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

  Still Brilliana did not want Ned to come down and protect her; that would endanger him. And still she refused to budge from the castle. ‘If I go away,’ she told her son, ‘I shall leave all that your father has, to the prey of our enemies; which they would be glad of.’ As for the danger of her present position, defending Brampton Bryan: ‘I cannot make a better use of my life.’32

  In December 1642 came the expected stern demand from the Royalist Governor of Hereford that Lady Harley should hand over Brampton Bryan to the King’s cause. As the Royalist gentry all about her assembled their levies, confident that with Sir Robert Harley at Westminster the stronghold would soon be theirs, Lady Harley told Ned: ‘They [her neighbours] are in a mighty violence against me.’33

  Yet Lady Harley’s public defiance, as her letters to Ned reveal, covered an inner turmoil. Was she really right to hold out? What was Sir Robert’s desire? ‘I will be willing to do what he would have me do,’ confided poor Brilliana to Ned. ‘I never was in such sorrows.’ Her tenants now found an excellent excuse for not paying their rents; money and food were short. By January 1643 the fowlers were forbidden to bring her game, her young horses had been commandeered and her servants dared not go into the town. ‘Now they say they will starve me out of my house,’ she wrote in February, when her cattle were driven away. The alternative was to dismiss her garrison, but that would be to invite plunder by all the local rogues: ‘If I leave Brampton, all will be ruined.’34

  In March Lady Harley received a summons but declined to hand over the castle. In June, still not yet officially beset, she burst out in a letter: ‘O! my dear Ned – that I could but see you … you are both a Joseph and a Benjamin to me.’ On 26 July 1643 the siege began in earnest, at about two o’clock in the afternoon, with the arrival of two or three troops of horse, who proceeded to stop all passage between the castle and the outside world. Then 200 or 300 foot arrived; a total of 700 faced the beleaguered garrison. In the evening a trumpeter, according to custom, officially summoned the ‘honourable and valiant Lady Harley’ to surrender the castle, in the name of the High Sheriff of the City of Hereford, and others. The summons was politely worded: the Royalist troops and their commander Sir William Vavasour wished to prevent ‘further inconvenience’ to her.35

  Lady Harley’s reply was more dramatic. ‘I dare not, I cannot, I must not believe’, she exclaimed at the sight of Sir William drawing up his forces before the house. What of the King’s many solemn promises on the subject of liberty? ‘I have the law of nature, of reason, and of the land on my side.’ At this, Sir William, although still polite, showed himself more menacing. He referred to his wish to keep from Lady Harley ‘all insolencies that the liberty of soldiers, provoked to it by your obstinacies, may throw you upon’. However, he went on: ‘if you remain still wilful, what you may suffer is brought upon you by yourself, I having by this timely notice discharged those respects due to your sex and honour’. It was left to Brilliana to conclude this fruitless exchange with the protest that there was no ‘drop of disloyal blood’ in her body.36

  The next day, 27 July, some small shot was exchanged; the Royalists plundered Lady Harley’s sheep and cattle, and more dangerously invested the town and church – from the latter they were well placed to bombard Brampton Bryan. How much Lady Harley’s bold words to Sir William belied her own fears is demonstrated by her letter of 30 July: she believed her state of misery was without parallel. That ‘One of my condition, who have my husband from me and so wanting comfort should be besieged, and so my life, and the lives of my little children, sought after!’ Yet, the next day, when Sir William offered her a protective guard for the house, and the guarantee of safety for herself and her family if they would lay down their arms, Brilliana firmly declined on the grounds that this would be betraying her trust to her dear husband who had confided his home and children to her care. Lady Harley ended pointedly: ‘I do not know that it is his pleasure that I should entertain soldiers in his house.’37

