CHAPTER EIGHT

Living under Obedience

Susanna Perwick, daughter of those Perwicks who kept a fashionable girls’ school at Hackney, was one of the few Englishwomen of this time – the age following the death of Queen Elizabeth – to be glorified under the title of virgin. Susanna, an exceptionally talented musician if her biographer John Batchiler is to be believed, died in 1661 at the age of twenty-four. Batchiler called his work The Virgin’s Pattern: in the Exemplary Life and lamented Death of Mrs Susanna Perwick¹ (‘Mrs’ was the title then applied to respectable unmarried females, ‘Miss’ except in the case of very young girls being reserved for the other sort). Her musical talents were early encouraged, since the Perwicks’ school staff included such luminaries as Simon Ives, the collaborator of Henry Lawes, as singing-master, and Edward Coleman the song-writer. Batchiler mentions that first Thomas Flood, then William Gregory, taught Susanna; others would gladly have taken their place, such as Albertus Bryne, the composer and ‘famously velvet-fingered Organist’ of St Paul’s Cathedral. Susanna’s proficiency at the violin quickly attracted favourable attention and she was also skilled at composing extemporary variations on a given theme; in addition she played the lute and harpsichord, sang, and studied books on harmony.

It was no wonder that ambassadors and other foreign visitors attended the Hackney school as the fame of this paragon spread, lured further by her sweet face, and her conversation – which, unlike that of most women, was ‘rather sententious than garrulous’. According to Batchiler, Susanna had other skills beyond music: calligraphy, accountancy and cookery.

Alas, at the age of twenty-four Susanna caught a violent fever from sleeping in damp linen on a visit to London from Hackney. When she realized she was dying, she bequeathed her belongings in the neat orderly fashion which had characterized her whole short life: her books went to the young gentlewomen of the school, with the dying wish that they would not read other ‘vain books’ or waste time dressing-up. Then in the course of her protracted deathbed, Susanna herself gave ‘small silent groans’, in between her ‘smiling slumbers’, while her family wept loudly around her. At her funeral, attended by the whole school, Susanna’s velvet-clad hearse was carried by six white-clad maidservants; while the pupils who had known her best, dressed in black, with white scarves and gloves, held up the mourning sheet. She was buried in the Hackney church, in the same grave as Mrs Anne Carew, a schoolfriend, ‘a fine costly garland of gumwork’ being placed on the coffin. Susanna’s epitaph made her ultimate destination clear:

And it was highly satisfying to an age which particularly enjoyed the significance of a good anagram that the letters of Susanna(h) Perwick’s name could, with a little pious cheating, produce the words: AH! I SEE (C) HEAV’N’S PURE SUN.’¹

Although the title of his work, The Virgin’s Pattern, celebrated Susanna’s unmarried state, Batchiler was careful to make it clear that she had by no means rejected altogether that ‘blessed knot’ of matrimony which was the lot of dutiful (Protestant) womankind. Admittedly after the early death of her fiancé, Susanna had dismissed various other proposed bridegrooms as wanting in spiritual riches; but Batchiler announced that Susanna had made another ‘secret choice’ before her death, and died in the arms of the man concerned.⁴ It was a significant assurance in a work much closer to hagiography than biography; readers could feel confident that the conventional virgin’s pattern of the seventeenth century – which was in fact to eschew virginity and marry – had finally been followed.

Yet Susanna Perwick’s character, as it can be discerned beneath the veil of Batchiler’s melancholy ecstasies, has something distinctly austere and as we should now say, nun-like about it; certainly her persistent rejection of her suitors, even if allayed by a deathbed change of heart, does not indicate any great enthusiasm for the matrimonial state. Like the Catholic Mary Ward, who suffered a similar loss, Susanna Perwick regarded the death of her betrothed as a significant affliction from God. For Susanna there followed a form of spiritual ‘conversion’; Mary Ward decided to devote her life to God and took the veil. The option of the convent was of course not open to the Protestant girl; indeed Susanna remained very much opposed to the ‘Romish’ religion, which she considered to be positively ‘anti-Christian’.⁵ Susanna was compelled to construct her own life of retirement within the confines of her parents’ busy boarding-school.

Susanna also resembled Mary Ward in that she had the gift of beauty: Batchiler refers to the contrast of her brilliant complexion – ‘red and white, Mixed curiously gave great delight’ – with her ‘black, jetty, starry’ eyes. And for once the frontispiece to The Virgin’s Pattern does actually show a pretty face, although there is a hint of firmness as well as humour in the curved mouth, above the legend: ‘Here’s all that’s left.’ Nevertheless, after the death of her betrothed Susanna adopted a deliberately plain, neat garb, abhorring the black spots and patches which were just becoming the rage of fashionable London; not only for her own use, but also making her mother confiscate them from the giddy young ladies at the boarding-school. At least Susanna showed enough sympathy with adolescent frailty to wear the jewellery she would otherwise have eschewed in order to please the girls. Batchiler also eulogized her bosom – ‘Her pair of round crown’d rising hills’ – but these rising hills were, after Susanna’s conversion, sternly covered with a whisk or handkerchief, contrary to the usual custom of the time.

