CHAPTER TWELVE

Sharing in the Commonwealth

During the Civil Wars and after, it was axiomatic that women were enjoying a new kind of freedom and strength, just as it was conventional in many quarters to deplore the fact. On the one hand biblical women who had assumed some kind of active role, such as Esther, Deborah and Jael, became popular images of liberty, without such images being attached to any precise notion of rights. On the other hand the idea of a Parliament composed of ladies was generally mocked: in January 1642 some 400 women presented a petition to the House of Lords on the subject of the decay of trade and their general distress:

‘Away with these women,’ cried the Duke of Lennox, adding sarcastically, We were best to have a Parliament of women.’¹

This notion also provided a convenient metaphor for satirists to use to attack other targets. The republican politician and pamphleteer Henry Neville wrote two pamphlets in 1647, The Ladies Parliament and The Ladies, a Second Time, Assembled, and another in 1650, The Commonwealth of Ladies, aimed at the louche morals of the Cavalier aristocrats in a series of double entendres in which the inherently absurd notion of such an assembly was taken for granted – as well as woman’s natural venality.²

The ‘Rattel-head Ladies’ were stated to have assembled at ‘Kattes’ in Covent Garden – the notorious Oxford Kate’s, a hostelry already half-way to being a bawdy-house. The beautiful and dissolute Lady Isabella Thynne resolved ‘That no Roundhead dare to come into any of their Quarters.’ Ladies Montagu and Craven were thanked for favours to Cavaliers beyond the seas. A complaint was officially registered against Sir Henry Blunt, who was said to prefer the favours of common women to those of ‘Ladies of Honour’; other members of the Parliament discussed ‘the common enemy’, their husbands. And in attendance, to help with the ladies’ ‘pressing affairs’, were Doctors Hinton and Chamberlen – who were in fact fashionable obstetricians.

The Commonwealth of Ladies began: ‘There was a time in England, when men wore the breeches … which brought many grievances and oppressions upon the weaker vessels; for they were constrained to converse only with their homes and closets, and now and then with the Gentleman-usher, or the Footman (when they could catch him) for variety …’ Now they have ‘Voted themselves the Supreme Authority both at home and abroad’. Lubricious details of their use of this new freedom followed.

Nor was this kind of gibing limited to Cavalier targets. The wives of the Army leaders were regularly and gleefully subjected to the scurrilous charge that they had ‘usurped the general’s baton’ – as it was said of Sir William Waller’s first wife, who was accused of being ‘ambitious of the popular favour’ and ‘predominant’ over her husband. Later Mrs Venables, wife of the commander of the disastrous West Indian expedition, would be arraigned in very similar language as one who had caused her husband to ‘lower his topsail to a petticoat’.³ Not much could be made along these lines of Oliver Cromwell’s wife, a homebody if ever there was one (sneers at the economical housekeeping of ‘Protectress Joan’, as she was nicknamed, came closer to their target). But Fairfax’s spirited wife Anne, daughter of Lord Vere of Tilbury, was regularly known to pamphleteers as ‘Queen Fairfax’ (as Elizabeth Lilburne was known as ‘Queen Besse’). It was suggested that his wife’s unfeminine ambition was causing Sir Thomas Fairfax to aim at the throne. ‘Tell me not of gowns or lace nor such toys!’, Queen Fairfax was supposed to have exclaimed to ‘Madam Cromwell’ in 1647, ‘Tell me of crowns, sceptres, kingdoms, royal robes; and if my Tom but recovers and thrives in his enterprise I shall not say pish to be Queen of England.’ When Fairfax later withdrew from the trial of the King, and in effect from the Parliamentary cause, it was once again conjectured – with more plausibility – that his wife had influenced him.⁴

Some of this freedom was genuine enough, even if it had only developed through the breakdown of traditional social organization either during or after the war. A member of the older generation like Clarendon deplored the fact that ‘the young women’ at this date ‘conversed without circumspection or modesty’; that, perhaps, was only to be expected. Yet lack of chaperonage and in many cases lack of parents or at least fathers had led to the breeding of a rootless and thus independent generation. The Eure girls Peg and Mall, daughters of Ralph Verney’s ‘Aunt Eure’ (whose father had been killed in 1644) dealt very saucily with efforts to marry them off in the 1650s. Peg broke off one alliance and announced that she would marry no one with living parents who might order her about! Her forthright words on the subject would surely have made Sir Edmund Verney turn in his grave: ‘Sir, I am to lead my life with them [her possible in-laws] … and know so well my own temper that I fear I shall never be happy with them.’ She added that if dragged to the church, she would say no to her bridegroom at the altar. As for Mall, she turned down her cousin, Sir Ralph’s son and heir Edmund, on the extraordinary grounds that she found him personally repulsive; although ‘Mun’ professed himself madly in love with her.⁵

This was the kind of behaviour to which Margaret Duchess of Newcastle drew attention in 1650 when she discussed women ‘affecting a Masculinacy … practising the behaviour (but not the spirits) of men’. Margaret Newcastle did not hesitate to ascribe this new confidence and boldness, or even impudence, as women began ‘to Swagger, to Swear, to Game, to Drink, to Revell, to make Factions’ to the evil effects of the recent conflict. Civil wars were, she wrote, ‘the greatest storms that shipwreck honest Education’, and especially for women, that are ‘Self-admirers’.⁶

Unfortunately this new liberty enjoyed by women in the Civil War and Commonwealth period was frequently associated with two phenomena dreaded by sober citizens of whatever politics. The first of these was sexual licence. Certain extreme religious sects were accused of preaching sexual licence although such scandals were often the product more of rumour and prurient imagination than of knowledge. One hundred members of the Family of Love (a sect founded in Münster in the sixteenth century) were said to be living in Bagshot, in a broadsheet of 1641; the feast of Priapus being celebrated among their calendar of saints. The Familists did have their marriages arranged for them by elders, hence rumours spread that they practised sexual communism. And because the Anabaptists practised ‘dipping’ as a form of baptism, and sometimes ‘dipped’ at night, they were accused of public nudity and thus immorality.⁷

