The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (24 page)

Not all old women witches who practised some form of primitive magic suffered as cruelly as the Bideford witches. The mysterious nature of ‘black’ witchcraft, as it was regarded in the seventeenth century, is underlined by the fact that ‘white magic’ co-existed with it, as indeed forms of ‘white magic’ had always been practised since ancient times (and are, in various forms from fortune-telling to herbal healing, still practised today). ‘Cunning folk’, who unlike witches were often male, existed in abundance: in
The Anatomy of Melancholy
, Robert Burton wrote that there were ‘Cunning men, Wizards and white-witches … in every village’. Their protection was quite simply that they were believed to do good. Thus a ‘cunning woman’, one with certain curative arts at her disposal from which black magic was specifically excluded, might pursue an active and even lucrative career,
provided she kept herself carefully free from the taint of witchcraft. Sir Ralph Verney’s son and heir Edmund, generally know as ‘Mun’, had a ‘distracted’ wife called Mary. It was decided to send for a cunning woman called Old Judith.
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First of all Mun Verney asked Old Judith to assure him that she did not ‘use any manner of Charms, Sorceries, or Magic whatsoever’. Old Judith hastily gave ‘devout assurances’ to the contrary. She was then permitted to carry out her experiment. This was to take a hare’s head – ‘Jack Hare’ – and wrap it in a cloth; she then bound the wrapped hare’s head round the patient’s own head for three days and three nights. When the hare’s head was finally removed, it was inserted into the patient’s pillow, amid the feathers, to lie there ‘so long as they live’. The idea of the cure was that there was a ‘sympathetical Virtue’ in a ‘melancholy Hare’s Brain’ which would ‘draw away all Melancholy out of that hare-brained people’ (i.e. the mad).

The cure did not work. As Mun Verney wrote: ‘It would be very pretty if so slight a thing could cure.’ Poor mad Mary Verney never fully recovered her wits. All the same, Old Judith suffered no ill consequences for her efforts, while Mun Verney in his slightly sceptical attitude to the whole affair represented a kind of tolerance which not only co-existed with harsh prejudice but also grew as the century progressed.

Among rational people, it had always seemed strange that the devil should choose the ‘poor and atrabilious’ and invest them with such colossal powers. As the newspaper
The Moderate Intelligencer
put it in 1645, it was ‘a great wonder’ that devils should be conversant with ‘silly old women that know not their right hand from their left’. In 1641 Henry Oxinden of Barham, father of the headstrong Peg, wrote with marked good sense about the case of one Goodwife Gilnot, who was accused by a man called Brake of having lost his sheep. Oxinden pointed out that he too had frequently lost sheep – without going to the trouble of thinking himself bewitched.
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As for Goodwife Gilnot, who was accused of having a teat upon her upper body – actually a small wart – ‘Believe it’, he wrote, ‘there is none so familiar with her as to receive any
sustenance from thence’. He went on: ‘Such deep root hath the fables of witchcraft taken hold in the heart of this and other silly men … they will not with patience endure the hand of and correction of God …’ It was being suggested ‘that certain creatures here on earth, called witches, be the authors of men’s miseries, as though themselves were innocents and had deserved no such punishments …’ Henry Oxinden concluded: ‘Moreover I cannot see how any rational man can persuade himself that a simple woman should do such things as these.’

The progress in scepticism on the subject has been summed up by Christopher Hill in these terms: ‘In 1600 most respectable people believed in witches … by 1700 this was no longer true.’
⁴²
The last execution of a witch occurred at Exeter in 1685, three years after the deaths of the three ‘decrepid’ Bideford women: Jane Wenham, the last person to be condemned (in 1712) was reprieved. Yet as late as 1704
The Athenian Oracle
, a magazine for answering popular queries whose view on life was otherwise quite enlightened, when asked whether it was permissible to kill a witch to preserve oneself, answered: as to those ‘wretched and malicious Creatures … we should make no scruple to strike or stab them’.
⁴³

But these old women, wretched and malicious as they often were, might have framed on their own behalf the bitter question posed by the Witch of Edmonton:

Cause I am poor, deform’d, ignorant

And like a bow buckled and bent together …

Must I for that be made a common sink

For all the filth and rubbish of Men’s tongues

To fall and run into?
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CHAPTER SEVEN

Unlearned Virgins

… But think you, Helen,

If you should tender your supposed aid,

He would receive it?…

A poor unlearned virgin …

COUNTESS OF ROUSILLON TO HELENA,

All’s Well That Ends Well

‘T
hou mayest perhaps think I have lost my labour’: thus Elizabeth Josceline to her husband in 1622 on the prospect of her giving birth to a daughter. The best way to palliate the blow would be to think of those biblical exemplars, Elizabeth, Esther, and chaste Susanna. Betty Viscountess Mordaunt was equally frank on her own account: ‘If it be thy blessed will, let it be a boy’ – this was her fervent prayer when she was once more pregnant in 1665, although she already had six sons. And when a seventh boy was indeed safely born, Betty Mordaunt apostrophized the Almighty in verse:

To all the rest, thou hast this added more

The blessing of a son, to increase my store.

