Women's Life Writing and Early Modern Ireland
348
Women's Life Writing and Early Modern Ireland
348eBook
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Overview
This volume addresses a range of genres, from letters to book marginalia, and a number of different women, from now-canonical life writers such as Mary Rich and Ann Fanshawe to far less familiar figures such as Eliza Blennerhassett and the correspondents and supplicants of William King, archbishop of Dublin. The writings of the Boyle sisters and the Duchess of Ormonde—women from the two most important families in seventeenth-century Ireland—also receive a thorough analysis. These innovative and nuanced scholarly considerations of the powerful influence of Ireland on these writers’ construction of self, provide fresh, illuminating insights into both their writing and their broader cultural context.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781496214263 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2019 |
| Series: | Women and Gender in the Early Modern World |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 348 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
Alice Thornton, Elizabeth Freke, and the Remembrances of Ireland
Raymond A. Anselment
Among the writing of early modern English women, recollections of life in Ireland are less common than the English presence might suggest. The numerous formulaic depositions recorded in the months following the 1641 Irish uprising offer a vivid testimony of the atrocities and trauma English settlers suffered; personal narratives of several women who defended their property against besieging forces have also survived. Forms of self-writing from less troubled periods of the seventeenth century are not as extensive or as accessible. Letters women wrote from Ireland are now held often among family papers and in archives. Few diaries and memoirs that include accounts of living among the Irish appear to have survived. The remembrances of Ireland of Alice Thornton (1626–1707) and Elizabeth Freke (1642–1714) are noteworthy exceptions. Near the end of 1634, eight-year-old Alice, along with her mother and younger brothers, joined her father, Christopher Wandesford, in Dublin, where he had been appointed master of rolls and where they would live for eight years. Elizabeth Freke was thirty-three when she and her husband, Percy, left England in 1675 for County Cork to "try our fortuns" in Ireland. Over the next twenty years, Elizabeth would live there on five occasions, the shortest eight months and the longest four years. Thornton recalled briefly in "A booke of remembrances" and at greater length in a second manuscript, "My First Booke of My Life," the sense of place she enjoyed with her family during a happy Dublin life. Freke, on the other hand, describes in both versions of "Some few remembrances" the isolation and alienation during her years in Ireland. For both women the Ireland of memory is inseparable from their self-images and subsequent life experiences.
The meaning of Ireland also alters in the revisions of their recollections. The first of Thornton's two manuscripts, each of which begins with her birth in 1626 and ends with the 1668 death of her husband, William, begins as a spiritual memoir. The years in Ireland briefly recalled are occasions of divine deliverance set down in celebration of God's providential mercy. Though the narrative turns more toward her life and family after the return to England, she does not seem at least initially to have a larger audience in mind. Within a year of her husband's death, however, Thornton circulated a personal defense of her honor and that of her family. The revised "My First Booke of My Life" she bequeathed to her daughter significantly expands and refocuses "A booke of remembrances," remembering Ireland anew from an implicitly defensive point of view. The awareness of a larger audience is not apparent in either version of Freke's years in Ireland. Included in manuscripts that contain, among other entries, lists of properties and inventories of possessions, the narratives that begin with her marriage and end within months of her death in 1714 seem another form of accounting. Begun before her husband's death in 1705 and rewritten in the final years of her life, "Some few remembrances of my misfortunes" associate much of her unhappiness with Ireland. Unlike Thornton, whose family contributed significantly to her feeling of belonging, Freke never found in Ireland a sense of place. A stranger and at first frightened, for her Ireland increasingly came to embody the growing separation and estrangement from her husband and son, as well as a place she came to view in widowhood with suspicion and mistrust.
