When the couple did meet again in November 1655, they had a bitter quarrel; yet even now, for the higher purpose of marital union, it was Elizabeth who agreed to a reconciliation on John’s terms. By August 1657 John Lilburne, although nominally still a prisoner, was allowed to rent a house at Eltham in Kent; moreover Elizabeth was pregnant again (she underwent a total of ten pregnancies, five of her babies, including the boy named Tower, dying young). The house was for the accouchement, ‘that I might be near my friends at my lying-in’. She duly gave birth. Then Cromwell, hearing of Lilburne’s freedom, and being prepared to grant him an allowance but not to have him at large, called for his return. It was too late. John Lilburne was now ‘sick and weak’.49On 29 August 1657, at the age of forty-three, he was dead.
Elizabeth was now in a state verging on destitution, with three children to care for, including a new-born baby. Her grief was not allayed by the Quaker funeral which followed. All that was left for her to do was to petition the all-powerful Cromwell, who, whatever his treatment of the dissident John, had as we have seen a merited reputation for helping distressed women. Cromwell responded with an order for the payment of the arrears due to Elizabeth, and a continuation of the 40s a week allowance granted to Lilburne. Unfortunately this was not to be the end of Elizabeth’s ‘piercing sorrows’. By the time Richard Cromwell succeeded his father as Protector, she was still petitioning to have Parliament repeal that Act of 1652 which had sentenced John to a colossal fine: ‘Your late father professed very great tenderness to me’, she wrote desperately to Richard.50 The 1652 Act was finally repealed in February 1659.
This, little enough, was the material reward secured by Elizabeth Lilburne: in return for a small allowance (still being paid in March 1660) she surrendered John Lilburne’s papers. If Lilburne himself would not have approved,51 who can blame the exhausted widow, who had, as she told Richard Cromwell, endured ‘seventeen years’ sorrows’ and longed for ‘a little rest and comfort among my fatherless children’. A more equitable award lay in the earlier judgement of Lilburne himself. Dispatching a petition to Cromwell by her hand, he wrote: ‘This I have sent by the gravest, wisest, fittest messenger I could think of.’ He added, in this at least a conventional product of the seventeenth century, ‘and, though a Feminine, yet of a gallant and truly masculine spirit’.52
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
When Women Preach
When women preach and cobblers pray
The fiends in hell make holiday.
‘Lucifer’s Lackey or The Devil’s New Creation’, 1641
‘Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak’; it was this verse from St Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians which was at the root of the accepted condemnation of female preaching (and participation in church government) at the beginning of the seventeenth century. To conventional Christian ears, the mighty voice of the Apostle still thundered down the centuries with undiminished vigour and there seemed little distinction to be drawn between St Paul’s admonition to the inhabitants of Achaea in the first century AD, and the will of God 1,600 years later.
For women, as a whole, there had to be a more private – and one might add less voluble – way of influencing their contemporaries; or as the epitaph of the pious and charitable Lettice Viscountess Falkland phrased it:
And now, though Paul forbids her Sex to preach,
Yet may her Life instruct, and her Death teach.
Richard Brathwaite, in The English Gentlewoman of 1631, that mine of advice on the conduct of the modest female, took the argument one stage further. Just as ‘discourse of State-matters’ would not become her, it was equally unsuitable ‘to dispute of high points of Divinity’: since women were forbidden to be speakers in church it was not right that they should discuss theological matters in private either.1
By October 1650 when Sir Ralph Verney was having his brush with Dr Denton (and Nancy) on the subject of a girl’s rightful education, all this had changed. ‘Had St Paul lived in our Times’, wrote Sir Ralph gloomily, ‘I am confident he would have fixed a Shame upon women for writing (as well as for their speaking) in the Church.’2 Preaching among the women sectaries was a phenomenon of the English scene from the 1640s onwards; the shame that St Paul would or would not have felt being a subject of hot debate not only amongst outsiders hostile to the sects, but also within their ranks.
