2 Between 1753 and 1837 the marriages of the Quakers and the Jews were the only ones performed outside the Church of England which were legal.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Delight of Business
‘Business is her sole delight in this world … It is charity to keep her in full time employment.’
MRS CONSTANCE PLEY TO SAMUEL PEPYS, Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1666
‘It is the Lord that creates true industry in his people …’; thus Joan Dant, a pedlar, or rather a pedlar-extraordinary, and one of the few women entrepreneurs of the seventeenth century about whom some personal details are known. A woman pedlar in the seventeenth century was of course not necessarily indigent or despised, as the name might seem to indicate today. At one end of the market there did exist those women, close to beggars, who if sufficiently unsuccessful, old and quarrelsome, might be in danger of being accused of witchcraft. But at the other end were those enterprising women who travelled the country supplying haberdashery or provisions to the good wives unable or unwilling to make the journey to market. There was the Widow Elizabeth Doddington of Hillbishops, licensed by the Somerset justices in 1630 to use up to three horses in her work as a ‘badger’ of butter and cheese in Somerset, Wilts, Hants and Devon; or Hester Pinney, the unmarried daughter of a Puritan minister in Dorset who was ejected from his living at the Restoration: she sold lace in London, first as part of the family business (keeping in touch with her relations by letter) and then on her own account.1
When Joan Dant, who died in 1715 at the age of eighty-four, came to make her will she was worth rather more than £9,000. ‘I got it by the rich and I mean to leave it to the poor,’ she observed. In a letter to her executors she described herself as having ‘through the blessing of God, with honesty and industrious care, improved my little in the world to a pretty good degree’. She therefore wished to help ‘the fatherless and the widows in the Church of Christ’.
Joan Dant was a Quaker. Her husband had been a weaver who worked in Spitalfields. It was after his death that she took up work as a pedlar; carrying haberdashery, hosiery and the like from house to house in London and thereabouts. As a Quaker, and incidentally a woman of resolutely upright life, she was able to make good business use of her connections among the Friends. Soon the frugality of her own lifestyle (which she never altered) combined with the expanding nature of her business enabled her to save enough to start trading abroad. At her death, her executors found debts incurred due to business pending, as far away as Paris and Brussels; while the amount of her fortune surprised even those who knew her well.
Joan Dant’s industry – that ‘true industry’ whose creation she ascribed to the Lord – is an example of the fact that religions which encouraged women as well as men to work ‘in God’s vineyard’ often encouraged them by implication to toil in other more commercial fields. The medieval abbesses of the great convents, confident in their religious office, had also been great businesswomen; in the same way Quaker women were sustained rather than depressed in the world of business by their beliefs; the knowledge that God intended them, in the words of George Fox, to be ‘serviceable in their generation’.2
Katherine Philips, the Matchless Orinda, had been able to help her husband in his business as well as write plays and poetry, in which capacity, wrote Ballard in the eighteenth century, ‘few wives are supposed capable of serving their husbands’. But a Quaker dynasty, such as that of the Gurneys of East Anglia, would produce without comment women like Elizabeth Gurney, who in the 1680s kept the books of her husband’s and brother’s mercantile affairs, and acted as chief clerk. This energy can hardly be ascribed to lack of employment on her part; Elizabeth Gurney also bore eight sons, four of whom lived to adulthood.3
In part this ability was due to the Quaker emphasis on schools and education for both sexes, which meant that arithmetic was not a closed book to the female Friends. But since this emphasis on education was in itself due to the Quaker conviction that the Lord might move in any spirit, regardless of sex, one is back with the confidence granted at source, that is with the esteem given to women within the Quaker religion. Sarah Fell, Margaret’s brilliant eldest daughter, had a good head for business, as well as being a ‘ravishing’ preacher, as the account books for Swarthmoor Hall show, during the years when she ran it.4
Where the women of the other dissenting sects were concerned, the connection, traced by the Puritans, between worldly success and divine approval, meant that there was nothing inherently abhorrent about the amassing of profits, particularly when they were used to forward God’s purposes. (We detect a note of this in Joan Dant’s letter to her executors, even if she was herself a Quaker.) But it is also noticeable in general that those women – often but not always widows – whose circumstances led them to indulge in business, could, whatever their rank or religion, expect approval if their efforts were successful. There was no trace here of that execration which attended the public endeavours of the ‘petticoat-authors’. After all business practice in a woman could be seen as an extension of her role as the mainstay of her household, whereas learning and authorship were dangerously unfeminine pursuits. Just as the arithmetic necessary to do accounts (household accounts) was an esteemed part of female education, whereas the study of the classics drew forth angry male expostulations.
