Women on the Edge in Early Modern Europe

Gendering the Late Medieval and

Early Modern World

Series editors: James Daybell (Chair), Victoria E. Burke, Svante Norrhem, and
Merry Wiesner-Hanks

This series provides a forum for studies that investigate women, gender, and/
or sexuality in the late medieval and early modern world. The editors invite
proposals for book-length studies of an interdisciplinary nature, including,
but not exclusively, from the fields of history, literature, art and architectural
history, and visual and material culture. Consideration will be given to both
monographs and collections of essays. Chronologically, we welcome studies that
look at the period between 1400 and 1700, with a focus on any part of the world,
as well as comparative and global works. We invite proposals including, but not
limited to, the following broad themes: methodologies, theories and meanings
of gender; gender, power and political culture; monarchs, courts and power;
constructions of femininity and masculinity; gift-giving, diplomacy and the
politics of exchange; gender and the politics of early modern archives; gender
and architectural spaces (courts, salons, household); consumption and material
culture; objects and gendered power; women’s writing; gendered patronage and
power; gendered activities, behaviours, rituals and fashions.
Women on the Edge in
Early Modern Europe

Edited by
Lisa Hopkins and Aidan Norrie

Amsterdam University Press

Cover image: Death and the Maiden (c.1570), English School. Oil on wood.
Image © Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden

Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout

isbn 978 94 6298 750 0

e-isbn 978 90 4853 917 8
doi 10.5117/9789462987500
nur 685

© Lisa Hopkins, Aidan Norrie / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2019

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of
this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise)
without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.

Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations
reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is
advised to contact the publisher.
 For
Chris and Sam, without whom I really would be a woman on the edge
—L.H.

For
Janine, Jo, Lyn, Marina, Nicola, Rebecca, Sarah P, Sarah S, and Von:
friends and colleagues who prove that Females Are Strong As Hell
—A.N.
 Contents

List of Figures 9

Acknowledgements 11

1. Introduction: Early Modern European Women and the Edge 15

Aidan Norrie and Lisa Hopkins

Section I Life on the Edge

2. ‘At the mercy of a strange woman’  29

Plague Nurses, Marginality, and Fear during the Great Plague of 1665
Lara Thorpe

3. Chemistry, Medicine, and Beauty on the Edge: Marie Meurdrac 45

Sarah Gordon

4. Anna Stanislawska’s Orphan Girl of 1685 71

Autobiography of a Divorce
Lynn Lubamersky

Section II Witchcraft and the Edge

5. Touching on the Margins 93

Elizabeth Sawyer’s Body in Performance and Print
Alex MacConochie

6. Anna Trapnel: Prophet or Witch? 113

Debra Parish

Section III Courtly Women on the Edge

7. Wife, Widow, Exiled Queen 139

Beatrice d’Aragona (1457–1508) and Kinship in Early Modern Europe
Jessica O’Leary
8. On the Edge of the S(h)elf: Arbella Stuart 159
Lisa Hopkins

9. Cecilia of Sweden: Princess, Margravine, Countess, Regent 179

Aidan Norrie

10. ‘Elizabeth the Forgotten’ 203

The Life of Princess Elizabeth Stuart (1635–1650)
Jessica L. Becker

Epilogue The Early Modern Edge in the

Twenty-first Century

11. Catalina de Erauso—‘the Lieutenant Nun’—at the Turn of the

Twenty-First Century 227
Eva Mendieta

Index 247
 List of Figures

Figure 3.1: Title page of the 1666 reprint of La Chymie charitable et

facile, featuring the Privilège du Roi. Image courtesy of
the Science History Institute (Philapdelphia, PA). 51
Figure 3.2: Title page of the second edition of La chymie charitable
et facile (left), and the book’s frontispiece, featuring
an image of Marie Meurdrac in her laboratory.
Images courtesy of the Science History Institute
(Philapdelphia, PA). 65
Figure 4.1: Anna Stanisławska. Unknown artist. Oil on canvas.
National Museum (Warsaw), MP4310. 74
Figure 4.2: ‘Aesop, as depicted in Polish fairy tales’. From Bajki
z tematów Ezopa [Fairy Tales on the Theme of Aesop].
Warsaw: Nasza Ksęgarnia, 1953. 76
Figure 6.1: A seventeenth-century engraving of Anna Trapnel by
Richard Gaywood. Reproduced by kind permission
of the Sy&ndics of Cambridge University Library, Syn
7.65.157.116
Figure 6.2: Title Page of Anna Trapnel’s Report and Plea (1654).
C 8348.460.15*, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 128
Figure 9.1: Medallion struck by Crown Prince Erik, c.1560,
featuring Princess Cecilia. Images courtesy of the
Statens Historiska Museum, Stockholm, KMK 23290.
Photography by Gabriel Hildebrand. 184
Figure 9.2: Cecilia, c.1625. Unknown artist. Oil on Canvas.
Nationalmusem (Sweden), NMGrh 441. 199
 Acknowledgements

Lisa would like to thank Aidan for coming up with the idea for this book;
Sarah Gristwood and Sara Jayne Steen, who both gave talks on Arbella at
events run as part of the Literary Cultures of the Cavendish Family project;
all the contributors to Bess of Hardwick: New Perspectives, who have done so
much to help me understand Arbella’s family background; Crosby Stevens for
showing me some ways of reading the houses that Arbella’s uncle and cousin
built; and colleagues and students both past and present at Sheffield Hallam
University who have borne patiently with my passion for the Cavendishes
and all things connected with them.

Aidan: I thank Jo Oranje, Robert Norrie, and Sophie Shorland for their
assistance both in the writing of my chapter, and for encouraging discussions
regarding the overall project. I also acknowledge the support of my former
colleagues in the Department of English and Linguistics at the University
of Otago, and the encouragement of my new colleagues in the Centre for
the Study of the Renaissance at The University of Warwick. Lisa and I
could not have been luckier in working with Erika Gaffney, our wonderful
Acquisitions Editor, who was always on hand to answer questions with
patience and professionalism. Joseph Massey and Marina Gerzic have been
good-humoured, and patient, sounding boards. Finally, I thank Lisa for her
support, and her continued enthusiasm for this project since its inception.
 Why do men of God seem so afraid of women?
—Mary, Queen of Scots, in Mary, Queen of Scots (2013)

Death is the final edge of things.

—Horace, Epistles, 1.16.79
1. Introduction: Early Modern European
Women and the Edge
Aidan Norrie and Lisa Hopkins

Abstract
This chapter introduces the studies presented in Women on the Edge in
Early Modern Europe, situating the chapters within both the burgeoning
field of gender studies and the ongoing scholarly debates concerning the
lived experiences of early modern women. This chapter contextualises
the studies that follow by exploring how gender impeded the exercise of
women’s personal, political, and religious agency, with an emphasis on
both the conflict that occurred when a woman crossed the edges society
placed on her gender, and the role scholars have played in reinforcing
these (often anachronistic) edges.

Keywords: women; gender; early modern; Europe; edge

In the Blackadder II episode ‘Bells’, Elizabeth I’s nurse offers a comment on

the way sex and gender affected women in early modern Europe that, for
all its ostensible naïveté, is in fact surprisingly astute:

Nursie: You almost were a boy, my little cherry-pip.

Queenie: What?
Nursie: Yeah! Out you popped out of your mummy’s tumkin,
and everyone shouted, ‘It’s a boy, it’s a boy!’ And then
someone said: ‘But it hasn’t got a winkle!’ And then I
said: ‘A boy without a winkle? God be praised, it’s a
miracle. A boy without a winkle!’ And then Sir Thomas
More pointed out that a boy without a winkle is a girl,
and everyone was really disappointed.

Hopkins, L. and A. Norrie (eds.), Women on the Edge in Early Modern Europe, Amsterdam University
Press, 2019.
doi 10.5117/9789462987500/ch01
16  Aidan Norrie and Lisa Hopkins

Lord Melchett: Ah yes, well you see, he was a very perceptive man, Sir
Thomas More.1

Elizabeth was the child of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, and was thus royal
and eligible to succeed according to English law, but for the absence of a
‘winkle’, her ability to rule—based on her perceived sex—was questioned,
and potentially even negated. The point ended up being rather moot: both
Elizabeth and her half-sister Mary ruled England as female kings, which
has the effect of making Nursie’s observation all the more humorous.
As this short interaction demonstrates, gender was a site of contest and
anxiety in early modern England, and early modern Europe more broadly.
Gender functioned as a distinct edge, and Elizabeth, as a female king,
blurred the edge between man and woman as no Englishwoman had done
before her: while her sister Mary had reigned before her, and Jane Grey,
albeit briefly, before that (not to mention Empress Matilda’s designs on
the crown), neither had claimed to have the heart and stomach of a king,
and neither had greeted the news of an attempted revolution by reaching
for Henry VIII’s sword, as Elizabeth is said to have done on the day of the
Essex Rebellion.2 But gender, and its role in blurring edges, or the way it
could cause one to exist on the edge, does not have to be as obvious as in
the case of Elizabeth. While the idea of being on ‘the edge’ might cause
some to think of mental health issues, we use the term in a far more
literal sense.3 As Hopkins has argued elsewhere, early modern people
constantly negotiated various edges in their ensure this reads day-to-day
lives. 4 Of signif icance here is the acknowledgement that edges allow
two-way traff ic, investing edges with a kind of power that could always
be crossed, contested, or ceded.5 People negotiated the edges between
various spheres, many of which overlapped or caused friction, including
the spiritual and the secular, between the private and the public, and
between society’s gendered order and their personal agency.6 The edges

1 For more on Elizabeth I, Queenie, and Blackadder II, see: Latham, Elizabeth I in Film and
Television, 216–220. For a discussion of how Elizabeth’s gender is constructed and subverted in
film, see: Norrie, ‘A Man? A Woman? A Lesbian? A Whore?’, 319–340.
2 See: Beem, The Lioness Roared; Ives, Lady Jane Grey; Castor, She-Wolves; and Levin, The Heart
and Stomach of a King.
3 Women’s mental health as an ‘edge’ in the early modern period is explored by Strocchia,
‘Women on the Edge’.
4 See: Hopkins, Shakespeare on the Edge; and Hopkins, Renaissance Drama on the Edge.
5 Hopkins, Renaissance Drama on the Edge, 171, 8.
6 See: Broomhall, ed., Gender and Emotions in Medieval and Early Modern Europe.
Introduc tion: Early Modern European Women and the Edge 17

between these spheres, in particular, were ones that required careful

navigation: especially by women.7
Women on the Edge in Early Modern Europe examines various occasions
when a woman’s navigation of an edge was impeded by her gender, or indeed,
when her gender caused her to blur the edge and cross between two spheres.
The lives of the women who are analysed in this collection demonstrate the
way that gender—‘a social category imposed on a sexed body’—impeded the
exercise of personal, political, and religious agency in various ways.8 Thanks
to the excellent scholarship in the field of gender studies, this observation
is well established in the scholarship.9 Nevertheless, there is still much to
be done in illuminating the lives of women in early modern Europe who
were neither queens nor queans, in that they gained their infamy through
their sexual exploits—both real or imagined.10 This collection begins to fill
a gap in the scholarship by focusing on such a wide range of women, across
a variety of social and economic classes, between c.1457 and c.1701. Rather
than make the accounts of these women’s lives fit or focus on a particular
topic, we have allowed their stories to be told without undue emphasis on
arbitrary conceptual constraints. Many of the women featured here have
only been afforded cursory scholarly focus, or the focus has been isolated
to a specific, (in)famous event. This collection redresses this imbalance by
providing comprehensive discussions of the women’s lives, placing the matter
that makes them known to history within the context of their entire life.
We have also applied a less rigid def inition of ‘early modern’ to the
collection. We are interested in a wide range of women, from diverse back-
grounds and circumstances, in as wide a geographic range as possible. Our
contributors thus discuss women who lived between the fifteenth and early
eighteenth centuries, across an array of countries in Europe (and indeed in
the New World). We have also included chapters on women whose legacies

7 It is for this reason that we prefer to speak of ‘edges’, rather than ‘margins’. Our thinking on
this topic, however, has been influenced by Davis, Women on the Margins.
8 Scott, ‘Gender’, 1056.
9 In addition to Scott, see, for example: Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe;
Meade and Wiesner-Hanks, eds., A Companion to Gender History; Canning, Gender History in
Practice; Rose, What Is Gender History?; and Monter, The Rise of Female Kings in Europe, 1300–1800.
10 There is an increasing amount of scholarship of both queens consort and female kings.
See, for example: Woodacre, ed., A Companion to Global Queenship; Schutte and Paranque,
eds., Forgotten Queens in Medieval and Early Modern Europe; Bertolet, ed., Queens Matter in
Early Modern Studies; Dunn and Carney, eds., Royal Women and Dynastic Loyalty; Woodacre,
ed., Queenship in the Mediterranean; Earenfight, Queenship in Medieval Europe; Woodacre, The
Queens Regnant of Navarre; Cruz and Suzuki, eds., The Rule of Women in Early Modern Europe;
and Earenfight, ed., Queenship and Political Power in Medieval and Early Modern Spain.
18  Aidan Norrie and Lisa Hopkins

were part of early modern culture (such as Beatrice d’Aragona and Elizabeth
Sawyer), and some of the contributors have considered the legacy of their
subjects from the early modern period to the present.

***

The book is divided into three, thematic sections. Section One—‘Life on

the Edge’—provides three case studies of different women (or groups of
women) from across Europe in the seventeenth century. These women
were either hampered in the exercise of their careers simply because of
their gender, or were forced against their will to enter into relationships
because they were required to occupy the spheres society believed their
gender required.
The various bouts of plague that raged across Europe in the premodern
period affected people indiscriminate of gender, class, or race. As Lara
Thorpe establishes, those often charged with caring for the sick were the
poorest women of the parish, who were subjected to the double indignity
of being socio-economically marginalised women who, thanks to various
polemic tracts, were seen as personifications of the horrors of quarantine.
Thorpe uses parish records to create a prosopography of a typical plague
nurse during the Great Plague of 1665 in London, demonstrating both the
women’s competence and medical skills, and the unfair association they
had with the disease they treated.
As many of our contributors demonstrate, women often did cross over
into spheres and careers society deemed unusual—or even unaccept­
able—for a woman in early modern Europe.11 Sarah Gordon’s contribution
assesses the career of Marie Meurdrac, a self-taught chemist who, in 1656,
published what can be described as the first modern chemistry textbook,
La Chymie charitable et facile en faveur des dames. The book was a culmi-
nation of years of experimentation on Meurdrac’s part, and, as Gordon
demonstrates, while the instructions are written with detailed steps and
clear language, it is still highly technical, and is certainly much more than
the mere recipe collection the book is sometimes dismissed as. Read today,
Meurdrac’s book gives a voice to the often voiceless women of premodern
science, and forms the basis of a conversation about gender bias in science
that continues today.

