The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (68 page)

What did Lord Conway now do? Ignoring the parade (and the advice) he fell violently in love with a most unsuitable chit of seventeen – unsuitable because she was flighty – Margaret Poulett, daughter of the second Lord Poulett and niece of the Speaker of the House of Commons. What pent-up emotions, suppressed during his wife’s long illness, what middle-aged desires, long believed quiescent, surged through the bosom of the admirable Lord Conway during this unexpected Roman spring?

Lord Conway’s friends, trained to believe that a fifty-six-year-old widower was indeed a proper spouse for a young girl if his rank was sufficiently august, suggested various modes of attack, in all of which ultimate victory was assumed.
⁶²
Perhaps he should
emulate the methods of Julius Caesar who came and saw and conquered: cry
Veni
,
Vidi
,
Vici
, and then all the young gallants who surrounded Mistress Margaret would be blown away. Another friend advised him first to prepare his ‘Wooing Countenance’ and then reflect on St Matthew, Chapter One (this, which begins with a long recital of the begetting of the generations before Jesus, was presumably to be regarded as some kind of fertility chant). For this elderly Romeo a further confidant recommended ‘a Handsome Dress’.

So Lord Conway had ‘a riding-suit’ ordered in order to call on his beloved at Bath. It was to be lined with black satin, and embroidered with black and silver; apart from the other black touches it was to be laced with black and white love lace, ‘both mourning enough and fine enough for this expedition’, a delicate way of emphasizing Lord Conway’s status, at once a widower and a lover. Fifty pounds was disbursed on this outfit, not counting the sword and hat which were extra. But the whole effect was wasted, at least in Bath, when Margaret Poulett’s brother would not let Lord Conway call upon her; he was himself perversely backing the suit of his own friend (and contemporary), the young Lord Arran. Lord Conway had to wait till London to call upon his beloved.

Gradually, very gradually, it was borne in upon Lord Conway that Margaret was merely playing with his attentions. He withdrew from the field. He did not however deny the force of that sweet fever which had ravaged him. He could have had many richer, nobler, handsomer and more discreet wives, he wrote, but ‘I have still more inclination for her [Margaret] than for any woman that ever I heard of … I believe there is a fate in such things which I can give no account of’.

Lord Conway did marry again a considerably older woman, someone presumably much closer to Sir Thomas Baines’s recipe for the widower’s ideal. But this second wife died in childbirth, as did the son she bore. Less than six weeks later Lord Conway married for the third time, a woman who brought him a portion of £30,000. By now Lord Conway’s own race was almost run. He died in August 1683, only four years after the death of Anne. He
died without an heir; but then he had long ago braced himself to accept that defeat rather than increase the physical burdens placed upon his precious jewel of a first wife; she who in the words of her brother possessed ‘knowledge enough’ to make the most intelligent man proud – and all ‘without noise’.

1
Wonderful Aphra fully deserves both her place in history as the first professional woman author, and her place in Westminster Abbey where she is buried; she lies in the Cloister, however, near the actress Anne Bracegirdle, not in Poets’ Corner.

2
In recent years she has been quoted with approval in a feminist context, as one who in Dale Spender’s words protested against the idea of the ‘natural’ patriarchal order.
³⁴

3
Coffee has not lost its reputation: Oliver Sacks, in
Migraine
, 1981, suggests that migraine sufferers take caffeine tablets, for the ‘management’ of migraine attacks.
⁴¹

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Helping in God’s Vineyard

‘Here will be work and business enough for us all that none need to be idle in God’s vineyard, but as we have everyone received a measure of God’s spirit and grace some may be fellow helpers and workers together with our brethren …’

LETTER OF ISABEL (FELL) YEAMANS, 1676

A
nne Viscountess Conway desired to have Quaker servants about her because this ‘suffering people’, so ‘still and very serious’ in their behaviour would make ideal sympathetic attendants for an invalid. Lord Conway on the other hand, in Ireland where he had to cope with the Quakers’ sudden demonstrations according to the dictates of ‘the Inner Light’, found them ‘senseless, wilful, ridiculous’.
¹

Certainly the stories of the early Friends, and their persistent testifying under the most hostile circumstances, more than justify Lady Conway’s description of them as ‘a suffering people’: although her belief in their stillness might have been shaken by some of the events in the ‘steeplehouses’ and elsewhere when ‘the Inner Light’ inspired a Friend to interrupt proceedings. In the 1670s for example the charge brought against a Quaker woman called Ann Blaykling was that she had called the minister ‘Priest, hireling and deceiver, greedy dumb dog, with many words of the same nature’:
²
a by no means uncharacteristic selection of insults for an early Friend. In their opposition to the payment of tithes, because they believed in the separation of Church and State (hence Anglican ministers were ‘hirelings’), their refusal to swear an oath (including an Oath of Allegiance in court), and in
their insistence on their own form of marriage, the Friends, as Lord Conway discovered, also posed other problems to the State, beyond an awkward tendency to extemporary prayer.

At the same time the Society of Friends increased: it has been estimated that when its founder George Fox died in 1691, there were 50,000 Quakers in England, one in every 100 of the population.
³
In all of this, the sufferings, the agitations and the responsibilities, women continued to play that prominent role which had been theirs from the first inception of the sect. In 1656 George Fox had defended the spiritual equality of women with men (see p.322): there was not only natural justice in this, there was also a practical recognition of the support women – including that despised, feared, disliked class, elderly women – gave him from the first.

