Flesh and Spirit: An anthology of seventeenth-century women's writing 9781526111012

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F PIRIT S

LESH

AND

AN ANTHOLOGY OF SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY WOMEN’S WRITING Edited by

Rachel Adcock, Sara Read & Anna Ziomek

Flesh and Spirit

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Flesh and Spirit An anthology of seventeenthcentury women’s writing

Edited by Rachel Adcock, Sara Read and Anna Ziomek

Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan

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Selection and editorial matter copyright © Manchester University Press 2014 All other matter copyright © as acknowledged The rights of Rachel Adcock, Sara Read and Anna Ziomek to be identified as the editors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed in Canada exclusively by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN  978 0 7190 9023 3  hardback First published 2014 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset in Plantin by R. J. Footring Ltd, Derby

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Contents

Acknowledgements

page vii

Chronologyix Introduction1 The dialogue between flesh and spirit 4 Sin and childbirth 11 Signs of the times 18 Conversion and cure 23 Advising on body and spirit: women’s writing 29 Note on the presentation of the texts 33

Part I: Exemplary conversion narratives 1 Lady Mary Carey Meditations and poetry (1647–57)

37 42

2 Elizabeth Major 58 Honey on the Rod: Or a Comfortable Contemplation for One in Affliction; with Sundry Poems on Several Subjects (1656)61 Sin and Mercy Briefly Discovered: Or, The Veil Taken a Little from Before Both (1656)

76

3 Gertrude More 81 The Holy Practises of a Devine Lover or the Sainctly Ideots Devotions (1657)84 The Spiritual Exercises of the Most Vertuous and Religious D. Gertrude More of the Holy Order of S. Bennet and English Congregation of our Ladies of Comfort in Cambray (1658)86 v

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Contents Part II: Advising on body and spirit   4 Elizabeth Clinton, Countess of Lincoln 105 The Countesse of Lincolnes Nurserie (1622)110   5 Brilliana, Lady Harley The commonplace book of Brilliana Conway (1622) Letters (1625–43)

122 126 129

  6 ‘Eliza’ 144 Eliza’s Babes: Or the Virgins-Offering (1652)146   7 An anonymous gentlewoman 174 Conversion Exemplified; In the Instance of a Gracious Gentlewoman Now in Glory (1663)178

Part III: Conversion and cure   8 Lady Elizabeth Delaval Meditations and prayers (1663–71)

197 200

  9 Katherine Sutton 218 A Christian Womans Experiences of the Glorious Working of Gods Free Grace (1663)221 10 Hannah Allen 236 A Narrative of God’s Gracious Dealings with that Choice Christian Mrs. Hannah Allen (1683)240

Bibliography256 Index of biblical allusions264 General index266

vi

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Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank several institutions for their help during the process of compiling this anthology. The Bodleian Library, Oxford, has kindly allowed us to quote from the original manuscripts, the ‘Meditations and Prayers’ of Lady Elizabeth Delaval, and Charles Hutton’s transcription of ‘Lady Carey’s Meditations and Poetry’. The University of Nottingham (Manuscripts and Special Collections) has given us kind permission to quote from Lady Frances Pelham’s ‘Expression of Faith’ and the commonplace book of Brilliana Conway (later Lady Harley). We would also like to thank the Royal Historical Society (successor to the Camden Society) for its kind permission to quote at length from the Society’s edition of the letters of Brilliana, Lady Harley, now published by Cambridge University Press. Thanks, too, to the librarians at the above institutions who have helped us find various materials along the way, and particularly those at Canterbury Cathedral Library, who located the only known copy still in existence of the 1663 edition of Conversion Exemplified. We would also like to thank Professor Jane Stephenson, Aberdeen University, for the information about Anne Ley’s commonplace book. Thanks must also go to the Early English Books Online database, which continues to make all kinds of work possible in our discipline. We are also grateful for the support of our colleagues in the Department of English and Drama at Loughborough University, the encouragement of the Early Modern Research Group based in the Department, and especially Catie Gill for suggesting several women’s works. Thanks must also go to the publisher’s anonymous readers of this anthology, whose comments were rigorous, enthusiastic and encouraging. Rachel Adcock would like to thank, in particular, my parents, Alan and Jane Adcock, for all their support and home cooking; Jo Fowler for vii

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Acknowledgements her unfailing encouragement; and Oliver Tearle for all his support in answering my numerous questions about phrasing and presentation. Most especially, however, I want to record a debt of thanks to Sara and Anna for their enthusiastic work on this project, and for sharing with me their knowledge of all things medical and spiritual in the early modern period. Sara Read would like to thank Rachel for the initial idea that came to be this book and both Rachel and Anna for making the process of compiling this anthology such a pleasure. I have learned such a lot about religion and spirituality from you both, for which I am grateful. I would also like to record my thanks to my family for putting up with my fascination with ‘dead ladies’ (to quote my daughter directly). Especial thanks, as ever, to Pete Read, for keeping me fed and watered and for everything else. Anna Ziomek gives special thanks to Rachel and Sara for their understanding, eagerness and the hard work that they have put into this project. Thank you for your guidance, many stimulating discussions and answering my countless enquiries. I would also like to thank my husband, Jacek, for his constant support and encouragement.

This book is dedicated with much affection to the memory of the late Professor Bill Overton, teacher, colleague, and friend, who dedicated much of his career to recovering and studying women’s writing, and to Professor Elaine Hobby, a pioneer of the study of early modern women’s writing, who is responsible for sparking our love of all things early modern. Thank you both.

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Chronology

1558

Accession of Elizabeth I (Protestant), causing restrictions for Catholic and Puritan worship

1591

William Perkins’s A Golden Chain

1603

Accession of James I and VI of Scotland

1605

(Catholic) Gunpowder Plot

1610

Douay-Rheims translation of the Bible (Catholic) completed abroad

1611

Translation of King James Bible completed

1620

Puritans leave for New England

1621

Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy

1622

Elizabeth Clinton’s The Countesse of Lincolnes Nurserie; compiling of the commonplace book of Brilliana Conway (later Lady Harley)

1623

Gertrude More co-founds Our Lady of Comfort at Cambrai, France

1625

Accession of Charles I, married to a French Catholic

1629

Charles dissolves Parliament until 1640

1633

William Laud made Archbishop of Canterbury (executed 1645)

1636

Outbreak of plague

1642

Outbreak of First Civil War; theatres closed

1643

Solemn League and Covenant agreed between England and Scotland; death of Brilliana, Lady Harley, following a siege at her family castle at Brampton Bryan ix

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Chronology 1644

First Baptist Confession of Faith

1646

End of First Civil War

1647

Lady Mary Carey commences her meditations and poetry; the Quaker George Fox begins public preaching

1648

Outbreak of Second Civil War; Westminster Shorter Catechism presented to Parliament

1649

End of Second Civil War; Charles I beheaded for treason; England becomes a Commonwealth

1649–53 Rump Parliament, later dissolved by Oliver Cromwell (Puritan) 1652

Eliza’s Babes

1653

Barebones Parliament; Oliver Cromwell then becomes the Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland

1656

Elizabeth Major’s Honey on the Rod

1657

Posthumous publication of Gertrude More’s The Holy Practises of a Devine Lover

1658

Death of Cromwell; posthumous publication of Gertrude More’s The Spiritual Exercises

1660

Restoration of the monarchy with Charles II; theatres reopened

1662

Act of Uniformity; Lady Elizabeth Delaval begins her meditations

1663

Katherine Sutton’s A Christian Womans Experiences published abroad; the anonymous Conversion Exemplified published after the author’s death

1665

Great Plague

1666

Great Fire of London

1671

Jane Sharp’s The Midwives Book

1672

Royal Declaration of Indulgence (a measure towards some religious liberty but withdrawn a year later)

1683

Hannah Allen’s A Narrative of God’s Gracious Dealings

1685

Accession of James II (Catholic)

1688

Glorious Revolution: accession of William III and Mary II (Protestant)

x

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Introduction

In a 1629 letter written to her mother, Lady Joan Barrington, Lady Elizabeth Masham, wife of the MP for Colchester, commented that ‘all the distempers of our bodies, which must need be many while we live here [on earth], may be a […] means of the curing the great distemper of our souls, and may make us long for that home where all sorrows have an end and we shall triumph in joy and glory forever more’.1 The occasion of Masham’s letter seems to have been concern for her mother’s health (both spiritual and physical) following the sudden death of her husband in the previous year.2 Lady Joan’s grief, which included questioning why God had punished her in such a way, manifested itself in a deep melancholic illness, which was rationalised in the seventeenth century as a physical reflection of her troubled soul. Belief in God’s displeasure could often cause men and women to question whether they were beloved of God, and whether they were among his chosen people. Masham’s remark, made by a daughter seeking to reassure her mother, explains that bodily discomfort was to be expected while on earth, as God deadened sin within each individual believer, before they were made ready for eternal life. While staying healthy meant taking appropriate care of both the body and the soul, the flesh and the spirit, resignation to illness was often conceived as a way of showing your acceptance of God’s will. This meant that, for some of the women anthologised here, a miscarriage, for example, was taken as

1 Arthur Searle, ed., Barrington Family Letters: 1628–1632 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1983), p. 92. 2 Lady Joan Barrington [née Williams or Cromwell] (c.1558–1641) and her husband, Sir Francis, were strict Calvinists and had brought their family up as Puritans. Sean Kelsey, ‘Barrington, Joan, Lady Barrington (c.1558–1641)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

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Introduction a sign of God’s displeasure over a lack of piety, or a reminder that life and death were both subject to God’s ordinance and pleasure. In her letter, Lady Masham reassured her mother that illness could serve as a way of reminding a woman that her earthly suffering would end when she was admitted to heaven. This anthology will demonstrate several of the ways in which early modern women, of varying religious beliefs, lived in, cared for and accounted for a body in which spirituality and physical health were intrinsically interconnected. In the seventeenth century, England was a Protestant country and the nature of worship was controlled by the Church of England, the state church. At church, on Sunday, every person in the country (provided they had not absented themselves, illegally) would have heard the minister read from The Book of Common Prayer in English (rather than Latin), first introduced a century before as part of the Reformation in England. The only deviation from this was during the mid-century Civil Wars and Cromwell’s Protectorate. The Book of Common Prayer assumed that a connection between the flesh and the spirit was natural when it asked the congregation at Holy Communion to offer ‘ourselves, our souls, and bodies’, indicating that a human body was made up of these two interconnecting entities.3 Danger was often thought to threaten the soul and body simultaneously. A catechism added to the prayer book in 1662 indicated that the function of saying the Lord’s Prayer was to ‘pray unto God, that he will send us all things that be needful both for our souls and bodies; […] and that it will please him to save and defend us in all dangers ghostly [spiritual] and bodily’.4 How to combat these threats to soul and body depended on how a believer viewed the relationship between the two entities, and where they thought the threats originated. For instance, depending on a person’s religious or medical beliefs, they might view melancholia (an illness which shares some symptoms with what we now recognise as depression) as a punishment from God which made the sufferer more prone to the temptations of Satan, as evidence of unpardonable sin, as an imbalance of bodily fluids or humours, as a result of spending too much time in private study or, most often, as a mixture of all these things. Women, however, were constructed by seventeenth-century ideologies as generally weaker and more dysfunctional than men in both soul and body, and so more susceptible to attacks on the spirit and the flesh. These understandings stemmed

3 Brian Cummings, ed., The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 138. 4 Ibid., p. 429.

2

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Introduction from Eve’s precedent, when she submitted to the Devil’s temptations in the Garden of Eden, meaning she and her female descendants were punished (spiritually and bodily) with painful childbirth. This anthology of women’s works seeks to foreground women’s explorations of the relationship between their bodies and souls partly in order to contrast them with these male-authored ideologies, but also to highlight contemporary understandings of the relationship between the flesh and spirit during important life events and religious awakenings. For instance, did women always believe that their bodies were sinful? Were pain and despair always understood as punishments? And if illness was understood as both a spiritual and a bodily problem, how was it cured? The selected women’s writings included in this anthology go some way to answering these important questions. This anthology of seventeenth-century women’s writings makes use of often overlooked or underutilised works to highlight religious and bodily contexts, while also making them easily accessible, and in some cases newly available, to scholars and students of the early modern period. The prose writings of Lady Mary Carey, the common­place book of Brilliana Conway (Lady Harley) and the anonymous female deathbed testimony Conversion Exemplified, have never been extracted in modern editions, and the writings of Harley, Lady Elizabeth Delaval and Gertrude More have appeared only in nineteenth- and twentiethcentury editions. Considering these particular works through religious and medical frameworks will not only add to scholarship’s understanding of the full historical context of the ways in which women related to religious doctrine in the period, but will also indicate how they saw their bodies as spiritually endowed. That is to say, for many early modern people, physical bodily change was thought to be the result of God’s agency acting directly upon them. In recent times, scholars have drawn attention to both ‘the turn to religion’ and the ‘return to the body’ in early modern studies, in order to understand and more accurately explain the explorations of human experience that the period produced. Ken Jackson and Arthur Marotti’s well-known article ‘The Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Studies’ recognised that religion constituted ‘a deep psychological and emotional experience’, as well as a political and social one, and recognised that in order to under­ stand more fully religious experience in this period, scholars should ‘acknowledge the need to incorporate the imagination and the physical in cultural-historical analyses’.5 This anthology does so by drawing 5 Ken Jackson and A. F. Marotti, ‘The Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Studies’, Criticism, 46 (2004), 167–90 (p. 169).

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Introduction attention to the importance of studying representations of the fleshly, physical senses in works that sought, predominantly, to communicate the vividness of religious experience, and also explores the significance of the religious imagination in medical treatises. It will highlight, in particular, how women experienced spiritual and physical changes and contribute to ongoing explorations of whether religious experience was gendered. These extracts demonstrate the various ways in which early modern women negotiated the relationship between their fleshly, physical suffering and their spiritual state.

The dialogue between flesh and spirit Understandings of the relationship between the body and soul in the seventeenth century were heavily influenced by early Greek philosophy. Platonic philosophy held that the soul and body were two warring entities; the body was like an earthly prison for the immortal soul before it was freed on the body’s death. As Roy Porter has noted, ‘throughout medieval and, in due course, Reformation and CounterReformation thinking, the human animal continued to be defined as homo duplex, the union incurably discordant, of earthly body and immortal soul’.6 Aristotelian theories of the body/soul relationship, on the other hand, placed more emphasis on the body working as an instrument of the soul. The two entities were believed inseparable and therefore one could not function without the other. Whereas in Plato’s works there was a moral distinction made between the corrupt, earthly body and the immortal soul, in Aristotelian philosophy there was no such moral distinction. At the Reformation, the theologian John Calvin also denied the moral responsibility of body or soul, assigning to both the responsibility for original sin inherited from Adam. He wrote: Corruption commencing in Adam, is, by perpetual descent, conveyed from those preceding to those coming after them. The cause of the 6 Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason: The Modern Foundations of Body and Soul (Oxford and New York: Norton, 2003), p. 37. For example, according to Pythagoras’s theory, quoted by James Luchte, ‘So long as it [the soul] is imprisoned in the bodily tomb it is impure, tainted by the evil substance of the body’. James Luchte, Pythagoras and the Doctrine of Transmigration: Wandering Souls (London: Continuum, 2009), p. 58. Psychologically – in terms of actual experience – this meant that the soul was profoundly conscious of an internal conflict of good and evil, the war in the members. This conflict dominates religious experience. In philosophical expression, it gives rise to the axiom of dualism. As Luchte writes (ibid.): ‘In the world as in the soul there is a real conflict or two opposite powers – good and evil, light and darkness’.

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Introduction contagion is neither in the substance of the flesh nor the soul, but God was pleased to ordain that those gifts which he had bestowed on the first man, that man should lose as well for his descendants as for himself.7

Both body and soul were believed to be corrupt until a regeneration process had taken place within the believer, equivalent to putting ‘on the new man’ of Ephesians 4:24. For Calvin, following St Paul, flesh and spirit did not refer directly to body and soul but to the ‘two ways of life which the whole man can choose to follow’.8 Galatians 5:17 depicts a warring of flesh against spirit (‘For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other’), where the ‘Spirit’ referred to a group of people who are spiritually regenerate, who ‘tend towards what is good’.9 Therefore, ‘the Spirit is not from nature’, Calvin writes, ‘but from regeneration’.10 The conflict between flesh and spirit is also described in Romans 7:22–3: ‘I delight in the law of God after the inward man: but I see another law in my members [limbs], warring against the law of my mind’. For Calvin, only those who were ‘regenerated by the Spirit of God’ experienced such a struggle between flesh and spirit within themselves.11 In the literature of the seventeenth century, however, body and soul, flesh and spirit, could be used interchangeably as both concrete, literal terms and as figurative representations of the war against sin inside each individual believer. By the early seventeenth century, English Protestantism, influenced by both Calvin’s doctrinal arguments and Greek thought, was encouraging believers to look inside themselves in order to discern the conflict between the sinful flesh and the regenerative spirit. This kind of introspection produced a growing number of poetic dialogues, often didactic in tone, that positioned the flesh and spirit in the midst of an argument about which one was the dominant force. For instance, the Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet included one such dialogue between ‘The Flesh and the Spirit’ in her Several Poems (published posthumously in 1678), where the two entities fought against each other as sisters: one was Flesh, ‘who had her eye / On worldly wealth and vanity’, and the other, dominant sister was ‘Spirit, who did rear / Her thoughts unto a   7 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2008), pp. 151–2.   8 Rosalie Osmond, Mutual Accusation: Seventeenth-Century Body and Soul Dia­ logues in Their Literary and Theological Context (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), p. 18.  9 Calvin, Institutes, p. 175. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid.

5

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Introduction higher sphere’.12 Body-and-soul dialogues had also been popular in the medieval period, but these staged arguments were mostly presented taking place after death and before the Last Judgement. Seventeenthcentury dialogues tend, instead, to focus on the struggle going on inside living believers, and are therefore similar to spiritual autobiographies of this period. Indeed, as the writings of Lady Mary Carey and Elizabeth Major included in this anthology show, a spiritual autobiography could be constructed using just such a dialogue. Bradstreet’s poem depicts this struggle in miniature, giving Spirit the space to dominate the argument and have the last word, though also admitting that the conflict will continue until Flesh is ‘laid in th’ dust’: Spirit:

Be still, thou unregenerate part, Disturb no more my settled heart, For I have vowed (and so will do) Thee as a foe still to pursue, And combat with thee will and must Until I see thee laid in th’ dust. Sisters we are, yea twins we be, Yet deadly feud ’twixt thee and me, For from one father are we not. Thou by old Adam wast begot, But my arise is from above, Whence my dear father I do love. (37–48)

Here, Flesh (sin) is inherited from Adam, while the Spirit (the regenera­ tive part) can only originate from God. The two are twins, usually thought to represent harmony, yet these twins have different fathers and war with each other over who inherits the whole man.13 Spirit demonstrates that she comes from God, and according to Puritan thinking was created first, so is the ‘elder’ of the twins. Two stanzas from another poetic dialogue, ‘A Short Dialogue between Flesh and 12 Anne Bradstreet, The Works of Anne Bradstreet, ed. Jeannine Hensley (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), pp. 231–4 (p. 231, lines 5–8). 13 The idea that non-identical twins could have different fathers was believed to be caused by a phenomenon known as ‘superfetation’, which is where a second pregnancy occurred when the mother was already carrying a child. Thomas Browne, seventeenth-century author and physician, insists that there are numer­ ous examples of this phenomenon in the classi­cal texts, including Pliny and Hippocrates, and explains how, by this process, the womb, ‘after reception of its proper Tenant, may yet receive a strange and spurious inmate […] as also in those superconceptions where one child was like the father, the other like the adulterer, the one favoured the servant, the other resembled the master’. Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica (London: E. Dod, 1646), p. 150.

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Introduction Spirit’, written in the 1660s by Sarah Davy, who had joined a Puritan ‘gathered congregation’ which worshipped separately from the state church, also demonstrate the inner conflict between unregenerate and regenerate states of being: Flesh: Spirit:

Fond soul what aileth thee thus low to deem, Our pleasure and our comforts here below, And that thou dost so highly them esteem As if thou didst not care such things to know Is it not better mirth for to enjoy, Which maketh fat the bones and glads the heart, Then in thy musings thus thy self annoy At last persuaded be with them to part. Fond fleshly part this all thou hast to say Cease now with all specious flattering speech, And never think by all thy pleas to sway A soul that now is got above thy reach, All thy suggestions I cannot approve Seeing in earth thy comforts all do lie But I much live in flames of heavenly love With heavenly comforts which will never die.14

Akin to Bradstreet’s poem, Davy’s poem in its entirety gives more space to Spirit’s argument, as well as the most powerful lines. However, Flesh voices a well-known criticism of religious introspection which Puritans, in particular, encouraged. Self-examination was part of the process of conversion, where believers were meant to look for signs of God’s grace and then to record and interpret them. Many undertaking this path became melancholy and ‘annoyed’ by these ‘musings’, leading others to observe that the process did more harm than good, but still others, including Davy, were of the opinion that faults could be mended only if they were identified. Davy’s conversion narrative, to which this poem is appended, includes her self-examinations as she struggled to fix her faults and rid herself of sin, and giving this advice to the tempting Flesh is therefore significant. Lady Mary Carey’s conversion narrative, extracted in this anthology, also utilises a dialogue between Soul and Body, but is remarkable for its comparatively sympathetic treatment of the desires of the Body. However, in Carey’s work Body’s desire for earthly things is actually a representation of her own desire for God to restore her dead children that he had taken from her. Her conversion narrative is a dramatisation of the struggle to accept God’s providence, and to eliminate her own ‘selfish’ desires, though her way of understanding grief might seem strange to us now. The anonymous 14 Sarah Davy, Heaven Realis’d (London: A. P., 1670), pp. 149–50 (p. 149).

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Introduction devotional poet who has come to be known as ‘Eliza’ also aligns the ‘unruly passion’ for ‘earthly love’ to a dangerous infection that ‘wrought distraction in my Soul, and bred distemper in my body’.15 Body and Soul, though often presented as opposites, shared their destination for eternal salvation or damnation (because they would again be united at the Day of Judgement) and so relied on and sympathised with each other. Most of the extracts that follow present the struggles within individual believers as they sought to overcome sin by denying the body’s selfish urges. The process of regeneration was thought particularly important for women, because they were understood to be more prone to sinful behaviour. Eve’s biblical precedent indicated that women were more susceptible to the temptations of Satan and therefore spiritually weak. Connected to this was a belief that these temptations could lead women to seduce and deceive men (like Adam), provoking them to sin against God; the Old Testament, in particular, contains many examples of disruptive, seductive women. John Calvin’s sermon on St Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians explained that: there is none other shift but women must needs stoop, and understand that the ruin and confusion of all mankind came in on their side, and that through them we be all forlorn, and accursed, and banished [from] the kingdom of heaven: when women (say I) do understand that all this came of Eve and womankind, […] there is none other way for them but to stoop, and to bear patiently the subjection that God hath laid upon them.16

In physical terms women were also believed to be the weaker sex, constitutionally made up of cold and wet humours rather than of the dominant hot and dry humours of men. Dorothy Leigh, the author of The Mother’s Blessing (1616), explained in her treatise that it had pleased God to give women ‘a cold and temperate disposition’ to remind them to live chastely, in deference to their husbands.17 Female children were thought to be the product of cold wombs, ones which lacked sufficient heat to produce ‘perfect’ male children. Medical authorities, developing the work of Aristotle, also linked the state of the womb to sexual desire: 15 [‘Eliza’], Eliza’s Babes: Or the Virgins-Offering (London: Laurence Blaiklock, 1652), p. 65. 16 John Calvin, The Sermons of M. John Calvin upon the Epistle of S. Paule to the Ephesians, trans. Arthur Golding (London: Lucas Harison and George Byshop, 1577), 279v –80r. 17 Dorothy Leigh, The Mother’s Blessing, in Sylvia Brown, ed., Women’s Writing in Stuart England: The Mothers’ Legacies of Dorothy Leigh, Elizabeth Joscelin and Elizabeth Richardson (Stroud: Sutton, 1999), pp. 16–87 (p. 29).

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Introduction according to the prolific medical writer Nicholas Culpeper, writing in the mid-seventeenth century, ‘hot’ wombs (thought to be healthier than cold) caused women to ‘desire copulation sooner and more vehemently and are much delighted therewith.[…] The hot and moist are not tired with much venery’.18 Though sex within marriage was encouraged in this period, in moderation, the desires of women were often said to be disruptive and in need of containment. These cultural beliefs led some contemporaries to joke (some perhaps more seriously than others) that women did not possess immortal souls at all. Poet and clergyman John Donne asked, as the essence of the soul was not passed through women (an Aristotelian belief not taken up by the seventeenth-century midwife Jane Sharp, discussed below, or indeed, Lady Mary Carey, the focus of chapter 1), and souls were denied to beasts ‘equal to [women] in all but in speech’, then ‘Why Hath the Common Opinion Afforded Women Souls’?19 On the other hand, an anonymous writer arguing for women’s religious liberty asked indignantly why women should not partake in voting on church matters: ‘have Women no Souls or no Faith?’20 Essayist William Austin presented an even more positive view, writing that the difference between men and women was ‘only in the body. For, she hath the same reasonable soul; and, in that, there is neither hes, nor shes; neither excellency, nor superiority: she hath the same soul, the same mind; the same understanding; and tends to the same end of eternal salvation that he Doth’.21 That women had an immortal soul seems to have been generally accepted by the mid-seventeenth century, though many continued to ascribe to their soul unequal intellectual powers and, in body, women were unquestionably thought of as the ‘weaker vessel’ (1 Peter 3:7). As Thomas Edgar, a lawyer at Gray’s Inn, maintained, when a woman ‘hath lost her husband; her head is cut off, her intellectual part is gone, the very faculties of her soul are […] so that she cannot think or remember when to take rest or reflection for her weak body’.22 Given the prevalence of these cultural ideas, male-authored writings exploring the relationship between the body and soul often associated the fleshly, sinful body with femininity. As Roy Porter observes, the 18 Nicholas Culpeper, ‘Of the Diseases of the Womb’, in Culpeper’s Directory for Midwives: Or, A Guide for Women (London: Peter Cole, 1662), p. 21. 19 John Donne, Juvenalia or Certaine Paradoxes and Problemes (London: E. P., 1633), p. 37. 20 E. T., Diotrephes Detected, Corrected, and Rejected (London: Henry Cripps, 1658), p. 12. 21 William Austin, Haec Homo, Wherein the Excellency of the Creation of Woman is Described (London: Ralph Mabb, 1637), p. 5. 22 T[homas]. E[dgar]., The Lawes Resolutions of Women’s Rights (London: John Moore, 1632), p. 132.

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Introduction dialogues between body and soul were clearly gendered: ‘typically, the body was identified with sensual Eve and the soul, or reason, with Adam’.23 The subordinate female body would tempt the immortal, male-gendered soul, while the dominant rational soul was in danger of submitting to fleshly desires. The Anglican preacher Jeremy Taylor likened this relationship to that of husband and wife: ‘The Dominion of a man over his Wife is no other than as the Soul rules the Body’.24 For then the Soul and Body makes a perfect Man, when the Soul commands wisely, or rules lovingly, and cares profitably and provides plentifully, and conducts charitably that body which is its partner, and yet the inferior. But if the Body shall give Laws, and by the violence of the appetite first abuse the Understanding, and then possess the superior portion of the Will and Choice, the body and the soul are not apt company, and the man is a fool and miserable.25

Here, a good relationship between body and soul is related to a successful marriage, following the words of St Paul in Ephesians 5:22–9, especially 23: ‘For the Husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body’. Conflict between body and soul was viewed as the inheritance of original sin, which would be removed completely at the Day of Judgement, when body and soul would reunite in harmony. Likewise, Calvin described an unhappy marriage as the ‘fruits of original sin’. The wife, in particular, was asked to remember: ‘good reason it is that I should receive the payment that commeth of my disobedience towards God, for that I hold not myself in his awe’.26 Women writers tended not to associate the body and soul with man and wife, preferring to emphasise their own possession of a soul equal to those of men. Lady Frances Pelham, the older sister of Brilliana, Lady Harley, anthologised here, handwrote an instructional legacy to her children entitled ‘Expression of Faith’ in which she explored the relationship between body and soul: The Soul and Body make but one Man; yet each of them severally receive their Being, and enjoy their lives by different nourishments, harm, destroy, preserve, and maintain each other’s comforts in the goodness of will and agreement in obeying it. The Soul is the divine and understanding part, the Body is the help by which it acts, without which it had no power amongst men to express the glory of the Creator: And being from Man it brings with it a see [seat] which ever springs to 23 Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason, p. 41. 24 Jeremy Taylor, Eniautos: A Course of Sermons (London: Richard Royston, 1653), p. 223. 25 Ibid., p. 240. 26 Calvin, The Sermons of M. John Calvin, 279r.

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Introduction overcast and distract the glory of the better part: Whereas it ought to know it is made inferior to it, a helpful companion in all good, by which they both shall enjoy eternal happiness. But when it yields or tempts to Sin the stronger part should mend those faults, find out the weakness, give strength to it and employ the other’s strength that both may live in peace on Earth, and possess joy in Heaven for ever.   A man and woman being man and wife are still but one until the day of death. The Woman is a helper for the Man and he an honour, strength, and safety to her. Her part is to obey and act his will, give her advice, leave the allowance of it to him; in love and faithfulness perform her part, speak her opinion but not control his act. The Man should love, respect, and hold her dear; not suffer any blemish to be seen in her, take her advice and counsel with his own and follow it when ’tis a help to his. Woman is not a help to Man as body to the Soul, she brings with her from God a part Divine to his which is only subdued to him by reason of her Sex; a punishment that lasts but in this life, increased or lessened by his good or ill. In heaven her part shall be as free as his.27

While Pelham acknowledges that women should subordinate themselves to men during their lives, typical of a work that seeks to educate younger family members, she is keen to deny that women can easily be equated with the sinful body. Here, women have souls which they unite with their husbands’ upon marriage, where they become ‘one’, though they are subdued until after death, when they would have equal inheritance of eternal life. The writings of women included in this anthology all engage with these debates in various ways, putting across arguments that women were equally beloved of God, with many suggesting that they should be able to praise him by publishing their work. Lady Mary Carey, for example, addresses her conversion narrative to her husband so that it may help him if she should die at the imminent birth of her fourth child; in it, she identifies herself with the nurturing, advisory voice of the Soul. It is clear from these women’s writings, as well as those collected hereafter, that women were subverting existing ideologies about their bodily and spiritual states. Sin and childbirth As has already been shown, in both spiritual and medical discourses women were constructed as inferior beings. They were thought to be imperfect creatures in body and mind, as well as more prone to sin 27 Lady Frances Pelham, ‘Expression of Faith’, University of Nottingham Library, MS PwV89, 18r. Lady Frances Pelham, née Conway (b. 1598), married Sir William Pelham of Brocklesby, Lincolnshire, in 1615. The couple had twelve children in nineteen years.

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Introduction and temptation. Painful childbirth, in particular, was understood as the curse inherited by all women from Eve. The midwife Jane Sharp, writer of the first female-authored English-language midwifery guide (1671), comments that: The accidents and hazards that women lie under when they bring their Children into the world are not few, hard labour attends most of them, it was the curse that God laid upon our sex to bring forth in sorrow, that is the general cause and common to all as we descended from the same great Mother Eve, who first tasted the forbidden fruit.28

Such was the acceptance of the conflation of labour pain with Eve that women would often offer a specific prayer while in labour to recognise this. One such prayer read: I acknowledge, O Lord, that justly for our sinful transgression of thy commandments, thou saidst unto the first woman, our grand-mother Eve, and in her to us all […]. All our pains therefore that we suffer in this behalf, are none other thing, but a worthy cross laid upon us by thy godly ordinance.29

In the period under consideration in this anthology, it was not just labour pains that were thought to be have resulted from Eve’s trans­g ressions but also menstruation. John Marten, an early eighteenth-century phys­ ician, and author of A Treatise on the Venereal Disease (1711), which went through several editions, paraphrased a treatise by Johannes Baptist van Helmont (1579–1644). Marten explains: That if the first Woman Eve, had not sinned, she had never been exposed to the Pangs of Child-birth, nor to the Shame, nor Confusion of seeing herself defiled once a Month with her own impure Blood: But as soon as she had eat[en] of the forbidden Fruit, she presently on a sudden, says Helmont, felt her Concupiscence [desire for earthly things] roused within her, nor was she any longer Mistress of her own Desires; she ran to look for her Husband Adam: She solicited, she pressed the poor Man so much, that being thereby moved with her Weakness, and embracing him to Comfort her, the pleasure they reciprocally felt was the Cause of Original Sin, which was afterwards entailed on all the Posterity of Adam.30

28 Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book; or the Whole Art of Midwifry Discovered, ed. Elaine Hobby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 129. 29 [T. Bentley], The Fift Lampe of Virginitie: Conteining Sundrie Forms of Christian Praiers and Meditations (London: [n. pub.], 1582), p. 96. 30 John Marten, A Treatise on the Venereal Disease (London: John Marten, 1711), pp. 170–1.

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Introduction In this reading, then, menstruation is clearly seen as part of the punishment given to Eve, in which she is to be ritually ‘defiled’ and shamed once a month. This sense of spiritual and bodily defilement associated with menstrual blood can be seen in John Oliver’s Present for Teeming [pregnant] Women, which is a set of meditations for women to use in labour, printed and published by two women. One meditation refers to the medical belief that the baby was fed menstrual blood for its nourishment in the womb, as part of the punishment of Eve: I find that the child in my womb brings many weaknesses and aches upon me; but oh how sad and deplorable are those deeper sicknesses and maladies, which I have brought upon it? Its body partaking of my substance, partakes unavoidably of my natural pollution [menstrual blood]. Its Soul, though it come immediately from the Father of Spirits, yet (I know not how) is upon its infusion into this tender infant, subjected to the common misery of the Children of Adam; who having lost the image and likeness of God, sin and corruption must needs follow. I am an unclean vessel, and how can any clean thing come out of me?31

Though a child in the womb will cause some discomfort to its mother, the meditation suggests that this is nothing compared to the sin and corruption the child receives from its mother’s body. It was believed that God would infuse the infant’s developing body with a soul at the moment it was felt to ‘quicken’ in the womb, that is, when the mother felt the child move. At this point, though, the child’s perfect soul was polluted with the sin of mankind, transmitted directly by menstrual blood, which cushioned and nurtured the growing infant. Woman was believed to be not only the original root and cause of this corruption (via Eve) but also the first means of transferring this sin to the child. As Roy Porter has written, the way people in any era have a ‘sense of [their] bodies, and what happens in and to them, is not first-hand but mediated through maps and expectations derived from the culture at large’.32 These expectations are formed from all aspects of cultural assumptions, from medical models to theological beliefs, to folklore and beyond, as reflected in the meditation above. In this way, the fact that Christian writings can be seen to relate a negative view of women necessarily affected how women came to view their bodies. As has been shown, even the normal physiological events of women’s lives were the topic of theological debate. As the meditation above further

31 John Oliver, Present for Teeming Women, or, Scripture-directions for Women with Child how to Prepare for the Houre of Travel (London: Mary Rothwell, 1663), pp. 53–4. 32 Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason, p. 45.

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Introduction demonstrates, menstruation and childbirth were both occasions of bleeding about which the Bible had plenty to say. After the birth of a baby, a woman is said in the Bible to have a period of time during which she is considered to be spiritually unclean. In seventeenth-century England, this time ended in a special church ceremony, colloquially known as ‘churching’, which was thought of as either a service of thanksgiving for a safe delivery, or a process of purification from the pollution of birth. The event was deeply politicised in the early modern period, banned altogether in the Interregnum and restored by Charles II.33 A woman would go for churching with her husband, her midwife and her ‘gossips’ (the female friends present at the birth of her child) when she was well again after the birth, usually around a month after the delivery. This practice was based on the instructions of Leviticus 12:1–5, which Jane Sharp discusses: ‘We read in Leviticus 12 that a woman delivered of a Boy, must continue in her purification thirtythree days, and for a girl sixty-six days’.34 Sharp points out, however, that this rule was meant for ‘the seed of Abraham’ (i.e. Jews) abiding by the Old Testament law (which included circumcision) rather than the New Testament teachings, and so does not have to be observed so precisely by women in England. Similarly, women would hear ­preachers regularly use the biblical metaphor that the fallen condition of man meant that human righteousness was so worthless that it could only be likened to the filthiest of items, such as a cloth used to absorb menstrual blood. Isaiah 64:6 states that ‘thy righteousness is but a menstrual cloth’. It seems inescapable, then, that the scripture about the female body selectively cited in the period was a site of negativity. How did women feel when routinely hearing sermons from the pulpit in which their unavoidable, normal bodily functions were vilified? Certainly, many women questioned these received beliefs. This questioning of the position of women at the creation as an inferior version of the man, and one who would be inevitably tainted by original sin, was seen as early as 1589, when Jane Anger (a possible pseudonym, as the author admits writing in a ‘choleric vein’ in which ‘Anger shall reap anger’) wrote a spirited defence of her sex: The creation of man and woman at the first, he being formed In principio of dross and filthy clay, did so remain until God saw that in him his

33 David Cressy, ‘Purification, Thanksgiving, and the Churching of Women in Post-Reformation England’, Past and Present, 141 (1993), 106–46 (p. 141). Cressy states that, officially, churching came to an end in 1645, when ‘the prayer-book was superseded by the Directory of Public Worship’ (p. 141). 34 Sharp, The Midwives Book, p. 179.

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Introduction workmanship was good, and therefore by the transformation of the dust which was loathsome unto flesh, it became purified. Then lacking a help for him, God making woman of man’s flesh, that she might be purer than he, doth evidently show, how far we women are more excellent than men.35

The reason for female superiority, Anger writes, is that ‘Our bodies are fruitful, whereby the world increaseth, our care wonderful, by which man is preserved’. Indeed, she claims that ‘From woman sprang man’s salvation. A woman was the first that believed, and a woman likewise the first that repented of sin’.36 However, despite such resolute vindications as this, the fact that in the Christian faith all women were seen as marked by the sin of Eve as the first mother is something that female writers were often drawn to. As late as 1723, in her Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies, Jane Barker explains to the female reader that: For ’twas the Eye, that first discerned the Food, As pleasing to itself, for eating good, She was persuaded, that it would refine The half-wise Soul, and make it all Divine. But O how dearly Wisdom’s bought with Sin, Which shuts out Grace; lets Death & Darkness in. And ’cause our Sex precipitated first, To Pains, and Ignorance we since are cursed.37

Barker’s verse foregrounds a sense of injustice that the quest for knowledge to give wisdom to the soul has cost women so dear in terms not only of the physical punishment of the existence of death in the world for both men and women, but also of a sense of how hard it is as a woman to achieve God’s favour and be eternally saved. This sense of the need to vindicate themselves in writing pervades the writings of many of the women in this collection; however, despite this, women writers also turn negative views of their bodies into a positive. Their bodies could be vehicles for the worship and praise of God. Women often used metaphors in their writing which reclaimed their bodily functions as part of their religious awakening. Female poets often appropriated birth as a metaphor for the process of writing verse,

35 ‘Jane Anger, her Protection for Women’, in Stephanie Hodgson-Wright, ed., Women’s Writing of the Early Modern Period, 1588–1688: An Anthology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), p. 4. 36 Ibid., pp. 4–5. 37 The Galesia Trilogy and Selected Manuscript Poems of Jane Barker, ed. Carol Shiner Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 87. See also, Kathryn King, Jane Barker, Exile: A Literary Career 1675–1725 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), p. 96.

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Introduction as in the work of ‘Eliza’ and Elizabeth Major contained in this anthology, and made use of metaphors exploring their bodily and spiritual fruitfulness, as in the poems of Lady Mary Carey. Describing her volume of poems, Major modestly admitted that, ‘For though I was not ambitious of a beautiful babe, yet I confess I would gladly have had it appear comely’.38 Using the language of the Song of Songs, where the male beloved compliments the ‘comely’ countenance and ‘sweet’ voice of his love (2:14), Major desires her poems should please her Lord, her beloved. In the collection of poetry entitled Eliza’s Babes, ‘Eliza’ also pleads with Christ to make himself the father of her children, though in this case the poet wishes to bring forth children (as a metaphor for being spiritually fruitful) from her ‘heart’: And if my heart thou dost incline Children to have, Lord make them thine Or never let be said they’re mine. I shall not like what’s not divine.39

The author proclaims that giving birth to divine children is a more pleasurable experience than physical birth. For instance, in ‘To a lady that Bragged of her Children’, ‘Eliza’ states that the addressee’s earthly children ‘did proceed from sinful race’, and hers ‘from the heavenly dew of grace’ (lines 3–4). Whereas this shows Eliza’s belief in the corruption of the female body caused by Eve’s sin, she also proposes a way to regenerate the female soul, encouraging women to devote themselves to a search for God’s grace. Such a description of regeneration is also present in the writings of An Collins, who refers to her written work as metaphorical fruit that was divinely inspired. In ‘Another Song’ she proclaims: But in my Spring it was not so, but Contrary, For no delightful flowers grew to please the eye, No hopeful bud, no fruitful bough, No moderate showers which causeth flowers To spring and grow. My April was exceeding dry, therefore unkind; Whence ’tis that small utility I look to find, For when that April is so dry, (As hath been spoken) it doth betoken Much scarcity. 38 Elizabeth Major, Honey on the Rod: Or a Comfortable Contemplation for One in Affliction; with Sundry Poems on Several Subjects (London: Thomas Maxey, 1656), H3v. 39 [‘Eliza’], Eliza’s Babes, p. 42.

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Introduction Thus is my Spring now almost past in heaviness The Sky of pleasure’s over-cast with sad distress For by a comfortless Eclipse, Disconsolation and sore vexation, My blossom nips. Yet as a garden is my mind enclosed fast Being to safety so confined from storm and blast Apt to produce a fruit most rare, That is not common with every woman That fruitful are.40

Critics have discussed the possibility that the first three stanzas of the poem indicate Collins’s bodily infertility because of her reference to the April of her life as ‘exceeding dry’, and that her ‘Spring’ had passed in ‘heaviness’.41 Despite this, Collins finds a way to make up for her in­ability to have children by producing divine offspring (‘a fruit most rare’), which women who are conventionally fruitful (fertile) cannot. While producing these fruits, Collins’s soul is also regenerated through her establishing a nuptial relationship with the Almighty, who takes on a role of a father to her writings. In this way Collins not only positions her body as sinless (because she does not menstruate, so is not an inheritor of Eve’s curse), but also insists on her virtuous mind, ‘confined from storm and blast’. The self-construction of female writers as pure and virtuous, as well as divinely inspired by God, was extremely important, as it made their writing and publishing more acceptable to a culture where a woman’s reputation could be damaged by her appearance in print. The authorial image that women writers created is complex: on the one hand, women promote their work (as mothers and nurturers), but, on the other, their self-effacement is shown through God’s original inspiration and further co-authorship. Women, therefore, engage with literal and metaphorical tropes of motherhood, often reappropriating the process to give them the power to communicate more closely with God, and to produce works that praise God.

40 An Collins, Divine Songs and Meditacions (London: R. Bishops, 1653), p. 57. 41 See, for instance, Sara Read, ‘“Thy Righteousness is but a Menstrual Clout”: Sanitary Practices and Prejudice in Early Modern England’, Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 3 (2008), 1–26 (p. 18). See also Sarah E. Skwire, ‘Women, Writers, Sufferers: Anne Conway and An Collins’, Literature and Medicine, 18 (1999), 1–23.

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Introduction Signs of the times The writings included in this anthology are from when Protestantism was the official state religion following the Reformation of the English Church which began during the reign of Henry VIII. Reformers across Europe and in England thought that the Catholic Church, to which English monarchs had always been subject before Henry separated himself from the rule of the Pope, had lost the message of Christ and the first churches, and had become increasingly corrupt. They rejected: the Catholic Church’s ritualism, which they said had no precedent in scripture; the doctrine of ‘good works’ (earning a place in heaven by living a moral life); and the financial support the Church required in payment for salvation. Protestants (as the groups of reformers became known) believed that people should be able to communicate with God without a mediator, a priest, and also placed more emphasis on the literal interpretation of the Bible. Any lay person, whether male or female, could pray to God without the assistance of a priest and, following several English translations of the Bible, all men and women could either read or listen to the word of God in their own language (rather than Latin). During the reign of ‘Bloody’ Mary (Mary I, 1553–58), who attempted to restore England to a Catholic country, a translation of the Bible was produced that was made by reformers who fled to Geneva to escape persecution, which continued to be popular with the laity and particularly with dissenters from the state church. The annotations published with the Geneva Bible were influenced by Calvin’s theology, in that the reformers encouraged believers to interpret the scriptures for themselves. Exiled Roman Catholics in northern France also imported a translation of their own (the Douay-Rheims Bible): translated at the English College at Douai, the New Testament was published in 1582 and the Old Testament in 1609–10. Gertrude More, whose posthumously published contemplative writings are included in this anthology, heavily relies on the Douay-Rheims translation as a member of a Catholic community in Paris. Both the Geneva and the Douay-Rheims translations were to influence the publication of the state-authorised King James Bible, which replaced the previous Bishop’s Bible, introduced by Elizabeth I. James I, who inherited his throne from Elizabeth I in 1603, organised the translation of this definitive version of scripture by eminent theologians who supported the Church of England’s episcopal structure. The King James Bible was completed in 1611, and became the translation that most English men and women heard read at church, and read, transcribed, listened to and discussed at home. 18

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Introduction For some reformers, however, the state church had not gone far enough: they thought that it still needed reforming from un­scriptural paraphernalia, such as feast days, iconography and priests’ vestments, and their voices became louder towards the mid-­seventeenth century, when the country erupted in civil war. The early Stuart kings, James I and Charles I, attempted to establish uniformity in religious worship, but neither managed to please all his subjects. Charles’s inno­vations, in particular, isolated two distinct religious groups: those still loyal to the Church in Rome, and those who did not think the Church of England had reformed itself enough from Romish practices. This latter group were called ‘Puritans’, reflecting their enthusiasm for church practices based solely in scripture: if there was no precedent in the Bible, they said, then the church should not be doing it. These tensions became more pressing during the reign of Charles I, particularly when he adopted personal rule without Parliament between 1629 and 1640, leading detractors to call this the ‘eleven years’ tyranny’. The king’s appointment of William Laud to the position of Archbishop of Canterbury also led to increasing uniformity of worship, such as replacing communion tables in the centre of churches with altars at the east end of the building surrounded by rails. Rituals such as kneeling and bowing, and the reintroduction of icons and crucifixes, convinced Puritans that Laud was bringing back Catholic doctrines: he was also influenced by a branch of Protestant theology called Arminianism, which held that Christ died to take away the sin of all mankind (rather than an elect few) and that man had free will (as opposed to his ­spiritual state being predestined). To many people, particularly Puritans, Laud’s beliefs resembled those of Catholicism, and this was certainly one reason why Charles’s rule became increasingly unpopular. Laud also had control of the ecclesiastical Court of High Commission, and through it im­prisoned writers of published material he considered subversive to the state. Katherine Sutton, a Puritan whose writings appear in this collection, was one of those who sought freedom of worship outside the country, taking a ship to an unknown destination, likely to have been the New World or Holland, where diverse religious views were tolerated. Tensions between Laudianism (often associated with supporters of King Charles) and Puritanism (which tended to be associated with the Parliamentary side) contributed to the arguments that led to the English Civil Wars which took place between 1642 and 1651. The conflict caused 100,000 deaths from fighting and perhaps a further 200,000 died from associated conditions such as disease.42 As the 42 Roger Hudson, ed., The Grand Quarrel: Selections from the Civil War Memoirs of

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Introduction population was just 4.5 million, this death toll would have affected most families, and the conflict saw family members pitted against each other. Brilliana, Lady Harley, whose writing appears in this anthology, famously had to defend her husband’s ancestral castle at Brampton Bryan from Royalist troops, who were led in part by a distant cousin of her husband, Sir William Croft. The Verneys, an influential family headed by Sir Edmund, who was killed at the battle of Edgehill in 1642, in the Royalist cause, were divided by the Civil War. Sir Edmund was against the Laudian religious reforms, but was, at least in one legend, reputed to be so loyal to the crown that he was identified in death only by a severed hand still clutching the royal standard with which he had been charged.43 However, his son and heir Sir Ralph was a Member of Parliament and on the opposing side, before he had to flee into exile for refusing to sign the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643, an oath requiring adherence to the reformed religion.44 Adding to the trials of those faithful to Charles I, the estates of known Royalists were confiscated (sequestrated) during this period, though they were also permitted to pay a fine (compound) and retain them if they took an oath never to oppose Parliament. In this anthology, the anonymous female speaker of Conversion Exemplified (1663) records that her relatives, given to episcopacy, had ‘dependence upon the Court of the late King, whose interest was so much woven into his, that in the late miserable Wars they did adhere to him, to the great reducement of their Families’.45 However, after the execution of Charles I on 30 January 1649, she, like a great many people, moderated her political and religious opinions to suit the changing times. Cromwell’s protectorate allowed Puritan religious practices to flourish more than ever before, particularly those of religious Independents, who gathered and ran their own autonomous congregations, outside state control. Though the anonymous speaker of Conversion Exemplified expressed her distaste for some of Cromwell’s accomplishments, she praised his ‘understanding of Gospel-truth’ and his view that ‘there Mrs Lucy Hutchinson; Ann, Lady Fanshawe; Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle; Anne, Lady Halkett; Mrs Alice Thornton and the Letters of Brilliana Lady Harley to her son Edward (London: Folio Society, 1993), p. xix. 43 Adrian Tinneswood, The Verneys: Love, War and Madness in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Vintage, 2008), p. 181. 44 This was an agreement between Parliament and the Scots to unite against the perceived Catholic threat of the Irish joining the Royalist cause in the Civil War. Sir Ralph was a moderate in Parliament and saw a formal alliance with the Presbyterians as a step too far. Tinneswood, The Verneys, p. 190. 45 Anon., Conversion Exemplified; In the Instance of a Gracious Gentlewoman, Now in Glory (London: [n. pub.] 1663), p. 52.

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Introduction were few Sects among Christians, in which something of God was not to be found, which must not be destroyed’.46 Indeed, until the later part of his reign, Cromwell took action only against sectarians who he believed threatened the state, especially Quakers. Even Baptists, formerly maligned in the popular consciousness because of the outward similarity of their beliefs to the mid-fifteenth-century continental Anabaptists, flourished because they were able to spread their ideas through travelling army regiments. The practice of adult baptism, a visible sign of election and separateness, was especially attractive to Cromwell’s army, which had travelled to Ireland in order to conquer and convert people they believed to be unregenerate papists. Despite this freedom, however, Cromwell’s death in 1658, and his son’s un­ successful rule, led to the restoration of the monarchy with Charles II, who later reneged on his 1660 promise to promote religious toleration. In 1662 he introduced a restrictive set of laws against those who did not conform to the state church (Nonconformists, including Independents, Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers and Catholics) and until the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when Charles’s brother, James II, was ousted from the throne, Nonconformists experienced various levels of persecution. During these radical religious and political changes, men and women sought to make sense of events by interpreting them as acts of God’s providence and by referring to scriptural precedents. Some were of the opinion that the Civil Wars were punishment for the sins of the English people, whether for not reforming the church enough or for changing it too much. The mid-seventeenth century saw an increasing trend for prophecies, and the death of the king was widely interpreted as one of the signs of the apocalypse; more generally, pamphlets appeared interpreting natural spectacles such as unusual and destructive weather or comets. Katherine Sutton, writing in 1663, interpreted two dry summers and ‘light appearances’ (comets) as indications that the second coming of Christ was imminent. Later writers also saw comets as prognostications of calamities, including the Great Plague of 1665 (discussed by Elizabeth Delaval) and the Great Fire of London of the following year. Richard Baxter, a Nonconformist minister, linked all these events to God’s displeasure. London, he wrote, was: laid low in Horrors, and wasted almost to Desolation, by the wrath of God, whom England hath condemned; and a God-hating Generation are consumed in their Sins, and the Righteous are also taken away as

46 Ibid., p. 53.

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Introduction from greater Evil yet to come. Strange comets, which filled the thoughts and writings of astronomers, did, in the winter and spring, a long time appear before these calamities.47

In response to such calamities, the state-controlled church ordered many more feast or fasting days. A feast day was a religious anniversary observed with rejoicing, whereas a fast day was one characterised by abstinence from food, when believers would deny themselves physically in order to become closer to God. Married couples were expected to abstain from sexual intercourse as part of the observance of these religious fast days. A table detailing which days were designated to be feasts or fasts was given in The Book of Common Prayer. Those in power could appoint fast days when the people were to pray for issues of national importance and set prayers were required to be read in congregations around the country. Individual congregations also held their own fast days to pray or give thanks for individual members or for the health of the collective group. Individual bodily illness and death were interpreted in a similar way to the health of the state, with the condition and recovery of a person accredited to his or her piety and strength of their prayers and the prayers of those around them. In 1664, for example, Viscountess Elizabeth Mordaunt recovered from an episode of illness and thanked God for her recovery: I said unto my soul, O put thy trust in God, for I shall yet give him thanks, for he is the Light of my countenance, and my God, O that I were able to thank him, for now with Joy can I say to my Soul turn to thy rest, for the Lord hath been gracious to thee, for notwithstanding the weakness of my Soul, my God hath granted ease to my pains, and in some measure strength, to my weak Body, praise the Lord O my Soul.48

Mordaunt also gave thanks that by God’s providence she had recovered from a riding accident and later from a broken ankle. Lady Mary Carey’s poetry and meditations, included in this anthology, also feature a response to God’s providence when she interprets the deaths of her children as him gradually ridding her of all earthly concerns. Every event in a seventeenth-century woman’s life was there to be interpreted, and the extracts included in this anthology certainly testify to this. 47 Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae, ed. Matthew Sylvester (London: T. Parkhurst, J. Robinson, F. Lawrence and F. Dunton, 1696), part ii, p. 448. 48 Earl of Roden, ed., The Private Diaries of Elizabeth the Viscountess Mordaunt (Duncairn: [n. pub.], 1856), p. 66. The Viscountess gave birth a month after this illness, but there is no reason to think this episode is related.

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Introduction Conversion and cure Men and women in this period also spent much time interpreting their own lives for signs indicating their destination after death. English Protestantism was heavily influenced by the theology of John Calvin, particularly the belief that all mankind had been predestined by God, before the Fall of Adam and Eve, to be one of the elect destined for heaven and the inheritance of God’s kingdom, or one of the reprobates, destined for eternal damnation (now often called ‘double predestination’). The unquestionable sovereignty of God meant that he had ordained everything that would come to pass and that no amount of ‘good works’ (like those encouraged by the Catholic tradition) could alter this. Therefore, believers spent no small amount of time looking for evidence of God’s grace, encouraged by preachers and ministers, to prove they were among the elect. Evidence could be found by interpreting trials, life events and illness, or by interpreting certain scriptures detailing God’s love or wrath for his people that they were led to by sermons, dreams or study. Private study of scriptures and the writing of meditations and diary entries allowed believers to explore and examine these pieces of evidence and record them for a later time when they, or their families, needed support. An easy way for be­lievers to examine their election was to anagrammatise their names, as these, too, were predestined by God. For instance, the poet Elizabeth Major rearranged the letters of her name to give ‘O I am a blest Heir’, which headed a poem expressing her conviction that she was an heir of the kingdom of God.49 The prolific prophet Lady Eleanor Davies interpreted her married name as a sign of her God-given gift of prophecy (‘reveale O Daniel’), though her opponents also utilised this process to name her ‘never so mad a ladie’.50 However, while many believers managed to find evidence of ‘saving grace’, there were those who struggled with the notion that they were powerless to save themselves, and many became convinced that they were reprobates. Dionys Fitzherbert, a gentlewoman in the midst of just such a spiritual crisis, wrote in her diary that she began to ‘fetch strange constructions from my name to prove myself to be as I termed myself’: ‘an adversary of God’.51 Later 49 Major, Honey on the Rod, p. 201. The spelling of names in the period was fluid, and Major’s poetry shows that she spelt ‘Elizabeth’ with a ‘z’ or ‘s’. 50 See Ann Geneva, Astrology and the Seventeenth-Century Mind: William Lilly and the Language of the Stars (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), pp. 33, 35. 51 Dionys Fitzherbert, ‘An Anatomy for the Poor in Spirit’, in Katharine Hodgkin, ed., Women, Madness and Sin in Early Modern England: The Autobiographical Writings of Dionys Fitzherbert (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), p. 185.

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Introduction she rejected these constructions as the delusions of Satan, but the doubts were there nevertheless. Clearly, the process of conversion, of moving away from sin and turning towards God, could be a time of considerable spiritual and bodily angst as well as comfort. Each believer followed a series of steps towards conversion, based on St Paul’s precedent, expressed in his epistle to the Romans, and popularised in the seventeenth century, in part, by the writings of the influential Puritan William Perkins. Perkins included a chart for his less literate readers that detailed the different stages of conversion, called ‘the golden chain’, in which he identified four steps: effectual calling, justification, sanctification and glorification.52 The belief was that all living men and women were automatically on a path to self-destruction, were rebellious (traits inherited from Adam and Eve) and were therefore spiritually unresponsive to God. However, at some point early in their lives, men and women were made aware of their election, through the grace of God, which was granted them because Jesus Christ gave up his life on the cross to atone for the sins of the elect. This opening up of the heart or soul to accept God was thought of as effectual calling, caused by hearing effective preaching, reading scripture and examining evidence of grace. Next, a person had to come to a belief in Christ’s death and atonement, and this faith was believed to be God-given: a damned person was not given saving faith and so could not experience true justification as the elect would. Conversion was continued in the process of sanctification, where the sins of the body were mortified (deadened) by the intervention of the Holy Spirit. Most Puritans believed that the last stage, glorification (the removal of all sin), could be achieved only after death, when the soul would separate from the body, only to be united at the Last Judgement, where the souls of the elect would be given eternal life. Throughout their lives, believers continued to experience the burden of sin, as well as doubts about the validity of their faith and election, in being tempted to over-value ‘fleshly’ things, whether they were loved ones, possessions, wealth, or food, drink and other sensual pleasures. Katherine Sutton, for instance, eventually interpreted her children’s deaths as God’s attempts to deaden sin within her through constant chastisements. Belief in these chastisements could lead to periods of melancholia, despair and even to self-harm if they were interpreted as signs of damnation, but, interpreted as God gradually removing their sins, believers could find strength to overcome their trials. The body 52 William Perkins, A Golden Chaine, or the Description of Theologie, trans. R. H. (London: John Legate, 1597), p. 176.

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Introduction and mind certainly bore the signs and scars of religious conversion: the comparison that Katherine Sutton’s preacher made between the Lord chopping away at a tree to make a beautiful wooden arbour and the refining, mortifying process of conversion was certainly an apt one.53 Though harsh, this process was thought to be an indication of spiritual health. As Jeremy Schmidt has written, ‘despair was actively cultured as a token of God’s favor and as something of a spiritual exercise […] paradoxically linking hope to the substance and feeling of despair itself’.54 Such ideas found their root in the story of Job in the Bible, where God tests Job’s devotion and patience by visiting upon him intense sufferings and allowing Satan to torment him. When Job does not give in completely to despair and temptation, God rewards him because even in adversity he did not falter in his belief. This goes some way to explaining the proliferation of conversion narratives like those included in this anthology, as believers sought to interpret their trial as part of a healthy spiritual life. As well as attacks of conscience, believers were also exposed to the wrath of Satan, believed to be a very real presence in seventeenth-­ century culture. It was popularly held that God allowed the Devil to terrify those who were, as the ‘anonymous gentlewoman’ dictated on her death bed, ‘guilty of some foul secret sin’.55 Satan’s presence tempted believers to commit terrible sins, including doubting the word of God and the existence of Christ, and to cause their friends and families harm. For example, the New England Puritan Anne Bradstreet proclaimed that although she felt the presence of God, she had often been ‘perplexed’: ‘Satan troubled me concerning the verity of the Scripture, many times by atheism how I could know whether there was a God’.56 Satan also drove people to commit suicide, an act that was illegal in the period and caused the confiscation of all the possessions of the party who had committed ‘self-murder’, as suicide was known. The crime also condemned one’s soul immediately to hell. However, the upheavals of the Civil War years did see a change in attitudes to suicide, and there began to be calls for the goods of the deceased not to be confiscated, not least because this was a punishment upon the surviving relatives.57 The 53 Katherine Sutton, A Christian Womans Experiences of the Glorious Working of Gods Free Grace (Rotterdam: Henry Goddæus, 1663), p. 11. 54 Jeremy Schmidt, Melancholy and the Care of the Soul: Religion, Moral Philosophy and Madness in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 54–5. 55 Conversion Exemplified, pp. 8–9. 56 Bradstreet, The Works of Anne Bradstreet, p. 265. 57 Suicide was not decriminalised until 1961. See Michael MacDonald and Terence R. Murphy, Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994).

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Introduction clergyman Isaac Archer recalled seeing a young woman in a condition of temptation. He wrote in his diary on 30 October 1678: It was some comfort to me in my ministry that God was pleased to do good to the soul of a poor maid who had been under great temptations to kill herself etc., so that she was brought very low in strength, and ready to die; and was judged out of her wits by some; the devil made her believe that she should be so 30 years (this was 1647) yet God kept her up; but of late she was at a loss again, and violently tempted, and God comforted her through the ministry of his word. The Lord convert, and confirm more and more! and give me that wisdom whereby I may win souls.58

Archer clearly understood that the cure for such disturbances was the comfort of God’s word; however, he acknowledges the power of the Devil to tempt godly men and women to take their own lives. Hannah Allen’s spiritual autobiography A Narrative of God’s Gracious Dealings (1683), included in this anthology, relates how she was tempted by the Devil in various ways, including committing suicide, which she attempted by smoking spiders (then believed to be poisonous), hiding under some floorboards at the top of the house for almost three days and, perhaps more seriously, making an attempt at bleeding to death. Her written work, however, testified to God’s ‘Triumphant Victories’ over the Devil’s ‘Stratagems and Devices’.59 Her prefatory writer explained these trials in terms of preparation for eternal life after death: ‘it being too much for the choicest Saints to have two Heavens, one in Earth, and another in Glory. Flesh is kept from Putrefaction by powdering it in Salt and Brine’ (p. iii). Bodily trials and temptations were believed to preserve the whole person from further sin and corruption, by keeping the believer focused on living a holy life. Early seventeenth-century religious and medical authorities believed that Satan was attracted to certain bodily dysfunctions, and that melan­ choly could be cured using a mixture of bodily and spiritual means. The connection between the health of the body and soul was set out in the male-authored preface to Hannah Allen’s narrative: The Soul of Man hath a singular affection for its own Body, rejoicing in its Prosperity, and sympathizing with it in all its Maladies, Miseries, and Necessities. Hence if the Body be out of frame and tune, the Soul cannot be well at ease. As the most skilful Musician cannot make any

58 M. J. Storey, ed., Two East Anglian Diaries 1641–1729: Isaac Archer and William Coe (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1994), p. 118. 59 Hannah Allen, A Narrative of God’s Gracious Dealings with that Choice Christian Mrs. Hannah Allen (London: John Wallis, 1683), title page.

