Sir Edmund Verney hoped gloomily that ‘some lucky bullet may free her of this misfortune’. Margaret Poulteney was felt to have behaved particularly badly because she had tricked Ralph’s wife Mary into buying her a form of trousseau – a black taffeta waistcoat and petticoat trimmed with handsome lace – and delivering Margaret’s favourite red damask petticoat and waistcoat from Claydon. Margaret used the excuse that she needed a new outfit for a christening. Instead she rushed off with her finery to meet William Eure on his way back from Scotland, where he had been serving in the King’s Army.
To all these reproaches Margaret, now Mrs Eure, had an irrefutable as well as disdainful reply: ‘The town makes havoc of my good name, but let them do their worst, I defy them all. None in the world can call me to account for my actions; for I am not in any one’s tuition.’30
By the 1670s The Ladies Calling was trying to get round this awkward possibility by suggesting that God did not set the same value upon their being ‘masterless’ as some over-independent widows did: ‘He [God] reckons them most miserable when they are most at liberty.’31 This last shot was presumably mere conjecture on the part of the Anglican divine who wrote The Ladies Calling; the feelings of the widows themselves, which can be established with more certainty, were very different. Liberty, if accompanied by affluence, could be very sweet.
Lady Anne Twysden was a widow with two fine houses, one in London and the other at East Peckham, Kent. In her youth she had been a beauty, tall but very slender. Her own son, Sir Roger Twysden, paid this tribute to her: ‘She was the handsomest woman (at least as handsome) as I ever saw’, with ‘skin exceeding fair’ and ‘light brown hair’. After forty, although she continued to look young for her age, ‘fatness’ was ‘much trouble to her’.32 Despite this hampering weight, ill-health generally and a lame foot where she had been dropped by her nurse as a child, Lady Anne ruled her domains with a rod of iron. Endowed with an excellent business brain, aided by a fluent epistolary style (and that female rarity, good handwriting), Lady Anne Twysden hardly accorded with the prevalent notion of woman as the helpless sex. At the time of the ship-money crisis in the 1630s, Lady Anne at one juncture had the courage to refuse to pay the tax – a development which deeply worried her son on her behalf, but which he could not affect.
Even though she was physically unable to move about the house, somehow Lady Anne, according to her son, managed to know ‘every egg spent in it’. Her thriftiness was combined with a chastity, one might almost say, prudery, which prevented her from being alone with a man – even her own son when grown up – without a maid present. Thrifty and prudish as she might be, Lady Anne was also, wrote Sir Roger, ‘full of motherly affection’.33 She must have been warm-hearted, for she managed to make herself beloved to those around her, including the young gentlewomen of little fortune whom she employed as attendants (no doubt to report on the egg-spending).
One of these, the thirty-year-old Isabella Saunders, was finally selected by Lady Anne as a bride for Sir Roger, still a bachelor at the advanced age of thirty-seven. Isabella tended her mother-in-law with devotion and wept copiously at her deathbed in 1638, although after her marriage it was still Lady Anne, not the new Lady Twysden (generally termed Dame Isabella, perhaps to differentiate her), who ran Roydon Hall. Sir Roger Twysden’s notebooks also leave us an exact record of the financial restraint which Lady Anne imposed upon him under the heading ‘Reckonings between me and my mother’; as for example, ‘The 6th July 1629 I owed her £46.12.10. pd her £20. 20 July and pd. her £40. 10 Sept and told her where she cd have another £100 in London.’34
The reason that Lady Anne Twysden was able to exercise such command over every aspect of life surrounding her, including the life of her son, was simple. It was not connected with her beauty, motherly affection, or even her thriftiness. It was because Anne Twysden had been born Lady Anne Finch, another member of that large Kentish family to which Sir Heneage Finch belonged. Her mother was the heiress Elizabeth Heneage, ‘a Lady of great Fortune; and having a mind suitable to it’,35 who married Sir Moyle Finch and after his death was created Viscountess Maidstone and Countess of Winchilsea in her own right as a mark of her status. Anne Finch’s husband, Sir William Twysden, died in 1629. After that, as a widow with an unencumbered estate, Lady Anne Twysden was able to enjoy personally that very fortune which she had brought to her husband on marriage.
