Mistress Bradstreet

by Charlotte Gordon

  BEFORE LONG Mercy must have told her husband about her elder sister’s obsession with ancient history, although it seems unlikely that John could have missed Anne’s immersion in her research, since there were probably books and papers stacked all over her kitchen table. But however he discovered his sister-in-law’s undertaking, John was soon intrigued. He himself aspired to writing poetry, “though,” he admitted, “my verse be not so finely spun” as Anne’s. Later he would write that he wanted “to show my love” for his sister-in-law in whatever way he could. He admired everything about her, from her “sweet hand” to her “blush” when he praised the beauty of her lines.18

  Surprisingly, Mercy raised no protest (that we know of) when John expressed his excitement about Anne and her work. Mercy must have known that John would not abandon her for her sister; he was too righteous and upstanding a Puritan. And clearly Anne was securely in love with Simon. Still, the intensity of her brother-in-law’s admiration must have provided Anne with some comfort during these years. With Simon rarely home, she was often alone with her children and the servants in the big home her husband had built for her, and it seems likely that she wanted to talk about the books she was reading and the poetry she was writing. Like Ward and her father, John was devoted to poetry, as well as being remarkably well informed about the events in the Old World. And so Anne embarked on another passionate friendship with yet another intelligent, sensitive man. Again her work benefited. Buoyed by his belief in her, Anne labored at her chosen task, writing history in a land that appeared to her to have no history.

  Meanwhile the drumroll of extraordinary events in England continued. Reports from England flooded the colony. The king had been captured. He escaped. He was captured again and escaped again. It was a game of cat and mouse, but what unearthly stakes! Most New Englanders were stunned: a king, captured? Surely this proved the “vanity” of all earthly pride, Anne decided, and immediately penned a short poem culled mainly from the Bible’s bleakest book, Ecclesiastes, reflecting, “He’s now a slave, that was a Prince of late.”19

  But there was a flip side to these chaotic happenings. If monarchs could be captives, then women could be political commentators, and though Anne’s writing time had always been stolen from the rest of her duties, she managed to write more than five thousand lines of “The Four Monarchies.” Just as The Quaternions had allowed her to grapple with the conflicts that tormented England and her colony, her new poem allowed her to contemplate these terrible events from the wide lens of Christianized history.

  Still, early in the spring of 1647, she felt an ebb in her spirits. As she wrote the lines that described the last king of the final, “fourth monarchy” (the Romans)—“The government they change, a new one bring, / And people swear ne’er to accept of king”—Anne stopped abruptly.20 Even while she was contemplating the exile of the Tarquins from Rome, Cromwell and his men were resolving

  that it was our duty . . . to call Charles Stuart, that man of blood, to account for the blood he has shed and mischief he has done to his utmost against the Lord’s cause and people in this poor nation.21

  Present reality was suddenly more powerful than historical tales. The parallels between the past and present must have been overwhelming. Anne knew, with a sudden shock, that her grand idea was not bearing fruit and that her poem was not living up to her expectations. She complained, “Essays I many made but still gave out, / The more I mused, the more I was in doubt.”22 It was hard to admit that her “endeavours” had failed, but Anne acknowledged to herself that her poem was only barely limping along. It was time to halt, regroup, and change course, and only a woman so dedicated to her craft would have had the courage to admit this.

  If there was no point in trying to flog dead words into life, Anne may also have been downcast that she was due to lose her new friend, John. In 1647, only a year after their move to Andover, Woodbridge had received a summons to return to England to fulfill a momentous duty. The leaders of the Puritan army wanted a New England minister to guide their negotiations with the king, who had been captured for the final time. Apparently an American Puritan seemed more neutral than his English counterparts and was therefore more acceptable to the suspicious Charles. Woodbridge came from a substantial family; he had a reputation for piety, but he had not actually raised arms against the king like so many of his English counterparts. Mercy and Anne trembled at the thought of losing him, even if only for a few months. Without Simon or John, they would have to struggle together in the frontier.

