Normal Women, page 18
Elite women and their women servants found themselves defending their houses and lands from the enemy troops, some of them resisting long sieges of their property. In the blockade of Basing House in Hampshire, it was the women who held off the Parliamentary troops by stoning the besieging forces from the parapets. When the siege was broken, many women died, including the daughter of the doctor, Dr Griffiths, who rushed to defend her father and was smashed in the head.106
Many ladies became famous for the defence of their houses, such as Lady Mary Winter at Lydney House, Gloucestershire. Lady Mary Bankes held Corfe Castle with her daughters and 80 soldiers for a six-week siege. She refused rescue and when the castle fell to Parliamentary troops and was razed to the ground, they allowed her to keep the keys and the seal as a gesture of respect for her generalship. Her epitaph claimed that she had ‘a constancy and courage above her sex’.107
Lady Brilliana Harley refused to surrender Brampton Castle for three months in August 1643, commanding with ‘a masculine bravery both for religion, resolution, wisdom and manlike policy’.108 Lady Portland said that she would fire the cannon herself rather than surrender Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight, and Lady Charlotte Derby, embroidering a bed hanging while organising the siege, swore that she would fight to the death. In fact she did not die; she broke out of Lathom House, seized the enemy mortars and won the battle in February 1643. Lady Cholmley stayed with her husband throughout the siege of Scarborough Castle, and Elizabeth Twysden nursed the wounded. Blanche Arundell held Wardour Castle.109 The queen herself, Henrietta Maria, came under fire in 1643 when she landed in England and marched at the head of her troops, and was fired on again when she sailed from Falmouth.
Some local people banded together to enforce peace in their own community, ready to fight against any marauding troop of either side, to keep their town or county free of warfare. They were called ‘clubmen’, but some of the bands were proudly female, ‘maiden’ bands: troops of women who defended their homes and their communities, and armed, drilled and fought for their locality. The ‘Virgins of Norwich’, in support of the Parliamentarians, commissioned and paid for their own troop known as the ‘Maidens Troop’. On the opposing side, women recruits and followers were known as ‘Leaguer Ladies’.110
In addition to serving as soldiers, women followed the armies as auxiliary troops, scavenging, cooking, providing laundry and medical and support services, frequently close to battles and sometimes caught up in them: the capture and plunder of the baggage train proved a highlight of victory for both sides. Some of these women would have been the wives of individual soldiers, travelling with their husbands and perhaps fighting at their sides. All women followers risked capture and attack from the opposing side, and even being abused by the army they were supporting. Sergeant Wharton in Denzil Holles’ Parliamentary regiment put his own women camp followers in the pillory and then threw them into the river.111
Both sides complained that camp followers were exploiting the situation, accusing women of accompanying the armies for profit rather than loyalty, and both armies protested that the other side was a magnet for women sex workers.
Thousands of women were caught up in the wars and suffered for their affiliation. Lady Ann Fanshawe and her sister followed their father to Royalist Oxford, and Lady Ann then travelled with her husband, in royal service all around Britain and to Europe, at enormous personal cost. Her children died during the family’s exile, and she buried a child in Lisbon, Madrid, Paris, Oxford, Yorkshire, Hampshire and Kent.112 Lady Filmer was trapped in her house and searched by suspicious troops ten times; Lady Anne Clifford, a Royalist, was held under house arrest in her London home for months; Margaret Eure reported that she was ‘exposed to all villainies’. Joyce Jeffreys had to pay protection money to Royalist troops;113 Mrs Atkyns travelled from Oxford to London to find her house looted and vandalised, and then miscarried her child and nearly died herself. Lady Anne Saville gave birth during the siege of York. In April 1644, Alderman Taylor’s laundry maid was killed while hanging out washing, and a maid was killed by accident at Wendover.114
Women were targeted for attack when towns were sacked by both sides, part of the plunder of a siege and punishment for the defenders. Some incidents were brutal; but some perpetrators were punished by their officers. In September 1644, after the Parliamentary surrender of Fowey to the king, a Lostwithiel woman who had given birth only three days before died after being stripped naked and thrown in the river. Charles I ordered the hanging of her murderers – his own soldiers. The terrible abuse of women and the civilian population by Oliver Cromwell in Ireland – 200 women were murdered at the Market Cross in Wexford in one incident alone on 11 October 1649 – was one of many savage imperialist crimes; not typical of Parliamentary troops nor of Cromwell’s behaviour in England.
Women made significant contributions to both sides as spies, agents and informants.115 Catherine Howard Lady d’Aubigny, served as a royal agent, hiding messages under her ringlets. She delivered the royal orders to Edward Waller, whose name not hers was given to the ‘Waller Plot’. Lady Isabella Thynne spied for and advised on royal strategy.Jane Whorwood, the highly active, highly skilful Royalist spy, planned Charles I’s escapes from imprisonment in Carisbrooke Castle and Hampton Court, and carried thousands of pounds of funds for him. From 1642–4 she moved more than £83,000 in gold for the Royalist cause, possibly hiding it in her soap barrels. Elizabeth Wheeler carried the king’s messages, as did Lady Mary Cave, who was caught trying to get to Charles, imprisoned at Holdenby, with a ciphered letter. The cipher alone meant that she would face charges of treason, punishable by death – and there are no records of her after her arrest.
Susan Hyde, sister of Edward Hyde, later Earl of Clarendon, spied for the Royalist conspiracy group the Sealed Knot, taking messages directly to the king, operating at the centre of the Royalist spy system for four years from 1652 to 1656. Arrested for spying by Parliament agents, she was imprisoned and possibly tortured. She died a fortnight after her arrest. Her brother, who wrote the definitive history of the English civil wars, never even mentioned her service: such was his shame at a lady in espionage; or perhaps it was sibling rivalry from a less courageous brother.
Elizabeth Carey and Elizabeth Murray were also lady members of the Sealed Knot. Catherine Murray (Elizabeth’s sister) financed the wartime court at Oxford and came under suspicion for spying throughout the war. Martha Parratt lost her property in 1650, accused of spying, riding with Sir John Byron’s troop and paying Captain Ashley £100 for horses for the king. Elizabeth Mordaunt worked with her husband John to spy for Prince Charles. When he went to England, she remained in Calais to send and receive secret messages. Anne Halkett was in the service of the young James Stuart, Duke of York, later James II, and she managed his disguise and his escape to the Dutch republic in 1648, and served the Royalist cause spying in London. The novelist and playwright Aphra Behn may have worked as a spy for the Royalists, or she may have forged false intelligence and her reports. A woman spy caught in the Earl of Essex’s camp before the Battle of Newbury was shot in the head and thrown in the river to die. Another female Royalist spy who confessed that she was paid 14s a week to spy for Prince Rupert was also killed and thrown in the water. The punishment of women spies by drowning suggests that men liked to duck them like scolds or ‘swim’ them like witches as a special punishment for disobeying male rule.
Working women also served the Royalist cause. Charles’s correspondence with his wife Henrietta Maria in France, while he was held captive at Carisbrooke Castle, was hidden and carried by Mrs Dowcett, the wife of the clerk of the kitchen, Abraham. The royal laundress Elizabeth Wheeler and her assistant Mary also risked their lives to save the royal prisoner. Women booksellers took secret messages for the Royalist spy Richard Royston. His brother, Peter Barwick, said they were ‘faithful and honest Messengers . . . in circumstances not much to be envied, and were consequently, through the Mediocrity or rather Meanness of their condition, less conspicuous and more safe’.
He noted: ‘These women used frequently to travel on Foot like Strowlers begging from House to House and loitering at Places agreed-upon to take up Books . . . it was easy to sew Letters privately within the Cover of any Book and then give the Book a secret Mark to notify the Insertion of Letters therein.’
Women spied for Parliament too. Lucy Hay, Lady Carlisle, leaked the news that the king was on his way to arrest the five leading Parliamentarians in 1642 in time for them to escape. Working women too, some out of conviction, some for money, as the spy business became more professional. The Parliament books of 28 May 1652 show a payment of £100 to a woman whose identity is hidden ‘for the good service done by her in giveing intelligence to the Armies of this Commonwealth at Worcester’.
As the reward indicates, the unknown woman made a significant contribution to one of the most important battles of the civil wars – the last, in 1651, a Parliamentary victory.
In 1650, Susan Bowen was paid £10 for intelligence; Elizabeth alias Joan Alkyn got £2 for ‘several discoveries’. Alkyn worked as a propagandist and journalist under the name of ‘Parliament Joan’, publishing pro-Parliament news books but also for the Royalist press such as the Mercurius Anglicus.
When the king’s eldest son Prince Charles escaped from England after defeat at the Battle of Worcester, he was famously smuggled and hidden by women royalists. Ann Wyndham, wife of Colonel Francis Wyndham, helped him escape from Worcester, as did her niece Juliana Coningsby; Anne Bird was ‘instrumental’ in the king’s escape, and other women like Catherine Gunter, Joan Harford, Eleanor Sampson and Ann Rogers were later given pensions for their service. Jane Lane, a young Roman Catholic woman, forged letters and passports and rode for two weeks, with the prince disguised as her servant, from Bentley Hall in Staffordshire to Lyme Regis on the south coast, where he took ship into exile.
A Parliamentary woman, Jane Bradley, a barmaid at the Heaven Tavern in Westminster, overheard men plotting against the government in 1679. She reported them and was paid a gold coin and recruited as a spy. She reported on a second plot against a nobleman and was charged with being part of a conspiracy, but was acquitted.116
Hard Times for Poor Women
There was a succession of disasters after the Tudor invasion: the start of a ‘Little Ice Age’, which caused bitterly cold weather and poor harvests; and an epidemic of a new illness – called the ‘Sweat’. The Reformation closed the religious houses that had provided charity, medicine and employment. The increasing profits of the wool trade and developments in agriculture tempted landlords to exclude tenants from common land in a fresh wave of ‘enclosures’, which made the elite richer and the poor poorer. The remains of lordly giving in the old-fashioned large households – supporting the local poor with gifts and loans, paying fair wages and supporting local markets – continued to decline under these pressures.
Anxiety about the poor, and especially the itinerant poor who were not controlled by parish or lord, increased pressure on homeless and travelling people. People known as ‘gypsies’ were ordered out of the country by Henry VIII; ‘gypsy’ immigrants could be removed within 15 days of their arrival; and there were mass expulsions to the then English port of Calais of people named as ‘gypsies’ in 1544, and to Norway from Boston, Hull and Newcastle. In 1562, an Elizabethan law declared that travelling with or joining ‘gypsies’ was illegal. In 1596, nearly 200 ‘gypsies’ (some of them women) were put on trial at York and 106 were sentenced to death. Nine were executed and the rest reprieved and sent to their home parishes. A woman in 1601 Middlesex was hanged for living with a ‘gypsy’ family, while a second was sentenced to death and only reprieved for her pregnancy.117
The Tudor poor laws formed a complex set of measures punishing beggars and vagrants, restricting beggars’ licences to those considered deserving, forcing people to stay in their parishes and registering the poor. They were set to work in purpose-built workhouses on low wages, financed by a compulsory poor rate paid by landowners to their parishes. This was supposed to replace lordly giving at the kitchen door; but avoided as a tax and meanly distributed by local middling men, it was almost impossible for the poor to get adequate support: the Norwich Census of the Poor in 1570 refused payment to Janis House, a widow of 85 years old, ruling that she was ‘able to keep herself, by her spinning’. The poor laws were not passed to assist the poor but to control and contain them, and used almost exclusively against poor women.118 The Statute of Artificers of 1563 forced any adult without their own property to take the work they were offered, regardless of pay or conditions.119 A London law at the same time put any woman without a male guarantor aged 14–40 into service at the whim of the ‘Burgesses’ or aldermen. Any single woman could be bound ‘to serve and be retained by yeare, weeke, or day, in such cost and for such wages as they shall thinke meete, and if she refuse, they may commit her to prison, till she shall he bound to serve’.120
The Statute of Artificers of 1601 ruled that the magistrates of an area – all of them landlords and employers – should be the ones to set the wages for everyone. Unsurprisingly, they set them as low as they dared. It was a crime for a neighbouring farmer to set better rates. New regulations for the guilds favoured employers: making all apprentices under the age of 21 serve for a new minimum of seven years, usually unpaid.121
The Elizabethan labour and poor laws of 1597–1603 were hard on all women, especially independent women living and working alone. A single woman could only leave her home parish if she could prove she had a lodging at her destination, though working men could still move for better pay – increasing the gulf between the wage for men and women.122 Women labouring gangs who followed the harvest, women shearing gangs who travelled and worked as a group, women pedlars, travelling merchants and entertainers, all were banned from the roads. Even travelling saleswomen with good businesses had to get a licence. A poor single woman could be legally forced into an apprenticeship by the parish authorities, or set to work in a workhouse. A pregnant single woman could be driven out of the parish. Single women on the streets were harassed, assaulted and abused, and there was an informal but widely observed curfew for women after dark.123
In Southampton in the 1600s, the city fathers demanded proof that a single woman living alone could support herself, and even when she demonstrated her business, they could still order her into employment of their choosing. If they put her into domestic service, she came under the rule of the male head of the household. In 1609, Elizabeth Green was ordered either to go into service or leave the city. In Norwich, women who lived alone could be sent to a house of correction, whipped and put into domestic service. Young single women were targeted by the authorities, who were increasingly afraid of them: conventional men frightened of disorder.124 The wealthy merchants and rising yeomen who aspired to be magistrates, and took the parish overseer jobs, opposed the old spontaneous charity of lordly giving. John Pike was summoned to the ecclesiastical court of Little Bedwyn in Wiltshire in 1610, charged with ‘harbouring a stranger in his house that came to him from Gloucester, great with child’.125
The court put pressure on the woman to name the father of her child – and so take the cost of the infant off the local rates: ‘We desire that the said Pike and the woman concerned, may be cited in court that the father of the child may be known, and the parish discharged.’126
Some women felt a sense of sisterhood: Anne Frie of Broad Hinton defended herself to the magistrates, telling them that she found ‘a walking woman . . . in travail of child in the open street and took her in for womanhood’s sake’.127
The Bastardy Act of 1610 imprisoned an unmarried mother for up to a year if she could not support her child. There was a moral panic about infanticide in Parliament in 1606, even though actual prosecutions remained low: in nearly 150 years in Surrey (1663 to 1802), only 11 per cent of women accused of murders were found guilty of infanticide (34 of 318).128 In Essex, it was the charge in 20 per cent of murder cases against women (84 cases). Most women sentenced to death were executed for infanticide – killing their babies – until the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 that signalled more merciful sentencing. Later prosecutions would have to prove that a woman had deliberately planned the death of her baby, until the repeal of the law in 1803.
Elite women landlords joined in the oppression of working people. Joan Thynne (1558–1612) warned her husband in 1601 to take legal action about his ‘common’: ‘It were not amiss if you did serve Tap with process for your common, or else you shall have but little by his goodwill. For he doth put in so many sheep and other cattle, that you shall have no common there, as I hear they say unto others. But I hope you will not let it pass so carelessly.’129
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, ordered her steward to enclose land and overcharge rents on the lands she managed as her husband’s widow. Her exploitation of the local poor people became so extreme that even her heirs complained.130
The poor men and women who suffered under the poor laws, excluded from the land by enclosures, understood completely what was happening. This ballad, from the sixteenth century, is called ‘The Poore Man Paies for All’:
Me thought I saw how wealthy men Did grind the poore men’s faces,
And greedily did prey on them, Not pittying their cases
They make them toyle and labour sore For wages too-too small.
Even as the mighty fishes still Doe feed upon the lesse;
So rich men, might they have their will, Would on the poore men cess
It is a proverbe old and true –
That weakest goe to th’ wall;
Rich men can drink till th’ sky looke blue,
