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

by Antonia Fraser

  Several of the little ‘chapbooks’ as they were later known, popular fiction sold by pedlars for 2d a story, centred upon strong-minded – and strong-bodied – heroines. Long Meg of Westminster, which first appeared in 1582, is a notable example,32 Long Meg being an Amazonian Lancashire lass who comes to London on a carrier’s cart at the age of eighteen, like Jane Martindale seeking a place in service. But although Long Meg takes to touring London at night, dressed in men’s clothing and beating men in fair fight, she ends by marrying a soldier, just as Jane Martindale had in the end married. To please her readers, most of whom were, of course, male, Long Meg vows to be a submissive wife: ‘It behoveth me to be Obedient to you, and, never shall it be said, though I Cudgel a Knave that Long Meg shall be her Husband’s Master.’

  Only the real-life heroine Mary Frith, subject of Middleton and Dekker’s comedy The Roaring Girl, never succumbed to the economic necessity or social ideal of obedience. But then Moll Cutpurse, as she was known, did not succumb to the law either. ‘She could not endure the sedentary life of sewing or stitching, a sampler was as grievous to her as a winding-sheet.’ Dressed as a man, sword and all, she was first of all notorious as ‘a bully, pick-purse, fortune teller, receiver and forger’. Later she became what it would be appropriate to term a successful highwayperson. Building up a gang of thieves, she used her house in Fleet Street as a centre for her operations, give or take a spell in Newgate. On Sundays this female Robin Hood would visit the gaols and feed the prisoners out of her haul. Moll Cutpurse, untroubled by obedience, lived to the ripe old age of seventy-five, and was buried in 1659 after an Anglican service at St Bride’s.33

  Moll Cutpurse was the exception, as is demonstrated by the popular wonder accorded to her – several books were written about her as well as Dekker’s play, and her biography The Life and Death of Mistress Mary Frith appeared in 1662. Living under obedience, as most women did, married or unmarried, they might be as garrulous as they pleased – so the satirists averred – at home, but their voices were unlikely to be heard in the public forum. The undesirable talkativeness of the female sex in the domestic circle was axiomatic; the desirability of its silence outside was equally taken for granted. Yet even before the Civil War, certain individual women, whether wilful, eccentric or just plain deluded, had already discovered a way in which the female voice might be raised without immediate masculine control.

  Women were of course forbidden to preach in the churches – on the direct authority of mighty St Paul himself. But when a woman started to ‘prophesy’ as did a pedlar called Jane Hawkins at St Ives near Huntingdon in 1629, the matter was somewhat more complicated. ‘This rhyming preacheress’, as she was later described, made a strong local impression.34 For by claiming direct inspiration from God – and expressing this inspiration in trances, descriptions of visions and other ‘prophecies’ – a woman made it that much more difficult for her voice to be extinguished; there would always be those around her, credulous or sympathetic, who believed that this extinction was suppressing the direct message of God. If the politics of Church and State were introduced, the matter became more complicated still. At the same time the dreaded implication of witchcraft, ever present for a woman who refused to conform, was avoided if the language was sufficiently religious in its expression to suggest possession by the Almighty, rather than some more sinister power.

  Jane Hawkins, ‘having fallen into a rapture or ecstasy’, foretold on the one hand such disagreeable eventualities for the Anglican Church as the downfall of the bishops; on the other hand she magnified’ the ministry of the local vicar, the Rev. Mr Tokey. When her prophetic rhyming continued for three days and nights, it was perhaps hardly surprising that the 200 people who listened to her included Mr Tokey, his curate, and another ‘scholar’ who sat at the feet of Jane Hawkins’s bed, rapidly copying out the verses – amounting to some thousands – which were emitted from the entranced woman. The plan was to make a fair copy of the verses later ‘with intent to print them’. At which point however, the Bishop, less enthusiastic at having his downfall predicted than Mr Tokey at having his ministry magnified, had the verses seized.