  As for Woodbridge, bidding farewell to his wife, children, and his friend and sister-in-law was painful. Perhaps as a kind of consolation for his grief at departure, John sailed for England with a collection of Anne’s poems by his side. This emissary act would turn out to be a momentous event for both Anne and America, but how it came about, no one knows. Did Anne hastily put the finishing touches on her manuscript and place it in John’s hands? Perhaps this accounts for the abrupt stop to “The Four Monarchies.” Did he urge her to let him have a copy to remember her by?

  There were others who might have been involved, too. Perhaps Ward had urged Anne or someone in her family—John or her father—to send her new poems to him. John could not have proceeded very far in bringing Anne’s work to England without her father’s blessing also, and undoubtedly Simon’s as well. The Dudley and Bradstreet names were at stake.

  Certainly, Dudley had a vested interest in getting Anne’s poems to England. He was hopeful that English Puritans would read his eldest daughter’s manuscript with admiration so that he and his family could recoup their pride in their family name. Sarah’s disgrace had brought shame upon their lineage. For Dudley, Anne’s verse was a sign of God’s grace, and her skill reflected positively on him as a Puritan father. Perhaps one daughter’s heresies could be redeemed by another’s piety.

  Whether he, Simon, or even Woodbridge expected the poems to be published is unclear. What is evident is that they wanted the manuscript to circulate in the right circles. What better way to advertise the New England way than with Anne’s prodigious learning and skill? It was time for English Puritans to read her words and be amazed at the spokeswoman America had produced.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Tenth Muse

  Is it possible? . . . It is the work of a Woman, honored, and esteemed where she lives.

  — JOHN WOODBRIDGE, “Epistle to the Reader”

  TO SURRENDER HER MANUSCRIPT was brave on Anne’s part, as she must have known her poems would not stay in John’s luggage for long. He believed the public should read her poetry, and although he would later claim that she knew nothing of his plans, Anne could hardly have been ignorant of the fact that her team of supporters would try to circulate her manuscript around important circles in England. If her fans succeeded with their ploy, her work might well be condemned. As she had once remarked to her father, any poetic prowess on the part of a woman might lead critics to say she had stolen her lines from another poet.1 It was impossible, after all, for many people to believe that a female could write skillful poetry.

  With potential hecklers in mind, she had written a last-minute prologue to her largest, most ambitious poem, “The Four Monarchies.” Immediately she sounded her note of humility, declaring:

  To sing of wars, of captains, and of kings,

  Of cities founded, commonwealths begun,

  For my mean pen are too superior things:

  Or how they all, or each their dates have run

  Let poets and historians set these forth,

  My obscure lines shall not so dim their worth.2

  But of course this was what “The Four Monarchies” set out to do—to chronicle wars, generals, kings—exactly what Anne said was too challenging for her to tackle. A less “feminine” subject was hardly imaginable, and so Anne tried to save herself from attack by complaining that unlike the male poets she admired—Du Bartas, Sidney, and the Greeks—her muse was “foolish, broken,” and “blemished.” Acknowledging
her vulnerability, she wrote, “A poet’s pen all scorn I should thus wrong, / For such despite they cast on female wits.”3

  But Dudley’s pride ran in her veins, and unable to remain entirely humble, she took issue with this last point, just as she had in her elegy to Queen Elizabeth.

  Let Greeks be Greeks, and women what they are

  Men have precedency and still excel,

  It is but vain unjustly to wage war;

  Preeminence in all and each is yours;

  Yet grant some small acknowledgement of ours.4

  She did not mean to threaten men’s primary position in the universe, she argued, but male “precedency” should not blot out the achievements and gifts of women. All male critics had to do was to bestow upon female writers even a “small” appreciation for their abilities. Canny politician that she was, Anne never claimed women’s talents were “small,” only that male “acknowledgement” was.

