CHAPTER SEVEN

Unlearned Virgins

‘Thou mayest perhaps think I have lost my labour’: thus Elizabeth Josceline to her husband in 1622 on the prospect of her giving birth to a daughter. The best way to palliate the blow would be to think of those biblical exemplars, Elizabeth, Esther, and chaste Susanna. Betty Viscountess Mordaunt was equally frank on her own account: ‘If it be thy blessed will, let it be a boy’ – this was her fervent prayer when she was once more pregnant in 1665, although she already had six sons. And when a seventh boy was indeed safely born, Betty Mordaunt apostrophized the Almighty in verse:

Anne, wife of the Royalist commander Sir Simon Harcourt, shared the primitive feelings of her husband who wrote back to her from the campaign in Ireland: ‘with God’s blessing bring me another lusty boy’. After his death Anne Harcourt married the Parliamentary general Sir William Waller, a widower with sons. Her diary, kept like that of Betty Mordaunt for spiritual reasons, is a long record of public and private trials and her own ‘transgressions’. Throughout, whenever pregnant, she pleads for the safe birth of a living child with all its parts and limbs – ‘and a son’.¹

The experience of Agnes Sim, a servant of East Brent in Somerset who had become pregnant by her master, was on a cruder level. She ‘asked him [her master] who should father the child. He said he would, if it was a boy, but if it was a maid, she should lack a father for it.’ (Servants did sometimes undertake the responsibility of providing their sonless masters with male heirs; the sex of the child being, it was believed, determined by the female.)² Neverless Agnes Sim discovered for herself what Betty Mordaunt and Anne Harcourt expressed so eloquently in their spiritual diaries, that primitive desire for a boy which in a sense disadvantaged the girls of this period even before their birth.

Cary Verney was one of the five sisters of Ralph Verney and as a child had been the ‘she-darling’ of her father Sir Edmund. Married at fifteen, but with the settlement never completed owing to the difficulty of wartime conditions, Cary found herself at the age of eighteen a pregnant widow, when her husband Captain Gardiner was killed in 1645. Then, ‘My sister was brought to bed of a girl to all our griefs’, wrote Ralph Verney. Having provided no male heir, with no proper marriage settlement, even her own jointure in peril, poor Cary was grudged her very food at the Gardiner home at Cuddesdon; finally she fled back to her own family. Cary Verney did enjoy an exceptionally happy second marriage to John Stewkeley of Hampshire; but it was no wonder, as one of the jolly, gambling, gossiping ladies of the Restoration court, that she regretted hearing the news that her nephew John Verney’s wife (already the mother of a son) had given birth to a daughter: ‘for I find our sex is not much valued in our age’.³

One of the primary reasons why the average female was ‘not much valued’, as Cary Verney lightly but aptly expressed it, was that she was not much educated – in comparison, that is, with the average male, her brother as it might be, that child who had fulfilled his parents’ primitive expectations by being born of the favoured sex.

Even women despised other women for their silliness. Margaret Duchess of Newcastle was sharp enough to see the reason for this foolishness: in 1655 in The Worlds Olio she wrote that ‘in Nature we have as clear an understanding as Men, if we were bred in Schools to mature our Brains’. Nevertheless in practice she found the tittle-tattle of women intolerable.⁴ Conversely, even those women who did for a number of individual reasons receive a proper education might well be scorned for their attainments. In principle, society rewarded the learned woman with disapproval or at best suspicion.

Anne Lady Newdigate, that devoted mother, unconsciously summed up the contemporary attitude to the education of the sexes when she wrote in her will, dated 1610: ‘that my boys may be brought up in good learning and both they and my daughters to be bred up in virtuous and godly life’. Elizabeth Josceline, laying down instructions in The Mothers Legacy to her Unborn Child for the education of that hypothetical daughter for whose arrival she had apologized in advance, hoped she would be taught ‘The Bible, housewifery, writing and good work’. (She herself, incidentally, had been highly educated by her grandfather, learning both languages and history in the enlightened tradition of the late sixteenth century.) Elizabeth Josceline added: ‘other learning a woman needs not, though I admire it in those whom God hath blest with discretion yet I desire it not much in my own, having seen that sometimes women have greater portions of learning than wisdom’. And if her husband himself wanted to have ‘a learned daughter’? At least: ‘my dear … I pray God give her a wise and a religious heart’.⁵

Where a highly educated woman did escape censure, it was generally for some extraneous reason which might be exceptional piety, of the sort which Elizabeth Josceline hoped would redeem her own ‘learned daughter’. Or it might, in a more worldly fashion, be due to her high position in society. In private Dorothy Osborne poked fun at Margaret Duchess of Newcastle, who admittedly did cut a fairly weird figure in society, at any rate where her costume was concerned. In 1653, Dorothy was ‘satisfied that there are many soberer people in Bedlam’, and she wrote that the Duchess’s friends were ‘much to blame to let her go abroad’.⁶ In public, however, Margaret Newcastle’s rank (that of a very rich Duchess, wife of a Royalist grandee who had been Governor to Charles II as a boy) obtained for her some handsome tributes from academics at both universities.

The Duchess used to present favoured colleges with her own works. Expressions of gratitude were published after her death in a special volume: Letters and Poems In Honour of the Incomparable Princess Margaret, Dutchess of Newcastle. A letter from the Master and Fellows of St John’s College, Cambridge, sets the tone: ‘In your Poesy we praise that Life and native Verdure, every way Confident with its self, Castilian like, it stands not still, nor boils over, but with a gentle stream doth touch our Ears and slide into our Minds. In your Philosophy we praise that lightsome and piercing acuteness, nothing constrained, nothing obscure; you render all things clear and genuine …’ However, Trinity College, in wondering aloud ‘how it came to pass that Eloquence, Poetry, Philosophy, things otherwise most different, should without the help of a Tutor, without the Midwifery of a University, at length, agree in a Woman’ showed that the Duchess was very much the high-born exception to the general rule.⁷

It was not a rule which showed signs of lapsing as the century progressed. On the contrary, the prejudice against education for girls – and its dreaded end-product, the learned woman – had derived fresh impetus from the presence of a male sovereign after 1603. It had always been rather tactless to attack the learned woman with too much zest so long as that paragon of female erudition Queen Elizabeth occupied the throne. As the poet Anne Bradstreet wrote in memory of ‘our dread Virago’ forty years after her death:

Not only were men freed from the inhibition of the ‘dread Virago’s’ intellectual example by her death, but that male sovereign, James I, had himself a scant opinion of the female intelligence. Perhaps the frivolity of his Queen, Anne of Denmark, had something to answer for; at any rate when it was suggested that his daughter, another Elizabeth, should learn Latin, the King replied that ‘To make women learned and foxes tame had the same effect: to make them more cunning.’ And he forbade it.⁸

Such sentiments would have come as a marked surprise to his English royal relations of yore: those Tudor princesses of the Renaissance, not only Queen Elizabeth herself who could translate Latin into Greek, and the famously erudite Lady Jane Grey, but Queen Mary Tudor, celebrated at the time for her knowledge of science and mathematics. For that matter James’s mother Mary Queen of Scots, whose intellectual attainments have been overshadowed by her dramatic life story was, as a princess, automatically instructed in the classics. We know from the English Ambassador to Scotland that she used to read Livy regularly for pleasure after dinner, with George Buchanan.⁹

In the sixteenth century Sir Thomas More had written: ‘I do not see why learning … may not equally agree with both sexes.’ At the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign a classical education was a mark of elegance in the circle round Mary Countess of Pembroke: William Wotton, in his Reflections on Ancient and Modern Learning, wrote of that period: ‘It was so very modish, that the fair sex seemed to believe that Greek and Latin added to their Charms: and Plato and Aristotle untranslated, were frequent Ornaments of their Closets.’ Such a tradition lingered on at a place like Little Gidding. Here the many daughters of the house, in the tranquil religious retreat founded by the Anglican theologian Nicholas Ferrar in the 1620s, were carefully educated in Latin, as well as arithmetic, writing and music (and such practical matters as book-binding). But it was in the seventeenth century that George Herbert was able to list among well-known proverbs: ‘Beware of a young wench, a prophetess and a Latin woman.’¹⁰ While women themselves were often contributing a note of ritual apology whenever they felt they had stepped outside the modest mental boundaries which circumscribed their sex.

Lady Elizabeth Hastings, carefully educated by her ‘Vigilant Mother’ Lucy Countess of Huntingdon to know French, Latin and Italian, was advised by her on marriage merely ‘to make herself fit conversation for her husband’. As a result, Lady Elizabeth showed herself so modest – that favourite epithet again – throughout her short married life with Sir James Langham that he never had ‘all those inconveniences which some have fancied, so necessarily accompany a Learned Wife’. She died still young in 1664. This model existence on the part of one who might otherwise have caused Sir James a great deal of trouble with her accomplishments, was summed up in a quatrain:

It was not that women did not read the books where they had the ability or the opportunity to do so. In 1647 we find Adam Eyre of Yorkshire spending IS 8d on a book at a fair at Wakefield for his scold of a wife – presumably to palliate her bad temper on his return. There was, as might be expected, a heavy bias towards what Lettice Falkland’s biographer called ‘good authors’. Mary Countess of Warwick’s tastes ran to the works of Jeremy Taylor, Foxe’s Martyrs, and Baxter’s Crucifying of the World by the Cross of Christ (which she described as her favourite book) as well as the poetry of George Herbert – who often features in ladies’ reading at this time. But Lady Anne Clifford read Turkish history as well as Chaucer, and had Ovid’s Metamorphoses read aloud to her by her cousin Maria. Lady Cholmley, wife of Sir Hugh, the Governor of Scarborough Castle during the Civil War, was ‘addicted to read and well versed in history’.¹²

Nevertheless an atmosphere of excuse was apt to prevail when a female achieved anything out of the ordinary of a literary nature. Mrs Dorothy Leigh, author of The Mothers Blessing, which had reached its seventh edition by 1621, dedicated it to her three sons (she was a widow). Writing, she admitted in this dedication, was ‘a thing unusually among us’ since women generally used words to exhort. The book itself contained a lot of advice on the sort of wives her boys should marry, and the need to exhibit patience towards them subsequently: ‘Bear with the woman,’ she pleaded, ‘as with the weaker vessel.’¹³

It was not a coincidence that one of the few Englishwomen in the first half of the seventeenth century who believed, without apology, in the need to educate girls properly was a Catholic nun: Mary Ward.

The disappearance of the convents at the time of the Reformation had deprived English girls not only of convenient local places of learning, but also of a pool of women teachers in the shape of the nuns themselves. Indeed, when the convent of Godstow near Oxford was being disbanded, a petition for its preservation (unsuccessful) was mounted on the grounds that ‘most of the gentlewomen of the county were sent there to be bred’.¹⁴

At home in England the position of the woman teacher had not recovered from the collapse of the nunneries. (Again, it was no coincidence that the Anglican Little Gidding, derided by opponents of its high church sympathies as a ‘Protestant nunnery’, also placed a value on female education.) Many of the daughters of the English Catholic families however continued to be sent abroad to convents in the Low Countries to receive their education. These girls – Knatchbulls, Gages, Vavasours, Blundells – embarked on journeys of much danger and difficulty, defying the authorities to reach their goal abroad.¹⁵

It was their parents’ intention in sending them that they should be preserved in the ancient faith. A Petition of the House of Commons of 1621, which asked for all children of Catholics to be recalled from abroad and given Protestant teachers at home, also had in mind re-educating such children religiously. But these girls who wended their way to the Low Countries, often remaining there as nuns, also found a kind of independence unknown to their sisters still at home – paradoxically in view of the black reputation of such convents back home in Protestant England.

