CHAPTER VI

Women in the English Revolution

Since the end of the Middle Ages, freedom from invasion and civil war had made possible the ideal woman of Richard Brathwaite, one who cultivates the graces of life and ignores its harsher side. But the outbreak of the troubles in 1640 was followed by twenty years in which many women, particularly those of royalist families, found themselves charged with unforeseen responsibilities. Charlotte Stanley, Countess of Derby, proved herself a competent commander in war by her successful defence of Lathom House in 1644 against a Parliamentarian army¹. Her little daughters were with her, and in after years were angry when they found that the two sieges of Lathom House were confused in the most popular history of the war. The second siege had ended in a surrender, but by that time the defence was in other hands. Lady Dorchester, one of the girls who had been besieged with their mother, tried to get the error put right in later editions of this history².

Many women, like Lady Verney or Lady Hatton, were tireless in travelling between England and France and in soliciting Parliament on their husbands’ behalf. Mrs. Heylin, wife of Dr. Peter Heylin, subdean of Westminster, earned honourable mention in the contemporary life of her husband. He was able to continue his studies because ‘his good wife, a discreet and active lady, looked both after her Housewifery within doors, and the Husbandry without; thereby freeing him from that care and trouble which otherwise would have hindered his laborious Pen’³. As a result of this happy arrangement, he was also able to aid many royalists less fortunate than himself. But when Cromwell tried the experiment of governing through major-generals, Dr. Heylin was again in trouble, ‘One Captain Allen, formerly a Tinker, and his Wife a poor Tripe-wife, took upon him to reprove the Doctor for maintaining his Wife so highly, like a Lady; to whom the Doctor roundly replied, that he had married a Gentlewoman, and did maintain her according to her quality, and so might he his Tripe-wife: adding withall, that this rule he always observed, For his Wife to go above his Estate, his Children according to his Estate, and himself below his Estate, so that at the years end he could make all even’¹.

Of all the ladies of the seventeenth century none has left a more intimate and appealing picture of herself, her husband, and their world than Ann Harrison, who married Richard Fanshawe in 1644. In her widowhood she wrote for her infant son an artless account of her husband and their life together. She was nineteen and he thirty-five when they married and the marriage lasted ‘but twenty-three years and twenty-nine days’². Anne had been educated ‘with all the advantage that time afforded, both for working all sorts of fine works with my needle, and learning French, singing, [the] lute, the virginals, and dancing; and notwithstanding I learned as well as most did, yet was I wild to that degree, that the hours of my beloved recreation took up too much of my time; for I loved riding in the first place, and running, and all other active pastimes; and in fine I was that which we graver people call a hoyting girl. But to be just to myself, I never did mischief to myself or [other] people, nor one immodest action or word in my life; but skipping and activity was my delight’³. It was fortunate for her that she was brought up so freely. Twenty-one births in twenty-three years were enough to weaken the strongest frame. Only four daughters and one son survived their mother. Her narrative is punctuated by the births and deaths of her children and the record of where their bodies lay.

Both the Harrison and Fanshawe families paid heavily for their loyalty to the crown. But throughout her married life Ann Fanshawe was blessed in the love and trust of her husband. ‘Glory be to God’, she says, ‘we never had but one mind throughout our lives, our souls were wrapped up in each other, our aims and designs were one, our loves one, and our resentments one. We so studied one the other that we knew each other’s mind by our looks; whatever was real happiness, God gave it me in him’¹. Again and again Lady Fanshawe crossed the Channel with only servants to attend her; sometimes to raise money in England; sometimes to carry it to her husband in France. She was proud to say that wherever they were forced to go, France, Ireland, or Spain they left no debts behind them. This was largely due to her management of their affairs, for Sir Edward Hyde, afterwards Lord Clarendon, who was with them in Spain in 1650, wrote home saying that he himself knew not how to get ‘either bread or money’². During her husband’s life her spirit never failed her. The hoyting girl, repressed behind the façade of the graver person, still lived within her. When her husband, captured after the battle of Worcester in 1651, was in prison at Whitehall, she was lodging in Chancery Lane. Every morning she started out at four o’clock ‘with a dark lantern in my hand, all alone and on foot’ to stand ‘beneath his window and softly call him’³. At her first call he put his head out and they talked together. Sometimes she was so wet with rain that the water ran in at her neck and out at her heels. She obtained a medical certificate from her husband’s doctor, took it herself to the council chamber, and secured his liberation upon bail.

After Cromwell’s death Fanshawe was released from his bail through the kind offices of his friend, the Earl of Pembroke, and crossed to France to put himself at the service of King Charles II. When he had received his instructions from the king he wrote to his wife to come to France with their children. Without a pass she could not leave the country and her application for one was refused. The hoyting girl again took control, and ‘leaving my maid at the gate, who was a much finer gentlewoman than myself, with as ill mien and tone as I could express, I told a fellow I found in the office that I desired a pass for Paris to go to my husband. “Woman”, says he, “what is your husband and your name?” “Sir”, said I, with many courtesies, “he is a young merchant, and my name is Ann Harrison”. “Well”, says he, “it will cost you a crown”. Said I “That is a great sum for me; but pray put in a man, my maid and three children”—all which he immediately did, telling me that a Malignant would give him five pounds for such a pass. She describes how she altered the name Harrison into Fanshawe ‘so completely that none could find out the change’. Without delay she set out by barge to Gravesend and thence by coach to Dover. One of the ‘searchers’, on seeing her pass, said that he little thought that they would give a pass ‘to so great a Malignant, especially in such a troublesome time as this’¹.

The restoration of King Charles II seemed to promise a happy future for the Fanshawes, but Sir Richard never played a great part in affairs. Lady Fanshawe blamed Clarendon for this, but there is no evidence that Fanshawe had any aptitude for statecraft. He served as ambassador in Portugal in 1662–3 and afterwards in Spain. In 1666 he was recalled because he had overstepped his authority in making a treaty between Spain and England. Before he could return to England he died at the age of fifty-eight. Broken by grief Lady Fanshawe brought his body home and survived him for fourteen years, but she felt that her life was over with his death. She could never recover from the crown all the money due to Sir Richard despite the king’s fair words. Like her venerable contemporary Lady Anne Clifford, Lady Fanshawe had no sympathy with the loose morals of the Restoration court. She belonged to the hard world of the civil war in which her youth and her best years were passed. There were many women who felt as she did in the ‘sixties and ‘seventies of the seventeenth century. She died in 1680 at the age of fifty-five.

The war and the troubles which followed it had called out qualities in Lady Fanshawe which might have lain dormant in happier times. She would have been well content to emulate Richard Brathwaite’s ideal, enjoying the simple pleasures of a peaceful life. Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, was a far more complex character. She was born in 1617, daughter of Sir Thomas Lucas, of St. John’s near Colchester. Her father died in her infancy and she was brought up by her mother, who gave her much the same sort of education which Lady Fanshawe had received. Margaret Lucas was always, as she said herself, ‘bashful’ and ‘given to contemplation’². At her own request she was allowed in 1643 to enter the service of the queen, though she had such difficulty in overcoming her shyness that she wanted to go home again. She went with the queen to Paris and in 1645 met the Marquis of Newcastle, who fell in love with her and married her in the same year. He was born in 1592, so that there were twenty-five years between their ages. Whatever may have been Newcastle’s defects as a general, his character and loyalty were beyond question and his political sense was far greater than his master’s. When forced into exile the Newcastles settled at Rotterdam, where ‘my Lord pleaseth himself with the management of some few horses, and exercises himself with the use of the sword.… Also he recreates himself with his pen, writing what his wit dictates to him, but I pass my time rather with scribbling than writing, with words than wit’¹.

There is a modern touch in the autobiography of the duchess when she says that she was always more addicted to write with her pen than to work with her needle. She was an unwearied writer of poems, essays on philosophy, orations for diverse occasions, and plays. She wrote an account of her husband’s life and kept a record of his sayings. In practical affairs she seems to have had little success. When she and her husband were reduced to desperate straits for money he sent her to England with his brother, Sir Charles Cavendish, to apply for the subsistence allowed to the wives of royalists from their husband’s estates. Her brother, Lord Lucas, accompanied her to the Goldsmiths’ Hall to state her case, ‘but they told him that by reason I was married since my Lord was made a delinquent I could have nothing, nor should have anything, he being the greatest traitor to the State, which was to be the most loyal subject to his king and country’² She was in England eighteen months and solaced herself by writing ‘a book of poems and a little book called my Philosophical Fancies’³ When King Charles II was restored to his throne he rewarded the Marquis of Newcastle with a dukedom, but his estates were greatly impoverished and he retired to the country to restore them. The duchess had no taste for society: ‘and for revelling, I am of too dull a nature to make one in a merry society’. Nevertheless, she sometimes visited the town. ‘I hold necessary sometimes to appear abroad, besides I do find that several objects do bring new material for my thoughts and fancies to build upon’⁴.

