Aphra Behn: A Secret Life

by Janet Todd

  Behn mocked the pig-like Oates whenever possible—although she did not, like other denigrators, allude to the homosexual practices for which he had been dismissed as a sea chaplain. He had a complicated past: ordained in the Church of England, converted to Catholicism, Oates had travelled to Valladolid where he failed to study for the priesthood, and to the seminary of St Omer, from which he was expelled. This limited but first-hand knowledge was invaluable when he made the implausible claim that he had carried treasonable material between the Jesuits in St Omer and England. Forged letters were produced and Oates even made their ineptitude incriminating: Jesuits wrote in disguised hands, he declared.

  The decisive event came on the evening of 17 October 1678: Sir Edmund Bury Godfrey was found dead in a ditch. According to the insatiably nosy Gilbert Burnet, the body was bruised and the neck broken, and, it was thought, Godfrey might have been strangled before being moved and pierced with his own sword. The contemporary recorder, Narcissus Luttrell, noted that his stick and gloves were carefully placed against a hedge, and his money and watch left in his pocket; so there could be no suspicion of the murder as part of a common theft.

  Had Godfrey died of natural causes? Had he killed himself? Had he been killed by Roman Catholics as a known persecutor? Or had he been killed by dissident Protestants to lay suspicion on the Catholics and stir up trouble?4 Court Catholics saw Godfrey as a depressive who had committed suicide, the strangling coming after to give the appearance of murder (which his family would wish since a suicide’s goods were confiscated by the state). The overwhelming belief of the populace was that he had been done to death by Roman Catholics.

  Once a respected, austere, and melancholy man, Godfrey now grew mythical.5 His death had occurred by Primrose Hill, in earlier times apparently called Green Bury Hill: Green, Berry and Hill were the names of the three hapless men who were condemned for his murder. Months later, the sky went dark for half an hour in morning service, as Godfrey’s ghost walked the earth, appearing significantly in Queen Catherine’s Catholic chapel.

  If Aphra Behn expressed her opinion at the time, it was privately or anonymously, but, a few years later, when several sensible people doubted aspects of both murder and Plot and when the court Catholics were in the ascendant, she declared them clearly: the whole lying edifice had been constructed of false ambition, corrupt judiciary, Church and Parliament playing on ‘the restless People’, she wrote. Godfrey was a ‘Melancholy Self-Murtherer’, whose death was used for mischievous political ends.

  After Godfrey’s death, Titus Oates could spread his net wide. The Duke of York’s part in the plot had so far been minimised, but he had a weak flank in his former secretary, Edward Coleman, a fanatical Catholic convert with grandiose ideas. Coleman had been sending letters to Louis XIV’s personal confessor, ludicrously urging on both the French king and the Pope to intervene in English affairs. His papers proved a gold mine, condemning him and tarnishing James. The Duke was discovered apologising to the Pope for the marriage of his daughter Mary to the ‘heretic’ William of Orange.

  Oates also lighted on the Queen’s physician, Sir George Wakeman, who was supposed to help with the poisoning of the King, as well as Charles’s mistress, the Duchess of Mazarine. He implicated an assortment of Catholic noblemen, including the ageing Viscount Stafford, Behn’s acquaintance from the journey to Antwerp. With the country raised to fever pitch, Charles II did not withstand the pressure, and five Catholic lords, including Viscount Stafford, were taken to the Tower at the end of October for allegedly plotting to kill the King.

  The winter of 1678–9 was given over to hysteria. Chalices and other Catholic bric-à-brac turned up everywhere and a warren of underground rooms and passages was allegedly discovered under London. Guards were posted on buildings, every noise was investigated, and the King was urged to tighten security about Whitehall, changing locks and preventing free access. Committees and tribunals met and dissolved. As Burnet later put it, ‘believing was then so much in season, that improbabilities or inconsistencies were little considered’. Rochester wrote, ‘things are now reduc’d to that extremity on all sides that a man dares nott turne his back for feare of being hang’d.’6 It was beyond the control of the King, Parliament or the governing classes.

