The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (26 page)

Mary Ward’s convents and schools, founded as far apart as Liège and Cologne, Vienna and Prague, Rome and Naples, flourished. But opposition to the new Institute intensified until in 1631 a decree was issued by Pope Urban VIII dissolving it; its members were only allowed to continue their ordinary work of religious education if they took purely private vows.
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Mary Ward herself was imprisoned in Germany, in a tiny airless filthy cell at the orders of the Church (but not the Pope
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who had her released when he heard the news). Subsequently she lived quietly in Rome, and in 1639 she returned to England.

Here, the patronage of the Catholic Queen Henrietta Maria seemed to promise her the opportunity of continuing her work of female education. There were ‘common schools for girls in London’ to be founded, and young women needed to be taught Latin; unlike King James I, Mary Ward was a fervent believer in the importance of Latin studies for girls. Or perhaps it would be accurate to say that Mary Ward approved of such studies for exactly the same reason as King James disapproved of them: she thought it important that women should become ‘more cunning’ – in the service of God. As Mary Ward wrote of a young nun in
her care: ‘let Kate perfect her Latin with all possible care, without loss of health.’ She added: ‘no talent is so much to be regarded in them [young nuns] as the Latin tongue’.
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The outbreak of the Civil War and the flight of the English royal family from London put an end to Mary Ward’s new London apostolate. She went north to her native Yorkshire, and died in 1645, having lived through the siege of York. Most of her adulthood she had suffered torments probably from stones, and the last twenty years of her life she was in such pain that she could not lie down, but had to sleep in a rocking-chair. Yet in her last hours, with characteristic spirit, she insisted on the sisters round her singing to stop their tears, and managed to sing with them. Her last recorded words were firmly practical: ‘It matters not the who, but the what.’
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In general, with her independence and her gallantry, as well as her excellent sense of humour in the most trying circumstances, Mary herself stands for the best kind of English spinster. ‘From my palace’, she headed a letter written in her filthy German cell. The Elector of Bavaria, in her private code, was known as ‘Billingsgate’, a slang term of the time for bad language. ‘When she travelleth she is extraordinarily jovial’, complained one of her contemporaries, who was shocked by her apparent lightheartedness. But Mary Ward had her answer: ‘Mirth at this time is next to godliness’, she observed of one particular tight corner. When she did travel
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crossing the Alps four times, frequently in winter and through snow – Mary Ward retained a kind of splendid English curiosity which sent her sightseeing in Prague and buying silks in Venice. She was notably fond of ‘a fine view’, yet shocked the fashionable Romans by proceeding on foot all the way to Perugia, wearing old clothes and leading a sick sister on her own donkey.

Above all education, and the need for education in women if they were to perform God’s work, aroused her fervour. ‘She was a great enemy of ignorance’, wrote a contemporary.
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In general, if an English girl, regardless of rank, did receive a good education, it was very much a matter of individual luck. Alice Heywood, Oliver Heywood’s saintly mother, made herself responsible for sending the children of her neighbourhood to
school as a work of charity, buying the ‘poor ignorant sottish creatures’ books. A maidservant might become an accomplished reader if she happened to fall into the employment of a benevolent mistress, such as Elizabeth Walker or Mary Countess of Warwick, both of whom saw it as their evangelical duty to instruct their maids to read (so that they could at least read the Bible and Psalms). A forlorn creature came to Elizabeth Walker’s door, who only knew her name was Mary Bun, ‘almost eat up with scabs and vermin, with scarce rags to cover her, and as ignorant of God and Christ as if she had been born and bred in Lapland or Japan’. Elizabeth Walker decided to save her not only by stripping her, washing her and curing her of ‘The Itch’, but also by teaching her to read, so that finally a rich farmer took Mary Bun as his apprentice. The formidable Lady Anne Clifford also delighted in giving her maids ‘such a book as they had not before’.
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As a result intelligent and forceful maids often feature prominently in the life stories of their mistresses: as ‘Honest Dafeny’ Lightfoote, Alice Thornton’s maid inherited from her mother, who both could and did write and became as a result the mainstay of the beleaguered Thornton household after Mr Thornton’s death as a bankrupt. ‘God hath sent me a friend after my own heart’, wrote Alice Thornton. Bess, maid to Sir Ralph and Lady Verney, who accompanied them into exile in France at the time of the Commonwealth, learnt French easily.
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A good Free School or benevolent patronage or both might account for sudden unexpectedly high figures of local literacy. A recent study by David Cressy quotes women as a whole (they are not analysed by class) as displaying the same high level of illiteracy as labourers and husbandmen; a figure of 90 per cent illiteracy amongst women is given for London
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the most favourable area – in 1600, declining in 1640 quite sharply to around 80 per cent; in East Anglia at the same period female illiteracy is given as nearly 100 per cent.
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The accounts of the Russell family headed by the Earls of Bedford at Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire, over a considerable period during the seventeenth century show that the skills among the maids varied. One year, out of seven or eight maids there would be two or three who could write well, another
year none (whereas amongst the male footmen there would always be two or three who could write well). One housekeeper, Ann Upton, wrote well; her predecessor could not write at all. Apart from contact with the Russell family themselves, some of these literate servants had probably been educated at the local Free School founded by the second Earl of Bedford.
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Where a girl of the upper classes was concerned, it was a happy accident if she came from a large family of brothers spread out over a number of years; she might then enjoy the services of their tutor, who would not automatically vanish when the eldest boy went away to school or university. In this way the disparity between the education offered to brother and sister might be somewhat lessened. The Ladies Diana and Margaret Russell were the daughters of William, fifth Earl of Bedford, he who married Anne Carr, worthy daughter of the unworthy Frances Somerset, for love. The education of these little girls, like the literacy of the maids, can also be traced in the accounts for Woburn Abbey.
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Anne Countess of Bedford, like Betty Mordaunt, was the proud mother of seven sons, as well as four daughters. As a result, for a number of years Diana and Margaret were taught by their brothers’ tutor, the Rev. John Thornton, a remarkable pedagogue and a man of formidable intellect who came straight to the services of the Russell family from Cambridge in 1646. The influence of this dissenting divine on the character of the girls’ brother William Lord Russell (the celebrated Whig martyr of the reign of Charles II) is a matter for the history books; but for the Russell girls, especially Lady Diana, who was Mr Thornton’s favourite, a rare opportunity occurred for instruction.