  When Woodbridge finally arrived in London, he could not at first concentrate on promoting Anne’s work, as he was thrust immediately into mediating between the king and the emissaries from Parliament. Helplessly, he watched Charles rebuff the attempts of the leaders to make peace. As the truculent Commons became increasingly impatient with the king, John understood that the crisis was escalating and that the worst was bound to happen. Inevitably, he would be stuck overseas for an indefinite amount of time, and so he sent for Mercy and his children, perhaps wishing he could bring Anne over as well.

  But Mercy traveled without her sister, and by the time she landed on her native shore, it was evident that the talks between the king and his people had come to a standstill. This was a terrible blow to men like Ward and Woodbridge. On the bright side, however, John was released from his duties as a mediator and could now devote his time to the poems of the sister-in-law he so admired.

  The first thing he seems to have done was to collect testimonials from men with worthy reputations, attesting to Anne’s merits as a writer and as a pious Puritan. Ward soon joined him in this endeavor, contributing his own celebratory verse as well. After a few months, Anne’s advocates had gathered twelve pages of prefatory poems by well-respected pious men to supplement the manuscript. These poems praised Anne’s faithfulness and modesty, assuring the reading public that this verse was the product of a virtuous woman and not some fame-seeking troublemaker. It was common to have a few pages of such support, not unlike modern-day blurbs on the back of a book, but this was far more than was usual and illustrated her supporters’ zeal on her behalf as well as their awareness of the criticism she faced as a woman writer. All in all, eleven individuals (including Ward, Woodbridge, and his brother, Benjamin) wrote commendations of her work.5

  Meanwhile, Charles had been caught trying to persuade the Irish and the Scots to invade the country. He now appeared to his enemies to be the most pernicious traitor in the history of the land. Reconciliation appeared impossible. Woodbridge, Ward, and other moderate Puritans were heartbroken at the shipwreck that loomed. The angriest citizens, many of them Puritans, shouted that it was time for a trial to put the villainous monarch to the test.

  To Ward and Woodbridge it must have seemed the perfect time to celebrate Anne and the mission she stood for. Both men believed she was an example of all that was exceptional about Massachusetts, and her poems were an excellent advertisement for the Christian venture in America.

  But just as she had predicted, even though she was not yet published, suspicions had begun to circulate about the truth of her performance. Had this New England woman really written these poems without male assistance? How had she managed to acquire so much learning? And where did her metrical talents come from? Was she actually only a “Du Bartas girl,” a female who had purloined her lines from the poetry of the French Protestant heavyweight?6

  It was time to squelch these vicious doubts. Ward showed the manuscript to his own publisher, Stephen Bowtell, and somewhat surprisingly, Bowtell decided to publish this unknown colonial woman without delay. Nothing, he suspected, would sell better during these turbulent times, with the Puritans controlling the country, than the verse of a pious Puritan woman from New England, if only because of the curiosity factor. Besides, any author recommended by Ward would have been in favor with Bowtell, as The Simple Cobbler of Aggawam had been an extraordinary success for the time.

  Back in Massachusetts, possibly unaware of their efforts on her behalf, Anne felt abandoned. For the first time in her life, she had no family around her—all of her sisters and her father were far away. The year after John’s departure, she gave birth to another son, whom she named Dudley in an attempt to cheer up her father, whose spirits were probably still sagging from Sarah’s blows to his family’s reputation. But even the healthy delivery of a new baby could not make up for her loneliness. Of course, she was actually hardly ever really by herself, but her crowded household of children and servants, all dependent on her, may have made Anne feel even more alone. Apart from Simon, home only rarely, nowhere could she find an intellectual or spiritual equal. Resourceful as ever, Anne decided that, bereft of friends, sisters, mentors, and her husband, she would have to view this loneliness as an opportunity to cleave more closely to the Lord.7

  Always serious about her religion, she became even more committed to an interior discipline of prayer and meditation, and her poetry began to reflect this change. With the last words of “The Four Monarchies,” she had decided to give up writing such showy, learned, political poetry. Now, instead of reading tomes of history, she went for long walks by herself in the woods near her house.8 The settlement had grown large enough to make it safe to wander down by the gentle curving river, although it was unwise to stray any farther.