Mary Ward’s obsession with women’s education (which has been shared by most people through history who have wished to improve the female lot in a permanent fashion) had as its ultimate objective the reconversion of her native England to Catholicism. But as a woman of remarkable independence of judgement, Mary Ward was quick to see that women in religious orders could not carry out their proper part in this apostolate, if they were not correctly prepared for it. As she told Pope Paul V, when she pleaded with him to be allowed to found an order of ‘English Virgins’: ‘the education of girls is congruous to our times’. Nor was this education intended to fit girls solely for the religious life. Mary Ward’s memorandum to the Pope on the subject of the ‘English Virgins’ described their aim as being to instruct young girls in ‘piety, Christian morals and the liberal arts’ so that they could ‘profitably embrace either the secular or the religious life’.¹⁶

Mary Ward was born in Yorkshire near Ripon in 1585: her baptismal name was Joan (she took Mary at her confirmation).¹⁷ She came of a prominent recusant family, related to half the other Catholics in England: two of her Wright uncles were involved in the Gunpowder Plot and her father was one of the many Catholic gentlemen arrested on suspicion immediately afterwards. On Mary herself the influence of her grandmother, with whom she lived for five years, was probably even more powerful since Mrs Wright was famous for being ‘a great prayer’. As a young girl, Mary became engaged to a member of the Redshaw family, but on his premature death, despite her ‘extreme beauty’ which attracted new suitors, she abandoned all thoughts of marriage. Instead she joined the Poor Clares at St Omer.

It was at this point that Mary encountered a completely new world from that of the hunted recusant Catholics in which she had been brought up. Women as a whole, and particularly women of rank – whether in religious orders or not – led much freer lives in the Low Countries. This was something on which travellers commented, including the fact that women here participated equally in conversation and argument with men. At the same time the generally passive or secluded role of women within the Catholic Church itself had begun to be questioned in certain quarters after the Council of Trent. The spirit of the Counter-Reformation, incarnated by the career of the great Spanish nun, St Teresa of Avila, suggested that women could achieve much not merely by prayer and contemplation but by direct participation in the worldly work of the Church. As Mary Ward was to put it later, women were proposing ‘to follow a mixed kind of life, such as Christ and his Blessed Mother lived on earth’.¹⁸

At Gravelines Mary Ward attempted to found a Poor Clare convent for Englishwomen out of her own resources, and later she did found a boarding-school for English girls at St Omer, where she was aided by five English friends, including her sister Barbara. On one occasion at St Omer the nuns’ confessor made an unwise observation, ascribing their diminishing religious fervour to the weakness of their sex. Mary Ward strongly rebutted him. Was their failure ‘because we are women? No, but because we are imperfect women. There is no such difference between men and women’, she went on, ‘that women may not do great things!…’ As for the Catholic religion, ‘It is not Veritas hominis, verity of men, nor verity of women, but Veritas Domini’ – the truth of God. Mary went on to quote the example of the (female) saints: ‘And I hope in God it will be seen that women in time will do much.’¹⁹

Certainly Mary Ward herself fulfilled her own prophecy that women in time would ‘do much’. Her life story was one marked by unusual reverses and dangers even by the standards of the seventeenth century; she was also dogged by ill-health. None of this stood in the way of her determination to prove that the education of girls was ‘congruous’ to the times in which she lived.

As time went on, an increasing number of English girls were sent abroad to be taught under the auspices of Mary Ward and her friends. This had the double effect of increasing Mary Ward’s contacts with the English Catholic world she had left behind via these young ladies, and also necessitating journeys to England itself to seek out new pupils, or in certain instances annuities to pay for their board and tuition.

The account of these travels, made by Mary Ward between 1608 and 1618, makes exciting reading: a sort of Westward Ho! in reverse. London at that period was a honeycomb round which government informers buzzed, seeking to rout out secret Catholics. The ‘English Virgins’ came to be nicknamed the Apostolicae Viragines or the Galloping Girls by their pursuers. The technique of Mary Ward and her friends was to come in plain clothes, as it were, and blandly to hold open house, as though there was nothing to hide. Then they pursued their mission under the noses of the Government and its spies. But the ‘plain clothes’ were in fact deliberately splendid garments such as ladies of quality would have worn if they had not been nuns. We have a description of Mary’s sister Barbara ‘in a bright taffeta gown’ with a starched yellow ruff ‘à la mode’ and richly embroidered petticoats.²⁰ When Mary Ward herself was hauled to the Guildhall to answer for her missionary work, she abandoned concealment and carried a rosary in her hand in defiance of the law – and her own safety. In the court she denounced the magistrate for blasphemy, and recited the litanies of the Blessed Virgin Mary in her coach on her way to prison.

It would be nice to be able to record that Mary Ward, allowed to vanish beyond the seas once more, was warmly received on the Continent. Unfortunately, for all her energies and perseverance in the cause of female education there, she was destined to arouse quite as much – and in a sense more – damaging hostility abroad. Here her enemies lay within her own Church. ‘Runaway nun!’, ‘Visionary!’, and worst of all, ‘False Prophetess!’ had shouted the townspeople of Gravelines. The spirit of the Counter-Reformation, where women were concerned, had its ardent supporters and also its furious detractors. While the immediate reaction of Pope Paul V to Mary’s idea of a new Institute of women following ‘a mixed kind of life’ in the world had been favourable, and his successor Gregory XV received her kindly in 1621, the atmosphere in Rome soon changed for the worse.

It was Mary’s intention to place her Institute under a superior general directly dependent on the Pope (on the model of the Jesuits). That was an unpopular notion with the Catholic Church as a whole, and in particular the bishops. But her conviction that women could ‘do much’ was equally unpopular with that section of the Catholic Church which remained convinced that women could do much – at home or in a secluded convent. Exaggeration is always a skilful weapon of attack. Mary Ward was accused of wishing women to rival men in the ministry, that is to say, usurp their functions as preachers; Mary Ward had in fact deliberately made the point that women could not and should not preach or administer the sacraments, and wives should also be subject to their husbands.²¹ Yet the unfair charge succeeded in its aim.

Mary Ward’s convents and schools, founded as far apart as Liège and Cologne, Vienna and Prague, Rome and Naples, flourished. But opposition to the new Institute intensified until in 1631 a decree was issued by Pope Urban VIII dissolving it; its members were only allowed to continue their ordinary work of religious education if they took purely private vows.¹

Mary Ward herself was imprisoned in Germany, in a tiny airless filthy cell at the orders of the Church (but not the Pope – who had her released when he heard the news). Subsequently she lived quietly in Rome, and in 1639 she returned to England.

