The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (17 page)

Breast-feeding had its theoretical advocates, particularly among the Puritans. Perkins, Gouge, Cleaver and Dod (who believed that the breast was not an erogenous zone) all recommended it as part of a good mother’s duty in their Puritan publications. But for all this preaching, there is evidence that the ideal was seldom realized: it has been pointed out, for example, that William Gouge’s wife only nursed seven out of her thirteen children, Gouge himself admitting that the practice could be forsworn if it proved dangerous to mother or child. It is noticeable that the midwife Jane Sharp, who had experience of the difficulties of nursing, was a good deal less positive in her advice than the male pundits.
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The recommendations against marital sex during the period of lactation may well have had something to do with the matter, where the feelings of the husband were concerned. The casual (masculine) point of view was exhibited by Sir William Knollys at the turn of the sixteenth century, in a letter of advice to his god-daughter Anne Fitton, Lady Newdigate. He told her that he would not like it ‘that you play the nurse, if you were my wife’. He admitted that ‘it argueth great love, but it breedeth much trouble to yourself’. However Anne Newdigate ignored her godfather’s advice; she did breast-feed her first child and went on to suckle four more (as a result of which achievement she was considered as a possible wet-nurse to the children of Anne of Denmark and James I). In a petition as a widow, she boasted that her children were born of her own body and nursed of her own breasts (‘they never suck other milk’ ).
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Elizabeth Knyvet, wife of the third Earl of Lincoln, wrote a defiant plea that the mother should suckle her own child in a book called
The Countess of Lincoln’s Nursery
, first printed in 1622.
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Her motive for her crusade was the same as that of Alice Thornton, who nursed her own child after her fright with an incompetent nurse. The Countess had given birth to eighteen children herself, and at least one of her ‘Babes’ had died through the neglect of nurses, who had falsely pretended ‘willingness, towardness, wakefulness’. In fact, in the upbringing of eighteen children, the Countess of Lincoln declared she had only encountered two careful attendants,

A foreword by Thomas Lodge contained the encouraging rhyme:

Go then, great Book of Nursing, plead the Cause;

Teach Highest, Lowest, all, it’s God’s and Nature’s Laws.

The Countess swept away all the possible objections that nursing was ‘troublesome … noisome to one’s clothes, makes one look old, endangers health’ (making the prevailing attitudes among her contemporaries clear). Such weak women, she observed, should not have married in the first place. She also pointed out triumphantly that the period of peace while nursing provided a woman with an excellent opportunity for prayer.

As in every controversial issue in the seventeenth century, the Bible was searched for precedents. Did not Sarah – ‘a great Princess’
–
suckle Isaac? What of Hannah? Above all, what of the Virgin Mary, suckling the Infant Christ? But in proving that breast-feeding by the mother was according to God’s holy ordinance, the Countess of Lincoln played her trump card in citing the example of Eve, who must surely have suckled Cain and Abel and Seth, since no other woman existed in the world to act as a nurse on her behalf.

‘We have followed Eve in Transgression’, declared the Countess of Lincoln on behalf of the female sex. ‘Let us follow her in obedience.’ But most women of her time who had the
choice, unaware of the protective value of such a practice, declined to imitate this rare piece of good behaviour on the part of Grandmother Eve.

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But the joint monument to the Duke and Duchess of Newcastle in Westminster Abbey still records this failure on her part, ahead of all her manifold virtues: ‘Here Lyes the Loyall Duke of Newcastle And his Dutches his second wife, by whome he had noe issue …’

2
This remarkable woman was buried in the nearby Church of the Holy Trinity at Stonegrave, where the Chapel of St Peter is still dedicated to her memory, a chapel which she had wished to restore; but through her husband’s failure she had not sufficient funds to do so. The arms of the Thorntons and Wandesfords can be seen there combined.

CHAPTER FIVE

Are You Widows?

‘Again, are you widows? You deserve much honour, if you be so indeed … Great difference then is there betwixt those widows who live alone, and retire themselves from public concourse, and those which frequent the company of men … In popular concourse and Court-resorts there is no place for widows.’

RICHARD BRATHWAITE,
The English Gentlewoman
,1631

O
nce widowed – the third stage of her projected life – a woman was expected to add a further virtue in the shape of fidelity to the long list of feminine virtues she already possessed, including modesty, meekness, patience and humility. The fidelity was to the memory of her deceased spouse, for the ideal widow did not seek to alter her state by marrying again. Instead, in a favourite comparison of the time, she emulated the turtle-dove by mourning her late husband in solitude; as Mary Countess of Warwick was thankful when she had married off her late husband’s nieces: her worldly duties being over she could spend the rest of her life a widow devoted to God’s service.
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That at least was the theory of widowhood. The reality as we shall see was often very different.

