The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (61 page)

At least Mrs Pepys was beginning to see reason on the subject of Pall’s dowry (the alternative of housing Pall was grimmer): in October 1665 she agreed that Pall should have £400, despite the fact that times were hard. As for Pepys, a mere three days after a certain Philip Harman’s wife died in childbirth, Pepys was considering him as a bridegroom for Pall. With this in view, Pall was allowed up to London to be ‘fashioned’. At the age of twenty-five, Pepys assessed her appearance as follows: even though she was ‘full of freckles and not handsome in face, she was at least pretty good-bodied … and not over thick …’ With the possibility of a portion to back up these charms, Pall also acquired another two suitors, even if one of them was ‘drunken, ill-favoured and ill-bred’.
¹⁶

Neither of these problems – Mrs Pepys’s desire for a gentlewoman and Pall’s desire for a husband – were however destined for immediate solution. It was not until 1668 that Pall, now aged twenty-seven, was finally married off to one John Jackson of Ellington in Huntingdonshire, a man with little to say for himself and of plain appearance, but a husband for all that. Pepys’s relief was profound; there had been some desperate moments when he feared he would never find her a husband before she had grown ‘old and ugly’. To his diary he confided that he could not love Pall, because she was so ‘cunning and ill-natured’. However, her appearance improved on marriage, although she remained ‘mighty pert’.
¹⁷

As for Mrs Pepys, she heard of a very fine lady who would replace Mercer for £20 a year, able to sing, dance and play on four or five instruments; but this paragon proved on inspection to be ‘tawdry’ and was in fact perfectly prepared to come for £8. (The genteel importance of the role of gentlewoman is underlined by the fact that even a ‘tawdry’ one might command more than twice a maid’s annual wage.) Under the circumstances Mrs Pepys preferred a girl called Barker; £7 or £8 was laid out on clothes for her by Pepys himself. Barker was ‘very plain’ but had good connections and a fine singing voice, two at least of the qualifications of a suitable gentlewoman. Barker duly accompanied Mrs Pepys on visits and learned part songs but proved to be
a trouble-maker in the household. Her departure in May 1667 occurred when she was discovered to have been ‘abroad’ without permission and lied about it, so that Mrs Pepys found herself obliged to strike her.

Barker had one persistent complaint: she ‘did always declare to her mistress and others that she had rather be put to drudgery and to wash the house than to live as she did, like a gentlewoman’. Pepys found this strange. Yet Barker’s outburst explains what a strain might be imposed upon an employee when her mere presence was expected to bestow social prestige upon a household – ‘qualities of honour or pleasure’ as Pepys put it, while complaining that Barker had failed to provide them.
¹⁸
Like any equivocal role, that of gentlewoman could result in a failure of expectations on both sides.

So the way was cleared for the arrival of Pepys’s great love, Deb Willet: a witness to the equivocal nature of the role (as had been in their different ways Pall, Gosnell, Ashwell, Mercer and Barker) but in yet another sense. At the beginning Deb only represented yet another attempt to find a suitable companion for Mrs Pepys; this time a mere child was chosen, the Pepyses hoping, no doubt, to avoid the independence of Gosnell and Barker. Deb had been at ‘the school at Bow’ for seven or eight years, and was said to be a model of good deportment. Mrs Pepys returned from a visit of inspection, reporting that Deb was ‘very handsome’. Pepys regarded this as good news about the prospective companion: ‘at least, that if we must have one, she should be handsome’. Alas, the handsomeness of Deb was his – and ultimately her – undoing. In vain she performed such duties as accompanying Mrs Pepys to the theatre, dancing and playing cards with admirable gravity and modesty. Her good looks aroused the passionate jealousy of Mrs Pepys, a jealousy which was certainly not without foundation, since Pepys, finding himself quite unable to resist the perpetual physical proximity of Deb, had embarked on a series of daring amorous explorations.