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Introduction pleasing melody upon an unstringed or broken Instrument. The blood and humours are the Soul’s Organs by which it doth exert its actions. If these be well tempered and kept in a balance, Ordinarily there is an inward calm serenity upon the Spirit. Ordinarily I say: For in some cases the most cheerful Temper may be broken down and overwhelmed either by the immediate impressions of God’s wrath upon the Soul, or the letting loose of those Bandogs [furious dogs] of Hell to affright and terrify it.60

For this writer, following the precedent of Aristotle, the body and the soul, however discordantly paired, were inextricably linked: one could not be well without the other being well. According to the dominant medical belief system in early modern England, based on the ideas of Hippocrates and Galen, the body was envisaged as being kept healthy by means of a finely balanced hydraulic fluid (humoral) system, which physicians went to great lengths to keep stable. The four main humours of the body mirrored the four elements of the earth, as well as the seasons: blood, which was related to air and spring; yellow bile (also known as choler), which was related to fire and summer; black bile (also known as melancholy), which was related to earth and autumn; and phlegm, which was related to water and winter.61 A predominance of any one humour put the human body out of balance and consequently made the person ill. An excess of any one humour could often be seen in a person’s ‘complexion’ (their outward appearance), so that a melancholic person would have a dark complexion, and was also thought to affect their personality. For instance, too much black bile in the body was thought to make a person melancholy, solitary and overly serious. Several authorities, including both William Perkins and Robert Burton, the author of the most well-known treatise on this humoral disorder, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), believed that the Devil was attracted to a body that contained overmuch black bile; Burton called the melancholy humour Balneum Diaboli (‘the Devil’s Bath’). ‘This humour’, he wrote, ‘invites the Devil to it, wheresoever it is in extremity, and, of all others, melancholy persons are most subject to diabolical temptations and illusions’.62 Lady Harley’s commonplace book, where she recorded helpful passages for when she experienced spiritual crises, includes passages from Perkins’s Cases of Conscience (1606). She paraphrased that the Devil worked ‘strange conceits’ in 60 Ibid., pp. i–ii. 61 Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, trans. Matthew Adamson (Oxford: Polity Press, 1985), p. 49. 62 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, introduction by William H. Gass, 3 vols (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001), vol. I, p. 200.

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Introduction believers’ minds, sending ‘to the brain and head fumes and mists which do corrupt the Imagination and make the Instrument of Reason unfit for understanding sins’.63 Unlike spiritual crises, which were responses to the believer’s sinfulness, the experience of melancholy was thought to distort people’s sense of whether they were irrevocable sinners or not. Similarly, Hannah Allen explains that ‘the great Advantages the Devil made of her deep Melancholy’ encouraged her to see visions and to harm herself but she ends her narrative by reinterpreting her ex­periences: ‘God convinced me by degrees; that all this was from Satan, his delusions and temptations, working in those dark and black humours, and not from myself’.64 Only with hindsight could Allen identify that Satan had taken advantage of her bodily dysfunction to confuse her sense of her own spiritual state. As Jeremy Schmidt has observed, ‘the health of the soul and the body were interdependent, as Galenic medicine maintained’, so in order to cure religious melancholy a believer needed access to both medical and spiritual physic.65 Many physicians were also skilled in theological matters, as well as the opposite. Richard Napier, whose voluminous practice notes still survive, was both a well-known astrological physician and an ordained Anglican minister who had studied theology at Oxford.66 As Anne Dunan-Page notes, ‘being far too aware of the interaction between physical and spiritual ailments’, believers ‘seldom rejected the help of a skilful physician’.67 Allen, though she interpreted her disorder as resulting from the Devil’s work, was also prescribed both ‘Physic and Journeys to several Friends for Diversion’ and later took ‘much Physic of one Mr. Cocket a Chemist’.68 Writing earlier, Harley, paraphrasing Perkins, records that melancholy is in the imagination, whereas a crisis of conscience (of believing oneself to be sinful) is worked by God. In order to cure melancholy, Perkins writes that sufferers should be encouraged to be penitent for their sins, to be ruled by the judgement of others, and encouraged to examine God’s scriptural promises to give them hope. Lastly, however, melancholics were told ‘they must use some Physic’.69 ‘Frenzy’ (or madness), however, 63 ‘The Commonplace Book of Brilliana Harley, née Conway’ (c.1622), University of Nottingham, MS Pl F1/4/1, 98r–v. 64 Allen, A Narrative of God’s Gracious Dealings, title page and p. 72. 65 Schmidt, Melancholy and the Care of the Soul, pp. 48–9. 66 See Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 67 Anne Dunan-Page, Grace Overwhelming: John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress and the Extremes of the Baptist Mind (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006), p. 161. 68 Allen, A Narrative of God’s Gracious Dealings, pp. 10, 29. 69 Harley, MS Pl F1/4/1, 98v.

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Introduction which could present itself in similar ways, was to be understood instead as a ‘correction of God’.70 The deathbed testimony of the anonymous gentlewoman anthologised here records that she was accused by her family of a ‘frenzy’ caused by some ‘foul secret sin’ that God was punishing her for. Divisions between melancholy and madness, and the causes of these complaints, were notoriously subjective and therefore difficult to treat. Bodily and spiritual problems were understood as inextricably intertwined.

Advising on body and spirit: women’s writing In the seventeenth century, many women were doing remarkable things. Radical changes in religion and politics encouraged women to defend what they believed was right for themselves, their families and their country. For instance, Lady Harley successfully defended her Herefordshire castle, which was laid under siege by Royalist troops in summer 1643, and effectively turned her home into a garrison for Parliamentary soldiers. The seventeen-year-old Gertrude More, the great-great-granddaughter of Sir Thomas More, left England for Paris in exile, and in France she became one of the founding nuns of Our Lady of Comfort at Cambrai (which later relocated and became Stanbrook Abbey, in Worcestershire). Also escaping religious persecution, the Baptist Katherine Sutton left England for Holland at the Restoration but was shipwrecked and her many of her writings were lost to the sea. Opportunities for women to publish increased during the Inter­ regnum, as censorship of the publishing press relaxed. More women than ever before began to publish their writings, predominantly pious in nature. These women included members of the aristocracy but also the less privileged. Despite this growth in female publishing, however, it has been estimated that only 1 per cent of published works in this century were by women, though women certainly participated more in writing and circulating manuscripts within their families and communities.71 This anthology includes both published and manuscript works to indicate comparisons that can be made between published texts, intended for a particular readership, and the private familial readership of manuscript writings. In the case of Lady Harley’s commonplace

70 Ibid. 71 See Patricia Crawford, ‘Women’s Published Writings, 1600–1700’, in Mary Prior, ed., Women in English Society, 1500–1800 (New York: Methuen, 1985), pp. 265–74.

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Introduction book (c.1622), where she copied and paraphrased passages from important devotional and philosophical treatises alongside helpful scriptural passages, perhaps the only intended reader was herself. Such pastimes were often advised by religious ministers to help maintain believers’ spiritual health, combined with the Puritan belief in regular self-­examination and meditation. Indeed, Susan M. Felch argues that paraphrase should be viewed as a genre in its own right. She writes: ‘paraphrase as a rhetorical trope demands a skill and imagination we associate with “original and authentic” poetic voices and it is anachronistic to deny authorial agency to women and men who wrote paraphrases simply because the materials paraphrased are authorized religious texts’.72 Certainly, private records and meditations were an important part of women’s spiritual and physical growth, and often combined useful passages for the help of body and soul. The prevalence of the commonplace book certainly influenced women’s published writings. The manuscript meditations of Lady Elizabeth Delaval, while not paraphrases of devotional texts as Harley’s book is, have been described as resembling a commonplace book because of the interspersing of diary entries and prayers. Though meant for religious reflection and not for publication, Delaval’s writings closely resemble those of Hannah Allen, whose narrative was designed for a public readership. Allen’s work comprises several passages that detail her traumatic spiritual conversion and that appear to have been written at various points throughout her experience, or at least written up from notes kept during her troubles. Prayers are interspersed with the narrative as well as a curious short account by an anonymous minister. Such blurring of the public (printed) and private (manuscript) also occurs in other women’s works included in this anthology, and suggests that the terms ‘public’ and ‘private’ need to be used with care. The spiritual exercises of Gertrude More were published in 1657 and 1658, twenty-five years after her death, out of manuscripts she had entrusted to her religious order. More’s meditations on the advantages to be gained from suffering affliction given to her by God would certainly have been helpful to others of her order, as well as assisting the doctrines of Augustine Baker, her spiritual director and the compiler and publisher of her material. Similarly, Lady Mary Carey’s writings in prose and verse were never published in print, but intended only for

72 Susan M. Felch, ‘“Halff a Scrypture Woman”: Heteroglossia and Female Authorial Agency in Prayers by Lady Elizabeth Tyrwhit, Anne Lock, and Anne Wheathill’, in English Women, Religion, and Textual Production, 1500–1625 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 147–66 (p. 157).

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Introduction the eyes of her husband, as she explains in the preface to her conversion narrative. However, these private works, including desperately sad poems exploring her feelings about repeatedly losing her children, were later included by Charles Hutton in a fair-written manuscript which he had copied alongside the Civil War memoirs of General Thomas Fairfax, a leading Parliamentary officer. Though meant as private devotional exercises, Carey’s poems and accompanying prose obtained new political meaning as examples of pious Parliamentarianism. Comparisons can be drawn between manuscript writings and those that made it into print. One main addition to a woman’s printed text was the presence of a justification for trespassing into the public sphere. Katherine Sutton’s Baptist conversion narrative, interspersed with prophecies, includes an address to the reader where she defends women’s right to praise God in print. Referring to an episode in which she was reluctant to declare to her congregation what God had told her and was punished by illness, she wrote that ‘if it was not out of obedience to God’ that the work ‘should not have come to your view, neither would I have put my name to it, if I could have avoided it, for fear of the rash judgment of some’.73 Using the examples of female biblical figures, including Mary Magdalene, Sutton defended her right to use the printed word to spread her prophecies. Elizabeth Clinton, Countess of Lincoln, the author of a treatise advocating maternal breastfeeding, also looked to scriptural precedents to support her publishing her argument. She wrote that she was obliged to pass this evidence on because older women were ordered to instruct the younger in Titus 2:3–4. Clinton’s work also had a male-authored preface by a well-known physician, Thomas Lodge, to testify to the importance of her work. Women rarely published anything without such prefatory material. Sutton’s work was supported by her Baptist minister, Hanserd Knollys; Gertrude More’s works were collected by her spiritual advisor, Augustine Baker; Hannah Allen’s work was prefaced by an anonymous male writer, likely to have been a minister and physician; and Elizabeth Major’s work was supported by the words of Joseph Caryl, an Independent minister and licenser of theological works. Women’s published works were often the product of a religious community, and were instrumental in bringing the group closer together; the prefatory material was instrumental in highlighting a particular message. Especially radical utterances, however, appeared anonymously. Even though the anonymous gentlewoman’s testimony was prefaced by her husband, both their names

73 Sutton, A Christian Womans Experiences, p. 40.

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Introduction are undisclosed because of their political leaning towards religious and political Independency at the Restoration. ‘Eliza’ may also be a pseudonym, whether to protect her identity as a woman, or as a possible Royalist publishing during the Interregnum. As well as presenting women’s both manuscript and printed writings, this anthology includes examples of writing by women from a variety of religious and political backgrounds. Both Catholic and Protestant women are represented (by More and Major), as well as Parliamentary Puritanism (Harley and Carey) and more radical Puritanism (Katherine Sutton and the anonymous gentlewoman). Pro-Royalist voices are also present in the works of Eliza and the anonymous gentlewoman, while the established church is criticised by Sutton and underground Catholicism by Delaval. Though the exploration of the flesh and spirit lends itself to certain genres, the anthology does include a wide range of different kinds of writing, setting such ‘non-literary’ works as Harley’s commonplace book and letters, and Clinton’s medical treatise advocating maternal breastfeeding as an act of piety, alongside devotional ‘literary’ works such as the verse of Eliza, Major, More and Carey and the prophetic songs of Sutton. The plain style of much of this verse was certainly in keeping with avoiding the trappings and temptations of earthly life. Overly figurative images could obscure meaning and the plain truth of what was being said. Other suitable genres for exploring the relationship between flesh and spirit tended to be personal testi­ monies. These included the conversion narrative (utilised in different ways by Carey, More, the anonymous gentlewoman, Delaval, Sutton and Allen), the mother’s legacy (Carey) and the deathbed testimony (the anonymous gentlewoman). These genres were certainly fluid: the work of Mary Carey, for instance, includes verse, prose, dialogue, meditations and conversion narrative, most of which was addressed to her husband so that if she died during the birth of her fourth child her advice would live on. Generally, though, the works included in this anthology all intended to advise their readers, whether themselves, their families, their religious community or a wider readership of printed works. Though some were also meant as vindications of their behaviour (Allen and Carey, for instance), one main purpose of the works was to praise God and to provide an exemplary pattern. Some women’s works were also intended to aid in the conversion of their readers, to evangelise and support them through all their afflic­tions, both spiritually and physic­ally. These texts all testify to the im­portance of considering bodily and spiritual context, but also to the sup­port female be­lievers gave each other in bringing about physical and spiritual renewal, whatever the circumstances. 32

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Introduction Note on the presentation of the texts The editorial principles applied to the extracts have been designed to ensure we maintain the integrity of the source texts while making them approachable to any new readers. To this end, spelling has been silently standardised. Otherwise, all attempts have been made to present the extracts as they appear in the source texts, by including all marginalia on printed and manuscript texts in footnotes (prefaced by ‘marginal note’), describing the material nature of the work in individual notes on the text, and preserving original capitalisation and italicisation (the latter of which is often used for quotations and speech). Similarly, where modernisation would detract from the tone of the work we have retained archaic spellings. So, for example, we retain the forms ‘hath’ and ‘doth’, but not ‘ye’, which was merely a shorthand form of ‘the’ and pronounced as ‘the’ by early modern readers. However, we have retained ‘ye’ where it is the early form of ‘you’ or sometimes ‘your’. Elisions have also been modernised, except when they are integral to the metre of passages of verse. Dates have been left as they appear in the originals, so readers should remember that in the seventeenth century the legal New Year began on 25 March. Where we have quoted from other early modern texts in the notes or introductions, they have been modernised on the same principles as the extracts. This is true too of nineteenth- and twentieth-century printed editions of texts. All references to the Bible indicated in the extracts and footnotes are to the King James translation of 1611, apart from the writings of Gertrude More, who uses the Douay-Rheims translation. Each chapter comprises: an introduction to the woman’s works, a brief note on the source text for the extracts, a brief list of relevant sources for further reading and then the edited extracts. Quotations to the women’s work(s) in the introduction to each chapter refer to the source text, referenced in the following ‘Note on the text’. As well as including original marginalia, footnotes to the women’s works explain unfamiliar words and concepts and gloss biographical and contextual information. These footnotes gloss an unfamiliar word or concept the first time it appears in each extract, to enable the works to be read in any order. A full bibliography of all the sources mentioned in the anthology appears at the end.

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Part I Exemplary conversion narratives

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1 Lady Mary Carey

The manuscript writings of Lady Mary Carey (c.1609–c.1680), consisting of a conversion narrative, some meditations and poetry, all written between 1647 and 1657, are remarkable for their exploration of the relationship between her sinful, earthly body and her immortal soul. In introspective modes characteristic of Puritan writing, religious and bodily concerns are often set at odds. The body’s appetite for carnal pleasures was thought to tempt the soul from its spiritual path towards salvation, and during the process of conversion the body was often afflicted by various means that God used to mortify sin in his chosen people. In Carey’s conversion narrative, ‘A Dialogue betwixt the Soul, and the Body’ (1647), she noted in the margin that ‘in order to spiritual good the body often afflicted’ (14 r ). When she was eighteen years old, Carey believed that God visited a sickness upon her to prevent her from pursuing pleasures like gambling and dancing, and throughout her life since he had continued to visit bodily suffering on her in order to refine her soul. The dialogue between the voices of Soul and Body that she uses as the basis for her conversion narrative is indicative of the struggle believers like Carey faced when confronted with what they thought were severe punishments: she lost at least five of her children during the time she wrote her surviving work and experienced at least one miscarriage. When she was writing the ‘Dialogue’, Carey was expecting her fourth child, Robert, who died soon after birth (in 1650), and two years later so did another newborn boy, Peregrine.1 Despite these terrible losses, Carey 1 Lady Mary Carey, née Jackson, retained the surname of her first husband, Sir Pelham Carey (c.1612–42/43), whom she married in 1630, which, Sara Mendelson has suggested, was ‘presumably because of Sir Pelham’s titled status’. Sara Mendelson, ‘Carey [née Jackson], Mary’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Carey married George Payler (died in or before 1678) in 1643, at her home town of Berwick-upon-Tweed.

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Exemplary conversion narratives wrote later in her meditations (between 1652 and 1657) that she trusted in God’s divine plan and counted her blessings: I had tenderly loving Parents, good Husbands, the last is so, & good was it for me, that I was Wife to the first; God hath given me lovely Children, Sons, & Daughters, 5 in God’s Bosom, 2 yet with me; ’tis best for me, & them, that those that died, died; ’tis best for me, & them, that those that live, live; many were the Mercies of them that died; & (in some kind) more are the Mercies of these that live, & all the Mercies of them both were my Mercies. (99r–v )

Carey consoles herself here that her children have gone to a better place, and that she has two children who have lived (Bethia, 1652/53–71, and Nathaniel, 1654/55–80?). Her conversion narrative, though written at least four years earlier than the meditations, depicts Body struggling to come to terms with losing such precious children, advised by Soul that ‘it is God’s Will, to which submit not one Word; and do not only yield, but approve; God is wise, and knows it best; God is loving; and therefore did it’ (7v ). In her poetry, too, Carey comes to the conclusion that God means her to exchange her children for greater knowledge of Jesus Christ: her son (‘my all’), she pleads in her elegy on the death of Robert, could be exchanged with God’s only son (‘thy all’). ‘A Dialogue betwixt the Soul, and the Body’ combines two important genres that seventeenth-century women utilised: the conversion narrative, where writers recall and recount their turn towards God; and the mother’s legacy, intended for use in place of the mother if she died in childbirth. In preparation for her forthcoming labour, Carey writes that she wanted to record all her assurances of salvation so that under severe bodily pain, when she was in greatest danger from the temptations of Satan, she could accept God’s will in all things, and face death happily. As Ralph Houlbrooke has noted, women could be said in some ways to have viewed childbirth ‘as a sort of rehearsal for the last act’, and certainly there are many similarities between this text and deathbed testimonies.2 Satan also appears in Carey’s meditations; she records his accusations that she had given into him at times when she lacked God’s presence (the voice of God in her last poem bears fruitful comparison with Satan’s voice), but she proves him wrong by supplying evidence of her assurances, thus dramatising a struggle akin to that of her childbed. Certainly her writings are meant as advisory texts, as well as a means of introspection. ‘A Dialogue betwixt the Soul, and the Body’, in particular, is addressed to her second husband, George Payler, who was paymaster 2

Ralph Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and the Family in England 1480–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 185.

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Lady Mary Carey at the army garrison in Berwick and an officer of military organisation at the Tower of London. This and Carey’s avowal of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, part of an attempt by Parliament to reform the English Church from Charles I’s Laudian innovations, identifies her as a Puritan and on the side of Parliament in the Civil Wars.3 Though Carey writes enthusiastically that God had made their minds, judgements, wills and ‘Aims in Spirituals’ (6r ) one and the same, she hoped that her narrative would help her husband to accept God’s will and continue on his own spiritual journey. Payler’s own poem on the death of his son Robert is also written to advise and teach his spouse (whereas Carey’s poem on the same occasion focuses only on her relationship with God), showing that husband and wife helped each other in their spiritual duties, and supported each other in the knowledge that they must accept God’s providence. As well as prose writings, Carey favoured the elegy as a way of exploring the loss of her children and attempting to find consolation. A characteristic of seventeenth-century child-loss poetry was the ex­ pression of belief that an unhealthy, deformed or dead child was God’s punishment for the sins of the parents, particularly the mother. As Pamela Hammons writes, the ‘intellectual, spiritual, and moral shortcoming of mothers were believed capable of replication in their offspring’s bodies and destinies’:4 in other words, the mother’s spiritual state could be mirrored by her child’s physical appearance. A connected medical belief concerned ‘maternal imagination’, by which the emotions of the mother during the formation of a foetus could affect the child’s appearance. The midwife Jane Sharp described this belief in her midwifery manual: The child in the Mother’s womb hath a soul of its own, yet it is a part of the mother until she be delivered, as a branch is part of a Tree while it grows there, and so the mother’s imagination makes an impression upon the child, but it must be a strong imagination at that very time when the forming faculty is at work or else it will not do, but since the child takes part of the mother’s life whilst he is in the womb, as the fruit doth of the tree, whatsoever moves the faculties of the mother’s soul may do the like in the child.5

3 Charles Hutton copied Carey’s manuscript works alongside those of Lord Thomas Fairfax in 1681, linking figures of pious Parliamentarianism. This is the source text used in this edition: Charles Hutton’s transcription of ‘Lady Carey’s Meditations and Poetry’, ff. 1r–117 v, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Rawlinson MS D.1308. 4 Pamela Hammons, ‘Despised Creatures: The Illusion of Maternal Self-Effacement in Seventeenth-Century Child Loss Poetry’, ELH, 66 (1999), 25–49 (p. 27). 5 Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book, ed. Elaine Hobby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 92–3.

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Exemplary conversion narratives Mothers, therefore, were held responsible for their children as soon as they were conceived, and their writings show them drawing on these ideas to express their grief and find consolation. These cultural ideas give some sense of what Carey encountered when she miscarried a child, causing her to write her last and most famous poem, ‘Upon the Sight of my abortive Birth the 31st of December 1657’. She describes the child as ‘void of life, & feature’ (114 r ), or form, suggesting that the child had been born dead before it could develop limbs or, possibly, that its body had developed but was deformed. According to early modern medical thinking, miscarriages occurred because the embryo had not developed properly, causing, as Nicholas Culpeper writes, ‘the exclusion of a child, not perfect nor living, before legitimate time’.6 He continues by writing that the appearance of an abortive birth altered according to how long the child had been nurtured inside the womb: Some differences of Abortion are from the time and bigness of the child. For that which is cast out, is little and round, without distinction of members [limbs] at first, like a Grape. Sometimes as long as a finger, and members may be distinguished. And sometimes the child is almost perfect.7

Since Carey’s abortive birth was ‘featureless’, it is possible that hers was a very early miscarriage, like the one Culpeper describes above, and her poem interprets its appearance as a reflection of her own spiritual state. Asking God directly why he has punished her with such an experience, she has him berate her for her own ‘deadness’ and inactivity in spiritual duties: God says that she has presented him with ‘dead Fruit’ (115v ), so he is repaying her with a dead child in order to encourage her to subdue her sin. Carey then ends the poem by asking God to enable her to be both spiritually and physically fruitful, because she believed one was dependent on the other. She asks that her own spiritual fruits be properly formed, according to the truth written in the Gospel, and not left unformed and featureless like the fruit of her womb: following this her spiritual fruits were to be ‘quickened’ or given life to worship according to God’s work. The forty-six couplets of the poem reflect the ongoing process of purging sin from the body in order to become spiritually healthy. Carey’s poem describes her abortive birth in a remarkable way, in that she consoles herself with the belief that her unformed child has an 6 Nicholas Culpeper, ‘Of Abortion’, in Culpeper’s Directory for Midwives: or, A Guide for Women (London: Peter Cole, 1662), p. 172. 7 Ibid.

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Lady Mary Carey immortal soul which will rise to eternal life. Seventeenth-century medical authorities held that ‘ensoulment’ occurred when the child ‘quickened’ in the womb, evident when the mother felt her child move for the first time. Jane Sharp, writing in her midwifery guide, explains the stages of a child’s development: ‘First the Child grows, then it begins to move, last of all it becomes a reasonable Soul’.8 As she describes earlier in her book, the ‘seed’ from which the baby develops contains the ‘vegetable Soul’, which allows for growth and sensation: the child was believed not to receive a soul which contains a rational faculty until it was given from ‘above’ at the quickening stage.9 The date of quickening was thought to vary: Sharp writes that a child could be alive and formed by forty-five days in the womb (about six weeks) and, if this was so, would move in twice that time (ninety days or about thirteen weeks). Theological and medical authorities disagreed, though, about whether the soul was joined to the body before this time. Quickening was only evidence of a soul and not the exact moment when it was infused. It seems likely that Carey believed her child had quickened within her, even though it was later delivered without a form that could preserve life, and her belief that her child was saved as a consequence of this allowed her some consolation. Babies were thought to gain the essence of their souls from their parents, and so Carey also exhibits her own spiritual credentials by endowing her unformed child with an immortal soul. The relationship between child loss and sin was a complex one and nowhere more so than in Carey’s manuscript writings.

Note on the text The copy text is Charles Hutton’s 1681 handwritten transcription, which is held by the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, at Rawlinson MS D.1308. It is a fair copy of Carey’s autograph manuscript, now held by the Meynell family, and, according to the Perdita project, Hutton’s ‘corrections’ to Carey’s work ‘are remarkably rare’.10

 8 Sharp, The Midwives Book, p. 105.   9 Ibid., p. 53. 10 ‘Lady Mary Carey’s Meditations, & Poetry’, catalogued by Marie-Louise Coolahan for the Perdita project, at the University of Warwick (2005), http:// web.warwick.ac.uk/english/perdita/html/ms_BODRD1308.htm (accessed 27 October 2012).

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Exemplary conversion narratives Further reading Raymond A. Anselment, ‘“A heart terrifying Sorrow”: An Occasional Poem on Poetry of Miscarriage’, Papers on Language and Literature, 33 (1997), 13–46 Elizabeth Clarke, ‘“A heart terrifying Sorrow”: The Deaths of Children in Seventeenth-Century Women’s Manuscript Journals’, in Gillian Avery and Kimberley Reynolds, eds, Representations of Childhood Death (London: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 65–86 —— , ‘The Legacy of Mothers and Others: Women’s Theological Writing, 1640–60’, in Christopher Durston and Judith Maltby, eds, Religion in Revolutionary England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), pp. 69–90 Michelle M. Dowd, ‘Genealogical Counternarratives in the Writing of Mary Carey’, Modern Philology, 109 (2012), 440–62

Meditations and poetry (1647–57) To my most loving, and dearly beloved Husband, George Payler, Esq. My Dear, The occasion of my writing this following Dialogue, was my apprehending I should die on my fourth Child, and undoubtedly expecting a Combat with Satan at last;11 when he would be in the Fullness of Power, and Malice, and I at weakest, and desiring to be armed against him, fitted for my Death, quiet, and comfortable as to my spiritual Condition; I thought it necessary, and profitable to look back, and take a view of the Lord’s Work upon my Soul, and so to collect my Evidences,12 that I might answer Satan, and argue for my Self, from Mercy to Mercy, from Love to Love, from free Grace showed here, to endless Glory possessed hereafter;13 And truly, My Dear, my endeavours herein were very successful through Mercy; for I not only found what I sought (God’s dealing with me in Love, and Faithfulness clearer than formerly in regard of an exact calling to Mind such Scriptures, and the powerful setting of them upon my Heart, that the Lord made use of as

11 At last: in her last moments. 12 Evidence that she was one of God’s elect, predestined to inherit eternal life, and not one of the reprobates who were destined for eternal damnation. That God had divided the human race into the elect and the reprobate before the beginning of the world was a belief held by most Puritans, influenced by theology of John Calvin. 13 Free grace: as soon as members of the elect believed in Christ as their saviour (which the reprobate could not do) they would receive eternal life.

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Lady Mary Carey the Means of my Conviction, Conversion, and Building up) but also I gained much Comfort by having so many Testimonies in present Sight, of the dear Love of my God; yea, by tracking God’s Method of Mercy, Power, and Sweetness formerly to me; I was now again so feasted with it (not only by contemplating my former Enjoyments from the Voice of the Spirit proclaiming Pardon, Peace, Love, all spiritual Blessings, and Privileges, all future Happiness, an Eternity of Glory through Christ; I say, God doth not only joy me with the Remembrance of what had been, which was marvellous sweet, but did at present afresh refresh me with the same sealing, satisfying, filling, assuring Consolation, as did much comfort my Spirit, confirm my Faith, and joy me inexpressibly.) [2r –3r ] […] O this lovely Grace! This beloved Grace! My Dear, let us labour for it, and endeavour the Increase of it in one another towards God, and especially let us take Care to build up one another in our most holy Faith; alas! I am a weak Help! but I will seek the Lord, that the poor Mite14 of my Endeavours added to the Treasury of those rich spiritual Means15 which God affords thee, shall be accepted by thee, and blessed by him for thy good; therefore, my Dear, I humbly present these Lines to thee, and have told thee my Ends in so doing: I have more need, and am more ready, and desirous to receive from thee, and God hath done, and will do much good by thee every way. Truly, my Dear, you are high in my Thoughts, and deservedly, God hath begun a Work in thee, which he will perform, Philippians 1:6. I partly know the Change which God hath made in thee, both inwardly, and outwardly, from what, and to what; I see much in thee, and praise God for it, and were I to speak what you should not hear, and to write what you read not, I could, and would say much in thy Praise upon just Grounds, but being I speak to you, I must deny my Self herein; yet shall I to avoid the false Suspicion of Flattery be guilty of Ingratitude, give me leave to take Liberty for one Word; to say, that I daily bless God for thee, and esteem thee the best of all my outward Blessings, the sweetest of all my creature Comforts, yea, as precious a Mercy to me in thy Relation (every way considered) as any Wife doth enjoy; I wish I were to thee what thou deservest, and had power to express my Affection further than I can, but I hope the Lord 14 Mite: small, insignificant amount. Carey is being deliberately modest. 15 Means: short form of ‘means of grace’. The means by which divine grace is imparted to the soul, which could include public worship, hearing the word preached and private meditation.

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Exemplary conversion narratives will reward thy Love, and Goodness towards me. My Dear, let us daily with Thankfulness remember God’s Mercy in bringing us together, and for the Variety of those great Mercies, we have since jointly enjoyed; God hath given us diverse sweet Babes, and though he hath in Wisdom removed them from our present Sight, yet they are in the Bosom of God, and we shall find them one Day made perfect in Glory;16 We have enjoyed much Love, and true Content; We have been kept together in these separating Troubles,17 a Mercy I have oft begged, and God hath given it; and I value thy Presence, and Company beyond any, and all my outward Comforters. Moreover, My Dear, God hath always put us in safe Places in these Times of War, and given us Plenty in these Times of Wants; God hath also made us of one Mind, our Judgments are one, our Wills, our Way, our Aims in Spirituals;18 and it is no small Mercy to be totally freed from any of those many Sufferings, which a married Condition makes many sensible of;19 Now preventing Mercy hath kept us from knowing them, but as we may guess by the Rule of Contraries: O our good God! Praised be his Name, as for Mercies personal, so for Mercies conjugal; as for the Mercies of a single Life, so for the Mercies of our married Condition; I shall now, My Dear, beg thy watchfulness over me, against Sin, and thy Prayers for me; a Christian’s Experience will teach him what Petitions he should frame in the behalf of another; let this be thy Rule, it shall be mine in my daily Prayers to the Father for thee; even the Father of Mercies into whose sweet Embraces I recommend thee, remaining most good, and dear Husband Thy much obliged, and most affectionate Wife Mary Carey. October 17th 1653 [4 r –6v]

16 According to her written works, Carey and her second husband, George Payler, had seven children, only two of whom survived into adulthood. Both parents believed that the children were among the elect and that God had called them to him early to dwell with him in glory. 17 During the Civil Wars (1642–51), Carey accompanied her husband on military campaigns and on his travels between his home in Berwick-upon-Tweed, Northumberland, and London. 18 Spirituals: spiritual matters. 19 Marriage gave Carey many comforts, but this, she says, was unusual for women in the period.

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Lady Mary Carey February, 11th 1649. A Dialogue betwixt the Soul, and the Body. Soul. My Sister, why art thou so sore cast down? hath anything befallen thee but what is the lot of God’s people whose Sufferings are here only? For what Son is he, whom the Father chasteneth not? Whom the Lord loveth, he chasteneth, and scourgeth every Son whom he receiveth; Hebrews 12:6–8. Is not this life a Baca, or Vale of Tears; Psalms 84:6.20 Is there not Ashes, Mourning, and the Spirit of Heaviness in Zion; Isaiah 61:3. Body. Dear Sister, the Lord hath taken from me a Son, a beloved Son, an only Son, an only Child, the last of three,21 and it must needs affect me; Can a Woman forget her sucking Child? that she should not have Compassion on the Son of her Womb; Isaiah 49:15. And will there not be mourning for an only son; Zechariah 12:10.22 besides I am now near the time of my Travel, 23 & am very weak, faint, sickly, fearful, pained, apprehending much sufferings before me, if not Death it self, the King of Terrors.24 Soul. First, For the removal of the Child, know that it is God’s Will, to which submit not one Word; and do not only yield, but approve; God is wise, and knows it best; God is loving, and therefore did it;25 I am sure In faithfulness hath the Lord afflicted me; Psalms 119:75. For thy own weakness be not discouraged; thy strength is no help in God’s Work; Faith looks at God, only as all-sufficient and hears him say, Behold, I am the Lord, the God of all flesh, is there anything too hard for me; Jeremiah 32:27.

20 Some translations (including the Latin Vulgate) translate the Hebrew word Baca as ‘tears’ or ‘lamentations’. The verse is used to support Carey’s belief that the body should expect suffering and despair in life, in preparation for the joy of everlasting life after death. 21 Carey had given birth to three children by 1647; the most recent was a son who had subsequently died. Each time one died it was her ‘only child’. On writing this, Carey was pregnant with her fourth child, Robert Payler, who also died soon after birth. 22 The Body significantly leaves out the latter part of Isaiah 49:15, which suggests that a nursing mother might forget her child, whereas God would never neglect his people. The passage in Zechariah is a prophecy of Christ’s death, the only son of God, highlighting the exchange Carey has made between her own only son(s) and God giving her his only son. Body’s suffering is undermined by the biblical passages. 23 Travel: labour in childbirth. 24 Job 18:14. 25 Marginal note: the apprehension of love produceth patience.

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Exemplary conversion narratives   And for thy fear of Death, know Christ hath unstung him;26 Paul disputes it with him; and in a holy triumph cries out; O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? 1 Corinthians 15:55. He sees it overcome by Christ, both in his own Person, & by his own Power, for all his People, so that death is now no enemy, but a necessary friend, whom God hath appointed to carry us to Christ. Body. But, my Sister, Thou knowest that when I shall be dissolved, thou wilt leave me, and go immediately to thy place;27 but I must lie in [the] grave, rot, putrefy, and have no enjoyment until our re-uniting, and therefore, my dear Soul, let me know what I may then hope for, that so I may lie down, In peace, and expectation, Psalms 16:9.28 Soul. This Query, my beloved Sister, is most pleasant, and welcome to me; I hope my answer shall give thee some satisfaction; indeed neither thou, not I should, or ought to be comforted until we can say, the Lord is our God, and we his, and can prove it out of his holy Word,29 which shall never fail: The Word of the Lord endureth for ever; 1 Peter 1:25. Body. My dear Soul, let me know, what assurance thou hast that the Lord will be with us till Death, at Death, and after Death;30 when thou, and I shall part where’s thy ground to believe thy present entering into the possession of that unspeakable happiness, which after our second meeting, we shall inseparably enjoy together? Soul. Why Sister, the Lord hath promised it, and I believe it, therefore it shall certainly be accomplished,31 take these 4 Scriptures in full Answer to thy last Questions for thy stay herein; 1. First, Unto Death; This God is our God forever, and ever; he will be our Guide (even) unto Death; Psalms 48:14; 2. Secondly, In dying Christ will say, Verily, I say unto thee, today shalt thou be with me in Paradise; Luke 23:43. 3. Thirdly, After Death, Christ will say to me, I will ransom thee from the power of the grave;32 I will redeem thee from death; Hosea 13:14. 26 Marginal note: death is nature’s enemy, but Christ hath made him the soul’s friend. 27 Marginal note: when the soul quits the body, it goes to possess eternity. 28 The body asks whether, after the separation of the soul from the body at death, it will be reunited with the soul at the day of judgement and be destined for heaven (with the elect) or hell (with the reprobate). 29 Marginal note: the Word will tell Conscience our Condition. 30 Marginal note: know when to meet at parting. 31 Marginal note: the gift of Faith is a pledge of performance. 32 Marginal note: that which is comfort after death shall be my chosen comfort whilst I live.

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Lady Mary Carey 4. Again, Fourthly, Thou wilt show me the Path of Life, in thy Presence is fullness of Joy, at thy right hand there are Pleasures for evermore; Psalms 16:11. And now let us proceed to look over our Evidences, wherein for what of time, I will observe no Method, but collect what may be of use in time of need. Body. Do dear Soul; that so through Mercy, thou mayest by drawing Water out of the Wells of Salvation; whilst I am fighting my last Battle according to that Promise, With Joy shall ye draw Water out of the Wells of Salvation; Isaiah 12:3. and I think Meditation (of Mercy) is a Bucket which will come full up with spiritual Joy. Soul. Mark then, what I believe;33 I believe there is a God;34 I am so commanded, so informed by Hebrews 11:6: He that commeth to God must believe that he is, &c.   And but one God.35   Thus saith the Lord, the King of Israel, & his Redeemer the Lord of Hosts; I am the first, and I am the last;36 and besides me there is no God; Is there a God besides me; yea, there is no God, I know not any. Isaiah 44:6, 8.   This one God is a Spirit;37 John 4:24: God is a Spirit, &c. [7r –10r ] […] Soul. I believe three Persons in the Godhead, the Father, the Son, & the Holy Ghost, yet these three but one God; as 1 John 5:7: There are three that bear record in Heaven, the Father, the Word, & the Holy Ghost, & these three are one; And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway out of the Water, & lo, the Heavens were opened unto

33 The following speech by Soul is based on the Shorter Catechism compiled by the Westminster Assembly in 1647. A catechism was intended to educate the laity, including children, in doctrinal matters via a series of questions and answers. Carey includes summaries of some of the answers, and some of the scriptural passages from the catechism, though she paraphrases and includes some passages of her own. The catechism itself advised that a ‘Learner may further improve it upon all occasions, for his increase in knowledge and piety, even out of the course of catechising, as well as in it’ – The Humble Advice of the Assembly of Divines (London: [n. pub.] 1648), p. 24. Carey includes answers and scriptures on ‘What is God?’, ‘Are there more Gods than one?’, How many Persons are there in the God-head?’, ‘How did God create man?’ and ‘What was the sin whereby our first Parents fell from the estate wherein they were created?’ 34 Marginal note: there is a God. 35 Marginal note: but one God. 36 Marginal note: where God is Alpha of Grace, he will be the Omega of Glory. 37 Marginal note: God is a Spirit.

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Exemplary conversion narratives him, & he saw the Spirit of God descending like a Dove, & lighting upon him; And, lo, a voice from Heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; Matthew 3:16–17.   Again, Go ye therefore, & teach all Nations, baptizing them in the Name of the Father, & of the Son, & of the Holy Ghost; Matthew 28:19.   I believe that in the beginning God created our first Parents after his own Image, holy, & happy; as Genesis 1:27. God created Man in his own Image, in the Image of God created he him, Male, & Female created he them;38 but they falling from God, listening to Satan, eating the forbidden Fruit, brought a Curse upon themselves, & all their Posterity being in their loins; Genesis 3. She took of the Fruit thereof & did eat, & gave also unto her Husband with her, & he did eat; verses 6, 17–19. so that all Mankind is equally guilty of all sin, & liable to all Miseries, Curse, Wrath, Death, & Hell; as Romans 5:12. Wherefore, as by one Man sin entered into the World, & Death by sin; & so death passed upon all Men, for that all have sinned; And death reigned from Adam, verse 14; By the Offence of one Judgment came upon all Men unto Condemnation, &c. verse 18; By one Man’s Disobedience many were made sinners; verses 19, &c.; And were by nature the Children of Wrath, even as others; Ephesians 2:3. Body. These are Truths; but my dear Soul, I would know of what use God made the knowledge hereof unto thee, for this is generally known, & believed, & thou hast showed me thy share in Guilt, Curse, Wrath, Hell, but not thy sensibleness of it, nor what Means God showed thee to get out of it, not how God dealt with thee, nor what case thou art now in.39 Soul. Sister, that was my only intention, though I have spoke a few Words by the Way, of that which was the ground Work, of what follows.40 Mark then what was the Lord’s dealing towards me, which I shall briefly, & truly relate; It was the Lord’s pleasure to smite me with a sore sickness; (in my apprehension it was unto death) when I was about 18 years old, in the midst of my Jollity, when I was taking my fill of worldly Contentments, & restrained my heart from nothing it fancied to follow delighting myself, & spending my time

38 Carey follows the Westminster Shorter Catechism in referencing the first of the two biblical creation stories (Genesis 1:26–8), where Adam and Eve are created together, rather than the second (Genesis 2:7–25), where Eve is formed from Adam’s rib. 39 The Body asks the Soul to tell her how she was saved from the sin mankind inherited from Adam, and how God dealt with her in conversion. 40 Marginal note: in order to spiritual good the body often afflicted.

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Lady Mary Carey in Carding, Dice, Dancing, Masquing,41 Dressing, vain Company, going to Plays, following Fashions, & the like; In this Sickness I began to think, that God had given me a time in the World, which I was now quitting, but I knew not God, nor what would become of me for Eternity; I found myself in a miserable, & hopeless Condition, which made me wish, O that God would spare my Life! till I learn to know him; O might I live, I would forever quit all my vain Company, leave my most beloved Pleasures, be a careful Hearer of God’s Word, & give myself up to his Service;   God did please to call back my Life from the Grave, & restored me to my Health, & Strength, which free Mercy did so win upon my Heart,42 that I found my Resolutions in the time of my Sickness much strengthened, but I knew not how to set one step forward in this great Work, only I sequestered myself from all my former Company & sinful Delights,43 & my Spirit was very restless, & full of Enquiry. Body. But what could’st thou do in this Condition? thou wert a stranger unto God, to his Word, to his People, to all Means, & Helps. Soul. ’Tis very true, I neither did, nor could do anything, but God did all, & thus he removed my dwelling, & set me under a powerful Ministry,44 powerful I may call it, even the Power of God, Sharper than a two-edged Sword, piercing, dividing Soul, & Body, Joints, & Marrow, a discerner of my Heart, & Thoughts;45 Hebrews 4:12 & Romans 1:16. This Word, I say, even every Sermon I heard, did so find me out, & discover me unto myself, that I thought there was no Reprobate in Hell more sinful than I;   I found myself equal with them in Original sin, beyond most in Actual sin,46 my sins were laid before me, Satan let loose upon me, so far as to tempt me, terrify, upbraid, & challenge me for his own, & worst of all, I believed God mine Enemy, his Wrath, & Hell my Portion for Eternity;47 O what Confusion was in my Thoughts day, & night; I durst not eat, nor drink, but to keep Life, nor take any 41 Participating in a dance (perhaps as entertainment or as part of a play) masked and disguised. 42 Marginal note: to give a mercy, & affect the heart with the gift, oh sweet. 43 Marginal note: why pulled out from others why. 44 Powerful Ministry: where she could hear sermons explaining and expounding the word of God that made a powerful impression upon her soul. 45 Marginal note: had not God spoke to my heart in his Word, it had never spoke to him in Prayer. 46 Carey not only felt the burden of Adam and Eve’s original sin she had inherited, but she also believed that she sinned more than others in her life. 47 Marginal note: none can apprehend this but those who know it.

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Exemplary conversion narratives Comfort from any Creature,48 that I could want; I thought I had no Interest in Christ, & therefore no Right to any Creature, but was confident to suffer for the least Refreshment I had (either from Meat, Drink, Sleep, Clothes, Fire, Company, &c.) in Hell. Body. Didst thou get no Comfort from the Word preached, nor read, nor from other good Books, nor Company, nor Prayer? when, & how did God come in? this was very sad, when wilt thou show me, how thou gottest Assurance? & how it is now with thee? thou leadest me far about, wert thou long in this Condition? Soul. Truly, long it was, as I thought, many Months, almost a Year, before I got any abiding, or firm Comfort; & all the Means I used made me still worse; for I could use none aright; I could not believe a Promise, nor give Obedience to any Precept; nor could I pray; I knew not what to call God, nor apprehend that Christ was offered me; all God’s Attributes, (now my Comfort) was then Terror. And, indeed, I took part with Satan, in disputing against Comfort; in this sad Condition of Desertion, I lay under the Arrest of Divine Justice,49 the Lord being so gracious to me, as not to let me fall back again; he also kept me from those Violences, that the Malice of my spiritual Enemy desired;50 Now the first glimpse of Mercy was, a secret Thought, or Wish, or poor Hope; yet, what if the Lord will be gracious, & freely merciful, even to me the chiefest of Sinners.   And, methinks those that I verily believe the People of God, and know they dare not lie, have been something after my manner;51 this a little stayed me;52 but when the Time, the sweet Time came, that God did declare his free Grace, his abundant Love to me, in the Gift of the Treasure of Heaven, & Earth, Jesus Christ, he set himself so forth to my Apprehension both by his Word, & Spirit, as a God seeking Reconciliation with me in Jesus Christ, making him mine, & all Christ’s mine, & I in Christ his. [12r –18v ] […] Now, to our dear, & merciful God the Father, to our dear, & tenderly loving God the Son, to our dear Comforter, & Guider God the Holy 48 Creature: material comfort. 49 Arrest: protective custody. 50 Following the example of Job, it was believed that Satan tempted those in spiritual straits to commit suicide. 51 Carey read the conversion narratives of other people of God, which comforted her because they had experienced similar troubles and temptations. Whether these were handwritten or published is unclear. 52 Stayed: comforted; reassured.

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Lady Mary Carey Ghost, be all Praise, Thanks, Glory, & Honour ascribed from all in Earth, & in Heaven, especially from my Soul, & Body for now, & ever, world without end; Amen. Mary Carey

May, 14th 1652 I have now buried four Sons, & a Daughter; God hath my all of Children, I have his all (beloved Christ) a sweet Change; in greatest Sorrows, content, & happy: Mary Carey.53

Written by my dear Husband at the Death of our 4th (at that time) only Child, Robert Payler. 1. Dear Wife, let’s learn to get that Skill,   Of free Submission to God’s holy Will: 2. He like a Potter is; & we like Clay,54   Shall not the Potter mould us his own Way? 3. Sometimes it is his Pleasure that we stand   With pretty lovely Babies in our hand: 4. Then he in Wisdom turns the Wheel about;55   And draws the Posture56 of those Comforts out: 5. Into another Form; either this, or that   As pleases him; & ’tis no matter what: 6. If by such Changes, God shall bring us in   To love Christ Jesus, & to loath our Sin. Covent-Garden, December 8th 1650

George Payler.

53 This small passage is appended to Carey’s 1649 conversion narrative, written a year before the dedication to her husband which appears at the beginning. Her fourth child whom she was carrying in 1649, Robert Payler, had died in 1650, and a further son, Peregrine Payler, died in 1652 (see poems below). 54 Isaiah 64:8. 55 He in Wisdom turns the Wheel about: God’s wheel of providence described in Ezekiel 1:15–25. God had ordered all actions according to his divine will and judgement and would turn the wheel to bring someone low or high depending on what his grand plan was. 56 Posture: state.

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Exemplary conversion narratives Written by me at the same time on the Death of my 4th, & only Child, Robert Payler. 1. My Lord hath calléd for my Son,   My heart breathes forth, thy Will be done: 2. My all; that Mercy hath made mine   Freely’s surrendered to be thine: 3. But if I give my All to thee   Let me not pine for Poverty: 4. Change with me; do, as I have done,   Give me thy All, even thy dear Son: 5. ’Tis Jesus Christ, Lord, I would have;   He’s thine, mine All; ’tis him I crave: 6. Give him to me; & I’ll reply   Enough my Lord; now let me die. Covent-Garden, December 10th 1650

Mary Carey.

Written by me at the Death of my 4th Son, & 5th Child Peregrine Payler. 1. I thought my All was given before   But Mercy ordered me one more: 2. A Peregrine, my God me sent,   Him back again I do present 3. As a Love-Token; ’mongst my others,   One Daughter, & her 4 dear Brothers; 4. To my Lord Christ, my only bliss   Is, he is mine, & I am his: 5. My dearest Lord, hast thou fulfilled thy Will?   Thy Hand-Maid’s pleased, completely happy still.57 Grove-Street, May 12th 1652.

Mary Carey. [94 r –96r ]

57 Handmaid: female servant of God, used often in the Bible.

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Lady Mary Carey A Meditation, or Commemoration of the Love of God the Father, Son, & Holy Ghost. […] I have lived 45 years, & never yet wanted58 anything that was absolutely necessary at the present one hour in all my Life. Indeed I had the greatest Want of all, when I wanted God, but so soon as I found a Want of him, I discerned him, although as an Enemy, & doing terrible things against me; yet this was the Supply of my Want, & I wanted the Enjoyment of God, no longer than his Wisdom knew the fittest time; & then I had a Soul satisfying Presence, I bless his Name; I hear Satan whisper, thou sayst not true, I have oft known thee want the Light of God’s Countenance, inward Peace, strengthening of some Graces, & Strength against some Corruptions, & I have oft foiled thee at such a time; Satan, I know it hath been thus with me, & it was best; for by my Want of the Sense of God’s loving Countenance, I came to know how I prized it; it set me a seeking it, & that Loss remains as an Awe upon my Spirit for time coming; And my Want of inward Peace, made me search the Cause, & a true Search is a great Advantage, Weakness of Grace, & Want of Strength against Corruptions, & my being foiled by thee, made me know myself, & sent me to God, & God gained himself much Glory, & me abundance of good out of such a Condition, thou knowest it; And shall I say, or think, that because I have not all I desire, of everything, at all times, I want anything that’s fit, no, I have, & ever had all that is, & was good, & best for me; & if I desired what I had not, the Fault was there; I shall never indulge any Desires, but what are limited to God’s Will; I would not have my Will, but as Mine is His; for I know my own Will to be foolish, & harmful; Now as I may say by Experience, I never wanted any Mercy, good, & absolutely necessary in time past, so by Faith, I say, I never shall for time to come; What’s that farther, Satan, I wanted the Life of my Children, which I importunately begged; I answer thee, When I importunately begged their Life, I knew not but God’s Will might be to spare as well as to take; & when I more clearly saw it God’s Will to remove them;59 I wanted not a Heart (of God’s giving) willingly to surrender them, nor did I want the Comfort of them after they were gone, for God gave me more than he took from me; more Enjoyment of God for some of the Creature is a sweet Change; & besides, I want not that desired Mercy of Children, but have now more than ever; One was my greatest number 58 Want/wanted here and in the followed paragraph: lack/lacked. 59 Marginal note: I first experienced self, then God, first weakness, then Mercy.

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Exemplary conversion narratives formerly; Now great, & tender Mercy gives, & continues me two, a Son, & a Daughter, all my former were sickly, weak, pained, not likely to live; but these have been, & are healthful, strong, enjoying Ease, hopeful; Blessed be God for Bethia, & Nathaniel, & all their Mercies, & let their Births, & all the rest never be forgotten by me; & all my Deliverances of each of them all; strong, & faithful was my God, good, good to Mother, & Child at such a time, great was mine, & their Danger, eminent were mine, and their Mercies. [100v–103v ] […]

Upon the Sight of my abortive Birth60 the 31st of December 1657. 1. What Birth is this? a poor despiséd Creature?61   A little Embryo?62 void of Life, & Feature?63 2. Seven times I went my time, when Mercy giving  Deliverance64 unto me; & mine all living; 3. Strong, right-proportioned,65 lovely Girls, & Boys,   Their Father’s, Mother’s present hoped for Joys: 4. That was great Wisdom, Goodness, Power, Love, Praise   To my dear Lord, lovely in all his Ways: 5. This is no less; the same God hath it done,   Submits my Heart, that’s better than a Son:66

60 Abortive birth: a spontaneous abortion; the result of a miscarriage. 61 Creature: created being. 62 Embryo: name for a child in the womb before birth (not just in the time before the third month of pregnancy, as is the modern sense). In this case, the embryo had been born before it was fully formed. 63 Feature: shape (of the body); also a double meaning as a term for foetus. See Thomas Raynalde, The Birth of Mankind: Otherwise Named, The Woman’s Book, ed. Elaine Hobby (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), p. 58. 64 Deliverance: safe deliverance in childbirth (though the sense of being delivered from sin is also present). 65 Right-proportioned: right limb proportion was believed to be indicative of a healthy body. Early modern mothers swaddled their infants in strips of cloth as they believed it would encourage the child’s limbs to grow strong and straight. When the child was four months old it was acceptable to release the arms from the binding, but the torso and legs were supposed to be swaddled until the child was one year old. See Culpeper’s Directory for Midwives, p. 229. 66 The identification of her abortive child as a ‘son’ is rhetorical. Carey is referring to the exchange of her son for the son of God, and passages in the Bible that figure the loss of an only son as among the worst bodily trials. See Jeremiah 6:25–6 and Amos 8:10.

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Lady Mary Carey 6. In giving, taking, stroking, striking still;   His Glory, & my good, is his my Will: 7. In that then, this now, both good God most mild,   His Will’s more dear to me, than any Child: 8. I also joy, that God hath gained one more,   To praise him in the Heav’ns, than was before: 9. And that this Babe (as well as all the rest),   Since’t had a Soul, shall be forever blest:67 10. That I’m made instrumental, to both these,   God’s Praise, Babes bless;68 it highly doth me please: 11. May be the Lord looks for more Thankfulness,   And high Esteem for those I do possess: 12. As Limners draw dead Shades69 for to set forth   Their lively Colours, & their Picture’s Worth, 13. So doth my God, in this, as all things, wise,   By my dead, formless Babe teach me to prize: 14. My living, pretty Pair, Nat: & Bethia,   The Children dear (God yet lends to Maria), 15. Praised be his Name, these two’s full Compensation:   For all that’s gone, & that in Expectation: 16. And if herein God hath fulfilled his Will,   His Hand-Maid’s pleased, completely happy still;70 17. I only now desire of my sweet God,   The Reason why he took in hand his Rod? 18. What he doth spy? what is the thing amiss?   I fain would learn? whilst I the Rod do kiss: 19. Methinks I hear God’s Voice, this is ye Sin,   And Conscience justifies the same within:

Psalms 119:65

Micah 6:9

67 Calvinism, unlike Catholicism, held that infants did not need to be baptised in order to be saved, so long as they were believed to have a soul. 68 Greer et al. suggest ‘babe’s bliss’ for the source text’s ‘babes blesse’. Germaine Greer, Jeslyn Medoff, Melinda Sansone and Susan Hastings, eds, Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of 17th Century Women’s Verse (London: Virago, 1988), p. 162, n.10. 69 Limners draw dead Shades: portrait painters drew in pen and ink before applying a colour wash to advertise their work to prospective clients (see Greer et al., p. 162, n. 12). While also referring to the absence of illumination in a painting, ‘Shades’ also has the sense of a disembodied spirit or ghost. God is compared to a limner who produces an unfinished work in order to hint towards the brilliance of the final version, the miscarried child highlighting the perfection of Carey’s existing, healthy children. 70 Cf. the final couplet of ‘Written by me at the Death of my 4th Son, & 5th Child Peregrine Payler’.

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Exemplary conversion narratives 20. Thou often dost present me with dead Fruit;   Why should not my Returns, thy Present suit:71 21. Dead Duties, Prayers, Praises thou dost bring, Rev. 3:1   Affections dead, dead Heart in everything; 22. In Hearing, Reading, Conference, Meditation;   In acting Graces, & in Conversation; 23. Whose taught, or bettered by ye? No Relation,   Thou’rt Cause of Mourning, not of Imitation;72 24. Thou dost not answer that great Means I give,   My Word, & Ord’nances do teach to live: 25. Lively, O do’t, thy Mercies are most sweet; Psalms 25:10   Chastisements sharp; & all the Means that’s meet; Hebrews 12:6 26. Mend now my Child, & lively Fruit bring me; Psalms 119:71, 65   So thou advantaged much by this wilt be; 27. My dearest Lord, thy Charge, & more is true;   I see’t, am humbled, & for Pardon sue; Psalms 25:7, 11 28. In Christ forgive, & henceforth I will be, Mat. 3:17   What, nothing, Lord; but what thou makest me; Dan. 9:17; Phil. 2:13 29. I am naught, have naught, can do naught but sin; Rom. 7:18, 19, 24   As my Experience saith, for I’ve been in 30. Several Conditions, Trials great, & many,   In all I find my Nothingness, not any 31. Thing do I own but Sin, Christ is my all; Col. 3:11; Heb. 7:25   That I do want, can crave, or ever shall: 1 John 2:1–2 32. That good that suiteth all my whole Desires;   And for me unto God, all he requires, 33. It is in Christ, he’s mine, & I am his; Song of Songs 2:16; 6:3; 7:10   This Union is my only Happiness: 34. But, Lord since I’m a Child by Mercy free;   Let me by filial Fruits much honour thee; John 15:8 35. I am a Branch o’th’Vine, purge me therefore; John 15:2   Father, more Fruit to bring, then heretofore: 36. A Plant in God’s house O that I may be; Psalms 92:13–14   More flourishing in Age, a growing Tree:

71 Carey believes that God has made her body unfruitful because she has not been spiritually fruitful. 72 Puritan women were encouraged to teach and catechise their children and servants in the home, and women’s testimonies containing evidence of grace received were often published as exemplary texts. God tells Carey that she is not fulfilling her role.

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Lady Mary Carey 37. Let not my heart, (as doth my Womb) miscarry;   But precious Means73 receivéd, let it tarry;74 38. Till it be formed; of Gospel Shape, & Suit;75 Phil. 1:27; Col. 1:6, 10   My Means, my Mercies, & be pleasant Fruit: 39. In my whole Life; lively do thou make me: Isaiah 4:1   For thy Praise, & Name’s sake, O quicken me;76 Psalms 143:11 40. Lord, I beg quick’ning Grace, that Grace afford;   Quicken me Lord according to thy word: Psalms 119:25 41. It is a lovely Boon77 I make to thee, Psalms 119:88, 37   After thy Loving kindness quicken me; Psalms 119:159 42. Thy quick’ning Spirit unto me convey;   And thereby quicken me; in thine own Way; Psalms 119:37 43. And let the Presence of thy Spirit78 dear,   Be witnessed by his Fruits, let them appear: 44. To, & for thee, Love, Joy, Peace, Gentleness,   Long-suff’ring, Goodness, Faith, & much Meekness; Gal. 5:22, 23 45. And let my Walking in the Spirit say,   I live in’t, & desire it to obey, Gal. 5:25 46. And since my Heart thou’st lifted up to thee;   Amend it, Lord, & keep it still with thee: January, 12th 1657.

Saith Maria Carey always in Christ happy. [114 r –117v]

73 Means: short form of ‘means of grace’. See note 15, p. 43. Carey goes on to explain that these ‘means’ are of ‘Gospel Shape’, referring specifically to the power of scripture to bring forth spiritual fruit. See, in particular, Colossians 1:5–6. 74 Tarry: continue. 75 Suit: style. 76 Quicken: give or restore spiritual life; animate the soul. Spiritual fruitfulness is constantly compared to bodily fruitfulness in this section. The verb ‘to quicken’ also refers to the first perceptible movement of a child within the mother’s uterus, which was an indication of the presence of a soul. 77 Boon: prayer, petition. 78 The Holy Spirit.

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2 Elizabeth Major

Elizabeth Major ( fl. 1656), a Puritan, wrote and published Honey on the Rod: Or a Comfortable Contemplation for One in Affliction; with Sundry Poems on Several Subjects in 1656, to be used by its readers as an instructive and comforting work if they were in bodily or spiritual affliction. Though the narrative is not set out as a spiritual autobiography (as in the manner of Katherine Sutton’s or Hannah Allen’s printed works), it depicts the conversion process of Major’s ‘Soul’ as she responded to the Lord’s spiritual refinement. As a theological text, the author demonstrates her excellent knowledge of both the Bible and Latin, indicating that she was well educated, but the text does not give away much other autobiographical information, except in her address to the reader in the second, appended section of her volume, entitled Sin and Mercy Briefly Discovered. What little information Major provides tells us that she was much afflicted in herself, losing her mother in her infancy and experiencing a disease, a ‘great heat and cold ’ (sig. h2) in her mid-twenties, which left her lame and in pain. As a result of this she had to return from the house of her governess to her father’s house in Blackfriars.1 Major’s case of affliction is made emblematic for others, as throughout the work she reclaims her pain as a sign that she is beloved of God. The title of the work encapsulates this paradox. Just as God chastises his children with his rod, correcting them in the manner of a father, these afflictions are sweet (like honey) because their purpose is to bring believers closer to God. Major indicates, for instance, that ‘human nature is corrupt, that it will not leave sinning, nay, [a person will] hardly take notice he sins

1 Sara Ross has speculated that Major’s parents could have been John Major and Mary Allton of Blackfriars, placing her birth in 1628. See Sarah Ross, ‘Major, Elizabeth ( fl. 1656)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

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Elizabeth Major till the rod is on his back’ (p. 18). The honeyed rod is also, as Joseph Caryl wrote in the volume’s prefatory address to the reader, an allusion to 1 Samuel 14, in which Jonathan unwittingly disobeys his father’s foolish decree that the Israelites should not eat before battle, and eats the honey God had provided off the end of his own rod, putting him in danger for his life. The honey made his ‘eyes enlightened’ (14:27) and so becomes a symbol of the restorative qualities of God’s gifts, in his grace, assurance and even punishment. Through this analogy, Major’s own work becomes a sweet gift to her readers, and to God, legitimising her act of writing and publishing. It is likely that Major was a protégée of Caryl, a prolific Puritan preacher and rector of St Magnus, London, who licensed her Honey on the Rod for publication. There is, however, no evidence in Major’s book to confirm whether she knew Caryl, except for the inclusion of his signed address to the reader asking the reader to treat the following work as an exemplary text. The fact that a male licenser endorsed a female-authored book would have helped to diminish any potential hostility from a male-dominated readership, but Caryl would have found the narrative supporting his own writings on the purpose of affliction, based on his fascination with the biblical book of Job. Between 1651 and 1666, Caryl published his Commentary on the Book of Job in twelve volumes, frequently expounding on these verses in his sermons in and around London, and, if Major continued to live with her father in Blackfriars, she could have seen him preach regularly. In his address, Caryl highlights Major’s position as an ‘afflicted Gentlewoman’ (sig. a r ) and asks her readers to compare her patient suffering with Job’s, emphasising that her sufferings were indicative of her experiencing God’s grace. As Elaine Hobby writes, by ‘reminding herself repeatedly that her disability is God’s judgement on her as a sinner’, Major ‘presents herself to the reader as a particular exemplar of the state of sin; and, as the text proceeds, as sinner saved’.2 Caryl certainly recognised the power of Major’s writings, endorsing them as by one whose afflictions had made her closer to God, explaining that ‘the School of the Cross, is the School of Light; or, that the Lord gives instruction with correction. It is a strong Argument, that they have received Light or Instruction who readily give it’ (sig. ar–v ). Paradoxically, it is Major’s bodily and spiritual weaknesses that allowed her to receive Caryl’s commendations and publish her writings. Major’s volume of prose and poetry includes a lot of references to tears of remorse for her sins, which accompany the preparation of her soul 2 Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing 1649–88 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1989), p. 66.

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Exemplary conversion narratives for inhabitation by the divine. Seventeenth-century society, following the belief of Aristotle that ‘woman is more compassionate than man, and has a greater propensity to tears’, considered weeping a sign of weakness and linked tears to the female body’s properties.3 In Major’s case this weeping reflects her remorse and shame for being sinful; for instance, she identifies with the sinful woman of Luke’s Gospel who wets Jesus’s feet with her tears, wipes them with her hair and kisses them (7:37–50). The emphasis in this story is on a notoriously sinful woman (possibly guilty of sexual sins) receiving the pardon of Christ, showing her complete subservience and gratitude by kissing his feet. Major presents herself as similarly penitent for her sins by her tears. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Major’s narrative is made up of a dialogue between her personified ‘Soul’, who declares ‘I, I am she that hath seen affliction’ (p. 2), and ‘Consolation’, who attempts to comfort Soul by providing her with scriptures that show why bodily affliction is necessary to the process of continual spiritual refinement. In her collection of poetry, published in Sin and Mercy Briefly Discovered, Major uses ‘Soul’ to voice her own beliefs. In a similar way to Mary Carey’s writings, which also use the dialogue as a rhetorical device, Major’s conversion narrative was certainly meant to help and instruct others undergoing similar trials and afflictions, whether in body or spirit. Her poetry continues the dialogue between Soul and Consolation in iambic pentameter, dealing with particular sins, including pride, drunkenness and covetousness, a meditation on ‘Death’s Progress’, and an application of the book of Jonah, another biblical narrative that depicts God’s corrective wrath at disobedience, though followed by his mercy. Three of the latter poems are fourteen-line acrostics and anagrams of Major’s name, conveniently fitting the sonnet form, showing her to be a ‘blest Heir’ of eternal life (p. 201). This provides the conversion narrative that has depicted intense sufferings and afflictions, causing tears and supplications, with a fitting end, confirming Major as one of God’s elect, and therefore supporting her need to share her work with others. She must perform this service, she writes, since she has received ‘a drop from [God’s] Ocean’ (A4), and by the act of writing she would like to reciprocate and share this gift.

