As Protector, Oliver Cromwell harkened to the plea of Lady Ormonde, heiress of the Irish Desmond estates, but also wife to the Marquess of Ormonde, the arch-Royalist leader, and as such condemned to poverty-stricken exile. A lady, he decided, should not ‘want bread’ for the bad luck of having ‘a delinquent lord’; he ordered the Desmond inheritance to be restored to her. Indeed Cromwell, then the single dominant force in Britain, had ‘a very general fame’ for helping the weak, as Lady Ormonde pointed out hopefully in a letter from Caen; in most cases where he had made a personal intervention, the weak consisted of women, whom he regarded as innocent victims of their husbands’ or fathers’ wrongdoings.5
Of course the figure of the suppliant female being granted mercy by an all-powerful male was as old as history – or monarchy – itself. Cromwell as Protector was merely carrying on the tradition of the clement sovereign. As King James I passed graciously through his new dominion of England, to take up royal residence after the death of Queen Elizabeth, he presented an excellent opportunity for suppliance on the part of those whose relatives had offended under the previous regime. At Doncaster, a widow named Muriel Lyttelton flung herself at his feet and begged that the forfeited estates of her late husband might be returned, that she might somehow be able to raise and care for her children.
Muriel Lyttelton’s husband, a Catholic, had been convicted of high treason under Elizabeth for his part in the Essex conspiracy and died in prison. As a result of Muriel Lyttelton’s plea, the estates were returned and in the first year of James’s reign, the act of attainder reversed. A careful businesswoman (she had some of the steely prudence of her father, the Lord Chancellor Sir Thomas Bromley), Mrs Lyttelton then tended her children’s inheritance so well that she eliminated all debts. It was with some justice that an eighteenth-century history of Worcestershire wrote of this importunate widow that she ‘may be called the second founder of the [Lyttelton] family’. Sir Edward Digby was another Catholic executed for conspiracy. His widow, Mary Lady Digby, twenty-four years old at his death, did so well with her suits and begging letters that in 1608 she was able to reclaim his forfeited properties for her sons; as a result of her perseverance, Sir Kenelm Digby inherited £3,000 a year.6
In the rising drama of the King’s powers versus his subjects’ rights in the 1630s, some of the most vivid incidents occurred when the Star Chamber sentenced men to physical punishments for the sake of the words they had spoken, written or printed. Wives played their convenient role here in appealing for mercy.
Henry Burton was a Puritan minister, denounced to the Star Chamber for preaching ‘seditious sermons’ at the same time as William Prynne was accused for his work Histriomastix; like Prynne, Burton was sentenced to have both his ears cut off while confined to the public pillory, and after that to be imprisoned for life. Sarah Burton was not allowed to visit him while he lay in prison in London, his wounds healing; but when he was deemed recovered and dispatched to a new prison in Lancaster, she followed him in a coach. On 7 November 1640, after he was transported to Guernsey, Sarah Burton petitioned to the House of Commons (now feeling its mettle against the practices of the Star Chamber) to allow him to return. Her language was carefully modest: ‘as she knows not how to manage so weighty a business’ she asked the House of Commons to take ‘her distressed condition’ into their serious consideration. On 10 November Burton was released. The language of John Bastwick’s wife, asking at the same time to visit him in the Scilly Isles (he had been convicted of a scandalous libel under Archbishop Laud) because she could not provide for the children, was remarkably similar: ‘your petitioner being a woman [is] no way able to follow nor manage so great and weighty a cause’.7 Bastwick was released in December.
In January 1644, the Houses of Parliament at Westminster (as opposed to the King’s Parliament at Oxford, a body whose validity they did not recognize) offered pardon to all Royalists who would submit before a certain date; the condition was that they should compound for their delinquency by payment of a sum, to be assessed, towards the public relief. After October 1645 when the capture of Bristol meant that the whole of England (with the exception, as we have seen, of a few fortresses) was at Parliament’s mercy, this offer was renewed and extended.