Quakers were of course not alone among the sects which were nourished by the enthusiasm and energies of women. The force of women preachers, the original Baptists and Anabaptists of the 1640s, bore witness to that aspect of so-called heretical sects which enabled women to find liberation, both spiritual and social, in their midst. There were other examples, and early evangelism (unconnected with Quakerism) would continue to find women prominent. The history of the Quakers does however provide a microcosm of that liberation, with all the problems, as well as fulfilment, it brought. For one thing, their adoption of the Quaker religion hardly freed such women from the pressures to which their condition made them already subject. An ‘ancient’ widow inspired to step outside the traditional woman’s role and speak publicly was for example more, rather than less, likely to be suspected of truck with the devil. As Margaret Fell, one of the most prominent of the early Quaker women, pointed out, there was always the danger of the Inner Light being mistaken for witchcraft; just as the prophetess Anna Trapnel, another female of independent voice, had been subject to the scrutiny of the ‘witch-trying woman’ (see p.316). Barbara Blaugdone of Bristol, for example, who spoke out both in the West Country and Ireland, was forty-six when she was ‘convinced’; in Cork some of her former friends termed her a witch and had their servants turn
her out of doors. (But convincement brought strength: for all her sufferings, the dour sharp-tongued Barbara Blaugdone lived to the age of ninety-five, dying in 1704.)
⁴

Nor did the presence of vociferous women in the Quaker midst allay hostility to a religion which relied on the worrying instrument of extemporary prayer – uncontrollable from the outside. In 1677 in
The Countermine
, the Royalist pamphleteer and historian John Nalson used this suspicious combination to deduce that such impromptu manifestations were in fact inspired by the devil. He gave an instance of a woman who had become generally admired for being ‘so eminent especially in this Gift of Prayer’; subsequently she went to New England where she was discovered to be ‘a most Abominable Witch’. At her trial she confessed that she had given up her soul to the devil in return for the gift of extemporary prayer. Concluded Nalson with satisfaction: ‘Either now we must believe that this Extempore Way is not an infallible sign of the Spirit of God: or that the Devil has the Power of disposing of the Gifts of the Spirit’. Had not St Paul himself issued ‘an express Command’ against ‘these Female Doctresses’?
⁵

As against this, George Fox, with that power which great conviction allied to great personal strength always bestows, never ceased to push forward the view that there was work for Quaker women to do as well as men. He admonished the Women’s Meetings: ‘Encourage all the women that are convinced, and minds virtue, and loves the truth, and walks in it, that they may come up into God’s service, that they may too be serviceable in their generation, and in the Creation …’
⁶

On the one hand therefore the Quaker women were able to exercise responsibilities within their own religious organization denied to any other Englishwoman of their time (and for a long time thereafter, if granted at all). These women as a result were able to practise a certain kind of admirable Nonconformist philanthropy from which so much reforming richness has flowed in English social life. On the other hand where the Inner Light drew Quaker women into a more challenging and adventurous way of life, not only did they themselves suffer hideously, but
they also pulled down upon their whole sex still viler imprecations concerning the nature of womankind.

Into the latter category of adventuresses falls the heroic Elizabeth Hooton – it is surely impossible to deny her the epithet, on grounds of her age alone.
⁷
She was nearly fifty when she first met George Fox, and over seventy when she came to her death in a foreign land, still serving the cause which she had made her life. Her age was indeed much remarked at the time: most allusions refer to her as old or ‘ancient’.

To George Fox Elizabeth Hooton was however ‘a very tender woman’.
⁸
The wife of a prosperous Nottinghamshire farmer, she was in fact George Fox’s first convert and his first preacher; that in itself was an indication of the prominent role women would play in his mission. George Fox met Margaret Fell a few years later. Elizabeth Hooton was then a Baptist, and had probably been a preacher among the Baptists before her ‘convincement’. Although Fox, like the Baptists (and other sectaries), shared in the denunciation of tithes, he criticized them in his journal for being ‘Jangling Baptists’; Elizabeth Hooton now testified against their ‘deceit’. By the end of 1648 Elizabeth Hooton had left her husband and family to become a Quaker preacher. Carrying out in church, when moved by the spirit, those kinds of interruptions which brought the Quakers their early notoriety, Elizabeth Hooton suffered as a result a series of imprisonments.

As with all problems of civil order, when the disrupter absolutely declines to promise amendment, one can certainly feel sympathy for the authorities in the administrative problem which the Quakers presented.
1
How were these interruptions – often of a frenzied and highly insulting nature – to be handled? On the other hand the rigorous treatment of the Quakers in prison can
command no such understanding. George Fox was first imprisoned in Derby in 1650. This term initiated a period of close on forty years in which the Quakers were regularly confined for disturbing the public peace until the exemption of Dissenters (including the Quakers) from the penal laws in 1689 gave them relief: a Declaration of Loyalty was allowed to replace the Oath of Allegiance in court which the Quakers’ religion would not permit them to swear.

There were periods of remission: at the Restoration a number of Quakers imprisoned under the Commonwealth were released from gaol. At the Declaration of Breda King Charles II had after all promised a liberty to ‘tender consciences’. What happened however if liberty of conscience led to a breach of the peace – and some even more menacing manifestation such as rebellion? It was ill luck that the Quakers should become identified in the mind of authority with those rebellious millenarian relics, the Fifth Monarchists; a foolish rising of 1661, headed by a wine-bottler named Thomas Venner, led to wide-scale Quaker imprisonment. The tough Quakers’ Act of 1662 followed, which imposed severe penalties on their Meetings, with transportation for a third offence. Then the first Conventicle Act of 1664 curtailed the activities of all Nonconformists by making it illegal for more than five persons outside a family to gather together for religious purposes. The Conventicle Act lapsed in 1668 but was re-enacted in 1670, bringing a fresh wave of imprisonments. As a result, thousands of Quakers passed through the prisons of England.