Lady Lucas had taught her daughter to love fine clothes, and she never lost her pleasure in ‘attiring, fine dressing, and fashions, especially such fashions as I did invent myself, not taking that pleasure in such fashions as was invented by others. Also I did dislike that any should follow my fashions, for I always took a delight in a singularity, even in accoutrements of habits’. In the writings of Restoration diarists the duchess appears as an eccentric figure in fantastic dress. Pepys speaks of meeting her ‘going with her coaches and footmen all in velvet; herself (whom I never saw before) … with her velvet cap, her hair about her ears, many black patches because of pimples about her mouth, naked necked, without anything about it, and a black just-au-corps. She seemed to me a very comely woman’. On May Day 1667 Pepys went to the park like many others simply to see her ‘which we could not, she being followed and crowded upon by coaches all the way she went, that nobody could come near her only I could see she was in a large black coach, adorned in silver instead of gold, and so white curtains, and every thing else black and white, herself in her cap’¹. Evelyn records his pleasure ‘with the extraordinary fanciful habit, garb, and discourse of the Duchess’. In a preface to her first book she asks readers ‘Be not too severe in your censures, for first I have no children to employ my care and attendance on. Next, my Lord’s estate being taken away in those times when I writ this book, I had nothing for housewifery or thrifty industry to employ myself in, having no stock to work upon’². Older women even today can sympathize with her slight sense of guilt for neglecting what was popularly supposed to be women’s work in favour of writing.

The duchess soon overcame her original diffidence. A duchess could safely play the eccentric and express her opinions, even on matters of philosophy and science. Her husband praised her works and letters and poems were written in her honour. The Royal Society even held a reception for her in 1667. She became ambitious and desirous of praise. ‘It will satisfy me’, she says, ‘if my writing please the readers, though not the learned; for I had rather be praised in this by the most, although not the best; for all I desire is fame, and fame is nothing but a great noise, and noise lives most in a multitude’. Her success increased her desire for fame. ‘I confess’, she wrote, ‘that my ambition is restless, and not ordinary, because it would have an extraordinary fame; and since all heroic actions, public employments, powerful governments, and eloquent pleadings, are denied our sex in this age, or at least be condemned for want of custom, is the cause I write so much’³.

In 1662 she published a volume of Orations of Divers Persons accommodated to Divers Places⁴ of which one section contained Female Orations supposedly made by women who were deliberating on the possibility of combining to make themselves as ‘free, happy and famous as men’¹. She made one of her speakers declare that ‘the truth is, we live like Bats or Owls, Labour like Beasts, and Dye like Worms’. But after all the company had said their say the conclusion that the duchess came to was set out: ‘Wherefore, women have no reason to complain against Nature, or the God of Nature, for though the gifts are not the same they have given to Men. Yet those Gifts they have given to Women, are much Better; for we Women are much more favour’d by Nature than Men, in giving us such Beauties, Features, Shapes, Graceful Demeanour, and such Insinuating and Inticing Attractives, as Men are forc’d to Admire us, Love us, and be Desirous of us, in so much as rather than not Have and Injoy us, they will deliver to our Disposals, their Power, Persons, and Lives, Inslaving themselves to our Will and Pleasures, also we are their Saints whom they Adore and Worship, and what can we Desire, more, than to be Men’s Tyrants, Destines, and Goddesses?’

This vital creature died in 1673 at the age of fifty-seven, three years before her aged husband. He assuaged his grief by erecting a monument to her memory above the tomb where he also was to lie. ‘Here lyes the loyall Duke of Newcastle, and his Dutches, his second wife, by whom he had noe issue: Her name was Margaret Lucas, yongest sister to the Lord Lucas of Colchester, a noble family; for all the Brothers were Valiant and all the Sisters virtuous. This Dutchess was a wise, wittie, and learned Lady, as her many Bookes do well testifie; and she was a most virtuous and a Loveing and carefull wife, and was with her Lord all the time of his banishment and miseries, and when he came home, never parted with him in his solitary retirements’².

Each of these three royalist ladies, Mrs. Peter Heylin, Lady Fanshawe, and the Duchess of Newcastle, were wives involved in contemporary troubles through their husbands. The career of the royalist Anne Murray shows that the civil war made it possible for a single woman to take an unconventional part in public affairs. She was born in 1622 and in 1656 married Sir James Halket. She lived happily with him for fourteen years, bearing four children, of whom only one survived. She lived as a widow for twenty-three years, dying in 1699. During her widowhood she indulged in devotional meditation and left many volumes of manuscript behind her. The most notable of her writings is an autobiography of which the end and several isolated pages are lost¹. It has nothing of the artless simplicity of Lady Fanshawe or the inconsequent eccentricity of the duchess. Anne Halket was an extremely able and attractive woman, who was unfortunate in her early love affairs and wanted to justify her behaviour in her own eyes. She had no false modesty and knew her own worth. Her education was superintended by her mother, ‘who paid masters for teaching my sister and me to write, speak French, play on the lute and virginalls, and dance, and kept a gentlewoman to teach us all kinds of needleworke’². Anne Murray’s father had been tutor to the future Charles I and her mother was twice entrusted with the office of governess to the Duke of Gloucester and the Princess Elizabeth. Anne was born and brought up in England and spoke and thought of herself as English, but she came of good Scots families on both sides.

Of her childhood and youth Anne Murray says little, save that she was ‘seldom or never absent from divine service at five a’clocke in the summer and six a’clocke in the winter till the usurped power put a restraint to that publicke worship so long owned and continued in the Church of England’³. She enjoyed plays and was the first to suggest that several girls should go together with a manservant to pay for them rather than depend on a gentleman to attend them. In the year 1644 she was, she says, ‘guilty of an act of disobedience, for I gave way to the adrese of a person whom my mother, att the first time that ever hee had occation to be conversantt with me, had absolutely discharged mee ever to allow of’⁴. The young gentleman was the brother of her dearest friend and came of a very good family, for he was the eldest son of Edward, Lord Howard of Escrick. Since it was essential that Mr. Howard should marry a wife with a good portion Anne’s mother would not allow the young people to consider marriage. Such were the merits of Anne herself that Lord Howard would have been glad to see her married to his son, if her mother’s pride would have let her agree to the match. The story of this love affair which had no happy ending is told in full, including a stolen meeting in the cellar, at which Anne kept the letter of her mother’s command never to see her lover again, by blindfolding herself before they met⁵. Mr. Howard was sent off abroad and Anne remained at home, unhappy, for her mother was so angry at her persistent refusal to give up her lover while he was loyal to her, that she never gave her her blessing for fourteen months. Anne was moved to write to a kinsman in Holland to ask him about the conditions of entry to a Protestant nunnery there. Instead of answering her letter he wrote to her mother to persuade her to be kinder to her daughter, and thereafter her mother used her more like a friend than a daughter. In July 1646 Mr. Howard married the Lady Elizabeth Mordaunt, daughter of the Earl of Peterborough, and the way was clear for Anne to interest herself in someone else.

Anne’s story of her mother’s death is lost, but it happened not long after Mr. Howard’s marriage. She then, at the invitation of her brother, Charles, took an apartment in his house for herself and her maid. She was living there when she met Colonel Bampfield, a royalist agent, who ‘came to see me sometimes in company of ladys who had been my mother’s neighbours in St. Martin’s Lane, and sometimes alone, butt when ever he came his discourse was serious, handsome, and tending to impress the advantage of piety, loyalty, and virtue’¹. Anne was evidently taken with the charms of this Irish adventurer, whose apparent loyalty to the crown was to her sufficient guarantee of his virtue. When an acquaintance told her that the colonel had not seen his wife for a year she took it upon herself to reproach him about it. His answer satisfied her for he said that his business on behalf of the king kept him in London, and that his wife lived among friends in the country who were loyal to the Parliament. Anne’s acquaintance with the colonel drew her into a dangerous adventure for which historians have given her too little credit. In the spring of 1648, Colonel Bampfield was charged by Charles I with the duty of smuggling his second son, James Duke of York, to France. Anne Murray caused her own tailor to make a girl’s dress to the duke’s measurement. The tailor said that he had never made a gown to such measurements in his life. The dress was ‘mixed mohaire of a light haire couler and blacke, and the under-petticoate was scarlet’². Anne awaited the duke’s coming in a private house near London Bridge which the Colonel had hired, She was told to ‘shift for herself’ if they did not bring the duke by ten o’clock. They were late, but she waited. At last they came, the duke calling ‘Quickely quickely dress me’. He looked very pretty in his woman’s habit and was sent down the Thames in a barge with a Wood Street cake, which he loved³.