  When Mr Tokey refused to abandon the claims of his spiritual patroness to be a true visionary, he was suspended, while his curate was ‘put quite away’; the Justices of the Peace were given a warrant by the Bishop to look after Jane Hawkins herself and ensure that the neighbours did not visit her. Reports said that the local people were deserting their ‘rhyming preacheress’; soon they were said to ‘cry out against her’. Finally the unfortunate vicar made a written acknowledgement that Jane was an impostor, and that he himself had been guilty of indiscretion.

  It is noticeable that the Bishop’s attitude to Jane Hawkins was from the first one of suspicion on the grounds of her sex. Here was ‘a witty crafty baggage’, who was deliberately stepping out of her low station in life to make trouble for the rest of the world; he was disgusted that she would not ‘confess’ to having written verses before, or to having written them of her own accord now. To the end he referred to ‘this imposture’ of the woman at St Ives; it was not within his cognizance that someone of Jane Hawkins’s ilk could have genuinely believed in the strength of her own visions.

  Yet there had been a brief moment of glory when Jane Hawkins, a ‘poor woman (and she but a pedlar)’ as she was contemptuously described, lay on a bed surrounded by 200 local people, led by the vicar, who hung on her words with bated breath, and even had them copied down for widespread publication. The point has been made by Keith Thomas that in an age when women were unable to attend grammar schools, let alone attend university, and of course unable to preach, the self-styled role of prophetess enabled a woman frustrated of any normal means of self-expression to make her voice at least heard.35

  A far more notorious ‘rhyming preacheress’ – because of her high station in life – was the woman born Eleanor Audeley, daughter of the Earl of Castlehaven, and wife in succession to Sir John Davies, Attorney-General for Ireland, and Sir Archibald Douglas. By her first marriage Lady Eleanor Davies (the name by which she is generally known) bore a daughter Lucy, whose life was early affected by her mother’s eccentricities. In 1623 at the age of ten Lucy was married off by her father (without a licence) to Ferdinando Lord Hastings, who succeeded his father as sixth Earl of Huntingdon in 1643; the hasty ceremony was probably intended to save Lucy from her mother’s drastic influence. Sir John Davies’s death meant that the young couple went to live together much earlier than had been anticipated.36 Life in the wake of a scandalous parent had its predictable effect on Lady Huntingdon: an intellectual, Lucy also had a strong regard for the conventions. It was she who had prepared her own clever daughter Elizabeth Hastings so well for marriage that her husband never suffered ‘all those inconveniences’ generally believed to accompany a learned wife (see p. 149).

  ‘Inconveniences’ certainly surrounded the career of Lady Eleanor Davies.37 In 1625, when she was in her mid-thirties, according to her own account she received a revelation while lying in bed at home at Englefield Manor: ‘nineteen and a half years to the Judgement and you as the Meek Virgin’. Sir John Davies died the next year, but since Lady Eleanor – who shared the contemporary preoccupation with anagrams – made of her husband’s name DAVIS IUDAS, she can hardly have regretted his demise. Sir John’s particular betrayal was described by Lady Eleanor: it was her first book which ‘was sacrificed by my first husband’s hand, thrown into the fire’. Lady Eleanor responded with her own weapons, giving Sir John details of his ‘doom’, telling him ‘within three years to expect the mortal blow’. To hammer the point in, she wore black – ‘my mourning garment’ – from that time forward.

  There had been other troubles in the marriage: Lady Eleanor’s son by Sir John, known as Jack, was an idiot. There is a great deal that is touching about the mother’s attitude to her son’s deformity, including the conviction (in 1617) that if Jack ‘were now put into the hands of some skilful man … [he] might
be brought to speak’. Lady Eleanor went on: ‘for he is wonderfully mended in his understanding of late … he understands anything that is spoken to him without making any signs, so as it is certain he hath his hearing … then the defect must be in his tongue’.38 But in the event poor Jack was drowned, leaving Lucy Davies, incidentally, as heiress to an important fortune.

