III.Traditional Roles in Novel Circumstances
But the Civil War did throw up circumstances in which women found themselves taking on new and unexpected roles and activities.One such activity was that of appealing to a newly-formed body,the Committee for Compounding.In 1643,Parliament—attempting to alleviate its own chronic shortage of funds—passed a law sequestrating(or confiscating)the estates of all those property-holders who continued to offer support to the king,the socalled‘delinquents’.A later law,however,allowed for up to one-fifth of a delinquent's sequestrated income to be reserved for the benefit of his wife and children.In order to claim this fifth,women were obliged to plead in person before the Committee for Compounding at Goldsmiths’Hall in London.Many royalist women were revolted by the notion of pleading for what they saw as their own property,stolen from them by their political enemies.Many,however,found themselves in such financial distress that an appeal to the Committee for Compounding became an economic necessity.
Mary Verney,Margaret Cavendish and Isabella Twysden were among the many women who found themselves faced with the ordeal of pleading before the powerful Committee.Mary Verney might reasonably have felt somewhat aggrieved at the prospect of having to do so,since her husband Ralph had defied family expectation by refusing to fight on behalf of the king.[11]However,Ralph,who was MP for Aylesbury in both the Short and the Long Parliaments,had chosen to avoid the Civil War by settling in France,and as an absentee MP,he too became liable to have his estates sequestrated by Parliament.When the sequestration took effect in 1646,Ralph was advised to send Mary to London to plead the family's case,his correspondent,Dr Denton,assuring him that‘women were never so useful as now…their sex entitles them to many privileges,and we find the comfort of them now more than ever’.[12]In the first instance,Mary was to plead for the sequestration to be lifted;if this attempt failed,however,she stood prepared to plead for her fifth before the Committee for Compounding.
Mary Verney was fortunate:after much argument the sequestration of the Verney estates in Buckinghamshire was lifted,and Ralph,Mary and their children were able to resume possession of the family property.Isabella Twysden and Margaret Cavendish,however,were not so lucky,though Cavendish at least had the doubtful satisfaction of a speedy answer.Cavendish's husband,the Marquis of Newcastle,had been a leading royalist commander in the early stages of the war,and had later settled in Flanders;he and his wife decided to appeal to the Committee for Compounding only when their financial position had severely deteriorated.[13]In November 1651 Margaret travelled to England with her brother-in-law,Sir Charles Cavendish,and made her request to the Committee.Perhaps unsurprisingly,the Committee denied her request in December 1651,on the grounds that she had married her husband after he had become a delinquent(and thus had had full knowledge both of his delinquency and of its financial consequences)and also that Newcastle himself was a particularly serious offender against the English people;the Committee described him as‘the greatest Traitor to the State’.[14]
Angered though Cavendish was by this decision(she described her husband indignantly as‘the most loyal Subject,to his King and Country’)[15],she cannot have found it very surprising.Isabella Twysden,however,was especially unfortunate in her dealings with the Committee for Compounding.Her husband,Sir Roger Twysden,was an antiquary and MP(for a constituency in Kent),who had opposed what he saw as Charles I's unconstitutional behaviour in the 1630s,but who in the early 1640s resisted attempts by Parliament to reform the Episcopal government of the Church of England.As a result,in 1643,he was imprisoned and an order was issued for the sequestration of his estates.Like Mary Verney,Isabella Twysden appealed for her husband's sequestration order to be lifted;when this attempt failed,she appealed to the Committee for Compounding for the fifth which was her legal right.When Committee refused to grant her her fifth until she had supplied full details of the sequestrated estate,she toured the property,compiling a full and up to date inventory for purposes of valuation.Although the Westminster Committee then agreed to award her her fifth,this order was subsequently nullified by Committee of Kent.The Twysdens did not regain their property until 1649,by which time over 1000 of Sir Roger's muchvalued oak trees had been felled and confiscated.[16]Isabella Twysden had done what she could on her family's behalf,but had not been able to overcome the forces of local jealousy and rivalry.
Mary Verney,Margaret Cavendish and Isabella Twysden were,in a sense,merely doing what women had been doing for countless generations—and what Elizabeth Mordaunt,similarly,was to do in 1658—namely,pleading on behalf of their husbands.But the Committee for Compounding was a new institution,which gave women a new forum in which to voice their pleas.Frightening though the experience of testifying in front of the committee must have been,it did nonetheless represent a form of agency for women.They,and not their husbands,had the legal capacity to act on behalf of their families and attempt to salvage something of their families’fortunes.