One night after supper in October 1668 occurred an incident which in Pepys’s words’ ‘occasioned the greatest sorrow to me that ever I knew in the world’. Deb was combing her master’s
hair – not in itself a proof of intimacy, since this hygienic duty was usually performed by maids. Unfortunately Mrs Pepys, arriving suddenly upon the scene, ‘did find me embracing the girl con my hand sub su coats; and endeed, I was with my main in her cunny’. It was impossible even for Pepys to gloss over such a flagrant discovery (although he tried). There was a violent scene; the episode led in the end to Deb’s dismissal. Pepys, full of ‘love and Pity’ for her, accepted her departure with anguish; he also warned Deb solemnly against allowing anyone else to take those same liberties to which he had so freely helped himself.
¹⁹

Hannah Woolley, author of several books on domestic practice and conduct under the name of her first husband, wrote out of her own experience. She was born in 1623 (her maiden name is unknown), learning ‘Physick and Chirurgery’ from her mother and elder sisters, but was early on left an orphan. However, before she was fifteen, she was entrusted to keep a little school of her own, by dint of her exceptional ‘accomplishments’.
²⁰
Hannah Woolley lists these (note the relatively low position of writing and arithmetic):

Needlework of very different sorts

Bugle-work

Framing pictures

Setting out of Banquets

Making salves and ornaments

All manner of Cookery

Writing and Arithmetic

Sweet powders for hair, or linen

At the age of seventeen she was enabled by these same accomplishments plus the additional asset of speaking Italian and playing several musical instruments to attract a ‘Noble Lady Patron’ who took her into her household to act as governess to her daughter. This lady taught her further ‘Preserving and Cooking’, introduced her to court and kept her for seven years until the children had all grown up.

The original role of governess developed into something more consequential. As Hannah put it: ‘Time and my Lady’s good opinion of me constituted me afterwards her Woman, her Stewardess, and her Scribe or Secretary. By which means I appear’d as a person of no mean authority in the Family.’ Hannah was proud of the fact that she read aloud daily to her employer poems, plays and romances (for which she had to learn French, one accomplishment hitherto lacking); she also took great trouble with the letters which she wrote for her.

At the age of twenty-four, Hannah married the master of a Free School at Newport Pond, Essex, by whom she bore four sons, as well as taking in boarders to her school. The Woolleys then moved to Hackney, the centre of genteel education at the time, where they kept over sixty boarders. Mr Woolley died about the time of the Restoration, but in 1666 Hannah married for the second time, one Francis Challinor, a widower of about forty-five. In 1674 she was to be found living in the house of her son Richard in London near the Old Bailey – as a Master of Arts and Reader at St Martin’s, Ludgate, he constituted an advertisement for an intelligent mother – and she was probably still alive ten years later.
²¹

Hannah Woolley began writing at the time of her first widowhood, presumably in order to support herself. Unfortunately she found herself enduring some of the less attractive aspects of an author’s career: one rogue publisher had her proofs revised by a different hand and another did not pay her. The book in question was
The Gentlewomans Companion
, and Hannah later issued a supplement to her second book,
The Queen-like Closet
, to correct the record. Her first books were however centred on the purely domestic arts; such as
The Ladies Directory in choice experiments and curiosities of Preserving and Candying both Fruits and Flowers
, printed in 1661. She moved on to issues of social behaviour, and later related details of her own life story, in order to enable other women to survive as she herself had done. Apologizing for the personal details, she explained that she had been prompted to write by ‘the mere pity I have entertained for such Ladies, Gentlewomen and others, as have not received the benefits of
the tithe of the ensuing accomplishments’.
²²
It was to her knowledge of these vital arts and artifices as listed above, as well as to her ability to write and add up, that Hannah Woolley firmly ascribed her own survival.

So that while Hannah Woolley wrote with the traditional and understandable bitterness of the female educationalist about the preference shown to boys – parents cared for the ‘barren Noddles of their Sons’, sending them to university, while the fertile ground of their daughters’ brains was allowed to go fallow – she did not herself ask for university education for women, or indeed anything like it.