It was easy for Susanna to refuse to attend public revels where there would be dancing; it was more difficult to find peace at home for prayer and meditation, with 100 girls, to say nothing of the servants, perpetually ‘going up and down’. So Susanna, like so many of her serious-minded contemporaries such as Mary Warwick and Dorothy Osborne, turned to the garden and there would read her Bible for an hour or so, secure from interruption (she had read the whole of the New Testament twice in the year of her death). For Susanna too, like Elizabeth Walker, there was the period of early morning prayer which would leave her red-eyed; before supper she would regularly meditate on death. Even if complimented on her music in later years, Susanna was liable to reply – rather off-puttingly – that music was as nothing compared to the joys of heaven.⁶

Throughout the seventeenth century it was customary for stout English Protestants to condemn the Catholic convents with horror as barbarous concomitants of the ‘Romish’ religion. Yet one cannot help noticing how much easier it was for a Catholic young woman, a Mary Ward for instance, to construct a life of serious purpose on her own terms, than it was for a Susanna Perwick.

‘Convenient storage for their [the Catholics’] withered daughters’ was how Milton dismissed the convents. Lettice Countess of Leicester was struck with horror when ‘a Popish orphan’ named Mary Gunter, whom she had taken into her household, persisted in wanting to go ‘beyond the seas, to become a nun’ on the grounds that this was ‘the surest and most likely way to go to Heaven … the nearest way’. There was however nothing withered about Mary Pontz, an associate of Mary Ward. She was an acknowledged beauty who was on the point of marriage when Mary Ward’s mission captured her spirit; she sent her cavalier a bizarre form of dismissal in the shape of her own portrait in which one half of the face had been eaten by worms!⁷ For Protestant girls who experienced these or similar urges there was little outlet; and Milton’s derisive comment omitted to state that for the withered daughters of Protestants – those who had probably been allowed to wither on the bough unmarried because they lacked dowries – there was no convenient refuge at all.

Some Protestant women, who thought for themselves, could see that it was by no means fair to condemn the Catholic nunneries wholesale. Margaret Duchess of Newcastle, for example, with her usual gift for stating the truth, however uncomfortable, thought it better for a girl to be ‘walled up’ in ‘a monastery’ than unhappily married. Margaret Godolphin, herself so earnest, so reserved, so worried by the implications of matrimony, went further. She was impressed by the convents she visited in France: ‘Their Nunneries seem to be holy Institutions,’ she reflected. ‘If they are abused, ’tis not their (the nuns’) fault; what is not perverted? Marriage itself is become a snare.’ Earlier she had wished that there might be some kind of similar Protestant refuge to which she might fly and eschew the claims of the world.⁸

It was a desire echoed by the youthful Anne Murray, at the end of her unhappy love affair with Mr Thomas Howard.⁹ As a girl without a fortune (her portion was ensnared in a legal tangle), Anne was aware that her marriage to Howard would not be permitted by his parents, and she honourably refused the young man’s passionate request for a secret ceremony. Despite this evidence of rectitude, even Anne’s own mother poured fury on her daughter for her behaviour, on the grounds that it was financially necessary for Howard to marry a rich citizen’s daughter. She made Anne promise not to see her lover again. Anne kept her promise to the extent of saying goodbye to Howard blindfold, when he was packed off by his own relations to France. Even so, the disgust of the mother was so great, that she refused to speak to Anne except in anger for fourteen months.

It was at this point that Anne inquired privately from her cousin Sir Patrick Drummond, who was Conservator (consul) in Holland, whether there was not some Protestant nunnery there, consistent with her religious principles, because if so she would retreat thither immediately. But Sir Patrick addressed his answer to the angry mother, leaving Anne to explain herself: ‘for since I found nothing would please her that I could do, I resolved to go where I could most please myself, which was in a solitary retired life’. A further blow was in store for Anne when Howard returned from France and married another lady, having cut Anne publicly: ‘Is this the man for whom I have suffered so much?’ she cried, falling on her bed. Her unfeeling mother laughed. It was no wonder that Anne secretly approved when her maid Miriam, as it will be remembered, called down a curse of barrenness upon Howard’s bride.

Gibbon pointed to the plight of the runaway slaves under the universal government of the Roman Empire: nowhere to flee for the victims of injustice, for whom the world thus became ‘a safe and dreary prison’. English girls who could not or would not marry were similarly without refuge. In contrast the remarkable longevity of many of the so-called ‘withered daughters’ who made the adventurous journey to the Continent to become Catholic nuns is also worthy of note. Two abbesses of Rouen, for example, died at over ninety; one of whom, Mother Francisca Clifton, had completed seventy-five years in religion. This longevity argues a life of purpose very different from that which faced many of their sisters at home – and of course freed in addition from ‘the pain and the peril’ of childbearing which brought so many of these other young women to an early death. Spiritual considerations quite apart, there was something to be said for the point of view of that ‘Popish orphan’ Mary Gunter (she was in fact not allowed to become a nun and died in England, still young, in 1633).’¹⁰ A life of chosen virginity, led in an ordered, secure and educated society, was certainly not the worst fate which could overtake a young woman in the seventeenth century.