  Catholic servants were seen as a fifth column and several were imprisoned on suspicion that they would kill their masters or burn their houses. The Queen and the Catholic royal mistresses, the Duchesses of Mazarine, Cleveland and Portsmouth, discreetly dismissed some of their Catholic retainers—although, as a Protestant, the Duke of Monmouth managed to keep his Catholic barber for the best part of another year. Much hatred was directed at these ladies, especially at the Duchess of Portsmouth, a direct emissary of Louis XIV and seen as a national disease and contaminator of the King. It was happy for Nell Gwyn that her wit reputedly came to her aid when, in Oxford, she was stopped by a hostile mob which took her for her French rival. She is supposed to have quelled the militant crowd by shouting, ‘Pray, good people, be civil; I am the Protestant whore.’ But in fact no whore of the King could have felt entirely secure.

  Booksellers and printers had much to gain from the furore and presses were in constant production of pamphlets, broadsides, and summaries of trials and confessions. But cashing in on the Plot was not entirely safe. The evidence on which people were being arrested was after all mainly textual, a matter of letters and notes, and it was easy to fall from zeal into sedition.

  The crisis led to an outpouring of political comment by such theorists as John Locke and Algernon Sidney, which set the terms of political debate for centuries to come. Yet there was an old-fashioned ring to pamphlets of the time. The monarchy was reeling but Tories could think of nothing beyond restating the old theory of divine monarchy, formulated before the Civil War had shown how easy it was to kill a king. Meanwhile, the Whigs fell back on theories of Roman republicanism which had done duty several times before. Beyond this restated difference, both sides were shocked by the power of the mob or ‘Mobile’, and both were increasingly aware of the influence of public opinion.

  As patriot and national hero, Titus Oates had been installed in Whitehall; he now affected gorgeous episcopal dress—silk gown, lawn sleeves, rosettes and rose scarf. He was romancing with impunity and had even reached the childless and Catholic Queen, something of a sitting target. The King, who had failed to carry out Catholic policy with enough alacrity, was to be poisoned using the Portuguese ambassador or, if this failed, the ‘Queen would procure the Doing of it’ with her doctor, Wakeman. Even Godfrey’s murder was now placed in the Queen’s apartments at Somerset House, although the informants had difficulty pointing out the rooms when questioned.

  Behn liked this no more than the King. She admired Catherine as royal and dignified and, when she addressed her formally six years later, she called the accusations ‘Perjuries... black and foul’. Happily the Queen displayed ‘Steady Graces’ becoming analogous to ‘our Blest Saviour’ when taunted and pierced with thorns:

  ...Heaven (to make the Heroin understood,

  And Hell it self permitted loose abroad,)

  Gave you the Patience of a Suffering God.

  Behn was as quick to make kings and queens into Christ and God as the opposition was to turn them into devils and Babylonian whores.

  Your pretious Life alone, the Fiends disdain’d,

  To Murder home, your Vertue they prophan’d;

  By Plots so rude, so Hellish a Pretence,

  As ev’n wou’d call in question Providence.

  Charles put the matter less exaggeratedly: the Queen was ‘a weak woman, and had some disagreeable humours, but was not capable of a wicked thing: and considering his faultiness towards her in other things he thought it a horrid thing to abandone her’. He was firm in his support, even if his declaration fell short of Behn’s rapture: ‘This the Great Lord of all Your Vows beheld, / And with disdain Hells baffl’d rage repell’d.’7

  At the end of the year Behn’
s friend and fellow playwright, Henry Nevil Payne, was seized; he sensibly proclaimed his Protestantism. Medburne, the Catholic actor and translator of Molière, had less opportunity and he died in prison.8

  It was at this inconvenient moment, at the end of the year, that Parliament became aware of the secret Treaty of Dover of 1670, entered into by their King with his cousin, the King of France. The revelation had come about partly through scandal.

  In the summer of 1678 Savile wrote of ‘terrible doeings att Paris betwixt my Lady Cleaveland and her daughter Sussex.... whilst ye Mother was in England the daughter was debauched by our Embassdr Mr Montaigue’.9 Anne, Countess of Sussex, had already shocked her mother by becoming intimate with the King’s bisexual mistress, the Duchess of Mazarine.10 Since Mr Montague had been the lover of Barbara, Duchess of Cleveland herself, the mother was not best pleased to find her daughter her rival. She wrote a stream of horrified and indignant letters to Charles as the girl’s father and Montague’s employer, accusing the ambassador of openly criticising the King and plotting against his ministers. Montague hurried to England to clear himself, but was sacked by his irate employer. He bided his time, schemed with Shaftesbury, and then revealed the correspondence between Charles and Louis XIV in which he himself had taken part. This showed the government offering peace with France and the reconversion of England in return for a subsidy which would render Charles independent of Parliament. The revelations reinforced the damage of Coleman’s letters. Popery and arbitrary government became fused in the popular mind.

