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

by Antonia Fraser

  Others were not so lucky. It has been pointed out that natural phenomena, common throughout the seventeenth century, such as harvest failure, disease and fire, had a far more disastrous effect on the lives of common people than the wars themselves.17 Plague pointed its finger and periodically decimated the population; a woman’s lot, in an age when effective birth control did not exist, comprised the ceaseless bearing of children, and the perils thereof, wars or no wars. Nevertheless civil strife in one version or another ploughed up the soil of England for nearly ten years. In addition English soldiers, both Cavalier and Roundhead, fought and continued to fight in Ireland; Cromwell installed an English Army of occupation in Scotland after the victory of Dunbar which remained there till the Restoration; under the Commonwealth English soldiers and sailors were involved in military action against the Dutch, the French and the Spanish, including an expedition to the distant West Indies. Women’s lives could hardly go unaffected by these hazardous peregrinations on the part of their menfolk.

  Alice Coles of Poole had the awkward problem of explaining how she had conceived a child during her husband’s absence serving in the Army in Ireland; accused at the quarter sessions, she claimed, with some, verve, that he had paid her a miraculous visit! Another West Country wife was propositioned by an enterprising gentleman after her husband likewise had been away serving in Ireland for some time on the grounds that ‘her husband used the company and lay with women in Ireland and had the carnal knowledge of their bodies and he would wish her to do the like with men here in England’.18

  These were mere hiccups compared to the financial sufferings often experienced by the widows and families of soldiers, and the dependants of the maimed, as the numerous petitions for their relief make clear. Towards the end of the century Gregory King would cite the families of soldiers and seamen among the three groups of the perpetually insolvent.19

  Of course social disruption could affect every class, and it would be insensitive to suppose otherwise. The death of the Royalist Sir Edmund Verney in 1642, bearing the King’s standard at Edgehill, left his five unmarried daughters breathing in a climate of genteel despair, their portions sequestered along with the rest of the estates. Sue, Pen, Peg, Molly and Betty Verney huddled together at Claydon; to be joined by a sixth unhappy sister in the shape of the widowed Cary Gardiner and her pathetic little daughter – for Cary had been so contemptuously treated by her dead husband’s family that she preferred to take refuge at Claydon (see p. 145). So the girls spent their time with little prospect of a glorious match, quarrelling peevishly amongst themselves in an attempt to keep up vanished standards. ‘I did speak to Peg as her maid might serve both her and Pen, but she will not it be so by any means’, wrote a relative. ‘I told her now their father and mother was dead, they should be a helper one to the other … but all would not do [so].’20 Without a man to protect them, the girls felt threatened by lawless soldiers on both sides while the King was at Oxford, since Claydon lay roughly on the borders of Royalist and Parliamentary territories.

  Sir Ralph Verney’s relations, the Denton family of Hillesden, suffered the capture of their house by the forces of Parliament. Sir Ralph wrote feelingly of ‘the ruin of sweet Hillesden and the distresses that happened to my aunt and sisters’. Yet here it should be noted that the Dentons displayed a certain emotional resilience not granted to the Verneys. Susan Denton, walking in her distress over the fields to nearby Claydon, somehow captured the heart of one Jeremiah Abercromby, a member of the attacking force and himself a Covenanter. His love being returned, the unlikely pair got married. ‘I think few of her friends like it,’ wrote her brother gloomily, ‘but if she hath not him, she will never have any, it is gone so far.’ Alas, the next year the bridegroom was killed in a raiding party.21

  More natural perhaps was the romance of Susan’s sister Margaret Denton and Colonel Smith, the defender of Hillesden, who was taken to the Tower of London together with the Dentons, when Hillesden fell. There in the Tower a courtship took place which resulted also in a marriage. Margaret’s aunt, Mrs Elisabeth Isham, wrote: ‘I think it will be a happy match if these ill times doth not hinder it.’ Although many thought it ‘a bold venture’ to wed a prisoner, Mrs Isham reflected: ‘if these times hold, I think there will be none men left for women’. Finally the gallant Colonel escaped, abetted by the Denton women, who after a further confinement of eight days as a punishment, were themselves released.22

