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

by Antonia Fraser

  As a result, the convenient identification of actress and ‘Miss’ led to young ladies becoming actresses precisely in order to secure a rich admirer. Now contemporaries pitied the ‘little playhouse creatures’, as Mrs Squeamish termed them in The Country Wife, only if they did not manage to pick up a protector. The casting-couch made its first appearance in our social history when a young woman was sometimes obliged to sacrifice her virtue in order to obtain a coveted place in the theatre from one of its patrons. It was an investment she expected to recoup in the shape of the desired wealthy keeper, once she could display her pretty face to advantage on the stage itself. The beaux of the court expected in their turn to keep a pretty actress; it figured along with all their other expenses in the cause of public display, such as gaudy clothes and fine horses. In this way George Porter kept Mrs Jane Long, Sir Robert Howard (the nephew of his namesake, the lover of Lady Purbeck) Mrs Uphill, Sir Philip Howard Mrs Betty Hall, and the Earl of Peterborough Mrs Johnson.9

  The louche atmosphere of the times is well caught by a joyful letter of 1677 from Harry Savile to Lord Rochester, then ill in the country. Savile tried to tempt Rochester to London with the prospect of a sweet new French comédienne called Françoise Pitel: ‘a young wench of fifteen’. Savile declared ‘it were a shame she should carry away a maidenhead she pretends to have brought’, but unfortunately the price was so steep that no one currently in London could afford it.10

  This two-way traffic called forth many references in the plays of the time. Some of these took the rueful side of management: ‘our Women who adorn each Play, Bred at our cost, become at length your prey’. Others pointed to the actress herself as predator, since she intended:

  With open blandishments and secret art

  To glide into some keeping cullies heart

  Who neither sense nor manhood understands

  And jilt him of his patrimonial lands.11

  Be that as it may, by the 1670s the word actress had secured in England that raffish connotation which would linger round it, for better or for worse, in fiction as well as fact, for the next 250 years.

  It had not always been so. The first actresses often concealed their origins, while the honorific appellation ‘Mrs’ pronounced mistress, which they were granted – as opposed to the opprobrious ‘Miss’ – sometimes makes their marital status hard to unravel. Yet it is clear that they were neither ‘Misses’ nor the daughters of ‘Misses’. Some, like Peg Hughes, came from actors’ families. Others were drawn from that same penurious segment of society which supplied waiting-women and the like, where the daughters were likely to go husbandless if they had no dowry. Singing and dancing being the prerequisites of a ladylike education such as that provided by the Chelsea girls’ schools, there were plenty of pupils in the early days from which to choose; some of whom later came to form part of what Anthony Hamilton called ‘the whole joyous troop of singers and dancers who ministered to His Majesty’s slighter pleasures’.12

  Hannah Woolley, advocating the role of gentlewoman in The Queen-like Closet as being the best option available to the unendowed girl, drew attention to the alternatives: ‘Some who have apt Wits and that Dame Nature hath been favourable to, they are courted to be Players.’ The fact was those who had been favoured by Dame Nature did not necessarily share Hannah Woolley’s particular sense of priorities. Mrs Pepys’s gentlewoman, Gosnell, was one of these. Finding the post of gentlewoman too restrictive, she left to find her freedom (see p.386). A few months later, in May 1663 ‘Who should we see come upon the stage’, wrote Pepys, ‘but Gosnell, my wife’s maid’. Unfortunately Gosnell ‘neither spoke, danced nor sung; which I was sorry for. But she becomes the stage very well.’ The following year Pepys saw Gosnell again, singing and dancing finely at first, but finally falling out of tune. Poor Gosnell! Her career never amounted to much more than being an understudy and an occasional singer. Four years later she was singing the performance ‘meanly’ throughout, and had lost her looks: Sir Carr Scroope characterized her as ‘that old hag’. Finally Gosnell was discharged and vanished from view.13

  Gosnell had been the daughter of a widow with very little money but genteel connections. Among the first actresses there were plenty of Gosnells, who preferred the liberty and adventure of the stage to a life of doing shell-work with Mrs Pepys, only they turned out to be more talented. Anne and Rebecca Marshall were the daughters of a country parson, who as chaplain to Lord Gerard had been married off to the illegitimate daughter of a Cheshire squire. Mrs Shadwell’s father was either a Norwich public notary or ‘a decayed knight’; Charlotte Butler was the daughter of a widowed shopkeeper. Accounts of Mrs Barry’s origins varied: she was either an orphan brought up by Lady Davenant to be her ‘woman’ in Norfolk, or the daughter of a barrister called Robert Barry who ruined himself fighting for the King.14

