The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (45 page)

It was the association of the vote with material wealth – the ‘permanent fixed interest’ in the country – which had enabled some women freeholders in the past to use their ‘Voice’ in Parliamentary elections. It was in this sense that Sir Simonds D’Ewes at Eye admitted with some disgust that the Suffolk women’s ‘voices’ might ‘in law’ have been allowed. In the remote medieval past, those Catholic abbesses who were early patterns of powerful womanhood had named representatives. Under Elizabeth there had been two cases of borough-owners, who happened to be women, returning Members of Parliament. More recently, in the reign of James I, a judge pronounced in the case of Coates v. Lyle that a ‘feme sole’, if a freeholder, could vote; in the cases of Catherine v. Surrey and Holt v. Lyle, the same judgment was given, although it was added that on marriage the right passed to the lady’s husband. In 1628 Sir Henry Slingsby endeavoured – but in vain – to use the votes of widowed burgage holders in Knaresborough in Yorkshire.
²⁰

For all this, the little episode at Eye was not the harbinger of numerous occasions at which female freeholders attempted to be sworn; despite the fact that the Members elected were Presbyterians and that the Parliament concerned was that famous innovatory body which would be known as the Long Parliament. The incident in Mr Hambies’s field on a windy day in 1640 was not a prologue but an epilogue to the subject of female suffrage. In 1644 the
Institutes
of Sir Edward Coke were published without challenge, in which it was laid down that ‘Multitudes are bound by Acts of Parliament which are not parties to [the] election’. In this silent subject herd were to be included males under twenty-one,
‘all they that have no freehold … and all women having freehold or no freehold’.
²¹

It was true that at another Yorkshire election, that of Richmond in 1678, widows were explicitly disallowed in advance – ‘it being against common right’ – although they could assign their votes to others; but this was less an indication of potential female rights than of the vague nature of the English electoral roll at the time.
²²
It was more significant that throughout a period of unparallelled radicalism – and radical debate – in English history, when so many revolutionary political ideas were discussed that to contemporaries it must have seemed that Pandora’s Box had been opened, the serious question of giving a vote to Pandora herself was never even mooted.

At the Army’s Putney debates in the autumn of 1647, the Levellers among their number put forward startling demands for the extension of the suffrage in their document
The Agreement of the People
, based on the premise that the consent of the governed was needed for government: a man could rule over other individuals ‘no further than by free consent, or agreement, by giving up their power to each other, for their better being’. The Army’s high command, including Oliver Cromwell and Henry Ireton, found this whole concept of a franchise based on rights rather than property both dangerous and appalling. But this was
manhood
suffrage which was being discussed, and those Levellers who did raise the question of universal suffrage at Putney, envisaged it in terms of adult males. Disconcerting as it may be to the modern inquirer, even male ‘servants’ were to be excluded from the new franchise of the Levellers if they were not householders, since roughly speaking household franchise was what was required. It was not even thought worth mentioning that women, whose legal rights were so obviously swallowed up in those of their husbands, were excluded.
²³

Henry Ireton’s answer came down firmly on the side of that freehold qualification for voting which had been the founding notion of Parliament since its earliest days in the time of Edward I (and was incidentally to remain so for the next two centuries). No one had a right to choose those ‘that shall determine what
laws we shall be ruled by here’, he declared, who did not have ‘a permanent fixed interest in this Kingdom’, by which Ireton meant the possession of freehold property, or some other form of freehold such as an office or benefice (a fellowship at an Oxford or Cambridge college entitled the holder to vote at county elections).

