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

  It was this thought which comforted him during those terrible moments when he was ‘almost swallowed up’ by sorrow.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Sharing in the Commonwealth

  ‘Since we are assured of our creation in the image of God, and of an interest in Christ equal unto men, as also of a proportionate share in the freedom of this Commonwealth …’

  PREAMBLE, The Petition of Women, APRIL 1649

  During the Civil Wars and after, it was axiomatic that women were enjoying a new kind of freedom and strength, just as it was conventional in many quarters to deplore the fact. On the one hand biblical women who had assumed some kind of active role, such as Esther, Deborah and Jael, became popular images of liberty, without such images being attached to any precise notion of rights. On the other hand the idea of a Parliament composed of ladies was generally mocked: in January 1642 some 400 women presented a petition to the House of Lords on the subject of the decay of trade and their general distress:

  ‘Away with these women,’ cried the Duke of Lennox, adding sarcastically, We were best to have a Parliament of women.’1

  This notion also provided a convenient metaphor for satirists to use to attack other targets. The republican politician and pamphleteer Henry Neville wrote two pamphlets in 1647, The Ladies Parliament and The Ladies, a Second Time, Assembled, and another in 1650, The Commonwealth of Ladies, aimed at the louche morals of the Cavalier aristocrats in a series of double entendres in which the inherently absurd notion of such an assembly was taken for granted – as well as woman’s natural venality.2

  The ‘Rattel-head Ladies’ were stated to have assembled at ‘Kattes’ in Covent Garden – the notorious Oxford Kate’s, a hostelry already half-way to being a bawdy-house. The beautiful and dissolute Lady Isabella Thynne resolved ‘That no Roundhead dare to come into any of their Quarters.’ Ladies Montagu and Craven were thanked for favours to Cavaliers beyond the seas. A complaint was officially registered against Sir Henry Blunt, who was said to prefer the favours of common women to those of ‘Ladies of Honour’; other members of the Parliament discussed ‘the common enemy’, their husbands. And in attendance, to help with the ladies’ ‘pressing affairs’, were Doctors Hinton and Chamberlen – who were in fact fashionable obstetricians.

  The Commonwealth of Ladies began: ‘There was a time in England, when men wore the breeches … which brought many grievances and oppressions upon the weaker vessels; for they were constrained to converse only with their homes and closets, and now and then with the Gentleman-usher, or the Footman (when they could catch him) for variety …’ Now they have ‘Voted themselves the Supreme Authority both at home and abroad’. Lubricious details of their use of this new freedom followed.

  Nor was this kind of gibing limited to Cavalier targets. The wives of the Army leaders were regularly and gleefully subjected to the scurrilous charge that they had ‘usurped the general’s baton’ – as it was said of Sir William Waller’s first wife, who was accused of being ‘ambitious of the popular favour’ and ‘predominant’ over her husband. Later Mrs Venables, wife of the commander of the disastrous West Indian expedition, would be arraigned in very similar language as one who had caused her husband to ‘lower his topsail to a petticoat’.3 Not much could be made along these lines of Oliver Cromwell’s wife, a homebody if ever there was one (sneers at the economical housekeeping of ‘Protectress Joan’, as she was nicknamed, came closer to their target). But Fairfax’s spirited wife Anne, daughter of Lord Vere of Tilbury, was regularly known to pamphleteers as ‘Queen Fairfax’ (as Elizabeth Lilburne was known as ‘Queen Besse’). It was suggested that his wife’s unfeminine ambition was causing Sir Thomas Fairfax to aim at the throne. ‘Tell me not of gowns or lace nor such toys!’, Queen Fairfax was supposed to have exclaimed to ‘Madam Cromwell’ in 1647, ‘Tell me of crowns, sceptres, kingdoms, royal robes; and if my Tom but recovers and thrives in his enterprise I shall not say pish to be Queen of England.’ When Fairfax later withdrew from the trial of the King, and in effect from the Parliamentary cause, it was once again conjectured – with more plausibility – that his wife had influenced him.4

