The Weaker Vessel: Women's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England

by Antonia Fraser

  Even her avowedly spiritual writings have a charmingly domestic flavour, an appreciation of the small mercies of life in terms of the small beauties of the daily round: ‘Upon walking in autumn among dead leaves’, ‘Upon seeing a silk worm spin’, ‘Upon seeing a hog lie under an acorn tree, and eat the acorns, but never look up from the ground to the tree from which they fell’. ‘Upon a Hen of my Lady Essex Rich’ described a chick which was hatched in the stillroom by her niece and afterwards ‘this poor grateful creature’ persisted in returning to the house to lay its eggs there (a lesson to those less thankful for benefits received). Fish, mowers in the fields, her pet dog, canary birds and linnets that learnt to sing like canaries, these were the kind of domestic sights seen at Leighs Priory, the Rich family property in Essex, which provoked edifying reflections from Mary.24

  A typical day, on which Mary would rise at about six for two hours of solitary meditation, would include not only a lengthy ordering of her household with all its ramifications between breakfast and dinner, but also a visit to the sick servants, and another visit to the village girls’ school. These activities were not purely gracious. On the contrary, the cure of the sick (as Mrs Walker had distributed salves) and the administration of medicines generally, were an important duty on a level with the relief of the poor; most of the remedies, of a herbal nature, being prepared at home in the stillroom.

  As for education, Mary Warwick was in the habit of catechizing her maids daily and reading to them books of devotion, in addition to her diurnal visits to the village girls’ school. The educative abilities of a mistress of a household – including those on a much smaller scale than Leighs Priory – were of enormous potential importance in an age when girls’ schooling as such hardly existed since the disappearance of the Catholic convents in the previous century (the Leighs Priory neighbourhood being fortunate in their patrons). Obviously the Puritans, with their emphasis on Bible reading, had a particular incentive to increase the spiritual capacity of their dependants by teaching them to read: Mrs Walker had her maids read holy texts to her. But in general, as we shall see when we return to the subject of educational opportunities for women, any conscientious housewife would expect to exert some kind of good influence in this respect – that is, when she could read herself.

  ‘Dost thou love me?’, Elizabeth Walker would ask of her husband, smiling.

  To which he would reply: ‘Most dearly.’

  ‘I know it abundantly,’ she would answer, ‘to my comfort; but I love to hear thee tell me so.’

  On another occasion Dr Walker was telling Elizabeth why he loved her and began: ‘First for conscience–’. She stopped him:

  ‘I would have thee love me, not because thou must, but because thou wilt, not as a duty but delight. For,’ she added, ‘we are prone to reluctate against what is imposed, but to take pleasure in what we choose.’

  ‘Our mutual compellation’, wrote Dr Walker, ‘Was always “My dear”, not spoken automatically nor as an empty compliment, but the sincere interpretation of the language of our hearts.’25This affectionate, even slightly flirtatious relationship between the Walkers, which emerges so beguilingly from the pages of the Holy Life, serves as a salutary reminder that the ground rules of seventeenth-century marriage, while they threw up a number of hard cases, did not preclude the formation of many very happy unions.

  The intimacy which flourished in the ‘sturdy oaken’ matrimonial bedstead, destined to last ‘one whole Century through’ in Mary Evelyn’s phrase in Mundus Muliebris, could be passionate and idyllic as well as fulfilling God’s ‘own holy and sacred ordinance’. (The importance of the marriage bed as a symbolic and enduring piece of furniture was attested by Henry Oxinden when he took the seventeen-year-old Kate Culling as his second wife, and had no bedstead of his own to share with her: he commissioned his cousin Eliza Dallison who lived in London to have a vast bed made, seven foot seven inches in breadth, six foot three inches long, with four posts at the corners one foot round. ‘We would willingly have of the latest fashion,’ he wrote, ‘for this is all the beds we are like to make in our time.’)26 Marital sex, far from being frowned upon, was generally approved as leading to health and happiness in the husband; while the generally straightforward attitude of the time included the sensible notion that women too, once introduced to the pleasures of the marriage bed, could and would enjoy them.

