With the dropping of fasts and meager days, fish was seldom used, and the Sunday morning breakfast of Queen Elizabeth and her retinue in one of her "progresses" through the country, for which three oxen and one hundred and forty geese were furnished, became the standard, which did not alter for many generations. A diet more utterly unsuited to the child who passed from one fit of illness to another, could hardly be imagined, and the gloom discoverable in portions of her work was as certainly dyspepsia as she imagined it to be "the motion and power of ye Adversary." Winthrop had encountered the same difficulty and with his usual insight and common sense, wrote in his private dairy fifteen years before he left England, "Sep: 8, 1612. ffinding that the variety of meates drawes me on to eate more than standeth with my healthe I have resolved not to eat of more than two dishes at any one meale, whither fish, fleshe, fowle or fruite or whitt-meats, etc; whither at home or abroade; the lord give me care and abilitie to perform it." Evidently the flesh rebelled, for later he writes: "Idlenesse and gluttonie are the two maine pillars of the flesh his kingdome," but he conquered finally, both he and Simon Bradstreet being singularly abstinent.
Her first sixteen years of life were, for Anne Dudley, filled with the intensest mental and spiritual activity—hampered and always in leading strings, but even so, an incredible advance on anything that had been the portion of women for generations. Then came, for the young girl, a change not wholly unexpected, yet destined to alter every plan, and uproot every early association. But to the memories of that loved early life she held with an English tenacity, not altered by transplanting, that is seen to-day in countless New Englanders, whose English blood is of as pure a strain as any to be found in the old home across the sea.
CHAPTER II.
UPHEAVALS.
Though the long engagement which Mr. Ruskin demands as a necessity in lessening some of the present complications of the marriage question may not have been the fortune of Simon and Anne Bradstreet, it is certain that few couples have ever had better opportunity for real knowledge of one another's peculiarities and habits of thought. Circumstances placed them under the same roof for years before marriage, and it would have been impossible to preserve any illusions, while every weakness as well as every virtue had fullest opportunity for disclosure. There is no hint of other suitors, nor detail of the wooing, but the portrait of Governor Bradstreet, still to be seen in the Senate Chamber of the Massachusetts State House, shows a face that even in middle life, the time at which the portrait was painted, held an ardor, that at twenty-five must have made him irresistible. It is the head of Cavalier rather than Roundhead—the full though delicately curved lips and every line in the noble face showing an eager, passionate, pleasure-loving temperament. But the broad, benignant forehead, the clear, dark eyes, the firm, well-cut nose, hold strength as well as sweetness, and prepare one for the reputation which the old Colonial records give him. The high breeding, the atmosphere of the whole figure, comes from a marvellously well- balanced nature, as well as from birth and training. There is a sense of the keenest life and vigor, both mental and physical, and despite the Puritan garb, does not hide the man of whom his wife might have written with Mrs. Hutchinson: "To sum up, therefore, all that can be said of his outward frame and disposition, we must truly conclude that it was a very handsome and well-furnished lodging prepared for the reception of that prince who, in the administration of all excellent virtues, reigned there a while, till he was called back to the palace of the universal emperor."
Simon Bradstreet's father, "born of a wealthy family in Suffolk, was one of the first fellows of Emanuel College, and highly esteemed by persons distinguished for learning." In 1603 he was minister at Horbling in Lincolnshire, but was never anything but a nonconformist to the Church of England. Here in 1603 Simon Bradstreet was born, and until fourteen years old was educated in the grammar school of that place, till the death of his father made some change necessary. John Cotton was the mutual friend of both Dudley and the elder Bradstreet, and Dudley's interest in the son may have arisen from this fact. However this may be, he was taken at fifteen into the Earl of Lincoln's household, and trained to the duties of a steward by Dudley himself. Anne being then a child of nine years old, and probably looking up to him with the devotion that was shared by her older brother, then eleven and always the friend and ally of the future governor.
His capacity was so marked that Dr. Preston, another family friend and a noted Nonconformist, interested himself in his further education, and succeeded in entering him at Emanuel College, Cambridge, in the position of governor to the young Lord Rich, son of the Earl of Warwick. For some reason the young nobleman failed to come to college and Bradstreet's time was devoted to a brother of the Earl of Lincoln, who evidently shared the love of idleness and dissipation that had marked his grandfather's career. It was all pleasant and all eminently unprofitable, Bradstreet wrote in later years, but he accomplished sufficient study to secure his bachelor's degree in 1620. Four years later, while holding the position of steward to the Earl of Lincoln, given him by Dudley on the temporary removal to Boston, that of Master of Arts was bestowed upon him, making it plain that his love of study had continued. With the recall of Dudley, he became steward to the countess of Warwick, which position he held at the time of his marriage in 1628.
It was in this year that Anne, just before her marriage recorded, when the affliction had passed: "About 16, the Lord layde his hand sore upon me and smott me with the small-pox." It is curious that the woman whose life in many points most resembles her own—Mrs. Lucy Hutchinson—should have had precisely the same experience, writing of herself in the "Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson": "That day that the friends on both sides met to conclude the marriage, she fell sick of the small-pox, which was in many ways a great trial upon him. First, her life was in almost desperate hazard, and then the disease, for the present, made her the most deformed person that could be seen, for a great while after she recovered; yet he was nothing troubled at it, but married her as soon as she was able to quit the chamber, when the priest and all that saw her were affrighted to look on her; but God recompensed his justice and constancy by restoring her, though she was longer than ordinary before she recovered to be as well as before."
Whether disease or treatment held the greater terror, it would be hard to say. Modern medical science has devised many alleviations, and often restores a patient without spot or blemish. But to have lived at all in that day evidenced extraordinary vitality. Cleanliness was unknown, water being looked upon as deadly poison whether taken internally or applied externally. Covered with blankets, every window tightly sealed, and the moaning cry for water answered by a little hot ale or tincture of bitter herbs, nature often gave up the useless struggle and released the tortured and delirious wretch. The means of cure left the constitution irretrievably weakened if not hopelessly ruined, and the approach of the disease was looked upon with affright and regarded usually as a special visitation of the wrath of God.
That Anne Dudley so viewed it is evident from the passage in her diary, already quoted; that the Lord "smott" her, was unquestioned, and she cast about in her girlish mind for the shadow of the sin that had brought such judgment, making solemn resolutions, not only against any further indulgence in "Pride and Vanity," but all other offences, deciding that self-abnegation was the only course, and possibly even beginning her convalescence with a feeling that love itself should be put aside, and all her heart be "sett upon God." But Simon Bradstreet waited, like Colonel Hutchinson, only till "she was fit to leave her chamber," and whether "affrighted" or not, the marriage was consummated early in 1628.