Aphra Behn: A Secret Life

by Janet Todd

  ... while the Chosen Seed possess the Promis’d Land,

  I like the Excluded Prophet stand,

  The Fruitful Happy Soul can only see,

  But am forbid by Fates Decree

  To share the Triumph of the joyful Victory....

  ‘Ruin’d in the Universal Turn’, she was reduced to cataloguing her ‘Indigence and Lost Repose’ as her ‘Meager Furies’. She did not quite convey humility but she did catch the melancholy of a Muse without its lover, of a court poet without a king.

  In fact, her Muse was working fast, but what she had written was a remarkable Pindaric to Burnet instead of William. The replacement was not impudent, for it gave Burnet the role of agent of the Glorious Revolution. He it was who had helped make William the conqueror. It was a parodic version of the point to which Behn had long been tending, that the pen is mightier than the sword and that the state needs its writers. In her new configuration, James as usual remained the simple soldier, a sort of Trojan Hector. William became Odysseus, sly maker of the Trojan horse, who captured Troy by deceit before arms. Because, despite his army, William was not delivered primarily as a soldier, as he had been in Behn’s poem on Mary of Modena’s pregnancy, he could be seen the more as a creation of Burnet, who moulded him into the embodiment of power.

  Although Baber had earlier been rude about her royal portrait, in this poem as elsewhere Behn insisted that she followed L’Estrange in dealing with the ‘Truth’ when it came to the King. So James II had simply been delivered by history. Dealing in propaganda not truth, however, Burnet had to create a fictional image of the new ruler, William. It had all worked out well for him, and Burnet had made the fickle public accept the new order created in the time of ‘post-truth’. In other words, he had seduced the country with his pen—and, it is implied, made a nation of whores. (Significantly, Behn did not allude to the piece of Burnet’s propaganda which had been most effective: she had acknowledged that the Stuart monarchy had been shaken by the fiction of the Popish Plot, but now she omitted mention of his insistence on the fraudulent birth of the Prince of Wales.)

  Burnet’s would-be seduction of the nation was enacted in miniature with Behn herself. Her coy Muse became a humble but honest English maiden, enticed by the notoriously tempting cleric. She probably recalled Dryden’s lines in The Hind and the Panther of Burnet as a ‘portly prince, and goodly to the sight... Broad back’d, and Brawny built for Loves delight, / A Prophet form’d, to make a female Proselyte’.7 As the seducee, Behn was the inferior, a woman of the past, while Burnet was a man of the future. She was detached from power, while he was at the centre of the new regime; she was principled and poor, while he was flexible, unprincipled and rewarded; she was a writer only of feminine pastoral, while he was a master of all styles, now heroic, now honey-tongued, seducing with ‘Language soft as Love’.

  Despite these contrasts, all serving her claim to feminine humility, Behn also used code and allusion to undercut her surface point, that, being of the old order she must perish with it. She declared she laid no claim to heroic poetry, especially heroic panegyric—she ‘never durst, like Cowly, tune her Strings, / To sing of Heroes and of Kings’. Yet the claim was palpably absurd: Behn was even then addressing Burnet in Cowley’s heroic pindaric form and both were aware that she had just written reams of court poetry to two kings. At the same time, they both knew this to be a hoary poetic manoeuvre, used by the Latin poet Horace and by Cowley himself, a man who had had to shift and turn to cope with changes in power. He, too, had declared himself the ‘Excluded Prophet’ and then moved on and in.8

  With this claim went some literary-political awareness. From the present dearth of heroic poetry Behn must have seen not just that poets were holding back, but that the genre was going out of fashion. Heroic pindaric poetry had been part of the panoply of sacred kingship in which the Stuarts had wrapped themselves and which, many thought now, had helped them separate themselves from political reality. Men like Shadwell had always found it distasteful. Now, it palpably did not suit the far from divine, more down-to-earth, and actively heroic William. If, then, Behn was, like Cowley before her, a forsaken prophet, it was in a context where there was no further occasion for ‘prophets’. Even in the old order, Behn had never been a much rewarded one. She had constantly hymned the tie of Stuarts and patronage, been sycophantic in her praise, and yet here she was declaring her poverty. Something must be allowed to be amiss. There might be other routes.9

  Beyond political implication and allusion was Behn’s desire for literary fame, admitted both in the Cowley translation and in Oroonoko. Now in this Pindaric Poem she revealed how she saw it slipping from her as she understood a truth of the new context, a truth beyond her earlier realisation that a state needed writers. This was that the state also governed literary fame. Fame, or, in modern terms, entry into the canon, was predicated on acceptance by an elite that controlled culture. The elite consisted of those with political authority. So, in the new world of Burnet and William, the writer of approved propaganda alone was an artist.

