Castles, Customs, and Kings: True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors (44 page)

When Cavendish—ever the defender of patriarchy—reprimanded the women for their disrespectful carriage, they turned their guns on her:

...the ladies being before Heated with Wine, and then at my Words, with Anger fell into such a Fury with me, as they fell upon me, not with Blows, but with Words, and their Tongues as their Swords, did endeavour to Wound me...it hath so Frighted me, as I shall not hastily go to a Gossiping-meeting again, like as those that become Cowards at the Roaring Noise of Cannons, so I, at the Scolding Voices of Women.

This episode also makes clear we should not imagine these gatherings as occasions for sisterly resistance against patriarchal oppression. Rather, they were the scene of as much infighting and competition as characterized society in general.

In the early modern period then, the term “gossip” could refer to any number of things, ranging from a child’s godfather, to a woman’s closest female friends, to a woman who spread scurrilous rumors about her neighbors. While some might find such imprecision frustrating, to my mind it simply speaks to the richness of early modern English and the ability of the common folk to define words in terms that were useful to them.

What Was Old in the Olden Days?

by Sam Thomas

I
f people know one thing about the early moder
n period, whether it is Tudor England or Puritan New England, it is that people died young. At some point they saw a statistic saying that the average lifespan was forty years and they leave it at that.

While technically true, this view of early modern life misses quite a bit about the past, not least because talk of an “average” hides the fact that high infant mortality rates skew things considerably. If a pair of twins is born in 1600, and one dies at birth while the other lives eighty years, their average life-span is forty years—but neither twin came remotely close to that number!

The strange thing is that the people of early modern England knew perfectly well that people—lots of people—grew old. In the late seventeenth century, a government commissioner named Gregory King (1648-1712) wrote a report called
Natural and Political Observations and Conclusions upon the State and Condition of England
, in which he estimated the population of England and broke down these numbers based on age as well as social and marital status. According to King, 10% of the population was over sixty.

Remarkably, modern demographers found that King was off by only a single percentage point: at the end of the 17th century, 9% of the population was over the age of sixty.

Put another way, if a girl made it past her fifth birthday—by which time childhood diseases had done their worst—it was not unreasonable to expect that she would live to a relatively old age, even by modern standards.

The question that this raises, however, is what being old
meant
in the past.

In the modern world we mark age in ways that are peculiar to our time and place: we get a driver’s license when we turn sixteen, vote at eighteen, drink at twenty-one, receive full retirement benefits at sixty-seven, etc. But obviously none of these markers would have made sense to people living any time before the 20th century. So what mattered to them?

As King’s estimate indicates, turning sixty was a big deal—in the minds of many people, that was when you became old. A Presbyterian minister named Oliver Heywood (1630-1704) made a habit of writing annual reflections on his birthday. When he turned fifty-nine, he noted:
“I bless the Lord, I am as fit for studying and preaching this day as ever I was in all my life.”

The next year—despite continuing good-health!—he adopted a rather more dramatic tone:

Oh my dear Lord, I am now arrived at the 60th year of my age, and not one amongst a thousand live to this age, and I have passed many changes and revolutions in the course of my pilgrimage.... how soon are these 60 years of my life past, like a tale that’s told, a dream when one awakes, its but t’ other day that I was an infant, a child, a school boy, and now I am grown of the older sort, and anon I shall not be here my place will know me no more.

“Why sixty?” you ask. In addition to being a comfortingly round number, it had religious significance, for it was when the great Apostle Paul died. Heywood wrote of,
“having passed to the sixtieth year of my Life,
[the date of the life of Paul the Aged]
within a few days; and my Lord only knows how soon my sun may set.”

Intriguingly enough, early modern men and women considered sixty-three to be another year-of note. When Thomas Jolly noted the death of a fellow minister, he added the note,
“he dyed in the close of his great climactericall year
[63]
, which is accounted most dangerous.”

This is all well and good, and thank God for demographers who crunch the numbers so we don’t have to, but the other half of this question remains unanswered. How did growing old
feel
in the world before modern medicine and the social safety net?

Perhaps the most interesting thing about old age in the early modern period is that one could “grow old” several times. The first phase of old age was known to contemporaries as “green old age.” This was a time, usually, when a person was in his fifties or sixties. While the body might have begun to decay, it was a time of generally good health and continuing activity.

