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

by Antonia Fraser

  It was no wonder that the sisters, watching the world through their brothers’ eyes, often developed passionate attachments to these young gods who could roam freely, while they were kept confined at home. Ann Oglander, daughter of another happy marriage, that of Sir John and Lady Oglander, described by her father as ‘Très belle Ann’ – the most beautiful of all the family – was in despair when her brother George left for Caen on the Grand Tour. Her sorrow was premonitory, for he died abroad shortly afterwards.32

  As a child Anne Viscountess Conway, daughter of the Widow Bennett by her carefully selected second husband Sir Heneage Finch, worshipped her step-brother John Finch, who was five years older – all the more so because her father had died before her birth. Little Anne hung around at home and in the gardens of Kensington House, plagued with sick headaches. Her family put her frequent maladies down to too much reading, unsuitable to her sex.33 Given the intellectual achievements which marked the adult life of Anne Conway despite this handicap, it is more likely that a proper education (her step-brothers went to Westminster and Christ Church or Eton and Balliol) would have helped rather than hindered her health.

  The most celebrated example of a sister’s devotion to a brother was that of Katherine Viscountess Ranelagh for Robert Boyle, the famous physicist and chemist who arrived at the eponymous Boyle’s Law (which stated that the pressure and volume of a gas were inversely proportional). Bishop Burnet proclaimed after her death that ‘Sister Ranelagh’, otherwise known as ‘the incomparable Lady Ranelagh’, had cut ‘the greatest figure in all these revolutions of these kingdoms, for above fifty years, of any woman of her age’.34 It was significant that this one woman whose learning merited universal respect not censure was not only well-born and pious but chose to exercise her powerful influence privately rather than through the writing and publication of books, spending the last forty years of her life caring devotedly for her brilliant brother. In her decency, her active kindness – she was both hospitable and charitable – and above all in her acceptance of the self-abnegatory nature of female intelligence, Sister Ranelagh incarnated the masculine ideal of a good woman. Her learning therefore, far from being a disturbing quality, became an added grace. As a result she had the distinction, perhaps a slightly dubious one, of being the one woman of whom Milton actually approved.

  Katherine Boyle was born in 1614, one of the vast brood of children of Richard Earl of Cork. Four sons and four daughters survived the original family of fifteen; others besides Robert Boyle were talented. Mary Rich (née Boyle), Countess of Warwick, was Katherine’s younger sister; Roger Boyle, Lord Broghill, later Earl of Orrery, author of the play Mustapha, was a writer as well as a soldier. ‘Precious sister Kate’, married at fourteen to an Irish nobleman, the second Viscount Ranelagh, quickly displayed that mixture of liveliness and godliness which would later captivate Commonwealth London. ‘The sweetest face I ever saw’ and ‘the best company in which to be merry’ – those were some of the compliments she attracted as a young married woman in Dublin.35

  Her own arranged marriage was unhappy: unlike wilful Mary she had not made a choice for love. The best thing that could be said about Lord Ranelagh, remarked a contemporary, was that he seldom came sober to bed. But ‘that excellent sister of mine’, as Mary Warwick called Katherine, showed no signs of envying Mary’s superior happiness. On the contrary, it was Sister Ranelagh alone in the family who forgave Mary instantly for her imprudent love match; it was Sister Ranelagh alone who visited Mary when she was laid low with smallpox; it was Sister Ranelagh who enabled Mary to bear the long strain of her husband’s protracted deathbed, the agonies of gout producing little serenity of temperament in the dying man. Mary’s verdict on Sister Ranelagh was as ‘the most useful and the best friend, for soul and body, that ever any person I think had’.36

  Separated from her unsatisfactory Irish husband, Sister Ranelagh came to make her life in England instead; her house in Pall Mall, Westminster, now became a home-from-home for her brother Robert Boyle at Oxford. Katherine was already acquainted with John Milton: in the late 1640s she dispatched her nephews to be educated by him at the Barbican. It was when Milton moved to Petty France, becoming Sister Ranelagh’s close neighbour, that the friendship properly ripened; Milton describing her as standing to him ‘in the place of all kith and kin’. At this point Lady Ranelagh’s son Richard Jones was also sent to Milton, probably to read Greek and Latin with him.37