Women probably first began to preach in Holland in the 1630s in the Baptist churches, whose congregations had always included a large number of their sex. (There were said to be more women than men in the large body of English separatists who went to Holland in 1558; thereafter on the Continent women had held numerous church offices and taken some part in lay preaching.) In the New World – Massachusetts – women were known to have preached by 1636. In England in the 1640s women preached weekly at the General Baptist Church in Bell Alley, off Coleman Street, in the City of London. Anne Hempstall was described as preaching to ‘bibbing Gossips’ in her house in Holborn and Mary Bilbrowe, wife of a bricklayer of St Giles-in-the-Fields, preached in her parlour, although the pulpit, which was made of brick, was so high that only her tippet could be seen. As early as 1641 a tract, The Discovery of Women Preachers, referred to their existence in Kent, Cambridge and Salisbury.3
Women were notable among the Brownists, those enthusiasts who led a tumultuous existence on the wing of the so-called Independent Church. (The name derived from one of their spokesmen, Robert Browne.) It was fear of these Independent sectaries which had led in March 1642 to the drawing-up of the Kentish petition, with Sir Roger Twysden as one of its leaders – that move to save the nation from ‘heresy, schism, prophaneness, libertinism, anabaptism, atheism’ which had led to all the subsequent troubles of the Twysden family (see p.256). Later the division between Independents and Presbyterians would give way to a new type of alignment: because Brownists could not accept any form of central authority in religious matters, they now found themselves opposed to many of their previous Independent colleagues, as well as the Presbyterians.
The style of such pioneers could hardly be expected to be self-effacing. In London Mrs Attoway, ‘Mistress of all the She preachers in Coleman Street’, who was capable of preaching for well over an hour, seems to have run off with another woman’s husband and in addition secured contributions to finance a journey to Jerusalem, a project which unlike her elopement remained largely in her imagination. Some of these women displayed undeniably an ‘eerie spirit’; others were less ‘eerie’ than ‘brazen-faced’.4 The trouble was that the kind of woman who possessed the audacity to challenge the ruling of St Paul was not likely to combine it with that feminine modesty which would win society’s respect for the cause of the woman preacher.
On the contrary, all the old gibes concerning woman’s talkativeness – ‘the natural volubility of their tongues’ – proved useful yet again in the conflict over the ‘preacheresses’. Prejudice could cause a woman preaching to be condemned first as ‘a prater’ or ‘prattler’, so by implication as a scold, and lastly even as some kind of witch – remembering the connection in the popular mind between scolding and cursing. Additionally, her ‘Bible-thumping’ could be held to demonstrate the perils of any form of education, however rudimentary, for women since they were clearly not capable of making good use of it.5
By 1645 the moderate Puritans were criticizing the Brownists for allowing women to take part in church government and to preach. Prynne attacked this implication of Independency, and in 1646 John Vicars, in The Schismatick Sifted: Or, A Picture of Independents Freshly and Fairly Washt over Again, deplored the fact that not only ‘saucy boys, bold botching taylors’ but also ‘bold impudent huswives’ were taking it upon themselves ‘to prate an hour or more’. The principal attack was that mounted by Thomas Edwards in the same year in Gangraena, deploring the fact that these ‘whirligigg spirits’ of the Brownists included smiths, tailors, shoemakers, pedlars, and worst of all women who were giving ‘constant
lectures’. He thought this to be against not only the light of Scripture but that of nature.6
On 14 January 1646 aldermen and common councillors of the City of London delivered a petition to the House of Commons concerning the multitude of religious schisms in the City which they wanted eliminated. They claimed that in one parish there were ‘eleven private congregations and conventicles who deserted the parish churches and have tradesmen and women preachers’. As a result, later that month several women preachers were committed to custody and others were brought before the Committee of Examinations of the House of Commons. Then in December 1646 the House resolved that no person should expound the Scriptures unless he be ordained in ‘this or some other Reformed Church’.7
With due respect to St Paul, why did the question of women preaching arouse such extreme apprehension? A popular rhyme of 1641 entitled ‘Lucifer’s Lackey or The Devil’s New Creation’ ran:
When women preach and cobblers pray
The fiends in hell make holiday.