  The ambiguous politics of A Pindaric Poem to Burnet fitted the moment. The refusal to praise William was clear, but little else. James who, by February, was preparing with French help to retake his kingdom was not revered as the present king, but entirely as a former master who had fallen, while William, not king indeed, was yet conceded to be the future. Had the work been written after the coronation, the insistence on calling the Prince by his Dutch title of Nassau would have startled a cautious reader. In the early months of 1689, however, it was not significant and Burnet must have felt he need not despair of Behn’s support in the long run. Even in her poem James was a failed king.

  She was in large company. Her old acquaintance Thomas Sprat, now Dean of Westminster, was trying again to set the needs of new allegiance within a framework that would not entirely sully it. Like Behn, Sprat implied it was his fidelity to the old regime that made him worthy of trust by the new.

  Events were moving quickly in the early weeks of 1689. Coming to the only possible conclusion, Parliament announced that James II had abdicated and that the throne was vacant. On 6 February, the crown was offered to William and Mary jointly, with the administration vested entirely in William’s hands—as he insisted. As soon as the news was conveyed to Holland, Mary set out for London. She arrived in Greenwich in mid-February, to be welcomed by William and her sister Anne. There was the kind of general rejoicing with bells and bonfires that the rather ungracious Dutchman William could never inspire in England, and court poets and artists took heart at her presence.

  Before landing, she had worried about the demeanour she should adopt in her native country, where her father had just been vanquished by her husband, and many were mindful of King Lear and its viperous daughters.10 In France, Madame de Sévigné imagined Mary stepping over James’s body and sneered that she had been ‘the procuress of her husband in his bid to take possession of the Kingdom of England’.11 Aware of such attitudes, Mary accepted her husband’s instructions that she show no public sorrow for her father’s fate when she entered Whitehall. She acted too well and many onlookers, including Evelyn, were shocked at the gaiety with which she took possession of the old King’s house.

  Probably Burnet read correctly the political meaning of Behn’s Pindaric Poem. He realised that her fascination for power was undimmed, but noted her implied cynicism. So he may now have suggested she take on the more welcome task of applauding James’s daughter. Praise solely of Mary was a common strategy for James’s old supporters who wanted to remain in London and receive some patronage. Behn obliged without equivocation. Her Congratulatory Poem to her Sacred Majesty Queen Mary, upon her Arrival in England was hurriedly written: Narcissus Luttrell bought a copy for 2d only two weeks after Mary landed.

  In this new poem, Behn could be more open about affection for ‘an Unhappy dear Lov’d Monarch’ than she had been in the Pindaric Poem, following her old habit of praising a lesser person by subsuming h
im or her into the greater. In earlier poems, Rochester had overpowered Anne Wharton and Thomas Creech, just as young Howard had been overwhelmed by his martyred father, Lord Stafford. Here Mary could more subtly disappear in James, within the conceit that she was his double, another Stuart deity revealing ‘all the Lines of your great Father’s face’. Given this doubled identity, Mary did not need the authority provided by a writer, as William had needed Burnet’s. Her authority was from God as James’s had been, as well as from her father. One monarch had been metamorphosed into the other.

  Behn was comfortable celebrating a powerful woman—her politics of absolutism, not based on paternal rule of father in his household, had never insisted power be masculine, only legitimate and hereditary. Indeed, she had always had more ease in associating herself with female than with male royalty, Catherine than Charles II, Mary of Modena than James II. She enjoyed the interaction of the female body with the state: Catherine the martyr, Mary of Modena as lover of James and the nation, and now Mary, a regnant queen who would rule through ‘Beauties’. Behn’s Muse was often female. Mary, the Stuart queen, slid easily into this role, inspiring her ‘Genius with new Life and Flame’. Always sensitive to female attractions, Behn had conveyed the charms of Mary of Modena, as well as of Nell Gwyn and the Duchess of Mazarine. The new Queen too was beautiful, demanding flamboyant imagery. The unfortunate levity of her arrival in Whitehall was glossed as lack of ‘Formal Nicety’, part of her sweet affability. None the less, no reader could fail to note that the portrait was more muted than that of Mary’s step-mother.