The theoretical procedure was as follows: ‘delinquents’ who wanted to free themselves from sequestration by this method had to present themselves at the Committee for Compounding which sat at the Goldsmiths’ Hall in the City of London, in Gresham Street near the Guildhall. The delinquent took an oath before the Committee binding himself not to bear arms against Parliament, and another (religious) oath, that of the Covenant. He then had to declare the full value of his estate, any mis-statement making him liable to a heavy fine. Rates of payment varied: MPs might lose half their estates, lesser delinquents only a sixth.8
In practice these negotiations were very often bedevilled by local jealousies – not forgetting that the original sequestration was carried out by the Committee of that county where the estates lay – as well as the separate but hideous complications attendant upon all bureaucracies, but particularly newly instituted ones. Some Royalist husbands were in prison – how were they to arrive at accurate figures concerning an estate and its rents? Others were in exile, not wishing to return until the principle of the compounding had been securely established. This was where the ‘innocent’ wives, already having the right to their ‘fifth’, might well be in a better position than the husbands to arrange for the compounding or obtain the vital certificate of sequestration from the local county Committee.
Above all, women had a mobility denied to the male; even if the word mobility has an ironic ring applied to persons who were often sick, often pregnant, often some combination of the two, yet finding themselves undertaking journeys which involved considerable physical hardship even for the healthy.
All this was nothing compared to women’s peculiar fitness to play the suppliant role. As the imprisoned Thomas Knyvett wrote to his wife in 1644: ‘I think it will be fit for thee to come up and Appear in the business, for Women solicitors are observed to have better Audience than masculine malignants.’9 It was in keeping with the contemporary estimate of the so-called weaker sex that any member of it could entreat most plangently without being accused of more than fulfilling her own feminine nature. This implicit social approval of ‘Women solicitors’ was the reverse side of that attitude which found excessive martial courage in wartime disquieting because it was considered masculine.
Lady Cholmley, she who had shown ‘a courage above her sex’ in her husband’s estimation during the siege of Scarborough Castle, remained firmly in Yorkshire after its surrender.10 Sir Hugh Cholmley was allowed to sail away to the Continent by the besieging commander Sir Mathew Boynton; Lady Cholmley however declined a pass to go abroad. It was important to establish that the Cholmley house at Whitby was hers, in order to avoid its sequestration with the rest of her husband’s property.
Lady Cholmley’s instinctive fear that in this case possession was nine if not ten points of this law was certainly right: the Roundhead Captain at Whitby refused to leave the house, despite Lady Cholmley’s authority. Homeless, Lady Cholmley was obliged to take lodgings in Malton, with her young daughters, and wait on events. Fortunately for her – if not the Captain – plague broke out in Whitby, and one of the Captain’s servants died; the Captain promptly fled. Seeing her opportunity, and unlike the Captain, careless of her own safety (although she left her daughters at Malton), Lady Cholmley then undertook a remarkable journey from Malton to Whitby, in the depths of winter. She was now in her late forties, but she went on foot ‘over the bleak and snowy moorland’ of North Yorkshire, a distance of some twenty miles as the crow flies, and rising to nearly a thousand feet. Attended by only one manservant and one maid, she took possession of her house again.
The plague vanished, the Captain tried to return. Lady Cholmley declined to be ousted. Finally, with the help of her brother-in-law, she secured officially that ‘fi
fth’ of Sir Hugh Cholmley’s estate which was her legal right; the following February her son William Cholmley (upon whom the manor of Whitby had in fact been settled by his father) arrived to look after it. So at last Lady Cholmley was able to go to her husband abroad; at Rouen in March 1647 joyfully she re-encountered her son, another Hugh, whom she had not seen for five years.
A period of Cholmley family peace – albeit in exile – followed. However, in February 1649, shortly after the execution of Charles I had put an end to one set of Royalist hopes, it was Lady Cholmley who returned to England and arranged, with the help of some Yorkshire friends, composition of favourable terms for her husband’s estate. Once the first instalment had been paid, Sir Hugh himself was able to come back in June 1649. After a period of helping William at Whitby, Lady Cholmley returned to her native south (she had been born Elizabeth Twysden, daughter of the grand Lady Anne Twysden, of East Peckham in Kent) and spent the rest of her days with Sir Hugh, mainly at her brother’s home of Roydon Hall. She died in 1655. As a tribute to her fidelity Sir Hugh Cholmley, who died two years later, elected to be buried with his wife in the south, rather than with his own forebears in Yorkshire.
