The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (WOMEN IN HISTORY)

by Fraser, Antonia

  Barker had one persistent complaint: she ‘did always declare to her mistress and others that she had rather be put to drudgery and to wash the house than to live as she did, like a gentlewoman’. Pepys found this strange. Yet Barker’s outburst explains what a strain might be imposed upon an employee when her mere presence was expected to bestow social prestige upon a household – ‘qualities of honour or pleasure’ as Pepys put it, while complaining that Barker had failed to provide them.18 Like any equivocal role, that of gentlewoman could result in a failure of expectations on both sides.

  So the way was cleared for the arrival of Pepys’s great love, Deb Willet: a witness to the equivocal nature of the role (as had been in their different ways Pall, Gosnell, Ashwell, Mercer and Barker) but in yet another sense. At the beginning Deb only represented yet another attempt to find a suitable companion for Mrs Pepys; this time a mere child was chosen, the Pepyses hoping, no doubt, to avoid the independence of Gosnell and Barker. Deb had been at ‘the school at Bow’ for seven or eight years, and was said to be a model of good deportment. Mrs Pepys returned from a visit of inspection, reporting that Deb was ‘very handsome’. Pepys regarded this as good news about the prospective companion: ‘at least, that if we must have one, she should be handsome’. Alas, the handsomeness of Deb was his – and ultimately her – undoing. In vain she performed such duties as accompanying Mrs Pepys to the theatre, dancing and playing cards with admirable gravity and modesty. Her good looks aroused the passionate jealousy of Mrs Pepys, a jealousy which was certainly not without foundation, since Pepys, finding himself quite unable to resist the perpetual physical proximity of Deb, had embarked on a series of daring amorous explorations.

  One night after supper in October 1668 occurred an incident which in Pepys’s words’ ‘occasioned the greatest sorrow to me that ever I knew in the world’. Deb was combing her master’s hair – not in itself a proof of intimacy, since this hygienic duty was usually performed by maids. Unfortunately Mrs Pepys, arriving suddenly upon the scene, ‘did find me embracing the girl con my hand sub su coats; and endeed, I was with my main in her cunny’. It was impossible even for Pepys to gloss over such a flagrant discovery (although he tried). There was a violent scene; the episode led in the end to Deb’s dismissal. Pepys, full of ‘love and Pity’ for her, accepted her departure with anguish; he also warned Deb solemnly against allowing anyone else to take those same liberties to which he had so freely helped himself.19

  Hannah Woolley, author of several books on domestic practice and conduct under the name of her first husband, wrote out of her own experience. She was born in 1623 (her maiden name is unknown), learning ‘Physick and Chirurgery’ from her mother and elder sisters, but was early on left an orphan. However, before she was fifteen, she was entrusted to keep a little school of her own, by dint of her exceptional ‘accomplishments’.20 Hannah Woolley lists these (note the relatively low position of writing and arithmetic):

  Needlework of very different sorts

  Bugle-work

  Framing pictures

  Setting out of Banquets

  Making salves and ornaments

  All manner of Cookery

  Writing and Arithmetic

  Sweet powders for hair, or linen

  At the age of seventeen she was enabled by these same accomplishments plus the additional asset of speaking Italian and playing several musical instruments to attract a ‘Noble Lady Patron’ who took her into her household to act as governess to her daughter. This lady taught her further ‘Preserving and Cooking’, introduced her to court and kept her for seven years until the children had all grown up.

  The original role of governess developed into something more consequential. As Hannah put it: ‘Time and my Lady’s good opinion of me constituted me afterwards her Woman, her Stewardess, and her Scribe or Secretary. By which means I appear’d as a person of no mean authority in the Family.’ Hannah was proud of the fact that she read aloud daily to her employer poems, plays and romances (for which she had to learn French, one accomplishment hitherto lacking); she also took great trouble with the letters which she wrote for her.

