Mistress Bradstreet

by Charlotte Gordon

  Anne could not help but follow these proceedings with excitement. Arbella’s mother promptly declared that the marriage was a grand idea, but the drama intensified when Isaac’s father refused to countenance it. At last Elizabeth approached Isaac’s grandfather to overrule the disapproving parent. To the delight of the Sempringham household, the old man was in favor of the union. In April 1623, Anne watched as Arbella and Isaac exchanged vows, an event that would be of great significance for the founding of New England.

  A WEDDING IN THE HOUSE naturally turned the thoughts of the other young people at Sempringham to their own prospective marriages. In the next few years, as Anne turned thirteen and then fourteen, Simon could no longer hold her at a distance as a beloved younger sibling. She was growing into a young woman whom he could love and desire. Anne’s status as the eldest daughter in the family made her seem more mature than her years—her next sister, Patience, was a full three years younger—and her piety and solemn dedication to prayer and books gave her the steady carriage and serious outlook of a much older person. Until his prospective bride had reached a more appropriate age for an engagement, however, twenty-three-year-old Simon was content to wait.

  Anne, on the other hand, was jolted by the shock of what she called her “carnal” feelings. At age fourteen, she was neither delighted nor enlivened by falling in love, but instead was deeply troubled. She worried that she had allowed “the follies of youth” to “take hold of me.” All too often, she would later remember, she found herself “sitting loose from God,” forgetting to contemplate her spiritual state and focusing too much energy on worldly matters such as her appearance and fashion. It was not easy to be a Puritan girl and love a man.6

  As a middle-aged wife, Anne would recall the sorry condition of her soul during this period in her life, describing how tempting it was to busy herself with being “fine”—“to curl, and pounce” her hair. Sadly, at the time of this spiritual crisis, Anne had no ability to stand back and gently take stock of her failings. It would take many years before she could invoke the uncontrollable feelings she had experienced by creating the allegorical figure of a young person in one of her most famous poems. “My lust doth hurry me to all that’s ill,” Youth declares in The Quaternions, “I know no law . . . but my will.”7

  In actuality, as long as Anne did not act on her impulses, she did not need to lash herself so strenuously. Sex within marriage was considered a pleasurable duty: “God has given us the pleasures of this world to enjoy. . . . We should therefore suck the sweet of them and so slake our thirst,” the minister Joshua Moody summarized.8 For the Puritans (unlike their descendants, the Victorians), sexuality was not really the issue. The more worrisome problem was the social disorder uncontrolled behavior could cause, particularly when it jeopardized inheritance proceedings or the social hierarchy of man over woman. An earthy people who enjoyed their ale and a good feast when the situation permitted, the Puritans sanctioned and even believed in the virtues of sex, even premarital sex, as long as the partners ended up in a married state. Bastards and unwed mothers, not pleasure, were to be avoided.9

  Anne’s difficulty, then, was that her desire for Simon was “wild,” and Puritans treated any evidence of ungoverned sexuality with severity. In the New World, for example, where Puritans would rule the colonies in accordance with their theology, adultery—a transgression that disrupted the order of the family—was punishable by death, although this was rarely carried out.10 Most Reformed ministers, like Cotton, relied on shame and public humiliation to enforce their moral code; in New England the entire community would become involved, as in Hawthorne’s depiction (nearly two centuries later) of the punishment meted out to the adulterous Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter. Anne had been taught to judge herself and others according to these severe standards, and so when she first experienced the strength of her own appetites, she was tortured by guilt.11

  Eventually Anne must have made her anguish known to her family, as Dudley abruptly announced that the family would move from Sempringham to Theophilus’s property in Boston, while Simon would remain to manage affairs at the Sempringham estate. Though sad to be separated from Simon, Anne may well have been relieved. Dutiful Puritan that she was, she knew that if she allowed herself to roam down the path of licentiousness, “My wit evaporates in merriment,” “my woeful parents’ longing hopes are crossed,” and “my education lost.”12