Lady Cholmley’s sister-in-law Isabella was another indomitable helpmate. We last heard of Isabella, the model daughter-in-law to Lady Anne Twysden, nursing the older woman with devotion through her last illness, having been picked by Lady Anne from amongst her gentlewomen, at the somewhat advanced age of thirty, as a bride for her son Sir Roger Twysden, the antiquary and MP (see p. 114). Sir Roger was a politician of independent mind: he had been sure that the demand for ship money had been wrong because the King had not acted in Parliament. But in the spring of 1642 he was one of the so-called Kentish Petitioners who protested to Parliament, amongst other things, on behalf of episcopal government and against religious ‘heresy’ in any form, a gesture which was extremely ill-received by the Puritan element in the House of Commons. According to Sir Roger, it was however owing to the private malice of his Kentish rivals Sir John Sedley and Sir Anthony Weldon that he was then imprisoned.11
Dame Isabella Twysden was now a woman of thirty-seven, her physique already wearied by child-bearing.12 Nevertheless on hearing the ill news concerning Sir Roger she sent her babies to an aunt at West Mall and set off for London. It was not until Sir Roger was freed on bail that she returned to Roydon Hall with him. In the April of the following year, Roydon Hall was ransacked by soldiers. Sir Roger, having no wish to stand by while the extremists fought each other, tried to set out for a self-imposed exile in France with his son William; he was stopped. On 17 May 1643 the order was given for the sequestration of his estate, and Sir Roger himself was immured in the Compter Prison in Southwark.
It was now the melancholy duty of Dame Isabella to appeal to the county Committee – that of Kent – for that fifth which was her due for maintenance. But at this point the Kent Committee demanded that Sir Roger had first to acknowledge his own delinquency and thus by implication the justice of the sequestration, otherwise she would get nothing at all. This message, which was in effect an attempt to get Sir Roger to throw in his lot with Parliament, was duly passed on by Dame Isabella. Sir Roger refused to make the acknowledgement.
At this the Kent Committee set to and not only had Sir Roger’s coppice woods felled – which if the sequestration order was accepted, was their right – but also certain trees which Sir Roger considered to be his standing timber. Sir Roger was convinced – no doubt with justice – that his old enemy Sir Anthony Weldon as Chairman of the Kent Committee was responsible; so that he in his turn decided to petition the central Committee of the Lords and Commons for Sequestrations, which sat at Westminster. For his emissary Dame Isabella, who was ill at the time, this involved daily journeys between Westminster and the Compter prison.
In late February 1644 Sir Roger was allowed to leave the Compter for a less formal confinement in Lambeth Palace, in the rooms of the former chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Moreover Dame Isabella was permitted to share with him the three rooms and a study, the latter ‘a fair chamber with a chimney’ in which Sir Roger was able to write and copy, following his antiquarian bent. The Westminster Committee also decided at last that the Kent Committee was not justified in their behaviour. However when Dame Isabella returned to Kent with this news, the local Committee merely greeted her with a yet more violent denunciation of her husband.
Sir Roger’s petition was heard by the Westminster Committee in August: bitterly hostile witnesses from Kent testified against him, and Dame Isabella, with her counsel, was not allowed to remain in the room while judgment was reached. It was hardly surprising that the decision went against Sir Roger. Dame Isabella was privately informed of the reason: that ‘for one man’s sake’, it would not do to disoblige the entire county of Kent. At least the Westminster Committee made an order to the Kent Committee at the beginning of September that they ‘do allow the said lady a fifth part of her husband’s estate’; a recommendation was added that Dame Isabella should be allowed the mansion house and the lands adjoining.
