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

by Antonia Fraser

  It was true that Mrs Bendish was no Constance Pley when it came to business. Her profuse, even wild, generosity whatever her financial circumstances got her into trouble with her business creditors, who took the line that their claims should precede those of the poor. We owe our original knowledge of Mrs Bendish to the character sketch by the Rev. Samuel Say, a Dissenting minister in Ipswich who was inspired to take up his pen by the publication of Clarendon’s History, including his epitaph on Cromwell: ‘a brave bad man’. The sketch is however hostile in tone; it has been suggested that Mr Say quarrelled with Mrs Bendish over her disposition of her aunt Fauconberg’s legacy, which she wanted to distribute among the poor and he thought should be used to reimburse her equally deserving creditors.42 He certainly reproached her for her behaviour on this occasion (without, it seems, swaying her) and admits that he felt by turns ‘her friendship and resentment’. Subsequent chroniclers of the Cromwell family history dug out other witnesses who were kinder and more sympathetic towards her manifest eccentricities.

  Dr Jeremy Brooke, paying tribute to her courage in helping Dissenters in a period of persecution, believed that this extraordinary woman born into another sphere, would have been ‘among the most admirable heroines’; another Zenobia, she would have supported an empire or defended a capital. He praised her charitable endeavours (with less thought to her creditors than Mr Say).43 Hewling Luson suggested by implication that it was difficult for a mere woman to accommodate the Cromwellian character. He wrote that she had as much of Cromwell’s courage ‘as a female constitution could receive, which was often expressed with more ardour than the rules of female decorum could excuse’.44

  It cannot be denied that Bridget Bendish’s behaviour was often bizarre. Hewling Luson describes her leaving these late-night sessions of drink and talk on the back of her old mare, known locally as ‘the old lady’. On these occasions Mrs Bendish often raised her voice in one of Watt’s versions of the Psalms: thus ‘the two old souls, the mare and her mistress, one gently trotting and the other loudly singing’ jogged home to Yarmouth in the small hours of the morning.

  As the years passed, the mare was employed to pull Mrs Bendish’s chaise. Still avid in the cause of business, Mrs Bendish took a particular interest in the subject of cattle-grazing. She would travel overnight in her chaise to attend the fairs, expeditions which ‘afforded exercises at once for her courage and enthusiasm’. Night to her, she said, was like day; surrounded by the most frightful storm, she would feel a particular happiness, sing this or that Psalm ‘and doubted not that angels surrounded her chaise’.45

  So the odd combination of a sacred monster as a grandfather and a prosperous businessman as a husband produced a way of life which, however strange it appeared to outsiders, was satisfying to the lady herself in its independence.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Wanton and Free

  ‘Some Men are of that Humour, as they hate Honest, Chaste Women … they love the Company and Conversation of Wanton and free Women.’

  MARGARET DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE, CCXI Sociable Letters, 1664

  In the late seventeenth century what is sometimes described (on no particular evidence) as the oldest profession was not necessarily the most disagreeable one for a woman to adopt – provided she was able to adopt it at an economically high level. The King – Charles II followed by his brother James II, equally lecherous but more neurotic about it – constituted the apex of the social pyramid; it was a pyramid which any audacious pretty woman might aspire to scale if she caught the monarch’s eye.

  A handsome upstanding young man in the reign of Elizabeth with a taste for poetry and adventure might dream of catching the old Queen’s eye; the same young man’s son might dream of catching the eye of old King James twenty years later. Let us imagine this cavalier’s granddaughter, the fortune culled from the immoral earnings of her ancestors lost in the Civil Wars. In her turn she might dream of catching the eye not only of the King himself but of any of the rich and famous protectors who aped his behaviour; she might become what a character in one of Aphra Behn’s plays described as ‘that glorious insolent Thing, That makes Mankind such Slaves, almighty Curtezan’. When Richard Allestree in The Ladies Calling of 1673 expatiated on the unhappy lot of harlots (‘Their most exquisite deckings are but like the garlands on a beast designed for sacrifice; their richest gowns are but the chains, not of their ornament but of slavery’) he was protesting against the luxury in which such women so evidently lived.1

  There was a universal truth expressed by Margaret Duchess of Newcastle: ‘Some Men are of that Humour, as they hate Honest. Chaste Women … they love the Company and Conversation of Wanton and free Women.’2 This truth was a positive advantage at this period to the women concerned if the men were powerful enough, and the women sufficiently bold, cynical or just plain desperate.