  By now, the first executions were occurring; a Catholic banker who was said to have been prepared to kill the King was followed in early December by James’s ex-secretary, Coleman, condemned by his own injudicious writing. He was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn on 3 December, expecting to the last a reprieve from those he had served. He was a warning to all agents and spies and confirmed the power of the letter to save or destroy.

  The uproar in the nation hit playwrights in their pockets. The theatre faced stiff competition from courthouses and public tribunals, and, along with the other dramatists, Behn moaned that this ‘cursed plotting Age’ had ‘ruin’d all our Plots upon the stage’.11 At the same time the Plot spurred political play-writing, which gained authority by analogy and could be commissioned by both sides. However, Behn as a woman had to be careful. So often rebellion was seen in gender terms, with armed revolt being masculine and insidious subversion feminine; it would be easy for a woman to be regarded as a covert plotter. If such as Queen Catherine could be suspected, a female playwright who had already invoked an image of the whorish woman would be fair game.12

  Although she remained cautious now, when times became propitious Behn retrospectively praised the one man who stood firm and had to go into temporary exile for his firmness: Roger L’Estrange, the royal propagandist and censor. He had the distinction among apparent Protestants of being openly against Titus Oates from the beginning, trying to rescue ‘the World from stupid Ignorance’. Behn agreed with his version of the Plot as a matter of perjury rising from national decay:

  Grave Judges, Church-men, and whole Senates now,

  Ev’n Laws and Gospel, were corrupted too.

  By these misled, the restless People Range

  Into a Thousand Errors, New and Strange;

  To every God, to every Idol-Change.

  Unknown Religions first their Poyson hurl’d,

  And with New Lights Debauch’d the giddy World;

  Not the Rebellious, Stubborn Hebrew Race;

  More falsely forbidden Worships did embrace.

  Hence Universal Feuds and Mischiefs rose,

  And Friends to Friends, Parents to Sons, were Foes.

  The Inspired Rabble, now wou’d Monarchs Rule,

  And Government was turn’d to Ridicule;

  ...Perj’ries, Treasons, Murthers, did ensue,

  And total Dissolution seem’d in View.13

  In such unstable times, code was the mode: playwrights could allude to political events, rather than stating what could not easily be repudiated if things took an unexpected turn. A useful device was the pointed revision of Shakespeare who was beyond prosecution. Otway turned Romeo and Juliet into Caius Marius, Edward Ravenscroft adapted the bloody Titus Andronicus into an horrific picture of civil strife, while Dryden used Troilus and Cressida to present a vision of political corruption.14 Another device was the Roman play, like Nat Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus, which showed the turmoil that accompanied the ending of a monarchy. These serious Tory plays warned against confusion in the state, but the fear of anarchy they overtly displayed did not quite eradicate the other fear of tyranny, the obsession of the Whigs.

  Behn was not in the habit of using drama to air great political questions, and she had no patron or commission to write direct propaganda. Also it was more politic to suggest the falseness of appearance and the equivocation of signs than to declare the Popish Plot fraudulent. In Sir Patient Fancy she had already shown she agreed with Dryden in opposing the virulent power of extreme Puritan speech, which she saw as creating public fear. Unlike him, she concluded that farce more than tragedy was an appropriate response. In the crisis she assumed the public might want something jolly in tone. It was a gamble, however, and she put on her new play, The Feign’d Curtizans, in the early spring of 1679 with some trepidation.15

  Behn chose to circumvent the charges of plagiarism levelled at Sir Patient Fancy and The Rover by providing an original play. Inevitably, though, there were loud echoes, both of herself and of earlier playwrights. While she never admitted she had overstepped the limits of propriety, Behn also made sure her new work did not offend morality quite as thoroughly as Sir Patient Fancy, and there are more conventionally misogynous lines.

