The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (37 page)

The romantic efforts of Jane Whorwood achieved in the end little. The partnership of Anne Murray, later Lady Halkett, and her lover Colonel Bampfylde, achieved in one respect much. For in 1648 this couple secured the rescue of James Duke of York from Parliamentary captivity in London. The what-might-have-beens of history are notoriously beguiling; all that can be said with certainty about the incident is that Charles I was extremely anxious his second son should not remain in Parliament’s grip as a potential pawn. Beyond that one can only speculate what might have happened if James, next in line to the throne after the Prince of Wales, had lingered in London, a possible titular king in place of his father and brother.

When we last heard of Anne Murray, she had just been slighted by her reluctant lover Thomas Howard, and pined in consequence for some (Protestant) convent to which she could flee (see p. 177). This was in 1644. Thereafter matters still did not mend for portionless Anne, since she fell victim to the charms of the dashing Colonel Bampfylde, a man who was certainly a Royalist agent, and later probably a double-agent as well.

The two-facedness of Colonel Bampfylde extended to his emotional life: a married man, he pretended that his wife was ‘dead and buried’ in order to overpower the scrupulous Anne. Wartime conditions made that kind of deception easier. Besides, the inventive Colonel gave as a reason for keeping this ‘death’ secret the fact that his wife’s fortune would otherwise be
sequestered by Parliament. It seems all too likely that the Colonel did overpower Anne’s moral objections to his sexual advances by this stratagem. The truth was eventually discovered – the wife still lived – and Anne, telling the tale in her memoirs, without exactly admitting to her seduction, does react with the utter horror and mortification of one who has sacrificed her principles for a fantasy.
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In 1648 all this pain lay ahead. Anne had begun assisting Colonel Bampfylde in his operations since either early this year or late the preceding one. When Charles I indicated to Bampfylde his extreme anxiety that the fourteen-year-old James should be spirited away from St James’s Palace, it was to Anne that Bampfylde turned for a vital part in the plan.
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The choice was approved in advance by Charles I, for Anne’s mother had been governess to James’s sister, the Princess Elizabeth, and her brother William Murray was in attendance on the King himself. It was also assumed that Anne as a young woman, like Jane Whorwood, would enjoy a kind of freedom of action certainly not granted to a known loyalist such as the Colonel.

So to Anne was entrusted the task of securing a suit of women’s clothes in which the young Duke might make his escape. First she got the Colonel to take a ribbon with him to St James’s Palace in order to mark ‘the bigness of the Duke’s waist’ and ‘his length’. Armed with this, Anne went to her tailor and inquired how much mohair would be needed to make a petticoat and waistcoat for ‘a young gentlewoman’ with these measurements.

There was a long silence. Then the tailor replied that he had made ‘many gowns and suits but he had never made any to such a person in his life’. Privately Anne thought that the tailor was certainly right. However, his actual meaning was to do with the strange measurements which confronted him: ‘he had never seen any woman of so low a stature have so big a waist’. Fortunately the tailor was more baffled than suspicious; he forthwith made a garment of mixed light and dark mohair, with a scarlet under-petticoat.

Now it was up to the young Duke. James, with some perspicacity, instituted a series of games of hide-and-seek in St
James’s Palace, so that his guardians should become accustomed to his absences. He also secured the keys to the gardens by a trick and had his pet dog locked up lest it should follow him. In this manner he managed to take advantage of his ‘hiding’ during a game to reach the Privy Garden and so the outside, where Colonel Bampfylde awaited him with the first stage of his disguise: a cloak and a periwig. They travelled first by coach and then by water from Westminster Bridge.

Anne’s turn came next. With her faithful maid Miriam she was to await the arrival of the Colonel and his protégé at the house of a surgeon named Low near the next bridge down river from London Bridge. The Colonel’s instructions were to remain till ten o’clock at night; after that, if he did not come that meant the plot had been discovered, and the women must save themselves as quickly as possible. As it was, ten o’clock came and went without the Colonel’s arrival. But still Anne refused to flee.

