Margaret the First

by Danielle Dutton

  I set down a letter from William’s daughter Jane. “It is against nature for a woman to spell right,” I bristled. William only kissed my cheek. “Such ill-informed, seditious readers,” he calmly said, “should exist beneath a marchioness’s notice.”

  January, February, March.

  One anonymous critic claimed that when he read Poems & Fancies his stomach began to rise—for Jane saw fit to send each notice the book incurred. Some readers were cross a lady had published at all, others that she had written of vacuums and war, rather than poems of love. William ignored the talk. He fenced and rode horses when the fashion was pall-mall. Still, I felt rotten, felt low. I hid and wished, or nearly wished, I had not published at all. I completely avoided the cabinet where my earlier writings lay. The days were short and dull, the garden in its thaw. Antwerp’s blue-gray cobblestones went slick with rain and moss.

  At last a mild evening: we took our supper outside, the leaves still off the branches, the stars so clear in the sky. Over pigeon pie and cherry compote, we spoke of his new horse. When I set aside my fork, William produced a note. “A letter has come from Huygens,” he said, “who’s been traveling in the south.” He turned a page and read: “It is a wonderful book, whose extravagant atoms kept me from sleeping last night.” The blood whirred inside my head. “What’s this?” I managed to say. Here was a letter from Huygens—who mattered!—Huygens, who’d read my book. I could hardly hear the rest as William read aloud: something, something, something, vibrating strings, my book!

  Thus by the time the spotted tulips blossomed, the nastiness of London seemed far across the sea. Indeed, it was a lovely spring. The sky was in the pond, the larks above. I tried to name each of the flowers we saw: double violet, lily, double black violet, plum.

  William left Antwerp for a hunting trip in the Hoogstraten.

  I, at last, unlocked the cabinet in my room.

  THERE LAY EVERYTHING I’D WRITTEN BEFORE BEING SENT TO London: essays, puzzles, anecdotes, rhymes. Did I expect a trove of gems? I found some worthy ideas, but no structure to the mess. Still, it had to work—it must!—for there is more pleasure in making than mending, I thought, and I named it after an olio, a spicy Spanish stew (a pinch of this, dash of that, onions, pumpkin, cabbage, beef), sitting to pen a defensive preface: “This is to let you know, that I know, my Book is neither wise, witty, nor methodical, but various and extravagant, for I have not tyed myself to any one Opinion, for sometimes one Opinion crosses another; and in so doing, I do as most several Writers do; onely they contradict one and another, and I contradict, or rather please my self, since it is said there is nothing truly known.”

  Reading it back, I realized I believed it.

  I was busy with two new pieces when a letter arrived in the mail: in the rented house in London, Sir Charles was stricken by ague. A week later, dear Charles was dead. William, just returned from the hunt, fell suddenly ill at the shock.

  I split my days, so split myself: it was mornings with my husband, afternoons at my desk. My thoughts spun round, like fireworks, or rather stars, set thick upon the brain. Truly I mourned Charles, yet every afternoon I lit up like a torch. In one essay I called the Parliamentarians demons. Gold mines, I argued, could not be formed by the sun. My fingernails went black from the scraping of my quill. Few friends came to the house. Had I lost what friends we’d made? It was one thing to write riddles for ladies, another to do what I’d done.

  Still, the summer invitations would arrive . . .

  And so: at a soiree at the Duartes’ I sat in black between Mr. Duarte and a visitor from Rome. I’d come alone—William too ill to attend—and grew sleepy on French wine as the two men spoke Italian across my chest all night. Finally, over boiled berry pudding, the Duartes announced a surprise: their eldest girl was pregnant, the pretty one who’d sung like a bird, now resting with her hands across her belly in a chair. Everyone raised a glass. I raised a glass. I looked around me, sipped the wine. To many healthy babies, I agreed. Yet I sank down into a private wordless rage, the fury of which I could not explain. I ordered the carriage, returned to the house. When William asked how the evening had gone, I snapped. Surely I had no time for such silly affectation. Only my work and my sick husband mattered. Nor was it easy labor. How many pages a day? How many days? Until, in the first fine week of autumn, as the branches in the orchard bent and wasps went mad with fruit, I set aside my quill. I’d finished my second book.