  For Simon’s part, the Dudleys’ move to Boston may have cost him some pain over losing Anne’s companionship, but it allowed him to come into his own as a man. He brought all of his charm, skill, and energy to his role as manager. Within a year, he had caught the eye of another noble dissenter, the Countess of Warwick. In 1627, presumably with Dudley’s support, as this was part of the progression everyone expected for Simon, he moved away from Sempringham to serve this difficult woman, who was so impossible she had supposedly driven her husband to “great perplexities” until he was “crased in braine”; in other words, she had driven him mad. That Simon “discharged” his duties for this forbidding woman with “an Exemplary discretion and Fidelity” was regarded by all as an extraordinary achievement.13 He was truly an adult in the eyes of the world; all he needed was a wife. Although he now lived more than a day’s journey from the Dudleys, Simon did not forget his love for Anne. He was at something of a disadvantage, though, for there were no clear courtship rituals for Puritan young people, and he had no one to act on his behalf. In fact, the most prominent paternal figure in his life was the father of his beloved.

  Puritan marriages were usually arranged by the parents of the two young people, although based on the interest of their children. If there was an attraction, the matter had to be prayed over and discussed with spiritual advisers. As with Arbella and Isaac, there were no private affairs of the heart; marital unions were family mergers and often involved extensive financial negotiations. In addition, there was not usually much of a ceremony, and this made it difficult in some cases for young people to discern when it was legal for them to engage in the sexual activity of a man and wife. There were certainly no church weddings, since marriage was considered a civic act.14

  With these kinds of dire pitfalls to avoid, even older people such as widowers and widows, who no longer had parents to guide them in their choices, did not heedlessly follow their “instincts” or, worse, their “passions.”15 To win the hand of a good Puritan woman, then, a suitor had to present evidence that his intentions were prompted by the Lord’s will, good sense, and in the best cases, the young woman’s father or family representative.

  Simon knew that at age fifteen Anne was still too young for marriage. But whether or not he had decided to venture proposing a future engagement, any such plans were preempted when a terrible crisis struck. Soon after the Dudleys moved to Boston, “God laid his hand sore upon” Anne and she became ill, this time with the dreaded smallpox plague that was sweeping the countryside, killing thousands. Though Simon was living miles away, Anne still perceived her suffering as punishment for her passion. Later in life she wrote, “It hath been with me that no sooner felt my heart out of order, but I have expected correction for it,” and in this case she connected the fact that she had allowed “the follies of youth [to] take hold of me” with her illness.16

  Smallpox, not surprisingly, was the sort of ordeal that tended to induce spiritual agonies in its victims. The patient’s suffering began with nausea, body aches, and a rocketing fever that induced delirium and disorientation. When she was older, Anne recalled how frightening these feverish hallucinations could be: “Sometimes the frenzy strangely mads my brain / That oft for it in bedlam I remain.”17 For pious individuals, these seizures were interpreted as either divine or satanic visitations, depending on the nature of the visions, and they left the victims feeling shaken and desperate for spiritual consolation.

  The famous pink sores, or “pocks,” only emerged gradually. At first they appeared as tiny discrete spots, or macules, on the mucous membranes
of the mouth and then on the face and forearms. These macules slowly grew into tight, painful papules that after a few days filled with liquid and formed a tense blister embedded deep in the skin.