Mr Thornton believed in the new principles of education introduced by Comenius, which amongst other things supplemented teaching by pictures. One entry in the accounts reads:

It will be seen that even under Mr Thornton’s care Lady Diana did not learn Latin (something which would have grieved Mary Ward). However, Lady Diana did receive the best Bible: an edition in ‘fair minion print’ costing 12s 6d where the other children’s Bibles cost 3s 6d.

Ultimately the gorgeous brothers departed – for Westminster, for university, for the Grand Tour – and when the last of them was gone, it was time for the Ladies Russell to be given over to the dancing master, music teacher and French master who would give them that education deemed in principle suitable for young ladies of their station. Lady Diana grew from the beguiling little girl painted by Lely with another sister Anne (who died of eating poisonous berries at the age of five) into a woman of resolute character. She married twice: first at the age of fifteen, being left a childless widow a year later, and secondly to Lord Alington of Wymondley. Lady Diana maintained however a lifelong friendship and correspondence with Mr Thornton. In later life Lely’s charming child came to believe sternly in total abstinence from food as a cure-all for sickness. ‘If he would come down to me, I should quickly cure him by fasting’, she wrote of one troubled member of the family.
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Outside the aristocracy both the educationalist Basua Makin and the scholar Elizabeth Elstob benefited from early association with gifted brothers. Basua Makin was born in 1612, the daughter of the rector of Southwick in Sussex, and the sister of the astonishing scholar John Pell – at the age of twenty he was reputed to know Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Italian, French and both High and Low Dutch. Influenced by his example, Basua herself by the age of nine was said in some measure to understand Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French and Italian; we shall consider the conclusions she drew for female education as a whole from this exceptional upbringing in a subsequent chapter. At the end of the century Elizabeth Elstob, the pioneer of Old English studies, was able to work in Oxford because she had accompanied thither her brother William, who was at the university. The antiquary George Ballard, who knew the Elstobs at Oxford and included Elizabeth among his celebrated ladies, was another with an
erudite sister who at the age of fourteen had ‘an extraordinary genius for Coins’ and had made a collection of them.
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It was no wonder that the sisters, watching the world through their brothers’ eyes, often developed passionate attachments to these young gods who could roam freely, while they were kept confined at home. Ann Oglander, daughter of another happy marriage, that of Sir John and Lady Oglander, described by her father as ‘
Très belle
Ann’
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the most beautiful of all the family
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was in despair when her brother George left for Caen on the Grand Tour. Her sorrow was premonitory, for he died abroad shortly afterwards.
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As a child Anne Viscountess Conway, daughter of the Widow Bennett by her carefully selected second husband Sir Heneage Finch, worshipped her step-brother John Finch, who was five years older
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all the more so because her father had died before her birth. Little Anne hung around at home and in the gardens of Kensington House, plagued with sick headaches. Her family put her frequent maladies down to too much reading, unsuitable to her sex.
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Given the intellectual achievements which marked the adult life of Anne Conway despite this handicap, it is more likely that a proper education (her step-brothers went to Westminster and Christ Church or Eton and Balliol) would have helped rather than hindered her health.

The most celebrated example of a sister’s devotion to a brother was that of Katherine Viscountess Ranelagh for Robert Boyle, the famous physicist and chemist who arrived at the eponymous Boyle’s Law (which stated that the pressure and volume of a gas were inversely proportional). Bishop Burnet proclaimed after her death that ‘Sister Ranelagh’, otherwise known as ‘the incomparable Lady Ranelagh’, had cut ‘the greatest figure in all these revolutions of these kingdoms, for above fifty years, of any woman of her age’.
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It was significant that this one woman whose learning merited universal respect not censure was not only well-born and pious but chose to exercise her powerful influence privately rather than through the writing and publication of books, spending the last forty years of her life caring devotedly for her brilliant brother. In her decency, her active
kindness – she was both hospitable and charitable – and above all in her acceptance of the self-abnegatory nature of female intelligence, Sister Ranelagh incarnated the masculine ideal of a good woman. Her learning therefore, far from being a disturbing quality, became an added grace. As a result she had the distinction, perhaps a slightly dubious one, of being the one woman of whom Milton actually approved.

Katherine Boyle was born in 1614, one of the vast brood of children of Richard Earl of Cork. Four sons and four daughters survived the original family of fifteen; others besides Robert Boyle were talented. Mary Rich (née Boyle), Countess of Warwick, was Katherine’s younger sister; Roger Boyle, Lord Broghill, later Earl of Orrery, author of the play
Mustapha
, was a writer as well as a soldier. ‘Precious sister Kate’, married at fourteen to an Irish nobleman, the second Viscount Ranelagh, quickly displayed that mixture of liveliness and godliness which would later captivate Commonwealth London. ‘The sweetest face I ever saw’ and ‘the best company in which to be merry’
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those were some of the compliments she attracted as a young married woman in Dublin.
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