Each account of young Alice's arrival in Ireland begins in essentially the same way. After "safe passage" across the Irish Sea, she arrived in Dublin, "In which place I inioyed great happienesse and Comfort dureing my honoured fathers life." The city where she lived for most of her stay offered a culture not found in north Yorkshire, where she was born. Noted in Raphael Holinshed's Irish Chronicle as "Irishe or yong London," Dublin in the 1630s had a population of about fifteen thousand. A traveler through Scotland and Ireland within a year of Alice's arrival praised Dublin as "the fairest, richest, best built city" on his journey, a metropolis "far beyond Edenborough" and most resembling London. Besides "fair, stately and complete buildings," it had in his opinion the "divers commodities" Londoners enjoyed. A resident of Dublin less favorably impressed by the city nevertheless earlier called attention to shops "well replenished withall sortes of wares" rivaling any in London; its citizens were also "wonderfully reformed in manners, in ciuility, in curtesy." Dublin, a cathedral city, possessed the hallmarks of a major urban center. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, Parliament resided permanently in Dublin and Trinity College had been founded. Courts of law, a royal custom house, and the commerce of a significant port increased the city's prominence in the next decades as an administrative, legal, and financial power. Though the majority of the Dubliners were Catholic, English Protestants gained substantial control of trade and during the administration of Thomas Wentworth, later Earl of Strafford, dominated the offices of government and law. When Alice with her mother and brothers joined her father in Dublin, he had an important role in the center of power Wentworth had begun to create, and the family would settle among the prominent residents of Dame Street. They lived in a "very elegant House," according to an eighteenth-century descendant with access to the family papers, "situated conveniently for the Discharge of his high Offices. It was in a very wholsome Air, with a good Orchard and Garden leading down to the Water Side, where might be seen the Ships from the Ring's End."
Almost five years later Alice crossed the Irish Sea again, accompanying her mother to Bath and later sailing back to Ireland through perilous seas. The account in the second manuscript of a life-threatening storm, her safe arrival on the Irish shore, and her response to this deliverance remembers Ireland anew. Though travel across the Irish Sea could take little more than a day if all went well, the tidal streams and winds of the narrow sea, the treacherous shoreline of rocks and sands, and the threat of pirates and privateers were dangerous realities. Sailing from Wexford to Kinsale in January 1650, Frances Cooke and John Cook spent ten days at sea in the turbulent storms described in her Meditations and his True Relation. While Alice waited in Cheshire with her mother for the stormy sea to change, they witnessed five ships driven onto the shore, only to be caught themselves in a tempest that turned the calm night on which they sailed into winds and waves that threatened to wreck the ship on the Irish sands. Her revised narrative of the harrowing journey in the second of the two manuscripts describes the threat in graphic detail: deliverance from danger includes Alice's rescue from the threat of entanglement in a ship's cable that would have swept her into the sea. Both also end in thanksgiving. Missing from the first version is the family's safe removal from the anchored ship caught on the sands, their reception once ashore, and an extended outpouring of thanksgiving. The additions in the second manuscript modify the emphasis and intent.
Alice's father and her praise of God are notably more prominent. The boat that rescues them from the ship is sent by a Mr. Hubert, who together with his family and friends welcomes them joyfully and entertains them "with abundante affection & kindenesse" (15). Coaches from Dublin with her father and his "many noble freinds" the next day take them back to the city and a reception of further joy. Once again, as Alice had in recounting their first arrival in Ireland, the second manuscript describes a welcoming place: "much peace & happinesse" that would last until her father's death. He, and not Ireland, is the source of this contentment. Mr. Hubert's kindness is an expression of gratitude for the justice received in her father's jurisdiction, having spent twenty ruinous years struggling against a powerful opponent to present his suit. The esteem her father brought to the law is also implicit in the coaches of men who accompany her father and are part of a Dublin she believed that his judicious office helped change. The family's deliverance from the storms of the Irish Sea moves Alice to emulate the thanksgiving of those "that goe downe to the Sea in Ships." Psalm 107 is appropriately central to her stormy journey in the parallels and grateful praise with which she too would "give thanks unto the Lord" (107:1). Her desire to keep the mercy of God in "perpetuall remembrance" is apparent in the long thanksgiving that in the second manuscript complements the greater emphasis on her father (16).