Dame Isabella’s health was worse; she was also, in her fortieth year, in the early stages of pregnancy (altogether she bore six children between her early thirties and late forties). Nevertheless she battled down to Kent, and presented the order. All that happened was that the Kent Committee, under the hated Sir Anthony Weldon, refused outright to give her the lease, and furthermore put off granting her her fifth, on the pretext of requiring certain rentals from her – as Dame Isabella pointed out, they were in a better position than she was to supply these rentals, since they had confiscated the land concerned. So that it was back to Westminster, to the Committee of the Lords and Commons, and to Sir Roger; but the members of the Westminster Committee, saying frankly they had done all they could, ended by recommending her to return to Kent.
On 2 November the Committee of Kent treated Dame Isabella courteously. However, she was told now that she could not receive her fifth until she had supplied those vital details of the estate, which, it will be remembered, it was the duty of the owner of a sequestered property to provide. This was all very well in theory, but in practice was a prodigious labour since the estate had already been sequestered for eighteen months, with its master in prison, unable to keep a record of rents. Dame Isabella was undeterred. She set about visiting all the tenants herself and constructing a proper return. In this manner she was able to go back to the Committee of Kent on 2 December although it was not until 18 December that the certificate was finally made out. Ten days later the Committee of Kent allowed Dame Isabella one fifth of the rents and profits of the estate, and an allowance from the receipts of the rents since Michaelmas (which in fact constituted another piece of meanness, since most people were allowed a fifth of the total rents received since sequestration). But Dame Isabella was not to be permitted to occupy Roydon Hall; and the felling of the timber went on.
It was the latter injustice which caused Sir Roger, fretting impotently in his London confinement, particular pain. Once again it was the task of Dame Isabella to petition the Westminster Committee: ‘… the woods adjoining to the said house, being as she conceived in her fifth part, were then in felling …’ Westminster did give out an order for this to stop; although privately once again they confessed that they could do little more to help her against the Committee of Kent.
At this point Dame Isabella started to keep a diary, which lasted for the next six years;13 this document, besides charting the political rigours of the life of a ‘Woman solicitor’, gives small intimate glimpses of that domestic existence from which ‘soliciting’ distracted her. Thus are chronicled the coming and going of nurses, or matters such as the ‘breeching’ of young Roger Twysden at the age of six: this was a miniature nursery ceremony of the time, when the boy child officially deserted the ‘skirts’ of his sisters for masculine attire; on this occasion Roger’s mother noted regretfully that although he was six years old, he was ‘very little of growth’.
The return to Kent with the new order, on 8 February 1645, was recorded as follows (her own spelling): ‘I came to Peckham great with child, and ride all the way a hors back, and I thank God no hurt.’ Dame Isabella must have been in fact eight months pregnant, for her son Charles was born at the beginning of March; she rode pillion behind the loyal tenant George Stone, with whom the children had been boarded. At the beginning of the sequestration, her husband had kept a man for her but now he could no longer afford to do so. Her endurance was however fruitless, for the Committee of Kent simply nullified the Westminster order. Thereafter Dame Isabella’s health took a long time to recover from the twin ordeal of childbirth and the journey. It was not until the end of May that she was well enough to return to London.
The fortunes of Sir Roger Twysden too mended slowly. In February 1646 he was allowed to leave his confinement for his London lodgings; in August 1647 he was further permitted to return to East Peckham, except that troops billeted there arrived the following week. In May 1649 Sir Roger was finally allowed to compound, at a rate of a tenth of his estate: and by this time ‘a thousand oaks’ had been felled. Dame Isabella reflected painfully in her diary how great her husband’s sufferings had been; and all for that one ‘Kentish’ petition to Parliament before the outbreak of war. Even then their lives were not immune from brutal interruption: in April 1651 troopers burst into Roydon Hall at four o’clock in the morning. They took Sir Roger away, with his brother-in-law Sir Hugh Cholmley, to nearby Leeds Castle, in order to search ‘as they said, for arms, and letters’. Dame Isabella commented: ‘For no cause, I thank Christ.’ Sir Roger Twysden was released, but Sir Hugh Cholmley, a more suspect figure, as the former Governor of Scarborough Castle and a returned exile, was kept shut up until June.
The Weaker Vessel: Women's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England Page 29