  In London Sister Ranelagh, gifted with a memory, according to Mary Warwick, ‘that will hear a sermon and go home and pen it after dinner verbatim’ took lessons in Hebrew from ‘a Scotch teacher’. He later dedicated his Gate to the Holy Tongue to her, congratulating Lady Ranelagh on her ‘proficiency’ in the language considering the short time she had learnt it and ‘amidst so many abstractions as she was surrounded with’. However, at the end of Robert Boyle’s life (when he was living with his sister) we are told that weak sight forced him to give up reading the Scriptures in Hebrew ‘since he had none about him that could read it to him’, so perhaps the ‘abstractions’ of Sister Ranelagh’s busy life had proved more formidable than her teacher supposed. On firmer ground, Sister Ranelagh expressed herself as well satisfied with the new Experimental Philosophy which her brother and others were trying to institute, believing it would help mankind to understand ‘this great frame of the invisible world’, and thus the power of Almighty God. And it was her suitably bountiful task to distribute gratis all the ‘noble Medicines’ which Robert Boyle compounded in his laboratory in her house.38

  A priggish note creeps into some of Sister Ranelagh’s later letters; or perhaps too many years of acting as the fountainhead of good advice to a wide circle, with Roger Lord Broghill as well as Robert Boyle hanging on her judgements, had corrupted her. Sometime in about 1658 Robert repeated to his sister a compliment paid to her by the poet Edmund Waller, whom Boyle had visited at Hall Barn, near Beaconsfield. But Sister Ranelagh was no Sacharissa. She responded: ‘I know his calling as a poet gives him licence to say as great things as he can, without intending they should signify any more than that he said them or to have any higher end than to make him admired by those whose admirations are so volatile as to be raised by a sound of words …’ That category did not include Sister Ranelagh. Why should Waller, so eloquent ‘upon things that so little deserved them … be so unwilling to apply that faculty to those subjects that were truly excellent?’ she wrote. For this reason she returned ‘his great professions’ with a ‘plain hearty wish’ that he should employ them ‘for the time to come’ upon higher topics than herself.39

  So much for Waller’s compliments. Was this the same woman who had once been ‘the best company in which to be merry’? One is not altogether surprised to learn that one of Sister Ranelagh’s three daughters, perhaps finding the high moral tone unendurable, ran off with a footman. ‘Niece Jones’, as Mary Warwick and Robert Boyle described her, did not however gain much happiness from this plunge into passion. Robert Boyle, referring to his six nieces in his will, left property to Niece Jones, now Mrs Melster, and the daughter of the mésalliance Catherine Melster, the latter’s portion to be held till she was twenty-one ‘because of her peculiar circumstances’.40

  Lady Ranelagh’s experiences as a mother were in general disheartening. Her son Richard Jones, the third Viscount Ranelagh, was a spendthrift who succeeded in being expelled from the House of Commons (although his reputation rests more pleasantly with posterity, since he built Chelsea House and laid out Ranelagh Gardens). Her favourite daughter – ‘a good person’ according to Mary Warwick – died unmarried in 1672; another married daughter died young.41

  It was as the beloved hostess to Robert Boyle, the centre of a distinguished and learned circle hanging on her good sense and judgements, that Lady Ranelagh enjoyed her true happiness. As late as 1687, when she was well over seventy, Sister Ranelagh was advising John Locke’s friend Damaris Lady Masham on how to cure melancholy, acting as ‘her physician’ in this cause
, as Lady Masham told Locke. When Sister Ranelagh died at the age of eighty-seven in December 1691, Robert Boyle, her companion of forty years, only survived her by a week; it was popularly believed that he had died of grief. The brilliant brother and his ‘dearest sister and constantly obliging friend’ as he had termed her in his will, were buried together in the chancel of St Martin-in-the-Fields.42

  If the fraternal association was a fortunate chance, the advantage of a supportive parent at this period, where female education was concerned, can hardly be overestimated. Elizabeth Walker, for example, took particular care to teach her daughters to read. The modest yet learned Lady Elizabeth Hastings was described as being educated in ‘a School or rather Academy’ – in short, by ‘her Vigilant Mother’ Lucy Countess of Huntingdon.43 It is notable how many of that slender band of female writers on whose autobiographical works we depend pay tribute to a mother who actively encouraged them to learn.

