The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (32 page)

This time there was no escaping ‘Bedlam’s loathsome Prison’ even for the mother of the Countess of Huntingdon. Here sightseers would come to gape at Lady Eleanor (and other inmates). Nor was Lady Eleanor’s prophetic voice silent. Particular alarm was caused when she predicted a fire within Bedlam, and fires duly occurred – although the fire risks were so great, that was hardly a surprising occurrence. Finally, after a spell in the Tower, Lady Eleanor was released into the care of her daughter and son-in-law in 1640.

The prophesying – and the violent treatment – continued. In 1646 Lady Eleanor was sent to another London prison called the Compter and incarcerated in a black cell by the Keeper, an experience she described graphically: ‘Not long after (she all unready, etc.) between two of them carried down thence, instantly shut and bolted was into the Dungeon-Hole, Hell’s Epitomy, in the dark out of call or cry, searching first her Coats pockets: Frustrate that way, with the Key took away the Candle, there left in their Pest-house on the wet floor to take up her lodging.’ Fortunately, so that Lady Eleanor could examine her cell all night long till dawn: ‘the Heavens without intermission flashed out Lightnings, as Noonday’.
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It seems unfair that for all her charitable treatment of her own ‘dear mother’ Lucy Countess of Huntingdon was the victim of a series of tragedies as a mother herself. Her first three sons all died; the fourth, Theophilus, who eventually became Earl of
Huntingdon, was not born until 1650, when the Earl and Countess of Huntingdon had been married for over a quarter of a century.
Sion’s Lamentation
, a powerful piece – and for once politically innocent – was written for the funeral of one of these boys, Henry Lord Hastings, in 1649, by the prophetic grandmother. Lady Eleanor described the eerie emptiness of the streets through which the funeral train passed. As when Joshua made the sun and moon stand still at his command at Gibeon, the Lord harkening to his request, so the cortège ‘saw not the face of Coach, Cart or Car, which passed by, either that met us, or stood in our way’.
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But by this date the whole world, not only the world of the distracted Lady Eleanor, was turning upside down – never so mad a lady till the present, perhaps, but other prophetesses were coming forward to rival her. Lady Eleanor, like these other frustrated women living in theoretical obedience, who poured their bizarre imaginings into prophecies, looked to the new order in the shape of Oliver Cromwell. We shall meet Lady Eleanor again in 1648, presenting a copy of the notorious 1633 prophecies to the great man himself.

For war was coming, a time when many women, not only the strange and wilful, would lead lives of chaos and disruption; a time of war, when the great mass of women who simply expected to exist, as their foremothers had done, rejoicing in the cyclical happinesses, enduring the private sorrows of domestic life, living under obedience, would not be able to do so. War, the great challenger, was coming to them all.

1
In the first half of the seventeenth century, about forty books concerning anagrams were printed in Latin alone; a preoccupation compared by one scholar to the modern love of palmistry.
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2
In 1932 the editor of
Dougle Fooleries
compared Lady Eleanor Davies’s ‘obscurity of meaning and … freedom from syntax’ to that of James Joyce or Gertrude Stein.
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PART TWO

With the War – Stronger Grown

To most ’tis known

The weaker vessels are the stronger grown.

The vine which on the pole still lean’d his arms

Must now bear up and save the pole from harms.

JAMES STRONG
,
Joanereidos: or, Feminine Valour Eminently discovered in Westerne Women
, 1645

CHAPTER NINE

Courage above her Sex

‘My dear wife endured much hardship … and though by nature, according to her sex, timorous, yet in greatest danger would not be daunted, but shewed a courage even above her sex.’

SIR HUGH CHOLMLEY, GOVERNOR OF SCARBOROUGH CASTLE

A
t the beginning of the wars, which lasted on English soil from August 1642 until September 1651, when Cromwell finally routed the young Charles II at Worcester, it was taken for granted that woman, the weaker vessel, lacked not only the martial spirit but also courage itself.

After the wars the theory of woman’s timidity continued to be preached: in 1653 Margaret Duchess of Newcastle’s first published work contained
An Epistle to Souldiers
, preface to a long poem describing the battle between Courage and Prudence before the Fortress of Hope. The Duchess was careful to explain that ‘these Armies I mention, were rais’d in my brain, fought in my fancy, and registered in my closet’. Anything else – from a woman – would be ludicrous. ‘Great Heroicks!’ she addressed the male sex, ‘you may justly laugh at me, if I went about to censure, instruct or advise in the valiant Art, and Discipline of War … according to the constitution of my Sex, I am as fearful as a Hare, for I shall start at the noise of a Potgun, and shut my eyes at the sight of a Bloody Sword, and run away at the least Alarm.’
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Reality in the previous decade had been very different. The Civil Wars threw up a considerable number of ‘Great Heroicks’
of the theoretically weaker sex: women of the calibre of the Countess of Portland who at Carisbrooke Castle ‘behaved like a Roman matron’ and rather than surrender ‘declared she herself would fire the first cannon’. Or there was the lioness Lady Mary Winter, wife of the Royalist commander Sir John, who declined to give up Lidney House, near Gloucester, to the Parliamentary commander Colonel Massey with some well-turned words on the subject of her absent husband’s ‘unalterable allegiance to his king and sovereign’. Thus Massey’s ‘hopes were disappointed by the resolution of a female’.
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Of these the most celebrated were the valiant ladies on both sides who in the absence of their husbands found themselves withstanding the enemy’s siege. Less celebrated, but in quite as much danger, were the ordinary women also involved in the siege, maidservants and so forth; these too threw themselves into the fray. So that far from being fearful as hares, women showed themselves capable, on many different levels, of gallantry at least equal to that of their menfolk; and if they were indeed inherently timorous, then it could be argued that their courage was correspondingly even greater.