  So the ordnance began to play upon the walls of the house; ‘their loud music’ was heard daily, including on the Sabbath, which further shocked Lady Harley. The fact that no one within this ‘close house’ became sick during these ‘dog-days’ of August was regarded by her as the workings of providence. However, a few days later Lady Coleburn lost an eye as a result of the bombardment and another woman, Mrs Wright, wife of the doctor, was injured. Fortunately news of a Parliamentary victory by Sir William Brereton was smuggled into the castle; this made up for the fact that shots fired from the church steeple had broken some precious Venetian glasses. It is interesting to note that the language of the soldiery – abuse shouted up at the castle inhabitants for being ‘Essex bastards, Waller’s bastards, Harleys bastards, besides rogues and thieves’ – was, as at the Royalist strongholds Lathom House and Corfe Castle, regarded as being a major part of the ordeal. Great earthworks had been thrown up by the besiegers in the gardens and walks of the castle, which ‘lay so near us that their [the Royalist troops’] rotten language infected the air; they were so completely inhuman, that out of their own mouths, and the mouths of their guns, came nothing else but poisoned words and poisoned bullets’.38

  For all this, for all Sir William Vavasour’s original announcement that nothing more was due to Lady Harley’s ‘sex and honour’, the siege of Brampton Bryan had by the third week of August reached a stalemate; just because its defence was being conducted by one of the weaker vessels – and a respected one at that. The Royalists hesitated to press. The lady refused to surrender. On 24 August Sir John Scudamore was allowed into the castle by means of a rope ladder, a drum having announced a parley; he presented a letter from King Charles I to Brilliana Lady Harley.

  The King declared himself ‘very desirous’ to believe that what had happened at Brampton had been due rather to Lady Harley’s being seduced by evil counsel, than ‘out of your ill-affection to us’. He was still willing to avoid ‘effusion of blood’ and he was ‘unwilling that our forces – in respect of your sex and condition – should take such course for forcing or firing of the same as they must otherwise take’. Lady Harley read the letter, but refused to receive Sir John personally. Perhaps it was just as well, for Sir John observed later that he would have told her squarely not only of the King’s victories (which made her defiance absurd) but also of other members of her sex in London, crying out in multitudes against the House of Commons: women ‘who cry out for their slain and imprisoned husbands; divers women killed by the soldiers in this tumult, yet unappeased’.39 The implication concerning Lady Harley’s own unfeminine conduct was clear.

  Brilliana replied to the King in comparatively humble terms: she reminded him that the castle was hers ‘by the law of the land’, but if he did require it of her, at least let him permit her, with her family, to pass somewhere where they would not perish. According to Lord Falkland (husband of Lettice) the King was much moved by this, ‘so far [as] to reflect with pity upon the sex and condition of the petitioner’; he suggested that Brilliana should stay at Brampton Bryan, under the protection of a Royalist garrison, until she found new accommodation. However, the only answer Brilliana actually received was a letter from Sir William Vavasour, offering once again a free pass, and a convoy for the lady and her servants to march safely away. At this stage of a siege this offer was in theory a concession. Brilliana was not appeased; especially as Sir William’s letter was followed in the evening by a sharp letter from Sir John Scudamore demanding the instant surrender of castle and arms.40

  Buoyed up by secret intelligence that the Parliamentary forces were approaching, Brilliana prevaricated. She also protested when the Royalists moved their gun carriages during this period of cessation of arms, and shot at them to teach them a lesson; when the Cavaliers stole her bells; ‘we sent some of his Majesty’s good subjects to old Nick for their sacrilege’.

  And relief was in sight. When Fairfax reached Gloucester, ‘these bloody villains’ were obliged to depart, leaving Brilliana
to instigate a service of public thanksgiving for the deliverance of ‘our poor family’ from the ‘malignants of seven counties’. There were public tributes also to the courage of her who ‘commanded in chief, I may truly say, with such a masculine bravery, both for religion, resolution, wisdom and warlike policy, that her equal I never saw’.

