The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (47 page)

It is understandable that the stricken Elizabeth now hoped
that her husband would make his peace with the new Commonwealth and settle with what remained of his little household. (Another son, John, was born in October 1650.) She hoped in vain. As a result of a vendetta against Sir Arthur Haselrig, Lilburne was banished for life by an Act of Parliament in January 1652, and a huge fine was imposed. While he was in exile, Elizabeth found herself in great hardship, having to sell or pawn most of her household goods; she also suffered a miscarriage, and her other children were ill. Under the circumstances, she refused to send him papers which she believed would merely lead to more fruitless troubles. Lilburne referred to her letters as ‘new paper skirmishes … filled with womanish passion and anger’.
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Outsiders may find it easier to comprehend the element of despair which was now creeping into her dealings with her intractable husband.

All the same, by May 1653 Elizabeth had scraped together enough money to visit John at Bruges; Lilburne had expected her to bring a pass for England from the newly installed Protector Cromwell. He was furious it was refused. Relations between husband and wife were evidently cool: in a letter to the Protector Lilburne blamed Cromwell for the fact: ‘Your late barbarous tyrannical dealing with me hath exposed her to so much folly and lowness of spirit in my eyes, in some of her late childish actions, as hath in some measure, produced an alienation of affection in me to her …’ He referred ominously to ‘that tenderness of affection that I owe to her whom I formerly entirely loved as my own life’.
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Lilburne sent Elizabeth to England once more for the pass and awaited her return at Calais. On hearing the news of a second refusal, he returned to England anyway, whereupon he was arrested, imprisoned once more in June 1653 and finally tried in July.

This was the celebrated trial which had the people roaring in chorus:

And what, shall then honest John Lilburne die!

Three score thousand will know the reason why!

John lilburne did not die; in effect he was acquitted; but the Government declined to release him (provoking those petitions on the part of the Leveller women to which reference has already been made). By July 1655 he was in prison on the island of Guernsey. Elizabeth, her soliciting temper unabated by her privations – and John’s recriminations – petitioned Cromwell that he should be released: ‘Our grievous afflictions have obtained no remission!’ she wrote. ‘I beg you take away all provocation from his impatient spirit, weared out with long and sore afflictions. I durst engage my life that he will not disturb the state.’ John’s own poor health lent plausibility to Elizabeth’s last statement: it was probably she who got Fleetwood, Cromwell’s brother-in-law and colleague, to persuade the Protector of Lilburne’s newly pacifist frame of mind.
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When lilburne reached Dover Castle, Elizabeth was living at the house of a friend who kept an inn at Guildhall; after years without a proper home life, or even a proper income, she had fallen into a state of depression, indicated by the fact that her newest baby, Benomy, had been a year old when she had had him baptized.
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In London she received another startling piece of news concerning her husband’s spiritual odyssey. He had now become a Quaker.

It was one thing for John to require Elizabeth to send him Quaker books down from London. But the language in which he hoped for Elizabeth’s own conversion was scarcely such as to bring comfort to the weary homeless woman. He spoke of self-denial: ‘even to a final denial of father, kindred, friends, my sweet and beloved (by me) babes’. Above all her conversion would enable her ‘to go cheerfully and willingly along hand in hand’ with her husband. Such a step, he wrote, ‘abundantly would render thee more amiable, lovely and pleasant in mine eyes although thou wert then clothed in rags …’ Elizabeth had just escaped death by drowning in the Thames – John’s sympathy with her plight was cursory. The fact that Elizabeth and the children
were
to all intents and purposes clothed in rags, John Lilburne treated with equal shortness, He wrote: ‘I am also sorry that thou art so straitly put to it for money, but to live upon God
by faith in the depth of straights, is the lively condition of a Christian: O that thy spirit could attain to it!’
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When the couple did meet again in November 1655, they had a bitter quarrel; yet even now, for the higher purpose of marital union, it was Elizabeth who agreed to a reconciliation on John’s terms. By August 1657 John Lilburne, although nominally still a prisoner, was allowed to rent a house at Eltham in Kent; moreover Elizabeth was pregnant again (she underwent a total of ten pregnancies, five of her babies, including the boy named Tower, dying young). The house was for the
accouchement
, ‘that I might be near my friends at my lying-in’. She duly gave birth. Then Cromwell, hearing of Lilburne’s freedom, and being prepared to grant him an allowance but not to have him at large, called for his return. It was too late. John Lilburne was now ‘sick and weak’.
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On 29 August 1657, at the age of forty-three, he was dead.

Elizabeth was now in a state verging on destitution, with three children to care for, including a new-born baby. Her grief was not allayed by the Quaker funeral which followed. All that was left for her to do was to petition the all-powerful Cromwell, who, whatever his treatment of the dissident John, had as we have seen a merited reputation for helping distressed women. Cromwell responded with an order for the payment of the arrears due to Elizabeth, and a continuation of the 40s a week allowance granted to Lilburne. Unfortunately this was not to be the end of Elizabeth’s ‘piercing sorrows’. By the time Richard Cromwell succeeded his father as Protector, she was still petitioning to have Parliament repeal that Act of 1652 which had sentenced John to a colossal fine: ‘Your late father professed very great tenderness to me’, she wrote desperately to Richard.
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The 1652 Act was finally repealed in February 1659.

