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

by Antonia Fraser

  Yet the compassion of the King towards his ‘tender consciences’ was genuine enough, a feeling of mercy strengthened by his own sufferings in exile – so long as he did not consider that their deeds were threatening the security of the newly established stable state. The King frowned upon any possible connection between the Quakers and the Fifth Monarchists. But he chided his brother the Duke of York for an explosion against the Quakers and suggested that they might do better instead to amend the quality of their own lives. When the brave Baptist girl from the West Country, Hannah Hewling, presented a petition to James II in 1685 on behalf of her brothers William and Benjamin, implicated in the Monmouth rising, Lord Churchill warned her of the hardness of King James’s heart: ‘marble is as capable of feeling compassion’. (Nor did Hannah’s pleas save the boys: both were hanged, although Hannah’s money did at least spare their corpses the indignity of ‘quartering’.)15 There was nothing of this chill quality about the heart of Charles II.

  Elizabeth Hooton first thought of coming to court in response to a revelation she had had at sea ‘and in great danger of my life, that I should go before the King, to witness for God, whether he would hear or no …’ But now she also asked for justice concerning the confiscation of her goods towards her son’s fine. With the cry ‘I wait for Justice of thee, O King’, she now proceeded to follow Charles II wherever he went, including two visits to his tennis court, when she spoke to him as he went up into his coach, ‘after he had been at his sport’, and an encounter in another favourite place of royal relaxation, St James’s Park, when she presented the King with two letters.

  Familiarity bred in the soldiers round the King a rough sympathy for the persistent old lady, and the King’s coachman actually read aloud one of her letters. In the park, the ordinary people murmured because old Elizabeth did not kneel before her sovereign. But one of the kindly soldiers did eventually get Elizabeth a kind of informal audience. She used it of course for a lengthy bout of preaching; and was in the end put once more outside the palace gates. The next morning Elizabeth Hooton returned, having devised a costume of sackcloth and ashes for herself in the meanwhile; once more she was pulled away from her preaching, but as she was being ejected, she continued to preach all the way through Westminster Hall and the palace yard, denouncing in particular the lawyers (who made professional use of that area).

  Elizabeth Hooton’s master-plan, apart from the need for justice, was to be able to buy a house and land within Boston itself, so that the Quakers of New England would have at once a meeting-house, a resting-place and a burial ground, all three being denied to them by current laws. The fact that Charles II eventually granted the old woman a certificate to settle in any British colony will not surprise anyone who is familiar with the parable of the importunate widow (even she did not think to accost a man exhausted after his favourite sport). So Elizabeth Hooton sold her farm, and armed with the King’s certificate succeeded in sailing to Boston, the certificate preventing the captain of the ship from being fined for transporting a Quaker. But the royal backing did not prevent her from having to pay up to 20s a night for her lodging – to cover the fine which might be levied.

  Elizabeth Hooton’s subsequent experiences in New England, where she wandered about North Massachusetts preaching, were indeed even more harrowing than her previous ones, certificate or no certificate. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the college boys, never as a class very sympathetic to Quakers, as ‘Little Elizabeth’ Fletcher found at Oxford (see p.321), mocked and pelted her.16 She was then put into a stinking dungeon and left for two days and nights without food, before being sentenced by the court to be whipped through three towns and finally expelled from the colony. So she was tied to a Cambridge whipping-post and lashed ten times with a three-stringed whip, three knots in each string. At Watertown willow-rods were used; at Dedham, on a cold frosty morning, she received ten lashes at the cart-tail. Once more, but this time ‘beaten and torn’ she was carried into the wilderness: ‘towards night they left her there, where there were many wolves, bears and other wild beasts, and many deep waters to pass through’. Once again, as on her first visit, Elizabeth Hooton made her way to friendly Rhode Island; she ascribed her preservation to the guidance of ‘an invisible hand’ and thanked God fervently that for His sake she had been able to endure ‘beyond what her age and sex, morally speaking, could otherwise have borne’.