  Wherever they began, the first actresses – and their managers – were not slow to take advantage of their unique opportunities for display, and profit from that display. Inheriting the famous pre-Restoration female ‘breeches’ parts from the men who had previously played them, they made of them something yet more titillating. Actresses with pretty legs, like Peg Hughes and Nell Gwynn, welcomed this legitimate opportunity for showing them off in public, not otherwise granted to them by the costume of the time; then there were the infinite enjoyable possibilities of the double entendre. New plays were rapidly written employing the old device for a new reason: it has been estimated that nearly a third of all the plays first produced after 1660 and before 1700 contained one or more breeches roles.15 Audiences, unused to such bonanzas, were enchanted when Betty Boutel, playing Fidelia disguised as a boy in Wycherly’s The Plain Dealer, had her peruke pulled off and her breasts felt by the actor playing Vernish.

  The costumes for the more straightforward women’s parts offered opportunities for self-advertisement too.16 The actress would first don a loose smock of Holland linen falling below the knees, with short sleeves and a very low-cut draw-string neck (it was in these smocks that they spent their hours resting off stage; a convenient costume it might be thought for receiving the gallants who pestered the tiring-rooms with their attentions, including during the performances, to judge from the frequent prohibitions issued against such behaviour). After the smock came wood or whalebone stays. Holland drawers followed for those who intended to dance: Nell Gwynn had a habit of wearing ‘Rhinegraves’ for the King’s delectation, special short wide divided skirts which flew up as she danced.17 Thread or silk stockings, gartered above and below the knee, were worn with high-heeled shoes and buckles. Two or three petticoats, a tight bodice and an over-skirt completed the outfit; this left the bosom more or less bare (so that actresses generally wore a scarf – ‘a whisk’ – out of doors).

  What with the Holland smocks and the low-cut dresses, the opportunities for actors on stage – in the course of plays which made frequent use of such gestures – and the gallants off stage, to ‘towse and mowse’ with a willing actress were virtually unlimited. Pepys was shocked by the backstage incidents he witnessed, including the bad language of the actresses.18 Only the leading actress had a room to herself.

  Nor were the financial rewards of being an actress such as to make additional income unnecessary. For one thing actresses had to supply their own petticoats, shoes, stockings, gloves and scarves as well as other living expenses; the introduction of liveries paid for by the King was thus a welcome economy, not a humiliation. (When the King, the Duke of York and the Earl of Oxford lent their coronation robes for Orrery’s Henry V, in which Betterton played Owen Tudor and Mrs Betterton the Princess of France, it was as much to do with economy as with the close informal relationship which existed between the court and the theatre; the court supplying the Lord Chamberlain, whose duty it was to license the players.) Runs of plays were often as short as two or three days and it has been estimated that no one worked for much more than thirty or thirty-five weeks in the year.19 The shutting of the London theatres for eighteen mon
ths at the time of the Great Plague brought about further hardship.

  A young actress would receive 10s to 15s a week and would be expected to work for nothing at the beginning of her career. Even the great Mrs Barry only received 30s at the height of her fame, although she also received much larger sums from benefit performances. Mrs Betterton, paid the enormous sum of 50s a week in 1691, was the wife of the principal actor, who was also incidentally the man who ran the company. There were rules which prevented actresses (and actors) from moving between the two companies without permission; the amalgamation of The King’s Company and The Duke’s Company between 1682 and 1695 as The United Company increased the problems of actors by setting up a monopoly.

  Unmarried actresses lived as close as possible to the theatre, the Fleet Street and Covent Garden area for The Duke’s Company and Drury Lane for The King’s Company; Davenant originally boarded some of his leading actresses, including Moll Davis, in his own apartments. As against these conditions, the life of the kept woman with her own house, best of all her own settlement from her protector, offered innumerable advantages unknown to the virtuous. It is hardly surprising that a large number of actresses succumbed to the temptation.