In his sixty-first year, the aforementioned Presbyterian minister, Oliver Heywood, traveled over 1,000 miles on horseback over extremely difficult terrain, delivered 135 weekday sermons, and attended forty religious fasts. When he was sixty-eight, he logged 700 miles, eighty-two sermons, and another forty fasts. Other men and women had a similarly pleasant experience of old age, as their children married and started lives of their own, or they found spiritual peace that had eluded them in their youth.

It is here worth noting that an individual’s experience of old age is closely tied to wealth and gender. A man who spent his entire life working in the fields would grow old much sooner (and more painfully) than a gentleman or aristocrat. Part of what allowed Heywood to enjoy his green old age was that (by lucky accident) he’d inherited an estate in Lancashire, so he did not have to worry about money.

Thanks to their role bearing children, many women also aged earlier than men, regardless of their social status. In contrast to the popular image of labor being fraught with peril, a woman had only a 6-7% chance of dying in childbirth (over her lifetime, not per birth). But the fact is that in the pre-modern era, a woman might become pregnant a half-dozen times and this could take a terrible toll on her body.

Whatever a person’s social status, green old age faded to brown and the elderly grew weaker, sicker, and less likely to recover from illness. In extreme old age, physical decay became a central fact in a person’s life, as it became more difficult to see, hear, breathe, and walk. Along with these physical challenges, many elderly people suffered from memory loss and melancholy. In 1699, at age sixty-nine, Heywood described his condition in touching detail:

My wind grows exceeding short, any little motion puts me out of order—my chapel is near me, but when I walk to it (as yesterday) my wind so fails me that I am forced to stand and get new breath, before I go into my pulpit. When I go up to my chamber, my breath cuts, that I am forced to sit a season in my chair to breath me. When I lay down in my bed I pant a considerable time and cough and oftimes my waters come from me with motion.

An individual’s ability to cope with the challenges of extreme old age varied with social status. The wealthy obviously lived in greater comfort than the poor. A few years after this, Heywood found himself unable to walk the few steps to his chapel, so he paid two men to carry him in a specially-built chair. Obviously, this was a luxury which most of his neighbors could not have afforded.

But old age was not just a physical event. For some in early modern England (particularly the Puritans), it could be seen as an event of cosmic significance.

Early Georgian Era (1715-1800)

Mary Delany, Artist and Personality

by Lauren Gilbert

B
orn Mary Granville on
14 May 1700 in Wiltshire, England,
Mary was the daughter of a Tory aristocratic family who were supporters of the Stuart crown. From the age of eight, she lived with her aunt and uncle, Lord and Lady Stanley, who were close to the court. Lady Stanley had hopes of Mary’s becoming a Maid of Honor and educated her accordingly. Lady Stanley brought Mary into close contact with court circles. Unfortunately, the death of Queen Anne in 1714 ended those hopes with the introduction of the Hanoverian line with King George I.

Skilled in painting, needlework, and other crafts and an ardent music lover (she became acquainted with Handel through Lady Stanley), Mary was an accomplished young woman when she went to live with her uncle Lord Landsdowne at Longleat. She was described by Edmund Burke as
“a woman of fashion for all the ages.”

Lord Landsdowne was an intimate friend of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. Because of her parents’ financial straits and Lord Landsdowne’s political aspirations, at the age of seventeen, Mary was forced to marry Alexander Pendarves, who was 60 years old and a member of Parliament.

Mr. and Mrs. Pendarves moved to London in 1721, where Mary was able to renew her friendships at court and in society. Unfortunately, the marriage, which had not been good to start with, deteriorated as Mr. Pendarves became a heavy drinker and very jealous of attention paid to his young wife. He died in 1724, leaving Mary a young widow with only a few hundred pounds per year on which to live and no home of her own.

But Mary’s widowhood actually brought her a greater freedom of movement than she could have had as either an unmarried or a married woman. She was able to socialize, attend concerts, and basically please herself. She lived with her aunt, Lady Stanley, again, as well as with other friends, particularly Margaret Bentinck, Duchess of Portland. She travelled to Ireland, where she became acquainted with Dr. Patric Delany, an Anglican pastor.

She hoped for an appointment to the royal household, which did not come to pass, but became a close and loyal friend of the royal family. She was unsatisfied with choices available to women; she was against marriage as a necessity, and felt that marriage should be a matter of choice only. She engaged in a massive correspondence writing about her interests. She also had a relationship with Lord Baltimore, which ended in 1730, after she came to feel he was trifling with her affections.