  Like the Pindaric Poem to Burnet and all Behn’s panegyrics, these verses to Mary were as much about herself as her ostensible subject and about the poet’s role in politically tempestuous times. She began in self-contemplation, taking up the image of the Pindaric Poem, of herself as ‘Excluded Prophet’, resolving to publish no more ‘fruitless Songs’ for ‘Brittains Faithless Shore’. Facing a republic, Cowley and the Interregnum Cavalier poets had grievingly accepted a private pastoral life, taking their Muses with them. But Behn’s Muse wanted public nourishment and did not care to retire. If Behn had invoked the image of rural retreat, it had usually been as prelude to rescue. Although, then, the poem began by placing the poet in a dark covert by the Thames, under willows through whose thick shade no light could penetrate, the retreat sounds as much like seclusion in St Bride’s as in the country. After all, it was mid-February, not a time noted for the thick shade of willow leaves.

  Whether the pastoral world she invoked was inside or outside, it began by being empty: not a nymph or faun in sight. Presumably William had frightened them away since they had been very present in 1685. Soon they returned, however, their arrival echoing that in the Coronation Ode for James. Relieved of her unwelcome isolation, Behn could join in the general rapture, moving from the winter of James to the spring of his daughter:

  Maria with the Sun has equal Force,

  No Opposition stops her Glorious Course,

  Her pointed Beams thro’ all a passage find,

  And fix their Rays Triumphant in the Mind.

  Soon the poet was properly overwhelmed by the glamour of true royalty: ‘What Human Fortitude can be / Sufficient to Resist a Deity?’ Behn was incorrigible where it came to the Stuarts.

  In her poem, the political wrangling of the ‘several Factions, several Int’rests’ which had so irritated William was quelled not by his force but by his wife’s presence: ‘Great Caesar’s Off-spring blest our Isle, / The differing Multitudes to Reconcile.’ Past loyalty was served by the absence of any mention of the real ruler of the country, Mary’s mastering husband, soon to be crowned William III. So the old King James, ‘Great Lord, of all my Vows’, was asked for his permission for Behn to pay tribute to the daughter who was ‘a Part of You’—though notably she did not wait for the exiled King’s reply. Whatever James was planning in France, there was no opening for his return in his old supporter’s poetry.

  What else could she have done? Much ailing by now, Aphra Behn had still to look to her possible future. She could not flee with James and the remnants of his court to Paris. James’s exile included a palace and largesse from his cousin, King Louis XIV. A poor poet’s flight abroad or to the country might simply be self-destructive, more like the magnificent, pointless resistance of the slave Oroonoko. Behn was a sick woman, probably now with no close family. She could hardly get around London, let alone make a journey outside. The rural seclusion in which she had symbolically placed herself at the outset of her poem to Mary was not an option without private means. She was a professional, political poet and her work was to hymn power in as principled a way as she could while earning a living. The heroic poet Cowley himself knew that court poetry could not be written in exile or to the loser: ‘it is so uncustomary, as to become almost ridiculous, to make lawrels for the Conquered.’ Though in war the pen could accompany the sword, ‘when the event of battel, and the unaccountable Will of God has determined the controversie... we must lay down our Pens as well as our Arms, and we must march out of our Cause it self...’.12 So, inevitably, A Congratulatory Poem aimed at making peace with the new source of power. It cannot have been exactly what ‘great NASSAU’ wanted but, as Behn wrote at the end of her Pindaric Poem to Burnet, he had other pens to ‘immortalise his Name’. Maybe the satirist who called her ‘machiavellian Behn’ thought she went too far, but the country would be a den of Machiavellians if such political trimming deserved the label.