In seventeenth-century England, neither legally nor psychologically was there a proper place for the unmarried female or ‘maid’ – the term generally in use in 1600 – except on her way to marriage. Psychologically, it was hard to look on a young woman as a heroine. The Blessed Virgin Mary was no longer the official pattern of English womanhood as she had been before the Reformation, no longer praised in nightly Ave Marias, daily or weekly masses as a chaste and sinless female. On the Catholic Continent, the position of respect she enjoyed was emphasized in the seventeenth century by the institution of a number of new Marian feasts in the church calendar.¹¹ Candles glimmered before the multitudinous wide-eyed depictions of the Virgin, painted by Murillo in honour of the growing cult of the Immaculate Conception. In England, the whole subject of the Virgin Mary was complicated by the fact that Marian devotion in any form – ‘Mariolatry’ – was regarded as High church or Laudian, liable to lead directly to Rome.

There was justice in this contention. Anthony Stafford, for example, who wrote a book entitled The Femall Glory in 1635, in which he attempted to rescue the Virgin Mary as a figure to be admired and emulated – she was not to be considered ‘a mere woman’ – was a follower of Laud, as was his patroness, the learned Lady Theophila Coke, to whom he dedicated the book. Stafford described Mary’s marriage to Joseph as being intended merely to ‘serve as a bar to the importunity of other Suitors … so she might the more freely enjoy the inconceivable pleasure she took in her vowed Virginity’. As for the conception of Jesus: ‘most blessed Virgin … let thy Modesty rest secure; for the Operation of God, and not of man is here required’.¹²

This kind of heady talk was anathema to the Puritans, to whom the Blessed Virgin Mary was no more than ‘Mall [a nickname for Mary], God’s Maid’.¹³ So Protestant womanhood was left with Grandmother Eve alone – that fearful guilty ancestress – to represent them. There was no chaste heroine in their pantheon: Grandmother Eve being very much a wife and mother, in her own guilty way, as all women in the seventeenth century were supposed to be.

Legally, the position of the ‘feme sole’ was equally ignored: her legal rights were assumed to be swallowed up in those of her nearest male protector. This does not overlook the fact that young women of the labouring class (that is, the vast majority of the population) worked to support themselves by one method or another from an early age;¹⁴ it was from the ‘spinsters’, for example, a considerable number of young women working at home, that the modern legal term for the unmarried female was derived during the seventeenth century. Certain professions such as that of dairymaid or milkmaid had a tradition of independence, based on the adventurous expeditions to market which such ‘maids’ carried out in the course of their work, a freedom of movement not enjoyed by their sisters at home in the village.

The bold girls admired by Pepys at Westminster in the May Day parade of 1667, garlands round their milk-pails, ‘dancing with a fiddler before them’ as they collected tips from customers, came of a long tradition of such independent lasses; they were probably from farms nearby (Westminster then being on the edge of a rural area) and on their way to the Maypole in the Strand. Dairymaids were also amongst the highest paid of women workers: in 1647 a dairymaid who brought a cow to Hatfield so that the Lord Cranborne of the day could drink its milk was given a 2s tip – at a time when women agricultural labourers were lucky to get 4d a day.¹⁵ Nevertheless an unmarried milkmaid, even if she enjoyed some practical freedom, was still legally in the care of her father, like any other young woman, and on marriage passed into that of her husband.

The point has been well made that it was only at marriage that men entered fully into the society into which they had been born;¹⁶ that was also true of women, who in taking up their destined place as wives, were filling that place most convenient for the rest of society – which was male. The concept of an unmarried female, beyond a certain age and not demonstrably in the care of a male, tended to bring about a kind of bewilderment at best.

‘Are you a maid, or widow, or a wife?’ asked a Suffolk magistrate of Sister Dorothea, an English Catholic nun and follower of Mary Ward, when she was brought before him in 1622.¹⁷ At the time of her arrest, Sister Dorothea was posing as the kinswoman of Lady Timperley of Hintlesham Hall, near Ipswich; from this vantage point she had taught local children of ‘the vulgar sort’ their Pater, Ave, Creed and Commandments, but she had also done a great deal of good work among the sick and the poor, which had made her popular in the neighbourhood and somewhat inhibited the magistrate in his treatment of her.

‘I am a maid,’ was the answer of Sister Dorothea.

‘So much the better,’ the magistrate exclaimed with relief, feeling that the problem was now virtually solved, ‘for then I hope a good husband will persuade you to change your religion.’ In vain Sister Dorothea protested that she had no intention of changing her state; the magistrate, taking his stand on the fact that the nun had performed much service to the poor – ‘to give you your due’ – and armed with the comforting thought that her religious eccentricity could not be of long duration, dismissed her. It was a point of view robustly expressed by Sir Ralph Verney, echoing the words of St Paul (a favourite source where he was concerned) to the Corinthians. He remonstrated on the subject of Nancy Denton, that ambitious scholar, to her father: ‘Dr Denton, teach her to live under obedience, and whilst she is unmarried, if she would learn anything, let her ask you, and afterwards her husband, At Home.’¹⁸

Obedience was thus the watchword.

One version of it was the obedience practised by the numerous serving-maids living in other people’s houses as part of their ‘family’ – the significant term used for the household. The role of the serving-maid, as opposed to that of the free unmarried female, was a conventional one, fully understood by society. For one thing it was widely fulfilled: it has been suggested that between one quarter and a third of all households of the period contained servants, in view of the fact that the lowly as well as the mighty entertained them.¹⁹

Marriage – especially to another servant – did not necessarily bring this kind of obedience to an end in any case since, as has been pointed out, girls outside the moneyed or landed class married quite late.²⁰ Not only in the great social edifices such as Woburn Abbey but in the little country dwellings were maids to be found – often the daughters of friends, leaving their own family to practise obedience (and work for their keep) in the ‘family’ of another, not necessarily removed further up the social scale.

