sent up to London with a letter to get rid of him, lest he join the other side and betray them.31