  For all the disturbances endured by the Verneys and the Dentons, the fate of those lower down in society who found themselves robbed not only of their natural protector but also of an actual livelihood in the absence of their man, was undoubtedly worse; as in all periods of distress, those at the bottom of society’s pile found themselves more woebegone than ever. The absence of the male – James Strong’s ‘pole’ to whose authority the female ‘vine’ was supposed to cling – was a serious economic loss. Letters have survived from two wives of militia men. The latter were members of the so-called trained bands, not professional soldiers but supposed, since the time of Queen Elizabeth, to come to the aid of their county or city in a time of crisis. In 1642 these recruits were generally raw and frequently reluctant; it is noticeable that the two women share a pathetic sense of grievance against their husbands for subjecting them to an experience which they are convinced could somehow have been avoided.

  In September 1643 Susan Owen, wife of John Owen serving under Lieutenant-Colonel West in the Blue Regiment, advanced a number of arguments as to why he should return to her side. First, she was pregnant and in danger of suffering a miscarriage. Second, the neighbours were mocking her for his departure: ‘you did it on purpose to show your hatred of me’. Third – the most poignant plea – ‘Why can everyone come [home] except you?’23

  The letter of another Susan, wife of Robert Rodway, was addressed to her husband, a militia man in the Westminster Liberty Regiment; known as the Red Regiment (like the Blue) from the colour of its flag, it was one of those involved in the early unsuccessful assault on Basing House in 1643. Susan Rodway’s letter was entrusted to ‘Robert Lewington, the Hampshire carrier’, but intercepted on its way by the Royalists and published as it stood in their newspaper Mercurius Aulicus:

  Most dear and loving husband, my king love. I remember me unto you, hoping that you are in good health, as I am at the writing hereof. My little Willie have been sick this fortnight. I pray you to come home, if you can come safely. I do marvel that I cannot hear from you as well as other neighbours do. I do desire to hear from you as soon as you can. I pray you to send me word when you do think you shall return. You do not consider I am a lone woman; I thought you would never leave me thus long together, so I rest ever praying for your safest return

  Your loving wife

  Susan Rodway

  Ever praying for you till death I depart. To my very loving husband, Robert Rodway, a trained soldier in the Red Regiment, under the command of Captain Warren. Deliver this with speed I pray you. 241

  But Captain Warren had led the ‘forlorn hope’ of the Red Regiment in one of the fiercest assaults on Basing House. Robert Rodway was probably already dead by the time Susan wrote her poignant letter.25

  The absence of the male ‘pole’ was the central hazard. This is not to say that episodes of violence, ravishings, assaults and the like, did not take place on the part of the soldiery when discipline broke down; but then such episodes happened to unprotected women throughout the seventeenth century. However, few of the truly gloating propaganda stories, pace The Scourge of Civil War and the Blessing of Peace, bear up to close examination.

  For instance, the report by the Roundhead Colonel Edward Massey and Major John Bridges of the mayhem, including rapine and robbery, created by the Northern Horse of the Royalist Sir Marmaduke Langdale was certainly wildly exaggerated. The Northern Horse, about 1,500 strong, were to a great extent officers: ‘This march of theirs was accompanied with many unheard-of cruelties. They robbed all the country people of the
ir goods and took away their cattle. They ravished the women and bound men neck and heels together, and ravished their daughters in their sight. One woman they ravished who was within a week of her time … etc. etc.’ On the other hand it is substantiated that two Royalist soldiers, charged by their own side in Coventry with ravishing women, were stripped and given a public lashing.26

  The xenophobic cruelty meted out to an old Irishwoman left behind by the Royalist forces after the unsuccessful siege of Lyme was the true type of atrocity which women had to fear in wartime. Unknown, unwanted, unprotected, the old woman stumbled into Lyme itself, not realizing that the troops to whom she had attached herself for some reason long ago forgotten, now never to be recorded, had departed. She was seized by the victorious defenders. Accounts as to the exact nature of her treatment vary; although all agree that it ended in a hideous death. First the old woman was robbed of her money – 20s or 40s. Then according to one version she was ‘slashed’ and her dead body thrown into the sea, from whence it was eventually cast up to lie ‘till consumed’ on the coast between Lyme and Charmouth. In another version the viragos of Lyme – heroines as they might be to their own side – pounced upon the stranger and incarcerated her in a hogshead full of nails, and then as in some frightful fairy tale, rolled her into the sea.27