Domestic service in the seventeenth century was not only a common fate, it was also not a bad way of life and the horror stories of later times – the Victorian era, for example – should be dismissed from the imagination as anachronistic. The intimacy denoted by the use of the word family had considerable advantages: food was shared, and where plentiful, it was plentiful for maid as well as master (or mistress). Indeed, the free regular provision of food, and often clothing as well, placed the domestic in a privileged position not only compared to those many unfortunates at the very bottom of society, who seldom had either, but also to their social equals, day-labourers.

Moreover, such provision places the apparently low annual wage of about £2 a year given to maidservants in perspective. The board wages for food for the maids at Belton House, Grantham, seat of Sir John Brownlow, when the family went away to London were 6s a week; in a 1688 inventory of the fine new palace designed for the Brownlow family by Wren, all the rooms including the servants’ rooms had feather-beds, besides three blankets and a quilt. The maids’ rooms at Woburn Abbey had pictures on their walls.²¹

Servants featured prominently in wills, where quite large sums would be bequeathed; if these legatees were mainly older women, married or widowed, nevertheless such legacies betokened the care and affection lavished in general upon their maids by those women they served. Mary Countess of Warwick left £80 to Martha Upsheer, a chambermaid, £70 to Anne Coleman, another old servant, and £40 to ‘my ancient servant Mary Taverner’, formerly her housemaid. Mary Warwick’s executors were instructed to use the money to purchase annuities for these women. Dame Margaret Verney, wife of Sir Edmund and mother of Sir Ralph, mentioned all the women servants at Claydon when she made her will (and incidentally they were all still there in service when she died ten years later).²²

As long as the concept of the domestic as part of the ‘family’, held by most people at the beginning of the seventeenth century, lingered, so the scale of the maids’ existence remained in proportion to the people they served. In the 1680s Mary Woodforde, wife of a Prebendary at Winchester Cathedral, wrote of the marriage of her servant Ann: ‘She lived with us thirteen years and a half.’²³ The idea of a maid as an inferior creature, entitled therefore to a far inferior standard of life, came later.

With so many domestic servants to consider, it was natural that the topic of their treatment should come under common discussion. Inordinate severity was generally frowned upon; the Puritan handbooks pointed to it as morally wrong. Winefrid, sister of William Blundell of Lancashire, busy engaging a servant at 15s a quarter for a lady of rank in London who wanted a Lancashire servant, had time to reflect that ‘some sweet encouragement’, not perpetual severity, was the way to treat servants. In 1688 Lord Halifax took pains to tell his daughter that as a newly-married mistress of a household of servants she must not abuse her position: The Inequality which is between you, must not make you forget that Nature maketh no such distinction.’²⁴

What then were they like? What of Nell Duck, Mary Hearne and Mary Croast, maids and cook-maid to Dame Isabella Twysden? What of Betty Bushin, Lydia Long the laundry-maid, and ‘Alice-about-the-house’, all in service to the Earl of Bedford at Woburn Abbey?²⁵ In many cases the lives of these maids come to us merely in tantalizing glimpses, like the rustle of a petticoat or the turn of an ankle, in the incidental references of accounts of their employers.

In 1614 at Chartley Manor in Staffordshire, seat of the Earl of Essex, three maids fell into the moat as they were doing the laundry. Two were saved by long poles, but one continued to drown. The Earl of Essex stood on the bank as the girl struggled, crying in some excitement: ‘Now she sinks! Now she’s gone!’ until another bystander, Arthur Wilson (who tells the tale), plunged in and saved her. Thereafter the delighted Earl received Wilson ‘in his private chamber’ and made him his gentleman-in-waiting – which equally delighted Wilson. Of the bedraggled laundry-maid nothing more is heard.²⁶

From the Woburn Abbey accounts, it is possible to know details such as the fact that they were often given clothes as presents, or part-presents (‘To Abigail, towards a nightgown. £1 10s od’). The Woburn maids also took – or were given – a great deal of medicine, and they were constantly bled for hysteria.²⁷ About the emotions or even events which might have prompted the hysteria, it is far more difficult to know.

The fact, referred to by Lord Halifax, that nature made ‘no such distinction’ was sometimes wryly underlined by the sexual connections formed between master, or master’s son, and maid; another side-effect of household intimacy. The opinion of the time held this to be a two-way hazard. Francis Kirkman, in his autobiography, confessed that he had a dread of being caught by a maid in marriage if he ‘toyed’ with one; for she might then try to prove he had already married her. It was considered to be a sign of madness in the son of Lord Grey of Wark, destined to marry the Earl of Northumberland’s daughter, that he fell in love with his mother’s chambermaid, or at any rate the experience was blamed for causing his ‘weak brain’ to ‘turn over’;²⁸ yet madness was not necessarily the explanation for such a socially unsuitable infatuation, propinquity being a more likely cause.