In the conduct of their affairs therefore, women paid far less lip service to the gospel of female modesty than they did, perforce, in the pursuit of a literary career. The melancholy withdrawal of Anne Countess of Winchilsea, fearing contempt for poems from a woman’s pen, may be contrasted, with the zest displayed by Anne Russell, Countess of Bristol, in the exploitation of her wine licence. Sister of William, fifth Earl and first Duke of Bedford, wife of George Digby, Earl of Bristol, the Countess was one of those rewarded with a licence to import goods at the Restoration, her husband having formed part of the Royalist administration-in-exile. She set to and sold her wine with a will, the Earl of Bedford being among her early customers. In 1691, when she was nearly eighty, the Countess of Bristol still managed to sell her brother six dozen bottles of red port for the sum of £5 8s.5
It was true, as the editors of Alice Clark’s seminal Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (recently reissued with a new introduction) point out, that women’s ‘productivity and talents’ depended on ‘the domestic conditions which fostered them or precluded them’.6 Pepys’s diary provides an excellent insight into a world in which a variety of women were to be found working as shop-keepers, booksellers, ale-house keepers and the like. Nearly always family circumstances played some part in their situation.
The connection of women with the Stationers’ Company and printing referred to earlier (see p.119) found its natural extension in the existence of women booksellers, either independently or in working partnership with their husbands. One of Pepys’s earliest entries concerns ‘my bookseller’ Mrs Ann Mitchell, who with her husband Miles sold not only books but pamphlets and newspapers in Westminster Hall. After Miles Mitchell died of the plague in 1665, Mrs Mitchell carried on the business. Also in Westminster Hall, plying their trade as linendrapers (not linendrapers’ assistants) were the sisters Betty and Doll Lane, to whose activities as Pepys’s unofficial mistresses we shall return.7
There had always been women among the brewers and the ale-wives, with special rights to brewers’ widows; ale-houses themselves being then enjoyed as meeting places by women as much as men, at a time when ale was the drink of the poor and tea and coffee the luxuries of the rich.8 Just as women might enjoy a pipe, there were numerous women among the tobacco-sellers (frequently unlicensed) keeping murky establishments where it was said of the inhabitants: ‘there communication is smoke’. The mistress of the ale-house was a stock character in the popular chapbooks. Then of course at a less commanding level there was a ‘lily at the bar’ as the playwright and Wit Sir George Etherege described the barmaid at the Rose Tavern in Russell Street. Sometimes the lily was the ale
-wife herself; Richard Gough, in his The History of Myddle, a portrait of a Shropshire parish begun in 1670, describes the lovely girl – ‘very fair’ – who helped her husband Samuel Downton keep an ale-house.9 She was known as White Legs because she wore no stockings, and drew the customers irresistibly from miles around to the great benefit of her husband’s business.
White Legs was actually the second Mrs Downton, Samuel Downton’s first wife having left him a fair amount of money. She had been a maid. Unfortunately White Legs’s character was not as fair as her complexion. First she decamped with her husband to Staffordshire, leaving behind three children to be maintained by the parish. Then the Downtons descended to becoming beggars; he ‘an old decrepit person’ and she with a box of pins and laces to sell. How unlike the worthy Joan Dant did White Legs show herself in her attitude to her trade! There was little of the ‘true industry’ given by the Lord to be seen here. Soon White Legs left her elderly husband for ‘a new Sparke’ who travelled the country. Old Samuel went back to Shropshire to be maintained by the kindly son of his first marriage.
