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

by Antonia Fraser

  It was the good fortune of Lady Eleanor Davies, she whose desperate rambling prophecies concerning the fate of King Charles I had brought her first to the Gatehouse prison and then to Bedlam (see p. 191 ff.), to survive into this more imaginative age. In 1648 she sought out Oliver Cromwell. With her predilection for anagrams, Lady Eleanor was from the first well disposed towards a man whose very name – O. CROMWEL – suggested the words HOWL ROME. The ‘O’ of Oliver she envisaged hopefully as the splendid round sun, in contrast to the sickly crescent moon which was the ‘C’ of Charles I. When the Army was at its headquarters at St Albans in 1648, Lady Eleanor presented to him a book of her prophecies first printed (with dire results) in 1633. She superscribed the book The Armies Commission, adding the verse: ‘Behold he cometh with ten thousand of his Saints to execute judgement on all.’ The splendid sun showed not only more tolerance but more humour than the sickly moon – but then of course Cromwell was not compared to Belshazzar as Charles I had been. Smiling at the superscription, and putting on his ‘specticles’ [sic], Cromwell gently observed: ‘But we are not all Saints.’16

  As a result of this newly permissive atmosphere towards prophetesses, Lady Eleanor was able to spend her last years in a state of happiness and honour she can scarcely have expected in the bad old days of the King’s reign. She also had the sweetness of revenge; her old enemy Archbishop Laud, ‘horned like the lamb’, was executed in 1645. When Charles I was in prison in January 1649, shortly before his own execution, Lady Eleanor took it upon herself to write to him: ‘For King Charles, Prisoner, These’. She reminded him of her sufferings at his behest ‘because [I] took upon me to be a Prophetess’ and suggested that he make public acknowledgement of his ‘high offence’. He should also implore her forgiveness, ‘if so be you expect to find Mercy in this world or the other’.

  In August that year, when the King, for better or for worse, had long exchanged worlds, Lady Eleanor’s pamphlet was reprinted. In 1651 appeared The Restitution of Prophecy, restoring all her original revelations, and at her death in 1652 the Anglican divine Peter Du Moulin suggested she had indeed been ‘favoured with some beam of divine knowledge of future things’, while being in general ‘erudita supra Sexum, mitis infra Sortem’: learned above her sex, humble below her fortune. The official epitaph put up by Lady Eleanor’s family congratulated her on having ‘in a woman’s body, a man’s spirit’.17

  What was more, despite these Cromwellian connections, a dutiful daughter saw to it that Lady Eleanor’s reputation was not blackened for ever after the Restoration. Lucy Countess of Huntingdon and her friend Katherine Stanley, Marchioness of Dorchester joined together to protest to Thomas Dugdale over the historical inaccuracies in his 1660 Continuation of Sir Richard Baker’s Chronicle.18 As has been noticed (see p.204), Lady Dorchester succeeded in removing the slur against the courage of her own mother, Charlotte Countess of Derby, based on false Parliamentary reports. Lady Huntingdon’s task was more delicate. Lady Eleanor Davies could hardly be whitewashed entirely but it was a matter of just how she was presented. Dugdale’s statement that she was ‘generally reputed little better than a mad woman’ caused much distress; in particular Lady Huntingdon was anxious to rescue her mother from the charge that in predicting the death of the Duke of Buckingham she had been associated with the notorious popular astrologer of the time, Dr Lambe.

  In the end Lady Huntingdon, supported by her young son Theophilus, seventh Earl of Huntingdon, was successful. Lady Eleanor’s name was expunged from the account of the Duke of Buckingham’s death. Even Peter Du Moulin’s eulogy – learned above her sex, humble below her fortune – was removed from the new edition as being presumably distasteful to the Countess. One wonders what Lady Eleanor herself would have thought of that omission. More pleasing to her perhaps would have been her grandson Theophilus’s measured yet tender judgement of her career.

  Lord Huntingdon wrote that his grandmother – ‘one not a little enthusasticall’ – had ‘obliged’ his mother to give him his unusual Christian name (this occurred very shortly before Lady Eleanor’s death, for Theophilus, the longed-for male heir to replace three dead sons, was not born until 1650).19 He showed no signs of holding this against her. On the contrary, he accepted her own account that ‘she heard voices supernatural, [so] that she was endowed with the gift of prophecy’, but for censuring the ecclesiastical government and the Queen’s Catholic practices, ‘and her obstinate refusing any submission’, wrote Lord Huntingdon, she was sentenced in the Court of High Commission ‘as one that was out of her wits’.