  How then was a woman to cope, she whose husband (or protector) had gone to the wars? It is clear that a great many women, out of a mixture of motives – commercial enterprise, loneliness, starvation or sheer love of adventure – went along too. The armies of the Civil Wars, and the various armies of occupation later, were attended by hordes of female camp-followers. Many of these adopted male clothing, more from convenience than caprice, which of course makes the numbers of this protean band hard to assess. All that can be said with certainty is that now in skirts, now in breeches, now as bawds, now as ‘horse-boys’, now as virtuous – and determined – wives, an amorphous mass of women went raggle-taggle along with those troops who comprised, for one reason or another, their means of livelihood.

  Whores served the Army as – given the opportunity – they would have served the same men in civilian life; but here was a greater concentration of custom. One prostitute who had followed the King’s camp from London was ‘taken by the soldiers, and first led about the city [Coventry] then set in the pillory, after in the cage, then ducked in a river, and at last banished the city’. Others received a warmer welcome. ‘There they had their whores with them’, wrote Bulstrode Whitelocke of the sacking of his house, Fawley Court; and the troops subsequently quartered there by the Royalist Sir John Byron included some women who for convenience’s sake ‘counterfeited’ their sex.28

  On 13 July 1643 King Charles I issued a proclamation in which the general licentiousness, profanity, drunkenness and whore-mongering of the Army was roundly castigated. Moreover the cunning adoption of male dress by females made it especially difficult to curtail the latter activity. These were the orders to be published at the head of every regiment: ‘because the confounding of Habits appertaining to both Sexes and the promiscuous use of them is a thing which Nature and Religion forbid and our Soul abhors, and yet the prostitute Impudency of some women … have (which we cannot think on but with Just Indignation) thus conversed in our Army; therefore let no Woman presume to Counterfeit her Sex by wearing mans apparell under pain of the Severest punishment which Law and our displeasure shall inflict’.29

  But there is no reason to suppose that King Charles I, for all his ‘Just Indignation’, any more than his predecessor King Canute, was successful in turning back this particular tide.

  Wives as well as whores proceeded to ‘counterfeit’ their sex and adopt soldiers’ attire. Sometimes they did so purely in order to follow their man. It was often better to be a man’s comrade, however rough the going, than to be left as a charge on the parish at home, with all that entailed; a soldier’s pay, a soldier’s keep was at least a form of sustenance. Then there were the types of a seventeenth-century Fidelio. Sometimes, with despairing devotion, a wife or mistress or betrothed would set out to search for her beloved, vanished into the maw of the armed services; in this case male dress was not so much an economic convenience as a necessity – lest the unguarded female be thought to be displaying that ‘prostitute Impudency’ which had shocked King Charles I.

  The ‘Gallant She-Souldiers’ saluted in contemporary song probably sprang from a mixture of these categories; once again their true numbers will never be known (the object of the exercise being after all anonymity rather than publicity). A newspaper of July 1642 told of a girl who disguised herself as a soldier to stay near her lover in the Earl of Lindsay’s regiment, but was later detected. And when Shelford, near Nottingham, was taken by Major-General Poyntz of the New Model Army in November 1645, one of the Royalist prisoners there was said to be a woman corporal.30 Jane Ingleby, who is said to have fought at Marston Moor in the cavalry, and being wounded, escaped on horseback to her home, was probably a Yorkshire yeoman’s daughter.31