This seemingly contradictory heroism of the weaker vessel was easily explained on the surface: an individual woman such as Brilliana Lady Harley was said to have exhibited ‘a Masculine Bravery’ or displayed that ‘constancy and courage above her sex’ which her memorial tablet ascribed to the valiant Lady Bankes of Corfe Castle.
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Elizabeth Twysden, Lady Cholmley, married Sir Hugh Cholmley of Yorkshire, later Royalist Governor of Scarborough Castle. Throughout the siege of the Castle, following the Parliamentary victory of Marston Moor, she stayed resolutely at her husband’s side; as he wrote later, she ‘would not forsake me for any danger’, although her daughters sailed for Holland and her sons were away in London. When the besieging commander Sir John Meldrum threatened total massacre, Lady Cholmley begged her husband not to consider her own safety; throughout the defence Lady Cholmley led the nursing of the wounded and numerous sick (scurvy soon broke out) with the aid of her maids.
Sir Hugh Cholmley’s tribute to his wife’s gallantry stands for many: ‘My dear wife endured much hardship, and yet with little show of trouble; and though by nature, according to her sex, timorous, yet in greatest danger would not be daunted, but showed a courage even above her sex.’
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Yet the conventional refusal to impute courage to the female sex as a whole (while granting it tenderly to individual members) did not survive the wars quite unaltered despite Margaret Newcastle’s ostentatiously modest words. Indeed, one can detect a certain masculine desperation in the repeated claims that the heroines of the wars acted out their martial role with the greatest reluctance. As we shall see, not a few of the ‘Great [female] Heroicks’ accepted their unusual destiny with zest; nor did this enthusiasm escape notice at the time, especially when it reflected derogatorily on the lady’s husband.

‘Three women ruined the Kingdom: Eve, the Queen and the Countess of Derby’: this comment from a Parliamentary source, by associating Charlotte de la Trémoille, Countess of Derby with Grandmother Eve and the hated Catholic Henrietta Maria, paid tribute to her pre-eminence as a Royalist heroine. But there were also sneers at her husband, James Stanley, seventh Earl of Derby: it was said that of the two she had proved herself the better soldier, or more crudely, that she had stolen ‘the Earl’s breeches’.
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Certainly the Countess was bred to be a heroine: in an age when royal women were among the few allowed to revel in public attention, she was by birth close to being a princess. A French Huguenot, daughter of the Due de Thouars, she was a granddaughter of William the Silent (of Orange) by his Bourbon wife. Through her marriage to the Earl of Derby, himself connected to the English royal line, she had enjoyed the full richness of English court life before the war; and since the Earl of Derby was the greatest magnate of the north-west, there she found herself a queen by his side: mighty Lathom House being generally considered ‘the only Court’ in the north.
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The habit of command then came naturally to her. (And it may also be noted that she was seven years her husband’s senior.)

Early in 1643 the fall of the Royalist stronghold of Warrington in Lancashire brought neighbouring Lathom House to the attention of Parliament. At this point the Earl of Derby was in the Isle of Man (also part of his estates) at the request of the Queen, while the Countess, a woman in her early forties, remained at Lathom House with two of her seven children, the Ladies Mary and Katherine Stanley. The aim of Sir Thomas Fairfax, the Parliamentary General, was to secure the surrender of Lathom House without bloodshed; to this end on 28 February he sent an official summons to the Countess by the hand of a Captain Markland.

At this point the formal rules governing a seventeenth-century siege become relevant (and indeed remain so through all the sieges, major or minor, which will be discussed in the ensuing chapter). These rules, which could have barbarous consequences for civilians plunged involuntarily into a siege, were nevertheless framed for the preservation rather than the destruction of life.

In short: after the besieging commander had issued an official summons to the defenders of a stronghold to surrender, a choice had to be made. If the defenders promptly surrendered, then the civilians – mainly women and children – within the stronghold were generally allowed to depart peacefully, leaving the soldiers within the stronghold to negotiate the details of the surrender, including the surrender of their arms. Before he captured Bridgwater, in July 1645, Sir Thomas Fairfax was said to have shown particular ‘pity and commiseration’ for these non-combatants by sending them a free offer of quarter before his troops began to fire. ‘Upon which there came out a whole regiment of women and children.’
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If, on the other hand, there was no surrender, then according to the rules of war, the besieged civilians were equally at risk with the military when and if the stronghold was taken by force; there need be no quarter given. (It was under these rules, incidentally, complying with contemporary procedure, if outraging the instincts of humanity, that Cromwell at Drogheda and Wexford in 1649 permitted the slaughter of civilians as well as soldiers, because neither fortified town, after repeated summonses, agreed
to surrender.) At Sherborne, shortly after the successful siege of Bridgwater, Fairfax ‘according to his wonted nobleness’ sent a messenger to the commander, Sir Lewis Dyve, that ‘if he pleased to send out his lady, or any other women, he would give way to it’. Sir Lewis, while expressing himself grateful for the favour, gave no very positive answer, and Lady Dyve remained within the stronghold. It was not until the ‘storm’ of Sherborne had begun that a white flag was hung out; this was too late to stop the sack, in the course of which the soldiers acquired a great deal of booty and everyone (except Lady Dyve) was ‘stripped’. Lady Dyve was lucky since by this point there was no theoretical guarantee of her safety. At Grafton House, near Stony Stratford, on Christmas Eve 1643, all the women of the house were ‘stripped to their naked skins’ by the troops of Major-General Skippon, after the fortress surrendered.
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