  It was Michaelmas and William was recovered.

  Now I myself fell ill.

  William wrote to Mayerne that I was bilious, passed a great amount of urine with specks of white crystals in it. The doctor wrote back: “Her ladyship’s occupation in writing of books is absolutely bad for health!” And what if it truly was? But if anything, I insisted, I’d only just begun, was off, at last, and thirty- one. I might be praised, I might be censured, but my desire was such, I explained, it was such . . . but I could not find the words. Judiciously, steadily, William worked to get me out—from my bed, my room, the house—and for his sake, I rallied. I promised him I’d lead a more sensible life.

  Of course, by this time my manuscript was already off to London.

  So one night, returning from a circus—monsters, camels, baboons, a man with sticks for fingers, a woman with soft brown fur—we opened the door to The World’s Olio arrived in the publisher’s crates.

  WHILE ONE BOOK IN THE WORLD MIGHT BE CONSIDERED AN anomaly, two books, it seemed, sounded an alarm. The lady is a fraud! Even if the books were ridiculous, how could a woman speak the language of philosophy at all? I hadn’t attended university. They knew I didn’t read Latin. It fell to reason a man was behind my work—writing it, dictating it, or even perhaps unknowingly the victim of my theft.

  But hadn’t Shakespeare written with natural ability?

  Every tree a teacher, every bird?

  Alone in my room, I fought with the air: “If any thinks my book so well wrote as that I had not the wit to do it, truly I am glad for my wit’s sake!”

  DEFENDING A SECOND BOOK QUICKLY LED TO A THIRD. Philosophical and Physical Opinions, 1655. In it I argued all matter can think: a woman, a river, a bird. There is no creature or part of nature without innate sense and reason, I wrote, for observe the way a crystal spreads, or how a flower makes way for its seed. I shared each page with William, often before the ink had dried. It put me at odds, he explained, with the prevailing thought of the day. But how could the world be wound up like a clock? It was pulsing, contracting, attracting, and generating infinite forms of knowledge. Nor could man’s be supreme. For how could there be any supreme knowledge in such an animate system? One critic called the book a “vile performance.” But another said my writing proved the mind is without a sex!

  At dinner parties now, I was sometimes asked to account for myself, to speak of my ideas. I very rarely could. Bold on the page, in life I was only Margaret.

  Still, Antwerp, the parties, my husband’s talks—all of it fed my mind. I’d hardly set down my quill before I took it up again, writing stories unconnected—of a pimp, a virgin, a rogue—strung up like pearls on a thread. This one, my fourth, called Natures Pictures, was something of a hit. It opens with a scene of family life—men blowing noses, humble women in rustling skirts—and closes somewhat less humbly, I admit, with “A True Relation of My Birth, Breeding, and Life”—in which, for the sake of history, I describe in my own words my childhood in Essex, my experiences of war, my marriage and disposition—in short, my life—and ultimately declare: “I am very ambitious, yet ’tis neither for Beauty, Wit, Titles, Wealth or Power, but as they are steps to raise me to Fames Tower.” O minor victory! O small delight! My star began to rise.

  ANTWERP

  1657

  I PAUSED IN THE HALL BEFORE GOING IN TO EAT. “I’VE HAD IT,” William spat, “with this damned unending war.” I took a spoonful of chestnut soup. “Yes,” I said, and watched him as he chewed. He finished his dinner in silence,
hulked off to his room. Alone with the duck and a vase of roses, was I to blame for his mood? The latest round of gossip had rattled him, I knew. “Here’s the crime,” he’d said in a fit, “a lady writes it, and to entrench so much upon the male prerogative is not to be forgiven!” He’d defended me at every turn. Yet lately he’d been riled. And for my part—riled, too—I decided simply to busy myself with the summer as best I could.

  There was a housekeeper to hire.

  A neighbor starting an archery school on the opposite side of our fence.

  A portrait to sit for—or rather, I stood.

  And Christina, Queen of Sweden, was on a European tour.