Here, the patronage of the Catholic Queen Henrietta Maria seemed to promise her the opportunity of continuing her work of female education. There were ‘common schools for girls in London’ to be founded, and young women needed to be taught Latin; unlike King James I, Mary Ward was a fervent believer in the importance of Latin studies for girls. Or perhaps it would be accurate to say that Mary Ward approved of such studies for exactly the same reason as King James disapproved of them: she thought it important that women should become ‘more cunning’ – in the service of God. As Mary Ward wrote of a young nun in her care: ‘let Kate perfect her Latin with all possible care, without loss of health.’ She added: ‘no talent is so much to be regarded in them [young nuns] as the Latin tongue’.²²

The outbreak of the Civil War and the flight of the English royal family from London put an end to Mary Ward’s new London apostolate. She went north to her native Yorkshire, and died in 1645, having lived through the siege of York. Most of her adulthood she had suffered torments probably from stones, and the last twenty years of her life she was in such pain that she could not lie down, but had to sleep in a rocking-chair. Yet in her last hours, with characteristic spirit, she insisted on the sisters round her singing to stop their tears, and managed to sing with them. Her last recorded words were firmly practical: ‘It matters not the who, but the what.’²³

In general, with her independence and her gallantry, as well as her excellent sense of humour in the most trying circumstances, Mary herself stands for the best kind of English spinster. ‘From my palace’, she headed a letter written in her filthy German cell. The Elector of Bavaria, in her private code, was known as ‘Billingsgate’, a slang term of the time for bad language. ‘When she travelleth she is extraordinarily jovial’, complained one of her contemporaries, who was shocked by her apparent lightheartedness. But Mary Ward had her answer: ‘Mirth at this time is next to godliness’, she observed of one particular tight corner. When she did travel – crossing the Alps four times, frequently in winter and through snow – Mary Ward retained a kind of splendid English curiosity which sent her sightseeing in Prague and buying silks in Venice. She was notably fond of ‘a fine view’, yet shocked the fashionable Romans by proceeding on foot all the way to Perugia, wearing old clothes and leading a sick sister on her own donkey.

Above all education, and the need for education in women if they were to perform God’s work, aroused her fervour. ‘She was a great enemy of ignorance’, wrote a contemporary.²⁴

In general, if an English girl, regardless of rank, did receive a good education, it was very much a matter of individual luck. Alice Heywood, Oliver Heywood’s saintly mother, made herself responsible for sending the children of her neighbourhood to school as a work of charity, buying the ‘poor ignorant sottish creatures’ books. A maidservant might become an accomplished reader if she happened to fall into the employment of a benevolent mistress, such as Elizabeth Walker or Mary Countess of Warwick, both of whom saw it as their evangelical duty to instruct their maids to read (so that they could at least read the Bible and Psalms). A forlorn creature came to Elizabeth Walker’s door, who only knew her name was Mary Bun, ‘almost eat up with scabs and vermin, with scarce rags to cover her, and as ignorant of God and Christ as if she had been born and bred in Lapland or Japan’. Elizabeth Walker decided to save her not only by stripping her, washing her and curing her of ‘The Itch’, but also by teaching her to read, so that finally a rich farmer took Mary Bun as his apprentice. The formidable Lady Anne Clifford also delighted in giving her maids ‘such a book as they had not before’.²⁵

As a result intelligent and forceful maids often feature prominently in the life stories of their mistresses: as ‘Honest Dafeny’ Lightfoote, Alice Thornton’s maid inherited from her mother, who both could and did write and became as a result the mainstay of the beleaguered Thornton household after Mr Thornton’s death as a bankrupt. ‘God hath sent me a friend after my own heart’, wrote Alice Thornton. Bess, maid to Sir Ralph and Lady Verney, who accompanied them into exile in France at the time of the Commonwealth, learnt French easily.²⁶

A good Free School or benevolent patronage or both might account for sudden unexpectedly high figures of local literacy. A recent study by David Cressy quotes women as a whole (they are not analysed by class) as displaying the same high level of illiteracy as labourers and husbandmen; a figure of 90 per cent illiteracy amongst women is given for London – the most favourable area – in 1600, declining in 1640 quite sharply to around 80 per cent; in East Anglia at the same period female illiteracy is given as nearly 100 per cent.²⁷ The accounts of the Russell family headed by the Earls of Bedford at Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire, over a considerable period during the seventeenth century show that the skills among the maids varied. One year, out of seven or eight maids there would be two or three who could write well, another year none (whereas amongst the male footmen there would always be two or three who could write well). One housekeeper, Ann Upton, wrote well; her predecessor could not write at all. Apart from contact with the Russell family themselves, some of these literate servants had probably been educated at the local Free School founded by the second Earl of Bedford.²⁸

Where a girl of the upper classes was concerned, it was a happy accident if she came from a large family of brothers spread out over a number of years; she might then enjoy the services of their tutor, who would not automatically vanish when the eldest boy went away to school or university. In this way the disparity between the education offered to brother and sister might be somewhat lessened. The Ladies Diana and Margaret Russell were the daughters of William, fifth Earl of Bedford, he who married Anne Carr, worthy daughter of the unworthy Frances Somerset, for love. The education of these little girls, like the literacy of the maids, can also be traced in the accounts for Woburn Abbey.²⁹

Anne Countess of Bedford, like Betty Mordaunt, was the proud mother of seven sons, as well as four daughters. As a result, for a number of years Diana and Margaret were taught by their brothers’ tutor, the Rev. John Thornton, a remarkable pedagogue and a man of formidable intellect who came straight to the services of the Russell family from Cambridge in 1646. The influence of this dissenting divine on the character of the girls’ brother William Lord Russell (the celebrated Whig martyr of the reign of Charles II) is a matter for the history books; but for the Russell girls, especially Lady Diana, who was Mr Thornton’s favourite, a rare opportunity occurred for instruction.

Mr Thornton believed in the new principles of education introduced by Comenius, which amongst other things supplemented teaching by pictures. One entry in the accounts reads:

It will be seen that even under Mr Thornton’s care Lady Diana did not learn Latin (something which would have grieved Mary Ward). However, Lady Diana did receive the best Bible: an edition in ‘fair minion print’ costing 12s 6d where the other children’s Bibles cost 3s 6d.