  ‘Dear Niece, Now that you know what’s what, and the best and worst that man can do unto you, you will give me leave to wish you joy’, wrote Lord Monmouth cheerfully to his niece Philadelphia Carey, now Lyttelton, Shortly after her marriage. Philadelphia’s sister was ill at Winchester: Lord Monmouth went on to suggest the same remedy for her: ‘You may tell her that such an ingredient as you have had of late would do her more good than any physick she can take. But she is too good and too handsome to lack it long if she have a mind to it; and therefore she may thank herself if she continue to be ill. But you will be better to preach this doctrine to her than I, now that you have tried it yourself. Well, sweet niece, to leave raillery…’27

  Jane Sharp, the midwife, writing for popular consumption agreed with Lord Monmouth that the ‘Green Sickness’ which occurred in unmarried girls would be cured by the physical delights of marriage. What was more, this was an age when the possibility of the female orgasm was not only appreciated and encouraged, but also, in the rather muddled state of thinking on the subject of the procreative process, believed by some people to help it along. Jane Sharp, for example, writing quite frankly about the private parts of a woman’s body such as ‘a little bank called a mountain of pleasure near the well-spring’, thought that a woman’s imagination, when aroused, helped her to produce the seed. The French believed that the womb then opened to enable conception.28

  The Puritan handbooks were equally forthright, seeing in marital sex part of the divine plan which helped to save the soul as well as keep the marriage together. As William Gouge wrote in Of Domesticall Duties: ‘To deny this duty being justly required, is to deny a true debt and to give Satan a great advantage.’ Milton, declaring that there was nothing inherently sinful about sex itself ‘whatever hypocrites austerely talk’, envisaged in Paradise Lost an Adam and Eve before the Fall who did not want for ‘youthful dalliance as beseems Fair couple, linkt in happy Nuptial league’.29

  There were prohibitions: excessive ‘dalliance’ even in marriage was to be avoided. Evelyn, in his advice to his son John on his wedding-night, particularly advised against the kind of ‘intemperance’ that would exhaust him (and might also create ‘unfortunate expectations’ in his bride…). But then Evelyn also advised against making love on a full stomach, by day and in very hot or very cold weather: in short ‘too frequent embraces dulls the sight, decays the memory, induces the gout… and shortens life’.30 The recommendation against sex in hot weather was general – in advice given in the almanacs the dog days of July and August were thought to be particularly hazardous. However, recent research into baptismal registers, while it does show a correlative drop in baptisms in May and June, has not yet pin-pointed the cause, which may have been simply due to the exhaustion of the harvest work. Even here the point was well taken, that ‘if husband wont, another must’.31 Although we must depend on guesswork, there is no reason to suppose that in a frank and earthy age these recommendations to sexual moderation in marriage were heeded by any who were not physically predisposed to it in the first place.

  Married love is a more difficult subject to chronicle with certainty than the lack of it – if easier than married sex. Yet there are revealing vignettes such as that of Lady Oglander, the wife of Sir John Oglander, Deputy Governor of the Isle of Wight, who would rush eagerly out to meet her husband under the oaks on Matthew’s Green when he returned to London from the Isle of Wight; merely to ‘live lovingly’ with his wife was Sir John Oglander’s declared public ambition.32 And true conjugal felicity can certainly be glimpsed obliquely through the conventional public tributes.

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bsp; Sometimes it is the death of the beloved which provokes the revealing outburst, as when the Parliamentary lawyer Bulstrode Whitelocke wrote in his journal on 15 May 1649 (a time of extreme political tension for the new Commonwealth): ‘This was the saddest day of all the days of my life hitherto; my brother William Willoughby brought me the direful news that my wife was dead.’33 Anthony Ashley Cooper, later Earl of Shaftesbury, whose cool sense of intrigue enabled him to survive membership of Cromwell’s Council of State into the high Whig politics of the next reign, made an advantageous marriage in February 1639 to Margaret, daughter of the Lord Keeper Coventry. His passionate encomium on her sudden death ten years later makes an extraordinary contrast with the taciturn jottings in his diary which precede it.34