The focus of "My First Booke of My Life" differs from that of the earlier version. Both begin as quite traditional exercises chronicling deliverances covering the span from early childhood to the death of Thornton's husband. The earlier "booke of remembrances" devotes considerably less attention to the stay in Ireland and recalls the decade of the 1640s and the family's return to England for the most part in cursory fashion. Important events that follow in Alice's life are often related in a minimalist fashion. One brief sentence records her 1651 marriage to William Thornton; short paragraphs enter births and deaths of their first children. The narrative and the thanksgiving become more substantial in the last years. Whether this or the revised account was the manuscript Thornton later states that she circulated a year after William died, "My First Booke of My Life" is the manuscript she bequeathed to her daughter. The biographical expansion and prayerful gratitude in this revision reflect more fully the troubled period in Thornton's life in the year preceding her husband's death.
Though the stages of composition in neither manuscript can be dated with certainty, when Thornton recalled her earlier life in a final revision, she had been deeply hurt by the betrayal of a niece who had withheld knowledge of "very great lies & fallshoods against my selfe" and the "Honour of my Family" (181) that might have been countered before the Thornton reputation had been compromised. The scandalous rumors are never clarified, but they appear related to the betrothal of their fourteen-year-old daughter to a local minister and the mother's relationship with him. Rumors about the propriety of the proposed marriage apparently insinuated that the parents were using their daughter to help secure the family's uncertain future. Bruited about was the further suggestion of an improper relationship between Alice and the minister, who had lived with the Thorntons. When the niece's maid revealed the rumors in an emotional confrontation, taunting Alice with the assertion that she, her family, and "all I came on" were "naught," and then both the niece and maid jeered and laughed, the scandal maligning the reputation of the family was all the more hurtful because the Thorntons had supported the niece in her difficult marriage.Compelled to defend her reputation and that of her family, when Alice expanded the recollections of the Irish years significantly, the revision reflects the defensive tenor. Praise of her honorable father and devotion to a merciful God are an essential part of this vindication.
The initial entry in each manuscript about the years in Ireland begins with the family and not Dublin; the happiness of Alice depends on her parents, especially her father. He "ordered" the traditional education of a young lady in French, dancing, and music; through her father's close relationship with the future Earl of Strafford, Thomas Wentworth, she had the advantage of being taught these and other "qualities" in the company of his two daughters. The "vertuous prouission" of a mother who raised her daughter with a care befitting "her qualitie & my fathers Childe" (10) reinforced their social class and heritage. Above all, through the guidance of her parents and their example, Alice believes she found greatest happiness in the religious life they both embodied and encouraged.
Her "bounden duty" to celebrate God's mercy is apparent in recollections of Alice's Irish life absent from the earlier manuscript. Her fall while swinging with the Wentworth sisters at Robert Meredith's Dublin house is one of the few memories of Alice's early years in Ireland. The account of the accident recalled in the revised manuscript recreates the childhood misadventure from the perspective of the young girl whose new confidence in her abilities turns to fear when she loses her grip. Everyone in the house may have been worried, as Thornton remembers, though probably few if any thought "for a good space of time" that the stunned girl was dead (13). The exaggeration, in any case, enhances her gratitude for her mother's care and her prayerful thankfulness for the mercy of God. Her narrative of another fall, this time when the family coach narrowly avoided sliding into the river on a trip to County Kildare, ends with a similar response. Thornton never describes Kildare, where her father had purchased an estate at Naas and where they would live for at least a while before he sold the property to Thomas Wentworth. The focus on the danger narrowly avoided by the skill of the coachman and the rejoicing of the father, who rode on horseback behind the coach helpless to assist him, occasion prayer as Thornton joins her father in glorifying God for the escape from death (11–12).