  After all, it was not as if the economic alternatives for women of all classes who had to provide for themselves were really so very enticing. Not everyone was as high-minded as the poet Jane Barker, who described herself in 1688 as indifferent to the charge of being an ‘Old Maid’. (The phrase was probably first used in the pejorative sense in The Ladies Calling: ‘An Old Maid is now thought such a curse.’) She was content to lead the existence of a good (single) woman:

  Suffer me not to fall into the Pow’rs

  Of Mens almost Omnipotent Amours;

  But in this happy Life let me remain

  Fearless of Twenty five and all its train.

  More than one gentlewoman without a portion found herself able to sacrifice the much-vaunted respectability of being a waiting-woman or housekeeper for the pleasanter if less moral life of being a kept woman – a ‘Miss’ or mistress. The exquisite Jane Roberts, mistress to Rochester amongst others, was a clergyman’s daughter. She died young (in 1679) with ‘a great sense of her former ill life’, but there is no suggestion that this was anything more than a deathbed repentance;3 if Jane Roberts, to whom Aphra Behn dedicated The Feign’d Curtezans, had lived, she would undoubtedly have continued to pursue her career among the other ‘insolent Things’.

  If there was a shortage of husbands, it appears there was no shortage of protectors. Mary Evelyn in Mundus Muliebris, laying down the rules by which a gallant should conduct his courtship, took it for granted that he had a choice ‘whether his Expedition be for Marriage or Mistress’. The Womens Complaint against their Bad Husbands, a satiric piece of 1676, complained that in ‘this frivolous Age’ many preferred the novelty of the mistress however painted her face, to the established wife, although the writer (unlike the more worldly Margaret Duchess of Newcastle) could not see what ‘temptations or allurements’ were couched in ‘the Monosyllable Miss’ which were not also to be found in the word ‘wife’. Palamede, in Dryden’s play of 1672, Marriage-à-la-Mode, complained that ‘all Mankind’ was setting up with mistresses, so that the demand was beginning to exceed the supply; as a result ‘poor little creatures, without beauty, birth or breeding, but only impudence, go off at unreasonable rates: and a man, in these hard times, snaps at ’em’.4

  It was not a purely literary conceit. Francis North, Lord Guilford, was seriously advised to ‘keep a Whore’ because he was being frowned upon ‘for want of doing so’. The playwright Mrs Mary Manley used the form of a novel Rivella, to give a true account of her own early romantic life. At the age of fourteen she was ‘Married [bigamously], possessed and ruined’ by her perfidious guardian. He finally abandoned her. Mrs Manley then went into the service of Charles II’s erstwhile paramour Barbara Duchess of Cleveland; here a former admirer surfaced with the proposition that she should live in the country as his mistress, an offer which ‘could no longer do her an Injury in the Opinion of the World’ because of her disgrace.5 In rejecting the offer on the grounds that she needed to feel herself in love with the protector (she subsequently lived for love as the mistress of another much less well-off man, a lawyer named John Tilly), Mrs Manley showed herself for the first, but not th
e last time, to be a highly eccentric woman by the standards of her time.

  The characters in Aphra Behn’s play of 1676 The Town-Fop included Betty Flauntit, a kept woman or ‘a Person of Pleasure’ as she was termed. While Betty Flauntit complained that ‘a Miss has as painful a life as a Wife; our Men drink, stay out late, and whore, like any Husbands’, for those who could not find husbands the conditions of life, like those of marriage, were not disagreeable unless the protector chose to make them so.6 The children of such unions were often mentioned quite openly and publicly in the father’s will, and in general provision was made for them.