  At the age of twenty-four, Hannah married the master of a Free School at Newport Pond, Essex, by whom she bore four sons, as well as taking in boarders to her school. The Woolleys then moved to Hackney, the centre of genteel education at the time, where they kept over sixty boarders. Mr Woolley died about the time of the Restoration, but in 1666 Hannah married for the second time, one Francis Challinor, a widower of about forty-five. In 1674 she was to be found living in the house of her son Richard in London near the Old Bailey – as a Master of Arts and Reader at St Martin’s, Ludgate, he constituted an advertisement for an intelligent mother – and she was probably still alive ten years later.21

  Hannah Woolley began writing at the time of her first widowhood, presumably in order to support herself. Unfortunately she found herself enduring some of the less attractive aspects of an author’s career: one rogue publisher had her proofs revised by a different hand and another did not pay her. The book in question was The Gentlewomans Companion, and Hannah later issued a supplement to her second book, The Queen-like Closet, to correct the record. Her first books were however centred on the purely domestic arts; such as The Ladies Directory in choice experiments and curiosities of Preserving and Candying both Fruits and Flowers, printed in 1661. She moved on to issues of social behaviour, and later related details of her own life story, in order to enable other women to survive as she herself had done. Apologizing for the personal details, she explained that she had been prompted to write by ‘the mere pity I have entertained for such Ladies, Gentlewomen and others, as have not received the benefits of the tithe of the ensuing accomplishments’.22 It was to her knowledge of these vital arts and artifices as listed above, as well as to her ability to write and add up, that Hannah Woolley firmly ascribed her own survival.

  So that while Hannah Woolley wrote with the traditional and understandable bitterness of the female educationalist about the preference shown to boys – parents cared for the ‘barren Noddles of their Sons’, sending them to university, while the fertile ground of their daughters’ brains was allowed to go fallow – she did not herself ask for university education for women, or indeed anything like it.

  Hannah Woolley complained indeed about the decline of standards of education among her own sex: ‘Most in this depraved later Age think a Woman Learned and Wife enough if she can distinguish her Husband’s bed from another’s’ was one of her gibes. She criticized the men who looked upon women merely as instruments to propagate their families, and were not interested in their minds. She was also, as we have seen, a strong believer in the ‘treasury’ to be laid up by education, ‘by which they [unmarried women] may live without an Estate’. Education would enable such women to gain ‘some honest and creditable Employment’, she wrote; as a result ‘their position will be so established that nothing almost but sickness and death can make an alteration therein’.23

  But how far, how very far removed were the requirements of Hannah Woolley – based of course on those of society – from that ‘modish’ Latin and Greek which had once entranced the great ladies at court at the end of the reign of Elizabeth I, or indeed that ‘ebri grek and laten’ to which Nancy Denton had aspired in the Commonwealth period, to the disgust of Sir Ralph Verney! (See p.170.)

  Hannah Woolley put particular emphasis on the art of carving; she had acquired it herself early in life from her ‘Noble Lady Patron’, and it did of course enable a gentlewoman to exercise public authority over the rest of the household; Hannah gave elaborate hierarchical instructions on how to distribute the best bits in meat and fish (remember that the cod’s head was considered a great delicacy). She reminded her gentlewomen that it would appear ‘very comely and decent’ to use a fork.24 Her special plea that a gentlewoman should not lick her fingers at a meal not only suggests that many people of the period did, but also that a genteel manner at table was more likely to
aid an unprotected woman to get on in the world in the reign of Charles II and his successor than all the knowledge which had once filled the august head of Queen Elizabeth I.

  The fact that the developing special nature of female education was in itself a restriction was perceived by very few people of either sex at this time. During that period of Puritan revolution when exciting new ideas concerning universal education were promulgated – if not put into practice – by men such as Hartlib, Dury, Petty and Robinson, girls’ education received scant attention. Only John Dury’s ‘Noble School’ was adapted to the requirements of both sexes; although girls were intended to become ‘good and careful housewives’, those capable of learning ‘Tongues and Sciences’ were to be given encouragement. (Dury may have been influenced by the stern attitude of his wife Dorothy, who wrote a letter to the pious Lady Ranelagh headed ‘Of the Education of Girls’, attacking the general frivolity.) Hartlib, Winstanley and others were more interested in equipping girls from the lower classes in crafts such as weaving.25

  One of the few who did appreciate the danger of the divide was Basua Makin. Like Hannah Woolley appalled by the decline in education, Basua Makin, unlike Hannah, was concerned to restore or at least promote the study of Hebrew and the classics. She determined to run a girls’ school guided by this principle.

