The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (12 page)

Sometimes it is the death of the beloved which provokes the revealing outburst, as when the Parliamentary lawyer Bulstrode Whitelocke wrote in his journal on 15 May 1649 (a time of extreme political tension for the new Commonwealth): ‘This was the saddest day of all the days of my life hitherto; my brother William Willoughby brought me the direful news that my wife was dead.’
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Anthony Ashley Cooper, later Earl of Shaftesbury, whose cool sense of intrigue enabled him to survive membership of Cromwell’s Council of State into the high Whig politics of the next reign, made an advantageous marriage in February 1639 to Margaret, daughter of the Lord Keeper Coventry. His passionate encomium on her sudden death ten years later makes an extraordinary contrast with the taciturn jottings in his diary which precede it.
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‘My wife, just as she was sitting down to supper, fell into an apoplectical convulsion fit: She recovered that fit after some time, and spoke and kissed me, and complained only in her head but fell again in a quarter of an hour, and then never came to
speak again; but continued in fits and slumbers until next day. At noon she died.’ Shaftesbury continued: ‘She was a lovely beautiful fair woman, a religious devout Christian, of admirable wit and wisdom, beyond any I ever knew, yet the most sweet, affectionate and observant wife in the world. Chaste, without a suspicion of the most envious, to the highest assurance of her husband, of a most noble and bountiful mind, yet very provident in the least things, exceeding all in anything she undertook, housewifery, preserving, works with the needle, cookery, so that her wit and judgement were expressed in all things, free from any pride or forwardness. She was in discourse and counsel far beyond any woman.’

Ashley Cooper, who was now a childless widower, did not long remain so; but his entry for that day in April 1650 on which he made a second marriage
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for sound political reasons
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is once more extremely taciturn: ‘I was married to Lady Frances Cecil, and removed my lodging to Mr Blakes by Exeter House.’ This time the match seems to have remained one of pure political convenience, for when a few years later the new wife also died, there was no outburst and no eulogy.

Lady Essex Rich was that niece and ward of Mary Countess of Warwick who as a girl had kept the ‘grateful hen’. She was married off by Mary, after due investigation of his moral suitability, to Daniel Finch, later second Earl of Nottingham. Lady Essex died not long after, leaving her husband with a single daughter. Finch wrote to the minister who had married them a distraught letter: ‘for I have lost surely a better friend, a wife without her equal, one that I loved as myself, for she was willing even to die to wean me from this world… that we might meet in a better, and live together eternally… Henceforward I will not think she has gone from me, but that I am going to her… no man can be so proud of what he has, as I am that I can say I once had the best woman in the world.’
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Like Lord Shaftesbury, Finch married again Shortly
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to the heiress Anne Hatton
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who presented him with an enormous family. But he called his eldest daughter by his second wife Essex
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after she who had been ‘the best woman in the world’.

Oliver Heywood, a Puritan minister, was even more explicit after the death of his first wife Elizabeth Augier, ‘the mirror of patience and subjection in her relation, as a child, as a wife, and of tenderness and care as a sister, and as a mother’. He wrote: ‘I want her at every turn, everywhere, and in every work. Methinks I am but half myself without her.’
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Letters too reveal affections beyond the normal conjugal respect which spouses were supposed to feel for each other.

