The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (28 page)

Richard Mulcaster was the first headmaster of Merchant Taylors’ School, and subsequently High Master of St Paul’s until his resignation in 1608 (he died in 1611). As an educationalist he was liberal compared to most of his contemporaries, believing in the value of such ‘extras’ as music, theatricals and physical training. He also viewed the education of girls with approval, generally advocating it in
Positions
…
for the training up of Children
, first
published in 1581 and dedicated to Elizabeth – ‘a Virgin and a Learned Queen’. Yet it is significant that to this champion (by the standards of the time) the education of girls was only as ‘an accessory by the way’ to the upbringing of youths.’
⁵²

In no way therefore did Mulcaster approach the position of Mary Ward, who believed that there was nothing to stop women one day, like men, doing ‘great things’. On the contrary, he qualified his general approval for female education in a number of important respects. First, he proposed that girls had a ‘natural weakness’; using this to explain the awkward fact that they often ‘ripened’ intellectually earlier than boys. Since girls’ brains were not so much ‘charged’ as those of boys, explained Mulcaster, ‘therefore like empty casks they make the greater noise’.

Second, Mulcaster was careful only to ‘allow them [girls] learning … with respect to their ends’. What were these ends? ‘I meddle not with needles nor yet with housewifery,’ wrote Mulcaster, ‘though I think it and know it to be a principal commendation in a woman to govern and direct her household … because I deal only with such things as be incident to their learning.’ Since these girls were to be in the future ‘the principal pillars in the upholding of households’ it was useful for them to learn to read; moreover reading was needful for the study of religion. But Mulcaster saw no point in the admission of girls to the public grammar schools or the universities.

There were a rising number of girls’ boarding-schools, particularly in the environs of London (we have noted how the heiress Sara Cox was snatched from Mrs Winch’s school at Hackney in 1637). To these the prosperous middle classes began to send their daughters; at the school of Mr and Mrs Robert Perwick, also in Hackney, which flourished from 1637 to 1660, there were as many as 100 girls at a time. Other such schools have been traced at Westerham in Kent, Manchester (where there were two), Oxford, Exeter (two) and in Leicester.
⁵³

The first public school actually recorded was the Ladies’ Hall at Deptford in Kent; here in 1617 the ‘Young gentlewomen’, fetchingly attired in loose green garments covered in silver and carnation lace, their shoulders bare, their arms half naked, their
hair ‘dishevelled’ (but artistically so), wearing green pumps and gloves, were presented to Queen Anne, wife of James I. They bestowed on her examples of their needlework. The Queen was then hailed in delightfully zeugmatic terms;

Then bright Goddess, with thy sweet smile grace all

Our nymphs, occasion, and our Ladies Hall.
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This emphasis on needlework and graciousness was characteristic. In 1647 Unton Lady Dering summed up what was expected for Peg and Elizabeth Oxinden, aged twelve and eleven, at Mr Beven’s finishing school at Ashford: ‘And besides the qualities of music both for the virginals and singing (if they have voices) and writing (and to cast account which will be useful to them hereafter) he will be careful also that their behaviour be modest …’ In these boarding-schools, as in the homes of Anne Halkett, Ann Fanshawe and Alice Thornton, it was the education ‘fit for her quality’ in Alice Thornton’s phrase, that is, ‘lady’s’ quality, which was being provided, rather than the sort of learning which Sir Thomas More had had in mind in the previous century when he wrote that a wife should be ‘learned if possible, or at least capable of being so’.
⁵⁵

Some practical accomplishments were of course taught
–
a form of shorthand for example (not so much for secretarial purposes as suitable for taking notes on ‘good’ reading), enough arithmetic for household accounts as Lady Dering suggested, legible handwriting, even tolerable orthography was considered desirable
–
although any girl who actually succeeded in these achievements would find herself way ahead of most of her female contemporaries.
²
At the same time all this was a world away from the kind of heavy grounding in Latin which was being automatically given to the girls’ brothers at the grammar schools: Latin being the key not only to entrance to the universities, but to all forms of serious scholarship at the time, as well as science and
medicine (something Mary Ward had appreciated in her emphasis on the subject to her young nuns).

As the boys’ grammar schools themselves improved with the progress of the century, the rift between male and female education grew into a chasm. Scholarship was not the only loss. By the Restoration, classical knowledge was a prerequisite of the cultivated gentleman. It was left to the playwright Aphra Behn to mourn on behalf of her sex:

The God-like Virgil, and great Homer’s verse

Like divine mysteries are concealed from us.
⁵⁷

Dainty French was however thought to be a desirable female accomplishment at court and elsewhere. An early seventeenth-century French grammar was written to enable women to ‘parlee [sic] out their part with men’. The arrival of a French Queen – Henrietta Maria – in 1625 continued the trend. The influx of French Protestant (Huguenot) refugees into London resulted in the establishment of a few French schools, and provided a number of French teachers. French maids and French nurses were to be found in fashionable households. Later French romances began to flood into England and were read avidly, sometimes in the original: Brilliana Lady Harley, ordering a book from her son at Oxford, in 1638, asked for it in French: ‘for I would rather read that tongue than English’.
⁵⁸

Humphrey Moseley, a leading bookseller, published a translation of Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s novel
Artamenes or The Grand Cyrus
‘now Englished by F.C., Gent’ in 1653; he dedicated it to Lady Anne Lucas on the grounds that she was known to have a perfect command of French (thus presumably not needing the services of F.C., Gent). Moseley added: ‘Were it a Discourse of the most profound Learning that Humane Nature is capable of, and written in Greek or Hebrew, I would make its Dedication to your Noble Lord …’
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That was the difference.