Another story told by Kirkman is probably more typical of the kind of blackmail which prevailed in which dismissal or worse was threatened if the maid proved obdurate. A certain married couple could never agree on a maid, for the master would not accept a plain nor the mistress a pretty one (a dispute no doubt as old as domestic service itself). In the end the master compromised by accepting a girl who was ‘liquorish’ hoping ‘to have a lick at her honeypot’. When the ‘liquorish’ girl was duly discovered broaching her master’s cask of Canary wine in the cellar, she had to submit to his advances under threat of imprisonment for theft in Bridewell.²⁹

Fear of unemployment followed by destitution was surely enough to account for Alice Thornton’s story of the goings-on in the louche household over which the Earl of Sussex and his ‘most odious’ Countess presided. Alice Thornton recounted with shocked surprise that when the Earl ordered six of the house-maids to dance naked, only one ‘modest chaste maid’, said she would not do it, and when ‘pressed’ by the Countess, immediately left her service. On the other hand Robert Hooke’s maid Nell, who slept with him three times a month for no extra money in the 1670s, as he records in his diary, presumably found the bargain worth while (at £4 a year, and more for sewing, she was already well paid).³⁰ In her own way Nell was living under obedience.

But some fell through the net and some did not care to be confined by it. Jane Martindale was an independent-minded Lancashire girl who in 1625 revolted against the narrow life prescribed for a yeoman’s daughter. (We happen to know her brief story because her brother Adam, the Nonconformist minister, wrote his autobiography.)³¹ Jane, in her brother’s words, had ‘her father’s spirit and her mother’s beauty’. She objected for instance to the restrictions imposed on the dress of women of her class – freeholders’ daughters customarily wore ‘felts’ (a covering garment) over petticoats and waistcoats with handkerchiefs round their necks, and white cloths covering a coif on their heads. ‘’Tis true the finest sort of them wore gold or silver lace upon their waistcoats, good silk laces (and store of them) about their petticoats,’ wrote Martindale. ‘But the proudest of them (below the gentry) durst not have offered to wear an hood, or a scarf … not so much as a gown till her wedding-day.’

1625 was a year in which one of the major outbreaks of plague had taken place in London; as a result a number of refugees from its devastation had reached Lancashire. When the time came for them to return, Jane Martindale decided to go with them, leaving her home village of Prescot, and seek the more adventurous life of the big city; she hoped to get a place serving ‘a lady’ since she was ‘ingenious with her needle’. Jane’s parents pleaded with her, pointing out that she wanted for nothing at home, while the London atmosphere might well prove dangerous to one who was not very hardy, having been brought up in the pure air of Lancashire. If Jane wanted to get married, her father told her that he could afford that luxury for her too – being able to provide a dowry.

Jane persisted. She took a little money from her family to get established in London and off she went. Perhaps her plan to serve ‘a lady’ with her ingenious needle might have worked – a form, naturally, of domestic service, but the life of serving ‘a lady’ in London offered opportunities for advancement unknown to a yeoman’s daughter in Lancashire. Unfortunately she herself caught the plague and the plan had to be abandoned. Even so, her spirit was not altogether extinguished; she sent for a goose-pie from her family, in order that she might make merry with her friends, and they duly sent one, encased in ‘twig-work’ all the way from Lancashire. Jane added that some money for drink would also be appreciated, that ‘the goose might swim’, without cost to herself. But the carrier took three weeks to deliver pie and money; in the meantime Jane was in such dire poverty that she contemplated selling her own hair; ‘which was very lovely’, wrote her brother, ‘both for length and colour’.

Ironically it was ‘this blessed knot’ of matrimony which rescued Jane in the nick of time; not the independent life she had envisaged. One of the young men who had travelled back to London with her had fallen in love with the beautiful Jane. He now married her, and the newly-wedded pair set up to run an inn called the George and Half Moon, just outside Temple Bar, which divided the City of London and Westminster. Jane’s parents assisted her to furnish the inn, and sent country produce down from Lancashire.

Jane’s city life then ran smoothly until the spring of 1632 when her mother became seriously ill. Jane bought ‘an excellent swift mare’ and rode home to Lancashire; too late – her mother was dead on her arrival. At this point Jane and her husband decided to sell the London inn and set up again at Warrington, to be closer to her remaining family. During one of her journeys between London and Lancashire to arrange all this, Jane stopped off at an inn to have a drink, where some children were suffering from smallpox. She caught the disease and died, being buried at Prescot in August 1632, beside her mother.

Several of the little ‘chapbooks’ as they were later known, popular fiction sold by pedlars for 2d a story, centred upon strong-minded – and strong-bodied – heroines. Long Meg of Westminster, which first appeared in 1582, is a notable example,³² Long Meg being an Amazonian Lancashire lass who comes to London on a carrier’s cart at the age of eighteen, like Jane Martindale seeking a place in service. But although Long Meg takes to touring London at night, dressed in men’s clothing and beating men in fair fight, she ends by marrying a soldier, just as Jane Martindale had in the end married. To please her readers, most of whom were, of course, male, Long Meg vows to be a submissive wife: ‘It behoveth me to be Obedient to you, and, never shall it be said, though I Cudgel a Knave that Long Meg shall be her Husband’s Master.’