3 Aristotle, The History of Animals, quoted in Kate Aughterson, ed., Renaissance Woman: A Sourcebook Construction of Femininity in England (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 44.

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Elizabeth Major Note on the text The source text for these extracts is Honey on the Rod: Or a Comfortable Contemplation for One in Affliction; with Sundry Poems on Several Subjects (London: Thomas Maxey, 1656), held by the British Library.

Further reading Patricia Demers, ‘“I could Wish my Tongue were as the Pen of a Ready Writer”: The Fragility of Hope in Elizabeth Major’s Honey on the Rod’, John Bunyan and His Times, 17 (1997), 38–48 Germaine Greer, Jeslyn Medoff, Melinda Sansone and Susan Hastings, eds, Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women’s Verse (London: Virago, 1988) Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing 1649–88 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1989) Elizabeth Major, Honey on the Rod: Or a Comfortable Contemplation for One in Affliction; with Sundry Poems on Several Subjects, ed. Anne Lake Prescott and Betty S. Travitsky (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003)

Honey on the Rod: Or a Comfortable Contemplation for One in Affliction; with Sundry 4 Poems on Several Subjects (1656) Courteous Reader, It hath been said and found more than once, and in this ensuing Treatise (compiled by an afflicted Gentlewoman) it is found once more, That the School of the Cross, is the School of Light; or, that the Lord gives instruction with correction.5 It is a strong Argument, that they have received Light or Instruction who readily give it.

4 Sundry: several. 5 The School of the Cross, is the School of Light: Popular saying, but also used by Caryl in ‘Mr Caryl’s Palme-Tree Christian’, published posthumously in Saints Memorials: […] Being, a Collection of Divine Sentences Written and Delivered by those late Reverend and Eminent Ministers (London: [n. pub.], 1674), p. 54: ‘The School of the Cross, is the School of Light; Which discovers the world’s vanity, baseness and wickedness, And lets us see more of God’s mind. Out of affliction, there comes a spiritual light’.

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Exemplary conversion narratives Reader, Untie and peruse this bundle of Meditations, knit together by a heart and hand long exercised under a heavy cross,6 and thou wilt soon perceive, That as Christ hath dropt honey into her soul from the Rod, so her pen drops honey into thy soul;7 take but a little of it (the All is not much) and taste it, as Jonathan did the honey upon the end of the rod that was in his hand (1 Samuel 14[:24–46]) and thy eyes, as his, may possibly be enlightened if thou art in darkness, and thy heart comforted if thou are in sadness. Joseph Caryl8 [sig. A1–A2] Courteous Readers, You that will not judge, nor condemn before you read & consider, nor value so much from whence it came, as what it is that is come to your view; to you I say, that Nature and Grace hath made tender in judging, if you please so far to descend, as to cast an eye upon these poor Lines presented to you: You may behold in it a little (but a full) Hive.9 I entreat thee not to be offended, if thou find in it more wax than honey, and more dross than either: the honey (the Divine part) I commend to thee, and the wax (the mortal part) being clarified from the dross (that is, the faults & failings through weakness) is useful in its place; nay, the faults and failings are not to be passed over without making some use of them, for they may make thee double thy watch upon all occasions, knowing that if but a crevice of our hearts lie open, sin stands ready to enter, and so to soil our best actions (probatum est).10 Therefore I confess if there be anything in these poor worthless Lines, worthy [of] thy commendation, know, it is the Lord my teacher (but what is faulty is mine) who was pleased to give me by experience this drop from his Ocean, & I humbly desire to return it into the Ocean of his praises. And now to show in some measure his dealings with me, that others might be encouraged to trust him in all conditions; Know that he was pleased in the prime of my years to take me, as it were, from a Palace to a Prison, from liberty to bondage, where I have served some Apprenticeships, so much I exceeded others in a dead   6 Heavy cross: an illness.   7 Proverbs 16:24.   8 Joseph Caryl (1602–73) was a moderate Puritan clergyman, minister and for a time the government’s licenser of religious works.   9 Major continues to compare her written meditations, and the experiences of the spirit they contain, with enlightening honey. In conventionally modest terms, used often by female writers, she apologises that the honeyed words (inspired by God) would be mixed with some wax (her own words). 10 Probatum est: it has been proved.

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Elizabeth Major and dull blockishness:11 O how incapable of learning the trade driven in Heaven am I! not a secret in it can I understand without a knock, though I confess done with much tenderness; for he was pleased to own me as one of the poor Scholars in the School, of the lowest Form, and according to my weakness he dealt with me: He was likewise pleased for some years to exercise me with much trouble, so that I seldom saw the day, before I saw or heard of some cause of sorrow nearly related to me, from the sound of which I would fain have fled: O how exceedingly I strove, for gladly would I have been released, by means used, without being beholding to a God, such actings, I confess, as became not one who would be owned as a servant to such a Master;12 for while I had either means, or friends to procure advice, the great Physician13 was neglected; for the reins being in some measure laid in my neck,14 I did like the Prodigal, run myself out of all before I looked back:15 But alas, when I had seen and considered what a gulf of misery I had plunged myself in, and what power it was that had blasted me in all that I had used, and against which I had acted; then, O then I feared, lest that power being backed by Justice should have consumed me;16 and it is the desire of my soul, ever to love and admire it because it did not. Likewise, I considered his wisdom to be so great, in opposing me in the use of means,17 that I would not for a thousand Worlds but have been so opposed: and for his free mercy I am silenced into holy admiration, that ever such a Majesty so offended, should please to afflict, when he might with so much justice have consumed me: Therefore these three attributes, his Power, Wisdom and Mercy, did for some time take up the thoughts of my heart; and sure God was pleased in mercy thus to exercise me, that so it might divert and take off my thoughts from 11 Blockishness: dullness; stupidity. Major was ignorant of her state of grace until God began to afflict her soul. She compares this to a period of apprenticeship, and of being a scholar in a school, as she learns the ‘trade driven in Heaven’. 12 Master: God. Major presents herself as a rebellious servant: she sought cures for her lameness, listening to the opinions of friends and doctors, but realised that she should submit to God’s will and not be forever seeking a cure. 13 Great Physician: God (a healer of the spirit). 14 Reins being in some measure laid in my neck: drawing on a common phrase meaning to become free of authority (often parental). 15 Prodigal: the prodigal son, who took his inheritance without looking back, subsequently wasting it before returning to his father’s forgiveness (Luke 15:11–16). 16 Justice: Major recalls fearing that God’s punishments would have consumed her, had she been one of the reprobate (damned), but later gives thanks for the ‘free mercy’ (or free grace) of God which allowed her to have faith in Christ and receive eternal life. 17 Means: short form of ‘means of grace’. The means by which divine grace is imparted to the soul, which could include public worship, hearing the word preached and private meditation.

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Exemplary conversion narratives that, that might have been prejudicial to the glory of his free mercy and my eternal good. And for the making it public, know, the kind acceptance I knew it would find from some, and the good it might do to others, prevented my looking upon it as waste Paper, choosing rather to adventure it abroad upon these hopes, than out of fear, dreading the censures of others conceal it; only this may cause some trouble in me, I think it will find none of so low a birth as itself, therefore may want a companion, and peradventure may meet with disdain for the Parent’s sake;18 but for this there is a comfort, for the subject will be the honour of it, being a comfortable Contemplation for a poor sin-besmeared soul, showing (though weakly) that there is a precious Fountain set open for sin and for uncleanness;19 and the way to obtain a washing in it, is by a true Faith (a precious gift) in the Spring or Head of this Fountain Jesus Christ, for all our Springs are in him; It pleased the Father that in him should all fullness dwell: for of him, and through him, and for him are all things: To him be glory forever. Amen. Thine in Christ Jesus, Elizabeth Major. [A3–A5]

A Comfortable Contemplation For One in Affliction. 20 Consolation: Give me leave, O my Soul, to question with thee, and to advise thee in the Prophet’s own words, saying, Why art thou cast down, O my soul, and why art thou disquieted within me? Hope in God, for I shall yet praise him, who is the health of my countenance, and my God. Psalms 43:5. Speak, O my soul, Why art thou so sad, and why art thou so much cast down? Search the cause; for the knowledge of a disease is part of the cure, and a burden divided is much easier to bear: therefore impart thy grief, and receive comfort.

18 Major compares the writing and publishing of her book to giving birth to and raising a child. The comparison was a common one for women writers of the period as it went some way to legitimise their writing and publishing activities, which might well attract ‘disdain’. 19 Zechariah 13:1. Major shows that faith in Christ entitles the believer to be washed in the fountain of eternal life. 20 Major presents a discussion between ‘Consolation’ and ‘Soul’, where Consolation quotes comforting scriptures in order to encourage Soul to understand the purpose of its bodily and spiritual affections.

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Elizabeth Major Soul: I could wish my tongue were as the pen of a ready writer, if there be hopes of ease by imparting; for my sighs are many, and my heart is heavy. I, I am she that hath seen affliction. All ye that pass by this way, behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow, which is done unto me, wherewith the Lord hath afflicted me in the day of his fierce wrath? Lamentations 1:12. The sentence is surely past, the decree is gone out, saying, that in vain shalt thou use many medicines, for thou shalt have no health, Jeremiah 46:11. For I may say with the woman in the Gospel, I have spent all, and am much worse, Mark 5:26. Sure, my sorrows are incurable, and there is no help for me: I looked for peace, but no good came; and for a time of health, and beheld trouble. I would have comforted myself against sorrow, but mine heart is heavy in me. Jeremiah 8:15, 18. Have pity upon, have pity upon me (O ye my friends) for the hand of God hath touched me, Job 19:21. Though I speak, my sorrow cannot be assuaged; though I cease, what release have I? Job 16:6. O that mine head were full of water, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night. Jeremiah 9:1. Woe is me now, for the Lord hath laid sorrow unto my sorrow, and I can find no rest, Jeremiah 45:3. Is there no Balm as Gilead?21 Is there no Physician there, that my health might be recovered? Jeremiah 8:22. Consolation: O thou afflicted, and tossed with tempest, that hast no comfort, Isaiah 54:11. why doth thine heart take thee away, and what do thine eyes mean? seem the consolations of God small unto thee? Job 15:11, 12. Hear me, and I will tell thee, verse 17, that assuredly the serious consideration that thy afflictions come from the all wise God (who can make all things work together for the best unto them that love him, Romans 8:28.) will afford thee great consolation. Job knew right well, that misery came not forth of the dust, neither doth affliction spring out of the earth, Job 5:6. No, he mounted higher, saying, God’s punishment was fearful unto me, and I could not be delivered from his Highness, Job 31:23. Behold now saith God, for I, I am he, and there is no gods with me; I kill, and I give life; I wound, and I make whole; neither is there any that can deliver out of mine hand, Deuteronomy 32:39. The holy Fathers were not to learn this lesson:22 they knew, when afflictions came, by whom there were sent. Joseph, in disclosing himself to his Brethren, could say, Be not sad, neither grieved with yourselves that ye sold me hither, for God sent

21 No Balm as Gilead: not even the precious balm found in the biblical city of Gilead could save the people of Israel who had sinned against the Lord. 22 The holy Fathers: the prophets Joseph, David and Ephraim, who already knew that God was the cause of their afflictions.

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Exemplary conversion narratives me before you for your preservation, Genesis 45:5. Twice more in that Chapter he doth affirm the same, verse 7, 8. For he could speak by experience, and say When ye thought evil against me, God disposed it to good, Genesis 50:20. [pp. 1–3] […] Consolation: For know, that as God is pleased for his own glory, and for the good and benefit of his children, many times to send great troubles and afflictions; so likewise is he pleased to promise in his holy word more especially at those times to hear them, and to be present with them; saying, He shall call upon me, and I will hear him; I will be with him in trouble, I will deliver him, and glorify him, Psalms 91:15. [p. 4] […] Consolation: Therefore, O my soul, take not up Ephraim’s lamentation only, but also his prayer; and if thou cryest, Thou hast corrected me, and I was chastised as an untamed heifer; yet humbly desire him to convert thee, and thou shalt be converted, for he is the Lord thy God, Jeremiah 31:18.23 Assuredly, should he be pleased to open thine eyes, as he did Elisha’s servants, thou wouldst see more with thee than against thee, 2 Kings 6:17. Thou mayst behold thyself surrounded with mercies, Psalms 32:10. O therefore make it thy daily request, in the name of thy dear Saviour, that he would be pleased to open thy sin-blinded eyes, that thou mayst behold his comfortable presence in thy greatest afflictions, and then let him send what he pleases. Soul: O the body of sorrow is of such a bulk, that it fills up my heart, that I cannot for the present admit of any comfort; therefore well may you say, O thou tossed with tempest, that hast no comfort; for I am as a woman forsaken and grieved in spirit;24 for if he hide his face, though it be but in a little wrath, and but for a moment, who can bear it without complaint? Consolation: But, O my soul, why gather you those sayings only which feed your trouble? do but go on, and you shall find in the same verse the Lord saying, With everlasting kindness will I have mercy on thee. The mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed, but my kindness shall not depart from thee, saith the Lord thy Redeemer,

23 See Jeremiah 31:18–20. Although Ephraim is troubled by his sins and therefore laments, God hears him and has mercy on him. 24 Isaiah 54:6.

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Elizabeth Major Isaiah 54:8, 10. For every hair of thy head is numbered by that great Arithmetician, without whose providence not one of them shall fall: Nay, the very sparrows find a place in his memory; for there is not one of them forgotten before God: Fear not therefore, thou art of more value than many sparrows, Luke 12:7.   And now, since it is the Lord, let him do what seemeth him good, 1 Samuel 3:18. Resolve thou with Job, to trust in him though he should slay thee, Job 13:15. Say not thou as the King of Israel’s messenger did; Behold, this evil cometh of the Lord, should I attend on the Lord any longer, 2 Kings 6:33? No, let this be the message of the murderer’s son: be thou as one dumb, not opening a repining mouth, because the Lord hath done it:25 But say with holy David, It is good for me that I have been afflicted, that I may learn thy statutes, Psalms 119:71. For I am persuaded, thou mayst justly say with him, Before I was afflicted, I went astray:26 therefore endeavour now to keep his word. If he bring thee to the furnace of affliction, 27 it is not to burn ought but thy dross, and so to refine thee, and bring thee out more pure.   O pray that thy heart, as Pharaoh’s, may not be hardened by afflictions, to thine own destruction; but that it may with David’s melt into repenting tears.28 Which that thou mayst do, O my soul, seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near, Isaiah 55:6. The righteous cry, and the Lord heareth them, and delivereth them out of all their troubles: the Lord redeemeth the souls of his servants, and none that trust in him shall perish, Psalms 34:17, 22. He is good, and as a stronghold in the day of trouble (but withal remember) he knoweth them that trust in him, Nehemiah 1:7. Behold (says the man of experience) blessed is the man whom God correcteth: therefore (O my soul) refuse not thou the chastening of the Almighty, Job 5:17.

25 2 Kings 6:24–33 records a famine in Samaria, where the ungrateful King of Israel sends his messenger to complain that the people should not worship a God who afflicts them. Instead ‘Consolation’ advocates accepting affliction because it is God’s work. 26 Psalms 119:67. 27 Isaiah 48:10. 28 Pharaoh would not allow Moses to lead the Israelites out of Egypt, so the Lord visited many afflictions on the Egyptian people. This caused Pharaoh to harden his heart (see, for example, Exodus 9:7). The prophet David committed adultery with another man’s wife, and the Lord caused the child from this relationship to sicken and die. During the child’s sickness, David prayed in the temple, but when it died, he stopped grieving, accepting the Lord’s judgement (see 2 Samuel 11–12).

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Exemplary conversion narratives Soul: I confess, I confess, I am corrected and chastised of God: and because it was his great wisdom that did it, I should have been as one dumb, and not have opened my mouth to murmur, Psalms 39:9. But surely, instead of saying (as it is meet to be said unto God) I have borne chastisement, I will not offend anymore: that which I see not teach thou me; if I have done iniquity, I will do no more, Job 34:31–32. I have, as it were, expostulated with him, pleading it were better for me to die, than to live and be crossed of my will. [pp. 5–8] […] Soul: By thee, by thee, I confess O Lord, was I seized on, I was in the prime of my youth arrested; no bail I had to enter here, to stand my friend, not one good work to plead in my behalf: All my actions so sooted over with sin, and made by me but dung and filth, and such as thy pure nature can no way admit of without rewarding them with the worst of punishments. O none have I in heaven or earth to make request for me, but my offended Lord: and how, O how can I ask mercy of him, against whom I sin even in asking? for alas, my whole nature, I see, is so corrupt, that it will be rebelling even under his rod (for if I go, I fear, I fear ’twill be astray, so vile I am): therefore no help here is below; alas, I must, I must to prison here: where Lord, thou knowest, some apprenticeships I have close prisoner been: my strength thou wert pleased to melt away by secret, unseen ways, leaving me almost as helpless, as when I first entered this vale of tears: and to my debility many other afflictions thy wisdom sees it needful here to add; for scarce doth the day break in upon me, before a new cause of sorrow hath made a breach. [p. 8] […] Soul: I acknowledge it is God that afflicted me; so likewise hath he done it justly and wisely: O that he would give some cordials with the bitter potions, that in their strong workings I might not faint away, but be able to declare to others that shall survive me, what great mercies I have received from a correcting hand. O help me with your instructions, and show me some cause that moves God to afflict. Consolation: Well, O my soul, since it is acknowledged that thy afflictions come not forth of the dust, but from a wise and just God, to whose wisdom thou must submit; according to thy desire, I shall in the next place consider the cause that provokes this God to afflict, which is Sin (for that is the most known cause:). [pp. 10–11] 68

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Elizabeth Major […] Consolation: It is true, while there is a World, and a man in it, there will be sin; and it is as true, that while there is sin, God will in mercy correct his [people], in wrath punish others; therefore; O my soul, expect not thou to be made a Wanton, nor to sail to Heaven by Heaven; for believe it, the King of Heaven his way is narrow, and the gate is straight, and few there be that find it, Matthew 7:14. [p. 21] […] Soul: But I, O hard-hearted I, how often hath he stood at the door of my heart, and knocked,29 but I would not hear nor open unto him, that he might come in and sup with me; though the time of singing of Birds was come, and the voice of many a Turtle 30 heard in our land and yet, I deaf, and would not hear them; 31 listening and gazing after vanity, till thou wast passed by: And when I sought thee, Lord, it was not aright; but now own me in mercy, fetch me into thy fold, for I have been a long and a perverse32 wanderer: O send forth thy power, and if I resist, compel me to come in; though thou thy find me at the hedge, yet suffer me not there to continue, but bring me within thy own pale,33 and keep me, Lord, when I am within. [pp. 25–6] […] Consolation: Now, O my soul, an humble submission under the hand of a Father, is good, (and scapeth with fewest blows) so it be seconded with reformation, hating sin, not so much for the misery that attends it, as for grieving such a Father; let that cause thee, if possible, to weep even tears of blood; not that I think tears of themselves will gain the favour of being reserved in his bottle;34 yet assuredly if he find them accompanied with a truly humbled heart, he values them, therefore approach him with Prayers and tears; and if thou canst not speak, cry out the desires of thy soul; if not cry, sigh and groan: Fear not, for he understands all the languages of a troubled soul, for the whole need not a Physician, but they that are sick, Matthew 9:12. Believe it, he came not to call the righteous, but sinners to 29 30 31 32 33

Revelation 3:20. Turtle: turtle dove. Song of Songs 2:12. Perverse: stubborn, or persistent in what is unreasonable. Pale: boundary. In the parable of the vineyard, which appears in Mark 12:1, the hedge encloses God’s people. 34 Psalms 56:8.

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Exemplary conversion narratives repentance; hearken then, O my soul, to that sweet voice of mercy, saying, Come unto me all ye that are weary and heavy laden, and I will ease you, Matthew 11:28. [p. 30] […] Soul: O I am troubled, I am troubled, Lord bathe me in that fountain set open for sin and for uncleanness, then shall I be whiter than snow; my heart is oppressed, O set me on the rock that is higher than I,35 so shall I overlook all impossibilities, and fly to thee upon eagles’ wings, when my faith is mounted,36 and my foundation is laid on the rock at thy right hand. Consolation: Oh happy are those wounds, by which issues the purified corruption of sins, and by which enters perfect and sound health! And, O happy disquiet, which is seconded with the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, Philippians 4:7. And, O welcome sorrow, that causeth repentance not to be repented of, 2 Corinthians 7:10 (For know, it is the riches of the goodness of God that leadeth thee to repentance, Romans 2:4.) For thou wilt find joy even in these tears, and comfort in this grief; this being the sorrow that must pass for current,37 and these the tears that God will wipe away; therefore when thou hast laid open thy disease before the great and wise Physician, he will administer spiritual Physic, even the precious blood of his beloved Son, the virtue of it being such, that one drop rightly applied, is sufficient to cure the wounds of a world of souls; nay, he will not only cure thee, but he will also crown thee, and make thee partaker of the glory which his Father hath given him, John 17:2. [pp. 35–6]

The Soul’s Confession. Soul: O that mine head were full of waters,38 and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night, for offending such a God of love:39 I have sinned, what shall I do now unto thee, O thou preserver of men?40 Woe unto me, for I have sinned, all the imaginations of the thoughts of my heart being evil continually. Behold I was shapen in

35 36 37 38 39 40

Psalms 61:2. Isaiah 40:31. Current: current time. Marginal note: Psalms 52:4. Marginal note: Jeremiah 9:1. Marginal note: Job 7:20, Lamentations 5:16.

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Elizabeth Major iniquity,41 and in sin did my mother conceive me,42 that original sin being it, that hath made by nature odious unto thee a pure God, and that is the root from which these evil branches, actual sins spring, which makes me to be as an unclean thing. […] therefore let mine eyes cast out repenting tears and my eyelids gush out as water:43 For who can tell whether God will (here)44 have mercy on the remnant of my days; and in wrath remember mercy,45 so that his hand may not be on me for my destruction; but because I have provoked my God, and displeased him that made me, and have forgotten him that created me, even the everlasting God, and grieved him that nourished me. [pp. 39–40] […] Soul: I have sinned against Heaven, and before thee, and I am no more worthy to be called thine;46 for which (O righteous Father) of thy Commandments have I not wilfully broken: I confess, I should have given unto thee the true God, an undivided heart, but alas it hath been divided. [p. 41] […] Soul: But O my dear Saviour, who are a guider of the blind, a Light to them which are in darkness, an Instructor of them which lack discretion, and a Teacher of the unlearned: To thee, to thee I that lack wisdom do come, humbly asking it of thee the all-wise God,47 beseeching thee to enlighten my understanding, to inform my judgement, and to make me wise in thy wisdom (and strong in thy strength) so that I may know thee, and be known of thee in that Son of thy love, for whom assuredly I should think all things [but] loss for that excellent knowledge sake of Christ Jesus my Lord:48 O certainly, did I but truly know that gift of (thine O God) Christ Jesus,49 my soul would give thee no rest, until thou wert pleased to give me of that water of life, to refresh and make fruitful my dry and barren

41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

Marginal note: Genesis 6:5. Marginal note: Psalms 52:5. Marginal note: Jeremiah 9:18. Marginal note: 2 Samuel 12:22. Marginal note: Habakkuk 3:2. Marginal note: Luke 15:21. Marginal note: James 1:5. Marginal note: Philippians 3:8. The gift of God’s son, Jesus Christ, redeemed mankind by his death on the cross.

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Exemplary conversion narratives soul; nay, shouldst thou seem to neglect me, and not to answer, yet grant that I, lying at the feet of thy Majesty, may cry in faith, Have mercy on me, O Lord. [p. 50] […] Soul: O Lord, I that of sinners am the chief, do humbly beg of thee to behold me in mercy,50 so that I may as the elect of God,51 holy and beloved, put on the bowels of mercy, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, and long-suffering, continually endeavouring to serve thee with all humility.52 [p. 53] […] Soul: I desire every moment to acknowledge my thankfulness unto thee a God of infinite love, and not only to speak thy praise, or here to write them, but that they may be so engraven in my heart, as never to be defaced, nor so much as shadowed or eclipsed by the darkest cloud of affliction, be it what thou please; but that I may look through them all at what I have deserved, and at that inexpressible love of Christ Jesus; and let that love constrain me to love thee above all things, giving thee thy own place in my heart, there to reign as Lord and King, commanding in it what may be most for thy own glory, beseeching thee to give me thy own grace, so that I may love and delight only in the obeying of thy commands, and no more grieve thy holy Spirit as I have done, nor provoke thee any longer by my ungratefulness, through which sin I have much offended thee. [p. 54] […] Soul: But above all, for that Son of thy mercy Christ Jesus, in whom only is my hope of pardon for these and all other my sins, for they are great and many, and I a poor creature not having one mite53 toward the payment of this great sum; for the leprosy of sin hath spread over all my actions; and hath made myself and them odious to thee a pure God. Therefore naked54 do I come unto thee, O my dear Saviour,55 50 Marginal note: Psalms 9:22 and 10:17. 51 Marginal note: Philippians 2:8. 52 Marginal note: Colossians 3:2. 53 Mite: small thing. 54 Naked: a soul that is not metaphorically dressed in faith. She seeks to put on ‘robes of righteousness’ through her conversion. 55 Marginal note: Hebrews 7:22.

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Elizabeth Major which are my surety, and on whom help is laid,56 because mighty and able to pay, beseeching thee to clothe me with thy rich robes of righteousness, and to cleanse my blood that is not yet cleansed;57 and with thy sacred oil to cleanse sin’s filthy rust, and to make fair that image of thine that is deformed, nay Lord, defaced through sin. [pp. 54–5] […] Soul: For though I am afflicted on every side,58 yet am I not in distress; though I doubt, yet I despair not; if persecuted, yet not forsaken; and though cast down, yet I perish not; and if the outward man59 should perish, yet O holy Father, renew daily the inward man, so that I may count my afflictions here, which are but for a moment, light, waiting with faith and patience, for that most excellent and eternal weight of glory; not looking on the things that are seen which are temporal, but on the things that are not seen, which are eternal.   And though there was a time when I was without Christ, having no right or title to the Commonwealth of Israel, but was a stranger from the Covenants of Promise,60 and had no hope, and were without God in the world, but now in Christ Jesus; I which was once far off (I beseech thee each day) to make nearer by the Blood of Christ, for he is my peace, and he is able only to make of twain, one new man in himself, that he might reconcile both unto God in one body by his cross: O then I humbly entreat thee, according to the riches of thy glory, to strengthen me by thy Spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in my heart by faith,61 that I may be filled with the knowledge of his will, in all wisdom and spiritual understanding, that I might walk worthy of the Lord, and please him in all things; being fruitful in all good works, and increasing in the knowledge of God, strengthened with all might through his glorious power, unto all patience and long suffering, with joyfulness. [pp. 61–2] […] Soul: Now you have showed to me the vanity of the Creature, and proved that there is no true content but in the arms of a Christ, which I see clearly 56 Marginal note: Psalms 89:19. 57 Marginal note: Joel 3:21. 58 Marginal note: 2 Corinthians 4:8–9, 16–18. 59 Outward: the body; inward: the soul. 60 Covenants of Promise: Christ redeemed humanity from sin. This refers to a Ephesians 2:11–13: ‘brought near by his blood’. 61 Marginal note: Ephesians 3:16–17.

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Exemplary conversion narratives to be a truth: I beseech you likewise to show me something concerning the time of trial, that so I might with the more hope and patience wait my appointed time here, until my change shall come. Consolation: To answer your desire in this, you must know, it is a great content to a sick patient, to be confident he is in the hand of a wise, able, and merciful Physician, he neither fears nor questions the mixing of his potions: So you, when you shall rightly consider that you are in the hands of your wise and merciful Maker, who will not let you faint away, in the long and strong workings of afflictions, it will comfort you, for he knows well, (and needs not thy information) the disposition and constitution both of soul and body, what quantity of prosperity thou art able to digest without surfeiting, and what weight of affliction thou canst bear without sinking; for he knoweth whereof we be made, he remembereth we are but dust, Psalms 103:14. Therefore let him do what seemeth good, and if afflictions break in upon thee with violence, & one messenger of sad tidings backing another as Job’s did, yet imitate him, who upon the loss of all, silences all passions with, The Lord hath given, and the Lord hath taken, Blessed be the name of the Lord:62 Presume not thou then to mix thy own portion,63 lest God in wrath make thee drink it; for though in the mouth it may be sweet as honey, yet in the belly it may cause bitterness, and thou with the Israelites have just cause to proclaim thy self but an ill chooser: Believe it, he will not put in one bitter ingredient more than is useful, neither shall it work a minute longer than the disease requires; therefore limit not the holy One: it may be the afflictions designed for thee in the high Court of Heaven. [p. 134–5] […] Consolation: Affliction to the soul, is like Physic to the body, and we see some bodies require a constant course of Physic, or else they are laid up with diseases: Some again expect it every Spring and Fall, or else it is supposed they are not able to continue: and some pass from the womb to the grave with a very small portion. 62 Job 1:21. Job was a wealthy man with a happy family, whose faith was tested by God. Although Job lost everything, he did not blame God for this, but claimed that it was God’s prerogative to give and to take away. Like many of the women in this anthology, Major considers Job’s behaviour exemplary. 63 If not a printer’s error, the slippage between ‘portion’ (the allotted life given to believers by God) or ‘potion’ (a concoction to cure) sums up Major’s belief that sufferings were part of spiritual refinement, in itself a kind of cure. In this part of the narrative, however, she advises against believers taking matters into their own hands: they should be in complete submission to God’s will.

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Elizabeth Major   So fares it with afflictions: as they are dispensed by a hand of providence, he setting the time, and ordering the portion according to the soul that is to have it. [p. 136] […] Consolation: If the heart be acted by love, it will set all the parts and faculties on work; as the feet to carry, the eyes to weep tears to wash his feet, the hair to serve as a towel to wipe them, the lips to kiss them, the hands to wash, wipe, and anoint them; and all this being done with great affection, is the thing eyed by Christ, and was by him accepted, commended, rewarded.64 [p. 141] […] Soul: O that I had wings like a Dove,65 then would fly away and be at rest, with the blessed to all eternity, where I should never act, see nor hear of sin more; for here I would, but cannot as I would, fly the corruption which is in the world through lust. [p. 148] […] Soul: O that these truths that you have gathered out of the Garden of holy Writ, and presented to me, might be as so many selected Flowers, not carelessly perused, and the practice not regarded, but bound up and tied together with the golden chain of faith; 66 Lord, plant them in my heart, that barren soil: Yet since my forfeiture of it, ’tis thy own by purchase, and a plot on which thou hast bestowed much labour. [p. 159] […] Soul: I appeal to thee, not only as thou art Lord of the purchase, but also as thou art husbandman to thy own purchased seed, beseeching thee to break up this fallow ground of my heart, and to gather out all the stones (for Lord, ’tis full) to plant it with thy best plants, and to command thy clouds 64 In Luke 7:37–50 a sinful woman is said to anoint Jesus with costly perfume, wash his feet with her hair and kiss his feet, receiving his forgiveness. Similar accounts appear in the other three Gospels, but in Luke’s the woman is specifically denoted as a sinner. 65 Psalms 55:6. The dove was a bird very common in Palestine, associated with purity and considered clean, hence it is used in sacrifices. The dove is also used as a symbol of the Holy Spirit. 66 The Puritan theologian William Perkins wrote The Golden Chain in 1597, which described the conversion process (through effectual calling, justification, sanctification and glorification in heaven) as a golden chain. See Introduction.

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Exemplary conversion narratives to rain a continued shower upon on it; and hedge it double, Lord, that it breaks not thy bounds, nor the Beasts of the forest break not into it: And build a Tower 67 in the midst of it for thyself to dwell in, and to steer the course of all things belonging to it.68   And Lord, though thou hast many seedsmen, many Pauls and Apollos, whose labours thou hast blest with a fruitful increase; yet the seed of grace is sown by no hand but thy own: O sow it, Lord plentifully in my heart, that it may make all other seed fruitful, and give a fragrant scent to all that springs from ground so blest.   O let not any of it fall by the way-side, lest that wicked one devour it; nor let no one stone be in this ground that it may take deep root, so that tribulation nor persecution might not cause swithering;69 neither let the thorny cares of this world choke any part of it, but let it be as seed sown in good ground, bringing forth good fruit,70 to thy glory, my eternal good, and the encouragement of others to seek to thee the true Husband-man. [pp. 159–60]

Sin and Mercy Briefly Discovered: Or, The Veil Taken a Little from Before Both. Together with the Author’s Accusation, Confession, and Belief. With Death’s Progress. And a Particular Application of the Book of Jona[h’]s (1656)71 Courteous Reader, The writing of these Lines, is to show the occasion of the ensuing discourse: therefore I shall declare the first of my going out into the world: I was, till the fifteenth or sixteenth year of my age, brought up by a godly and careful Father (my Mother being taken from me 67 Tower: it was believed that the soul was a temple of God (1 Corinthians 6:15–20). 68 This paragraph and the subsequent two draw heavily on Isaiah 5:1–7, the parable of God’s vineyard. 69 Swithering: faltering. 70 Mark 4:8. Major alludes to the parable of seeds falling on stony ground and so not growing. Only those which fell onto good ground sprang up and gave fruit. The verse demonstrates her belief in predestination as she compares God sowing seeds in his chosen people to this story. 71 This work is appended to Major’s Honey on the Rod and shares its 1656 publication date. It contains Major’s poetry.

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Elizabeth Major in my infancy) from whom I went to a great and honourable Family, where no vice I think was tolerated; and under a wise and virtuous Governess I lived near ten years, ’til God was pleased to visit me with lameness, by the taking of a great heat72 and cold; which weakness did not violently seize on me, but by degrees deprived me of my strength, and in a short time made me almost unable to go or help myself: Then was I forced to repair73 home to my Father again, where I was pursued with an inordinate desire of recovery; and having some money in my own hands, I endeavoured the accomplishing of that desire, without an humble and obedient submission to the will of God in it (and this, O this was my great evil) therefore he was pleased to let me take my course in the search of it, but blasted me in all I used, so that I spent all, and was much worse.74 Now it often happened in my resort to those that pretended skill in lameness (with whom I sometimes lodged) that they were such a people, as I did not know (by experience) had been in the world, virtue being at such a distance from them, and vice tolerated in their habitation, and such evils as I could not think had been in a Gospel-age. Therefore being returned home, where upon serious consideration I saw my folly, and found that I had lost much time, in which I had offended God, and deprived myself of that little health I enjoyed, spent my money, and only gaining a sight and knowledge of those things, I humbly desire my soul may ever abhor; therefore I had no rest in me, till I had showed my indignation against what so much offended me. Now for my writing against some sins, know (they were the fruits of some sad hours) in the particularising of some, all are included: But it may be some will say, There are sins named, that your blushing Sex should want75 confidence to mention.76 To this I answer, Sure I am, that fewer ever writ against them, than committed them: O I fear, I fear there is no sin under the Sun, but someone or other of my Sex have been stained with the guilt of it (I wish my judgement failed in this); therefore I desire to put on a holy confidence, and not to blush to declare the hatred of my soul against any of them. 72 Great heat: fever. 73 To repair: to go. 74 This account of Major’s early life maps onto her address to the reader in Honey on the Rod, where she compares herself to the wasteful prodigal son. Here she berates herself for spending money to find a cure for her lameness. 75 Want: lack. 76 Major’s Sin and Mercy Briefly Discovered includes several poems on particular sins, including pride caused by beauty, immodesty, drunkenness and covetousness, which she thought would bring her criticism because they were not acceptable subjects for women’s verse.

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Exemplary conversion narratives For when I had in my thoughts in some measure unmasked sin, and saw the ugly deformity of it, and how there was no sin but might in some kind be owned by me, the seed of all by nature being in me, free grace only making the difference; I thought I might, without offence to any, show how much I abhor the things I have seen and heard to be acted under the sun. And now to you, O my friends, I present these poor and undressed lines, being as they came into the world, I not finding any hand to help me to put it into a better dress than what it brought with it. For though I was not ambitious of a beautiful babe,77 yet I confess I would gladly have had it appear comely; therefore where you find it harsh or uneven, know, it should not have come abroad so,78 had not my ignorance to find the fault been the cause of it. Yet I beseech you, though faulty, to accept it, hoping that in it you shall find truth and plainness; so that if it do no good in the world, yet it will do no hurt, still serving me here as my lesson to learn and practise, till summoned by death; and then I shall leave it as a Legacy to my friends, whose Prayers I beg, and shall by the help of my Saviour return mine for them. Elizabeth Major [h2–4]

[From] On Pride caused by Wisdom Consolation:

What will our rich, wise Politicians say, When all their Hell-fetched wisdom faileth, nay, Shall never fail to ’tice them still along, To hear their doom, Depart from me, be gone, I know you not, you fools, my love I say You sold, for naught, depart, depart away? They’ll curse the wisdom then that made them lay Their souls at stake, nay curse the very day They their own counsel took, in which they toil Their souls to ruin, and of true joy beguile. [p. 172]

77 Beautiful babe: again, Major refers to the tradition of women writers often considering their books and writings as their children. 78 Abroad: outside, in public view.

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Elizabeth Major The Author’s Prayer:79 O my blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, have mercy on thy poor handmaid, Elizabeth Major. O My Blessed Lord And Saviour Jesus Christ Have Mercy On Thy Poor, Handmaid

Gracious God, inhabiting Blest redeemer, that hast me with hope, a kingdom to of thy mercy give an humble grant I pray, I may my life ’tis thou that canst my soul with grace my guilty soul promised grace, & thou, O Lord, art care of me, deal out with thine own to my poor soul, thou canst com- me a shower of grace, sin to praise to sing, my tongue shall be Lord I am, with fear and care to thee I am, in thee I’ll

E  ternity, L  ovingly I  nherit, S  pirit, A  mend: B  friend. E  ndue T  rue; H  and M   and A  void, I  mployed: O  ppressed, R  est. [p. 191]

[From] The Author’s Belief Soul:

For I confess a will I have, ’tis true, But ’tis for evil, no good that I can do: When I would good, then evil shows his face, The good I leave, the evil I embrace. [p. 198]

79 Forming acrostics and anagrams from names was undertaken to gain clues about whether believers were among the elect or damned. Major’s fourteen-letter name also lends itself to the sonnet form. Spelling was much more varied in the early modern period, so Major spelt her name ‘Elizabeth’ and ‘Elisabeth’ interchangeably, with the obvious benefit of ‘s’ for writing an acrostic poem. The letters ‘i’ and ‘j’ were also interchangeable when they appeared in the middle of words like ‘Major’.

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Exemplary conversion narratives Elizabeth Major. Anagram: O I am a blest Heir What? an Heir and blest, my soul! what honour’s here To a poor subject! Draw near my soul, draw near With Songs of Praise, let low born thoughts expire, Let love-inflaméd zeal break out as fire Into the praises of the King of Kings, Soar thou above these low inferior things: Try how the wings of faith will rise above The towering Eagle, or the mounting Dove: What? An Heir and blest! Doth not this echo ring, Shall I do ill, and Heir to such a King? O no, assist me, Lord, then shall I fly Sin’s soiléd ways, and to myself shall die; But live to thee, in whom I’m Heir and blest, till thou transport me to thy eternal rest. [p. 201]

On the Author’s Name E  ternal God, open my blinded eyes, L  ighten my sadded heart that in me lies: I  ncrease thy grace in me, endear my heart, S  aviour, to thee, by faith to have a part A  bove with thee in glory, there to shine, B  elovéd with that lasting love of thine; E  vil is my life, I walk in earthen ways, T  each me thy path, in it to spend my days; H  ear me in him on whom hope’s Anchor stays. M  ercy, O Saviour, teach me to ask aright, A  nd then for comfort, ’tis thy chief delight: I  beg and faint, I fear and hope again, O  Lord, I see all self, and earth is vain, R  enouncing all, on thee Lord, I remain. [p. 212]

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3 Gertrude More

Gertrude More (1606–33) was a Catholic nun who spent most of her life in exile in Cambrai, at Our Lady of Comfort convent, which was protected by Queen Henrietta Maria (who was also a Catholic).1 More became a spiritual guide for her sisters. The modern editor of her biography, which was originally written by her supervisor, the Venerable Father Augustine Baker, explains that ‘Dame Gertrude […] appears to have been a tower of strength to her Sisters, encouraging them by her cheerful confidence in God and by solid arguments’.2 This strength and devotion to God More partly owed to her upbringing. Born into a devout Catholic family (her great-great-grandfather was Sir Thomas More), More’s adherence to her faith was constantly cultivated. As Baker claims, Dame More ‘had a strong propensity towards God, partly the result of grace, and partly a natural endowment in which […] the intellective soul in some degree at least appeared to partake’.3 As a Catholic, More’s work places greater emphasis on the practice of achieving eternal life or grace by good works, as opposed to the Protestant belief in ‘limited atonement’ – that eternal life was given only to an elect few, predetermined by God. More’s volumes, which are mostly prose but with several poems, demonstrate her piety and instruct all believers to engage in regular spiritual practices. Two works – The Holy Practises of a Devine Lover or the Sainctly Ideots Devotions (1657) and The Spiritual Exercises of the Most Vertuous and Religious D. Gertrude More (1658) – were published in Paris. More declares that she wrote only for her own benefit and the purpose of her 1 Dorothy L. Latz, ‘Glow-Warm Light’: Writings of 17th Century English Recusant Women from Original Manuscripts (Salzburg: Salzburg University Press, 1989), p. 30. 2 Augustine Baker, The Inner Life of Dame Gertrude More, ed. Dom Benedict Weld-Blundell (London: R. & T. Washbourne, 1856), p. xxiv. 3 Ibid., p. 7.

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Exemplary conversion narratives works was to console her when she was in doubt, since she implies that she was divinely inspired, ‘in light’, while writing her volumes. While recognising the necessity of her supervisor’s censuring of her, More also shows her willingness to do that in her preface to The Spiritual Exercises by saying: ‘I will not conceal the very secrets of my heart much less this which I have written to lie by me, wherein there may be what they mislike and correct, to which I shall most willingly submit myself’ (p. 7). The volumes promote free conscience and simplicity as well as total devotion of the agape.4 In her volume of prose and poetry, the writer repeatedly portrays her soul as female, as do other the women in the works collected in this anthology, and claims that she is ‘espoused unto Him [Christ] by Faith, endowed with the Holy Ghost, adorned with virtues, esteemed equal with the Angels’ (p. 120). Nobody else can provide her with this divine ecstasy, since her ‘Heart longeth after thee [God], and with none but thee Alone can it be satisfied’ (p. 152). More’s writings use various biblical images to explore the relationship between the body, mind, and spirit. She participates in a mystical tradition based on the biblical Song of Songs; Christ becomes her divine lover, and this state is described using corporeal images. Her writing abounds with images of piercing, fiery darts, melting hearts and ravishing sensations, implying her intimate union with God. As Dorothy L. Latz has pointed out, More’s soul is ‘lost in Divine Love, and is in direct and loving union with Infinite Reality’.5 She also presents herself as a spiritual leader whose edifications are set out as an example to follow. For instance, among many spiritual directions in The Holy Practises of a Devine Lover or the Sainctly Ideots Devotions, More teaches that ‘it will suffice to exercise and use daily two mental exercises, to wit, the one on the morning, the other at the most convenient time in the evening’ (p. 30). These ‘Devotions’ aim to exercise the spirit and the mind (p. 27). The body, on the other hand, is considered as an enclosure for them, as More says: ‘I cannot enjoy, till my soul be set free from this corruptible flesh’.6 In a similar manner to other religious writers discussed in this collection, More desires to break free from the corrupted human body so that she can join her mystical spouse in a heavenly mansion. Even

4 Latz, ‘Glow-Warm Light’, p. 24. Latz argues that More’s writing is similar to literary works by St John of the Cross as well as St Teresa of Avila in terms of the symbols of ‘light and darkness, splendour and fire’ (p. 35). These symbols are also implemented in Richard Crashaw’s poetry. Since they are all Catholics, it is their faith that might be the reason for this similarity. 5 Ibid., p. 34. 6 Gertrude More, The Spiritual Exercises of the Most Vertuous and Religious D. Gertrude More (Paris: Lewis De La Fosse, 1657), p. 154.

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Gertrude More though she harshly discredits the body as corrupt, she acknowledges that its weaknesses and ailments are a means of perfecting her humility. They are necessary to establish the connection with the divine and prepare her body to become God’s dwelling place. According to More, abandoning the sinful body becomes a way of gaining the celestial raiment and emanating inner light, the images very often used in devotional writings as a sign of a connection with the Almighty. She also uses in her writings the act of forgiving Mary Magdalene’s sins as a consolation and hope for those who consider themselves sinners, including herself.

Note on the text The source texts for the extracts below are The Holy Practises of a Devine Lover or the Sainctly Ideots Devotions (Paris: Lewis De La Fosse, 1657) and The Spiritual Exercises of the Most Vertuous and Religious D. Gertrude More of the Holy Order of S. Bennet and English Congregation of our Ladies of Comfort in Cambray (Paris: Lewis De La Fosse, 1658). Since Gertrude More was a Catholic, her writings reference the Douay-Rheims Bible, to which all footnotes also refer.

Further reading Augustine Baker, The Inner Life of Dame Gertrude More, ed. Dom Benedict WeldBlundell (London: R. & T. Washbourne, 1856) Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England, 1500–1720 (London: Routledge, 1993) Dorothy L. Latz, ed., ‘Glow-Warm Light’: Writings of 17th Century English Recusant Women from Original Manuscripts (Salzburg: Salzburg University Press, 1989) Dom Benedict Weld-Blundell, ed., The Inner Life and Writings of Dame Gertrude More (London: R. & T. Washbourne, 1910)

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Exemplary conversion narratives

The Holy Practises of a Devine Lover or the Sainctly Ideots Devotions (1657) The Preface. To my most dearly beloved Friends in Christ Jesus I have according to your holy injunction, & desire (willing to communicate all Good to others) published those directions, & exercises through which by true practice (the only means, for simple reading only availeth nothing at all) you have reapt such great Comfort, & Benefit: that you seem to cry out with the Royal Prophet. Come and hear all ye that fear God, and I will declare to you what He hath done for my soul.7 That He may do the like for yours by the same means you practising these directions, & Exercises. This I know you say dear Friends, and from your heart wish the same Spiritual profit to all as to yourselves. Capiat qui capere potest.8 Let the capable & well disposed make use of them. It is not needful to name you to whom I speak this: for upon these very words I know your hearts are burning within you. My sheep hear my voice, & those who are mine know me.9 I am the poor unprofitable servant not so much as a voice sounding of the great & chief Shepherd; & you are his people, & the sheep of his pasture,10 yea I hope the choice of His flock feeding, & grazing in the pleasant deserts of internal Recollection guided by the sweet grace of His Holy Spirit the sole secure Director. I need say no more but that I am sure you rejoice for the voice of Him that speaketh11 and declareth these things to you, & all other good people: and that I have done so, is my joy also being hereby discharged of my Obligation to you and all: And our joy I hope none shall take from us being the best part,12 and forever permanent. Dear friends I am yours the more in time by how much less outwardly expressed, living with you (I trust in God) a life hidden with Christ in God.13 [pp. 3–5] […]

  7 Marginal note: Psalms 65:16.   8 Latin for the latter part of Matthew 19:12: ‘He that can take, let him take it’. More translates this in her next sentence. The scriptural reference is noted in the margin.   9 Marginal note: Luke 24:32 and John 10:14. 10 Marginal note: Psalms 94:7. 11 Marginal note: John 3:29. 12 Marginal note: Luke 19:42. 13 Marginal note: Colossians 3:3.

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Gertrude More The III Exercise 1. My feet have been swift to evil, and mine eyes have been dissolute to Vanity, & mine ears have been always open to trifles, and toys. 2. My understanding which should have contemplated thy Beauty, and have meditated both day and night on thy Commandments hath considered transitory toys, and meditated day and night how to transgress thy said Commandments. 3. My will was by thee invited to the Love of celestial delights and delicacies, but I preferred the earth before heaven. 4. I have spread my Arms which thou hast consecrated to thy love to embrace, and hug the filthy Love of Creatures. 5. This is O Lord the reward, this is the Fruit which I, thy Creature have yielded. 6. Alas. What can I a wretch answer if thou entrust with me into Judgement, and wilt say; I have planted thee a chosen vineyard all true seed, how then O strange vineyard art thou turned in my sight into that which is depraved. [pp. 46–7] […]

The XII Exercise 1. Hail sweet Jesus, Praise, Honour, and Glory be to thee O Christ: Who by thy silence condemning Herod’s vain desire wouldst not without good cause, and for a good end delight his curious eyes by working a Miracle. […] 12. O that I may prefer nothing before thee, or change thee for any Thing! 13. O that I could esteem all things as dung, and filth; to the end I may gain, and esteem thee! 14. Grant O Lord that the blot of envy may never stain my soul. 15. Hail sweet Jesus, who being stripped naked in the palace, and bound to a pillar didst suffer thy most naked, and immaculate flesh to be rent with most cruel scourges; that with thy sores thou mighst heal our wounds. 16. O amiable Jesus; I make choice of thee covered with stripes for the spouse of my soul! 85

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Exemplary conversion narratives 17. Desiring to be inflamed, and burned with the Fire of thy most sweet love. 18. Strip my heart naked I beseech thee from all indecent cogitations. 19. Grant that I may now patiently suffer the scourges of thy Fatherly correction. Amen. [pp. 260–3]

The Spiritual Exercises of the Most Vertuous and Religious D. Gertrude More of the Holy Order of S. Bennet and English Congregation of our Ladies of Comfort in Cambray (1658) To the R[everend] Mother. The R. Mother Bridget More14 of Saint Peter and Saint Paul most worthy Prioress of the English Benedictine Nuns of our Lady of Hope in Paris. Reverend Mother, This devout Book comes to you of right, being your natural sister’s excellent Goods, and there is no other heir left to it but your deserving self, besides I know few or none do any way pretend to it, but you and your Religious flock who exactly trace by true practice (O Practice, divine practice the only means) the same holy paths this book treats of. Take and accept of it therefore R. Mother: I guess I need not much invite you, for I dare say it will be most dear to you, and most highly esteemed by you, and yours. If it chance to fall into the hands of any such as may reject; or cry it down: (as some few did the Idiot’s Devotions of the same Spirit lately set forth)15 it will (as that did) but receive the greater lustre thereby, and be more highly prized, by how much it may be misprized by such sensual persons as relish not the Spirit of God, or whose vain and flashing wits as it were spurn at the Divine, and true heavenly Wisdom.16 That it hath some hands set in the margin, and

14 Bridget More: Gertrude More’s younger sister, who joined the convent in 1629. 15 Idiot: ignorant, without learning; also can refer to a lay person. More refers to her other published work: The Holy Practises of a Devine Lover or the Sainctly Ideots Devotions (1657). 16 To spurn at: to strike at.

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Gertrude More divers characters in many places to point out certain matters and make them more remarkable, is not but that in a manner every line and syllable is most remarkable and worthy to be observed. And that some places of Scripture are quoted in the margin, and not all, is because those be the more clear plain and unmingled texts, though the whole Book hath nothing in it almost bar Scripture. And if there be somewhat in the latter end very same with what is said in the preface, it will not much annoy since good advice cannot be too often repeated. I will say nothing of the admirable graces and gifts of the Author (let the Book speak them) because I should seem thereby to praise, and extol you (her natural Sister, and imbued with same natural and supernatural gifts) than which nothing would be more ungrateful and distasteful unto you. Howsoever, R. Mother give me leave to invite and incite you and your Holy Company to go on cheerfully and courageously in these sacred and secret Paths of Divine Love. With your Beauty and Fairness intend, proceed prosperously and reign.17 Let the wise men, or rather wits of the world laugh at you. They senseless think your life Madness, and your ways dishonourable.18 Be not I say dismayed. For your Truth, Mildness, Justice; and your Right hand (which is your Spiritual Prayer) will marvellously conduct you.19 So desirous to be partaker of your holy Prayers, and committing you to the Divine Protection, I rest ever R. Mother, Your most humble servant and faithful friend in our Lord. F. G.20 [pp. 3–6]

17 Psalms 45:4. 18 Wisdom of Solomon 5:4. 19 Psalms 45:4. 20 Francis Gage (1621–82): Roman Catholic priest, who was a student at the English College at Douai from 1630 to 1641, and later studied in Paris. He is believed to be the editor of More’s writings. See Thompson Cooper, ‘Gage, Francis (1621–1682)’, rev. D. Milburn, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)

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Exemplary conversion narratives This Devout Soul’s Advertisement to the Reader. With an Apology for herself, and her spiritual Guide, and Director the V. F. 21 Augustine Baker. Wherein is excellently described a true internal, contemplative Spiritual life, and the manner how to live happily in it, with right, and true Obedience to God and man. It may seem very strange (and that very justly) that I should write what here I have written; But when I have here declared my reason for it, I may perhaps pass with this censure only of being a little presumptuous. Yet God (who is my witness in all, and my desire above all) knoweth upon what grounds I have done it; And that it is but for mine own private comfort and help, and to be seen by no other, but against my will, my superiors only excepted, from whom (as they shall require) I will not conceal the very secrets of my heart much less this which I have written to lie by me, wherein there may be what they may mislike and correct, to which I shall most willingly submit myself. Yea and though it seem to me to be a great help to me to have that which I have writ in more light to read when I am either in obscurity of temptation, or other bodily indisposition to which I may be often incident.22 Yet I will suppress it at their command and good pleasure, and put the want thereof willingly to the hazard: out of confidence in the assistance of God, who is a lover,23 and rewarder of Obedience. Which virtue (howsoever it may be otherwise thought) I honour from my heart, and believe verily that nothing that I do which doth not partake of that is of any regard at all, with God. This I have thus affirmed because he who hath been my Master, 24 and Father in a spiritual life: and hath brought me into a course, which much satisfieth my soul, and conscience between me and God: (It tending to nothing but to love God by seeking him above Graces and Gifts:25 And by withdrawing all inordinate affection from all created things to become free to love and praise God in as pure and perfect a manner, as this life will admit. And also to true submission, and subjection of myself for God to whomsoever he puts over me in this life, with as great a contempt of myself as my frailty can reach unto.) [pp. 7–9] 21 V. F.: Venerable Father. 22 Incident: liable. 23 Lover: the Song of Songs contains the story of two lovers that is a metaphor for the relationship between Christ and his Church, and the relationship is mirrored in many seventeenth-century devotional writings. 24 Marginal note: V. F. Aug. Baker. 25 Graces and Gifts: outward appearance and worldly, material gifts.

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Gertrude More […] It sufficeth not for the soul that there is in God himself (whom the soul seeketh after) Simplicity, or Unity:26 but there must also be all possible Simplicity in the soul herself, for the making her sit to treat with God, and thereupon become united to him. The more simple or one that the soul is (which is that the more she is free and rid of all thoughts of creatures which cause multiplicity) the liker is she to God who is simplicity itself, & the more apt, and worthy to become united to Him. And therefore all the cunning, and industry of a spiritual master should ever be by all lawful means to rid the soul of all multiplicity encumbrances, blocks, and all other things that are enemies to the foresaid Simplicity in soul. And indeed every image of a created thing is an impediment to the said simplicity; And therefore is to be rejected at such time as the soul is in case to apply itself immediately to God. He that is a true spiritual Master will in such a case take great heed how he lay anything on the soul lest it cause the foresaid impediment. Every soul of her own nature is apt to contract multiplicity, and impediments enough: and if she have withal a Master to devise, and lay more on her, how can she be but held back, and be indisposed for the said perfect immediate treaty with God. And one only impediment is impediment enough, and hinders all. The spirit of Simplicity doth bring, and cause much Peace in the soul for tending wholly towards that one thing which is only necessary;27 It maketh the soul as insensible as it can towards all other things digesting and passing over with patience, unkindness & injuries, whereby her life becometh properly a life of Patience. Also as this simplicity is grounded upon plain, and simple instructions, so is it, and must it withal be as well founded upon simple, and plain dealing with God, and Man. Simply intending God and avoiding all double dealing, and all undue intention. A true spiritual life should be one long continued thread lasting from the time of his conversion to the end of his life. Saint Paul reprehendeth those who are ever learning, and never come to the perfection of knowledge.28 Such are they who yielding to temptations lose their

26 Simplicity: 2 Corinthians 1:12 advocates ‘simplicity of heart’ rather than ‘carnal wisdom’. More writes that God’s grace gives her all the wisdom she needs, and a good spiritual master would nurture this. 27 Luke 10:42. More here alludes to Christ’s encounter with Mary and Martha, where he praises Mary for her simplicity in sitting at his feet and listening to his word rather than Martha, who busies herself with housework. 28 2 Timothy 3:7.

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Exemplary conversion narratives supernatural light, and fall into a state of less light which is more natural than supernatural and therefore is but darkness in comparison of the other light, and always is deceitful and erroneous as to the finding of the right way towards God. Whereas the other said internal light within then proceeded from a Superior cause or gift that is mere supernatural.

The things absolutely necessary for those who shall begin, and prosper in a true spiritual course are these that follow. 1. Instructions proper for a contemplative life. 2. Secondly, an aptness to understand, and practise the said instructions aright. 3. Thirdly, a great courage to withstand all temptations come they from within, or without that might draw her into multiplicity from simplicity: & especially fear which soon draweth one into the most pestilent multiplicity that is maketh one more blind every day than other; and consequently into more diffidence, whereby they are made almost wholly incapable of conversing with God,29 unless God show them their errors, and they begin again: which is a hard matter to do, if a soul have once lost her light:30 which God I beseech him deliver all capable souls from doing. For it is the greatest ingratitude that can be offered to God, and none but God can tell the miseries, perplexities, and difficulties that attend on such a soul all the days of her life, as Saint Angela31 doth testify with terrible words. 4. Fourthly there is necessary in the soul a good, and right judgment for the understanding of things aright. For else the soul will erroneously understand all things though never so plain. The more she knows the further she is to seek, and the more errors she falleth into.

29 Conversing with God: praying. 30 Job 33:28–30. More believes that corrupted souls are not able to see the light of God. 31 Saint Angela: a Catholic nun born in 1474 in Grezze, in Italy. Angela was very religious from a young age. Her sister, father and mother died when she was very young and she experienced many supernatural visions. For example, she saw a troop of angels and a ladder stretching from the sky to the earth. The visions were accompanied by a voice that ordered Angela to set up a New Order of Women, which she eventually did many years later: she established the Ursulines in 1534. In the meantime, Angela travelled to many holy places such as Palestine and Jerusalem, and she also lost her sight temporarily, possibly due to her poor diet as part of her penitence. She was known for taking care of the poor and sick in various hospitals in Italy and for providing spiritual advice. She died in 1540. See Philip Carman, Saint Angela: The Life of the Foundress of the Ursulines (New York: Farrar and Straus, 1900).

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Gertrude More And better it were if such souls could be known (which is almost impossible till they have had some knowledge of a spiritual life: for many times they seem to have a greater aptness than the most capable souls, and a greater inclination towards God than others; and yet run into error, and are in danger (do what they can, that have the care of them) (to break their brains, or overthrow their bodies) that they never had spiritual instructions further than for the Active life. 5. Fifthly, a great capacity of tending towards God by the exercise of the will: which being prosecuted together with true mortification of themselves will bring, saith Blosius,32 to a mystic Union,33 and perfection in time convenient. Of those that have all these conditions there are yet great difference: for some have more aptness, and find less impediments than others, and some have more light, and other less, as it pleaseth God. Yet those that are most humble, and faithful to him though they seem less clear are the most pleasing to God, who be blessed by all. Amen. The Observing of the divine call, which indeed should be, and is the very life of a spiritual life, Is by most spiritual Masters nowadays turned into a scorn, or scoff. And therefore no marvel that true spirituality should in these days be so rare, and almost unknown. Nay if a soul give but herself to prayer she shall have an hundred enemies one objecting against one point, another against another of her proceedings. Everyone (according to their spirit, and humour) desiring to reform her in they know not what themselves; which if she be moved with, no other effect is like to come of it, than happened to the Painter who altered his work so long, and often that at last it had neither form nor fashion; And all other that had procured this alteration in the picture (which at first was a very good one) called the workman fool for his labour. The Application whereof is very plain and proper to our purpose. 1. First. There is difference between Unity and Union: for as Unity is but one thing, so union is a coupling together at last of two things.

32 Blosius: Francois-Louis de Blois (or Blosius) (1506–66). An abbot of the Benedictine monastery of Liesse, near Avesnes, in Hainaut, famous for his prudence, wisdom and devotion to God. 33 Mystic Union: mystical union; again, refers to relationship between the beloved and love pictured in the Song of Songs. Here More refers to chapter XI, ‘Mystical Union with God’ (pp. 185–91), of the devotional writings of Louis of Blois. See John Edward Bowden, ed., Spiritual Works of Louis of Blois: Abbot of Liesse (London: R. T. Washbourne, 1903).

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Exemplary conversion narratives 2. Secondly, simplicity is a singleness, or being alone, and simple is single, that is a thing alone. And therefore simple, or single and one or simplicity, and unity is but the self same thing. 3. Thirdly, multiplicity is a many manifoldness of things, and two, or more divers things do make a multiplicity; but one thing, & less than two will not make a multiplicity, God and a creature both thought of together as distinct things are a multiplicity: not because the apprehension of God being apprehended but according to Faith but because of the thinking of the creature not as in God (for then it would cause not multiplicity) is a thing distinct from God; and a creature alone thought of without any apprehension withal of God if it be not to be termed multiplicity (which it is in the takings of mystic Authors) yet is it not most certainly the simplicity in soul that is required for union with God? 4. Fourthly, God is but one thing, or an Unity, simplicity, or a singleness. For though all things, and all diversity of things be indeed in God; yet they are all of them but one thing in him. Yea whatsoever thing, or things be in him they are God himself. God was, and is that one thing (which our Saviour defending S. Mary Magdalene said to be) only necessary.34 The imperfect Contemplative spirits, who commonly in their external business are in their interior full of multiplicity; do yet for all that when their business are laid aside, and they betake themselves to their recollection at the season proper for it, (in regard they have as it were a natural, and habitual propension towards God, and his immediate presence with a loathing, or at least neglect, or disesteem of all creatures as to any affection to them) easily surmount all multiplicity of images that could be occasioned by their precedent employments, wherein their souls had never fixed their love: as who were not, nor could be satisfied, or much delighted with them. [pp. 33–40] […] Those souls who are apt to ask questions though they be never so quiet, devout innocent natures, or have never so much wit, and judgement they will never prosper in a contemplative course, and in those instructions. And therefore will do well, and much better to take the ordinary instructions of these days: and it were well if such souls never heard nor read contemplative books, and instructions; because they misunderstanding them will make both themselves, and others also 34 Luke 10:42. See note 27. More believes Mary in this passage is Mary Magdalene.

