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

by Antonia Fraser

  For war was coming, a time when many women, not only the strange and wilful, would lead lives of chaos and disruption; a time of war, when the great mass of women who simply expected to exist, as their foremothers had done, rejoicing in the cyclical happinesses, enduring the private sorrows of domestic life, living under obedience, would not be able to do so. War, the great challenger, was coming to them all.

  1In the first half of the seventeenth century, about forty books concerning anagrams were printed in Latin alone; a preoccupation compared by one scholar to the modern love of palmistry.3

  2In 1932 the editor of Dougle Fooleries compared Lady Eleanor Davies’s ‘obscurity of meaning and … freedom from syntax’ to that of James Joyce or Gertrude Stein.48

  PART TWO

  With the War – Stronger Grown

  To most ’tis known

  The weaker vessels are the stronger grown.

  The vine which on the pole still lean’d his arms

  Must now bear up and save the pole from harms.

  JAMES STRONG, Joanereidos: or, Feminine Valour Eminently discovered in Westerne Women, 1645

  CHAPTER NINE

  Courage above her Sex

  ‘My dear wife endured much hardship … and though by nature, according to her sex, timorous, yet in greatest danger would not be daunted, but shewed a courage even above her sex.’

  SIR HUGH CHOLMLEY, GOVERNOR OF SCARBOROUGH CASTLE

  At the beginning of the wars, which lasted on English soil from August 1642 until September 1651, when Cromwell finally routed the young Charles II at Worcester, it was taken for granted that woman, the weaker vessel, lacked not only the martial spirit but also courage itself.

  After the wars the theory of woman’s timidity continued to be preached: in 1653 Margaret Duchess of Newcastle’s first published work contained An Epistle to Souldiers, preface to a long poem describing the battle between Courage and Prudence before the Fortress of Hope. The Duchess was careful to explain that ‘these Armies I mention, were rais’d in my brain, fought in my fancy, and registered in my closet’. Anything else – from a woman – would be ludicrous. ‘Great Heroicks!’ she addressed the male sex, ‘you may justly laugh at me, if I went about to censure, instruct or advise in the valiant Art, and Discipline of War … according to the constitution of my Sex, I am as fearful as a Hare, for I shall start at the noise of a Potgun, and shut my eyes at the sight of a Bloody Sword, and run away at the least Alarm.’1

  Reality in the previous decade had been very different. The Civil Wars threw up a considerable number of ‘Great Heroicks’ of the theoretically weaker sex: women of the calibre of the Countess of Portland who at Carisbrooke Castle ‘behaved like a Roman matron’ and rather than surrender ‘declared she herself would fire the first cannon’. Or there was the lioness Lady Mary Winter, wife of the Royalist commander Sir John, who declined to give up Lidney House, near Gloucester, to the Parliamentary commander Colonel Massey with some well-turned words on the subject of her absent husband’s ‘unalterable allegiance to his king and sovereign’. Thus Massey’s ‘hopes were disappointed by the resolution of a female’.2

  Of these the most celebrated were the valiant ladies on both sides who in the absence of their husbands found themselves withstanding the enemy’s siege. Less celebrated, but in quite as much danger, were the ordinary women also involved in the siege, maidservants and so forth; these too threw themselves into the fray. So that far from being fearful as hares, women showed themselves capable, on many different levels, of gallantry at least equal to that of their menfolk; and if they were indeed inherently timorous, then it could be argued that their courage was correspondingly even greater.

  This seemingly contradictory heroism of the weaker vessel was easily explained on the surface: an individual woman such as Brilliana Lady Harley was said to have exhibited ‘a Masculine Bravery’ or displayed that ‘constancy and courage above her sex’ which her memorial tablet ascribed to the valiant Lady Bankes of Corfe Castle.3