11 See, for other examples: Hanawalt, ed., Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe; Wiesner,
Working Women in Renaissance Germany; McIntosh, Working Women in English Society, 1300–1620;
and Simonton and Montenach, eds., Female Agency in the Urban Economy.
Introduc tion: Early Modern European Women and the Edge 19

Most of the women analysed in this collection are known through the
writings of others, usually men.12 Some women, however, were able to
not only escape their particular situation, but also write about it them-
selves. Lynn Lubamersky’s chapter analyses the autobiography of Anna
Stanisławska, a Polish woman who was married against her will to a mentally
ill man before managing to procure a divorce. Stanisławska might have
accepted her fate, but instead she extricated herself, using all of the tools
available to her, including secular and canon law, patronage, and family
connections. Her autobiography, which is unique in European history,
paints a damning picture of the commonplace ‘transaction’ of women,
and reveals a woman from a distant time whose desire for liberty and
self-determination is eternal.
An issue that disproportionately affected women in early modern Europe
was accusations of witchcraft.13 The use of witchcraft as a tool to deny
women political, religious, or social agency is the focus of Section Two,
‘Witchcraft and the Edge’.
Alex MacConochie’s contribution analyses the treatment of Elizabeth
Sawyer, convicted witch, in Henry Goodcole’s pamphlet, The Wonderful
Discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer, Witch, and in the collaborative play The Witch
of Edmonton (both 1621). MacConochie focuses on acts of touch, demonstrat-
ing that the play exemplifies common contemporary attitudes towards
touch, and treats the witch’s touch as a demonic influence over her victims,
whereas the pamphlet employs acts of touch between Elizabeth and others to
model reciprocal forms of contact that contrast markedly with hierarchical
uses of touch in the community from which she is excluded. The play and
the pamphlet blur the divide between Sawyer’s ‘real’ life, and Sawyer as a
personified manifestation of public anxieties. As MacConochie demonstrates,
where the pamphlet constructs communal bonds by scapegoating Elizabeth,
the play models alternative forms of association between elderly, poverty-
stricken women like Sawyer and other figures on the edges of the community.
Anna Trapnel, who came to prominence as a prophetess in England during
the 1650s, is the focus of Debra Parish’s chapter. One of hundreds of visionary
women who identified as prophets during the Civil Wars and Interregnum
period, Trapnel gained a following for her compelling visionary trances

12 This fact is discussed in, for example: Knoppers, ed., Cambridge Companion to Early Modern
Women’s Writing; Gilleir, Montoya, and Dijk, eds., Women Writing Back / Writing Women Back;
Ross and Salzman, eds., Editing Early Modern Women; and Daybell and Gordon, eds., Women
and Epistolary Agency in Early Modern Culture, 1450–1690.
13 Rowlands, ‘Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Europe’, 449. Interestingly, male witches
were in the majority in Russia. See: Kivelson, ‘Witchcraft Trials in Russia’.
20  Aidan Norrie and Lisa Hopkins

and prophetic declarations. She published several works giving accounts

of her visions and propounding God’s warnings to all outward political and
religious powers. As Parish demonstrates, while being unmarried allowed
Trapnel the freedom to travel and prophesy, she was constantly forced to
subvert her own agency by declaring herself simply the mouthpiece of God
in order to deflect criticisms directed at her blurring of the edges of the
various spheres she existed in. Parish explores the writings and actions
of this independent and outspoken woman, analysing her shifting public
identity from ‘prophet’ to ‘witch’, and demonstrating that she not only
pushed boundaries of gender, but also challenged dominant political and
religious institutions and authority.
Section Three, ‘Courtly Women on the Edge’, analyses the lives of four
royal women across early modern Europe. These women navigated different
edges from the women previously studied: born into relative affluence,
these women were all expected to marry well (the three who survived into
adulthood did, to different degrees), and to produce heirs who would continue
and expand their family line (though only one of these four did). Their noble
heritage placed them very much on the edge: some blurred the line between
virtuous wife and ruler, others dutiful daughter and public figure.
In the case of Beatrice d’Aragona, Jessica O’Leary demonstrates the way
the queen-consort of Hungary and Bohemia navigated the four spheres
of daughter, wife, ruler, and public figure. Born in Italy, which we now
think of as the centre of Renaissance culture, Beatrice d’Aragona moved to
Hungary, a land whose status as a beacon of Renaissance art and learning
is less well remembered (although it deserves to be). Her marriage in 1476
to its king Matthias Corvinus took her to the edge of Christendom, since
Hungary lay in the line of advance of the Ottoman Turks, and also brought
her to a point of crisis in the contemporary definition of femininity, for the
marriage produced no children. Widowhood in 1490 seemed to offer her
political power, but actually led her to a second marriage with a man who
quickly repudiated her. Childless, husbandless, and unqueened, Beatrice
d’Aragona inhabited the edge in many senses.
Lisa Hopkins’s chapter considers how Arbella Stuart hovered on the edge of
the succession to two thrones, that of England and that of Scotland, although
she never inherited either. Too important to be allowed to marry freely, Arbella
engineered an elopement (during which she disguised herself as a boy) with
the grandson of Lady Catherine Grey. She seems in general to have identified
with the Grey sisters, but she was also inevitably compared to her aunt, Mary,
Queen of Scots, and also to Elizabeth I herself. Hopkins explores how Arbella
was fashioned by others, as well as how she tried to fashion herself.
Introduc tion: Early Modern European Women and the Edge 21

Aidan Norrie provides a biography and re-assessment of Princess C ­ ecilia

of Sweden, later Margravine of Baden-Rodemachern and Countess of ­Arboga.
Cecilia is best known for her eight-month visit to England to meet Elizabeth I
in 1565–1566. The rising debt that finally forced her to leave has tainted
Cecilia, and accounts of her life barely mention the sixty years between her
leaving England and her death in 1627. Norrie re-assesses Cecilia’s life by
focusing on the way her gender caused her to exist on the edge, demonstrat-
ing that no matter her situation, Cecilia was ultimately defined by the
men—present or absent—in her life.
Jessica Becker’s chapter on Elizabeth Stuart reminds us of Charles I’s
forgotten daughter. Elizabeth died at the age of fifteen, so never exercised
power and never married, but Becker argues that studying her helps us
understand more clearly the tensions and cross-currents of the English
Civil Wars. Dying on the edge of her own maturity, Elizabeth paradoxically
occupied centre ground in that her youth and fragility spoke to both sides
of the conflict. Along with Beatrice d’Aragona, Arbella Stuart, and Princess
Cecilia, the vulnerable, imprisoned Princess Elizabeth helps us see some of
the ways in which women could exercise symbolic appeal even when they
wielded no actual political power.
The book concludes with an epilogue, ‘The Early Modern Edge in the
Twenty-First Century’, which seeks to demonstrate the role scholars have
played in both reinforcing, and breaking down, edges. Eva Mendieta
examines the literary (after)life of Catalina de Erauso, ‘the Lieutenant
Nun’, contextualizing both Erauso’s life, and the literary evidence of her
life. Importantly, Mendieta analyses the recent scholarship on Erauso,
demonstrating the (positive) effect of gender and feminist critiques on
understanding the Lieutenant Nun’s Autobiography, and the renewed focus
on the way that Erauso constructed her identity—without emphasizing her
interpreted gender identity—with attention being paid to her Basque origin.

***

We hope that the essays in this collection continue to encourage the increas-
ing scholarly focus on the lives of people on the edge.14 We acknowledge that

14 Ashgate’s (now University of Nebraska Press’s) series, Women and Gender in the Early Modern
World, has been at the forefront of encouraging this kind of scholarship. Some recent examples
of other such works include: Pearson, ed., Women and Portraits in Early Modern Europe; Tarbin
and Broomhall, eds., Women, Identities and Communities in Early Modern Europe; Broomhall
and Spinks, Early Modern Women in the Low Countries; Akkerman and Houben, eds., The Politics
of Female Households; Poska, Couchman, and McIver, eds., The Ashgate Research Companion to
22  Aidan Norrie and Lisa Hopkins

royal and aristocratic women make up a large part of this collection. This
is not an accident: royal and noble status did not do away with the issues
women faced in early modern Europe. But we hope by placing the lives of
these women against other, non-noble women, who achieved much in spite of
the obstacles placed in their way, we can expand this scholarly conversation,
and continue to include the people who lived on the edge—not only because
of gender, but also because of their race and/or sexual orientation—in the
increasingly inclusive and accessible histories being written of not only
early modern Europe, but also of periods and places that have long been
neglected by both academic and popular audiences alike.15

Works Cited

Akkerman, Nadine, and Birgit Houben, eds. The Politics of Female Households:
Ladies-in-waiting across Early Modern Europe. Leiden: Brill, 2013.
Beem, Charles. The Lioness Roared: The Problems of Female Rule in English History.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Bertolet, Anna Riehl, ed. Queens Matter in Early Modern Studies. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2018.
Broomhall, Susan, ed. Gender and Emotions in Medieval and Early Modern Europe:
Destroying Order, Structuring Disorder. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015.
Broomhall, Susan, and Jennifer Spinks. Early Modern Women in the Low Countries:
Feminizing Sources and Interpretations of the Past. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011.
Canning, Kathleen. Gender History in Practice: Historical Perspectives on Bodies,
Class, and Citizenship. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006.
Castor, Helen. She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England before Elizabeth. London:
Faber and Faber, 2010.
Cruz, Anne J., and Mihoko Suzuki, eds. The Rule of Women in Early Modern Europe.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Davis, Natalie Zemon. Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.
Daybell, James, and Andrew Gordon, eds. Women and Epistolary Agency in Early
Modern Culture, 1450–1690. London: Routledge, 2016.

Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe; Daybell and Gordon, eds., Women and Epistolary
Agency in Early Modern Culture, 1450–1690; and Ilmakunnas, Rahikainen, and Vainio-Korhonen,
eds., Early Professional Women in Northern Europe, c.1650–1850.
15 The idea for this collection was in part inspired by the groundbreaking studies of extra-
European women in various royal courts, including: Walthall, ed., Servants of the Dynasty;
Mernissi, The Forgotten Queens of Islam; and Peirce, The Imperial Harem.
Introduc tion: Early Modern European Women and the Edge 23

Dunn, Caroline, and Elizabeth Carney, eds. Royal Women and Dynastic Loyalty.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
Earenfight, Theresa. Queenship in Medieval Europe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2013.
Earenfight, Theresa, ed. Queenship and Political Power in Medieval and Early Modern
Spain. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005.
Gilleir, Anke, Alicia C. Montoya, and Suzan van Dijk, eds. Women Writing Back /
Writing Women Back: Transnational Perspectives from the Late Middle Ages to
the Dawn of the Modern Era. Leiden: Brill, 2010.
Hanawalt, Barbara, ed., Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1986.
Hopkins, Lisa. Renaissance Drama on the Edge. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014.
Hopkins, Lisa. Shakespeare on the Edge: Border-Crossing in the Tragedies and the
Henriad. Farnham: Ashgate, 2005.
Ilmakunnas, Johanna, Marjatta Rahikainen, and Kirsi Vainio-Korhonen, eds. Early
Professional Women in Northern Europe, c.1650–1850. London: Routledge, 2017.
Ives, Eric. Lady Jane Grey: A Tudor Mystery. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.
Kivelson, Valerie. ‘Witchcraft Trials in Russia: History and Historiography’. In The
Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America,
edited by Brian P. Levack, 355–374. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Knoppers, Laura Lunger, ed. Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s
Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Latham, Bethany. Elizabeth I in Film and Television: A Study of the Major Portrayals.
Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2011.
Levin, Carole. The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex
and Power. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.
McIntosh, Marjorie Keniston. Working Women in English Society, 1300–1620. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Meade, Teresa A., and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, eds. A Companion to Gender History.
Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
Mernissi, Fatima. The Forgotten Queens of Islam. Translated by Mary Jo Lakeland.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
Monter, William. The Rise of Female Kings in Europe, 1300–1800. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2012.
Norrie, Aidan. ‘A man? A woman? A lesbian? A whore?: Queen Elizabeth I and
the Cinematic Subversion of Gender’. In Premodern Rulers and Postmodern
Viewers: Gender, Sex, and Power in Popular Culture, edited by Janice North, Karl
C. Alvestad, and Elena Woodacre, 319–340. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
Pearson, Andrea, ed. Women and Portraits in Early Modern Europe: Gender, Agency,
Identity. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008.
24  Aidan Norrie and Lisa Hopkins

Peirce, Leslie P. The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Poska, Allyson M., Jane Couchman, and Katherine A. McIver, eds. The Ashgate
Research Companion to Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe. Farnham:
Ashgate, 2013.
Rose, Sonya O. What Is Gender History? Oxford: Polity Press, 2008.
Ross, Sarah C.E., and Paul Salzman, eds. Editing Early Modern Women. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2016.
Rowlands, Alison. ‘Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Europe’. In The Oxford
Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, edited by
Brian P. Levack, 449–467. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Schutte, Valerie, and Estelle Paranque, eds. Forgotten Queens in Medieval and
Early Modern Europe: Political Agency, Myth-Making, and Patronage. London:
Routledge, 2019.
Scott, Joan W. ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’. The American
Historical Review 91, no. 5 (December 1986): 1053–1075.
Simonton, Deborah, and Anne Montenach, eds. Female Agency in the Urban
Economy: Gender in European Towns, 1640–1830. London: Routledge, 2013.
Strocchia, Sharon T. ‘Women on the Edge: Madness, Possession, and Suicide in
Early Modern Convents’. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 45, no.
1 (2015): 53–77.
Tarbin, Stephanie, and Susan Broomhall, eds. Women, Identities and Communities
in Early Modern Europe. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008.
Walthall, Anne, ed. Servants of the Dynasty: Palace Women in World History.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.
Wiesner, Merry E. Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1993.
Wiesner, Merry E. Working Women in Renaissance Germany. New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 1986.
Woodacre, Elena. The Queens Regnant of Navarre: Succession, Politics, and Partner-
ship, 1274–1512. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Woodacre, Elena, ed. A Companion to Global Queenship. Bradford: ARC Humanities
Press, 2018.
Woodacre, Elena, ed. Queenship in the Mediterranean: Negotiating the Role of the
Queen in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2013.
Introduc tion: Early Modern European Women and the Edge 25

About the authors

Lisa Hopkins is Professor of English at Sheffield Hallam University. She is

co-editor of Shakespeare, the journal of the British Shakespeare Association,
of Arden Early Modern Drama Guides, and of Arden Studies in Early Modern
Drama. Her publications include Renaissance Drama on the Edge (Ashgate,
2014), Drama and the Succession to the Crown, 1561-1633 (Ashgate, 2011), and
Shakespeare on the Edge (Ashgate, 2005). She has recently edited a collection
of essays, Bess of Hardwick: New Perspectives, published by Manchester
University Press, and is co-editing (with Tom Rutter) A Companion to the
Cavendishes: Writing, Patronage, and Material Culture (ARC Humanities
Press).