When Lord Clarendon came to write his history of the great rebellion he did not record, and perhaps did not know, the part a woman played in the duke’s escape¹.

No one was taken for the escape, although the authorities knew pretty well who had been involved. The colonel returned secretly to England and summoned Anne to come to see him. Through the last months of Charles I’s life she was collecting information and carrying it to Bampfield in his lodgings. ‘The earnest desire I had to serve the King made me omitt noe opertunity wherein I could bee usefull, and the zeale I had for his Majesty made me nott see what inconveniencys I exposed myselfe to’². Frequent private visits to the colonel led to warmer feelings on both sides. One day she found him ‘lying upon his bed, and asking him if he were nott well, hee told me he was well enough’, but he had learned that morning that his wife was dead³. Soon after this he suggested that now that he was free they might get married, pointing out that it would be a reasonable thing to do since if the king were restored to his throne they would certainly have a joint income of about eight hundred pounds a year. Whenever she was with him he pressed her to agree and at last she did so, but they put off the marriage until they could see how the king’s affairs went. It was as well that they had delayed for soon after the execution of Charles I the colonel told her that he had news that his wife was not dead after all. He had, he said, sent off a servant to find out the truth⁴ Anne’s own affairs were driven from her mind by the return from France of her brother William, whom she nursed through his last illness. She then accompanied Sir Charles Howard and his lady to Naworth Castle, fearing that if she stayed in London she might be put in prison for her share in the duke’s escape. The colonel had intended to escape to the north also, but was taken and imprisoned.

News of the colonel’s imprisonment was followed almost at once by letters from Anne’s brother and sister, denouncing him as ‘the most unworthy person living; that he had abused mee in pretending that his wife was dead, for she was alive’⁵. All this threw Anne into an illness from which she almost died. She was saved by the housekeeper pointing out that if anyone else were equally ill Anne herself would have known how to cure her. With this stimulus she told her maid what remedy to prepare and in due course recovered her health. The egregious colonel escaped from prison to Flanders, but Anne’s brother-in-law was a passenger on the same boat and challenged him to a duel. Unfortunately the colonel wounded his opponent severely in the hand. This news was distressing but Anne was cheered by the fact that her sister’s husband was prepared to fight a duel on her behalf, ‘which hee would never have done (I was assured) if he had believed mee vicious’¹. In Flanders the colonel met the Earl of Dunfermline, who had gone abroad to invite King Charles II to Scotland. He persuaded the earl to invite Anne to Scotland to be presented to the king, and wrote to her himself urging her to come. She left for Edinburgh on 6 June 1650. After the battle of Dunbar on 3 September she went north to Fyvie with Lady Dunfermline. Her skill in the dressing of wounds enabled her to help many of the men fleeing north after the battle; ‘for I had provided myself very well of things necessary for that imploymentt, expecting that they might be usefull’². The king gave her fifty pieces of gold for her services to the wounded.

At Fyvie Castle, where Anne stayed for almost two years, the colonel reappeared to plead that he was a much maligned man. When the English army had reduced all Scotland the household of Fyvie broke up and Anne returned to Edinburgh, hoping to straighten out her financial affairs. Her lodgings in Edinburgh became a centre for royalist plotters. Early in her stay there she met Sir James Halket, a widower, who seems from her account to have fallen in love at first sight. He made excuses to visit her frequently, so that she had to tell him about the colonel. Instead of withdrawing his attentions Sir James was as attentive as ever and even did all he could to help his rival. In March 1653 she learned that the colonel’s wife was indeed alive and had gone up to London to prove her existence. Unfortunately a leaf of the autobiography is lost on which her reaction to this news was recorded. Sir James Halket urged her to marry him and when she refused he persuaded her to undertake the charge of his two daughters. She set up house with them in Edinburgh and after a time agreed to marry Sir James as soon as she had settled her affairs. For that reason she went to London, where for the last time she saw the colonel. He came to her lodgings and asked her if she were Sir James Halket’s wife, because if she were he would trouble her no more. ‘I am’, she said out loud, adding to herself ‘not’. The colonel ‘immediately rose up and said “I wish you and him much happiness together” and, taking his leave, from that time to this I never saw him or heard from him’³. After she had raised a little money there was nothing to delay her marriage, which took place on I March 1656. She returned to Scotland with her husband, but her autobiography breaks off before they had lived long together.

Someone who signed his dedication S. C. published an account of Lady Halket within two years of her death in 1699¹. The author says that he has based his work on Lady Halket’s own diary, even using her own words. Although he went in great detail into her financial affairs, he passed lightly over her relations with the colonel and her part in the Duke of York’s escape. These passages in the life of a spirited young woman may well have seemed remote from the elderly lady filling a long widowhood with works of piety. Sir James had died in 1670, and Lady Halket always rejoiced that while he was alive her creditors had left her in peace. Like many other royalists, she carried a burden of debt which could only be reduced by further borrowing. In 1683 she even thought of giving up her home in Scotland and returning to England, but instead, she opened her house to children of noble families whose mothers had died. At one time, she was entrusted with ‘the Heirs and Children of eight several Families; all of them Motherless, save one, who was Fatherless’². One of her religious works is a guide to a virtuous life called Instructions for Youth ‘for the use of those young Noblemen and Gentlemen, whose Education was committed to her care’. It is to the credit of James II that when he became king he gave her a pension of £100 a year for life.

Lady Halket was evidently a woman of charm with whom it was easy to fall in love. She was a good friend, afraid of nothing in the king’s service. She faced a hostile band of soldiers at Fyvie Castle, though not until she was quite sure that Lady Dunfermline would not regard her action as presumptuous³. They were immediately reduced to politeness by her dignity. She was concerned lest the world should misjudge her, for she was conscious that from 1644 until her marriage she had often behaved unconventionally. She might never have troubled to write about her life if it had been the placid married existence of a peaceful age. As it is she has left a record of two lives to which there is no parallel even among all the copious memorials of the seventeenth century.

Like King James II, his brother King Charles had once escaped from England with a woman’s help. Unfortunately Jane Lane, the heroine of King Charles’s flight after the battle of Worcester, never wrote her autobiography. She was the daughter of Thomas Lane, of Bentley near Walsall, and at the time of the battle was living at Bentley with her brother, Colonel John Lane. She had a sister married to a Mr. Norton, who lived about three miles from Bristol, which gave her ‘a fair pretence’ of going there¹. She obtained a pass for herself, a manservant and her cousin, Henry Lascelles. The king was dressed in a servant’s clothes and took the name of William Jackson, one of her brother’s men. Jane rode pillion behind him. Too many people knew Charles II’s strong features for the journey to be anything but extremely hazardous. After various adventures, the party reached Trent, near Sherborne, where the king stayed at Frank Windham’s house while his friends looked for a boat for France. Jane Lane went home and the king rode to Lyme Regis before Mrs. Judith Coningsby, a cousin of Windham’s². After the king had gone Jane Lane and her brother escaped to France in disguise, knowing that their story would become known. Charles II welcomed her there as his ‘life’. After the Restoration she married a Warwickshire country gentleman and enjoyed a life pension from the crown. Nothing intimate is recorded of her later years, but a hint that she remained a woman of spirit to the end is given by her justification for living up to her income; her hands, she said, should be her executors³.

None of the picturesque royalist heroines was so widely known and praised in the nineteenth century as Mrs. Lucy Hutchinson, the Puritan wife of Colonel Hutchinson. She was born in 1620, daughter of Sir Allen Apsley, Lieutenant of the Tower of London. Her mother had lived for some time in Jersey, where she learned French from a minister who had fled from religious persecution in France. From him, too, she learned ‘their Geneva discipline’, which she imparted to her daughter⁴. Lady Apsley’s dream when she was awaiting the birth of Lucy that a star came down from heaven to her hand, may have been the reason for the extraordinary care taken over the child’s education. Her father felt that the dream signified that the infant about to be born would be of ‘some extraordinary eminency’. She was carefully instructed by many tutors and was even taught Latin by her father’s chaplain, ‘a pitiful dull fellow’, as she ungratefully describes him. Despite his dullness she outstripped her brothers who were at school¹. Her writings show that she had acquired a knowledge of Greek and Hebrew and read much classical and theological literature. Like the Duchess of Newcastle, Mrs. Hutchinson never loved her needle. ‘My genius’, she says, ‘was quite averse from all but my book’. In her youth, although religious, she thought it no sin to learn or hear witty songs and amorous sonnets or poems’. She even translated the six books of Lucretius into English verse. She gave her translation to the Earl of Anglesea at his own request in 1675, asking him to ‘conceal it as a shame’². She became touched with anabaptist doctrines and in 1647 would not have one of her children baptized. Many of her own kinsfolk were royalists, but she became an ardent republican, as hostile before the end to Cromwell as she had been to Charles I.

