The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (29 page)

Here Beauties, Odours, Musicks Lie

To shew that such rare things can die …

From Heav’n she came with Melodies

And back again to Heav’n she flies.
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And it was highly satisfying to an age which particularly enjoyed the significance of a good anagram that the letters of Susanna(h) Perwick’s name could, with a little pious cheating, produce the words:
AH! I SEE (C) HEAV’N’S PURE SUN.
’
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Although the title of his work,
The Virgin’s Pattern
, celebrated
Susanna’s unmarried state, Batchiler was careful to make it clear that she had by no means rejected altogether that ‘blessed knot’ of matrimony which was the lot of dutiful (Protestant) womankind. Admittedly after the early death of her fiancé, Susanna had dismissed various other proposed bridegrooms as wanting in spiritual riches; but Batchiler announced that Susanna had made another ‘secret choice’ before her death, and died in the arms of the man concerned.
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It was a significant assurance in a work much closer to hagiography than biography; readers could feel confident that the conventional virgin’s pattern of the seventeenth century – which was in fact to eschew virginity and marry – had finally been followed.

Yet Susanna Perwick’s character, as it can be discerned beneath the veil of Batchiler’s melancholy ecstasies, has something distinctly austere and as we should now say, nun-like about it; certainly her persistent rejection of her suitors, even if allayed by a deathbed change of heart, does not indicate any great enthusiasm for the matrimonial state. Like the Catholic Mary Ward, who suffered a similar loss, Susanna Perwick regarded the death of her betrothed as a significant affliction from God. For Susanna there followed a form of spiritual ‘conversion’; Mary Ward decided to devote her life to God and took the veil. The option of the convent was of course not open to the Protestant girl; indeed Susanna remained very much opposed to the ‘Romish’ religion, which she considered to be positively ‘anti-Christian’.
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Susanna was compelled to construct her own life of retirement within the confines of her parents’ busy boarding-school.

Susanna also resembled Mary Ward in that she had the gift of beauty: Batchiler refers to the contrast of her brilliant complexion – ‘red and white, Mixed curiously gave great delight’ – with her ‘black, jetty, starry’ eyes. And for once the frontispiece to
The Virgin’s Pattern
does actually show a pretty face, although there is a hint of firmness as well as humour in the curved mouth, above the legend: ‘Here’s all that’s left.’ Nevertheless, after the death of her betrothed Susanna adopted a deliberately plain, neat garb, abhorring the black spots and patches which were just
becoming the rage of fashionable London; not only for her own use, but also making her mother confiscate them from the giddy young ladies at the boarding-school. At least Susanna showed enough sympathy with adolescent frailty to wear the jewellery she would otherwise have eschewed in order to please the girls. Batchiler also eulogized her bosom – ‘Her pair of round crown’d rising hills’ – but these rising hills were, after Susanna’s conversion, sternly covered with a whisk or handkerchief, contrary to the usual custom of the time.

It was easy for Susanna to refuse to attend public revels where there would be dancing; it was more difficult to find peace at home for prayer and meditation, with 100 girls, to say nothing of the servants, perpetually ‘going up and down’. So Susanna, like so many of her serious-minded contemporaries such as Mary Warwick and Dorothy Osborne, turned to the garden and there would read her Bible for an hour or so, secure from interruption (she had read the whole of the New Testament twice in the year of her death). For Susanna too, like Elizabeth Walker, there was the period of early morning prayer which would leave her red-eyed; before supper she would regularly meditate on death. Even if complimented on her music in later years, Susanna was liable to reply – rather off-puttingly – that music was as nothing compared to the joys of heaven.
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Throughout the seventeenth century it was customary for stout English Protestants to condemn the Catholic convents with horror as barbarous concomitants of the ‘Romish’ religion. Yet one cannot help noticing how much easier it was for a Catholic young woman, a Mary Ward for instance, to construct a life of serious purpose on her own terms, than it was for a Susanna Perwick.