Lady Anne Clifford, like Anne Twysden, was an heiress, but on a vastly grander scale. She was born in 1590 but true happiness only came to her late in life in her role as a magnificent widow, mother and grandmother, one of whom V. Sackville-West, the editor of her autobiography, aptly wrote that she was ‘born to matriarchy’. After Anne Clifford’s first marriage to Richard Sackville, Earl of Dorset, in 1609, Emilia Lanier serenaded her as
… that sweet Lady sprung from Cliffords race,
Of noble Bedford’s blood, fair stream of Grade;
To honourable Dorset now espous’d …36
However, much of life with ‘honourable Dorset’ turned out to be torment for his young wife.
Her role as chatelaine of the historical Sackville palace at Knole was often invidious since Lord Dorset was openly unfaithful – even bringing his inamorata Lady Penistone – ‘a dainty fine young lady’ – to stay at Knole. Almost worse from Anne’s point of view was the fact that Dorset refused to support her in her struggle to claim her own northern inheritance from her father’s brother (since the estates had been entailed in her father’s will on a child of either sex). Lord Dorset wanted to commute these rights for cash; his wife wanted to cling to the lands. Most people blamed her for her obstinacy and at one point during the row her son was removed from her care. Anne described herself in her autobiography as being ‘like an owl in the desert’; while Lord Dorset went to ‘Cocking, to Bowling Alleys, to Plays and Horse Races … I stayed in the country having many times a sorrowful and heavy heart, and being condemned by most folks because I would not consent to the agreements.’37
Death removed Lord Dorset in 1624, but Lady Anne Clifford’s second marriage, in 1630, to Philip Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, owner of sumptuous Wilton House near Salisbury, was no happier. Notorious for his rough ways in youth, Lord Pembroke sided with Parliament in later life – possibly to secure his possessions – and was much pilloried by the Royalist pamphleteers in consequence. Fortunately – from Anne’s point of view – his death in 1649 left her a widow for the second time. From now until her own demise nearly thirty years later at the age of eighty-six, she was able to enjoy not only the fruits of two rich jointures, but also those northern properties she had so much desired, released to her at last by the death of her uncle.
‘The marble pillars of Knole in Kent and Wilton in Wiltshire were to me oftentimes but the gay arbours of anguish’, wrote Anne of her two marriages. How different, how formidably different was the life of the Dowager Countess! Clad usually in black serge, ‘her features more expressive of firmness than benignity’, as a nineteenth-century local historian tactfully expressed it after studying her portraits, ‘the Lady Anne’, as she is still remembered in the north, gave full vent to all her tastes in a way she could never do throughout two unhappy marriages.38 Her two surviving children being daughters, by her first marriage, they offered no impediments to her will.
These tastes included the restoration of ancient castles and chapels, part of her inheritance, on which it has been estimated that she must have spent at least £40,000. ‘The Lady Anne’ also took particular pleasure in raising monuments in stone: among others she was responsible for the classical monument to the poet Spenser in Westminster Abbey executed by Nicholas Stone, and a medieval type of altar tomb to her own mother which can still be seen in the Church of St Lawrence, Appleby, in Cumbria, alongside the monument which she erected to herself. John Donne had paid tribute to her conversation in youth: she was a woman who ‘knew well how to discourse of all things, from predestination to flea-silk [a plant], a wonderful housekeepe
r who could still open her mouth with wisdom’. In later life the Lady Anne shared the conversational gifts which had so much impressed Donne with those poorer widows whom she had installed in a residence at Appleby in Westmorland; she made a point of dining with them once a week and talking as freely ‘as with persons of the highest rank’.39
The Lady Anne was a great reader; as she grew old, she kept two ‘Well-educated females’ constantly at her side to read aloud. The Psalms and the Old Testament were favourites, but she also enjoyed classical authors and had a particular love of Chaucer. When engrossed in his works, she wrote, ‘a little part of his bounteous spirit infuses itself into me’. Bounteous she certainly was, and not only in spirit. She made the giving of presents her hobby, buying books of devotion, for example, in bulk – up to fifty at a time – to give away. And she was a prodigious tipper: £3 to a man who brought her a letter from her daughter, a sum which represented something like the man’s annual wage. Even if her autobiography gained a good deal from the work of certain literary ghosts,40 that in itself was a form of patronage which few women of the time other than a very rich widow could have exercised.
