The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (40 page)

For the next two years Anne remained at Kinross, helping the sick. In later life as Lady Halkett her love of physics and surgery made ‘things of her preparing’ very popular; certainly she had scope enough in Scotland during the war and post-war years. It is good to record that her flight to Scotland resulted at last in that suitable marriage which Anne Murray had surely long deserved. She was by now a governess in the household of Sir James Halkett, her employer being a widower. As Anne observed demurely in her memoirs: ‘It is so usual where single persons are often together to have people conclude a design for marriage, that it was no wonder if many made the same upon Sir James and me.’
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Yet even now, because the matter of her portion was still unresolved, Anne hesitated. What was more, while matters were hanging fire, the duplicitous if fascinating Colonel Bampfylde made yet another appearance, with more tall tales about his wife, asking Anne soulfully whether she was yet married to Sir James Halkett.

‘I am,’ said Anne stoutly aloud, adding ‘not’ under her breath.
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Then at last, with a simple appearance in front of the Justice in Commonwealth style (who called for a glass of sack to drink their
health) and a subsequent religious ceremony in front of the Minister, at the age of thirty-three Anne achieved the long-sought state of matrimony …

1
Susan Rodway’s letter as printed is a good example of the spelling of a literate woman of the time: ‘My little Willie have bene sick this forknight. I pray you to come whome, ife youe cane cum saffly. I doo marfull that I cannot heere from you ass well other naybores do. I do desiere to heere from you as soone as youe cane. I pray youe to send me word when youe doo thenke youe shalt returne. You doe not consider I ame a lone woemane; I thought you woald never leve me thuse long togeder, so I rest evere praying for your savese returne.’

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A Soliciting Temper

‘Certainly it would not do amiss if she [Lady Verney] can bring her spirit to a soliciting temper, and can tell how to use the juice of an onion sometimes to soften hard hearts.’

SIR ROGER BURGOYNE
’
S ADVICE

TO SIR RALPH VERNEY
, 1646

‘I
n these late Times’, wrote Basua Makin after the Restoration, not only did women defend their homes and ‘play the soldier with Prudence and Valour’ but they also ‘appeared before Committees, and pleaded their own Causes, like men’. The necessity for women to make public appearances in their own interests was one of the most surprising developments of the wartime period. ‘The customs of England’ were changed as well as the laws, as Margaret Duchess of Newcastle expressed it, with women ‘running about’ and acting as ‘pleaders, attornies, petitioners and the like’.
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What began as a necessity would later be regarded as an opportunity. A decade or so later, Basua Makin was advancing this type of wartime activity as evidence of the female’s fitness for that education generally denied to her. Yet ironically enough, women’s influential role as ‘solicitors’ actually developed out of their own supposed weakness.

The sequestration or confiscation of Royalist estates (and rents) had its origin in the Parliamentary side’s desperate need for money in the early stages of the war, lacking resources to acquire supplies and pay troops. On 27 March 1643, Parliament passed an ordinance which sequestrated the estates of all those giving
assistance to the King; in practical terms, the property of such a ‘delinquent’ was to be sequestered by a committee of that county in which it was situated. In October of the same year, the lands and houses of those Members of Parliament who had absented themselves, or those who had neglected to pay Parliamentary taxation were ordered to be let, so that the rent might serve as a security for loans for Parliament.
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Women, however, were not delinquents, or if they were, it was a rare state, more likely to be connected with their Catholicism than their Royalism. Of the Kentish delinquents listed for example only 5 per cent were female, and of those who did feature, about 93 per cent were Catholic recusants; the tiny category of women sequestered in their own right, widows and spinsters, were accused of such offences as selling goods to Royalist garrisons.
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Women were not delinquents because of their own dependent legal status: there their dependency worked to their advantage. Technically, because all her rights at law were swallowed up in his, a woman’s husband was also responsible for her crimes. Conversely his delinquency could not be laid at her door; there could be no guilt by association. This principle however had the awkward effect of leaving the weaker vessel not responsible for the crimes of the stronger, yet enduring all the same their practical consequences. So, the Parliamentary ordinance being framed to raise money rather than to impose suffering, delinquents’ families had to be given some kind of protection from the complete destitution which would otherwise have been their lot following the sequestration.

For this reason, another ordinance was passed in August 1643 which set aside a special sum, not to exceed one fifth of the sequestered income of the delinquent, for the benefit of his wife and children. It was the right to this ‘fifth’, if she pleaded for it personally before the committee concerned at the Goldsmiths’ Hall in the City of London, which gave to the wife
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the woman
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a new and special importance in that society where her public silence had previously been rated an eminent virtue. A Royalist ballad saluted the change:

The gentry are sequestered all;

Our wives you find at Goldsmith Hall

For there they meet with the devil and all.
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At the same time the jointures of wives and the settlements of heiresses were not supposed to be sequestered along with their husband’s own property, no matter how masterful a ‘malignant’ (as the Parliamentarians termed their adversaries) he had proved himself to be. It is a commentary on the postulated legal innocence of the weaker vessel that Lady Bankes complained bitterly – and with perfect justification – over the sequestration of her jointure along with the rest of her husband’s assets after the fall of Corfe Castle. Yet, as we have seen, no one could have shown a finer sense of the need to assist the King than the woman who held the upper ward of the Castle and poured stones and hot embers on the heads of the invaders.

As Protector, Oliver Cromwell harkened to the plea of Lady Ormonde, heiress of the Irish Desmond estates, but also wife to the Marquess of Ormonde, the arch-Royalist leader, and as such condemned to poverty-stricken exile. A lady, he decided, should not ‘want bread’ for the bad luck of having ‘a delinquent lord’; he ordered the Desmond inheritance to be restored to her. Indeed Cromwell, then the single dominant force in Britain, had ‘a very general fame’ for helping the weak, as Lady Ormonde pointed out hopefully in a letter from Caen; in most cases where he had made a personal intervention, the weak consisted of women, whom he regarded as innocent victims of their husbands’ or fathers’ wrongdoings.
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Of course the figure of the suppliant female being granted mercy by an all-powerful male was as old as history
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or monarchy – itself. Cromwell as Protector was merely carrying on the tradition of the clement sovereign. As King James I passed graciously through his new dominion of England, to take up royal residence after the death of Queen Elizabeth, he presented an excellent opportunity for suppliance on the part of those whose relatives had offended under the previous regime. At Doncaster, a widow named Muriel Lyttelton flung herself at his feet and
begged that the forfeited estates of her late husband might be returned, that she might somehow be able to raise and care for her children.

Muriel Lyttelton’s husband, a Catholic, had been convicted of high treason under Elizabeth for his part in the Essex conspiracy and died in prison. As a result of Muriel Lyttelton’s plea, the estates were returned and in the first year of James’s reign, the act of attainder reversed. A careful businesswoman (she had some of the steely prudence of her father, the Lord Chancellor Sir Thomas Bromley), Mrs Lyttelton then tended her children’s inheritance so well that she eliminated all debts. It was with some justice that an eighteenth-century history of Worcestershire wrote of this importunate widow that she ‘may be called the second founder of the [Lyttelton] family’. Sir Edward Digby was another Catholic executed for conspiracy. His widow, Mary Lady Digby, twenty-four years old at his death, did so well with her suits and begging letters that in 1608 she was able to reclaim his forfeited properties for her sons; as a result of her perseverance, Sir Kenelm Digby inherited £3,000 a year.
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In the rising drama of the King’s powers versus his subjects’ rights in the 1630s, some of the most vivid incidents occurred when the Star Chamber sentenced men to physical punishments for the sake of the words they had spoken, written or printed. Wives played their convenient role here in appealing for mercy.

Henry Burton was a Puritan minister, denounced to the Star Chamber for preaching ‘seditious sermons’ at the same time as William Prynne was accused for his work
Histriomastix
; like Prynne, Burton was sentenced to have both his ears cut off while confined to the public pillory, and after that to be imprisoned for life. Sarah Burton was not allowed to visit him while he lay in prison in London, his wounds healing; but when he was deemed recovered and dispatched to a new prison in Lancaster, she followed him in a coach. On 7 November 1640, after he was transported to Guernsey, Sarah Burton petitioned to the House of Commons (now feeling its mettle against the practices of the Star Chamber) to allow him to return. Her language was carefully modest: ‘as she knows not how to manage so weighty a business’
she asked the House of Commons to take ‘her distressed condition’ into their serious consideration. On 10 November Burton was released. The language of John Bastwick’s wife, asking at the same time to visit him in the Scilly Isles (he had been convicted of a scandalous libel under Archbishop Laud) because she could not provide for the children, was remarkably similar: ‘your petitioner being a woman [is] no way able to follow nor manage so great and weighty a cause’.
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Bastwick was released in December.

In January 1644, the Houses of Parliament at Westminster (as opposed to the King’s Parliament at Oxford, a body whose validity they did not recognize) offered pardon to all Royalists who would submit before a certain date; the condition was that they should compound for their delinquency by payment of a sum, to be assessed, towards the public relief. After October 1645 when the capture of Bristol meant that the whole of England (with the exception, as we have seen, of a few fortresses) was at Parliament’s mercy, this offer was renewed and extended.

The theoretical procedure was as follows: ‘delinquents’ who wanted to free themselves from sequestration by this method had to present themselves at the Committee for Compounding which sat at the Goldsmiths’ Hall in the City of London, in Gresham Street near the Guildhall. The delinquent took an oath before the Committee binding himself not to bear arms against Parliament, and another (religious) oath, that of the Covenant. He then had to declare the full value of his estate, any mis-statement making him liable to a heavy fine. Rates of payment varied:
MP
s might lose half their estates, lesser delinquents only a sixth.
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In practice these negotiations were very often bedevilled by local jealousies
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not forgetting that the original sequestration was carried out by the Committee of that county where the estates lay – as well as the separate but hideous complications attendant upon all bureaucracies, but particularly newly instituted ones. Some Royalist husbands were in prison – how were they to arrive at accurate figures concerning an estate and its rents? Others were in exile, not wishing to return until the principle of the compounding had been securely established. This was where the ‘innocent’ wives, already having the right to their ‘fifth’, might
well be in a better position than the husbands to arrange for the compounding or obtain the vital certificate of sequestration from the local county Committee.

Above all, women had a mobility denied to the male; even if the word mobility has an ironic ring applied to persons who were often sick, often pregnant, often some combination of the two, yet finding themselves undertaking journeys which involved considerable physical hardship even for the healthy.