Like Lady Fanshawe, Mrs. Hutchinson wrote her memoirs in order that her children might be instructed in their father’s virtues. Her own qualities of mind, carefully tended by her education and reading, enabled her to write a book which has become a classic. Her Life of John Hutchinson of Owthorpe, in the county of Nottingham, Esquire, was written between 1664, when her husband died, and 1671. He was not a great man, nor did he play a great part in events. He was a Nottinghamshire squire of secondary rank who held Nottingham Castle and town for the Parliament and he was one of those who signed the king’s death-warrant. The book has no particular value for the general history of the time, but it preserves an accurate story of the war in Nottinghamshire. Its unique value lies in its picture of a Puritan family in the middle seventeenth century. There is real charm in the story of Mr. Hutchinson’s courtship and early married life. Very naturally Mrs. Hutchinson left out anything which might tend to detract from her husband’s character, and sometimes suggests he did kind actions when he certainly did not. The fact that Hutchinson had not held with Cromwell’s ‘tyranny’ helped him to escape the fate of other regicides on the restoration of Charles II. The royalist friends and kinsfolk on both sides of the family united to testify that he had worked in the interest of Charles II. This kindly misrepresentation, supported by a letter to Parliament humbly petitioning for his life, secured him for a time. Mrs. Hutchinson says that she herself wrote the letter, signed it with her husband’s name and sent it to the Speaker. Hutchinson’s old fellow-soldiers felt that he had betrayed them and he himself was conscious of denying the cause for which he had fought. It may have been a relief when in October 1663 he was arrested on suspicion of treason. He died in prison in 1664.

Even those who have least sympathy with the stern religious creed professed by Mrs. Hutchinson cannot but admire the skill and power of her description of her husband and the relationship between them. She must have been by far the stronger character, but she had no desire to rise above the accepted woman’s place. ‘Never man’, she says, ‘had a greater passion for a woman, nor a more honourable esteem of a wife; yet he was not uxorious, nor remitted not that just rule which it was her honour to obey, but managed the reins of government with such prudence and affection that she who would not delight in such an honourable and advantageable subjection, must have wanted a reasonable soul. He governed by persuasion which he never employed but to things honourable and profitable for herself. … So liberal was he to her and of so generous a temper, that he hated the mention of several purses; his estate being so much at her disposal, that he would never receive an account of anything she expended’¹. In her last writings she expressed her acceptance of the Apostle’s attitude to women: ‘but as our sex, through ignorance and weakness of judgment, which in the most knowing women is inferior to the masculine understanding of men, are apt to entertain fancies and be pertinacious in them, so we ought to watch over ourselves in such a day as this, and embrace nothing rashly’². The writings of the half-educated royalist ladies rouse in the reader’s mind feelings of real affection for their authors. Respectful admiration is the warmest emotion it is possible to have for one so sure of herself and her rightness as the learned Mrs. Hutchinson.

Nevertheless, there is a quality in Mrs. Hutchinson’s writing, derived from thought and wide reading, which is absent from the work of the royalist ladies. The Puritan zeal for learning which had flourished under Queen Elizabeth was by no means dead a hundred years later. In the sixteenth century it had encouraged noble families to educate their daughters; in the seventeenth century it can be found exercising its beneficent influence among the growing professional and merchant classes. Schools were being set up for their children, particularly in the neighbourhood of London. It was to Mrs. Salmon’s school at Hackney that Katherine Fowler—known to her friends and admirers as ‘the matchless Orinda’—was sent at the age of eight. She was the daughter of a London merchant of Presbyterian leanings and was born in 1631. She is said to have read the Bible through ‘before she was full four years old’. She could ‘take sermons verbatim, when she was but ten years old’¹. This remarkable capacity seems to have been due as much to her early religious zeal as to the skill of her teachers.

The ‘matchless Orinda’ had left the Presbyterians for the Church of England and become a royalist long before she died. The change probably resulted from her mother’s second marriage to Hector Philips, of Porteynon, in Glamorgan, and her own marriage at the age of sixteen to her stepfather’s eldest son, James Philips, of the Priory, Cardigan. Katherine Philips was not a scholar, but a poet whose verses, handed about in manuscript, or prefixed to the books of others, gave her a considerable reputation. She was one of a group of friends who gave each other fanciful, pseudo-classical names. She was Orinda and her husband Antenor. Jeremy Taylor, whom she must have met when he was in retirement at Golden Grove in the Towy valley, was Palaemon and Sir Edward Dering was Silvander. Katherine Philips’s reputation as a poet did not long outlive her, but she deserves to be remembered as the lady, ‘eminent in friendships’, to whom Jeremy Taylor addressed A Discourse of the nature, offices and measures of friendship, with Rules conducting it. In a Letter to Mrs. K. P.² He described marriage as ‘the Queen of friendships, in which there is a communication of all that can be communicated by friendship’³. ‘You may see’, he wrote, ‘how much I differ from the morosity of those Cynicks who would not admit your sex into the communities of a noble friendship. I believe some Wives have been the best friends in the world’⁴. Katherine Philips replied in a poem addressed ‘To the noble Palæmon, on his Incomparable Discourse on Friendship’⁵. Her poems ‘To my dearest Antenor, on his Parting’, ‘To Antenor’, and ‘To my Antenor’ show that her marriage was happy¹. She died of smallpox in London in 1664 at the age of thirty-one.

The exaggerated reputation of Katherine Philips implies that not many ladies, whether Puritan or royalist, could compete with her. It is probable that some girls were educated beyond their capacities, and that the scepticism which their elders sometimes expressed may have been justified. The royalist Dr. Denton, a fashionable doctor who remained in his London practice all through the Commonwealth, had educational ambitions for his daughter. She was a god-daughter of Sir Ralf Verney, of Claydon, and in July 1652 wrote to him in France that although she knew that he could ‘outreach’ her in French she hoped that she would ‘outreach’ him in ‘ebri, grek, and laten’². Her father added an apologetic postscript, saying that he expected Sir Ralf, who could see that the letter was her own work, to be as pleased with it as if ‘Nat Hobart or Selden’ had written it for her. Sir Ralf answered affectionately but firmly, pointing out that ‘a Bible (with the common prayer) and a good plaine cattichisme in your Mother tongue well read and practised, is well worth all the rest and much more sutable to your sex; I know your Father thinks this false doctrine, but bee confident your husband will bee of my oppinion’. On the other hand he told her that she could not know French too well and promised to send her some French books—plays, novels, and cookery books—to start her library. To her father he wrote urging him not to let Anne learn either Latin or shorthand; ‘the difficulty of the first may keep her from that Vice, for soe I must esteem it in a woeman’. The danger of shorthand was that she might want to take down sermons in it and St. Paul would certainly have disliked women writing in church as much as he disliked them speaking there. His own daughter, Peg, Sir Ralf described as ‘very backward’, but ‘I doubt not that she will be scholar enough for a woman’³. Sir Ralf Verney was in full agreement on this subject with Richard Brathwaite.

If the women of position in the middle years of the century were as a rule not highly educated, they could nevertheless write good love-letters. Seventy-seven letters written by Dorothy Osborne to her future husband, Sir William Temple, have passed into the body of seventeenth-century literature¹. The lovers first met in 1648 when Dorothy was twenty-one and Temple was twenty. It was not until December 1654 that they were married. Dorothy’s letters reveal something of the slow, quiet country life that most royalist ladies lived under the Commonwealth. Other suitors courted her with the good will of her family, and Temple’s father wanted him to look elsewhere for a wife. The one letter of Temple’s which survives reveals him a passionate and masterful lover². Dorothy’s letters show her gradually coming to trust him with all her thoughts. The same quality is present in an isolated letter of the seventeen-year-old Mary Whichcote to her future husband, Dr. John Worthington, Master of Jesus College, Cambridge. ‘I cannot’, she writes, ‘but acknowledge the moving of my heart to you, that of all the men that ever I saw, if I were to chuse of ten thousand, my heart would not close with any as with yourself’³. The touch of austerity in the phrasing is appropriate in a letter from a girl who, like Mary Whichcote, had lived among the most intelligent scholars of her time.