Not all the accusations were the product of misunderstanding or ill will. Some of the women among those sectaries known as the Ranters were unbalanced and hysterical. James Naylor was not a Ranter – he condemned them – but an extreme form of early Quaker who was at one point tried for blasphemy. Some of the women surrounding him were very wild in their behaviour, such as a couple known merely as Mildred and Judy, or Martha Simmonds, in whom ‘an exceedingly filthy spirit … got up; more filthy than any yet departed …’ None of this was reassuring to those who feared excess in women in the first place.⁸

Ironically enough the few instances where free love was publicly advocated benefited in practice the male rather than the female. A Wiltshire rector named Thomas Webbe believed that he had rights to all women: ‘there is no heaven but women, nor no hell save marriage’ was the motto. Abiezar Coppe, a scholar of Oxford University, claimed that property was theft and pride worse than adultery: ‘I can kiss and hug ladies and love my neighbour’s wife as myself without sin.’ One Laurence Clarkson preached that to the pure all things were pure, moving from place to place lying with ‘maids’ until he founded a little group in London called ‘My One Flesh’, a cooperative of willing maids; Clarkson justified himself by the example of Solomon. After returning to his wife in the country, Clarkson proceeded to travel England with another woman, a Mrs Star, until arrested by the Privy Council in 1650 for preaching the doctrine of free love.⁹ Yet by seventeenth-century standards such incidents were as much to the discredit of the female sex as to that of the male sex, if not more so.

The second dreaded phenomenon was that of the ‘Amazonian’ all-female mob. This fear was not totally without reasonable basis: hopeful praise of female modesty and gentleness notwithstanding, such a force had a long history. To go back no further than the beginning of the century, women had led a successful revolt in 1603 at Market Deeping in Lincolnshire, against the draining of Deeping Fen, which threatened their own livelihoods. About 200 women had emerged from Langton and Baston ‘and did cast down a great deal of the captain’s ditch on the north side of the fen, threatening further to burn his houses, drown his servants, and if they had himself, to cut off his head and set it upon a stake’. It was only the intervention of ‘a gentlewoman’ who happened to be passing which dissuaded the women from their violent course, otherwise they would have done the captain, Thomas Lovell, ‘some great mischief’. Thirty-four years later the women of the Fens had lost none of their vigour in defence of the lands on which their cattle grazed, when threatened with enclosure, and were among those who resisted the work of the ‘overseers’ at Holme Fen with scythes and pitchforks. Again in 1641, the crowd which broke into an enclosed fen at Buckden consisted mainly of women aided by boys.¹⁰

In Wiltshire in the 1630s the enclosure of Braydon Forest was resisted with what the Privy Council described as ‘riotous insolencies … committed in the night season by persons unknown, armed with Muskets’; when the principal actors were arrested, women’s names featured as well as men’s. At York in May 1642, women destroyed an enclosure and went to prison for their pains; like the she-soldiers, these particular viragos enjoyed tobacco and ale ‘to make themselves merry when they had done their feats of activity’. Nor did the capital lack its own viragos: after the flight of the five members of Parliament in January 1642, King Charles I unwisely came to the City of London, hoping to secure their arrest at the instigation of the Lord Mayor. He failed (the members were not there) but after his departure certain citizens’ wives fell on to the Lord Mayor, pulled his chain from his neck, and at one point looked like pulling him and the Recorder of the City of London to pieces.¹¹

A tract, The Women’s Sharpe Revenge, which appeared in 1640, under the pseudonymous authorship of ‘Mary Tattle-well and Joane Hit-him-home, Spinsters’, was probably the work of middle-class women – tradeswomen for example. Here grievances were aired, many about education, which have a familiar sound to modern ears: if women were taught singing and dancing it was ‘the better to please and content their [men’s] licentious appetites’. Daughters in general were ‘set only to Needle, to prick our fingers: or else to the Wheel to spin a fair thread for our undoings’. It was the policy of all parents in any case to subdue their daughters ‘and to make us men’s mere vassals, even unto all posterity’. Marriage was the be-all and end-all of the female existence: ‘What poor woman is ever taught that she should have a higher Design than to get her a Husband?’ At the same time it was claimed that the female character was infinitely preferable to that of the male, being for example far more chaste – the Virgin Mary, not Grandmother Eve, was cited here.¹²

When war broke out, however, these outwardly genteel preoccupations were swallowed up in the general disturbance. Those primitive cries of female protest which did make themselves heard tended to be on the basic subjects of food, money – and peace. All this had a raucous sound to frightened ears of both sexes (it was not only the men who shrank back in disgust or terror or both from the image of the Amazon). Certain groups of strong women who had long enjoyed the protection and even the encouragement of society now appeared to assume a more menacing aspect in these troubled times.

Of these the fishwives of Billingsgate market provided a striking – and strident – example. Women had been connected with the sale of fish in London as far back as medieval times, if not further, since an act of Edward III allowed the ‘continuance’ of itinerant fish-women called ‘billesteres’ (the poor who sold their fish in the street, first crying up their wares).¹³ These women were not however permitted to keep stalls ‘nor make a stay in the streets’; they were also enjoined to buy their fish from free fishmongers. A similar liberty was granted to a category described as including both ‘Persons and women’ who came from ‘the uplands’ with fish, ‘caught by them or their servants, in the waters of the Thames or other running streams’.

In the latter years of the seventeenth century, the fishwives’ trade became depressed in the face of the activities of salesmen who cut out these middlewomen and sold Thames fish directly on commission. To try and remedy this, in 1699 the Government ordered that Billingsgate be kept as an open market daily, and ‘not permitting the fisherwomen and others to buy the said fish of the said fishermen, so that the fishermen were obliged to sell their fish to the fishmongers at exorbitant rates’ was explicitly condemned.

However, in the early part of the century the fishwives flourished. In 1632 Donald Lupton gave a jovial picture of them in his Characters of London:¹⁴ ‘these crying, wandering and travelling creatures carry their shops on their heads’, he wrote, their storehouse being Billingsgate or the foot of London Bridge and their habitation Turn-again Lane. As well as all sorts of fish, their tiny shops – ‘some two yards compass’ – would hold ‘herbs or roots, strawberries, apples or plums, cucumbers and such like’ and sometimes even nuts, oranges and lemons.

