Mistress Bradstreet

by Charlotte Gordon

  Anne Dudley and Anne Hutchinson were likely both in Botolph’s when they first heard Cotton’s dream of a “City of God” populated only by saints. The promise of the New Testament was one of the unifying themes of Cotton’s sermons; he taught his parishioners to yearn for a “new” England, one free from Rome’s taint. The Anglican Church was failing, he said, and it must be restored to its scriptural purity, or else even the godly Puritans would suffer the Almighty’s wrath.

  Cotton’s vision of a redeemed church and a fresh new world inspired many, but no one was more intrigued by the idea than Thomas Dudley. The wistful Cotton conceived of this new England in purely symbolic terms; he was not preaching emigration, and he never fully believed that such a world could come into being. But Dudley took Cotton’s words literally, beginning to imagine how he might create a real “new” England, knowing it would have to be somewhere far away from the corruption of the old. Not surprisingly, when Dudley began to discuss utopian ventures overseas with other restless Puritans, Cotton argued that England must be reformed from the inside. “The Beast,” or the Antichrist, must be driven out, Cotton said, and his flock must remain, resisting the temptation to sail away to nearby Holland, which had a thriving Puritan community, or to the faraway English colony in Barbados.

  But these subtleties were lost on Thomas Dudley. Cotton’s vision had, though inadvertently, laid the groundwork for the idea of a Puritan “remove.” Ironically, Cotton himself would take far longer than his parishioners to be convinced that establishing a new England across the sea was the answer to their crisis. In fact, Cotton was so concerned that his flock might abandon England that he deepened his emphasis on compromise. He agreed with Thomas Shepard, a fellow minister, who wrote, “The Lord [makes] me feare . . . running too far in a way of separation from the mixt, [or England].”24 For a time, Cotton’s appeals succeeded in quelling any rash decisions that Dudley and his friends might make. These men respected Cotton’s tempering words and loved England too much to launch themselves immediately into leaving their country behind.

  For the young Anne, Cotton’s moderate response to the political climate was probably more congenial than her father’s more extremist position. But she was fortunate to be exposed to the ideas of both men, as well as those of her mother. When she came of age, her thinking would be tinged with her father’s utopian politics, Cotton’s gentle spiritual lessons, and her mother’s pragmatic teachings about the humble place of women in this world and the next.

  Chapter Three

  Sempringham

  ANNE’S EDUCATION DID NOT only consist of her visits to St. Botolph’s. The medieval halls of her childhood home were dark and forbidding, but it was in these cavernous rooms that Anne received the extraordinary gift of a nobleman’s education. Her father’s arrogance and ambition would turn out to be a blessing for Anne’s literary future.

  She was eight years old when Dudley accepted an offer to serve as steward to the Earl of Lincoln and moved his family to the young lord’s grand manor at Sempringham. The position, a combination of business manager, lawyer, and secretary, was a plum situation for Dudley, who had had to endure two years of unemployment before finding this opportunity. Most employers regarded Puritans as rabble-rousers intent on undermining the government’s God-given authority, not as individuals to depend on. But fortunately, the twenty-year-old Earl of Lincoln, Theophilus Fiennes-Clinton, had been raised as a Puritan and was sympathetic to Dudley’s ideals.

  Serving under one of the most highly placed noblemen in the country suited Anne’s father’s grandiose beliefs about his destiny and that of his family. It was also in accordance with his view of Puritan theology: a pious father should enhance his wealth and status so his family could fulfill God’s will on earth more effectively. In 1620, the year Dudley took the position at Sempringham, his four children—Samuel, Anne, Patience, and Sarah—were, respectively, twelve, eight, four, and two, and Dorothy was pregnant with a fifth baby. The rich benefits his son and daughters would receive from life on such a luxurious estate included an upper-class education as well as an assured knowledge of aristocratic manners.