Two other additions in the revised manuscript are less immediately related to God's protection of Alice and her family. The vivid narrative of a fire in Dublin Castle, where the Wentworth family resided, traces its cause to a carelessly stored basket of embers and describes the damage to the chapel. The danger to the castle averted by Providence may not have been as immediate as Thornton believes, and she could only have imagined as "terrible to behold" a scene she never witnessed. The cries in the night, the description of the castle setting, and the rescue of the Wentworth family "brought out of bed in blankets" accentuate, however, the providential mercy. Significantly, the rescue of the family includes the deliverance of "all the Kingdom in them," her father, and "his family" (14). This inclusiveness reflects Thornton's belief that on Wentworth's governance rested the wellbeing of Ireland.
A much longer addition depicting the governance, trial, and death of Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, develops the nature of this relationship and its connection to her Irish memories. Family loyalty explains in part Thornton's departure from thanksgiving and prayer to praise the lord deputy's governance of Ireland and to denounce the malice of his enemies. Alice's father, Christopher Wandesford, would not have been an entrusted part of the administration in Ireland without his ties to Wentworth. They were both friends and kin. An important supporter of Wandesford's career in the English Parliament and Yorkshire government and the godfather of his first child, the newly appointed lord deputy brought his kinsman with him to Ireland, where Wentworth continued to promote his role in the administration. Wandesford also relied on the lord deputy's influence in securing and protecting his possession of the twenty thousand acres of Castlecomer he had negotiated in the county of Kilkenny. After he succeeded the newly ennobled Earl of Strafford as lord deputy, Alice's father tried to circumvent a remonstrance against Strafford in Ireland, proroguing the Irish Parliament and futilely attempting to prevent committee members from going to England to present their case.
The relationship with Ireland — both Strafford's and Wandesford's — is the foundation of Thornton's forceful, uncompromising support of the earl and an implicit defense of her father's loyalty. Strafford's seven years of Irish governance disaffected others through the unbending administration of policies that seemed absolutist and threatening. As lord deputy, he was also believed to have used the office for his own benefit. Before being brought back to England to face charges of treason, Strafford had few supporters. The earl was, in Thornton's judgment, however, "a wise & prudentiall" leader who preserved the dignity and majesty of the monarchy and secured both the church and state on "the right foundations of truth & peace." Thornton scorns his detractors as "factious" and "Seditious," threatening law and peace under the guise of a heretical and popish religion. In her excoriation of the bloodthirsty Irish unworthy of the bountiful peace in the seven years of the "wise & Noble" lord deputy's rule, Thornton adopts the common seventeenth-century English view of the Irish as a "Barbarous People" incapable of benefiting from the civilizing force of English government and law (18). She also accepts without question, albeit with extreme exaggeration, reports of the uprising that began in the years following the death of Strafford and led in her view to the "destruction" and the "martyredom" of "millions of the Poore protestants." But Thornton's denunciation is not limited to the Irish. Unwavering in her commitment to the monarchy and the Church of England, which she unequivocally asserts was upheld by Strafford, Thornton attacks his enemies in the English Parliament as "Mastiues, & blood hounds." The crowds gathering each day in London outside Parliament demanding his death are "Vulger meaner Peopple" easily swayed by lies and "Cruell Malice" (19, 20).
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments,
Introduction Julie A. Eckerle and Naomi McAreavey,
1. Alice Thornton, Elizabeth Freke, and the Remembrances of Ireland Raymond A. Anselment,
2. Reading Dislocation and Emotion in the Writings of Alice Thornton, Ann Fanshawe, and Barbara Blaugdone Anne Fogarty,
3. The Boyle Women and Familial Life Writing Ann-Maria Walsh,
4. Life Writing in the Boyle Family Network Amelia Zurcher,
5. The Politics of Honor in Lady Ranelagh's Ireland Ruth Connolly,
6. The Place of Ireland in the Letters of the First Duchess of Ormonde Naomi McAreavey,
7. English-Irish Social Networks in the Seventeenth Century Amanda E. Herbert,
8. Women's Letters in the Lyons Collection of the Correspondence of William King Julie A. Eckerle,
9. Ownership Inscriptions and Life Writing in the Books of Early Modern Women Jason McElligott,
Appendix: Archives and Female Life Writers of Early Modern Ireland,
Bibliography,
Contributors,
Index,