Aidan Norrie is a historian of monarchy, and is a Chancellor’s International

Scholar in the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at The University
of Warwick. He is the editor, with Marina Gerzic, of From Medievalism to
Early-Modernism: Adapting the English Past (Routledge), and, with Mark
Houlahan, of On the Edge of Early Modern English Drama (MIP University
Press). Aidan is working on a study of Elizabeth I’s depiction in modern
films and television series, and is currently developing a monograph that
analyses Elizabeth’s engagement with the Old Testament.
Section I
Life on the Edge
2. ‘At the mercy of a strange woman’
Plague Nurses, Marginality, and Fear during the Great
Plague of 1665

Lara Thorpe

Abstract
In the polemic literature of the Great Plague of 1665, nurses were depicted
at best as incompetent, and at worst, as murderers and thieves. This chapter
explores why the prospect of receiving care from a plague nurse was so
feared by contemporaries. Nurses, as pensioners, were on the edge in terms
of their socioeconomic background, living in some of London’s poorest
streets. Their association with disease and quarantine further contributed
to the case of polemicists against parish-assigned plague nurses. Accusa-
tions against nurses, however, were completely unfounded. This chapter
shows that on the ground, London’s system of parish plague nursing was
successful: it allowed plague nurses—women who were on the edge—to be
paid for their competent and skilled care of their neighbours and friends.

Keywords: early modern medicine and public health; nursing; poor women;
quarantine; early modern London

In 1665, the Great Plague roared through London’s streets and ravaged
its inhabitants. On 10 July, in the parish of St. Margaret’s, Westminster,
the churchwarden made an unusual notation in the bound book he used
exclusively to record the parish’s plague-related expenses. Margery Stiffany,
one of St. Margaret’s poorest parishioners, was paid for ‘her Extraordinary
Paynes in looking after ye Visited’.1 This was significant praise in records
that are mostly a list of names with minimal detail; of the as many as 414

1 Westminster City Library [hereafter WCL], Churchwardens’ accounts in relation to the

plague, SMW/E/147.

Hopkins, L. and A. Norrie (eds.), Women on the Edge in Early Modern Europe, Amsterdam University
Press, 2019.
doi 10.5117/9789462987500/ch02
30  L ar a Thorpe

men and women who nursed the plague sick in St. Margaret’s, Stiffany is
the only woman who merited more comment than her name and role.2 She
was paid for plague nursing seven times that year—an exceptional number,
considering that only 22 women were paid for nursing more than three times.
That Margery Stiffany warranted such a response in the churchwardens’
accounts would have been surprising to most Londoners, many of whom
dreaded the prospect of catching plague and becoming the charge of a parish-
assigned nurse. Medical practitioners and polemical writers described the
horrors of a plague nurse’s care. Plague doctor Nathaniel Hodges described in
lurid detail how rather than tend and nurture their patients, plague nurses,
‘out of Greediness to plunder the Dead, would Strangle their Patients, and
charge it to the distemper in their Throats’. Indeed, he continued, ‘nothing
[…] deterred these abandoned Miscreants from prosecuting their avaritious
Purposes by all the Methods their Wickedness could invent’.3 One nurse,
having ransacked the house of her recently deceased patient, was caught
out in her wickedness when she collapsed in the street, dead of plague. 4 The
anonymous author of a pamphlet condemning the practice of quarantine
provided a similarly lurid picture. He wrote that

Little is it considered how careless most Nurses are in attending the

Visited, and how careful (being possessed with rooking avarice) they are
to watch their opportunity to ransack their houses; the assured absence
of friends making the sick desperate on the one hand, and them on the
other unfaithful: their estates are the Plague most dye on, if they have
any thing to lose, to be sure those sad creatures (for the Nurses in such
cases are the off-scouring of the City) have a dose to give them; besides
that, it is something beyond a Plague to an ingenious spirit to be in the
hands of those dirty, ugly, and unwholsome Haggs; even a hell it self, on
the one hand to hear nothing but screetches, cryes, groans, and on the
other hand to see nothing but ugliness and deformity, black as night,
and dark as Melancholy: Ah! to lye at the mercy of a strange woman is
sad: to leave wife, children, plate, jewels, to the Ingenuity of poverty, is
worse; but who can express the misery of being exposed to their rapine
that have nothing of the woman left but shape.5

2 The names of 324 women are recorded, while 90 nurses are unnamed and noted instead by
the household they cared for.
3 Hodges, Loimologia, 8.
4 Hodges, Loimologia, 8.
5 The Shutting Up of Infected Houses, 9.
‘At the merc y of a str ange woman’  31

The message communicated via the rhetoric and imagery in this polemic
tract was clear: nurses were one of the most dreaded elements of becoming
a plague victim. At best, plague nurses were bumbling and incompetent,
and at worst, murderers and thieves.
The gap between the murderous hags of these printed sources and Mar-
gery Stiffany’s ‘Extraordinary Paynes’ is wide and seemingly irreconcilable.
Recent work on parish-assigned nurses, however, has provided a picture
much closer to the latter than the former. Margaret Pelling has argued that
the competent medical care of parish-assigned nurses was marred by the
‘fear and distaste’ with which their working conditions were viewed, as well
as their relative independence as women.6 Deborah Harkness has echoed
this argument by asserting that women were embedded in ‘organized
systems of healthcare’ in London parishes and medical practitioners in
their own right.7 Most recently, Richelle Munkhoff has contended that the
parish officials viewed the medical expertise of nurses as a commodity
worth paying for.8 Ian Mortimer recognized that although nursing implied
‘watching’ a sick patient rather than providing medical care, by 1660 women
with medical experience dominated nursing roles.9 The works of these
historians has largely rescued the reputations of the parish nurse in early
modern England.
However, the work of these scholars has not adequately addressed the
question of why, if these women were competent caregivers, the prospect of
‘lying at the mercy of a strange woman’ was so deeply feared by contemporar-
ies. This chapter seeks to address this gap in the scholarship by comparing
the polemic pamphlets in which plague nurses were critiqued with the
parish records that note their activities. Plague nurses were vilified due to
their socioeconomic marginality, their close association with a much-feared
disease, and because of the inextricable role they played in the process of
quarantine, a deeply unpopular public health measure. On the page, plague
nurses were nightmares; in reality, the system of plague nursing practised
across the metropolis constituted a major success, as shown in this chapter’s
close analysis of the parishes of St. Margaret’s, Westminster, and St. Bride’s,
Fleet Street. Nurses, as pensioners and often widows, were on the edge in
terms of their socioeconomic backgrounds; their homes were in some of
London’s most deprived streets. The records indicate that their patients were

6 Pelling, ‘Nurses and Nursekeepers’, 202.

7 Harkness, ‘View from the Streets’, 56.
8 Munkhoff, ‘Poor Women and Parish Public Health’, 584.
9 Mortimer, The Dying and the Doctors, 140, 188.
32  L ar a Thorpe

from the same impoverished backgrounds, and that the system of parish
nursing allowed them to receive competent and experienced medical care.

Nurses and the Practice of Quarantine in 1665

Largely, the negative reputation of nurses can be ascribed to the polemic

debate about the practice of quarantine. In 1665, the recommendation for
strict quarantine was still relatively new; funds from the government had
only made a strict segregation of the sick and the well possible in the previous
epidemic in 1636. Public health measures adopted to restrict the spread of
plague had undergone significant change in the previous century and a half.
It was only in 1518 that London’s metropolitan government made the first
attempts to identify infected houses,10 stipulating that a bundle of straw
be hung from the house in question.11 However, the house’s occupants were
permitted to leave as long as they carried a white rod to visually mark their
proximity to plague.12 Sixty years later, in 1578, Elizabeth I’s Privy Council
sent the Lord Mayor a list of suggested measures to be followed in order to
control the spread of plague; in 1583, the metropolitan government passed
these as the city’s first plague regulations.13 The Plague Orders constituted
an important centralizing hand to ‘remedy haphazard local efforts’.14 It was
not until 1608 that strict quarantine was recommended, though it was not
made a reality until 1636, when the first plague tax was instituted.15 These
funds allowed London parishes to purchase padlocks and make formal
provisions for the payment of warders and nurses.16
In 1665, quarantine was enforced on a parish-by-parish basis. Searchers were
the linchpin of London’s system of quarantine. The parish had employed these
women since the 1570s: their task was to identify cases of plague and to notify
the parish authorities, who compiled data for the Bills of Mortality and enforced
quarantine when necessary.17 While searchers were often seen as susceptible
to bribery, they actually used their own medical knowledge as women and
a number of targeted questions—including taking a patient history—to

10 Slack, ‘Metropolitan Governments in Crisis’, 65.

11 Slack, ‘The Responses’, 168.
12 Slack, ‘The Responses’, 169.
13 Slack, ‘Metropolitan Governments in Crisis’, 66.
14 Slack, ‘The Responses’, 169.
15 Slack, ‘Metropolitan Governments in Crisis’, 67.
16 Slack, ‘Metropolitan Governments in Crisis’, 72.
17 Munkhoff, ‘Reckoning Death’, 119–120.
‘At the merc y of a str ange woman’  33

diagnose illness.18 When a searcher identified a case of plague within a house

or building, parish authorities initiated quarantine.19 The affected building
was padlocked; a red cross and the words ‘Lord Have Mercy Upon Us’ were
painted on the door so that neighbours and passers-by could identify the
building as infected and dangerous. Warders, one for the day and one for the
night, were placed at the door to guard it. A nurse, sponsored by the parish,
was also assigned to the household if those inside required medical care.20
Plague nurses were part of the early modern public health system, which
was administered locally by parishes.21 Until the Reformation, monasteries
and nunneries had served as major healthcare centres; the resulting public
health crisis caused by the Dissolution of the Monasteries saw the transfer
of the burden of local healthcare to parishes.22 The Protestant imperative of
charity made possibly a system wherein those who received relief worked
for it, a system in which pensioners provided a nursing service for fellow
pensioners.23 Indeed, receiving relief from the parish often obligated older
women and pensioners to work for the parish in healthcare capacities. 24
The system worked to the parishes’ benefit: relying on pensioners was
much more economical than relying on, and paying for, the services of
professional practitioners.25 These systems of local healthcare were complex
and effective, as demonstrated by the work of Margaret Pelling and Jeremy
Boulton.26 Nurses were often called on to attend those afflicted with chronic
illness or immobilized by old age. It is thus unsurprising that when a plague
epidemic descended on early modern cities, the same nurses were called
upon to care for those stricken with the disease. Just as the demand for the
parish services increased during plague—nursing, warding, searching the
infected, and bearing and burying the dead—so too did the potential pool
of those receiving relief from the parish to fill these roles. As Champion has
established, epidemic plague led to a transformation in London’s economy
from being service-based towards ‘a market in the services associated with
social policy’.27 As quarantine halted the metropolis’s normal economic

18 Munkhoff, ‘Reckoning Death’, 120–132.

19 Munkhoff, ‘Searchers of the Dead’, 10.
20 Rules and Orders to be Observed, 1.
21 Munkhoff, ‘Poor Women and Parish Public Health’, 580.
22 Munkhoff, ‘Poor Women and Parish Public Health’, 579.
23 Grell and Cunningham, ‘The Reformation and Changes in Welfare Provision’, 580.
24 Wear, ‘Caring for the Sick Poor in St Bartholomew’s Exchange’, 47.
25 Wear, ‘Caring for the Sick Poor in St Bartholomew’s Exchange’, 49.
26 Pelling, ‘Nurses and Nursekeepers’, 179–202; Boulton, ‘Welfare Systems and the Parish Nurse
in Early Modern London’, 127–151.
27 Champion, London’s Dreadful Visitation, 91–92.
34  L ar a Thorpe

activities, ‘more women were forced to seek dangerous employment as

nurses, and […] the provision of this employment was seen as form of relief
for the women employed as well as for those to whom they supplied care’.28
Thus, the material circumstances of plague both demanded and supplied
nurses to care for the sick.
Quarantine was a deeply unpopular and contentious issue in 1665.
­Nathaniel Hodges complained that it ‘occasion’d such tedious Confinements
of sick and well together, as sometimes caused the Loss of the whole’.29 The
enforcement of quarantine was so unpopular that in April 1665, an enquiry
was opened to the cause of a house which

was shut up as suspected to bee Infected with the Plague, & a Crosse and
paper fixed, on the doore; And that the s[ai]d Cross and paper were taken
off, & the doore opened, in a vitous manner, & the people of the house
permitted, to goe abroad into the street promiscuously, with others.30

The scandalous affair was called a ‘Ryott’; the perpetrators were punished.
An entire polemic debate emerged, and devoted itself to enumerating the
futility and unnecessary cruelness of quarantine. Thomas Clarke, reflecting
on his experiences being shut up, lamented that the measure ‘hath swept
houses clean’.31 Vincent poignantly recorded the effect it had had on his own
household, recalling that, ‘Thus did the Plague follow us, and came upon us
one by one […] so the Messengers of death came so close one after another,
in such dreadful manner, as if we must all follow one another immediately
into the Pit’.32 Quarantine risked more than just life, however. Clarke was
particularly upset by his inability to make a living, ‘Which thing next to
my Childrens loss, was chief, and greatest of my smart and worldly grief’.33
Quarantine thus not only caused unnecessary death, but also robbed those
shut up of the chance to provide for themselves. The criticisms of plague
nurses in these pamphlets are inextricably linked to discontent with the
practice of quarantine in 1665. Keen to imbue the public health measure
with as many horrors as could be imagined, polemicists utilized the plague
nurse—imposed by the parish at the time of quarantine—as the monstrous
personification of an unpopular measure. Nurses were described in lurid

28 Champion, London’s Dreadful Visitation, 95.

29 Hodges, Loimologia, 7.
30 The National Archives, PC 2/58.
31 Clarke, Meditations in my Confinement, 7.
32 Vincent, Gods Terrible Voice in the City, 44.
33 Clarke, Meditations in my Confinement, 17.
‘At the merc y of a str ange woman’  35

detail as murderers and thieves precisely because quarantine was seen to

rob people unnecessarily of their lives, their property, and their ability to
engage in gainful employment.
Polemicists also expressed considerable concern about the nurse as a
medical caregiver. Vincent opined that the plague sick were more afraid of
nurses ‘then the Plague itself’.34 This was partially due to the fact that norms
of medical care were reversed during times of epidemic plague. In the early
modern period, family members typically cared for the sick and dying. Sisters,
mothers, and grandmothers fed and washed their relatives, watched at the
sickbed, and prepared and administered food and medicines.35 Servants
could also be called upon to nurture their ill masters and mistresses.36
However, widespread fear of plague and the threat of quarantine ‘made the
Neighbours fly from theirs, who otherwise might have been a Help to them’.37
One writer, condemning the practice of quarantine, commented that ‘a whole
and healthy familie to day, for want to preservatives, antidotes, attendance,
and (it may be) necessaries off meat and drink, is to morrow none at all’.38
Neighbourly and familial care lapsed during epidemics of feared diseases, like
plague and smallpox. Into this gap stepped parish-assigned nurses. Typically,
sickness was viewed as a public rather than a private event, with relatives,
servants, paid attendants, acquaintances, friends, landlords, and landladies
playing a part in nursing the stricken.39 In cases of plague, however, the
nurses who were allocated to quarantined houses may have been strangers.
Mortimer has contented that the nurse’s status as a stranger ‘exacerbated
[the images of] nurses as “uncaring” carers’.40 That contemporary accounts
referred to the plague nurse as ‘a strange woman’ amongst their many insults
suggests that there was an anxiety about receiving care from a practitioner
whose skills and background were fundamentally unknown.
Despite numerous critiques and tragic examples offered by such writ-
ers, quarantine remained the legislative bar set by both metropolitan and
national governments. Polemicists conflated plague nurses with both the
disease they treated and the new, stricter practice of quarantine. As I will
demonstrate, however, many of the objections to nurses were rooted in
their socioeconomic marginality.