In 1650 the Eure girls, Ralph Verney’s cousins, children of his aunt Margaret Poulteney’s romantic second marriage to William
Eure, were taught ‘what is fit for them, as the reading of the French tongue and to sing and to dance and to write and to play of the guitar’. In contrast, when Sir Ralph heard that his god-daughter Nancy Denton, child of his friend and kinsman the learned Dr Denton, was going to be taught the classics, he read first the doctor, and then Nancy a lecture. ‘Let not your girl learn Latin’, he pronounced to the former, condemning shorthand too for good measure. ‘The difficulty of the first may keep her from that vice, for so I must esteem it in a woman; but the easiness of the other [i.e. shorthand] may be a prejudice to her; for the pride of taking sermon notes, hath made multitudes of women most unfortunate.’
⁶⁰

Nancy, a girl of spirit, wrote back to her godfather that her cousins might out-reach her in their French, but she would outstrip them by learning ‘ebri grek and laten’(let us hope that knowledge of Hebrew, Greek and Latin improved Nancy’s spelling in English). Sir Ralph however refused to concede; in a further letter he condemned such unfeminine attainments once again: ‘Good sweet heart be not so covetous; believe me a Bible (with the Common Prayer) and a good plain catechism in your Mother Tongue being well read and practised, is well worth all the rest and much more suitable to your sex; I know your Father thinks this false doctrine, but be confident your husband will be of my opinion.’
⁶¹

Sir Ralph did put his seal of approval upon learning French. He offered to start a French library for Nancy on his next visit to Paris, since matters suitable for women’s perusal were often written in that language; he included in that category not only romances, plays, poetry, but also all manner of subjects suitable to good housewifery such as recipes and gardening hints. In French could also be read profitably the stories of ‘illustrious (
not learned
)’ women from the past, wrote Sir Ralph firmly.
⁶²
The distinction between the two was not one which would have been appreciated by that ‘dread Virago’, Queen Elizabeth I. Yet Sir Ralph was no fierce male brute: he was on the contrary a good husband, a loving and considerate brother to his five orphaned sisters, a caring father to his daughters. He was merely expressing
the philosophy of his times; while Nancy Denton, the daughter of an enlightened father with a particular interest in female education, represented one of the fortunate exceptions.
⁶³

¹
It was not until 1703 that Mary Ward’s congregation received papal approval, and not until 1877 that the then Pope officially described Mary Ward as its foundress. Finally, in 1951, Pius XII described Mary Ward, with St Vincent de Paul, as the outstanding pioneer of the lay apostolate of women. Today Mary Ward’s Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a mainly teaching foundation, spreads across five continents.

²
The editors of the Verney letters and Oxinden papers comment on the ‘evident decline’ in female education and ‘lack of advance’ in female literacy respectively in the seventeenth century as compared to the sixteenth.
⁵⁶

CHAPTER EIGHT

Living under Obedience

‘Teach her to live under obedience, and whilst she is ummarried, if she would learn anything, let her ask you, and afterwards her husband,
At Home
.’

SIR RALPH VERNEY TO DR DENTON

S
usanna Perwick, daughter of those Perwicks who kept a fashionable girls’ school at Hackney, was one of the few Englishwomen of this time – the age following the death of Queen Elizabeth – to be glorified under the title of virgin. Susanna, an exceptionally talented musician if her biographer John Batchiler is to be believed, died in 1661 at the age of twenty-four. Batchiler called his work
The Virgin’s Pattern: in the Exemplary Life and lamented Death of Mrs Susanna Perwick
¹
(‘Mrs’ was the title then applied to respectable unmarried females, ‘Miss’ except in the case of very young girls being reserved for the other sort). Her musical talents were early encouraged, since the Perwicks’ school staff included such luminaries as Simon Ives, the collaborator of Henry Lawes, as singing-master, and Edward Coleman the song-writer. Batchiler mentions that first Thomas Flood, then William Gregory, taught Susanna; others would gladly have taken their place, such as Albertus Bryne, the composer and ‘famously velvet-fingered Organist’ of St Paul’s Cathedral. Susanna’s proficiency at the violin quickly attracted favourable attention and she was also skilled at composing extemporary variations on a given theme; in addition she played the lute and harpsichord, sang, and studied books on harmony.

It was no wonder that ambassadors and other foreign visitors attended the Hackney school as the fame of this paragon spread, lured further by her sweet face, and her conversation – which, unlike that of most women, was ‘rather sententious than garrulous’. According to Batchiler, Susanna had other skills beyond music: calligraphy, accountancy and cookery.

Alas, at the age of twenty-four Susanna caught a violent fever from sleeping in damp linen on a visit to London from Hackney. When she realized she was dying, she bequeathed her belongings in the neat orderly fashion which had characterized her whole short life: her books went to the young gentlewomen of the school, with the dying wish that they would not read other ‘vain books’ or waste time dressing-up. Then in the course of her protracted deathbed, Susanna herself gave ‘small silent groans’, in between her ‘smiling slumbers’, while her family wept loudly around her. At her funeral, attended by the whole school, Susanna’s velvet-clad hearse was carried by six white-clad maidservants; while the pupils who had known her best, dressed in black, with white scarves and gloves, held up the mourning sheet. She was buried in the Hackney church, in the same grave as Mrs Anne Carew, a schoolfriend, ‘a fine costly garland of gumwork’ being placed on the coffin. Susanna’s epitaph made her ultimate destination clear: