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

by Antonia Fraser

  Gradually, very gradually, it was borne in upon Lord Conway that Margaret was merely playing with his attentions. He withdrew from the field. He did not however deny the force of that sweet fever which had ravaged him. He could have had many richer, nobler, handsomer and more discreet wives, he wrote, but ‘I have still more inclination for her [Margaret] than for any woman that ever I heard of … I believe there is a fate in such things which I can give no account of’.

  Lord Conway did marry again a considerably older woman, someone presumably much closer to Sir Thomas Baines’s recipe for the widower’s ideal. But this second wife died in childbirth, as did the son she bore. Less than six weeks later Lord Conway married for the third time, a woman who brought him a portion of £30,000. By now Lord Conway’s own race was almost run. He died in August 1683, only four years after the death of Anne. He died without an heir; but then he had long ago braced himself to accept that defeat rather than increase the physical burdens placed upon his precious jewel of a first wife; she who in the words of her brother possessed ‘knowledge enough’ to make the most intelligent man proud – and all ‘without noise’.

  1 Wonderful Aphra fully deserves both her place in history as the first professional woman author, and her place in Westminster Abbey where she is buried; she lies in the Cloister, however, near the actress Anne Bracegirdle, not in Poets’ Corner.

  2 In recent years she has been quoted with approval in a feminist context, as one who in Dale Spender’s words protested against the idea of the ‘natural’ patriarchal order.34

  3 Coffee has not lost its reputation: Oliver Sacks, in Migraine, 1981, suggests that migraine sufferers take caffeine tablets, for the ‘management’ of migraine attacks.41

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Helping in God’s Vineyard

  ‘Here will be work and business enough for us all that none need to be idle in God’s vineyard, but as we have everyone received a measure of God’s spirit and grace some may be fellow helpers and workers together with our brethren …’

  LETTER OF ISABEL (FELL) YEAMANS, 1676

  Anne Viscountess Conway desired to have Quaker servants about her because this ‘suffering people’, so ‘still and very serious’ in their behaviour would make ideal sympathetic attendants for an invalid. Lord Conway on the other hand, in Ireland where he had to cope with the Quakers’ sudden demonstrations according to the dictates of ‘the Inner Light’, found them ‘senseless, wilful, ridiculous’.1

  Certainly the stories of the early Friends, and their persistent testifying under the most hostile circumstances, more than justify Lady Conway’s description of them as ‘a suffering people’: although her belief in their stillness might have been shaken by some of the events in the ‘steeplehouses’ and elsewhere when ‘the Inner Light’ inspired a Friend to interrupt proceedings. In the 1670s for example the charge brought against a Quaker woman called Ann Blaykling was that she had called the minister ‘Priest, hireling and deceiver, greedy dumb dog, with many words of the same nature’:2 a by no means uncharacteristic selection of insults for an early Friend. In their opposition to the payment of tithes, because they believed in the separation of Church and State (hence Anglican ministers were ‘hirelings’), their refusal to swear an oath (including an Oath of Allegiance in court), and in their insistence on their own form of marriage, the Friends, as Lord Conway discovered, also posed other problems to the State, beyond an awkward tendency to extemporary prayer.

  At the same time the Society of Friends increased: it has been estimated that when its founder George Fox died in 1691, there were 50,000 Quakers in England, one in every 100 of the population.3 In all of this, the sufferings, the agitations and the responsibilities, women continued to play that prominent role which had been theirs from the first inception of the sect. In 1656 George Fox had defended the spiritual equality of women with men (see p.322): there was not only natural justice in this, there was also a practical recognition of the support women – including that despised, feared, disliked class, elderly women – gave him from the first.

  Quakers were of course not alone among the sects which were nourished by the enthusiasm and energies of women. The force of women preachers, the original Baptists and Anabaptists of the 1640s, bore witness to that aspect of so-called heretical sects which enabled women to find liberation, both spiritual and social, in their midst. There were other examples, and early evangelism (unconnected with Quakerism) would continue to find women prominent. The history of the Quakers does however provide a microcosm of that liberation, with all the problems, as well as fulfilment, it brought. For one thing, their adoption of the Quaker religion hardly freed such women from the pressures to which their condition made them already subject. An ‘ancient’ widow inspired to step outside the traditional woman’s role and speak publicly was for example more, rather than less, likely to be suspected of truck with the devil. As Margaret Fell, one of the most prominent of the early Quaker women, pointed out, there was always the danger of the Inner Light being mistaken for witchcraft; just as the prophetess Anna Trapnel, another female of independent voice, had been subject to the scrutiny of the ‘witch-trying woman’ (see p.316). Barbara Blaugdone of Bristol, for example, who spoke out both in the West Country and Ireland, was forty-six when she was ‘convinced’; in Cork some of her former friends termed her a witch and had their servants turn her out of doors. (But convincement brought strength: for all her sufferings, the dour sharp-tongued Barbara Blaugdone lived to the age of ninety-five, dying in 1704.)4

  Nor did the presence of vociferous women in the Quaker midst allay hostility to a religion which relied on the worrying instrument of extemporary prayer – uncontrollable from the outside. In 1677 in The Countermine, the Royalist pamphleteer and historian John Nalson used this suspicious combination to deduce that such impromptu manifestations were in fact inspired by the devil. He gave an instance of a woman who had become generally admired for being ‘so eminent especially in this Gift of Prayer’; subsequently she went to New England where she was discovered to be ‘a most Abominable Witch’. At her trial she confessed that she had given up her soul to the devil in return for the gift of extemporary prayer. Concluded Nalson with satisfaction: ‘Either now we must believe that this Extempore Way is not an infallible sign of the Spirit of God: or that the Devil has the Power of disposing of the Gifts of the Spirit’. Had not St Paul himself issued ‘an express Command’ against ‘these Female Doctresses’?5

  As against this, George Fox, with that power which great conviction allied to great personal strength always bestows, never ceased to push forward the view that there was work for Quaker women to do as well as men. He admonished the Women’s Meetings: ‘Encourage all the women that are convinced, and minds virtue, and loves the truth, and walks in it, that they may come up into God’s service, that they may too be serviceable in their generation, and in the Creation …’6

  On the one hand therefore the Quaker women were able to exercise responsibilities within their own religious organization denied to any other Englishwoman of their time (and for a long time thereafter, if granted at all). These women as a result were able to practise a certain kind of admirable Nonconformist philanthropy from which so much reforming richness has flowed in English social life. On the other hand where the Inner Light drew Quaker women into a more challenging and adventurous way of life, not only did they themselves suffer hideously, but they also pulled down upon their whole sex still viler imprecations concerning the nature of womankind.

  Into the latter category of adventuresses falls the heroic Elizabeth Hooton – it is surely impossible to deny her the epithet, on grounds of her age alone.7 She was nearly fifty when she first met George Fox, and over seventy when she came to her death in a foreign land, still serving the cause which she had made her life. Her age was indeed much remarked at the time: most allusions refer to her as old or ‘ancient’.

  To George Fox Elizabeth Hooton was however ‘a very tender woman’.8 The wife of a pros
perous Nottinghamshire farmer, she was in fact George Fox’s first convert and his first preacher; that in itself was an indication of the prominent role women would play in his mission. George Fox met Margaret Fell a few years later. Elizabeth Hooton was then a Baptist, and had probably been a preacher among the Baptists before her ‘convincement’. Although Fox, like the Baptists (and other sectaries), shared in the denunciation of tithes, he criticized them in his journal for being ‘Jangling Baptists’; Elizabeth Hooton now testified against their ‘deceit’. By the end of 1648 Elizabeth Hooton had left her husband and family to become a Quaker preacher. Carrying out in church, when moved by the spirit, those kinds of interruptions which brought the Quakers their early notoriety, Elizabeth Hooton suffered as a result a series of imprisonments.

  As with all problems of civil order, when the disrupter absolutely declines to promise amendment, one can certainly feel sympathy for the authorities in the administrative problem which the Quakers presented.1 How were these interruptions – often of a frenzied and highly insulting nature – to be handled? On the other hand the rigorous treatment of the Quakers in prison can command no such understanding. George Fox was first imprisoned in Derby in 1650. This term initiated a period of close on forty years in which the Quakers were regularly confined for disturbing the public peace until the exemption of Dissenters (including the Quakers) from the penal laws in 1689 gave them relief: a Declaration of Loyalty was allowed to replace the Oath of Allegiance in court which the Quakers’ religion would not permit them to swear.

  There were periods of remission: at the Restoration a number of Quakers imprisoned under the Commonwealth were released from gaol. At the Declaration of Breda King Charles II had after all promised a liberty to ‘tender consciences’. What happened however if liberty of conscience led to a breach of the peace – and some even more menacing manifestation such as rebellion? It was ill luck that the Quakers should become identified in the mind of authority with those rebellious millenarian relics, the Fifth Monarchists; a foolish rising of 1661, headed by a wine-bottler named Thomas Venner, led to wide-scale Quaker imprisonment. The tough Quakers’ Act of 1662 followed, which imposed severe penalties on their Meetings, with transportation for a third offence. Then the first Conventicle Act of 1664 curtailed the activities of all Nonconformists by making it illegal for more than five persons outside a family to gather together for religious purposes. The Conventicle Act lapsed in 1668 but was re-enacted in 1670, bringing a fresh wave of imprisonments. As a result, thousands of Quakers passed through the prisons of England.

  It was however from this experience, this wholesale incarceration of people who were not themselves members of the criminal classes, that the honourable Quaker commitment to prison reform sprang. It has been pointed out that in her letters from prison Elizabeth Hooton herself anticipated by 150 years the demands of the nineteenth-century Quaker reformer Elizabeth Fry.10 Elizabeth Hooton’s earliest extant letter to the Mayor of Derby contrasted the state of the prisoners with his own comfort and honour, warning him of the fate of Dives ‘if he will not regard the poor and in prison’. Elizabeth Hooton was first shut up in the Fen Country; then in York prison (where she found a number of other Friends) on and off for two years; then in Beckenham prison for once again ‘exhorting the people to repentance’ for five months; finally she was imprisoned in Lincoln Castle, and here she found herself entirely among felons.

  At Lincoln Castle too Elizabeth Hooton encountered a further hazard in the shape of a particularly malevolent female gaoler. The law permitted the magistrates to send Quakers to prison, but they were not obliged to make provision for the Quakers’ maintenance (nor for that of other prisoners of course). The Quakers then had to find their own board and pay fees for their lodging, something which brought them squarely within the power of their gaolers if malevolently inclined. It was easy for ‘a malignant woman’ like the gaoler of Lincoln Castle to persecute her Quaker prisoner, and also to whip up the other prisoners against her. Elizabeth Hooton, Prisoner in Lincoln Castle, pleads to him in Authority to reform the Abuses of the Gaol drew attention not only to the system of ‘fees’ but also to Brueghel-like conditions within the prison itself. Elizabeth Hooton described ‘in drinking and profaneness and wantonness, men and women together many times part of the night …’ She asked that strong drink at least should be removed from the gaols.11

  One of Elizabeth Hooton’s fellow prisoners in York prison had been a Quaker servant-girl, originally from Pontefract, called Mary Fisher. She had probably been converted by George Fox in 1651 when she was about twenty-seven.12 It was this Mary Fisher who was inspired by the Inner Light to carry the Quaker message to New England. Accompanied by Anne Austin, she reached Boston in July 1656. Her reward was to be ‘searched’ for being a witch. The hundred or so books on Quakerism which filled her baggage were confiscated. She was then flogged at the orders of the Governor of Massachusetts and expelled. In 1657 and 1658 the General Court of Massachusetts passed laws against Quakers’ landing. Elizabeth Hooton, once more at liberty, was moved in her turn to set forth for New England. She intended to carry on the work of Mary Fisher and the other Friends, regardless of the Governor’s prohibition.

  The death of Oliver Hooton in 1661 placed ‘old Elizabeth’ in that traditionally strong position of a widow of considerable property at her own disposal. At the age of sixty she determined, despite the opposition of her children, to set forth for Boston; Joan Brocksoppe of Derbyshire, reputedly about the same age, ‘freely resolved to be her companion’. The two women, having taken this resolve, were however forced to kick their heels for a considerable time before a passage to New England could be secured; this because a new law had been passed in Boston fining the captain of any ship bringing a Quaker within its jurisdiction £100.