  It was not the talentless who adopted this code of behaviour, rather the reverse. Of the eighty women, who appeared on the Restoration stage, listed by name by J.H. Wilson in his comprehensive study of the subject,20 twelve who enjoyed an enduring reputation as courtesans or ‘Misses’ included the most celebrated performers such as Elizabeth Barry and Betty Boutel, an innocent-looking Fidelia, but off stage known as ‘Chestnut-maned Boutel, whom all the Town F–ks’. The ladies, it should be said, thrived on this combination of public and private acclaim: Betty Boutel spent twenty-six years on the stage and Elizabeth Barry thirty-five. As for Mrs Bracegirdle, who made a special parade of her virtue, she was described as one that had got ‘more Money out of dissembling her Lewdness than others by professing it’; and it seems that she was kept at different times by both Congreve and Lord Scarsdale.21

  At least another twelve, either lazier, unluckier or less successful, are known to have left the theatre to become straightforward kept women or prostitutes. Another thirty are mentioned so briefly as being on the stage, that it is likely that many of them also vanished into prostitution. ‘Mistaken Drab, back to thy Mother’s stall’; with these cruel words the pretensions of Sarah Cooke, Rochester’s protégée, to be an actress were dismissed by a satirist in the 1680s. In fact ‘Miss Sarah’s’ origins were not so low as indicated; nor was she quite devoid of talent, since she was wanted by Dryden to play Octavia in All For Love.22 Nevertheless the supposition that an unsuccessful actress, having come from the stews, would return to them, was a characteristic one of the period.

  Roughly a quarter of these actresses lived respectable lives, so far as we know, and most of these, like Mrs Betterton, were married to fellow-actors; it seems that in the seventeenth century show-business marriages reversed the modern trend and were more stable than otherwise. In general, as the jovial satirist Tom Brown wrote in Letters from the Dead to the Living (this letter was headed: ‘From worthy Mrs Behn the Poetress, to the famous Virgin Actress’): ‘’Tis as hard a matter for a pretty Woman to keep herself honest in a Theatre, as ’tis for an Apothecary to keep his Treacle from the Flies in Hot Weather; for every Libertine in the Audience will be buzzing about her Honey-Pot …’23

  Hester Davenport, widely known as ‘Roxalana’ after her performance in that part in The Siege of Rhodes in 1661, was ‘a charming, graceful creature and one that acted to perfection’. She was about twenty at the time of her first fame. With her exceptional looks – a beauty that made men ‘take ill courses’ wrote Anthony à Wood – she captured the heart of the Earl of Oxford, then a childless widower of forty-four. He was a Knight of the Garter, handsome, famously rich, notoriously proud; he was also a lover of the theatre (as his loan of his coronation robes would evince). However, these were the early years before the identification of actress and ‘Miss’ had thoroughly set in, and there is reason to believe that Roxalana herself attached as much importance to her talent as to her looks; she was after all in proper employment and as the darling of the stage able to support herself.24 She therefore began by refusing Lord Oxford’s tender of protection.

  Offers of services and presents were of no avail, nor were insults, nor, in the last resort, were ‘spells’ and incantations. Lord Oxford could neither smoke nor gamble as a result of his obsession. Various contemporary accounts agree that Hester Davenport only finally succumbed because Lord Oxford made it seem lawful for her to do so (an elaborate process which neither of them would probably have thought necessary ten years later). In Anthony Hamilton’s words, where Love had failed, he ‘invoked the aid of Hymen’.25 First Lord Oxford displayed to his Roxalana a signed contract of marriage. He then enacted that scene which was to become a commonplace of Restoration drama, the fake wedding ceremony, with the minister played by his own trumpeter and the witness by his kettle-drummer. A fellow-actress, who was not in the plot, stood witness for Roxalana.

  The next morning, according to the most colourful description of the episode (by the Baroness d’Aulnoy), Lord Oxford aroused his ‘bride’ with the surprising words: ‘Wake up, Roxalana, it is time for you to go.’ At which the betrayed woman burst out screaming and wounded her husband-lover with his own sword. The trumpeter and the kettle-drummer vanished; the actress-witness was told Roxalana had merely been playing a part in a play. Whatever her initial revulsion, Roxalana did continue the relationship; she left the stage and bore Lord Oxford a son, Aubrey de Vere, a couple of years – not nine months – later.