At the bottom, it was woman’s demand for freedom of conscience rather than for freedom to ‘prate’ which caused concern. The crude mockery of ‘Lucifer’s Lackey’ masked a real dread that a woman who placed conscience above husband and family might consider herself outside the former’s control. The question as to whether a woman sectary had the right to leave a husband who was ‘unsanctified’ was never officially settled, though much discussed in the early 1650s. But the fact that some women sectaries such as Mrs Attoway did cast out or abandon ‘unsanctified’ husbands in the 1640s did nothing to relieve such fears.8
For this reason those women who were not ‘eerie spirits’ – and thus were in control of what they said – generally took care to emphasize their own weakness in advance of their message. This self-deprecation might be expected to win the sympathy of a masculine audience, or at very least avoid arousing its hostility. Elizabeth Warren, a pamphleteer, declared herself fully conscious of her own ‘mental and sex-deficiency’ in her preface to The Old and Good Way vindicated of 1645, which bewailed the troubles of the times and defended a certain persecuted clergyman. In Spiritual Thrift she even went so far as to acknowledge that ‘we of the weaker sex, have hereditary evil from our grandmother Eve’. Claiming for herself in general a ‘silent Modesty’, she defended her action in having her sentiments printed, aware that she might be accused of having deserted both this silence and this modesty.9 As we shall see, even the redoubtable Katherine Chidley was not above pleading the weakness of her sex on occasions when it seemed politic.
Katherine Chidley lived in Soper Lane, off Coleman Street, a centre of Brownist activity, where St Pancras was one of the most famous of the Independent churches. Her son Samuel Chidley was also a leading sectary and later one of the treasurers of the Leveller party, hence Katherine Chidley’s prominence among the women who had tried to secure John Lilburne’s release. In the eighteenth century Ballard described Katherine Chidley as fighting as violently as Penthesilea, the Amazonian Queen, for the cause of Independency. The language in which she was described in her own time was less romantic if equally evocative. Thomas Edwards, a fanatical Presbyterian supporter, called her ‘a brazen-faced audacious old woman’, both ‘talkative and clamorous’, qualities as undesirable in a woman as they were in a witch.10
There is no reason to doubt the essential features of Edwards’s picture (although it may be pointed out that the language of Edwards’s attacks on the Independents certainly far exceeded in virulence anything the most ‘clamorous’ old woman could achieve). With Samuel, Katherine Chidley journeyed through England in 1641, and founded ‘a small gathered church’ at Bury St Edmunds where eight adults signed the Brownists’ covenant. That took persistence and presumably a certain stridency too. In 1641 also Katherine Chidley wrote The Justification of the Independent Churches of Christ, to combat Thomas Edwards’s attack upon Independency.11 It was a sharply worded document. When Edwards argued that Independency would breed divisions within families, setting husband and wife against each other, Katherine Chidley countered that there had been a division in the first family, but that had been caused by Satan, not by toleration.
She wrote: ‘Next you will say: “Oh! How will this take away that power and authority which God hath given to Husbands, Fathers and Mothers, over wives, children and servants.”’ To this Katherine Chidley answered that St Paul in the First Epistle to the Corinthians had plainly declared that the wife could be a believer in her sense (‘sanctified’), and the husband an unbeliever (‘unsanctified’). Why would he have advised husband or wife not to leave an unbelieving spouse if the Apostle had not at least envisaged the possibility? Furthermore St Paul also envisaged some unbelievers wishing to depart and added: ‘A brother or a sister is not under bondage in such cases.’
Still, Katherine Chidley was careful to make it clear that an ‘unsanctified’ husband was not robbed of his ordinary rights, only of control of his wife’s beliefs: ‘It is true he hath authority over her in bodily and civil respects, but not to be a Lord over her conscience.’ On the primacy of conscience, Katherine Chidley was unalterably strong, denying utterly the claims of the ‘magistrate’ to rule over it: ‘I know of no true Divinity that teacheth men to be Lords over the Conscience.’ (Although she herself would not tolerate the Catholics – but that, she declared, was because they had attempted by plots and treachery to ‘ruinate the land’.)