  Some of this freedom was genuine enough, even if it had only developed through the breakdown of traditional social organization either during or after the war. A member of the older generation like Clarendon deplored the fact that ‘the young women’ at this date ‘conversed without circumspection or modesty’; that, perhaps, was only to be expected. Yet lack of chaperonage and in many cases lack of parents or at least fathers had led to the breeding of a rootless and thus independent generation. The Eure girls Peg and Mall, daughters of Ralph Verney’s ‘Aunt Eure’ (whose father had been killed in 1644) dealt very saucily with efforts to marry them off in the 1650s. Peg broke off one alliance and announced that she would marry no one with living parents who might order her about! Her forthright words on the subject would surely have made Sir Edmund Verney turn in his grave: ‘Sir, I am to lead my life with them [her possible in-laws] … and know so well my own temper that I fear I shall never be happy with them.’ She added that if dragged to the church, she would say no to her bridegroom at the altar. As for Mall, she turned down her cousin, Sir Ralph’s son and heir Edmund, on the extraordinary grounds that she found him personally repulsive; although ‘Mun’ professed himself madly in love with her.5

  This was the kind of behaviour to which Margaret Duchess of Newcastle drew attention in 1650 when she discussed women ‘affecting a Masculinacy … practising the behaviour (but not the spirits) of men’. Margaret Newcastle did not hesitate to ascribe this new confidence and boldness, or even impudence, as women began ‘to Swagger, to Swear, to Game, to Drink, to Revell, to make Factions’ to the evil effects of the recent conflict. Civil wars were, she wrote, ‘the greatest storms that shipwreck honest Education’, and especially for women, that are ‘Self-admirers’.6

  Unfortunately this new liberty enjoyed by women in the Civil War and Commonwealth period was frequently associated with two phenomena dreaded by sober citizens of whatever politics. The first of these was sexual licence. Certain extreme religious sects were accused of preaching sexual licence although such scandals were often the product more of rumour and prurient imagination than of knowledge. One hundred members of the Family of Love (a sect founded in Münster in the sixteenth century) were said to be living in Bagshot, in a broadsheet of 1641; the feast of Priapus being celebrated among their calendar of saints. The Familists did have their marriages arranged for them by elders, hence rumours spread that they practised sexual communism. And because the Anabaptists practised ‘dipping’ as a form of baptism, and sometimes ‘dipped’ at night, they were accused of public nudity and thus immorality.7

  Not all the accusations were the product of misunderstanding or ill will. Some of the women among those sectaries known as the Ranters were unbalanced and hysterical. James Naylor was not a Ranter – he condemned them – but an extreme form of early Quaker who was at one point tried for blasphemy. Some of the women surrounding him were very wild in their behaviour, such as a couple known merely as Mildred and Judy, or Martha Simmonds, in whom ‘an exceedingly filthy spirit … got up; more filthy than any yet departed …’ None of this was reassuring to those who feared excess in women in the first place.8

  Ironically enough the few instances where free love was publicly advocated benefited in practice the male rather than the female. A Wiltshire rector named Thomas Webbe believed that he had rights to all women: ‘there is no heaven but women, nor no hell save marriage’ was the motto. Abiezar Coppe, a scholar of Oxford University, claimed that property was theft and pride worse than adultery: ‘I can kiss and hug ladies and love my neighbour’s wife as myself without sin.’ One Laurence Clarkson preached that to the pure all things were pure, moving from place to place lying with ‘maids’ until he founded a little group in London called ‘My One Flesh’, a cooperative of willing maids; Clarkson justified himself by the example of Solomon. After returning to his
wife in the country, Clarkson proceeded to travel England with another woman, a Mrs Star, until arrested by the Privy Council in 1650 for preaching the doctrine of free love.9 Yet by seventeenth-century standards such incidents were as much to the discredit of the female sex as to that of the male sex, if not more so.