  Still Elizabeth Hooton did not abandon her mission, continuing to assail Boston with her fervour, before being assailed in turn by the authorities and returning to Rhode Island to recuperate. A rare treat was provided by the funeral of Governor Endicott, taken away by the Lord just as Elizabeth had predicted five years earlier, in 1665. Elizabeth Hooton attended the ceremony; but since the Lord guided her to preach at it, she was removed from there to prison once more.

  Elizabeth Hooton never succeeded in buying a house and land; after five years therefore she returned to England. Her experiences were summed up by her son Samuel, who later tried to continue her mission and told the justices: ‘I had an old mother who was here amongst you and bore many of your stripes and much cruelty at your hands!’ Back in England, Elizabeth Hooton was in time to witness the fresh wave of Quaker imprisonments consequent upon the second Conventicle Act of 1670, the penalties of which were still more severe than those of the previous one; Margaret Fell was one of these victims and Elizabeth Hooton lobbied her old friend the King on her behalf. In 1671 a London Meeting of the Friends made her one of the Overseers of the Fleet prison, to help care for the Quakers therein.

  For all this useful work, the call of the New World still rang in the old woman’s ears. When she learnt that George Fox intended to visit the West Indies in order to straighten out the somewhat chaotic affairs of the Quakers there, she decided to accompany him, one of twelve Friends to do so. She sailed with the rest on 12 August 1671, and arrived after a troublesome journey at Barbados on 3 October. In January the following year George Fox set off again for Jamaica where Quakerism, introduced in 1658, had recently been languishing. He was accompanied by Elizabeth Hooton and three male followers. This was to be old Elizabeth’s last journey. A week after they landed, she died.

  She went very suddenly, well one day and dead the next, according to George Fox’s journal: ‘in peace like a lamb’. A fellow Quaker, James Lancaster, was beside her when she died, and heard her give her last testimony ‘concerning Truth’. But Elizabeth Hooton had spoken her own best epitaph when she explained, a few years before the end of her life: ‘Yes, the Love that I bear to the Souls of all Men, makes me willing to undergo whatsoever can be inflicted on me.’17

  Mary Fisher, the Yorkshire girl who introduced Quakerism to New England before being banished from it, was another of those early Friends whose travels ‘for the Service of Truth Abroad’ compel one’s awe.18 Her early spell in York prison had had one beneficial effect: she learnt to write while she was there. On her release Mary Fisher left Yorkshire for East Anglia. It was within the university town of Cambridge that Mary Fisher and her companion Elizabeth Williams met with an experience parallel to that of Elizabeth Hooton at Cambridge, Massachusetts, although some small provocation can be argued in this case. Observing the ‘Froth and Levity’ of the undergraduates’ behaviour at Sidney Sussex, the two women told them that they were ‘Antichrists’ and that their college was ‘a Cage of Unclean Birds, and the Synagogue of Satan’. As a result the women were abused and pelted with stones.

  Examined by the Mayor, Mary Fisher and Elizabeth Williams presented that familiar conundrum where problem women were concerned: under whose legal protection were they? He asked their names: They replied, their Names were written in the Book of Life. He demanded their Husbands’ names. (It was in essence the same question as that posed by the magistrate to the Catholic nun Sister Dorothea in 1617 – see p.179.) The two women told the Mayor ‘they had no Husband but Jesus Christ and he sent them’. At this the Mayor grew furious, denounced them both as whores, and ordered them to
be whipped by the constable until the blood ran down their bodies. They were probably the first Quakers to suffer under the brutal application of the Elizabethan Act against rogues and vagabonds to the members of their religion. Throughout this ordeal Mary Fisher and Elizabeth Williams managed to sing: ‘The Lord be blessed, the Lord be praised.’