Until the victory of the Parliamentary forces in the civil war the Puritans had been in opposition to the Church and Government throughout the century. Their insecurity as the opponents of the established order in the Church tended to make them aggressive and argumentative. Their womenfolk shared these qualities. Although many of them had much the same sort of education as the daughters of the Church of England they tended to take a more vigorous part in theological argument. Some of them had been educated in Holland, like Lady Fairfax and Brilliana, Lady Harley. According to Clarendon it was this breeding in Holland which had deprived Lady Fairfax of ‘that reverence for the Church of England, which she ought to have had’ and made her concur in her husband’s joining the rebels. Of this she repented when King Charles was brought to trial, and she found sufficient courage to protest in court. Lord Fairfax, although commander-in-chief of the Parliamentary army, was not present, and when his name was called ‘there was a voice heard that said, that he had more wit than to be there; which put the court into some disorder, and somebody asking who it was, there was no answer but a little murmuring. But presently, when the impeachment was read, and that expression used, of “all the good people of England”, the same voice in a louder tone answered, “No, nor the hundredth part of them!” … it was quickly discerned that it was the general’s wife, the Lady Fairfax, who had uttered both those sharp sayings; who was presently persuaded or forced to leave her place, to prevent any new disorder’¹.

Her cousin, Lady Harley, was the daughter of Sir Edward Conway, commander of the fortress of the Brill in Holland. From her birth there (in 1600) she was given the name of Brilliana. In 1623 she became the third wife of Sir Robert Harley, of Brampton Bryan Castle, Herefordshire, an ardent Puritan. The incumbent of Brampton Bryan from 1612 to 1633 was Thomas Pierson, of Emmanuel College, ‘a profound scholar and theologian’². He was succeeded by Stanley Gower, another man of similar quality. Brampton Bryan in the civil war was an island of Puritanism in a county mainly royalist. A large number of the letters written by Brilliana Harley have survived. Most of the earlier ones, between 1625 and 1633, were sent to her husband, and most of the rest to her son, Edward, who in October 1638 went up to Oxford as an undergraduate. Her letters show that she kept well in touch with affairs through news letters and letters from kinsfolk in other shires³. She often spoke of books she had read or wished to read and on one occasion suggested that Ned should send her the French version since she preferred to read that language. Parcels of foodstuff were sent constantly from home to Ned at Oxford, a ‘loyn of veale’, apples, a turkey pie sometimes made from two turkeys, a kid pie with a different flavouring in each half of it, bacon, violet cakes, eight bottles of cider. Always his mother sent her love or remembrances to his ‘worthy tutor’. The Puritan sympathies of the Harleys at Brampton Bryan brought upon them the suspicion of the royalists, who on 25 July 1643 laid siege to the castle. Both her husband and son were away, but Lady Harley had laid in powder and shot and muskets. The siege lasted six weeks. On 25 August Lady Harley wrote to tell her son ‘the gentillmen of this county have effected their desires in bringing an army against me.… The Lord in mercy preserve me that I fall not into their hands’⁴. Her last letter, dated 9 October 1643, told Ned that she had ‘taken a great cold’. She died of it before the end of the month.

Lady Harley came of an aristocratic family, but the Puritan women of the professional classes shared the same qualities of zeal and courage. Oliver Heywood, one of the outstanding Nonconformist ministers ejected from their livings in 1662, described his own mother as ‘very kind to her poor neighbours’, and one who ‘paid for the schooling of many poor children’. She was ‘a great lover of peace; when people quarrelled she used to fall upon them with plain, downright, homely rhetoric and scripture grounds, that few had power to deny her request’. She was ‘the centre of news for knowing the time of weekday sermons; kept conferences and private fasts’. She was ‘an irreconcilable enemy’ to bishops’ government and rejoiced at their downfall during the Commonwealth. She ‘showed her forwardness in demolishing relics of superstition’, which must mean that she encouraged the breaking of stained glass windows and other medieval works of scriptural art. Nevertheless, ‘she did recount and cause to be written fair over’, a great number of the ‘national mercies and admirable deliverances, to excite a present thankfulness and to be a memorial to succeeding ages’. When the chapels in the neighbourhood were vacant, she used every means in her power to procure the settlement of pious ministers in them. ‘The very last day she spent at Bolton, and the very last work she did in Lancashire, was to exert herself to bring such a minister to the chapel at Ainsworth, having succeeded in getting together a meeting of ministers and some of the people to consult about it, which was the only means to accomplish the end’¹.

Mrs. Heywood is here seen through the mind of her son. It is possible to come into closer touch with one of the women who shared the dreams of the more advanced enthusiasts of the Commonwealth. Two tracts written by ‘M. Cary a servant of Jesus Christ’ were published together in 1651². The first is entitled The Little Hornes Doom and Downfall and the second A New and more exact Mappe or Description of New Jerusalems Glory. At the end of her book the author added three deplorable poems: one addressed

‘Unto the Court of Parliament, who are

Supreme, in England, Ireland, and elsewhere’;

the second addressed

‘Unto the Armies Faithful Leaders, and

Unto the Faithful under their command’;

the third addressed

‘Unto those people of the Lord that do

In Babylon abide unto their wo’¹.

In her preface the author explained that since in her former book², published in April 1648, she had subscribed her name Cary, she has thought it best to put the same name upon her title-page although she is now known as Mary Rande.

She is not remembered under either name today but in her own time famous people were interested in her work³. She was a believer in the Fifth Monarchy, basing her beliefs on her interpretation of Scriptural prophesies. She held that the four beasts seen by the prophet Daniel were the four great monarchies, which in turn had dominated the world, the Babylonian, the Persian, the Grecian, and ‘the fourth, which was the most dreadfull, and terrible, and the last of the foure, was the Roman which succeeded the Grecian’⁴. The Roman monarchy was the worst because the Pope had succeeded to the power of the Emperor and controlled the kings of Europe, the ten horns, of which the prophet spoke. The little horn, whose doom and downfall had been foretold, was Charles I, upon whom Parliament had executed ‘the judgement written’⁵. The Fifth Monarchy, which would be the rule of Christ and the saints, was about to come upon the world. By Mary Cary’s calculations Christ had begun to enter into His kingdom in 1645. The Jews would be converted in 1656. The millennium, or the Fifth Monarchy, would come in 1701, ‘or neer this year’⁶.

Mary Cary’s book was prefaced by letters from Hugh Peters, Henry Jessey, and Christopher Feake. Hugh Peters, best remembered today as an uncompromising republican who suffered death as a regicide in 1660, was a leader among the religious enthusiasts whose undisciplined passion both inspired the Cromwellian armies and embarrassed their commanders. His preface was obviously regarded as of particular value, for it is printed in the largest and heaviest type that was available. But it was ‘respect to the author’ rather than concurrence in her views which moved him to write his preface, and the militant Puritan’s ideal of the place of a woman in religion gives it exceptional interest. What he found himself able to say about the book is arranged under three headings: ‘First, that she hath taught her sexe that there are more ways than one to avoid idleness (the devils cushion) on which so many sit and sleep their last. They that will not use the Distaff, may improve a Pen.

‘Secondly, A holy, modest and painfull spirit, runs through her endeavours, which I desire not to be slighted by any, nor thrown by: for good wine may be found in this Cluster: in this dress you shall see neither naked Brests, black Patches, nor long Trains; but an heart breathing after the coming of Christ, and the comfort of Saints.

‘Thirdly, Scriptures cleerly opened, and properly applied; yea so well, that thou might easily think she plow’d with anothers Heifer, were not the contrary well known.…

‘Two of this sexe I have met with, very famous for more than their mother-tongue, and for what we call Learning, yet living. The one an unhappie branch of that Tree which is cut off, and pulling up by the roots; of whom I could say much, to whom I owe much. The other of deserved note in Utrecht, the glory of her sexe in Holland¹. But this my Country-woman speaks the best language: yea. I will adde: Other daughters have done vertuously, but thou surmountest them, Prov. 31. 29…’

The Judgement of H. Jessey follows the cool praise of Hugh Peters and is printed in rather smaller type. Jessey was a Baptist divine who raised £300 in 1657 and sent it to the distressed Jews in Jerusalem with his good wishes for their conversion. After 1660 he was for a time in custody; he was released and died in 1663. Although his interpretation of the Scriptures might differ in detail from Mary Cary’s he was in essential agreement with her views. He seems to have felt some resentment that she had put them in print before his own work had appeared. He says that ‘before 1650’ he had ‘made a collection from the Book of the Revelation, and from Daniel, and other Scriptures’ about ‘these Great Changes in the World now at hand; of the pouring out of four Vials; and of the slaying and rising of the Witnesses, and of the conversion of the Jews, probably before 1658, and of the Scriptures order in these proceedings, before the conversion of the Jews, and thence until the thousand yeers of Christs reign begin’. The commendation by Christopher Feake is printed in the type used for the rest of the book. He himself was a believer in the Fifth Monarchy and in 1650 had preached a sermon about it before the Lord Mayor of London, Sir Thomas Foote. The Fifth Monarchy men disliked the Protectorate and tried to persuade the army to overthrow it. Feake was imprisoned in 1654 for his attacks on Cromwell. That Mary Cary was not the only woman who interested herself in explaining scriptural prophecies is shown by Feake’s reference to the offence felt by many that ‘a company of illiterate men and silly women should pretend to any skill in dark prophecies and to a foresight of future events’.