Women, as we have seen, had always had strong connection with the provision business, where their work naturally complemented that of their male relations. In June 1690, a certain Widow Long was discovered who was prepared to give evidence to explain the adulteration of the soldiers’ and sailors’ provisions the year before. ‘Bloody arts’ had been practised, as a result of which many had become sick. The widow would give her evidence so long as she was protected from the consequences, since ‘one of her nearest kindred was a practitioner of these arts; till his conscience troubled him’.10
Pepys, as Clerk of the Acts to the Navy Board, involved with the provisioning and equipping of the Fleet, came into contact with more than one ‘she-merchant’ in the course of his official duties, with pleasanter consequences. Mrs Elizabeth Russell had been the wife of a respected ship’s chandler named Robert Russell. After his death in 1663, the widow took on the business – including the practice of sweetening those able to put business in her way. She sent Mrs Pepys a fine St George in alabaster, which the latter placed in her bedroom; Pepys himself received a case of knives with agate hafts, which he described as ‘very pretty’.11
Far from showing any prejudice against the female in such a role, Pepys seems to have been both impressed and pleased by the phenomenon. Sarah Bland was the wife of a provision merchant named John Bland to whom Pepys went in December 1662 in order to discuss supplies for Tangier, a newly-acquired possession, part of the dowry of Queen Catherine. After the official business was over, Pepys stayed on to eat a dish of anchovies, and drink wine and cider: ‘very merry’, he commented, ‘but above all, pleased to hear Mrs Bland talk like a merchant in her husband’s business very well; and it seems she doth understand it and perform a great deal’. Two years later he was once again ‘fain to admire the knowledge and experience of Mrs Bland, who I think as good a merchant as her husband’.12
Mrs Constance Pley was admired for her business sense and dealings not only by Samuel Pepys but by Colonel Bullen Reymes, a Dorset landowner and Member of Parliament, and a man with a reputation for financial acumen. He became Mrs Pley’s business partner and – as a result of these transactions – intimate friend.13
Bullen Reymes, a Royalist, had been brought up in the service of the Duchess of Buckingham – Catherine Manners, widow of the first Duke and only surviving child of the sixth Earl of Rutland. Reymes married the co-heiress to extensive properties in Dorset and Somerset. After the Restoration, he was made Charles II’s envoy to inspect Tangier after the Moorish invasion of 1664, and Surveyor of the Great Wardrobe (a financial post). At the time of the Dutch War he acted as the Portsmouth Commissioner for Sick and Wounded Seamen. A friend of John Evelyn, it was on the latter’s nomination that in 1667 Reymes was made a Fellow of the Royal Society. A man of the world in every sense, charming, educated, well-travelled, Reymes paid no small compliment to Constance Pley at the end of his life; the first instruction which he left to his son, was to ‘keep fair with Mrs Pley … he is sure she will not wrong him’. Yet by upbringing Mrs Pley seemed destined merely for the obscurity of her own household in a Dorset town.
Colonel Reymes’s esteemed partner was born Constance Wise: a name of Bunyanesque appropriateness. In June 1635 Constance Wise married George Pley at Melcombe Church in Melcombe Regis, Dorset.14 George Pley fought in the Civil War, reaching the rank of captain on the Parliamentary side; later he was to become Puritan Mayor of Weymouth. Under the Commonwealth he had already begun to supply Cromwell’s fine new Navy with sailcloth, manufactured under his supervision in his cottages in and around Weymouth. Shortly after the Restoration Captain Pley was joined in business by Constance, their son George junior and Bullen Reymes. In the words of Bullen Reymes’s biographer, Constance Pley now became ‘the driving force of the enterprise’, which was expanded to include the manufacture of hemp and cordage, and the import of canvas and other ‘stuffs’ from France.15
These were good times to live in for those involved in the outfitting of ships – that is, until they came to present the bills for payment. The King himself, described by Bullen Reymes’s friend Evelyn as ‘a great lover of the sea’, took an obsessional interest in all the details of shipbuilding and naval fortification.16 English foreign policy after the Restoration, guided by hostility towards the Dutch and nervous rivalry with the French, demanded ships to implement it in either case, while the expanding empire – including the new jewel of Tangier – was sea-based. The Pleys, headed by Constance, were vigorous in their exploitation of this apparently favourable situation. In March 1664, and later in December, Constance Pley’s name features in a contract with the Navy Commissioners for different kinds of canvas – the only woman’s name to appear. Correspondence was however almost as much a feature of the business as supervision of the work and importation.