  In New England, as we have seen, Mary Fisher was flogged before being expelled. Curiously enough it was in her encounter with the ‘Grand Seignior’, as the Sultan of Turkey was known, that Mary Fisher suffered no ordeal beyond that imposed by her own adventurous progress. There was a certain irony in the fact that the low position of women in the Moslem world enabled the Turks at least to appreciate exactly how remarkable an individual Mary Fisher must be; they accorded her that amazed respect denied to her in the Christian world. On the other hand it is only fair to say that the converse is also true; Mary Fisher displayed a tact in handling the claims of Mahomet to divinity which she certainly did not choose to exercise when denouncing the frothy and light-hearted undergraduates of Sidney Sussex College.

  Be that as it may, it is undeniable that this strange episode, like some kind of ‘Turkish Nights’ is one from which Sultan and Vizier of Turkey alike emerge with a credit quite alien to Governor Endicott of Massachusetts. The fate of Mary Fisher in Turkey was also a great deal preferable to that of two fellow Quakers, Katherine Evans and Sarah Chevers, who embarked for Alexandria but only got as far as Malta, where they were imprisoned by the Catholic Inquisition. There they remained for three and a half years until the efforts of the English Catholic Seigneur d’Aubigny, almoner to Queen Catherine, who had Maltese interests, effected their release in 1664. The two women then offered to serve d’Aubigny should it be in their power. He courteously replied that it was enough that he should be remembered in their (Quaker) prayers.

  Mary Fisher originally set out for the Mediterranean in 1657 as part of a Quaker mission of six people: three men including the Irish Quaker John Perrot, another ex-Baptist, and two other women, Mary Prince and Beatrice Beckley. Hoping to reach Jerusalem, they got as far as Smyrna where the idea of converting the Turkish ‘Grand Seignior’ along the way seems to have first occurred. The English Consul, if amiable, was also discouraging, and sent the party back towards Venice by sea. However, Mary Fisher took the opportunity of a call along the coast to Morea to land and head none the less for the Sultan’s court. Beatrice Beckley seems to have accompanied her at the landing, but Mary Fisher made her final prodigious journey alone. The first account published (by a Dutch Quaker in the early eighteenth century) said that she made it entirely on foot, which would have meant walking 500 to 600 miles through Greece and Macedonia and over the mountains of Thrace: this during a period when the prolonged war between Venice and the Ottoman Empire (and internal feuds within Turkey itself) caused either terror or xenophobia at the mere sight of strangers. It is more probable that the Friends took a Greek boat across the Aegean, before Mary Fisher set off alone on foot on her divinely appointed mission to the ‘Great Turk’.19

  The Sultan – the ‘Great Turk’ – was at this point lying together with 20,000 men at Adrianople, along the banks of the river Maritsa, whither he had repaired from Constantinople. The Sultan’s tents were hung with rich gold embroideries: ‘the magnitude of these Pavilions is such’, wrote Henry Marsh in a survey of the Turkish Empire a few years later, ‘that afar off they seem no less than Cities’. The Sultan himself, Mahomet IV, aged sixteen, was also gorgeously attired in gold and sable as he sat surrounded by his eunuchs. His appearance was however more terrifying than dazzling. The son of a half-witted father, he had been permanently marked by his father’s savage attack on him as a child. For all his majestic trappings here was ‘a monster of a man’ in the words of another English observer, ‘a deformed sight both in body and mind, as if one strove with the other how to offend; stupid, loggerheaded, cruel, fierce as to his aspect’.20

  Mary Fisher, on the other hand, was a thirty-five-year-old ‘maid’; one whose ‘intellectual faculties’ were in the opinion of a contemporary ‘greatly adorned by the gravity of her deportment’. Even to be granted an interview was in itself an achievement. Mary Fisher succeeded in persuading the Grand Vizier, to whom the Sultan left all business matters so that he himself could ‘follow the chase of fearful and flying Beasts’, to introduce her, despite the fact that the Grand Vizier, generally speaking, recommended the Sultan never to listen to women’s ‘Counsels and Advices’.