Lettice Viscountess Falkland, on top of all her other virtues, was formally commended for being:

A Scripture Vestal, one whose chaste desire

Call’d it adultery not to watch one fire …

Eschewing ‘all second loves’ she displayed herself until her death ‘One made of ice toward Venus, and her doves’. Lady Alice Lucy,
who died in 1648, was considered such an outstanding example of female virtue that Samuel Clarke chose her for one of his subjects in
The Lives of Sundry Eminent Persons in this Later Age
, published in 1683. Lady Alice began with a thoroughly submissive approach to her union with Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote: ‘She knew that her taking of a second self, was a self-denying work; and therefore she resigned both her reason, and her will unto her Head, and Husband …’ After Sir Thomas’s death, she never even contemplated remarriage, for the good reason that God ‘made himself her Husband, supporting her, comforting her, and enabling her prudently to manage her great Estate, and to order her numerous family’.
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Another ‘ideal of the true mourning turtle’ was Anne Lady Newdigate, she who as a widow boasted that all her children were ‘nursed of my own breasts’. Petitioning in 1600 to be allowed to have the wardship of her son and his lands during his minority, Lady Newdigate hotly denied that she should ever be so ‘accursed a woman [as] to marry again’. She kept her word, despite various offers for her hand, devoting her life to her children and their business interests. Her friend Lady Grey proposed a less severe attitude to remarriage – ‘I must needs tell you that your too infinite care may take away that happiness which might give much content to you and yours.’ Lady Newdigate’s constancy was nevertheless considered heroic. Here was the reverse of the Pygmalion image: ‘a fair woman’ was ‘turned into a marble stone’.
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Conversely, some very peculiar attitudes can be detected towards those widows who did take a second husband. There was an idea that marrying a widow might constitute ‘bigamy’, and if a widow had two spouses dead, it might even be termed ‘trigamy’. John Aubrey ascribed an even more complicated view to William Harvey, the physician who discovered the circulation of the blood: ‘He that marries a widow makes himself Cuckold’ (that is, by the woman’s dead husband). Harvey was supposed to have suggested that the children of the second marriage might even resemble the husband of the first, just as ‘a good bitch’, if first mated with a mongrel, would still bring forth ‘curs’ even after she had been mated with a dog of a better strain.
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The attitude of Edward Lord Herbert of Cherbury to his mother Magdalen’s second marriage was positively eccentric: in his autobiography he paid a glowing tribute to her character, how ‘she lived most virtuously and lovingly with her husband [his father] for many years … brought up her children carefully and put them in good courses for making their fortune …’ At no point did he mention that in 1608 the widowed Lady Herbert had married Sir John Danvers – she being forty and he twenty years old. Danvers himself is also mentioned by name, but the relationship between the two men is not. One might well wonder what this Hamlet was endeavouring to conceal on the subject of his mother’s second union, except that John Donne (who preached the funeral sermon for Lady Danvers in 1627) tells us the marriage was, in fact, a very happy one. It seems therefore that nothing more than a theoretical distaste for abandoned widowhood was at stake.
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This revulsion against the notion of remarriage could also take the form of sentimental surprise when it actually took place. Dorothy Countess of Sunderland was widowed at the age of twenty-five. As a girl Dorothy Sidney had been the idol of her generation, one who succeeded in her professed aim to her father, the Earl of Leicester, to be ‘the perfectest good child upon earth’. For her, his Sacharissa, Edmund Waller wrote that classic lover’s apostrophe:

Go lovely Rose

Tell her that wastes her time and me,

That now she knows,

When I resemble her to thee,

How sweet and fair she seems to be.

Having rejected not only the poet (who then wishes on her that first curse of womankind, ‘the pains of becoming a mother’) but another aristocratic suitor for his addiction to debauched company, Dorothy Sidney made what seemed the ideal marriage to Henry Lord Spencer, later created Earl of Sunderland, a man who combined handsome looks with great taste – and great
possessions. Four years later he was killed at the first battle of Newbury (that same Battle into which Lord Falkland rode looking ‘very cheerful’), leaving Dorothy with a son and two daughters, but also heavily pregnant: she gave birth to a second son a fortnight later.
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After Lord Sunderland’s death, Lord Leicester gave a classic piece of advice on the behaviour of a desolate widow to his ‘dear Doll’: she must cease damaging herself by her unhappiness since ‘you offend him who you loved, if you hurt that person he loved’. Her children remained – ‘those pledges of your mutual friendship and affection which he hath left with you’ – and if she did not recover enough to take care of them, she was betraying ‘their father’s trust’ which had been reposed in her: ‘For their sake, therefore, assuage your grief …’
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For the next ten years or so the young Dowager Countess did devote herself in approved widow’s fashion to the upbringing of her family, especially her son and the management of the Spencer family estates at Althorp.

The consternation of the world when Dorothy married Robert Smythe in 1652 may seem by modern standards ludicrous. He was a Sidney family connection, a neighbour to the Leicester property at Penshurst (where Dorothy had spent her first widowhood), and although some years younger than the Countess had probably been in love with her for years. The contemporary consternation was none the less real. The Countess tactfully suggested to Dorothy Osborne that she had been swayed by pity for Smythe, although the fact that Smythe was ‘a very fine gentleman’ was surely at least as relevant. Even though Dorothy Osborne admitted that the Countess of Sunderland – still only in her thirties – might be growing ‘weary of that constraint she put upon herself’, her verdict was unforgiving: ‘She has lost by it [the marriage] much of the repute she had gained by keeping herself a widow. It was then believed that wit and discretion were to be reconciled in her person that have so seldom been persuaded to meet in anybody else. But’, concluded Dorothy Osborne sadly, ‘we are all mortal.’
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This yearning for fidelity beyond the grave – the ideal of the devoted widow – makes strange reading put side by side with the nature of the society in which these men, women (and widows) lived. While there was general agreement, except by a few generous-minded or realistic spirits, that a second marriage for women was to be avoided, the facts about life in the first half of the seventeenth century give us a very different picture. Pepys, in one of the earliest entries in his diary, was much moved by a sermon he had heard on the subject of St Anne, mother of the Virgin Mary, only seven years married, who had lived to the age of eighty-four a widow. It neatly expressed the contrast between the ideal and the actual. The preacher ‘did there speak largely in commendation of widowhood, and not as we do, to marry two or three wives or husbands one after another’.
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