by Janet Todd
Generally unpopular because of her religion, Mary of Modena much appealed to Behn. She was a striking slender woman with dark hair and eyes. Indeed so riveting was the spectacle of female loveliness, of ‘Snowy Neck’, ‘Ebon Hair’ and ‘fair rising Breasts’, that Behn occasionally forgot that her subject was primarily James.33 She treated Mary to baroque Catholic imagery which stressed not only her natural beauty, but also her iconic robed majesty. Behn enjoyed theatrical effect and could accept the transformation wrought by robes and crown: she had seen the actresses with their smudged faces and mottled skins in the tiring-room translated into alluring beauties on the stage below the flickering candles.
The King and Queen lived on a plane above ordinary mortals and their sexual activities were beyond their subjects’—indeed, when it came to Mary’s much-awaited pregnancy, Behn would even suggest that they took longer to produce children. In the Coronation Ode, Mary was such a sexual force that she provoked joy ‘too fierce for any sense’ but the King’s. Considering the danger from the late King’s illegitimate son, there was some point to Behn’s insistence that Stuart monarchs would be best employed coupling with their divine wives.
In its use of the coronation only as an outward show for the benefit of the people, Behn’s Ode was politically correct in the Stuart mode. Power and government moved from one king to another at the moment of Charles’s death, as her elegy had indicated, and the coronation in the Abbey was there ‘not to make, but to confirm the King’. The Stuarts insisted on the absolutes of their power, the divinity of kingship. Even the cynical Charles II accepted the ceremony of touching for the King’s Evil or scrofula, suggesting that he too wished to be seen, in Behn’s words, as ‘True Representer of the Pow’rs Divine!’
At the climax of the crowning, her verse struggled for the condition of music to express ‘All Raptur’d Joy! all perfect Extasie’, the vision of ‘the third Heav’n... / Where Glory sits Enthron’d above the Stars’. The magnificent picture gives way to her political hope, echoing Nahum Tate in his poem in her recent Miscellany, that the new King will rule the people as a rider controls his horse:
You mount the unruly World with easie force...
The wanton Beast Restive with ease has lain,
And ’gainst the Rider lifts the sawcy heel;
But now a skilful hand assumes the Rein.
She never had much time for democracy. The people usually became brutes in her political analogies.34
The genre in which Behn was writing, the Pindaric ode, had the advantage of allowing the poet to concentrate on him or herself, as well as the person addressed. So the poet might allude to the need for money, providing it was couched in suitable terms. One of the attractions of James over Charles was his suffering. Both brothers had been in exile, but James had been shunted off to the Low Countries and Scotland since the Restoration, during the Popish Plot upheavals. He could thus provide a fine analogy for the poet, whose life had also been chequered and who had experienced toil, care and ‘Vicisitudes of Night’. James should be generous from sympathy. In view of her powers, Behn felt justified in making a claim on this generosity:
Oh Blest are they that may at distance gaze,
And Inspirations from Your looks may take,
But how much more their happier Stars they Praise,
Who wait, and listen when you speak!
Mine for no scanted bliss so much I blame,
(Though they the humblest Portion destin’d me)
As when they stint my noblest Aim,
And by a silent dull obscurity
Set me at distance, much too far
The Deity to view, or Divine Oracle to hear!
In other words, Behn would like now to be at court, as well as to be rewarded.
It seems a strange place to put in a claim for pay and position, but Dryden, who had received a great deal more than Behn had, used his elegy to point out that Charles had given very little to poets, expecting them to sing away and eat nothing. For Behn’s point, it was useful that Mary of Modena’s family had been patrons of the Italian epic poet, Tasso, and could be pictured as the embodiment of magnificent feudal patronage.35
Behn’s coronation poem must have pleased, since it was published in various forms and reprinted by the royal publisher in Scotland. One ‘Lady’ reader was especially impressed and responded by composing a Pindaric to Behn herself as ‘sole Empress of the Land of wit’, both masculine and feminine in cleverness and tenderness. This staunch ‘Lady’, sometimes identified with Behn’s successor as Tory poet and playwright, Delarivier Manley, thought that Aphra Behn should now be rewarded by the new King for her ‘unlabour’d Song’ with something substantial like a house. It would be called Arcadia in honour of the realm in which Behn had spent much of her imaginative life:
May the just Monarch, which you praise,
Daine to acknowledge this.
