Women of England

by Bartlett Burleigh James

The Civil War itself had a wide effect upon the state of education among the people. Families in which education had been fostered, with the turn of their fortunes found it impossible to continue it; families whose fortunes had risen by political changes felt their deficiency in this respect, and affected to despise accomplishments of which they themselves were destitute. Certain of the more enlightened Puritan women pretended to apply themselves to the study of Hebrew, on the ground that they looked upon it as necessary to eternal salvation. Such pedantry brought no credit to those who affected it, but only served to heap odium upon the higher studies, which were now rejected with contempt on all sides. How effectually interest in education was suppressed by the civil disorders is shown by a remark of a traveller who visited the country after the Revolution. He says: "Here in England the women are kept from all learning, as the profane vulgar were of old from the mysteries of the ancient religions." It is amusing to note the theories which had arisen with regard to female education and which were used to extenuate its lack. Some apologists for feminine ignorance gravely asserted and led others to believe that the women of England "were too delicate to bear the fatigues of acquiring knowledge," besides being by nature incapable of doing so, for, said they, "the moisture of their brain rendered it impossible for them to possess a solid judgment, that faculty of the mind depending upon a dry temperature." But the unanswerable argument of all was that death and sin had fallen upon the race of Adam solely in consequence of the thirst which Eve had manifested for knowledge. In the face of such contentions, it was not difficult to lead people generally to accept the further conclusion as to the disastrous consequences which would certainly come upon society when woman became puffed up with her mental acquirements; the favorable opinion which she would then have of herself would not harmonize with that obedience to men for which she was created. Worthy of note is the fact that these views extended in some circles to the arresting of the progress of religious instruction, especially that of a public nature. Evelyn, in his Diary, says that while the saints inherited the earth under the Protectorate, it was his invariable custom to devote his Sunday afternoons to the catechising and instruction of his family; but, he remarks, these wholesome exercises "universally ceased in the parish churches, so as people had no principles, and grew very ignorant of even the common points of Christianity, all devotions being now placed in hearing sermons and discourses of speculative and national things."

There was a sterner side to the religious movement in England than its relation to matters intellectual or even moral. The Reformation under Henry VIII. had added the names of certain women to those of the noble army of martyrs of all the ages. To be false to conscience was to be false to the very principles of their being, and both Catholic and Protestant women became intensely strong in their convictions and intolerant of those of others. The Roman Church offered up its holocaust to the passions and prejudices of the leaders of the Protestant movement, just as the Roman Church in turn exacted the tribute of their lives from many adherents of Protestantism. Woman was looked upon as inferior to man and less capable of responsible action, but in meting out persecutions there was no distinction as to sex, the weaker suffering equally with the stronger. The history of religious persecutions in England is one of its least engaging chapters, and extends over a long period. Puritan, Prelatist, and Catholic alike darkened the annals of the times by deeds of violence. To recite the sufferings of women under the crossfires of persecution would be at best an ungracious task; and as such experiences form but a part of the history of the sex during the period which we have broadly styled the period of the Commonwealth, an instance or two of the sufferings of notable women, irrespective of their party affiliations, will suffice for citation.

One of the most sorrowful of the judicial murders of which a woman was the victim, which occurred during the whole of this extended period, was that of Lady Lisle, who, because of her sympathies with Monmouth's rebellion against the king, was brutally executed, the specific charge being the harboring of fugitives. The king's project to hand over the nation to papacy nowhere aroused such outbursts of indignation as among the Covenanters of Scotland, who saw in it the destruction of all their hard-wrought-out religious liberties, and the endangering of their lives, besides the return of the nation to the chaos from which it was emerging. The address of Lady Lisle before her execution is an example of the sublimity to which woman's character may rise under persecution, when the spirit is buoyed by faith: "Gentlemen, Friends, and Neighbors, it may be expected that I should say something at my death, and in order thereunto I shall acquaint you that my birth and education were both near this place, and that my parents instructed me in the fear of God, and I now die of the Reformed Protestant Religion; believing that if ever popery should return into this nation, it would be a very great and severe judgment.... The crime that was laid to my charge was for entertaining a Non-conformist Minister and others in my house; the said minister being sworn to have been in the late Duke of Monmouth's army." Continuing, she said: "I have no excuse but surprise and fear, which I believe my Jury must make use of to excuse their verdict to the world. I have been also told that the Court did use to be of counsel for the prisoner; but instead of advice, I had evidence against me from thence; which, though it were only by hearing, might possibly affect my Jury; my defence being such as might be expected from a weak woman; but such as it was, I did not hear it repeated to the Jury, which, as I have been informed, is usual in such cases. However, I forgive all the world, and therein all those that have done me wrong." Another victim of the same "Bloody Assize" of Jeffreys, Mrs. Gaunt, of Wapping, pathetically says: "I did but relieve an unworthy, poor, distressed family, and lo, I must die!"

