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

by Antonia Fraser

  Of course the sensation did not stop there. Since 1650 Anna Trapnel had belonged to the congregation of John Simpson, the minister of St Botolph’s, now a leading Fifth Monarchist, who was one of the ‘lecturers’ at Allhallows Church. At the end of January Simpson was arrested and sent to prison at Windsor, along with other ministers, for making public a vision which predicted the fall of Cromwell within six months. At Allhallows, however, the new Protectoral regime continued to be denounced. Marchamont Nedham, the Commonwealth journalist, reported on this to Cromwell personally in February, making the point that ‘This meeting much diminishes your reputation among foreigners, who expect changes, because they are proclaimed from the pulpit, and great things are made of it, though it is but a confluence of silly wretches.’ Moreover, there was a plan to print Anna Trapnel’s discourses ‘which are desperate against your person, family, children, friends and the government’, as well as sending her all over England to proclaim them. She is much visited, wrote Nedham, doing ‘a world of mischief’ since ‘the vulgar dote on vain prophecies’ such as she proclaimed daily in a trance.’31

  Still no action was taken against Anna Trapnel personally despite these subversive sentiments. Not everyone accepted the source of her visions without reservation: ‘some say that what she doth is by a mighty inspiration, others say they suppose her to be a troubled mind’. Yet the general impression given was of some sort of communion with God, as one correspondent wrote who confessed himself baffled by the precise nature of her revelation and ‘under what sort to rank it’.32

  As for the attention Anna Trapnel received, Dorothy Osborne referred, humorously perhaps, but with a wry note beneath it all, to the prophetess’s success in the world compared to her own. In March 1654 she wrote to her lover, William Temple: ‘I am coming into my preaching term again. What think you, were it not a good way of preferment as the times are? If you advise me to do it, I’ll venture.’ After all, the woman (Anna Trapnel) ‘was cried up mightily’. Dorothy Osborne’s father had recently died, which affected the question of her long-delayed marriage (see p.40); now Dorothy had to await her brother’s arrival to know ‘how I shall dispose myself’. Once more, Dorothy advocated patience to William Temple.33 At the same time, rather more excitingly, Anna Trapnel awaited the arrival of the spirit of God and needed apparently very little other guidance as to how she should dispose herself.

  The guidance which arrived from the Lord was that Anna should accept an invitation to tour the West Country.34 When she first received the invitation, Anna exclaimed: ‘There’s a far journey indeed!’ But the Lord over-persuaded Anna. As a preliminary she visited Simpson in his Windsor prison, having a vision of ‘high rocky hills’ at Hillingdon near Uxbridge on the way, and knowing that was how Cornwall would be. Still Satan tempted her not to set out; however, in the nick of time the birds singing outside the window of her chamber in the early morning reminded Anna of God’s care for sparrows and restored her to her purpose.

  The journey to the West Country certainly justified Anna’s original reaction. She got a place in a coach at an inn but it took six days for the coach to reach Exeter; fortunately its ‘rattlings’ could not disturb her inner tranquillity. In the West Anna stayed at Tregasow near Truro with Captain Langdon, a Fifth Monarchist who had been a member of the recently defunct Barebones Parliament.

  A later report would sum up the purpose of her visit as ‘to asperse the government’. That was certainly too crude a summary from Anna’s point of view, and she wrote back to the congregation at Allhallows denying that she had ever tried to stir up the people. However, her language on the subject of the Protector could hardly be interpreted otherwise. From the Government’s point of view it was equally relevant that Anna, together with other Fifth Monarchists, took the line that the ‘Saints’ were not bound by legal precepts but by the commands of the Gospel ‘and in this sense they are dead to the law, by the life of Christ in them’. People who considered themselves ‘dead to the law’ were not likely long to survive at liberty once they started to break it in any way that outraged the community. Thus when the local Presbyterian clergy showed themselves notably hostile to Anna and her prophecies, they were easily able to secure a warrant against her for subversion.35

