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

by Antonia Fraser

  So: ‘When my husband returned from Council, after welcoming him home, as his custom ever was, he went with his handful of papers into his study for an hour or more. I followed him. He turning hastily said: “What wouldst thou have, my life?”’ Ann Fanshawe then told him that she guessed he had the recent packet from the Queen in his hand and would like to know what was in it.

  ‘He smiling replied, “My love, I will immediately come to thee. Pray thee go, for I am very busy.” When he came out of his closet, I revived my suit. He kissed me and talked of other things.’ At supper Ann declined to eat, although Richard carried on discoursing as usual, ‘and drunk often to me, which was his custom’. Then it was time to withdraw. ‘Going to bed, I asked again, and said I could not believe he loved me if he refused to tell me all he knew, but he answered nothing, but stopped my mouth with kisses, so we went to bed. I cried and he went to sleep… next morning very early, as his custom was, he called to rise, but begun to discourse with me first, to which I made no reply. He rose, came on the other side of the bed and kissed me, and drew the curtain softly and went to court.’

  When Richard returned that night for dinner, Ann took his hand and accused him of not caring about seeing her so upset. ‘To which he, taking me in his arms, answered, “My dearest soul, nothing upon earth can afflict me like that; and when you asked me my business, it was wholly out of my power to satisfy thee… the trust I am in may not be revealed.’” He then assured her that in everything else ‘my life and fortune shall be thine, and every thought of my heart’.

  Richard Fanshawe kept his word, although some of the turns of fortune which he offered his wife might have broken the spirit of a lesser woman. In Galway they found themselves in a plague-ridden town, having narrowly escaped seizure in Cork at the time of Cromwell’s campaign, as the Irish, ‘stripped and wounded’, were with ‘lamentable shrieks’ turned out of the town. On their subsequent sea journey to Spain at the request of Charles II, Ann Fanshawe, as a woman, was in danger of being taken as a slave by a Turkish man-of-war. While the master of their ship was parleying with the Turks, trying to convince them of his innocence, Ann was locked in her cabin. She stole out by bribing the cabin boy to let her have his clothes: ‘I crept up softly and stood upon the deck by my husband’s side as free from sickness and fear as, I confess, from discretion; but it was the effect of that passion I could never master.’ When the danger had passed and Sir Richard realized who it was beside him, ‘looking upon me he blessed himself and snatched me up in his arms, saying “Good God, that love can make this change!” And though he seemingly chid me, he would laugh at it as often as he remembered that voyage.’44

  Leaving Spain for France, they were very nearly shipwrecked in the Bay of Biscay in a violent storm which lasted for two days and three nights, and ripped both sails and mast from the ship, so that crew and passengers thought all hope was lost. Afterwards, at Nantes, they had some white wine, butter, milk, walnuts and eggs, and ‘some very bad cheese’. But, commented Ann: ‘I am sure until that hour I never knew such pleasure in eating, between which we a thousand times repeated what we had spoke when every word seemed our last. We praised God; I wept, your father lifting then up his hands admired so great a salvation. Then we often kissed each other, as if yet we feared death…’45

  Richard Fanshawe had been made a baronet in 1650; after the Restoration he was made a Privy Councillor and appointed Ambassador first to Portugal and then to Spain (where he died, although his body was finally reburied in Ware Church near his home in Hertfordshire). Diplomacy apart, he enjoyed the role of ambassador, having a great taste for hospitality, ‘and would often say it was wholly essential for the constitution of England. He loved and kept order with the greatest decency possible.’ Here once more Ann Fanshawe was the perfect helpmate and housekeeper, as we can appreciate, reading between the lines of her own modest disclaimer: ‘though he would say I managed the domestics wholly, yet I ever governed them and myself by his commands, in the managing of which I thank God I found his approbation and content’.46

  When she tried to sum up her married life for her son, Lady Fanshawe wrote: ‘Now you will expect I should say something that may remain of us jointly, which I will do, though it makes my eyes gush out with tears, and cuts me to the soul, to remember and in part express the joys I was blessed with in him.