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Gertrude More with them, to lay the defect which was only in them upon the unfitness of the instruction for woman: for it will seem to them that they cannot possibly be practised by women without perils, and dangers unspeakable: which wrong done to souls put out of their way by this means (who would have happily prospered therein) redoundeth to the dishonour of Almighty God. But yet as it seems to them that they cannot be practised without great danger: So those on the contrary who are fit, and capable for these ways see and experience how little peril there is in them: for can a soul be too humble, and love God too well? No certainly. And this is all the course of this internal life, and to this only it tends, to love God, and to humble ourselves. [pp. 60–1] […] And the longer, and more faithfully a soul hath served our Lord the clearer doth it appear to her, that whatsoever is well done by her it is so wholly to be attributed to God, that she deserves most just punishment if she take any part of it to herself; or presume by what she hath done by his power, to be able to endure the least cross that can befall her of her own self. [pp. 87–8] […] And reason I had having so many occasions to try me within and without, and to put me into perplexity, and fear. For one in an eminent place did labour by his objections to divert me though not with ill intention, but out of a pretence of putting me into a course more proper for me, as for example, because I was full of imperfections he pretended that contemplative instructions were no way proper for me, and that I took too much liberty by them, they being proper for those of more tender, and fearful consciences than I was. And in fine35 gave it me under his hand very resolutely as a determination from my Ghostly Father, as in the place of God Almighty that those that gave me contemplative instructions, and applied the liberty that was necessary for contemplative souls (of which he saith there are not two in all the house) to me, might give me peace, but never true peace in God. These were his words which did so much astonish me that it made me purvey for all the instructions that I could that might uphold me in that which I found was the only way that I could prosper in, or be able to find our Saviour’s yoke sweet, and his burden light:36 for I had suffered so much before God 35 In fine: in conclusion. 36 Sweet yoke: Matthew 11:28–30.

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Exemplary conversion narratives did bestow the favour upon me of being put into a course that was proper for me, and this for near five years after my coming over, and had fallen into so many great inconveniences and miseries that none could believe it, but I that felt it. And though I made a shift a days37 to set a good face on it, yet in the night I bewailed my miseries with more than ordinary Tears of which God and our blessed Lady38 were Witnesses of, though few others on earth. And I did rouse up all the books in the house, and whatever I found that any had done to please God, I took notes of it and did it as I could. And this course I always held since I came into Religion: as also to consult with all the men that any had found good by in the house, and yet all this would do me no good. And me thought I was as great a stranger to Almighty God as I was in England when I scarce thought (as to any good I did) whether there were a God, or no. And being thus perplexed, and tossed with a thousand imaginations, and overwhelmed with miseries, yea almost desperate through the fear, and consideration of my sins; My Mistress39 advised me to go to Father Baker telling me that four or five in the house had found good by him, and that at least it was no harm to try, and it would do me no harm though it did me no good; for he was a very grave man, and one that was much respected in the Congregation, such like words as these she used to me and I in my nature being not very hard to be ruled (though I remember I had no great mind to it of myself) did as she bid me which being done I found myself in fifteen days so quiet that I wondered at myself: the which was so soon as I had received from him some general instructions: As that I must give all to God, without any reservation wittingly, and willingly of any inordinate affection to any creature: the which I found myself willing to do. And that I must use prayer twice a day, which I found myself capable of; and though I found little of that which is called sensible devotion, yet I found that with a little industry, I was able to use it with much profit, and that it did make anything very tolerable which happened to me. Yea, and it made me capable of understanding anything that was necessary for me in a spiritual life, and discovereth daily to me that which is an impediment between God, and my soul as far as is necessary: and makes me abhor to do anything in the world for any other intention than out of the regard of God, and because God would have me so do. [pp. 89–92]

37 Shift a days: made an effort. 38 Our blessed Lady: the Virgin Mary. 39 Mistress: nun from the congregation.

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Gertrude More The Confessions Amantis: 40 The Confessions of a Loving & Pious Soul to Almighty God The XVI Confession O Lord my God; Father of the poor, and true comforter of all affiliated souls; be merciful to my desolate heart, and stir it up to perfect love of thee, that I may simply seek thee, and sigh after thee my beloved absent, and not for the sorrow I feel at the present. Let me long to embrace thee with the arms of my soul, and think it little to endure any misery in body, or soul, to be at last admitted into the bosom of my Love, fairest, and choicest of thousands. Let all fall down, and adore my God, the glory of my heart. Let the sound of his Praise be heard to sound, and resound over all the earth. O when shall my soul, having transcended itself, and all created things, be firmly united to thee, the beloved of my heart, resting in thee, not in thy gifts or graces, and neither desiring, nor taking any satisfaction in any work, or exercise whatsoever, but in all pains, temptations, contempts, desolations, poverties, and miseries either body, or mind, conforming myself to thy sweet will for time and eternity, who as justly as ever thou didst anything, mayst condemn my soul eternally to hell, from which nothing but thy mere mercy were able to save, and deliver me; and daily I should incur this sentence, if thou didst not out of thy goodness ever help, and protect me, thy sinful servant. [pp. 98–100] […] The XXV Confession O Love of my Lord God, how forcible art thou in a pure soul? O who will give thee to me, that my heart may be purged, and purified, thereby to become a pleasing habitation for my God? 41 […]

40 The Confessions Amantis: The lover’s confessions. The language of this work draws heavily on the Song of Songs, where Christ is the beloved and his Church is the spouse, including the souls of believers. 41 More steps into the tradition of devotional poetry that promotes God’s violent acting on sinners, such as purging and purifying their bodies. Only in this way can one’s soul be refreshed and ready to be inhabited by God. See, for example, John Donne’s ‘Batter My Heart’.

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Exemplary conversion narratives O let me being obliged by thee to love, let me, I say, through thy mercy obtain this love of thee, which maketh a soul in all things grateful, and faithful to thee! […] O let this thy love wholly possess my soul, that all that is within me may bless thy holy Name! I renounce into thy hands all that is in me contrary to this thy love; Let it wholly consume me that I may be wholly turned into love, and that nothing else may be desired by me. Let me be drowned and swallowed up in that of Divine love, in which my soul may swim for all eternity, never more by sin to be separated from thee. [pp. 122–6] […] The XXXVI Confession O My Lord, to thee I will speak, to whom yet the secrets of my heart are otherwise most clearly manifest; To thee I will speak, and upon thee I will call. If thou wilt my Lord thou canst save me. This day my Lord God; it is read of thee in the holy Church, that thou didst heal the man sick of the Palsy.42 Let me also find grace before thee, that my diseases may by thee be cured, that so I may become pleasing to thee. For the diseases of the mind in which I languish are much more grievous than those of the body. For these make us but ungrateful to men, but the other make us displeasing in thine eyes. But thy goodness as it is seen in this example together with the cure of the one, did also use the grant pardon for the other. For thou didst say to him; Thy sins are forgiven thee; by which he became cured in body, and soul. This thy mercy I remember with great joy, and comfort, and falling down at thy feet my Lord, I beg of thee, that thou wilt be merciful to me a sinner for thy own sake, and say unto my soul; Thy sins are forgiven thee; and grant that I may now begin to live to thee, that so by thy grace all impediments may be removed, which hinder me from loving thee, as thou wouldst be loved by me, which is all I wish, or desire. To this end, I fly to thee; to this end I sigh after thee, only wishing and desiring that in all things, thy holy will may be perfectly accomplished in me for time, and eternity. If I should not hourly approach to thee, who art the only true light, darkness, and the shadow of death would overwhelm me, and make me incapable of this thy light, which leadeth to the true love of thee. 42 Marginal note: Matthew 9:3.

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Gertrude More […] For those souls that thou leadest by the way of love of them I say, thou exactest, that they should make their moan, only to thee, thou having as it were given them a pledge that thou wilt become all in all, and above all to them, if they will but remain faithful to thee. […] For alas, my Lord God, what is all thou canst give to a loving soul who sigheth and panteth after thee alone, and esteemeth all things as dung, that she may gain thee? What is all, I say, whilst thou givest not thyself, who art that one thing which is only necessary and which alone can satisfy our souls. Was it any comfort to St Mary Magdalene, when she sought thee, to find two Angels, which presented themselves instead of thee?43 verily, I cannot think it was any joy unto her. For that soul that hath set her whole love and desire on thee, can never find any true satisfaction, but only in thee. […] I had rather serve thee without consolation than to find, or feel that which may make me esteem anything of myself, or hinder me from resting only in thee, who art my God, and all my desire for ever. Amen. [pp. 169–76] […]

The XLIII Confession. Lord, with great joy I desire to celebrate this divine Solemnity of thy Resurrections. Thou hast showed thyself in all forms, so that the weakest capacities might in some sort apprehend thee who art incomprehensible. Thou appearedst a child, that thy little ones might conceive more easily some things that might move them to love thee, and being as it is were astonished at thy love towards us, and at thy infinite humility, we might thirst after thy example, and love only thee. For all thou hast done, or said, is for our comfort and instruction. What hast thou left undone, which might any way further our good, if we would but concur with thy Grace; But we straying from thee, how can we choose but be blind. For only in thy light can we see and discern that which only importeth us 43 John 20:12. Mary Magdalene entered the empty tomb of the risen Christ to see two angels seated where he had been laid and wept that he had been taken.

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Exemplary conversion narratives to see and know, to wit, to know thee, thereby to love thee, and to know ourselves, thereby to humble us in all things before thy Divine Majesty. For nothing but true Humility can make us gracious in thine eyes. […] Never was there ever such acquaintance, love, and friendship, between any in this world, as there is between thy Goodness and an humble soul, that seeketh thee above all graces and gifts whatsoever, and transcended all created things, that she may adhere to thee in the bottom of her soul. Verily it is so strange, that it putteth the heavenly Court into admiration, that we that have dedicated our souls wholly to thee, should love, seek, or desire anything besides thee. But alas human frailty, as they well know, is very great, and therefore they also cannot choose but pity and pray for us; and especially we women, silly44 to all things that this world admires, and therefore most contemptible of all creatures, if we do not labour for the love of thee, the which to do, thou dost as willingly enable us as thou dost the wise of the world, if we hinder not thy grace who despisest not anything thou hast made. How much are we to be therefore blamed and condemned if we labour not, I say, for thy love? Yea to show thy power thou hast been pleased many times to bring a silly woman, loving thee, to that wisdom that no creature by wit or industry could attain to the same. But, where my Lord have these thy Spouses in these days placed their hearts? Where, I say, seeing they seek, and desire so much the favour and praise of the world, to have the friendship of men, and by letters, and tokens to draw their hearts from thee unto them, notwithstanding (as good reason) it prospereth not with us in such doing; for they by this means seeing our defect in loving thee, cannot confide in them, who are not true to thee; but contrary compare us to those, who proffer love to all, and yet, as we ought for thee, love none. [pp. 187–90] […]

44 Silly: ignorant.

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Gertrude More The LII Confession O My Lord, and my God; If none have much forgiven them, but those that love much, what will become of me? This day we read in our Office, that Saint Mary Magdalene coming to thy feet (which she watered with her tears) heard that comfortable answer from thee, to wit; Go in peace, thy sins are forgiven thee; but it was out of this regard that she loved much.45 This answer thou madest to her (whose heart in silence speak unto thee) doth much comfort my sinful soul. But yet when I remember how void I am of that which was the necessary disposition for her soul to hear those comfortable words, thy sins are forgiven thee, go in peace, it draweth tears from mine eyes to see how far my soul is destitute of that pure love which prevaileth with thy divine Majesty. What shall I say? What shall I do? Or wherein shall I hope? I am not fit to plead for myself, my sins, indeed are so many and so great; and as for the love which only thou desirest, behold my soul is destitute of it. For if I have any towards thee, my God it is but a sensible, childish love, which is a love little beseeming the bestowing upon such a God, who is all Good, Beauty, Wisdom, yea even Goodness and Love itself; to whom is due a love which is able to suffer all things for this love is a strong love, more strong than death itself, the which kind of love is far from me, who am blown down with the least blast of temptation, and cannot endure any disgrace, desolation, or difficulty whatsoever, as it beseems a true lover of his. But not withstanding my poverty, and misery, yet I will hope in him and will approach to his feet, who is Mercy itself. There, my Lord, and my God, I will in silence sigh and weep both for my sins and for my defect in loving thee, who art worthy of all love and Praise whatsoever. There I will beg this love so much to be desired. There I will wish and long for it and from thy feet I will not depart till thou denounce to me; thy sins are forgiven thee, and sayest to my soul, go in peace. This voice I long to hear in my heart, that I may with the voice of exaltation praise thee forever. Amen. [pp. 231–3]

45 More refers to the biblical story of a sinner, Mary Magdalene, whose sins were forgiven by Christ. Luke 7:37–50.

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Exemplary conversion narratives Here follow some other Devotions of the same pious soul D. Gertrude More. A short Oblation 46 of this small work by the writer gatherer thereof to our most sweet and Merciful God. My God to thee I dedicate  This simple work of mine, And also with it heart and soul;   To be forever thine. No other motive will I have,   Than by it thee to praise. And stir up my poor frozen soul  By love itself to raise. O I desire neither tongue, nor pen   But to extol God’s praise, In which excess I’ll melt away   Ten thousand thousand ways, And as one that is sick with love   Engraves on every Tree The Name and Praise of him she loves   So shall it be with me. [p. 277] To Our Blessed Lady: the Advocate of sinners. All hail, O Virgin, crowned with stars,   and Moon under thy feet,47 Obtain us pardon of our sins  of Christ our Saviour sweet. For though thou art Mother of my God,   yet thy Humility Disdaineth not this simple wretch,   that flies for help to thee. Thou knowst thou art more dear to me,   than any can express, And that I do congratulate   with joy thy happiness;

46 Oblation: offering. 47 Revelation 12:1. This verse speaks only of a ‘woman’, but she is considered by More, as a Catholic, to be the Virgin Mary.

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Gertrude More Who art the Queen of Heaven and earth,   thy helping hand me lend, That I may love and praise my God,   and have a happy end. And though my sins me terrify,   yet hoping still in thee I find my soul refreshed much   when I unto thee fly. For thou most willingly to God   petitions dost present And doth obtain much grace for us   in this our banishment. The honour and the glorious praise   by all be given to thee, Which Jesus thy beloved Son   ordained eternally For thee, whom he exalts in heaven   above the Angels all And whom we find a Patroness,   when unto thee we call. Amen. [pp. 279–80]

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Part II Advising on body and spirit

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4 Elizabeth Clinton, Countess of Lincoln

In 1622, when Elizabeth Clinton (c.1574–c.1630), Countess of Lincoln, published her short treatise, it was fashionable for aristocratic families to employ a wet-nurse, that is, another woman to breastfeed their children, rather than for mothers to do this themselves. The treatise follows a tradition which can be traced to the Latin text Puerpera (‘the new mother’) (1526) of the humanist Catholic priest Desiderius Erasmus.1 Erasmus set up his argument in the form of a dialogue in which the conversation ranged from the importance of maternal breastfeeding to the nature of the soul. The text is informed by the teachings of ancient authors such as Aristotle and decries as ‘half-mothers’ women who choose not to breastfeed.2 However, while the practice of employing wet-nurses remained fashion­able, there was a consensus among medical texts that it was better for a child to be nursed by its own mother, which Clinton’s treatise, The Countesse of Lincolnes Nurserie (1622), although founded on theological concerns rather than medical, wholeheartedly supports. The physician Helkiah Crooke suggested that breastfeeding was designed to form part of what we would now see as the bonding process, as, while breastfeeding, ‘the Mother doth not only nourish her Infants, but embraceth them and kisseth them; and so love being never forgotten, at length grows reciprocal and mutual’.3 However, these books were usually pragmatic and offered advice on how best to choose a suitable wet-nurse should a

1 Valerie Wayne, ‘Advice for Women from Mothers and Patriarchs’, in Helen Wilcox, ed., Women and Literature in Britain 1500–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 56–79 (p. 60). 2 Desiderius Erasmus, Colloquies, in Craig R. Thompson, ed., Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), p. 605. 3 Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, a Description of the Body of Man (London: William Jaggard, 1615), p. 157.

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Advising on body and spirit woman be unable to breastfeed. Conduct and household management treatises by men and women also appeared which made appeals for women to stop putting their children out to be nursed by others. Indeed, William Gouge’s Of Domesticall Duties, published in the same year as Clinton’s tract, makes many of the same arguments in favour of maternal nursing that she does. Drawing on religious doctrine, Gouge stated that: God hath given to women two breasts fit to contain and hold milk: and nipples unto them fit to have milk drawn from them. Why are these thus given? to lay them forth for ostentation? There is no warrant for that in all God’s word. They are directly given for the child’s food that commeth out of the womb; for till the childe be born, there is no milk in the breasts.4

Since this was a time when the understanding of all bodily experience was mediated through scriptural teachings in conjunction with increasing medical knowledge, it is unsurprising that the word of God is used to justify the arguments of both men and women. The gender distinction might appear in the fact that Clinton’s language is not as anatomical as Gouge’s when she makes the parallel point that ‘God provideth milk in our breasts against the time of our children’s birth, and this he hath done ever since it was said to us also, Increase and multiply’ (pp. 9–10). There were many reasons why high-ranking women did not breastfeed, but the main concern was the observation that lactation temporarily reduced the fertility of a nursing mother. When a baby is exclusively breastfed, this has a contraceptive effect on the nursing mother’s body, and for noble families interested in creating dynasties this would have been an unwanted break in their production of children. Large families could increase their political influence through advantageous marriages. While the average family for the lower and middling sorts was much smaller, in upper-ranking marriages a woman like Clinton could expect to give birth every eighteen months.5 Clinton had eighteen children, none of whom she nursed herself. Other reasons why the aristocracy did not practise maternal breastfeeding included the belief, expressed in medical books since ancient times, that breastfeeding weakened a woman, and aristocratic women were thought to be more susceptible to this than other women. As Sara F. Matthews Grieco explains, ‘[t]he higher her social rank, the more

4 William Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties (London: William Bladen, 1622), p. 511. 5 Sara F. Matthews Grieco, ‘Breastfeeding, Wet Nursing and Infant Mortality in Europe (1400–1800)’, in Historical Perspectives on Breastfeeding: Two Essays by Sara F. Matthews Grieco and Carlo A. Corsini (Unicef, 1991), at www.unicef-irc. org/publications/pdf/hisper_breast.pdf (accessed October 2013), p. 19.

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Elizabeth Clinton, Countess of Lincoln delicate her constitution was supposed to be and the less it was expected to withstand the demands of lactation’.6 Further, higher-ranking women were thought to be more concerned about the effects on their figures, worrying that nursing made breasts saggy at a time when a high, firm cleavage was considered desirable.7 Many fine women were worried about the effects of breastfeeding on their figures, and of leaking milk not only spoiling expensive clothing but repulsing their husbands. Clinton directly addresses the idea that nursing would ruin fine clothes and even suggests that because breastfeeding is a godly precept then it enhances, not detracts from, a woman’s beauty. Choosing a suitable wet-nurse was not a simple process and so advice books listed the many and various qualities of an ideal one. The Accom­ plished Ladies Rich Closet of Rarities (1687) gives a typical description: A good nurse ought to be of a middle-stature, plump of body, though not over corpulent; of a sanguine complexion, pleasant and cheerful, clear skinned and well proportioned.   For her conditions, they must be suitable: anger must be a stranger to her, and her delight naturally in children; not drowsy nor self-conceited; her age must be a medium, between five and twenty and forty, being one that has been well educated; and seen to want for nothing; for if she be necessitated [poor], the child must pine; or if Sickness happen through accident or disorder, her milk is injured thereby: Yet temperance must be her greatest care, for fear by excess of meat or drink the milk be corrupted or inflamed; and in all things her care of her charge must let her prudence appear. Take a woman whose child was a boy, to nurse one of that kind, and on the other side the contrary.8

It was thought that a baby would assume the characteristics of the nurse along with her milk and so it was vital to the child’s future that a nurse had the most desirable attributes. For this reason Elizabeth Joscelin went against the prescriptions of the medical books in her ‘legacy’ to her unborn child (1622) and asked her husband to ensure that if she died in childbirth, he would find a ‘religious nurse no matter what her complexion’.9 Clinton comments on this belief when she warns that any wet-nurse will naturally ‘fret’ because she is separated from her own child in order to nurse someone else’s child, and a child nursed by a 6 Ibid., p. 17. 7 Ibid. 8 J. S., The Accomplished Ladies Rich Closet of Rarities: Or, the Ingenious Gentlewoman and Servant-Maids Delightfull Companion (London: Nicholas Boddington and Joseph Blare, 1687), p. 83. 9 Elizabeth Joscelin, ‘Manuscript Mother’s Legacy’, in Sylvia Brown, ed., Women’s Writing in Stuart England: The Mothers’ Legacies of Dorothy Leigh, Elizabeth Joscelin and Elizabeth Richardson (Stroud: Sutton, 1999), pp. 106–39 (p. 109).

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Advising on body and spirit fretful woman was thought likely to be fretful themselves. The reason for this belief is to be found in the prevailing medical explanation for how milk came into the breast. It was traditionally taught that the baby in the womb was nourished by her mother’s menstrual blood and that after the delivery the blood is transported to the breasts to be transformed by the breasts into milk. In her treatise, Clinton argues passionately against the conventional reasons usually given against maternal nursing, often using scripture to back her rebuttals. She also uses well-known stereotypes about wetnurses not taking proper care of their charges, or even changing their own child for the nursling, frequently depicted and described on the stage and in conduct literature. The debate continued to rumble on throughout the seventeenth century. Indeed, such was the depth of feeling on the topic that prolific medical writer Nicholas Culpeper exclaimed, ‘Oh! what a Racket do Authors make about this! What wharting [thwarting] and contradicting, not of others but of themselves?’ The arguments about why a woman should nurse her own child would, Culpeper wrote, ‘make a dying man laugh, or a Horse break his Halter’.10 Culpeper took the pragmatic line, and implied at least that it was a matter of personal choice, provided that whoever nursed the baby had good, healthy milk. However, the debate continued apace and led to the publication of the rector Henry Newcombe’s The Compleat Mother: or, An Earnest Perswasive to all Mothers (especially those of Rank and Quality) to Nurse their own Children (1695). Newcombe made some extraordinary claims in his text which suggest that, even at the end of the seventeenth century, women who went against the prevailing fashion and did nurse their own children were mocked and taunted for it. The Compleat Mother situates maternal nursing as a Protestant duty and suggests that not to do it was to diminish the efforts of the martyrs of the Reformation. Against this background, high-ranking women who were able to breastfeed and who resisted social and matrimonial pressures in order to nurse her own children were ‘considered to be almost saintly, sacrificing their health, beauty, and peace of mind for the benefit of their children’.11 Clinton’s book is dedicated to her daughter-in-law, Bridget, Countess of Lincoln, who apparently nursed her own baby.12 Of Clinton’s eighteen children, five daughters and four sons survived infancy, and she came to 10 Nicholas Culpeper, A Directory for Midwives; or, A Guide for Women, in Their Conception, Bearing, and Suckling Their Children (London: Peter Cole, 1651), pp. 203–4. 11 Matthews Grieco, ‘Breastfeeding, Wet Nursing and Infant Mortality’, p. 17. 12 Bridget Clinton, née Fiennes (c.1604–d. by 1644), daughter of William Fiennes, first Viscount Saye and Sele, married Clinton’s third, but first surviving, son,

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Elizabeth Clinton, Countess of Lincoln view, with great remorse, that the reason why half her children did not survive beyond infancy was that she did not nurse her children herself. Indeed, this seems to be one of the driving factors behind the publication of her treatise. Clinton claims that she did not breastfeed partly because she was overruled by another’s authority and partly because she was ‘deceived by some’s ill counsel, & partly I had not so well considered of my duty’ (p. 16). Clinton’s treatise does not align itself to any one religious affiliation. She justifies the writing and publication of her treatise by comparing herself to the older, more experienced women, who were instructed to teach the younger and inexperienced women in 1 Timothy. This positions her readers as female, an acceptable audience for Clinton’s work, but her actual readers would certainly have been women and men. Like many other women included in this anthology whose works were published in print, Clinton’s treatise is prefaced by an address to her readers written by a man, endorsing the words contained therein. The short, two-page address, praising Clinton’s ‘Nobility’ (sig. A4v ) and ‘Honour’ (sig. A4), is written by Dr Thomas Lodge (1558–1625), a prolific author and later a physician, who clearly saw the benefits of the work to teach its readers, though particularly those of the aristocracy (the ‘anciently Honourable’) whom he suggested should make an ‘Alliance’ (sig. A4) with Clinton. Significantly, Lodge was a practising Catholic: he had been placed on a list of Catholic recusants as late as 1618. As a member of the Royal College of Physicians since 1610, he was granted immunity from prosecution for his beliefs in 1611 by the Privy Council, but could not have published them openly.13 Lodge’s relationship to Clinton is unclear: he may have acted as her physician, or he may have been connected through family ties (Lodge had many connections to the Stuart court and these would have included the notorious Lady Catherine Howard, Countess of Suffolk, Clinton’s elder sister). Or he may simply have seen her treatise passed around in manuscript, subsequently publishing it from the press at Oxford University, where he had studied (Oxford and Cambridge published theological, medical and monarchical works, and were the only presses that were legal outside London). It is also possible that Clinton shared Lodge’s religious beliefs, although, like him, she

Theophilus (c.1600–67), in c.1620. Theophilus, fourth Earl of Lincoln, became known as Fiennes from then on. The couple had nine children. Bridget had died prior to 1644 as her husband remarried Elizabeth Gorge in that year. The fourth Earl rose to the rank of colonel in the English Civil Wars, fighting on Parliament’s side. 13 Alexandra Halasz, ‘Lodge, Thomas (1558–1625)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

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Advising on body and spirit would not be able to be explicit about this at this time. Clinton’s children, however, appear to have been brought up in the Puritan tradition: her son Theophilus, the husband of Bridget, the treatise’s addressee, was a staunch Puritan – his chief steward was Thomas Dudley, father of Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet – and two of her daughters emigrated with their husbands to the New World as part of the Puritan migration. The dedication of the treatise to her Puritan daughter-in-law is perhaps the most concrete evidence of Clinton’s religious position, but the text seems to have been deliberately ambiguously positioned. Note on the text The source text is the only known printing of this treatise, published as The Countesse of Lincolnes Nurserie (Oxford: John Lichfield and James Short, 1622), and held by the British Library. Clinton’s treatise is quoted in its entirety. Further reading Valerie Fildes, Breasts, Bottles and Babies: A History of Infant Feeding (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1986) —— , Wet Nursing: A History from Antiquity to the Present (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988) —— , Women as Mothers in Pre-industrial England: Essays in Memory of Dorothy McLaren (London: Routledge, 1990) David Harley, ‘From Providence to Nature: The Moral Theology and Godly Practice of Maternal Breast-feeding in Stuart England’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 69.2 (1995), 198–223 Sarah F. Matthews Grieco, ‘Breastfeeding, Wet Nursing and Infant Mortality in Europe (1400–1800)’, in Historical Perspectives on Breastfeeding: Two Essays by Sara F. Matthews Grieco and Carlo A. Corsini (Unicef, 1991) at http://www. unicef-irc.org/publications/pdf/hisper_breast.pdf (accessed October 2013)

The Countesse of Lincolnes Nurserie (1622) Because it hath pleased God to bless me with many children, and so caused me to observe many things falling out to mothers, and to their children; I thought good to open my mind concerning a special matter belonging to all child-bearing women, seriously to consider of: and to manifest my mind the better, even to write of this matter, so far as God shall please to direct me; in sum, the matter I mean, Is the duty of nursing due by mothers to their own children. 110

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Elizabeth Clinton, Countess of Lincoln In setting down whereof, I will first show, that every woman ought to nurse her own child; and secondly, I will endeavour to answer such objections, as are used to be cast out against this duty to disgrace the same. The first point is easily performed. For it is the express ordinance of God that mothers should nurse their own children, & being his ordinance they are bound to it in conscience. This should stop the mouths of all repliers, for God is most wise,14 and therefore must needs know what is fittest and best for us to do: & to prevent all foolish fears, or shifts,15 we are given to understand that he is also All sufficient,16 & therefore infinitely able to bless his own ordinance, and to afford us means in ourselves (as continual experience confirmeth) toward the observance thereof. If this (as it ought) be granted, then how venturous are those women that dare venture17 to do otherwise, and so to refuse, and by refusing to despise that order, which the most wise and almighty God hath appointed, and instead thereof to choose their own pleasures? Oh what peace can there be to these women’s consciences, unless through the darkness of their understanding they judge it no disobedience? And then they will drive me to prove that this nursing, and nourishing of their own children in their own bosoms is God’s ordinance; They are very wilful, or very ignorant, if they make a question of it. For it is proved sufficiently to be their duty, both by God’s word, and also by his works. By his word it is proved, first by Examples, namely the example of Eve.18 For who suckled her sons Cain, Abel, Seth, & c. but herself? 19 Which she did not only of mere necessity, because yet no other woman was created; but especially because she was their mother, and so saw it was her duty: and because she had a true natural affection, which moved her to do it gladly. Next the example of Sarah the wife of

14 15 16 17 18

Marginal note: Isaiah 31:2. Shifts: evasions. Marginal note: Genesis 17:1. Venture: expose yourself to loss. Eve, the first woman in the Bible, was the wife of Adam. She is often referred to in this period as the first mother. See, for example, Genesis 3:20: ‘And Adam called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living’. 19 Genesis 4:1 describes Cain as the eldest of Adam and Eve’s children; Genesis 4.2 says that Abel was born next; Genesis 4:25 says Eve had another son, Seth, to replace Abel, whom Cain had killed. Genesis 5.4 says that Adam went on to have many more unnamed sons and daughters.

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Advising on body and spirit Abraham; For she both gave her son Isaac suck,20 as doing the duty commanded of God: And also took great comfort, and delight therein, as in a duty well pleasing to herself; whence she spake of it, as of an action worthy to be named in her holy rejoicing. Now if Sarah, so great a Princess, did nurse her own child, why should any of us neglect to do the like, except (which God forbid) we think scorn to follow her, whose daughters it is our glory to be, and which we be only upon this condition, that we imitate her well-doing.21 Let us look therefore to our worthy Pattern, noting withal, that she put herself to this work when she was very old, and so might the better have excused herself, than we younger women can: being also more able to hire, and keep a nurse, than any of us. But why is she not followed by most in the practice of this duty? Even because they want22 her virtue, and piety. This want is the common hindrance to this point of the woman’s obedience; for this want makes them want love to God’s precepts, 23 want love to his doctrine, and like stepmothers, want due love to their own children.24 But now to another worthy example, namely that excellent woman Hannah,25 who having after much affliction of mind obtained a son of God, whom she vowed unto God; she did not put him to another to nurse, but nursed him her own self until she had weaned him, & carried him to be consecrated unto the Lord: As well knowing that this duty of giving her child suck, was so acceptable to God, as for the cause thereof she did not sin in staying with it at home from the yearly sacrifice:26 but now women, especially of any place, and of little grace, do not hold this duty acceptable to God, because it is unacceptable to themselves: as if they would have the Lord to like, and dislike, according to their vain lusts. 20 Suck: breastfeed, from suckle. Marginal note: Genesis 21:7. Sarah, wife of Abraham, was barren until the Lord enabled her to conceive a child, who was called Isaac, even though Abraham was recorded as being at the time 100 years old. This was on the condition that Abraham would circumcise his new-born son. 21 Marginal note: 1 Peter 3:6. 22 Want: lack. 23 Precept: a rule for moral conduct. 24 Stepmothers had a bad reputation in the period (which has lingered in cultural belief). The anonymous gentlewoman author of Conversion Exemplified (1663) was said not to endure the name ‘mother-in-law’ (another name for stepmother in the seventeenth century) because of its bad reputation, presumably because of the lack ‘of due love’ to their children, as Clinton writes. 25 Marginal note: 1 Samuel 1:23. Hannah, one of the wives of Elkanah, prayed to the Lord for a son in return that he would serve God for the rest of his life. Although she was barren, she conceived a son who was called Samuel, and she nursed him. 26 1 Samuel 1:22.

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Elizabeth Clinton, Countess of Lincoln To proceed, take notice of one example more, that is, of the blessed Virgin:27 as her womb bore our blessed Saviour, so her paps28 gave him suck. Now who shall deny their own mothers’ suckling of their own children to be their duty, since every godly matron has walked in these steps before them: Eve the mother of all the living; Sarah the mother of all the faithful; Hannah so graciously heard of God; Mary blessed among women, and called blessed of all ages. And who can say but that the rest of holy women mentioned in the holy Scriptures did the like; since no doubt that speech of that noble Dame, saying, who would have said to Abraham that Sarah should have given children suck?29 was taken from the ordinary custom of mothers in those less corrupted times. And so much for proof of this office, and duty to be God’s ordinance, by his own Word according to the argument of Examples: I hope I shall likewise prove it by the same word from plain Precepts.30 First from that Precept, which willeth the younger women to marry, and to Bear children, that is, not only to Bear them in the womb, and to bring them forth; but also to Bear them on their knee, in their arms,31 and at their breasts: for this Bearing a little before is called nourishing, and bringing up; and to enforce it the better upon women’s consciences, it is numbered as the first of the good works, for which godly women should be well reported of. And well it may be the first, because if holy Ministers, or other Christians do hear of a good woman to be brought to bed,32 and her child to be living; their first question usually is, whether she herself give it suck, yea, or no? If the answer be she doth, then they commend her: if the answer be she doth not, then they are sorry for her. And thus I come to a second Precept. I pray you, who that judges aright, doth not hold the suckling of her own child the part of a true mother, of an honest mother, of a just mother, of a sincere mother, of a mother worthy of love, of a mother deserving good report, of a virtuous mother, of a mother winning praise for it? All this is assented to by any of good understanding. Therefore this is also a Precept, as for other duties, so for This of mothers to their children; which says, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are

27 28 29 30

Virgin Mary: mother of Jesus Christ. Paps: breasts. Marginal note: Genesis 21:7. Marginal note: 1 Timothy 5:14: ‘I will therefore that the younger women marry, bear children, guide the house, give none occasion to the adversary to speak reproachfully’. 31 Marginal note: 1 Timothy 5:10. 32 Brought to bed: to go into labour.

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Advising on body and spirit just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things be worthy of love, whatsoever things be of good report, if there be any virtue,33 if there be any praise, think on these things, these things do and the God of peace shall be with you. So far for my promise, to prove by the word of God, that it is his ordinance that women should nurse their own children: now I will endeavour to prove it by his works: First by his works of judgement; if it were not his ordinance for mothers to give their children suck, it were no judgement to bereave them of their milk, but it is specified to be a great judgement to bereave them hereof, & to give them dry breasts,34 therefore it is to be gathered, even from hence, that it is his ordinance, since to deprive them of means to do it, is a punishment of them. I add to this the work that God worketh in the very nature of mothers, which proveth also that he hath ordained that they should nurse their own children: for by his secret operation, the mother’s affection is so knit by nature’s law to her tender babe, as she finds no power to deny to suckle it, no not when she is in hazard to lose her own life, by attending on it; for in such a case it is not said, let the mother fly, and leave her infant to the peril, as if she were dispensed with: but only it is said woe to her,35 as if she were to be pitied, that for nature to her child, she must be unnatural to herself: now if any then being even at liberty, and in peace, with all plenty, shall deny to give suck to their own children, they go against nature: and show that God hath not done so much for them as to work any good,36 no not in their nature, but left them more savage than the Dragons, and as cruel to their little ones as the Ostriches. Now another work of God, proving this point is the work of his pro­ vision, for every kind to be apt, and able to nourish their own fruit: there is no beast that feeds their young with milk, but the Lord, even from the

33 Marginal note: Philippians 4:8. 34 Hosea 9:14. God pronounced a judgement on Israel such that the people could not be fruitful, bear or nourish their children. 35 Matthew 24:19: ‘And woe unto them that are with child, and to them that give suck in those days!’ Christ’s prophecy of the signs leading up to the second coming included that women bearing children, and breastfeeding them, would not be able to make their escape or protect themselves. Clinton writes that these women should not be pitied for the love and natural affection they have towards their children. It is not unnatural for them to want to stay to protect them. 36 Marginal note: Lamentations 7:3. Possibly Clinton or her printer made an error here for Lamentations 4:3 as the book has only five chapters: ‘Even the seamonsters draw out the breast, they give suck to their young ones: the daughter of my people is become cruel, like the ostriches in the wilderness.’ The chapter goes on to describe children who are thirsty because their mothers will not give them suck so that their tongues ‘cleaveth to the roof’ of their mouths (4:4).

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Elizabeth Clinton, Countess of Lincoln first ground of the order of nature; Grow and multiply;37 hath provided it of milk to suckle their own young, which every beast takes so naturally unto, as if another beast come toward their young to offer the office of a Dame unto it, they show according to their fashion, a plain dislike of it: as if nature did speak in them, and say it is contrary to God’s order in nature, commanding each kind to increase, and multiply in their own bodies, and by their own breasts, not to bring forth by one Dame, and to bring up by another: but it is his ordinance that every kind should both bring forth, and also nurse its own fruit.38 Much more should this work of God prevail to persuade women, made as man in the image of God, and therefore should be ashamed to be put to school to learn good nature of the unreasonable creature.39 In us also, as we know by experience, God provideth milk in our breasts against40 the time of our children’s birth, and this he hath done ever since it was said to us also, Increase and multiply, so that this work of his provision showeth that he tieth us likewise to nourish the children of our own womb, with our own breasts, even by the order of nature:41 yea it showeth that he so careth for, and regardeth little children even from the womb, that he would have them nursed by those that in all reason will look to them with the kindest affection, namely their mothers; & in giving them milk for it, he doth plainly tell them that he requires it. Oh consider, how comes our milk?42 Is it not by the direct providence of God? Why provides he it, but for the child? The mothers then that refuse to nurse their own children, do they not despise God’s providence? Do they not deny God’s will? Do they not as it were say, I see, O God, by the means thou hast put into me, that thou wouldst have me nurse the child thou hast given me, but I will not do so much for thee. Oh impious, and impudent unthankfulness; yea monstrous unnaturalness, both to their own natural fruit borne so near their breasts, and fed in their own wombs, and yet may not be suffered to suck their own milk.

37 Genesis 1:28. 38 Own fruit: own children. Clinton is saying that giving your child to a wet-nurse goes against nature. 39 Unreasonable creature: the woman who refuses to breastfeed. 40 Against: to correspond with. 41 Breast milk was believed to be menstrual blood, gone through a transformation in the body to turn it into milk. It was believed that menstrual blood nourished the child in the womb, so it was natural that the child should continue to receive the same substance after birth, as nature had arranged it. 42 Menstrual blood was thought to be transported to the breasts by a vein known as the ‘epigastrick’ vein. This vein was depicted from ancient times and can be seen in a sketch by Leonardo da Vinci from 1490. In fact, no such vein exists.

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Advising on body and spirit And this unthankfulness, and unnaturalness is oftener the sin of the Higher, and the richer sort, than of the meaner, and poorer, except some nice and proud idle dames, who will imitate their betters, till they make their poor husbands beggars.43 And this is one hurt which the better rank do by their ill example, egg and embolden the lower ones to follow them to their loss: were it not better for Us greater persons to keep God’s ordinance, & to show the meaner their duty in our good example? I am sure we have more helps to perform it, and have fewer probable reasons to allege against it, than women that live by hard labour, & painful toil. If such mothers as refuse this office of love, & of nature to their children, should hereafter be refused, despised and neglected of those their children, were they not justly required according to their own unkind dealing? I might say more in handling this first point of my promise, but I leave the larger and learneder discourse hereof unto men of art,44 and learning: only I speak of so much as I read, and know in my own experience, which if any of my sex, and condition do receive good by, I am glad: if they scorn it, they shall have the reward of scorners. I write in modesty, and can reap no disgrace by their immodest folly. And so I come to the last part of my promise; which is to answer objections made by divers45 against this duty of mothers to their children. First it is objected that Rebekah had a nurse,46 and that therefore her mother did not give her suck of her own breasts, and so good women, in the first ages, did not hold them to this office of nursing their own children. To this I answer; that if her mother had milk, and health, and yet did put this duty from her to another, it was her fault, & so proveth nothing against me. But it is manifest that she that Rebekah calleth her nurse, was called so,47 either for that she most tended her while her mother suckled her: or for that she weaned her: or for that during her nonage,48 and childhood, she did minister to her continually such good things as delighted, and nourished her up. For to any one of these the name of a nurse is fitly given: whence a good wife is called

43 By paying for a wet-nurse unnecessarily, in imitation of high-ranking women. 44 Men of art: men trained in the art of rhetoric, a key skill taught to all welleducated men. 45 Divers: several. 46 Rebecca was the wife of Isaac (son of Abraham), who was barren until her husband entreated the Lord. She conceived twins (Esau and Jacob), who ‘struggled together within her’ (Genesis 25:22) because they represented two nations. 47 That is to say, she was her nursemaid rather than her wet-nurse. This is a clever piece of rhetoric in the way that Clinton claimed that only university-educated men were capable of. 48 Nonage: infancy.

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Elizabeth Clinton, Countess of Lincoln her husband’s nurse, and that Rebekah’s nurse was only such a one,49 appeareth, because afterward she is not named a nurse, but a maid, saying: Then Rebekah rose, and her maids; now maids give not suck out of their breasts, never any virgin, or honest maid gave suck,50 but that blessed one51 from an extraordinary, & blessed power. Secondly it is objected, that it is troublesome; that it is noisome52 to one’s clothes; that it makes one look old, & c. All such reasons are uncomely,53 and [too] unchristian54 to be objected, and therefore unworthy to be answered, they argue unmotherly affection, idleness, desire to have liberty to gad 55 from home, pride, foolish fineness, lust, wantonness, & the like evils. Ask Sarah, Hannah, the blessed virgin, and any modest loving mother, what trouble they accounted it to give their little ones suck? behold most nursing mothers, and they be as clean and sweet in their clothes, and carry their age, and hold their beauty, as well as those that suckle not, and most likely are they so to do because keeping God’s Ordinance,56 they are sure of God’s Blessing, and it hath been observed in some women that they grew more beautiful, and better favoured, by very nursing their own children. But there are some women that object fear: saying that they are so weak & so tender, that they are afraid to venture to give their children suck, lest they endanger their health thereby. Of these, I demand, why then they did venture to marry, and so to bear children; and if they say they could not choose, and that they thought not that marriage would impair their health: I answer, that for the same reasons they should set themselves to nurse their own children, because they should not choose but do what God would have them to do: and they should believe that this work will be for their health also, seeing it is ordinary with the Lord to give good stomach, health, and strength to almost all mothers that take this pains with their children. 49 Marginal note: Genesis 24:61. 50 Because a woman can only make milk after giving birth, which a virgin or maid would not have done. ‘Maid’ was used synonymously with ‘virgin’. 51 Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus Christ, who was believed to have conceived by immaculate conception (i.e. without having the sin of sexual intercourse). Luke 28 describes how an archangel visited Mary: ‘And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women’. 52 Noisome: smelly, offensive. 53 Uncomely: immoral. 54 Vanity was considered to be unchristian, as it was linked to the sin of pride. See Isaiah 5:18: ‘Woe unto them that draw iniquity with cords of vanity, and sin as it were with a cart rope’. 55 Gad: wander aimlessly. 56 Ordinance: what God had commanded.

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Advising on body and spirit One answer more to all the objections that used to be made against giving children suck, is this, that now the hardness, to effect this matter, is much removed by a late example of a tender young Lady,57 and you may all be encouraged to follow after, in that wherein she hath gone before you, & so made the way more easy, and more hopeful by that which she findeth possible and comfortable by God’s blessing, and no offence to her Lord 58 nor herself: she might have had as many doubts, and lets,59 as any of you, but she was willing to try how God would enable her, & he hath given her good success, as I hope he will do to others that are willing to trust in God for his help. Now if any reading these few lines return against me, that it may be I myself have given my own children suck: & therefore am bolder, and more busy to meddle in urging this point, to the end to insult over, & to make them to be blamed that have not done it. I answer, that whether I have, or have not performed this, my bounden duty, I will not deny to tell my own practice. I know & acknowledge that I should have done it, and having not done it, it was not for want of will in myself, but partly I was overruled by another’s authority, and partly deceived by some’s ill counsel, & partly I had not so well considered of my duty in this motherly office, as since I did, when it was too late for me to put it in execution. Wherefore being pricked in heart for my undutifulness,60 this way I study to redeem my peace; first by repentance towards God, humbly and often craving his pardon for this my offence: secondly by studying how to show double love to my children, to make them amends for neglect of this part of love to them, when they should have hung on my breasts, & have been nourished in mine own bosom: thirdly by doing my endeavour to prevent many Christian mothers from sinning in the same kind, against our most loving, and gracious God. And for this cause I add unto my performed promise, this short exhortation: namely I beseech all godly women to remember, how we elder ones are commanded to instruct the younger,61 to love their children, now therefore love them so as to do this office to them when they are born, more gladly for love’s sake, than a stranger, who bore them not, shall do for lucre’s sake.62 Also I pray you to set no more so light by God’s blessing in your own breasts, which the holy Spirit ranketh

57 58 59 60 61 62

Tender young lady: Bridget, to whom this work is dedicated. Lord: husband. Lets: hindrances. Psalms 73:21. Titus 2:3–4. Lucre: profit.

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Elizabeth Clinton, Countess of Lincoln with other excellent blessings; if it be unlawful to trample under feet a cluster of grapes, in which a little wine is found;63 then how unlawful is it to destroy and dry up those breasts,64 in which your own child (and perhaps one of God’s very elect,65 to whom to be a nursing father, is a King’s honour; and to whom to be a nursing mother, is a Queen’s honour) might find food of sincere milk,66 even from God’s immediate providence, until it were fitter for stronger meat? I do know that the Lord may deny some women, either to have any milk in their breasts at all, or to have any passage for their milk, or to have any health, or to have a right mind: and so they may be letted67 from this duty, by want, by sickness, by lunacy, &c. But I speak not to these: I speak to you, whose consciences witness against you, that you cannot justly allege any of those impediments. Do you submit yourselves, to the pain and trouble of this ordinance of God? Trust not other women, whom wages hires to do it, better than yourselves, whom God, and nature ties to do it. I have found by grievous experience, such dissembling in nurses, pretending sufficiency of milk when indeed they had too much scarcity; pretending willingness, towardness,68 wakefulness, when indeed they have been most wilful, most froward,69 and most slothful, as I fear the death of one or two of my little Babes came by the default of their nurses. Of all those which I had for eighteen children, I had but two [wet-nurses] which were thoroughly willing, and careful: divers have had their children miscarry in the nurses’ hands, and are such mothers (if it were by the nurses’ carelessness) guiltless? I know not how they should [be], since they will shut them out of the arms of nature, and leave them to the will of a stranger; yea to one that will seem to estrange herself from her own child, to give suck to the nurse-child.70 This she may feign to do upon

63 Isaiah 65:8. 64 Many methods were employed to dry up unwanted breast milk. A popular method was to soak sponges in vinegar and apply them to the breasts and then tightly bind them to physically stop the breasts from filling with milk. Alternatively, medicines with drying herbs such as basil were used. 65 Elect: chosen. That God had divided the human race into the elect (the saved) and the reprobate (the damned) before the beginning of the world was held by most Puritans, influenced by theology of John Calvin. 66 Milk: scripture. As in 1 Peter 2:2: ‘As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby’. 67 Letted: impeded. 68 Towardness: inclination towards. 69 Froward: perverse or peevish. 70 Poor women often left their own babies from financial necessity and paid someone else to nurse them in order to be free to wet-nurse a higher-ranking woman’s baby, for a profit.

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Advising on body and spirit a covetous composition, but she frets at it in her mind, if she has any natural affection.71 Therefore be no longer at the trouble, and at the care to hire others to do your own work: be not so unnatural to thrust away your own children: be not so hardy72 as to venture a tender Babe to a less tender heart: be not accessory to that disorder of causing a poorer woman to banish her own infant, for the entertaining of a richer woman’s child, as it were, bidding her unlove her own to love yours. We have followed Eve in transgression,73 let us follow her in obedience. When God laid the sorrows of conception, of breeding, of bringing forth,74 and of bringing up her children upon her, & so upon us in her loins, did she reply any word against? Not a word; so I pray you all mine own Daughters, and others that are still child-bearing reply not against the duty of suckling them, when God hath sent you them. Indeed I see some, if the weather be wet, or cold; if the way be foul; if the Church be far off, I see they are so coy, so nice,75 so lukewarm, they will not take pains for their own souls: alas, no marvel if these will not be at trouble, and pain to nourish their children’s bodies, but fear God, be diligent to serve him: approve all his ordinances; seek to please him; account it no trouble, or pain to do anything that has the promise of his blessing: and then you will, no doubt, do this good, laudable, natural, loving duty to your children. If yet you be not satisfied, inquire not of such as refuse to do this: consult not with your own conceit:76 advise not with flatterers: but ask counsel of sincere, and faithful Preachers. If you be satisfied; then take this with you, to make you do it cheerfully. Think always, that having the child at your breast, and having it in your arms, you have God’s blessing there. For children are God’s blessings. Think again how your Babe crying for your breast, sucking heartily the milk out of it, and growing by it, is the Lord’s own instruction, every hour, and every day, that you are suckling it, instructing you to show that you are his newborn Babes, by your earnest desire after his word; & the sincere doctrine thereof, and by your daily growing in grace and 71 It was thought that character traits would pass through the milk, so a fretful, worried nurse would result in a similarly natured child. 72 Hardy: bold. 73 Transgression: disobeying God’s rules. See 1 Timothy 2:12–15: ‘And I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man, but to be in silence. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived, fell into transgression. Nevertheless, she will be saved in childbearing if they continue in faith, love, and holiness, with self-control.’ 74 Genesis 3:16. 75 Nice: foolish. 76 Conceit: personal opinion.

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Elizabeth Clinton, Countess of Lincoln goodness thereby, so shall you reap pleasure, and profit.77 Again, you may consider, that when your child is at your breast, it is a fit occasion to move your heart to pray for a blessing upon that work; and to give thanks for your child, and for ability & freedom unto that, which many a mother would have done and could not; who have tried and ventured their health, & taken much pains, and yet have not obtained their desire. But they that are fitted every way for this commendable act, have certainly great cause to be thankful: and I much desire that God may have glory and praise for every good work, and you much comfort, that do seek to honour God in all things. Amen. Finis. [pp. 1–21]

77 Again, Clinton draws the parallel between suckling children with breast milk and nourishing them with the word of God (1 Peter 2:2). She also indicates that women who nurse their children will then remember that they are also ‘babes’ of Christ because they desire to hear his holy word and doctrine.

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5 Brilliana, Lady Harley

Brilliana (1598–1643), Lady Harley, was a committed Puritan and Parliamentarian whose manuscript writings display a preoccupation with preserving her own spiritual and physical health, but also that of her family (particularly her husband and son). Combined with 375 surviving letters, which were often accompanied by gifts of medicines and food, Harley also kept her own ‘commonplace’ book in the early 1620s, just prior to her marriage – the signature on the book suggests that it was written in 1622. A commonplace book was a notebook in which people jotted down household accounts, recipes, medical notes, copies of letters and things they wished to keep a record of. While the keeping of common­place books was a discipline taught to boys in grammar schools, it was a practice followed by a number of higher-ranking women too.1 Peter Beal has appositely compared the use of the commonplace book in early modern times to the dependence of business people on their personal organisers in the 1980s and ’90s (the infamous ‘Filofax’ system).2 The commonplace book of Anne Ley, for example, is the main reason we know that Judith Lynch, daughter of the former Bishop of London, John Aylmer, was exceptionally well educated and a talented

1 Arthur F. Marotti, ‘Manuscript, Print, and the Social History of the Lyric’, in T. N. Corns, ed., The Cambridge Companion to English Poetry Donne to Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 52–79 (p. 64). As Marotti comments ‘democratic factors such as literacy and the cost of paper and of blank table books’ would stop the practice being carried out much further down the social scale (p. 63). 2 Peter Beal, ‘Notions in Garrison: The Seventeenth-Century Commonplace Book’, in W. Speed Hill, ed., New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1985–1991 (Binghamton, NY: Renaissance English Text Society, 1993), pp. 131–47 (p. 147). The dependence on the electronic version of this in the form of the smart phone might well be more apposite now.

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Brilliana, Lady Harley healer, and that her son John gave an address at his stepfather’s funeral.3 Women were encouraged to record a sermon they had heard as part of a reflection upon it, and their commonplace books would also contain religious and scriptural material; and since the commonplace book was ‘initially at any rate, a private compilation, intended for use only by the compiler himself, or by a strictly limited circle of family or friends’, it was a place in which to record passages which were particularly meaningful to the writer.4 Unlike many such works, the commonplace book of Brilliana Conway (as she then was) contains no personal anecdotes or recollections but is a series of improving and theological passages, such as notes from the Bible or from John Calvin’s Institutes. This makes this text by Beal’s definition a commonplace book in the ‘purest or most classic form’.5 Many of the passages are direct transcriptions of William Perkins’s The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience, which appeared in at least ten posthumous printings between 1606 and 1651. Perkins, a prolific ‘moderate’ Puritan author, was a correspondent of her future husband, Sir Robert Harley. Indeed, Sir Robert was one of the few people to openly refer to himself as a Puritan, embracing a term which others used derisively. Lady Harley also transcribes Nathaniel Coles’s Godly Man’s Assurance (1615). Other passages are not transcriptions but her interpretation of Perkins’s Calvinist ideas or scriptural teachings, and her reflections on the preaching of Thomas Case, her local clergyman.6 A short extract from the commonplace book is included here to show the ways in which a woman used such teaching texts as Perkins’s book. The cover contains an epigraph taken from 1 Corinthians 8:1–2 which reads: ‘Knowledge puffeth up, Love eddifieth’. It also contains her signature many times over. Harley’s letters to her husband and son show the concerns of a pious wife and mother. She worried after their health, and sent food and medication regularly to both. The letters also reveal that Harley suffered from regular bouts of illness, which seems to have been related to her menstrual cycle. Her letters regularly disclose how piously she considers that she endures these bouts of illness, as this functions as an expression of faith; she writes on 22 March 1638, for example, that ‘when I consider my own afflictions they are not so bitter, when I look at the will of God

3 Anne Ley, Commonplace Book, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, MS L6815 M3 C734, f. 181. 4 Beal, ‘Notions in Garrison’, p. 133. Emphasis in original. 5 Ibid., p. 134. Emphasis in original. 6 Kennet Charlton, Women, Religion and Education in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 160.

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Advising on body and spirit in it’.7 Religious discourse is recurrent in the letters and the connection between the perceived similarity between the ways of maintaining the health of the body and of the soul is made explicit in a letter from Harley to her son Ned, at university in Oxford, in December 1638, in which she writes: I take it for a great mercy of God, that you have your health; the Lord in mercy continue it to you, and be you careful of yourself: the means to preserve health, is good diet and exercise: and, as I hope you are much more careful with your soul, that the better part of yours may grow in the way of knowledge. And in some proportion it is, with the soul as the body, there must be a good diet; we must feed upon the word of God, which when we have done we must not let it lie idle, but we must be diligent in exercising of what we know, and the more we practise the more we know.8

The sentiments expressed here reflect Perkins’s teaching, which Harley had recorded in her commonplace book some sixteen years previously. The following extracts presented here are taken from the letters Harley wrote to both her husband while he was absent on Parliamentary business and her son Edward (Ned) while he was studying at the University of Oxford from 1638. Brilliana was Sir Robert’s third wife and the couple had seven children in ten years, of whom all except the youngest survived into adulthood. This contrasts with Sir Robert’s second marriage, to Mary Newport, which produced nine children, none of whom survived infancy, and with his first wife, Ann Barratt, who died in childbirth in the same year that they married, along with their son. The marriage to Brilliana was certainly a dynastically arranged one, but it was also a love match, and the couple shared a Puritan ­religious perspective. They were married by Puritan preacher and author Thomas Gataker, who had recently published a treatise, Marriage Duties (1622), setting out the duty of wives to be subordinate to their husbands, a practice Harley followed. This is best exemplified when Harley stayed in danger at the family castle at Brampton Bryan, Herefordshire, when her correct instinct was that to do this was to put herself and her children in danger.9 The Harleys’ religious views informed the running of their household and so, for example, ‘the ember days, the mandatory fast days, which were kept on the last Wednesday of the month, and special days of a more private nature for humiliation and prayer, were strictly observed at Brampton

7

‘Letter XXVIII’, in T. Taylor Lewis, ed., Letters of the Lady Brilliana Harley, Wife of Sir Robert Harley, of Brampton Bryan, Knight of the Bath (London: Camden Society, 1854), p. 34. 8 ‘Letter XV’, ibid., pp. 14–15. 9 Harley usually spells this as Brompton, indicating her pronunciation.

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Brilliana, Lady Harley Castle’.10 When the Civil Wars divided the country, the Harleys were on the side of Parliament, despite living in a Royalist stronghold, but although Calvinistic in their Puritanism, they worshipped as part of the established church and disapproved of ‘separatists for withdrawing from its communion’.11 Harley was named after the town of Brielle, in the Netherlands, where her father, Viscount Conway, was stationed at her birth. She was the younger sister of Lady Frances Pelham, whose spiritual writing is discussed in the Introduction. The daughters of one of the most eminent statesmen of the era, the women were naturalised as English citizens by an act of Parliament in 1606, along with their siblings.12 A highly educated woman, she was fluent in French and preferred to read romances in the original French – indeed, she wrote to her son Ned that ‘I had rather read anything in that tongue than English’ – and she had some Latin.13 There are approximately 375 surviving letters, of which some 115 are autograph letters and the rest in a scribal hand. As a high-ranking woman, the use of a scribe was not unusual, but Harley also relied on her secretary when she was too unwell to correspond personally. The dates on Harley’s letters are in the Julian calendar, which was the legal dating system until 1751. In this system the legal date for the New Year was 25 March, even though most people celebrated the New Year on 1 January. Realising the insight the letters offer into the life of a Puritan wife and mother, the Camden Society first published a selection of these letters, introduced and annotated by a Hereford clergyman, in 1854, which we have taken as our source text. Further letters to and from Harley were published in 1894, in a collection of the Duke of Portland’s papers, edited by Richard Ward. These have been used for additional context. Despite Ward’s comments that Harley’s letters are ‘ill-spelt, untidy, and ill written’, she writes clearly but with idiosyncratic spellings, typical of the era. She writes largely phonetically, giving ‘ryteings’ for ‘writings’, and ‘fisck’ or ‘fiseke’ for ‘physic’, for example.14

10 James Anderson, Memorable Women of the Puritan Times, 2 vols (London: Blackie and Son, 1862), vol. I, p. 87. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 ‘Letter XIV, 30 Nov 1638’, in Taylor Lewis, ed., Letters of the Lady Brilliana Harley, pp. 13–14. Harley was asking her son to buy her books while he was in Oxford; he had just sent her Francis Godwin’s newly published utopian novel Man in the Moone (1638). 14 Richard Ward, ed., The Manuscripts of his Grace the Duke of Portland, Preserved at Wellbeck Abbey (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1894), p. iv.

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Advising on body and spirit Note on the text Sources for this chapter are the commonplace book of Brilliana Conway (1622), Manuscripts and Special Collections, University of Nottingham, MS Pl F1/4/1 (page numbers are given after the extract); and Thomas Taylor Lewis, ed., Letters of the Lady Brilliana Harley, Wife of Sir Robert Harley, of Brampton Bryan, Knight of the Bath (London: Camden Society, 1854) (page numbers are given following each letter).

Further reading James Anderson, Memorable Women of the Puritan Times, 2 vols (London: Blackie and Son, 1862), vol. I Jacqueline Eales, ‘Harley, Brilliana, Lady Harley (bap. 1598, d. 1643)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) —— , Puritans and Roundheads: The Harleys of Brampton Bryan and the Outbreak of the English Civil War (London: Hardinge Simpole, 2001) Antonia Fraser, The Weaker Vessel: Woman’s Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Phoenix Press, 1984) Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: A People’s History (London: Harper, 2007)

The commonplace book of Brilliana Conway (1622) Mr Perkins, Cases of Conscience: how thy body troubles the mind Of the Body The body troubles the mind for these Reasons: First, the actions of Man, though they be sundry, yet they all proceed from one fountain and common cause, the soul, and are done by the power thereof. The body is not an agent in any work, but an Instrument by which the soul produces all actions and works.15 Secondly, though all actions are done by the soul yet they are performed by the body, and the parts thereof, and the spirits that

15 Paraphrased from William Perkins, The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience (Cambridge: John Legat, 1606), p. 174. This describes the Aristotelian theory of the body as an instrument of the soul, and that the soul is likened to the ‘head’ of a body, whereas the body works as the ‘limbs’. See Introduction. Perkins, however, calls the body a ‘dead instrument’.

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Brilliana, Lady Harley are placed in the body. The body is used as the hands and feet of the soul, and this is the cause, but when the body is troubled the soul is troubled. The body does not hurt the soul by taking any part of it away, for the soul is Indivisible, but by corrupting the action of the mind, or more properly by corrupting the next Instrument whereby the mind worked.16 The body causes trouble to the mind two ways: by melancholy, or some strange alteration of the parts of the body. That of melancholy, is a king of Earthly and black blood, specially in the spleen corrupted and distempered, which when the spleen is stopped and flows itself to the heart and brain and there annoyeth them both.17 The Effect of Melancholy The Effects of melancholy are strange and fearful. An ancient divine18 calls it the ‘devil’s bait’ because the Devil, being well acquainted with man’s complexion by God’s Justice,19 conveys himself into this humour and worketh strange conceits. It sends to the brain and head fumes and mists which do corrupt the Imagination and make the Instrument of Reason unfit for understanding sins and from hence proceeds strange Imaginations and conceits: one is called the bestial melancholy whereby a man thinks himself to be a beast, as it is said of Nebuchadnezzar.20 If a melancholy person sees or hears any fearful thing, the strength of his Imagination is such as he will presently fasten it upon himself, as, if he hears of a man that has hanged himself, or is possessed, presently he thinks he must do so or that he is (or shall be) possessed.21

16 17 18 19

Paraphrased from Perkins, ibid., p. 175. Paraphrased from Perkins, ibid., pp. 190–1. Divine: minister of God. Perkins has ‘God’s just permission’ rather than ‘God’s Justice’, p. 191. Popular belief held that God allowed Satan to torment both the elect and the damned. 20 Marginal note: Daniel 4:30. Perkins (ibid., p. 193) explains the relevance of this verse, writing: Nebuchadnezzar was smitten in the brain with this disease of beastlike Melancholy, whereby he was so bereft of his right mind, that he carried himself as a beast. And this interpretation is not against the text: for in the 31st verse of that chapter it is said, that his mind came to him again: and therefore in the disease, his understanding, and the right use of his reason was lost. And the like is true in history, by divers examples, though it were not true in Nebuchadnezzar. 21 Paraphrase of Perkins, Cases of Conscience, pp. 191–4.

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Advising on body and spirit The second work of melancholy is in the heart The second work of melancholy is upon the heart, when the mind has framed evil thoughts then comes affection and is answerable to Imagination, and hence proceeds horrors and desperation, Even of salvation. The difference between a troubled conscience and melancholy is this: when the conscience is Afflicted the Affliction is in the conscience and so in the whole man, but melancholy is in the Imagination. Secondly, conscience is troubled for as true and certain cause (for the sight of sin and sense of God’s wrath), but melancholy conceiveth a thing to be so that is not so. The [first] way to cure this is to bring the party to be sorrowful for his sins, that his sorrow may be turned into a godly sorrow. Secondly, he must be brought to be content Ruled by the Judgment of others, when he is brought to have some faith, and sorrow for sin then application of God’s promises22 must be applied to him. Lastly they must use some Physic.23 The second means whereby the body troubles the mind The second means whereby the body troubles the soul is by strange alterations [of the body]. When a Man begins to Enter into a Frenzy,24 if the brain admit never so little alteration,25 presently the mind is troubled, the Reason corrupted, the heart terrified, the man distracted in the whole body. The means to cure it The means to cure this is to bring the party to some sorrow for his sins, to bring him to the Exercise of Invocation: he must be taught that it is a correction of God.26 [98r–v ] 22 Marginal note: Psalms 34:9; Psalms 91:10; 2 Corinthians 15; James 4:8. Harley misreads 2 Corinthians for 2 Chronicles 15[:2]. 23 Physic: medicine and/or medical treatment. Again, Perkins explains in The Whole Treatise that this is because physic ‘serves to correct and abate the humour [melancholy], because it is a means by the blessing of God, to restore the health, and to cure the distemper of the body’ (p. 197). 24 Frenzy: madness; distraction. Frenzy was understood in the period to involve ‘a degree of pathological disturbance far superior to that of melancholy’ and was ‘treated as an inflammation of the brain, causing a high temperature’. Anne Dunan-Page, Grace Overwhelming: John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress and the Extremes of the Baptist Mind (Oxford: Peter Lang, 1996), pp. 168–9. 25 Marginal note: strange alterations besides melancholy. 26 Lady Harley records only the cure repentance, as her paraphrase of Perkins’s work ends here, but he also advises that, after this, ‘means must be used to take

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Brilliana, Lady Harley

Letters (1625–43) I. To my dear husband Sir Robert Harley, Knight of the Bath. 27 Sir, Doctor Barker28 has put my sister into a course of gentle physic, which I hope by God’s blessing will do her much good. My sister gives you thanks for sending him to her. I pray you remember that I reckon29 the days you are away; and I hope you are now well at Hereford,30 where it may be, this letter will put you in mind of me, and let you know, all your friends31 here are well; and all the news I can send you is that my Lord Brooke is now at Beauchamp’s Court.32 My hope is to see you here this day sennight,33 or tomorrow sennight, and I pray God give us a happy meeting, and preserve you safe; which will be the comfort of You most true affectionate wife,

Brilliana Harley.

