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

by Antonia Fraser

  Today Anne Conway’s recurring headaches would certainly be regarded as migrainous in nature, particularly as they were often accompanied by sickness (but migraine today, even if understood, is still something for which no absolute cause, let alone an absolute cure, can be given). In those days, as the Conway correspondence amply demonstrates, Anne Conway’s existence was bounded by remedies tried and failed, doctors approached and abandoned, healers of infinite variety solicited, whose increasingly bizarre nature indicates all too eloquently the desperation of the uncured – but surely not incurable? – patient with the passing of the years.

  There was ‘a red powder’ and ‘a blue powder’. Mercury was resorted to three times (something which worried More), once in the form of an ointment prescribed by the celebrated physician Sir Theodore Mayerne, twice in the form of a powder taken orally, made up by Charles Huis, a well-known chemist. Robert Boyle made up another powder, to be taken in a solution of sack and canary, which he prepared himself. Opium – probably laudanum, at that time a novelty in England – was tried at the suggestion of Thomas Sydenham. Other doctors consulted included William Harvey and Sir Francis Prujean.

  At one point Henry More proposed tobacco, which had a therapeutic reputation at that time and was not infrequently prescribed for headaches; he also suggested coffee.3 Anne Conway’s coach had to be stuffed with the softest down since even feathers threatened her acute sensibilities. She tried a special diet of ‘husbandman’s fare’: woodcocks, pheasants and baked turkeys, and at the other extreme ‘the experiment of water falling on your head.42

  The gruesome suggestion of trepanning actually originated with Harvey in 1656 (although he did refer Lady Conway to a board of specialists). Nevertheless the patient, in what state of torment one can only guess, took a sudden decision to go to France and have the operation, involving the sawing open of a hole in the skull to relieve pressure, performed forthwith. In the event the French physicians did no more than open Lady Conway’s jugular arteries, although it is not clear whether the doctors drew back or in the end the patient shrank from the ultimate ordeal. In any case, there was a further ordeal to be endured of quite a different nature: Lord Conway, coming to join his wife, was captured at sea by the Dutch and thrown naked into a filthy prison until such time as he was ransomed.43

  The episode of the Irish faith healer Valentine Greatrakes was less traumatic (although equally unsuccessful in its results). Greatrakes, known as ‘the Irish stroker’, came of a good family in Youghal; he never took any money for his cures in Ireland. His visit did have therapeutic effects for a good many of the tenants at Ragley, who found their ills alleviated. To Lady Conway he arrived on a morning when the sun was shining: ‘for the sun, Madam, is a great healer and composer’. Greatrakes laid his fingers on her head while all around waited for the headache to vanish. It did not. Day after day he repeated the process. Still the headache maintained its vicious grip. After a fortnight the ‘Irish stroker’ like the previous doctors, admitted failure and departed.44

  Lady Conway’s condition aroused sympathy beyond her own country. From the Grand Duke of Tuscany, at whose court John Finch held the post of Minister, arrived ‘a very ingenious contrivance to sit at all heights in the bed, and have the use of a table. It goes upon screws, and everything is to be unscrewed. The glass within the bed-pan is to be taken out by unscrewing the handle and taking the handle quite off, for then it opens.’45

  The particular stresses of Anne Conway’s life, such as the death of little Heneage, naturally exacerbated her condition. ‘Our passions are given us for certain uses and services which when they cease, our passions are to cease also,’ wrote More.46 That was easier advised than done. Yet it is notable and heroic – fully justifying More’s praise of his pupil – that she pursued her studies throughout all these agonizing years; we find her for example attempting to learn Greek in 1665, when she was in the extremities of pain. In the winter of 1667 she was not only bedridden but reduced to an amanuensis in her correspondence with More at Cambridge; by the autumn of the following year, however, she was rising gallantly once more.