  Lord Huntingdon’s chief indignation was reserved for the historian Sir William Sanderson, who in his account of the reign of Charles I had passed ‘his own censure on this Lady as if she was either mad or possessed with delusions from the Devil’. This was indeed a ‘Barbarous’ judgement for a historian to deliver to posterity, complained Lord Huntingdon, ‘considering her [Lady Eleanor’s] extraction from a family of Ancient English Nobility …’

  Lady Eleanor Davies was an eccentric and an exception. The social standing of the other prophetesses of the period made it at least conceivable – by Lord Huntingdon’s standards, that is – for them to be considered mad or deluded. Yet on the whole respect obtained. At Bodmin in February 1647, for example, a young girl was said to be busy foretelling things to come, most of which were said already to have ‘fallen out true’. (Although one of her prophecies, that Charles I would shortly enjoy his own again, being revenged on his enemies, was less successful). She lived off a diet of sweetmeats, which were brought to her by ‘small people clad in green, and sometimes by birds’. This girl was said to cure most diseases, as well as specializing in broken bones, which she mended with a touch of her hand. Examined by three divines, she gave a good account of herself, having the Scriptures by heart ‘very perfectly’. Now under guard, she was seen to be fasting entirely, except on Christmas Day, when she had a feast of ‘bread and water’.20

  The prophetesses who interrupted the councils of Cromwell, the Army and later his colleagues in the new Government of England were an even more remarkable phenomenon. The point has been made that at least half a dozen times between 1647 and 1654 important deliberations were put aside, while some obscure prophetess (or prophet) delivered a message generally relayed by the Almighty via an apocalyptic vision.21 Nothing underlines more clearly the weird atmosphere of these times. In the 1630s King Charles I showed first irritation, then outright anger, faced with the revelations of Lady Eleanor Davies. At the end of December 1648 – the most crucial period for the Army Council as the King’s future swayed in the balance – an unknown woman named Elizabeth Poole appeared in front of them to communicate her visions concerning ‘the presence of God with the Army’. She declared that the Army had appeared to her in the shape of a man and the country as a whole as a woman ‘full of imperfection, crooked, weak, sickly’. The man it seemed was destined to heal the woman. This revelation was taken extremely seriously by the Army Council and much discussed. Elizabeth Poole’s visions were described by Colonel Rich as ‘that testimony which God hath manifested here by an unexpected Providence’.22

  On 5 January God instructed Elizabeth Poole to return to the Council. There she handed in a paper arguing against the execution of the King, which was formally debated by the Council’s members in her absence, She was then called back for further discussions. Elizabeth Poole repeated her conviction that the King should not be executed: ‘you may bind his hands and hold him fast under’ she announced, but he should not be put to death. She referred to the Scriptures to enforce her case, quoting the text: ‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.’ She also described the King as the husband or head of the people; as such, citing the precedent of Nabal among the Israelites, he might be restrained but not cut down by his ‘wife’.

  Henry Ireton – the most intellectual of the Army leaders – questioned Elizabeth Poole at length about her revelations. If this King was not to die, was no King ever to die? Had she seen a
n angel or a vision? (The answer was: a vision.) A later Royalist pamphlet accused Cromwell of stage-managing the whole incident, coaching the woman in her answers to the Council; but this is manifestly absurd, especially in view of the King’s fate at the hands of his ‘wife’ less than a month afterwards. The true significance of Elizabeth Poole lay in the exalted audience this humble woman was able to secure without difficulty, by invoking the awesome role of the prophetess.