Anne, wife of the Royalist commander Sir Simon Harcourt, shared the primitive feelings of her husband who wrote back to her from the campaign in Ireland: ‘with God’s blessing bring me another lusty boy’. After his death Anne Harcourt married the Parliamentary general Sir William Waller, a widower with sons. Her diary, kept like that of Betty Mordaunt for spiritual reasons, is a long record of public and private trials and her own
‘transgressions’. Throughout, whenever pregnant, she pleads for the safe birth of a living child with all its parts and limbs – ‘and a son’.
¹

The experience of Agnes Sim, a servant of East Brent in Somerset who had become pregnant by her master, was on a cruder level. She ‘asked him [her master] who should father the child. He said he would, if it was a boy, but if it was a maid, she should lack a father for it.’ (Servants did sometimes undertake the responsibility of providing their sonless masters with male heirs; the sex of the child being, it was believed, determined by the female.)
²
Neverless Agnes Sim discovered for herself what Betty Mordaunt and Anne Harcourt expressed so eloquently in their spiritual diaries, that primitive desire for a boy which in a sense disadvantaged the girls of this period even before their birth.

Cary Verney was one of the five sisters of Ralph Verney and as a child had been the ‘she-darling’ of her father Sir Edmund. Married at fifteen, but with the settlement never completed owing to the difficulty of wartime conditions, Cary found herself at the age of eighteen a pregnant widow, when her husband Captain Gardiner was killed in 1645. Then, ‘My sister was brought to bed of a girl to all our griefs’, wrote Ralph Verney. Having provided no male heir, with no proper marriage settlement, even her own jointure in peril, poor Cary was grudged her very food at the Gardiner home at Cuddesdon; finally she fled back to her own family. Cary Verney did enjoy an exceptionally happy second marriage to John Stewkeley of Hampshire; but it was no wonder, as one of the jolly, gambling, gossiping ladies of the Restoration court, that she regretted hearing the news that her nephew John Verney’s wife (already the mother of a son) had given birth to a daughter: ‘for I find our sex is not much valued in our age’.
³

One of the primary reasons why the average female was ‘not much valued’, as Cary Verney lightly but aptly expressed it, was that she was not much educated
–
in comparison, that is, with the average male, her brother as it might be, that child who had fulfilled his parents’ primitive expectations by being born of the favoured sex.

Even women despised other women for their silliness. Margaret Duchess of Newcastle was sharp enough to see the reason for this foolishness: in 1655 in
The Worlds Olio
she wrote that ‘in Nature we have as clear an understanding as Men, if we were bred in Schools to mature our Brains’. Nevertheless in practice she found the tittle-tattle of women intolerable.
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Conversely, even those women who did for a number of individual reasons receive a proper education might well be scorned for their attainments. In principle, society rewarded the learned woman with disapproval or at best suspicion.

Anne Lady Newdigate, that devoted mother, unconsciously summed up the contemporary attitude to the education of the sexes when she wrote in her will, dated 1610: ‘that my boys may be brought up in good learning and both they and my daughters to be bred up in virtuous and godly life’. Elizabeth Josceline, laying down instructions in
The Mothers Legacy to her Unborn Child
for the education of that hypothetical daughter for whose arrival she had apologized in advance, hoped she would be taught ‘The Bible, housewifery, writing and good work’. (She herself, incidentally, had been highly educated by her grandfather, learning both languages and history in the enlightened tradition of the late sixteenth century.) Elizabeth Josceline added: ‘other learning a woman needs not, though I admire it in those whom God hath blest with discretion yet I desire it not much in my own, having seen that sometimes women have greater portions of learning than wisdom’. And if her husband himself wanted to have ‘a learned daughter’? At least: ‘my dear … I pray God give her a wise and a religious heart’.
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Where a highly educated woman did escape censure, it was generally for some extraneous reason which might be exceptional piety, of the sort which Elizabeth Josceline hoped would redeem her own ‘learned daughter’. Or it might, in a more worldly fashion, be due to her high position in society. In private Dorothy Osborne poked fun at Margaret Duchess of Newcastle, who admittedly did cut a fairly weird figure in society, at any rate where her costume was concerned. In 1653, Dorothy was ‘satisfied that there are many soberer people in Bedlam’, and she
wrote that the Duchess’s friends were ‘much to blame to let her go abroad’.
⁶
In public, however, Margaret Newcastle’s rank (that of a very rich Duchess, wife of a Royalist grandee who had been Governor to Charles II as a boy) obtained for her some handsome tributes from academics at both universities.

The Duchess used to present favoured colleges with her own works. Expressions of gratitude were published after her death in a special volume:
Letters and Poems In Honour of the Incomparable Princess Margaret, Dutchess of Newcastle
. A letter from the Master and Fellows of St John’s College, Cambridge, sets the tone: ‘In your Poesy we praise that Life and native Verdure, every way Confident with its self, Castilian like, it stands not still, nor boils over, but with a gentle stream doth touch our Ears and slide into our Minds. In your Philosophy we praise that lightsome and piercing acuteness, nothing constrained, nothing obscure; you render all things clear and genuine …’ However, Trinity College, in wondering aloud ‘how it came to pass that Eloquence, Poetry, Philosophy, things otherwise most different, should without the help of a Tutor, without the Midwifery of a University, at length, agree in a Woman’ showed that the Duchess was very much the high-born exception to the general rule.
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It was not a rule which showed signs of lapsing as the century progressed. On the contrary, the prejudice against education for girls
–
and its dreaded end-product, the learned woman
–
had derived fresh impetus from the presence of a male sovereign after 1603. It had always been rather tactless to attack the learned woman with too much zest so long as that paragon of female erudition Queen Elizabeth occupied the throne. As the poet Anne Bradstreet wrote in memory of ‘our dread Virago’ forty years after her death:

Let such as say our Sex is void of Reason,