Ultimately the gorgeous brothers departed – for Westminster, for university, for the Grand Tour – and when the last of them was gone, it was time for the Ladies Russell to be given over to the dancing master, music teacher and French master who would give them that education deemed in principle suitable for young ladies of their station. Lady Diana grew from the beguiling little girl painted by Lely with another sister Anne (who died of eating poisonous berries at the age of five) into a woman of resolute character. She married twice: first at the age of fifteen, being left a childless widow a year later, and secondly to Lord Alington of Wymondley. Lady Diana maintained however a lifelong friendship and correspondence with Mr Thornton. In later life Lely’s charming child came to believe sternly in total abstinence from food as a cure-all for sickness. ‘If he would come down to me, I should quickly cure him by fasting’, she wrote of one troubled member of the family.³⁰

Outside the aristocracy both the educationalist Basua Makin and the scholar Elizabeth Elstob benefited from early association with gifted brothers. Basua Makin was born in 1612, the daughter of the rector of Southwick in Sussex, and the sister of the astonishing scholar John Pell – at the age of twenty he was reputed to know Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Italian, French and both High and Low Dutch. Influenced by his example, Basua herself by the age of nine was said in some measure to understand Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French and Italian; we shall consider the conclusions she drew for female education as a whole from this exceptional upbringing in a subsequent chapter. At the end of the century Elizabeth Elstob, the pioneer of Old English studies, was able to work in Oxford because she had accompanied thither her brother William, who was at the university. The antiquary George Ballard, who knew the Elstobs at Oxford and included Elizabeth among his celebrated ladies, was another with an erudite sister who at the age of fourteen had ‘an extraordinary genius for Coins’ and had made a collection of them.³¹

It was no wonder that the sisters, watching the world through their brothers’ eyes, often developed passionate attachments to these young gods who could roam freely, while they were kept confined at home. Ann Oglander, daughter of another happy marriage, that of Sir John and Lady Oglander, described by her father as ‘Très belle Ann’ – the most beautiful of all the family – was in despair when her brother George left for Caen on the Grand Tour. Her sorrow was premonitory, for he died abroad shortly afterwards.³²

As a child Anne Viscountess Conway, daughter of the Widow Bennett by her carefully selected second husband Sir Heneage Finch, worshipped her step-brother John Finch, who was five years older – all the more so because her father had died before her birth. Little Anne hung around at home and in the gardens of Kensington House, plagued with sick headaches. Her family put her frequent maladies down to too much reading, unsuitable to her sex.³³ Given the intellectual achievements which marked the adult life of Anne Conway despite this handicap, it is more likely that a proper education (her step-brothers went to Westminster and Christ Church or Eton and Balliol) would have helped rather than hindered her health.

The most celebrated example of a sister’s devotion to a brother was that of Katherine Viscountess Ranelagh for Robert Boyle, the famous physicist and chemist who arrived at the eponymous Boyle’s Law (which stated that the pressure and volume of a gas were inversely proportional). Bishop Burnet proclaimed after her death that ‘Sister Ranelagh’, otherwise known as ‘the incomparable Lady Ranelagh’, had cut ‘the greatest figure in all these revolutions of these kingdoms, for above fifty years, of any woman of her age’.³⁴ It was significant that this one woman whose learning merited universal respect not censure was not only well-born and pious but chose to exercise her powerful influence privately rather than through the writing and publication of books, spending the last forty years of her life caring devotedly for her brilliant brother. In her decency, her active kindness – she was both hospitable and charitable – and above all in her acceptance of the self-abnegatory nature of female intelligence, Sister Ranelagh incarnated the masculine ideal of a good woman. Her learning therefore, far from being a disturbing quality, became an added grace. As a result she had the distinction, perhaps a slightly dubious one, of being the one woman of whom Milton actually approved.

Katherine Boyle was born in 1614, one of the vast brood of children of Richard Earl of Cork. Four sons and four daughters survived the original family of fifteen; others besides Robert Boyle were talented. Mary Rich (née Boyle), Countess of Warwick, was Katherine’s younger sister; Roger Boyle, Lord Broghill, later Earl of Orrery, author of the play Mustapha, was a writer as well as a soldier. ‘Precious sister Kate’, married at fourteen to an Irish nobleman, the second Viscount Ranelagh, quickly displayed that mixture of liveliness and godliness which would later captivate Commonwealth London. ‘The sweetest face I ever saw’ and ‘the best company in which to be merry’ – those were some of the compliments she attracted as a young married woman in Dublin.³⁵

Her own arranged marriage was unhappy: unlike wilful Mary she had not made a choice for love. The best thing that could be said about Lord Ranelagh, remarked a contemporary, was that he seldom came sober to bed. But ‘that excellent sister of mine’, as Mary Warwick called Katherine, showed no signs of envying Mary’s superior happiness. On the contrary, it was Sister Ranelagh alone in the family who forgave Mary instantly for her imprudent love match; it was Sister Ranelagh alone who visited Mary when she was laid low with smallpox; it was Sister Ranelagh who enabled Mary to bear the long strain of her husband’s protracted deathbed, the agonies of gout producing little serenity of temperament in the dying man. Mary’s verdict on Sister Ranelagh was as ‘the most useful and the best friend, for soul and body, that ever any person I think had’.³⁶

Separated from her unsatisfactory Irish husband, Sister Ranelagh came to make her life in England instead; her house in Pall Mall, Westminster, now became a home-from-home for her brother Robert Boyle at Oxford. Katherine was already acquainted with John Milton: in the late 1640s she dispatched her nephews to be educated by him at the Barbican. It was when Milton moved to Petty France, becoming Sister Ranelagh’s close neighbour, that the friendship properly ripened; Milton describing her as standing to him ‘in the place of all kith and kin’. At this point Lady Ranelagh’s son Richard Jones was also sent to Milton, probably to read Greek and Latin with him.³⁷