  The mother of Anne Murray, Lady Halkett, was governess to the younger children of King Charles I, but did not neglect her own family: she ‘paid masters for teaching my sister and me to write, speak French, play on the lute and virginals, and dance, and kept a gentlewoman to teach us all kinds of needlework’. The mother herself oversaw her daughters’ Bible reading: five a.m. in the summer and six a.m. in the winter. Ann Lady Fanshawe’s mother saw to it she was offered ‘all the advantages that time afforded, both for working all sorts of fine works with my needle, and learning French, singing, lute, the virginals, and dancing’. Alice Thornton’s mother had her taught to read the Bible and the Psalms, also writing, singing and dancing, playing the harpsichord and the lute, and everything else thought fit for a lady.44

  The ultimate advantage, however, for a daughter, was to be born of an erudite father, one who for whatever motive – possibly seeking a son-substitute – set out to provide her with a ‘masculine’ education. When Helena, the heroine of All’s Well That Ends Well, offered to cure the King of France of his fistula, the Countess of Rousillon suggested with alarm that her aid was hardly likely to be accepted – that of a ‘poor unlearned virgin’ – where so many celebrated doctors had failed; Helena, however, armed with her father’s ‘prescriptions of rare and prov’d effects’ went on to cure the King, and win the hand of her desired Bertram.45 There were a few Helenas in the seventeenth century, although their contemporaries tended to react with the same alarm as the Countess of Rousillon at the idea of such accomplishments in ‘a poor unlearned virgin’.

  Like Katherine Ranelagh, Lucy Hutchinson had ‘a great memory’ as a girl and put it to the same pious use: ‘I was carried to sermons’, she tells us and, ‘while I was very young could remember and repeat them so exactly, and being caress’d, the love of praise tickled me and made me attend more heedfully’. Lucy Hutchinson, born in 1620, the daughter of the Royalist Sir Allen Apsley, is one of the most attractive of the gallery of seventeenth-century women.46 Although she sprang into print in order to write a justificatory memoir of the husband she adored, Colonel John Hutchinson, Governor of Nottingham Castle and judge at the trial of Charles I, it is the witty, independent, ever courageous character of Lucy which animates the text, rather than that of the Puritan John Hutchinson.

  In Lucy’s case she began life well with a mother who actually did want a daughter after bearing three sons. Lucy was also delicate, and received special care (including breast-feeding) from her mother, who feared she would not live. Furthermore, Lady Apsley began to dream of having an ‘eminent’ daughter when she found that Lucy could read perfectly by the age of four. Being given a Frenchwoman as a ‘dry-nurse’ as soon as she was weaned, Lucy was also bilingual in French and English at an early age.

  At this point her mother lost confidence and began to worry that so much study would ruin Lucy’s health. It was Lucy’s father who had her taught Latin. Thus encouraged, Lucy began to outstrip in her progress her three brothers who were at school, despite the fact that her father’s chaplain, who acted as her tutor, was in her own words ‘a pitiful dull fellow’. Lucy became an avid reader: ‘every moment I could steal from my play I would employ in any book I could find’; at the same time her mother took to having her daughter’s own books locked up, to preserve her health. Her mother also worried at Lucy’s lack of progress in dancing, and at the lute and harpsichord, and ‘for my needle’, wrote Lucy, ‘I absolutely hated it’.