  ‘My wife, just as she was sitting down to supper, fell into an apoplectical convulsion fit: She recovered that fit after some time, and spoke and kissed me, and complained only in her head but fell again in a quarter of an hour, and then never came to speak again; but continued in fits and slumbers until next day. At noon she died.’ Shaftesbury continued: ‘She was a lovely beautiful fair woman, a religious devout Christian, of admirable wit and wisdom, beyond any I ever knew, yet the most sweet, affectionate and observant wife in the world. Chaste, without a suspicion of the most envious, to the highest assurance of her husband, of a most noble and bountiful mind, yet very provident in the least things, exceeding all in anything she undertook, housewifery, preserving, works with the needle, cookery, so that her wit and judgement were expressed in all things, free from any pride or forwardness. She was in discourse and counsel far beyond any woman.’

  Ashley Cooper, who was now a childless widower, did not long remain so; but his entry for that day in April 1650 on which he made a second marriage – for sound political reasons – is once more extremely taciturn: ‘I was married to Lady Frances Cecil, and removed my lodging to Mr Blakes by Exeter House.’ This time the match seems to have remained one of pure political convenience, for when a few years later the new wife also died, there was no outburst and no eulogy.

  Lady Essex Rich was that niece and ward of Mary Countess of Warwick who as a girl had kept the ‘grateful hen’. She was married off by Mary, after due investigation of his moral suitability, to Daniel Finch, later second Earl of Nottingham. Lady Essex died not long after, leaving her husband with a single daughter. Finch wrote to the minister who had married them a distraught letter: ‘for I have lost surely a better friend, a wife without her equal, one that I loved as myself, for she was willing even to die to wean me from this world… that we might meet in a better, and live together eternally… Henceforward I will not think she has gone from me, but that I am going to her… no man can be so proud of what he has, as I am that I can say I once had the best woman in the world.’35 Like Lord Shaftesbury, Finch married again Shortly – to the heiress Anne Hatton – who presented him with an enormous family. But he called his eldest daughter by his second wife Essex – after she who had been ‘the best woman in the world’.

  Oliver Heywood, a Puritan minister, was even more explicit after the death of his first wife Elizabeth Augier, ‘the mirror of patience and subjection in her relation, as a child, as a wife, and of tenderness and care as a sister, and as a mother’. He wrote: ‘I want her at every turn, everywhere, and in every work. Methinks I am but half myself without her.’36

  Letters too reveal affections beyond the normal conjugal respect which spouses were supposed to feel for each other.

  On this evidence Brilliana Lady Harley, ‘that noble Lady and Phoenix of Women’, to whose heroic story we shall return, had enjoyed a married life abundant in tenderness at its inception. ‘I pray you remember that I reckon the days you are away…’, she wrote to Sir Robert Harley on 30 September 1625, when they had been married two years. Throughout his absences she expressed a constant wish to see him, culminating on 5 October 1627 with the cry: ‘Believe me, I think I never missed you more than now I do, or else I have forgot what is past.’37

  In 1642 Basil Lord Feilding, the Parliamentary commander, married as his third wife Elizabeth (Betty) Bourchier. The next year he succeeded to the title of his Royalist father, the Earl of Denbigh. It was no doubt an arranged match: despite his two previous marriages, the new Lord Denbigh was childless; Betty herself was a daughter and co-heiress of Henry Bourchier, fifth Earl of Bath. Nevertheless her letters breathe with her desire for him: ‘My dear heart, my dear life, my sweet joy…’, she begins, ending with ‘PS A hundred, thousand kisses I give thee, as I might be so happy as this paper. I long much to see you.’ Sometimes Betty becomes petulant: surely he doesn’t really love her, otherwise he would come back and see her? At other times she is more resigned. In 1644 she writes: ‘Dear Joy…I should have been glad to have been with you on the 8th July, because it is our wedding-day’ but instead she will eat three cherry pies and drink her husband’s health with his niece Su Hamilton. (For Lord Denbigh’s own delectation Betty dispatched presents of cakes and candied flowers, borage and marigolds.) It is all summed up by another ecstatic postscript: ‘Dear! how thy Betty loves thee!’38

  It is good to be able to record that the loving Betty, unlike so many wives in the seventeenth century, lived to enjoy nearly thirty years of married life (although, like all the Earl of Denbigh’s other wives, she was childless).