  Elizabeth Twysden, Lady Cholmley, married Sir Hugh Cholmley of Yorkshire, later Royalist Governor of Scarborough Castle. Throughout the siege of the Castle, following the Parliamentary victory of Marston Moor, she stayed resolutely at her husband’s side; as he wrote later, she ‘would not forsake me for any danger’, although her daughters sailed for Holland and her sons were away in London. When the besieging commander Sir John Meldrum threatened total massacre, Lady Cholmley begged her husband not to consider her own safety; throughout the defence Lady Cholmley led the nursing of the wounded and numerous sick (scurvy soon broke out) with the aid of her maids. Sir Hugh Cholmley’s tribute to his wife’s gallantry stands for many: ‘My dear wife endured much hardship, and yet with little show of trouble; and though by nature, according to her sex, timorous, yet in greatest danger would not be daunted, but showed a courage even above her sex.’4

  Yet the conventional refusal to impute courage to the female sex as a whole (while granting it tenderly to individual members) did not survive the wars quite unaltered despite Margaret Newcastle’s ostentatiously modest words. Indeed, one can detect a certain masculine desperation in the repeated claims that the heroines of the wars acted out their martial role with the greatest reluctance. As we shall see, not a few of the ‘Great [female] Heroicks’ accepted their unusual destiny with zest; nor did this enthusiasm escape notice at the time, especially when it reflected derogatorily on the lady’s husband.

  ‘Three women ruined the Kingdom: Eve, the Queen and the Countess of Derby’: this comment from a Parliamentary source, by associating Charlotte de la Trémoille, Countess of Derby with Grandmother Eve and the hated Catholic Henrietta Maria, paid tribute to her pre-eminence as a Royalist heroine. But there were also sneers at her husband, James Stanley, seventh Earl of Derby: it was said that of the two she had proved herself the better soldier, or more crudely, that she had stolen ‘the Earl’s breeches’.5

  Certainly the Countess was bred to be a heroine: in an age when royal women were among the few allowed to revel in public attention, she was by birth close to being a princess. A French Huguenot, daughter of the Due de Thouars, she was a granddaughter of William the Silent (of Orange) by his Bourbon wife. Through her marriage to the Earl of Derby, himself connected to the English royal line, she had enjoyed the full richness of English court life before the war; and since the Earl of Derby was the greatest magnate of the north-west, there she found herself a queen by his side: mighty Lathom House being generally considered ‘the only Court’ in the north.6 The habit of command then came naturally to her. (And it may also be noted that she was seven years her husband’s senior.)

  Early in 1643 the fall of the Royalist stronghold of Warrington in Lancashire brought neighbouring Lathom House to the attention of Parliament. At this point the Earl of Derby was in the Isle of Man (also part of his estates) at the request of the Queen, while the Countess, a woman in her early forties, remained at Lathom House with two of her seven children, the Ladies Mary and Katherine Stanley. The aim of Sir Thomas Fairfax, the Parliamentary General, was to secure the surrender of Lathom House without bloodshed; to this end on 28 February he sent an official summons to the Countess by the hand of a Captain Markland.

  At this point the formal rules governing a seventeenth-century siege become relevant (and indeed remain so through all the sieges, major or minor, which will be discussed in the ensuing chapter). These rules, which could have barbarous consequences for civilians plunged involuntarily into a siege, were nevertheless framed for the preservation rather than the destruction of life.

  In short: after the besieging commander had issued an official summons to the defenders of a stronghold to surrender, a choice had to be made. If the defenders promptly surrendered, then the civilians – mainly women and children – within the stronghold were generally allowed to depart peacefully, leaving the soldiers within the stronghold to negotiate the details of the surrender, including the surrender of their arms. Before he captured Bridgwater, in
July 1645, Sir Thomas Fairfax was said to have shown particular ‘pity and commiseration’ for these non-combatants by sending them a free offer of quarter before his troops began to fire. ‘Upon which there came out a whole regiment of women and children.’7