  Henry Sidney, always said to be the handsomest man at the Restoration court, was exceptional in that when he died unmarried in 1704 he left numerous illegitimate children for whom he refused to provide. The brother of Dorothy Countess of Sunderland (but born almost a generation later), he showed none of her charm of character, especially when dealing with Grace Worthley, his mistress of twenty years’ standing. Mrs Worthley was a widow, but a poor one, her husband having been killed at sea in 1665 during the second Dutch War. She was gently born, living originally at Stoke Hall in Cheshire. The role of kept mistress to Henry Sidney was therefore an opportunity for support for one who might not otherwise have found it easy to survive; she bore Sidney a son. But it is clear that Mrs Worthley also adored her debonair protector for his own sake. Writing to him in 1689 she referred to herself as ‘a poor, deluded woman, that hath loved you above myself, nay, above heaven or honour’.7

  The trouble was that Sidney had acquired a new mistress at the beginning of the 1680s: Diana Countess of Oxford, wickedly attractive, one of the almighty courtesans of the court. By 1682 Grace Worthley was lamenting her dismissal after so many years, at the orders of one whom she described as ‘the common Countess of Oxford’ with ‘her adulterous bastards’. Her son by Sidney was no longer acknowledged: ‘all this to please his great Mistress’. Desperate for lack of money, Grace Worthley threatened to shoot Sidney.

  Sidney’s reaction was to depute his servant to pay Mrs Worthley £12. 10s a quarter. If there was any more fuss, he threatened her with a warrant for arrest, which as a Privy Councillor he assured her he would be able to secure.

  A few years later the discarded mistress heard that Sidney might be visiting her old neighbourhood in company with the new King William III. The news provoked a pathetic letter of nostalgia for country innocence: ‘That I might once before I die make a visit to the good old wooden house at Stoke … where I was born and bred … I wish your Lordship would do what is reasonable by me, that I might go into Cheshire and there end my days. I should enjoy more happiness in one month in Cheshire than I have done in all the twenty-five years I have mis-spent in London.’ Two years later Grace Worthley was still pleading for money to return to Stoke Hall, having in the meantime been escorted away from her lover’s door by a constable and a beadle. Part of this petition of 1694 consisted of a pathetic list of Grace Worthley’s relatives to prove that she had originally come of a respectable family.

  While a measure of such tragedies was inherent in the insecurity of the situation (although wives as well as mistresses were deserted) Henry Sidney was rated at the time to be specially hardhearted as well as handsome. Betty Becke, the mistress of Lord Sandwich, had an altogether jollier time, either because her own nature was more resilient or because his was more susceptible. In the spring of 1663 Lord Sandwich, Pepys’s patron, while recovering from a serious illness, lodged at the house of a merchant’s wife named Mrs Becke in Chelsea. Mr Becke was a merchant who had come down in the world; Mrs Becke, acting as a landlady, had the reputation of being a good and gracious manager, with her food well dressed and presented. Other comforts were provided by her daughters.

  By the August of 1663, Pepys heard that his patron doted on one of the Becke girls; his days were spent at court but he passed all his evenings with her, as well as dispensing a great deal of money. Lord Sandwich was at this point a man approaching forty, in a powerful official position; although Pepys was in a sense not surprised that Lord Sandwich should show himself ‘amorous’ when everyone else at court was busy doing so, in another way he was deeply shocked to see his patron ‘grossly play the beast and fool’. Lord Sandwich’s ‘folly’, he was horrified to discover, included taking Betty Becke out in public, playing on his lute under her window ‘and forty other poor sordid things’.8

  At this point Pepys was convinced that Lord Sandwich was dabbling with one who was ‘a Common Strumpet’. Another report spoke of Betty Becke as ‘a woman of very bad fame and very impudent’. In November therefore Pepys was moved to write his patron a magisterial letter of reproof on the subject: how the world took a grave view of Lord Sandwich’s continued sojourn in a house of ‘bad report’ when his health was clearly mended; Betty Becke was charged with being ‘a common Courtesan’ there being places and persons to whom she was all too well known; the notorious wantonness of ‘that slut at Chelsea’, as Pepys assured his patron Betty Becke was commonly known, was causing scandal to adhere to the name of Lord Sandwich.9

  The following June Lord Sandwich did try the well-known adulterous expedient of using his daughters as a cover for visiting Mrs Becke; unfortunately the girls in question were well able to ‘perceive all’. In consequence they hated the place, and complained that their father’s one aim was to ‘pack them out of doors to the park’; while he stayed behind with Betty Becke.10