  Lastly, in the private memoir written by Ann, wife of Sir Richard Fanshawe, can be found in a humbler prose form the kind of lyrical sentiments about love and separation which Richard Lovelace, the admired Cavalier poet of his generation, poured into his volume of 1649, Lucasta:

  … Though seas and land betwixt us both,

  Our faith and troth

  Like separated souls

  All time and space controls:

  Above the highest sphere we meet

  Unseen, unknown, and greet as Angels greet.39

  Ann, daughter of Sir John Harrison of Hertfordshire, described herself as being ‘that which we graver people call a hoyting girl’ (i.e. a hoyden) when she married Richard Fanshawe in 1644, he being a bachelor of thirty-five, and she a mere seventeen years old. She wrote the memoir after his death, in 1665, to be circulated in the family, and for the special attention of her only surviving son, so that he might understand the kind of man his father had been – and the kind of relationship of perfect trust which existed between them.40 Fanshawe had been a man ‘so reserved that he never showed the thought of his heart in the greatest sense, but to myself only’, wrote his wife, but ‘this I thank God with all my soul for, that he never discovered his trouble to me but went from me with perfect cheerfulness and content, nor revealed he his joys and hopes, but would say that they were doubled by putting them in my breast’.

  Richard Fanshawe was a highly educated man, with a deep love of reading, especially history and poetry; he would even go for a walk with a book in his hand, generally poetry. He was a minor poet himself, a translator of Horace, and of Camoens’s The Lusiads from the Portuguese. Indeed his career, as a courtier-politician and diplomat in the Stuart cause, through good times and bad, fully justified his wife’s description of it after his death as ‘nearly thirty years suffering by land and sea, and the hazard of our lives over and over…’ There were also ‘seven years of imprisonment’ as Lady Fanshawe phrased it: for Richard Fanshawe was captured after the fatal Battle of Worcester in 1651, which ended the cause of Charles II in England, and imprisoned at Whitehall. Although he was released on bail in November, it was not until 1658 that he was properly free once more and permitted to go abroad.

  When the Fanshawes were married at Oxford in 1644, where the court then was, Richard had just been created Secretary for War to the Prince of Wales (the future Charles II, then a boy of fourteen); King Charles I hoped to use his son’s position as a titular leader in order to pacify his squabbling rival commanders in the West. Clearly fierce love existed between the Fanshawes from the first, despite the seventeen-year gap in their ages and the allegedly austere nature of Richard.
The first day they were parted after their marriage – Richard Fanshawe had to go to Bristol on the King’s business – the ‘reserved’ husband was ‘extremely afflicted even to tears, though passion was against his nature’. When he was able to send for Ann from Oxford, the letter of summons made her feel so faint with joy that she ‘went immediately to walk, or at least to sit, in the air (being very weak) in the gardens of St John’s College’.41

  At Bristol, after Richard Fanshawe had joyfully hugged his young wife, he showed his trust in her practical sense by entrusting her with his store of gold. He told her: ‘I know that thou that keeps my heart so well will keep my fortune, which from this time I will ever put into thy hands as God shall bless me with increase.’ After this, Ann Fanshawe wrote, ‘I thought myself a queen, and my husband so glorious a crown that I more valued myself to be called by his name than born a princess.’42

  Equally clearly, it took a little time before the ‘hoyting girl’ realized the limits of the position of such a queenly wife, who could be trusted with her husband’s fortune, but not his State secrets. Lady Fanshawe tells the story of how her kinswoman at the court – the Countess Rivers, an older woman – tacitly convinced her that in these troubled times it had become fashionable for women such as the beautiful Lady Isabella Thynne to display deep interest in matters of State and that to do so would make her even more beloved by her husband – ‘if that had been possible’ adds Lady Fanshawe quickly.43 Impressed by this reasoning, the gullible girl proceeded to question her husband about his confidential business as Secretary for War, and in particular about the contents of a packet which had recently arrived from the Queen in France; all this was with a view to passing on the information to Countess Rivers.