34

Ragley: the 30 of September 1625. [p. 1]

away the opinion conceived, which will be done by giving him information of the state of his body, and what is the true and proper cause of the alteration thereof. This being known the grief or fear conceived, will easily be staid. For take away the false opinion, and inform the judgement, and the whole man will be the better’ (Perkins, The Whole Treatise, p. 198). If this information about the physiology of the body does not help, then Perkins teaches acceptance of the melancholic mood, for, whether good or bad, the condition of the person is the subject of God’s will. 27 Sir Robert was knighted as part of James I’s coronation ceremony in 1603. Knights appointed during celebrations such as this had a higher status, as Knights of the Bath, than those appointed less ceremoniously. 28 Doctor Barker: unidentified. Harley had four sisters, Alice and Frances, who were older, and Heliganwith and Jane, who were younger. 29 Reckon: count. 30 Sir Robert was the justice of the peace for Hereford at this time and the MP for Herefordshire. 31 Friends: family. 32 Fulke Greville (1554–1628) was first Baron Brooke of Beauchamp’s Court, Alcester. A courtier and author, he was most famous for being a great friend of the poet and courtier Sir Philip Sidney. Greville was related to Harley, as her grandmother, Eleanor, was the daughter of Sir Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke’s grandfather. As a Calvinist, Lord Brooke had similar religious beliefs to the Harleys. 33 Sennight: a week (seven nights). 34 Ragley Hall, Alcester: her father’s home, situated just two and a half miles from Beauchamp’s Court.

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Advising on body and spirit III. To my dear husband Sir Robert Harley, Knight. Sir, I thank you for sending me word I may hope to see you at Easter, which time will be much longed for by me. I hope the parliament has spent as much time as will satisfy them in doing nothing: so that now some good fruit of their meeting will be brought to ripeness, which is the effect of our prayers.35 […] This last night I not being very well, made me send this day for the midwife, which I think I should have deferred too long.36 I assure myself I have your prayers, because you have so great a part of mine: and I bless37 God that you enjoy your health, which I beg of you take care of. I thank God, Ned is well, and I beg your blessing for him: and I pray God preserve you well and give you a happy and speedy meeting with Your most faithful affectionate wife,

Brilliana Harley.

I pray you present my humble duty to my father, and my lady.38 My cousin Tomkins remembers her love to you.39 Brampton, the 17 March 1625.

[pp. 2–3]

35 That is to say, Harley hopes that, after doing nothing for so long, Parliament will make the right decision. 36 Harley had written in a letter to her husband of 10 March that she then meant to send for the midwife, not because she thought she was about to give birth imminently but ‘for my better satisfaction when I feel a little ill’ (letter published by Ward, ed., The Manuscripts of His Grace the Duke of Portland, p. 21). She gave birth to her second son, Robert, on 16 April 1626 (just a month after the date of the extracted letter, as the legal new year began on 25 March). On 21 April Harley wrote to her husband of the christening: ‘I give thanks to God for this new blessing of another son. The child was christened last Sunday and my father[-in-law] stood for Lord Vere and Sir Andrew Corbet for himself. As you said nothing of the name, I chose that I love best, being yours’ (ibid., p. 21). 37 Bless: praise. 38 My father: Sir Edward Conway, first Viscount Conway (1564–1631). Viscount Conway was a privy counsellor and was Secretary of State from 1627. My lady: his second wife, Katherine, Harley’s stepmother. 39 Cousin Tomkins: Mary Tomkins (bap. 1598). Mary was the wife of Richard Tomkins of Monnington and sister of Sir William Croft. Her father, Sir Herbert Croft, was the cousin of Sir Robert Harley. Sir Herbert converted to Catholicism and published tracts to persuade his wife and children to join him, one of which, directed to Mary, was A Reply to my Daughter M. C. which she made to a Paper of his Concerning the Rom Catholic Church (1619). In a letter dated July 1642, Lady Harley says ‘cousin Tomkins is as violent as ever’ and implies that Mary might have dictated some of the anti-Parliament pamphlet The Declaration or Resolution of the County of Hereforde, for which the publisher was prosecuted for libel.

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Brilliana, Lady Harley IV. To my dear husband Sir Robert Harley. Dear Sir, Your two letters, one from Hereford and the other from Gloucester, were very welcome to me: and if you knew how gladly I receive your letters, I believe you would never let any opportunity pass. I hope your cloak did you service between Gloucester and my brother Bray’s,40 for with us it was a very rainy day, but this day has been very dry and warm, and so I hope it was with you; and tomorrow I hope you will be well at your journey’s end, where I wish myself to bid you welcome home. You see how my thoughts go with you: and as you have many of mine, so let me have some of yours. Believe me, I think I never missed you more than now I do, or else I have forgot what is passed. I thank God, Ned and Robin are well;41 and Ned asks every day where you are, and he says you will come tomorrow. My father is well, but goes not abroad,42 because of his physic. I have sent you up a little hamper, in which is the box with the writings and books you bid me send up, with the other things, sewed up in a cloth, in the bottom of the hamper. I have sent you a partridge pie, which has the two pea chickens43 in it, and a little runlet44 of mead,45 that which I told you I made for my father. I think within this month, it will be very good drink. I send it up now because I think carriage when it is ready to drink does it hurt; therefore, and please you let it rest and then taste it; if it be good, I pray you let my father have it, because he spake to me for such mead. I will now bid you goodnight, for it is past eleven o’clock. I pray God preserve you and give you good success in all your business, and a speedy and happy meeting. Your most faithful affectionate wife,

Brilliana Harley.

I must beg your blessing for Ned and Rob. and present you with Ned’s humble duty. Brampton, the 5 of October, 1627. [pp. 3–4]

40 Sir Giles Bray of Barrington (d. 1641) was Harley’s half-brother from her mother’s first marriage to Sir Edmund Bray. 41 Ned and Robin: Harley’s two oldest children, Edward (1624–1700) and Robert (1626–73). 42 Abroad: outside, i.e. he is housebound. 43 Pea chickens: peachicks (young peacocks). 44 Runlet: cask for wine or beer. Not in the Oxford English Dictionary. 45 Mead: an alcoholic drink made from fermented honey.

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Advising on body and spirit VI. To my dear husband Sir Robert Harley, Knight. My dear Sir, I thank you for your letter, which I received this week by the carrier, and I thank God for my father’s health. I trust in our good God, in his own good time, he will give a happy end to your business. I have written a letter to my father, which I send you here enclosed. If you think it will not displease him, and it may anything at all set forward your business, I pray you deliver it to him. If you do deliver it to my father, I pray you seal it first. Alas! my dear Sir, I know you do not to the one half of my desires, desire to see me, that loves you more than any earthly thing. I should be glad if you would but write me word, when I should hope to see you. Ned has been ever since Sunday troubled with the rheum in his face very much.46 The swelling of his face made him very dull; but now I thank God, he is better, and begins to be merry. […] I must desire you to send me down a little bible for him. He would not let me be in peace, till I promise to send for one. He begins now to delight in reading: and that is the book I would have him place his delight in. Tom47 has still a great cold; but he is not, I thank God, sick with it. Brill48 and Robin, I thank God, are well; and Brill has two teeth. Ned presents his humble duty to you, and I beg your blessing for them all: and I beseech the Almighty to prosper you in all you do, and to give you a happy meeting with Your most faithful affectionate wife,

Brilliana Harley.

I pray you, Sir, send no silk grogram.49 I hope you have received the silver candlestick. Your father, I thank God, is much better than he was. I pray you, Sir, present my best love to my sister Wake.50 December 4, 1629. [pp. 4–5]

46 Rheum: watery, mucous discharge. Thought to be caused by humours falling from the brain. 47 Tom: Thomas Harley, Brilliana’s third son (b. 1628). 48 Brill: Brilliana, the couple’s first daughter (b. 1629). 49 Grogram: a coarse silk fabric, stiffened by gum, but also used as the name of any garment made from the same. 50 Anna, Lady Wake, née Bray, was Harley’s stepsister from her mother’s first marriage, to Edmund Bray. She married Sir Isaac Wake in December 1623.

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Brilliana, Lady Harley VII. To my dear husband Sir Robert Harley, Knight, at his house in Aldermanbury.51 My dearest Sir, Your men came to Brampton on Thursday last. I thank God that you have your health. I hope the Lord will give us both faith to wait upon him; and I trust that in his mercy he will give a good end to your business. It pleases God that I continue ill with my cold, but it is, as they say, a new disease: it troubles me much, more because of my being with child;52 but I hope the Lord will deal in mercy with me; and, dear Sir, let me have your prayers, for I have need of them. Doctor Barker is now with me. I thank God the children are all well, and Ned and Robin are very glad of their bows, and Ned is much discontented that you come not down. I beg your blessing for them all, beseeching the Almighty to preserve you, and to give you a joyful and happy meeting with your Most faithful and affectionate wife,

Brill. Harley.

I pray present my humble duty to my father. This day there came a man from Ragley to fetch my cousin Hunks53 to her mother, who is very sick. Brampton, the 8 of May, 1630. [pp. 5–6] IX. To my dear son Mr Edward Harley. Good Ned, I hope these lines will find you well at Oxford. I long to receive assurance of your coming well to your journey’s end.54 We have fair weather since you went, and I hope it was so with you, which made it more 51 Aldermanbury: a small parish within the City of London. 52 Harley was expecting her second daughter, Dorothy, named after her mother, Dorothy Ann Tracy. 53 Cousin Hunks: Mary Huncks, daughter of Lady Harley’s paternal aunt, Catherine Conway, and Sir Thomas Huncks. Lady Huncks died in 1646. Mary Huncks became the second wife of a Nonconformist preacher, Richard Baxter’s father, in 1636. Mary Huncks is reputed to have ‘reached the advanced age of ninety-six; and her holiness, mortification, contempt of the world, and fervency of prayer, rendered her an honour to religion, and a pattern to all who knew her’. See Richard Baxter, The Practical Works of the Rev. Richard Baxter with a Life of the Author and a Critical Examination of His Works by the Rev. William Orme¸ 23 vols (London: James Duncan, 1830), vol. X, p. 26. 54 Edward went to the Puritan Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1638, at the age of fourteen, as was usual then.

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Advising on body and spirit pleasing to me. You are now in a place of more varieties than when you were at home; therefore take heed it take not up your thoughts so much as to neglect that constant service you owe to your God. When I lived abroad,55 I tasted something of those wiles: therefore I may the more experimentally56 give you warning. Remember me to your tutor, in whom I hope you will find daily more and more cause to love and respect. I thank God my cold is something better than when you left me. I pray God bless you, and give you of those saving graces which will make you happy here and forever hereafter. Your most affectionate mother,

Brilliana Harley.

October 25, 1638. [p. 7]

X. To my dear son Mr Edward Harley. Good Ned, I was doubly glad to receive your letter, both for the assurance of your coming well to Oxford, and that I received it by your father’s hand, who, I thank God, came well home yesterday, about four o’clock. I am glad you like Oxford; it is true it is to be liked, and happy are we, when we like both places and conditions that we must be in. If we could be so wise, we should find much more sweetness in our lives than we do: for certainly there is some good in all conditions (but that of sin), if we had the art57 to distract58 the sweet and leave the rest. Now I earnestly desire you may have that wisdom, that from all the flowers of learning you may draw the honey and leave the rest.59 I am glad you find any that are good, where you are. I believe that there are but few noblemen’s sons in Oxford; for now, for the most part, they send their sons into France, when they are very young, there to be bred.60 Send me word whether

55 Little is known about Harley’s life before her marriage, but her father had responsibilities in Holland until 1616, so she might have travelled overseas with him, or been brought up in another noble family, as was customary. Her comment about being exposed to temptations might suggest that she spent some time at court. 56 Experimentally: as the result of experience. 57 Art: skill or knowledge. 58 Distract: separate. 59 Compare this use of honey as a metaphor with Elizabeth Major’s usage. 60 Harley would particularly disapprove of this fashion because France was a Catholic country. Charles I was married to French Catholic Henrietta Maria.

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Brilliana, Lady Harley my brother Bray do send to you, and whether Sir Robert Tracy61 did come to see you, for he told your father he would; and let me know who shows you any kindness, when you have a fit opportunity, commend my service to Mrs Wilkinson62 and tell her I thank her, for her favour to you. I may well say, you are my well-beloved child; therefore I cannot but tell you I miss you. I thank God I am something better with my cold than I was; your brother Robin has had no fits since the Monday before you went away;63 the rest of your sisters and brother, I thank God, are well. Remember me to your tutor. If you would have anything, let me know it. Be not forgetful to write to me; and the Lord in mercy bless you, both with grace in your soul and the good things of this life. Your most affectionate mother till death,

Brilliana Harley.

Be careful to keep the Sabbath. November 2, 1638. [p. 8]

XI. To my dear son Mr Edward Harley, in Magdalen Hall in Oxford. Good Ned, I beseech the Lord to bless you with those choice blessings of his Spirit, which none but his dear elect64 are partakers of; that so you may taste that sweetness in God’s service which indeed is in it: but the men of this world cannot perceive it. Think it not strange, if I tell you, I think it long since I heard from you; but my hope is that you are well, and my prayers are that you may be so. As you say you have found your tutor kind and careful of you, so I hope he will be still.65 If you want anything, let me know it. On Saturday last I heard from your Aunt Pelham: she and all hers are well.66 I believe you have all the intelligence 61 Sir Robert Tracy, second Viscount Tracy of Rathcoole (c.1593–1662), a Member of Parliament, with Sir Robert Harley; however, he fought for the Royalists in the English Civil War. He was related to Harley through her maternal line. 62 Mrs Wilkinson: the wife of Dr John Wilkinson, the principal of Magdalen College between 1605 and 1644. 63 Robin: familiar form of Robert. Harley and her daughter Brilliana refer to Robert’s fits several times in correspondence. 64 Elect: That God had divided the human race into the elect (the saved) and the reprobate (the damned) before the beginning of the world was held by most Puritans, influenced by theology of John Calvin. 65 Still: always. 66 Harley’s sister Frances (b. 1598) married Sir William Pelham of Brocklesby, Lincolnshire, in 1615. The couple had twelve children in nineteen years. Lady

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Advising on body and spirit of the Queen mother’s arrival and entertainment, therefore I will omit it.67 Your father, I thank God, is well; and for myself, I have not yet shaked off my cold. Your brother Robert by God’s mercy to him has been yet free of his fits, and goes to school carefully;68 and I hope he is now so wise to see his stubbornness was not the way to gain anything but reproof. I purpose, if it please God, to send the next week to see you. Your father prays God to bless you. Remember me to your tutor, and I beseech the Lord to keep you from all evil. I have sent you some juice of liquorice, which you may keep to make use of, if you should have a cold.69 So I rest, Your most affectionate mother,

Brilliana Harley

Brampton, November 13, 1638. [p. 9]

XVI. To her son Edward. Good Ned, I have a new welcome for every letter you send, and a new thanks to you for it. I bless God that you are well; the Lord in mercy continue your health, for sure I am, if you be well, I count it upon my own score, and think myself so. My dear Ned, be still watchful over yourself, that custom in seeing and hearing of vice do not abate your distaste of it. I bless my God for those good desires you have, and the comfort you find in the serving of God. Be confident, he is the best Master, and will give the best wages, and they wear the best livery, the garment of holiness, a clothing which never shall wear out, but is renewed every day.70 I remember you in my prayers, as I do my own soul, for you are as dear to me as my life. I hope in a special manner we shall remember you at the fast;71 and, dear Ned, think upon that day, how your father is used to spend it, that so you may have like affections to join with us.

Frances left a text, ‘Expression of Faith’, which is a spiritual guide left as an instructional legacy to her children. See Introduction, note 27. 67 Queen Henrietta Maria’s mother, Marie de Medici, arrived in England in October 1638, for a visit. 68 Carefully: cautiously. 69 A cordial made from water and liquorice was used as an expectorant. 70 A paraphrase of Revelation 19:8: ‘fine linen is the clothing of the righteous’. 71 Fast: a period of abstaining from food or drink. During the Interregnum, the last Wednesdays of every month were known as ‘ember days’ and kept as fast days for religious contemplation. By this time, Christmas was increasingly seen as a Catholic indulgent feast and Puritans were beginning to argue that Christmas

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Brilliana, Lady Harley Let your desire be oftener presented by God that day; and the Lord, who only hears prayers, hear us all. Dear Ned, be careful to use exercise; and for that pain in your back, it may be caused by some indisposition of the kidneys. I would have you drink in the morning beer boiled with liquorice; it is a most excellent thing for the kidneys. For the book, if you cannot have it in French, send it me in English: and I will, if please God, send you money for it. Dear Ned, it is very well done, that you submit to your father’s desire in your clothes; and that is a happy temper, both to be contented with plain clothes, and the wearing of better clothes, not to think oneself the better for them, nor to be troubled if you be in plain clothes, and see others of your rank in better. Seneque72 had not got that victory over himself; for in his country house he lived privately, yet he complains that when he came to the court, he found a tickling desire to [be] like them at court. I am so unwilling that you should go to any place without your worthy tutor, that I send this messenger expressly to your tutor, with a letter to entreat him, you may have the happiness of his company, where so ever you go; and your father by no means would have you go anywhere without him. If you should go to my brother’s, I hear there is a dangerous passage; I desire you may not go that way, but about. The Lord in much mercy bless you, and preserve you from all evil, especially that of sin: and so I rest Your most affectionate mother,

Brilliana Harley.

Your father does not know I send. Therefore take no notice of it, to him, nor to any. December 14, 1638. Nobody in the house knows I send to you. [pp. 16–17]

Day should also be kept as a day of fasting and prayer. Indeed, from June 1647 Parliament banned the feast days of Easter and Christmas altogether, as not sanctioned by the Bible. 72 Seneque: Lucius Annaeus Seneca (d. 65 CE). Harley uses the French spelling of the Roman philosopher’s name. The commonplace book contains excerpts from Seneca’s Epistles. See Margo Todd, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 94.

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Advising on body and spirit XXVIII. To my dear son, Mr Edward Harley, Oxford. My good Ned, The last week being not well, I could not enjoy this contentment of writing to you. You may remember, that when you were at home, I was often enforced to keep my bed; it pleases God, it is so with me still, and when I have those indispositions, it makes me ill for some time afterwards. It is the hand of my gracious God; and though it be sharp, yet when I look at the will of God in it, it is sweetened to me: for to me, there is nothing can sweeten any condition to us, in this life, but as we look at God in it, and see ourselves his servants in that condition in which we are. Therefore when I consider my own afflictions they are not so bitter, when I look at the will of my God in it. He is pleased it should be so, and then, should not I be pleased it should be so? And I hope, the Lord will give me a heart still to wait upon my God; and I hope the Lord will look graciously upon me. And my dearest, believe this from me, that there is no sweetness in anything in this life to be compared to the sweetness in the service of our God, and this I thank God, I can say, not only to agree with those that say so, but experimentally; I have had health and friends and company in variety, and there was a time, that what could I have said I wanted;73 yet in all that there was a trouble and that which gave me peace, was serving my God, and not the service of the world. And I have had a time of sickness, and weakness, and the loss of friends, and as I may say, the gliding away of all those things I took comfort in, in this life. If I should now say (which I may boldly) that, in this condition, O how sweet did I find the love of my God, and the endeavour, to walk in his ways; it may be, some may say, then it must needs be so, because all other comforts failed me; but my dear Ned I must lay both my conditions together; my time of freedom from affliction, and my time of afflictions; and in the one, I found a sweetness in the service of God, above the sweetness of the things in this life, and in trouble a sweetness in the service of God, which took away the bitterness of the affliction; and this I tell you, that you may believe how good the Lord is, and believe it, as a tried truth, the service of the Lord, is more sweet, more peaceable, more delightful, than the enjoying of all the fading pleasures of the world.

73 Wanted: lacked.

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Brilliana, Lady Harley My dear Ned, I thank you for your letter by the carrier this week. Howsoever troubles may befall me, yet if it be well with you, I rejoice. I thank God, that you enjoy your health. The Lord in mercy continue it to you. My dear Ned, I long to see you; but I fear it will not be a great while. I know not well when the Act is and I think I must not look to see you till the Act be passed.74 […] Your most affectionate mother,

Brilliana Harley.

In haste, March 22, 1638. [pp. 33–6]

LX. For my dear son Mr Edward Harley, at Magdalen Hall, in Oxford. Dear Ned, It hath pleased God that I have been ill ever since you went; but yet I rejoice in God’s mercy to me, that you enjoy your health, which your letters have assured me of. I thank you for them, for they have been sweet refreshments to me. Your letter this week by the carrier I received last night, and I bless God that I receive such childlike expressions of love from you. I hope I receive the fruit of your prayers, for the Lord hath been pleased to show His strength in my weakness, to enable me to undergo such a fit of weakness which hath made stronger bodies than mine to stoop.75 This day seven night it pleased God I did miscarry, which I did desire to have prevented; but the Lord which brought His own work to pass, and I desired to submit to it. Your father out of his tender care over me sent for Doctor Diodati,76 who gave me some

74 The Act: At Oxford University a candidate had to defend his bachelor degree thesis in public to be awarded the qualification. The occasion, usually performed in early July each year, included music and sermons and was a large public event. The last one took place in 1733. 75 2 Corinthians 12:9. 76 Doctor Charles Diodati, son of the London physician Theodore Diodati, was based in Chester during this time, so would have to travel some distance for the consultation. Dorothy Evenden Nagy, Popular Medicine in Seventeenth-Century England (Wisconsin, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1988), p. 11. Harley spells his name as variously Dayodet and Deodate, indicating that the doctor pronounced his name in an Anglicised way.

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Advising on body and spirit directions, and is now gone. I thank God I am pretty well, and I hope that as the Lord hath strengthened me to bear my weaknesses in my bed, so I trust He will enable me to rise out of my bed. I was so desirous that you should know how I was, that I entreated your father to let you know in what condition I was. My dear Ned, since I cannot see you, let me hear from you as often as you can. I thank God your father is well, and so are your brothers and sisters. Mr Balham carries himself very well, who I have enquired after as much as my illness will give me leave.77 Remember me to your tutor, who I desire to remember me in his prayers. I pray God bless you with those eternal riches of the saving graces of His spirit. So I rest Brill. Harley.78

Your affectionate mother, Brampton, January 31, 1639.

[pp. 78–9]

LXII. For my dear son Mr Edward Harley, in Magdalen Hall, Oxford. My dear Ned, Yesterday I received your letter by my cousin Davis,79 and this day yours by the carrier, both were very welcome to me, and I desire to acknowledge God’s mercy to me, that you enjoy your health, which I pray God you long do, with a heart desirous to spend all your strength and health to the glory of your God. My dear Ned, I thank you for your earnest desire for my health. I am, I think, better for your prayers. I did not send for Doctor — 80 to take physic, for I thank God I was not sick, but I knew I had need of cordials, and those I took of Doctor Diodati and not of Doctor Wright.

77 Mr Balham was someone Edward brought home from Oxford with him for the holidays. 78 This letter was dictated and signed by Harley. 79 Possibly Captain Priamus Davies, who was among those besieged when the castle at Brampton was attacked. Davies left a diarised account of the siege of Brampton Bryan, entitled ‘A True Relation of the Siege of Brampton Castle in the county of Hereford, begun on Wednesday, July 26th, 1643, being the Public Fast day’, MS. f. 23 PO/VOL. XXIII, Longleat House. 80 Name left blank in source text.

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Brilliana, Lady Harley I thank God I am now able to sit up a little. This day I sat up out of my bed almost an hour. I should be glad to have you with me, since I can let your thoughts run with me. I did not think I had been with child when you were with me.81 The Lord bless you, and make you still a comfort to Your affectionate mother,

Brilliana Harley.

February 8, 1639. Brampton. Your father, brothers and sisters are well. Remember my service to your worthy tutor, who I hope remembers me in his prayers, for I do him in mine. [p. 80]

CLXXV. For my dear son Mr Edward Harley. My dear Ned, Believe it, your letter by Rafe and Mr Longly and the post this week were very welcome to me. It is true, as you apprehend it, that I have great cause to bless God for His great mercy in giving me, now at this time, a far more full measure of health than I have had, ever since I was ill; for now, I thank God, I can go abroad at those times that I was enforced to keep my bed, and this last week was able, at that time, to keep a private fast,82 and the Lord that has done this for me, the unworthiest of all His servants, I trust I am fully assured, will do much more for His church. I have often told you, I thought you would see troublesome times; but, my dear Ned, keep your heart above the

81 Edward went home to Brampton during December for Christmas. There is a break in the letters between 6 December and 31 January 1639. Edward was back in Oxford by mid-January as on 17 January his sister Brilliana sent him some books there. The miscarriage was probably at a very early stage in the pregnancy, as Harley reports being ill for a week at the end of November with her usual illness, by which she normally means her menstrual problems, and says that she did not suspect herself to be pregnant while Edward was home. Edward appears to have reproved his sister for not writing to him to tell him how ill their mother was because she writes on the same day as her mother, by which time their father had informed Edward of the miscarriage, that she thought bad news would reach him ‘fast enough’, and again on 3 February hoping that he had now forgotten her ‘fault’ in not contacting him, but he is still upset because when Brilliana writes again on 8 February to tell him that their mother was now well enough to get up from her bed, she comments that his last letter to her ‘had not a spark of love in it’ (pp. 58–9). 82 Matthew 6:18.

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Advising on body and spirit world, and then you will not be troubled at the changes in it; and having your God for your portion, which I am confident you have, and it is my comfort that I can believe so, you are happy: for I can experimentally say, that the Lord will show most mercy, when we stand in most need of it; and I am confident, the Lord will not fail His poor servants at this time. I wish you with me, but dear Ned, I am glad you are at London, because that is a safer place. […] I pray God bless you and give you a comfortable meeting with Your most affectionate mother,

Brilliana Harley.

[…] July 15, 1642. [pp. 177–79]

CCV. For my dear son Colonel Harley. My dear Ned, Your short but welcome letter I received by Prosser, and as it has pleased God to entrust you with a greater charge, as to change your troop into a regiment, so the Lord in mercy bless you with a double measure of abilities, and the Lord of Hosts be your protector and make you victorious. My dear Ned, how much I long to see you I cannot express, and if it be possible, [to] in part meet my desires in desiring, in some measure as I do, to see me; and if [it] pleased the Lord, I wish you were at Brampton. I am now again threatened; there are some soldiers come to Lemster83 and 3 troops of horse to Hereford with Sir William Vavasour,84 and they say they mean to visit Brampton again; but I hope the Lord will deliver me. My trust is only in my God, who never yet failed me. I pray you ask Mr King what I prayed him to tell you concerning Wigmore.85

83 Lemster: Leominster. 84 Sir William Vavasour was one of the group of noblemen who went to fight with Prince Rupert in Germany, he received a baronetcy in this year. Sir William Croft, kinsman of the Harleys, was also in Vavasour’s party. 85 As correspondence was often intercepted, confidential information was passed orally, for safety.

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Brilliana, Lady Harley I have taken a very great cold, which has made me very ill these 2 or 3 days, but I hope the Lord will be merciful to me, in giving me my health, for it is an ill time to be sick in.86 My dear Ned, I pray God bless you and give me the comfort of seeing you, for you are the comfort of Your most affectionate mother,

Brilliana Harley.

October 9, 1643. [pp. 208–9]

86 Harley died twenty days later, on 29 October 1643.

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6 ‘Eliza’

Even though Eliza’s Babes: Or the Virgins-Offering (1652) is in part a spiritual autobiography, specific details about the author’s life are excluded; instead, what a reader is offered is a generic pattern that makes it impossible to separate an individual from an image. Through this volume of prose and poetry, produced over a period of eight years, if not longer, the anonymous author establishes an intimate union between herself and Christ, her beloved. Since very little is known about the author, she has become recognised as ‘Eliza’, which might be either a pseudonym or indeed her real name. On the title page ‘Eliza’ calls herself ‘a Lady, who only desires to advance the glory of God, and not her own’ (p. 56), indicating that she may have been a member of the gentry. Her volume is dedicated to her ‘Sisters’ (p. 8), alluding either to her siblings or possibly to her religious congregation. There are no details concerning this matter, apart from the titles of her two poems, ‘To my Sister. S. G.’ (p. 8) and ‘To my Sister, S. S.’ (p. 27), but whether these were the author’s siblings or her congregational family has been impossible to discover. The volume also includes a poem addressed to her brother, showing that there must have been a strong bond between them, as Eliza requests that she be buried alongside him, after her death. In the volume she uses the loss of her brother to demonstrate the pious way with which she accepts the will of God. Although the poems to her husband suggest that Eliza was married (rather than that she used this as a rhetorical device), her poems about marriage discuss her desire to remain single and to dedicate her life to God. As Katharine Hodgkin has commented, following the post-Reformation closure of the monasteries, ‘women in Protestant England no longer had the possibility of a convent life’, but the trope of preferring to live a retired religious life is one which occurs regularly in women’s writings of the period.1 1 Katharine Hodgkin, ed., Women, Madness and Sin in Early Modern England: The Autobiographical Writings of Dionys Fitzherbert (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), p. 10.

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‘Eliza’ The fact that the author identifies strongly with the Virgin Mary might imply that Eliza was affiliated with Catholicism or High Church Anglicanism. Her spiritual mentor’s initial is supposedly revealed in her poem ‘My Bill of Thanks to Mr. C.’ (p. 47), but this information is insufficient to identify him. As a devotional work, Eliza’s text is full of scriptural allusions, particularly images from the books of Psalms, Ecclesiastes, Romans, Luke, Hosea, Isaiah and Ephesians. However, her wit also comes across in her writing and the text is permeated with sarcasm and irony. The work also demonstrates the influence of such canonical writers as George Herbert and George Wither. By assigning the authorship to God, Eliza follows the popular trope of self-denial and self-promotion; this illustrates the paradoxical situation where virtuous female Christian writers build complex godly portraits of themselves, while denying their desire for fame, but nevertheless also attract attention to themselves as the authors of their texts. Because of the complexity of her views and general lack of information about her, it is difficult to define Eliza’s political stance, but there are several poems in her volume that provide room for speculation. ‘To the King. Writ, 1644’ (p. 76) offers political advice or rather prophetic guidance by telling Charles I to ‘Be not too rigid, dear King yield’ (line 10) and to accept the proposed Parliamentarian reforms. She does not want him to leave the kingdom, ‘But rather thee reformed receive’ (line 16) and ‘Let us in peace, your presence view’ (line 18). On the one hand, this shows her pro-Royalist attitude; on the other, it indicates that Eliza was aware of the unfavourable royal politics and the necessity of flexibility that would avoid further conflicts. Her undated poem ‘To General Cromwell’ (p. 101) questions Oliver Cromwell’s political skills, and begins with the speaker’s general wondering: ‘Why do I, complain of thee [Cromwell]?’ Eliza’s audacity to criticise the political situation and to question Cromwell’s authority to ‘scourgeth’ people with a ‘rod’ can be viewed as a public testimony. ‘To a Friend at Court’ (p. 72) ends with the moral: ‘We envy none, but pity Kings’. This conclusion might be a reflection of her witnessing the complicated nature of the leader’s role; it can be assumed that Eliza was in some way connected to Charles I’s court. She also mentions her acquaintances with a wider, European political circle. Her probable visit to The Hague is succinctly discussed in her poem ‘To the Queen of Bohemia’ (p. 77; not reproduced here). Eliza’s speaker claims to have seen Princess Elizabeth, the sister of Charles I, but there is no indication or evidence of them meeting. Eliza’s possible socialising with such well-established people might have encouraged her to build her audacity to criticise the civil situation in England, to speak on behalf of her community and to articulate her community’s demands. 145

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Advising on body and spirit Note on the text The source text for this extract is Eliza’s Babes or, the Virgins-Offering. Being Divine Poems, and Meditations. Written by a Lady, who Only Desires to Advance the Glory of God, and not her Own (London: Laurence Blaiklock, 1652), held by the British Library.

Further reading Erica Longfellow, ‘Eliza’s Babes: Poetry “Proceeding from Divinity” in SeventeenthCentury England’, Gender and History, 14 (2002), 242–65 Michael Rex, ‘Eyes on the Prize: The Search for Personal Space and Stability Through Religious Devotion in Eliza’s Babes’, in Eugene R. Cunnar and Jeffrey Johnson, eds, Discovering and (Re)Covering Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyrics (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2001), pp. 205–32 Liam Semler, ed., Eliza’s Babes: Or the Virgin’s Offering (London: Associated University Press, 2001) —— , ‘The Protestant Birth Ethic: Aesthetic, Political, and Religious Contexts for Eliza’s Babes (1652)’, English Literary Renaissance, 30 (2008), 432–56 —— , ‘Who Is the Mother of Eliza’s Babes (1652)? “Eliza”, George Wither and Elizabeth Emerson’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 99 (2000), 513–36 Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993)

Eliza’s Babes: Or the Virgins-Offering (1652) To My Sisters. Look on these Babes2 as none of mine, For they were but brought forth by me; But look on them, as they are Divine, Proceeding from Divinity. [A1v ]

2

Babes: early modern writers very often referred to their writings as their children. Anne Bradstreet’s poem ‘An Author to Her Book’, for example, published in a reissue of a former collection of her poems in 1678, presents her book of poetry as the ‘ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain’: Jeannine Hensley, ed., The Works of Anne Bradstreet (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 238.

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‘Eliza’ To the Reader When first the motion3 came into my mind, that these Babes of mine, should be sent into the world; I would fain have supprest that motion, for divers4 reasons which may be imagined, by them, that shall read them: But especially by those, that knew my disposition. But rising one day, from my Devotions, it was suggested to my consideration, that those desires were not given me, to be kept in private, to myself, but for the good of others. And if any unlike a Christian shall say; I wrote them, for mine own glory. I like a Christian, will tell them; I therefore sent them abroad;5 for such a strict union is there betwixt my dear God and me, that his glory is mine, and mine is his; and I will tell them too, I am not ashamed of their birth; for before I knew it, the Prince of eternal glory had affianced me to himself 6 and that is my glory. And now to all such shall I direct my speech, whose brave spirits may carry them to high desires. Place not your affections in your Youth, beneath yourselves, but if you would be happy on earth, and enjoy these outward blessings, with free and lawful contentment; bestow your first affections on my Almighty Prince. I would have you all love him, and him to love you all. I being his, must do, as he will have me: and methinks, he directs me to tell you, that you shall never be happy on Earth, nor glorious in Heaven, if you do not love him, above all earthly things. More, I must tell you, that if you will dedicate to his service, and present into his hands, your wealth, wit, spirit, youth, beauty, he will give you wealth, if less, more useful: your wit more pure, your spirit more high, and transcendent, and your youth and beauty, which time will steal from you, or some malignant disease, with pain, rend from you; them he will lay up awhile for you, and return them again for eternity, with great advantage.7 And that you need not doubt of the certainty of what is told you, they that tell it you have found part of it true, and shall the rest. I cannot be content, to be happy alone, I wish you all blessed too; nor can I smother up those great and infinite blessings, that I have received

3 4 5 6

Motion: agitation of the mind or feelings. Divers: several. Abroad: to the public. Prince of eternal glory (also Great Prince, Prince of Peace): Christ. Eliza alludes here to the idea of a mystical marriage in which she is a wife to Christ; the strict union was initiated by Christ’s death, which redeemed all sinners. 7 This sentence makes explicit the assumed link between the health of the soul and that of the body. Eliza warns that pride in earthly beauty can be destroyed by disease, especially smallpox, which, if it was not deadly, often scarred the face. Smallpox was very common in the seventeenth century. See Raymond Anselment, ‘Smallpox in Seventeenth-Century English Literature’, Medical History, 33 (1989), 72–95.

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Advising on body and spirit from him, with private thanks.8 That Great Prince of Heaven and Earth, proclaimed by Angels, that he was come into the world, to show his good will and love to me; was here content, to die a public death9 for me, to save me, from a Hell of misery; in which I lay, and should have lain, had not he, the Prince of Peace, and the fairest and chiefest among the sons of men, shed his most precious and royal blood, for me; and before he died he left word, that I should not fear, for it was his great and glorious Father’s10 will, to bestow on us a Kingdom. And was so great a Prince, not ashamed to avow so great affection and love to me, and shall I be ashamed to return him public thanks, for such infinite and public favours? No: I will not, but with all my mind, heart, and soul, I bless and praise my Almighty God, for so great benefits, bestowed on me, his unworthy servant. Methinks it is not enough for myself only to do it, but I must send out my Babes, to do it, with me, and for me: And if any shall say, others may be as thankful as she, though they talk not so much of it; Let them know that if they did rightly apprehend the infinite mercies of God to them, they could not be silent: And if they do not think the mercies of God worth public thanks; I do, and therefore I will not be ashamed, to be that one in ten that returned, to acknowledge himself a cleansed Leper.11 And now my Babes some may say to you, unless you had been more curiously drest, or more finely shaped, your Mother might have kept you in obscurity. Tell them, I sent you to their more learned and refined wits, to form you to a more curious shape;12 and tyre13 you in a more enticing dress. But this I will say for you, You want14 none of your limbs,15 and your clothes are of rich materials. I dare not say, I am loath to let you go: Go you must, to praise him, that gave you me. And more I’ll say for you, which few Mothers can, you were obtained by virtue, born with ease and pleasure,16 and will live to 8 9 10 11

Private thanks: praying at home and privately writing her poetry to praise God. Public death: Christ was crucified for the sake of redeeming all sinners. Father: God. Luke 17:11–19. Only one of the ten lepers who were miraculously healed by Christ returned to him to express gratitude and to glorify him. 12 Curious: careful; in this case referring to the quality that is to the form and language of the writing. This might allude to Psalms 139:15: ‘I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth’. The word ‘curious’ is also used in Andrew Marvell’s ‘The Coronet’ to describe the quality of the poem. 13 Tyre: attire, clothe. 14 Want: lack. 15 Limbs: In the seventeenth century, babies were usually swaddled to ensure that they grew with straight limbs, so this was a reference to Eliza being a good mother. As well as in a straightforward sense, the word ‘limbs’ was used metaphorically to refer to members of the Church as limbs of the body of Christ. 16 Eliza follows the tradition of writers giving birth to their works. She also directly opposes the ‘ease and pleasure’ of this birth in comparison with actual (painful) child labour.

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‘Eliza’ my content and felicity. And so Adieu: But stay! Something you may truly say for your own imperfections, and your Mother’s excuse, That some of you were born, when herself was but a child; but My joy, my bliss, my happy Story In Heaven is writ, and that’s my Glory. [A2–A3V ]

Psalms 56, Verse 10 I Glory in the word of God,   To praise it I accord. With joy I will declare abroad,   The goodness of the Lord. All you that goodness do disdain,   Go; read not here: And if you do; I tell you plain,   I do not care. For why? above your reach my soul is placed, And your odd words shall not my mind distaste. And when you read these lines, mistake not a Divine affection, for a Poetical fancy; for I affect not to express my fancy, but I would have my fancy express my affection. [p. 1]

The Virgin’s Offering With thee, blest Virgin,17 I would bring An Offering, to please my King.18 Two Turtle Doves,19 thou didst present, Can there be better by me sent. A Lamb more pure, than they could be, 17 Virgin: The Virgin Mary, mother of Christ. 18 King: God. 19 Luke 2:21–4. Luke’s gospel states that the Virgin Mary brought gifts of two turtle doves to the temple to express her gratitude towards God after the birth of her son and that is what Eliza says she is doing after giving birth to her volume. These are later referred to as ‘Turtles’ (line 7).

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Advising on body and spirit I heard was thither brought by thee. These two small Turtles now of mine, To him, I do present with thine. The Lamb will serve for thee and me, No better offering, can there be. Thus with thee, Virgin do I bring An offering will please my King. [p. 5]

Canticles 220 The Winter is passed, the Summer is come, I will now solace myself in the Vineyards of my beloved; for he will guide me here by his Counsel, and at length receive me to his Glory.

The Rapture21 Most of people hover here below, Too near the earth, I’ll not do so; But I’ll arise, and to Heaven go, I will not tarry here below. This earthly state’s, too mean for me, I’ll flee where the bright Angels be, That still the face of God do see, With them, my Soul can best agree, ’Mong them I’ll set me down and sing, The praises of our glorious King, By him we have our blest being, We with delight his praises sing.

20 Canticles: the book of the Bible called the Song of Songs (also known as the Song of Solomon) that was used as source of establishing a matrimonial union between God and a believer. It tells a story of two lovers: the beloved (as Christ) and a love (a believer). The Song includes various images of the sensuous and intimate relationship between the man and the woman. 21 Rapture: refers to the act of transporting a person from earth to heaven.

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‘Eliza’ Still in this Rapture let me bide, And from this pleasing bliss nev’r glide, But be like to the Eagle eyed. I have just now methinks descried The glorious Sun in Heaven so bright, On this transcendent throne of light; It dazzles now my human sight; The lustre of it is so bright. I would not now with mortals be, To tell them in what bliss are we. Let them arise, and come to me, If they would know our dignity. O let me not to earth now go, How dark and hideous, it doth show, They crawl like Ants methinks below, Among such Creatures, I’d not go. But if to earth thou wilt have me, To do what thy will doth decree; Let me descend more willingly; By me thy will must acted be. But yet before I go away Grant I beseech, for what I pray, Or let me here with thee still stay, Take no offence at my delay. Oh let thy heavenly Sun of light With me send down his beams most bright, So to my soul shall be no night, She being enwrapt in Heav’ns bright light. [pp. 10–11]

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Advising on body and spirit Upon a Pain at Heart God laid his hand upon my heart, To see, if I would from it part: I was content to let it go, I lik’t it best to have it so; For then no more it should be pained, When it with him a place had gained, But he’d hav’t here, a few more days, An Instrument unto his praise. [p. 12]

The Pavilion22 On thy fair wings, most sacred Dove, 23 Let me be raised, with thee on high Unto the heavenly God of Love, Where I shall rest me quietly. No ill shall there my Dove affright, I’ll bid all fear on earth adieu, For I am now at such a height, As cannot reachèd be by you. In this Pavilion I shall sing, Though I may see you fly at me, I am assured by his bright wing, He will not let me wounded be. [p. 14]

22 Pavilion: a shelter or a place to hide; in this case Eliza refers to heaven as a place offering protection and safety. 23 Eliza echoes David’s psalm where he wishes ‘that I had wings like a dove! for then would I fly away, and be at rest’ (Psalms 55:6). Like Eliza, David experienced the ‘oppression of the wicked’ (55:3) and sought to fly to his Lord in heaven. Cf. Eliza’s poems ‘The Submission’ (p. 153), ‘The Bride’ (p. 158), ‘What I Love’ (p. 159) and ‘Wings’ (p. 173).

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‘Eliza’ The Submission24 My soul to Heaven would haste & fly, And there make suit, that I may die Because from heaven she is detained, Lives in a body sometimes pained: And in her glory cannot be, So long, as here she stays in me. But that thy will she doth respect, And looks to what thou hast elect.25 And will contented be to stay; That here thy will, she might obey: She wisheth rather to please thee, Then in her glory for to be. [pp. 14–15]

The Change Vain world, when as I lovèd thee. Dire sadness still possessèd me, But since I learnt to despise thee, Sweet joys and gladness filleth me. [p. 15]

To a Friend at Court Retired26 here content I live, My own thoughts to me pleasure give. While thine own actions anger thee, Sweet quiet thoughts contenteth me. This blessing sweet retiredness brings, We envy none, but pity Kings. [p. 17]

24 Submission: deferring to a higher authority. 25 Elect: that God had divided the human race into the elect (the saved) and the reprobate (the damned) before the beginning of the world was held by most Puritans, influenced by theology of John Calvin. 26 Retired: living in a quiet or secluded place.

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Advising on body and spirit My Robes I will not now to thee Lord come   As I from Adam27 came, But I will come as in thy Son.   His Robes28 shall hide my shame. He is my Spouse,29 and my loved Lord,   In him thou lovest me, I to thy will would still accord,   And with him still agree. In his bright Robes, I will present   Myself to thee and say, To do thy will is my intent;   In him I thee obey. Thou canst not now, Lord me reject,   Thou must me perfect see; His beauty doth on me reflect,30   I’m beautiful to thee. [p. 21]

27 Adam: the first man in the Bible, who was created in God’s image. 28 His Robes: Christ’s robes. 29 Spouse: Husband in a mystical marriage. 30 The covenant believers entered into with God guarantees his forgiveness and ‘robes of salvation’, and these God imputed to his people. This means that even though people can be dressed in God’s righteousness, it is still God’s, not theirs, and they still have to be devoted and committed in their faith and conduct. This might allude to Romans 4:18–22, where Abraham expresses his ardent belief in God’s promise to make him a father, in spite of him and his wife being aged. And, finally, his wife becomes pregnant: ‘Who against hope believed in hope, that he might become the father of many nations, according to that which was spoken, So shall thy seed be. And being not weak in faith, he considered not his own body now dead, when he was about an hundred years old, neither yet the deadness of Sara’s womb: He staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief; but was strong in faith, giving glory to God; And being fully persuaded that, what he had promised, he was able also to perform. And therefore it was imputed to him for righteousness.’ See Milian Lauritz Andreasen, Isaiah the Gospel Prophet: A Preacher of Righteousness (New York: Herald, 2001), p. 384.

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‘Eliza’ The Dart31 Shoot from above Thou God of Love, And with heav’ns dart Wounded my blest heart. Descend sweet life, And end this strife: Earth would me stay, But I’ll away. I’ll die32 for love Of thee above, Then should I be Made one with thee. And let be said Eliza’s dead, And of love died, That love defied. By a bright beam, shot from above, She did ascend to her great Love, And was content of love to die, Shot with a dart of Heaven’s bright eye. [p. 22]

To the King. Writ, 1644 33 To thee, Great Monarch of this Isle I send my Babes, pray make them smile; For yet methinks ’tis in thy power, To make them smile, or let them lower.34

31 Dart: used in a figurative sense to mean God’s punishment. The three darts were traditionally war, plague and famine. 32 Die: a pun on orgasm as a little death; here the spiritual coupling results in a rapturous state. 33 King: Charles I, whose execution in January 1649 marked the start of the English Commonwealth, which ended in 1660 with the restoration of his son, Charles II. 34 Lower: frown.

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Advising on body and spirit They’re children to that Prince of might; Who is the Prince of peace behight.35 Do not with war my Babes affrights, In smiling peace is their delight, My Prince by yielding won the field, Be not too rigid, dear King yield: Examples that are great and high. I hope you’ll follow, fix your eye On my great Prince, that is your King, He left a Heaven, you peace to bring, A Kingdom I’d not have you leave, But rather three reformed receive, All bliss and peace I wish to you, Let us in peace, your presence view. [p. 23]

The Renowned King Ladies! if beauty you desire, Or to high fortunes do aspire, Come now with me I have descried, A Prince, that to all, can you guide. He is a King of great renown, And on your head can place a Crown And with immortal beauty bless, Can you with more? yet wish no less If you desire this Prince to see, Then leave the world and go with me, To true Elysian fields,36 I’ll guide You, where I this great Prince espied.

35 Behight: called; named. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word was becoming obsolete in the seventeenth century, though was used by Edmund Spenser as an archaism in The Fairie Queene. 36 Elysian fields: the supposed state or abode of the blessed after death in Greek mythology, used figuratively as here for a place of happiness.

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‘Eliza’ The holy leaves of Sacred writ Are those Elysians, there let’s get, Where with joy we shall him find, This glorious Prince will please your mind. He’s like the Rose in Sharon fields, Pleasant to sight, and sweetness yields, With sweet and fair, from his bright face, The Lily and the Rose gets grace,37 With serious thoughts now him behold If you him love you may be bold, And in his presence ever be, His beauty will reflect on thee. If thou get beauty from his face, He will you take from your mean place, And on his Throne he will set thee, Where with his Crown thou crowned shalt be, That beauty still with thee will stay, Time will not carry it away. That Crown shall no man take from thee, But thou shalt wear’t eternally. [pp. 25–6]

The Vision Why from celestial bliss, did you Draw me? these meaner things to view, Through those fair gates of pearl,38 get I And that most pleasant wall passed by, Up that pure river strait I went, That from the throne takes his ascent, Then to the glorious throne I got, Where I did see, O God, what not: For whatsoever doth excel, In thee, doth in perfection dwell. 37 Song of Songs 2:1. 38 Gates of pearl: the gateway to heaven, as described in Revelation 21:21.

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Advising on body and spirit That glorious Lustre and bright ray Made me forget my mortal day. Me thought that fine Oriental light,39 Made me like it appear as bright. From these sweet joys why draw you me Myself in meaner Robes to see? For since I used to heaven to go, All things on earth do sordid show. [pp. 29–30]

The Bride Sith40 you me ask, Why born was I? I’ll tell you; ’twas to heaven to fly, Not here to live a slavish life, By being to the world a wife. When I was born, I was set free, From mortals’ thraldom here to be;41 For that great Prince prepared a bride, That for my love on earth here died. May not I then earth’s thraldom scorn, Sith for heaven’s Prince I here was born? If matched in heaven I wear a Crown, But earthly thraldom pulls me down. [p. 31]

39 Oriental light: this was a phrase used by John Donne in his Sermon XLIX, 1629, perhaps indicating that Eliza read his work. See LXXX Sermons Preached by that Learned and Reverend Divine, John Donne (London: Richard Royston, 1640), p. 496. Eliza seems to be referring to heavenly light. 40 Sith: if subsequently. 41 Thraldom: being in bondage or servitude.

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‘Eliza’ When my Brother was Sick If that my brother thou wilt take from me, Lord with thy will make me contented be. But if it be, thy blessèd will my Lord, To my request to bend and to accord. And if no harm, to him, that it might be In this request, then gracious God hear me, And grant, that well and long, he here may live, And honour thee, and glory to thee give And be an instrument here of thy praise, And in thy service, spend and end his days. But if in his young years, my Lord thou please From pain and grief to take him unto ease. And if thou fitter dost my Brother see, With thee to reign in glory, then to be, Here subject to a world of slavish fears; For in this mortal world we must have cares. Only in heaven we shall sweet freedom gain, In heaven, there is no fear, no care, nor pain. Then to thy holy will, my gracious Lord, Make me thy servant ever to accord. And if to Heaven thou wilt my Brother take, I pray thee teach my soul for to forsake Vain earthly thoughts, and flee from earth to thee, So with my Brother’s soul my soul shall be. My wishes are, those beams may ravish42 thee, That wrapt me now in sweet felicity. [pp. 32–3]

What I Love Give me a Soul, give me a Spirit, That flies from earth, heaven to inherit. But those that grovel here below, What! I love them? I’ll not do so. [p. 36] 42 Ravish: fill with ecstasy, intense delight, or enrapture.

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Advising on body and spirit The Only Bound My boundless spirits, bounded be in thee, For bounded by no other can they be. [p. 36]

Upon the Loss of my Brother When loss of ought would thee torment. Cry; ’tis thy will, Lord I’m content. My love must not divided be, ’Twixt Earth and Heaven, thou’lt have me see. My brother from me thou hast tane,43 But yet content I must remain. A Brother and a friend was he, But much more thou wilt be to me. When thoughts of absence moves a tear, Thy will is, that I should forbear, He went not but by thy decree, And I must not displeasèd be. [p. 38]

To a Lady Unfaithful Madam, The Prince of the heaven being in love with you Did to his glorious Kingdom, bid Adieu. The heaven, he was awhile content to leave To see, if you would his chaste love receive. You did belong to him, when he you sent Into the world; but you from him soon went, And his chaste love, so pleasing and so sweet, You left your wanton Paramour44 to meet, With his unlawful love you pleased yourself, Fie Madam, leave him, he is but an Elf.45 43 Tane: taken. 44 Paramour: a lover. 45 Elf: a supernatural creature, one that possesses formidable magical powers, troublesome, sometimes malevolent.

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‘Eliza’ See what your dear sweet Prince hath done for you, ’Tis very strange, but yet ’tis very true. When he did see you wantonize46 with them Who were professèd enemies to him: He then with his fierce enemy did fight, To reingain47 you as his ancient right. He lost his royal blood to purchase you, How can you then but to this Prince prove true. Can you a Coward love, and stain your name By being false unto this Prince of fame? Your wanton lover’s actions hate the light. And you’re ashamed to act them in our sight. Then here I’ll tell you, if you know not it, All your actions, and vain thoughts unfit, Your true and lawful Lord doth straight espy, He sees the wanton glances of your eye. Think with yourself, and then you will refrain, You both yourself, and your great Lord defame. I wonder how you can this vain world love, As if you did forget your heaven above, And in your ill, unlawful actions live. Your God doth freely all things to you give: Prove you but constant to his love and true, All things are lawful to be used by you. [pp. 40–1]

On Marriage Lord! if thou hast ordained for me, That I on earth must married be: As often I have been foretold, Be not thy will, by me controlled. And if my heart thou dost incline Children to have, Lord make them thine,

46 Wantonize: act lewdly with. 47 Reingain: regain. Eliza adds an extra syllable probably to fit the metre.

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Advising on body and spirit Or never let’t be said they’re mine. I shall not like what’s not divine. I no ambition have for earth, My thoughts are of a higher birth. The Soul’s sweet Babes, do bring no pain, And they immortalize the name. [p. 42]

The Gift My Lord, hast thou given me away? Did I on earth, for a gift stay? Hath he by prayer of thee gained me, Who was so strictly knit to thee. To thee I only gave my heart, Wouldst thou my Lord from that gift part? I know thou wouldst deliver me To none, but one beloved by thee. But Lord my heart thou dost not give, Though here on earth, while I do live My body here he may retain, My heart in heaven, with thee must reign, Then as thy gift let him think me, Sith I a donage48 am from thee. And let him know thou hast my heart, He only hath my earthly part. It was my glory I was free, And subject here to none but thee, And still that glory I shall hold If thou my Spirit dost enfold. It is my bliss, I here serve thee, ’Tis my great joy; thou lovest me. [pp. 42–3]

48 Donage: dowry.

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‘Eliza’ The Change Great God! How hast thou changed my thoughts in me, For when I thought to be a wife, I then did think troubled to be, Because I saw most live in strife. But thou a husband hast given me, Whose sweet discretion doth direct, And orders all things so for me, As if of heaven, he were elect. To take all trouble quite from me, That earth’s possession here doth bring, And so doth leave me quite to thee, Thy praise here to sit and sing. [pp. 43–4]

My Descent If anyone think mean of me, ’Tis cause they do not my birth see, I did descend from a great King, And an Immortal God did spring. I’m daughter to the King of Kings, And must condemn base earthly things. To heaven’s great Prince, he married me, And now my linage you may see. And while I mean am in your eye, I often to my glory fly, And with my great Prince do abide, Where placèd by his blessèd side. With heavenly bliss methinks I’m crowned, His glorious beams do me surround, Where I sit and hear the story Of my Prince, and see his glory. [pp. 45–6] 163

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Advising on body and spirit To my Husband When from the world, I shall be tane,49 And from earth’s necessary pain. Then let no blacks be worn for me, Not in a Ring50 my dear by thee. But this bright Diamond, let it be Worn in remembrance of me. And when it sparkles in your eye, Think ’tis my shadow passeth by. For why, more bright you shall me see, Than that or any Gem can be. Dress not the house with sable weed, As if there were some dismal deed Acted to be when I am gone, There is no cause for me to mourn. And let no badge of Herald51 be The sign of my Antiquity. It was my glory I did spring From heaven’s eternal powerful King: To his bright Palace heir am I. It is his promise, he’ll not lie. By my dear Brother pray lay me. It was a promise made by thee. And now I must bid thee adieu, For I’m a parting now from you. [pp. 46–7]

Being in Pain Lord, if my sin produce my pain, Pray let me never sin again. For pain is grievous unto me, And sin is hateful unto thee. Let me not do what troubleth thee, And thou’lt not send what grieve shall me. But if my patience Lord thou tryest,

49 Tane: taken. 50 Ring: a mourning ring (a ring worn as a memorial of a deceased person). 51 Herald: an officer who acted as a messenger. See Daniel 3:4.

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‘Eliza’ If I will bear, what thou applyest, To cure the malady of sin, Cease not my pain, but send’t again; For pain I rather would endure, Than grieve thine eyes of light so pure That our most secret thoughts do spy, And wanton glances of the eye: For which thou sendest punishments, Or else corrects with sapience.52 [p. 48]

Being Called a Stoic 53 Not as a Stoic I’m exempt from care, But as a Christian I would all things bear. Nor that I blinded am and nothing see, No: I see all, but take it patiently. [p. 50]

To General Cromwell 54 The Sword of God doth ever dwell I’th hand of virtue! O Cromwell, But why do I, complain of thee? ’Cause thou’rt the rod that scourgeth mee? But if a good child I will be, I’ll kiss the Rod,55 and honour thee; And if thou’rt virtuous as ’tis said, Thou’lt have the glory when thou’rt dead.

52 Sapience: wisdom or understanding. 53 Stoic: a person who represses emotion, and endures various misfortunes patiently. 54 General Cromwell: Oliver Cromwell became a Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland after the execution of Charles I. 55 Kiss the Rod: a common euphemism used to mean accepting punishment meekly.

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Advising on body and spirit Sith56 Kings and Princes scourgèd be, Whip thou the Lawyer from his fee That is so great, when nought they do, And we are put off from our due. But they for their excuse do say, ’Tis from the law is our delay. By Tyrants’ heads those laws were made, As by the learnèd it is said. If then from Tyrants you’ll us free, Free us from their Law’s Tyranny. If not! we’ll say the head is pale, But still the sting lives in the tail.57 [p. 54]

To a Lady that Bragged of her Children If thou hast cause to joy in thine, I have cause too to joy of mine.58 Thine did proceed from sinful race, Mine from the heavenly dew of grace. Thine at their birth did pain thee bring, When mine are born, I sit and sing. Thine doth delight in nought but sin, My Babes’ work is, to praise heav’n’s King. Thine bring both sorrow, pain and fear, Mine banish from me dreadful care. [pp. 54–5]

56 Sith: seeing that. 57 The sting lives in the tail: Revelation 9:10 prophesies the coming of locusts out of the great pit that resemble pale horses with the tails of scorpions with the power to ‘hurt men five months’. 58 Mine: Eliza’s ‘children’ (her writings).

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‘Eliza’ To a Friend for her Naked Breasts Madam, I praise you, ’cause you’re free, And you do not conceal from me What hidden in your heart doth lie, If I can it through your breasts spy. Some Ladies will not show their breasts For fear men think they are undresst, Or by’t their hearts they should discover, They do’t to tempt some wanton Lover. They are afraid tempters to be, Because a Curse imposed they see, Upon the tempter that was first, By an all-seeing God that’s just.59 But though I praise you have a care Of that all-seeing eye, and fear, Lest he through your bare breast sees sin, And punish you for what’s within. [p. 56]

On Earthly Love From thee, O Heaven of glory flows that celestial stream, that being taken hath power to make us forgetful of our earthly love, the which must vanish, and alone can set us free from those tormenting passions. Thou sweet stream, having cured us of those distempered passions, hast then the power to work in our hearts a more peaceable and durable affection: earthly affection, ever brings distemper, sometimes distraction; but that sweet love, which thou O pearly fountain, raisest in our breast, flameth in our hearts, peace, rest, joy, and it worketh a perpetual assurance of still60 enjoying what we love, wish, or can in heart desire. My Lord! My soul is ravisht with the contemplation of thy heavenly love; and I cannot chose but infinitely admire thy mercies to me thine unworthy servant; for grievous were the perturbations which I was subject to, when I was infected with the poison-bane of earthly 59 The curse placed on Eve, the first ‘tempter’. 60 Still: always.

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Advising on body and spirit affections, the which a time thou wert pleased to let reign and tyrannize in my breast, which like a thorn in the flesh, not being drawn out, by the hand of art, lies throbbing and working torment, not only to the place where it hath taken up its abode, but brings distemper to the whole body: So that unruly passion having taken up his place in my heart, did not only tyrannize there, but wrought distraction in my Soul, and bred distemper in my body; But blessed be thy Majesty for that distemper, for in that time of my weakness, thou Oh all-powerful hand, by thy most heavenly art, didst draw from my heart that tormenting passion, and by the addition of thy heavenly love, which thou didst leave in the room thereof; thou repairedst in me the breaches that that unruly passion had made. When I was sick I thought that I should die, I did mistake, ’twas earthly love, not I. [pp. 65–6]

Psalms 85:10: The Perfume In thee most blessed Prince, are those two excellent ingredients mixed, which yield so sweet a scent to the world, that no corrupted air of our unsavoury enemy is able to disperse. Thy most blessed body, the sweetest and truest perfume that ever proceeded out of the earth, was joined with the odoriferous scent of righteousness from heaven. Blessed Joseph, knew thy perfect body needed no embalming;61 That pure Balsam that came from heaven at the beginning, kept thy precious body from corruption. On the cross was all that was to be suffered in the body, finished, God would not suffer his holy one to see corruption; truth made hast, and sprang the third day from the earth,62 and righteousness showed herself from heaven; in thee met mercy and truth, righteousness and peace there kissed each other. Now are they in thee conjoined never again to be separated. ’Tis not for ignorant man, seeing thou hast not revealed it, to examine what thou did’st with thy precious soul, when thy body was in the grave. My Lord! I will not search into those secrets, kept

61 Joseph of Arimathea, a disciple of Jesus, asked Pontius Pilate for Jesus’s body and laid it in a tomb wrapped only in a linen sheet without the traditional embalming of the body, which Eliza believes was because he knew the body would not decay. 62 Christ rose from the dead on the third day after his burial.