  The next move – on the part of Lord Sandwich’s wife – was an equally time-honoured one in the great game of adultery. Lady Sandwich was suddenly inspired to go down to Chelsea herself in order to pay a call upon Mrs Becke the landlady. As Lady Sandwich told Pepys: ‘And by and by the daughter came in …’. By some extraordinary chance – ‘for she never knew they had a daughter’, let alone more than one – Lady Sandwich found herself feeling very troubled, and ‘her heart did rise as soon as she appeared …’ As for Betty Becke, by another surprising coincidence, she seemed ‘the most ugly woman’ that Lady Sandwich had ever seen. As Pepys commented tersely, all this, if it was true, was very strange; ‘but I believe it is not’.11

  However when the Becke family – invited by Lady Sandwich – came to call upon the Sandwiches in London, Pepys found that his own view of Betty was radically altered. She was neither ‘a Common Strumpet’ nor remarkably ugly. Although she did not have one good feature, Betty was nevertheless ‘a fine lady’, with a good figure, altogether ‘very well carriaged and mighty discreet’. Pepys made a point of trying to draw her out in the company of Lord Sandwich’s hostile young daughters. When she did contribute to the conversation, as she did from time to time, she spoke ‘mighty finely’. Pepys reversed his verdict. Betty Becke was now ‘a woman of such an air, as I wonder the less at my Lord’s favour to her’; he saw that Betty’s true charm lay in her intelligence – ‘she hath brains enough to entangle him’. Two or three hours were spent in her company, Pepys and the rest of the ladies adjourning to Kensington where, in the famous garden with its fountain where Anne Conway had played as a little girl, now belonging to her elder step-brother, they all enjoyed some ‘brave music’ and singing. All in all, Pepys was delighted with the day’s work: ‘Above all I have seen my Lord’s Mistress.’12

  Five years later, as the intimate record provided by the diary draws to a close, Pepys reported that one of Lord Sandwich’s daughters was recovering from sickness in her turn in the Becke house in Chelsea. Lord Sandwich intended to visit her; but Pepys still suspected that it was ‘more for young Mrs Becke’s sake than for hers’.13

  Economics apart, there was the subtler question of independence for the mistress. When the Duchess of Newcastle referred to the allurements of women who were wanton and free, she had in mind their conduct rather than their status. Nevertheless it was true of the seventeenth century as people imagined it had been in ancient Rome: it was possible in theory at least for a courtesan to enjoy a measure of independence denied to her married sister, for whom security
and adherence to the social norm were accompanied by the need for absolute subordination to her husband, legally and in every other way. Courtesans were sympathetically and even admirably treated in Restoration plays: Otway’s Aquilina in Venice Preserv’d – ‘Nicky Nacky’ scornfully trouncing her elderly admirer at his own request – or Aphra Behn’s much courted Angelica Bianca in The Rover who vowed that ‘nothing but Gold shall charm my Heart’. (Although even the spirited courtesan Aquilina received a sharp put-down from her lover Pierre when she attempted to discuss politics: ‘How! A woman ask Questions out of Bed!)14

  In 1695 Rachel Lady Russell wrote a long letter of maternal advice to her nineteen-year-old daughter Katherine Lady Roos, interesting because it reveals such a very low expectation of female happiness even for a nice young lady married to a highly eligible young man. ‘Believe me, child,’ wrote Lady Russell, ‘life is a continual labour, checkered with care and pleasure, therefore rejoice in your portion, 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.’15 (Admittedly Lady Russell had endured an exceptional sorrow, but then she had also been granted an exceptionally happy marriage.) For most women of this time life was indeed a continual labour – literally as well as metaphorically so. Even so, there were deep springs of strength and independence within the nature of certain females in this as in every other age, which would continue to bubble inextinguishably forth whenever the circumstances were propitious. For some of these, taking the world as they found it meant something a good deal more high-spirited, if less moral than the noble but essentially passive course advocated by Lady Russell. For such a woman, the life of ‘that glorious insolent thing … almighty Curtezan’ brought rewards beyond the merely financial.