Going on their rounds, they would first of all set up ‘a good cry’, hoping to sell the contents of their basket for 5s; ‘they are merriest when all their ware is gone’, he reported. Then they would ‘meet in mirth, singing, dancing, and the middle as a Parenthesis, they use scolding’. If a particular fishwife was missing of an evening in a drinking house, it was suspected that she had had a bad return, or paid off some old debts, or gone bankrupt. If anyone ‘drank out’ their whole stock, the remedy was simple: ‘it’s but pawning a petticoat in Long Lane or themselves in Turnbull Street to set up again’. In short the fishwives were ‘creatures soon up and soon down’.

Lupton’s reference to the fishwives’ ‘scolding’ in the midst of all their merry singing and dancing was significant. The fishwives’ language was notorious. By the Restoration, the term ‘fishwife’ had become synonymous with one who swore (as ‘Billingsgate’ was already used to denote foul language); in the early eighteenth century ‘a Billingsgate’ was defined as ‘a scolding, impudent slut’, Addison making a whimsical reference to ‘debates which frequently arise among ladies of British fishery’. During the Civil War period, James Strong, author of Joanereidos, stressed this aspect of their charms, saluting:

Those not sharing Strong’s admiration for women who had ‘stronger grown’ were on the contrary much alarmed by the appearance of the stalwart and loud-mouthed fishwives among the women who petitioned the House of Commons. As Samuel Butler wrote in Hudibras:

The fact that the women’s tongues probably were louder than ‘bellowing Drums’ did not add to the cogency of their case; on the contrary it confirmed that disgust for and fear of a scolding woman mentioned in connection with witches, and associated at a primitive level in society’s consciousness with female activists.

The great women’s peace petition of August 1643 – Parliament having recently rejected proposals which many had hoped would lead to the end of the war – was variously described.¹⁶ The women arrived wearing white silk ribbons in their hats ‘to cry for Peace, which was to the women a pleasing thing’. Numbers as large as 6,000 were mentioned although one contemporary report spoke more plausibly of 200 or 300 ‘oyster wives’, who with other ‘dirty and tattered sluts’ arrived at the House of Commons and threatened to use violence to those there ‘as were Enemies to Peace’. Another report referred to ‘Whores, Bawds, Oyster-women, Kitchen-stuffe women, Beggar women and the very scum of the scum of the Suburbs, besides abundance of Irish women’ (here were a number of prejudices neatly combined). Other reports spoke more simply of citizens’ wives with their babies at the breast. Ironically enough, this was the peace-seeking mob – ‘divers women killed by the soldiers in this tumult, yet unappeased’ – which the Royalist Sir John Scudamore mentioned approvingly to Brilliana Lady Harley as an implied reproach to her unfeminine conduct in prolonging the siege of Brampton Bryan Castle (see p. 217). In London their violence had appalled both Houses of Parliament.

First of all the women forced their way into the yard at Westminster, beating the sentinels about and yelling at each dignitary who passed on his way to the House of Lords: ‘We will have Peace presently, and our King’. Other women bewailed the loss of their husbands slain in the war. Sir Simonds D’Ewes, he who had, as we shall see, put an effective end to the voting of the women freeholders in Suffolk, displayed some cunning by declaring himself all for peace. In this manner he was able to pass through the mob easily, even receiving some ‘benedictions’. Others were less wily and thus less fortunate. Violence continued to be shown; ministers and soldiers, especially those with short hair (still at this date considered a mark of a Roundhead), had it pulled. The women’s especial venom was reserved for those MPs such as Pym who had received them favourably over earlier petitions in 1642, and promised them that their distress would be alleviated.

By the afternoon, despite the efforts of a trained band, the women had blockaded the House for two hours. When the militia men shot powder at them the women howled scornfully that it was ‘nothing but powder’ and hurled brickbats in reply. Another howl went up to produce ‘the Traitors that are against peace, that we may tear them in pieces. Give up Pym in the first place’, cried the women. A troop of soldiers was ordered up but the women simply tore their colours out of their hats and assaulted them in turn. Provoked, the soldiers began to use the flat of their swords: one woman was said to have been killed and another lost her nose. At last someone – it was not clear who – sent for a troop of horse, Waller’s Horse, known derisively as ‘Waller’s Dogs’, who cudgelled the petitioners with their canes. The women fled but before they could escape the pursuing horse further casualties were suffered, estimates of which varied from one or two to 100; and there were injured women as well.

Many of the women were sent to Bridewell, including ‘a most deformed Medusa or Hecuba, with an old rusty blade by her side’, whose hands had to be tied behind her back with ‘Match’ (the long fuse used for lighting the soldiers’ muskets).

There were persistent rumours that this outburst, and other similar outbursts by women, were not in fact genuine if over-violent expressions of the misery caused by the war, but something far more menacing: highly organized demonstrations on behalf of the other side – in this case the Royalists. It was suggested that the Royalist Earl of Holland had egged on the campaign and even provided the white silk for the favours. As a rider to this, it was often suggested that any particularly virulent body of protesting women had contained men within its ranks, dressed up as women; Jenny Geddes, for example, the Scotswoman who hurled her stool at the preacher in St Giles’ Cathedral in 1637, was alleged to have been an apprentice in disguise.¹⁷

It was of course impossible to disprove these propagandist allegations afterwards – which is why they were so effective. The mere possibility that a female mob might constitute an instrument to be wielded by the enemy, and even include the enemy itself concealed within, made yet more sinister a spectacle already disquieting enough to the male eye. It was not considered relevant that most of those women decked in white silk favours were probably sincere when they raised their voices and cried for peace – sweet peace ‘which is to women a pleasing thing’. For if peace was pleasing to women (and to many men also) the sound of women’s voices raised in tumult calling for it was not.

Woodcuts of the time show plenty of women present in the crowd of spectators which watched the execution of King Charles I on 30 January 1649, anticipating the tricoteuses of the French Revolution by 150 years. This was the type of ‘Virago’ from whom her contemporaries shrank back.

Hindsight – but only hindsight – has shown the importance of female suffrage in the elevation of women’s condition; this importance was certainly not appreciated in the seventeenth century.