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‘Eliza’ in thine own Cabinet: Thou hast revealed enough to confirm my faith, and to make me happy. Thou hast told me, That righteousness looked down from heaven; I will not expect thy coming from any other place. [pp. 76–7]

The Acknowledgement My Omnipotent God, fain would I say something to thee, but I am afraid. But shall my womanish fear make thee lose thy glory; My God it must not! Thy glory must so dazzle mine eyes, that I must not regard the censure of the world. And if thou, O all-seeing eye! seest ought of myself, in what I write or say, restrain my hand from writing, and my tongue from speaking; but if thy glory be the intention of my heart, let not my hand and tongue be ashamed to confess that I cannot but see those infinite blessings that thou hast bestowed on me, which thou hast not as yet bestowed on all. My Lord! I were a fool if I did not see them; I were a beast if I did not acknowledge them; but thou hast taught me to know the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou has sent into the world, to take away my sins; this wisdom given me by thee, enlightens mine eyes to see thy blessings, and that I must not be like a beast which receives many favours from thee, without acknowledgement; Then with infinite thanks I do acknowledge to thy glory, thou hast enriched me with a multitude of thy blessings. [p. 77]

On Ecclesiastes 9:7: Go Eat Thy Bread with Joy, & c. My Dear Lord! With what a sweet and pleasing object this morning hast thou presented mine eyes, that they may deliver it to my heart, for to my heart, thou art pleased to speak it, and if any shall ask if that message was sent to me, I will aver it was, for they who by the hand of faith lay hold on the promises of God, are and shall be partakers of those promises; My hand presented that object to mine eyes, mine eyes delivered it to my heart, my heart took hold of it by the hand of faith; so that I may confidently say, It belongs both to Soul and body; And now methinks I hear my God saying to me, Go, But some may say, Go is a word of separation, and so he will say to those that shall forever be debarred of his happy presence: but yet to me he says, Go, but it is not from him, but with him, to that blessed place from which Adam fell. 169

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Advising on body and spirit […] And from heaven my soul mayst thou take those white garments with which thou mayst always be clothed, for his garments were white and glistering: then ask for those robes of purity that are his, for thou mayst be sure thou shalt obtain; and being clothed in those garments thou needst not fear thou shouldst ever be found naked or unseemly drest, for thou shalt be gloriously inhabited, because God will make thy righteousness, in him as clear as the light, and thy just dealing as the noon day. […] And though I thought that place from which Adam fell too mean for the felicity of my Soul, yet for my body it is a place sufficiently considerable; and seeing the benefits that were lost by the first Adam, are all, with many more restored to thee by the second: My body, thou mayst go with my Soul, and eat thy temporal bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart, and thy garments may be pleasant and delighting, and thy head want no odoriferous ointment, for our bountiful and liberal God, hath given us many creatures for pleasure and delight, as well as for necessity; but ’tis with a restraint, our bodies are of Adam’s race, we must not touch that which is forbidden: thou mayst use them all with an innocence, not with any sinister end, or to think to make thyself like a God. [pp. 80–4]

The Temple My God! Is my body the Temple of the Holy Ghost?63 What Palace can there be in this small Fabric, fit to entertain so great a Prince; yet thou hast said, If any love thee, thy Father will love them, and thou, and thee, and thy holy spirit, which cannot be separated from thee, will come and make thy abode with him. My Lord and King! thou knowest I love thee, for long since I was willing to have left the world, and all the blessings that thou has given me in it, to have gone to live with thee: but what talk I, leaving the world to come to live with thee. Thou art come into the world to live with me and in me. But my great Lord,

63 1 Corinthians 6:19–20. The passage clearly indicates that the body is the temple of God and every human being must respect it.

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‘Eliza’ where in me, shall I find thee; hast thou enthroned thyself in my heart, give me then thy assistance, that no proud imagination, for my own greatness, may arise to disenthrone thee; and make the distaste that habitation; but be thou in my heart, ever attended by sweet humility and humble obedience. Let all the members of my body be employed in thy service; Let my hands administer to thy Saints, and not stretched out to covetousness. Let my feet be swift to run in the ways of thy commandments, and not to shed innocent blood: or if in my head thou hast taken up thy seat; there let humility attend on thee too, or I shall fear thou wilt go from me; for thou resistest the proud: but though thou beest high, and inhabitest eternity, yet thou, O great Prince will dwell with the humble. Then in my head, and in all that belong to it, do thou find humble obedience, that there I might retain thee. Let not mine eyes have any proud look, nor be windows to let in vanity, but let them be ever looking to the hills from whence cometh my salvation. Let not my tongue which thou has given me to serve thee, be employed to back-bite or defame any the least of thy children, or any one; for how know I who are thine, or who not, but let my tongue be ever speaking to thy praise and glory; and let the words of mouth be acceptable in thy sight; nor let mine ears listen to any idle or unseemly discourse, that may displease thy divine Majesty, and let my nostrils be ever filled with the sweet savour that comes from thy heavenly garments: So if all the faculties of my body be employed by my Soul,64 humbly to serve thee, I shall live and express a glorying heart, because I know this body is the Temple of the Deity. Then where I am a Heaven must be, For thou dost bring a Heaven with thee. [pp. 93–4]

64 Eliza draws on St Augustine’s belief that the soul gives life to the body or flesh, not the other way round. See, for example, Philip Cary, Augustine’s Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of a Christian Platonist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 46.

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Advising on body and spirit The Royal Priesthood 65 Peace! Present now no more to me (to take my spirit from the height of felicity) that I am a creature of a weaker sex, a woman.66 For my God! If I must live after the example of thy blessed Apostle,67 I must live by faith, and faith makes things to come as present; and thou hast said by thy servant, that we shall be like thy blessed Son: then thou wilt make all thy people as Kings and Priests, Kings are men, and men are Kings; And Souls have no sex; the hidden man of the heart,68 makes us capable of being Kings; for I have heard it is that within makes the man; then are we by election capable of as great a dignity as any mortal man; But thoughts of mortals! now Adieu; I will close the eyes of my Soul, to mortality, and will not open them but to eternity; seeing that by thy grace and faith in thee, thou hast made us partaker of thy divine nature, by thy assistance I will live by faith; I will no more now see myself as mortal, but as an immortal King will I begin to live, that hidden man never dies, but when mine immortal King, that placed me in this Kingdom of felicity with him; shall see it fit time, he will raise me on a triumphant Chariot, composed of the wings of bright Angels, to his Immortal Kingdom of Glory, where I shall reign with him for all eternity, and never more desire to change. And as a Royal Priest must I be to thee; ever offering up the sweet incense of my praise to thy divine Majesty, for thy infinite mercies to me, thy unworthy servant. [pp. 100–1]

65 The Royal Priesthood: the chosen generation (1 Peter 2:9). 66 Patriarchal society considered women inferior on the grounds that woman (Eve) is said in Genesis 2:21–3 to be made from man’s rib. This is why the uncertainty arises as to whether she was created in the image of God or, rather, of a man. 67 Thy blessed Apostle: Paul. Eliza draws on Galatians 3:22–9, where Paul holds that all are equal in Christ Jesus, and that faith can bring anyone to Christ. This passage contrasts with 1 Peter 2, alluded to in the subtitle, which advocates the traditional hierarchy of king and subject, master and servant. 68 The hidden man of the heart: an allusion to 1 Peter 3:4 to describe the inner, incorruptible part of a person where God abides (as opposed to the outer part, which can be corrupted by the adorning of rich and excessive clothes and ­possessions). Because God dwells in Eliza’s heart, she is capable of ‘as great a dignity as any mortal man’, which was a radical statement for a woman to make.

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‘Eliza’ Wings69 Wings my Doves you have now obtained   To flee to that Invincible Rock70    Where you may hide you safe    In those Clifts71 of security From your Malignant Enemies,   Who may flee after you.    And think to grasp you,     And so to hurt you,     But they cannot. But you may without any gall tell them,   You are placed beyond their envy’s reach,    And with that blest Apostle72 may say    ’Tis a small matter for me to be judged     By you, or of man’s judgement    The Lord is Judge of all;      He judgeth me, and I      Am safe under     His powerful Wings. [p. 103]

69 ‘Wings’ recalls George Herbert’s ‘Easter-Wings’ (first published in 1633) which is also shaped like the wings of a Davidic dove (see note 23). Lady Elizabeth Delaval quotes from Herbert’s poem ‘Vertue’, suggesting that his The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations (Cambridge: Thomas Buck and Roger Daniel, 1633) was considered suitable meditational material for women. For the female readership of Herbert’s poems, see Helen Wilcox, ‘“You that Indeared are to Pietie”: Herbert and Seventeenth-Century Women’, George Herbert Journal, 18 (1994/95), 201–14. 70 Invincible Rock: God. 71 Clifts: cliffs. 72 That blest Apostle: St Paul, who claimed to be beyond man’s judgement (1 Corinthians 4:3–4).

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7 An anonymous gentlewoman

The first edition of Conversion Exemplified was published in 1663, within a year of the death of the anonymous gentlewoman whose dictated testimony makes up most of the book. After a long illness, which began in 1658 with what she calls a ‘violent cold’ (p. 48), the gentlewoman asked that her ‘dearest Friend’ (title page), her husband, transcribe her last testimony to show to others after her death, to convince them of her imminent journey to heaven, where she would dwell forever in the glorious presence of God. She evidently expressed a concern for how she would appear after death (both physically and spiritually), a concern that was quite typical in this period, when a dying person could be judged on how they behaved in their last moments. Her husband transcribed the words she spoke just before she died, when the gentlewoman declared she had ‘settled peace’ in believing, and that Satan, who had tormented her since she was ten years old, no longer troubled her, though she was suffering intense pain. As Ralph Houlbrooke has written, ‘the ability to show Christian faith and patience on the death-bed was a valuable indication of the likely destination of the dying’ and ‘some accounts were clearly written to dispel fears or malicious rumours of death-bed apathy, apostasy or despair’.1 The gentlewoman was certainly well aware that her dying moments would be closely scrutinised by her relatives, who differed markedly in their religious beliefs, as her narrative makes clear. As well as controlling the appearance of her spiritual state, her forbearance and patience indicating that she was destined for heaven, the gentlewoman also asked her husband to take care of her physical appearance, requesting that he position her as if she were sleeping peacefully

1 Ralph Houlbrooke, ‘The Puritan Death-bed, c. 1560–1660’, in Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales, eds, The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996), pp. 122–44 (p. 127).

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An anonymous gentlewoman because, even after death, the body cannot be separated from Christ and should be respected. The book of Job, one of the gentlewoman’s most oft-quoted biblical texts, testified that ‘though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God’ at the Last Judgement (19:26): the dead, as the Savoy Declaration of the […] Congregational Churches (1658/59) maintained, ‘shall be raised up with the self-same bodies, and none other, although with different qualities, which shall be united again to their souls forever’.2 The deathbed testimony, then, allowed the gentlewoman the power to control her representation and legacy, and her words, given on the passage between life and death, were respected and recorded. The deathbed was a place that women, forbidden from speaking in their congregations, could utilise to direct others on their own paths to salvation. The testimony is addressed, in the closing pages, to the gentle­woman’s ‘unregenerate’ relatives (p. 58), who, she says, supported the restoration of episcopacy (government of the church by bishops) and a revised Book of Common Prayer supported by Charles II in 1662. Those members of the clergy who did not agree to adhere to these practices were excluded from preaching to their congregations under the Act of Uniformity in mid-1662, a year or less after the gentlewoman’s testimony was given. Two ministers who were deprived of their livings under this Act are mentioned in the testimony. Both Joseph Caryl (1602–73) and John Rowe (1626/27–77) preached at Westminster in the late 1650s, where the gentlewoman said she was attending in 1658. Caryl, who, according to the gentlewoman’s husband, visited his wife in her last days, was appointed a preacher at Whitehall Palace, the seat of Cromwell’s government, in 1651, where she would have encountered him, having arrived at Whitehall in 1655/56. Importantly, though, these men were also of Independent r­eligious beliefs, which meant that they thought congregations should govern themselves rather than being controlled by ecclesiastical bodies, like bishops, or by the state itself. Caryl contributed to the Savoy Declaration, the doctrines of which the gentlewoman subscribes to wholeheartedly, and he also appears to have taken an interest in the writings of women in affliction, which might explain his interest in Elizabeth Major (see chapter 2). Both Caryl and Rowe continued to preach to their gathered congregations in London, although because of the limitations placed on Nonconformists, the locations and members of these remain obscure.

2 Congregational Church in England and Wales, A Declaration of the Faith and Order Owned and Practised in the Congregational Churches (London: [n. pub.] 1659), p. 22.

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Advising on body and spirit In such a climate, it is perhaps unsurprising that Conversion Exemplified appeared anonymously, with its praise of Cromwell’s tolerance to diverse religious opinions during the Interregnum in comparison with the persecution of Nonconformists that followed the Restoration. There are few clues as to the identity of the gentlewoman and her husband. She was certainly born into a Royalist family (c.1635), at least some of whom fought on the side of Charles I in the Civil Wars and were fined heavily for doing so. She moved from the country to London in the early 1650s, where she stayed with some ‘persons of quality’ (p. 28), before arriving at Cromwell’s court at Whitehall in the mid-1650s, at which time she married her husband (he writes that he ‘enjoyed’ her for seven years before she died in 1662/63). The marriage seems to have been undertaken with some level of trepidation and some parties at court appear to have discouraged her from the match, possibly because of her husband’s politics and religious profession: he must certainly have been of Independent persuasion, which was characterised by a belief in liberty of worship and a separation between church and state. It was not his first marriage, as she was a stepmother to his children, but their union produced no children who lived. The anonymity of the printer or bookseller on the title page also testifies to the subversive nature of the work. A later advertisement in a work published by Elizabeth Calvert, a well-known seller of books by Nonconformists, including Independents, reveals that the 1669 printing of Conversion Exemplified was still available in 1674.3 Calvert was questioned and imprisoned several times in the 1660s and early 1670s for publishing works critical of the way the restored monarchy treated political and religious dissenters, and this also indicates why both the author and publisher of such a work might want to keep their identity anonymous. The justification of religious difference is at the heart of this work, and the main reason for its publication, and the main disagreement between the woman and her relatives was in their interpretation of melancholia experienced during conversion. When the gentlewoman was ten years old, she began to experience temptations to sin, which made her believe that she was not one of God’s elect. These thoughts appear to have coincided with the onset of adolescence, in a similar way to those of Elizabeth Delaval and Katherine Sutton, also included in this anthology. Early in her narrative she refers to her womanly ‘Nature’ being ‘polluted’ 3 Samuel Petto, The Difference Between the Old and New Covenant (London: Elizabeth Calvert, 1674), p. 327. The first printing of the text appeared in 1663, which now survives in one copy at Canterbury Cathedral Library, differs from the 1669 edition only in the decorative woodcuts and in some of the line spacing. There are now four existing copies of the 1669 edition.

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An anonymous gentlewoman or corrupt, indicating that she regarded herself as a sinful woman, confirmed by the onset of her monthly periods. She was later able to identify her temptations as the work of Satan, who was thought to trouble women more than men because of their being descended from Eve. The author eventually came to believe that her sins were forgiven by the death of Christ on the cross, but during this period, and later, she experienced anxiety. She explained that she tried to hide these emotions from her family as they interpreted ‘wounds of conscience’ like these as ‘melancholy fits’, as a humoral disorder, and if these were more severe they thought the person was ‘maddish’ (mad) or ‘guilty of some foul secret sin’ (pp. 8–9). As Michael MacDonald explains, ‘a long tradition of popular theology taught that God himself inflicted madness and despair on notorious sinners’, including the biblical king Nebuchadnezzar, who was insane and saw visions.4 When the gentlewoman styles herself as the prophet Daniel advising Nebuchadnezzar, addressing her relatives, she is deliberately reversing the claims they had made against her that she was mad or ‘frenzied’ (p. 59). The gentlewoman’s fever and religious fervour were both given the name ‘frenzy’ by her relatives, which caused the sufferer to display signs of madness and experience a high temperature. In disagreement with this, the gentlewoman’s husband interprets these symptoms as religious ‘enthusiasm’, also caused by a heating of the humours. As a contemporary writer exploring the nature of ‘enthusiasm’ as a medical condition wrote, ‘melancholy while it is cold, causes sadness and despondency of mind, but once heated, [causes] Ecstasies and Raptures with triumphant joy’.5 Therefore, her husband explains in his preface that the gentlewoman’s ‘Love to Christ and his Members burnt so hot in her (in this frigid age wherein all seek their own) as it drank up her radical [vital] moisture in a degree to the shortening of her life’ (A3). He draws on earlier Renaissance ideas that saw burning enthusiasm as divinely inspired, rather than as a humoral illness. Certainly, the interpretation of the gentlewoman’s illness depended largely on her contemporaries’ religious opinions, and she and her husband sought to locate her experiences in a narrative of religious conversion, rather than allowing her relatives’ accusations of madness and sinfulness to prevail.

4 Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 174. 5 Henry More, Enthusiasmus Triumatus (London: W. Morden, 1656), p. 24.

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Advising on body and spirit Note on the text The source text is the only surviving copy of the original edition of Conversion Exemplified, published in London in 1663, now held by Canterbury Cathedral Library.

Further reading Lucinda M. Becker, Death and the Early Modern Englishwoman (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003) Kate Chedzoy, Melanie Hansen and Suzanne Trill, eds, Voicing Women: Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern Writing (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1998) Ralph Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and the Family in England 1480–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) Owen Watkins, The Puritan Experience: Studies in Spiritual Autobiography (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972)

Conversion Exemplified; In the Instance of a Gracious Gentlewoman Now in Glory (1663) Written from her own mouth and Appointment, by her dearest Friend:6 and Published, in pursuance of her desires, for common benefit, but especially for her near Relations in the flesh.

An Epistle to the Reader Reader, The following History contains a Narrative of the Work of Conversion upon a Gentlewoman, who now enjoys the harvest of that seed-time, in Glory.7 At the day of Judgement she will come again bringing her sheaves with her, having (as you may here read) sown in tears. The unusual way of her translation out of the power of Satan into the Kingdom of Christ, impressed so deep upon her heart so oft as she reflected on it, as (though her conscience was 6 ‘Friend’ is commonly used to mean a member of the family in the seventeenth century; therefore, ‘dearest friend’ is almost certainly her husband. The 1669 Cambridge University Library copy has ‘his work’ handwritten next to the preface title. 7 Harvest: death.

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An anonymous gentlewoman sprinkled with the blood of the Covenant, 8 yet) she could not quietly think on dying, till she had caused as much as (in so languishing an estate as she was in) she could call to mind, to be written down, that by publishing of it, God might be glorified, and souls by her example receive some guidance, comfort and establishment. [A2r–v ] […] Her eyes were wholly deprived of their beloved rest from Friday night till Tuesday afternoon, when death closed them, so far as those about her could discern. Much about two complete days and nights she wrestled under more immediate gripes of death: and it was, that what God had in so great plenty given her, might have its due exercise for his glory. It was indeed a time of sharp trial, but not the least prevailing against her faith and patience. Her saying was, My pain is great, but God is good still. He restrains Satan from troubling me in the least. I feel no ravishing joy, but I have settled peace in believing. I was wont to be troubled at the consideration of the putrefaction of my body in the grave, that it must be separated from the society of men, and be wrapped up in darkness, but I am now beyond all those things, and long to be at rest. In words to this purpose she oft expressed her mind. Once she said It is hard work to be under the Arrest of Death, as I am, with all my senses in their free exercise.9 She oft expressed fear of being held long under those pains; yet with child like submission, like that of Christ when he prayed that the Cup might pass from him, which he was drinking.10 And they were both heard in the thing they feared; for the Cup passed from Christ so soon as his prayer was ended,11 and her patience was protracted, till Death had set her free. [A4 r–v ] […] Before I end this Preface, give me leave to inform you into what familiarity she was grown with Death, some months before she met with it. It is called in scripture, the King of Terrors,12 and notoriously known to have amazed the

  8 Blood of the Covenant: Christ’s blood, shed at his crucifixion, a sign of the contract (or covenant) between God and the people that their sins would be forgiven.   9 Death had not deprived her of her senses, so the pain was not dulled. 10 Matthew 26:39. 11 Matthew 26:42: ‘He went away again the second time, and prayed, saying, O my Father, if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done.’ Drinking from the cup alludes to Christ’s sacrifice. 12 Job 18:14.

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Advising on body and spirit boldest Constitutions; yea, and those sometimes who have attained to good measures in grace. But God, to show his Sovereignty, bound this Leviathan for his Handmaid to play with, and made it her servant, insomuch as she called it her Father’s man sent to fetch her from School:13 And upon a time, about two months before she died, sitting with her, she fell into this discourse with me: My dear (said she) I shall be in Heaven this Winter. I pray take care of this poor body of mine when I am dead; for Death cannot separate it from Christ; and therefore see that it be used comely. Let me beg you to close mine eyes yourself, and let not foolish passion keep you from rejoicing at my happiness in that hour. Let my chin be kept from falling, by pinning the ends of my pinner 14 under it; and when it is stiff with cold, then leave them loose, but put on no muffler.15 When I am put in my Coffin, raise my head with a small pillow, and turn it to one side, that it may resemble sleep, and as little of ghastliness appear in it as may be. Were it your lot to depart before me, I would do the like for you and more; not out of hardness of heart, but entire love. As inconsiderable as this may seem, I know not why it should not be here recorded, as well as Joseph’s charge to his Brethren concerning his bones in the Scripture, being an act of Faith as his was.16 Being not like ever to meet with such a subject whilst I live, I would willingly make this Entry larger; but mine heart so much affects mine eyes, that I cannot see to hold open the door any longer. [Bv–B2v ] Conversion Exemplified My Birth being in a Family which (according to the value put upon things of that nature) is able to make as large a demonstration of Antiquity, from honourable Ancestors, as the generality of that rank of Persons can do; I had withal, the Blessing of that Education in it, which might free me from being a dishonour to it, being bred in the best and most ingenious ways, that that place, and the distraction of the times, by reason of civil Wars (which began in my Childhood, and continued till my grown Age) could afford.17 13 Leviathan: usually Satan, from Isaiah 27:1, but in this case Death personified. Handmaid: female servant, in this case God’s. 14 Pinner: close-fitting cap worn by women of high social status. 15 Muffler: scarf/disguise. 16 Genesis 50:25. The bones of Joseph, son of Jacob, were taken by the Israelites when Moses led them out of Egypt. A comparison is being made here between Egyptian bondage and the new climate of the Restoration. 17 The First Civil War ran 1642–46 and the Second Civil War 1648–49, though armed conflict lasted until 1652.

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An anonymous gentlewoman It was (to the best of my remembrance) about the tenth year of my age, when God (who is rich in mercy) began to declare a design upon me, locked up in the secret of his Counsels before the foundations of the World were laid,18 of bringing me to the knowledge of himself in the face of Jesus Christ; to whom though I was born an Enemy, and of whose Natures, Persons, Offices and Ordinances I was stupidly ignorant, yet by the work of his own Spirit, and effectual teachings of it, I became so well acquainted with those great Mysteries in the true substance of them, and that without the ordinary help of man’s teaching (of which that place was wanting)19 as I was thereby in the infancy of my life enabled to receive the satisfaction of a Mediator, 20 to the justification of my person, and the Spirit of the same Mediator for the sanctification of my nature, and that some years before I understood them in their distinct and proper terms.21 Upon this so choice and signal Love, I cannot think at any time seriously, without washing the feet of him with Tears,22 who loved me, and washed me in his own Blood:23 To him be Glory forever. The method which the holy Ghost used in bringing me to God through Christ, was that which he observes in the ordinary execution of his work, as I have since been informed by Teachers of the Gospel, and experienced Christians, with whom then I had not the like acquaintance; and it was first by convincing me of sin, and then of righteousness, the manner thus. Satan mingled his temptation with a childish disposition of waggery24 in me, and stirred me up to hurt one of my Brothers in his sleep, out of no reason, but an inclination to do harm. God (who wants not means to break the Serpent’s head)25 took occasion from hence to present me with the view of my nature,

18 That God had divided the human race into the elect (the saved) and the reprobate (the damned) before the beginning of the world was held by most Puritans, influenced by theology of John Calvin. 19 Wanting: lacking. 20 Mediator: Christ Jesus. 21 Independents (and most Puritans) believed there were four stages to salvation: election (where believers are convinced they are chosen by God for salvation); justification (where believers are persuaded that Christ’s death has made them righteous and that their sins have been taken away); sanctification (continually ridding the body of sin); and glorification (after death). See Introduction. 22 Mary Magdalene asked Christ (‘him’) to forgive her sins by washing his feet with her tears. See Luke 7:37–50. 23 Christ shed his own blood at his crucifixion in order to redeem mankind. 24 Waggery: practical joking. 25 God’s promise in the Garden of Eden that man would always bruise the head of the serpent that tempted Eve to sin. This ended with Christ’s sacrifice. See Genesis 3:15.

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Advising on body and spirit how vile it was, that it should be acting in me to provoke me to hurt an innocent Babe in his sleep, yea, a Brother, who was as dear to me as mine own life. A window being thus opened, plenty of Light shed itself in, whereby I was discovered to myself, and that discovery was attended with so much terror, and sense of eternal wrath from God, due to me, a guilty sinner, as the Bed I then lay upon afforded me no ease; from which I arose in the dark and silent night, to lament myself and woeful state: It was a dreadful time, never to be forgotten of me. Satan finding himself under so unexpected a defeat, pursued his work to countermine the work of God thus begun in me: and in order thereunto bespread my troubled soul with plenty of fiery Darts.26 The first that he pressed me to, was Murder, and that of my near Relations; this by the assistance of God, I soon cast out, being convinced how impious, abominable and unnatural it was to destroy my best Friends. Then he urged me to make away myself as a Reprobate without hope: but this I looked at as more unnatural than the other. Nature (as polluted as it was) stood amazed, and exercised great reluctancy against these bloody Temptations.27 Nevertheless, perplexed I was in a dreadful measure, and knew not what to do: Gospel I was ignorant of, though I had read it often, for the veil was over my heart,28 and the Scriptures were to me a Book clasped up, having neither from Sermons or Conferences ever received help or light, whereby spiritually to understand them; without which they are but a dead and deadly letter.29 To communicate my condition to any, I judged it most unadvised; because I knew none that understood it. For, for those of my acquaintance who I did think knew most of the way to Heaven, I had always observed, that they counted wounds of conscience for sin, melancholy fits. And if the wound were deeper and more smarting than ordinary,

26 Ephesians 6:16. 27 Reprobate: one of the damned. Suicide was often attributed to the person despairing of their own redemption and was often seen as a crime against God, surpassing murder. 28 2 Corinthians 3:15–16. 29 2 Corinthians 3:14. The gentlewoman dictates that the scripture is both ‘dead’ (uninspiring) and ‘deadly’ (dangerous) if not read when under instruction or after having received an infusion of grace. The works of John Murcot, published by Joseph Caryl and other Congregationalist ministers, Humphrey Chambers, Samuel Eaton, Thomas Manton and Samuel Winters, explain that ‘except [where] the Spirit therein be conveyed, the Gospel is but a dead letter as well as the Law, and a deadly letter also’. See John Murcot, Several Works of Mr. John Murcot (London: R. White for Francis Tyton, 1657), p. 485.

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An anonymous gentlewoman then they esteemed them maddish upon whom it was, and that it beset them for being guilty of some foul secret sin, worse than themselves had ever committed.30 And I did fear if they knew my case, they would think no better on it. In which respect I was very careful to hide it from them. Being at this set, I turned aside from my black thoughts, and said to my heart, (as Solomon in another case) Go to, I will try thee with mirth.31 I sought diversion in merry company, and would thereby have abated the rage of my guilty conscience, as Cain sought to do by building of Cities.32 This remedy increased the disease, for it multiplied sin in me, and God thereupon multiplied my sorrows. The Way being by his Providence thus hedged up with thorns about me, I knew not how to get out. This path at length he discovered to me, that if I would ever be at peace I must get my sin pardoned, in regard that it was most evident that all my anguish and torment proceeded from the guilt of unpardoned sin. [pp. 5–9] […] Satan, from whom before this time I had received no temptation concerning Christ, (like a Lion in a seeming sleep)33 roused himself with great fury and rage, that if possible he might keep me from believing, and closing with God in a Covenant of Grace. The first scruple he cast in, was, With what safety or prudence I could adventure my eternal happiness upon him, of whom so great a Question was in the world, whether he were the Son of God or no? To help myself against this, I read the History of him in Evangelists,34 but could not do it peaceably, for the blasphemies injected by Satan into my thoughts concerning him: By this means, the old wound of my Conscience, not yet healed, began again to throb and bleed afresh: Faith, which carnal people speak of as if they wore it in their Pockets. I found hard, to a degree of difficulty next impossible: My desires pressed

30 Her relatives interpret her behaviour during conversion as madness, which they believed was the punishment for sin (see Introduction). 31 A reference to Ecclesiastes 2:1, which the anonymous gentlewoman believes was written by Solomon. In this chapter, Solomon declared that there was no profit to be had in transitory pleasures. 32 After murdering his brother Abel, Cain was cursed by God, but built a city for his family thinking that he would be able to atone for his crimes (Genesis 4:17). 33 Psalms 10:9. 34 History of him in Evangelists: the history of Christ as told by the Gospels (the Evangelists were Matthew, Mark, Luke and John).

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Advising on body and spirit vehemently after Faith, but found no adherence to or resting on Christ, which I could perceive or take comfort from: For while I read, meditated of, and sought to Jesus Christ, I could find nothing but unbelieving, undervaluing thoughts, partly arising from mine own heart, and partly cast in by Satan. At length, having spent many sad and weary hours in searching, I met with the Parable of the unjust Judge, recorded in Luke 18, under which Christ recommends to us importunity in prayer, from the example of him, who administered Justice to a poor Widow, to free himself from the trouble he foresaw she would give him, though he feared not God, nor regarded Man.35 The Spirit of God set this so home upon me, as closing the book suddenly, I said within myself, Is it even so! then Lord I will never give thee rest, but my soul shall with thy gracious Assistance, follow hard after thee till I have found the thing I seek. Upon this I found some dawnings of Faith and Hope; yet was this twilight soon made dark by the advantage Satan took of my weakness, to recover in what degree he could his almost lost possession. To the best of my remembrance I was exercised in this manner, with various disquietments, for the space of three years. [pp. 15–17] […] The next establishment I received, was, by reading the story of one cured by Christ of Blindness, John 9. In reading which Chapter, I observed the manner of the cure, and the consequence of it. I took notice of the behaviour of the hypocritical, rebellious, gainsaying Pharisees, towards him on whom the miracle was wrought, and of their opprobrious Blasphemies against him that wrought it. I found my heart cleaving to the man that was healed for owning Christ,36 and my hatred kindled against them, who upon this occasion, did reproach and vilify him. Yet withal, the old Tempter 37 played his game, vexing me with insinuations, that for ought I knew the Pharisees spake true of him, being hereby put into an unquiet frame, I sat lamenting the hardness of my heart, and concluding I could not obtain Mercy at his hand, of whom I was apt to entertain such base thoughts: Hereupon, through weariness, and heaviness of spirit, I fell into a slumber, in which Christ seemed to appear to me, with his breast open, and Blood issuing out as Water from a Fountain, and uttered these words, viz.,

35 Particularly Luke 18:7. 36 Owning Christ: to acknowledge Christ’s authority. 37 Old Tempter: Satan.

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An anonymous gentlewoman Come, drink freely, and be satisfied.38 Upon this invitation, I seemed to draw near to him, and to drink of his Blood abundantly, and with great pleasure; continuing still thirsting, and drinking, while I awoke from sleep, and found myself gasping for breath, and soul and body refresh as with a rich Cordial: My soul was hereby greatly melted with love to Christ, for condescending to me in so great a strait, with so much tenderness and familiarity; and I did resolve to believe in him with the same earnestness with which in my dream I seemed to drink in his Blood. From that time I began to have the sense of his Love, and enjoyment of his Presence: yet not without opposition; for Satan instantly stepped in, and told me it was but a dream; and would I be so foolish as to bottom39 Soul-comfort upon dreams? I answered, That I would not contend about the nature of this dream, but sure I was, that when I was awakened out of it, God did enable me to believe more steadfastly than before; and this I looked upon as a sound argument of comfort. [pp. 18–20] […] I proceed to the last stage of my travels, about which I intend any further discourse, and that was Whitehall;40 for thither the hand of providence led me; and in a short time after I came thither, I met with a change of my condition, from single to married.41 The dealings of God with me in this place and state, were too remarkable to be passed over in silence. New relations call for new duties; new duties require new graces, and are, as I said before, attended with new trials: for sin sticking close to the whole man, endeavours to promote itself by every occurrence in this world.42

38 Revelation 21:6. 39 To bottom: to found/establish. 40 Whitehall: in the 1650s, the Palace of Whitehall, London, was home to the court of Oliver Cromwell and his councillors. It was the seat of government for much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and was inhabited by Charles I and Charles II either side of the Interregnum. 41 The change from maid (unmarried woman) to a wife was considered to be part of a woman’s physical growth to maturity, along with the material change of status, which is why it is routinely expressed as a change of condition. 42 Throughout her testimony, the gentlewoman refers to succumbing to the sin of vanity and pride, though it is probable that she also refers to other new duties. Part of the post-Reformation shift in ideals was the move away from venerating celibacy to promoting Protestant ideals of physical intimacy as an integral part of marriage, and therefore the duty of a wife: not least to protect the husband from temptation to sin. The next paragraph makes clear that this is the duty the

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Advising on body and spirit The sorrows and bitterness that every enjoyment in this life is attended with, derives its Original from sin. And although the comforts I met with in Marriage, were many, and such as that state affords to few,43 in sundry particulars, yet I found vanity enough in it also, teaching me to say, Arise, and go hence, for this is not thy rest:44 Yet in all my straits, still he was near that helped me: and how bad so ever my naughty heart behaved itself, yet he that for his own sake loveth, and saveth, did deliver me. God gave me to find favour in the eyes of the Governors,45 and chief Persons in that Court, and generally I did not observe any to be an enemy to me, at first, till some began to despise, and hate me partly for my Profession,46 and partly out of some little envy, which those places abound with. Now, for a person of my years and interest, not to begin a building of worldly happiness upon such a foundation, is very unusual: For my part I am willing to take to myself the shame of confessing, that I fell into this snare; only through Mercy it held me not long: the Lord soon showing me experimentally, that Men of high degree are a lie,47 and showing me good reason, why he commanded me to cease from them. To relate the particular Trials that here I met with, would argue my memory over tenacious of such things; and appear uncomely 48 in other respects. The miscarriages of Professors49 in this age, is too notorious, and God hath made their sufferings as visible. To set forth God’s dealings with me in those times, is that which I am carrying on. I remember that my approach to Marriage was with great perturbation of mind: for though my affections were deeply engaged to him that God provided for me, and have from thence to this day grown up, and that upon such principles, as will endure when

gentlewoman is referring to. Sex was inextricably linked to original sin and was often a source for emotional conflict for pious young women who had previously thought to dedicate their lives to God, but had by circumstance been encouraged to marry. 43 Marriage gave the gentlewoman many comforts, but this, she says, was unusual for women in the period. 44 Micah 2:10. This verse refers to false confidence. 45 If the gentlewoman is referring to 1656, the government of the country was controlled by Cromwell and the rule of the Major Generals, whose forces were funded by a ‘decimation tax’ on known Royalists, likely to have included the anonymous gentlewoman’s family. 46 Profession: likely to be a declaration of allegiance to different court factions, possibly the Independents. 47 Psalms 62:9. 48 Uncomely: inappropriate; unattractive. 49 Professors: those who profess particular religious values which they do not uphold; hypocrites.

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An anonymous gentlewoman my relation to him, as a wife, shall cease: yet worldly cares did present themselves to me in great multitudes; the Devil providing instruments to help that business of his forward; who frequently told me how unhappy I should be, if such things and such things fell out:50 I dare say the parties sought my good in it intentionally, as Peter did his Master’s, when he prayed him to spare himself: yet was their discourse to me as Peter’s was, tempting to sin.51 It would be very unhandsome, to enter into the particulars of the things: but in the toss and heat of them all, my heart was up to God for a word of support, who gave it me in the words spoken to Joshua 1:5, repeated by the Apostle, Hebrews 13:5, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee. Upon my first reflections on this text, I knew not what to make of it, nor understood that it was to my case: but a while after, being in company with a very eminent Divine52 (upon what occasion I know not now) he fell into discourse upon that Scripture, and said, That it was evident from the foregoing verse, that that Promise was by the Apostle mainly intended to arm people against those worldly cares, that attend a married life.53 His words brought me to remembrance, how it had been by the immediate Voice of God, whispered to me when I was exercised with those kind of distractions, and I was surprised with such sudden comfort from it, that (though I said nothing, my very looks discovered it to the party) who enquiring of me, found the relation of it, which now I make. At another time, being under the fear of many dangers, which I foresaw I was like to meet with, I was relieved by reading Isaiah 48:17. Thus saith the Lord, thy Redeemer, the holy One of Israel, I am the Lord thy God, which teacheth thee to profit; which leadeth thee by the way which thou shouldst go. [pp. 38–42] […] About the beginning of April, in the year 1658, I was taken with a violent cold, which was exceeding common at that time; since when I cannot say, that I have had one healthy day, as before, but distempers have increased upon me, with very troublesome Effects and Symptoms. Under this visitation, I have had great experience of God’s gracious dealing with me in my weakness: I had recourse to the words of the

50 Fell out: came about. The gentlewoman is marrying a man who is thought, by some, to be an unsuitable match. Given the times, this could be because of his involvement in the Protectorate or for his religious convictions (or both). 51 Matthew 16:22–3. 52 Divine: clergyman/minister. 53 Hebrews 13:4.

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Advising on body and spirit Prophet, Jeremiah 9:23–4, Thus saith the Lord, Let not the strong man glory in his strength, &c. But let him that glorieth, glory in this, that he understandeth, and knoweth me, that I am the Lord, who exercise Lovingkindness, Judgement and Righteousness in the Earth. Also the saying of the Apostle, James 1:12, was of great use to me: Blessed is the man that endureth temptation, for when he is tried, he shall receive the Crown of Life, which the Lord hath promised to them that love him. While these things passed on, finding in myself many signs of approaching mortality, I was very conversant in the more serious thoughts of Eternity; and I oft was thinking with myself, Oh that I had a crevice, in at which to look, that I might see the state of souls departed. Satan (who loses no opportunity) took the hint of these thoughts, because: I did sometime utter them, and interposed this suggestion, That there was no such enjoyment of God after death, as men talked on; and to make it good, instanced in those who were raised from the dead, as Lazarus, Dorcas, and those that arose at the Resurrection of Christ, and went into the City, and appeared to many; none of all which made any report of what they had seen; which no doubt they would have done, if they had been partakers of such happiness as some speak of.54 My curiosity in this, God reproved in the words spoken to Job 38:17. Have the gates of death been opened unto thee? or, hast thou seen the doors of the shadow of death? As if he should say, The things thou enquirest after, are secrets, not to be pried into. In the beginning of that Chapter, I also read, how God argued Job, and in him me, into a conviction of what a poor worm man is, as being unable to search into, or give an account of his wonders, wrought without number:55 And for my confirmation, in the belief of the happiness of Saints departed, presented to me, John 14:1–3, Let not your hearts be troubled, ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s House are many Mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you: I go to prepare a place for you; and if I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to myself, that where I am, there ye may be also. This instructed me, and hinted to me my atheism, and unbelief, as the proper root of such thoughts as I had been tampering with; it thereupon humbled me, and drew me nearer to Christ.

54 Lazarus was raised from the tomb by Jesus in John 11–12; Tabitha (or Dorcas) was raised from the dead by Peter in Acts 9:36–42; and after Christ’s death on the cross, an earthquake opened the graves of ‘many bodies of the saints which slept’, who went into Jerusalem and appeared to many people (Matthew 27:51–3). 55 Job 9:10.

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An anonymous gentlewoman One thing I may not here omit, being a very considerable note for practical direction. Upon a certain day, about this time, the Lord’s Supper was to be celebrated by the Church at Westminster into the fellowship of which, I had through great mercy obtained admission.56 In the morning before I went, I had a great indisposedness to go, and would have been glad of any slight hindrance, yet (stirred up by considering Hebrews 10:25, Forsake not the assembling of yourselves together, as the manner of some is) I went; when I came there, Mr. Roe (the Pastor of that Church)57 was carrying on a discourse, the subject of which was, Sanctified Affections;58 in the prosecution of which, before and after that day, he spent much time: That which he spake then, was by the presence of God, much set upon my heart, notwithstanding the dead frame I came thither in. Sermon being ended, I went to the place where the Church met to break Bread, that I might likewise partake of that Institution: There God met me with greater enlargement of heart, in the sense of his rich Grace set forth in that Ordinance, than to my remembrance I ever had before or since: It put me into a deep mourning over a sinful heart, and made me press after a more clear manifestation, of my being at peace with him, by a holy conversation: To this God gave in a promise containing both, Micah 7:19, He will subdue our iniquities, and thou wilt cast all our sins into the depth of the Sea. To bury sin in the satisfaction made for it, and to subdue it, in respect of the reign of it, are the highest attainments on this side of Heaven, where the remains of it will in like manner be removed. [pp. 48–51] […] These being the most remarkable things which I remember did attend my being at Whitehall, I think it my duty to say something of the mind I brought thither, and the change wrought in it there.

56 The gentlewoman joined an Independent congregation gathering in Westminster Abbey. Admission to such a congregation usually occurred after a member had provided spoken evidence that they had received God’s grace in front of the gathering by the prospective member. 57 Mr Roe: John Rowe (1626/27–77), Independent minister of Westminster Abbey from 27 June 1655 until he lost his living at the Restoration. His Independent church included members of the Parliamentary government and others living in Westminster. 58 Sanctified Affections: a purified state; faith working to further sanctify the heart and soul. John Rowe’s posthumously published book of fifteen sermons, Emmanuel, or the Love of Christ Explicated and Applied in his Incarnation […] in XXX Sermons (London: Francis Tyson, 1680), has one expounding on Ephesians 3:17.

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Advising on body and spirit My birth and education was from those who had dependence upon the Court of the late King,59 whose interest was so much woven into his, that in the late miserable Wars they did adhere to him, to the great reducement of their Families, of which I being one, had a deep share of suffering, and was accordingly embittered against the instruments of it.60 I came not only out of the Country with this in mind, but I brought it into his61 Family who had been a chief instrument of those great Changes, against whose person (partly upon the former reason, but principally from the stories I had heard of him) I had sufficient prejudice. Now, that I may right him for the wrong I have done him in my thoughts (and it may be in my words too, sometimes) I cannot so comfortably leave the world without declaring what I found from him; wherein, if I could sufficiently demonstrate how little I am biased by carnal worldly motives, that which I say, would gain the greater acceptance: That many of his actions had, that either for the matter of them, or manner in which, or end to which they were done, as to provoke God to pour contempt and suffering upon him and his in the view of the world since his death,62 and that most justly (for God doth nothing unjustly) is most evident: teaching us to tremble before him always; For even our God is a consuming fire.63 Yet notwithstanding, I should bury the truth in unrighteousness, did I not from many observations, declare that he was (in my opinion) a man of greater Faith and Holiness, than is almost to be found among the sons of men: One, who had the clear understanding of Gospel-truth, and lived in the power of it (the times of his surprisal in strong temptation excepted), One to whom Christ was dear, and everything that seemed to have anything of Christ stamped on it, without distinctions of this or that Sect. Whence I have heard knowing men say (and I believe truly) That he was apt to indulge pretenders to Holiness, to the apparent hurt of his outward interest, as fearful to beat down anything which God would have stand: And hath been heard to say, That there were few Sects among Christians, in which something of God was not to be found, which must not be

59 Late King: Charles I, who was executed on 30 January 1649. 60 Parliament set up a sequestration committee at the beginning of the Civil Wars that confiscated the lands of Royalists who fought on the side of the King. 61 Him: Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658). 62 After the Restoration, Cromwell’s corpse was exhumed from Westminster Abbey and his head placed on a spike outside Westminster Hall. His wife, Elizabeth, was accused of stealing royal jewels and was subjected to rough searches until her death in 1665, and Richard Cromwell (Oliver’s son) fled England, leaving his family, to escape creditors. 63 Deuteronomy 4:24; Hebrews 12:29.

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An anonymous gentlewoman destroyed.64 How some of them did requite him, I doubt not but they have had leisure since to consider, or will have. And as to the Cause which he was so great a patron of, it was Public Reformation;65 which when the means to effect it is vindicated from those just scandals which Professors of Religion have brought upon it, I doubt no more of the resurrection of it, than of mine own at the last day: And when wicked men have finished their transgressions, and filled their measures, they shall receive the reward of them. God will judge me very shortly as to what I say herein; and hath judged some already of whom I speak; and will judge the rest before another Age be passed, and that will not be long: to Him therefore, and his righteous Judgement, I leave it. [pp. 52–4] […] This only I find, that Episcopacy (in its last restitution)66 comes attended with such profaneness, as the very sight of it hath made me rejoice in the hopes of being delivered by death, from beholding those judgements which I fear will fall upon some of my dearest relations, for being too near those things. And now upon the sad consideration of what is herein written, Oh! you my unregenerate unacquaintance (and such of my relations as are in that condition) let me address some Questions. Tell me honestly, what think you of this story? The Narrative I have made of God’s dealing with me, I solemnly profess to be in every tittle67 true, but not by much all that which might have been said; I have caused it to be written, in that which I account my last sickness, with none other intent, but to give God the glory of his dealing with me, and bring you to happiness the like way. Now, can you think that this great work was from Satan?

64 Cromwell was often criticised by MPs for the freedom allowed to groups with radical religious opinions. On dissolving Parliament in 1655, he exclaimed that nothing would ‘satisfy [the members], unless they can put their fingers upon their brethren’s consciences, to pinch them there’. See W. C. Abbott and C. D. Crane, The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, 4 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937–47), vol. III, p. 586. As an Independent, the anonymous gentlewoman would have supported liberty and independency of religious groups. 65 Cause: the ‘godly old cause’ was that of public moral reformation. 66 Episcopacy: A hierarchy of church government with bishops, lately reinstated by the Restoration. 67 Tittle: small point.

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Advising on body and spirit It is true, Satan tempted and troubled me in my childhood, but I was brought to Christ by it. Did Satan intend that, think you? And hath Christ in requital of Satan’s kindness therein, returned me back as a present to him? Judge, I pray you, in your most retired thoughts; for I appeal to your Consciences from your wild discourses; wherein out of your natural enmity to Conversion, you call it Frenzy,68 and to a holy conversation, which gains no better title from you than Fanaticism, or (which is worse) Sedition and Rebellion; and the words wherein it is held out, Canting.69 I was known to you from my youth, and I appeal to that knowledge yet, without vainglory; Was not my whole carriage as free from offence, as the generality of youth is, if not more free and gaining? How comes it then that sin should be made thus burdensome to me, when you seem to bear it so lightly? My Soul hath oft mourned for you in secret, God knows; and I was encouraged thereto, because, for some God heard me, and delivered them out of their desperate state. Original sin hath dreadfully defaced the Principles of Truth, and darkened the Beams of Light, that once were in man’s heart; yet not so totally, but that I dare appeal to the remnants of them in you, whether you do not think this that hath been said, is the work of God, bringing home a lost creature, and leading a blind sinner in the straight way to Life,70 to which yourselves are strangers? for to such I speak, knowing assuredly that the generation of the Just, do echo to all that I have said. And that I was raised from the dead by that Power which Christ himself was raised, Ephesians 1:19–20 and am kept by no less Power to this very day. And if so, then, as Daniel said to Nebuchadnezzar, Let my counsel be accepted of you;71 Break off your sins by Repentance, your unbelief by Faith; your superstition, ignorance and profaneness, by Purity, Integrity, and a sound understanding of the Ways of God, in his Worship.

68 Frenzy: madness; distraction. Frenzy was understood in the period to involve ‘a degree of pathological disturbance far superior to that of melancholy’ and was ‘treated as an inflammation of the brain, causing a high temperature’ which meant the symptoms of which could be confused with religious enthusiasm, also thought to be caused by the heating of the humours. See Anne Dunan-Page, Grace Overwhelming: John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress and the Extremes of the Baptist Mind (Oxford: Peter Lang, 1996), pp. 168–9. 69 Canting: talking in an affectedly pious way (meant as an insult). 70 Matthew 7:14. 71 Daniel 4:27.

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An anonymous gentlewoman You little think how oft I have sought God for you herein; wherein, if I obtain answer, I shall at length meet you as co-heirs of the Rest purchased by Christ: However the election of God shall stand, and he knoweth who are his. And let what I have herein declared, remain upon record, as a witness of what God hath done for some, and particularly for me, against those who in despite of all kinds of teaching, whether by word or example, do violently pursue their lusts, to their eternal and most just destruction. Finis [pp. 58–61]

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Part III Conversion and cure

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8 Lady Elizabeth Delaval

Between 1663 and 1672, Lady Elizabeth Delaval (1649–1717) wrote several autobiographical meditations and prayers that explored the relation­ ship between her inconsistent religious obedience and her physical condition. As well as meditations on her personal condition, such as when she experienced toothache, she also meditated upon largescale epi­demics, such as the outbreaks of plague in the 1660s. In one example she describes how she incurred God’s displeasure, causing her to become ill because she ate too much fruit when her aunt had expressly told her not to eat it ‘immoderately’. In humoral theory fruit is considered to be an agent for making the body wet and cold, and so it is unsurprising that Delaval feels that she is made ill by eating too much fruit. Indeed, roughly contemporaneously, Royalist gentlewoman Alice Thornton recorded in her Book of Remembrances that ‘My uncle Sir Edward Osbourne died at Kiverton of a surfeit of eating melons, being too cold for him’.1 Physician Richard Boulton comments on the assumed effects on the female body of eating fruit: And I have another plain Observation, that will satisfie all Observing Women, that Acids cause Distempers; for nothing is more common, than that taking cold stops Women’s Courses, the Acid Particles of the Air coagulating their Blood, and causing Obstructions, and nothing is more common, than that Children and young Women drive themselves into the Green-sickness, by eating Fruit.2

1 ‘Alice Thornton: From A Book Of Remembrance, c. 1668’, in Elspeth Graham, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby and Helen Wilcox, eds, Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 145–62 (p. 152). 2 Richard Boulton, An Examination of Mr. John Colbatch His Books (London: A. and J. Churchill, 1698), p. 153.

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Conversion and cure In a similar way to Delaval, Dionys Fitzherbert, another teenage writer of meditations, blamed the eating of a baked apple on making her illness worse, when she was young. Fitzherbert had initially pretended that a slight stomach ache she was suffering from (an episode of ‘wind-colic’ or the stitch) was much worse than it actually was, so as to avoid the New Year celebrations in the house she was staying in.3 This shows that, in many ways, Delaval’s meditations are representative of the concerns of other young women at the time and of the ways in which bodily health was thought possible only in conjunction with spiritual health. Meditations are a religious reflection and were a common form of the expression of faith. Delaval claims that she gathered together all her separate ‘scattered’ papers and copied them into a bound book in Lent when she was ‘4 months past twenty’ (p. 2), as she judged it to be a fitting occupation for Lent, a time of religious reflection. Writing up her account of her sins would, she declares, be the most self-mortifying thing she, as a Christian, could do. By this means Delaval sought to purge herself of sin. Addressing her soul, she writes, ‘How canst thou now O my soul support the burden of these sad, yet true, Meditations, what can keep my spirit from sinking under the weight of those just sorrows Thou art oppressed withal’ (p. 4). Douglas Green contends that Delaval’s ‘concern for her own soul rather than the salvation of others was typical in seventeenth-century religion, but, even in those passages not directly related to theological and devotional matters, she generally viewed events and people only as they related to her’.4 It is the case that the meditations are often based on events she claims to have witnessed and her reaction to these, such as the time she said she saw an elderly man whom she knew to be in church only to escape a fine for being a recusant (someone who refused to attend Anglican services), but some centre on philosophical arguments such as the ‘necessary duty of consideration’. These sentiments engage with moral teaching in a similar way to the commonplace book of Brilliana Harley (chapter 5), which included aphorisms like ‘there is nothing more prejudicial to our souls and bodies than rashness’. The meditations typically take the form of an account of an incident from her adolescence, followed by a series of appropriate prayers. Delaval’s book is an expensive calf-bound volume. It has over 300 pages of text, with many more blank leaves, in which Delaval has copied out all her loose-leaf meditations and musings. Such a volume would

3 See Katherine Hodgkin, ed., Women, Madness and Sin in Early Modern England: The Autobiographical Writings of Dionys Fitzherbert (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010). 4 Douglas D. Green, ed., The Meditations of Lady Elizabeth Delaval (Gateshead: Northumberland Press, 1978), p. 18.

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Lady Elizabeth Delaval have cost substantially more to purchase than the average worker would earn in a week.5 As Margaret Ezell aptly notes, the text, which has been variously described as a commonplace book, a religious diary, or an autobiography, is one that resists classification.6 Generically, the meditations have much in common with a romance, as Delaval vindicates her actions over her thwarted love for Lord Annesley, and of the wrongs done to her by her aunt’s servant, a Presbyterian, Mistress Carter, and others, but also makes use of narrative fiction techniques to recreate meetings between parties at which she was not present.7 It also is a religious record of her acts of meditation and contemplation, which were very much encouraged as a sign of religious adherence, as she designs prayers to atone for events and actions that she records. Nonetheless, as Ezell further notes, to consider Delaval’s work purely as a religious text, as some cataloguers have done over the centuries, is to miss some of its key multi-generic qualities.8 Much of what is known of the detail of the early life of Delaval, née Livingstone, comes from a manuscript volume which she left. She was the daughter of Catherine Howard (daughter of Theophilus Howard, second Earl of Suffolk) and Sir James Livingstone, first Earl of Newburgh, so had staunch Royalist credentials.9 Her mother died in exile in The Hague in 1650, when Delaval was just an infant. For many of her formative years Delaval’s father lived with the exiled court of Charles II, leaving her in England in the care of her paternal aunt, Dorothy, Lady Stanhope. However, her relationship with her guardian seems to have been a difficult one. Delaval was taught to read by her grandmother, Lady Gorges, with whom she used to spend the summer months in London. When Delaval was seven, her grandmother ordered that she should be taught French and employed an exiled Huguenot gentlewoman as a governess. The main method of teaching was by studying verses from the Bible in both English and French.

5 In 1651, ‘a six quire (144 sheets) of writing paper and a bottle of ink cost three shillings and six pence, more than a labourer’s weekly wage’. Germaine Greer, ‘Introduction’, in Germaine Greer, Jeslyn Medoff, Melinda Sansone and Susan Hastings, eds, Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of 17th Century Women’s Verse (London: Virago, 1988), pp. 1–31 (p. 4). 6 Margaret J. M. Ezell, ‘Elizabeth Delaval’s Spiritual Heroine: Thoughts on Redefining Manuscript Texts by Early Modern Women’, English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), vol. III, pp. 216–37 (p. 224). 7 Ibid., p. 234. 8 Ibid., p. 236. 9 Theophilus Howard was the son of the elder sister of Elizabeth Clinton (the Countess of Lincoln – see chapter 4), Katherine, making Delaval Clinton’s great-great-niece.

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Conversion and cure Note on the text The source text for these extracts is the manuscript volume, Lady Elizabeth Delaval, Meditations and Prayers, Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Rawl. D. 78.

Further reading Ezell, Margaret J. M., ‘Elizabeth Delaval’s Spiritual Heroine: Thoughts on Redefining Manuscript Texts by Early Modern Women’, English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), vol. III, pp. 216–37 —— , ‘Delaval, Lady Elizabeth (1648?–1717)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) Douglas D. Green, ed., The Meditations of Lady Elizabeth Delaval (Gateshead: Northumberland Press, 1978)

Meditations and prayers (1663–71) This was my third Meditation in my Fourteenth year How much is my heart now oppressed with grief to find my Aunt10 dotes upon a creature11 with the most tender affection in the world, who is so meanly born, that I am as ashamed to tell myself I Envy her. And yet it is but too true, for whilst she is put into my Aunt’s bosom, I am treated with a cold respect, and seldom have any share of her familiar kindness, which creates happiness amongst Friends (even in the most remote corners of the earth) whereas on the contrary ceremony banishes it from all places. ’Tis certainly the Devil who has raised my discontent to the sin of envy, which is so horrid and tormenting, that could I but with skilful art describe what I feel; sure envy would appear dreadful enough to be banished from amongst the children of men. Why should not I then labour with speed to overcome this evil, which sin alone brings upon me. If I did not repine,12 and murmur, at

10 Her aunt was Lady Dorothy Stanhope, her father’s sister, who lived at Nocton, Lincolnshire, and with whom Delaval lived. 11 Creature: a person. 12 Repine: grumble, complain.

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Lady Elizabeth Delaval the affliction I now have, the smart of it would soon lessen, for nothing may truly be called an Evil and a bitter thing but to forsake the Lord. I will now therefore begin strictly to examine my own heart.

The Fourth Meditation It is most certain that in those few years I have lived, I have done little, or no good, I have done much Evil, and I have received much good; which is all forgot upon the first slight contradiction, my impatient desires meets withal; I will no longer suffer my memory to be thus treacherous concerning her most valuable treasures, but I will often repeat God’s mercies to me, that I may learn humbly to kiss his Rod.13 It is most profitable to make our past sins (though formerly bewailed, and for some time past forsaken) the subject of our present meditations that we may be humbled, and God glorified in the Justice of his dispensations towards us, which murmurings against his providence seems to deny. This sin of Envy I should not now have reason to repent of, had I often seriously considered how unprofitably my Youth has hitherto been spent, how long ’twas before I would so much as hearken to any good instructions; and then how oft I broke those Laws which I was no longer ignorant of, how by degrees I grew censorious, unjust, and filled with vainglory,14 and ambition, in fine with how much imprudent joy I quitted a peaceful innocent life to dwell in the dangerous Palace of a King.15 Had these guilts and Follies been present in my thoughts in their true colours, and not in those disguises with which they bewitched me to love them, I should have expected from God severe punishments, and not have murmured at gentle Chastisements. I should have admired his mercy in blessing me with life, in continuing my health, in blessing me with many comforts as well as necessaries, and I should not have been discontented that I did not always meet with smiles, where I expected them. I will no longer suffer myself to envy this favourite of my Aunt’s (who possesses that love which I covet) I will put it out of my thoughts that she is Daughter to a Coachman and that the greatest honour

13 Kissing the rod: well-known proverb meaning to accept correction submissively. 14 Vainglory: unwarranted pride in her achievements. 15 Palace of Charles II. At fourteen years old (c.1662), Delaval was appointed to the privy chamber of Catherine of Braganza, wife of the king.

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Conversion and cure her Mother has to brag of is her having been my brother Richmond’s nurse,16 and I will endeavour by often representing to myself all her amiable qualities to love her, and then instead of repining, I shall rejoice at her good fortune, and that way share it. [pp. 27–30] […]

Meditations writ in my fifteenth Year Upon the Singing of a Lark Our time is in God’s hand.17 1 The early Lark welcomes the break of day But I (alas) drowse many hours away: She to my God praises does daily sing Reproaching thus my slothful idle sin Whilst I do still neglect to worship him Till all the golden hours of morning light Passed a recall are vanished out of sight. 2 O thou, who only lasting joys canst give, In mercy teach me a new life to live; Thou who unfading pleasures dost command. Pleasures which ever are at thy right hand; Give me thy Grace each minute to improve And fill my heart, O God, with Heavenly love. 18 3 Since time does fly too fast – For me to call one moment mine Great and good God, what’s thine – Let me no longer waste. [pp. 41–2]

16 Nurse: wet-nurse. 17 Marginal note: Psalms 30:17. This is probably an error for Psalms 31:15. 18 Marginal note: Psalms 1:11. This is probably an error for Psalms 16:11. These slight misattributions suggest Delaval is adding the references from memory.

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Lady Elizabeth Delaval Prayers after this meditation O Lord my God, have mercy upon me who have been so foolishly fond of misery, that though I have often smarted for my eager pursuit of vain praise, yet still do I daily pursue those paths that lead to destruction.19 By sad experience (Alas) I have found that when I gained my desires by obtaining those praises I so eagerly coveted, my joys were but false, lasting only for a few moments, even no longer than whilst my conscience slept, and I endeavoured it should do so. But when by the Grace of God it was awaked immediately was I checked, and made to discern how dear I paid for an imaginary pleasure ruining myself, displeasing thee my Dearest Lord and pleasing the Devil with his accursed angels. Instead of being humbled with a sense of my great unworthiness for the least of thy mercies, Pride and vainglory being crept into my heart led in envy, so that I have sinned against thee my God and by my sin have been punished. But (Alas) since I cannot say (though I have confessed) that I have forsaken my sin, how shall I dare to Hope for pardon. Yet O My God, let me not add to all my Crimes that intolerable one of distrusting thee who art all sufficient, and dost (even) hearken to the young Ravens that call upon thee for Food.20 How much rather then wilt thou incline thine Ear to me, who begs of thee such blessings as, far beyond our Earthly food, will make our soul live forever and who begs of thee for thy Beloved son’s sake in whom thou art well pleased.21 It is not only thy mercy I pray for in pardoning my past offences, but also thy grace for the remaining part of my life so that my goings may be held up in thy paths, and my footsteps may not slip. Grant I beseech thee that I may not put off from day to day my turning unto thee my Lord, and My God, but that I may now call early upon thee, Remembering my creator in the days of my youth, before the day comes or the Years approach, wherein I shall say, I have no Pleasure.22 Glory be to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost, now and forever Amen. [pp. 64–6]

19 20 21 22

Romans 3:16. Job 38:41. Marginal note: St Matthew 3:17. Ecclesiastes 12:1.

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Conversion and cure This following Meditation was written when I was just turned of 16 years old, upon the Eating too much fruit just upon my Recovering out of that dangerous fit of sickness23 Who can I blame for any misfortune but myself, and who ought I to praise for any good I enjoy, but the Lord my God. It was certainly my sin that drew from him the punishment I so lately felt, it was his mercy alone that allayed the smart of it. My Great folly in pleasing my taste for some short moments has brought me many days of trouble, and may justly do many more, since I have preferred the transitory pleasure of Eating Fruit before the great Blessing of health (which is without doubt the most precious Jewel upon Earth). Thus I have been ungrateful to my God hazarding so slightly the loss of a great Treasure which he has just but now restored to me. How many sins has this one of intemperance drawn me into, first disobedience to my Dear Aunt (who I look upon as a Parent), she having forewarned me of the eating fruit immoderately, which the Physicians also have forbid me; And in the next place my eager love of it has made me receive the calm kind advice of Mistress Corny (one of my best Friends) rather with anger than thanks, answering her peevishly enough (though against my own conscience) that I did not believe what I eat hindered my having good Health at all, yet daily experience contradicted what I said. O Gracious Lord God what a multitude of sins are here, and yet these are but few in comparison of those many I have been guilty of, since I was born into this miserable world; How can I but be in amaze at thy infinite goodness, which has spared me all this while, and blessed me with comforts as well as the necessaries of this life. O My God, bless me still24 and give me grace to turn from all my evil ways, every day to overcome Vices, and to embrace those virtues which may make me acceptable in thy sight through Jesus Christ;25 For his sake I beseech thee hear my imperfect prayers, to whom with thee and the Holy Ghost be all glory and honour, world without end. Amen. [pp. 102–4] 23 Delaval says she fell seriously ill while grieving for her beloved grandmother. She says that soon after her death she suffered from a ‘very violent Fit of sickness’ (p. 102). See the Introduction to this chapter for an explanation of fruit and illness in the humoral body. 24 Still: always. 25 Psalms 19:14.

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Lady Elizabeth Delaval […]

This following Meditation was also written in my seventeenth year. Upon the having Worms in my Gums and taking of them out. 26 Pain seldom seizes us, but Physicians can tell what evil is the cause of it, from whence our Distempers proceed, and what are the most proper remedies (or at least they make us believe so), and by these remedies one may be cured, perhaps suddenly too, but if not me who it may be God will punish longer making me smart under his Rod, even till I humbly kiss it, by suffering willingly, yet some other person in pains might find ease by the Physician’s skill. But what I now endure, as it can scarcely be described, so neither can it be cured by any of those who are most learned in diseases that afflict us. My Head, my Eye, my Teeth, and my Neck are most miserably tormented with raging pain: All which a poor unlearned woman (with God’s blessing) promises to ease me of; She tells me that what I suffer is caused by the gnawing of little worms, that run along with the blood in my Veins, I know, tell this now to any learned Doctor of Physic and he will rather smile at my sim­plicity; for expecting it to be Eased by this woman’s skill; than not believe her more likely than to cheat than cure me.27 I must have patience till tomorrow before I can know the truth, for her Art cannot be showed till there is day light for her to work in.

26 Marginal note: this was written while I felt the pain which kept me awake several nights. 27 After the cures which every housewife knew, the local wise woman was the only option for most ranks of society who could not afford a physician’s fees. However, in popular culture there was a stereotypical older woman healer – a witch, invoking Satan’s help, or at best a charlatan, relying on unconventional cures. Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft (London: Andrew Clark, 1665), which went through several editions between 1584 and 1665, explains that many old women accused of being witches are not using the supernatural, but that the cures they claim to use are fake, designed to make money. He cites (p. 138) a rhyme from one who he says was erroneously thought to be able to cure disease in cattle who used the charm: My Loaf in my lap, My Penny in my purse; Thou art never the better, And I am never the worse.