Hannah Woolley complained indeed about the decline of standards of education among her own sex: ‘Most in this depraved later Age think a Woman Learned and Wife enough if she can distinguish her Husband’s bed from another’s’ was one of her gibes. She criticized the men who looked upon women merely as instruments to propagate their families, and were not interested in their minds. She was also, as we have seen, a strong believer in the ‘treasury’ to be laid up by education, ‘by which they [unmarried women] may live without an Estate’. Education would enable such women to gain ‘some honest and creditable Employment’, she wrote; as a result ‘their position will be so established that nothing almost but sickness and death can make an alteration therein’.
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But how far, how very far removed were the requirements of Hannah Woolley – based of course on those of society – from that ‘modish’ Latin and Greek which had once entranced the great ladies at court at the end of the reign of Elizabeth I, or indeed that ‘ebri grek and laten’ to which Nancy Denton had aspired in the Commonwealth period, to the disgust of Sir Ralph Verney! (See p.170.)

Hannah Woolley put particular emphasis on the art of carving; she had acquired it herself early in life from her ‘Noble Lady Patron’, and it did of course enable a gentlewoman to exercise public authority over the rest of the household; Hannah gave elaborate hierarchical instructions on how to distribute the best bits in meat and fish (remember that the cod’s head was
considered a great delicacy). She reminded her gentlewomen that it would appear ‘very comely and decent’ to use a fork.
²⁴
Her special plea that a gentlewoman should
not
lick her fingers at a meal not only suggests that many people of the period did, but also that a genteel manner at table was more likely to aid an unprotected woman to get on in the world in the reign of Charles II and his successor than all the knowledge which had once filled the august head of Queen Elizabeth I.

The fact that the developing special nature of female education was in itself a restriction was perceived by very few people of either sex at this time. During that period of Puritan revolution when exciting new ideas concerning universal education were promulgated – if not put into practice – by men such as Hartlib, Dury, Petty and Robinson, girls’ education received scant attention. Only John Dury’s ‘Noble School’ was adapted to the requirements of both sexes; although girls were intended to become ‘good and careful housewives’, those capable of learning ‘Tongues and Sciences’ were to be given encouragement. (Dury may have been influenced by the stern attitude of his wife Dorothy, who wrote a letter to the pious Lady Ranelagh headed ‘Of the Education of Girls’, attacking the general frivolity.) Hartlib, Winstanley and others were more interested in equipping girls from the lower classes in crafts such as weaving.
²⁵

One of the few who did appreciate the danger of the divide was Basua Makin. Like Hannah Woolley appalled by the decline in education, Basua Makin, unlike Hannah, was concerned to restore or at least promote the study of Hebrew and the classics. She determined to run a girls’ school guided by this principle.

Basua Makin had excellent credentials to found the most fashionable establishment, apart from the fact that she may have been associated with a set of girls’ ‘schools or colleges’ at Putney in 1649, visited by John Evelyn. The sister, as we have seen, of John Pell the learned mathematician (another brother, Thomas Pell, had been Gentleman of the Bedchamber to Charles I), she had a particular claim on the loyalty of the newly Royalist society
in that she had been governess to Princess Elizabeth, that sad little sister of Charles II who had died in captivity at Carisbrooke Castle. As a result, this Princess at least had enjoyed an elaborate education including Hebrew as well as Latin and Greek (unlike her aunt and namesake Elizabeth of Bohemia, denied the classics by
her
father, James I, because Latin had the unfortunate effect of making women more ‘cunning’).

The education afforded to the next generation of Princesses, Mary and Anne, daughters of James II, then Duke of York and heir presumptive to the throne, stood in astonishing contrast. How ironic that Basua Makin’s passionate plea of 1673,
An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentle-women, In Religion
,
Manners
,
Arts and Tongues
.
With an Answer to the Objections against this Way of Education
, should be dedicated to Mary, Princess of York, principal among all ‘Ingenious and Vertuous Ladies’! For in the upbringing of Mary and her sister Anne, born in 1663 and 1665 respectively, domestic accomplishments were in fact stressed to the exclusion of virtually everything else. Yet these girls, as the children of the heir presumptive, stood in direct line to the throne from the moment of their birth, and in this age of high infant mortality there must always have been a distinct possibility that at least one of them would inherit it.