  ‘Glory to God we never had but one mind throughout our lives, our souls were wrapped up in each other, our aims and designs one, our loves one, and our resentments one. We so studied one the other that we knew each other’s mind by our looks; what ever was real happiness, God gave it me in him…’47

  Fourteen years after her husband’s death, when ‘what ever was real happiness’ had ended, Ann Lady Fanshawe was laid beside him, at the age of fifty-five, in the family grave at Ware. So for them both at last those lines which Richard Fanshawe had written half a century ago came true:

  White peace (the beautifullest of things)

  Seems here her everlasting rest

  To fix, and spreads her downy wings

  Over the Nest.48

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Pain and the Peril

  ‘My God and my Lord, my defender and protector, receive I most humbly beseech thee my acknowledgements of thy mercy, and my thanksgivings for my safe deliverance from the pain and the peril of Childbirth …’

  PRAYER OF ELIZABETH VISCOUNTESS MORDAUNT

  AFTER THE BIRTH OF HER SON JOHN, 1659

  If we try to envisage the appearance of the women of the seventeenth century in relation to our own, we should allow of course for the evil effects of diseases now vanished such as smallpox, or dental decay in an age before competent dentistry. Both of these depredations, taken for granted at the time, might come as a shock to the curious time-traveller. But the fact that most of the leading female characters of the seventeenth century were in a state of virtually perpetual pregnancy would probably come as a far greater surprise.

  Let us take the reigning goddesses of the courts of Charles I, Charles II and James II. Henrietta Maria, the exquisite sloe-eyed pearly Queen of Van Dyck’s portraits and the court masques of Inigo Jones, was in fact pregnant almost without intermission from the autumn of 1628 until January 1639, when she bore her seventh child Katherine. After that, absence from the King’s side in wartime accounted for a gap, but a last child Henrietta-Anne was born in 1644. Barbara Duchess of Cleveland, tempestuous mistress of Charles II, and Lely’s voluptuous beauty, produced five children in as many years during the very height of her ascendancy over the King’s affections (as well as a sixth somewhat later, about whose paternity there was undignified dispute). Mary of Modena, second wife of James II, gave birth as Duchess of York to four children in four years between 1675 and 1678 and another in 1682. None of these survived. James ascended the throne in 1685. It was the birth of a son in 1688, after what was considered to be (by James’s supporters) an alarmingly long gap, which precipitated the Protestant Revolution.

  As the great ladies fructified, so did their humbler sisters. There too we should retain a floating image of motherhood. Once the blessed knot had been tied, a married woman was expected to shoulder forthwith that special burden of motherhood bequeathed to her by Grandmother Eve. It did not need the incentive of a royal succession (or a king’s favour); the desire for children in marriage, as many children as possible, to be born as quickly as possible, was universal. Puritan doctrines emphasized the importance of God’s ordinance to increase and multiply and cover the earth (which had the beneficial effect of increasing the number of the Elect).1 At the other extreme, the Catholic Church had reaffirmed the teaching of St Thomas Aquinas, that the whole end of sex was procreation, at the Council of Trent in the previous century.

  Most married couples, however, scarcely needed a scriptural or doctrinal backing to carry out such natural activity. Thus ‘big-bellied’ or ‘great-bellied’ women were considered to be the norm, the happy norm; indeed the very use of such a straightforwar
d term as ‘great-bellied’ (the common phraseology of the time, being neither vulgar nor jocular) indicates the way in which perpetual gravidity was taken for granted during the long child-bearing years of a married female. Pregnant, ‘she seems to me, Diana in her crescent majesty’, wrote Nicholas Hookes, in Amanda in 1653, describing the various aspects of his loved one’s beauty.2

  Most of the admirable wives referred to in the last chapter spent their adult life, in addition to their other duties, bearing, rearing and – all too often – burying children, in a great cycle of birth and life, birth and death, but at any rate birth and birth and birth, which meant that they were generally either crescent or descendent.