Her confidence was rewarded. After a while ‘a great noise’ was heard; Anne imagined that the soldiers were coming to take her. In fact the first sight which met her eyes was the person of the young Duke himself, in those days, as the Grande Mademoiselle of France assures us, ‘extremely good-looking and well made’ (the saturnine looks of the future Charles II were considered much less appealing).
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‘Quickly, quickly, dress me,’ called the boy. So Anne did as the Duke commanded, finding him ‘very pretty’ in his woman’s clothes. She also provided James with some food, including a Woodstreet cake, which she had procured because she knew he loved them. So the Duke, now outwardly a young lady if a somewhat oddly shaped one, departed for Gravesend in a barge ‘with four oars’. And Anne and Miriam set off in a coach, helter-skelter, for the safety of her brother’s home. At that moment all was confident action. The disillusionment concerning the Colonel’s marital duplicity lay ahead.

If women were not passive, true it is that they suffered in the period of the wars (and so of course did the men). There was the
most obvious suffering of all caused by the loss of the loved ones, bringing with it that grief which is the handmaiden of wars throughout history. Margaret Eure (for all her meek words a lady of some spirit, as her choice of the Catholic William Eure for her second husband had indicated – see p. 113) certainly found no ‘good end’ in the war. The ‘lucky bullet’, which her brother-in-law Sir Edmund Verney had once angrily hoped would free the headstrong young woman from the ‘misfortune’ of her second marriage to a Papist, found its mark. Colonel William Eure was killed in 1644. Margaret’s romantic love for him had never faded: far from being relieved, she described herself as having suffered ‘the greatest misfortune that could ever happen to me in this world … the Death of the gallantest man that ever I knew in my Life’.
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Grief struck equally at both sexes, but women were more likely to experience those pangs of divided loyalty peculiar to civil wars, brought about by marrying from one political allegiance into another. Thus Mary Rich, daughter-in-law of the Puritan Admiral of the Fleet, the Earl of Warwick, was also the sister-in-law of the Royalist Commander Lord Goring. She was alone at the Rich seat in Essex, Leighs Priory, when Goring arrived to help himself to the Warwick armaments stored in the house. Goring, blithely believing that Mary would favour her own family rather than that of her husband, sent a message to say that he would first take dinner with her, and then commandeer the arms. Mary did serve dinner – but thereafter did her level best to save the store from Royalist depredation.
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The agonies of a Royalist mother whose son joined the side of Parliament are affectingly recorded in the letters of Susan Countess of Denbigh.
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‘Su’ Denbigh was the sister of the magnificent Duke of Buckingham, favourite in turn of James and Charles I; she had thus been raised in intimate contact with the court, with kings and for that matter queens – she was now a lady-in-waiting to Henrietta Maria, and when the French Queen left for Holland to raise money and troops, Su Denbigh went with her. A friend and patron of the poet Crashaw, it was to Lady
Denbigh that Crashaw recommended the Catholic Communion in the lines:

What Heaven-entreated heart is this,

Stands trembling at the gate of bliss?
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And she did subsequently convert to the Catholic Church.

William Earl of Denbigh, who had been Master of the Robes to James I, was equally a staunch Royalist. He was over sixty but he stood forth for the King at Edgehill; to the pain and humiliation of the mother her eldest son Basil Lord Feilding appeared on the opposite side of the battlefield for Parliament.

Clearly Basil Lord Feilding had the gift of inspiring affection (remember the adoration of his third wife, exclaiming ‘Dear! how thy Betty loves thee!’– see p. 65). For Lady Denbigh loved while she agonized. ‘I suffer [more] for the ways you take …’ she wrote ‘than ever I did to bring you into this world.’ And again: ‘Let my pen beg that which, if I were with you, I would do upon my knees with tears.’ Or: ‘I do long to hear my dear son Feilding speak once again to me in the duty he owes to his Master and dread sovereign [Charles I], the master of your poor afflicted mother, banished from the sight of you I do so dearly love.’