  The more pocks you had, the more danger you were in of dying, and children were the most vulnerable. Indeed, most parents believed that smallpox was an inevitable curse that families had to bear. It would be more than one hundred years before the smallpox vaccination was invented. In the early seventeenth century no one knew why some people survived and some did not; fully one-quarter of the people who contracted the disease died. Most people thought of the pox as “the scourge” that killed without mercy, although Anne might well have taken heart from the fact that the famous queen of her father’s generation, Elizabeth I, was reputed to have been stricken with the dread disease and survived.18

  Though Anne’s suffering was drawn out—probably several months—and acute, and there was no assurance that she would survive, she never gave way to despair. There was no treatment to stem the course of the disease, but Anne believed she was in God’s hands. Her shattering fever led her toward an even deeper commitment to her religion; she coped with her fear through prayer, and looking back on this time, she wrote, “When I was in my affliction, I besought the Lord and confessed my pride and vanity, and He was entreated of me and again restored me.”19

  AT LAST THE PAINFUL POCKS all over Anne’s body dried up into a hard lentil-like crust. She would survive. Although there is no concrete evidence that Anne suffered scars from her bout with the disease, the scabs of smallpox sufferers usually peeled away to reveal pigment-free skin, and most sufferers were left with these blemishes for the rest of their lives. Whether or not Anne’s face was pitted with the scars of the illness, her pride in her youthful beauty had been delivered a severe blow; she wrote, “The pox me sore be-mars with outward marks and inward loathsome scars.” The severity of her pain left her wiser and more reflective, albeit far weaker, than she had been before.20

  John Cotton’s proximity to the Dudley family meant he could lead Anne and her family in prayer and reflection during her prolonged battle with death. But Anne did not give him or her father much credit for helping stave off her despair. According to Anne, it was God Himself who came to her in the midst of her misfortune and comforted her when she felt so troubled by her own “follies.” Her illness had served as a kind of test, allowing her to discover the depth of her own faith. As she recovered, she felt rescued from the uncertainty of her passions and reminded of the course she wanted to follow in life, that of the devout Puritan pilgrim. God had saved her for some reason, and now she would have to devote herself to uncovering His purpose. As a result, she began to focus more intensely on her personal relationship with God rather than on her relationship with human authorities. This was a dramatic turning point for someone who had always been instructed to put the dictates of her father and her ministers first.

  Although there is no evidence that Simon came to visit the Dudleys during Anne’s illness, he must have been in constant touch with the family and deeply concerned that Anne was near death’s door. At some point during her recovery, he made it clear that he wanted to marry the young girl whose conscience had been so troubled by her desire for him. Dudley agreed, and Anne’s enthusiasm for this idea was expressed by the speed with which she married Simon. Instead of keeping to her bed and enjoying a slow period of convalescence, she fled the sickroom and plunged straight into a union with her old friend. Within a few weeks, the couple had moved away from her family to live on the dowager countess of Warwick’s estate. Anne was, one hopes, further along in her recovery than another contemporary smallpox victim, who married her husband “as soon as she was able to quit the chamber, when . . . all that saw her were affrighted to look upon her.”21

  Having just turned sixteen, Anne was relatively young to be a wife, even in that time, especially since her husband was ten years older. It must also have been difficult for her to be separated from her younger sisters and her parents. But the challenges of the situation paled beside the gains. After all, smallpox had tried Anne’s spirit, and she had not been found wanting. Now it was her duty to share sexual pleasure with her husband and to flourish as a woman in the “garden” of her marriage. The legitimization of her desires could not help but be a powerful relief to this conscientious teenager. No longer did she need to consider herself “carnal” and “lustful”; instead she could think of herself as “dutiful” and “loving”—she was safely back inside the Puritan fold. Anne also knew that as a married woman, she could now order her household as she saw fit. She was an adult, and God’s vocation lay waiting for her.

  With a passionate bride thrilled to embrace the liberating joys of union, a gentle groom who understood that he had almost lost his love to the pox, and years of a steady, intelligent relationship already under their belt, it seems almost inevitable that Anne and Simon would enjoy a blissful start in the world.

  The year was 1628, however, and the young pair’s life together had begun at a forbidding juncture of events. One Puritan minister after another was being silenced or imprisoned, and rumor had it that anyone who protested these events would be severely punished. It was becoming increasingly difficult to observe the tenets of their religion, and like the Israelites, the Puritans felt marooned in a strange and corrupt land; England had turned into a terrible Egypt and would soon be destroyed for her sins. All omens pointed toward disaster for Anne’s future with Simon, and for Puritans in general. The fact that her father, Arbella, and, for that matter, most of her friends and family were now eagerly focused on emigration to America did nothing to inspire Anne with confidence. It seemed that only more suffering lay ahead.

