VI.Recording the Civil War:Poets and Memoirists
The final category to be considered in this paper comprises women who actually wrote about the Civil War.This is not to say that the women so far surveyed in this paper did not write about the war.Elizabeth Mordaunt,for instance,wrote about her own experiences in her diary;and Brilliana Harley's efforts in defence of Brampton Bryan are known to scholars mainly because of her letters to her husband and son.The women to be considered in this section,however,wrote about the events of the war from a greater distance,whether historical or geographical.This greater distance enabled them to take a more wide-ranging,reflective view of events.Almost inevitably,these women—who had the leisure,education and information to comment on public events—belonged to the upper social classes.Just as inevitably,their verdicts on the war were affected by their own experiences of the war years and their attitudes to both king and Parliament.
Three of these women writers—all poets—reflected on some of the key issues of the Civil War,either while war was still underway or shortly after the events they described.In 1642,from the safe vantage point of Massachusetts,the puritan Anne Bradstreet wrote a poem entitled‘A Dialogue between Old England and New’.In the course of its 295 lines,Bradstreet analysed the causes of the Civil War,which she identified unequivocally as being Laudian reforms and the neglect of true religion.At this relatively early stage of the war,Bradstreet was careful to follow the usual discreet convention of blaming the king's evil counsellors rather than the king himself,but she was emphatic that Old England could hope for better things only if Parliament were to prevail in the war.[38]
But not all English women favoured the parliamentary side in the conflict.Nor did they have to live on the other side of the Atlantic in order to express their views about the war.Katherine Philips and Hester Pulter are among the best known of the royalist women poets who wrote about the war in the 1640s and 1650s.Philips,who lived in Wales and was married to a parliamentary officer,nonetheless held broadly royalist views and deplored the treatment of Charles I by the parliamentarians.In her poem‘On the double murder of King Charles I’,she responded directly to an attack on the late king by the Fifth Monarchist Vavasour Powell(by coincidence,one of the radical authors published by Hannah Allen).[39]As Philips saw it,the literal murder of the king—his execution—had subsequently been compounded by a second,metaphorical murder:namely,the violent(and,in Philips's opinion,unfounded)attacks on his reputation by opponents such as Powell.Whereas Powell had condemned Charles as a lawbreaker,Philips's poem condemned Powell as unchristian,and insisted that no new political order based on such injustice as had been shown to Charles could itself be just.[40]
A still more emphatic defence of Charles and royalist values was penned by the Hertfordshire gentlewoman,Hester Pulter.Pulter did not publish her poems,and does not even seem to have circulated them in manuscript,so she was free to be as outspoken as she liked in expressing her views.In one of Pulter's early poems,‘Upon the imprisonment of his Sacred Majesty,that unparalleled Prince King Charles the First’,she condemned the‘Usurpers’ who had seized Charles's kingdom,asserting that they had‘bought and sold’ their king and country only for‘Cursed Gold’.[41]After the execution,she wrote two poems on what she called‘the Horrid Murder of that incomparable Prince,Charles the First’.[42]Pulter declared that Charles's supporters should‘weep out[their]eyes’for sorrow at his death,and imagined Charles himself(‘the very soul of this sad Isle’)looking down from heaven at the‘Monsters’now vying to replace him as the supreme authority in England.In Pulter's view,only the Restoration of Charles's son could return England to peace,stability and happiness.
In the mid seventeenth century,it was still comparatively unusual for women to publish their own writings.Publication by women was often regarded as immoral and unsuitable—a breach of the modesty appropriate to the so-called weaker sex.For women to comment publicly on affairs of state would have been considered still more inappropriate.Women such as Elizabeth Poole,Eleanor Davies and Margaret Cavendish who did comment on public affairs and who chose to publish their works were considered outrageous or even mad.Bradstreet,Philips and Pulter,much more discreet and self-conscious of their womanly virtue,each held back from printpublication.Pulter's poems remained unknown to the wider world until the 1990s,and even now have not been published in their entirety.[43]Although Bradstreet's and Philips's poems were printed in their lifetimes,in each case the poet herself denied having any involvement in the publication of her works,which was said to have been surreptitiously arranged by others.However,the examples of Bradstreet,Philips and Pulter make it clear that even though opportunities for publication were limited,some women did nonetheless reflect on the wider implications of the war,and did not hesitate—in the comparative privacy of manuscript—to criticise the men at the centre of war and politics.