‘Convenient storage for their [the Catholics’] withered daughters’ was how Milton dismissed the convents. Lettice Countess of Leicester was struck with horror when ‘a Popish orphan’ named Mary Gunter, whom she had taken into her household, persisted in wanting to go ‘beyond the seas, to become a nun’ on the grounds that this was ‘the surest and most likely way to go to Heaven … the nearest way’. There was however nothing
withered about Mary Pontz, an associate of Mary Ward. She was an acknowledged beauty who was on the point of marriage when Mary Ward’s mission captured her spirit; she sent her cavalier a bizarre form of dismissal in the shape of her own portrait in which one half of the face had been eaten by worms!
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For Protestant girls who experienced these or similar urges there was little outlet; and Milton’s derisive comment omitted to state that for the withered daughters of Protestants – those who had probably been allowed to wither on the bough unmarried because they lacked dowries – there was no convenient refuge at all.

Some Protestant women, who thought for themselves, could see that it was by no means fair to condemn the Catholic nunneries wholesale. Margaret Duchess of Newcastle, for example, with her usual gift for stating the truth, however uncomfortable, thought it better for a girl to be ‘walled up’ in ‘a monastery’ than unhappily married. Margaret Godolphin, herself so earnest, so reserved, so worried by the implications of matrimony, went further. She was impressed by the convents she visited in France: ‘Their Nunneries seem to be holy Institutions,’ she reflected. ‘If they are abused, ’tis not their (the nuns’) fault; what is not perverted? Marriage itself is become a snare.’ Earlier she had wished that there might be some kind of similar Protestant refuge to which she might fly and eschew the claims of the world.
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It was a desire echoed by the youthful Anne Murray, at the end of her unhappy love affair with Mr Thomas Howard.
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As a girl without a fortune (her portion was ensnared in a legal tangle), Anne was aware that her marriage to Howard would not be permitted by his parents, and she honourably refused the young man’s passionate request for a secret ceremony. Despite this evidence of rectitude, even Anne’s own mother poured fury on her daughter for her behaviour, on the grounds that it was financially necessary for Howard to marry a rich citizen’s daughter. She made Anne promise not to see her lover again. Anne kept her promise to the extent of saying goodbye to Howard blindfold, when he was packed off by his own relations to France. Even so, the disgust of the mother was so great, that she refused to speak to Anne except in anger for fourteen months.

It was at this point that Anne inquired privately from her cousin Sir Patrick Drummond, who was Conservator (consul) in Holland, whether there was not some Protestant nunnery there, consistent with her religious principles, because if so she would retreat thither immediately. But Sir Patrick addressed his answer to the angry mother, leaving Anne to explain herself: ‘for since I found nothing would please her that I could do, I resolved to go where I could most please myself, which was in a solitary retired life’. A further blow was in store for Anne when Howard returned from France and married another lady, having cut Anne publicly: ‘Is this the man for whom I have suffered so much?’ she cried, falling on her bed. Her unfeeling mother laughed. It was no wonder that Anne secretly approved when her maid Miriam, as it will be remembered, called down a curse of barrenness upon Howard’s bride.

Gibbon pointed to the plight of the runaway slaves under the universal government of the Roman Empire: nowhere to flee for the victims of injustice, for whom the world thus became ‘a safe and dreary prison’. English girls who could not or would not marry were similarly without refuge. In contrast the remarkable longevity of many of the so-called ‘withered daughters’ who made the adventurous journey to the Continent to become Catholic nuns is also worthy of note. Two abbesses of Rouen, for example, died at over ninety; one of whom, Mother Francisca Clifton, had completed seventy-five years in religion. This longevity argues a life of purpose very different from that which faced many of their sisters at home – and of course freed in addition from ‘the pain and the peril’ of childbearing which brought so many of these other young women to an early death. Spiritual considerations quite apart, there was something to be said for the point of view of that ‘Popish orphan’ Mary Gunter (she was in fact not allowed to become a nun and died in England, still young, in 1633).’
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A life of chosen virginity, led in an ordered, secure and educated society, was certainly not the worst fate which could overtake a young woman in the seventeenth century.