  Just how important these lessons were was self-evident to Dudley, as he had once worked as a page to the Earl of Northampton at the magnificent Castle Ashby. The world that he had found there was overwhelmingly sophisticated and urbane, and it brimmed with rules you had to learn fast if you wanted to survive. Social standing determined where you sat at banquets, what kind of overnight accommodations you merited, what sort of clothes you could wear, whom you could talk to, and which servants waited upon you. As a result, Dudley was a stickler for pristine etiquette and social distinctions, and he would pass on to his children a sense that the Dudley family was slightly more refined, and certainly more elegant, than others.

  When Anne was first plunged into life at Sempringham, the contrast between her family’s old home in Northamptonshire and the manor was overwhelming. For the first eight years of her life she had lived in a simple Puritan cottage. Now she had to learn to navigate the rambling corridors of a sprawling mansion. Instead of living a quiet life with her family and a few servants, she now lived in the midst of a bustling nobleman’s estate. At least fifty servants staffed Sempringham, and famous visitors often came for extended stays. Theophilus’s own family was huge. The earl had eight younger brothers and sisters, all of whom still lived at home when Anne took up residence in the manor.

  Once they arrived, Dudley was far too busy to help his family get acclimated to their new environment. He was acutely aware of the young lord’s dire financial situation—Theophilus owed creditors almost twenty thousand pounds, thanks to his dead father’s excesses. Immediately, Dudley cut back on the laborers’ pay and urged the earl to raise his tenants’ rents as well as their annual contribution to the estate at harvesttime.1 Naturally, those under his rule resented him, but Dudley did not seem to mind his unpopularity. He glared at people as though he would like to boss them around, or at least improve their manners. He held his chin up higher than was strictly necessary and stared as if he were boring a hole straight into the earth. His eyebrows were delicate and slightly arched, which lent his gaze an air of contempt or, perhaps, of inquiry. In keeping with his aristocratic leanings, he dressed in a far more elegant manner than most of his compatriots. In the one remaining portrait of him, he has on a creamy, silken tie, loosely knotted at his throat, rather than the enormous stiff collars of his colleagues. He made it clear that he was not a man to be trifled with and that his displeasure could harm his opponents in real and frightening ways. Dudley felt it was his job to improve the earl’s estate, and he did this as directly and speedily as he could, producing extraordinary results. Within a few years, Theophilus was not only solvent but a wealthy young man.

  Of course, there was another reason Dudley had no difficulty ignoring the complaints of the farmers. He saw harshness as his duty because he understood his role as steward in biblical terms. As Cotton Mather, the Puritan apologist of the next generation, would write many years later, Dudley would be as “Joseph was to Pharaoh in Egypt.”2 From the Puritan perspective, it was Dudley’s “calling” to increase Theophilus’s wealth.

  As Dudley’s oldest daughter, Anne soon became aware of her father’s notoriety among the tenant farmers but fiercely defended him against his enemies, just as she would throughout her life whenever Dudley’s firmness met with criticism. Later she would write:

  Who is’t can tax thee ought, but for thy zeal?

  Truth’s friend thou wert, to errors still a foe,

  Which caused apostates to malign so.3

  Still, it was difficult to be a child of the unpopular steward, and it was with some relief that Anne encountered a new personage in her life—the powerful woman who ruled the household, Theophilus’s mother, the dowager countess, Elizabeth. Never before had Anne met such an impressive female. Here was a woman who was completely unafraid of Dudley and who was actually his social superior. For Anne it must
have been a complicated and liberating experience to see the man she thought ruled the world bow to the will of another—a noble, of course, but a woman all the same. Stickler that he was for elegant manners, Dudley always addressed Elizabeth by her full title, effectively demonstrating his own perfect breeding but also his own capacity for deference—a new side of his character as far as Anne was concerned.