On ‘an extreme windy day’ in October 1640 the Parliamentary elections for the borough of Eye in Suffolk were being held according to the contemporary custom, in public – in ‘Mr Hambies’s field’. Some women, widows, arrived, to be ‘sworn’, as it happened on behalf of the two Presbyterian candidates, Sir Philip Parker and his uncle Sir Nathaniel Barnardiston. When the two knights were duly elected there were accusations of cheating from their opponents, amongst which was registered the fact that women had been allowed to be ‘sworn’. At which point everyone, not least the knights concerned, made haste to point out that the women had not got very far in their endeavour, owing to the prompt conduct of the High Sheriff of Suffolk, Sir Simonds D’Ewes.

At first, it is true, the women did have their votes taken owing to the ignorance of the clerks concerned, but when D’Ewes heard what was going on, ‘Mr Sheriff would have us take no women’s oaths’. Both the knights requested the women’s votes to be removed from the total, and when the High Sheriff ‘cast up the Books, he cast out the women of the general sum’. Sir Simonds D’Ewes was quite clear in his own mind as to the reason for his behaviour: ‘conceiving it a matter very unworthy of any Gentleman, and most dishonourable in such an election to make use of their [women’s] voices, although they might in law have been allowed’.¹⁸

It was significant that the women in Hambies’s field in 1640 were widows; once again, the widow, by her very status outside conventional male authority, occupied a position of potential strength. This was in any case a time of franchisal doubt concerning who could or could not vote (in those elections which were disputed and where public voting actually took place; undisputed nominations to Parliament were arranged behind the scenes).¹⁹ It is important to realize therefore that these widows were not acting as agitators but freeholders.

It was the association of the vote with material wealth – the ‘permanent fixed interest’ in the country – which had enabled some women freeholders in the past to use their ‘Voice’ in Parliamentary elections. It was in this sense that Sir Simonds D’Ewes at Eye admitted with some disgust that the Suffolk women’s ‘voices’ might ‘in law’ have been allowed. In the remote medieval past, those Catholic abbesses who were early patterns of powerful womanhood had named representatives. Under Elizabeth there had been two cases of borough-owners, who happened to be women, returning Members of Parliament. More recently, in the reign of James I, a judge pronounced in the case of Coates v. Lyle that a ‘feme sole’, if a freeholder, could vote; in the cases of Catherine v. Surrey and Holt v. Lyle, the same judgment was given, although it was added that on marriage the right passed to the lady’s husband. In 1628 Sir Henry Slingsby endeavoured – but in vain – to use the votes of widowed burgage holders in Knaresborough in Yorkshire.²⁰

For all this, the little episode at Eye was not the harbinger of numerous occasions at which female freeholders attempted to be sworn; despite the fact that the Members elected were Presbyterians and that the Parliament concerned was that famous innovatory body which would be known as the Long Parliament. The incident in Mr Hambies’s field on a windy day in 1640 was not a prologue but an epilogue to the subject of female suffrage. In 1644 the Institutes of Sir Edward Coke were published without challenge, in which it was laid down that ‘Multitudes are bound by Acts of Parliament which are not parties to [the] election’. In this silent subject herd were to be included males under twenty-one, ‘all they that have no freehold … and all women having freehold or no freehold’.²¹

It was true that at another Yorkshire election, that of Richmond in 1678, widows were explicitly disallowed in advance – ‘it being against common right’ – although they could assign their votes to others; but this was less an indication of potential female rights than of the vague nature of the English electoral roll at the time.²² It was more significant that throughout a period of unparallelled radicalism – and radical debate – in English history, when so many revolutionary political ideas were discussed that to contemporaries it must have seemed that Pandora’s Box had been opened, the serious question of giving a vote to Pandora herself was never even mooted.

At the Army’s Putney debates in the autumn of 1647, the Levellers among their number put forward startling demands for the extension of the suffrage in their document The Agreement of the People, based on the premise that the consent of the governed was needed for government: a man could rule over other individuals ‘no further than by free consent, or agreement, by giving up their power to each other, for their better being’. The Army’s high command, including Oliver Cromwell and Henry Ireton, found this whole concept of a franchise based on rights rather than property both dangerous and appalling. But this was manhood suffrage which was being discussed, and those Levellers who did raise the question of universal suffrage at Putney, envisaged it in terms of adult males. Disconcerting as it may be to the modern inquirer, even male ‘servants’ were to be excluded from the new franchise of the Levellers if they were not householders, since roughly speaking household franchise was what was required. It was not even thought worth mentioning that women, whose legal rights were so obviously swallowed up in those of their husbands, were excluded.²³

Henry Ireton’s answer came down firmly on the side of that freehold qualification for voting which had been the founding notion of Parliament since its earliest days in the time of Edward I (and was incidentally to remain so for the next two centuries). No one had a right to choose those ‘that shall determine what laws we shall be ruled by here’, he declared, who did not have ‘a permanent fixed interest in this Kingdom’, by which Ireton meant the possession of freehold property, or some other form of freehold such as an office or benefice (a fellowship at an Oxford or Cambridge college entitled the holder to vote at county elections).

In the late 1640s even the extreme opinions of the Levellers did not lead them to challenge the concept of a woman’s legal subordination to her husband. One scholar has written that no plea for female franchise was put forward in the Civil War period so far as he can discover.²⁴ Towards the end of the century, Locke omitted women from natural equality, and James Tyrrell, one of Locke’s associates, observed: ‘There never was any government where all the promiscuous rabble of women and children had votes, as not being capable of it, yet it does not for all that prove that all legal civil government does not owe its origin to the consent of the people.’ It was a contrast on which Mary Astell, the educationalist, would reflect bitterly at the beginning of the next century: ‘how much soever Arbitrary Power may be dislik’d on a Throne, not Milton … nor any of the Advocates of Resistance, would cry up Liberty to poor Female Slaves or plead for the lawfulness of Resisting a Private Tyranny’.²⁵

The very few possible exceptions to this rule only serve to emphasize the monolithic nature of male supremacy at the time, at least in the political sphere, for none of them bore fruit. The short-lived Diggers’ movement, whose members, extreme radicals, believed that land should be held in common, did result in some revolutionary suggestions on the subject of marriage from its leader Gerrard Winstanley. Article 56 of Winstanley’s ‘Laws for a Free Commonwealth’ proposed that: ‘Every man and woman shall have the free liberty to marry whom they love, if they can obtain the love and liking of that party whom they would marry, and neither birth nor portion’ should hinder the match. The reason given was: ‘for we are all of one blood, mankind, and for portion, the Common Storehouses are every man and maid’s portion, as free to one as to another’.²⁶ Here was indeed a revolutionary suggestion; as we have seen, the disposal of the young in marriage for reasons other than affection was a cornerstone of society, without which the building could be expected in the minds of contemporaries to collapse. Marriage itself, in the same free style, was to take the form of a simple verbal declaration in front of witnesses.