  To the outside world, however, Lady Eleanor was clearly marked down as a trouble-maker, even before she turned her attention, fatally, to matters of Church and State. In 1622, for example, a certain man called Brooke reproached her for abuse (not recorded) of his wife and innocent child. Brooke declared that Lady Eleanor had by her behaviour abandoned all ‘goodness and modesty’, being not only mad and ugly, but also blinded with pride in her own birth; in retaliation he threatened on the one hand to ‘scratch a mince-pie’ out of her; on the other hand he wished Lady Eleanor, as being the most horrible curse in his power, to remain exactly what she was.39

  Lady Eleanor’s second marriage to Sir Archibald Douglas was by her own account not much more successful than her first. It took place only three months after Sir John Davies’s death ‘contrary to a solemn Vow’, and soon there was a recurrence of both the old trouble – ‘he likewise burning my book’ – and the old revenge. For Sir Archibald ‘escaped not scotfree’, being bereft of his senses while at Communion and ‘instead of speech made a noise like a Brute Creature’.40 In later life (he lived until 1644) Sir Archibald believed he saw angels, and became, like his wife, preoccupied with anagrams.

  REVEALE O DANIEL! This, the transformation of her maiden name, if spelt ELEANOR AUDLIE, was the crucial anagram in Lady Eleanor’s own opinion (how very different was this strident call from that meek cry – AH, I SEE HEAV’N’S PURE SUN – composed by her admirers out of the name of Susanna Perwick). Altogether this self-styled Daniel was responsible for twenty-eight tracts of a prophetic nature, which have been described in modern times as ‘an almost unintelligible mixture of religion, politics and prophecy’.41 Unfortunately for Lady Eleanor, in her own time they were not altogether unintelligible, and unfortunately too, she had the occasional Cassandra’s knack of prophesying accurately some rather unlikely and extremely unpleasant event.

  The first prediction which brought Lady Eleanor real notoriety was that of the impending assassination of the Duke of Buckingham, made in June 1628, with the rider that the Duke’s ‘time was not till August’. When Buckingham was duly struck down by John Felton on the twenty-third of that month, Lady Eleanor’s stock as a prophetess was understandably high amongst the common people of London, who elevated her as ‘a cunning woman’. (However, lest Lady Eleanor be credited too firmly with supernatural powers, it has been suggested that her prophecy was common knowledge that summer and Felton may actually have timed his blow to fit in with it.)42

  Lady Eleanor’s successful prophecies concerning the pregnancies of Queen Henrietta Maria, if less ostentatious, probably had more effect in gaining her a reputation as a seer in high places – and thus leading in the end to her downfall. It was the inevitable way of royal life that soon after Henrietta Maria arrived in England in June 1625 as a bride, her possible pregnancy should be the subject of speculation. When two years later there was still no sign of an heir to the throne, it was also inevitable that the Queen (and those around her) should be concerned about her possible infertility. According to the story, it was on All Saints’ Day, 1 November 1627, that the Queen paused as she was leaving the evening service and asked Lady Eleanor when she would be with child. Lady Eleanor replied that the Queen’s first child would be christened and buried all in one day. And in May 1629 the Queen’s firstborn, a Prince named Charles James, did die more or less as Lady Eleanor had predicted. In response to a further emissary from the court, a Mr Kirk, Lady Eleanor struck lucky again by predicting that the Queen’s next baby would be another boy, but an exceptionally strong child – as the future Charles II, born in May 1630, proved to be. The King was irritated by Lady Eleanor’s influence over his wife but Mr Kirk among others spread the lady’s fame.

  Three years later the lady’s ‘prophesyings’, which she had printed at Amsterdam (where she needed no licence) under the legend ‘Reveale O Daniel’, were of a more extravagant nature. Now it was a question of the ‘doom’ of Charles I; referring to the King as ‘Belshazzar’ and describing her vision of a Beast ascended out of the Bottomless Pit, having seven heads to signify the seven past years of the King’s rule, Lady Eleanor foretold the final execution of the King. In addition Laud, newly appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, was picturesquely evoked as ‘horned like the lamb, hearted like a Wolf.’43

  The King’s annoyance was pardonable. This kind of prophecy was in theory a grave offence (even to cast the monarch’s horoscope without authorization was treason). Lady Eleanor was summoned to the court of High Commission on 24 October 1633, and there committed for ‘compiling and publishing certain fanatic and scandalous pamphlets’. At least two of the judges thought that Lady Eleanor should acknowledge her offence at St Paul’s Cross, while the Bishop of Rochester suggested Bedlam – the madhouse. In the end Lady Eleanor was fined £3,000 and sentenced to imprisonment in the Gatehouse. Her books however did not get off so lightly, being burnt publicly: ‘this is the third day their dead bodies throwed in loose sheets of paper lie in the streets of the great city’, she wrote in anguish.44