  Of course I’d heard the stories, impossible to avoid: how the queen drew crowds in Frankfurt and Paris, where one lady, shocked, wrote that her “voice and actions are altogether masculine,” noted her “masculine haughty mien,” and bemoaned a lack of “that modesty which is so becoming, and indeed necessary, in our sex.” She wore breeches, doublets, even men’s shoes. She smoked. She’d sacked Prague. She wore a short periwig over her own flaxen braids, and a black cap, which she swept off her head whenever a lady approached. Most importantly, she’d be traveling to Antwerp next, and Béatrix in her castle would host a masquerade.

  A Gypsy, a flame, a sea nymph? I wondered what to be.

  Late one night, with the ball still weeks away, a messenger banged on our door. Voices from the courtyard, footsteps down the hall—I found William in the parlor and a letter on the floor. The Viscount of Mansfield, Charles Cavendish, Charlie, his eldest, was dead. A “palsy” was how the letter writer put it: raised a glass to his lips and choked on the lamb. “Inconceivable,” William choked. He muttered to himself. Only thirty-three and alive last week. I reached out for his hand. Was there anything he needed? But he didn’t see that the fire smoked. He didn’t hear me leave. I stepped into the courtyard, where out under the whirling stars I prayed for a grandson, many grandsons, legions of grandsons for William, who sat in front of the fire with the blankest of looks on his face. I watched him through the windowpane as through a room of glass. Later, too—tossing, restless—I watched as if from another world as he sweated through his sheets. He took a glass of brandy. He drifted off at last.

  Next came a flurry of letters, back and forth. William grew suspicious, suspected the widow—of what? And Henry, so long a second son, was quick to claim his dead brother’s title, even as his sisters begged him to delay, ensure that Charlie’s widow wasn’t pregnant with an heir. William shouted at servants. He fired the cook, rang the bell. Meanwhile, feeling so far from my husband’s grieving, I felt strangely aware of myself. My face in the mirror was only one year older than Charlie’s had been last week. How odd that I could still feel like a girl, be made to feel it, feel the cold floors of St. John’s Green beneath my feet—“Picky Peg,” my brothers called me—yet my neck was beginning to sag, the skin grown soft and loose. I was all discontent. Angry, in fact. At Charlie for dying so suddenly, at Henry for causing William to suffer, at William for letting his children upset him as much as they did.

  A week passed with hardly a word in the house.

  I worked at poems, he on his book about manège.

  At last, one night, he asked me to sit up with him, and I agreed to a small glass of wine. We settled on a sofa near the fire. A quiet rain was falling. A dog in the corner scratched. My husband began to cry. “Now my best hope is that his widow will be pregnant.” He choked back a sob. “A link to poor Charlie,” he sighed. He took out a handkerchief, blew his nose: “Of course, I do not blame you.” I put down the glass of wine. “Blame me for what?” I asked. He fiddled with a ring. “I will never hold our disappointment against you,” he finally said. His words, though softly spoken, meant, I saw, he did.

  So, a carrying on of patterns: in and out of rooms, watching windows, imperceptibly closing doors. When the night of Béatrix’s party arrived, William was dressed as a captain. I emerged from the marble staircase in layers of gauze and yellow silk. “A beehive?” he asked, and offered me his arm.

  Birds still chirped in branches. The night was warm, bright with moonlight and the lanterns off carriages that lined the gravel drive. Once inside the castle, William wandered left, I right, glancing through rooms, over tables lit by tulips, and out the windows to stars. In elaborate gilded bird-beak masks, partygoers passed me. Even the music was like a dream, a foreign, pulsing air. And there, in the bustling courtyard, I spotted her at last—Christina, Queen of Sweden. She was dressed as an Amazon. Her entire breasts were bared, her knees. O excellent scandal! O clever ladies’ chatter! But privately I admired the queen’s gold helmet and cape, and her hand that rested lightly on the hilt of her handsome sword.

  The following morning, a messenger rang the bell. William was out atop a horse, so I received the note. The widow was not pregnant. I asked the cook to fix his favorite meal. Over a pie of eels and oysters, I gently broke the news. “It will all be for the best,” I said. I didn’t say it might be best for the widow as well. I didn’t say: There’s no telling a child will be any comfort to its mother at all.