Not with a short applause of crackling Bays
But a return that may revive thy days;
And thy well-meaning grateful loyal Muse
Cherisht by that blest theam its zeale did chuse.
Maist thou be blest with such a sweet retreat,
That with contempt thou maist behold the great;
Such as the mighty Cowlys well-known seat.
Whose lofty Elms I wou’d have all thy own...
The new Arcadia shou’d the Grove b.e nam’d
And for the guift our grateful Monarch fam’d.36
It was a conventional plea. The poet Cowley had famously been unable to purchase a small house when he wanted to retire from the world until his patrons secured a lease for him. Behn, it is implied, is a female Cowley and should be treated as such. Alas, no house and grounds materialised, however. Her huge effort seems to have yielded her little in goods, money or status.
None the less, the new reign generally improved conditions for Tories and Behn could not yet have despaired. Titus Oates was convicted of the perjury he had long been practising and was whipped through the streets. The disapproving Burnet swiftly left the country and became a naturalised citizen of Holland, where he grew into a trusted confidant of both William and Mary. Dryden was confirmed as Laureate and the Whig Shadwell was blacklisted by the theatre. The Licensing Act was renewed and Roger L’Estrange, now knighted, returned to control the press. The attainder of treason was removed from Stafford. And The Rover was put on at court.
Chapter 25
Farewell to the Theatre:
The Luckey Chance and The Emperor of the Moon
‘We cannot help our Inclinations, Sir’
The serene first months of James II’s reign were interrupted by the event so long feared and predicted: the illegitimate and Protestant Duke of Monmouth made a bid to oust his uncle James and seize the throne.
Colonel Bampfield, who had loomed large in the dispatches of Scot and Behn from Antwerp in the 1660s, had been silent for many years. Now, having lost his position in the army, he resumed activity with more time on his hands than ever. Consequently, he was even more eccentric, garrulous and lugubrious. He had, however, something to tell, especially about the escaped rebels involved in the Rye House Plot, the most notorious of whom were Monmouth and Lord Grey.1 Sunderland suggested the government send someone over to Amsterdam to meet Bampfield and pump him. If Behn were approached because of her past, she had the good sense to decline the mission.
Monmouth was already raising loans in Holland for the enterprise: A great part of the goods made over as a security... were my lady Henrietta Wentworth’s, or her mother’s...’, confessed the wealthy Grey later.2 He and Monmouth chartered ships and purchased arms, while Turner (Lady Henrietta Berkeley’s ‘husband’) helped recruit about eighty men. James had pleaded with William of Orange to send Monmouth packing from Holland; yet it was from Holland that the Monmouth invasion was launched.
The rebels decided to land in Lyme Regis in the west of England, where Monmouth had once been popular. Because of bad weather the trip took
a lengthy eighteen days and James’s quicker agents had anticipated him with the news in Whitehall. On landing, Monmouth at once issued a declaration, mainly composed by Robert Ferguson, one of his more extreme followers: cautiously it claimed the throne, but incautiously attacked James for a multitude of fantastic crimes, including starting the Fire of London and poisoning Charles II.3 By now, the 80 followers had swelled to 6,000; they were equipped with some, but insufficient, Dutch arms and they remained a small and undisciplined army with which to face the trained militia of the King. Although one of his generals was the competent John Churchill, later Duke of Marlborough and victor of Blenheim, James modified his advantage by putting the inept Christopher Monck, Duke of Albermarle, in charge of the Devon militia. Monmouth’s cavalry was commanded by Grey.
The two sides met in an unglamorous way at Bridgeport. Grey fumbled and an officer asked Monmouth to replace Grey in future cavalry engagements. Monmouth refused. Then, on the night of 5 July, the rebels attacked the royal forces in the fog at Sedgemoor. Grey again mishandled the cavalry and his men fled the field, leaving the Duke and his infantry unprotected. After the rout that followed, Monmouth was advised by one of his few remaining supporters to take a boat for Wales from the nearby coast; from there he might escape to Holland. Grey persuaded him to go east—towards the Royalist soldiers.
On 8 July, the exhausted Monmouth was found asleep in a ditch, his pocket containing a manuscript book of spells and charms for combatting death in battle and opening prison doors. He was captured and taken to London. There he wrote childish and ill-ordered letters to James and his Queen, begging for mercy and blaming everyone but himself:
my misfortune was such, as to meet with some Horrid People that made me beleve things of your majesty, and gave me so many false arguements that I was fully led away to belive, that it was a Shame, and a Sin before God, not to doe it.