Mary Cary dedicated her book to ‘The Vertuous, Heroicall, and Honourable Ladies, The Lady Elizabeth Cromwel, The Lady Bridget Ireton, and The Lady Margaret Role’. ‘I have chosen’, she wrote, ‘(being of your own sex) to dedicate these Treatises to your Ladiships, (whom I honour because God hath honoured) and under your favourable aspects to publish them to the world’. She observed ‘how that among the many pious, precious, prudent, and sage Matrons, and holy women, with which this Commonwealth is adorned; as with so many precious jewels, and choice gemmes (which God having here and there placed in it doe set out the glory and lustre of the Nation) God hath selected and chosen out your Ladiships, and placed you in some of the highest places of honour’. The Lady Elizabeth Cromwell was the general’s wife, who appears little in history. Her acceptance of this dedication is one of the few pieces of evidence which may indicate her personal sympathies. Mrs. Hutchinson called Cromwell’s daughters ‘insolent fools’, but she excepted Bridget Ireton from her condemnation¹. When Mary Cary was writing, Henry Ireton, Bridget’s husband, was in command in Ireland. He died, worn out by over-work before the year was over. Of the Lady Margaret Role little is known, but she was the daughter of Sir Thomas Foote, Lord Mayor of London, before whom Feake had preached in the previous year, and the wife of Henry Rolle, Chief Justice of the Upper Bench.

Mary Cary’s writing is noteworthy because she looked forward to women’s future achievements in the reign of the saints. She commented on the prophecy of Joel ii. 28, ‘And it shall come to pass, that I shall pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesie: your old men shall dream dreams and your young men shall see visions: and also upon the servants, and upon the handmaids, in those days, will I pour out my spirit’. She regarded this as a prophecy for the present time, but one that was not yet fulfilled, for few of the saints have the spirit of prophecy: ‘witness the complaints of many Country towns and Parishes, which they make for want of faithful able men to preach the Gospel among them. And if there be very few men that are thus furnished with the gift of the Spirit; how few are the women! Not but that there are many godly women, many who have indeed received the Spirit: but in how small a measure is it? how weak are they? and how unable to prophesie? for it is that that I am speaking of, which this text says they shall do; which yet we see not fulfilled. Indeed, they have tasted of the sweetness of the Spirit; and having tasted, are longing for more, and are ready to receive from those few that are in any manner furnished with the gifts of the Spirit for prophesying; but they are generally very unable to communicate to others, though they would do it many times in their own families, among their children and servants: and when they would be communicating to others into whose company they come, though sometimes some sprinklings come from them, yet at other times they finde themselves dry and barren. But the time is coming when this promise shall be fulfilled, and the Saints shall be abundantly filled with the spirit; and not only men, but women shall prophesie; not only aged men, but young men; not only superiours, but inferiours; not only those that have University learning, but those that have it not; even servants and handmaids’¹. The Quaker discipline, which gave women equality with men, was a natural product of an age when a woman could write like this².

The movement began when in 1644 George Fox left his home in Leicestershire, although it was not until 1646 that he realized that learning alone was not enough to make a man a minister of God. He took the logical step of preaching in 1647 and began his travels, which lasted to the end of his life. During the Commonwealth period religious meetings of the various Protestant sects could be freely held, and humble folk, as well women as men, rejoiced to take part in them. But for a stranger to enter a church in service time and testify to the people was a disturbance of ordered services. In 1649 George Fox was imprisoned for brawling in church, the first of many such imprisonments. He urged men and women to trust in the knowledge of God within them, the ‘inner light’, to abandon forms and ceremonies, and to speak the truth without swearing to it¹. In such a faith there could be no distinction between men and women, for both could testify to the light within them. The first name of this new society was ‘The Children of Light’, but this soon gave way to ‘The Friends of Truth’ or ‘Truth’s Friends’, and so ‘Friends’ by which the community is known today. The name ‘Quakers’ was first given them by a member of the Derby bench of Justices in 1650, after Fox had enjoined him and his companions to ‘tremble at the name of the Lord’².

The new preaching attracted followers from all the Protestant sects, and in early years its future was in danger from visionaries and enthusiasts. The ranting preaching of early converts attracted others, but needed curbing and repressing. In establishing a form of Quaker government George Fox was greatly helped by an able woman, Margaret Fell, who later became his wife. She was born in 1614 and married at the age of eighteen to Thomas Fell of Swarthmore Hall, near Ulverston, Lancashire. Her husband appears in George Fox’s autobiography as Judge Fell. In the winter of 1652 George Fox was received at Swarthmore, while the judge was holding the Assizes, and Margaret Fell and her household were converted³. Fell himself was never converted, but helped and protected the Quakers until his death in 1658⁴. Even during Judge Fell’s life Swarthmore Hall had become the Quaker headquarters and Margaret Fell was already writing letters of exhortation and encouragement to Friends both in England and abroad⁵. By the Restoration the Quakers had become an orderly and organized religious body. Fox introduced the discipline of silence into meetings, which reduced the ranting element to submission. A system of regular meetings, visitations by travelling preachers, the registration of births, deaths, and marriages had given coherence to the society before the full burden of persecution fell upon it after 1662.

Margaret Fell in her remote home at Swarthmore Hall was the heart of the movement. Her ‘general epistles to friends’ are written with authority¹. To her, the travelling preachers reported, and to Swarthmore Hall George Fox returned between journeys or imprisonments. It was Margaret Fell who wrote and signed the appeal to Charles II on behalf of ‘the People of God called Quakers’ which she delivered to him on 22 June 1660, within a month of his return to England². In the name of all Quakers the appeal was witnessed by the thirteen chief members of the community. In the eleven years between the death of her first husband and her marriage to George Fox in 1669, Margaret Fell was incessantly occupied in the business of the society, visiting meetings in many parts of England, holding meetings at Swarthmore, lying in prison at Lancaster, and, in the months immediately before her marriage, visiting all prisons in which Quakers were held. Persecution tightened and strengthened the Quaker organization. It eliminated weaklings and toughened the strong. The earliest surviving records of Quaker meetings reveal the close-knit organization of a religious society which was already strong enough to insist on a stricter control of marriage than the negative banns of the Church of England. Quakers were not expected to marry outside the society and enquiries were always made as to the suitability of the contracting parties³.

From the account book kept by Sarah Fell, daughter of Margaret Fell, between 1673 and 1678, a sidelight is thrown both on the Society of Friends and the home life of their founder. The accounts are complicated, for although the Swarthmore estate was still in Margaret Fell’s possession each of her three daughters living at home had an individual income. They engaged in various business ventures which are reflected in the accounts, iron smelting, trading by boat with west coast ports as distant as Cornwall⁴. Sarah Fell indicated on whose account the various items of expenditure ought to go⁵. George Fox appears in the account book as ‘father’. On 7 December 1677 ‘father gave Tho: Benson, bayliffe of ye Liberties, for his civillity to mee being A Prisoner, 2s. 6d’⁶. Payments for letters to father frequently occur. On 17 June 1676 ‘glue and tobacco pipes for father’ cost 3 pence¹. On 25 January 1677 the carrier was paid 2 pence for bringing some writing paper for father from Lancaster². On II February 1678 a quarter of a pound of tobacco was bought for 2½d. ‘to wash father’s horse with, he being troubled with an Itch’³. On 22 March 1677 ‘a pair of Stockens for father’ cost 1 shilling and 4 pence⁴. Women’s meetings were established by this time and Sarah Fell herself was closely concerned with the organization of those in the neighbourhood of Swarthmore. On 10 May 1674 she records ‘Received at weomens Meettinge here being a Collection for ye weomens Stocke 14s. 2d.’ ‘Received of 5 weomen of our Meeting that were not at weomens Meettinge for said collection 2s. 2d.’⁵ On 15 July 1674 she records the expenditure of 5s. 6d. ‘by Mother and my selfe when wee went to ye weomens Meettinge at Hugh Tickells’⁶.

