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

by Fraser, Antonia

  The twentieth of August brought an anguished letter from Constance Pley to Pepys; £15,000’s worth of goods delivered, and still no payment! From this she ‘can apprehend nothing but an approaching ruin, unless speedy relief be granted; £6,000 owing is wanted this month and next’. She ‘must end her days in sorrow for meddling in this affair, and bringing in Colonel Reymes and other friends to suffer with her’.22

  The summer of 1665 was one of gathering crisis, and not only for the Government’s many creditors. The first ominous signs of plague were seen in London in June; by August the capital was paralysed. Pepys, making his will, wrote on the tenth that the town was so ‘unhealthy’ that a man could not reckon on surviving more than two days. The King and the court had already gone to Oxford; even more to the point the Exchequer had moved to the old palace of Nonsuch in Surrey. The King’s minister, Arlington, engaged in finding funds for a spring campaign, complained of the difficulty of raising money at that distance.23 For Mrs Pley it was the difficulty of getting paid.

  Trade was of course as adversely affected as everything else dependent on the busy working hum of a capital city. The rich merchants and their families, like the courtiers, fled. Many of them took refuge on ships moored on the river Thames from Greenwich to Limehouse.24 Mrs Pley heard from one of her correspondents, Richard Fuller, that every day was like Sunday in the City of London; not one merchant in 100 was left. She enclosed Fuller’s letter with her own, since Fuller was one of those who protested that health and rest were being ‘snatched from him’ because Mrs Pley could not meet her obligations, and that she was ‘going about to murder him’. At all points Mrs Pley took the responsibility for the business upon herself; payment must be forthcoming, so that ‘the reputation of her husband and Colonel Reymes, who were drawn into the business by her advice, were not shipwrecked’.

  In the meantime George Pley at St Malo, animated by something of his mother’s determined spirit, seized every opportunity to trade despite the French ‘vapour’ or threat of impending war. A small English ship which had sailed on to the French rocks in error, and thus had the right to ask for help to get on its way, was used to send canvas, yarn and hemp back to England. But as Constance Pley told Pepys in December, things brought in by ‘stealth’ inevitably cost most; she must be paid something out of the Prize Office, for that at least was enriched by the proceeds of wartime capture at sea.25

  At last some payment came. Mrs Pley’s immediate ambition, after she had recovered from her abundance of joy, was ‘once more to fill the King’s storehouse which is very empty’. But the new year brought with it no halcyon period either for England or the Pleys. In January 1666 Mrs Pley was once more begging on her knees for £500 out of £2,000 owed for goods manufactured in the West Country, to ‘stop the mouths of the poor people in her employ’. By late February she described herself as so short both in purse and credit, that she ‘scarce dares show her face’. She suffered from a conviction that her appeals were being neglected just because they were so perpetual, but necessity left her no choice. As she told Pepys, if only a special clerk could deal with her on business matters, she could avoid these endless personal applications. Her ultimate threat was that she would come up to London herself and sort matters out.26

  All the time the people at the centre were not without sympathy for Mrs Pley’s case: in the middle of April Thomas Middleton wrote to Pepys, ‘Madam Pley complains much for want of money; it would be a pity to let so good a manufacture of English canvas fail for want of encouragement.’ The trouble was that the King’s financial situation, and that of the country as a whole, was parlous; the Fire of London, coming in high summer to cleanse away the dreaded plague, was in a financial sense a further disaster. In the summer of 1667 the Dutch successfully raided the Medway. Mrs Pley was given ‘assignments’, i.e. first call, on the Navy tallies at the Guildhall; but in March 1668 Sir William Coventry was telling Pepys that Mrs Pley had written in despair that she could not even secure these payments. Surely ‘the burning of London cannot go so deep in the Royal aid … as to hazard her money’, Coventry commented. In 1669 there appear to have been some orders to pay.

  The business intimacy between Colonel Reymes and Constance Pley, the respect which he felt for his ‘woman partner’, led to another venture being arranged between them. In the spring of 1666, a marriage was brought about between Tabitha Reymes and George Pley junior, the girl receiving a portion of £1,000. Public prosperity came to the Pley family following Colonel Reymes’s elevation as Vice-Admiral of Dorset. Captain Pley was made his deputy; George Pley junior Collector of Customs at Lyme.