34 Vincent, Gods Terrible Voice in the City, 34.

35 Stolberg, Experiencing Illness, 53–54.
36 Williams, ‘Caring for the Sick Poor’, 150.
37 Hodges, Loimologia, 9.
38 The Shutting Up of Infected Houses, 8.
39 Stolberg, Experiencing Illness, 53–56.
40 Mortimer, The Dying and the Doctors, 137.
36  L ar a Thorpe

Case Studies: Plague Nursing in St. Margaret’s, Westminster and

St. Bride’s, Fleet Street

In the pamphlet debates about quarantine, nurses were depicted (at best) as
uncaring interlopers, and at worst, murderous thieves. The reality was radi-
cally different. Here, I compare the records of the parishes of St. Margaret’s,
Westminster, and St. Bride’s, Fleet Street, with the 1666 Hearth Tax Returns to
construct a prosopography of the typical parish plague nurse. This compari-
son shows that while parish nurses came from a diverse background, they
were most often selected from the parish’s most disadvantaged inhabitants.
The same was true of their patients. The system of parish plague nursing
practised during London’s 1665 epidemic was a welfare and public health
success, ensuring that a parish’s poorest inhabitants received competent
medical care from their neighbours and friends.
Fashionably placed in London’s trendy West End, St. Margaret’s was home
to both the fabulously wealthy and the extremely deprived. The 1666 Hearth
Tax returns for the parish includes streets like Dean’s Yard and Channel
Row, where inhabitants lived in mansions of more than ten hearths, and
then streets like White Alley, Codpiece Court, and Twyfords Alley, where
houses had two hearths or fewer. 41 The parish’s churchwardens’ accounts
are uncommonly detailed; where other parishes typically listed payments
to simply ‘a nurse’, St. Margaret’s churchwarden not only kept a separate
book filled with expenses related to the plague, but he also referred to
nurses by their full names in the account book for 1665. The records of St.
Margaret’s, Westminster—a large, suburban parish bordering Whitehall
Palace—includes details that I have used to construct a prosopography of
the typical plague nurse, showing that an important element of the plague
nurses’ negative reputation was their socioeconomic marginality.
As many as 414 women were employed by the parish of St. Margaret’s
between 29 May 1665 and 5 November 1666. Of these, 324 were listed by
name—for example ‘Rachel Butler Nurse’ and ‘Mary Snow Nurse’—while
another 90 nurses were signified by the household they were assigned to,
as in the case of ‘George Keate’s Nurse’ and ‘A Nurse at Boltons’. Women
who nursed did not do so for the entirety of the epidemic, moving from
one quarantined household to the next. Instead, nursing was occasional,
precarious employment taken on only by the most desperate. Of the 324
named nurses in St. Margaret’s, only 109 received payment for nursing more
than once over the course of the 1665 epidemic; a mere 22 were paid four

41 ‘London Hearth Tax: City of London and Middlesex, 1666’.

‘At the merc y of a str ange woman’  37

or more times. Mary Butler, the most frequently paid nurse, was paid only
eight times during the year-and-a-half-span of the churchwardens’ account
book. While plague nursing relied on a core group of nurses who appear in
the records more regularly than others, it becomes clear that in times of
epidemic, nursing tasks were spread across the parish to include all those
who needed additional monetary relief, and only those who needed the
relief took on dangerous employment as a plague nurse.
Tracking named nurses in the 1666 Hearth Tax returns illuminates a
wealth of information about the socioeconomic background of nurses in
St. Margaret’s. The expectation would likely be that the poor would treat
the poor: but this is not necessarily the picture that emerges. It should be
noted that these comparisons are not definitive—in cases where nurses
were married, her husband’s name was noted in the Hearth Tax rather than
her own, meaning that in several cases implied links have been drawn.
For example, I have supposed that Dorothy Heard was the wife of Robert
Heard, as only one Heard household appears in the Hearth Tax returns. In
several cases, particularly when the surname was more common, it has been
impossible to track down nurses; the parish of St. Margaret’s was riddled
with Bells, Stephens, Fishers, and Butlers.
What is clear is that nurses were largely gathered from among the parish’s
socioeconomic periphery. Margery Stiffany, Elizabeth Taylor, and Alice
Lewes were all listed as heads of their own household in dwellings of just
one hearth apiece; Joan Davis’s home on New Way had just two hearths.
Several other nurses were possibly married to husbands living in houses
with just one or two hearths: these include Jane Singleton (wife of John
Singleton, one hearth), Anne Millet (wife of Alexander Millet, one hearth),
Sarah Hilliard (wife of John Hilliard, one hearth), and Mary Crooke (wife
of William Crooke, two hearths). A number of connections have also been
made between women listed as widows in the Hearth Tax: Widow Bird
of White Alley had only one hearth, and Widow Bayly and Widow Petty
each had two. It also seems likely that Marie Cole was the Widow Cole
(one hearth), Elizabeth Lee was the Widow Lee (one hearth), and Jane
Gray the Widow Gray (one hearth). Clearly, many of these women came
from desperate circumstances, which were exasperated by the plague that
provided them temporary employment. Indeed, these women on the edge
were amongst those most likely to receive payment for nursing several times
during the epidemic. Margery Stiffany was paid seven times; Jane Singleton
and Elizabeth Lee five times; Anne Millet and Sarah Hilliard three times;
and Marie Cole and Elizabeth Taylor were each paid twice. Of the 324 named
nurses, 103 were listed as previously having received plague-related aid,
38  L ar a Thorpe

although if this aid was due to having been a sufferer of plague or simply
due to financial difficulties caused by the upheaval of the city’s economic
life is impossible to tell. That one third of these nurses was paid from the
parish coffer supports the suggestion that nursing was often a task carried
out by the desperate. Clearly, those in the most destitute circumstances
were those most likely to take up nursing and those condemned to repeat
this undoubtedly unpleasant and dangerous task.
However, comparing St. Margaret’s records to the Hearth Tax returns
allows for an even more vibrant and varied picture. For one thing, many
comfortable and even affluent women served as nurses during the epidemic.
Mary Snow lived in a St. Peter’s Street home of six hearths, while Katherine
Lewis lived in a house of eight hearths on Bell Court. Making connections
between nurses and possible husbands listed in the Hearth Tax provides a
picture that is even more diverse. Married women of considerable means
took on the role of plague nurse in 1665. Elizabeth Cuthbert’s potential home
of nine hearths in Bow Street was likely very comfortable; Dorothy Heard,
possibly the wife of Robert Heard, lived in an enormous Round Yard home
with a full 14 hearths. That being said, nursing tasks were far more likely
to be carried out by the poor and the widowed. Of these women, only Mary
Snow and Katherine Lewis—unmarried women—were paid for nursing
more than once during the epidemic, with Mary Snow nursing on three
occasions and Katherine Lewis on two. The married women, on the other
hand, were each paid only once, perhaps for close friends and neighbours
struck down by plague. 42 Overwhelmingly, poor and single women were
those forced to take on the precarious work of plague nursing.
St. Margaret’s parish records also suggest that many of the women who
served as plague nurses during the 1665 epidemic were experienced medical
caregivers. While ‘nursing’ in the early modern period could apply to a vari-
ety of tasks, varying from the medical care given by nurses in hospitals,43 to
washing, cleaning, or looking after orphaned children or bedridden adults, 44
in the parish of St. Margaret’s, churchwardens made a clear distinction
between these tasks. For example, in January 1666, Margery Jones was paid
for ‘looking to the Widd Twine being vizited’, and another nurse was paid
for looking after the Yates family and the ‘washing of Linnen’. 45 That each of
the women paid for attending to the parish’s plague sick were consistently

42 Champion, London’s Dreadful Visitation, 94.

43 Pelling, ‘Nurses and Nursekeepers’, 188.
44 Williams, ‘Caring for the Sick Poor’, 152.
45 WCL, SMW/E/1/47.
‘At the merc y of a str ange woman’  39

referred to and labelled as a ‘nurse’ is significant, implying that there was a

medical element to their care that went beyond the basic tasks of cleaning,
cooking, and watching. Moreover, women with proven medical experience
were among of the ranks of St. Margaret’s nurses. Jane Allaway was paid for
nursing five times throughout the epidemic; on two other occasions, the
parish paid her for her services as a midwife. Jane Allaway is a vivid example
of Harkness’s assertion that women played established roles in healthcare
in early modern London.
The records of St. Margaret’s, Westminster, and the Hearth Tax combined
show that the nurses of the parish came from a variety of backgrounds, but
were most likely and most often single heads of household living in poverty.
The records of St. Bride’s, Fleet Street, can show us more about the patients
nursed by parish nurses during the Great Plague of 1665. The parish of St.
Bride’s, located just outside the western walls of the City, which, unlike St.
Margaret’s, did not have clusters of the extremely rich to balance out the
socioeconomic backgrounds of its inhabitants, had an average number of
hearths per dwelling of just 3.66.46 There, the parish’s churchwarden, Henry
Clarke, recorded details about the parish’s enforcement of quarantine in a
separate account book, just as in the parish of St. Margaret’s. However, this
record of payments for the good of the visited only survives for the period
of about a week in September 1665. The information included for this week
provides a vibrant picture of a parish under strain. Warders and even bearers
are mentioned by name; nurses are, with just one exception, never named.
This detail suggests the premium the parish placed not only on male work,
but also on work that filled the parish’s most pressing demands: the burial
of the dead and the quarantine of the sick. In St. Bride’s, the care of the sick
takes the back burner to these more immediate demands. The fact that
the churchwarden indicates a nurse by the family she cared for and their
house’s location—for example, payments are made to ‘Whiteheads nurse
george Alley’, ‘To Coopers nurse in poping alley for one weeke’ and ‘to a
nurse at Lovells milke yard’—further suggests the idea that the officials
of St. Bride’s were more concerned about the location and containment of
plague cases than about the details of sick care. 47
By comparing the streets at which parish plague nurses were assigned
with the 1666 Hearth Tax Returns, we can broadly reconstruct the economic
backgrounds of the visited sick in St. Bride’s. In this particularly deprived

46 ‘London Hearth Tax: City of London and Middlesex, 1666’.

47 London Metropolitan Archives [hereafter LMA], St. Bride’s Churchwardens’ account books
1639–1869, P69/BRI/B/016.
40  L ar a Thorpe

parish, those streets described as having a nurse stationed to them had fewer
than three average hearths; no inhabitants on streets with 4.5 hearths on
average was recorded as receiving nursing care. Indeed, only three streets
with more than four average hearths received any care in these records. In
St. Bride’s, then, the poor were absolutely those most likely to be assigned
nursing care from the parish. 48
This shows that, while the polemicists of the printed debate about
quarantine objected to the strangeness of plague nurses, these women
were actually most often caring for fellow pensioners: people of a similar
socioeconomic background. As Williams has observed, the advantage of the
poor law system of healthcare was that the poorer people were cared for,
often in an intimate way, by ‘people of a similar class and outlook’.49 Plague
nursing, in 1665, constituted an important success of early modern London’s
healthcare system: as I have demonstrated, the poorest women of the parish
received payment for treating patients from a similar economic background.
The polemic devoted to denouncing quarantine, then, attributed the crimes
of quarantine to the plague nurses assigned to shut up households.
The Middlesex Sessions Records from 1665 demonstrate that no plague
nurse was charged with theft or murder that year. However, the escalation
of burglaries in London in 1665 bears out Champion’s observation that
the new economy of the metropolis, now focused on the enforcement of
quarantine and public health policy, was so detrimental to some that they
were driven to crime for survival.50 Many of the perpetrators, particularly
during the seasonal peak of the epidemic from June to October, were women
from the same socioeconomic background as St. Margaret’s plague nurses.
For example, in September Elizabeth Moyes and Elizabeth Collier were
tried for stealing the goods of ‘Doctor Parks lately dead of the Plague’.51 In
October, Isabella Petty of Whitechapel and Elizabeth Ellis of St. Giles in
the Fields were separately brought to answer for their theft of the goods in
the houses of recent plague dead.52 Elizabeth Williams helped three men
ransack a house in the parish of St. Botolph without Aldgate.53 The ubiquity
of lower-class women in reported burglary cases suggests that nurses, from
the same socioeconomic backgrounds as the accused, were painted with
the same broad brush. There was a prevailing bias against poor women in

48 ‘London Hearth Tax: City of London and Middlesex, 1666’.

49 Williams, ‘Caring for the Sick Poor’, 167.
50 Champion, London’s Dreadful Visitation, 91–92.
51 ‘Middlesex Sessions Rolls: 1665’.
52 ‘Middlesex Sessions Rolls: 1665’.
53 ‘Middlesex Sessions Rolls: 1665’.
‘At the merc y of a str ange woman’  41

early modern London. Jeremy Boulton has observed that female-headed

households were overrepresented in those considered poor, and could be
prevented from settling in a particular area due to their perceived vulnerable
socioeconomic positioning.54 An established distrust and prejudice against
poor women led to their being cast in a role that equated their poverty with
low morals and the burden they placed on the parish coffers.
Undoubtedly, many objected to plague nurses and other parish plague
workers due to their close, daily proximity with plague, as Munkhoff has
suggested.55 This is vividly exemplified by the case of several women receiving
payment from the parish of St. Bride’s, Fleet Street for ‘searching’ the dead to
determine cause of death. Parishioners had voiced concerns about the fact that
these women stood in the streets smoking and gossiping after performing their
duties; the churchwarden warned them to ‘keepe within Doores as much as
they can’.56 Restricting the visibility of these women, who, like plague nurses,
were obvious reminders of the disease they treated and diagnosed, assuaged
fears that they would spread the infection, intentionally or by accident.
The plague nurses of London’s 1665 epidemic were vilified in print for
being women on the edge. Their close association with quarantine; the
fact that they treated plague, a disease of the poor; the reality that they
nursed because they were poor; and the frequent involvement of women
of a similar socioeconomic status in burglaries during the 1665 epidemic,
ensured that they were easy prey for polemists who objected to quarantine.
In reality, however, these nurses were women of proven medical experience
and expertise who were providing care for other pensioners; indeed, the
care of these nurses was the only medical and pastoral provision many of
these patients would receive.

