The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (107 page)

Mary Lady Verney, wife of Sir Ralph Verney, a portrait attributed to Van Dyck.

A fishwife selling crabs, from a drawing by Marcel Laroon.

‘Grandmother Eve’, as she was often familiarly termed in the seventeenth century, shown on an English Delftware charger.

A satirical print, probably by Laroon, of a Quakers’ Meeting in the seventeenth century showing a woman as the principal speaker.

Oliver Cromwell at the age of fifty, by Samuel Cooper.

Cromwell’s granddaughter, Mrs Bridget Bendish, in middle age; the resemblance to her grandfather, give or take ‘female dress … and a very little softening of the features’, was the subject of much contemporary comment.

Mrs Elizabeth Pepys, wife of the diarist.

Lady Isabella Thynne, who according to Aubrey was ‘most beautiful … but she could not subdue one thing’. The wife of Sir James Thynne of Longleat, she was formally separated from him in 1653; her talent for music was commemorated by Waller’s poem ‘Of my Lady Isabella playing on the Lute’. From the School of Van Dyck.

Basua Makin, governess to Princess Elizabeth, daughter to Charles
I
, before the Civil War. She later founded a school in which she hoped to inculcate the classics.

Mary Duchess of Beaufort and her sister Elizabeth Countess of Carnarvon, holding a flower painting, with her initials ‘E.C.’ and a coronet in the left-hand corner. Flower-painting, unlike the study of the classics, was considered a proper feminine accomplishment. Painted by Sir Peter Lely.

Rachel Lady Russell, wife of the Whig Martyr William Lord Russell who was executed in 1683.

The poet Anne Kingsmill, Countess of Winchilsea, by Lawrence Crosse.

Anne Killigrew. A self-portrait used in the book of her poems published in 1686, after her death.