  On 11 April 1654 an order was given to take Anna Trapnel ‘quickly’ and send her up to the Council in London.36

  Anna spent the eve of her apprehension in an all-night session of prayer and singing. She was still in a trance, and still singing the next afternoon when the constable with the justices came for her. Captain Langdon pleaded for her to be allowed to remain one more night, but the response was merely to pull the entranced woman from her pillow, first lifting up her eyelids to see if she was shamming. From the doorway a Presbyterian minister commented grimly: ‘A whip will fetch her out.’ Then at last Anna awoke and saying that she had had ‘a sweet day’, inquired if anyone had visited her.37

  According to Anna, the people round about were on her side, telling the justices who came to take her that they would have to fetch their silk gowns and perform the deed themselves ‘for the poor would not do it’. However, on her way to the sessions, a less enlightened mob of men and women, boys and girls, pulled at her as she passed and shouted: ‘How do you now? How is it with you now?’ And in the session house she was, as she put it, ‘a gazing stock’.

  One of those who gazed at her steadfastly in the face was the ‘witch-trying woman’. But Anna survived this ordeal and although she heard whispers all round her that she would reveal herself to be a witch by being unable to answer her judges, afterwards it was agreed by this same crowd of whisperers that she could not possibly be a witch, since she had spoken so many ‘good words’. All the same the accusation of witchcraft – at least by the ignorant – was never totally abandoned. Later, at Plymouth, words like ‘witchcraft’ and ‘a white Devil’ were thrown at her.

  In the main Anna Trapnel was courteously treated by her judges, despite the fact that she refused to read aloud one of her own passages concerning the Little Horn. A soldier who smiled when Anna related one of her visions was sent out of court. Two women were produced who swore that Anna had been well aware of the people’s presence during her trance. One of her judges termed Anna, not uncharitably, ‘a dreamer. (‘So Joseph was called’, retorted Anna.)

  Anna’s true sufferings began in the course of her journey back to London. There was no proper vessel to convey her to Portsmouth so that Anna spent more than fifteen weeks in a ‘man’s prison’ before being shipped along with some prisoners-of-war (although she did have a maid with her). When a storm blew up, Anna was accused by her shipmates of causing the winds through witchcraft ‘and they curst me there’. The same storm caused an injury to her leg. Her company in the coach from Portsmouth was rather more agreeable: a clutch of partridge eggs on its way to the Protector as a present. The sight of the eggs inspired Anna. To her companions in the coach ‘I often told of a present from heaven’, she wrote afterwards, ‘which was much better than the present of partridge eggs, yea, it was costlier than the gold of Ophir, or Rubies and Pearls from a far country’. Another comparison she was inspired to make was between ‘the Great Protector’ in heaven and the inferior man who had assumed the same title in England in the December of the previous year.

  On 2 June Anna Trapnel was committed to Bridewell.38 She reached the prison at eleven o’clock at night. The Matron told her sharply that she had dealt with other ‘ranting sluts’, before admitting she had never received one quite like Anna, since she had performed no ‘base actions’. Anna now insisted on sending for her friends, who would collect the maid that she had brought from Cornwall to attend her. Despite the Matron’s protests, the friends arrived at midnight, and inspected Anna’s lodging. They found it large, but with only ‘a hard flock-bed’ and one little window in the corner; the common ‘shore’ (sewer) ran beneath ‘which sink smelt grievously’. The rats ‘that abode much in that room’, running about like cats and dogs, also c
ontributed to the smell. Everyone, including Anna herself, was horrified. The Matron however was inexorable, denied Anna’s right to a maid, and refused to leave her a candle, saying that she did not trust a prisoner to put it out.