Further Digger clauses on the subject of rape and the begetting of illegitimate children by men were even more startling. If a man lay with a woman forcibly and she cried out (as testified by two witnesses) he was to be put to death while the woman went free: ‘it is robbery of a woman’s bodily freedom’. If a man lay with a maid and she conceived, he was to marry her.

With the extinction of the Diggers’ movement vanished Winstanley’s revolutionary notions on marriage. Their effect on society as a whole had in any case been insubstantial; except to link radicalism still further with the upsetting of the natural order as regards the family. It was significant that the governmental – Puritan – legislation concerning sexual relationships between man and woman was of a very different order. The harsh new Act of 1650 made adultery a capital crime; however, the man could escape execution by pleading that he did not know the woman was married (a convenient loophole). The woman on the other hand could in theory only avoid execution if her husband had been absent more than three years. It seems that only one woman, Ursula Powell, brought before the Middlesex Quarter Sessions, was actually put to death under the law (and there is even some doubt about her fate); this was because juries refused to convict, or dealt out lesser penalties of imprisonment or whipping.²⁷ Nevertheless the principle of the greater guilt of the female was explicitly stated, in marked contrast to Winstanley’s vision of justice.

In 1646, the year before the Putney debates, in The Freemans Freedome Vindicated, John Lilburne, the Leveller leader and theoretician, did at least include women in his doctrine of consent. He wrote that of ‘every particular individual man and woman … by nature all equal and alike in power, dignity, authority, and majesty’ none had by nature any authority over any except by ‘donation, that is to say, by mutual agreement or consent’. It has been proposed by one of his biographers that inclusion of women in the franchise was at least ‘consonant with Lilburne’s actions’;²⁸ nevertheless he did not in fact postulate such an inclusion.

The early history of the Levellers was however marked by the courage of their ‘lusty lasses’, as Mercurius Pragmaticus described them. Not all of these lasses were as young as such a cheerful description implied. Katherine Hadley was an old spinster who tended John Lilburne in the Fleet prison in 1639, where he had been incarcerated the previous year for printing and circulating unlicensed books, having been first fined, whipped and pilloried. She was subsequently accused of distributing Lilburne’s pamphlet A Cry for Justice at the Whitsun holiday to some apprentices, and another Lilburnian appeal to both apprentices and cloth-workers. Arrested without a warrant, she was consigned by the Lord Mayor of London to the Poultry Compter prison in the City, where she withstood seven months of harsh conditions. When she petitioned for liberty, Katherine Hadley was transferred to Bridewell on 1 October – still without trial or even examination. Here, to her chagrin and suffering, she was placed, as she put it, among ‘the common sluts, whose society is a hell upon earth to me, that fears the Lord’. She was not set free until December 1640, in that newly liberal climate which also led to the release of Burton and Bastwick. Thanks to Lilburne, Katherine Hadley received £10 in compensation for what she had endured.²⁹

Mary Overton, the wife of the pamphleteer Richard Overton, who under the name of Martin Marpriest attacked the Westminster Assembly of Divines mercilessly, was another woman who suffered for a principle with fortitude. At the time of the Long Parliament, Overton published attacks on the position of the bishops anonymously; later he moved on to theological matters and it was when he described, still anonymously, the doctrine of immortality – ‘the present going of the soul into heaven or hell’ – as ‘a fiction’ that his work incurred the displeasure of the House of Commons, who ordered the licensing committee to inquire into its author, printer and publisher. In August 1646 Overton was arrested for printing some of John Lilburne’s pamphlets and taken to Newgate.

Mary Overton’s petition for her husband’s release would later refer with indignation to the fact that he had ‘constantly adhered to the Parliament’. She described his incarceration in Newgate as ‘the high violation of the fundamental Laws of this Land, the utter subversion of the Common Liberties of the people and of your Petitioner’s husband’s native Right and Inheritance in particular’, quoting a list of protests starting with that of Magna Carta and going right forward to the Petition of Right in 1628.

She also described the traumatic moment of the arrest (she was sick in bed, having recently given birth), when the officers of the law broke open and ransacked their house, followed by another visit at which the officers were sent again ‘to enter, search, ransack and rifle your Petitioner’s house, her trunks, chests, etc. to rob, steal, plunder and bear away her goods, which were her then present livelihood for her imprisoned husband, her self, and three small children, her brother and sister’.³⁰

In January 1647 Mary Overton herself was arrested, together with her brother Thomas Johnson, when they were discovered stitching the sheets of a seditious pamphlet written by her husband with the assistance of Lilburne, Regal Tyranny Discovered.³¹ She was taken before the Bar of the House of Lords, but here she stalwartly refused to answer any questions or to take any oath against herself or her husband. At which point she was herself committed to prison. What was more she was literally dragged there ‘on two cudgels … headlong upon the stones through all the dirt and mire of the streets’ with her six-months-old baby in her arms, and incidentally once more pregnant. As if this was not enough, the officers of the law abused her all the way, ‘with the scandalous, infamous names of wicked Whore, Strumpet etc.’. Finally she was thrown into the ‘most reproachful gaol’ of Bridewell, that ‘hell upon earth’ to decent women as Katherine Hadley had described it, where of course Mary Overton joined the company of all the genuine whores and strumpets (and lost the child she was carrying).

In Mary Overton’s petition to the House of Commons of late March, she begged for a speedy sentence. If wrong had been done, then she was prepared to face execution; if not she should be granted her freedom; but arbitrary imprisonment at the orders of the House of Lords was utterly intolerable. Despite these cogent arguments, she was not released until July. And Richard Overton, issuing a number of broadsheets against his arbitrary imprisonment, continued to be associated both in and out of gaol with the Levellers.