  Perhaps, though, she had gone further than her Stuart loyalist publisher, William Canning, wished to follow. He had published the poems on the birth of a Prince of Wales and was then a co-publisher with Richard Bentley of the Mary work, but the Pindaric Poem to Burnet was brought out by Bentley alone, a man who may well have been involved in anti-Stuart propaganda before James’s flight.13 Certainly Behn went beyond Henry Nevil Payne, who could not be coopted for William and Mary, or Dryden, who did not supply a poem for the new rulers—though Shadwell, his old enemy, added insult to injury by faking one for him.14 Shadwell of course provided work on his own behalf as well. His efforts met with approval, and in March he was rewarded with the laureateship, replacing his old antagonist, John Dryden.

  On 11 April, William and Mary were jointly crowned in Westminster Abbey, guarded by Dutch soldiers. For the first time in English history monarchs swore to govern according to ‘the statutes in Parliament’ and, after the ceremony, there was no touching for the King’s Evil. This was not a divine monarchy. Burnet, upholder of the gender proprieties and fitting symbol of the new regime that would promote moral values in society and theatre, preached the coronation sermon. The crown was carried by the illegitimate son of Charles II, the Duke of Grafton, dedicatee of Behn’s most politically committed Stuart play, The Roundheads. Her old friend Thomas Sprat, who had a few months earlier organised prayers of thanksgiving for Mary of Modena’s pregnancy, assisted at the service as current Dean of Westminster, showing that he could negotiate this Revolution as he had negotiated the Restoration nearly thirty years before.

  If Aphra Behn picked up her pen to hymn the moment, she had to let it fall again. For on 16 April, five days after the coronation, she died.

  It was commonplace to blame death on doctors and pharmacists, and the ‘Memoirs’ was no exception: ‘her Death’ was ‘occasioned by an unskilful Physician’. Probably there was some truth in it. Behn’s old enemy Gould described druggists

  (Who, Leach-like, cleave to the poor Patient close,

  And suck their Purses full ’ere they break loose;)

  With their damn’d, long, unconscionable Bills,

  Bring in as many Pounds as they deliver Pills.

  Thus Fools, with Villains wilfully complying,

  Are made to pay for dying.15

  This is certainly possible for Behn. Many died of their ‘cures’, especially when these included hefty doses of mercury and new hot dung.

  Also chronic pain persuades its sufferers to search, e
ven irrationally, for relief and, despite her pleas of poverty, Behn was probably not as poor in her final year as she had been earlier; she had something to lay out on physicians and quacks. Her commendation of the mystical herbalist, Thomas Tryon, and her attraction to Cowley’s Of Plants, which lengthily described the curative properties of plants, prove her interest in health and medicines, and she probably had some belief in doctors, although she did note that a person best knows his or her own body. She routinely ridiculed quacks, along with lawyers and clerics, but she omitted from Sir Patient Fancy Molière’s opinion, that ‘Most men die of their cures, and not their diseases’. She might have been better served had she followed the new ruler rather than the old: where Charles II had been famously helped to death by excess medical advice, the always sickly William considered himself alive only because he avoided doctors.16

  As well as sickness and cures, Behn had thought much about the moment of death, the act of dying itself. Lord Stafford’s end on the scaffold in 1680 had been an example to the nation in the art of dying well. In her translation of La Rochefoucauld, she noted that heroism in death was not confined to the well-born: Vratz the highwayman and murderer had put on as great a show as any peer. In the last years, her fiction too had been engrossed with death, especially the spectacular version: of the accepting Isabella of The History of the Nun, of the stoical Oroonoko, of the foolish Tarquin of The Fair Jilt, of the misguided Cesario of Love-Letters, and of the Oedipal Dangerfield of ‘The Dumb Virgin’.

  Although each character was heroic in some way, however, each also had some grotesqueness that prevented a completely heroic depiction and made the whole inharmonious. If disharmony was part of staged death, it was even more so of private inadvertent dying. In public, Behn knew that people could rise to heights caused less by heroism of spirit than by fear of disapproval. In private, it was different. In her translation of La Rochefoucauld, she distanced herself from Stoicism. The Roman philosopher Seneca had believed in the mind’s control of the body, but Behn had no such illusion and probably did not expect great things of her dying self. She accepted the pain of death and the fear of the pain. Everyone dreaded death she thought, and most clung to life, even when it seemed intolerable: ‘Tho wrackt with various paines yet life does please / Much more than death, which all our pressures ease.’