  So the fame of Brilliana Lady Harley spread throughout the kingdom; even her enemies greeted her story ‘with admiration and applause’. And it was said that those who had proceeded against her – a mere woman, albeit a brave one – were jeered at in the opposing King’s Army.41

  What should she do now? Should she leave Brampton Bryan or remain? Brilliana confided her worries to Ned on 24 September, being already confident that Ned – by now in the Army himself – would thoroughly disapprove of ‘all plundering unmercifulness’. By October the forces of the King were once again menacing the safety of Brampton Bryan. And there was another ominous development. Brilliana had never been strong; throughout the previous siege her health had been progressively weakening. In a letter of 9 October, Brilliana revealed that she had taken ‘a great cold’. It was ‘an ill time to be sick in’ she told Ned ruefully, adding that her last wish was to see him: ‘for you are the comfort of your B.H., yr. most affect. mother’.42

  Her wish was not granted. Later the same month Brilliana had ‘an apoplexy and defluxion of the lungs’ and lay for three days in extremity. Still her temper remained resolute: she ‘looked death in the face without dread’. On the fourth day she died, leaving behind ‘the saddest garrison in the three kingdoms, having lost their head and governess’. Once her commands had ‘carried us into the cannon’s mouth’, as a grief-stricken eye-witness, Captain Priamus Davies, wrote; now her death was saluted not with the thunder of guns but with ‘volleys of sighs and tears’.43

  Brampton Bryan did not long survive the loss of its ‘head and governess’: hideous tales of the fate of the defenders of Hopton Castle nearby scarcely encouraged the civilians left within Brampton Bryan, under Dr Wright, to proceed with their defiance now that the chivalrous protection due to Brilliana’s ‘sex and honour’ could no longer be expected from the King’s Army. So Brampton Bryan, early in 1644, surrendered.

  Prince Rupert – a legend to his opponents for his savagery – was said to have ordered its inhabitants to be put to the sword, but Sir William Vavasour, more of a gentleman, refused. In the event, as the Puritan defenders of Brampton Bryan were carried away to captivity at Ludlow they ‘baited us like bears’, wrote Captain Davies, ‘and demanded where our God was’.44 But worse did not befall. And Brilliana’s bereft children, baby Tom, and Ned’s ‘sweet little sisters’ Dorothy and Margaret, aged eleven and thirteen respectively, were well treated by the Governor of Ludlow Castle and also by the Royalist Sir John Scudamore – who was, incidentally, their kinsman.2

  The castle itself was of course ‘utterly ruined’. Sir Robert Harley estimated that he had lost nearly £13,000 worth of goods, for all his wife’s frenzied wish to protect his property. At least the legend of Brilliana’s heroism survived: ‘That noble Lady and Phoenix of Women died in peace,’ declared the minister at her husband’s funeral, ‘though surrounded with drums and noise of war, yet she took her leave in peace. The sword had no force against her.’45

  From time to time, relating the exploits of the ‘Great Heroick’ ladies, contemporaries commended in passing the activities of their female acolytes: Lady Cholmley’s maids who nursed the sick at Scarborough, Lady Bankes’s chambermaids defending the upper ward of Corfe Castle, the Marchioness of Winchester’s maidservants who turned lead into bullets at Basing House … Where the women of the people were concerned, their Amazonian deeds in their own defence, if they attracted public notice, were certainly officially applauded.

  After the siege of Gloucester in 1644, the town clerk John Dorney collected various pamphlet accounts of its defence. One referred to the ‘cheerful readiness of young and old of both sexes … to labour in the further fortification of our city’ as being admirable to observe. The young women who ventured forth to gather fuel were specifically commended: ‘Nay, our maids and others wrought daily without the [earth] works in the little mead, in fetching in turf, in the very face of our enemy.’ The fortifications of the City of London were thrown up with the assistance of a number of women, not all as socially prominent as the Lady Mayoress armed with her own entrenching tool. This democratic spirit was celebrated by Samuel Butler in Hudibras, describing how women

  From Ladies down to oyster wenches

  Labour’d like pioneers in trenches.46

  During the siege of Bristol by Prince Rupert, one Mary Smith valiantly took out provisions to the men on the out-works, and helped construct the fortifications. Joan Batten and Dorothy Hazzard helped to stop up the Frome Gate; and about 200 women were said to have gone to the Parliamentary commander Colonel Fiennes and offered to place themselves in the mouth of the cannon to ward off the shot. Women in Nottingham patrolled the streets, keeping a look-out for fires. During the siege of Nantwich in Cheshire, women were employed to put out the ‘terrible fire’ in the brush-wood ricks in a back-yard and saved Dorfold House.47

  The most renowned of these group-heroines were the women of Lyme, on the Dorset coast, who in 1643 successfully helped to repel the attacks of the Royalists under Prince Maurice. Their fame was spread in a long poem by a local man named James Strong, the son of a tailor at Chardstock, who after being educated at Wadham College, Oxford, held livings at Bettiscombe and then Ilminster. Joanereidos, printed in 1645, declared its subject to be: ‘Feminine Valour Eminently discovered in Westerne Women’;

  To most ’tis known

  The weaker vessels are the stronger grown.