Of all the Levellers’ wives, Elizabeth Lilburne, born Elizabeth Dewell, excites at once the most sympathy for her sufferings and the most admiration for her endurance; these feelings being not unmixed with pity for the fate of anyone married to John Lilburne. (In general the story of Elizabeth Lilburne recalls that definition of a saint as one that is married to a martyr.) The kind of freedom which Elizabeth Lilburne shared with her husband was short-lived if it existed at all; the best tribute to her character being those words of Lilburne’s in 1646 from The Freemans Freedome Vindicated, quoted earlier, in which man and woman were declared equal alike in dignity and authority; these sentiments – so much in advance of Lilburne’s time – it must be plausible to ascribe to her husband’s intimate knowledge of one splendid woman. His later treatment of her is not so edifying.

John Lilburne was about twenty-four when in 1638 he was sentenced by the Star Chamber. It has been suggested that Elizabeth Dewell, like Katherine Hadley, may have been among the women who visited him after his whipping. She certainly comforted him in the Fleet prison. Lilburne was released at the beginning of the Long Parliament and took to brewing. After his marriage, Lilburne described Elizabeth as ‘an object dear in my affections several years before from me she knew anything of it’. At least these early days must have been a sweet period, for John could write later: ‘I confess I partly know it by experience that divers months after marriage are most commonly a time of dotage.’³²

At the beginning of the Civil War, Lilburne joined the Parliamentary Army and fought at Edgehill; Elizabeth was probably present too, quartered with the other women at Kineton, along with those baggage trains which the dreaded ‘Prince Robber’ Rupert plundered. John Lilburne was subsequently captured at Brentford, and having been tried for high treason for bearing arms against the King, was shut up in Oxford Castle in danger of execution. From there he smuggled out a letter to his wife; whereupon she, although pregnant, set out for the Royalist headquarters, which she reached after ‘so many sad and difficult accidents to a woman in her condition, as would force tears from the hardest heart’. Lilburne’s liberty was secured by exchange: he wrote later that by her ‘wisdom, patience, diligence’ Elizabeth had saved his life.³³

On his release Lilburne’s thirst for agitation proved to be in no way quenched by his ordeal. Elizabeth had secured him a government position at £1,000 a year; to her ‘extraordinary grief’ he rejected utterly the possibility of an easier life: he ‘must rather fight for 8d a day’. It was true that Lilburne had an astonishingly quarrelsome nature, as well as passionate political convictions. He left the Army in the spring of 1645, refusing to take the oath of the Covenant. His contentiousness as much as his conscience soon led to further periods of imprisonment, this time at the orders of Parliament. Elizabeth, pregnant again, lived with him in Newgate prison in the autumn of 1645 until he was released in October; it was peculiarly painful to discover that when the Stationers’ Company’s agents had ransacked their house in Half-Moon Alley for seditious writings, they had also stolen the childbed linen which was carefully stored there (much as the Overtons had been robbed).

During a further period of more severe imprisonment in the summer of 1646, Elizabeth occupied herself in active campaigning on her husband’s behalf. It was Elizabeth who undertook the presentation of John’s defence in a letter to the Keeper of Newgate prison which was later printed with a characteristic challenge: ‘as a free Commoner of England, I do here at your open Barre protest …’.³⁴ On 10 July, Lilburne was committed to the Tower of London and not even allowed to receive food at his wife’s hands. With about twenty other women, Elizabeth visited the House of Commons in September to present Lilburne’s petition for justice, headed ‘For J. Lilburne from his wife and many women’, and she continued to protest at being barred from his side. Day after day this devoted body appeared at Westminster until a Committee of the House was appointed to hear Lilburne’s case and Elizabeth was permitted to join him.

In February 1647 Elizabeth herself was arrested while at her husband’s side for dispersing his writings. Unlike Mary Overton she did not remain silent: in court she gave vent to a furious outburst on the subject of ‘a company of unjust and unrighteous Judges’. In this instance it was the quick-tempered John who demanded that what she had said should be overlooked: the court should ‘pass by what in the bitterness of her heart being a woman she had said’. It was a perfect example of the weak but protected role of the female at law: Lilburne secured Elizabeth’s discharge on the grounds that he, as her husband, must be held responsible for what had happened.³⁵

Elizabeth Lilburne remained free to haunt the Army headquarters at St Albans and Kingston, petitioning for her husband’s release and carrying messages to Leveller meeting places. But when Lilburne was offered bail in the autumn, his address to his family expressed the classic position of the man of conscience: ‘Shall I for love of them, sin against my soul …?’³⁶

Elizabeth even had an opportunity to protect her husband physically. In January 1648 Lilburne was brought before the Bar of the House of Commons to answer further charges; in the lobby the soldiers turned on ‘Freeborn John’ with their musket butts until Elizabeth flung herself in the way. Lilburne was subsequently taken to the Tower, from which he was released in August. The great Leveller petition of 11 September is thought to have been largely his work. It was signed by ‘Thousands of well-affected, dwelling in and about London’; in it the demands of The Agreement of the People were repeated, together with a demand for the abolition of the ‘negative voices’ of the King and the House of Lords.³⁷

By the end of 1648, however, Lilburne had become disillusioned with the Army and its leaders, including Cromwell, seeing in its control of Parliament after Pride’s Purge merely another face of tyranny. In the New Year, although he approved of the execution of the King in principle, he thought that an ordinary jury of the people should try him, following the establishment of a republic, rather than a High Court of Justice.

At the beginning of 1649 therefore, thanks to John Lilburne’s temporary withdrawal from public affairs, a short period of domestic peace was enjoyed by Elizabeth and her family, now including three children, two of whom had been born while John was in prison (Tower was the unusual if appropriate name chosen for the youngest). But by the spring Lilburne, as the voice of the Levellers, had abandoned domesticity for strife once more. Once again Lilburne was demanding liberty of conscience, attacking the new Government. Once again he was clapped into prison. Once again it was necessary to petition for his release.

