The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (89 page)

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Authors: Antonia Fraser

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BOOK: The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England

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Women were no longer put to death for being witches in eighteenth-century England: although Jane Wenham, who was condemned to die in 1712 but subsequently reprieved, must have had some anxious moments, unless she was magically aware that to Alice Molland of Exeter in 1685 had already fallen the dubious honour of being the last witch to be killed in this country. Nevertheless the fact that the old women of the poor were able to relapse into their traditional practice of ‘white’ witchery, as ‘cunning women’ and healers, without fear of ugly reprisals based on primitive forces beyond their own control, certainly constituted an advance, albeit a somewhat negative one.

In general the war of words concerning the precise nature of woman’s ‘weakness’ was being won by those who saw in this weakness something which entitled her to the special tenderness and protection of the male; there was no longer held to be something spiritually inferior about it. Indeed the notion of the ‘softer sex’, ‘the gentle sex’, which might actually be finer than its masculine opposite was growing in literature as the century grew to a close. A work of Cornelius Agrippa,
Female Pre-eminence or the Dignity and Excellency of that Sex, above the Male
, originally written in Latin in the early sixteenth century for the benefit of Margaret of Austria, daughter of the Emperor Maximillian I, appeared in an English version in 1670, adapted by Henry Care. Here it was boldly stated that where the soul was concerned there was ‘the same innate worth and dignity’ in both male and female, ‘the Image of their Creator being stamped as fairly and shining as brightly in one, as ’tother’; but in all other respects ‘the noble and delicate Feminine Race, doth almost to infinity excel that
roughhewn boisterous kind, the Male’.
⁵Here was a line of reasoning which would lead eventually to the Victorian notion of woman as a creature too pure to be sullied by man’s gross appetites.

When on 11 May 1699 the Rev. John Sprint preached a wedding sermon at Sherborne,
The Bride-Woman Counseller
, which trotted out all the old reproaches towards womankind, he was much attacked for it. He admitted himself that his views were by now largely old-fashioned, although he could wish to see them restored to currency. Sprint blamed women for all the faults of their husbands since Man’s previously sweet nature had been soured by the Fall: ‘You may thank your Mother Eve for it’, he declared, ‘who, when she had gotten a good Natur’d and Loving Husband, that was easy to be pleas’d, could not then be contented, but must try Practices with him.’ Under these disgraceful circumstances, Sprint advocated the example of certain ‘Persian Ladies who have the resemblance of a Foot worn on top of their Coronets’ in order to indicate that ‘the height of their Glory, Top-Knot and all, does stoop to their Husband’s feet’.
⁶

If few English ladies at the turn of the seventeenth century would have contemplated sporting ‘the resemblance of a Foot’ upon their Top-Knots, the lack of such an outward symbol of submission should not obscure the fact that their position at law with regard to their husbands was exactly the same in 1700 as it had been 100 years earlier: the authority of the husband remained, as it was then, absolute.

The Lawes Resolutions
(probably written by lawyers in the late sixteenth century, but printed in 1632) had pointed out that a man might beat ‘an outlaw, a traitor, a Pagan, his villein, or his wife because by the Law Common these persons can have no action’. In 1696 the author of
An Essay in Defense of the Female Sex
(anonymous except for her sex) evoked an even more piteous comparison: ‘Women, like our Negroes in our western plantations, are born slaves, and live prisoners all their lives.’
⁷As against the lack of legal rights within marriage which applied to the vast majority of Englishwomen, the small amelioration brought about to heiresses by the development of Chancery, or
the increased choice of marriage partner (within socially prescribed limits) allowed to the young, were but limited advances.

Women remained weak at law, tied by what Samuel Hieron had called ‘this blessed knot of matrimony’, something which did not always live up to this enthusiastic description, but was nevertheless the binding which every girl was expected to accept if she was to fulfil her role in society.
⁸In this connection legal bewilderment prevailed when any young woman who did not admit such a state or something related to it encountered the authorities: ‘Are you a maid, or a widow or a wife?’ inquired the magistrate of the Catholic nun, Mary Ward’s colleague,
⁹unable to accept the concept of chosen celibacy in a female. It is significant that two new types of woman which imposed themselves upon public attention in the second half of the seventeenth century, the Quaker and the actress, were both in their different ways outside the law as it stood up till 1660.

In another area, even more crucial to their daily lives, women were as weak (if not weaker) at the end of the century as at the beginning. It was no one’s fault that one of the consequences of the development of gynaecology (before the nature of infection was appreciated) meant that maternal mortality rose slightly by the end of the century, with outbreaks of puerperal fever. The fact remained that women’s lot was ‘a continual labour’ in more senses than one, as Rachel Lady Russell told her daughter Katherine,
¹⁰and with high maternal mortality, no proper means of controlling conception, high infant mortality and high expectations of childbearing from their spouses, it was difficult to see how it could be otherwise – with all the attendant family joys that such persistent child-bearing also brought.