  The vine which on the pole still lean’d his arms

  Must now bear up and save the pole from harms.

  Joanereidos was to be much satirized in later years:

  Which I should most admire, I know not yet

  The womens valour, or the Poets wit.

  He made the verses, and they threw the stones …

  O happy stones which those fair fingers gripped!48

  Even at the time it was not altogether clear that the masculine pole relished the principle of the female vine’s assistance – even if he enjoyed it in practice. (Never mind the fact that these intrepid women were already well equipped to defend themselves by the lives of physical endeavour they led at home or in the fields – war was different.) An uneasy impression that women were ‘stronger grown’ was one of the many disquieting feelings produced in the masculine breast by the course of the Civil Wars in England.

  Camden in Britannia described Lyme as ‘a little town situate upon a steep hill … which scarcely may challenge the name of a Port or Haven town, though it be frequented by fishermen’ being ‘sufficiently defended from the force of winds with rocks and high trees’. And then there was its Cobb, a long spit of stone cutting off the harbour from the open seas. In 1643 Prince Maurice paid his own kind of tribute to the town which managed to frustrate his advance by referring to it as ‘the little vile fishing village of Lyme’.49 The fact was that Lyme (the Regis came later, ironically enough for the town’s loyalty in aiding the escape of Charles II after Worcester) held off Prince Maurice against all expectations; and contemporaries were agreed that this was owing to the exceptional enthusiasm of the defence.

  On their arrival in the area in April, the Royalists had described the capture of Lyme as ‘breakfast work … they would not dine till they had taken it’.50 Thomas Bullen captured Stidecombe House, three miles from Lyme, and on 20 April Prince Maurice took some nearby dwellings. Weeks later ‘little vile … Lyme’ still held off the invader, although cut off from the interior by the Prince’s forces.

  The defenders consisted of some 1,100 men on day and night duty; but they were far from being well-equipped – they had not, for example, sufficient shoes and stockings to go round. Nevertheless their ferocity in their own defence was so grea
t, and so many of the besiegers were slaughtered, that at one point their water supply was coloured rusty brown with blood. Some of the more affluent ladies inside Lyme when the blockade began were taken off – ‘to the ease of the town’ – in the Parliamentary ships of Lord Warwick, lying off the coast. It was left to the rest to suffer their casualties with the men. Following the bombardment, fire arrows were shot into the town, setting alight twenty houses. One maid lost her hand while carrying a pail to put out the conflagration, and another lost both her arms. A woman was killed while drying clothes on the strand near the Cobb-gate.51

  This was suffering in the pursuit of ordinary domestic duty. The women of the town also filled the soldiers’ bandoliers as they fought, which meant they shared the dangers equally with the men. They acted as look-outs, especially at night, work commemorated by Strong as follows:

  Alas! who now keeps Lime? poor female cattell

  Who wake all night, labour all day in Battle

  And by their seasonable noise discover

  Our Foes, when they the works are climbing over.

  (The satirists later compared these faithful women to the geese who saved the Capitol:

  Geese, as a man may call them, who do hiss,

  Against the opposers of our Country’s bliss.)52

  In fact the women of Lyme threw stones with the best of the defenders; and with the best of the defenders it seems they too cursed the besiegers.

  Finally, on 14 June the siege was raised and the Royalists departed. Then it was the women of the town, 400 of them, who fell upon Prince Maurice’s earthworks and fortifications, and with spades, shovels and mattocks, levelled them. As a result of their efforts in ‘throwing down ditches’, the fortifications which had threatened them were removed in a week.53