On this evidence Brilliana Lady Harley, ‘that noble Lady and Phoenix of Women’, to whose heroic story we shall return, had enjoyed a married life abundant in tenderness at its inception. ‘I pray you remember that I reckon the days you are away…’, she wrote to Sir Robert Harley on 30 September 1625, when they had been married two years. Throughout his absences she expressed a constant wish to see him, culminating on 5 October 1627 with the cry: ‘Believe me, I think I never missed you more than now I do, or else I have forgot what is past.’
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In 1642 Basil Lord Feilding, the Parliamentary commander, married as his third wife Elizabeth (Betty) Bourchier. The next year he succeeded to the title of his Royalist father, the Earl of Denbigh. It was no doubt an arranged match: despite his two previous marriages, the new Lord Denbigh was childless; Betty herself was a daughter and co-heiress of Henry Bourchier, fifth Earl of Bath. Nevertheless her letters breathe with her desire for him: ‘My dear heart, my dear life, my sweet joy…’, she begins, ending with ‘PS A hundred, thousand kisses I give thee, as I might be so happy as this paper. I long much to see you.’ Sometimes Betty becomes petulant: surely he doesn’t really love her, otherwise he would come back and see her? At other times she is more resigned. In 1644 she writes: ‘Dear Joy…I should have been glad to have been with you on the 8th July, because it is our wedding-day’ but instead she will eat three cherry pies and drink her husband’s health with his niece Su Hamilton. (For Lord Denbigh’s own delectation Betty dispatched presents of cakes and candied flowers, borage and marigolds.) It is all summed up by another ecstatic postscript: ‘Dear! how thy Betty loves thee!’
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It is good to be able to record that the loving Betty, unlike so
many wives in the seventeenth century, lived to enjoy nearly thirty years of married life (although, like all the Earl of Denbigh’s other wives, she was childless).

Lastly, in the private memoir written by Ann, wife of Sir Richard Fanshawe, can be found in a humbler prose form the kind of lyrical sentiments about love and separation which Richard Lovelace, the admired Cavalier poet of his generation, poured into his volume of 1649,
Lucasta:

… Though seas and land betwixt us both,

Our faith and troth

Like separated souls

All time and space controls:

Above the highest sphere we meet

Unseen, unknown, and greet as Angels greet.
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Ann, daughter of Sir John Harrison of Hertfordshire, described herself as being ‘that which we graver people call a hoyting girl’ (i.e. a hoyden) when she married Richard Fanshawe in 1644, he being a bachelor of thirty-five, and she a mere seventeen years old. She wrote the memoir after his death, in 1665, to be circulated in the family, and for the special attention of her only surviving son, so that he might understand the kind of man his father had been – and the kind of relationship of perfect trust which existed between them.
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Fanshawe had been a man ‘so reserved that he never showed the thought of his heart in the greatest sense, but to myself only’, wrote his wife, but ‘this I thank God with all my soul for, that he never discovered his trouble to me but went from me with perfect cheerfulness and content, nor revealed he his joys and hopes, but would say that they were doubled by putting them in my breast’.

Richard Fanshawe was a highly educated man, with a deep love of reading, especially history and poetry; he would even go for a walk with a book in his hand, generally poetry. He was a minor poet himself, a translator of Horace, and of Camoens’s
The
Lusiads
from the Portuguese. Indeed his career, as a courtier-politician and diplomat in the Stuart cause, through good times and bad, fully justified his wife’s description of it after his death as ‘nearly thirty years suffering by land and sea, and the hazard of our lives over and over…’ There were also ‘seven years of imprisonment’ as Lady Fanshawe phrased it: for Richard Fanshawe was captured after the fatal Battle of Worcester in 1651, which ended the cause of Charles II in England, and imprisoned at Whitehall. Although he was released on bail in November, it was not until 1658 that he was properly free once more and permitted to go abroad.