  Surrounded by dragomans, who waited to interpret for her, Mary Fisher was introduced into the Sultan’s presence. She then stood in silence. She was after all waiting for the guidance of the Inner Light. When the Sultan, mistaking her silence for modesty, offered to dismiss some of his suite, she declined his offer. Finally she spoke ‘what was upon her mind’. The Turks listened to her ‘with much attention and gravity’ until she had done. The Sultan asked Mary if she had anything more to say, and she in return asked whether he had understood her message. According to the Quaker account which may have come from Mary herself, he answered, Yes, he had understood every word, ‘and further said, that what she had spoken was truth’.21

  The Sultan then pressed Mary Fisher to stay with them, saying that they could not but respect one who had taken so much pains to come to them so far from England, with a message from the Lord God. In view of the danger of travelling alone, he also offered her a guard to get back to Constantinople, if she persisted in that plan. Mary Fisher declined both offers: It was at this point that the Turks asked Mary Fisher what she thought of their prophet Mahomet, and she replied warily ‘that she knew him not’ although she knew Christ the true prophet. Concerning Mahomet she suggested that they should judge him to be true or false according to the words or prophecies he spoke: ‘If the word that a prophet speaketh comes to pass, then shall ye know that the Lord hath sent the prophet; but if it come not to pass, then shall ye know that the Lord never sent him’. The Turks acknowledged the truth of what she said.

  It is impossible to know exactly what interpretation the Sultan and his entourage put upon this amazing visitation; just as it is impossible to know exactly how Mary Fisher’s words – and those of the Sultan – were transformed in translation. The Sultan never did mend his ways towards other Christians, or show any practical appreciation of Mary’s message. Nevertheless Mary Fisher herself did return to Constantinople ‘without the least hurt or scoff’.

  Her gracious treatment at the Sultan’s hands inclined her to believe of the Turks that ‘there is a royal seed amongst them which in time God will raise’. ‘The English are more bad, most of them’, wrote Mary grimly. For in Constantinople the Quakers, including Mary, were treated much as they were in England and America, as a pernicious nuisance. The English Ambassador, Sir Thomas Bendish, drew weary attention to the Quakers’ ‘insufferable’ disturbances of ‘our divine exercises’. His successor was the third Earl of Winchilsea (father-in-law of Anne Countess of Winchilsea, and Anne Viscountess Conway’s first cousin). He too complained that ‘the carriage of that sort of people is ridiculous and is capable to bring dishonour to our Nation …’ when ordering the removal of the English Quakers.22

  This particular Earl of Winchilsea, a man of great magnificence, was certainly not predisposed by his way of life to appreciate the Quaker message, unlike his cousin Anne. He was married four times and had twenty-seven legitimate children, of whom sixteen lived to maturity. His second wife, who accompanied him to Turkey, bore eleven of them. But Lord Winchilsea also kept a number of other women in Turkey, building little convenient houses for them, by whom he produced still further progeny. ‘My Lord, you have not only built a town, but peopled it too’, observed Charles II on Lord Winchilsea’s return to England in 1669. ‘Oh Sir, I was your Majesty’s representative’, retorted the prolific Earl.23

  As for the grave and fearless Mary Fisher, she eventually reached England safely, where she later married a fellow Quaker, the master-mariner William Bayly, a romance begun
when he was in Newgate. It was a very happy marriage, blessed by three children, and Mary Fisher preached no more. But in 1697, as an old lady, she was still pointed out as ‘one whose name you have heard of, Mary Fisher, she that spoke to the Grand Turk’.

  ‘God is thy Witness’, wrote Elizabeth Hooton to Margaret Fell in 1671, ‘thou hast suffered more than many have expected …’24 It was true that Margaret Fell, born Margaret Askew in 1614, might legitimately have expected a comparatively easy life by the (female) standards of the time. As a girl she had a portion of £3,000; she was married at sixteen to a much older man, Judge Fell, and left a wealthy widow on his death in 1658. Margaret Fell also enjoyed the blessing of an extremely large and affectionate family: she had no less than seven remarkable and intelligent daughters. Against these one ungrateful son weighed lightly in the emotional balance; although the practical consequences of his ingratitude, in the light of his sex, were heavy. She was blessed in addition with a constitution which would enable her to survive into her late eighties.