In 1743, Mary married Dr. Delany, whose wife had died, and lived with him for the next 25 years in Dublin, where her focus was on gardening and her botanical interests, shell art, needlework, gilding, and many other crafts, and she continued her voluminous correspondence. Sadly, Mr. Delany died in 1768 and with his death, Mary lost interest in her other pastimes. Then in 1771, she combined her interest in botany and crafts by creating what she called “paper mosaicks”. These were extremely intricate, detailed, and botanically accurate pictures of plants and flowers, made of tiny pieces of paper cut and pasted in layers.

In these later years of her life, Mary had a house near Queen’s Lodge at Windsor, given to her by King George III and Queen Charlotte who also visited her there, and she spent at least half the year with the Duchess of Portland. Her eyesight failed in 1782 and she died in 1788.

She left ten albums of her mosaics,
Hortus Siccus,
which ultimately went to the British Museum in 1897. Although she was a woman of parts, noted for her botanical knowledge and artistic abilities in many areas, her wit, and her charm, ultimately it is her paper mosaics which have kept her fame alive.

Sources

British Museum. “Mary Delaney (Biographical Details).”
http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_collection_database/term_details.aspx?bioId=127351
.

Cariati, Christine. “Flora Delanica: Art and Botany in Mrs. Delany’s ‘paper mosaicks.’”
Venetian Red,
December 4, 2009.
http://venetianred.net/2009/12/04/flora-delanica-art-and-botany-in-mrs-delanys-paper-mosaicks/
.

Paston, George.
Mrs. Delany (Mary Granville) A Memoir.
London: Grant Richards, 1900. Via Internet Archive
http://archive.org/details/mrsdelanymarygra00past
.

The Peak of Chic. “Mary Delany and Her Paper Mosaicks.”
The Peak of Chic: Musings on Stylish Living,
September 4, 2008.
http://thepeakofchic.blogspot.com/2008/09/mary-delany-and-her-paper-mosaicks.html
.

Port, Andy. “Now Showing: Mary Delany a Force of Nature.”
New York Times Magazine Blog
. September 29, 2009.
http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/now-showing-mary-delany-a-force-of-nature/
.

Women and the Garden. “Mary Granville Pendarves Delany 1700-1788.”
Women and the Garden,
April 28, 2011.
http://womenandthegarden.blogspot.com/2011/04/mary-granville-pendarves-delany-1700.html?utm_source=BP_recent
.

The Rise and Rise of the English Landscape Garden

by M.M. Bennetts

T
hroughout the early part of the 17th century, under
James I and Charles I, English gardens continued to develop along the lines discussed previously in
The Elizabethan Gardening Craze
.

But with the onset of the Civil War in 1642 and the subsequent Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell, gardening, such as it had been, ground to a halt for many different reasons. Armies tramping across the countryside, particularly armies of Levellers, aren’t good for the preservation of gardens. Taxes were high and remained very high under Cromwell which meant substantially less disposable income.

Also, many of the keen gardeners and plantsmen had been Royalists. And they, like the famed garden writer John Evelyn, chose to spend the decade of Cromwell’s rule on the Continent studying gardens, or travelling, often to stay close to Charles II in exile, or further afield, even plant collecting in the Americas.

Which is not to say that Cromwell’s period in power didn’t have a marked effect on the countryside as a whole. For during the Protectorate, huge swathes of forest, particularly in the Midlands, had been chopped down. As Daniel Defoe wrote of Theobalds, King James’s former palace:
“...it has suffered several depredations since that, and in particular in the late Time of Usurpation, when it was stript, both of Game and Timber...”
And in the place of pleasure gardens, Cromwell and his advisers encouraged, both on moral and economic grounds, the planting of vast orchards.

With the Restoration of Charles II, the idea of a pleasure garden was once again permitted. But now, after their experience on the Continent, the large landowners and fashionable gardeners sought to recreate versions of the most splendid garden of their age: Versailles. And this formal style, full of grand canals, classical statuary, fountains, and extensive geometrical beds edged in box, held sway into the early years of the 18th century.

But vast, formal gardens are very expensive to maintain—they are not only labour intensive, they also take up so much land that might be otherwise profitably employed. And it was the garden writer and designer, Stephen Switzer, who suggested a cheaper alternative in his
Ichnografia Rustica
, published in 1718. He was writing mainly for the owners of villas—successful businessmen mostly—whose smallish estates were near London.

His proposal was that one should open up the countryside so that one might enjoy
“the extensive charms of Nature, and the voluminous Tracts of a pleasant County...to retreat, and breathe the sweet and fragrant Air of gardens.”
He went on to suggest that the garden be
“open to all View, to the unbounded Felicities of distant Prospect, and the expansive Volumes of Nature herself.”