  All this while More the philosopher had to contemplate the physical purgatory of his friend, and could do nothing to help her to pass from it. ‘The pious and virtuous’ came out of their travails as ‘gold purified out of the fire’, he declared. In 1671 More wrote to Anne Conway: ‘And I hope your body will not prove a Tomb to you, but rather an holy Temple, an hallowed edifice for your soul to work in, those bodies that are most vigorously in health are the most devouring sepulchres to swallow down the soul into and to bury all the nobler faculties.’47 Reflections such as these can have been as little true consolation to Anne Conway’s agonized friend as they were to the suffering woman herself.

  Perhaps there was more comfort to be found when More turned to philosophy. Lady Conway’s headache, he wrote, might be good for the whole on the grounds that what is good for the whole may not be good for the part, and Lady Conway’s headaches were certainly not good for one part – ‘her particular friends’. The sentence: ‘if her body were as well as her mind, it would be better for us all’ only applied after all to these friends. Or perhaps after all poetry provided the true consolation. More sent Anne Conway a scribbled translation, done in bed, of his own Aphoria, or The Perplexity of the Soul, and then Euphoria, or The Extrication of the Soul, in a friend’s translation which Anne had learnt by heart and of which she desired a copy. These lines in Aphoria apostrophizing Father Jove may have found some dark echo in Anne’s heart:

  ’Tis rare, we mortals live i’ the clouds like thee,

  Lies, Toys, or some hid fate, us fix or move.

  All else being dark, what’s life I only see …48

  In the autumn of 1670 Lord Conway and Henry More between them persuaded the Netherlander physician F.M. Van Helmont to visit Ragley. Van Helmont remained there for nine years, devoting himself to finding a cure for Lady Conway. Fresh medicines were sought from Germany; the headaches persisted but at least Lady Conway’s general health, so much damaged by that fatal bout of smallpox which killed little Heneage, improved. At first Van Helmont’s presence at Ragley had the agreeable side-effect that More could still visit the castle from Cambridge when Anne was too ill to receive him, since Van Helmont could act as host. But later Van Helmont’s own interest in Quakerism reinforced Anne Conway’s tendencies in that direction, and after some years of spiritual doubt she finally joined the sect in 1677. In the last years of her life she lived at Ragley surrounded by Quakers, and More’s visits dwindled.

  On several different levels, it is easy to see what attracted Anne Conway to the Friends; although the fact that Van Helmont regularly attended Quaker meetings from 1675 onwards was clearly relevant in view of Anne’s physical isolation brought about by her sickness, More’s estimate of his friend’s character must also be borne in mind: ‘she was one that would not give up her Judgment entirely unto any’.49 Her first interest was in that sect known as the Familists and the cobbler-poet of Bohemia, Jacob Boehme. Then she came to study the Quaker arguments through their tracts: like several of her friends, including More, she was prepared to believe that religion had been choked with irrelevant detail and speculate how it might be resuscitated.

  Lady Conway was of course cut off by illness not only from the Quaker Meetings, but also from the more violent public manifestations of their religion, exactly those aspects which revolted her contemporaries. Thus Lady Conway did not perceive in the Quakers uncontrollable spirits who might interrupt a preacher in the midst of his sermon, but rather ‘lovers of quiet and retirement’. On this ground, she sent away to London for Quaker maids: ‘for if they prove what they seem to be … they will fit the circumstances I am in (that cannot endure any noise) better than ordinary domestics’.50 And she seems to have been lucky in her finds: for Quaker maids could be unreliable, suddenly inspired by the Lord to leave their position and go preaching; Lady Conway’s maids on the contrary stayed with her to the e
nd.

  Lady Conway was also convinced that the Quakers understood the loneliness of pain and could comfort her when ‘Reason’ and ‘Philosophy’ could not, just because of their own frequent ordeals in the Lord’s service: ‘they have been and are a suffering people’. She wrote: ‘The weight of my affliction lies so very heavy upon me, that it is incredible how very seldom I can endure anyone in my chamber, but I find them so still and very serious’; the Quakers’ company would be acceptable to her so long as she could bear any company at all.51 So in her dark room surrounded by luxuries which could not cure, she harkened to their consolations and listened to their sufferings.