The age was the legatee of a spirit of venom and bigotry which expressed itself in deeds of violence more distressing than those incident to the religious wars. Deeds of blood, when connected with the defence of convictions, have about them something of the heroic, but there is absolutely no ray of glory to fall upon and lighten the dreary records of the war upon defenceless women charged with being witches, which broke out with fresh virulence with the increase of religious fervor under the Commonwealth. The charges were many and specious, but a very common form centred about the compassionate functions of women as the ameliorators of human distress.

The history of witchcraft is so intimately associated with that of medicine, that to write an account of the one involves a recital of the other. The utter lack of knowledge of the anatomy of the human body and its functions, which continued down to quite recent times, accounts for the mystery and magic which surrounded the whole subject of medicine, not only earlier than and during the period of which we are speaking, but long subsequent to it. The one who could successfully treat disease was regarded as in league with the powers of darkness. Until the practice of medicine came to be established upon scientific principles, the care of the sick largely devolved upon women. Had it been men instead of women who performed the crude but often sincere service of nurse and physician, they would have come under the same ban with the effects of which the practitioners of the other sex were visited. It is not probable, however, that the public odium would have gone to such lengths of violence in its expression.

Among savage peoples, as the primitive tribes of Africa and the American aborigines, the man who can dispel disease by a fetich—the great medicine-man of a tribe—has always been regarded with a feeling of combined jealousy, suspicion, and fear; but, because of the occult powers he is supposed to control, fear predominates and passes into a form of reverence. Not so, however, in the case of woman, of whom we write; she was looked upon as having forfeited, to an extent, her claims upon humanity by her original alliance with Satan, and, being outside of the pale of God's grace, or sustaining only a permissive relationship to it, it was deemed a pious, a safe, and a creditable thing to mete out to her the divine dispensation of wrath. Thus again, amid numerous instances of woman's suffering as a penalty for her sex, we have the occurrence of woman being persecuted unto death because of her compassion. It was not regarded as despicable for the very person who had been succored by her in the hour of sickness to turn informant and declare that he or she had been healed by diabolical agency, and, whether under the influence of an honest hallucination, or simply actuated by a malicious propensity, to declare that evil spirits had actually been conjured up in human form and been seen by the eyes of the sufferer.

Women were not blameless in the matter of their reputation for possessing occult knowledge and having diabolical relations; for there were many women who, being morally not beyond reproach, separated themselves from society as they grew older, and resorted to medicinal knowledge and magic for a living and to maintain in the public eye the position of unenviable notoriety of which they had become morbidly fond. It gratified such natures to be reputed to possess the power—which even philosophers ascribed to them—of, at certain seasons, turning milk sour, making dogs rabid, and producing other such freakish manifestations. They were considered to be able not only to heal sickness, but to cause it; and the presence in one's clothing of a pin whose irritant end was pointed in the wrong direction was sufficient to make the person believe that he was under a spell of witchcraft. If a cow or a horse fell lame, it was the village witch who did it; if a child developed as an imbecile, or anyone became bereft of reason, it was laid at the door of the witch; the failure of crops, a drought,—anything that interfered with the comfort or convenience of a person or a community,—was due to some such representative of Satan.

As the number of happenings of this sort increased, or there occurred an epidemic of disease, or a flood or famine of especial virulence, the number of alleged witches correspondingly increased; and so the persecution swelled in volume, each wave of malevolence receding only to rise in larger aspect on the next occasion of its arousing. Not until the reign of Henry VIII. were there any enactments against witchcraft in England; prior to the passage of these acts, the persecution of a sorceress followed only upon an accusation of poisoning. During some parts of the Middle Ages the crime of poisoning was extensive, and certain women were adepts in making the deadly potions. To such abandoned characters resorted persons of state who desired to make away with hated rivals, or the men and women of the nobility who sought to hide or to further their intrigues by the death of someone who stood in their way. As the women who practised the arts of the poisoner were also devotees of sorcery, the crime and the superstition came to be thought of together. One reason for the detestation of witches was the subtlety they displayed in concocting poisons which slowly sapped the vitality of a person, as if by a wasting illness. In 1541, conjuring, sorcery, and witchcraft were placed in the list of capital offences. Similar statutes were enacted during the succeeding reigns of Elizabeth and James I.

The curious matter of demoniacal possession called forth a great many books and pamphlets treating of its nature, history, methods of repression, and the dispossession of those under witches' spells. John Wier, a physician, wrote a treatise, in the last half of the sixteenth century, in which he described witches as but exaggerated types of the perversity which is found in women generally. In the easy subjection of the sex to malign influences he saw a proof of its greater moral weakness.