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Conversion and cure Meditations the next day after the worms were taken out Most strangely has this woman surprised me, and many more here present, for behold here is no less than 200 worms in this Basin which she has taken out of my Gums where (though I was willing to try her skill) I did not believe there had been any. But though I wonder much to see a plain demonstration of what very few will believe yet at the same time I consider we are far from understanding all the secrets of nature, nor can I give credit to any man’s judgement before my own eyes. Nor because this woman’s Art in taking these little creatures of my gums (where they have so many days and nights bitterly tormented me) is unusual, must I therefore conclude it impossible to be done, but either by witchcraft or cozenage.28 As for the first of these, God forbid I should ascribe such power to a wicked creature, as is only due to our Glorious Creator. ’Tis at his word that the stormy winds arise, and not at the command of a witch (as some do foolishly imagine) and ’tis God alone that can still the raging of the sea.29 We were certainly in a most miserable condition if a professed servant of the Devil’s could at her pleasure cause sorrow, pain, or sickness to seize us. But blessed be our merciful God who preserves us from such sad evils and himself corrects us, but with judgement, not in his anger lest we should be consumed and brought to nothing; Correction (saith Solomon) is grievous unto him that forsaketh the way, and he that hateth reproof shall die.30 Most welcome then be all my afflictions. O may I ever submit like Old Eli, saying it is the Lord, let him do what seemeth him good.31 Most convincing Arguments there are to me this woman deserves not the hated name of a witch; which many people give her, amongst the Giddy multitude, whilst the more sober sort reckon her to be a cheat and that she cannot be neither, for ’tis impossible she can have cunning

28 Cozenage: the practice of deceiving people. People in pain are easy targets for dishonest people to take advantage of. 29 Scot, in his The Discoverie of Witchcraft, makes this point too, writing, ‘Such faithless people (I say) are also persuaded, that neither hail nor snow, thunder nor lightning, rain nor tempestuous winds, come from the Heavens at the commandment of God; but are raised by the cunning and power of Witches and Conjurers […] But certainly, it is neither a Witch, nor Devil, but a glorious God that maketh the thunder’ (pp. 1–2). 30 Marginal note: Proverbs 15:10. 31 1 Samuel 3:18.

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Lady Elizabeth Delaval enough (as has been reported) to put worms into my mouth through the Quill with which she takes them out;32 I am sure she neither brought the quill with her, nor did so much as make it, for it was made by one of my own servants, and I plainly enough (as well as others) saw the worms stir (after she left me) in the water where she washed the quill that she opened my Gums withal. Nay more, some curious people that were here took some of those little worms out of the water to try if they had life, and when they were cut in pieces we saw blood, which was a certain proof that they were not little pieces of lute-string which some incredulous people used to say she might slip into my Mouth with the quill with which she opened my Gums, and so washing it in the Basin she might make those pieces of strings move in the water, as if there were life in them; but these arguments were not made use of by any of those persons who were Eye witnesses of the sudden cure that was wrought upon me. In fine, after all critical Arguments I dare affirm it for a truth, that worms have caused those torturing pains, my God has punished me withal, and in his good time mercifully removed.

The Prayers belonging to these Meditations 1. I adore thee, O glorious Majesty the great God of Heaven and Earth; I acknowledge thy power and tremble at thy Judgements, humbly desiring ever to submit to thy holy Will without the least murmur.

32 Claiming bits of string were tooth-worms (believed to be the source of dental pain, as the worm assumed to live in the gum was thought to wriggle around in the cavity and irritate the tooth nerve) was a well-known con trick, a version of which is described by John Gerard in The Herbal or General History of Plants (London: Adam Islip, Joyce Norton, and Richard Whitakers, 1633), under the entry for ‘henbane’: The seed is used by mountebank Tooth-drawers which run about the country, for to cause worms come forth of men’s teeth, by burning it in a chafing-dish [portable grate] with coals, the party holding his mouth over the fume thereof, but some crafty companions to gain money convey small lute string into the water, persuading the patient that those small creeping beasts come of his mouth or other parts which he intended to ease. (p. 355) A mountebank was ‘an itinerant charlatan who sold supposed medicines and remedies, frequently using various entertainments to attract a crowd of potential customers’ (Oxford English Dictionary).

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Conversion and cure 2. I praise thee with my whole heart for all thy Mercies, and amongst them for thy gentle Corrections. O My God be thou pleased still to deal graciously with thy unworthy servant; now, I beseech thee, incline my Ear and hear me; I call, thou God of my salvation. 3. Ah my Lord and my God, according to thy great Goodness grant that I (who have rather misemployed than buried my Talent) may now seriously repent, and henceforward be blest, with the Grace of wisely turning to some spiritual advantage all the gloomy as well as cheerful hours of my life. 4. Let those violent pains which I have felt be in my memory in the midst of my pleasures, lest I be foolishly transported and think them durable, neglecting to fix my thoughts upon those Heavenly mansions where there can be no tears: nor sorrow.33 O Merciful God, for the merits of my saviour’s glorious and bitter sufferings, deny me not an entrance there. 5. Grant, Blessed Lord, that the preying of these worms upon me now alive may make me severely condemn myself for not oftener meditating upon that time, when I shall be devoured by them in the Grave, even when Death that King of Terrors34 seizes me, at the approach of which Flesh and blood trembles. 6. But with the Eye of Faith I can discern the Glories behind the cloud, and say with thy servant Job, I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the later day upon the earth; and though after my skin, worms destroy this body: yet in my flesh shall I see God, whom I shall see for myself, and my eyes shall behold, and not another, though my Reins35 be consumed within me.36

33 34 35 36

Revelation 21:14. Job 18:14. Reins: kidneys. Marginal note: Job 19:25–7.

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Lady Elizabeth Delaval 7. Lord increase, and strengthen then my Faith; give me also, I beseech thee, a grateful heart for thy mercy in sending me here some of those creatures (which in the grave will be my only attendants) to put me in mind of my mortality, so shall I have reason to say with thy servant David; it is good for me that I have been afflicted:37 8. O Learn me, thou Saviour of our Souls and Bodies, to live in a daily expectation, both of Death, and sorrows, since Death triumphs over all for my many sins I justly do deserve, that sorrows may be my portion here. 9. Thy mercy alone in granting to thy servant, a contempt of those pleasures which vain men thirst after, can make those miseries that attend children of men in this valley of tears38 to be supportable; 10. O Therefore give me grace to look upon sin ever as the greatest evil, and never by any action of my life to deny the acknowledgement of this great and evident truth; 11. O Blessed Jesus, suffer not my nature to be declined, and corrupted (who have the honour to be called after thy own name) then those heathen philosophers39 were who being guided by the dim light of reason only, without any knowledge of the true God, did yet agree to­gether in confessing that the most solid and real pleasures of the soul was to despise those pleasures of the Body, which are falsely so called, and so evince them to be but counterfeits, and cheats. 12. O Grant that my study may be evermore to condemn all such imaginary pleasures, of the body, and so to elevate my mind, that my thoughts being fixed wholly upon thee, and what relates to thy service, I may bear all afflictions thou art pleased to send me with true patience; and also praise thy holy name that thou art pleased to chasten me.

37 Marginal note: Psalms 119. 38 Valley (or vale) of tears: the earth as a place of suffering before a person enters heaven. 39 Heathen philosophers: philosophers of reason who lived before Christianity (e.g. Aristotle, Plato, Hippocrates).

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Conversion and cure 13. Give me grace O My God, I beseech thee, so profitable to mediate upon my Death, that I may (after that Debt is paid) live eternally.40 O let me no longer waste the greatest part of my time in foolish mirth; nor place my felicity in happy successes here below; in such prosperous fortune as is only envied by the ignorant, nor in any vain foolish delights, that my heart has formerly longed after, for well are we taught by the words of Solomon (after well examining the truth) that all things under the sun are but vanity and vexation of spirit.41 In thy presence only, O my God, is the fullness of joys, O Grant that I may no longer thirst after those which are empty and unsatisfying.

These following Meditations were writ in the later end of my seventeenth year 1. When the Devil finds us watchful against those temptations which at their first approach discover to us without much examining that they come from him, then with great subtlety he ceases for some time to assault us that way, and with yet greater cunning goes on to contrive our ruin. Thus has he many times deceived me, by suggesting to my thoughts, when I have been inclined to quit my Bed early in the morning, that ’twas not at all necessary for me to rise early, since I was not a person that would spend my time at my glass, when the Bell called me to the public prayers,42 for after my own private devotions were ended, I was not one that could be satisfied in my mind for the whole day after unless I also joined with the whole congregation afterwards in those prayers that are appointed by the Church, which I would certainly go to when I was called to them, though it happened to be in the middle of my dressing. This consideration joined with an accustomed laziness, has often lulled me asleep till the precious hours of morning light have slipped away, and I at noon have not been fit to appear, till ’twas so late, that 40 Romans 6:23: ‘For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord’. By accepting that Christ died for her sins, she can receive eternal life. 41 Marginal note: Ecclesiastes 2:25. This is probably an error for Ecclesiastes 1:14. 42 Court services were held in the Palace of Whitehall’s Chapel Royal, near the king’s bedchamber. The gentlemen and ladies were separated by wall hangings. The queen’s ladies would have attended public worship as part of this congregation.

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Lady Elizabeth Delaval my servants (though not myself) were forced to neglect the worship of God, for they well as I must have some time allowed them to put on their clothes, before they can be seen at the public prayers.43 This is now a grief unto my soul. Henceforward by the Grace of God nothing but want of Health shall make me thus lose my time, and cause others to do so too, neither shall that keep me in my bed when I should be praising God, if I know I will only trouble, and not hurt me to quit it. 2. In all things I find that young people are generally too much inclined to indulge themselves, and rather choose what is pleasing than profitable, at least in things that are not directly evil, we please our fancy constantly without resistance; And thus we so much accustom ourselves to satisfy our Desires, that when they (even) are criminal, we can scarce resist them anymore, than when they are innocent. To avoid which difficulty of being able to resist temptations, I will frequently deny myself those pleasures that (as to this world) have most charms in them for me. Thus will I often choose rather the company of people that I am obliged to, who find pleasure in my conversation, and I little in theirs, rather than the company of others who are more agreeable to me. And when I have free liberty to choose what I will (having no obligation upon me to the contrary) retirement from all the world, is the way that I would willingly choose to pass most of my hours, nothing being so necessary as to get my mind well stored with wisdom. 3. ’Tis of much greater consequence than we easily believe the setting of a strict watch over ourselves, in the daily actions of our lives which seem least considerable, for we no sooner are negligent in a trifling concern, but the Devil catches that advantage to serve his designs against us. Thus when I have sat down to eat (which is a necessary and innocent action), has he oft by my inadvertency turned my meal into a sin; since I have many times considered the pleasing of my taste more that the preservation of my health, and have reaped the miserable Fruits of that folly quickly after.44 43 Delaval’s lateness set the whole household behind in their morning duties, as her maids could not get ready for church until their mistress was dressed. 44 Delaval was making herself ill by eating foods that upset her humoral balance. See the Introduction to this chapter.

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Conversion and cure But now I will begin to be more wary, and when I eat or drink, I will take care not wholly to place my heart upon that satisfaction, but I will endeavour – by sometimes causing those I eat withal and by cheerful, harmless discourse to make myself acceptable, so shall I probably be reckoned courteous, and gain the hearts of some who perhaps would else be apt to censure me as guilty of pride. 4. After a day of Fasting, or abstinence, too often does succeed, excess if not in food, yet in pleasures, which that I may avoid, by the grace of God I will carefully watch myself, when my fast is ended that I may not trifle away my precious time, and so by disorder be prevented from rising seasonably the next morning to my devotions. 5. The most advantageous penances are in my opinion such as at the instant puts us most in remembrance of those sins, we afflict ourselves for. Therefore having wasted too many of my precious hours, in idle discourses, I do now resolve by a constant silence for some days (except when duty or necessity makes me speak) to punish myself for this sin; and also to improve my silence into a sad meditation of this, and other offences of my sinful life. 6. The customs of this world are grown so evil (even) amongst those who profess Christianity that our youth are first taught to understand pleasures, before they are learnt necessary duties, the sad experience of which sort of education I am but too sensible of. For near 15 years of my life were passed away, before I did so much as know what days of fasting or abstinence our Church appoints,45 and not 9 years were past before I was well instructed in the Art of dancing gracefully. And when at length I knew the duty I had been so long a stranger to, I neglected the thoughts of it so much, that I was negligent in practising what I knew, in so much that a witty raillery46 has oft had force enough to dash all my resolutions of doing my duty. Thus (alas) has more

45 The church appointed several days of the year to be times of abstaining from food in order to concentrate on religious reflection and these were set down in The Book of Common Prayer. See the Introduction to the anthology. 46 Raillery: teasing/banter.

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Lady Elizabeth Delaval than 20 months longer of my life passed away, in which I have seldom numbered any penitential hours. For which I am now so much grieved, that I resolved not only to observe those days I am commanded to keep, but also for some weeks to forbear one day in each of them to taste any such food as pleases me best, or eat such a quantity as I desire. I will also for some Time (as a punishment for my intemperance in sleep) allow myself no more than 5 hours sleep in the 24.

Some Meditations and Prayers writ also in the later end of my seventeenth year.47 Most miraculously has the Lord my God now spared my life, and delivered my soul from death, since the plague (that dreadful Arrow of God)48 has not only approached, but also entered into my dwelling, my Mother-in-Law,49 and two of her servants being smitten with that infectious disease before I was sent out of my Father’s house, in which his great passion for her made him shut himself up with her. 1. O Blessed Saviour, have mercy upon me a most miserable sinful creature, and give me Grace I beseech thee to seek thee with my whole heart even now that thou hast so wonderfully preserved me, now that my Eyes have seen the mourning and my ears have heard the great Lamentation that is in our land, for the many thousands not only weak, and sickly persons but goodly strong healthful people that are swept away by the raging Pestilence.50 2. O now my Jesus my Dearest Lord who in the midst of such great danger hast saved me from Death and also all those who are near, and dear to me, grant I beseech thee that I may now (out of a grateful sense of thy mercy) sincerely turn to thee with my whole heart.

47 The topic of this meditation is the plague. The last great outbreak of plague in London was in 1665, when Delaval was sixteen, as she declares here. 48 Plague was considered one of the three ‘arrows of punishment’, along with famine and war, which God would rain down on the world if he was displeased. 49 Mother-in-law: stepmother. Delaval’s father remarried in 1656 to Anne Poole (d. 1692). 50 Around 15 per cent of the population of London are thought to have died in the 1665 outbreak, for example.

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Conversion and cure O Let that life which thou hast now spared be wholly dedicated to thy service forever. Let me not be like those people who when thou didst slay them then sought thee and served thee more for fear than love, but grant that I may now praise thee with joyful lips, because thou has so wonderfully blessed and preserved me. Yet though I could not imitate the Children of Israel in their inconstant service, I desire to follow their example in inquiring early after thee my Lord and my God: Wherefore I humbly pray thee, let me not resolve to turn and yet delay the time when51 3. O let me not like Felix once tremble at the consideration of Judgement to come,52 promise to think of it again, but never find a time convenient for it. Neither let me like Pilate once have a desire to know what is truth,53 and let that desire vanish in a moment but O my God do thou enable me to cherish every good thought thy Holy Spirit puts into my heart, and grant me thy grace, so to blow every spark of holy fire that it may be kindled into a pure flame of love to thee my blessed Lord and Saviour. 4. Since there are but few, that enter in at the straight gate or find that narrow path which leadeth unto life,54 in thee will I put my trust, unto thee, my God, will I make my prayer. O Grant that I may not only love thee with my whole heart; but also that I may have wisdom when and how to seek thee. O suffer me not My God to seek thee lazily (as thy spouse once did) in my Bed, lest as she then, so I now seek and find thee not.55 5. Neither let me ever so much as entertain a thought of what may be done by miracle upon my Deathbed, and so shrink up the seeking of thee into a narrow time when I am come to the very last cast when my 51 There seems to have been a transcription error here when Delaval edited her work as the line peters out here. 52 Felix was a Roman official who jailed Paul, but was afraid of God’s judgement after he heard Paul speak, according to Acts 24:24–5. Perhaps Delaval brought this passage to mind as, in Acts 24:5, Paul is accused before Felix of being ‘a pestilent [plague-ridden] fellow’ because of his ‘seditious’ preaching (24:5). 53 John 18:38. Pontius Pilate was prefect of Judea and allowed Christ’s crucifixion. 54 Matthew 7:14. 55 Marginal note: Song of Solomon 3:1.

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Lady Elizabeth Delaval strength is gone, my spirit clean spent, and the powers of my soul as numb as my senses. 6. Ah, no, no, my Blessed Saviour this is not a time to begin to seek thee in, A Great Man (who is but a mortal, even sinful dust, and ashes) would not accept of my service at such a time, and much less reason have I to expect the Immortal God should be pleased with it. O therefore blessed Jesus, effect now in me what thou wert sent to do by that Heavenly Father for the advantage of mankind, even bless me by turning me away from my iniquities.56 7. O Grant that now whilst I have youth, health and strength, I may give glory to thee my Lord and my God, that so when my feet do stumble upon the dark mountains, when Age creeps upon me, when sickness or Death itself seizes me, I may not tremble nor be amazed at the King of Terrors, but may put my trust in thee my creator, whom I have remembered in the days of my youth, and then through the merits of my Saviour’s sufferings, I shall fear no evil but willingly leave this valley of Tears. 8. O Dear Saviour Grant that I may live (as thy servant David did) like a pilgrim and a stranger here,57 that so when thou takes away that breath which thou hast given me, and that worms devour my body, my soul may take its flight home to the heavenly Jerusalem (which is the Mother of us all) where thou lives and reignest with the Father and the holy Ghost, ever one God blessed forever Amen. Our Father which art in heaven, &c.58 [pp. 108–25] [...]

56 Marginal note: Acts 3:26. 57 In 1 Peter 2:11, Peter urged believers, ‘as strangers and pilgrims’, to ‘abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul’. David’s psalms often present him as both a stranger and a pilgrim. 58 The Lord’s Prayer, the prayer that Jesus taught to his followers. Matthew 6.

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Conversion and cure Meditations writ upon the Continuance of the Plague, writ in the beginning of my eighteenth Year. It is ever seasonable to consider well the advice of the son of Sirack,59 but in this sad time of calamity (except we all resolve to perish) ’tis absolutely necessary not only to have it in our thoughts but also to practise it in all our actions – Be not (says he) without fear to add sin unto sin, and say not his mercy is great, he will be pacified for the multitude of my sins, make no tarrying to turn to the Lord, and put not off from day to day.60 ’Tis wonderful and indeed strikes one with horror to behold that this increase of the raging pestilence has no effect upon us, our hearts are not filled with deep afflictions, nor do we mourn bitterly our sins, but alas we go on in them still, throwing away our time in unprofitable pleasures. Woe is me how can a Christian now refrain from shedding plenty of tears day by day, considering that the very last week there were 5 thousand persons in the City of London,61 and perhaps most of them at that time well in their health, who are now cut off and lie in their graves; yet all these were our fellow Christians whom we ought to love even as ourselves, and to mourn for them with true Grief. But Alas, Alas, how do we perform this duty, or indeed any other? Do we not serve God coldly and sin with eagerness ah me what can we now expect from a just God, but such a swift vengeance as our many sins deserve, and particularly the hardness of our hearts to our Brethren in this their great calamity, whilst the living that remain in the City are some of them mourning for their dead, and others trembling

59 Son of Sirack: Jesus the son of Sirach (also called Ecclesiasticus and Ben Sira) wrote the largest book included in the apocrypha of the King James Bible: ‘The Wisdom of Jesus the son of Sirach’, known under its Latin name Ecclesiasticus (‘belonging to the church’). Delaval alludes to a passage from the work later in the paragraph. 60 Marginal note: Ecclesiasticus 5:5–7. 61 Information in the following meditation concerns a law passed on 6 July 1665 which stated that the first Wednesday of each month should be kept as a public day of fasting to try to atone for God’s displeasure which had caused the plague, which means that Delaval has misplaced this meditation, as she was just sixteen that summer. A published Bill of Mortality for the year 1665 states that 68,596 Londoners died of the plague that year, compared with 625 women who died in childbirth and 1,545 deaths from old age, for example. This is just the officially recorded number of plague deaths and is likely to be a very conservative figure. The claim that 5,000 people died in a week in the hot summer months is perfectly possible.

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Lady Elizabeth Delaval from fear of their own approaching Fate here insensibly we pass away our time in Gaiety and Pleasures. The Plague (blessed be the holy name of God) has not yet been in these parts, but how soon it may, God only knows.62 We have no reason to be secure, since we daily provoke him to destroy us, but we have a great deal to fear that though this moment we live, yet the next God may take away our breath and turn us to Dust.

Prayers after this Meditation 1. O Glorious Majesty who desirest not the death of a sinner but rather that he should turn from his wickedness and live, look I beseech thee with thy Fatherly Compassion upon me, who have been an ungrateful, unworthy creature towards thee. 2. O Lord God I confess from the very bottom of my heart and with true sorrow that I have returned thy manifold blessings and mercies with a continual disobedience all my life long, for I cannot call so much as one day to mind, in which I have served thee faithfully with all my power. 3. O my God, my God, I do now plainly see that it is an Evil, and a bitter thing to forsake the Lord63 yet without thy infinite goodness towards me I cannot move one step towards thee, O be pleased, Gracious God, for my dear Saviour’s sake to make me a clean heart, to renew a right spirit within me, and to pardon all my iniquities. O Grant that I may (like thy servant David) acknowledging my faults, and have my sins ever before me.64 Glory be to the Father &c. [pp. 131–3]

62 This is further evidence that Delaval has misattributed the age she was when she wrote this meditation, as an earlier meditation records her stepmother having caught the disease. 63 Marginal note: Jeremiah 2:19. 64 Psalms 51:3.

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9 Katherine Sutton

The conversion narrative by Katherine Sutton (birth and death dates unknown), A Christian Womans Experiences of the Glorious Working of Gods Free Grace, was published in Holland in 1663, after she had fled England following the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. She had previously undertaken another voyage to either Holland or America. Many religious dissenters, including Particular (or Calvinistic) Baptists like Sutton, emigrated to the Americas and continental Europe in order to worship in relative peace and freedom from persecution. Particular Baptists had begun to consolidate their organisation and practice in the early 1640s following the breakdown of Laud’s Court of High Commission, and this consolidation culminated in the publication of their first Confession of Faith in 1644. Like many radical Puritans, Baptists were fond of drawing meaning from life events in order to prophesy about the future of the people of God on earth, and what this meant for the arrival of the Kingdom of God, led by Christ the King. Sutton was no exception, describing her traumatic passage to Holland in terms of the Israelites crossing the Red Sea; her ship was wrecked upon a sandbank, forcing her to find passages across the sands in order to reach the shore. Just as Moses led God’s chosen people out of Egypt to escape a tyrannical ruler, so Sutton was miraculously saved from harm while escaping from persecution in England. She then interpreted this act of providence as an indication that the country would be delivered from its troubles. Sectarian risings attempting to bring about deliverance by force, led by Fifth Monarchists, who believed that the four empires prophesied in the book of Daniel (Babylonian, Persian, Macedonian and Roman) would be followed by the coming of Christ, had caused Baptists (many of whom had published works that supported Fifth Monarchism) to be regarded with suspicion. Their practice of adult baptism by immersing believers in freezing waters was widely criticised as a dangerous heresy, 218

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Katherine Sutton damaging for both body and soul. Baptists thought, however, that they were following the pattern of Christ’s own burial and resurrection from the dead, as they rose from out of the water. Ideas of deliverance and regeneration are at the heart of Baptist narratives, depicting periods of despair and affliction before the dawn of a new life in Christ. Sutton’s traumatic experiences, which also included bouts of severe illness and the deaths of some of her children, were interpreted by her as God continuing to sanctify her through the Holy Spirit and deaden sin within her. One of her ministers likened the process to the Lord hacking and carving an arbour out of a favourite tree so that he might sit and delight in it, which explained to Sutton why she was afflicted with bodily and spiritual distempers. Her belief in ‘free grace’ meant that as soon as she believed in Christ as her saviour (which only the elect could do) she would receive eternal life, but after this time Christ’s sacrifice would continue to rid her of sin. She later desired ‘that all afflictions might be sanctified rather than removed’ (p. 11), preferring to suffer and be purged of her sins rather than to live her life without affliction. Like many believers in similar circumstances, Sutton compared the fourteen-year period of her spiritual troubles to birthing ‘pangs’ before she brought forth the ‘new birth’, when she came to a true belief in God: she wrote that ‘something of Jesus Christ was in me all that while’ (p. 32). After this period she was also thankful for God’s ‘mercies to our souls and bodies’ (p. 33), aligning herself with the leper who thanked Christ for healing him in Luke 17.1 The purpose of Sutton’s narrative was certainly to praise the ‘glorious workings of God’s free grace’, but also to show the ongoing process of mortifying sin in the body, all testifying to her election and destination after death. Sutton also experienced afflictions that she maintained were visited on her for not declaring to her congregation the songs and prophecies she had received from the Holy Spirit. After praying for the Lord to impress upon her the meaning of his word, she was made able to sing devotional and prophetic verses in a similar manner to prophecies sung by the Baptist and Fifth Monarchist prophetess Anna Trapnel, who was said to sing in a trance-like state. However, Sutton had doubts about whether these songs were truly gifts of the Holy Spirit and did not communicate them to her Baptist congregation, which resulted in ‘a great fit of sickness’ (p. 20) which she believed was punishment for her silence. At this time gathered congregations restricted women’s speaking aloud in church meetings, taking their precedent from 1 Corinthians 14:34: ‘Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted 1 See also ‘Eliza’, p. 148 of this anthology.

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Conversion and cure unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law’. Women were, however, sometimes permitted to speak when they had the gift of prophecy. Because this was thought to be the voice of God, with the woman acting as a vessel for his word, this removed her agency and the scandal associated with a woman preaching. Her prefatory writer and Baptist minister, Hanserd Knollys, later praised her singing as ‘performed by a gift and the assistance of the Spirit’ (sig. a2): these songs were not her own but given to her by the Holy Spirit. In 1658, when she was first given the ‘knowledge of other things which he is bringing to pass’ (p. 20), her congregation were ‘unacquainted’ with the practice, and she struggled to find a delegated male member who might communicate her gift to the whole group. In the same year she sang in front of some governors in ‘high places’ (p. 16), but these prophecies went unheeded and the persons were ‘brought low’ soon afterwards, a warning to any sceptical readers of the narrative. Eventually she decided to write down her experiences and prophecies so that they could be published after her death, but they were then lost with the ship that was wrecked. This confirmed to Sutton that it would please God if she published her works so that they would find a public readership and never be lost: the written experiences were not ‘given in to me from the Lord for my own sake only, but for your benefit, to whom it may come’ (p. 39). Sutton, then, goes against conventional womanly behaviour by entering the public sphere, but explains that this is only because she is obeying her God. Likewise, she is keen to emphasise that even though in her culture women were deemed to be the weaker sex, biblical precedents suggested that women could still glorify the Lord. The address to her readers at the end of the narrative asks that they do not ‘despise’ the work ‘because it is the Spirit’s working in the weakest vessel’ (the female), because after his resurrection Christ first appeared to a woman, Mary Magdalene. He was also not afraid to tell a sinful woman of Samaria that believing in him would give her eternal life, and so his free grace, Sutton observes, was given ‘as well to the one [sex] as the other’ (p. 41). The narrative simultaneously protects Sutton’s reputation by styling it as divinely inspired, but also contains arguments to support the wider participation of women in Baptist congregations. Note on the text The source text is from the copy of Sutton’s A Christian Womans Experiences of the Glorious Working of Gods Free Grace (Rotterdam: Henry Goddæus, 1663) held by Cambridge University Library. The text has numerous printing errors, which have been amended on transcription. 220

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Katherine Sutton Further reading Kathleen Lynch, Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) J. F. McGregor and B. Reay, eds, Radical Religion in the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) Marcus Nevitt, Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England, 1640–1660 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) Diane Purkiss, ‘Producing the Voice, Consuming the Body: Women Prophets of the Seventeenth Century’, in Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman, eds, Women, Writing, History: 1640–1740 (London: Batsford, 1992), pp. 139–58 John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Despair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991)

A Christian Womans Experiences of the Glorious Working of Gods Free Grace (1663) A fit of desertion 2 After this [convincing me of his mercy] the God of comfort was pleased to withdraw and leave me in a deserted condition, which I found to be very sad, and I was very much perplexed in my spirit, but could not speak of it unto any: But going to hear a Sermon, the Minister was upon that Text: Lord forsake me not utterly 3 (that is to say) not overlong lest the spirit should fail before thee: 4 he then showed what desertion was; and why God doth sometime seem to leave his own people. Because (said he) through some pride, they thought they could walk alone, and so neglected their watch, then God hides his face, that they might see their own insufficiency: and know that all their peace, strength and comfort is in and from him: And this (through mercy) was a great help unto me at that time. Further, while I was under that ministry, God was pleased to convince me of the falseness of their Worship,5 which in that place then was used, and having an opportunity to go with others to the communion (as they 2 Fit: a recurrent attack of a periodic ailment; a sudden and transitory state of activity or inaction. 3 Psalms 119:8. 4 Isaiah 57:16. 5 Sutton refers here to the practices of the Anglican Church which she, and other radical Puritans, thought were not scripturally based. These ideas were most prevalent in the 1630s, when Charles I’s Archbishop William Laud brought in various innovations in church worship that resembled Catholicism, including

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Conversion and cure call it) I could not kneel as the rest did, but sat down as if I had kneeled;6 and as I there sat, it came upon my heart to think thus (as if it had been spoken to me) why dissemblest thou a worship before the Lord, he that commands thee to kneel there, may as well command thee to kneel at an Altar (although at that time there was nothing known of setting up of Altars)7 which thing I made known to that Minister, and did warn him that if Altars should be set up, that he would not (for filthy lucre8 sake) kneel at them himself, nor compel others so to do: But he told me he could not believe any such thing should be: but if it should be so he promised me he would not conform to them. But in a short time after he found it too true, for Altars were reared up, and he poor man (contrary to his promise) did conform himself in that thing, and compelled others so to do: but the first time he did so, it pleased the Lord to smite him with a sore languishing disease,9 that he went out no more. Soon after I was at the Christening of a child (as they call it) at which time God was pleased to convince me of the evil and falseness of that piece of Worship also.10 Then was there in the nation a public fast proclaimed, and by man’s invention there was a form of prayer made and appointed to be read in every assembly that fast-day,11 & this was a third conviction that I had

the veneration of icons and an increase in ritual and ceremony. Laud was also influenced by the teachings of Jacob Arminius that advocated free will over predestination, which also resembled Catholicism.   6 Separatists like Sutton could see no scriptural precedent for kneeling at particular parts of the church service and thought it a false, ritualistic ceremony. Bishop John Cosin recorded a story of a gentlewoman who in 1630 sat quietly while others stood to sing the Nicene creed and was made to stand by him, calling her a ‘lazy sow’ and tearing her sleeve in the process. See G. Ornsby, ed., The Correspondence of John Cosin, D. D. Lord Bishop of Durham (London: Surtees Society, 1868), vol. I, p. 174.    7 Up until the 1630s, English churches had communion tables in various positions, but Laud (supported by Charles I) established uniformity of worship by dictating that all altars be placed at the east end of the church, as they were in the great cathedrals, surrounding the altar with rails, to keep the space sacred. These innovations caused distress up and down the country, leading many people to observe that the Anglican Church was becoming increasingly popish.   8 Lucre: profit.  9 Languishing disease: a debilitating illness characterised by low spirits or depression. 10 Many people at this time questioned the scriptural validity of baptising infants, and whether they should do so in a Church they considered to be corrupt. Some of these formed or joined Baptist congregations, where believers were baptised only when they had experienced evidence of God’s grace. 11 The ruling government appointed public fasts as times for people to pray for issues of national importance and it set the prayers to be read. Later in her nar­rative, Sutton berates all formal prayers of man’s invention.

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Katherine Sutton about their formal outside way of worship; I had then an opportunity to come into one of those assemblies that fast-day while that prayer was reading, at which present this thought came strongly upon me: Is this a worship in spirit and truth which thy soul (when it is upon the wing with God) cannot join with all; for I could not join with the words then read in that foremost prayer. Upon which I even melted in my spirit, and fell into shedding of tears, resolving to separate12 from, and come no more to join in such a way of worship until I had very diligently searched into the true way of God’s worship, as it is written in his blessed word; and in order there unto I made use of all the best books I could get, that were then published to that purpose, and also called in the help of many Godly Ministers of several judgments: but when all this was done I was still unsatisfied in that behalf: And then did I cry unto the Lord to teach me, and it was by the Lord set upon my heart, that I must not do anything in the way of his worship but what I had ground for in his holy word; & that God’s Servants were always to observe his pattern in all that they do to him, and that Scripture was much set upon my heart. Revelation 22:18–19. For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, if any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book; and if any man shall take away from the words of the Book of this Prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the Book of life, and out of the holy City, and from the things which are written in this book: well still I was put upon it to continue seeking the Kingdom of God and the righteousness thereof, and the promise that all other things should be added unto me.13 Then did I with some others seek the Lord by fasting and prayer, for counsel what we should do, and whether we should go to enjoy communion with the Lord, in the way of his pure worship,14 and the Lord was pleased in love to answer my desires in a wonderful manner, for being then entangled with a house of which my Husband had a lease for some years; and upon that account was unwilling to remove,15 not knowing how to dispose of that house: But yet the Lord was pleased in a short time to make him willing that I should remove if I could get off that lease, and some goods I had; which the Lord soon helped me in, by sending one unexpectedly the very next day, after my Husband 12 To separate from the established church by worshipping in a group gathered according to the principles of the primitive churches in the New Testament. Particular Baptists were a branch of separatists. 13 Matthew 6:33. 14 That is, somewhere where people worshipped according to scripture. 15 Remove: move house.

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Conversion and cure declared his willingness for my removal upon those conditions, who took the lease of the house off our hands with those goods, and so I was made free;16 So forthwith I removed to a place where I did enjoy the hearing of a good man preach, and had the sweet benefit of some private meetings, which was much refreshing unto me: but yet two things I was very earnest with God for. 1. One that I might be filled with the clear witness, and full assurance of the eternal Spirit. 2. And the other, that I might enjoy more full and close communion with God in all his blessed ordinances in both, which God was pleased to answer me in some measure. [pp. 6–8] […] After waiting, the Lord was pleased to set it upon my heart, to believe that my habitation should be removed, and that I should enjoy my desire by (the time called) Easter,17 and so it was accordingly; and I through mercy, after I had gotten the renewing of the seal and clear witness of the Spirit, lived for about a quarter of a year as it were in Heaven upon earth, but then began a cloud again to arise, and I was under the buffetings of some sore temptations, God withdrawing in a great measure (though not the witness of the Spirit yet the comforts of his Spirit which before I did enjoy); and I conceive this might be the cause of it (which I wish all others may take heed of, for it cost me dear) under that sweet soul refreshing communion18 I had with our heavenly Father, I gave way to some doubtings and questionings, whether there was not a delusion in the thing I then enjoyed.

16 Made free: it was normal for leases on rental property to be made out in terms of years and leases were viewed as collateral which could be sold and bequeathed. The Suttons seemed to have taken a long rental lease on a home which made moving difficult until they providentially found someone willing take over the lease from them. See Amy Louise Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1995), for more on women who managed and owned property in the period. Some separatists saw property charges and leases as a political issue and so were unwilling to pay. See also Laura Brace, The Idea of Property in Seventeenth-century England: Tithes and the Individual (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998). 17 Feast days, such as Easter, Christmas and Whitsun, were abolished by Parliament in 1647 because evidence of the date of their celebration could not be found in scripture. Secular holidays for workers replaced them until the Restoration. 18 Communion: close spiritual union and conversation.

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Katherine Sutton This temptation lasted some six days, and I had no peace, day nor night when I was awake, to think that I should grieve so good a God, and cause him to depart from me. And Satan not changing his weapons, made me think that there was something in me that I did not so fully resist him, for when our dear Lord Jesus was tempted, he by his powerful resistance made him to change them.19 So I lay mourning before the Lord, but could not set to praying for the violence of this temptation. Then my sleep departed, and I grew sick, & then God gave me to mind that Abraham’s work lay before me, when he went to offer sacrifice he was to drive away the fowls, Genesis 15.20 This work the Lord directed me to do by laying hold upon Jesus Christ, who had prayed for me, though I could not now pray for myself, John 15:17–19.21 And so soon as my heart was brought to believe this, I was presently delivered, and in all this temptation the Lord hid not his face from me, blessed be his name. And then as the Lord carried me over the Sea, where I did enjoy further and fuller communion with himself in his ordinances, he gave me another occasion for the exercise of faith and Patience.22 For whilst I was upon that voyage, the vessel that I was in was pursued with enemies, and troubled with contrary winds, so that we were in great straits. But God gave me to believe that he that delivered Paul out of his straits, 23 would also deliver us out of ours, and so it was, blessed be his

19 Christ was tempted by Satan three times during forty days in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1–11; Luke 4:1–13), each time by a different means, which Christ resisted. Sutton’s temptations did not change. 20 Genesis 15:11: ‘And when the fowls came down upon the carcases, Abram drove them away’. Abraham, who was called Abram before God gave him a new name, was making a sacrifice to the Lord, who had promised him the inheritance of the land of Canaan: the sacrifice was to seal the covenant or promise and the ‘fowls’ were the birds of prey that came to feast on the slaughtered offerings. Sutton is showing that she has been promised a share in God’s kingdom (heaven on earth) and that she must rid herself of anything that would distract her from sealing her covenant with him. 21 The source text has John 15:17–19, but more likely John 17:9 is meant. 22 Sutton travelled abroad at this time to escape the persecution of the Laudian Church in the 1630s. Although she later travelled to Holland, where her account was published, there is no evidence to suggest that this is her destination here. She may have travelled to Boston, Massachusetts, in order to follow her p ­ refatory writer and publisher Hanserd Knollys, although it seems more likely that her subsequent baptism took place in either England or Holland, where such practices were developing. 23 Transported as a prisoner, St Paul also experienced a voyage with contrary winds (Acts 27:4), leading to the ship being wrecked on the coast of Malta.

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Conversion and cure name; and so very safely was I carried unto that place that the Lord called me unto. But presently after I was there arrived the Lord was pleased to exercise me with several afflictions. First by taking away a child by death, and then by laying upon myself such a distemper that my joints and sinews were by fits bound up, that I could not stir them, nor take any rest while it lasted, my pain was so great, no Doctor could do me any good (though several physicians consulted what to do for me) but concluded, there was no help but I must die.24 But when I heard that, I said, there is yet help in God, and it was set upon me to believe, that if I could but touch the hem of the garment of Jesus Christ, that is believingly go to him, I should be healed, 25 being also put in mind of that promise, that whosoever forsake anything for his sake and the Gospel’s, Matthew 19:29. should receive an hundredfold; then I cried, Lord give me to be healed of this distemper by thee seeing thou art pleased to deny help by man. And one day our Pastor called in to visit me, as he was going to the meeting, whom I did desire to pray for me, and to stir up the brethren to join with him, and I much encouraged him that they should pray in faith, believing for what they asked, telling him that by faith and prayer he would assuredly heal me, and verily according unto my faith it was done unto me, forever blessed be God for Jesus Christ, for as they were praying in his name the distemper departed. Next the Lord was pleased to lay his afflicting hand upon another of my children, then did I much desire that all afflictions might be sanctified rather than removed, and that by all I might be made more conformable unto Jesus Christ was I helped then to read and mind that place in Job, Job 34:32. That which I see not teach thou me; if I have done iniquity, I will do no more. Then our Pastor coming again to visit me, I asked him how we should know the mind of God in these many afflictions, he answered me, that a man having an orchard or vineyard walks therein, and 24 It is probable that her physician would have viewed the problem in Sutton’s joints and sinews as emanating from her grief. Cures tried would include soothing baths in cordials with selected herbs such as Melissa (lemon balm), which was also thought to ‘cheer the heart’: John Pechey, The Compleat Herbal of Physical Plants (London: Henry Bonwicke, 1694), p. 15. 25 Matthew 9:20: In this verse Jesus cured a woman who touched the hem of his garment. She had had ‘an issue of blood [for] twelve years’ and Jesus declared that her faith had made her ‘whole’. The use of this verse suggests that Sutton’s child died at birth and that she was suffering from problems related to post­ partum bleeding and other symptoms of illness following pregnancy.

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Katherine Sutton among all the trees he makes choice it may be of some one tree, whose standing is more pleasant and convenient than others; and that tree he chops, & hacks and makes an Arbour to sit in for his delight, and said he, if God will do so by you, will you not therewith be content? Oh! yes said I: if that be the good will of my heavenly father; and blessed be God I did find it so; for though I have sown in tears, I have reaped in joy, 26 and have found the times of greatest outward trouble, and affliction have been the only times of greatest inward and spiritual joy and soul consolation, verily I cannot express with tongue nor pen the large experience I have had upon this account. And this I have found, that when a poor soul is faithful and single hearted for God walking up to the light it hath received, this is the very way to enjoy the presence of God and his blessing upon him, in what state and condition so ever he is in; for this I can declare from mine own experience that loss is the way to gain, trouble is the way to peace, sorrow is the way to joy, and death is the way to life; he that looseth his life for my sake, saith Jesus Christ, the same shall find it, 27 through the valley of tears lieth the way to the mountain of joy; for whilst I set myself in good earnest to seek the Lord for instruction into the truth as it is in Jesus, I met with many difficulties; but yet our prayer hearing God was pleased to come in by degrees; having through his grace given me faith in his son (who was exalted as a Prince and a Saviour to give me repentance) made me also willing to be baptised for the remission of sins. Now that which made me willing to obey the Lord, in this Ordinance was the Command of Jesus Christ in Matthew 28:19. and Acts 10:48. And the example of Christ and the practice of the Apostles, and primitive Saints, together with the promise of the gift of the Holy Ghost annexed there unto Acts 2:38. And indeed this truth at last was so set upon my heart by the Lord, that though many difficulties lay in the way, yet the Lord carried me through them all: and after I had obeyed the Lord therein (in very faithfulness) I must declare that I did enjoy the incomes of God in a more plentiful manner than before: But Satan for some time laboured to hinder me in obeying the Lord in this piece of service, with this temptation, that by this means a death (in all likelihood and in an eye of reason) would fall upon my livelihood, 28 but God made it a furtherance to me and to others also, so that many

26 Psalms 126:5. 27 Matthew 16:25 and Luke 9:24. 28 Sutton was a governess, and so could be in a position to influence children by her own teaching without their parents’ knowledge.

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Conversion and cure of us were at that time (after waiting on God by fasting and prayer) baptised together.29 And after that the Lord was pleased to bless me in my employment that following year, with more than ordinary success, by which the Devil was proved a liar. But afterward I had some fears, that my employment might be a snare unto me (as the world is to many) and that I should be too earthly in it, for this Scripture did follow me very much, (which I desire to give good heed unto) Oh! Earth, Earth, hear the word of the Lord.30 And often in prayer I did cry unto God, saying, speak Lord, for thy servant desires to hear; and was very desirous to know, what the Lord would have me to understand by this word; and when I had considered I found something in my employment sinful, and a hindrance unto my spiritual enjoyments, to convince me of which, the Lord was pleased to withhold his blessing upon that employment, which before I had found therein; to the convincing and converting of some to himself, so finding something in it contrary to his will, I was constrained to leave it off, and after much seeking of the Lord for counsel, these Scriptures were much with me, Matthew 7:7. Ask, and it shall be given you: seek, and ye shall find: knock, and it shall be opened unto you. If ye then being evil know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your father, which is in heaven, give good things to them that ask him. Matthew 7:11. And on my servants, and on my hand maidens will I pour out of my spirit, and they shall prophesy. Acts 2:18. These promises did dwell with me for a long season, so that I was much stirred up to pray to the Lord, that he would please to accomplish them upon me, and pour out of his blessed Spirit upon me. And after long seeking (especially one day) being very earnest and importunate with the Lord, after which I went out to walk, and on a sudden I was endued with the gift of singing,31 in such a way and manner as I had not been acquainted with before. [pp. 9–13] […] 29 Groups of believers were often baptised together. Most accounts, sympathetic and derogatory alike, describe adult (or believer’s) baptism as taking place in a river or stream by the believer being ‘dipped’ under the water by the minister and rising in the pattern of Christ’s resurrection. Some Baptist groups favoured baptism by ‘sprinkling’ water, but Knollys favoured immersion. 30 Jeremiah 22:29. 31 Suddenly Sutton was invested with the spiritual gift of singing which she believed was given her by the Holy Spirit. Her songs were a mixture of devotional hymns and prophecies.

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Katherine Sutton After these promises and instructions followed this song, in the year 1658. Oh, now my soul! Give glory to the Lord. For this rich mercy he doth thee afford; He made the heavens, and ordered every light; He takes the hearts up of his people quite. And as I was on a Journey, this also was given in: When that this green shall blossom bear, And birds shall pleasant sing; Then shall there be a knell most sad, In every place, heard ring. Then did the Lord pour out upon me much of the spirit of prayer, and praising, with the knowledge of other things, which he is bringing to pass: In so much that I was much broken before him, to see my own unworthiness, and his goodness, a sense of which I lay under for some season, not long after I had a great fit of sickness; and I was inquiring of God, what his mind should be in that affliction: he showed me, it was because I did not declare to the Church with whom I walked; those things he had made known unto me. But being troubled at my own insufficiency; and they being un­ acquainted with such things;32 and indeed myself did question at the first, whether it were the gift of God or no (the gift of singing)? Then the Lord was pleased to set it upon my heart, that as those prophesies were true, and should come to pass, so should I know that this was the true gift of God, given in unto me. And it was so when the spring came on, then began that sickness of agues33 and fevers, that have continued ever since, little or much, and there followed two dry summers one after another, and also we had many light appearances;34 but they sat in dark shadows, till Christ our light shall appear, and in great mercy take away and remove our dark 32 Gathered churches did not allow women to speak in front of the congregation, taking their precedent from 1 Corinthians 14:34 (see Introduction to the present chapter). However, congregations would sometimes allow a woman to prophesy in front of the congregation if they judged her words to be direct revelations of the Holy Spirit. The scriptural precedent for this Sutton mentions earlier – Acts 2:18. 33 Ague: violent fever. 34 Sutton catalogues a list of prodigies including illness, weather and apparitions/ comets (‘light appearances’) that indicated the imminence of the second coming of Christ. Turbulent times produced more interpretations, and the Restoration

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Conversion and cure and sad afflictions, and sorrows; well now, I was at last so moved in my spirit, that I could not tell how to keep in these things any longer, and therefore went to the Church to that end, but I then could not find him that I would have spoken of it unto, for him to declare unto the rest, so I returned, and did it not.35 Then the Lord afflicted me again, and then I besought him again, and he gave me to mind that I was justly afflicted for neglecting, to make it known, then being raised up again, I did declare something, but not so fully as I should; and indeed would have done fearing, it would not be born, for which I was mourning before the Lord: and as I was mourning, I was put upon singing, as followeth:   Cease thou thy mourning, and see thou dost praise, For thou shalt do my will in all my ways: Thy work shall be praises now for to sing, Because thou hast chosen Christ to be thy King.   Lift up your heads redemption draweth near, Do not at all possess thy heart with fear: Lift up your heads, and look to heaven high; For God will make his people glorify.   Draw water from the wells that are so deep: You shall drink flagons of my love, when others are asleep. Then still sought I God what I might do to honour God in my genera­ tion; and about three days after it was set upon my heart in the night, that I must write my experiences; but then I thought, oh, how should I remember thirty years’ experiences! But then presently came in these promises. Fear thou not, for I am with thee; be not dismayed; for I am thy God, I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will up hold thee with the right-hand of my righteousness. Isaiah 41:10. Fear not, thou worm Jacob, I will help thee, saith the Lord, and thy Redeemer the holy one of Israel. Isaiah 41:14. Commit thy way unto the Lord, trust also in him, and he shall bring it to pass. Psalms 37:5. Great things have I laid up for them that fear me among the sons of men.

of the monarchy, accompanied by the increasing persecution of dissenters like Sutton, was no exception. Prognostications and almanacs were increasingly common during the mid-seventeenth century. 35 See note 32. If she wanted something to be known to the church, a woman could ask a delegated male member (sometimes an elder) to make an announcement.

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Katherine Sutton The next day I set my house in order, that I might go about this work that the Lord had called me unto, and until I went about it, this word followed me; be instructed lest my Spirit depart from thee; and as soon as I set upon my work, it left me, and I found the Lord (according to his promise) mightily assisting me, in bringing things to my remembrance and I writ them down, and had some thoughts to put them in print; but yet through the corruptions of my heart, and the advice of a friend, I was not willing they should be published whilst I am living: my reason was, because I am a poor weak worthless worm, and have not the parts and gifts that some others have. And because I am an old fruitless branch,36 my memory fails, and my understanding is so dull, that I am (and was at the best) a poor empty one, which I cannot but acknowledge with tears and brokenness of heart. Oh, that the Lord should be so good to me! and I can bring no more glory and honour to him; but yet notwithstanding I must give glory to God, for that he hath been pleased to pour out of his Spirit upon me, and since that, to fill my soul with very sweet choice, and heavenly enjoyments from himself. The most large measure of the spirit of prophecy was upon me at two particular times, the one in the year one thousand six hundred and fifty five. And the other in the year 1658. But at many times God was pleased to give me much of the spirit of prayer and praise. Then by his hand of providence I was removed again out of England into Holland, and I brought the papers of my experiences with me: which (the Ship being cast away)37 were lost, with the trunk in which they were: Then was it much set upon my heart, that God was displeased with me, for not putting them in print, and then the gift of singing and praising was much ceased, and I was troubled for the which I sought the Lord, and did beg, that if he were offended at me, for not printing, and leaving them behind me, that he would pardon it unto me; and that, if it were his good pleasure, I should write them again. I did pray, that he would let his Spirit come to enable me again in singing and prayer, as I was wont to do, and be my remembrance to write again: and indeed it did so, not long after, in the night; both in song, and in prayer.

36 A reference to John 15:2 but also a metaphor for ageing, as Sutton refers to being old and fruitless (or beyond her childbearing years) and having memory problems. 37 Cast away: shipwrecked.

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Conversion and cure But then I having not time, was much hindered; yet notwithstanding (according to the time I had) I set myself to do it; and the Lord was pleased to assist me, in bringing again to my remembrance things of long standing. Now before I departed from England, I was satisfied in my spirit, that I had a clear call from the Lord so to do; for indeed more than a year I had such a motion in my spirit, backed with many Scriptures for its furtherance. Yet notwithstanding in this Voyage we met with some difficulty, for the Ship I came over in was cast away; but in the time of the greatest trouble the Lord gave me in these promises; that he would be me in six troubles, and in the seventh he would not forsake me.38 Call upon me in the day of trouble, I will hear thee, and deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me.39 With this sweet word also, thou shalt not die, but live, to see the mercy I will show unto thee.40 It was in the night, and after some time (the Ship being aground, and in great danger, and so were all the persons in it) one asked me, if I were not afraid? I answered, the God of heaven my Father hath brought me hither, and if he may have more honour in drowning of me, than by preserving me, his will be done. Then, when the mast was cut down,41 and the Master with some others said, we are dead persons, and like to lose our lives, yet I had much hope in the Lord, because of his promise, and after that I (and some others in the Ship with me) had committed ourselves unto God by prayer, I being in the Cabin, laid me down to sleep: but I had not (it seems) lain half an hour, but they called us, and said, there was Land not far off, if we would seek for help? which accordingly we did. But it being but about the break of the day, we did wander over the sands, but could find no way out of the sea, as it were, compassing us about round; then we all returned to the Ship again, and some concluded we must go in and perish there; so they went in again. But we said, if we must perish, we would be still seeking to save our lives.42

38 Job 5:19. 39 Psalms 50:15. 40 Psalms 118:17. 41 Ships’ masts were sometimes cut down in stormy weather to stop them capsizing, but this left them stranded, especially if the ship was already aground, for example on a sandbank. 42 That is, we would rather die trying to save our own lives.

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Katherine Sutton And as our God (to whom we had committed ourselves) guided us, we went another way on the sands, and as I was going (looking to God to be my Pilot) not knowing whither we went, for the sea was on both sides of us, and we had but a small way on the sands to walk in; and as I was begging of the Lord, to keep in the seas till we found out a place, not only for our own escape, but that we might see deliverance for our friends in the Ship also, the Lord was pleased to set this upon my heart.43 As thy deliverance is, so shall England’s be, when they are brought to greatest straights, then will deliverance be from God. [pp. 19–23] […] Courteous Reader, If these my Experiences suit not with thy condition, yet let it have a patient view of thee, and pass by what is of the flesh, own what is of the spirit, and judge not, what thou shalt meet with of the truth: because thou art not yet acquainted in that way, for the secrets of God are sometime with poor weak ones that fear him, and what is come to pass I hope you will believe; If it was not out of obedience to God, it should not have come to your view, neither would I have put my name to it, if I could have avoided it, for fear of the rash judgment of some, Lest it should be thought, I did it out of pride, or to own a prophetical spirit, which I know not,44 But I own a Prophetical voice of Christ, which if he pleases to speak, he can make me to hear, yea to believe, this I have Experience of: And if these Crumbs which I have gathered from my bountiful Lord’s table, you cannot find it savoury45 to you, leave it to the hungry broken-hearted Christians, to whom every crumb of mercy is sweet, when it comes out of love from our blessed Saviour. And let not this be despised, because it is the Spirit’s working in the weakest vessel;46 for Christ did not reject the woman though weak, ignorant, and sinful; and where he hath forgiven much, he maketh them love much, and follow him to the last, especially if they keep the word of his patience, holding fast to every truth of God, though it be in an evil time when truth is despised.

43 To an early modern readership, this part of Sutton’s narrative would have resembled Moses’ parting of the Red Sea in the Old Testament, for the Israelites to escape from Egypt (Exodus 12–15). 44 That is, to falsely claim to be able to prophesy. 45 Savoury: appetising or pleasing to the taste. 46 Weakest vessel: women. St Paul refers to women as the weaker of the sexes as a vessel for God’s grace (1 Peter 3:7).

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Conversion and cure Mary followed Christ to the last, and the Lord did so assist her with his Spirit, who showed her strong affections to him, going early in the morning to the sepulchre, and Christ put his honour upon her, that she must bring the first glad tidings of the Gospel of the resurrection unto the Disciples.47 And his appearance to her in that season, when she knew not where to seek him. Christ herein showed his great Love to sinners; for she being a poor ignorant woman, though full of affection, did as many of us do nowadays, seek the living among the dead: but where Christ keeps up the affections of a soul to himself, he manifests more of the knowledge of himself; and Christ doth testify in John 4 That it was his meat and drink to do his father’s will, and that was to teach the poor the knowledge of his will. And when he made known himself to that poor woman, her affections were so enlarged that she goes and calls others John 4:34.48 thus Christ finished the work of his father, to take care of the weakest of his flock, that as the woman was first in the transgression, she might have first knowledge of the resurrection, the gift of the well of water, which springs up unto everlasting life:49 and this gift God is pleased to give it unto women as well as unto men. And he doth require that they should honour him as well as men, for the free grace of God in Christ as well to the one as the other,50 and it is his free grace that I am what I am; and if this small mite51 be not accepted (by all) I shall take it as an high honour to suffer for well-doing; for though in myself I am low, and find the flesh would hinder, and my memory bad, yet I can through grace say, the spirit hath been my remembrance, and in the simplicity of my heart I have done this, and out of obedience to my good God, which makes the Son of righteousness to shine on the weak and on the strong. And truly I have nothing to glory in, for I never did see myself so weak as now,

47 Mary Magdalene was the first to see the resurrected Christ and was instructed to bring the news to the disciples (Matthew 28; Mark 16; John 20). She had been previously cured of ‘seven devils’ by Christ’s power. 48 John 4:34: ‘Jesus saith unto them, My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work’. The disciples are shocked when they find Jesus talking with a Samaritan woman at a well, both because of her sex and because of enmity between the Jews and Samaritan people. Learning that he is the messiah, the woman goes into the city and tells the men what she has seen and heard (4:28–9). 49 Sutton here makes the case that though women were first to sin against God (Eve’s transgression in the Garden of Eden), a woman, Mary Magdalene was the first to see Christ after his resurrection, and the Samaritan woman (see note 48) was offered water by Jesus that would never make her thirsty again (John 4:14). 50 Belief in free grace meant that a person would receive eternal life only after truly believing in their saviour, Jesus Christ. God made only his elect able to believe truly. John 4 (above) is often cited as a precedent for the doctrine. 51 Mite: small thing.

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Katherine Sutton and since I had communion night and day with God, I never was so much in self-loathing and abhorring as now; therefore praise the Lord with me, for I am a poor sinful creature, and I desire that all that fear the Lord, to whom this shall come, would pray earnestly to God for me, that I may stand fast in this evil day, may walk humbly, blamelessly, and very harmlessly towards all: so that I may honour him which hath honoured me, with his Son, to whom be glory and praise for ever. [pp. 40–1]

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10 Hannah Allen

Hannah Allen’s narrative of her triumph over Satan, A Narrative of God’s Gracious Dealings, was published in 1683, around sixteen years after she had recovered from the spiritual melancholy that was thought to have made her vulnerable to his temptations. In her early teenage years Allen (c.1638–83?, possibly after) had begun to suffer from poor health and, although she had begun to feel God’s grace, she became more and more convinced that she had committed an unpardonable sin. Allen, interpret­ing this as a sign that she was predestined for damnation, developed a profound spiritual melancholy. In the depths of her despair she made serious attempts on her own life, which included smoking spiders (then believed to be poisonous), locking herself under the floorboards and opening up the wounds that her surgeon had made while letting her blood. Her narrative acts as a kind of case study for the effects of the burden of sin on the body and mind of a godly woman; it shows both physicians and ministers using a combination of medical and spiritual cures to help her. The length of Allen’s sufferings testifies to the severity of her condition, but also to the experimental nature of cures for a malady that had its roots in spiritual conflicts. Eventually it was the work of a minister, Mr Shorthose, who managed to help her find a way out of her despair by aiding both her ‘soul and body’, to the end that she found solace in her new husband, Mr Charles Hatt. The anonymous preface to her work explains to her readers how these maladies were to be understood in a spiritual framework. The writer briefly explains the prevalent theory that if ‘the Body be out of frame or tune, the Soul cannot be well at ease’ (p. i), a belief explored by Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), where he suggested that the Devil would bathe himself in the body’s melancholy humour when it was out of balance with the rest of the humoral system. However, Allen’s prefatory writer also recognised that, even if the humoral system was 236

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Hannah Allen ‘kept in a balance’, the ‘impressions of God’s wrath upon the Soul or the letting loose of those Bandogs of Hell to affright and terrify it’ (p. ii) would cause the believer to lapse into despair. According to the prefatory writer, this theory most accurately described the cause of Allen’s melancholy, and also several examples of the malady in scripture, particularly the example of Job. Like Allen, Job suffered under the hand of ‘his own God’ because Satan was permitted to torment him. He was ‘scared with Visions’ and ‘terrified with Dreams’, which ‘made him choose Strangling rather than Life’ (pp. iii–iv, alluding to Job 7:14–15), but, significantly, he never blasphemed against the Lord. Allen’s attempts at suicide, which was illegal in this period (see Introduction), were defended by the prefatory writer as ‘Temptations’ that would ‘possibly’ have faced Job and other godly men and women ‘under horror’ (p. iv). Just as Job resisted similar temptations to make away with himself, Allen overcame her own melancholy because of the ‘sovereign graces’ God had predestined her to. Using such a scriptural precedent for published experiences was common, as it indicated that the narrative should be read as part of a history of godly men and women who had suffered for their faith, and who intended their experiences to be used as examples for others. If there was hope for Allen in her great despair then there was hope for others experiencing similar trials. It is clear from the narrative that neither Allen nor those around her knew exactly how to ease her condition, although, as the prefatory writer suggests, they suspected that she would need both a bodily and a spiritual cure. From the work, it would seem that Allen sank into her melancholia after the death of her first husband, Hannibal Allen, a merchant sailor who died at sea, whom she had married in her late teenage years. After his death she returned to her mother’s house in Snelston, Derbyshire, to live with her stepfather, and newly widowed aunt (Mrs Ann Wilson); the latter was to be some considerable comfort to her. Believing that the cure for Allen’s distemper lay in London, where her old friends and specialist physicians were, her aunt sent her to her brother’s house, where she consulted several of them, to no end, including a chemist, Mr Cocket, and the wealthy physician Sir Francis Prujean, who had treated the queen of England earlier in his career. Instead, her brother’s lonely house left her at liberty to experiment with how to do away with herself, and it was soon agreed that she should move to her cousin Walker’s house nearby. Here she received the help of a surgeon, who let the blood from her arm to balance her humoral system, but when he had gone Allen opened the vein again in another desperate, frustrated attempt on her life. Around this time she also recorded a particular passage from The Saint’s Everlasting Rest (1650), by the Nonconformist minister Richard 237

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Conversion and cure Baxter, which had given her much discomfort because it reprimanded those who neglected their daily prayers and obligations, but yet still (falsely) felt God’s grace. Despite unsuccessfully trying to consult Baxter about her illness, because of his reputation for exploring both bodily and spiritual cures, Allen later records receiving help from another minister, Mr Shorthose, who did her much good ‘in soul and body’ (p. 70). This supported the view that both medical and spiritual physic were needed to cure those convinced they were under the thrall of Satan. Godly narratives like Allen’s were often published as exemplary lives for other believers to follow. Hers is a special kind of autobiography, concerned with presenting her spiritual journey, which accounts for why she includes only limited biographical material. She is a mother, but she refers to her child only in passing, when she cannot bear to look at the Lord’s Prayer printed on the ‘hornbook’ in its hands; she never refers to the child’s birth. Her experiences, recording fifteen years of suffering, are presented through a mixture of narrative (written from hindsight, probably in the late 1670s and early 1680s), diary entries and meditations (written at various times between 1663 and 1667) and, occasionally, the words of others. The sometimes fragmentary nature of the text is likely to be because it was made up of a variety of manuscript sources, gathered together by either Allen, her family or friends, her prefatory writer, or a collaboration between them. What was included was likely to have been a combination of what writings had survived her journeys back and forth to London, and what experiences she could remember ‘as they came to my mind’ (p. 35). It is likely that Allen wrote the work with a view to it being used by others as an example of godly fortitude, and to show others how to obtain cures for their melancholy. It is possible that the narrative was intended for the use of one gentlewoman in particular, because Allen addresses some of her experiences to a ‘Ladyship’: Madam,   As for the time I was at my Cousin Walker’s, I refer your Ladyship to them, or any Friend else that may assist you; only I have here set down several passages, as they came to my mind which passed there, which your Ladyship may make use of as You please. (pp. 34–5)

Candidates for the title of ‘Ladyship’ include: the Lady Mary Baker, who wrote several letters to Allen to encourage her in the depths of her despair (see note 49); the ‘neighbouring gentlewoman’ who visits her at Mrs Wilson’s; and Lady Elizabeth Rich, who was a ‘neighbour’ to Allen’s second husband, Charles Hatt, at Ingrave, Essex, in 1691. Whoever the lady was, what Allen’s address to her shows is that she was part of a godly community who wrote in order to help and direct each other in their 238

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Hannah Allen faith, and not only this, but that female writers could help to support and evangelise their friends and co-religionists. Her work shows her referring to the popular work of Edmund Calamy, who admitted her to his Presbyterian congregation at St Mary Aldermanbury, and whom she would have heard preach regularly. In her work she refers to a sermon of his at the funeral of Lady Elizabeth Moore, which was published in The Godly Mans Ark (1657); Moore evidently suffered under the burden of sin, very much like Allen, and Calamy includes some of her own ‘Evidences for Heaven: Collected by her self in the time of her health’, which report similar temptations to submit to Satan’s machinations.1 Both Allen’s and Moore’s works show that the work of godly women, as well as godly men, could provide hope and spiritual nourishment for their readers, in the hope of understanding more about the nature of bodily and spiritual melancholy.

Note on the text The source text is Allen’s A Narrative of God’s Gracious Dealings with that Choice Christian Mrs. Hannah Allen (London: John Wallis, 1683), held by the British Library.