  The most extreme language was used by those prophetesses connected with the Fifth Monarchy movement. This was a millenarian sect so called because it looked forward to the establishment of the ‘Fifth Monarchy’ – that of Christ after his second coming. Among the Fifth Monarchists themselves particular reverence was accorded to any woman who ‘appeared to be endowed with divine grace’ – although no other category of woman other than a prophetess was in the end granted special rights within their church; nor, contrary to popular accusation did the Fifth Monarchists attempt to elevate the status of the woman within the family, asking only for freedom of conscience from the husband’s control.23

  The determination of the Fifth Monarchists that the second coming of Christ would establish His political power brought them into natural conflict with the current rulers of England. The movement got under way after 1651 when it became clear that neither Parliament (nor Cromwell) was likely to set up the ‘Rule of the Saints’, as had once been hoped. In 1653 Cromwell’s elevation as Protector was construed as a further insult to the true dominion of Jesus Christ, since to Him alone belonged the prerogative of single rule. Cromwell, hailed by Lady Eleanor Davies as a splendid sun in the early stages of his leadership, now found himself identified with something far less pleasant called the ‘Little Horn’, an odious excrescence on the head of the Beast. Despite this, and despite the violence of the prophetesses’ invective, for some time the civil powers showed quite remarkable restraint towards them, genuinely hampered by their claims to be reporting the true intentions of God. The treatment of Mary Overton, dragged through the streets of London on ‘cudgels’ with her baby at her breast, and thrown into Bridewell among the vagrants and harlots for helping to sew up her husband’s political pamphlets, contrasts remarkably, as we shall see, with that of the fervent Fifth Monarchist Anna Trapnel, including the comparative comfort allowed to the prophetess when she finally did reach Bridewell.

  Anna Trapnel was the daughter of a shipwright in Poplar, and lived in Hackney.24 By her own account, A Legacy for Saints, being several Experiences of the dealings of God with Anna Trapnel, her piety came to her early, ‘when a child, then the Lord awed my spirit’, and was encouraged by her ‘godly mother’.25 By the time she was fourteen, she was eager to hear the words of the Lord and to pray for herself, and it was while listening to the famous independent preacher Hugh Peter on a text of Isaiah that her eyes were opened to ‘the marriage covenant … between God and his spouse’. Thereafter Anna went from minister to minister, and from sermon to sermon daily, but still did not find further elucidation. She could not sleep or even rest. In her depression she was even tempted to suicide, to which the devil tempted her by showing her a sharp knife. Her spiritual aridity only increased as she wrestled with the doctrine that Christ came not only to the righteous, but to all sinners. Finally she found herself able to accept it.

  After this time of protracted perplexity, Anna enjoyed her true moment of revelation on New Year’s Day 1642. It was a Sunday and she was listening to the Baptist minister of St Botolph’s Church in Aldgate, John Simpson (later a prominent Fifth Monarchist), preaching on the text: ‘Now if any man have not the spirit of Christ, he is none of his.’ Suddenly Anna found herself saying: ‘Lord, I have the spirit.’ Then what joy she felt! ‘Oh what triumphing and songs of Hallelujah were in my spirit.’ Anna felt ‘a clothing of glory’ over her and saw angels, a clear flame without smoke and other ‘christal appearances’. Sometimes ‘the golden trumpet sounded higher, and sometimes lower, yet still it was sounding, and caused an echo to follow it’.

  Thereafter there were still moments when Anna felt buffeted by Satan, as when she learnt of her mother’s death. Yet many ‘raptures’ followed: sometimes she would fall down on the ground in public, at other times, alone in her room, she felt grace pouring over her ‘like a fountain’. John Simpson, visiting Anna at home when she was sick, and her ‘earthly tabernacle’ – her body – was shaking with a fever, issued a caution: she might be deluded regarding the presence of God within her, as others in the past had been. But Anna had no such doubts. She knew that the Lord had chosen her so that ‘out of the mouths of babes and sucklings he would perfect his praise’. She had a series of visions which ranged from the sun itself to Jesus taking up Peter and John into the Mount, the Transfiguration, and ‘Revelations concerning the Government of the Nation, the Parliament, Army and Ministry’.

  It was important to Anna Trapnel, as it was to an earlier prophetess and pamphleteer, Mary Pope, to point out the divine source of such outpourings. Mary Pope, author of A Treatise of Magistracy, referred to ‘God having made me a Mother in Israel’ and God ‘as it were forcing me on … for helping to settle these unsettled times’. Anna made a similar point. She felt a strong personal identification with ‘that approved Hannah’, the prophetess in the book of Samuel, which sometimes led to her being described as Hannah, not Anna, Trapnel (in fact she herself always signed her name Anna).26

  The importance of the connection with the biblical Hannah, whom she declared herself desirous of imitating, was that Hannah too had been judged to be ‘mad, under the administration of evil angels, and a witch’. Even the priest Eli had at first assumed Hannah to be drunk when he saw her lips moving – in prophecy – and no sound coming forth. Hannah had issued a dignified reproach to Eli telling him not to confuse ‘thy handmaid’ with ‘a daughter of Belial’. In an age rich in citation of biblical precedent, all of this was very much to the advantage of any latter-day Hannah, who might expect to encounter several Elis, and even more unsympathetic individuals, in the course of her divinely-ordained career as a prophetess.