Conclusion

This chapter has broadened our understanding of plague nursing during the
Great Plague of 1665. Polemicists and male medical practitioners painted
a horrifying and sensational picture of the women who served as parish
plague nurses, accusing them of sub-standard care, theft, and murder. In
reality, many of these complaints turned nurses into the personification
of quarantine: a hotly contested issue during the epidemic. Polemicists

54 Boulton, Neighborhood and Society, 127–129.

55 Munkhoff, ‘Searchers of the Dead’, 16.
56 LMA, St. Bride’s Vestry Minute Books 1644–1665, 1681–1937, P69/BRI/B/001.
42  L ar a Thorpe

complained that quarantine caused unnecessary deaths and robbed those

‘shut up’ of the means to make a living; in parallel, nurses were accused of
spreading disease, murdering their patients, and making off with infected
goods. Other complaints about nurses focused on their role as a stranger,
emphasizing their unknown medical knowledge. While objections to nurses
were rooted in their strangeness, and their proximity to disease, much was
directed at their social origins and class. As one pamphleteer commented,
‘the Nurses […] are the off-scouring of the City’.57
These criticisms, however, had no effect on the success of the system as
it was practised in London’s parishes. The records of St. Margaret’s, West-
minster have allowed me to describe the typical background of the plague
nurse. While some nurses appear to have been economically privileged,
these women were typically paid only once during the epidemic, suggesting
that they volunteered to care for friends and family members. The women
who nursed more frequently were those from deprived circumstances;
the economic upheaval of plague forced them to take on the precarious
work of treating their fellow parishioners. The account books of St. Bride’s
demonstrate that plague patients receiving care subsidised by the parish
were from similar socioeconomic circumstances. The real triumph of the
parish system of public health was that it allowed the parish’s poorest to
receive skilled and experienced medical care from nurses with a similar
background and attitude.

Works Cited

Primary Sources

Clarke, Thomas. Meditations In my Confinement, When my House was Visited with

the Sickness: in April, May and June, 1666. In which time I buried two children,
and had three more of my family sick. London, 1666. Wing C4562.
Hodges, Nathaniel. Loimologia: Or, an historical account of the plague in London
in 1665: with precautionary directions against the like contagion. London, 1721.
Goldsmiths’ 6067.
‘London Hearth Tax: City of London and Middlesex, 1666’. British History Online.
2011. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/london-hearth-tax/london-mddx/1666.
London Metropolitan Archives, St. Bride’s Churchwardens’ account books
1639–1869, P69/BRI/B/016.

57 The Shutting Up of Infected Houses, 9.

‘At the merc y of a str ange woman’  43

London Metropolitan Archives, St. Bride’s Vestry Minute Books 1644–1665, 1681–1937,
P69/BRI/B/001.
‘Middlesex Sessions Rolls: 1665’. In Middlesex County Records. Volume 3: 1625–67,
edited by John Cordy Jeaffreson, 363–381. London, 1888. British History Online.
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/middx-county-records/vol3/pp363-381.
The National Archives, Kew. State Papers, PC 2/58.
Rules and Orders to be Observed by all justices of peace, mayors, bayliffs, and other
officers, for prevention of the spreading of the infection of the plague. Published
by his Majesties special command. London, 1666. Wing E819.
The Shutting Up of Infected Houses as it is practised in England soberly debated.
London, 1665. Wing S3717.
Vincent, Thomas. Gods Terrible Voice in the City. London, 1667. Wing V440.
Westminster City Library, Churchwardens’ accounts in relation to the plague,
SMW/E/147.

Secondary Sources

Boulton, Jeremy. Neighbourhood and Society: A London Suburb in the Seventeenth

Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Boulton, Jeremy. ‘Welfare Systems and the Parish Nurse in Early Modern London,
1650–1725’. Family & Community History 10, no. 2 (2007): 127–151.
Champion, J.A.I. London’s Dreadful Visitation: The Social Geography of the Great
Plague in 1665. London: Centre for Metropolitan History, 1995.
Grell, Ole Peter, and Andrew Cunningham. ‘The Reformation and Changes in
Welfare Provision in Early Modern Northern Europe’. In Healthcare and Poor
Relief in Protestant Europe 1500–1700, edited by Ole Peter Grell and Andrew
Cunningham, 1–42. London: Routledge, 1997.
Harkness, Deborah E. ‘View from the Streets: Women and Medical Work in
­Elizabethan London’. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 82, no. 1 (2008): 52–85.
Mortimer, Ian. The Dying and the Doctors: The Medical Revolution in Seventeenth-
Century England. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2004.
Munkhoff, Richelle. ‘Poor Women and Parish Public Health in Sixteenth-Century
London’. Renaissance Studies 28, no. 4 (2014): 579–596.
Munkhoff, Richelle. ‘Reckoning Death: Women Searchers and the Bills of Mortality
in Early Modern London’. In Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval
and Early Modern England, edited by Jennifer C. Vaught, 119–134. Farnham:
Ashgate, 2010.
Munkhoff, Richelle. ‘Searchers of the Dead: Authority, Marginality, and the
­Interpretation of Plague in England 1574–1665’. Gender & History 11, no. 1 (1999):
1–29.
44  L ar a Thorpe

Pelling, Margaret. ‘Nurses and Nursekeepers: Problems of Identification in the

Early Modern Period’. In The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Occupations, and
the Urban Poor in Early Modern England, edited by Margaret Pelling, 179–202.
London: Longman, 1998.
Slack, Paul. ‘Metropolitan Governments in Crisis: The Response to Plague’. In
London 1500–1700: The Making of the Metropolis, edited by A.L. Beier and Roger
Finlay, 60–81. Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1986.
Slack, Paul. ‘The Responses to Plague in Early Modern England: Public Policies and
their Consequences’. In Famine, Disease and the Social Order in Early Modern
Society, edited by John Walter and Roger Schofield, 167–188. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1989.
Stolberg, Michael, Experiencing Illness and the Sick Body in Early Modern Europe.
Translated by Leonhard Unglaub and Logan Kennedy. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011.
Wear, Andrew. ‘Caring for the Sick Poor in St Bartholomew’s Exchange: 1580–1676’.
Medical History Supplement 11 (1991): 41–60.
Williams, Samantha. ‘Caring for the Sick Poor: Poor Law Nurses in Bedfordshire, c.
1770–1834’. In Women, Work, and Wages in England, 1600–1850, edited by Penelope
Lane, Neil Raven, and K.D.M. Snell, 141–170. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2004.

About the author

Lara Thorpe received her PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London.
Her thesis examined medical responses to the Great Plague of 1665. Her
wider research interests include early modern English epidemics, venereal
disease, proprietary medicine, kitchen physick, chemistry, midwifery, and
the role of gender in the provisioning of medical care.
3. Chemistry, Medicine, and Beauty on
the Edge: Marie Meurdrac
Sarah Gordon

Abstract
Marie Meurdrac (1610–1680) was a self-taught chemist who published
an early chemistry textbook. Unique in seventeenth-century France,
Meurdrac had her own laboratory where she conducted experiments,
taught private courses to women, and wrote La Chymie charitable et facile,
en faveur des dames. The little-studied manual addresses a wide range
of topics, from technical distillation to cosmetics. This chapter argues
that the textbook is as much a treatise on the education of women as it
is a treatise on chemical principles and processes. Meurdrac’s powerful
preface advocates for equality in education, and she discusses her own
learning process and chemical experiments. Her voice is heard: giving
voice to the otherwise voiceless women of science in this period.

Keywords: women in science; education; chemistry

From laudanum to lipstick, housewife and self-taught chemist Marie

Meurdrac (1610–1680) taught French women practical chemical recipes
along with organic chemistry principles and procedures. With her chemistry
textbook, Meurdrac openly challenged societal norms. Her goal was to give
women access to science. This chapter argues that Marie Meurdrac situates
herself on the edge of the early modern scientific community because, as
she suggests, both her gender and her chosen scientific discipline are on
the edge of science.1 The analysis below demonstrates how Meurdrac’s

1 Even until the twentieth century, women laboratory scientists still found themselves in
male-dominated disciplines, despite the much later case of Marie Curie, as the survey of female
scientists in Abir-Am and Outram, Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives, demonstrates.

Hopkins, L. and A. Norrie (eds.), Women on the Edge in Early Modern Europe, Amsterdam University
Press, 2019.
doi 10.5117/9789462987500/ch03
46 Sar ah Gordon

work is disruptive, crossing the lines of gender roles, generic conventions,

academic traditions, and scientific norms. Throughout the seventeenth
century, relatively few European women found themselves even on the
outskirts of science, especially in the fields of chemistry and medicine.2
Those women who did attempt to insert themselves within the male
scientific circles were often criticized or even mocked, as represented in
seventeenth-century French literature, theatre, and philosophy. Very few
women studied chemistry, medicine, natural philosophy, biology, or other
related sciences formally, if at all, and the few who did were mostly unknown,
self-taught practitioners. At least one self-taught female chemist, Meurdrac,
decided on her own that women needed a textbook covering chemistry
principles and practical applications, writing one of the first chemistry
textbooks, and the first by a female author.3 Because even bourgeois and
aristocratic women were not included in formal scientific education at
university, Meurdrac explains that she endeavoured to provide accessible
written knowledge and informal hands-on training in chemistry, botany,
pharmacology, and medicine, as well as in cosmetics. Only a few studies
in the history of science and medicine mention her work and do not focus
on her preface, which addresses gender equality and scientific education
for women. This chapter fills that gap in the scholarship.
There were spaces for women’s learning in the seventeenth century,
of course, but Marie Meurdrac wanted to make the laboratory a space
for women as well. She was not content to remain in the female space of
what would become the enlightened intellectual women’s salons of Paris,
debating philosophical and literary topics with other eloquent, self-educated
women. For her, actions spoke louder than words. Her textbook reveals
she was not only learned in natural philosophy, but also interested in

2 Jean-Pierre Poirier, Histoire des femmes de science en France, includes Meurdrac as a significant
figure in his survey of the history of women in science in Ancien Régime France. Eric Sartori’s
Histoire des femmes scientifiques views her as influential in the ‘vulgarization’ of chemistry and
pharmacy. On the other side of the Channel, several women made significant contributions in
science and philosophy to the Royal Society and beyond, as demonstrated in Women, Science and
Medicine 1500–1700, particularly in Hunter’s chapter, ‘Women and Domestic Medicine’, which
is concerned with what Hunter calls ‘lady experimenters’ and women’s domestic medicine,
focusing on a trend of women publishing in this area in the 1650s in England.
3 Being an autodidact in this period meant extensive experimentation and invention, in
addition to reliance on existing traditions (Hunter, ‘Sisters of the Royal Society’). In seventeenth-
century Britain, noblewomen Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673) and Anne Conway (1631–1679) were
also autodidacts, and, as according to Parageau’s research, ‘Without any method or sustained
pedagogical guidance, they had to invent their own conception and practice of science’ (‘Auto
Didacticism and the Construction of Scientific Discourse in Early Modern England’, 4).
Chemistry, Medicine, and Beaut y on the Edge: Marie Meurdr ac 47

hands-on experimentalism. Simply put, she was not afraid to get her hands
dirty, to experiment, to install laboratory equipment, and to work with
open flames and volatile chemicals. It would have been extremely rare in
mid-seventeenth-century Europe for a female to have her own laboratory,
with expensive specialist equipment for laboratory experimentation and
pharmaceutical composition.4 Contrary to what one might perhaps expect
in this period, Meurdrac was not an assistant to a male scientist, as were
many other women in the eighteenth century and beyond who worked
in male-run laboratories, or assisted their husbands.5 In her preface, she
describes that in the private space of her home laboratory, she discreetly
taught private courses in chemistry, botanical distillation, and chemical
medicine, because such courses were not available to women in a formal
academic setting. Like scientists working in medical chemistry today, her
goal was to isolate medicinal agents in plants, to analyse new compounds,
and to create pharmaceuticals. Meurdrac’s textbook reveals that she used
her personal laboratory to teach herself, to teach others, to codify the pro-
cesses of distillation, and remarkably, to record the results of original and
reproduced chemical experiments. In addition, she had a charity apothecary
practice, in which she advised others on medicines and their indications,
even prescribing them and providing them for those living in poverty, all
the while recording the medicines’ efficacy.
Published in Paris first in 1656, Meurdrac’s La Chymie charitable et facile
en faveur des dames, or literally translated, ‘Charitable and Easy Chemistry,
Especially for Women’, was a treatise on chemistry that covered equipment,
techniques, chemical properties of various substances both vegetable and
mineral, and finally, detailed recipes for cosmetics and medical remedies.
The title is often translated into English as ‘Useful and Easy Chemistry,
for the Benefit of Ladies’. Though the text includes practical instruction
written with detailed steps and clear language, it is far from easy, and it is
much more than a mere recipe collection, and represents one of the first
textbooks in chemistry. It is nearly impossible to definitively label the

4 In one of the few technical studies of Meurdrac, Solsana-Pairó, ‘Los instrumentos de vidrio
de Nicaise Le Fèvre y Marie Meurdrac’, provides a useful overview and historical context of the
types of glassware that would have been used by Meurdrac, Le Fèvre, and their contemporaries.
5 See Rayner-Canham and Rayner-Canham, Women in Chemistry, 13–25, for a discussion
of the roles of chemistry assistants and female chemist assistants of the Paris salon culture.
Wiesner-Hanks, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 168, suggests that women who
were wives or relatives of scientists (such as astronomers) also made their own observations
and findings of their own; her study does not cover Meurdrac, but does deal with gender and
power in science in this period.
48 Sar ah Gordon

genre of Meurdrac’s work. In one sense, it is as much a treatise on equitable

education for women as it is a treatise on chemistry.
Meurdrac’s epistolary preface appears to be proactively responding to
contemporary views of women in education and patriarchal scientific
professions, continuing the debate raised since the Middle Ages in the
ongoing literary and philosophical Querelle des Femmes phenomenon.6
Meurdrac’s remark situates her on one side of this centuries-long literary
war of the sexes. She was truly an exception, because

If the definition of what is to be an educated woman is to be a woman

educated like a man, then by definition there would be very few educated
women in early modern Europe. Thus, any history of women’s education
following such guidelines will be a history of exceptional women, those
women who, in spite of institutional impediments, attained an educational
training similar to that of a man’s.7

Limited education for women and gender bias continued to be ubiquitous

in the educational discourse of the seventeenth century. Even in Rous-
seau’s later Emile: A Treatise on Education (1762), part fictional novel, part
philosophical treatise, published decades after Meurdrac’s textbook was
circulating, the French Enlightenment philosopher still claimed that women
could not understand abstract concepts. Furthermore, Rousseau suggests
that women did not have a mind for their own scientific research, and could
only really act as assistants to male researchers:

The quest for abstract and speculative truths, principles, and axioms in
the sciences, for everything that tends to generalize ideas, is not within
the competence of women. All their studies ought to be related to prac-
tice. It is for them to apply the principles man has found, and to make
the observations, which lead man to the establishment of principles.
Regarding what is not immediately connected with their duties, all the
reflections of women ought to be directed to the study of men or to the
pleasing kinds of knowledge that have only taste as their aim; for, as
regards works of genius, they are out of the reach of women. […] Nor do

6 The Querelle des Femmes was a pre-feminist phenomenon dating approximately from
the end of the fifteenth century through the seventeenth century in Europe. In this period, a
number of literary and philosophical texts in French and Latin, many by women, debated the
superiority of the sexes, raised questions of nature versus nurture, and called into question
established views on gender.
7 Whitehead, Women’s Education in Early Modern Europe, x.
Chemistry, Medicine, and Beaut y on the Edge: Marie Meurdr ac 49

women have sufficient precision and attention to succeed at the exact

sciences.8

Rousseau’s gender discrimination was normalized in Meurdrac’s day; in

particular, the notion that women were considered more pragmatic, less
theoretical, and less exact in their thinking.9 Meurdrac’s prefatory letter
explicitly attacks this normalized sexist view of women’s aptitudes in science,
and the text provides examples of the observations, principles, and practical
knowledge she gained through her independent scientific research.
Rousseau’s Émile situates women as would-be assistants to men, as
those who merely make observations or carry out practical hands-on
work. Certainly, many French female chemists did start or continue their
careers acting as educated assistants or trained technicians in laboratories,
such as the later examples of Mary Anne Paulze Lavoisier (born in 1719),10
or Claudine Picardet (born 1735, mostly a translator of scientific texts);
however, this was not the case years earlier for the fiercely independent
Meurdrac. Moreover, contrary to Rousseau’s condemnations of women’s
minds as limited to the practical and the imprecise, Meurdrac includes
theories and principles in her text as well, noting that it is without the help
of any male counterpart.
Meurdrac was not the only woman in mid-seventeenth-century Europe
to advocate for the education of women, of course. In the Netherlands, Anna
Maria van Schurman (1607–1678) published Whether a Christian Woman
Should Be Educated (1638) and The Learned Maid, Or Whether A Maid May
Be A Scholar, A Logick Exercise (1659).11 Parisian novelist Marie de Gournay
(1565–1645), an associate of essayist Michel de Montaigne, penned Égalité
des Hommes et des Femmes (1622) (Equality of Men and Women), arguing
that women’s achievements would be equal to men’s if they were given
equal education, and Meurdrac echoes this argument in her own preface.
Moreover, though focusing more on the arts, humanities, and languages,
these two roughly contemporary treatises mention the scientific education
of women, both practical and theoretical.

8 Rousseau, Émile, 386–387.

9 The biographies of seventeenth-century women by Natalie Zemon Davis also stand in stark
opposition to Rousseau’s contemporary condemnation of women’s roles and minds.
10 Poirier, Lavoisier: Chemist, Biologist, Economist, covers the role of the later eighteenth-century
chemist and economist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier’s wife as an influential figure in science in
her own right.
11 Most of her extant publications and correspondence with contemporaries have been edited
and translated by Joyce Irwin, in Schurman, Whether a Christian Woman Should Be Educated.
50 Sar ah Gordon

Greater socio-cultural context to Meurdrac’s work may be found in

seventeenth-century French theatre. For instance, Molière’s play, Les Femmes
savantes, performed in Paris in 1672, when Meurdrac’s Chymie was still
being reprinted posthumously in new editions and translations, still depicts
education for women—and especially female autodidacts—in a negative
light.12 It is highly derisory of female philosophers and scientists, it cautions
against exaggerated préciosité,13 and is echoed later in Rousseau’s treatise on
education. Molière’s social satire mocks many groups, and here he ridicules
les femmes précieuses, a stereotype of a group of increasingly educated
intellectual women in France, of which Marie Meurdrac no doubt would have
been considered an example in the eyes of Molière’s audience. Chemistry is
represented in this play as part of a charlatan alchemy practice, or at best, as
a burgeoning pseudo-learned tradition. Such negative dramatic and literary
representations of learned women or women scientists provide evidence of
the oppressive context in which Meurdrac indeed was bravely going out on a
limb in publishing a volume of chemical and medical education for women.
The frontispiece in the early French printed editions refers to the author
as ‘Demoiselle M. M.’, highlighting her gender. Very few biographical details
are known for Meurdrac. Daughter of a rural notary and registrar, Marie
Meurdrac was an upper-middle- class woman who lived in the suburbs of
Paris (Mandres). She was married to Henri de Vibrac, an upper-middle-class
military man, who was a high-ranking artillery commander in the guard
unit of Charles de Valois, Duke of Angoulême. She was a close friend to the
influential intellectual Comtesse de Guiche. Meurdrac’s sister, Madame de La
Guette, was also an educated author, and had her Mémoire published in 1681.14
Already positioned on the edge, as the only scientist in the family, Meurdrac

12 The cursory study in Bishop and DeLoach, ‘Marie Meurdrac’, suggests there is literary-
historical value in reading Meurdrac, as it may in turn shed light on Molière’s theatrical portrayal
of educated women in this period.
13 Though it resists def inition, French préciosité was in part a literary trend and a social
phenomenon in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, a term used to describe upper-class
female intellectuals and authors who valued wit, erudition, education, and sentiment. For a more
thorough characterization of the salons and the précieuses who inhabited their female space,
see, for example: Beasely, Salons, History, and the Creation of Seventeenth-Century France.
14 Further biographical details of Meurdrac’s life and home are given in a historical survey on
French women in science by Poirier, Histoire des femmes de science en France, 170–176. Lougee also
lists Marie Meurdrac in the biographical background on the Meurdrac family. Lougee, ‘“Reason
for the Public to Admire Her”’, has investigated the truths and fictions in her sister’s memoir
and the historical record and issues of social identity and justice (13–30). Recent scholarship
has focused more on the sister Madame de La Guette’s memoires than on Meurdrac’s science;
see, for example: Grélé, ‘Les Mémoires de Madame de La Guette’, among others.
Chemistry, Medicine, and Beaut y on the Edge: Marie Meurdr ac 51

Figure 3.1: Title page of the 1666 reprint of La Chymie charitable et facile, featuring the Privilège du
Roi. Image courtesy of the Science History Institute (Philadephia, PA).

was a non-conformist, a self-proclaimed chemist and botanist trying to get

her foot in the door of the medical and scientific community so that other
women could enter, too. Again, Meurdrac had her own laboratory, a unique
female space for science, on the edge of the scientific community. Incredibly,
it appears that she owned and operated her own furnace, which would
have been very costly and would have required formal written permission
from the authorities.
The book appears to have an aristocratic female patron, as it is dedicated
to the Comtesse de Guiche, and one of the praise poems mentions her.
Moreover, legitimacy is given to its contents and usefulness as it has received
approval from both the medical school in Paris and from the Crown (signified
by its being stamped with the official Privilège du Roi) by the second edition
(Figure 3.1). It is not known to what extent the Comtesse de Guiche acted
as a patroness or commissioned experiments, or whether she may have
funded any of Meurdrac’s chemical equipment, supplies for experiments,
students, or other scientific endeavours, but it is reasonable to assume
she provided both financial and moral support. Certainly, de Guiche built
a community of educated, audacious women around her, and promoted
52 Sar ah Gordon

scientific education among women and publications aimed at autodidact

women, whether aristocrats or upper-middle class.
Andréolle and Molinari discuss the growing relationship between women
and science education in the seventeenth century, using the slightly later
works of English natural philosophers Margaret Cavendish (1661–1717) and
Anne Conway (1631–1679) as examples. Meurdrac would have been writing
in this same context, in which most women did not have a formal education
in the sciences, but instead a few female autodidacts, with indirect access
to scientific knowledge,

wrote treatises of natural philosophy revealing clear knowledge of the

scientific theories of their time. […] As autodidacts, both women could
only glean fragments of knowledge, which they then tried to reassemble
in dialogic and eclectic works.15

This same fragmentary approach to scientific knowledge is clear in the

nature of Meurdrac’s work, which is very much a compilation of practical
instruction, theoretical knowledge, and laboratory detail.

Seventeenth-Century Chemistry

In Meurdrac’s view of natural philosophy, chemistry forms the basis for all
human physiology and medicine. The numerous plant and mineral-based
remedies she includes are varied, and more detailed, than those in medi-
cal commonplace books or household receipt books of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries that would have been circulating in her time. Many
of the available common ingredients, however, were much the same as in
these manuals (including cinnamon, nutmeg, pepper, ginger, rosemary,
hyssop, sage, egg, and dozens of others).
In publishing La Chymie charitable, Meurdrac intended it as a chemis-
try manual for an upper-middle-class female audience. As the examples
discussed show, the manual ranges from technical distillation practices to
medicinal botany and cosmetics. Her writing is highly technical, and this
study shows how her approach is different from other roughly contemporary
manuals (including cookbooks and printed household manuals) by men.

15 Andréolle and Molinari, Women and Science, xiii. Other historians have also studied the
growing numbers of women making contributions to scientific fields in the seventeenth century,
notably several in Zinsser, Men, Women, and the Birthing of Modern Science.
Chemistry, Medicine, and Beaut y on the Edge: Marie Meurdr ac 53

She states that she is concerned with the safety and education of women
who might be engaging in chemistry, distillation, or medicine at home
without training.
With her treatise focusing on chemistry and pharmacy, combined
with other topics of special interest to women, Meurdrac was not only
on the margins of the scientif ic community, but chemistry itself was
also a discipline on the margins in early seventeenth-century Europe.16
Chemistry was not yet considered its own discipline, but was often either
subsumed under other sciences or crafts (such as botany, medicine, or
metallurgy) or often considered merely practical knowledge. It was taught
privately rather than at university in France. Chemistry was somewhat
controversial in the early to mid seventeenth century, and posed a per-
ceived threat to natural philosophy in France and beyond. The Faculté de
Médicine in Paris still opposed teaching chemistry as an official subject
in the medical school when the f irst edition of La Chymie charitable
appeared; however, in the second edition, published in Lyon in 1680, the
book received the printed approval of doctors from the medical school.
Meurdrac also admits that some of her medical recipes came from the
Faculté de Médicine (thereby perhaps unwittingly lending authority to her
work and linking herself to this community). Not yet a fully independent
university science in the mid-seventeenth century, chemistry was taught
in Paris in the botanical gardens of the Jardin du Roi (after 1640), 17 and to
some extent in the facilities of the French Master Apothecaries (founded
in 1629), with courses that were mostly botanical and medical in nature.
Meurdrac’s work appears to be steeped in this botanical tradition as
well. Historian Jean-Pierre Poirier judges that ‘Marie possessed a real
competency of an apothecary’.18
Chemistry was thus perceived as a tradecraft and burgeoning science, of
practical use for physicians, apothecaries, and other practitioners in the early

16 Meurdrac was of course not the only woman on the margins of the scientific community at
this time; Davis, in her Women on the Margins, paints a picture of many women on the margins
of the artisanal-commercial domain in roughly the same period, stepping outside of traditional
roles, including in entomology and education. See also Rayner-Canham and Frenette, ‘Some
French Women Chemists’, for brief biographies of Meurdrac, and other little-studied, later
French women chemists following in the trail blazed by Meurdrac.
17 See Clericuzio, ‘Teaching Chemistry and Chemistry Textbooks in France’, for a portrait of
chemistry teaching in this period in Paris, including the chemical education provided through
the Jardin du Roi, and male-authored chemical textbooks and courses.
18 Poirier, Histoire des femmes de science en France, 172. ‘Marie possède une réelle competence
d’apothicaire’. All translations are my own.
54 Sar ah Gordon

seventeenth century.19 While in the twenty-first century, of course, medicinal

chemistry is regarded as a major—and by nature multidisciplinary—field of
research, it was seen as a lesser, impure science in Meurdrac’s time. Theorems
and laws of chemistry were only beginning to be introduced, and were still
criticized by natural philosophers until the mid to late seventeenth century.
Around 1650–1680, chemistry and chemical compounds were beginning to
be accepted by some natural philosophers and those working in the sciences
as the foundations of nature itself. As interest in chemistry as a legitimate
science grew, so too did the demand for textbooks on the subject. During
this time, chemistry primers may have been used more for practice than
for theoretical education, for example by apothecaries and physicians for
distilling plants and mixing medicines, or by metallurgists as a hands-on
guide to the properties of metals. There was no set course in chemistry
available in public institutions, and no set chemistry curriculum. Another
of Meurdrac’s significant contributions to education was pedagogical, and
she suggests which practical and theoretical topics should be included in
a future curriculum.
Contemporary male-authored chemistry textbooks and treatises include
the influential Tyrocinium chymicum (1610, 1615) by Jean Béguin; the Traicté
de la Chymie (1660), by Nicolas Le Fevre;20 and the medically-oriented, widely
circulated Le Cours de Chymie (1660, 1675) by Nicolas Lemery (contemporary
with later editions of Meurdrac and influential in the field of chemistry
and chemistry education later).21 Like these later texts written by men,
Meurdrac’s also included a laboratory manual of materials and techniques,
as well as a list of chemical terms and symbols. Meurdrac’s chapters are
organized in a similar fashion to that of Béguin’s Latin text (but it does not
appear to be a direct source), beginning with operations, and continuing
with the distillation and use of various vegetable and mineral products.
Being the first female chemist to publish such a textbook is not the only
thing that qualifies Meurdrac as cutting edge, however. She not only explains
necessary instrumentation for isolating substances and chemical com-
pounds, but also details the processes of the purification, synthesis, testing,

19 Space does not allow for a complete history of chemistry in this period. See: Baudet, Histoire
de la chimie, for a more complete list and discussion of Meurdrac’s male contemporaries. Baudet
lists Meurdrac on page 86.
20 From 1751, the work was published as Cours de Chymie, and modern editions have used this
title.
21 For a more complete overview of the history of French chemistry textbooks and primers
preceding and following Meurdrac, see: Clericuzio, ‘Teaching Chemistry and Chemistry Textbooks
in France’.
Chemistry, Medicine, and Beaut y on the Edge: Marie Meurdr ac 55

analysis, and identification of compounds and products. The rudimentary

textbook is thus looking forward to the skills of organic chemists and medici-
nal chemists today. Writing from the margins of the scientific community,
Meurdrac not only provided some of the first accessible scientific education
for women, but also made useful contributions to the fields of chemistry
and medicine, such as revealing for the first time some of the physical
dangers of mercury poisoning and other observations that look forward to
the field of toxicology. She also helped refine existing techniques, such as
the bain marie. Moreover, Meurdrac’s contribution includes making explicit
connections between chemical compositions, physiology, and medicines,
explaining many properties of each substance as well as potential medical
indications for different substances.