  Aristocrats had rarely crossed her path before. Now, thrown into the midst of the earl’s family with the eccentric Elizabeth in charge, Anne entered a wholly new world of complicated manners, politics, and intrigue. She was used to her mother’s quiet simplicity, while Elizabeth was famous for her outspokenness. The dowager believed that women were capable of far more than most people believed, and she made no bones about it. A deeply literate, redoubtable lady of not much beauty, who was famous for her own excellent education, Elizabeth was dedicated to the intellectual advancement of other noblewomen. She had even written a learned treatise on child rearing that promoted breast-feeding, a novel idea for most ladies, as they had been taught that they were too frail to feed their own babies and should employ wet nurses.4 As the mother of five daughters, the soon-to-be mother-in-law of one young bride, and the potential grandmother of many granddaughters, Elizabeth had ample opportunity to exercise her ideas.

  In 1620, the year Anne joined the throng at Sempringham, the dowager was still raising her younger children, and this important job involved instruction in the social intelligence they would need to launch themselves into the troubled and complicated world of Jacobean England. Tutors had to be hired, influential acquaintances had to be struck up, a thorough understanding of their responsibilities as lords and ladies of the manor had to be passed on, marriage contracts needed to be drawn, knowledge of the court and court politics had to be instilled, and ministers and vicars needed to be consulted on a regular basis to ensure the proper religious education for these noble young Puritans. In general, if children failed to live up to the expectations of their class in their adult lives, either through a disastrous marriage, sinful behavior, or the profligate management of their estates, the mother was almost always blamed.

  Elizabeth seems to have believed that classical history and literature were vital to the education of women—an unusual viewpoint at a time when it was rare for females to be able to read much more than rudimentary passages from Scripture. For her daughters, she hired an outstanding instructor whose sole job was to teach them reading, writing, and ancient history. Dedicated as she was to the education of young women, it seems likely that the countess allowed Anne and her younger sisters to receive the same education as her noble daughters. Certainly the enormous breadth of Anne’s reading and the refinement of her skills suggest that she had an early education that far surpassed the simplistic training of most gentlewomen: the ability to “reade plainly and distinctly, write faire and swiftly.” Nor did she have to be content with “a Bible . . . and a good plaine cattichism.” Instead she could eagerly read translations of the Latin historians and philosophers Josephus and Seneca, as well as medical texts such as Helkiah Crooke’s Microcosmographia, or a Description of the Body of Man, truly extraordinary reading for a child—male or female—from any class background.5

  Anne would have greatly admired Theophilus’s younger sisters—Frances, Arbella, Susan, Dorcas, and Sara—who had their mother’s confidence and zeal, knew the ropes of the manor, had exquisite manners, and could not only sew but read and write with far more grace and intelligence than Anne imagined possible. Although Sara was around the same age as Anne, it is likely that Anne’s favorite of the five girls was nineteen-year-old Arbella, who was the particular beneficiary of the dowager’s strength of mind and fortitude and who seemed to share Anne’s fervor for religion and study.

  As she spent the majority of her day with her mother and sisters, Anne could never forget the difference in rank between herself and the noble girls who were her fellow students. At times the gap that separated her from the others was uncomfortable: They dressed in silks; she dressed in linen and wool. They were conversant with luxuries and books and had met many of the era’s most famous personages, whereas Anne had lived a quietly sheltered life until Sempringham. But Anne could take comfort from the fact that she shone as a student. The poetry she would write as an adult reveals that she was able to retain copious amounts of information, make probing political arguments, and master the details and overarching themes of history, science, religion, and medicine with more depth and complexity than most of her peers—male or female. Thus even Theophilus’s younger brothers, Charles, Knyvet, and John, were undoubtedly soon surpassed in learning by this young middle-class aspirant.

  Not surprisingly, Anne was particularly receptive to verse, which was esteemed as one of the most important arts of the age. She could scan difficult lines, marking the accented feet with speed and clarity. One of her favorite poets was the long-winded French Protestant, Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas (1544-90), who had leaped into superstardom with his attempt to capture, in copious detail, each moment of God’s Creation in verse.6 This famous work, The Divine Weekes and Workes, unfortunately bogged down somewhere in day three. Creation was too gigantic an event for even this literary heavyweight to manage; snowed under by the enormity of God’s handicraft, he could never bring himself to complete the poem. Nonetheless, Puritans everywhere loved this unfinished work, and Anne was no exception.