  When Elizabeth Hooton and Joan Brocksoppe did reach Boston, by a sea and land route, they entered a town where one Quaker woman, Mary Dyer, had already been hanged on Boston Common in 1659, to say nothing of those who had been whipped at the cart-tail from town to town. None of this prevented the two ‘ancient’ Quakers from interrupting the preachers when moved to do so. Soon enough, therefore, old Elizabeth and old Joan found themselves shut up in that ‘Lion’s Den’, Boston prison.

  From here they were taken to confront the dreaded Governor Endicott. He roundly called both these women witches, and asked them why they had come to Boston.

  ‘To do the will of Him that sent me,’ was the reply.

  ‘What do you understand by that will?’ demanded the Governor.

  ‘To warn thee of shedding any more innocent blood,’ answered Elizabeth Hooton. When the Governor countered that he would hang many more yet, Elizabeth Hooton pointed out that the Lord might spoil his plans by choosing to take him away.13 Awaiting this happy event, she was put back into the Lion’s Den, expecting to meet the same fate as Mary Dyer. In prison at the same time lay a Quaker man, Wenlock Christiansen, who was himself due to be hanged on 13 June. Unexpectedly all the Quakers – including Christiansen – were released the day before. It transpired that the execution of Mary Dyer was regarded with displeasure in England; for while no one could work out a plan for muzzling the Quakers, hanging was certainly considered an inappropriately harsh solution.

  Perhaps there were moments when Elizabeth Hooton wondered if the fate which was substituted for it was not even worse than the gallows. Or on second thoughts, since there is no record of despair, we must assume her remarkable faith sustained her through the ordeal which followed. In Elizabeth Hooton’s own words, another jury was called ‘which condemned us all to be driven out of their jurisdiction by men and horses, armed with swords and staffs and weapons of war, who went along with us near two days’ journey in the wilderness, and there they left us towards the night amongst the great rivers and many wild beasts that useth to devour and at night we lay in the woods without any victuals but a few biscuits that we brought with us and which we soaked in the water’.

  By degrees
the two old women reached Rhode Island, the centre of religious toleration since its foundation by the liberal-spirited Roger Williams. From Rhode Island they proceeded to Barbados, where Mary Fisher had also brought the message of Quakerism, and there were in consequence a number of Friends to receive them. Even at this point the two women were convinced that it was their duty to return to Boston; but having sailed back to New England, they were once more arrested in Boston and deported to Virginia. From here at last they took ship again for home.

  In England however old Elizabeth’s problems hardly diminished. She found herself returned to a land where Quakers were beset by the problems posed by the recent Acts comprised in the ‘Clarendon Code’ (which included the harsh Conventicle Act). A magistrate summoned Elizabeth’s son at harvest-time, and when he would not take the oath in court, according to Quaker practice, fined him £5. When the son refused to pay, Elizabeth Hooton’s property – to the value of £20 – was confiscated; to meet such demands the old woman was further forced into selling her farm at a severe financial loss. Then Elizabeth Hooton herself was imprisoned for twelve weeks, for not taking the oath.

  At this point Elizabeth embarked on a relationship with King Charles II based – in her opinion – on her crying need for temporal mercy and his equally pressing need for spiritual conversion. Even if somewhat one-sided, this relationship does at least give some kind of lighter touch to her otherwise painful story. This lightness was not entirely due to the piquant combination of the earnest old Quaker woman with the playful womanizing monarch: ‘king charles,’ she would exclaim some years later, ‘how oft have I come to thee in my old age, both for thy reformation and safety, and for the good of thy soul, and for justice and equity. Oh that thou would not give up thy kingdom to the papists nor thy strength to the women …’ Lightness was often King Charles’s way with solemn events, as though good-natured mockery might palliate those ills which could not be eliminated. Pepys witnessed a scene when a pretty young Quaker presented an extremely long petition to the King. (She was probably the Kentish Quaker’s wife who was debauched by an adventurer called John Scott; he got hold of her entire fortune to purchase an imaginary estate in Long Island, and then fled to America himself, taking with him her jewels and her eldest son.) Charles II listened to the petition and then observed that ‘if all she desired was of that length, she might lose her desires’. The pretty Quaker declined to join in a conversation of such immodesty; it was not until it had returned to a more serious level that she began again. ‘O King!’14