Now he had learnt ‘an Abhorrence for those, that put me upon it; and for the Action it self’.4
Monmouth was questioned by the King and Sunderland, tried and sentenced to death. On the scaffold he was as infatuated with his mistress, Henrietta Wentworth, as he had been in the previous years when they had ‘imagined themselves man and wife.... The poor duke alleged a pretence, very airy and absurd, that he was married so very young that he did not know what he was doing, and that my poor Lady Henrietta he regarded as his wife before God, and she was a visionary on her side.’ Facing death, he was more concerned with returning a talismanic toothpick case to his beloved than with his political place in history. So he wasted his critical, political moment on the scaffold.5
When Behn came to fictionalise the execution in the last and third part of Love-Letters, she gave Monmouth little sympathy. She made much of the toothpick case presented to him by Henrietta, so portraying him as the stereotypical would-be ruler destroyed by effeminating and uxorious love.6 She did not give the detail of the bungled death, in which the executioner failed to sever Monmouth’s head after five blows with his axe and was forced to cut off the rest of the neck with a long knife (unlike Tarquin of The Fair Jilt he was not saved by popular tumult). It was rumoured that James had ordered a blunt axe for his nephew.7
For Hermione (Henrietta Wentworth) and her ageing charms Behn did, however, display some final sympathy: she depicted her taking to her bed on the news of Monmouth’s end, vowing to starve herself to death—‘and she was as good as her word’. Outside fiction, Rochester’s friend Henry Savile diminished the event: ‘My Lady Henrietta Wentworth is dead, having sacrificed her life to her beauty by painting so beyond measure that the mercury got into her veins and killed her.’8 The demise of both was no doubt satisfactory to Sunderland, who had recently flirted with Monmouth and did not wish it known.
Behn was clear where she stood. James was the ‘Representative of Heaven’, the ‘Saving Angel, who preserv’st the Land’, a man ‘Soft and Forgiving, as a God’.9 Not everyone agreed with her. Judge Jeffreys, who had presided over the trial of Lord Grey for the abduction of Lady Henrietta Berkeley, was the main instrument of the new King’s sledge-hammering justice, and the judgements he meted out to the Monmouth rebels were gruesome. The offender was hanged, drawn—i.e. organs pulled out before dead—and then quartered, the limbs pickled and sealed in tar and dispatched about the country. The process was extremely expensive, at about 27s a victim. It was also long, so much so that often only two or three were dispatched in a day, and the punishing of a hundred or so seemed to last an age. Hence the exaggeration of the numbers killed. None the less, most regarded Jeffreys as bloodthirsty and not many praised him. One of those who did was Aphra Behn.
Jeffreys was fascinated with the theatre, and he and his wife often entertained the young up-and-coming actor, William Mountfort. Indeed lampoons suggested some intimacies, especially between Mountfort and Jeffreys’ wife. On one occasion, the tipsy Jeffreys had Mountfort mimic the quirks of his fellow judges and comically ridicule the law, to the grave disapproval of the more serious in the company.10 Not overly grave about the law herself, Behn may have been present at some of these unseemly revels, for Mountfort and his new wife, Susannah, began to appear in her plays about this time. Jeffreys was also a friend and associate of the subservient, trimming, and hedonistic Judge Wythens, now the husband of her poetic friend, the former Elizabeth Taylor.11
For Behn, Jeffreys, a handsome and witty man if his portraitist and she are to be believed, remained primarily a zealous Royalist who had, in her words, ‘so absolutely attach’d’ himself ‘to the interest’ of the King that he had no purpose in life except to serve him, despite the fact that he had been persecuted in the ‘Rabble-ruling times’ of Charles II. But, except for herself and Elkanah Settle, now as violent a Tory as formerly he had been a Whig, the poets did not rally to him. Loyalty, it seems, did not bring popularity. In the next reign, when the Monmouth Rebellion was mythologised as part of England’s fight for freedom, he would be demonised as a cruel monster, the ‘Western hangman’.