  In later years she would remember that when she read his poetry, it was as though she were gazing at “glittering plate and Jewels,” a “brave wealth” that she wanted to possess. This poet made her hunger to write poetry herself. She yearned for “some part (at least)” of his store of technique and knowledge. And she was not alone. Du Bartas so thrilled John Milton that the young poet attempted to imitate him in his own heroic undertaking, explaining the ways of God to men in Paradise Lost. But Anne knew that such literary dreams were “empty wishes” for a “silly prattler” like herself, since intellectual ambition was an inadmissible desire for a young woman of her time and place.7 Females could not be poets, the experts said; their brains and constitutions were not strong enough, and too much learning might distract them from their proper station in life. The day would come when Anne would ignore these warnings, and then it would be Du Bartas’s example that would spark her into action, leading her to hammer out her own poem about Creation, The Quaternions.

  This brave act, however, would take place many years in the future on the distant shores of America. In the 1620s writing such grand verse would have been unthinkable for the young Anne. There was her own humility to contend with, as well as the societal taboo against intellectual women. Even worse, her frail health seemed to confirm the critics’ feeling that learning weakened the female constitution.

  A year or so after the Dudleys arrived at Sempringham, Anne had her first painful experience with illness, an indeterminate fever that confined her to bed for many tedious weeks. At least, she wrote, she had the opportunity to “commun[e] with my heart.”8 Unable to perform the domestic duties so prized by her mother, Anne could take part only in quiet activities while she convalesced. Encouraged by her minister and parents to reflect on her sins and to view her illness as a “correction” from God, Anne suffered spiritually as well as physically. Because she was separated from the flurry of everyday life as well as from the lively chatter of her younger sisters, Anne’s misery became even more pronounced, until her father began to bring her books from the earl’s well-stocked library and from his own. At last Anne had found consolation in her loneliness.

  This was an extraordinary act for a Puritan father, not only to allow his daughter such weighty reading, but to promote her encounter with these writers. But to Dudley, history was a devotional tool, and so it makes sense that he would choose this time to bestow heavy tomes about this serious subject on his frail, bedridden daughter. Perhaps the thought that she might be facing death prompted him to overlook conventions. Before long, behind her heavy linen b
ed curtains, the nine-year-old could venture forth into realms of learning far beyond those of her sisters, mother, and even her older brother, Samuel. She devoured John Speed’s Historie of Greate Britaine, William Camden’s Britannia, Richard Knolle’s Generall Historie of the Turkes, and Raleigh’s History of the World, while, of course, never neglecting the study of her beloved Bible.9

  Anne was fortunate that her father’s unbridled passion for Puritan theology, which emphasized reading and writing, had allowed him to overlook his culture’s prejudice against women and learning. Now, in the unlikely person of a sickly young girl, he had discovered an intellectual companion blessed with an inquisitive nature like his own, a voracious appetite for knowledge, and a capacity to immerse herself in her studies with ever-increasing determination. For a serious-minded Puritan child like Anne, history was a dramatic recital of the ways God moved in the world. He left His footprints everywhere, and because her father tended to dwell on periods of terror and woe, Anne became a kind of expert in disasters. Later, her history poems would sweep from one catastrophe to the next as she would attempt, in print, to wage her father’s war against the enemies of Puritanism.

  As Anne approached adolescence, it was impossible not to see her preternatural aptitude for poetry. Dudley had long held that he was related to the sixteenth-century poet Sir Philip Sidney, whose famous words “Look into thy heart and write” had inspired a raft of writers from Spenser to Raleigh.10 Whether or not they were actually connected to Sidney by blood is arguable, but because Dudley believed so, he exploited the significance of this relationship to the fullest, telling his daughter of her family’s poetic birthright. Anne was born to write poetry, Dudley seems to have thought, although it would take many years and an ocean voyage to the New World before his dreams for her were fully realized.