The Society of Friends had established a system of poor relief long before their founder’s death. Money collected by the meetings became a stock from which sums could be dispensed in charity to poor Friends. On 6 February 1677 Jane Cowell was entrusted with 3 shillings ‘to bee given to Jane Colton, who is sicke, and at want for supply’⁷. On 4 December 1677 4 shillings of the women’s meeting’s stock was paid by their order to ‘Isabell Strickland of Cartmell meetting, being Sickly’⁸. On 7 January 1674 Sarah noted ‘paid of ye weomens Meettinge stocke to ffriends of the Hawxheade Meettinge yt gave it to a woman for lookeinge to Tomasin Sawrey when she was sicke, 3s.’, and again, ‘paid more of said money, to friends of the Cartmell Meettinge, for some in Necessity at their Meettinge, 2s’⁹. On 8 May 1677 the 2 shillings which Anne Birkett was behind in her house rent were found from the women’s meeting stock¹⁰. As much as 10 shillings was contributed on 6 June 1676 towards buying a cow for Ellin Braithwait of the Cartmell meeting¹¹. The women’s meeting stock provided 2 shillings on 1 September 1674 towards the ‘Necessity of Christofer Harrison of Cartmell Meettinge, hee being poore’¹². It is possible that the Swarthmore Friends had organized their stock earlier than Friends in other parts. Their women’s meeting was in full working some years before the Friends in north-west Lincolnshire had succeeded in establishing one. Although the necessity of setting up a women’s meeting was discussed there in 1675 and again in 1689 the women’s monthly meeting was not set up until 1690¹. Margaret Fell and her daughters from time to time can be seen contributing small sums to the stock of meetings in other parts².

In remembering the achievements of Margaret Fell there is a danger of forgetting that she alone could have secured nothing. George Fox was not only the founder of the society, but its inspirer and leader until he died in 1691. Nor was Margaret Fell the only woman in the Quaker ministry in the early history of the society. Two women, Elizabeth Hooton and Elizabeth Miers, were members of the mission to Barbados in 1671, and Elizabeth Hooton, ‘who had travelled much in the truth’s service, and suffered much for it’, died in Jamaica at a great age³. Most of the early converts were humble folk. Their women, though capable of bearing testimony and preaching, had little education. Margaret Fell was not only an able, but a cultivated woman, who could express herself on paper and was not afraid of print. She wrote easily, but her sentences are long and involved. She occasionally hits off a phrase that is memorable—‘Now let any honest hearted People judge, whether these be sound principled men, that can turn, conform, and transform to every change, according to the Times?’⁴ In 1666 she wrote a tract to justify the ministry of women entitled Women’s Speaking Justified, Proved, and Allowed of by the Scriptures, introducing into her title the words: ‘how Women were the first that preached the tidings of the Resurrection of Jesus and were sent by Christ’s own Command, before he Ascended to the Father, John, 20. 17’⁵.

The ministry of women in the Quaker community continued through the many generations during which the ordinary women of other beliefs remained content under male authority. Not until the end of the eighteenth century did another woman appear among the Friends who displayed a power comparable with that of Margaret Fell. But contemporary lives of Quaker women reveal an independence of character which marks them out as strongly as did their way of life. Sarah Stephenson, for example (1738–1802), travelled about England, Wales and Ireland, commissioned by her own meeting as a public minister and visitor of the families of Friends¹. In 1801, when she felt her health to be failing, her yearly meeting authorized her to visit families of Friends in America, where she died in the next year. Her brief notes of her journeys show many obscure women of her community engaged, like herself, in preaching and visiting². In 1794 there appeared the life of another woman who, like Sarah Stephenson, had given herself to the Quaker ministry of women. Sarah Tuke was born at York in 1756, and married an Irish Quaker, Robert Grubb, who had lived there for many years. She died when she was only thirty-four, but she had travelled in her ministry over much of England, and into Scotland, Ireland, and parts of the Continent³.

But the outstanding woman in the later succession of English Quakers is Elizabeth Fry (1780–1845). She was one of the seven daughters of John Gurney of Earlham, Norfolk, and Gurney’s bank in Norwich. Although the Gurneys were a Quaker family Elizabeth and her brothers and sisters enjoyed a gay youth, for their father’s position drew him into a wide acquaintance outside the Society of Friends. Elizabeth was stirred to religious zeal by the preaching of an American Quaker, William Savery, who visited Norwich in 1798. The seven Gurney sisters sat in a row under the gallery at the meeting and one of them remembered her amusement at Elizabeth’s ‘very smart boots’⁴. They were purple laced with scarlet. After this, Elizabeth adopted the dress and speech of Friends. Her marriage at the age of twenty to Joseph Fry brought her into a family which, like her own, had been Quakers from the early days of the society, but the Frys strictly observed Quaker speech and dress and their friends were like-minded with them. Elizabeth Fry and her husband lived in London, and notwithstanding the births of many children she maintained an active interest in work for the poor. In 1810, after long uncertainty, she became a minister among the Friends. Her calling as a minister was formally recognized by the meeting of which she was a member early in the following year. Her eminent contemporary, Mary Somerville, who had heard her preach, wrote ‘her voice was fine, her delivery admirable, and her prayer sublime’¹. Her life’s work lay among the women in English prisons and she took it up when in 1813 she began to visit female prisoners in Newgate.

When Elizabeth Fry first went to Newgate, she was accompanied by a cousin, Anne Buxton, and other Quaker ladies came forward to support and help. Their first visits to Newgate were followed by three years in which Elizabeth Fry could do little outside her home. She herself fell ill; her ninth child was born, and her seventh daughter died. But at the end of 1816 she took up her work again. With the wife of a London clergyman and ten ladies of the Society of Friends she formed ‘an association for the improvement of the female prisoners in Newgate’. Its object was ‘to provide for the clothing, the instruction, and the employment of the women; to introduce them to a knowledge of the Holy Scriptures, and to form in them as much as possible, those habits of order, sobriety, and industry, which may render them docile, and peaceable whilst in prison, and respectable when they leave it’². Other women than Quakers were moved to share in this work, and its scope became greatly enlarged. But its inspiration and direction came from Elizabeth Fry.

When reflecting on the permanence of the movement in which Margaret Fell was an original leader, it should not be forgotten that the great mass of English women were at no time capable of reaching the heights of religious exaltation. Even amid the austerities of the Puritan revolution the age-long arts of feminine adornment were not forgotten. In 1656 there appeared a curious little book called A Discourse of Auxiliary Beauty or Artificial Handsomenesse In point of conscience between two Ladies³. The treatise is anonymous, and it has been variously attributed to John Gauden, Bishop of Worcester, to Jeremy Taylor, and to Obadiah Walker. In this uncertainty, there seems no reason to doubt the word of Richard Royston, one of the most respectable publishers of the century, who prefaced the first edition with a letter addressed by ‘The Publisher to the Ingenuous Reader’. He was, he said, ‘certainely informed’ that ‘a Woman was not only the chiefe occasion, but the Author and writer’. When the discourse came into his hands he was about to destroy it because he disliked women improving their looks ‘beyond that portion which God and Nature had given them’, but being secretly ashamed to condemn it unread, he not only read it himself, but tested it by persuading ‘two or three severe censors’ to read it, ‘persons of Socratick browes, and Catonian lookes, wholly bred up in Academicall shades, and in no way partiall to the delights of women’. With their opinion behind him he concluded that the book ought to be published for three reasons: firstly, because it is ‘a very necessary debate, in a case so much (they say) practised by women of unspotted worth and honour: And yet so much censured as sinful and abominable by others of a very warm and commendable piety’: secondly, it was only civil to let ladies know the issue of the debate: and thirdly it might be profitable to the publisher¹.

The book takes the form of thirteen objections to women painting their faces put forward in turn by a lady who is addressed as ‘Your Ladyship’ and disposed of by a lady who is addressed as ‘Madam’. The discourse was probably written some little time before it was printed, for it treats as an authority a divine who was writing in the reign of Charles I. The defender of women who used some form of artificial beauty asked ‘Whom did her Ladyship ever blame (if in other things unblameable) for using a Glasse eye? … When was your Ladyship scandalized with any grave and sober matron, because she laid out the combings or cuttings of her own or others more youthfull haire, when her own (now more withered and autumnall) seemed lesse becoming her? How many both mens and womens warmer heats in religion, do not now admit not onely borders of forain haire, but full and fair peruques, on their heads, without sindging one haire by their disputative and scrupulous zeal, which in these things of fashion, is now grown much out of fashion. Your Ladyship’s charity doth not reprove, but pity those poor Vulcanists, who ballance the inequality of their heels, or badger leggs, by the help of the shoemaker; … Who fears to set straight, or hide the unhandsome warpings of bow leggs and baker feet?’² After all her arguments had been met, her ladyship thanked her opponent for the generous freedom of her discourse, more particularly since she was not so much pleading her own cause as ‘civilly affording a charitable relief and protection to others, whose infirmity may require or use such helps’. The text with which the dialogue is drawn to its conclusion is Tit. i. 15. ‘To the pure all things are pure, but to the defiled and unbelievers nothing is pure, but even their mind and conscience is defiled’³. It is not surprising that this tract, for all its outmoded language, was reprinted in 1662 and again in 1690.