  The Feign’d Curtizans was set in Italy, in Catholic Rome, where, as in The Rover and The Dutch Lover, vengeful southern patriarchs made the alternative to marriage not spinsterhood but the convent or the brothel. The setting might have been intended to compliment Mary of Modena, the young second wife of the Duke of York, who had married an English man as Behn’s two heroines do in the play. (In 1673, when she was fourteen, Mary had been forced to relinquish her desire for a convent to marry the almost forty-year-old widower Duke of York—to the dismay of the Protestant citizenry. She was beautiful, her dark fragile looks contrasting with the heavier features of James, his recently dead first wife Anne Hyde, and their daughters Mary and Anne. Her strange presence was caught in the lampoons that greeted her arrival, including one ascribed to the Earl of Rochester which became extraordinarily popular called Signor Dildo. Since this instrument was hardly a novelty in England, it is unclear why it should have become entrenched in the entourage of the teenaged bride. If the setting were a compliment—there is evidence Behn joined Elizabeth Barry in admiring the young Duchess—then it was mistimed since, in the month of the play’s production, the Duke and Duchess of York were forced into expedient exile. In any event, Rome had more obvious significance, especially when the play concerned amorous plots which turned out to be trivial and when the Roman girls who pretended to be whores were revealed as chaste. The whore, ‘La Silvianetta’, like the Great Whore of Roman Catholicism, existed only in the imagination.

  Behn did not need to underline the point, but she did so in her prologue all the same. Like The Rover, which she said could not be popular since it was set during a ‘popish carnival’, she argued that her new play must be damned because set in Rome (and because wit was considered ‘Jesuitical’), rather hoping that the play would have the same success as its predecessor. In fact not much is made in the play of Rome as the centre of Catholicism, and the church functions, as it usually does in her works, as a place of assignation and amour. As one lady puts it, she goes to St Peter’s with no ‘other Devotion, but that which warms my Heart for my young English Cavalier’.

  The Feign’d Curtizans follows The Rover in concerning Behn’s usual group of intermeshed young people trying to form themselves into
suitable couples. Various virtuous virgins have escaped to Rome, where, confusedly, two of them take the whore’s name of La Silvianetta. They meet the usual band of desirable and desiring Englishmen: Belvile and Willmore are transformed into Sir Harry Fillamour and Galliard, Florinda and Hellena into Marcella and Cornelia. Galliard declares the libertine creed of the momentary state: he will not love till hair and eyes change colour, for he hates ‘the lazy stay’. Desire, he announces, ‘knows no time but the present’ and he has Willmore’s robust, misogynous attitude to rape when he exclaims that, in Roman times, ‘noble Rapes, not whining Courtship, did the Lover’s business’. In fact, however, he is far less devil-may-care, much less drunken than Willmore. Hedonism, so criticised by moralists, could now only be lightly expressed. Yet, this hedonism becomes the only defence against factionalism and intolerance. When Fillamour rails against the times that caress the coward, reward the villain and give beauty to fools, Galliard declares it all ‘Mere accident’—there is no need to read providence into history and so breed anger and fear. Galliard’s hedonism is not preferred to the more romantic passion of Fillamour, any more than Willmore was preferred to Belvile in The Rover, but he gets the best lines and the wittiest lady.

  Cornelia expresses a libertine contempt for the reputation and status her sister holds dear. Although disguised as a courtesan, Marcella remains alarmed at the word and Cornelia reasonably responds, ‘can you be frighted with the vizor, which you your self put on[?]’ Indeed, the disguise has revealed to Cornelia how much there is of life she did not know. The knowledge is not what a virtuous woman should have, for now she concludes that, if Marcella’s lover fails to rescue them,

  we have no more to do than to advance in this same glorious Profession, of which now we only seem to be:—in which to give it its due, there are a thousand satisfactions to be found, more than in a dull virtuous life.16

  She has a point in the context of Restoration London, where the rewards of warming the King’s bed, or even that of a man less elevated, were certainly substantial and most working women in the theatre were ‘kept’ at one time or another. Although Marcella urges: ‘However we may rally, certainly there’s nothing so hard to woman, as to expose her self to villainous Man,’ Cornelia knows that virginity must be sold in some way.17 Either the girls market themselves or they return home, where Marcella must be disposed of to an ogre and Cornelia, like Hellena, pent up in a convent to secure more capital to her family. Remembering the dissatisfied nuns she had seen in Flanders, Behn gives Cornelia the usual grumble against enforced incarceration: she would ‘whistle through a Grate like a Bird in a Cage’. Whilst Cornelia acts wildly in the short crucial interval between childhood and marriage, however, she does not go as far towards libertinism as the married Lady Fancy. In the end, she remains like Hellena a libertine only in sentiment, though when the comedy and masquerade are over she tries to salvage something by declaring she will be a most mistress-like wife.