Gallant she-soldiers
Isabel Colegate
The Weaker Vessel:
Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England
Antonia Fraser
(Weidenfeld and Nicolson £12.95) of women's unnatural, insatiable lust,' wrote Robert Burton in 1621, 'what country, what village, does not complain...,, The 17th-century idea of woman was of a creature sexually voracious, intellectually legally more or less non-existent. That extraordinary century, in the course of which the England we know, its institu- tions, its economic system, its religion, its Lscience, its idea of itself, emerged from the half shadow, half dazzling brightness of the clizabethan age and became more or less rkecognisable to a modern eye, held t,,11.r°ughout its course a consistently low 'levy of the female half of the species. rathers Women were the property first of their L of their husbands; as like a•sh not, they were morally as well as 4P, hicallY frail; there was even some doubt ci" to whether they could properly be bescribed as having souls at all. Nor can it ye said that the upheavals of the Civil War Ilea:5, in which women of necessity assumed ellialuiliar roles and in which ideas cir- e414led wonclusions hich, if pursued to their logical t, might have seemed favourable „c) the liberation of women, left them in fact i'"1111 better off than before, except perhaps tuLthe sense that the spread of more seep- attitudes meant that the old and ugly ,..""'o Poor among put t... them were less likely to be u. death as witches. If we remember that life expectancy was considerably less risk than now, and that, apart from the shIc of death from disease which women ahhared with men, they were also likely to be i
the°st continuously pregnant throughout ho..r adult lives, the wonder is not so much litnited were the opportunities of our s,.'Ircestresses as how extraordinarily they "rountecl those limits.
„;stne were driven to desperate measures °n attempt to make known their views otii,,P,s'ulic matters. Jane Hawkins, though a Poor woman (and she but a pedlal ple on poor bed in 1629 surrounded by 200 peo- o– ed 1 her by the vicar of St Ives, and poured 4 Prophecies in rhyme. A woman in
the pulpit was more suspect; if once the female sex began to claim freedom of cons- cience, who knew where it might end? The same suspicion, on the whole, greeted female writers; ideas were dangerous. A woman who took up business, or a rich widow who decided to handle her own af- fairs, was more acceptable. Cromwell's grand-daughter, Bridget Bendish, inherited farms and salt-works on the Norfolk coast and became a notable figure in the neighbourhood. A considerable eater and drinker, she was often to be seen jogging home late at night on her old mare singing psalms, 'the two old souls, the mare and her mistress, one gently trotting and the other loudly singing'.
In the Civil War, not only did such heroines as Lady Bankes at Corfe Castle, or Brilliana Lady Harley at Brampton Bryan, courageously withstand siege in the absence of their husbands; but less socially exalted women were sometimes 'gallant she- soldiers' in male disguise. A husband im- prisoned or exiled often meant that a wife had to deal with complicated legal and ad- ministrative matters. Dame Isabella Twysden spent years wrestling with a par- ticularly complicated case bedevilled by rivalries within the Kent Committee. Lady Verney left her beloved husband in exile in Paris and spent 18 months in London argu- ing with committees before finally the Com- mittee of both Houses at Westminster lifted the sequestration order on her husband's property. She died not long after, at the age of 34, leaving her husband 'almost swallow- ed up' by sorrow. He remained a widower for nearly half a century, faithful to the memory of his 'dear, discreet and most in- 'I beg to differ. I rather liked England. After all, you can shoot people and get away with it.' comparable wife', and much concerned at the thought of there being no marriages in Heaven.
For, of course, despite the low status ac- corded to women, and despite the note of fear and hostility not infrequently heard (a hostility sometimes returned — 'he is not a pleasant man — very few are', wrote the Dowager Countess of Sunderland of her niece's bridegroom in 1680), the phenomenon of Love, theoretically despis- ed and ridiculed, keeps breaking in. It may be the tortured passion of Rochester, writing to his mistress Mrs Barry, whom he had made the foremost actress of her day by his coaching, 'Madam, there is now no minute of my life that does not afford me some new argument how much I love you; the little joy I take in everything wherein you are not concern' d, the pleasing perplex- ity of endless thought, which I fall into, wherever you are brought to my remem- brance; and lastly, the continual disquiet I am in, during your absence, convince me sufficiently that I do you justice in loving you, so as woman was never loved before,' or the domestic bliss of the Verneys, or the grief of Lady Russell who could find no comfort after her husband's death, 'I want him to talk with, to walk with, to eat, and sleep with. All these things are irksome to me. The day unwelcome, and the night so too
The cries of pain are most often those of bereaved parents. Some recent historians have suggested that the deaths of children, being so frequent, were not felt then as they would be now; but this must be to underestimate human resilience. Probably no more than one in three children born survived into adulthood. '1 did but see him, and he disappeared,' wrote the poet Katherine Philips of her son. '1 did but pluck the Rose-bud and it fell.'
No form of birth control seems to have been much used, except for coitus interrup- tus which, pace Germaine Greer, was not very effective. There was thus a constant demand for the services of the midwife, though even here the unwillingness to allow women the benefits of education worked against their interest, for, since they were denied Latin, it came to be increasingly felt that men were better able to understand medical terms, and the doctors began to take over from the midwives. The century saw a falling-off from the Renaissance ideals according to which Queen Elizabeth and the other Tudor princesses had been educated. By the time the 18th century began, separate paths for the education of male and female had become established; not for two centuries did they begin to coin- cide again.
Antonia Fraser's acute but always good- natured response to the crowd of troubled humanity which thrusts itself on her atten- tion makes her book, despite its weight of detailed research, consistently interesting, funny, touching and thought-provoking to read; a fresh angle of vision has given her a fresh view of the private life of the 17th cen- tury, and she conveys it with skill.
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