  More, who had warned Anne against ‘melancholy’ (which has been described as the contemporary atheism), had failed to predict that she would turn to ‘enthusiasm’ (the contemporary fanaticism).52 Before her death Anne did somewhat reconcile More to the Quaker cause: at least to understand her own attraction to it. Conversions, especially those to ‘enthusiastic’ or fanatical religions, are however notoriously difficult for the previous intimates of the convert. Lord Conway was by now occupying an important administrative position in Ireland; Anne dispatched a parcel of Quaker books to him ‘to chalk out the way, by which all serious seekers after God may attain their desired satisfaction and true rest’. She signed her covering letter for the first time in Quaker style: ‘Thine’. Although Lord Conway tried to plough his way through the books, despite eye-strain, and although he attempted honourably to assist the Quakers in Ireland (just as his wife in England tried to get George Fox out of gaol), he still pronounced them from the point of view of a government official a ‘senseless, wilful, ridiculous generation of people.’53

  At his last visit to Ragley in Anne’s lifetime, Lord Conway was dismayed to find how the situation had changed: ‘all the women about my wife and most of the rest are Quakers and Mons. Van Helmont is governor of that flock, an unpleasing sort of people, silent, sullen and of a removed conversation’. George Fox on the other hand, the Friends’ leader, found Lady Conway ‘tender and loving’, and in 1678 willing to detain him longer than he was ready to stay, in view of the call of his mission in other parts of the country.54

  In February 1679, after days of terrible pain, Anne Conway was released into death; in her last agonies, she stoically refused to have Lord Conway sent for from Ireland, but her tiny wasted body was encased in an inner coffin of wood and glass so that he could see her face on arrival before she was wrapped in her outer covering of lead. A codicil to her will, clearly written with much physical difficulty, asked that the customary ostentation at the funeral of a lady of her quality should be forsworn, in accordance with Quaker practice. In addition, ‘My Lady would have no Cerecloth to avoid the coming of any men about her, but desired that only Her Women with the two maids should lay her in the coffin’. In her will Lady Conway left £500 to Sir John Finch, £400 to Henry More, and £300 to Van Helmont, representing three stages of affection in her life.55

  More spoke this epitaph upon her: ‘I perceive and bless God for it, that my Lady Conway was my Lady Conway to her last Breath; the greatest Example of Patience and presence of Mind, in highest Extremities of Pain and Affliction, that we shall easily meet with: Scarce anything to be found like her, since the Primitive times of the church.’ But the most telling judgement on Anne Viscountess Conway, at least by the standards of the century in which she lived, was pronounced by her brother Sir John Finch: ‘I must never hope to see again in this World, knowledge enough to have made a Man of Parts proud, in a more talkative Sex to be possessed without noise.’56

  The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy by Anne Viscountess Conway is thought to have been written by her when Van Helmont first lived with her and her general health temporarily improved: it was noted down with ‘a Black-lead Pen’ in ‘a Paper-Book’.57

  Like many others in the seventeenth century, Lady Conway was interested to try and reconcile the findings of the new science with the truths of the Christian religion. She put forward a great many notes on Hebrew and cabbalistic beliefs. Her work also included a disquisition on the nature of God, who had created the world out of goodness, not out of necessity. ‘In God there can exist no Passion … For every Passion is something Temporal.’ She proposed that the time passed since the beginning of Creation must be infinite (not 6,000 years as was popularly believed), as could be demonstrated from the infinite goodness of God: ‘Now how can it be, that this Fountain shall not always plentifully flow, and send from itself Living Waters?’ As it was ‘an Essential Attribute’ of God, to be a Creator, ‘so by Consequence God ever was a Creator, and ever will be a Creator’; otherwise his nature would be changed. Creatures themselves ever were and ever would be: ‘yet this Infiniteness of Times is not equal to the Infiniteness of God’s Eternity, because the Eternity of God himself, hath no times in it’. Christ she described as ‘the Middle Being, not subject to decay’.58