Between June 1660 and August 1672 nearly 100 letters were written on behalf of the joint enterprise to correspondents who included the Navy Commissioners such as Sir William Coventry and Thomas Middleton at Portsmouth, Sir John Mennes, the Comptroller of the Navy, and Sir George Carteret, the Navy Treasurer, as well as Pepys. Constance Pley herself wrote most of the letters – fourteen to Pepys alone are recorded, although only one of his has survived.17 Bullen Reymes wrote of Mrs Pley’s style; ‘her oil will be better than my vinegar’. But if Mrs Pley’s tone was never vinegary, it was sometimes highly charged. Most of the letters are pleas of varying degrees of urgency for payment, in order that the Pleys and Bullen Reymes should be able to pay their own workmen and suppliers.
In September 1664 Bullen Reymes himself fired off a furious letter to the Navy Commissioners, having discovered some patterns of canvas known as Noyals (for sails) at the docks supplied by Mr Browne and Le Texer, said to be the same as that used by the French King. It was, he pointed out bitterly, not a jot better than their own – and in any case the partners were owed £20,000! Under the circumstances, Parliament should at least see that they continued to buy the Pleys’s sailcloth and cordage; whose business ‘would have been aground long since but for his woman partner’.
The precarious finances of the King’s administration were not improved by the prospect of war with the Dutch; this war itself, which broke out in March 1665, plunged the Government’s credit downwards while elevating its expenses. The result was catastrophic, at least in financial terms (at the Battle of Lowestoft in June a naval defeat was inflicted on the Dutch by a fleet headed by the Duke of York). Everyone involved in the war, who depended in some way upon payment from a depleted Exchequer, suffered.
The sufferings of the seamen and their dependants, denied their promised pay and given ‘tickets’ or IOUs, were so acute that in July the following year a maddened mob of women demonstrators – over 300 of them – surged into the yard of the Navy Office, and stayed there, in Pepys’s words ‘clamouring and swearing, and cursing us’. Then the women broke into the garden which gave them access
to Pepys’s closet window ‘and tormented me’. Many were demonstrating on behalf of their husbands, who had been taken prisoner and were lying penniless and starving in foreign prisons.18 The extent to which those complaints were justified can be seen by the fact that this was one female mob from which officialdom did not shrink in disgust. Pepys himself felt sorry for the women and called one back to give her extra money as they were departing; she blessed him. When the Navy Board ordered the relief of the prisoners, it was to be done ‘without any trouble to be given to any of their relations in attendance here (demonstrating) for the same’.19
In 1665 the plight of the sail-makers, desperate for payment for work done for which the Pleys had no money to give them, was not much better; then there was the question of paying for goods imported from France (George Pley junior was now at St Malo supervising that end of the business). Mrs Pley bombarded Sir George Carteret with requests for payment, couched in language which would surely have brought forth recompense, had any recompense been available. At one point she worked out that the Navy Board owed her well over £8,000 and she invoked God himself to move Sir George Carteret’s hard heart.20
Young George Pley’s position at St Malo also concerned her as the ‘breach’ with France was seen to be approaching: Constance Pley wrote to Pepys demanding a convoy home for £10,000’s worth of hemp and other goods, lest they become the object of ‘nefarious plundering’. But when the precious cargo did arrive, still Constance Pley was not paid for it – as she told Sir John Mennes on 3 August, this was a poor requital for all her tedious waitings, the great risk she had taken, and the care. In the absence of payment, she had to draw £500 upon her son’s credit, something she was loath to do, but ‘necessity hath no law’.21
The Weaker Vessel: Women's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England Page 52