In the late 1640s even the extreme opinions of the Levellers did not lead them to challenge the concept of a woman’s legal subordination to her husband. One scholar has written that no plea for female franchise was put forward in the Civil War period so far as he can discover.
²⁴
Towards the end of the century, Locke omitted women from natural equality, and James Tyrrell, one of Locke’s associates, observed: ‘There never was any government where all the promiscuous rabble of women and children had votes, as not being capable of it, yet it does not for all that prove that all legal civil government does not owe its origin to the consent of the people.’ It was a contrast on which Mary Astell, the educationalist, would reflect bitterly at the beginning of the next century: ‘how much soever Arbitrary Power may be dislik’d on a Throne, not Milton … nor any of the Advocates of Resistance, would cry up Liberty to poor Female Slaves or plead for the lawfulness of Resisting a Private Tyranny’.
²⁵

The very few possible exceptions to this rule only serve to emphasize the monolithic nature of male supremacy at the time, at least in the political sphere, for none of them bore fruit. The short-lived Diggers’ movement, whose members, extreme radicals, believed that land should be held in common, did result in some revolutionary suggestions on the subject of marriage from its leader Gerrard Winstanley. Article 56 of Winstanley’s ‘Laws for a Free Commonwealth’ proposed that: ‘Every man and woman shall have the free liberty to marry whom they love, if they can obtain the love and liking of that party whom they would marry, and neither birth nor portion’ should hinder the match. The reason given was: ‘for we are all of one blood, mankind, and for portion, the Common Storehouses are every man and maid’s portion, as free to one as to another’.
²⁶
Here was indeed a revolutionary suggestion; as we have seen, the disposal
of the young in marriage for reasons other than affection was a cornerstone of society, without which the building could be expected in the minds of contemporaries to collapse. Marriage itself, in the same free style, was to take the form of a simple verbal declaration in front of witnesses.

Further Digger clauses on the subject of rape and the begetting of illegitimate children by men were even more startling. If a man lay with a woman forcibly and she cried out (as testified by two witnesses) he was to be put to death while the woman went free: ‘it is robbery of a woman’s bodily freedom’. If a man lay with a maid and she conceived, he was to marry her.

With the extinction of the Diggers’ movement vanished Winstanley’s revolutionary notions on marriage. Their effect on society as a whole had in any case been insubstantial; except to link radicalism still further with the upsetting of the natural order as regards the family. It was significant that the governmental – Puritan – legislation concerning sexual relationships between man and woman was of a very different order. The harsh new Act of 1650 made adultery a capital crime; however, the man could escape execution by pleading that he did not know the woman was married (a convenient loophole). The woman on the other hand could in theory only avoid execution if her husband had been absent more than three years. It seems that only one woman, Ursula Powell, brought before the Middlesex Quarter Sessions, was actually put to death under the law (and there is even some doubt about her fate); this was because juries refused to convict, or dealt out lesser penalties of imprisonment or whipping.
²⁷
Nevertheless the principle of the greater guilt of the female was explicitly stated, in marked contrast to Winstanley’s vision of justice.

In 1646, the year before the Putney debates, in
The Freemans Freedome Vindicated
, John Lilburne, the Leveller leader and theoretician, did at least include women in his doctrine of consent. He wrote that of ‘every particular individual man and woman … by nature all equal and alike in power, dignity, authority, and majesty’ none had by nature any authority over any except by ‘donation, that is to say, by mutual agreement or consent’. It has
been proposed by one of his biographers that inclusion of women in the franchise was at least ‘consonant with Lilburne’s actions’;
²⁸
nevertheless he did not in fact postulate such an inclusion.

The early history of the Levellers was however marked by the courage of their ‘lusty lasses’, as
Mercurius Pragmaticus
described them. Not all of these lasses were as young as such a cheerful description implied. Katherine Hadley was an old spinster who tended John Lilburne in the Fleet prison in 1639, where he had been incarcerated the previous year for printing and circulating unlicensed books, having been first fined, whipped and pilloried. She was subsequently accused of distributing Lilburne’s pamphlet
A Cry for Justice
at the Whitsun holiday to some apprentices, and another Lilburnian appeal to both apprentices and cloth-workers. Arrested without a warrant, she was consigned by the Lord Mayor of London to the Poultry Compter prison in the City, where she withstood seven months of harsh conditions. When she petitioned for liberty, Katherine Hadley was transferred to Bridewell on 1 October – still without trial or even examination. Here, to her chagrin and suffering, she was placed, as she put it, among ‘the common sluts, whose society is a hell upon earth to me, that fears the Lord’. She was not set free until December 1640, in that newly liberal climate which also led to the release of Burton and Bastwick. Thanks to Lilburne, Katherine Hadley received £10 in compensation for what she had endured.
²⁹