Men of course shared all the other physical miseries of women induced by poverty and disease (having the additional privilege of dying on the battlefield): life expectancy overall fell in certain places in England after 1625 for a period,
¹¹another example of the cyclical nature of progress. Then there were the emotional sufferings equal for both sexes, including the deaths of infants; as is made clear by the lamentations of such multi-fathers as William Brownlow, with his twenty-two years of recorded grief.
¹²Nevertheless being Adam’s sons rather than Eve’s daughters, they could not and did not suffer what the poet Waller had once jocularly called down upon Dorothy Sidney when she chose another suitor: ‘the first curse imposed on womankind – the pains of becoming a mother’.
¹³

For all this, women in the seventeenth century were as they had always been, strong vessels where they had the opportunity: that is to say, where a particular combination of character and circumstance enabled them to be so. In this of course they were exactly like their male counterparts, no more no less. Who can tell what imponderable freak of character inspired the girl soldier Anne Dymoke to pursue such a courageous course after the death of her lover at sea, ending up in a Scottish garrison, when most other girls of her time and class would have remained quietly melancholic in the country in the first place? It was just that women, given the structure of society at the time, had vastly fewer opportunities to demonstrate their worth and resourcefulness.

It was the unexpected arrival of these opportunities which gave to the Civil War period its peculiar character for women; although even here one should note that the boldest she-soldier could not count on being free from ‘the first curse’. Such heroines were often only detected by the unconcealable fact of pregnancy, as unavoidable a lot, it seemed, in uniform as out of it. The ballad of ‘The Female Warrior’, she who was ‘at push of Pike … As good as ever struck’, commemorated this hazard:

This valiant Amazon with courage fill’d

For to Display her Colours was well skill’d

Till pregnant nature did her Sex discover

She fell a pieces, and was made a Mother.
¹⁴

As for those women ‘solicitors’, they too lay under the first curse: from Mary Lady Verney, alone and gravid as she pleaded in vain with ‘Old Men’s Wife’ to aid her husband’s cause, to Elizabeth Lilburne, baptizing her baby Tower because he had been born in the Tower of London (John Lilburne’s current prison).

It is however an almost universal fact of history that women
have done well in wartime when they have been able or compelled to act as substitutes for men, showing themselves resourceful, courageous and strong in every sense of the words; in short displaying without much difficulty all those qualities generally described as masculine. It is another fact that the post-war period has generally seen a masculine retreat from this view of the female sex when the vacuum no longer needs to be filled. Post-Restoration England was no exception to this rule: indeed as early as 1657 Dr Jeremy Taylor, discoursing on friendship
In a Letter to the most Ingenious and Excellent Mrs Katherine Phillips
(the Matchless Orinda), attacked those morose cynics who would not admit women to this state: ‘a man is the best friend in trouble’, he wrote, ‘but a woman may be equal to him in the days of joy … in peaceful Cities and times vertuous women are the beauties of society and the prettiness of friendship’.
¹⁵His views were flattering enough considering the low opinion of women then prevalent, most men arguing against the mere possibility of friendship with the opposite sex, but the terms in which he couched them paid but scant attention to the realities of recent history.

On the other hand most women were undoubtedly pleased to see the return of peaceful conditions, the old order as it seemed, without analysing its social consequences for themselves. The fact that John Lilburne may (or may not) have included women in the natural order which endowed natural rights, and that John Locke thirty years later certainly did not, was of little importance to their ‘continual labour’. While the fact that John Lilburne, revolutionary thinker concerning natural rights in public, was in private one of the most trying husbands a woman ever had to bear, goes perhaps some way to explaining the slow pace of the development of women’s position in the ensuing centuries.

The public ideal of womanhood towards the end of the seventeenth century is given in a panegyric, preached as a sermon after the death of Queen Mary on 28 December 1694, and later printed.
¹⁶Nothing is rarer than to find the heroic character in a woman, declared the panygyrist, the Rev. James Abbadie, minister at the French church in the Savoy, while going on happily to discover such heroism in the character of the deceased sovereign.
Only the heroism which distinguished her and which conjured forth his admiration was entirely based on modesty: it was modesty which had marked out Queen Mary from first to last, including modesty in abasing herself before her husband, William III; all kinds of modesty, ending with the notion that her own palace was ‘a true temple of modesty’.

Yet this was an age which produced the quick-witted ‘She-Champion and Midwife’ Mrs Cellier as well as the modest Mary, born to rule, content to serve. Carving out a nursing career despite her dubious origins, holding her own against the officers of the law while on trial at the Old Bailey, indulging in
badinage
with Charles II on the same occasion, coolly storing the stones thrown at her in the pillory in her pocket and later ambitiously attempting to found a college of therapeutic midwifery, Mrs Cellier was also characteristic of a century when woman was widely held to be the weaker vessel.

To those that have come after, Mrs Cellier is a more engaging, and even perhaps a more admirable character than the submissive Queen – if not to her own society, which threw the stones.

References

Prologue: How Weak?