  The news from England was more and more terrible. By 1649 the king, far from being above the law, had been declared by Parliament guilty of treason. On January 30, after donning two shirts so that he would not shiver in the cold and be thought fearful, he gazed up at heaven one final time, quietly laid his head down on the block, and was beheaded before a huge mob that miraculously remained silent until after the royal blood spilled onto the ground. Immediately, English Puritans sent gleeful accounts of the gruesome event to their contacts in the New World. But Anne’s friends and family were not so quick to jump on the bandwagon.

  Even though she disparaged his behavior, his papist tendencies, and especially his traitorous dealings with the Irish, Anne was shocked. After all, Charles had been the king. Graphic reports made their way to Massachusetts. One eyewitness said the Puritans had lowered the height of the chopping block so that if Charles struggled, they could hold him down. Of course, as it turned out there was no need, since Charles had too acute a sense of history and theater to resort to such a last-minute wrestling match. Reportedly, though, the king’s last words concerned such details:

  King. “It [the block] might have been a little higher.”

  Executioner. “It can be no higher, sir.”

  King. “When I put out my hands this way, then —”

  Then having said a few words to himself, as he stood, with hands and eyes lifted up, immediately stooping down he laid his neck upon the block; and . . . his Majesty, thinking [the executioner] had been going to strike, bade him, “Stay for the sign.”

  Executioner. “Yes, I will, and it please your Majesty.”

  After a short pause, his Majesty stretching forth his hands, the executioner at one blow severed his head from his body; which, being held up and showed to the people, was with his body put into a coffin covered with black velvet and carried into his lodging.9

  Another witness recorded that “such a groan as I never heard before and hope never to hear again” emerged from the mob.10 Of course this famous sigh was as symbolic as it was bloodcurdling. Charles had met his execution with such dignity that even some Puritans could not avoid regarding him as a martyr. To a people raised on The Book of Martyrs, nothing guaranteed a following more quickly than submitting to a seemingly unfair public execution.


  Charles’s death annihilated centuries of English tradition. Certainly royal pretenders to the throne had been executed before, but no sitting monarch had ever been sentenced to die by his own people. Whether or not one supported his cause, his execution asked the English people to question what they believed and to whom they were loyal. As a result, people began to see that even kings were fallible, vulnerable to the will of the land, and not God’s chosen hand servants. There was a touch of empowered liberation to this sort of realization, as well as a growing cynicism. The future was frighteningly uncertain, and so it was only fitting that Cromwell, the military commander who rushed in to fill the vacuum, was compared to a rush of “three-forked lightning” by the poet Andrew Marvell.11

  With the sacred links to the past severed, England seemed a volatile place to be. Anne could not help worrying about John, Mercy, and Ward. Winthrop’s son Stephen, who was stationed in London, wrote home in consternation, declaring, “New England seems to be the only safe place where I believe we must come . . . at length if we can.”12

  Comparatively speaking, the colony did seem a far more peaceful and certain place than the Old World in the immediate aftermath of the execution. But then New England lost its own famous leader, John Winthrop. At the age of sixty-one, after a final illness, he died on March 26, 1649, in his home in Boston. For all but seven years of the colony’s existence, Winthrop had stood as its leader. To the colonists, the loss of both the king and their old governor in the space of two months seemed a double calamity. With Winthrop’s chair empty, the time seemed ripe for disaster to strike.

  Anne coped with these events the best way she knew how, through the writing of poetry. She set herself the task of penning an elegy to the dead king, whom she had hated but who she did not think deserved to die. Cromwell and his band of followers had decreed it traitorous to lament Charles’s death, but Andover was a long way from London and Anne was used to employing literary disguises. It was not difficult for her to come up with a device that allowed her to mourn the king and protect herself and her friends at the same time, although it must have seemed strange to think that they faced danger from other Puritans.