  Anna Trapnel prided herself on two other aspects of her character, in both of which one can detect a certain feminine defensiveness, as though to meet predictable charges in advance. First, she was concerned to make it clear that she was in no way a whore, being on the contrary, as her friends put it, of ‘beautiful and unblameable conversation’. Second, she prided herself on the fact that she had not received any ordinary education, since ‘Christ’s scholars’, amongst which she included herself, were endowed with a far better type of learning ‘from above’. Consciously or not, this was a smart attitude to adopt for one who could well claim to be one of ‘Christ’s scholars’ but not the duller sort who had merely attended an earthly university. So Anna, in her long rambling verses of prophecy, preempted one accusation commonly made against the women who preached – that they were silly uneducated females:

  Thou shalt not read what’s spoke of Dragon and Beast

  With University-art;

  But thou shalt read with Kings seven eyes,

  And an enlightened heart.

  Thou shalt not run to Antichrists Libraries

  To fetch from thence any skill

  To read the Revelation of Christ,

  But be with knowledge fill’d.27

  As for the other common charge – that the rise of women preaching demonstrated the sheer foolishness of giving them an education – Anna Trapnel, being untutored, was not liable to that. She after all had received her education from the great university in the sky.

  Anna Trapnel first came into public prominence as part of the violent Fifth Monarchist reaction to the installation of Oliver Cromwell as Protector on 16 December 1653. On the eve of the event, she had had a vision of Cromwell in the shape of a bull amidst a large herd of cattle: ‘and of a sudden there was a great shout of those that followed him, he being singled out alone, and the foremost, and he looking back, they bowed themselves unto him, and le
aped up from the earth, and shewed much joy that he had become their Supreme’. However, all did not end happily for the joyful herd, for after mistakenly ‘running at the Saints’, they found themselves scattered, with their horns broken, and finally they fell into their graves.28

  Three days later a Welsh preacher named Vavasour Powell announced in a sermon that Cromwell’s Government could only be temporary (in view of the expected coming of Christ) and ‘a small matter should fetch him down with little noise’. It was not the kind of remark calculated to reassure a nervous new regime, and in January Powell was summoned to Whitehall to explain himself before the Council. Along with him went ‘a maid called Hannah’.

  Anna Trapnel sat just outside the Council chamber in a little room with a fire, awaiting Powell’s return from his examination. Just as Powell emerged, intending to go home, Anna was ‘as it were seized by the Lord’ and ‘carried forth in a spirit of Prayer and Singing, from noon till night’. When she finally fell into her bed at Mr Roberts’s lodging house near the Palace of Whitehall, at eleven o’clock at night, she lay there for twelve days. For the first five of these Anna remained without eating or drinking; thereafter she took a little toast soaked in small beer every twenty-four hours, sometimes merely to moisten her mouth. During all this period her eyes were shut, while out of her mouth issued a stream of prophecies, for two, three or even four hours at a time, by day or by night, and sometimes both.29

  The sensational effect of such a daily performance in the heart of Whitehall, so close to the seat of the Protectoral power, may be imagined. ‘Many hundreds’ were said to be flocking to see her. Although very little of what she was saying could be understood when Anna was singing, her prayers were reported to be ‘in exceeding odd method and order’, and phrased in ‘good language’. The effect of her ‘excellent words and well placed’ was that ‘all that come, do much admire what they hear from her’. In view of some of Anna’s topics for prayer – that the Lord Protector should be ‘delivered from Carnal Councils’ and should not be ‘vain, nor regard earthly pomp and pleasure’ – perhaps the obscurity of her singing was to be preferred, at least from the point of view of the Government. After twelve days of this, Anna rose up from her bed at Mr Roberts’s lodging house and went home ‘speedily and lustily’.30