  Basua Makin had excellent credentials to found the most fashionable establishment, apart from the fact that she may have been associated with a set of girls’ ‘schools or colleges’ at Putney in 1649, visited by John Evelyn. The sister, as we have seen, of John Pell the learned mathematician (another brother, Thomas Pell, had been Gentleman of the Bedchamber to Charles I), she had a particular claim on the loyalty of the newly Royalist society in that she had been governess to Princess Elizabeth, that sad little sister of Charles II who had died in captivity at Carisbrooke Castle. As a result, this Princess at least had enjoyed an elaborate education including Hebrew as well as Latin and Greek (unlike her aunt and namesake Elizabeth of Bohemia, denied the classics by her father, James I, because Latin had the unfortunate effect of making women more ‘cunning’).

  The education afforded to the next generation of Princesses, Mary and Anne, daughters of James II, then Duke of York and heir presumptive to the throne, stood in astonishing contrast. How ironic that Basua Makin’s passionate plea of 1673, An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentle-women, In Religion, Manners, Arts and Tongues. With an Answer to the Objections against this Way of Education, should be dedicated to Mary, Princess of York, principal among all ‘Ingenious and Vertuous Ladies’! For in the upbringing of Mary and her sister Anne, born in 1663 and 1665 respectively, domestic accomplishments were in fact stressed to the exclusion of virtually everything else. Yet these girls, as the children of the heir presumptive, stood in direct line to the throne from the moment of their birth, and in this age of high infant mortality there must always have been a distinct possibility that at least one of them would inherit it.

  As a concession to their place in the Stuart family tree, it was thought important that these young Protestant hopes should be able to recite Anglican – as opposed to Catholic – prayers, but otherwise Mary and Anne could be safely abandoned to their favourite pastimes of whist and basset (another card game). Where education was concerned, the Princesses did learn French: Pierre de Laine’s French grammar, published in 1667 when she was five, was written for Princess Mary, and a second edition for Princess Anne. Otherwise they were taught to sing and draw and dance (Mary was an especially graceful dancer), but that was the limit of their preparation for life. When Basua Makin wrote in anguish that all young gentlewomen were taught nowadays was ‘to frisk and dance, to paint their faces, to curl their hair and put on a whisk’26 she might have been describing the princesses’ own fate.

  Tragically late, it seems to have been borne in upon Queen Anne that she was lacking in some of the essential equipment of a monarch; it was said to be ‘an unhappiness’ to her that she was not much acquainted with English history and the reigns and actions of her predecessors: ‘she beginning to apply herself to it but a little while before King William died’. For all these last-minute efforts, Queen Anne as a monarch, with no magisterial co-ruler, no William III at her side, did display a lamentable ignorance of history and geography; while her grammar and spelling were both deplorable. (Only her good grounding in French, that traditional female accomplishment, but also of course the language of diplomacy, was to be admired.)27

  As for Queen Mary, in effect a consort not a ruler, it was hardly surprising that in adult life she displayed few intellectual ambitions. Instead she concentrated on those gentle pursuits such as ‘knotting’, bugle-work to make bead bags, crewel-work and other forms of embroidery beloved of well-bred English ladies of her time. These were the refined accomplishments, the study of which Hannah Woolley advocated in order that a gentlewoman would appeal to her mistress: skill in such matters was certainly essential to the ladies surrounding Queen Mary. Celia Fiennes gives a picture of the Queen and her Maids of Honour embroidering away for dear life at Hampton Court.28 The poet Anne Countess of Winchilsea was aware that she was a scornful exception when she described herself as one who would not participate in such trivially pointless crafts:

  … In fading silks compose

  Faintly, the inimitable Rose,

  Fill up an ill-drawn Bird, or paint on Glass,

  The Sovereign’s blurred and undistinguished face.29

  To many women, to Mrs Pepys for example, who adopted the new fashionable passion for decorating objects with shell-work, such accomplishments betokened the leisure to have mastered them, and such leisure, like the employment of a gentlewoman, was the outward symbol of their rising social status. In this way amateur music publications rose as amateur singing extended, and the pursuit of painting – ever considered a suitable hobby for a lady – increased too. It was true that in certain rare cases painting might lead to professional employment. But the real motive which inspired a young lady to learn to paint or ‘limn’ as The Ladies Dictionary phrased it in 1694 (where ‘limning’ headed the list of a lady’s permitted recreations, followed by dancing and music and finally reading) was hardly to support herself; it was to bequeath ‘rare moments of her ingenuity to posterity’.30 The moments of her actual ingenuity may have been rare; but the hours of leisure which stretched about them were not. So the lady limner also bequeathed to posterity, along with her creative efforts, the message that she had been gracefully unsullied by any other occupation.

  It will be seen that the Princess Mary was indeed an inappropriate dedicatee for Basua Makin’s Essay of 1673, a work in which she was much concerned to break the tacit embargo by which women were not allowed to study the classical languages. ‘Tongues are learnt in order to [learn] things’, she cried. As for the old witticism: ‘Many say that one tongue is enough for a woman’, Basua described that angrily as ‘but a quibble upon the word’. Furthermore Basua pleaded for education so that women could ‘understand Christ’. She did not suggest that women of ‘Low parts’ (the poor) should be educated; what she was anxious to do was to break down that dreadful idle way of life common to women in society, by which they learnt when young ‘merely to polish their Hands and Feet, to curl their Locks, to dress and trim their Bodies …’ and so were incapable of any finer way of life, including the enrichment of their own souls, when older.31

  Moreover in her Essay, Basua Makin was already toning down considerably her original demands concerning the scope of female education. In 1663 she had called for a curriculum based on that of the celebrated Dutchwoman Anna van Schurman, with whom Basua Makin had kept up a correspondence (in Greek). This included the study of grammar, rhetoric, logic, physics, mathematics, geography, history, and all languages, with Greek and Latin stressed, as well as painting and poetry. Anna van Schurman, the friend of Descartes and Richelieu, as well as the exiled Elizabeth of Bohemia, was another Helena who had been well instructed by her father; the vigour
of her intellect equalled its emancipation: ‘By what right indeed are certain things alone apportioned to us? Is it God’s law or man’s?’ she wrote. Her influential work appeared in England in translation in 1659 as The Learned Maid, in which Anna van Schurman even suggested that women should be able to study the theory of military discipline if they so desired.32

  In one respect however the great Anna van Schurman was mistaken. Citing the celebrated women of the previous century, such as Queen Elizabeth I and Lady Jane Grey, she supposed Englishwomen to enjoy exceptional freedom. In fact this kind of high-born female concentration on learning and learned discussion, and thus by implication on the preparatory education necessary, was by this period to be found far more widely on the Continent than in England.

  Madame de Maintenon, the austere mistress of Louis XIV whom he married privately after his Queen’s death, was as keen an advocate of the education of poor girls of good family as Hannah Woolley or Basua Makin, but with a great deal more influence to bring to bear on the subject. She had set up several little schools before the famous school for 250 girls at Saint-Cyr was founded under royal patronage in 1686, Louis XIV taking a keen interest in the details. After the King’s death in 1715, Madame de Maintenon chose Saint-Cyr as her own place of retirement.33

  A passionate interest in female education was not a marked characteristic of any of the mistresses of King Charles II, nor would it be appropriate to regard the King himself as obsessed by this particular aspect of the female development (although he did patronize the education of poor boys, particularly in mathematics, leading to his own pet topic of navigation).34