  To poor Anna, alone in the stinking darkness, Satan now returned. He suggested that everyone would point at her when she went out, saying ‘There goes a Bridewell bird’; decent people would not associate with her ‘because of Bridewell reproach’. The hard cold bed and the damp sheets gave her a fever. It was not until Anna’s friends had clubbed together to buy a copy of the order against her for 16d that the Matron was convinced nothing had been laid to her charge. Thereafter, because Anna was not a criminal, the Matron allowed flowers and herbs to be strewn, to sweeten the room; her friends were now allowed to stay.

  On the day Anna was supposed to appear in court, she was too weak to rise. The Matron showed a flash of her old form by threatening to send the man to fetch her who conveyed the harlots and thieves to beat hemp. Under the circumstances Anna’s friends persuaded her to appear. Once again, she was treated courteously in court and allowed to sit down. After that relations between Anna and the Matron never progressed much further than an uneasy truce, the Matron accusing Anna of telling tales ‘to wrong her’, and Anna much resenting the Matron’s suggestion that Anna wanted ‘men to come at her’. Explaining herself, Anna said that her delight was not and never had been in men’s company ‘but in all people as they are godly’.

  Yet compared to most criminals – that of course being the very comparison which she detested – Anna Trapnel was well treated. There was no question, as there had been with Mary Overton and Katherine Hadley, of suggesting that she belonged to their number. She was allowed to rent her own chamber at 5s a week – expensive but convenient – and when she was supposed to beat hemp, the other women did it for her. Seven out of the eight weeks she spent in gaol, Anna was accompanied by her sister Ursula Adman. For all that, she could hardly sleep because of ‘such scolding’ among the prisoners, especially when they were brought in at night. It was no ‘pleasant prison’ to those ‘brought up tenderly’, reflected Anna.

  Anna Trapnel was released on 26 July after nearly eight weeks in Bridewell.39 She had declared of herself: ‘while I have tongue and breath it shall go forth for the Fifth Monarchy Laws, teaching and practice’. Nor would she give any undertaking about her public pronouncements on her release: on the contrary, she announced she would continue to speak out whenever the spirit moved her. Anna visited the West Country again the following year and with ‘three young fellows’ went to see the Fifth Monarchist John Carew in St Mawes prison. One of these fellows had a sword, and a soldier taxed him with it, saying that he was on the look-out for Cavaliers, and unless it was accounted for, he would remove it. Anna Trapnel and the young fellows together denied his authority: ‘The Lord Protector we own not, thou art of the Army of the Beast.’ But when the Governors of Pendennis Castie and the justices sent for her, Anna went into a convenient trance.

  A quantity of her verses, which were probably given extemporaneously, were taken down by a reporter in 1657 or 1658.40 Some of the imagery with Anna as the ‘wife’ of Christ recalls that of the Catholic mystics (whom Anna would have sternly condemned):

  For they did tear and rent the veil

  Of Christs beloved wife,

  She doth complain unto her King,

  What injuries and smites

  O spouse my Love, saith he, still sing …41

  Some of it, which has been compared to the early hymns of the Methodists, touches with its simplicity:

  I shall be enclosed and kept

  I shall be very secure

  Unto eternity itself

  And through many strokes, endure.

  Though many strokes of death doth pain

  And make the body smart

  Yet thy presence, dear Jesus, doth

  Refresh and raise my heart.

  Anna Trapnel did not however display much spirit of Christian forgiveness to her enemies:

  … Bedone by as they did

  O they have laid them on the rack

  They have tormented by degrees

  And as they have done, so shall it be

  Saith Christ, done unto these … 42

  In Voice for the King of Saints of 1658 she developed the theme further:

  O come with vengeance, come Dear Lord,

  That their blood may drop out,

  That do now rob and steal from thee.