  Eight years after the Restoration a play by the popular comic actor John Lacy called The Old Troop celebrated both types of camp-follower, the promiscuous whore and the faithful mistress. Lacy himself, who specialized in funny accents, played Monsieur Raggou the French cook; the character of Dol Troop was a prostitute, hailed by Raggou in the following terms: ‘Begar, Madam Dol, you be de great whore de Babylon.’ Dol’s widespread generosity – if such it can be termed since she had saved about £400 out of her earnings – led her to remark when she discovered herself to be pregnant: ‘I cannot say I am with child, but with children; for here has been all nations, and all languages to boot.’ On the other hand Dol’s tenderest feelings were reserved for the handsome young cornet’s boy – who was of course a girl in disguise. Biddy had joined the Army for love and, unlike Dol, maintained her virtue throughout the play. It is legitimate to assume that Lacy, who began his career as a lieutenant of cavalry, had not only known Dols, but Biddys too.32

  Dol Troop saw her pregnancy as a means of mulcting the entire regiment of payment. (‘I mean to lay this great belly to every man that has but touched my apron strings.’) But where the genuine she-soldiers were concerned, it was pregnancy which very often provided the means of detection. The popular ballad of 1655, ‘The Gallant She-Souldier’, described the real-life adventures of a woman who successfully masqueraded in the Army as ‘Mr Clarke’:33

  Her Husband was a Souldier, and to the wars did go,

  And she would be his Comrade, the truth of all is so.

  She put on Man’s Apparel, and bore him company,

  As many in the Army for truth can testify.

  No lewd camp-follower she: ‘Mr Clarke’ was not only ‘upright and just’ but ‘Modest still’. However, for all this vaunted modesty, ‘Mr Clarke’ was just as good as any man at firing a musket or beating a drum, until the untoward appearance of ‘a pretty little son’ upset her disguise. She also took part in many soldiers’ recreations such as wrestling, leaping, cudgels and cuffing, drinking and taking tobacco with the best of them.

  Indeed when ‘Mr Clarke’s’ commander commented on his soldier’s surprising girth: ‘Tom, why do you grow so fat?’, the she-soldier answered cunningly: ‘’Tis strong beer and tobacco which is the cause of that.’ Finally, when ‘Mr Clarke’ was in labour, concealment was no longer possible. The she-soldier now became concerned to stress her own virtue: as for the baby: ‘’Twas by her honest Husband, she could not be beguil’d.’ At the end of the ballad, those interested to see ‘the young Souldier and his mother’ were asked to repair to the sign of the Blacksmith’s Arms, in East Smithfield near Tower Hill. ‘Mr Clarke’, one notes, was still the name to ask for.

  The moral drawn from the tale of ‘Mr Clarke’ was of a praiseworthy fidelity, not always exhibited by the weaker vessel:

  I wish in heart and mind

  That Women to their Husbands were everyone so kind,

  As she was to her Sweet-heart, her love to him w
as so

  That she forsook all others, along with him to go.

  Another conclusion can however be drawn from this and other ballads on the subject, such as ‘The Famous Woman Drummer’, whose heroine’s devotion and courage, dressed in man’s apparel at her husband’s side, is similarly stressed:

  They have been both in Ireland, in Spain and famous France, sir,

  And lustily she beat her Drum, her honour to advance, sir,

  Whilst Cannons roar’d, and bullets fly, as thick as hail from sky, sir;

  She never feared her foreign Foes, when her Comrade was nigh, sir.34

  This conclusion, supported by cases of she-soldiers outside the realms of ballad, concerns female physical strength and endurance.

  Most women could obviously manage pistols, and a sword would not have presented great problems (in any case soldiers’ weapons tended to be sorry blades, not particularly long or heavy). A halberd, a cross between a spear and an axe, would also have been easy to manage. Muskets were weightier, with barrels officially four feet in length, reduced to three in the course of the Civil War, and had heavy – one and a half ounce – bullets. The arquebus, reduced from three to two and a half feet during the war, and the carbine which armed the light cavalryman would have been less of a burden. But what of the pike? Its proper length was eighteen feet, later reduced to sixteen; and although in practice often cut a good deal shorter by the soldiers on active service, one still might suppose it presented a challenge to the physique of the weaker vessel. But it is clear that women managed pikes too. The protagonist of ‘The Female Warrior’, for example, ‘was at push of Pike some say, As good as ever struck’. The ‘Famous Woman Drummer’ was also said to have been adept with the pike, as well as the musket.35