  Of Mrs Elizabeth Walker for example, her husband wrote that ‘her posterity cannot choose but prosper’; he might have added – those of them that survived. In the course of her energetic and charitable life Mrs Walker gave birth to eleven children, and there were abortive or ‘untimely’ births in addition. Of these eleven, explained Dr Walker, ‘I say nothing of the eight lost but only the last three.’ These were all daughters. Little Mary died when she was six, but even at that tender age was established as a passionate reader, spending an hour or two every night at her books by candlelight; young Elizabeth died at the age of sixteen (the sins to which she used to confess were the sympathetic adolescent ones of lying in bed too long on Sundays and ‘slubbering’ over her duties). Mrs Walker’s last daughter died in childbirth, although the baby – Johnny – for whom she gave her life, survived. To this beloved grandson, Mrs Walker in old age was wont to proffer a good deal of sage advice. ‘Dear Johnny’, she would write, ‘let not the length [of this letter] be tedious unto thee …’ – twenty pages follow – but then we must remember that Johnny was the only ‘posterity’ left to her after eleven births, she who was used to declare that children were ‘the nurseries of families, the church and the nation’.3

  The background to the many dangerous adventures endured by Ann Lady Fanshawe was one of virtually unceasing pregnancy, child-nursing – and child-burying.4 Her first son Harrison was born in February 1645 and died in March. The next year, when the Fanshawes had arrived in Jersey, in retreat from England with the Prince of Wales, was born Ann (the first of two daughters who bore their mother’s name); she died when she was nine. A son (the first of two to be christened Henry) was born the year after, and died at the age of two. In 1648 – by which time Ann Fanshawe had been married four years – was born the first of three babies to be christened Richard; he died at the age of eleven. In 1650, while she was in Madrid on her husband’s mission seeking aid, Lady Fanshawe gave birth to the first of her three daughters who would be called Elizabeth; the baby, whom Ann Fanshawe was carrying at the time of their perilous Irish experiences, died immediately. (It was also shortly after this that the Fanshawes were virtually shipwrecked on their way to Nantes.) The second Elizabeth was born the next year; she died at the age of five.

  It was during the years of Richard Fanshawe’s nominal captivity in England that Katherine, Margaret and Ann were born, all of whom survived; this was surely not unconnected with the fact that during these pregnancies Lady Fanshawe did not travel abroad. However, a fourth daughter Mary, who was born in 1656, died in 1660, and a son Henry, born in 1657, died in 1658. After the Restoration, when the Fanshawes’ life was equally nomadic, if far more gloriously so, three more children were born. Elizabeth, born in 1662, survived, but the second Richard, born in 1663, died at birth; it was not until August 1665 that the third Richard Fanshawe, that surviving son for whom Ann wrote her memoir of her husband, was born in Madrid. The following June, when his son and heir was not yet a year old, Sir Richard Fanshawe himself died; among other problems faced by his widow in a foreign land was the task of conveying very young children homeward.

  Not only Lady Fanshawe but very many of the married women whose deeds of heroism during the Civil War we shall consider, were struggling at the same time with the additional burden of repeated pregnancies. These include the wives of the Levellers – Mary Overton and Elizabeth Lilburne – whose sufferings were similar in kind to those of Mary Lady Verney or the Yorkshire heroine, Lady Cholmley, or her sister-in-law Dame Isabella Twysden, or Lucy Hutchinson, wife of the Roundhead Governor of Nottingham Castle, but whose privations through poverty and imprisonment were even worse.

  It was the ‘barren Hannah or childless Elizabeth’, in Samuel Hieron’s phrase, who bewailed her fate. Some real connection was seen between child-bearing and grace: for what was woman’s best chance to redeem herself from the sin of Eve and restore herself to honour but by fulfilling this natural female role? This philosophy had the backing of the New Testament: ‘Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression. Notwithstanding she shall be saved in child-bearing.’5

  Conversely, infertility might come to be equated with sin. Thus Samuel Hieron’s prayer for the barren woman began with an acknowledgement of the sinfulness which had brought the petitioner to such a state (‘It is just, I confess, with thee, to punish my barrenness in grace, and my fruitlessness in holy things, with this want of outward increase’), before proceeding to the heartfelt plea: ‘let me be as the fruitfall Vine on the walls of my husbands house, and let (at the least) one Olive plant spring out from me, to stand about this table …’6