  The name of the son born to George and Tabitha, Reymes Pley, commemorated the unusual – for its time – business association between the boy’s paternal grandmother and his maternal grandfather. Was there another more romantic aspect – more usual for the time – to this association? Colonel Reymes, left a widower while still a vigorous man, was both attractive to women and susceptible to their charms; for example there was a neighbouring Widow Rodney whose ‘fair hands’ he wished to kiss, having had much delight from her ‘sweet and pleasant conversation’ in the course of a journey by stagecoach from London to Salisbury.

  The Colonel never remarried, and at his death he instructed his son via his faithful maid Hester Clinch to ‘burn all Woman’s letters’ that he found among his papers. The directive to his son to ‘keep fair with Mrs Pley’ was however the first and therefore most important instruction in this document; the letter-burning directive comes two paragraphs lower and is not connected to it.27 The Colonel’s attitude and language to Constance Pley was not that of a lover: she was formally and gratefully addressed as his ‘sister’. In his will he wrote; ‘I give to my sister Constance Pley (my very intimate dear friend and one whom I greatly value and do acknowledge to have been highly obliged by and as having received many obligations from her ever since I knew her) my great Diamond Ring already in her possession, desiring her to accept of it in Testimony of my thankfulness and constant owning her as such to my very last.’28

  Constance Pley was a ‘sister’ who was in a position to help Colonel Reymes with a series of loans when times were hard, such as at the beginning of the Dutch War; he borrowed as much as £400 at a time from her, although the amounts were always repaid. When Reymes wrote to Captain Cocke, Receiver for the Sick and Wounded, urging payment for Mrs Pley, he pleaded: ‘Pray be punctual with her, she being as famous a she merchant as you have met with in England, one who turns and winds thirty thousand pounds a year, and that even with … Sir George Carteret.’ He added: ‘She is also my friend.’ There is surely no need to doubt the truth or deny the strength of that description.

  And what of the she-merchant herself, what was her motivation? Beyond the particular family circumstances in which she found herself at the Restoration, part of the unusually small family unit, so that every member was needed to act, if the family business was to expand. Fortunately the inimitable and inquisitive Pepys was on hand to ask her. On 16 January 1666 Mrs Pley replied to one of his letters, which does not survive, but clearly contained an inquiry. She explained that several of her family had died years before – ‘being formerly deprived of her children’ – and more recently her surviving daughter ‘within the space of four months was married and buried’. Since then, Mrs Pley wrote, business had been her ‘sole delight in this world … It is a charity to keep her in full employment.’29

  William Hazlitt reported a conversation among his friends in which all agreed that Oliver Cromwell ‘with his fine, frank, rough, pimply face, and wily policy’ was the only statesman in history they would wish to have seen.30 In any similar discussion concerning women born in the seventeenth century, Cromwell’s granddaughter Bridget Bendish must certainly have a strong claim to be selected on curiosity value alone. By general consent she bore an alarming – or exciting, depending on your point of view – physical resemblance to her grandfather.

  It was one pleasing aspect of the
Restoration that no vengeance was exacted from the Protector’s large tribe of relatives (although they had all, like putative princes and princesses, benefited from his supremacy). The Lady Protectress ended her days in peace in Northamptonshire with her son-in-law John Claypole; in general this particular Cromwell family sank back into the ranks of the gentry from which it had suddenly and so blazingly emerged. By 1670 King Charles II, in his genial way, was accepting the hospitality of Oliver’s second son Henry at his house near Newmarket. Mary Cromwell, who married the Yorkshire magnate Viscount Fauconberg towards the end of the Commonwealth period, went on superbly to enjoy the life of a great lady at court.