Even for the less privileged, widows’ rights were one area where the law was by no means so unfavourable to women as it was elsewhere. For those outside the wealthier world of the marriage settlement made in advance of the ceremony, there existed the traditional widow’s ‘thirds’, that is, a third share in the husband’s estate which under common law was her due.41 A widow’s inheritance could take many different forms, some of which could enable her to make a convenient second marriage on her own terms if she so wished, while others allowed her a position of her own in commercial society.
In cases of trouble a widow’s dower lands were protected if the late husband’s creditors fell upon the rest of the estate. These lands could only be forfeited by the widow voluntarily. There were other perquisites: Alice Thornton, dealing with her husband’s virtually bankrupted estate, was advised by her brother to cling on to her valuable ‘widow-bed’ instead of selling it to pay the debts. Unlike the beds left to her by her mother, which formed part of her estate – and thus part of her husband’s – and so could be ‘prized’ away by creditors, the ‘widow-bed’ could not be touched.42
Manorial court rolls show that it was customary for a widow of a copyhold tenant to remain in occupation of his land until she remarried or died – this was called her ‘widow’s estate’.43 As a new grant of a piece of copyhold land was customarily made for three lives, the widow of the first named – if she did not remarry – might survive the other two. (The fact that remarriage meant loss of the copyhold kept many widows from remarrying.) But women were also copyhold tenants in their own right in some of those manorial court rolls that have survived from the seventeenth century: thus one Henry Hellier put his wife and son’s name into the copy in 1626 – a demonstration of equality. This meant that Anne Hellier could enjoy the copy after her second marriage.
Certain corporations of the period still recognized the wife’s position as a business partner (even if that recognition was dwindling as the century progressed).44 In contrast to unmarried girls who were rarely allowed to be apprenticed to the guilds, the wives of guild members could have their husbands’ rights and privileges conferred upon them: as widows, they were thus often in a position to run the business, for the assistance of a journeyman still meant that the widow was in practical control. Carpenters’ widows, for example, could receive apprentices. Weavers’ widows were especially well treated, being able to continue to work in their own right. After the Restoration, when many similar privileges were vanishing, Charles II still upheld the rights of the weaver’s widow by decree ‘to use and occupy the said trade by herself’.
Widows’ names appear in the contracts of the shipping trade: in 1636 Susanna Angell and her daughter Elizabeth petitioned to land fourteen barrels of powder, and another thirty-eight barrels expected to arrive in the ship Fortune, and either sell it or send it back to Holland, from whence it came. In Tom of all Trades, published in 1631, Thomas Powell recommended young men not to seek employment in the provision businesses which he termed ‘the housewives’ trades (as brewer, baker, cook and the like)’ because the wife so often acted as her husband’s business partner. Where the wife had demonstrably shared the work during the husband’s lifetime, her position was often entrenched on his death. The names are known of brewers’ widows, bakers’ widows, and butchers’ widows still plying the family trade (not all, one hopes, of the type of Elizabeth Chorlton, who was fined in the 1650s for selling ‘stinking meat’). A widow could even be a vintner, if she inherited the business, an unlikely opportunity for a woman on her own account.45
Strongest of all was the position of the printers’ widows. Membership of the Stationers’ Company, which included booksellers, binders and printers, was strictly limited to twenty-two persons. Widows actually retained their freedom of the Stationers’ Company not only after their husband’s death, but following remarriage. In this way a printer’s widow presented an eligible match for an aspirant printer, printers’ businesses frequently travelling sideways in this manner, as when the widow of Francis Simson married in turn Richard Read and George Elde, carrying the vital membership of the Stationers’ Company with her.46
These energetic women were certainly not carrying out the ideal of the widow’s conduct proposed by Richard Brathwaite in The English Gentlewoman: ‘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. For a widow to love society … gives speedy wings to spreading infamy … for in such meetings she exposeth her honour to danger, which above all others she ought incomparably to tender.’ What if a widow needed to plead in a law court for her inheritance, family fortunes which might ‘all lie a-bleeding’? Here widows were simply reminded of the promises of Christ: ‘Your Lord maketh intercession for you, rendering right judgement to the orphan and righteousness unto the widow.’47
The women described in this chapter would have preferred to take Christ’s parable of the importunate widow as their text; which advocated a far less passive code of behaviour.
CHAPTER SIX
Poor and Atrabilious
‘[I] could see nothing in the evidence which did persuade me to think them other than poor, melancholy, envious, mischievous, ill-disposed, ill-dieted, atrabilious constitutions.’
ARTHUR WILSON ON THE CHELMSFORD WITCHES, 1645
When the fifth Earl of Huntingdon succeeded to the title of his grandfather in 1604 he specifically ordered that great respect should be paid to ‘my ould lady’ – Dorothy Port, Dowager Countess of Huntingdon. Fifty years later a cheerful young lady, proposing to marry a peer who was on his deathbed, saw it as an undoubted advantage that she ‘might be a widow in a very short time, and not be troubled long with him’.1 But the independence of a wealthy widow, and the honour generally paid to an elderly aristocrat, found no parallels in the condition of the poor women who made up the vast majority of the widow class. The contrast between the fate of the haves and the have-nots in seventeenth-century society is alarmingly illustrated by the relative prospects of the rich and poor women in widowhood.
The very sight of a poor old woman lacking an obvious protector aroused many different primitive fears in the breast of society (nor were these fears exclusive to the male sex). To begin with, such a woman presented a social problem: where the ‘masterlessness’ of the wealthy widow was her opportunity for independence, the unsupported state of her poorer contemporary could all too easily mean suffering, if not actual destitution.
Recent research has dispelled the cosy notion of a society where old folk lived side by side in the same dwelling with their descendants: very few married children lived with their parents, let alone with a single surviving parent; such a household was the exception rather than the rule. At the same time th
e old style of welfare, based on the charity of the church or the manorial organization, had either vanished or was breaking down. A series of Tudor statutes, culminating in the Poor Law of 1601, made the succour of the weak the business of the parish, by means of compulsory rates levied on its members.2
There were also far more women than men at the bottom of society economically: most of the adult pensioners in the City of London were widows (however, their treatment here seems to have been benign).3 The frequent mention of poor widows in the social projects and wills of the charitably inclined (the efforts of Lettice Viscountess Falkland and Lady Anne Clifford have been observed) makes the continuous nature of the problem clear. These and other private beneficiaries were the lucky ones. In general, the sight of a poor old woman might raise implications of possible financial responsibility in fellow members of her community – guilt never being an agreeable sensation.
Nor was the phenomenon of old age a particularly rare one, despite the short expectation of life at birth. Every village, wrote Francis Bacon in 1623, had at least one person in it over sixty; Gregory King, in his account of the English population written at the end of the century, estimated that one person in ten would be aged sixty or older.4 The fact was that those members of society who did survive the perils of accident, disease and childbirth might live to a great age.
These figures do not refer of course peculiarly to women; nevertheless accounts of women attaining an exceptional age, even by today’s standards, spatter such annals as we have. George Ballard, born in 1706, was a self-educated antiquary; his diligence at research makes his Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain who have been celebrated for their writings or skill in the learned languages, arts, and sciences, first published in 1752, a valuable source-book for the previous century. He quotes among his heroines Elizabeth Legge, who was born in 1580 and died in 1695; her two sisters lived to 100 and 112, her brothers to 109 and what must have been under the circumstances a disappointing eighty-two, respectively. Some of the early Quaker women, for all their trials, lived to an astonishing age. It has been suggested that it would be not so much the lack of aged persons as the lack of a large middle-aged group which would surprise us about the seventeenth century, in contrast to our world today.5