Mary Overton, the wife of the pamphleteer Richard Overton, who under the name of Martin Marpriest attacked the Westminster Assembly of Divines mercilessly, was another woman who suffered for a principle with fortitude. At the time of the Long Parliament, Overton published attacks on the position of the bishops anonymously; later he moved on to theological matters and it was when he described, still anonymously, the doctrine of immortality – ‘the present going of the soul into heaven or hell’ – as ‘a fiction’ that his work incurred the displeasure of the House of Commons, who ordered the licensing committee to inquire into its author, printer and publisher. In August
1646 Overton was arrested for printing some of John Lilburne’s pamphlets and taken to Newgate.

Mary Overton’s petition for her husband’s release would later refer with indignation to the fact that he had ‘constantly adhered to the Parliament’. She described his incarceration in Newgate as ‘the high violation of the fundamental Laws of this Land, the utter subversion of the Common Liberties of the people and of your Petitioner’s husband’s native Right and Inheritance in particular’, quoting a list of protests starting with that of Magna Carta and going right forward to the Petition of Right in 1628.

She also described the traumatic moment of the arrest (she was sick in bed, having recently given birth), when the officers of the law broke open and ransacked their house, followed by another visit at which the officers were sent again ‘to enter, search, ransack and rifle your Petitioner’s house, her trunks, chests, etc. to rob, steal, plunder and bear away her goods, which were her then present livelihood for her imprisoned husband, her self, and three small children, her brother and sister’.
³⁰

In January 1647 Mary Overton herself was arrested, together with her brother Thomas Johnson, when they were discovered stitching the sheets of a seditious pamphlet written by her husband with the assistance of Lilburne,
Regal Tyranny Discovered
.
³¹
She was taken before the Bar of the House of Lords, but here she stalwartly refused to answer any questions or to take any oath against herself or her husband. At which point she was herself committed to prison. What was more she was literally dragged there ‘on two cudgels … headlong upon the stones through all the dirt and mire of the streets’ with her six-months-old baby in her arms, and incidentally once more pregnant. As if this was not enough, the officers of the law abused her all the way, ‘with the scandalous, infamous names of wicked Whore, Strumpet etc.’. Finally she was thrown into the ‘most reproachful gaol’ of Bridewell, that ‘hell upon earth’ to decent women as Katherine Hadley had described it, where of course Mary Overton joined the company of all the genuine whores and strumpets (and lost the child she was carrying).

In Mary Overton’s petition to the House of Commons of late
March, she begged for a speedy sentence. If wrong had been done, then she was prepared to face execution; if not she should be granted her freedom; but arbitrary imprisonment at the orders of the House of Lords was utterly intolerable. Despite these cogent arguments, she was not released until July. And Richard Overton, issuing a number of broadsheets against his arbitrary imprisonment, continued to be associated both in and out of gaol with the Levellers.

Of all the Levellers’ wives, Elizabeth Lilburne, born Elizabeth Dewell, excites at once the most sympathy for her sufferings and the most admiration for her endurance; these feelings being not unmixed with pity for the fate of anyone married to John Lilburne. (In general the story of Elizabeth Lilburne recalls that definition of a saint as one that is married to a martyr.) The kind of freedom which Elizabeth Lilburne shared with her husband was short-lived if it existed at all; the best tribute to her character being those words of Lilburne’s in 1646 from
The Freemans Freedome Vindicated
, quoted earlier, in which man and woman were declared equal alike in dignity and authority; these sentiments – so much in advance of Lilburne’s time – it must be plausible to ascribe to her husband’s intimate knowledge of one splendid woman. His later treatment of her is not so edifying.