The presentation of The Humble Petition of divers well-affected Women inhabiting the City of London, Westminster, the Borough of Southwark, Hamblets and places adjacent to the House of Commons in April 1649, and the events surrounding it, represented the high point of political female activity at this period; just as the ardent demonstration at the funeral of the executed Leveller soldier Robert Lockyer was the most overt instance of public Leveller sympathies. The coffin was decorated with sprigs of rosemary dipped in blood. The long column of mourners adorned with black and sea-green ribbons – sea-green was the adopted colour of the Leveller cause – was brought up by a body of women at the rear, sea-green and black ribbons mingled at their breast.

The women petitioners for the release of Lilburne, Overton and the others, first tackled the House of Commons on 23 April, when they were simply told that the House was too busy to receive them. The next day the Sergeant at Arms dismissed them with the words that the matter was one ‘of a higher concernment’ than they understood. Besides the House had already given an answer to ‘their husbands’; therefore ‘you are desired to go home, and look after your own business, and meddle with your housekeeping’. Some angry repartee followed this condescending dismissal, in which the women gave as good as they got. One unwise Member attempted to say that ‘it was not for women to Petition, they might stay at home and wash the dishes’ only to be told smartly: ‘Sir, we have scarce any dishes left us to wash, and those we have are not sure to keep.’ Another MP ventured the milder observation that it was strange for women to petition; ‘It was strange that you cut off the King’s head’, was the answer, ‘yet I suppose you will justify it.’³⁸

On 25 April twenty women were at last admitted to the lobby of the House of Commons bearing a petition, although the attendant soldiers threw squibs at them, and cocked their pistols. The women, with equal determination if not equal violence, grabbed Cromwell’s cloak and began to lecture him on their grievances.

‘What will you have?’ cried Cromwell in answer to their tirade. ‘Those rights and freedoms of the Nation, that you promised us …’ was the ominous reply. Whatever the public indignation of these furies, The Petition of Women was a considered document; it is likely that Lilburne had a strong hand in its production.³⁹ It called on all women who approved it to ‘subscribe’ (that is, sign or mark) and then deliver their signatures to women who would be ‘appointed in every Ward and Division to receive the same’. Apart from the release of the Leveller leaders, grievances for which redress was sought included high taxes, lack of work, and arbitrary government in general.

The most interesting passage came in The Petition of Women’s preamble when the issue of women taking such an apparently unnatural step as to petition was squarely faced, There was a token reference to the ‘weak hands’ of women; but this was followed by the counter claim that ‘God had wrought many deliverances for several stations from age to age by the weak hand of women’ as they knew for their own ‘encouragement and example’. Deborah and Jael were quoted in this context, as were the ‘British’ women who delivered the land from the Danes, and more recently the Scotswomen who fought against ‘episcopal tyranny’. As for the charge that it was not the custom for women to address themselves publicly to the House of Commons, the Preamble began with the bold words: ‘Since we are assured of our creation in the image of God, and of an interest in Christ equal unto men, as also of a proportionate share in the freedom of this Commonwealth …’

Was there perhaps, as has been suggested, an implicit demand here for a share in the franchise as well as the freedom? If implicit, it was once again not explicit. Two more petitions on behalf of Lilburne were presented at the beginning of May by ‘bonny Besses in sea-green dresses’ as Mercurius Pragmaticus picturesquely termed them. There were satirical mentions of ‘my brave Viragoes, the Ladyes-errants of the Sea-green order … so lately fluttering like flocks of wild Geese about the Parliament ears, for the liberty of their champion Jack and his confederates’.⁴⁰ Then the brutal quelling of the Burford mutiny in the middle of the month led to the collapse of the Leveller cause as a political force.

Petitioning on the part of Leveller women did not, however, fade away altogether. In October 1651 women were included in a Leveller petition that debtors should be released from prison to work off their debts (a favourite Leveller proposal and one of the many in which they were excitingly in advance of their times). In June 1653, a body of women, including the ‘clamorous’ Katherine Chidley, presented still further petitions for the release of John Lilburne, enduring yet another spell of imprisonment.

In July Katherine Chidley got into the pulpit at Somerset House and along with another sectary – a young man – ‘preached to the people very much in Lilburne’s behalf’. In the same month about a dozen women, headed by Katherine, presented a petition to Parliament on behalf of Lilburne, said to have been ‘subscribed by above six thousand of that sex’.⁴¹ This was that Little Parliament (sometimes known as the Barebones Parliament after one of its members, Praisegod Barebones, an Anabaptist leather-merchant) which was created following Cromwell’s purge of the Rump Parliament of April 1653; it was disbanded when he became Protector in the following December.

The Leveller women ‘boldly knocked at the door, and the House taking notice that they were there, sent out Praisegod Barebones to dissuade them from their enterprise, but he could not prevail; and they persisting in their disturbance, another Member came out and told them, the House could not take cognizance of their petition, they being women, and many of them Wives, so that the law took no notice of them’. The women issued a reasonable challenge to the notion of total female dependency based on wifehood by replying that ‘they were not all wives, and therefore pressed for the receiving their petition’. The rest of the conversation was not quite on this high level. If their petition was refused, the women went on, the Members of Parliament ‘should know that they [the women] had husbands and friends’, who ‘wore Swords to defend the liberty of the people etc.’. The members should ‘look to themselves, and not to persecute that man of God [Lilburne] lest they were also destroyed, as the late King, Bishops, Parliament and all others that ever opposed him, who were all fallen before him’.⁴²

But Lilburne was not released.

The story of Elizabeth Lilburne continued on more poignant if less dramatic lines as the petitioning woman of the 1640s gave way to the despairing – but still soliciting – wife of the 1650s; having much in common with Dame Isabella Twysden and Mary Lady Verney, despite the difference in their husbands’ politics. To retrace our steps in John Lilburne’s story: at the end of the Burford mutiny, he was still held in prison in the Tower of London. Elizabeth Lilburne therefore was still holding together the little household in London as well as she might in her husband’s absence. At this point the family received ‘a melancholy visitation’ in the shape of smallpox; hardly an uncommon seventeenth-century occurrence, but the consequences in this particular case were heart-rending. Both of Elizabeth’s sons died – ‘the greater part of his earthly delight in this world’, as John Lilburne would later describe them.⁴³ Elizabeth herself and her daughter hovered on the brink of death. Under these circumstances Lilburne was at least allowed to visit them from prison. Finally in November 1649 he was released.