In London Sister Ranelagh, gifted with a memory, according to Mary Warwick, ‘that will hear a sermon and go home and pen it after dinner verbatim’ took lessons in Hebrew from ‘a Scotch teacher’. He later dedicated his Gate to the Holy Tongue to her, congratulating Lady Ranelagh on her ‘proficiency’ in the language considering the short time she had learnt it and ‘amidst so many abstractions as she was surrounded with’. However, at the end of Robert Boyle’s life (when he was living with his sister) we are told that weak sight forced him to give up reading the Scriptures in Hebrew ‘since he had none about him that could read it to him’, so perhaps the ‘abstractions’ of Sister Ranelagh’s busy life had proved more formidable than her teacher supposed. On firmer ground, Sister Ranelagh expressed herself as well satisfied with the new Experimental Philosophy which her brother and others were trying to institute, believing it would help mankind to understand ‘this great frame of the invisible world’, and thus the power of Almighty God. And it was her suitably bountiful task to distribute gratis all the ‘noble Medicines’ which Robert Boyle compounded in his laboratory in her house.³⁸

A priggish note creeps into some of Sister Ranelagh’s later letters; or perhaps too many years of acting as the fountainhead of good advice to a wide circle, with Roger Lord Broghill as well as Robert Boyle hanging on her judgements, had corrupted her. Sometime in about 1658 Robert repeated to his sister a compliment paid to her by the poet Edmund Waller, whom Boyle had visited at Hall Barn, near Beaconsfield. But Sister Ranelagh was no Sacharissa. She responded: ‘I know his calling as a poet gives him licence to say as great things as he can, without intending they should signify any more than that he said them or to have any higher end than to make him admired by those whose admirations are so volatile as to be raised by a sound of words …’ That category did not include Sister Ranelagh. Why should Waller, so eloquent ‘upon things that so little deserved them … be so unwilling to apply that faculty to those subjects that were truly excellent?’ she wrote. For this reason she returned ‘his great professions’ with a ‘plain hearty wish’ that he should employ them ‘for the time to come’ upon higher topics than herself.³⁹

So much for Waller’s compliments. Was this the same woman who had once been ‘the best company in which to be merry’? One is not altogether surprised to learn that one of Sister Ranelagh’s three daughters, perhaps finding the high moral tone unendurable, ran off with a footman. ‘Niece Jones’, as Mary Warwick and Robert Boyle described her, did not however gain much happiness from this plunge into passion. Robert Boyle, referring to his six nieces in his will, left property to Niece Jones, now Mrs Melster, and the daughter of the mésalliance Catherine Melster, the latter’s portion to be held till she was twenty-one ‘because of her peculiar circumstances’.⁴⁰

Lady Ranelagh’s experiences as a mother were in general disheartening. Her son Richard Jones, the third Viscount Ranelagh, was a spendthrift who succeeded in being expelled from the House of Commons (although his reputation rests more pleasantly with posterity, since he built Chelsea House and laid out Ranelagh Gardens). Her favourite daughter – ‘a good person’ according to Mary Warwick – died unmarried in 1672; another married daughter died young.⁴¹

It was as the beloved hostess to Robert Boyle, the centre of a distinguished and learned circle hanging on her good sense and judgements, that Lady Ranelagh enjoyed her true happiness. As late as 1687, when she was well over seventy, Sister Ranelagh was advising John Locke’s friend Damaris Lady Masham on how to cure melancholy, acting as ‘her physician’ in this cause, as Lady Masham told Locke. When Sister Ranelagh died at the age of eighty-seven in December 1691, Robert Boyle, her companion of forty years, only survived her by a week; it was popularly believed that he had died of grief. The brilliant brother and his ‘dearest sister and constantly obliging friend’ as he had termed her in his will, were buried together in the chancel of St Martin-in-the-Fields.⁴²

If the fraternal association was a fortunate chance, the advantage of a supportive parent at this period, where female education was concerned, can hardly be overestimated. Elizabeth Walker, for example, took particular care to teach her daughters to read. The modest yet learned Lady Elizabeth Hastings was described as being educated in ‘a School or rather Academy’ – in short, by ‘her Vigilant Mother’ Lucy Countess of Huntingdon.⁴³ It is notable how many of that slender band of female writers on whose autobiographical works we depend pay tribute to a mother who actively encouraged them to learn.

The mother of Anne Murray, Lady Halkett, was governess to the younger children of King Charles I, but did not neglect her own family: she ‘paid masters for teaching my sister and me to write, speak French, play on the lute and virginals, and dance, and kept a gentlewoman to teach us all kinds of needlework’. The mother herself oversaw her daughters’ Bible reading: five a.m. in the summer and six a.m. in the winter. Ann Lady Fanshawe’s mother saw to it she was offered ‘all the advantages that time afforded, both for working all sorts of fine works with my needle, and learning French, singing, lute, the virginals, and dancing’. Alice Thornton’s mother had her taught to read the Bible and the Psalms, also writing, singing and dancing, playing the harpsichord and the lute, and everything else thought fit for a lady.⁴⁴

The ultimate advantage, however, for a daughter, was to be born of an erudite father, one who for whatever motive – possibly seeking a son-substitute – set out to provide her with a ‘masculine’ education. When Helena, the heroine of All’s Well That Ends Well, offered to cure the King of France of his fistula, the Countess of Rousillon suggested with alarm that her aid was hardly likely to be accepted – that of a ‘poor unlearned virgin’ – where so many celebrated doctors had failed; Helena, however, armed with her father’s ‘prescriptions of rare and prov’d effects’ went on to cure the King, and win the hand of her desired Bertram.⁴⁵ There were a few Helenas in the seventeenth century, although their contemporaries tended to react with the same alarm as the Countess of Rousillon at the idea of such accomplishments in ‘a poor unlearned virgin’.

Like Katherine Ranelagh, Lucy Hutchinson had ‘a great memory’ as a girl and put it to the same pious use: ‘I was carried to sermons’, she tells us and, ‘while I was very young could remember and repeat them so exactly, and being caress’d, the love of praise tickled me and made me attend more heedfully’. Lucy Hutchinson, born in 1620, the daughter of the Royalist Sir Allen Apsley, is one of the most attractive of the gallery of seventeenth-century women.⁴⁶ Although she sprang into print in order to write a justificatory memoir of the husband she adored, Colonel John Hutchinson, Governor of Nottingham Castle and judge at the trial of Charles I, it is the witty, independent, ever courageous character of Lucy which animates the text, rather than that of the Puritan John Hutchinson.