  The second dreaded phenomenon was that of the ‘Amazonian’ all-female mob. This fear was not totally without reasonable basis: hopeful praise of female modesty and gentleness notwithstanding, such a force had a long history. To go back no further than the beginning of the century, women had led a successful revolt in 1603 at Market Deeping in Lincolnshire, against the draining of Deeping Fen, which threatened their own livelihoods. About 200 women had emerged from Langton and Baston ‘and did cast down a great deal of the captain’s ditch on the north side of the fen, threatening further to burn his houses, drown his servants, and if they had himself, to cut off his head and set it upon a stake’. It was only the intervention of ‘a gentlewoman’ who happened to be passing which dissuaded the women from their violent course, otherwise they would have done the captain, Thomas Lovell, ‘some great mischief’. Thirty-four years later the women of the Fens had lost none of their vigour in defence of the lands on which their cattle grazed, when threatened with enclosure, and were among those who resisted the work of the ‘overseers’ at Holme Fen with scythes and pitchforks. Again in 1641, the crowd which broke into an enclosed fen at Buckden consisted mainly of women aided by boys.10

  In Wiltshire in the 1630s the enclosure of Braydon Forest was resisted with what the Privy Council described as ‘riotous insolencies … committed in the night season by persons unknown, armed with Muskets’; when the principal actors were arrested, women’s names featured as well as men’s. At York in May 1642, women destroyed an enclosure and went to prison for their pains; like the she-soldiers, these particular viragos enjoyed tobacco and ale ‘to make themselves merry when they had done their feats of activity’. Nor did the capital lack its own viragos: after the flight of the five members of Parliament in January 1642, King Charles I unwisely came to the City of London, hoping to secure their arrest at the instigation of the Lord Mayor. He failed (the members were not there) but after his departure certain citizens’ wives fell on to the Lord Mayor, pulled his chain from his neck, and at one point looked like pulling him and the Recorder of the City of London to pieces.11

  A tract, The Women’s Sharpe Revenge, which appeared in 1640, under the pseudonymous authorship of ‘Mary Tattle-well and Joane Hit-him-home, Spinsters’, was probably the work of middle-class women – tradeswomen for example. Here grievances were aired, many about education, which have a familiar sound to modern ears: if women were taught singing and dancing it was ‘the better to please and content their [men’s] licentious appetites’. Daughters in general were ‘set only to Needle, to prick our fingers: or else to the Wheel to spin a fair thread for our undoings’. It was the policy of all parents in any case to subdue their daughters ‘and to make us men’s mere vassals, even unto all posterity’. Marriage was the be-all and end-all of the female existence: ‘What poor woman is ever taught that she should have a higher Design than to get her a Husband?’ At the same time it was claimed that the female character was infinitely preferable to that of the male, being for example far more chaste – the Virgin Mary, not Grandmother Eve, was cited here.12

  When war broke out, however, these outwardly genteel preoccupations were swallowed up in the general disturbance. Those primitive cries of female protest which did make themselves heard tended to be on the basic subjects of food, money – and peace. All this had a raucous sound to frightened ears of both sexes (it was not only the men who shrank back in disgust or terror or both from the image of the Amazon). Certain groups of strong women who had long enjoyed the protection and even the encouragement of society now appeared to assume a more menacing aspect in these troubled times.

  Of these the fishwives of Billingsgate market provided a striking – and strident – example. Women had been connected with the sale of fish in London as far back as medieval times, if not further, since an act of Edward III allowed the ‘continuance’ of itinerant fish-women called ‘billesteres’ (the poor who sold their fish in the street, first crying up their wares).13 These women were not however permitted to keep stalls ‘nor make a stay in the streets’; they were also enjoined to buy their fish from free fishmongers. A similar liberty was granted to a category described as including both ‘Persons and women’ who came from ‘the uplands’ with fish, ‘caught by them or their servants, in the waters of the Thames or other running streams’.

  In the latter years of the seventeenth century, the fishwives’ trade became depressed in the face of the activities of salesmen who cut out these middlewomen and sold Thames fish directly on commission. To try and remedy this, in 1699 the Government ordered that Billingsgate be kept as an open market daily, and ‘not permitting the fisherwomen and others to buy the said fish of the said fishermen, so that the fishermen were obliged to sell their fish to the fishmongers at exorbitant rates’ was explicitly condemned.