  Lady Conway was of course a resolute opponent of Hobbes, who with his associates ‘grievously’ erred in teaching that ‘Sense and Knowledge’ were no more than ‘a reaction of Corporeal Particles’ one upon another. Sense and knowledge, she wrote, were ‘a Thing far more Noble and Divine; in any Local or Mechanical Motion of any Particles Whatsoever’. Rejecting Hobbes utterly, she described every creature as comprising both a body and a spirit, or Principium magis Activum, et magis Passivum (a more active and a more passive principle). Lady Conway thought these two principles ‘may fitly be termed Male and Female, by reason of that Analogy a Husband hath with his Wife. For as the ordinary Generation of Man requires a Conjunction and Co-operation of Male and Female; so also all Generations and Productions whatsoever they may be, require an Union.’59

  More was probably responsible for the Latin translation of Lady Conway’s Principles, in which form it first appeared in print in Amsterdam in 1690; two years later the book, re-translated into English, was printed in England. The English edition referred to a certain English Countess (Lord Conway was raised to an earldom in the year of his wife’s death), ‘a Woman learned beyond her Sex’, whose work, found after her death inscribed ‘in a very dull and small character’ could only be read with the greatest difficulty. Leibniz probably heard of her work through Van Helmont: he declared himself greatly influenced by her and expressed his approval of her principles over those of Locke – ‘Les miens en philosophie approchent un peu d’avantage de ceux de feue Mme la Comtesse de Conway.’60

  A postscript may be added concerning the fate of Lord Conway. He was now in his mid-fifties, a man with an important position in the world; in 1681, two years after his wife’s death, he was created one of the Secretaries of State. Yet his house had no mistress and he himself had no heir. However valiantly Lord Conway may have reconciled himself to this disappointment twenty years earlier, he was now generally judged to be in need of a wife who would provide a son. Nor did the Finch family shrink from the prospect. Anne Conway’s sister, Lady Clifton, was pleading with her brother-in-law to marry again only two months after Anne’s death. Sir John Finch was also prominent in his persuasions, invoking the very name of his dead sister: let him remarry ‘for her sake (whose dust could it speak, would join with me I am sure)’. Sir Thomas Baines, as the lifelong ‘chevalier’ of Sir John Finch, also interested himself in the affair: he gave it as his opinion that the ideal ‘widower’s wife’ was small, thin and pale, albeit very healthy and coming of fruitful parents; she should also be ‘of a feminine lax temper’.61 A stream of young – or youngish ladies, generally in their early twenties, was paraded, most of whom possessed large or largish portions.

  What did Lord Conway now do? Ignoring the parade (and the advice) he fell violently in love with a most unsuitable chit of seventeen – unsuitable because she was flighty – Margaret Poulett, daughter of the second Lord Poulett and niece of the Speaker of the House of Commons. What pent-up emotions, suppressed during his wife’s long illness, what middle-aged desires, long believed quiescent, surged
through the bosom of the admirable Lord Conway during this unexpected Roman spring?

  Lord Conway’s friends, trained to believe that a fifty-six-year-old widower was indeed a proper spouse for a young girl if his rank was sufficiently august, suggested various modes of attack, in all of which ultimate victory was assumed.62 Perhaps he should emulate the methods of Julius Caesar who came and saw and conquered: cry Veni, Vidi, Vici, and then all the young gallants who surrounded Mistress Margaret would be blown away. Another friend advised him first to prepare his ‘Wooing Countenance’ and then reflect on St Matthew, Chapter One (this, which begins with a long recital of the begetting of the generations before Jesus, was presumably to be regarded as some kind of fertility chant). For this elderly Romeo a further confidant recommended ‘a Handsome Dress’.

  So Lord Conway had ‘a riding-suit’ ordered in order to call on his beloved at Bath. It was to be lined with black satin, and embroidered with black and silver; apart from the other black touches it was to be laced with black and white love lace, ‘both mourning enough and fine enough for this expedition’, a delicate way of emphasizing Lord Conway’s status, at once a widower and a lover. Fifty pounds was disbursed on this outfit, not counting the sword and hat which were extra. But the whole effect was wasted, at least in Bath, when Margaret Poulett’s brother would not let Lord Conway call upon her; he was himself perversely backing the suit of his own friend (and contemporary), the young Lord Arran. Lord Conway had to wait till London to call upon his beloved.