Only the real-life heroine Mary Frith, subject of Middleton and Dekker’s comedy The Roaring Girl, never succumbed to the economic necessity or social ideal of obedience. But then Moll Cutpurse, as she was known, did not succumb to the law either. ‘She could not endure the sedentary life of sewing or stitching, a sampler was as grievous to her as a winding-sheet.’ Dressed as a man, sword and all, she was first of all notorious as ‘a bully, pick-purse, fortune teller, receiver and forger’. Later she became what it would be appropriate to term a successful highwayperson. Building up a gang of thieves, she used her house in Fleet Street as a centre for her operations, give or take a spell in Newgate. On Sundays this female Robin Hood would visit the gaols and feed the prisoners out of her haul. Moll Cutpurse, untroubled by obedience, lived to the ripe old age of seventy-five, and was buried in 1659 after an Anglican service at St Bride’s.³³

Moll Cutpurse was the exception, as is demonstrated by the popular wonder accorded to her – several books were written about her as well as Dekker’s play, and her biography The Life and Death of Mistress Mary Frith appeared in 1662. Living under obedience, as most women did, married or unmarried, they might be as garrulous as they pleased – so the satirists averred – at home, but their voices were unlikely to be heard in the public forum. The undesirable talkativeness of the female sex in the domestic circle was axiomatic; the desirability of its silence outside was equally taken for granted. Yet even before the Civil War, certain individual women, whether wilful, eccentric or just plain deluded, had already discovered a way in which the female voice might be raised without immediate masculine control.

Women were of course forbidden to preach in the churches – on the direct authority of mighty St Paul himself. But when a woman started to ‘prophesy’ as did a pedlar called Jane Hawkins at St Ives near Huntingdon in 1629, the matter was somewhat more complicated. ‘This rhyming preacheress’, as she was later described, made a strong local impression.³⁴ For by claiming direct inspiration from God – and expressing this inspiration in trances, descriptions of visions and other ‘prophecies’ – a woman made it that much more difficult for her voice to be extinguished; there would always be those around her, credulous or sympathetic, who believed that this extinction was suppressing the direct message of God. If the politics of Church and State were introduced, the matter became more complicated still. At the same time the dreaded implication of witchcraft, ever present for a woman who refused to conform, was avoided if the language was sufficiently religious in its expression to suggest possession by the Almighty, rather than some more sinister power.

Jane Hawkins, ‘having fallen into a rapture or ecstasy’, foretold on the one hand such disagreeable eventualities for the Anglican Church as the downfall of the bishops; on the other hand she magnified’ the ministry of the local vicar, the Rev. Mr Tokey. When her prophetic rhyming continued for three days and nights, it was perhaps hardly surprising that the 200 people who listened to her included Mr Tokey, his curate, and another ‘scholar’ who sat at the feet of Jane Hawkins’s bed, rapidly copying out the verses – amounting to some thousands – which were emitted from the entranced woman. The plan was to make a fair copy of the verses later ‘with intent to print them’. At which point however, the Bishop, less enthusiastic at having his downfall predicted than Mr Tokey at having his ministry magnified, had the verses seized.

When Mr Tokey refused to abandon the claims of his spiritual patroness to be a true visionary, he was suspended, while his curate was ‘put quite away’; the Justices of the Peace were given a warrant by the Bishop to look after Jane Hawkins herself and ensure that the neighbours did not visit her. Reports said that the local people were deserting their ‘rhyming preacheress’; soon they were said to ‘cry out against her’. Finally the unfortunate vicar made a written acknowledgement that Jane was an impostor, and that he himself had been guilty of indiscretion.

It is noticeable that the Bishop’s attitude to Jane Hawkins was from the first one of suspicion on the grounds of her sex. Here was ‘a witty crafty baggage’, who was deliberately stepping out of her low station in life to make trouble for the rest of the world; he was disgusted that she would not ‘confess’ to having written verses before, or to having written them of her own accord now. To the end he referred to ‘this imposture’ of the woman at St Ives; it was not within his cognizance that someone of Jane Hawkins’s ilk could have genuinely believed in the strength of her own visions.

Yet there had been a brief moment of glory when Jane Hawkins, a ‘poor woman (and she but a pedlar)’ as she was contemptuously described, lay on a bed surrounded by 200 local people, led by the vicar, who hung on her words with bated breath, and even had them copied down for widespread publication. The point has been made by Keith Thomas that in an age when women were unable to attend grammar schools, let alone attend university, and of course unable to preach, the self-styled role of prophetess enabled a woman frustrated of any normal means of self-expression to make her voice at least heard.³⁵

A far more notorious ‘rhyming preacheress’ – because of her high station in life – was the woman born Eleanor Audeley, daughter of the Earl of Castlehaven, and wife in succession to Sir John Davies, Attorney-General for Ireland, and Sir Archibald Douglas. By her first marriage Lady Eleanor Davies (the name by which she is generally known) bore a daughter Lucy, whose life was early affected by her mother’s eccentricities. In 1623 at the age of ten Lucy was married off by her father (without a licence) to Ferdinando Lord Hastings, who succeeded his father as sixth Earl of Huntingdon in 1643; the hasty ceremony was probably intended to save Lucy from her mother’s drastic influence. Sir John Davies’s death meant that the young couple went to live together much earlier than had been anticipated.³⁶ Life in the wake of a scandalous parent had its predictable effect on Lady Huntingdon: an intellectual, Lucy also had a strong regard for the conventions. It was she who had prepared her own clever daughter Elizabeth Hastings so well for marriage that her husband never suffered ‘all those inconveniences’ generally believed to accompany a learned wife (see p. 149).