  Nevertheless Anthony à Wood wrote of Roxalana as having married ‘the Earl of Oxon’, and another account criticized Lord Oxford for ‘marrying his whore’ as well as ‘spending his estate’. Roxalana complained to the King that she had been deceived and secured a large pension of 1,000 crowns per annum. She also continued to term herself the Countess of Oxford for the rest of her life: at the time of her second – or first – marriage, which occurred after Lord Oxford’s death in 1703, she was termed Dame Hester, Dowager Countess of Oxford; she signed her will Hester Oxford.26 None of this prevented Lord Oxford himself from marrying, in 1673, that fascinating if promiscuous beauty Diana Kirke, successful rival to Mrs Grace Worthley for the affections of Henry Sidney (see p.485).

  The solution may lie in the loose nature of marriage at the time. Given that Roxalana was joined together with Lord Oxford in some kind of union in some kind of ceremony, perhaps she herself did not inquire too closely into its validity. ‘You may think she was but an actress …’ observed Mrs Hobart to her fellow Maid of Honour Mrs Temple, telling this cautionary story about the evil intentions of the opposite sex;27 yet in the early sixties, this mere actress might put up considerable resistance before sinking into the role of ‘Miss’.

  Peg Hughes, on the other hand, arrived on the stage five years later ‘a mighty pretty woman’ but not a modest one, for she had a reputation already for being Sir Charles Sedley’s mistress.28 She proceeded to capture the heart of that old warhorse, the King’s cousin, Prince Rupert. Peg Hughes’s brother was a minor comedian (later killed in a brawl at Windsor over the relative claims of his sister and Nell Gwynn to be ‘handsomer’). Her first appearance may have been as Desdemona in an Othello seen by Pepys in February 1669; she probably replaced another actress called Davenport, Frances, no relation to Hester, who had vanished ‘to be kept by somebody’ a few weeks earlier. Peg Hughes was certainly acting by the summer – in May Pepys was granted a backstage kiss – although her first recorded performance was as Panura in Fletcher’s The Island Princess.

  Like Roxalana, Peg Hughes resisted her elderly royal admirer in the first place, although unlike Roxalana, she was hardly concerned to preserve her virtue. The fatal encounter took place at the fashionable spa of Tunbridge Wells; Queen Catherine had sent for the players from London to divert the court. To the ri
bald glee of the younger gallants and the open pleasure of the King, Prince Rupert became quickly obsessed by the ‘mighty pretty’ actress, deserting all his habitual scientific pastimes. It was ‘farewell to alembics, crucibles, furnaces and the black tools of alchemy; farewell to mathematical instruments and speculations! Powder and perfume now filled his whole mind …’29 At first Peg seems to have been reluctant to leave the fun of the stage and to have regarded the Prince’s passion as rather ridiculous (perhaps he was one of those who, as in Madam Cresswell’s advice to Dorothea, recalled ‘Naseby fight’ in moments of amorous excitement).

  The following year more worldly counsels prevailed. Peg Hughes became the Prince’s mistress, being installed by him in a substantial house at Hammersmith (George IV’s spurned Queen, Caroline, later lived there). She bore him a daughter named Ruperta in 1673, at which point she quitted the stage for three years. It should be said that Peg Hughes, whose acting had been widely praised by her contemporaries, also proved an admirable concubine. At first there were local difficulties: in 1674 Peg Hughes was suspected of acquiring some of the jewels which had once belonged to Prince Rupert’s mother, Elizabeth of Bohemia. But as the years wore on, Prince Rupert’s sister, the Electress Sophia, grew to appreciate the good care which Peg took of her elderly protector. The Electress described Mrs Hughes as ‘très modeste’, or at least the most modest of that not conspicuously modest English court; she wished ‘Mistress Hus’ (or sometimes Hews) had produced a son for her brother, but in any case wished to embrace ‘pretty Ruperta’.30

  In 1682 Prince Rupert’s health began to give way. He praised Peg Hughes’s solicitude in a letter to the Electress which also conveyed a picture of the happy family life enjoyed in Hammersmith: ‘She [Peg] took great care of me during my illness’, he told his sister, ‘and I am obliged to her for many things … As for the little one [Ruperta] she cannot resemble me, she is turning into the prettiest creature. She already rules the whole house and sometimes argues with her mother, which makes us all laugh.’ Prince Rupert died at the end of November. In his will, for which the Earl of Craven was trustee, he divided his property between ‘Margaret Hewes’ and ‘Ruperta my natural daughter begotten on the body of the said Margaret Hewes’. In addition Ruperta was charged to be a good obedient daughter and not to marry without her mother’s consent.31