Verney,Cavendish and Twysden—like many of the women who had left traces in the historical record—were privileged members of the aristocracy or nobility.But women from humbler classes as well found themselves exercising traditional feminine virtues in new circumstances.Mary Overton,for instance,wife of the pamphleteer Richard Overton,petitioned Parliament for her husband's release after he had been arrested and confined to Newgate prison in 1646.[17]Her petition not only stressed the suffering she had herself undergone at the time of her husband's arrest—a traditionally‘womanly’ argument,especially since at the time of Richard's arrest Mary was still recovering from childbirth—but also cited Magna Carta and the 1628 Petition of Right to bolster her claim that Richard had been wrongfully imprisoned.[18]The following year,Mary too was arrested,when she and her brother were discovered while stitching together a controversial pamphlet written by Richard Overton and the leading Leveller,John Lilburne.Lilburne too,like Overton,spent much of the 1640s in prison,and relied heavily(and not always gratefully)on his wife to act on his behalf while he was in gaol.[19]When in 1642 Lilburne,then serving in the parliamentary army,was captured by royalists,it was petitioning by his wife,Elizabeth,which persuaded Parliament to intervene on his behalf.Elizabeth herself,though pregnant,delivered the letter which ensured John's release from prison.In 1647,during another of John's periods of imprisonment,Elizabeth Lilburne was arrested on charges of circulating politically contentious books by her husband.Both her experience and Mary Overton's suggest that such(usually brief)periods of imprisonment were an occupational hazard for women married to notorious print controversialists.After John's death in 1657,Elizabeth successfully petitioned Cromwell for relief from a fine imposed on her husband in 1652,as well as for the renewal of a pension for herself and her children and help with a legal dispute.Petitioning on her husband's behalf,suffering arrest for his sake,and pleading on behalf of her children after his death:Elizabeth Lilburne was a much tested wife whose experience of the English Civil War,though extreme,is in its way representative of many women of her time.
A final category of women who found their traditional roles as wives and mothers stretched to the limit by the exceptional conditions of the Civil War is that of women who were besieged in their own homes by enemy armies.This frightening situation,which brought women alarmingly close to the front line of hostilities,was suffered by women on both sides of the conflict.The Countess of Derby and Mary,Lady Bankes,are perhaps the best-known royalist women who were besieged by the parliamentarian armies.However,perhaps the most famous woman to resist an enemy siege during the English Civil War was the Parliament-sympathising Brilliana Lady Harley.
Brilliana Harley was the third wife of Sir Robert Harley,who owned substantial properties in Herefordshire(on the borders between Wales and England)and served as an MP in the 1620s and 1640s.[20]Both husband and wife were devout puritans who opposed Laudian innovations in the Church of England.During Sir Robert's absences to attend Parliament,Brilliana became accustomed to managing the Harleys’estates and communicating with other local dignitaries on the family's behalf.This experience probably stood her in good stead when,in 1642,she found herself at the head of one of the very few parliamentarian families in a largely royalist county.In March 1643,Harley received a formal demand that she surrender the family's seat,Brampton Bryan Castle,to the royalists.She refused,and a siege of the castle by royalist forces began late in the following July.But Harley had taken measures to prepare Brampton for the siege,including taking fifty soldiers into the castle to help with its defence.Once the siege was underway,she also attempted to negotiate with the king,sending letters,messengers and a petition,protesting her loyalty and demanding that the besieging forces be withdrawn.After seven weeks,the royalist forces were called away to join the(militarily more important)siege of Gloucester.Harley then defied her husband's advice to leave Brampton,and instead directed all her energies towards fortifying the castle against a renewal of the siege.On her orders,earthworks raised by the royalists were levelled and neighbours who had supported the siege were plundered.She even authorised a pre-emptive strike against a royalist encampment a few miles away.Her efforts in defence of Brampton and the Harleys were ended only by her death,which occurred—from natural causes—in October 1643.
Brilliana Harley is one of the most conspicuously heroic of the many women who found themselves called to respond to the unprecedented,unpredictable and often dangerous events of the English Civil War.She did,however,belong to a class—if not a sex—which was fully accustomed to exercising power.The Harleys had been landowners in Herefordshire for generations and her birth family,the Conways,were similarly wellestablished property holders in neighbouring Warwickshire.Brilliana Harley even had early experience of military life,as she was born in(and named for)the garrison town of Brill in the Netherlands,where her father was then serving as lieutenant-governor.Her experience during the siege of Brampton Bryan,though extreme,was to some extent continuous with her role as mistress and manager of the castle in the previous twenty years of her marriage to Sir Robert.A woman who was used to instructing servants and directing tenants would be better placed than many to command soldiers,resist an enemy army and even to assert her will against the king.
The following two sections of this paper,however,consider women who had not been born into the property-holding or governing classes of England.The turbulent conditions of civil war,which displaced so many men from positions of power,did not by any means raise these women to positions of institutional authority within the kingdom.Nonetheless,the unusual circumstances did enable some women from outside the traditional elites to exercise a degree of influence—and to attain a level of visibility—which would not have been so readily available to them in peacetime conditions.One such area of female activity has already been cited in my discussion of Mary Overton and Elizabeth Lilburne:namely,women's involvement in the book trade—and it is this,the role of women in an industry central to political development and the circulation of ideas in the Civil War period,which is the subject of the next section of this paper.