  If, on the other hand, there was no surrender, then according to the rules of war, the besieged civilians were equally at risk with the military when and if the stronghold was taken by force; there need be no quarter given. (It was under these rules, incidentally, complying with contemporary procedure, if outraging the instincts of humanity, that Cromwell at Drogheda and Wexford in 1649 permitted the slaughter of civilians as well as soldiers, because neither fortified town, after repeated summonses, agreed to surrender.) At Sherborne, shortly after the successful siege of Bridgwater, Fairfax ‘according to his wonted nobleness’ sent a messenger to the commander, Sir Lewis Dyve, that ‘if he pleased to send out his lady, or any other women, he would give way to it’. Sir Lewis, while expressing himself grateful for the favour, gave no very positive answer, and Lady Dyve remained within the stronghold. It was not until the ‘storm’ of Sherborne had begun that a white flag was hung out; this was too late to stop the sack, in the course of which the soldiers acquired a great deal of booty and everyone (except Lady Dyve) was ‘stripped’. Lady Dyve was lucky since by this point there was no theoretical guarantee of her safety. At Grafton House, near Stony Stratford, on Christmas Eve 1643, all the women of the house were ‘stripped to their naked skins’ by the troops of Major-General Skippon, after the fortress surrendered.8

  It may be asked what justification there could be for this ritual; the answer lies in the nature of siege warfare at that time. Without such a proviso it was greatly to the advantage of the defenders, if they had sufficient food and water, to hold out as long as possible, or at least until these supplies had been used up; after all they were warmly sheltered, and the possibility of rescue from outside remained. Meanwhile the besiegers were leading a far less agreeable existence, enduring the rigours of exposure, which led quickly to disease; the prospect of attack from the rear, in the shape of rescuing forces, only increased as time passed. Under these circumstances, some grim inducement had to be offered to the defenders to obey the summons: hence the harsh rules of siege war. Given these conditions the ‘Welsh howlings’ of the women who wanted to urge surrender upon their husbands at the siege of Oswestry (a walled town about to be blown up) were perfectly comprehensible.9

  Lathom House in the 1640s was a massive and ancient fortress. The walls were six feet thick; a moat, eight yards across and six feet deep, surrounded them; after that came a strong palisade. Nine towers dominated the walls, each containing six pieces of ordnance or mounted guns; mightiest of all was the Eagle Tower, over which flew the proud motto Sans Changer. There was an excellent water supply. Even the terrain favoured the defence, for the ground rose up round Lathom House like another natural fortification.

  The Countess of Derby’s answer to Captain Markland’s summons was not outright defiance. Instead she played for time, while subtly reminding both the Captain and his superior of her own renowned social status. It was after all only six months since the outbreak of this ‘war without an enemy’, as the Parliamentarian Sir William Waller called it in a letter to a Royalist friend: the pre-war standards of courtesy and respect towards a great lady still prevailed. Not only did the Countess request further time to consider the summons, but she firmly declined to emerge from her fortress in order to ‘treat’ with the enemy; in the first of a series of magnificent communications she observed that ‘notwithstanding her present condition, she remembered both her Lord’s honour and her own birth, conceiving it more knightly that Sir Thomas Fairfax should wait upon her, than she upon him’.10

  Various other summonses were equally rebuffed in the same high style. The Countess’s final answer was as follows: ‘That though a woman and a stranger divorced from her friends, and robbed of her state, she was ready to receive their utmost violence, trusting in God both for her protection and deliverance.’11

  Apart from the protection of God, the Countess also had a considerable garrison of soldiers, under a Captain Farmer, and the men from the Derby estate, the keepers, fowlers and suchlike who, being by profession skilled marksmen, manned the towers. Nevertheless the bombardment which ensued, including ‘flaming granadoes’ (grenades) as well as the pounding of a great mortar, was severe and left its impact on the besieged: several women had their hands scorched. A contemporary diary of the siege pays tribute to the courage of Mary and Katherine Stanley, ‘for piety and sweetness truly the children of so princely a mother’. Having inherited the Countess’s spirit as well, ‘the little ladies had stomack to digest canon’, although ‘the stoutest soldiers had no hearts for granadoes’.12

  The Countess remained staunch. The pinnacles and turrets of Lathom House began to crumble to the pounding of the mortar, a culverin and a demi-culverin, but still she continued to refuse in ringing terms that safe-conduct for herself and her daughters which would have implied surrender. It was, she declared, ‘more noble to preserve her liberty by arms than to buy peace with slavery’. As for negotiations: ‘’tis dangerous treating when the sword is in the enemy’s hand’. Although the diary of the siege refers to the indignities the Countess and her daughters had to suffer, listening to the language and affronts of the besieging soldiery, the cowardice of her neighbours presented a more practical problem. One petition suggested that the Countess would do well to surrender – for the future of the surrounding countryside. The Countess of Derby made short work of it. There is no evidence that the more forceful comments of the Parliamentary preachers on her character, couched in biblical terms – the Scarlet Woman, the Whore of Babylon and so forth – made any impact on her spirit either.