This, little enough, was the material reward secured by Elizabeth Lilburne: in return for a small allowance (still being paid in March 1660) she surrendered John Lilburne’s papers. If Lilburne himself would not have approved,
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who can blame the exhausted widow, who had, as she told Richard Cromwell, endured ‘seventeen years’ sorrows’ and longed for ‘a little rest and comfort among my fatherless children’. A more equitable
award lay in the earlier judgement of Lilburne himself. Dispatching a petition to Cromwell by her hand, he wrote: ‘This I have sent by the gravest, wisest, fittest messenger I could think of.’ He added, in this at least a conventional product of the seventeenth century, ‘and, though a Feminine, yet of a gallant and truly masculine spirit’.
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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

When Women Preach

When women preach and cobblers pray

The fiends in hell make holiday.

‘Lucifer’s Lackey or The Devil’s New Creation’, 1641

‘L
et your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak’; it was this verse from St Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians which was at the root of the accepted condemnation of female preaching (and participation in church government) at the beginning of the seventeenth century. To conventional Christian ears, the mighty voice of the Apostle still thundered down the centuries with undiminished vigour and there seemed little distinction to be drawn between St Paul’s admonition to the inhabitants of Achaea in the first century
AD
, and the will of God 1,600 years later.

For women, as a whole, there had to be a more private – and one might add less voluble – way of influencing their contemporaries; or as the epitaph of the pious and charitable Lettice Viscountess Falkland phrased it:

And now, though Paul forbids her Sex to preach,

Yet may her Life instruct, and her Death teach.

Richard Brathwaite, in
The English Gentlewoman
of 1631, that mine of advice on the conduct of the modest female, took the
argument one stage further. Just as ‘discourse of State-matters’ would not become her, it was equally unsuitable ‘to dispute of high points of Divinity’: since women were forbidden to be speakers in church it was not right that they should discuss theological matters in private either.
¹

By October 1650 when Sir Ralph Verney was having his brush with Dr Denton (and Nancy) on the subject of a girl’s rightful education, all this had changed. ‘Had St Paul lived in our Times’, wrote Sir Ralph gloomily, ‘I am confident he would have fixed a Shame upon women for writing (as well as for their speaking) in the Church.’
²
Preaching among the women sectaries was a phenomenon of the English scene from the 1640s onwards; the shame that St Paul would or would not have felt being a subject of hot debate not only amongst outsiders hostile to the sects, but also within their ranks.

Women probably first began to preach in Holland in the 1630s in the Baptist churches, whose congregations had always included a large number of their sex. (There were said to be more women than men in the large body of English separatists who went to Holland in 1558; thereafter on the Continent women had held numerous church offices and taken some part in lay preaching.) In the New World – Massachusetts – women were known to have preached by 1636. In England in the 1640s women preached weekly at the General Baptist Church in Bell Alley, off Coleman Street, in the City of London. Anne Hempstall was described as preaching to ‘bibbing Gossips’ in her house in Holborn and Mary Bilbrowe, wife of a bricklayer of St Giles-in-the-Fields, preached in her parlour, although the pulpit, which was made of brick, was so high that only her tippet could be seen. As early as 1641 a tract,
The Discovery of Women Preachers
, referred to their existence in Kent, Cambridge and Salisbury.
³

Women were notable among the Brownists, those enthusiasts who led a tumultuous existence on the wing of the so-called Independent Church. (The name derived from one of their spokesmen, Robert Browne.) It was fear of these Independent sectaries which had led in March 1642 to the drawing-up of the Kentish petition, with Sir Roger Twysden as one of its leaders –
that move to save the nation from ‘heresy, schism, prophaneness, libertinism, anabaptism, atheism’ which had led to all the subsequent troubles of the Twysden family (see p.256). Later the division between Independents and Presbyterians would give way to a new type of alignment: because Brownists could not accept any form of central authority in religious matters, they now found themselves opposed to many of their previous Independent colleagues, as well as the Presbyterians.

The style of such pioneers could hardly be expected to be self-effacing. In London Mrs Attoway, ‘Mistress of all the She preachers in Coleman Street’, who was capable of preaching for well over an hour, seems to have run off with another woman’s husband and in addition secured contributions to finance a journey to Jerusalem, a project which unlike her elopement remained largely in her imagination. Some of these women displayed undeniably an ‘eerie spirit’; others were less ‘eerie’ than ‘brazen-faced’.
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The trouble was that the kind of woman who possessed the audacity to challenge the ruling of St Paul was not likely to combine it with that feminine modesty which would win society’s respect for the cause of the woman preacher.

On the contrary, all the old gibes concerning woman’s talkativeness – ‘the natural volubility of their tongues’ – proved useful yet again in the conflict over the ‘preacheresses’. Prejudice could cause a woman preaching to be condemned first as ‘a prater’ or ‘prattler’, so by implication as a scold, and lastly even as some kind of witch – remembering the connection in the popular mind between scolding and cursing. Additionally, her ‘Bible-thumping’ could be held to demonstrate the perils of any form of education, however rudimentary, for women since they were clearly not capable of making good use of it.
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By 1645 the moderate Puritans were criticizing the Brownists for allowing women to take part in church government and to preach. Prynne attacked this implication of Independency, and in 1646 John Vicars, in
The Schismatick Sifted: Or
,
A Picture of Independents Freshly and Fairly Washt over Again
, deplored the fact that not only ‘saucy boys, bold botching taylors’ but also ‘bold impudent huswives’ were taking it upon themselves ‘to prate an
hour or more’. The principal attack was that mounted by Thomas Edwards in the same year in
Gangraena
, deploring the fact that these ‘whirligigg spirits’ of the Brownists included smiths, tailors, shoemakers, pedlars, and worst of all women who were giving ‘constant lectures’. He thought this to be against not only the light of Scripture but that of nature.
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