In seventeenth-century England, neither legally nor psychologically was there a proper place for the unmarried female or ‘maid’ – the term generally in use in 1600 – except on her way to marriage. Psychologically, it was hard to look on a young woman as a heroine. The Blessed Virgin Mary was no longer the official pattern of English womanhood as she had been before the Reformation, no longer praised in nightly Ave Marias, daily or weekly masses as a chaste and sinless female. On the Catholic Continent, the position of respect she enjoyed was emphasized in the seventeenth century by the institution of a number of new Marian feasts in the church calendar.
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Candles glimmered before the multitudinous wide-eyed depictions of the Virgin, painted by Murillo in honour of the growing cult of the Immaculate Conception. In England, the whole subject of the Virgin Mary was complicated by the fact that Marian devotion in any form – ‘Mariolatry’ – was regarded as High church or Laudian, liable to lead directly to Rome.

There was justice in this contention. Anthony Stafford, for example, who wrote a book entitled
The Femall Glory
in 1635, in which he attempted to rescue the Virgin Mary as a figure to be admired and emulated – she was not to be considered ‘a mere woman’ – was a follower of Laud, as was his patroness, the learned Lady Theophila Coke, to whom he dedicated the book. Stafford described Mary’s marriage to Joseph as being intended merely to ‘serve as a bar to the importunity of other Suitors … so she might the more freely enjoy the inconceivable pleasure she took in her vowed Virginity’. As for the conception of Jesus: ‘most blessed Virgin … let thy Modesty rest secure; for the Operation of God, and not of man is here required’.
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This kind of heady talk was anathema to the Puritans, to whom the Blessed Virgin Mary was no more than ‘Mall [a nickname for Mary], God’s Maid’.
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So Protestant womanhood was left with Grandmother Eve alone – that fearful guilty ancestress – to represent them. There was no chaste heroine in their pantheon: Grandmother Eve being very much a wife and mother, in her own guilty way, as all women in the seventeenth century were supposed to be.

Legally, the position of the ‘feme sole’ was equally ignored: her legal rights were assumed to be swallowed up in those of her nearest male protector. This does not overlook the fact that young women of the labouring class (that is, the vast majority of the population) worked to support themselves by one method or another from an early age;
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it was from the ‘spinsters’, for example, a considerable number of young women working at home, that the modern legal term for the unmarried female was derived during the seventeenth century. Certain professions such as that of dairymaid or milkmaid had a tradition of independence, based on the adventurous expeditions to market which such ‘maids’ carried out in the course of their work, a freedom of movement not enjoyed by their sisters at home in the village.

The bold girls admired by Pepys at Westminster in the May Day parade of 1667, garlands round their milk-pails, ‘dancing with a fiddler before them’ as they collected tips from customers, came of a long tradition of such independent lasses; they were probably from farms nearby (Westminster then being on the edge of a rural area) and on their way to the Maypole in the Strand. Dairymaids were also amongst the highest paid of women workers: in 1647 a dairymaid who brought a cow to Hatfield so that the Lord Cranborne of the day could drink its milk was given a 2s tip – at a time when women agricultural labourers were lucky to get 4d a day.
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Nevertheless an unmarried milkmaid, even if she enjoyed some practical freedom, was still legally in the care of her father, like any other young woman, and on marriage passed into that of her husband.

The point has been well made that it was only at marriage that men entered fully into the society into which they had been born;
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that was also true of women, who in taking up their destined place as wives, were filling that place most convenient for the rest of society – which was male. The concept of an unmarried female, beyond a certain age and not demonstrably in the care of a male, tended to bring about a kind of bewilderment at best.

‘Are you a maid, or widow, or a wife?’ asked a Suffolk magistrate of Sister Dorothea, an English Catholic nun and follower of
Mary Ward, when she was brought before him in 1622.
¹⁷
At the time of her arrest, Sister Dorothea was posing as the kinswoman of Lady Timperley of Hintlesham Hall, near Ipswich; from this vantage point she had taught local children of ‘the vulgar sort’ their Pater, Ave, Creed and Commandments, but she had also done a great deal of good work among the sick and the poor, which had made her popular in the neighbourhood and somewhat inhibited the magistrate in his treatment of her.