Further reading Katharine Hodgkin, Madness in Seventeenth-Century Autobiography (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in SeventeenthCentury England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) Jeremy Schmidt, Melancholy and the Care of the Soul: Religion, Moral Philosophy and Madness in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007) Alison Searle, ‘“My Souls Anatomiste”: Richard Baxter, Katherine Gell and Letters of the Heart’, Early Modern Literary Studies, 12:2 (2006), 1–26

1 Edmund Calamy, The Godly Mans Ark (London: printed for John Hancock and Thomas Pankhurst, 1657), p. 233.

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Conversion and cure

A Narrative of God’s Gracious Dealings with that Choice Christian Mrs. Hannah Allen (Afterwards Married to Mr. Hatt), Reciting the great Advantages the Devil made of her deep Melancholy, and the Triumphant Victories, Rich and Sovereign Graces, God gave her over all his Stratagems and Devices (1683)

Satan’s Methods and Malice Baffled, &c. I Hannah Allen, the late Wife of Hannibal Allen Merchant, 2 was born of Religious Parents; my Father was Mr. John Archer of Snelston in Derbyshire, who took to Wife, the Daughter of Mr. William Hart of Uttoxeter Woodland in Staffordshire, who brought me up in the fear of God from my Childhood;3 and about Twelve Years of Age, for my better Education, sent me up to London in the Year 1650, to my Father’s sister Mrs. Ann Wilson, the Wife of Mr. Samuel Wilson, Merchant, then Living in Aldermanbury,4 and after some time spent there, and at School,5 I being not well in Health, had a desire to go down for a time to my Mother, being a Widow (my Father dying when I was very young), where I stayed almost two Years. In which time and a little before my going down, it pleased God to work in me earnest breathings6 after the ways of God, but the enemy of my Soul striving to crush such hopeful beginnings in the bud, cast in horrible blasphemous

2 Hannah Archer married Hannibal Allen, a merchant and a widower, on 23 December 1654. He may already have had two sons. A Hannibal Allen, whose parents were Hannibal and Mary Allen, was baptised on 14 July 1652 at St Mary Aldermanbury, London; and a Thomas Allen on 19 July 1654. Allen’s husband Hannibal died in 1664. 3 John Archer married Elizabeth Harte on 16 March 1630 at Uttoxeter, Stafford­ shire. The records also show the birth of two boys at Uttoxeter (William Archer, 26 July 1632; John Archer, 11 July 1630). Hannah’s birth date of c.1638 is indicated by her being twelve years old in 1650. 4 Parish of St Mary Aldermanbury, London. 5 Young women of the wealthy merchant class were sent away to women’s boarding schools, or taught in the houses of local people. 6 Earnest breathings: longing after (the ways of God).

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Hannah Allen thoughts and injections into my mind, insomuch that I was seldom free day or night, unless when dead sleep was upon me. But I used to argue with myself to this purpose, Whether if I had a Servant that I knew loved me, and desired in all things to please me, and yet was so forced against his will to do that which was contrary to my mind, whether I would think ever the worse of him, seeing I knew what he did was to his grief. And by such thoughts as these, it pleased God to give me some support wherein his goodness did the more appear in casting such thoughts into my mind; I being young, and also bearing this burden alone, not so much as acquainting my Mother with it, but by degrees these Temptations grew to that height, that I was persuaded I had sinned the Unpardonable Sin:7 With these dreadful Temptations I privately conflicted for some Months, not revealing it (as I said) to anyone, thinking with myself that never any was like me, and therefore was loath to make my Condition known: I would often in my thoughts wish I might change Conditions with the vilest Persons I could think of, concluding there was hopes for them though not for me: that Scripture in Isaiah 57:20–1, did exceedingly terrify me, But the wicked are like the troubled Sea, when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt. There is no peace to the wicked, saith my God. In this sad and perplexed state, upon a Sabbath day, my Mother having been reading in the Family in one of blessed Mr. Bolton’s Books,8 and being ready to go with them to Church; I thought with myself, To what purpose should I go to hear the Word, since, as I thought, all means whatsoever for the good of my Soul were in vain, but the same time I carelessly turning over Mr. Bolton’s Book as it lay on the Table, lighted on a place that directly treated on my Case; which it pleased God so to bless; that I was so much comforted and strengthened, that I recovered for that time from my Despairing condition, and so continued for several years with good hopes of the love of God in Christ towards me, yet still continually assaulted with Temptations, but with less violence than before. After my abode in the Country almost two years with my Mother, I returned to London to my Uncle and Aunt Wilson; by whom about a Year and four Months after, I was disposed of in Marriage to Mr. Hannibal Allen, but still lived with my Uncle and Aunt Wilson ’til after my Uncle died;

7

The Unpardonable Sin: Puritan and Presbyterian believers were often convinced that they had committed the only unforgivable sin, speaking against the Holy Ghost, mentioned in Matthew 12:32. 8 Either Robert (1572–1631) or Samuel (1605/56–54) Bolton, both Church of England clergymen who wrote spiritual treatises. It was common for mothers to teach their families by reading devotional works to them.

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Conversion and cure and was about this time admitted to the Sacrament by Mr. Calamy,9 with good approbation: And in the time of his Life, I was frequently exercised with variety of Temptations, wherein the Devil had the more advantage I being much inclined to Melancholy, occasioned by the oft absence of my dear and affectionate Husband,10 with whom I lived present and absent about eight Years; and soon after he went his last Voyage, I went into the Country to live with my Aunt Wilson, who was now a Widow, and returned to live at Snelston with my aged Mother, she being Married again and living elsewhere; but in a few Months after I heard of the death of my Husband (for he died beyond the Sea) I began to fall into a deep Melancholy, and no sooner did this black humour 11 begin to darken my Soul, but the Devil set on with his former Temptations, which at first were with less violence and frequent intermissions, but yet with great strugglings and fightings within me; as I would express it (to my Aunt) I am just as if two were fighting within me,12 but I trust, the Devil will never be able to overcome me; then I would repeat several promises suitable to my condition,13 and read over my former experiences that I had writ down, as is hereafter expressed, and obligations that I had laid upon myself,14 in the presence of God, and would say, Aunt, I hope I write not these things in Hypocrisy, I never intended any Eye should see them; but the Devil suggesteth dreadful things to me against God, and that I am an Hypocrite.15 At the first I began to complain that I found not that comfort and refreshment in Prayer as I was wont to do, and that God withdrew his comforting and quickening Presence from me.

  9 Edmund Calamy (1600–66), Presbyterian minister, was admitted to the living of St Mary Aldermanbury in 1640. As the rector of the church, Calamy would have administered the sacrament (first communion) on Allen’s joining the Presbyterian Church. 10 This illness would have been understood to be directly connected to her husband’s absences. At this time a regular sex life was thought of as essential for the physical health of both men and women. A build-up of humours caused by lack of sexual release was envisaged as one of the causes of melancholy in adolescent and adult women who were predisposed to this condition. 11 Melancholy: one of the four humours and thought to be black in colour. 12 Fighting within me: men and women often alluded to their souls as the battle­ ground between God and the Devil. 13 Promises suitable to my condition: the promises were chapters and verses in scripture that would support and comfort Allen in her spiritual trials. 14 Obligations: promises that Allen had made to God before she was troubled by the Devil. 15 Hypocrite: in this case, Allen is worried that she has believed she is one of God’s elect, when in fact it has become clear to her that she might be one of the damned.

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Hannah Allen When I had seen the Bible, I would say, oh that the blessed Book that I so delighted in once! the Devil was strongly assaulting my Faith, and I seemed ready to be overcome, I answered the Tempter within myself in the bitterness of my Spirit; Well if I perish, God must deny himself.16 See the difference betwixt the voice of Faith, and the Language of Despair. At another time I cannot be saved because God cannot deny himself;17 The truth is, it had been most of all worth the Publishing my Expressions in the time of my Combating with Satan at the beginning of my Affliction, but those passages are most of all forgotten. One hour my hope was firm, the next hour ready to be overwhelmed. This began in February 1663, but it grew worse and worse upon me notwithstanding such means was used both by Physic and Journeys to several Friends for Diversion. The last Journey I took upon this account, was to a good Friend of mine, a Minister, Mr. John Shorthose,18 who was related to me by Marriage, who lived about Thirty Miles’ distance, where I still grew much worse, and my continual course there, was to be asking him Questions whether the truth of Grace could consist with such sins, for then I began to fear I was an Hypocrite, and that place I thought upon with much dread, in Job 8:13, The Hypocrite’s hope shall perish; nor had I any ease longer than I was thus discoursing with him, for though he often silenced my Objections, and I seemed for the present to be much satisfied, yet he was no sooner gone from me, but my troubles returned afresh insomuch that his Wife would often send for him home when he was but gone into the Fields. While I was there the Devil would suggest something to this purpose to me, That when I was gone from him, he would torment me. After some stay there, I returned home again, where quickly I began to grow into deep Despair. It was my custom for several years before to write in a Book I kept for that purpose in Short-Hand,19 the Promises, together with my Temptations and other afflictions, and my experiences how God delivered me out of them, mixing therewith Prayer and Praises, which practice I continued ’til I was overwhelmed with despair, some few passages whereof are

16 That is, if I am one of the reprobate (as the Devil says), God must contradict what he has already predestined. 17 That is, I cannot be one of the elect because God cannot contradict what he has already predestined. 18 Mr Shorthose was a minister who had either married one of her cousins or who was a relation of Hannibal Allen. 19 Short-Hand: it seems to have been quite common for sermon-goers to take notes in shorthand so that they could remember the words of the minister, and the promises he highlighted, and Allen writes that she recorded all the conciliatory scriptural promises in this way.

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Conversion and cure here inserted as they were written in my deep distress. This Book in my Affliction I would oft say, would rise up in Judgment against me. As I was walking with my Cousin, Mrs. Shorthose, a Woman cursed and swore sadly; Ah Cousin, said I, I have abhorred such Company all my Life, therefore I hope they shall not be my Companions to Eternity.20 This being the 20th February 1663 is a time of great trouble and bitter Melancholy, and one great cause is for want21 of the light of God’s Countenance; and for fear that if I should have any mercy showed me, I should abuse it; and my wretchedly deceitful heart be drawn aside from God (for I am only fit for the School of Affliction); and on the other hand, if God should send some further trials, I should sink under them; and my Life be made a burden to me. But (Lord) sure this is the voice of my wretched unbelieving heart; The Lord for Christ’s sake, fit me for whatever thou wilt do with me, that I may have power against Sin and Satan, and enjoy the light of thy Countenance, and then do with me what thou wilt: Oh that I might prevail with my Lord, for Christ’s sake, for graces suitable to every condition, and that I may be able to improve every mercy, and every affliction, to thy glory and the comfort of my poor Soul, and that I may be useful in my Generation and not be burdensome; Lord pity my state for Christ’s sake, who hath never left me in my trials. The 6th of April 1664. The truth is I know not well what to say, for as yet I am under sad Melancholy, and sometimes dreadful Temptations, to have hard thoughts of my dearest Lord (The least assenting to which by his grace I dread more than Hell itself) Temptations to impatience and despair, and to give up all for lost; and to close with the Devil and forsake my God, which the Almighty for Christ’s sake forbid: These Temptations were with dreadful violence. Besides, my Melancholy hath bad effects upon my body, greatly impairing my Health: Truly there is sometimes such a woeful confusion and combating in my Soul, that I know not what to do; And now my earnest Prayer to my Lord is this, (which I trust for Christ’s sake he will not deny me, though I cannot beg it with such earnest affections as I should, yet I hope my heart is sincere) that for my sweet Redeemer’s sake he would preserve me from Sin and give me strength of Faith; and Self-denial and patience to wait upon him, and submit to him; and let him do with me what he pleaseth. [pp. 1–16] […]

20 Swore: Allen hopes she will not be among those who swear (the damned) for eternity. 21 Want: lack.

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Hannah Allen When both my inward and outward distempers22 grew to such a height, my Aunt acquainted my Friends at London with my condition, for at London I had formerly had four loving Uncles, my Father’s brethren; two whereof were then living, and a Brother of my own, that was set up in his Trade: These advised to send me up to London; there being the best means both for Soul and Body; in order to which Mrs. Wilson sent to entreat my Mother to accompany me to London;23 (for at that time she could not leave her Family so long) who accordingly came, but she found it a hard work to persuade me to this Journey; [pp. 25–6] […] When I came to London, I went to my Brother’s House in Swithin’s Lane,24 where my Mother stayed with me about three Weeks or a Month, in which time I took much Physic of one Mr. Cocket a Chemist25 that lived over the way, but still I was, as I thought, always dying; and I yet wearying my Mother with such fancies and stories; One Evening my Mother said to me, Well, if you will believe you shall be saved if you die not this night, I will believe all that you say to be true if you do die this night; to this she agreed, and in the night about one a Clock (as we thought) the Maid being newly gone out of the Chamber to Bed, but left a Watch-light burning, we both heard like the hand of a Giant, knock four times together on the Chamber door, which made a great noise (the Door being Wainscot)26 then said I, You see, Mother, though I died not to night, the Devil came to let you know that I am damned; my Mother answered, but you see he had no power to come into the Chamber. Soon after this my Mother returned home into the Country, and left me in my Brother’s house, who was a young Man unmarried, and had only a Man and a Maid, and he much abroad himself about his occasions; and now my opinion of Dying suddenly began to leave me, therefore I concluded that God would not suffer me to die a natural death; but that I should commit some fearful abomination, and so be put to some horrible death: One day my Brother going along with me

22 Distempers: spiritual or physical troubles. 23 It is not clear whether Allen’s aunt, whom she calls Mrs Wilson, is still living near Snelston at this point or whether she sends from London. 24 St Swithin’s Lane, London, under half a mile from St Mary Aldermanbury. 25 Chemist: a doctor, sometimes called an iatrochemist (from iatros, Greek for physician), who favoured the use of medicines made from minerals and other salts in their practice. This was different from conventional doctors, who were mainly interested in balancing the hydraulic bodily humours. 26 Wainscot: a panel-work door made out of European oak (wainscot) or other wood.

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Conversion and cure to Doctor Pridgeon,27 as we came back, I saw a company of Men with Halberds,28 Look, Brother, said I, you will see such as these (one of these days) carry me to Newgate:29 to prevent which I studied several ways to make away myself, and I being so much alone, and in a large solitary House, had the more liberty to endeavour it; first I thought of taking Opium that I might die in my Sleep, and none know but that I died naturally (which I desired that my Child might not be disgraced by my untimely end),30 and therefore sent the Maid to several Apothecaries’ shops for it, some said they had none, others said it was dangerous and would not sell it her: Once she had got some, and was coming away with it; the Master of the Shop coming in, asked what she had, and when he knew, took it from her (this the Maid told me); When I had sent her up and down several days, and saw she could get none; then I got Spiders and took one at a time in a Pipe with Tobacco,31 but never scarce took it out, for my heart would fail me; but once I thought I had been poisoned; in the night awaking out of my sleep, I thought I felt death upon me (for I had taken a Spider when I went to Bed), and called to my Brother and told him so, who presently arose and went to his Friend an Apothecary, who came and gave me something to expel it; the next day my Uncles and Brother (considering the inconveniency of that lonesome House) removed me to Mr. Peter Walker’s House, a Hosier at the Three Crowns in Newgate Market 32 (whose Wife was my Kinswoman); who received me very courteously, though I was at that time but an uncomfortable33 Guest. [pp. 29–34]

27 Sir Francis Prujean (1597–1666), member of the College of Physicians, and credited with curing Charles II’s queen of typhus in 1663. William Birken, ‘Prujean, Sir Francis (bap. 1597, d. 1666)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). At the end of his career, Prujean’s home was near the Old Bailey prison, which would account for Allen seeing men with halberds nearby. He was extremely wealthy, according to Samuel Pepys, and a consultation might well have cost a considerable sum. 28 Halberd: a military weapon which has both a spear point and an axe-head. 29 Newgate: infamous London prison; also a generic name for a prison. 30 Self-murder (suicide) was illegal and economic penalties were enforced on the families of suicides, who would also experience the associated stigma. 31 Spiders were considered to be poisonous because it was thought they attracted venom into themselves. A suggested cure for a spider bite was garlic, ‘which is an enemy to poisons’. See Nicholas Culpeper, trans., Pharmacopoeia Londinensis: Or, the London Dispensatory (London: Peter Cole, 1663), p. 3. 32 Peter Walker married Allen’s unnamed cousin, perhaps the daughter of one of her London uncles. A hosier made or sold hose (stockings and socks) or woven underclothing. The Three Crowns was situated in Cheapside, near the Newgate Market. 33 Uncomfortable: here, being inconsolable, incapable of being comforted.

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Hannah Allen […] I would say that Pashur’s doom belonged to me, that I was MagorMissabib, a Terror to myself and all my Friends;34 that I was a Hell upon Earth, and a Devil incarnate; for that which I prayed against in hypocrisy, God had brought upon me in reality: for I used to have frequently in my Prayers such an expression as this (apprehending the vileness of my Nature) if God should leave me to myself, I should be an Hell upon Earth, a Terror to myself and all my Friends; and because this was in Hypocrisy, therefore God had brought it on me in reality. Sometimes when they had told me I had been Prayed for, I would say, they did not pray for me, for I was not to be prayed for; for the Scripture said, That they who had sinned the sin unto death, were not to be Prayed for:35 And when a good Friend of mine Mr. Blake came daily and unweariedly to see me; I would Ask him, Why he yet came, seeing I rejected his Counsel; And, Christ bid his Messengers shake the dust of their Feet off against such.36 I would say Because I have built my Fabric upon the Sand so high, therefore my fall is so dreadful:37 When I was told of some that were possessed with the Devil and were by Prayer dispossessed, I would reply, What tell you me of Possession, I cared not if I were possessed with a Thousand Devils, so I were not a Devil to myself: When some had told me that I had been Prayed for, I would Answer, I was the less beholding to them, for it would but sink me the deeper into Hell. I would often say, I was a thousand times worse than the Devil, for the Devil had never committed such Sins as I had; for I had committed worse Sins than the Sin against the Holy Ghost: some would answer, The Scripture speaks not of worse sins, and can you be guilty of greater Sins than the Scripture mentions? Yes, said I, My Sins are so great, that if all the Sins of all the Devils and Damned in Hell, and all the Reprobates on Earth were comprehended in one man; mine are greater; There is no word comes so near the comprehension of the dreadfulness of my Condition; as that, I am the Monster of the Creation: in this word I much delighted.

34 Marginal note: Jeremiah 20:3. The reference actually extends to Jeremiah 20:4. Pashur, the son of the chief priest of the temple in Jerusalem, ‘smote’ Jeremiah (perhaps by whipping him) and had him put in the stocks for prophesying. When Jeremiah was released he renamed Pashur ‘Magormissabib’ (‘terror on every side’) and prophesied that the Lord would make him a ‘terror to thyself and to all thy friends’. 35 Another reference to the ‘Unpardonable Sin’ (see note 7). 36 In Matthew 10:14, Christ tells his disciples to ‘shake off the dust of your feet’ while leaving a house that would not heed their counsel. 37 Matthew 7:26.

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Conversion and cure I would say, Let him that thinks he stands, take heed lest he fall: I once thought myself to stand, but am miserably fallen. When I was forced to be present at Duty,38 I would often stop my Ears, my Carriage was very rugged and cross, contrary to my natural temper; Here I practised many devices to make away myself, sometimes by Spiders (as before) sometimes endeavouring to let myself blood39 with a pair of sharp scissors, and so bleed to death; once when the Surgeon had let me blood, I went into a Chamber and bolted the Door to me, and took off the Plaster and tied my Arm, and set the Vein a bleeding again; which Mrs. Walker fearing, ran up stairs and got into the Chamber to me, I seeing her come in, ran into the Leads,40 and there my Arm bled upon the Wall; Now (said I) you may see there is the blood of a Cursed Reprobate. [pp. 40–4] […] When I complained of those dreadful Sins I said I was guilty of; some would Ask me, If I would be glad to be rid of ’em, and to be in another Condition? Yes, said I, so had the Devils; who do you think would not be happy? But I cannot desire it upon any other Account. I would say, I now saw that my Faith was only a Fancy, and that according to an Expression of Mr. Baxter’s in a Book of his; That the Love I formerly had to God, was Carnal and Diabolical.41 I would say to my Cousin Walker, Though I am a damned Reprobate, yet from me believe (for sometimes the Devil speaks Truth) that there is a God, and that his Word is true, and that there is a Devil, and that there is a Hell; which I must find my woeful Experience. I would often Ask my Cousin Walker, What those that came to visit me, thought of my Condition? He would Answer, Very well; I much wondered

38 Duty: prayers in the family or attending church on a Sunday. 39 Allen is referring to the practice of bloodletting, which was a common cure in the seventeenth century. A barber or apothecary would normally do this upon the instruction of a physician. The idea was that illness was caused by an imbalance of humours, and that by removing some of the excess blood (one of the humours) the balance could be restored. 40 Leads: landing or corridor. 41 Paraphrase of Richard Baxter’s The Saints Everlasting Rest (London: Thomas Underhill and Francis Tyton, 1650), p. 412: ‘If thou grow seldom and customary, and cold in Duty, especially in thy secret Prayers to God, and yet findest no abatement in thy Joys, I cannot fear, that thy Joys are either Carnal or Diabolical’. It is taken from a section on ‘laziness’ in spiritual duties, which Baxter shows results in the believer not feeling assured of God’s love. Just as a father would not smile on his child’s ‘neglect and disobedience’, so God would suspend his consolations to a neglectful, grieving soul.

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Hannah Allen at it; and would do what I could to discourage ’em from coming; yet if at any time I thought they neglected me, I would be secretly troubled; as afterward I said. I was wont earnestly to Enquire whether it was possible that the Child of such a Mother as I could be saved; yet I would say I was without Natural Affection;42 that I Loved neither God nor Man; and that I was given up to work all manner of wickedness with greediness; We see no such thing by you, would some say; I would Answer, I, but it is in my heart; Why doth it not break out in Act? say they, It will do ere43 long; said I. The Devil would bring many places of Scripture to my mind, especially Promises; as I said, to Jeer me with them, because once I thought I delighted in them; but was miserably mistaken; which did much terrify me. I would with Dread think with myself, if the men of Beth-shemesh were so destroyed, 1 Samuel 6:19, but for looking into the Ark,44 what will be my Condemnation that have so often meddled with the Holy Ordinances of God, as the Word and Sacraments; and now proved to be only a Cursed Hypocrite, and nothing to do with them; I thought with myself them, I would not partake of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper for a thousand worlds. When any Friend desired me to go to hear the Word of God; I would earnestly beg of them to let me alone, saying, I had Sermons enough to Answer for already, and that it would add to my great Account; if they offered to compel me to go, I would desire them to let me alone, and I would go with them the next time, if I lived ’til then; but my aim was to make away with myself just before the time came, for I thought I had better go to Hell sooner, than hear the Word still, and thereby increase my Torment, and heap up wrath against the Day of wrath, as I often expressed it. I would sometimes say to my Cousin Walker, will you not pity me, that must as sure as that there is a God, forever burn in Hell; I must Confess I am not to be pitied, for did you know me, you would abhor me, and say Hell was too good for me; yet however pity me as I am your fellow-Creature; and once thought myself not only a Woman but a Christian, and though I was such a dreadful wretch as now it appears; yet I did not know it, I verily thought myself in a good condition; and 42 Allen is using the fact that she did not have maternal feelings for her child as proof that she was among the reprobate, as being a good mother was considered integral to living a pious Christian life. 43 Ere long: before long. 44 The Ark of the Covenant.

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Conversion and cure when you see me come to my horrible End, which I am sure will be ere long; though you must loath me, yet I say, pity me. Yes he would say, if I thought it was true I would pity you, but I do not believe it. I used to say, God could not save me, and the reason I gave was; that God could not deny himself. I found within myself (as I apprehended) a scorning and jeering at Religion, and them that professed it, and a despising of ’em, when I came to the height of my distemper, the struggling and fighting that was in me continually at first (while I combated with Satan) left me: When I complained how vile I was, my Friends would tell me, It was not I, but the Devil’s Temptations, I would Answer, No, it is from myself; I am the Devil now, the Devil hath now done his work, he hath done tempting of me; he hath utterly overcome me: Then why are you so troubled? would some say; I would Answer, Have I not cause to be troubled, (think you) that am assuredly given up to the Devil and Eternally Damned. I would write in several places on the walls with the point of my Scissors, Woe, Woe, Woe and alas to all Eternity; I am undone,45 undone forever, so as never any was before me. Upon some sudden occasion I would sometimes smile, but when I did; I would exceedingly check myself, and be the more troubled afterwards. Mr. Walker endeavoured to get Mr. Baxter to come to me, but he still missed of him when he came to Town;46 No (said I), God will not let Mr. Baxter come to such a Wretch as I am; but I had then a secret desire to see him, rather than anyone else. And to my best remembrance my Cousin Walker told me that he asked me if I would believe better of myself, if Mr. Baxter told me my condition was safe; and that I answered, Yes. [pp. 48–56] […] The next Spring which was in May, 1665. My Aunt Wilson came up to London, being restless in her mind ’til she saw me; when I heard that my Aunt was come to High-Gate to her Brother’s House, and did not come to London ’til Monday, I often said I hoped to have seen my Aunt before I died; but now I shall not; this fire within me, will kindle and

45 Undone: ruined. 46 Throughout his life as a minister, Richard Baxter maintained correspondence with believers who were having crises of conscience, believing that they were, in some sense, under the wrath of God. Baxter recognised the close relationship between divine and physiological problems and the need for such petitioners to receive help from both a minister and a physician, and so would have been an ideal candidate to treat Allen.

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Hannah Allen burn me before Monday; on Monday my Aunt came, I being taken with the first sight of her, went with her to dinner to a Friend’s house in the Old-Jury;47 but was at my old Language still every Day, That the Fire would kindle within me and burn me: the Sickness then increasing, my Aunt resolved to take me down again into the Country, which I was very glad of; for there I thought I should live more privately, and be less disturbed (for so I accounted of the kind visits of Friends). A week before Midsummer we set forward toward Derbyshire, and an uncomfortable Journey we had, for by the way I would not eat sufficient to support Nature; when I was come to Snelston again, I was where I would be; for there I could do what I pleased, with little opposition; there I shunned all Company though they were my near Relations; nor could I endure to be present at Prayer, or any other part of God’s Worship, nor to hear the sound of reading, nor the sight of a Book or Paper; though it were but a Letter, or an Almanac.48 The Lady Baker49 was pleased to write me several Letters which I would not so much as look on, nor hear read by others, one being brought me, and I pressed much to receive it, tore it in pieces. Nay I would strike the Horn-book50 out of my Child’s hand; but that would trouble me as soon as I had done it: I would wish I had never seen Book, or learned letter; I would say it had been happy for me if I had been born blind; daily repeating my accustomed Language, that I was a Cursed Reprobate, and the Monster of the Creation. One Sabbath-day being disturbed about some small trifle, I fell into violent passion; weeping even to roaring, and cried out, I was made to be damned, God made me to that very end, to show the power of his Justice more in me than in any other Creature. My Aunt sometimes would tell me; that my expressions were so dreadful she knew not how to bear them; I would answer roundly, but what must I do then, that must feel them; I would often say to my Aunt, Oh, you little know what a dismal dark condition I am in; Methinks I am as dark as Hell itself: my Aunt would say, Cousin, would you but believe you were melancholy it might be a great means to bring you out of this 47 Marginal note: Mr. Hatt’s House, who afterwards Married her. [Charles Hatt, Allen’s second husband, lived in Old Jewry, a street off Cheapside, London.] 48 Almanac: an annually published, popular book which included astrological tables, feast days and other useful information for the year ahead. 49 Most likely refers to Lady Mary Baker, daughter of Sir Daniel Norton (1568– 1636) and Lady Honoria Norton (d. 1648), of Sissinghurst, Kent. 50 A hornbook was used for teaching small children. It consisted of a leaf of paper attached to a horn paddle which had on it the alphabet, sounds used to teach spelling and, often, prayers. It is likely that the reading of the Lord’s Prayer or ‘Our Father’ prompted Allen to strike the book from her child’s hands.

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Conversion and cure Condition; Melancholy, would I say, I have Cause to be Melancholy, that am as assuredly Damned as that there is a God; and no more hopes of me than of the Devils; I have more Cause to be Melancholy than they have, it’s a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the Living God, Hebrews 10:31. My Aunt would persuade me to seek God in the use of means, from that Argument of the resolution of the four Lepers, in 2 Kings 7:4.51 I would Answer with scorn, I have heard that often enough. One fit my humour was such, that when Friends would have argued with me about my condition, I would not speak, but only give them some short scornful Answer and no more; but I would be sometimes in one temper and sometimes in another; my Aunt would take the advantage of my best humour, to talk with me then, and the main thing she designed in most of her Arguments with me was, to convince me of the fallacy and delusion that was in my Opinion; That it was so infallibly revealed to me that I was Damned; but alas all took no place with me; but when she began to speak with me of such things, I would generally fling away with great fume, and say; Will you not let me alone yet, methinks you might let me have a little quiet while I am out of Hell; this was almost my daily practice while I was with my Aunt: I was usually very nimble in my Answers, and peevishly pertinacious52 to please my own cross humour. My Aunt told me she believed God would not have exercised me so with Afflictions, from my Childhood, if he intended to reject me at last; I answered, Do you not remember what Mr. Calamy used to say, That unsanctified Afflictions par-boil the Soul for hell;53 Oh, said I, that I had gone to hell as soon as I had been born (seeing I was born to be damned), and then I had not had so many sins to have answered for, then I should not have lived to be a Terror to myself and all that know me; and my Torments in Hell would have been far less. [pp. 56–63] […] Towards Winter I grew to Eat very little, (much less than I did before) so that I was exceeding Lean; and at last nothing but Skin and Bones (a Neighbouring Gentlewoman, a very discreet Person that had a great desire to see me, came in at the back-door of the House unawares and

51 2 Kings 7:4: four lepers are taught to trust that God will feed them. Allen’s aunt tries to persuade her that she will die from melancholy and malnourishment if she carries on not trusting that God has saved her from damnation. 52 Pertinacious: stubbornly upholding one’s opinion; resolute. 53 Calamy, The Godly Mans Ark, p. 25.

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Hannah Allen found me in the Kitchen, who after she had seen me, said to Mrs. Wilson, She cannot live, she hath death in her face); I would say still that every bit I did Eat hastened my Ruin; and that I had it with a dreadful Curse; and what I Eat increased the Fire within me, which would at last burn me up;54 and I would now willingly live out of Hell as long as I could. Thus sadly I passed that Winter, and towards Spring I began to Eat a little better. This Spring in April, 1666. My good Friends Mr. Shorthose and his Wife, whose Company formerly I much delighted in, came over, and when I heard they were come and were at their Brother’s house, half a mile off, and would come thither the Friday after; Ah, says I, that I dreaded, I cannot endure to see him nor hear his voice; I have told him so many dreadful Lies (meaning what I had formerly told him of my experiences, and, as I thought, infallible evidences of the Love of God towards me: and now believed myself to be the vilest Creature upon Earth); I cannot see his face; and wept tenderly, wherewith my Aunt was much affected, and promised that when he came he should not see me (I would have seen neither of them, but especially my He-Cousin); On the Friday, soon after they came in, they asked for me, but my Aunt put them off ’til after Dinner, and then told them, she had engage her word they should not see me, and that if she once broke her promise with me, I would not believe her hereafter; with such persuasions she kept them from seeing me, but not satisfied them; for that Night Mr. Shorthose was much troubled, and told his Wife if he had thought they must not have seen me, he would scarce have gone to Snelston; the next day they Supped at Mr. Robert Archer’s House, Mrs. Wilson’s Brother that then lived in the same Town, where my Aunt Supped with them; at the Table something was said of their not seeing Mrs. Allen, but after Supper Mr. Shorthose and his Wife stole away from the Company to Mrs. Wilson’s, where they came in at the back-side of the House suddenly into the Kitchen where I was; but as soon as I saw them, I cried out in a violent manner several times; Ah, Aunt Wilson hast thou served me so! and ran into the Chimney and took up the Tongs; No, said they, Your Aunt knows not of our coming; What do you do here? said I, We have something to say to you, said they, but I have nothing to say to you, said I, Mr. Shorthose took me by the hand and said, Come, come, lay down those Tongs and go with us into the Parlour, which I did, and there they discoursed with me, ’til they had brought me to so calm and

54 A possible allusion to Job 20:14.

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Conversion and cure friendly a temper, that when they went, I accompanied them to the door and said; Methinks I am loath to part them; Mr. Shorthose having so good encouragement, came the next day again, being the Sabbath day after Dinner, and prevailed with me to walk with him into an Arbour in the Orchard, where he had much discourse with me, and amongst the rest he entreated me to go home with him; which after long persuasions both from him and my Aunt, I consented to, upon this condition, that he promised me, he would not compel me to any thing of the Worship of God, but what he could do by persuasion; and that week I went with them, where I spent that Summer; in which time it pleased God by Mr. Shorthose’s means to do me much good both in Soul and Body; he had some skill in Physic himself, and also consulted with Physicians about me; he kept me to a course of Physic most part of the Summer, except with the great heat of the Weather prevented, I began much to leave my dreadful expressions concerning my condition, and was present with them at duty; and at last they prevailed with me to go with them to the public Ordinance,55 and to walk with them to visit Friends, and was much altered for the better. A Fortnight after Michaelmas56 my Aunt fetched me home again to Snelston, where I passed that Winter much better than formerly, and was pretty conformable and orderly in the Family; and the next Summer was much after the same manner, but grew still something better; and the next Winter likewise still mending though but slowly, ’til the Spring began, and then I changed much from my retiredness, and delighted to walk with Friends abroad. And this Spring it pleased God to provide a very suitable Match for me, one Mr. Charles Hatt,57 a Widower living in Warwickshire; with whom I live very comfortably, both as to my inward and outward man, my husband being one that truly fears God. As my Melancholy came by degrees, so it wore off by degrees, and as my dark Melancholy bodily distempers abated, so did my spiritual Maladies also, and God convinced me by degrees; that all this was from Satan, his delusions and temptations, working in those dark and black humours, and not from myself, and this God cleared up to me more and more; and accordingly my love to, and delight in Religion,

55 Public Ordinance: religious observance which took place in a church, referring to the sacraments, in this case communion. 56 Michaelmas: feast of St Michael, on 29 September. 57 Charles Hatt (1639–1709) appears to have married Hannah in or around spring 1667. They went on to have at least two children together, William and Charles Hatt.

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Hannah Allen increased; and it is my desire that, lest this great Affliction should be a stumbling-block to any, it may be known (seeing my Case is published), that I evidently perceive that God did it in much mercy and faithfulness to my Soul; and though for the present it was a bitter Cup,58 yet that it was but what the only wise God saw I had need of according to that place, 1 Peter 1:6, Though now for a season, if need be, ye are in heaviness through manifold Temptations. Which Scripture did much comfort me under my former Afflictions in my first Husband’s days. [pp. 64–73]

58 Possible allusion to Numbers 5:11–31.

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Bibliography

Primary sources Manuscripts Bodleian Library, University of Oxford: Rawlinson MS D.78 Lady Elizabeth Delaval, ‘Meditations and Prayers’ Rawlinson MS D.1308 Charles Hutton’s transcription of ‘Lady Carey’s Meditations and Poetry’, ff. 1r–117v Manuscripts and Special Collections, University of Nottingham: MS PwV89 Lady Frances Pelham, ‘Expression of Faith’ MS Pl F1/4/1 Brilliana Conway (later Lady Harley), Commonplace Book William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California: MS L6815 M3 C734, Anne Ley, Commonplace Book

Printed books (pre-1750) Abbot, Robert, Milk for Babes, or a Mothers Catechism (London: John Legate for Philemon Stephens, 1646) Allen, Hannah, A Narrative of God’s Gracious Dealings with that Choice Christian Mrs. Hannah Allen (London: John Wallis, 1683) [Anon.], Conversion Exemplified; In the Instance of a Gracious Gentlewoman, Now in Glory (London: [n. pub.] 1663) Austin, William, Haec Homo, Wherein the Excellency of the Creation of Woman is Described (London: Ralph Mabb, 1637) Baxter Richard, The Certainty of the Worlds of Spirits (London: T. Parkhurst and J. Salisbury, 1691) —— , Reliquiae Baxterianae, ed. Matthew Sylvester (London: T. Parkhurst, J. Robinson, F. Lawrence and F. Dunton, 1696) —— , The Saint’s Everlasting Rest (London: Thomas Underhill and Francis Tyton, 1650) [Bentley, T.], The Fift Lampe of Virginitie: Conteining Sundrie Forms of Christian Praiers and Meditations (London: [n. pub.], 1582) Boulton, Richard, An Examination of Mr. John Colbatch His Books (London: A. and J. Churchill, 1698)

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Bibliography Bradstreet, Anne, Several Poems Compiled with Great Variety of Wit and Learning (Boston: John Foster, 1678) Browne, Thomas, Pseudodoxia Epidemica (London: E. Dod, 1646) Burton, Robert, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford: Henry Cripps, 1621) Calamy, Edmund, The Godly Mans Ark (London: John Hancock and Thomas Parkhurst, 1657) Calvin, John, The Sermons of M. John Calvin upon the Epistle of S. Paule to the Ephesi­ ans, trans. Arthur Golding (London: Lucas Harison and George Byshop, 1577) Clinton, Elizabeth, The Countesse of Lincolnes Nurserie (Oxford: John Lichfield and James Short, 1622) Collins, An, Divine Songs and Meditacions (London: R. Bishop, 1653) Congregational Church in England and Wales, A Declaration of the Faith and Order Owned and Practised in the Congregational Churches (London: [n. pub.], 1659) Crooke, Helkiah, Mikrokosmographia, a Description of the Body of Man (London: William Jaggard, 1615) Culpeper, Nicholas, A Directory for Midwives; or, A Guide for Women, in Their Conception, Bearing, and Suckling Their Children (London: Peter Cole, 1651) —— , Culpeper’s Directory for Midwives: Or, A Guide for Women (London: Peter Cole, 1662) —— , trans., Pharmacopoeia Londinensis: Or, the London Dispensatory (London: Peter Cole, 1663) Davy, Sarah, Heaven Realis’d (London: A. P., 1670) Donne, John, Juvenalia or Certaine Paradoxes and Problemes (London: E. P., 1633) —— , LXXX Sermons Preached by that Learned and Reverend Divine, John Donne (London: Richard Royston, 1640) E[dgar]., T[homas]., The Lawes Resolutions of Women’s Rights (London: John Moore, 1632) [‘Eliza’], Eliza’s Babes: Or the Virgins-Offering. Being Divine Poems, and Meditations. Written by a Lady, who Only Desires to Advance the Glory of God, and not her Own (London: Laurence Blaiklock, 1652) Gerard, John, The Herbal or General History of Plants (London: Adam Islip, Joyce Norton, and Richard Whitakers, 1633) Gouge, William, Of Domesticall Duties (London: William Bladen, 1622) Herbert, George, The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations (Cambridge: Thomas Buck and Roger Daniel, 1633) Major, Elizabeth, Honey on the Rod: Or a Comfortable Contemplation for One in Affliction; with Sundry Poems on Several Subjects (London: Thomas Maxey, 1656) Marten, John, A Treatise on the Venereal Disease (London: John Marten, 1711) Maubray, John, The Female Physician, Containing All the Diseases Incident to that Sex in Virgins, Wives and Widows (London: James Holland, 1724) More, Gertrude, The Holy Practises of a Devine Lover or the Sainctly Ideots Devotions (Paris: Lewis De La Fosse, 1657) —— , The Spiritual Exercises of the Most Vertuous and Religious D. Gertrude More (Paris: Lewis de la Fosse, 1658) More, Henry, Enthusiasmus Triumatus (London: W. Morden, 1656) Murcot, John, Several Works of Mr. John Murcot (London: R. White for Francis Tyton, 1657) Newcombe, Henry, The Compleat Mother; or, An Earnest Perswasive to all Mothers (especially those of Rank and Quality) to Nurse their own Children (London: J. Wyat, 1695) Oliver, John, Present for Teeming Women, or, Scripture-directions for Women with Child how to Prepare for the Houre of Travel (London: Mary Rothwell, 1663)

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Bibliography Pechey, John, The Compleat Herbal of Physical Plants (London: Henry Bonwicke, 1694) Perkins, William, A Golden Chaine, or the Description of Theologie, trans. R. H. (London: John Legate, 1597) —— , The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience (Cambridge: John Legat, 1606) Petto, Samuel, The Difference Between the Old and New Covenant (London: Elizabeth Calvert, 1674) Rowe, John, Emmanuel, or the Love of Christ Explicated and Applied in his Incarnation […] in XXX Sermons (London: Francis Tyson, 1680) S., J., The Accomplished Ladies Rich Closet of Rarities: Or, the Ingenious Gentlewoman and Servant-Maids Delightfull Companion (London: Nicholas Boddington and Joseph Blare, 1687) Saints Memorials: […] Being, a Collection of Divine Sentences Written and Delivered by those late Reverend and Eminent Ministers (London: [n. pub.], 1674) Scot, Reginald, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (London: Andrew Clark, 1665) Sutton, Katherine, A Christian Womans Experiences of the Glorious Working of Gods Free Grace (Rotterdam: Henry Goddæus, 1663) Taylor, Jeremy, Eniautos: A Course of Sermons (London: Richard Royston, 1653) T., E., Diotrephes Detected, Corrected, and Rejected (London: Henry Cripps, 1658) Walkington, Thomas, The Optick Glasse of Humors (London: I. D., 1639) Westminster Assembly, The Humble Advice of the Assembly of Divines (London: [n. pub.] 1648)

Modern (post-1750) editions of primary texts Abbott, W. C. and C. D. Crane, eds, The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, 4 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937–47) Baker, Augustine, The Inner Life of Dame Gertrude More, ed. Dom Benedict WeldBlundell (London: R. & T. Washbourne, 1856) Barker, Jane, The Galesia Trilogy and Selected Manuscript Poems of Jane Barker, ed. Carol Shiner Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) Baxter, Richard, The Practical Works of the Rev. Richard Baxter with a Life of the Author and a Critical Examination of His Works by the Rev. William Orme¸ 23 vols (London: James Duncan, 1830), vol. X Bowden, John Edward, ed., Spiritual Works of Louis of Blois: Abbot of Liesse (London: R. T. Washbourne, 1903) Bradstreet, Anne, The Works of Anne Bradstreet, ed. Jeannine Hensley (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010) Brown, Sylvia, ed., Women’s Writing in Stuart England: The Mothers’ Legacies of Dorothy Leigh, Elizabeth Joscelin and Elizabeth Richardson (Stroud: Sutton, 1999) Burton, Robert, The Anatomy of Melancholy, introduction by William H. Gass (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001) Calvin, John, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2008) Collins, An, Divine Songs and Meditacions, ed. Sidney Gottlieb (Tempe: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1996) Cummings, Brian, ed., The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) Graham, Elspeth, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby and Helen Wilcox, eds, Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen (London: Routledge, 1989)

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Bibliography Green, Douglas D., ed., The Meditations of Lady Elizabeth Delaval (Gateshead: Northumberland Press, 1978) Greer, Germaine, Jeslyn Medoff, Melinda Sansone and Susan Hastings, eds, Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of 17th Century Women’s Verse (London: Virago, 1988) Hodgkin, Katharine, Women, Madness and Sin in Early Modern England: The Autobiographical Writings of Dionys Fitzherbert (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010) Hodgson-Wright, Stephanie, ed., Women’s Writing of the Early Modern Period, 1588–1688: An Anthology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002) Hudson, Roger, ed., The Grand Quarrel: Selections from the Civil War Memoirs of Mrs Lucy Hutchinson; Ann, Lady Fanshawe; Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle; Anne, Lady Halkett; Mrs Alice Thornton and the Letters of Brilliana Lady Harley to her son Edward (London: Folio Society, 1993) Latz, Dorothy L., ‘Glow-Warm Light’: Writings of 17th Century English Recusant Women from Original Manuscripts (Salzburg: Salzburg University Press, 1989) Major, Elizabeth, Honey on the Rod: Or a Comfortable Contemplation for One in Affliction with Sundry Poems on Several Subjects, ed. Anne Lake Prescott and Betty S. Travitsky (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003) Ornsby, G., ed., The Correspondence of John Cosin, D. D. Lord Bishop of Durham (London: Surtees Society, 1868), vol. I Raynalde, Thomas, The Birth of Mankind: Otherwise Named, The Woman’s Book, ed. Elaine Hobby (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009) Roden, Earl of, ed., The Private Diaries of Elizabeth the Viscountess Mordaunt (Duncairn: [n. pub.], 1856) Searle, Arthur, ed., Barrington Family Letters: 1628–1632 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1983) Semler, Liam, ed., Eliza’s Babes: Or the Virgin’s Offering (London: Associated University Press, 2001) Sharp, Jane, The Midwives Book; or the Whole Art of Midwifry Discovered, ed. Elaine Hobby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) Storey, M. J., ed., Two East Anglian Diaries 1641–1729: Isaac Archer and William Coe (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1994) Taylor Lewis, T., ed., Letters of the Lady Brilliana Harley, Wife of Sir Robert Harley, of Brampton Bryan, Knight of the Bath (London: Camden Society, 1854) Thompson, Craig R., ed., Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997) Thornton, Alice, ‘From A Book Of Remembrance, c. 1668’, in Elspeth Graham, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby and Helen Wilcox, eds, Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 145–62 Ward, Richard, ed., The Manuscripts of his Grace the Duke of Portland, Preserved at Wellbeck Abbey (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1894) Weld-Blundell, Dom Benedict, ed., The Inner Life and Writings of Dame Gertrude More (London: R. & T. Washbourne, 1910)

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Bibliography —— , ‘The Puritan Death-Bed, c. 1560–1660’, in Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales, eds, The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996), pp. 122–44 Jackson, Ken, and A. F. Marotti, ‘The Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Studies’, Criticism, 46 (2004), 167–90 Jacquart, Danielle, and Claude Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, trans. Matthew Adamson (Oxford: Polity Press, 1985) Keeble, Neil H., ed., The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001) —— , The Cultural Identity of Seventeenth-Century Woman (London: Routledge, 1994) —— , The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1987) Kelsey, Sean, ‘Barrington, Joan, Lady Barrington (c.1558–1641)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) King, Kathryn, Jane Barker, Exile: A Literary Career 1675–1725 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000) Laurence, Anne, Women in England 1500–1700: A Social History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995) Longfellow, Erica, ‘Eliza’s Babes: Poetry “Proceeding from Divinity” in SeventeenthCentury England’, Gender and History, 14 (2002), 242–65 —— , Women and Religious Writing in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) Luchte, James, Pythagoras and the Doctrine of Transmigration: Wandering Souls (London: Continuum, 2009) Lynch, Kathleen, Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) MacDonald, Michael, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in SeventeenthCentury England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) ——  and Terence R. Murphy, Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994) Mack, Phyllis, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: University of California Press, 1992) Marotti, Arthur F., ‘Manuscript, Print, and the Social History of the Lyric’, in T. N. Corns, ed., The Cambridge Companion to English Poetry: Donne to Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 52–79 Matthews Grieco, Sara F., ‘Breastfeeding, Wet Nursing and Infant Mortality in Europe (1400–1800)’, in Historical Perspectives on Breastfeeding: Two Essays by Sara F. Matthews Grieco and Carlo A. Corsini (Unicef, 1991), at http://www. unicef-irc.org/publications/pdf/hisper_breast.pdf (accessed October 2013) McGregor, J. F., and B. Reay, eds, Radical Religion in the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) Mendelson, Sara, ‘Carey [née Jackson], Mary’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) Nevitt, Marcus, Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England, 1640–1660 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) Osmond, Rosalie, Mutual Accusation: Seventeenth-Century Body and Soul Dialogues in Their Literary and Theological Context (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990) Pacheco, Anita, ed., A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002) Porter, Roy, Flesh in the Age of Reason: The Modern Foundations of Body and Soul (Oxford and New York: Norton, 2003)

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Bibliography Purkiss, Diane, ‘Producing the Voice, Consuming the Body: Women Prophets of the Seventeenth Century’, in Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman, eds, Women, Writing, History: 1640–1740 (London: Batsford, 1992), pp. 139–58 —— , The English Civil War: A People’s History (London: Harper, 2007) Raymond, Joad, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) Read, Sara, ‘“Thy Righteousness is but a Menstrual Clout”: Sanitary Practices and Prejudice in Early Modern England’, Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 3 (2008), 1–26 Rex, Michael, ‘Eyes on the Prize: The Search for Personal Space and Stability Through Religious Devotion in Eliza’s Babes’, in Eugene R. Cunnar and Jeffrey Johnson, eds, Discovering and (Re)Covering Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyrics (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2001), pp. 205–32 Ross, Sarah, ‘Major, Elizabeth ( fl. 1656)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) Sawday, Jonathan, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Duckworth, 1975) Schmidt, Jeremy, Melancholy and the Care of the Soul: Religion, Moral Philosophy and Madness in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007) Searle, Alison, ‘“My Souls Anatomiste”: Richard Baxter, Katherine Gell and Letters of the Heart’, Early Modern Literary Studies, 12:2 (2006), 1–26 Semler, Liam, ‘The Protestant Birth Ethic: Aesthetic, Political, and Religious Contexts for Eliza’s Babes (1652)’, English Literary Renaissance, 30 (2008), 432–56 —— , ‘Who Is the Mother of Eliza’s Babes (1652)? “Eliza”, George Wither and Elizabeth Emerson’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 99 (2000), 513–36 Skwire, Sarah E., ‘Women, Writers, Sufferers: Anne Conway and An Collins’, Literature and Medicine, 18 (1999), 1–23 Smith, Nigel, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989) Stachniewski, John, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Despair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) Tenny, Edward Andrews, Thomas Lodge (New York: Russell and Russell, 1935) Tinneswood, Adrian, The Verneys: Love, War and Madness in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Vintage, 2008) Todd, Margo, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) Wall, Wendy, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993) Watkins, Owen, The Puritan Experience: Studies in Spiritual Autobiography (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972) Wayne, Valerie, ‘Advice for Women from Mothers and Patriarchs’, in Helen Wilcox, ed., Women and Literature in Britain 1500–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 56–79 Wear, Andrew, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) Wilcox, Helen, ‘“You that Indeared are to Pietie”: Herbert and Seventeenth-Century Women’, George Herbert Journal, 18 (1994/95), 201–14

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Index of biblical allusions

Note: ‘n.’ after a page reference indicates the number of a note on that page.

Old Testament Genesis 48, 66, 71n.41, 111n.16, n.18, n.19, 112n.20, 113n.29, 115n.37, 116n.46, 117n.49, 120n.74, 172n.66, 180n.16, 181n.25, 183n.32, 225 Exodus 67n.28, 233n.43 Leviticus 14 Numbers 255n.58 Deuteronomy 65, 190n.63 Joshua 187 1 Samuel 59, 62, 67, 112n.25, 206n.31, 249 2 Samuel 67, 71n.44 2 Kings 66, 67, 252 Nehemiah 67 Job 25, 45n.24, 50n.50, 59, 65, 67, 68, 70n.40, 74, 90n.30, 175, 179n.12, 188, 203n.20, 208, 226, 232n.38, 237, 243, 253n.54 Psalms 45, 46, 47, 55, 56, 57, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69n.34, 70, 71n.42, 72n.50, 73n.56, 74, 75n.65, 84n.7, n.10, 87n.17, n.19, 118n.60, 128n.22, 145, 148n.12, 149, 152n.23, 168–9, 183n.33, 186n.47, 202n.17, n.18, 204n.25, 209n.37, 215n.57, 217n.64, 221n.3, 227n.26, 230, 232n.39, n.40

Proverbs 62n.7, 206n.30 Ecclesiastes 145, 169, 183n.31, 203n.22, 210n.41 Song of Songs 16, 56, 69n.31, 82, 88n.23, 91n.33, 95n.40, 150n.20, 157n.37 Ecclesiasticus 216 Wisdom of Solomon 87n.18 Daniel 127n.20, 164n.51, 177, 192, 218 Ezekiel 51n.55 Lamentations 65, 70n.40, 114n.36 Jeremiah 45, 54n.66, 65, 66, 70n.39, 71n.43, 188, 217n.63, 228n.30, 247n.34 Isaiah 14, 45, 47, 51n.54, 57, 65, 66n.24, 67, 70n.36, 76n.68, 111n.14, 117n.54, 119n.63, 145, 180n.13, 187, 221n.4, 230, 241 Amos 54n.66 Micah 55, 186, 189 Habakkuk 71n.45 Joel 73n.57 Hosea 46, 114n.34, 145 Zechariah 45, 64n.19

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Index of biblical allusions New Testament Matthew 48, 69, 70, 84n.8, 93n.36, 96n.42, 114n.35, 141n.82, 179n.10, n.11, 183n.34, 187n.51, 188n.54, 192n.70, 203n.21, 214n.54, 215n.58, 223n.13, 225n.19, 226, 227, 228, 234n.47, 241n.7, 247n.36 Mark 65, 69n.33, 76, 183n.34, 234n.47 Luke 46, 60, 63n.15, 67, 71n.46, 75n.64, 84n.9, n.12, 89n.27, 92n.34, 99n.45, 117n.51, 145, 148n.11, 149n.19, 181n.22, 183n.34, 184, 219, 225n.19, 227n.27 John 47, 56, 70, 84n.9, n.11, 97n.43, 183n.34, 184, 188, 214n.53, 225, 231n.36, 234 Acts 188n.54, 214n.52, 215n.56, 225n.23, 227, 228, 229n.32 Romans 5, 24, 48, 49, 65, 70, 145, 154n.30, 203n.19, 210n.40 1 Corinthians 46, 76n.67, 123, 170n.63, 173n.72, 219, 229n.32

2 Corinthians 70, 73n.58, 89n.26, 128n.22, 139n.75, 182n.28 Galatians 5, 172n.67 Ephesians 5, 8, 10, 48, 73n.60, n.61, 145, 182n.26, 189n.58, 192 Philippians 43, 70, 71n.48, 72n.51, 114n.33 Colossians 57n.73, 72n.52, 84n.13 1 Timothy 109, 113n.31, 120n.73 2 Timothy 89n.28 Titus 31, 118n.61 Hebrews 45, 47, 49, 56, 72n.55, 187, 189, 190n.63, 252 James 71n.47, 128n.22, 188 1 Peter 9, 46, 112n.21, 119n.66, 121n.77, 172n.65, n.67, n.68, 215n.57, 233n.46, 255 1 John 56 Revelation 69n.29, 100n.47, 136n.70, 157n.38, 166n.57, 185n.38, 208n.33, 223

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General index

Note: chapters are indicated in bold type. adolescence 176, 198 ageing 231n.36 ague see fever Allen, Hannah 26–7, 28, 30, 31, 32, 58, 236–55 anagrams 23, 60, 79n.79, 80 Anger, Jane 14–15 Anglican Church 221n.5, 222n.7 High Church Anglicanism 145 ministers 10, 28 services 198 Anon., Conversion Exemplified 3, 20, 25, 29, 31–2, 112n.24, 174–93 Archer, Isaac 25–6 Aristotle 8, 27, 60, 105, 209n.39 Baker, Augustine 30, 31, 81, 88, 94 Baptists 21, 29, 31, 218–20 see also Sutton, Katherine Barker Jane 15 barrenness 17 Barrington, Lady Joan 1 Baxter, Richard 237–8, 248, 250 Blois, de, Francois-Louis 91 blood (humour) 27, 197, 237 blood-letting 236–7, 248 menstruation 12–14, 108, 115n.42, n.43 post-partum bleeding 226n.25 Book of Common Prayer 2, 22, 175 Boulton, Richard 197

Bradstreet, Anne 5–7, 25, 110, 146n.2 breastfeeding 31, 32, 105–21 see also Clinton, Lady Elizabeth Burton, Robert 27, 236 see also melancholy Calamy, Edmund 242 The Godly Mans Ark 239, 252 Calvin 4–5, 8, 10 Calvinism 4–5, 8, 18, 23, 55n.67, 123, 125, 218 Institutes 4–5, 8, 123 Carey, Lady Mary 3, 6, 7, 9, 11, 16, 22, 30–1, 32, 37–57, 60 Caryl, Joseph 31, 59, 61n.5, 61–2, 175, 182n.29 Commentary on the Book of Job 59 Saints Memorials 61n.5 catechising 2, 39, 47n.33, 48n.38, 56n.72 Catholicism 18–21, 23, 32, 81–101, 109, 130n.38, 136n.70, 145, 221n.4 Charles I 19–20, 39, 134n.60, 145, 155–6, 176, 185n.40, 190n.59, 221n.5, 222n.7 Charles II 14, 21, 175, 185n.40, 199, 201n.15, 246n.27 childbirth 3, 11–17, 106–7, 113, 115, 148n.16, 216n.61 see also barrenness; pregnancy

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General index child loss 7, 22, 24, 31, 37–41, 45, 51–7, 67n.28, 119, 219, 226 choler (humour) 14, 27 churching 14 Civil Wars 2, 19–21, 25, 31, 39, 44n.17, 109n.12, 124, 135n.61, 176, 180, 190n.60 Clinton, Lady Bridget, Countess of Lincoln 108, 110 Clinton, Lady Elizabeth, Countess of Lincoln 31, 32, 105–21, 199n.9 colic 198 see also food and illness Collins, An 16–17 commonplace book 3, 27, 29–30, 122–3, 124, 126–8, 137n.72, 198, 199 Conway, Brilliana see Harley, Lady Brilliana Cromwell, Oliver 2, 20–1, 145, 165–6, 175–6, 185n.40, 186n.45, 190n.61, n.62, 191n.64 family of 190n.62 Culpeper, Nicholas 9, 40, 54n.65, 108, 246n.31 dancing see temptations Daniel (biblical figure) 23, 177, 192 David (biblical figure) 65n.22, 67, 152, 209, 215, 217 Davies, Lady Eleanor 23 Davy, Sarah 7 de Blois, Francois-Louis 91 Delaval, Lady Elizabeth 3, 30, 32, 173n.69, 176, 197–217 depression see melancholy dialogues 5–10, 37–9, 42–51, 60, 64–76, 105 diaries 23, 26, 30, 199, 238 Diodati, Charles 139n.76 Donne, John ‘Batter My Heart’ 95n.41 Juvenalia or Certaine Paradoxes and Problemes 9 LXXX Sermons Preached by that Learned and Reverend Divine, John Donne 158n.39 Douay-Rheims Bible 18, 33, 83

election 21, 23, 24, 172, 181n.21, 193, 219 elegy 38, 39, 51–2, 54–7 ‘Eliza’ 8, 16, 32, 144–73 ensoulment 41 see also pregnancy, quickening enthusiasm 177, 192n.68 envy see temptations Ephraim (biblical figure) 65n.22, 66 Erasmus, Desiderius 105 Eve (biblical figure) 3, 8, 10, 12–17, 23, 24, 48n.38, 49n.46, 111n.19, 113, 120, 167n.59, 172n.66, 177, 234n.49 Fairfax, General Thomas 31, 39n.3 fasting 22, 136n.71, 212, 216n.61, 223, 228 fever 77, 229 caused by enthusiasm 177 Fifth Monarchists 218, 219 Fitzherbert, Dionys 23, 198 food and illness 197–8, 211n.44 see also humoral theory Gage, Francis 87n.20 Galen 27, 28 Gataker, Thomas 124 Geneva Bible 18 Gouge, William 106 Hannah (biblical figure) 112, 113, 117 Harley, Lady Brilliana 3, 10, 20, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 122–43, 198 hell see Satan Henrietta Maria, Queen 81, 134n.60, 136n.67 Herbert, George 145 ‘Easter-Wings’ 173n.69 Hippocrates 6n.13, 27, 209n.39 humoral theory 27, 177, 197, 236, 237 see also blood; choler; melancholy Hutton, Charles 31, 39n.3, 41 Independents 20, 21, 31, 175, 176, 181n.21, 186n.46, 189n.56, n.57, 191n.64

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General index Job (biblical figure) 25, 50n.50, 59, 65, 67, 68, 74, 188, 208, 237 joint pain 226 Jonathan (biblical figure) 59, 62 Joseph (biblical figure) 65, 168, 180 Knollys, Hanserd 31, 220, 225n.22, 228n.29 labour see childbirth Laud, Archbishop William 19, 20, 39, 218, 221n.5, 222n.7, 225n.22 Lazarus (biblical figure) 188 laziness see temptations Leigh, Dorothy 8 Lodge, Thomas 31, 109 madness 26–9, 87, 127–8, 177, 183n.30, 192n.68 see also enthusiasm; melancholy; Satan; suicide; visions Major, Elizabeth 6, 16, 23, 31, 32, 58–80, 134n.59, 175 Marten, John 12–13 Mary, the mother of God 94, 100, 113, 117n.51, 145, 149n.17, n.19 Mary Magdalene 31, 83, 92, 97, 99, 181n.22, 220, 233, 234n.47, n.49 Masham, Lady Elizabeth 1–2 melancholy (humour) 27, 127, 177 experience of 7, 26–9, 126–8, 177, 182, 192n.68, 236–9, 242, 244, 251–2, 254 menstruation see blood midwifery see childbirth; Sharp, Jane miscarriage see child loss Moore, Lady Elizabeth 239 Mordaunt, Viscountess Elizabeth 22 More, Bridget 86 More, Gertrude 3, 18, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 81–101 mother’s legacy 10–11, 32, 38, 107 Nebuchadnezzar (biblical figure) 127, 177, 192 Newcombe, Harry 108 nursing see breastfeeding Oliver, John 13

Pelham, Lady Francis 10–11, 125, 135 Perkins, William 124 The Golden Chain 24, 75n.66 The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience 27, 28, 123, 126–8 plague 21, 155n.31, 197, 213–14, 216–17, 223 Plato 4, 209n.39 Pontius Pilate (biblical figure) 168n.61, 214 Porter, Roy 4, 9, 13 pregnancy 6n.13, 8, 13, 133, 141 quickening 13, 40, 41, 57n.76 see also childbirth Presbyterianism 20n.44, 21, 239, 242n.9 pride see temptations prophecy 23, 45n.22, 220, 223, 231 Quakers 21 quickening see pregnancy, quickening Rebecca (biblical figure) 116 Reformation 2, 4, 18, 108, 144, 185n.42 Rowe, John 175, 189n.57, n.58 St Paul (in Acts of the Apostles) 76, 214n.52, 225 teachings of 5, 8, 10, 24, 46, 89, 172n.67, 173n.72, 233n.46 Samaritan woman (biblical figure) 234n.48 Sarah (biblical figure) 111–12, 113, 117 Satan 2, 8, 24–5, 28, 38, 42, 48, 49, 50, 53, 127n.19, 174, 177, 178, 179, 180–5, 188, 191–2, 205n.27, 225, 227, 236–9, 243, 244, 250, 254 sexual intercourse 9, 22, 117n.51, 185n.42, 242n.10 Sharp, Jane 9, 12, 14, 39, 41 Singing 79, 152, 163, 166, 219–20, 228, 229, 230, 231 Solomon (biblical figure) 183, 206, 210

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General index Stanhope, Dorothy Lady 199, 200n.10 suicide 25–6, 50n.50, 182, 237, 246 Sutton, Katherine 19, 21, 24, 25, 29, 31, 32, 58, 176, 218–35 Taylor, Jeremy 10 temptations 212 dancing 37, 49, 212 drunkenness 60 envy 85, 186, 200–1, 203 gambling 49 greed 15, 24, 60, 213, 249 see also food and illness laziness 117, 211n.42 lusts 5, 75, 112, 117, 215n.57 pride 117n.54, 60, 78, 117, 147n.7, 185n.42, 201n.14, 203, 212, 221, 233

Thornton, Alice 197 Toothache 197, 205–7 Van Helmont, Jean Baptist 12 Verney, Sir Edmund 20 visions 28, 90n.31, 157–8, 177, 237 see also madness Westminster Shorter Catechism 39, 47n.33, 48n.38 wet-nurse see breastfeeding witchcraft 205n.27, 206

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