  Nevertheless the baleful image of Old Noll, warts – or pimples – and all, continued to fascinate the post-Restoration society which had survived him; the 1660s saw a number of plays in which Cromwell featured as tyrant, usurper and so forth, but always as the central character. After 1670 there were still plenty of people alive who could not only testify to Bridget Bendish’s physical likeness to her infamous progenitor – ‘if their imaginations can add a female dress, a few years in age, and a very little softening of the features’ – but also found in this resemblance a subject of cosy fascination.31 It was an added titillation that in her nature too, as well as her appearance, Bridget Bendish seemed to derive much from her grandfather, and some of the wilder, stranger elements in it; all this in the person of a married woman, later widow, living in Yarmouth and running a salt-works.

  Bridget Bendish, born Bridget Ireton in 1649 or 1650, was the fourth child of Cromwell’s eldest daughter Bridget, his anxious scrupulous ‘dear Biddy’, always worrying over the state of her own soul. Her father was Henry Ireton, Cromwell’s brilliant dedicated right-hand man. Ireton was left behind by Cromwell to rule over conquered Ireland, a career cut short by his death in 1651 at the age of forty. Young Bridget, who would have been eight or nine when her grandfather died in 1658, was thus quite old enough to remember him. In addition, Bridget was largely brought up by her grandmother the Protectress during the absence of her mother in Ireland; for Bridget Cromwell’s second husband Charles Fleetwood, another of her father’s associates, was also given command there.

  Bridget’s childhood memories then consisted of life in the protectoral palace of Whitehall (where incidentally something approaching royal state was kept, at least where the position and prestige of the Protector himself was concerned). At the age of six, she sat between her grandfather’s knees during a session of the Council of State. When one of those present objected, the Protector loftily replied: ‘There is nothing I would discuss with any one of you which I would not equally confide to that child.’32

  After the Restoration, Bridget lived for a while with her mother and step-father Fleetwood at Stoke Newington. In 1670 she married Thomas Bendish, a leading member of the Independent Church at Yarmouth on the Norfolk coast (a connection of that Sir Thomas Bendish, the Ambassador at Constantinople who had wearily ejected the Quaker Mary Fisher). Her grandfather, such a prominent supporter of the Independents during the Civil War period, would surely have been gratified by Bridget’s choice of bridegroom. In any case, Bridget Bendish, helped on by her early memories and fortified no doubt by a physical resemblance which grew stronger with the passing years, now constituted herself the unofficial guardian of her grandfather’s memory. ‘Ah, that was what I learned from my grandfather’ was a favourite observation33 – a good or at least impressive remark to be able to make, if your grandfather happened to be Oliver Cromwell.

  There was a famous incident when one of her fellow passengers in a stagecoach made some slighting remark about Cromwell, unwitting of the identity of his neighbour. On arrival in London Mrs Bendish challenged him – unsuccessfully – to a duel with a sword. Her aunt Mary Viscountess Fauconberg was, as has been mentioned, a great lady at the court of Charles II, her husband leading a distinguished diplomatic career under his auspices; although aunt would subsequently leave niece a substantial legacy, there was a moment when Bridget Bendish flew into a fury with Mary Fauconberg, on hearing her grandfather (and Mary’s father) disparaged under the Fauconberg roof. Bridget, with her usual passion, declared that if her grandmother had not been the most virtuous woman in the world, she would have believed Mary to have been a bastard. As to Oliver Cromwell ‘next to the twelve apostles, he was the first saint in heaven’.34

  It must be said that few, even among his most perfervid admirers, would have agreed with such a remark at any period in Cromwell’s lifetime. As to Oliver himself, his quizzical reception of the ecstatically reverential Lady Eleanor Davies (‘But we are not all Saints,’ – see p.305) shows that he would certainly have dismissed his granddaughter’s overweening championship with a smile and a shake of his head.