In Lucy’s case she began life well with a mother who actually did want a daughter after bearing three sons. Lucy was also delicate, and received special care (including breast-feeding) from her mother, who feared she would not live. Furthermore, Lady Apsley began to dream of having an ‘eminent’ daughter when she found that Lucy could read perfectly by the age of four. Being given a Frenchwoman as a ‘dry-nurse’ as soon as she was weaned, Lucy was also bilingual in French and English at an early age.

At this point her mother lost confidence and began to worry that so much study would ruin Lucy’s health. It was Lucy’s father who had her taught Latin. Thus encouraged, Lucy began to outstrip in her progress her three brothers who were at school, despite the fact that her father’s chaplain, who acted as her tutor, was in her own words ‘a pitiful dull fellow’. Lucy became an avid reader: ‘every moment I could steal from my play I would employ in any book I could find’; at the same time her mother took to having her daughter’s own books locked up, to preserve her health. Her mother also worried at Lucy’s lack of progress in dancing, and at the lute and harpsichord, and ‘for my needle’, wrote Lucy, ‘I absolutely hated it’.

In an autobiographical fragment,⁴⁷ Lucy confesses that she was disliked by the other children for her solemnity, and her tendency to give little knowledgeable lectures. She was not however a prig, and passion always had a high priority. The maids fortunately were more appreciative of Lucy’s lectures, as a result of which she was delighted to find herself their confidante in their love affairs. It was to Lucy’s great satisfaction that her learning, far from depriving her of a husband as was generally prognosticated, actually won her the love of John Hutchinson. Idly, he spied some Latin books lying on the shelves at Lucy’s parents’ when she was away in the country; hearing they belonged to a mere girl, he became curious about this unusual character and asked a series of questions about her. The other girls, thinking to belittle her, told Hutchinson ‘how reserv’d and studious she was, and other things which they esteem’d no advantage’.

They had mistaken their man: thus was ignited a lifelong love, John Hutchinson and Lucy being married in 1638, when she was eighteen. Many years later, after Hutchinson had died in the prison to which his allegedly treasonable activities had brought him (only Lucy’s energies in tackling her Royalist relations saved him from death), she summed up her feeling for her husband as follows: ‘So, as his shadow, she [Lucy] waited on him everywhere, till he was taken into that region of light which admits of none, and then she vanished into nothing.’⁴⁸ It was a romance stirred not by a pair of gloves, a favour or a fan, but by a shelf of books in the Latin language.

Although one should perhaps add that Lucy Hutchinson, like that other clever woman Margaret Newcastle, never evinced a very high opinion of the rest of her sex: doubtless the behaviour of her early companions rankled. The influence of Queen Henrietta Maria, for example, she thought to be disastrous: it was an ‘unhappy kingdom’ where the hands which were made only for ‘distaffs’ affected ‘the management of sceptres’. And Lucy praised Queen Elizabeth for acceding to her male counsellors.⁴⁹We have dealt with the exceptions, the products of fortunate chance. What happened to those who were not singled out in this way?

No one was very interested in the formal education of the daughters of the poor for the obvious reason that reading and writing were not likely to be skills which would enable them to support themselves in later life. Where provisions had to be made by the authorities, as in the case of foundlings, emphasis was very much on the practical – knitting rather than reading or writing. A Free School was endowed at Great Marlow in Buckinghamshire in 1626 to teach twenty-four girls to knit, spin and make bean-lace – twenty-four boys, however, were to be taught to read. The well-known school for the ‘Red Maids’ of Bristol – daughters of ‘decayed’ (poverty-stricken) or dead freemen, so called after their uniform of red cloaks – had been intended by its founder to teach the girls either reading or plain needlework; the latter accomplishment, so much more economically useful, soon swallowed up the former.⁵⁰

The quality of public education offered to girls also went downhill from the late sixteenth century onwards, as the practice by which a few girls had attended the grammar schools, if not to an advanced age, ceased. In 1594 for example Banbury Grammar School forbade the inclusion of girls above the age of nine, or when they could read English. Where girls did attend the grammar schools in the seventeenth century – their presence attested by girls’ names in the margins of school books – this was where the curricula of the schools in question were not limited to a strict grammar course; girls were not permitted to take the ordinary public grammar course (with its heavy grounding in Latin).⁵¹

Richard Mulcaster was the first headmaster of Merchant Taylors’ School, and subsequently High Master of St Paul’s until his resignation in 1608 (he died in 1611). As an educationalist he was liberal compared to most of his contemporaries, believing in the value of such ‘extras’ as music, theatricals and physical training. He also viewed the education of girls with approval, generally advocating it in Positions … for the training up of Children, first published in 1581 and dedicated to Elizabeth – ‘a Virgin and a Learned Queen’. Yet it is significant that to this champion (by the standards of the time) the education of girls was only as ‘an accessory by the way’ to the upbringing of youths.’⁵²

In no way therefore did Mulcaster approach the position of Mary Ward, who believed that there was nothing to stop women one day, like men, doing ‘great things’. On the contrary, he qualified his general approval for female education in a number of important respects. First, he proposed that girls had a ‘natural weakness’; using this to explain the awkward fact that they often ‘ripened’ intellectually earlier than boys. Since girls’ brains were not so much ‘charged’ as those of boys, explained Mulcaster, ‘therefore like empty casks they make the greater noise’.

Second, Mulcaster was careful only to ‘allow them [girls] learning … with respect to their ends’. What were these ends? ‘I meddle not with needles nor yet with housewifery,’ wrote Mulcaster, ‘though I think it and know it to be a principal commendation in a woman to govern and direct her household … because I deal only with such things as be incident to their learning.’ Since these girls were to be in the future ‘the principal pillars in the upholding of households’ it was useful for them to learn to read; moreover reading was needful for the study of religion. But Mulcaster saw no point in the admission of girls to the public grammar schools or the universities.