When the Fanshawes were married at Oxford in 1644, where the court then was, Richard had just been created Secretary for War to the Prince of Wales (the future Charles II, then a boy of fourteen); King Charles I hoped to use his son’s position as a titular leader in order to pacify his squabbling rival commanders in the West. Clearly fierce love existed between the Fanshawes from the first, despite the seventeen-year gap in their ages and the allegedly austere nature of Richard. The first day they were parted after their marriage
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Richard Fanshawe had to go to Bristol on the King’s business – the ‘reserved’ husband was ‘extremely afflicted even to tears, though passion was against his nature’. When he was able to send for Ann from Oxford, the letter of summons made her feel so faint with joy that she ‘went immediately to walk, or at least to sit, in the air (being very weak) in the gardens of St John’s College’.
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At Bristol, after Richard Fanshawe had joyfully hugged his young wife, he showed his trust in her practical sense by entrusting her with his store of gold. He told her: ‘I know that thou that keeps my heart so well will keep my fortune, which from this time I will ever put into thy hands as God shall bless me with increase.’ After this, Ann Fanshawe wrote, ‘I thought myself a queen, and my husband so glorious a crown that I more valued myself to be called by his name than born a princess.’
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Equally clearly, it took a little time before the ‘hoyting girl’ realized the limits of the position of such a queenly wife, who could be trusted with her husband’s fortune, but not his State
secrets. Lady Fanshawe tells the story of how her kinswoman at the court – the Countess Rivers, an older woman – tacitly convinced her that in these troubled times it had become fashionable for women such as the beautiful Lady Isabella Thynne to display deep interest in matters of State and that to do so would make her even more beloved by her husband
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‘if that had been possible’ adds Lady Fanshawe quickly.
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Impressed by this reasoning, the gullible girl proceeded to question her husband about his confidential business as Secretary for War, and in particular about the contents of a packet which had recently arrived from the Queen in France; all this was with a view to passing on the information to Countess Rivers.

So: ‘When my husband returned from Council, after welcoming him home, as his custom ever was, he went with his handful of papers into his study for an hour or more. I followed him. He turning hastily said: “What wouldst thou have, my life?”’ Ann Fanshawe then told him that she guessed he had the recent packet from the Queen in his hand and would like to know what was in it.

‘He smiling replied, “My love, I will immediately come to thee. Pray thee go, for I am very busy.” When he came out of his closet, I revived my suit. He kissed me and talked of other things.’ At supper Ann declined to eat, although Richard carried on discoursing as usual, ‘and drunk often to me, which was his custom’. Then it was time to withdraw. ‘Going to bed, I asked again, and said I could not believe he loved me if he refused to tell me all he knew, but he answered nothing, but stopped my mouth with kisses, so we went to bed. I cried and he went to sleep… next morning very early, as his custom was, he called to rise, but begun to discourse with me first, to which I made no reply. He rose, came on the other side of the bed and kissed me, and drew the curtain softly and went to court.’

When Richard returned that night for dinner, Ann took his hand and accused him of not caring about seeing her so upset. ‘To which he, taking me in his arms, answered, “My dearest soul, nothing upon earth can afflict me like that; and when you asked me my business, it was wholly out of my power to satisfy
thee… the trust I am in may not be revealed.’” He then assured her that in everything else ‘my life and fortune shall be thine, and every thought of my heart’.

Richard Fanshawe kept his word, although some of the turns of fortune which he offered his wife might have broken the spirit of a lesser woman. In Galway they found themselves in a plague-ridden town, having narrowly escaped seizure in Cork at the time of Cromwell’s campaign, as the Irish, ‘stripped and wounded’, were with ‘lamentable shrieks’ turned out of the town. On their subsequent sea journey to Spain at the request of Charles II, Ann Fanshawe, as a woman, was in danger of being taken as a slave by a Turkish man-of-war. While the master of their ship was parleying with the Turks, trying to convince them of his innocence, Ann was locked in her cabin. She stole out by bribing the cabin boy to let her have his clothes: ‘I crept up softly and stood upon the deck by my husband’s side as free from sickness and fear as, I confess, from discretion; but it was the effect of that passion I could never master.’ When the danger had passed and Sir Richard realized who it was beside him, ‘looking upon me he blessed himself and snatched me up in his arms, saying “Good God, that love can make this change!” And though he seemingly chid me, he would laugh at it as often as he remembered that voyage.’
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Leaving Spain for France, they were very nearly shipwrecked in the Bay of Biscay in a violent storm which lasted for two days and three nights, and ripped both sails and mast from the ship, so that crew and passengers thought all hope was lost. Afterwards, at Nantes, they had some white wine, butter, milk, walnuts and eggs, and ‘some very bad cheese’. But, commented Ann: ‘I am sure until that hour I never knew such pleasure in eating, between which we a thousand times repeated what we had spoke when every word seemed our last. We praised God; I wept, your father lifting then up his hands admired so great a salvation. Then we often kissed each other, as if yet we feared death…’
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