It is understandable that the stricken Elizabeth now hoped that her husband would make his peace with the new Commonwealth and settle with what remained of his little household. (Another son, John, was born in October 1650.) She hoped in vain. As a result of a vendetta against Sir Arthur Haselrig, Lilburne was banished for life by an Act of Parliament in January 1652, and a huge fine was imposed. While he was in exile, Elizabeth found herself in great hardship, having to sell or pawn most of her household goods; she also suffered a miscarriage, and her other children were ill. Under the circumstances, she refused to send him papers which she believed would merely lead to more fruitless troubles. Lilburne referred to her letters as ‘new paper skirmishes … filled with womanish passion and anger’.⁴⁴ Outsiders may find it easier to comprehend the element of despair which was now creeping into her dealings with her intractable husband.

All the same, by May 1653 Elizabeth had scraped together enough money to visit John at Bruges; Lilburne had expected her to bring a pass for England from the newly installed Protector Cromwell. He was furious it was refused. Relations between husband and wife were evidently cool: in a letter to the Protector Lilburne blamed Cromwell for the fact: ‘Your late barbarous tyrannical dealing with me hath exposed her to so much folly and lowness of spirit in my eyes, in some of her late childish actions, as hath in some measure, produced an alienation of affection in me to her …’ He referred ominously to ‘that tenderness of affection that I owe to her whom I formerly entirely loved as my own life’.⁴⁵ Lilburne sent Elizabeth to England once more for the pass and awaited her return at Calais. On hearing the news of a second refusal, he returned to England anyway, whereupon he was arrested, imprisoned once more in June 1653 and finally tried in July.

This was the celebrated trial which had the people roaring in chorus:

John lilburne did not die; in effect he was acquitted; but the Government declined to release him (provoking those petitions on the part of the Leveller women to which reference has already been made). By July 1655 he was in prison on the island of Guernsey. Elizabeth, her soliciting temper unabated by her privations – and John’s recriminations – petitioned Cromwell that he should be released: ‘Our grievous afflictions have obtained no remission!’ she wrote. ‘I beg you take away all provocation from his impatient spirit, weared out with long and sore afflictions. I durst engage my life that he will not disturb the state.’ John’s own poor health lent plausibility to Elizabeth’s last statement: it was probably she who got Fleetwood, Cromwell’s brother-in-law and colleague, to persuade the Protector of Lilburne’s newly pacifist frame of mind.⁴⁶

When lilburne reached Dover Castle, Elizabeth was living at the house of a friend who kept an inn at Guildhall; after years without a proper home life, or even a proper income, she had fallen into a state of depression, indicated by the fact that her newest baby, Benomy, had been a year old when she had had him baptized.⁴⁷ In London she received another startling piece of news concerning her husband’s spiritual odyssey. He had now become a Quaker.

It was one thing for John to require Elizabeth to send him Quaker books down from London. But the language in which he hoped for Elizabeth’s own conversion was scarcely such as to bring comfort to the weary homeless woman. He spoke of self-denial: ‘even to a final denial of father, kindred, friends, my sweet and beloved (by me) babes’. Above all her conversion would enable her ‘to go cheerfully and willingly along hand in hand’ with her husband. Such a step, he wrote, ‘abundantly would render thee more amiable, lovely and pleasant in mine eyes although thou wert then clothed in rags …’ Elizabeth had just escaped death by drowning in the Thames – John’s sympathy with her plight was cursory. The fact that Elizabeth and the children were to all intents and purposes clothed in rags, John Lilburne treated with equal shortness, He wrote: ‘I am also sorry that thou art so straitly put to it for money, but to live upon God by faith in the depth of straights, is the lively condition of a Christian: O that thy spirit could attain to it!’⁴⁸

When the couple did meet again in November 1655, they had a bitter quarrel; yet even now, for the higher purpose of marital union, it was Elizabeth who agreed to a reconciliation on John’s terms. By August 1657 John Lilburne, although nominally still a prisoner, was allowed to rent a house at Eltham in Kent; moreover Elizabeth was pregnant again (she underwent a total of ten pregnancies, five of her babies, including the boy named Tower, dying young). The house was for the accouchement, ‘that I might be near my friends at my lying-in’. She duly gave birth. Then Cromwell, hearing of Lilburne’s freedom, and being prepared to grant him an allowance but not to have him at large, called for his return. It was too late. John Lilburne was now ‘sick and weak’.⁴⁹On 29 August 1657, at the age of forty-three, he was dead.

Elizabeth was now in a state verging on destitution, with three children to care for, including a new-born baby. Her grief was not allayed by the Quaker funeral which followed. All that was left for her to do was to petition the all-powerful Cromwell, who, whatever his treatment of the dissident John, had as we have seen a merited reputation for helping distressed women. Cromwell responded with an order for the payment of the arrears due to Elizabeth, and a continuation of the 40s a week allowance granted to Lilburne. Unfortunately this was not to be the end of Elizabeth’s ‘piercing sorrows’. By the time Richard Cromwell succeeded his father as Protector, she was still petitioning to have Parliament repeal that Act of 1652 which had sentenced John to a colossal fine: ‘Your late father professed very great tenderness to me’, she wrote desperately to Richard.⁵⁰ The 1652 Act was finally repealed in February 1659.

This, little enough, was the material reward secured by Elizabeth Lilburne: in return for a small allowance (still being paid in March 1660) she surrendered John Lilburne’s papers. If Lilburne himself would not have approved,⁵¹ who can blame the exhausted widow, who had, as she told Richard Cromwell, endured ‘seventeen years’ sorrows’ and longed for ‘a little rest and comfort among my fatherless children’. A more equitable award lay in the earlier judgement of Lilburne himself. Dispatching a petition to Cromwell by her hand, he wrote: ‘This I have sent by the gravest, wisest, fittest messenger I could think of.’ He added, in this at least a conventional product of the seventeenth century, ‘and, though a Feminine, yet of a gallant and truly masculine spirit’.⁵²