‘Inconveniences’ certainly surrounded the career of Lady Eleanor Davies.³⁷ In 1625, when she was in her mid-thirties, according to her own account she received a revelation while lying in bed at home at Englefield Manor: ‘nineteen and a half years to the Judgement and you as the Meek Virgin’. Sir John Davies died the next year, but since Lady Eleanor – who shared the contemporary preoccupation with anagrams – made of her husband’s name DAVIS IUDAS, she can hardly have regretted his demise. Sir John’s particular betrayal was described by Lady Eleanor: it was her first book which ‘was sacrificed by my first husband’s hand, thrown into the fire’. Lady Eleanor responded with her own weapons, giving Sir John details of his ‘doom’, telling him ‘within three years to expect the mortal blow’. To hammer the point in, she wore black – ‘my mourning garment’ – from that time forward.

There had been other troubles in the marriage: Lady Eleanor’s son by Sir John, known as Jack, was an idiot. There is a great deal that is touching about the mother’s attitude to her son’s deformity, including the conviction (in 1617) that if Jack ‘were now put into the hands of some skilful man … [he] might be brought to speak’. Lady Eleanor went on: ‘for he is wonderfully mended in his understanding of late … he understands anything that is spoken to him without making any signs, so as it is certain he hath his hearing … then the defect must be in his tongue’.³⁸ But in the event poor Jack was drowned, leaving Lucy Davies, incidentally, as heiress to an important fortune.

To the outside world, however, Lady Eleanor was clearly marked down as a trouble-maker, even before she turned her attention, fatally, to matters of Church and State. In 1622, for example, a certain man called Brooke reproached her for abuse (not recorded) of his wife and innocent child. Brooke declared that Lady Eleanor had by her behaviour abandoned all ‘goodness and modesty’, being not only mad and ugly, but also blinded with pride in her own birth; in retaliation he threatened on the one hand to ‘scratch a mince-pie’ out of her; on the other hand he wished Lady Eleanor, as being the most horrible curse in his power, to remain exactly what she was.³⁹

Lady Eleanor’s second marriage to Sir Archibald Douglas was by her own account not much more successful than her first. It took place only three months after Sir John Davies’s death ‘contrary to a solemn Vow’, and soon there was a recurrence of both the old trouble – ‘he likewise burning my book’ – and the old revenge. For Sir Archibald ‘escaped not scotfree’, being bereft of his senses while at Communion and ‘instead of speech made a noise like a Brute Creature’.⁴⁰ In later life (he lived until 1644) Sir Archibald believed he saw angels, and became, like his wife, preoccupied with anagrams.

REVEALE O DANIEL! This, the transformation of her maiden name, if spelt ELEANOR AUDLIE, was the crucial anagram in Lady Eleanor’s own opinion (how very different was this strident call from that meek cry – AH, I SEE HEAV’N’S PURE SUN – composed by her admirers out of the name of Susanna Perwick). Altogether this self-styled Daniel was responsible for twenty-eight tracts of a prophetic nature, which have been described in modern times as ‘an almost unintelligible mixture of religion, politics and prophecy’.⁴¹ Unfortunately for Lady Eleanor, in her own time they were not altogether unintelligible, and unfortunately too, she had the occasional Cassandra’s knack of prophesying accurately some rather unlikely and extremely unpleasant event.

The first prediction which brought Lady Eleanor real notoriety was that of the impending assassination of the Duke of Buckingham, made in June 1628, with the rider that the Duke’s ‘time was not till August’. When Buckingham was duly struck down by John Felton on the twenty-third of that month, Lady Eleanor’s stock as a prophetess was understandably high amongst the common people of London, who elevated her as ‘a cunning woman’. (However, lest Lady Eleanor be credited too firmly with supernatural powers, it has been suggested that her prophecy was common knowledge that summer and Felton may actually have timed his blow to fit in with it.)⁴²

Lady Eleanor’s successful prophecies concerning the pregnancies of Queen Henrietta Maria, if less ostentatious, probably had more effect in gaining her a reputation as a seer in high places – and thus leading in the end to her downfall. It was the inevitable way of royal life that soon after Henrietta Maria arrived in England in June 1625 as a bride, her possible pregnancy should be the subject of speculation. When two years later there was still no sign of an heir to the throne, it was also inevitable that the Queen (and those around her) should be concerned about her possible infertility. According to the story, it was on All Saints’ Day, 1 November 1627, that the Queen paused as she was leaving the evening service and asked Lady Eleanor when she would be with child. Lady Eleanor replied that the Queen’s first child would be christened and buried all in one day. And in May 1629 the Queen’s firstborn, a Prince named Charles James, did die more or less as Lady Eleanor had predicted. In response to a further emissary from the court, a Mr Kirk, Lady Eleanor struck lucky again by predicting that the Queen’s next baby would be another boy, but an exceptionally strong child – as the future Charles II, born in May 1630, proved to be. The King was irritated by Lady Eleanor’s influence over his wife but Mr Kirk among others spread the lady’s fame.

