II.Women in Traditional Roles
Many English women,no doubt,spent the Civil War period quietly at home,caring for their children,running their households,and—in short—continuing the activities which had fallen to women's lot for generations.However,it is the other women—women who,whether through choice or by force of circumstances,became involved in public life—on whom this essay will focus.
In Elizabeth Mordaunt we see a good example of a woman acting as a political agent,yet without stepping outside a traditionally‘feminine’ supporting role.[4]Elizabeth Mordaunt had been born(in 1632/3)into a noble family:she was the only daughter of Thomas Carey,a son of the Earl of Monmouth.Her husband,John Mordaunt,was a royalist who,although too young to fight in the first Civil War,raised troops on behalf of Charles I in 1648 and subsequently spent several years in exile in Holland.After his return to England in 1652,John Mordaunt was‘on the fringes of royalist conspiracy’for the next several years,but it seems to have been only after his marriage to Elizabeth Carey in 1657 that he became actively involved in plotting against Cromwell on behalf of the young Charles II.[5]These plots—including a secret meeting with a royalist agent,the Marquis of Ormond—were betrayed to the government,and Mordaunt was put on trial for treason.But just as John Mordaunt's return to a more engaged form of royalist commitment in the 1650s may be attributable to his wife's influence,so too is Elizabeth Mordaunt often held at least partially responsible for his narrow deliverance from conviction(and its probable consequence,execution).She bribed members of the jury on her husband's behalf,and was probably responsible for arranging the escape of a key witness,whose absence from the trial substantially weakened the legal case for the prosecution.When votes were counted at the end of Mordaunt's trial,they were evenly divided:nineteen each in favour of conviction and acquittal.Mordaunt was spared on the casting vote of the president of the court,and duly returned to his royalist intrigues.He probably owed his life to his wife's efforts.
In this example,the nature and extent of Elizabeth Mordaunt's political activities are telling.Although she was clearly a committed royalist,her role in the events of 1657-8 seems to have been strictly ancillary to her husband's:initially confined to encouraging and assisting him,later directed towards saving him from execution.Just as telling,moreover,is another anecdote which continues to circulate about her,though its veracity has been questioned.[6]The more romantic version of Elizabeth Mordaunt's actions in defence of her husband represents her not merely as bribing jurors and spiriting away an important witness,but more dramatically as going—while pregnant—to see Cromwell himself,to plead with him to spare her husband's life.Whether or not this story is true is almost unimportant.A wife—especially a pregnant wife—pleading with the enemy on her husband's behalf is a traditional and very powerful image within many cultures.Elizabeth Mordaunt,in pleading with Cromwell,would have been fulfilling cultural expectations of what a wife should do on behalf of her husband and the father of her unborn child.She would have been exercising a form of feminine influence,but she would have been doing so in an entirely traditional and well-accepted manner.There is nothing about this story which sets it apart as being either particular to the English Civil War,or outside the normal cultural understanding of a woman's role.In so far as it is transgressive at all,it is licensed transgression,and is fully consistent with what English culture,in this and other periods,would have expected a loyal and heroic wife to do.
Elizabeth Mordaunt has gone down in history as a woman who intervened in public events primarily in defence of her husband(though she would also have seen her actions as being ultimately in support of the king).My second example in this section,Jane Whorwood,differs from Mordaunt in the sense that her interventions into public events seem to have been undertaken on her own initiative,albeit probably with the support of her mother and stepfather.Her actions were also much more specifically directed towards the defence of the king himself.Furthermore,although Whorwood's public interventions can still more or less be accounted for in terms of traditional female roles,they push the definition of such roles to the limit.[7]
Jane Whorwood had been born in 1612 into a family with court connections.Her father was principal harbinger of the royal stables and her mother was laundress to Queen Anne;her mother's second husband,married in 1619,was groom of the bedchamber to the then Prince Charles(later Charles I).Jane's own husband,Brome Whorwood,was a royalist in the Civil War,but was apparently more lukewarm in his allegiances than his wife:rather than fighting on the king's behalf,he spent most of the first Civil War in self-imposed exile in France.Jane,however,was intensely loyal to the king,and seems to have been quite prepared to use her femininity on his behalf.Many of the actions she undertook in support of Charles would have been available to her only because she was a woman.
Jane Whorwood's role as a royalist agent began in the mid 1640s,when she smuggled more than£80,000 worth of gold from a city merchant(a financial ally of her stepfather's)to help swell the king's shrinking coffers.In 1647,when Charles and his court relocated to the north of England,she served as a courier,carrying letters for the king between Newcastle and London.She also consulted with the astrologer William Lilly on Charles's behalf.When Charles was imprisoned in Carisbrooke Castle,on the Isle of Wight,in 1648,Whorwood continued to organise couriers and letters(often in cipher)on the king's behalf.She corresponded about a possible invasion,in support of Charles,from Scotland,and she consulted Lilly about the feasibility of the king's plans for escape from Carisbrooke Castle.In April 1648 she and another royalist ally obtained a boat and waited off the shore of Kent,intending to smuggle Charles to safety in Holland.The plan was thwarted only by Charles's failure to escape from Carisbrooke at the appointed time.The Marquis of Hertford,also party to the plot,wrote afterwards that if all the king's allies had‘done their parts as carefully as Whorwood,the King would have been at large’.[8]
Even such a brief summary as this shows that Jane Whorwood was a remarkable and resourceful royalist agent:loyal,inventive and physically courageous.Her range of activities on the king's behalf is considerably more varied and proactive than Elizabeth Mordaunt's.Yet her actions—carrying money and letters,consulting an astrologer,even arranging an escape vessel—still fall,like Mordaunt's,more or less within the scope of activities traditionally available to women in conditions of war.Contemporaries,indeed,assumed that during Charles's period of captivity in Carisbrooke,Whorwood had taken on that most traditional of female supporting roles and become the king's mistress.According to recent research,this assumption may have been correct.[9]Jane Whorwood's ingenuity and bravery on behalf of King Charles are undoubted,but there is little about them that speaks of new opportunities available to women during the Civil War period.[10]Rather they represent a woman doing her utmost for the cause she believed in,using a conventional range of resources and opportunities,albeit with an unusual degree of skill,creativity and tenacity.