Another literary form which enabled women to pass comment on political events was the personal memoir.The irrepressible Margaret Cavendish was possibly the first women to write—or at least publish—her recollection of the war years:as early as 1653 she published‘A True Relation of my Birth,Breeding and Life’in her volume Natures Pictures.The‘True Relation’ recounted all of Cavendish's life up to the time of publication,but especially emphasised her experience of the war.After the Restoration she followed this autobiographical narrative with a biography of her husband,The Life of William Cavendish(1667)—again,laying emphasis on her husband's wartime experiences.Possibly influenced by Cavendish,at least three other English women are known to have written memoirs of their or their husband's experiences during the Civil War.The royalist Anne Halkett,for instance,wrote an autobiography which—in addition to extensive accounts of several unsuccessful love affairs—described her role in helping the young James Duke of York escape from the custody of parliament and in nursing royalist soldiers wounded during Cromwell's invasion of Scotland.The puritan Lucy Hutchinson produced an autobiography—of which only a fragment now survives—as well as a biography of her husband,a colonel in the parliamentary army who also served as governor of Nottingham Castle during the Civil War.Another royalist,Ann Fanshawe,wrote a vivid and varied account of her travels in England,Ireland,the Channel Islands,France and Spain in the 1640s and 1650s,in company with her husband,the courtier and diplomat Richard Fanshawe,and their numerous children.[44]
Of these four female memoirists,only the famously eccentric Cavendish actually published her recollections of the war years.Halkett,Hutchinson and Fanshawe all conformed to the conventions of the time and confined their biographies and autobiographies to manuscript.This did not mean,however,that they did not have a readership.In each case,Halkett,Hutchinson and Fanshawe seem to have written their accounts of their Civil War experiences for circulation among their own immediate families.This is especially clear in the case of Hutchinson and Fanshawe,who were both writing principally about their husbands and whose narratives are clearly written for the benefit of their own children.Both John Hutchinson and Richard Fanshawe had died when their youngest children were very young indeed;Fanshawe's son and heir,for instance,was less than a year old when his father died in 1666.The biographical narratives produced by Ann Fanshawe and Lucy Hutchinson were clearly intended to create a lasting record of their husbands’illustrious deeds which would to some extent act as a surrogate for the dead men themselves.The memoirs would ensure that even if Lucy and Ann,as well as their husbands,were to die while their children were still young,the memory of John and Richard's virtuous deeds would not be lost.
Cavendish,Halkett,Hutchinson and Fanshawe differed greatly from one another,in terms both of their political views and their attitudes towards publication.What they did have in common,however—and what in each case seems to have motivated them to produce their memoirs—was a desire for vindication.Even though Cavendish,Halkett and Fanshawe,for instance,had all been on the ultimately victorious royalist side in the Civil War,each of them had reason to feel somewhat ill-used by the treatment they or their families received after the Restoration.Each of them felt that their or their husbands’efforts on Charles I's and Charles II's behalf had not been sufficiently recognised in the 1660s,and their sense of family and personal honour made it imperative for them to set down what they saw as the true version of events for the benefit of their children.Anne Halkett,for instance,whose sexual reputation had been somewhat compromised through her dealings with the royalist agent Captain Bampfield,wanted to demonstrate that her co-operation with Bampfield had had politically virtuous effects,through making possible the escape of James Duke of York.Both Margaret Cavendish and Ann Fanshawe wanted to emphasise the extent of their husbands’loyalty to the Stuart monarchy—as well as the debts both had incurred during their service of the Crown—to counteract what they saw as hostile and unfounded slander by lesser men who were jealous of their husbands’merits.Meanwhile Lucy Hutchinson,who saw the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 as a political disaster,wanted to clarify for her own young children the principles for which her husband had lived and died.In doing so,she wanted to distinguish John Hutchinson's Christian and republican probity not only from the official pro-monarchical ideology of the 1670s(when she was writing)but also from the less pure motives of some of John's erstwhile political allies.
Each of these women—Cavendish,Halkett,Hutchinson and Fanshawe—wrote from a combination of personal,family and political motives.Their accounts of the English Civil War rank as among the most important autobiographical narratives of the period,giving unrivalled insights into how the events of war and high politics were experienced at an individual level.All now form important sources for social and political historians,as well as for scholars of women's writing and history.[45]