  Even more humiliating to her spirit was her actual experience in court. Efforts were made to convince Lady Eleanor of the meaninglessness of her prophecies, and in particular of her precious anagrams. To illustrate the point, some had the happy thought of pointing out that DAME ELEANOR DAVIS could be transformed into NEVER SO MAD A LADIE, ‘which happy fancy brought that grave Court in to such a laughter, and the poor woman into such a confusion’ that Lady Eleanor herself never alluded to this particular incident subsequently.45 It is an ironic scene in retrospect: the august body of judges, from whom the future was happily hidden, attempting in vain to convince the distracted woman that anyone who predicted the execution of Charles I must necessarily have their wits a-wandering.

  The fine was probably not paid, but Lady Eleanor remained in the Gatehouse despite her daughter Lucy Countess of Huntingdon’s petitioning for her release. Lucy was careful to admit that her mother had been confined ‘by just censure’, but she asked that she might have some free air, ‘for womanhood’ some female of her own to attend her, and perhaps a clergyman as well.46

  In 1635 Lady Eleanor was released from her London prison and went to live in the cathedral town of Lichfield in Staffordshire. Here she found no peace. Flouting the conventions, she freely used those seats reserved for the wives of the bishop and the canons within the cathedral; worse still she sat herself down on the episcopal throne, and declaring that she was both ‘Bishop and Metropolitan’, sprinkled a mixture of tar and water on the cathedral hangings.

  This time there was no escaping ‘Bedlam’s loathsome Prison’ even for the mother of the Countess of Huntingdon. Here sightseers would come to gape at Lady Eleanor (and other inmates). Nor was Lady Eleanor’s prophetic voice silent. Particular alarm was caused when she predicted a fire within Bedlam, and fires duly occurred – although the fire risks were so great, that was hardly a surprising occurrence. Finally, after a spell in the Tower, Lady Eleanor was released into the care of her daughter and son-in-law in 1640.

  The prophesying – and the violent treatment – continued. In 1646 Lady Eleanor was sent to another London prison called the Compter and incarcerated in a black cell by the Keeper, an experience she described graphically: ‘Not long after (she all unready, etc.) between two of them carried down thence, instantly shut and bolted was into the Dungeon-Hole, Hell’s Epitomy, in the dark out of call or cry, searching first her Coats pockets: Frustrate that way, with the Key took away the Candle, there left in their Pest-house on the wet floor to take up her lodging.’ Fortunately, so that Lady Eleanor could examine her cell all night long till dawn: ‘the Heavens without i
ntermission flashed out Lightnings, as Noonday’.472

  It seems unfair that for all her charitable treatment of her own ‘dear mother’ Lucy Countess of Huntingdon was the victim of a series of tragedies as a mother herself. Her first three sons all died; the fourth, Theophilus, who eventually became Earl of Huntingdon, was not born until 1650, when the Earl and Countess of Huntingdon had been married for over a quarter of a century. Sion’s Lamentation, a powerful piece – and for once politically innocent – was written for the funeral of one of these boys, Henry Lord Hastings, in 1649, by the prophetic grandmother. Lady Eleanor described the eerie emptiness of the streets through which the funeral train passed. As when Joshua made the sun and moon stand still at his command at Gibeon, the Lord harkening to his request, so the cortège ‘saw not the face of Coach, Cart or Car, which passed by, either that met us, or stood in our way’.49

  But by this date the whole world, not only the world of the distracted Lady Eleanor, was turning upside down – never so mad a lady till the present, perhaps, but other prophetesses were coming forward to rival her. Lady Eleanor, like these other frustrated women living in theoretical obedience, who poured their bizarre imaginings into prophecies, looked to the new order in the shape of Oliver Cromwell. We shall meet Lady Eleanor again in 1648, presenting a copy of the notorious 1633 prophecies to the great man himself.