There were a rising number of girls’ boarding-schools, particularly in the environs of London (we have noted how the heiress Sara Cox was snatched from Mrs Winch’s school at Hackney in 1637). To these the prosperous middle classes began to send their daughters; at the school of Mr and Mrs Robert Perwick, also in Hackney, which flourished from 1637 to 1660, there were as many as 100 girls at a time. Other such schools have been traced at Westerham in Kent, Manchester (where there were two), Oxford, Exeter (two) and in Leicester.⁵³

The first public school actually recorded was the Ladies’ Hall at Deptford in Kent; here in 1617 the ‘Young gentlewomen’, fetchingly attired in loose green garments covered in silver and carnation lace, their shoulders bare, their arms half naked, their hair ‘dishevelled’ (but artistically so), wearing green pumps and gloves, were presented to Queen Anne, wife of James I. They bestowed on her examples of their needlework. The Queen was then hailed in delightfully zeugmatic terms;

This emphasis on needlework and graciousness was characteristic. In 1647 Unton Lady Dering summed up what was expected for Peg and Elizabeth Oxinden, aged twelve and eleven, at Mr Beven’s finishing school at Ashford: ‘And besides the qualities of music both for the virginals and singing (if they have voices) and writing (and to cast account which will be useful to them hereafter) he will be careful also that their behaviour be modest …’ In these boarding-schools, as in the homes of Anne Halkett, Ann Fanshawe and Alice Thornton, it was the education ‘fit for her quality’ in Alice Thornton’s phrase, that is, ‘lady’s’ quality, which was being provided, rather than the sort of learning which Sir Thomas More had had in mind in the previous century when he wrote that a wife should be ‘learned if possible, or at least capable of being so’.⁵⁵

Some practical accomplishments were of course taught – a form of shorthand for example (not so much for secretarial purposes as suitable for taking notes on ‘good’ reading), enough arithmetic for household accounts as Lady Dering suggested, legible handwriting, even tolerable orthography was considered desirable – although any girl who actually succeeded in these achievements would find herself way ahead of most of her female contemporaries.² At the same time all this was a world away from the kind of heavy grounding in Latin which was being automatically given to the girls’ brothers at the grammar schools: Latin being the key not only to entrance to the universities, but to all forms of serious scholarship at the time, as well as science and medicine (something Mary Ward had appreciated in her emphasis on the subject to her young nuns).

As the boys’ grammar schools themselves improved with the progress of the century, the rift between male and female education grew into a chasm. Scholarship was not the only loss. By the Restoration, classical knowledge was a prerequisite of the cultivated gentleman. It was left to the playwright Aphra Behn to mourn on behalf of her sex:

Dainty French was however thought to be a desirable female accomplishment at court and elsewhere. An early seventeenth-century French grammar was written to enable women to ‘parlee [sic] out their part with men’. The arrival of a French Queen – Henrietta Maria – in 1625 continued the trend. The influx of French Protestant (Huguenot) refugees into London resulted in the establishment of a few French schools, and provided a number of French teachers. French maids and French nurses were to be found in fashionable households. Later French romances began to flood into England and were read avidly, sometimes in the original: Brilliana Lady Harley, ordering a book from her son at Oxford, in 1638, asked for it in French: ‘for I would rather read that tongue than English’.⁵⁸

Humphrey Moseley, a leading bookseller, published a translation of Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s novel Artamenes or The Grand Cyrus ‘now Englished by F.C., Gent’ in 1653; he dedicated it to Lady Anne Lucas on the grounds that she was known to have a perfect command of French (thus presumably not needing the services of F.C., Gent). Moseley added: ‘Were it a Discourse of the most profound Learning that Humane Nature is capable of, and written in Greek or Hebrew, I would make its Dedication to your Noble Lord …’⁵⁹

That was the difference.

In 1650 the Eure girls, Ralph Verney’s cousins, children of his aunt Margaret Poulteney’s romantic second marriage to William Eure, were taught ‘what is fit for them, as the reading of the French tongue and to sing and to dance and to write and to play of the guitar’. In contrast, when Sir Ralph heard that his god-daughter Nancy Denton, child of his friend and kinsman the learned Dr Denton, was going to be taught the classics, he read first the doctor, and then Nancy a lecture. ‘Let not your girl learn Latin’, he pronounced to the former, condemning shorthand too for good measure. ‘The difficulty of the first may keep her from that vice, for so I must esteem it in a woman; but the easiness of the other [i.e. shorthand] may be a prejudice to her; for the pride of taking sermon notes, hath made multitudes of women most unfortunate.’⁶⁰

Nancy, a girl of spirit, wrote back to her godfather that her cousins might out-reach her in their French, but she would outstrip them by learning ‘ebri grek and laten’(let us hope that knowledge of Hebrew, Greek and Latin improved Nancy’s spelling in English). Sir Ralph however refused to concede; in a further letter he condemned such unfeminine attainments once again: ‘Good sweet heart be not so covetous; believe me a Bible (with the Common Prayer) and a good plain catechism in your Mother Tongue being well read and practised, is well worth all the rest and much more suitable to your sex; I know your Father thinks this false doctrine, but be confident your husband will be of my opinion.’⁶¹

Sir Ralph did put his seal of approval upon learning French. He offered to start a French library for Nancy on his next visit to Paris, since matters suitable for women’s perusal were often written in that language; he included in that category not only romances, plays, poetry, but also all manner of subjects suitable to good housewifery such as recipes and gardening hints. In French could also be read profitably the stories of ‘illustrious (not learned)’ women from the past, wrote Sir Ralph firmly.⁶² The distinction between the two was not one which would have been appreciated by that ‘dread Virago’, Queen Elizabeth I. Yet Sir Ralph was no fierce male brute: he was on the contrary a good husband, a loving and considerate brother to his five orphaned sisters, a caring father to his daughters. He was merely expressing the philosophy of his times; while Nancy Denton, the daughter of an enlightened father with a particular interest in female education, represented one of the fortunate exceptions.⁶³

¹It was not until 1703 that Mary Ward’s congregation received papal approval, and not until 1877 that the then Pope officially described Mary Ward as its foundress. Finally, in 1951, Pius XII described Mary Ward, with St Vincent de Paul, as the outstanding pioneer of the lay apostolate of women. Today Mary Ward’s Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a mainly teaching foundation, spreads across five continents.

²The editors of the Verney letters and Oxinden papers comment on the ‘evident decline’ in female education and ‘lack of advance’ in female literacy respectively in the seventeenth century as compared to the sixteenth.⁵⁶