  The besiegers attempted to drain off the castle water supply, where the spring rose on the hill. But the real danger was presented by the great mortar loaded with stones thirteen inches across, eighty pounds in weight, daily, relentlessly pounding them to pieces. The successful sally of the defenders out of the gates to capture the mortar and drag it inside was therefore a triumph of the desperate – except that the Countess would not admit to being desperate. Instead she commanded a public thanksgiving.

  It was not the least of her pleasures to discover that the commanding officer of the besiegers, Colonel Rigby, had summoned his neighbours to watch Lathom House either yield or be burnt. They were thus present to witness his humiliation. Lady Derby gave him instead ‘a very scurvy satisfying answer, so that his friends came opportunely to comfort him’ (instead of rejoicing with him). Her enemy was ‘sick of Shame and dishonour, to be routed by a lady and a handful of men’.

  Three months later it was the arrival of Prince Rupert at the head of a considerable force which relieved Lathom House. The Prince conveyed twenty-two of the enemy’s colours to the great lady who had held fast. Although the actual military manoeuvres were conducted by Captain Farmer, it is evident that without a woman of the lofty courage – one might add the aristocratic arrogance – of the Countess of Derby, Lathom House would have fallen to the enemy almost immediately. As it was, when it did surrender in December 1645, the Countess was far away on the Isle of Man. After the Restoration, her daughter Katherine, who retained vivid childish memories of the siege, would take to task a historian who suggested that the Countess had been present at, and thus connected with, this final débâcle. Thomas Dugdale, in his widely read 1660 Continuation of Sir Richard Baker’s 1637 Chronicle, perpetuated this error, based on two false Parliamentary reports. Katherine, now Marchioness of Dorchester, joined with Lucy Countess of Huntingdon and her son (anxious to refute the rather more substantiated charge that Lady Eleanor Davies had foretold the death of Buckingham). As a result, Dugdale, while retaining the error, inserted a slightly equivocal compliment to the Countess in the 1665 edition: ‘in her defending of that place’ (Lathom House) the Countess ‘had manifested a more than Feminine Magnanimity’ – that is
, greatness of spirit. It was not until 1674 that the error concerning the 1645 surrender was eliminated and the Countess’s role in the original victory enlarged.13

  The ‘Heroick Countess’ herself lived until 1664, surviving not only the wars but the tragedy of her husband’s execution at the orders of Parliament for his part in the Worcester campaign (she tried, despite the objections of the inhabitants, to surrender the Isle of Man in return for his life). As an old lady she would tell stories of the wars to her Lancashire neighbour William Blundell, which he found difficult to understand on account of her French accent: ‘a defect’ in ‘my lady’s English’. To the end she was something of a tartar: where the Quakers were concerned, for example, ‘she shut out all pity and tenderness’ when they were imprisoned for non-payment of tithes.14

  The Countess, so confident in her birth, and the utter rightness of all her opinions, would have appreciated Dugdale’s equivocal compliment to her ‘more than Feminine Magnanimity’. From the point of view of the enemy, a high-born heroine in charge of a siege represented a double hazard. Most obviously, her combination of gallantry and authority would fuel the chivalrous defenders to greater efforts; secondly, the hoped-for effect of an official summons upon the defenders’ nerves might be largely nullified by the presence of such a feminine figurehead, No one had any particular desire to kill, maim or wound her or her family: hence the constant pleading requests to the Countess of Derby to accept a safe-conduct. When the husband himself conducted the defence, his wife’s presence at the siege was still embarrassing to the attackers, as in the case of the Marchioness of Winchester, another brave woman whose refusal to quit inhibited her opponents.