  In 1644 Anne Murray was jilted by her lover Thomas Howard for the sake of a much richer bride, whom the unfaithful lover married ‘privately’ without letting Anne know. When the news leaked out, Anne’s indignant maid Miriam lifted up her hands and cursed the new wife: ‘Give her, O Lord, dry breasts and a miscarrying womb.’ In her memoirs, Anne tells us that she reproved Miriam. However, she adds: ‘But it seems the Lord thought fit to grant her [Miriam’s] request, for that lady miscarried several children before she brought one to the full term, and that one died presently after it was born; which may be a lesson to teach people to govern their wishes …’7

  Under the circumstances every manual and every almanac offered remedies for infertility, many of them allegedly with a long history of success; for as William Sermon wrote in The Ladies Companion, or The English Midwife of 1671: ‘the Ancients (not being ignorant of what this Sex principally desire) have left several ways for the accomplishment of the same’. Sermon’s recommendations ‘to make Women fruitfull’ included doses of white ginger taken in a powdered form, and more imaginatively, sitting over a bath in which skeins of raw yarn had been boiled in the water and then mixed with ashes. Otherwise the infertile wife might bathe herself in water in which ‘Ale-hoof, oaten and pease straw have been boiled together – then let her dry herself, and presently let her Husband do his best endeavour.’8

  It is easy to be cynical and suggest that of all these remedies, only the advice to the husband was likely to be remotely helpful; the number and extent of such cures advocated on every side bear witness to the passionate wishes of every wife to fulfil this other part of her bounden duty. Sir John Brownlow of Belton believed in the drinking of mares’ milk every morning in March and April. Rules suggested to Samuel Pepys (anxious that his wife should conceive) ranged from the drinking of sage juice – popular remedy of the time – and the ‘wearing of cool Holland drawers’ to the propping up of the married bed at a slant or even better ‘to lie with our heads where our heels do’.9 In spite of this, Mrs Pepys never did bear any children.

  It was hardly surprising that Margaret Duchess of Newcastle, whose husband had children by his first marriage, consulted the celebrated physician Sir Theodore Mayerne when she failed to conceive after two years. His advice was sensible: ‘Be in good health and then you may till your ground, otherwise it will be time lost if you enter that race frowningly.’ But Margaret did not conceive. As a result she came to write with considerable acerbity about her fertile sisters – women like ‘Lady S.M.’ who had only been married for four weeks, but knowing herself to be with child was already proudly ‘rasping wind out of her stomache … making Sickly faces … and bearing out
her Body, drawing her Neck downward, and standing in a weak and faint Posture as great bellied Wives do …’10

  Margaret Newcastle poured further contempt on the great fuss which was made about the business of childbirth itself: the making and buying of fine and costly childbed linen (although one should perhaps point out that the heiress Lady Anne Clifford used her husband’s three-year-old shirts as ‘clouts’). Then there was the fearful fuss over the baby, including an expensive christening – the money, she suggested, would be better spent on the child’s education – swaddling clothes, baby mantles, cradles, baskets and so forth.11 In Margaret Newcastle’s general scorn for women who prided themselves on their ‘great bellies’, one can detect the jealous voice of one who would never be able to form the centrepiece of such a celebration herself.

  The constant emphasis on the virtuous work of bearing children – in which the mothers, as well as the fathers, preachers and advisers all concurred – casts the whole subject of contraception within marriage (never wholly clear of the shadows in any age) into a particular obscurity. The pathetic case of Mistress Augier, mother of Elizabeth Heywood, provides an extreme example of how a large family was regarded as a mark of God’s favour. In 1642 Mistress Augier had been suffering from cancer of the breast for two years, enduring pangs ‘so painful that she often said she would be content to have her breast ripped open for a little ease’. Under the circumstances it might seem fortunate rather than the reverse that there had been a long gap in her child-bearing; however, her husband, a Puritan minister, did not view the situation in that light. When Mistress Augier conceived once more, her husband attributed it to divine intervention. She was delivered of her child a month early, with a very long hard labour, in the course of which the midwife pronounced – correctly – that there was no hope of saving the mother’s life. Mistress Augier died in terrible agonies. ‘God gave her conception after almost eight years’ respite,’ wrote her husband after her death, ‘having often put it into my heart to pray for the enlarging of my family.’ He went on: ‘Yet after her conception her weakness and weariness increased.’12