The Earl of Denbigh was severely wounded in the head by ‘swords and poll-axes’ at Birmingham, under Prince Rupert, in 1643; Lord Feilding visited him under a flag of truce – but by the time he arrived, his father was dead. Now let Lord Feilding give her ‘the comfort of that son I do so dearly love’, wrote Lady Denbigh from Holland from the depths of her grief. ‘Leave those that murdered your father,’ she pleaded, ‘for what can it be called but so? … there was no mercy to his grey hairs but wounds and shots, a horror to me to think of.’ Before, her son had been merely in error; now his adherence to Parliament was ‘hideous and monstrous’. Nevertheless Basil Lord Feilding remained true to Parliament; and Susan Countess of Denbigh remained true to the service of the Stuarts. She died in exile in Paris in 1652 without having seen her beloved son again.

Then there were the ordeals of the women who found themselves in the mindless path of the war. If divided loyalties were the painful prerogative of those somewhere near the political centre of things, it was aggravated distress which threatened those lower down the social scale. One Alice Stonier of Leek in Staffordshire was one member of this dejected flotsam, bobbing about between armies, countries and peoples – a lucky one as it turned out, since the righteous justices and churchwardens of Staffordshire eventually came to her rescue. Alice Stonier had been taken over to Ireland by her husband, an unsuccessful drover; there they had been robbed, their house burned, themselves driven out and stripped naked except for a ragged woollen cloak by the somewhat inhospitable native Irish population. The Stoniers slept in the fields at night till they reached Dublin; at which point Thomas was ‘pressed’ (conscripted) to be a soldier, and almost immediately killed. Because Alice and her five children represented Protestant victims of Irish Catholic aggression (a popular English concept at the time) the Stonier family were shipped back to Staffordshire, where Alice was granted 8d a week and her three eldest children were placed ‘in good service’.
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Others were not so lucky. It has been pointed out that natural phenomena, common throughout the seventeenth century, such as harvest failure, disease and fire, had a far more disastrous effect on the lives of common people than the wars themselves.
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Plague pointed its finger and periodically decimated the population; a woman’s lot, in an age when effective birth control did not exist, comprised the ceaseless bearing of children, and the perils thereof, wars or no wars. Nevertheless civil strife in one version or another ploughed up the soil of England for nearly ten years. In addition English soldiers, both Cavalier and Roundhead, fought and continued to fight in Ireland; Cromwell installed an English Army of occupation in Scotland after the victory of Dunbar which remained there till the Restoration; under the Commonwealth English soldiers and sailors were involved in military action against the Dutch, the French and the Spanish, including an expedition to the distant West Indies. Women’s lives could
hardly go unaffected by these hazardous peregrinations on the part of their menfolk.

Alice Coles of Poole had the awkward problem of explaining how she had conceived a child during her husband’s absence serving in the Army in Ireland; accused at the quarter sessions, she claimed, with some, verve, that he had paid her a miraculous visit! Another West Country wife was propositioned by an enterprising gentleman after her husband likewise had been away serving in Ireland for some time on the grounds that ‘her husband used the company and lay with women in Ireland and had the carnal knowledge of their bodies and he would wish her to do the like with men here in England’.
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These were mere hiccups compared to the financial sufferings often experienced by the widows and families of soldiers, and the dependants of the maimed, as the numerous petitions for their relief make clear. Towards the end of the century Gregory King would cite the families of soldiers and seamen among the three groups of the perpetually insolvent.
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Of course social disruption could affect every class, and it would be insensitive to suppose otherwise. The death of the Royalist Sir Edmund Verney in 1642, bearing the King’s standard at Edgehill, left his five unmarried daughters breathing in a climate of genteel despair, their portions sequestered along with the rest of the estates. Sue, Pen, Peg, Molly and Betty Verney huddled together at Claydon; to be joined by a sixth unhappy sister in the shape of the widowed Cary Gardiner and her pathetic little daughter – for Cary had been so contemptuously treated by her dead husband’s family that she preferred to take refuge at Claydon (see p. 145). So the girls spent their time with little prospect of a glorious match, quarrelling peevishly amongst themselves in an attempt to keep up vanished standards. ‘I did speak to Peg as her maid might serve both her and Pen, but she will not it be so by any means’, wrote a relative. ‘I told her now their father and mother was dead, they should be a helper one to the other … but all would not do [so].’
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Without a man to protect them, the girls felt threatened by lawless soldiers on both sides while the King was at Oxford, since Claydon lay
roughly on the borders of Royalist and Parliamentary territories.