Nor did loyalty bring money for poets. After the Monmouth Rebellion, Behn had used her dedication to Lemuel Kingdon of the second part of Love-Letters to compliment him on his unobtrusive Royalism. Then she went on:
I am so good a subject that I wish all his Majesties work done by such hands, heads and heart, so effectual and so faithful, and then we shall fear no more Rebellions, but every man shall bask securely under his own Vine, that has one.—For my part I have only escap’d fleaing by the Rebels to starve more securely in my own native Province of Poetry....
Her situation was exacerbated by the fact that Tonson seems to have dried up as a source of loans and Behn had to borrow money else-where—although using him as surety. In August 1685, at about the time she was moaning about her poverty to Kingdon, she wrote an IOU to Zachary Baggs, later treasurer (and probably at this time sub-treasurer) of the United Company:
Whereas I am indebted to Mr Baggs the sum of six pound for the payment of which Mr Tonson has obliged himself. Now I do hereby empower Mr Zachary Baggs, in case the said debt is not fully discharged before Michaelmas next to stop what money he shall hereafter have in his hands of mine, upon the playing my first play till this aforesaid debt of six pound be discharged. Witness my hand this 1st August 85.12
She was still managing to spend her earnings before she received them.
To alleviate her immediate poverty further, Behn may surreptitiously have turned to an earlier standby, copying for money within a scriptorium of men and women. In the Bodleian Library, Oxford, is a manuscript verse miscellany of lampoons entitled ‘Astrea’s Booke for Songs & Satyr’s’, most of which was written between 1685 and 1688. It was copied by several people, one of whom, joining the manuscript late in 1685, on page 101, may be Aphra Behn. The handwriting resembles the clear script of Behn’s letter to Zachary Baggs, while, on the cover, is scrawled the subtitle ‘Bhen’s and Bacon’. ‘Beans and bacon’ was a common phrase, which Behn had met in Tatham’s The Rump, where the crude Parliamentar
ian, Desborough, is made to exclaim, ‘my colon begins to cry out beans and bacon. Possibly the bawdy and coarse satires copied into the manuscript were intended as antidotes for the nation.13 (If so, a restorative might have been the ‘sack possett’, for which a recipe was also provided.)
Writing and copying lampoons to exhibit ‘the Faults of the Great and the Fair’ was a thriving business throughout the 1670s and 1680s.14 The main operator was Robert Julian, often called ‘Secretary to the Muses’, who had famously lost his ears through his career in libel. He supplied material to poets such as Robert Gould (and possibly Behn herself), commissioned to write for a coterie clientèle. He also used scribes to copy works for distribution to individuals, coffee houses, taverns and brothels; Ravenscroft describes Julian as employing ‘too Clarks’.15 On the cover of ‘Astrea’s Booke’ the name of John Somerton is doodled along with ‘Bhen’, which makes it more likely that the manuscript was a commercial venture rather than a private collection. In 1684, Julian had been convicted of publishing libels on the King and others; he was put in the pillory and bound over for good behaviour for life. Successors immediately replaced him: Captain Warcup, possibly the father of Behn’s friend Emily Price, was dubbed ‘second scandal Carrier of the Town’ to the first, named John Somerton or Summerton.16 A fictitious letter to Julian from Brown’s Letters from the Dead also mentions ‘your Successor Summerton’, noting, as contemporary lampoons did, Somerton’s subsequent ‘madness’, during which the libelling business collapsed.
In the mid-1680s, Somerton was in his heyday as distributor and writer of lampoons and newsletters, and it is quite likely that he supplied Behn and other copyists of the manuscript with scurrilous works. Towards the end of the volume there is a list of names and addresses, in which New Street, Behn’s own place of lodging, figures more than once. There is also the name of the printer, R. Holt, whom she was using during these years, while on the cover but not in Behn’s hand, is the address in Paris of the Duke of Norfolk, Behn’s patron ‘Maecenas’.17 He might well have been one intended recipient of the manuscript through his Parisian address; the Duke himself was in England during these years. If Norfolk did read the manuscript, he cannot have relished it: it presented him as ‘a famous cuckold’ and masochist, sneaking into bed with his infamous relative, Moll Howard. Meanwhile, his wife, celebrated by Behn in her Coronation Ode, appeared ‘less sparing of her arse than eyes’; she was famed for her ‘Dissolute lewdness, falseness, and ill nature’.18 Perhaps, however, like insolent prologues, the lampoons were enjoyed by their victims: Tom Brown has Julian declare that noblemen wanted his libels ‘tho’ their own folly and their Wives were the Subject’.19