At the end of the Justification Katherine Chidley challenged Edwards to a parley on the subject of Independency, each speaker to choose six people who in the presence of a moderator would thrash out the matter in ‘fair discourse’. The sting was in the tail. Katherine Chidley was confident that she would defeat Thomas Edwards, but if by any chance she did not, that would represent no triumph for him: ‘for I am a poor woman and unable to deal with you’. It was perhaps that thought which led Edwards to reject the encounter.
Katherine Chidley’s second pamphlet, A New Yeares Gift, Or A Briefe Exhortation to Mr Thomas Edwards, contended that Independency alone followed the primitive pattern of Christ, and she argued that it should thus be instituted as the State religion, controlled by Parliament (not the Westminster Assembly of Divines) to form ‘one entire government established upon sound principles, unalterable’. Good Counsell to the Petitioners for Presbyterian Government that they may declare their faith before they build their Church, of November 1645, which suggested that ‘there is but one true Religion’, attacked Presbyterianism for not being according to God’s Word. The Chidleys, mother and son, were also said to have written the famous independent tract Launseters Launse together; and Katherine Chidley may have had a hand in the composition of The Petition of Women in 1649.12
Unlike the retiring Elizabeth Warren, who said of herself that she disliked controversy (and about whom as a result nothing is known beyond her pamphlets), Katherine Chidley led a robust existence outside the confines of the printed page. In August 1645, for example, she rose up in church in Stepney, preached the tenets of Brownism and attacked various ministers ‘with a great deal of Violence and bitterness’. Her particular grievance was the meeting of people in churches and other places where ‘idolatrous services’ had previously taken place. The incumbent minister, a Mr Greenhill, tried to rebuke her. Was no worship to take place in a church just because it had once been dedicated in the name of saints or angels? Did that imply that this church had been for ever ‘set apart’ for ‘idolatry’? This encompassed the whole of England, which had been ‘set apart’ or dedicated to St George. At this Katherine Chidley’s outburst of indignation was so overriding that Mr Greenhill was obliged to retire.13
In 1646 when Thomas Edwards issued his celebrated attack on Independency, Gangraena, he spared time to denounce the whole idea of women preaching, as well as the audacious Katherine Chidley in particular. As for claims of spiritual equality, this would mean that ‘all women at once were exempt from being under government’.14 In fact, as we have seen, Katherine Chidley had sp
ecifically excepted such a claim from her demands; nevertheless the fear remained and Edwards, in voicing it, exercised a more potent influence on public opinion than Katherine Chidley in denying it.
In contrast to the ‘preacheress’, the prophetess had always been treated with a certain nervous respect by society – remember Jane Hawkins, ‘a poor woman (and she but a pedlar)’, who in 1629 had for a period prophesied before 200 people (see p. 187). Claiming direct inspiration from God, the prophetess might challenge accepted notions concerning religion and society but she did not necessarily in her own person challenge the accepted order. What differentiated the Civil War period was the substantial increase in the number of prophetesses and allied female seers. In this time of hopes and dreams and visions, the attitude of authority itself – the new authority: Army, Council, new Parliament, new rulers such as Cromwell – was equally more responsive.
In 1654 an Independent church congregation would debate at length whether the average man had that dominion over prophetesses such as he had over ‘all Widows and Maids that are not Prophetesses’. The eventual conclusion relied upon St Paul’s remark in his First Epistie to the Corinthians that ‘every woman that prayeth or prophesieth with her head uncovered dishonoureth her head’; from this admonition it was deduced that St Paul, since he did not explicitly forbid them, conceived of and tolerated the existence of prophetesses, so long as their heads were covered. So it was decided that ‘a Woman (Maid, Wife or Widow) being a Prophetess may Speak, Prophesy, Pray with a Veil. Others may not.’15
The Weaker Vessel: Women's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England Page 34