  However, in the early part of the century the fishwives flourished. In 1632 Donald Lupton gave a jovial picture of them in his Characters of London:14 ‘these crying, wandering and travelling creatures carry their shops on their heads’, he wrote, their storehouse being Billingsgate or the foot of London Bridge and their habitation Turn-again Lane. As well as all sorts of fish, their tiny shops – ‘some two yards compass’ – would hold ‘herbs or roots, strawberries, apples or plums, cucumbers and such like’ and sometimes even nuts, oranges and lemons.

  Going on their rounds, they would first of all set up ‘a good cry’, hoping to sell the contents of their basket for 5s; ‘they are merriest when all their ware is gone’, he reported. Then they would ‘meet in mirth, singing, dancing, and the middle as a Parenthesis, they use scolding’. If a particular fishwife was missing of an evening in a drinking house, it was suspected that she had had a bad return, or paid off some old debts, or gone bankrupt. If anyone ‘drank out’ their whole stock, the remedy was simple: ‘it’s but pawning a petticoat in Long Lane or themselves in Turnbull Street to set up again’. In short the fishwives were ‘creatures soon up and soon down’.

  Lupton’s reference to the fishwives’ ‘scolding’ in the midst of all their merry singing and dancing was significant. The fishwives’ language was notorious. By the Restoration, the term ‘fishwife’ had become synonymous with one who swore (as ‘Billingsgate’ was already used to denote foul language); in the early eighteenth century ‘a Billingsgate’ was defined as ‘a scolding, impudent slut’, Addison making a whimsical reference to ‘debates which frequently arise among ladies of British fishery’. During the Civil War period, James Strong, author of Joanereidos, stressed this aspect of their charms, saluting:

  … ye warlike bands

  That march towards Billingsgate with eager hands,

  And tongues more loud than bellowing Drums, to scale

  Oyster or Herring ships, when they strike sail …

  Those not sharing Strong’s admiration for women who had ‘stronger grown’ were on the contrary much alarmed by the appearance of the stalwart and loud-mouthed fishwives among the women who petitioned the House of Commons. As Samuel Butler wrote in Hudibras:

  The oyster women had locked their fish up,

  And trudged away to cry ‘No bishop’.15

  The fact that the women’s tongues probably were louder than ‘bellowing Drums’ did not add to the cogency of their case; on the contrary it confirmed that disgust for and fear of a scolding woman mentioned in connection with witches, and associated at a primitive level in society’s consciousness with female activists.

  The great women’s peace petition of August 1643 – Parliament having recently rejected proposals which many had hoped would lead to the end of the war – was variously described.16 The women arrived wearing white silk ribbons in their hats ‘to cry for Peace, which was to the women
a pleasing thing’. Numbers as large as 6,000 were mentioned although one contemporary report spoke more plausibly of 200 or 300 ‘oyster wives’, who with other ‘dirty and tattered sluts’ arrived at the House of Commons and threatened to use violence to those there ‘as were Enemies to Peace’. Another report referred to ‘Whores, Bawds, Oyster-women, Kitchen-stuffe women, Beggar women and the very scum of the scum of the Suburbs, besides abundance of Irish women’ (here were a number of prejudices neatly combined). Other reports spoke more simply of citizens’ wives with their babies at the breast. Ironically enough, this was the peace-seeking mob – ‘divers women killed by the soldiers in this tumult, yet unappeased’ – which the Royalist Sir John Scudamore mentioned approvingly to Brilliana Lady Harley as an implied reproach to her unfeminine conduct in prolonging the siege of Brampton Bryan Castle (see p. 217). In London their violence had appalled both Houses of Parliament.

  First of all the women forced their way into the yard at Westminster, beating the sentinels about and yelling at each dignitary who passed on his way to the House of Lords: ‘We will have Peace presently, and our King’. Other women bewailed the loss of their husbands slain in the war. Sir Simonds D’Ewes, he who had, as we shall see, put an effective end to the voting of the women freeholders in Suffolk, displayed some cunning by declaring himself all for peace. In this manner he was able to pass through the mob easily, even receiving some ‘benedictions’. Others were less wily and thus less fortunate. Violence continued to be shown; ministers and soldiers, especially those with short hair (still at this date considered a mark of a Roundhead), had it pulled. The women’s especial venom was reserved for those MPs such as Pym who had received them favourably over earlier petitions in 1642, and promised them that their distress would be alleviated.