Three years later the lady’s ‘prophesyings’, which she had printed at Amsterdam (where she needed no licence) under the legend ‘Reveale O Daniel’, were of a more extravagant nature. Now it was a question of the ‘doom’ of Charles I; referring to the King as ‘Belshazzar’ and describing her vision of a Beast ascended out of the Bottomless Pit, having seven heads to signify the seven past years of the King’s rule, Lady Eleanor foretold the final execution of the King. In addition Laud, newly appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, was picturesquely evoked as ‘horned like the lamb, hearted like a Wolf.’⁴³

The King’s annoyance was pardonable. This kind of prophecy was in theory a grave offence (even to cast the monarch’s horoscope without authorization was treason). Lady Eleanor was summoned to the court of High Commission on 24 October 1633, and there committed for ‘compiling and publishing certain fanatic and scandalous pamphlets’. At least two of the judges thought that Lady Eleanor should acknowledge her offence at St Paul’s Cross, while the Bishop of Rochester suggested Bedlam – the madhouse. In the end Lady Eleanor was fined £3,000 and sentenced to imprisonment in the Gatehouse. Her books however did not get off so lightly, being burnt publicly: ‘this is the third day their dead bodies throwed in loose sheets of paper lie in the streets of the great city’, she wrote in anguish.⁴⁴

Even more humiliating to her spirit was her actual experience in court. Efforts were made to convince Lady Eleanor of the meaninglessness of her prophecies, and in particular of her precious anagrams. To illustrate the point, some had the happy thought of pointing out that DAME ELEANOR DAVIS could be transformed into NEVER SO MAD A LADIE, ‘which happy fancy brought that grave Court in to such a laughter, and the poor woman into such a confusion’ that Lady Eleanor herself never alluded to this particular incident subsequently.⁴⁵ It is an ironic scene in retrospect: the august body of judges, from whom the future was happily hidden, attempting in vain to convince the distracted woman that anyone who predicted the execution of Charles I must necessarily have their wits a-wandering.

The fine was probably not paid, but Lady Eleanor remained in the Gatehouse despite her daughter Lucy Countess of Huntingdon’s petitioning for her release. Lucy was careful to admit that her mother had been confined ‘by just censure’, but she asked that she might have some free air, ‘for womanhood’ some female of her own to attend her, and perhaps a clergyman as well.⁴⁶

In 1635 Lady Eleanor was released from her London prison and went to live in the cathedral town of Lichfield in Staffordshire. Here she found no peace. Flouting the conventions, she freely used those seats reserved for the wives of the bishop and the canons within the cathedral; worse still she sat herself down on the episcopal throne, and declaring that she was both ‘Bishop and Metropolitan’, sprinkled a mixture of tar and water on the cathedral hangings.

This time there was no escaping ‘Bedlam’s loathsome Prison’ even for the mother of the Countess of Huntingdon. Here sightseers would come to gape at Lady Eleanor (and other inmates). Nor was Lady Eleanor’s prophetic voice silent. Particular alarm was caused when she predicted a fire within Bedlam, and fires duly occurred – although the fire risks were so great, that was hardly a surprising occurrence. Finally, after a spell in the Tower, Lady Eleanor was released into the care of her daughter and son-in-law in 1640.

The prophesying – and the violent treatment – continued. In 1646 Lady Eleanor was sent to another London prison called the Compter and incarcerated in a black cell by the Keeper, an experience she described graphically: ‘Not long after (she all unready, etc.) between two of them carried down thence, instantly shut and bolted was into the Dungeon-Hole, Hell’s Epitomy, in the dark out of call or cry, searching first her Coats pockets: Frustrate that way, with the Key took away the Candle, there left in their Pest-house on the wet floor to take up her lodging.’ Fortunately, so that Lady Eleanor could examine her cell all night long till dawn: ‘the Heavens without intermission flashed out Lightnings, as Noonday’.⁴⁷2

It seems unfair that for all her charitable treatment of her own ‘dear mother’ Lucy Countess of Huntingdon was the victim of a series of tragedies as a mother herself. Her first three sons all died; the fourth, Theophilus, who eventually became Earl of Huntingdon, was not born until 1650, when the Earl and Countess of Huntingdon had been married for over a quarter of a century. Sion’s Lamentation, a powerful piece – and for once politically innocent – was written for the funeral of one of these boys, Henry Lord Hastings, in 1649, by the prophetic grandmother. Lady Eleanor described the eerie emptiness of the streets through which the funeral train passed. As when Joshua made the sun and moon stand still at his command at Gibeon, the Lord harkening to his request, so the cortège ‘saw not the face of Coach, Cart or Car, which passed by, either that met us, or stood in our way’.⁴⁹

But by this date the whole world, not only the world of the distracted Lady Eleanor, was turning upside down – never so mad a lady till the present, perhaps, but other prophetesses were coming forward to rival her. Lady Eleanor, like these other frustrated women living in theoretical obedience, who poured their bizarre imaginings into prophecies, looked to the new order in the shape of Oliver Cromwell. We shall meet Lady Eleanor again in 1648, presenting a copy of the notorious 1633 prophecies to the great man himself.

For war was coming, a time when many women, not only the strange and wilful, would lead lives of chaos and disruption; a time of war, when the great mass of women who simply expected to exist, as their foremothers had done, rejoicing in the cyclical happinesses, enduring the private sorrows of domestic life, living under obedience, would not be able to do so. War, the great challenger, was coming to them all.

1In the first half of the seventeenth century, about forty books concerning anagrams were printed in Latin alone; a preoccupation compared by one scholar to the modern love of palmistry.³

2In 1932 the editor of Dougle Fooleries compared Lady Eleanor Davies’s ‘obscurity of meaning and … freedom from syntax’ to that of James Joyce or Gertrude Stein.⁴⁸