  WHEN THE SCHELDT FROZE THIS TIME, I STOOD AT THE WINDOW, watching Antwerp’s well-to-do slide by. Their sleighs, gliding, were lit by footmen with torches. William easily persuaded me to go out. Bundled in blankets, we rode to the shore, to revelers skating, vendors selling cakes and fried potatoes under lamps. The frozen expanse glistened in the dark, icicles licking the pier like devil’s tongues. William stepped down and waited for me to follow. And—oh!—how I longed to go, to dance with him on incorporeal legs. But I couldn’t. Or I wouldn’t. He climbed back up. We turned around. William looked strangely heartbroken, and we rode through the streets in silence. Then alone at my desk, I imagined a frozen river in me: “a smooth glassy ice, whereupon my thoughts are sliding.”

  ANTWERP TO THE CHANNEL

  1658–1660

  WHEN YOUNG KING CHARLES II CAME FROM PARIS TO VISIT HIS brothers (the dukes) and sister (now Princess of Orange), William proposed a ball: “Opulent, of course, yet fittingly refined.” We stuffed Delft bowls with winter roses—their petals tissue-thin—and draped the painter’s studio in silk. Dancing was of the English country style, with arched arms and curtsies, embroidered twists and knots. “Lavish,” it was whispered. And sixteen hired servants carried dinner on eight enormous silver chargers—half through the eastern door, half through the west, meeting at a table in the center of the room. I managed the evening from a confluence of my own, a merging of myself, my present and my past, as if half of myself were here, myself, while the other half was still in Oxford clutching the queen’s fox train. Back then I’d been but a maid—and awkward and shy—whereas tonight I was a marchioness and seated beside the king. “Did you know,” he leaned in close, “you are something of a celebrity in London?” In truth, I’d heard as much. Still, I blushed as pink as the ham. “And it seems your husband’s credit,” he winked, “can procure better meat than my own.” At two in the morning, we toasted the Commonwealth’s downfall. And seven months later, by God’s blessing, Cromwell was dead.

  WILLIAM WAS HUNTING IN THE HOOGSTRATEN WHEN THE NEWS hit. In Paris, Rotterdam, Calais, Antwerp, exiles danced in the street.

  Cromwell was dead.

  I was at my desk.

  Then, a creeping kind of peace. For some months nothing happened. There were skirmishes, flare-ups, but nothing of any substance. Not until December of the following year was William confident of a speedy restoration. He began, in delight, to compile a book of counsel, to be handed to the young king at some sympathetic moment. “Monopolies must be abolished,” he wrote. “Acorns should be planted throughout the land.” But above all else—and here he was firm—the king must circulate, must be as a god in splendor, and make the people love him “in fear and trembling love,” as they once loved Queen Elizabeth, for “of a Sunday when she opened the window the people would cry, ‘Oh Lord, I saw her hand, I saw her hand.’ ”
/>   He could not wait to be home.

  But what could home mean now? To what did we return? Through my open bedroom window came the sounds of morning: the clip-clop of a horse’s hooves, the steady hum of bees. I’d lived in exile half my life, in marriage nearly as long. There was the familiar wooden gate, the leafy garden path. Once, it’s true, I’d wished the war would end, so we could live at Welbeck, where I knew William longed to be. The children in their beds, I’d thought, peacocks on the lawn. But the war had never ended, or it had not ended for us. I’d long ago stopped waiting for home to come.

  Still, the king’s words were never far from my mind. A celebrity, he’d said.

  Now William finished his book of counsel and had it bound in silk.

  I ordered two new gowns: one white and triumphant like a lighthouse, one bruised like autumn fruit.

  FIREWORKS, SPEECHES, GUN SALUTES, A BALL. IN APRIL OF 1660, THE Hague celebrated with King Charles II. William rushed to his side. He hoped to be named Master of the Horse, but his reception was cool, the little book went unmentioned, and that post of honor was granted to a handsome new courtier named Monck. Snubbed—even as Marmaduke was made a baron, Lord Jermyn an earl—William refused an invitation to join the king’s brother on the crossing, hired an old rotten frigate, and left alone the following day. He never returned to Antwerp. He sent a letter instructing me to remain where I was, a pawn for all his debts. His trip took an endless week—they were becalmed in the middle of the passage—but when finally he saw the smoke and spires of London, his anger passed to joy. He said: “Surely, I have been sixteen years asleep.”