  Nor did she regard the godly and the ungodly as in any way equal in an ideal society: under the ‘Rule of the Saints’, the godly alone would have been constituted ‘earls and potentates’.43

  Anna Trapnel was attacked in print as late as 1660, at which point, with the turn-about of the Restoration, she vanishes from history.1

  After 1660 the voices of the prophetesses died away except for a few lonely exclamations; the female clamour of the Commonwealth, both sonorous and serious, gave way to the merry prattle of the ladies of King Charles II’s England. The bells rang out for the restored King on 29 May, the cannons roared, and over 20,000 people jostled to greet him in London, so that the noise of it all was so great that it made Charles ‘prodigiously dazed’.45 Women were amongst these 20,000, as there had been women watching the execution of his father eleven years earlier. But the age when the female voice might be listened to with general respect – at least if it claimed to come from God – was over.

  Did nothing remain – except memories, painful or otherwise – of this time when women had been ‘stronger grown’?

  It has been mentioned that among those women who caused public disturbances some of the wildest had been those ‘eerie spirits’ surrounding the strange Quaker enthusiast and preacher James Naylor. In some ways Quaker women, who were prominent in the sect from the start (giving rise to rumours that the sect was entirely composed of them), coincided in their behaviour with the worst prejudices concerning the uncontrolled female. Disruption of services, for example, by persistent crying out and ‘quaking’ during a minister’s sermon – hence the popular nickname for what was in fact the Society of Friends – whenever moved by the spirit to do so, was not calculated to win the respect of the male authorities.

  ‘Good Mistress Fell, go into your own pew, or else go your way’, exclaimed a local justice to Margaret Fell concerning her repeated interventions at the local ‘steeplehouse’, in the course of which she called him ‘a caterpillar’ to be swept aside (and she was the sect’s most respectable member).46

  ‘Little Elizabeth’ Fletcher, as she was generally known for her tiny physique, arrived in Oxford in June 1654 at the age of fourteen, on a self-imposed mission to speak to the undergraduates. After some ugly horse-play from her ‘flock’, which led to Little Elizabeth’s being pushed under the pump ‘with other shameful abuses’, this ‘virtuous maid of considerable family’, ‘contrary to her own Will or Inclination. In Obedience to the Lord’ ran naked through the streets of Oxford ‘as a sign of the Hypocritical Profession they made there’. In the end, since she still persisted in speaking, the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford had Little Elizabeth whipped for blasphemy.47

  There was however another aspect to the Quaker religion at its inception which was of more profound importance to the weaker vessel than these manifestations of unrest. George Fox, the founder of the Society of Friends, was a weaver’s son from Leicestershire, whom William Penn described as ‘an original, being no man’s copy’. One of the marks of his originality was to face up to the uncomfortable implications of Christianity, that sex was not necessarily relevant where religion was concerned. Whereas an individual prophetess such as Anna Trapnel had merely claimed a special position for herself, in 1656 George Fox published the first defence in English of the spiritual equality of women since the Reformation. As for testifying, wrote Fox in 1652, ‘I said that if the power of God and the Seed spoke in man or woman it was Christ.’48

  Since Quaker testifying was dependent upon
the arrival of the spirit of Christ in the breast, this doctrine of Fox’s cast an entirely new light on the whole subject of women speaking in public. We shall meet the heroic if turbulent Quaker women again, their voices at least unstilled, their steps vigorous and defiant in adversity, as they not only travelled their own land but ventured to the New World of Puritan Massachusetts and the old world of the Sultan’s Turkey. These women at least were confident that ‘in the restoration by Christ’ they were equal partners once again: ‘Man and Woman, as they were before the Fall’.49 Thus the most enduring claim made for woman during the period when the world was turned upside down proved to concern her soul, but that of course was invisible, as woman herself was sometimes supposed to be.

  1Although she is just possibly to be identified with Anna Trapnel who married in Woodbridge in Soffolk in 1661.44

  PART THREE

  Afterwards – A Continual Labour

  ‘Believe me, child, life is a continual labour, checkered with care and pleasure, therefore rejoice in your position, take the world as you find it, and you will I trust find heaviness may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.’

  ADVICE OF RACHEL LADY RUSSELL TO HER DAUGHTER, 1695

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Worldly Goods