Minds Have No Gender

Decreeing boldly on the second page of her preface that ‘minds have no sex’,22
Meurdrac demonstrates that she is aware of her own marginalized position,
and of her need to justify her decision to publish and to educate. It is possible
that she is remarkably forward thinking in redefining the very notion of
gender in this statement. She appears aware that she is defying societal
expectations for her gender. Meurdrac’s textbook crosses the boundaries
of scientific education in the mid 1600s and takes a feminist point of view
in claiming that women and men can be equally good chemists, and that
women need to have access to chemistry and related scientific fields. The
textbook was groundbreaking, but like its female author, still remained on
the margins of the scientific community, because, after all, in the view of
the seventeenth-century scientific establishment, it was merely a textbook
of chemistry for women specifically, ‘in favour of women’.23 Tosi’s brief study
has deemed this a feminist position, and indeed Meurdrac may have been
a feminist before her time.24 In her preface, Meurdrac is also celebrating
difference, and attempting to redefine gender roles and notions of gender.
But above all, her preface speaks to her position as female scientist doing
science for and with other women. Lynette Hunter has suggested that women

22 ‘les esprits n’ont point de sexe’.

23 ‘en faveur des dames’. The translation of this subtitle invites ambiguity in its interpretation,
implying either sexist gender bias or feminist gender advocacy, it can be translated with varying
nuances: in favour of women, for the benefit of women, especially for women, or on behalf of
women.
24 Tosi, ‘La Chymie charitable et facile’, 531. ‘l’auteur se signale par une prise de position feministe’.
56 Sar ah Gordon

may have had different social practices and indeed different scientific
practices in this period.25
The printed chemical compendium is over 330 pages long. Meurdrac’s
preface speaks volumes about women on the edge of the scientific com-
munity, as she justifies her project in chemistry education.26 The preface
is a little-studied but powerful, trailblazing discourse on both gender and
science. First, the female chemist begins with the genesis of her publication
project, explaining that it was purely for her own edification and even
enjoyment but that she hoped to share it with others in wider distribution:

When I began this little treatise, it was for my satisfaction alone, and for
the purpose of not losing the memory of the knowledge I have acquired
through lengthy work and through various often-repeated experiments.
I cannot conceal that upon seeing it completed better than I could have
dared to hope, I was tempted to publish it: but if I had reasons for bringing
it to light, I also had reasons for first keeping it hidden and for not exposing
it to general criticism.27

She is careful to avoid the criticism of the patriarchal scientific community.

She makes several arguments for the validity of her publication, from dif-
ferent angles, anticipating the objections of her male detractors. Meurdrac
claims she delayed publication for about two years, struggling with an
internal debate about the limitations traditionally placed on her gender,
while she considered the potential ramifications of publishing a textbook
as a woman:

25 Hunter, ‘Women and Science in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, 123, explains this
difference: ‘men and women practised science in the same places and with roughly the same
equipment up until the middle of the seventeenth century. However, they practised science for
different reasons, leading them to communicate in different ways, and these different rhetorics
have had a long-term impact on access to scientific power and to the legitimation of particular
methodologies and various kinds of scientific knowledge’.
26 A published translation of this passage appears in the brief biography of Meurdrac in the
broad survey of female chemists by Rayner-Canham and Rayner-Canham, Women in Chemistry,
which refers to her as, ‘one of the last women of alchemy’, 9. Note that her name is misspelled
as ‘Meudrac’ in that publication.
27 Meurdrac, La Chymie charitable et facile, 2. ‘Quand j’ay commence ce petit Traité, ç’a esté
pour ma seule satisfaction, & pour ne pas perdre la memoire des conoissances que je me suis
acquises par un long travail, & par diverses experiences plusieurs fois reïterées. Je ne puis celer
que le voyant achevé mieux que je n’eusse osé esperer, j’ai esté tentée de le publier : mais si
j’avois des raisons pour le metre en lumiere, j’en avois pour le tenir caché, & ne le pas exposer à
la censure generale’.
Chemistry, Medicine, and Beaut y on the Edge: Marie Meurdr ac 57

I remained undecided in the combat for almost two years: I objected to

myself that it was not the profession of a lady to teach; that she should
remain in silence, listen and learn, without bearing witness to her
knowledge: that it is above her station to offer a work to the public and
that her reputation is not ordinarily enhanced by doing so, because men
always mistrust and blame the products that come from a woman’s mind.
Furthermore, perhaps such secrets should not be divulged; and that in
the end, maybe, in of my way of writing, there could well be things that
need to be revised.28

After her disclaimers and defence of her work as a woman, Meurdrac then
argues for the recognition of the equality of women, lamenting that with
the same formal education and support, women’s achievements would
equal those of men. Though she is a self-made intellectual, she argues for
increased availability of more formal academic education of women and
support of their scientific research. Meurdrac notices that some educated
or self-educated women studying and writing in other fields (mostly in the
humanities) and professions have been successful and are as competent as
their male counterparts:

I flattered myself on the other hand that I am not the first woman to have
sent something to press; that minds have no sex, and that if the minds
of women were cultivated like those of men, and that if as much time
and effort were used to instruct women, their minds would be equal;
that our century has seen women born who, in prose, poetry, languages,
philosophy, and even the government of the state, are in no way inferior
in their competence and talent to men.29

28 Meurdrac, La Chymie charitable et facile, 2. ‘Dans ce combat je suis demeurée prés de deux ans
irresoluë : je m’objectois à moy-mesme que ce n’estoit pas la profession d’une femme d’enseigner;
qu’elle doit demeurer dans le silence, écouter & apprendre, sans tesmoigner qu’elle sçait : qu’il
est au dessus d’elle de donner un Ouvrage au public, & que cette reputation n’est pas ordinaire
avantageuse, puisque les hommes méprisent & blasment toujours les productions qui partent
de l’esprit d’une femme. D’ailleurs, que les secrets ne se veulent pas divulguer, & qu’enfin il se
trouveroit, peut-estre, dans ma maniere d’écrire bien des choses à reprendre’.
29 Meurdrac, La Chymie charitable et facile, 2. ‘Je me flattois d’un autre costé de ce que je ne
suis pas la premiere qui ait mis quelque chose sous la Presse; que les Esprits n’ont point de sexe,
& que si ceux des femmes estoient cultives comme ceux des hommes, & que l’on employast
autant de temps & de dépense à les instruire, ils pourroient les égaler: que nostre siecle a veu
naistre des femmes qui pour la Prose, la Poësie, les Langues, la Philosophie, & le gouvernement
mesme de l’Estat, ne cedent en rien à la suffisance, & à la capacité des hommes’.
58 Sar ah Gordon

She is thus aware that her century is a time for change and opportunity
for women in many different academic f ields and professions (and in
fact, between Meurdrac’s time and the Revolution, there was a window
of increased activity and publishing opportunity for female scientists and
writers). Her sister was one of these published writers, with her memoir.
Marie goes on to justify the publication of the medical section of the book,
alluding to concepts of public health, preventative medicine, and women’s
health:

Moreover, this work is useful, because it contains many infallible rem-

edies for the cure of illnesses, for the maintenance of health, and several
rare secrets for the ladies; not only to preserve but also to increase the
advantages that they have received from Nature; it is a curious work,
it teaches faithfully and clearly how to practice them with ease; and it
would be a sin against Charity to hide the knowledge that God has given
me, that may benefit the whole world. That is the sole motive that made
me resolve to let this book leave my hands.30

Interestingly, in her discussion on her thought process pondering whether

or not to publish, she does not mention any encouragement by male or
female colleagues or students—though she does dedicate her work to the
Comtesse de Guiche, and the book is published with praise poems by well-
known supporters, both male and female, lending it some social status and
legitimacy. She appears to be fully self-motivated in her unusually daring
educational enterprise.
Meurdrac’s foreword reveals that she was an experimentalist, who fol-
lowed the new trends and guidelines of what was eventually to grow into the
modern experimental scientific method. She devotes part of her textbook
to the responsibilities and best practices of a scientist. She expresses her
wish to share her observations from the laboratory, and her desire that her
medicines become a benefit to the public. Her respect for the new scientific
method, and her views on gender equality in education, extend beyond the
preface as recurring themes in the primer itself.

30 Meurdrac, La Chymie charitable et facile, 3. ‘De plus, que cet Ouvrage est utile, qu’il contient
quantité de remedes infaillibles pour la guerison des maladies, pour la conservation de la
santé, & plusieurs rares secrets en faveur des Dames; non seulement pour conserver, mais aussi
pour augmenter les avantages qu’elles ont receus de la Nature; qu’il est curieux, qu’il enseigne
fidellement & familierement à les pratiquer avec facilité, & que se seroit pecher contre la Charité
de cacher les connoissances que Die m’a données, qui peuvent profiter à tout le monde. C’est le
seul motif qui m’a fait resoudre à laisser sortir ce Livre de mes mains’.
Chemistry, Medicine, and Beaut y on the Edge: Marie Meurdr ac 59

Later in the foreword text, Meurdrac offers a defence of chemistry, and

distinguishes it from other arts or sciences. Meurdrac tries to demonstrate
that chemistry for her is a discipline, distinct from older, less scientific and
less respectable arts, such as alchemy or home remedy for lay healers. Just as
French chemist Jean Béguin had done a few decades prior, she contributes
her own thoughts on the nature of the field of chemistry, expanding on
prior work such as his. She then makes an important move to distinguish
herself from the less credible alchemists of centuries past, declaring that
she will intentionally omit chemical operations related to gold and silver,
saying that she knows nothing of them and cannot attest to their veracity
(potentially also, gold and silver may have been too expensive for her
middle-class female students to use for their own experiments or home
remedies). Her refusal of such alchemical operation lends legitimacy to
her publication. Meurdrac attempts to disassociate herself from what she
views as a lesser art. In one of the few brief existing scholarly studies on
Meurdrac, Feinstein situates her in the company of lesser-known male
figures in alchemy.31
Pinkus’s comprehensive study of alchemy unpacks the ambiguous
terms ‘alchemy’ and ‘chemistry’ over time, summarizing approaches to
this problematic term thus:

Scholars of alchemy tend to take up one of a number of possible positions

toward their subject: Either alchemy is pre-modern chemistry; or it is a
spiritual, ritualistic discourse or set of theories; it is a form of medico-
pharmacological manipulation of elements; or it is some combination of
the above. The problem of how to distinguish alchemy from (a prehistory
of) chemistry is intimately bound up with the teleological view of the
history of science as a progressive accretion of knowledge. As early as
the seventeenth century, scientists who could not utterly dismiss the
contribution of the alchemists favored the adoption of the word chymistry
to suggest a summation of both ‘old’ and ‘new’ ideas.32

Meurdrac’s work is indeed medico-pharmacological to some extent, but it

is neither spiritual nor ritualistic in nature, and has much more in common
with early modern textbooks than it does with medieval alchemy manuals.
It may, however, be somewhat anachronistic for scholars to attempt to
completely disassociate the notions alchemy and chemistry in this period.

31 Feinstein, ‘Chemistry by a Lady for Ladies’, 59–60.

32 Pinkus, Alchemical Mercury, 4.
60 Sar ah Gordon

Like others working outside of their discipline and outside of their gender
roles, Meurdrac’s work resists the hegemonic, progressive views of the history
of science, and it resists being confined to such definitions. The foreword
and the recorded experiments and observations appear to ally themselves
with a new science.
An advocate of the growing trend of experimentalism, Meurdrac de-
fends her burgeoning new discipline, assures us of the truthfulness of her
own work, and the efficaciousness of her medical remedies in the closing
words of her forward. She relies more on her own empirical testing of
chemical operations and medicines than on written authorities. Some
of her appeals to authority or humble admissions of her own limitations
are admittedly commonplace, but nonetheless show an awareness of her
role in the contemporary scholarly debates surrounding chemistry. Ob-
servation and experimentation were of course growing in importance in
scientific communities in Europe in this period, and Meurdrac’s work was
no exception to this empirical vogue. Her foreword emphasizes that her
experiments followed strict parameters, and that they were often repeated.
She makes a few recognizable, indirect allusions to older medical, chemical,
and alchemical texts; but she often provides her own updated and tested
versions of well-known medical recipes that appeared in countless medical
commonplace books in France and England throughout the mid fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries. However, her textbook is much more organized,
structured, explanatory, and pedagogically oriented than older medical
manuals, and because of this, her work is unique and cannot be lumped
together with medical commonplace books or household manuals.

From Medicine to Make Up

The six sections of Meurdrac’s book also speak to the scientific and mul-
tidisciplinary nature of her experiments. In addition, the sections appear
to include both the practical aspects and the theoretical underpinnings
of chemistry. The divisions Meurdrac makes are: principles, methods and
techniques of chemistry, properties of plants, animal and mineral-based
substances, preparation of medicine, and cosmetics.33 The title of the
first section sets out its pedagogical objectives: ‘teaching the principles,

33 ‘principes, méthodes et techniques de la chimie, propriétés des végétaux, des substances

animales et des minéraux, préparation des médicaments, et cosmétiques’.
Chemistry, Medicine, and Beaut y on the Edge: Marie Meurdr ac 61

operations, vessels, lute,34 furnaces, flames, and weights that are used in
chemistry’.35
On the theoretical side, Meurdrac distinguishes active and passive
principles, looking forward to the principles of modern chemistry. As for
the practical aspect, procedures and materials are all part of the chemistry
course and Meurdrac may have demonstrated proper usage privately to
female students in her laboratory. Needless to say, women were in the
minority in the scientific and education communities, but one assumes
that the interested female audience Meurdrac addresses in her text really
did exist, and were learning from her work in chemistry.
Over two dozen distinct chemical operations (with several that either are
the same or have analogues in chemistry today) and specific types of fires
are described in detail, including at least six types of distillation, cohobation
(repeated distillation), sublimation, rectification, calcination, coagula-
tion, filtration, desiccation, amalgamation, fermentation, torrefaction, and
others. Distillation operations are the most frequently presented with
examples, perhaps the most practical, or the most sought-after, procedures
for Meurdrac’s students.
For most of the remedies in the pharmacopeia section, Meurdrac includes
descriptions of the therapeutic properties of ingredients (again, unlike
many past medical commonplace manuals, which omit explanations of
how ingredients work with human physiology). Part of her experimentation
in medicinal chemistry was to distribute remedies and medicines—from
elixirs to ointments—to those in need in the name of charity, but also in
the name of scientific experimentation on human subjects. Meurdrac offers
treatments for many common ailments and symptoms from haemorrhoids
to jaundice, and even experimental treatments for epilepsy. Perhaps most
impressively, she includes medicines with preparations that would today
be known to include antiseptic and antibiotic qualities in her sections on
wound-care and burn-care. She offers treatments for the plague, small
pox, gout, dysentery, and other major diseases common in that time. Her
recipes include more detailed instructions and physiology than do earlier
sixteenth-century medical manuals in circulation at the time that may have
been her sources. Her medicine is still inscribed in the Paracelsian tradition