  The Bendishes settled down in South Town (once known as Little Yarmouth) on the outskirts of Great Yarmouth. There, on a marshy tract known as Cobham Island, for several centuries the property of the corporation and sold by it in 1657, lay the old-established salt-pans and refineries. The importance of the North Sea herring trade in the seventeenth century led to an equivalent emphasis being placed on salt. The ‘good red herring’ which abounded off the east coast of England (for which English and Dutch fishing-fleets competed) was either smoked or salted at the ports; salted fish was both a necessity in winter in the absence of fresh meat, and a profitable export to Catholic (Friday-fish-eating) Europe.35

  Salt-works being good business – indeed, the fishermen complained of the stranglehold which the shorebound salt-providers exerted upon their trade – the Bendishes lived in a handsome mansion nearby. Thomas Bendish owned farms as well as saltworks; until his death in 1707, Mrs Bendish worked alongside him in the conduct of his two businesses (including actual physical labour) as well as running her own household and raising three children. Her incessant love of drudgery, as it was seen by observers, reminded some of her grandmother the Protectress who had not allowed protectoral state to rob her of the pleasures of her own kitchen and household work. On Thomas Bendish’s death, his widow inherited an income of £2,000 or £3,000 a year and the handsome mansion, as well as the farms and salt-works with whose management she was already closely concerned.36

  For all the drudgery, there was something scintillating, even charismatic about the personality of Mrs Bendish, when she chose to exhibit that facet of herself. One who had known her described how she would be among her workmen ‘from the earliest morning to the decline of day; insensible to all the necessities and calls of nature, and in a habit and appearance beneath the meanest of them and neither suiting her character or sex’. After that, ‘having eaten and drunk almost to excess’ of whatever was put before her ‘without choice or distinction’, Mrs Bendish would throw herself down on to the nearest couch or bed and fall into a deep sleep. Then she would rise ‘with new life and vigour’, and proceed to dress herself ‘in all the riches and grandeur of appearance’ with a view to attending the assembly at Yarmouth. Here she would regularly appear, ‘one of the most brilliant there’, sparkling in the company ‘as a lady who once expected … to have been one of the first persons in Europe’.37

  In later life Mrs Bendish was remembered in company as a striking presence attired in black, what was by now being termed ‘the Quaker’s colour’; her dress would be of silk, with a scarf or hood (not then fashionable) of the same material. But among her workmen she was seen ‘stumping about with an old straw hat on her head, her hair about her ears, without stays, and when it was cold an old blanket about her shoulders and a staff in her hands – in a word, exactly accoutred to mount the stage as a witch in Macbeth’.38

  Politics continued to interest Mrs Bendish under the Stuarts, provided it was possible to strike out for the ideals she imagined her grandfather would have approved. She was involved to a small degree in that murky tangle, the Rye House Plot of 1683 (which led to the execution of William Lord Russell) and is said to have lobbied for the accession of William III. Queen Mary allowed Mrs Bendish t
o be presented to her by Archbishop Tillotson and there was some talk of a pension, although the Queen’s death put an end to the project.39

  In religion, she was an extreme Calvinist, some of her religious habits certainly bearing a strong resemblance to those of her grandfather in his early days: ‘she would retire to her closet, where, by fasting, meditation and prayer, she would work up her spirit to a degree of rapture, and then inflexibly determine her conduct by some text of Scripture that occurred to her, which she regarded as a divine revelation’. It was said that once ‘the vapours’ were raised by this method and ‘the animal spirits brought up to an unusual ferment’, no one could sway Mrs Bendish from her course, not even the ‘plainest evidence of the same Scripture against it.’40

  Was there a streak of the same depression in her nature which had caused Oliver as a young man to be categorized as valde melancholicus by Sir Theodore Mayerne? Dr Isaac Watts, a friend to Mrs Bendish, dedicated an ode to her entitled ‘Against tears’. If so, Mrs Bendish certainly possessed in full measure the other side of Cromwell’s complex character, the upswing which led Richard Baxter in Reliquiae Baxterianae to describe him as ‘naturally of such a vivacity, hilarity and alacrity as another man is when he hath drunken a cup too much’.41 As Mrs Bendish grew older, she developed a tendency to call on her friends at nine or ten at night (if the house was not shut up) and would often stay on till one in the morning; ‘she would on her visits drink wine in great plenty’, wrote a young man who remembered them. Hewling Luson was connected to the Cromwell family because his aunt Hannah Hewling (the brave Baptist maid of the West Country) had married one of Henry Cromwell’s sons. ‘The wine used to put her tongue into brisk motion, though’, he added quickly, ‘I do not remember that she was ever disgracefully exposed by it.’