1 Tracts relating to military proceedings in Lancashire during the Great Civil War, ed. G. Ormerod, Chetham Soc., 1844, pp. 161 fF.

2 Sir Maurice Powicke, ‘Notes on Hastings Manuscripts’, The Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. i, 1938, pp. 264–6.

3 The Historical and Miscellaneous Tracts of the Reverend and Learned Peter Heylin, D.D., London, 1681, p. xix.

1 The Historical and Miscellaneous Tracts of the Reverend and Learned Peter Heylin, D.D., p. xxi.

2 The Memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe, London, 1907, p. 13.

3 Ibid., p. 22.

1 The Memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe, p. 5.

2 Ibid., p. 409.

3 Ibid., p. 80.

1 The Memoirs of Ann Lady Fanshawe, pp. 89–90.

2 Memoirs of the Life of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, ed. C. H. Firth, p. 161.

1 Memoirs of the Duke of Newcastle, pp. 171–2.

2 Ibid., pp. 56 and 167.

3 Ibid., p. 170.

4 Ibid., p. 173.

1 These references from Pepys and Evelyn are quoted by Sir Charles Firth, Memoirs of the Duke of Newcastle, p. 175 n-

2 Quoted by Sir Charles Firth, ibid., p. xxx.

3 Ibid., pp. xxxi-xxxii.

4 London, 1662. I owe a sight of this book to Professor Dickins, who allowed me to examine the copy presented by the duchess to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

1 Pp. 225–32.

2 Memoirs of the Duke o f Newcastle, p. xxxii.

1 The Autobiography of Anne, Lady Halket, ed. J. Gough Nichols, Camden Soc., 1875. This had also been used by the writer of The Life of Lady Halket, published in 1701.

2 Autobiography, p. 2.

3 Ibid., p. 3.

4 Loc. cit.

5 Ibid., p. 13.

1 Autobiography, p. 19.

2 Ibid., p. 21.

3 Ibid., p. 22.

1 Clarendon, History of the Great Rebellion, Bk. XI, par. 20.

2 Autobiography, p. 24.

3 Ibid., pp. 24–5.

4 Ibid., p. 27.

5 Ibid., p. 32.

1 Autobiography, p. 53.

2 Ibid., p. 63.

3 Ibid., p. 99.

1 The Life of Lady Halket, Edinburgh, 1701. A list of her writings is appended to the book, six pages unnumbered. Several of them were printed in the course of 1701 and 1702. Meditations on the Twentieth and Fifth Psalm, 1701. This was written at Fyvie and finished 1 January 1652. Instructions for Youth, 1701. Meditations and Prayers upon the First Week with observations on each days creation, 1701. Meditations upon the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, 1702. Meditations upon Jabes his Request, and other papers, 1702. All these are collected into one volume which was kindly lent to me by Mr. Arnold Muirhead of St. Albans. His copy had belonged to the Halket family, for on the front page is written ‘Charles Andrew Hacket. July 13th, 1842. Received from Aberdeen among the effects of his Cousin C. H.’

2 Ibid., p. 45.

3 Autobiography, pp. 68–9.

1 An Account of the Preservation of King Charles II after the Battle of Worcester drawn up by himself, Edinburgh, 1801, pp. 28–9.

2 Ibid., p. 47.

3 D.N.B.

4 Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson by his widow Lucy, ed. the Rev. Julius Hutchinson, revised by C. H. Firth, London, 1906, p. 9.

1 Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson, pp. 13–14.

2 Ibid., p. xviii.

1 Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson, p. 26.

2 Ibid., p. xix.

1 Ballard, pp. 287–8.

2 Written by Jer. Taylor, D.D., London, 1671. Mrs. Philips’s name is written in full in the short title on p. 1.

3 Ibid., p. 73.

4 Ibid., p. 87.

5 Poems by the most deservedly admired Mrs. Katherine Philips, London, 1710, pp. 19–21.

1 Poems by Mrs. Katherine Philips, pp. 60, 97, 180.

2 Memoirs of the Verney Family, ed. M. M. Verney, 2nd ed., vol. i, p. 501.

3 Ibid., pp. 500–1.

1 The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, ed. Israel Gollancz, The King’s Classics, 1903.

2 Ibid., pp. 269–72.

3 The Diary and Correspondence of Dr. John Worthington, ed. James Crossley, Chetham Society, vol. xiii, 1847, p. 88. Mary’s uncle, Dr. Benjamin Whichcote, was a leader among the Cambridge Platonists.

1 Clarendon, History of the Great Rebellion, Bk. XI, par. 235.

2 The Letters of the Lady Brilliana Harley, ed. T. T. Lewis, Camden Society, 1853, p. xv.

3 Ibid., pp. 72, 81.

4 Ibid., p. 207.

1 Joseph Hunter, The Rise of The Old Dissent exemplified in the life of Oliver Heywood, London, 1842, pp. 25–6.

2 At London. Printed by W. H., and are to be sold at the sign of the Black-spread-Eagle at the West End of Pauls.

1 Unpaged.

2 The Resurrection of The Witnesses. In a postscript to her 1651 book she added a number of corrections to her former work.

3 She was presumably identical with the ‘Mistris Carew’ whose prophesies were mentioned by Sir William Sanderson, The Life and Reign of King Charles, 1658, p. 126.

4 The Little Hornes Doom and Downfall, p. 4

5 Ibid., p. 41.

6 New Jerusalems Glory, pp. 119 and 209.

1 The Dutch lady is Anna Maria à Schurman, whom Peters must have met when he was in Holland.

1 Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson, p. 298.

1 The New Jerusalems Glory, pp. 136–238. The pages are wrongly numbered in my copy: p. 238 follows p. 137.

2 See below, p. 179.

1 The First Minute Book of the Gainsborough Monthly Meeting of the Society of Friends, vol. i, ed. Harold Brace, Lincoln Record Society, vol. xxxviii, 1948. The editor, clerk of Lincolnshire Monthly Meeting, sets out briefly but clearly the modern Quaker’s attitude to the history of Friends in his Introduction, pp. ix ff. Hereafter referred to as Quaker Minutes.

2 Autobiography of George Fox, ed. H. S. Newman, London, 1886, p. 22.

3 Ibid., p. 51. A Brief Collection of Remarkable Passages and Occurrences Relating to … Margaret Fell, London, 1710, p. 3.

4 Loc. cit.

5 A Brief Collection, pp. 47–196. All this was written by her between 1653 and

1 A Brief Collection, pp. 196–201.

2 Reprinted in A Brief Collection, pp. 202–10.

3 E.g. Quaker Minutes, p. 2.

4 Isobel Ross, Margaret Fell, London, 1948, pp. 266–75.

5 The Household Account Book of Sarah Fell of Swarthmoor Hall, ed. Norman Penney, Cambridge, 1920, see p. 281.

6 Ibid., p. 337.

1 Household Account Book, p. 283.

2 Ibid., p. 349.

3 Ibid., p. 459.

4 Ibid., p. 369.

5 Ibid., p. 68.

6 Ibid., p. 101.

7 Ibid., p. 353.

8 Ibid., p. 439.

9 Ibid., p. 29.

10 Ibid., p. 387.

11 Ibid., p. 281.

12 Ibid., p. 129.

1 Quaker Minutes, pp. xvii, 40–2, 47, 130–3; women Friends were asked to come to the men’s meeting, pp. 49, 52, 62.

2 Household Account Book, pp. 237, 285, 349.

3 Autobiography, pp. 284, 293.

4 Margaret Fell, A Declaration and an Information from us the People of God called Quakers, London, 1660, p. 5. Reprinted in A Brief Collection, p. 208.

5 A Brief Collection, pp. 331–50.

1 Memoirs of the Life and Travels in the service of the Gospel of Sarah Stephenson, London, 1807.

2 Ibid., pp. 33, 35, 43.

3 Some Account of the Life and Religious Labours of Sarah Grubb, 2nd ed., London, 1794.

4 Susanna Corder, Life of Elizabeth Fry, London, 1853, p. 19.

1 Personal Recollections of Mary Somerville, by her daughter, Martha Somerville, London, 1874, p. 145.

2 Susanna Corder, Life, p. 225,

3 London, 1656,

1 The Publisher to the Reader is unpaged.

2 A Discourse of Auxiliary Beauty, pp. 59–60.

3 Ibid., pp. 199–200.