  In an autobiographical fragment,47 Lucy confesses that she was disliked by the other children for her solemnity, and her tendency to give little knowledgeable lectures. She was not however a prig, and passion always had a high priority. The maids fortunately were more appreciative of Lucy’s lectures, as a result of which she was delighted to find herself their confidante in their love affairs. It was to Lucy’s great satisfaction that her learning, far from depriving her of a husband as was generally prognosticated, actually won her the love of John Hutchinson. Idly, he spied some Latin books lying on the shelves at Lucy’s parents’ when she was away in the country; hearing they belonged to a mere girl, he became curious about this unusual character and asked a series of questions about her. The other girls, thinking to belittle her, told Hutchinson ‘how reserv’d and studious she was, and other things which they esteem’d no advantage’.

  They had mistaken their man: thus was ignited a lifelong love, John Hutchinson and Lucy being married in 1638, when she was eighteen. Many years later, after Hutchinson had died in the prison to which his allegedly treasonable activities had brought him (only Lucy’s energies in tackling her Royalist relations saved him from death), she summed up her feeling for her husband as follows: ‘So, as his shadow, she [Lucy] waited on him everywhere, till he was taken into that region of light which admits of none, and then she vanished into nothing.’48 It was a romance stirred not by a pair of gloves, a favour or a fan, but by a shelf of books in the Latin language.

  Although one should perhaps add that Lucy Hutchinson, like that other clever woman Margaret Newcastle, never evinced a very high opinion of the rest of her sex: doubtless the behaviour of her early companions rankled. The influence of Queen Henrietta Maria, for example, she thought to be disastrous: it was an ‘unhappy kingdom’ where the hands which were made only for ‘distaffs’ affected ‘the management of sceptres’. And Lucy praised Queen Elizabeth for acceding to her male counsellors.49We have dealt with the exceptions, the products of fortunate chance. What happened to those who were not singled out in this way?

  No one was very interested in the formal education of the daughters of the poor for the obvious reason that reading and writing were not likely to be skills which would enable them to support themselves in later life. Where provisions had to be made by the authorities, as in the case of foundlings, emphasis was very much on the practical – knitting rather than reading or writing. A Free School was endowed at Great Marlow in Buckinghamshire in 1626 to teach twenty-four girls to knit, spin and make bean-lace – twenty-four boys, however, were to be taught to read. The well-known school for the ‘Red Maids’ of Bristol – daughters of ‘decayed’ (poverty-stricken) or dead freemen, so called after their uniform of red cloaks – had been intended by its founder to teach the girls either reading or plain needlework; the latter accomplishment, so much more economically useful, soon swallowed up the former.50

  The quality of public education offered to girls also went downhill from the late sixteenth century onwards, as the practice by which a few girls had attended the grammar schools, if not to an advanced age, ceased. In 1594 for example Banbury Grammar School forbade the inclusion of girls above the age of nine, or when they could read English. Where girls did attend the grammar schools in the seventeenth century – their presence attested by girls’ names in the margins of school books – this was where the curricula of the schools in question were not limited to a strict grammar course; girls were not permitted to take the ordinary public grammar course (with its heavy grounding in Latin).51

  Richard Mulcaster was the first headmaster of Merchant
Taylors’ School, and subsequently High Master of St Paul’s until his resignation in 1608 (he died in 1611). As an educationalist he was liberal compared to most of his contemporaries, believing in the value of such ‘extras’ as music, theatricals and physical training. He also viewed the education of girls with approval, generally advocating it in Positions … for the training up of Children, first published in 1581 and dedicated to Elizabeth – ‘a Virgin and a Learned Queen’. Yet it is significant that to this champion (by the standards of the time) the education of girls was only as ‘an accessory by the way’ to the upbringing of youths.’52

  In no way therefore did Mulcaster approach the position of Mary Ward, who believed that there was nothing to stop women one day, like men, doing ‘great things’. On the contrary, he qualified his general approval for female education in a number of important respects. First, he proposed that girls had a ‘natural weakness’; using this to explain the awkward fact that they often ‘ripened’ intellectually earlier than boys. Since girls’ brains were not so much ‘charged’ as those of boys, explained Mulcaster, ‘therefore like empty casks they make the greater noise’.