The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (65 page)

Orinda was capable of showing possessive disgust towards her friends’ attachments. When Lucasia married the widower Lord Dungannon, Orinda saluted the occasion in verse:

You are so happy in each other’s love

And in assur’d perfection from above

That we no wish can add unto your bliss

But that it should continue as it is.

Unfortunately this perfect bliss seemed to preclude a relationship with Orinda on the old terms; ‘I find there are few Friendships in the World Marriage-Proof’, she wrote crossly, ‘especially when the Person our Friend married has not a Soul particularly capable of the Tenderness of that Endearment … we may generally conclude the Marriage of a Friend to be the Funeral of a Friendship.’ So ‘lovely Celimina’ (the Countess of Thanet) replaced the renegade Lucasia.

It would however be wrong to read anything covertly sensual into these relationships, however overtly passionate. That would have been quite outside the Platonic tradition. As Orinda herself wrote on the nature of friendship, such ‘flames’ were free from ‘grossness or mortality’.
¹⁵

Orinda’s personality was sufficiently distinguished for Jeremy Taylor to ruminate on the whole nature of friendship in a work entitled:
In a Letter to the most Ingenious and Excellent Mrs Katherine Phillips
. Dr Taylor explained in advance how much he differed from ‘the morosity of those Cynics – who would not admit your sex in to the communities of friendship’. Nevertheless in the body of the work, he himself differentiated carefully between the two sexes: ‘a man is the best friend in trouble, but a woman may be equal to him in the days of joy: a woman can as well increase our comforts, but cannot so well lessen our sorrows: and therefore we do not carry women with us when we go to fight,
but in peaceful Cities and times vertuous women are the beauties of society and the prettiness of friendship’.
¹⁶

Where the merits of Orinda’s poetry are concerned, it is unfortunately impossible to dissent from the view of her biographer: ‘little enthusiasm is possible, even to one who has come to know her well’.
¹⁷
Although Keats was taken by her lines to Rosania:

To part with thee I needs must die

Could parting sep’rate thee and I –

the superbly banal wedding address to Lucasia and Lord Dungannon is quite as characteristic of Orinda’s style: the touching simplicity of her grief for her dead son became her poetry best.

Her character is another matter. Katherine Philips, by dint of a personality which impressed but did not challenge, supported by a happily respectable private life, managed both to be known and to be respected as a she-author. She did so, unlike previous she-authors, without the benefit of aristocratic birth. This, in an age when it was the notion of the lady, with her carefully-nurtured, economically-protected languor, which captured the popular imagination, rather than that of her learned sister, was in itself a considerable achievement.

A gentle virtuous disposition in life, a life led none the less close to the highest in the land, an early much-lamented death leaving behind a deposit of poems to be printed thereafter in an atmosphere of mourning, these elements made of Anne Killigrew one she-author of whom it was not only safe but sentimentally delightful to approve. The fact that this Maid of Honour at court died in 1685 at the age of twenty-five unmarried contributed further to the sentimental picture: here was one who ‘despised the Myrtle’ (symbol of marriage) for the ‘nobler Bay’ (garland of the poet) in the words of Dryden. In an admonition to the reader the publisher of Anne Killigrew’s work (to which Dryden wrote
an introduction) drew attention to the same phenomenon, in slightly less graceful language:

Know, that a Virgin bright this Poem writ,

A Grace for Beauty, and a Muse for Wit!

But on the evidence of her secret poems, Anne Killigrew was a more complicated character than this salutation of ‘a Virgin Bright’ or Dryden’s verdict – ‘Wit more than Man, her innocence a Child’ – would indicate.
¹⁸
An obsessional fragment called ‘Cloris’ Charms’ described a journey to be taken by the love-lorn:

First take thy Hapless Way

Along the Rocky Northern Shore

Infamous for the Matchless store

Of Wracks within that Bay

None o’er the Cursed Beach e’er crossed

Unless the Robb’d, the Wrack’d or Lost

Where on the strand lie spread,

The sculls of many Dead

Their mingl’d Bones

Among the Stones,

Thy Wretched Feet must tread …

For there’s no Light

But all is Night,

And Darkness that you meet …
¹⁹

Throughout her poetry a thread of melancholy, even bitterness runs, particularly on the subject of female unrequited love, a hint that ‘Love the Softer Sex does sorriest wound.’ In one of her pastoral dialogues, Anne Killigrew portrays a maiden who has been betrayed. She exclaims:

Remember when you love, from that same hour

Your peace you put into your Lovers Power:

From that same hour from him you Laws receive

And as he shall ordain, you Joy, or Grieve.

Anne Killigrew’s ‘Paragon’ was the beautiful and chaste Duchess of Grafton, wife of one of Charles II’s bastards and daughter of his minister Arlington. Here was a woman who for all her beauty kindled ‘in none a fond desire’; this virtuous wife, admired but not courted, bonded by reason not the chains of passion, was the type of heroine she envied.
²⁰

In general there is a fastidious rejection of the worldly values of the court against the background of which Anne Killigrew led the whole of her short life. A very long and very pessimistic poem ‘The Miseries of Man’ pleads that reason, not passion, shall hold the reins of the chariot, so that anger, fear, hope and desire may be harnessed. The poem, singularly modern in its approach to nature, points out:

The bloody Wolf, the Wolf does not pursue;

The Boar, though fierce, his Tusk will not embrue

In his own kind, Bears, not on Bears do prey:

Thou art then, Man, more savage far than they.
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‘A Farewell to Worldly Joys’ rejects among other things ‘Ye Unsubstantial Joys, Ye Gilded Nothings, Gaudy Toys’. ‘The Discontent’ casts aside grandeur and fame, the pillars of the court, in favour of that repose which gold alone cannot purchase.
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All of this suggests that the resignation saluted in another elegy on her death, probably by the poet and theologian Edmund Elys, was not achieved without emotional cost:

O Happy Maid, who didst so soon Espy

In this Dark Life, that All is Vanity.
²³

Anne’s father was Dr Henry Killigrew, Almoner to the Duke of York, Chaplain to the King, and Master of the Savoy, one of three brothers all of whom combined an interest in the arts, specially the dramatic arts, with the royal service: Thomas Killigrew was manager of the Theatre Royal and head of the troupe of actors known as the King’s Servants as well as Groom of the Bedchamber to the King; Sir William Killigrew, Vice-Chamberlain
at court, also wrote plays. It was these connections which led Dryden to describe Anne as ‘A Soul so charming from a Stock so good.’
²⁴
However, the good stock also included Thomas’s son, dissolute Harry Killigrew, Groom of the Bedchamber to the Duke of York, whose bawdy exploits served to
épater
the court, as well as Sir William’s more conventional daughter Mary, who by marrying an illegitimate son of the House of Orange, established still closer Killigrew royal connections. Anne herself entered the household of the Duke of York, as Maid of Honour to his second wife, Mary of Modena.

It was significant of the relative public attitudes to female painting (approved) and female authorship (suspected) that the recognition Anne Killigrew did seek during her lifetime was for her artistic talent, not her poetry. Applauded in royal circles as a portraitist, she was reckoned to be particularly successful in capturing the likeness of the Duke of York: ‘Her Hand drew forth the image of his Heart,’ wrote Dryden. From Dryden too we learn that Anne painted Greek and Roman scenes, and subjects such as Venus and Adonis, the Graces dressing Venus, and Judith and Holofernes.

Anne Killigrew looks out of her own self-portrait, displaying what Dryden described with not too much flattery as a ‘well-proportion’d Shape, and beauteous Face’. In some ways this is the conventional late-seventeenth-century visage, so often painted by Lely, with its fine long nose, round cheeks, full mouth and lofty pure forehead, framed in thick curls; but there is something tighter and more disciplined here, compared to his flowering beauties (as well as a more restrained display of bosom). Anne Killigrew died of smallpox in the summer of 1685 and her father produced a memorial edition of her poems the following autumn. The modest yet firm self-portrait represents the public use of her talent. In private Anne Killigrew wrote poems like this
On Death
:

Tell me thou safest End of all our Woe

Why wretched Mortals do avoid thee so

Thou gentle drier o’ th’ Afflicted Tears,

Thou noble ender of the Cowards fears;

Thou sweet Repose to Lovers sad despair …
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But then painting and drawing were the agreed feminine accomplishments, were they not? Psychologically, it was always possible to regard the female artist as merely extending the talents of a refined education into a wider sphere, even when as in the case of Mary Beale, who was influenced by Robert Walker and Lely, she was actually earning a good professional income from her efforts. Joan Carlile seems to have been the first of such female artists, said to have been presented with artist’s materials (ultramarine) by King Charles I, and by 1658 known as ‘a virtuous example’ of painting portraits in oils, as well as copying Italian masters in miniature.
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Mary Beale, born before the Civil War, the daughter of a clergyman called Craddock, lived to the end of the century; she produced watercolours and crayon drawings, portraits amongst others of Milton, Lord Halifax, the Duke of Norfolk and Bishop Wilkins. With a house in Pall Mall, her earnings rose from £200 in 1672 to a peak of £429 pounds – from eighty-three commissions – in 1677; although as Lely’s pupil, her popularity declined with his death.
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Mary Beale, like Anne Killigrew, wrote poetry; not for her however the kind of hostility which might be shown to the more ostensibly learned ‘Scarecrow’. Her brother-in-law Samuel Woodforde, a Prebendary of Winchester and himself a poet, described her with affection as ‘that absolutely compleat Gentlewoman … the truly virtuous Mary Beale’, and Woodforde included two of her works in his
Paraphrase to the Psalms
, saying that she had made ‘Painting and Poetrie … to be really the same’.
²⁸
Where painting was concerned, the distinction between the professional and the amateur was not really perceived; no modest apologies were felt necessary for the presumptuous female pen so long as it was wielded in the cause of art not literature.

Elizabeth Capel, Countess of Carnarvon, who died in 1678 at the age of forty-five, was one of the large family of that Royalist hero Arthur Lord Capel, executed in 1648. All the Capels loved
flowers (as the great family portrait of 1637 bears vivid witness): another sister, Mary Duchess of Beaufort, a keen botanist and a friend of Sir Hans Sloane, developed the gardens at Badminton and commissioned an important florilegium by Everhardus Kickius. Flower-painting, inspired by her parents’ garden at Little Hadam, was Lady Carnarvon’s speciality. There is a small gouache in the Royal Collection dated 1662 (which may however be a copy of an existing flower-piece), and Lely’s double portrait with the Duchess of Beaufort shows Lady Carnarvon holding one of her own works. In both cases the signature reads ‘E. Carnarvon
fec
…’ under a coronet.
²⁹
Here was a pursuit which no one resented: ‘E. Carnarvon’ would have many ladylike and floral-minded followers in the future, coroneted and otherwise, whom no one would think to criticize for being petticoat-painters.