  Chapter Five

  God Is Leaving England

  THE CRISIS OF 1628 had not happened overnight. Years of violence between religious extremists had left a trail of bloodshed that no one could forget. The world was a dangerous place for Puritans, or so Anne and Simon both believed. Having been raised on stories of murderous Catholics and treacherous Anglicans, they spent their lives perpetually on guard against the enemy, whether this meant the devil in human or inhuman form, in Europe or England. The important thing was to be vigilantly prepared for catastrophe.

  During the years of Anne’s childhood and adolescence, the medieval principle of un roi, une foi, une loi—one king, one faith, one law—still held sway in both Protestant England and Catholic Europe. There was little understanding of the idea of tolerance, since to most people, two different faiths in one country made as little sense as having two kings attempt to govern one people. Religious people of all stripes and banners strove against each other in scorching fights for survival, and to most Christians, this violence shimmered in a bloody glow of glory and honor, as a kind of gallant assertion of faith.

  Puritans used the most bloodthirsty rhetoric of all. A tiny subset of the Protestant grab bag, whose name had been bestowed on them by their enemies, they were outnumbered in a largely Catholic and Anglican world. In fact, the word puritan was an umbrella term for all sorts of dissenters, who ranged from the Pilgrims to proponents of adult baptism, and their different viewpoints only served to make them feel more isolated and more defensive.1

  What they had in common, though, was a belief that the Anglican-controlled English church had not gone far enough in its split from Rome. This was ironic, since the Anglicans had been the original party of dissent in England, splitting off from the Catholic Church in 1536 under the leadership of Henry VIII. But most Puritans felt that the Anglicans were far too Catholic, or papist, in their tastes and customs. In general they hated the hierarchical system of church governance, where bishops controlled the fates of dioceses. They wanted worship to be simple and heartfelt and believed that there should be no fancy vestments for the clergy, no ornamentation of churches, and no preplanned feast days like Christmas and Easter. Preachers should be learned yet filled with the passion of God’s grace. Nothing was more deadly, not to mention
boring, than the rote chanting of memorized prayers. Congregations should be transfixed by riveting sermons and the words of Scripture.

  Families like the Dudleys who had chosen to stay in England during the 1620s taught their children that they were fighting for the survival of the true religion in a largely Catholic world and that attacks might come at any instant from any quarter. Because Puritans blurred the distinctions between Catholics and Anglicans, Puritan children grew up thinking that the Anglican bishops who controlled the English church were simply an insidious brand of English papist and that English Puritans were, therefore, essentially surrounded by the enemy. Thus Anne learned that she must be prepared to defend the cause of Reform with her life and that all around her, the international community of “true believers” was in crisis and might be obliterated by their enemies if Puritans were not fiercely prepared to do battle. Given the martial righteousness of this theological point of view, it was almost impossible not to envision yourself as a soldier, even if you were a female.

  Puritan wrath was further inflamed by the many stories about the evil deeds of their enemies that parents passed down to children and that ministers invoked from the pulpit. It did not matter that many of the reports of butchery had happened long before Anne was born. In some ways this distance in time and place was helpful for Puritan propagandists because, as the years passed, the stories grew increasingly gruesome; facts slowly slid away and emotions took over. For the men and women of Dudley’s generation who had lost their fathers in various struggles against religious enemies, it was almost impossible not to pass their anger on to their children. As a result, by the time she was a teenager, Anne had been taught to view Anglicans and Catholics as deluded heretics intent on destroying the world. If some Puritan warrior could have burned down the Vatican’s stronghold or murdered the king’s Anglican advisers, she would undoubtedly have rejoiced.2