34 Lute was a substance used by chemists or alchemists to seal and protect vessels from heat
for distillation, or to line furnaces.
35 ‘Enseignant les Principes, les Operations, les Termes, les Vaisseaux, les Luts, les Feux, les
Fourneaux & les Poids dont on se sert en Chymie’.
62 Sar ah Gordon

and Galenic principles of course, but at times is also quite inventive and
based on her own experimentation with symptoms and remedies.
Meurdrac’s instructions for medicinal therapies distilled from plants,
flowers, fruits, barks in the second section, and remedies mixed from animal
bi-products, ranging from animal fats to honey to bone in the third section,
would also ally her work with the medical community of male physicians and
apothecaries using biological and chemical preparations in their treatments.
Meurdrac’s text treats a full range of illnesses and disease from head to toe,
having more in common with the late medieval and early modern tradition
of written medical commonplace books written by or for male physicians
than it does, for instance, with the more female-specific or female-written
textbooks circulating in her time.36
Chemical properties and various chemical compounds appear in the
fourth section including minerals, salts, sulphuric acid, nitric acid, saltpetre,
and many others, that are characterized. She makes a division between salts,
sulphur, and mercury, harkening back to the Paracelsian movement that
relied on the principle of the balance or harmony in these three elements,
for the tripartite organization of the chemical part of her work.
Recipes in the fifth section range from familiar plant products to more
exotic plant preparations for a variety of therapies, including migraines,
heart palpitations, melancholy, burns, and toothache. There are prepara-
tions from aromatherapy to vermicide to pain-killers such as laudanum,
and those that still follow principles that are used by both traditional and
holistic medicine today. Meurdrac’s preparation for laudanum and other
recipes shared many similarities with the sixteenth-century pharmacopeia
of the Swiss-German Paracelsus (1493–1541). Meurdrac’s chemical theory
and medical materials are very much in line with Paracelsian doctrine as
accepted by her contemporaries.37
Some of the more shocking oils and powders offered in the medicinal
recipe section include medicines made using dried human blood or ground
human bone, or dried slugs, recalling the type of content found in earlier
fifteenth century medical commonplace book recipes. Most of the other

36 Such as Louise Bourgeois’s learned treatises on obstetrical theory and practical midwifery.
See: Perkins, Midwifery and Medicine in Early Modern France.
37 A discussion of Paracelsian chemistry’s supporters and detractors in this period is outside
of the scope of this chapter. See Clericuzio, Elements, Principles, and Corpuscles, 26–35, for
further contextualization of chemistry and natural philosophy in this period, and specifically
a discussion of the status of Paracelsian chemistry and its relation to atomism in this context.
See also the landmark studies on the intellectual history of English and French Paracelsians
by Allen Debus.
Chemistry, Medicine, and Beaut y on the Edge: Marie Meurdr ac 63

medical preparations are in line with contemporary remedies with probably

more effective and more botanical ingredients.
From the mid-sixteenth century through to the mid-seventeenth century,
iatrochemistry, or the art of chemical medicine, was growing in popularity.
Chemistry itself was thought to be a key to understanding medicine, disease,
and human physiology (iatrochemistry was also popular with British chem-
ists, including Robert Boyle). The concept of balance in chemistry and in
the human body was important in the theories of iatrochemistry, and the
distillation of plant and mineral products, and metals, aimed at using their
essence to treat imbalances. Many male chemists in this period attempted
to promote their discipline as the key not only to practical medicine, but
also to natural philosophy, with chemicals as the building blocks of nature.
Meurdrac’s work is largely informed by iatrochemistry.
The more gendered final section of the manual includes cosmetics and
what might be considered dermatology today. Cosmetics—including hair
colouring, skincare, lipstick, rouge, and medicinal perfume—feature in the
end of the work. Again, she gives detailed instructions for the distillation
and isolation of substances found in plants, both for medicinal and cosmetic
uses, some of which appear to be the first time some of the plant compounds
were isolated, paving the way for Pelletier and other chemists who isolated
plant alkaloid compounds almost a century later. But only after five lengthy
sections on chemical principles and the preparations of herbal medicine
does her manual’s sixth section turn to cosmetics, including treatments for
wrinkles, tooth whitening, hair regrowth, and hair colouring, skin bleaching,
sunscreen lotion, scar treatments, and make up (including rouge, eye liner,
concealer, and others), as a practical application for her chemistry. Some
of her cosmetics are related to the diseases common in her time, such as
waters and creams to treat the scars and marks of smallpox. She is also
interested in women’s health and offers therapies related to menstruation,
lactation, childbirth, and other women’s health issues. Meurdrac states
she has added this section for women, so that they can avoid dangerous
accidents in cosmetics when mixing their own at home, because they do
not yet know enough about chemical compositions.
Conventional praise poems that appear following the foreword highlight
her talents and attest to impact and reception of her work. Du Pelletier’s
prefatory sonnet begins, ‘Your book shows us marvellous effects’.38 Moreo-
ver, this sonnet and others allude to Meurdrac’s discoveries, inventions,
or revelations of secrets: ‘The secrets of your book are laid bare on each

38 ‘Ton livre nous fait voir de merveilleux effets’. Meurdrac, La Chymie charitable et facile, 6.
64 Sar ah Gordon

page’.39 Somewhat tellingly, not all of them refer to her gender, concentrating
instead on her competence and contributions. They almost act as letters of
recommendation for her entry into the scientific and academic communities.
One praises her approach and thinks she makes it look easy and explains
her techniques well. Moreover, one praises her for her ability to discover and
explain in simple language the secrets theories of the ancients. Meurdrac’s
approach is indeed clear and detailed, as this sonnet suggests, and often
jargon-free, aimed at the beginner who requires basic instruction in chemical
compounds, detailed definitions and descriptions, and simple techniques
such as distillation. It is a remarkable contribution to the field of chemistry
that unlike many medical chemical treatises or even cookery books prior to
her work, Meurdrac adds precise quantities and measurements by weight
and volume, times, and temperatures, and equipment or vessels to be used
in the preparation of medicine.
Meurdrac demonstrates an awareness of the high cost of materials and
laboratory supplies, offering advice on where to make affordable purchases,
or how to make substitutions if one is unable to acquire the necessary
materials. If a woman’s place was in the kitchen in this period, Meurdrac
wanted that kitchen to be well equipped with chemistry equipment. She
also invites her readers to her own laboratory if they are unable to conduct
experiments or make her medical recipes at home. 40
Meurdrac invites her readers to contact her personally if they have
questions, or to meet in person if they desire further hands-on personal
instruction in her home laboratory. As in male-dominated laboratories of this
period, growing interest in experimental methodologies meant possibilities
for collaborative work and social networks within the growing scientific
community. Meurdrac attempts to build this female community with the
publication of her textbook, and promises she can reveal to her students
other ‘secrets’ and discoveries. This is not alchemy, so it is not a secret. It
is chemistry, so should be shared and its findings replicated. She goes on
to explicitly guarantee the accuracy of her observations and the quality of
her instruction, by offering to demonstrate her experiments in person. She
assures the reader that the operations that appear in the book have all been

39 ‘Des Secrets que ton Livre explique en chaque page’. Meurdrac, La Chymie charitable et
facile, 7.
40 One scholar mentions Meurdrac and suggests that perhaps for her and for later early modern
women scientists, ‘The association of chemistry with the kitchen gave women a certain confidence
to publish in the field’, Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex?, 113; however, Meurdrac goes out of
her way to set up a legitimate laboratory space, and to explain the need for and proper safe use
of specific chemistry vessels and equipment.
Figure 3.2: Title page of the second edition of La chymie charitable et facile (left), and the book’s
frontispiece, featuring an image of Marie Meurdrac in her laboratory. Images courtesy of
the ­Science History Institute (Philadelphia, PA).

tested, and are tried and true. She promotes communication and shared
results among scientists. Moreover, the publication of her experiments,
results, and replications lent further credibility to her work as a scientist.
As for the contemporary reception of her work, from what little is known,
it is clear the La Chymie charitable became very popular over the next
five decades or longer. Five French editions (1666, 1674, 1680, 1687, and
1711)—three of these editions while she was still alive—as well as at least six
translations into German (between 1674 and 1738), and at least one in Italian
(1682),41 attest to the broad circulation and growing popular reception of the
textbook for women, though it is not known how many women or men were

41 Ray, Daughters of Alchemy, focuses on Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
and mentions Meurdrac, showing that female scientists—and those engaging in what she calls
‘practical alchemy’—were more commonly accepted in Italy than in France in the early modern
period.
66 Sar ah Gordon

using the textbook as a learning tool in their own homes or laboratories.

The 1687 French edition adds a frontispiece with a portrait of the author,
seated on a box of materials in front of shelves full of books and laboratory
equipment including vessels and glass containers for distillation, with this
iconography highlighting the identity and gender of the author, and lending
further authenticity to the text by picturing both written textual authorities
and realistic laboratory materials (Figure 3.2).
In the end, Meurdrac’s voice remains a unique combination of learned
science, educational advocacy, and practical medical and cosmetic instruc-
tion. She is aware that she is on the fringe of the scientific community, and
her preface endeavours to justify both her field and her sex. The structure,
content, level of detail, and scientific methodologies set her work apart from
the traditions of household manuals of the time. She makes a compelling
argument in her foreword for stepping out of the margins and into the labora-
tory to publish a chemistry primer for women. Such an argument from the
seventeenth century is still relevant today, as sexism, gender bias, double
standards, and significant gender pay gaps still exist in science and STEM
fields.42 She celebrates women’s education and female agency. Moreover, when
Meurdrac logs her own laboratory experiments that she conducts ostensibly
on her own or with her own female students, her voice is heard—giving
voice to the often voiceless women of science in this period and beginning
a conversation about gender bias in the scientific community that continues
today. She argues that the mind has no gender and that science should not
either. Despite its author’s initial fears of the reception of a scientific textbook
by a woman, in the decades immediately following its publication, La Chymie
charitable was widely circulated and eventually earned a spot on the shelf
in the chemical education library that was far from marginal.

Works Cited

Primary Sources

Béguin, Jean. Tyrocinium chymicum. Paris, 1610.

Gournay, Marie Jars de. Égalité des Hommes et des Femmes. 1622. Reprint, Paris:
L’Harmattan, 2014.
Le Fevre, Nicolas. Cours de chymie pour servir d’introduction à cette science: Primary
Source Edition. 1660. Reprint, Paris: Nabu, 2014.

42 I extend my thanks to MollyAnne Porter for her input on this chapter.

Chemistry, Medicine, and Beaut y on the Edge: Marie Meurdr ac 67

Lemery, Nicolas. Cours de chymie. Paris, 1675.

Meurdrac, Marie. La Chymie charitable et facile, en faveur des Dames. Edited by
Jean Jacques. Paris: CNRS, 1999.
Molière, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin. Les Femmes savantes. Edited by Georges Couton.
Paris: Folio Classique, 2013.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Émile, or on Education. Translated by Allan Bloom. New
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Schurman, Anna Maria van. Whether a Christian Woman Should Be Educated and
Other Writings from her Intellectual Circle. Translated by Joyce Irwin. Chicago,
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and Science, 17th Century to Present: Pioneers, Activists, and Protagonists, edited
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Cambridge Scholars Press, 2011.
Baudet, Jean. Histoire de la chimie. Paris: De Boeck Supérieur, 2017.
Beasely, Faith. Salons, History, and the Creation of Seventeenth-Century France.
London: Routledge, 2006.
Bishop, Lloyd, and William DeLoach. ‘Marie Meurdrac: First Lady of Chemistry’.
Journal of Chemistry Education 47, no. 6 (1970): 448–449.
Clericuzio, Antonio. Elements, Principles, and Corpuscles: A Study of Atomism and
Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000.
Clericuzio, Antonio. ‘Teaching Chemistry and Chemistry Textbooks in France:
From Beguin to Lemery’. Science and Education 15, no. 2 (2006): 335–355.
Davis, Natalie Zemon. Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives.
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Debus, Allen. The English Paracelsians. New York: Franklin Watts, 1965.
Debus, Allen. The French Paracelsians: The Chemical Challenge to Medical and
Scientific Tradition in Early Modern France. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991.
Feinstein, Sandy. ‘Chemistry by a Lady for Ladies: Education in the Alchemical
Arts’. In Dominant Culture and the Education of Women, edited by Julia Paulk,
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Grélé, Denis. ‘Les Mémoires de Madame de La Guette ou l’art de se reconstruire
une vie’. Neophilogus 95 (2011): 165–175.
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Hunter, Lynette. ‘Sisters of the Royal Society: The Circle of Katharine Jones, Lady
Ranelagh’. In Women, Science and Medicine 1500–1700: Mothers and Sisters of
the Royal Society, edited by Lynette Hunter and Sarah Hutton, 178–197. Stroud:
Sutton, 1997.
Hunter, Lynette. ‘Women and Domestic Medicine: Lady Experimenters 1570–1620’.
In Women, Science and Medicine 1500–1700: Mothers and Sisters of the Royal
Society, edited by Lynette Hunter and Sarah Hutton. 89–107. Stroud: Sutton, 1997.
Hunter, Lynette. ‘Women and Science in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries:
Different Social Practices, Different Textualities, and Different Kinds of Science’.
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123–140. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005.
Hunter, Lynette, and Sarah Hutton, eds. Women, Science and Medicine 1500–1700:
Mothers and Sisters of the Royal Society. Stroud: Sutton, 1997.
Lougee, Caroline Chappell. ‘“Reason for the Public to Admire Her”: Why Madame
De la Guette Published Her Memoirs’. In Going Public: Women and Publishing
in Early Modern France, edited by Elizabeth Goldsmith and Dena Goodman,
13–30. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995.
Parageau, Sandrine. ‘Auto Didacticism and the Construction of Scientific Discourse
in Early Modern England: Margaret Cavendish’s and Anne Conway’s “Intellectual
Bricolage”’. In Women and Science, 17th Century to Present: Pioneers, Activists,
and Protagonists, edited by Donna Spalding Andréolle and Véronique Molinari,
3–17. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2011.
Perkins, Wendy. Midwifery and Medicine in Early Modern France: Louise Bourgeois.
Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996.
Pinkus, Karen. Alchemical Mercury: A Theory of Ambivalence. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2009.
Poirier, Jean-Pierre. Histoire des femmes de science en France: du Moyen Âge à la
Révolution. Paris: Pygmalion, 2002.
Poirier, Jean-Pierre. Lavoisier: Chemist, Biologist, Economist. Translated by Rebecca
Balinski. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998.
Ray, Meredith. Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern
Italy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.
Rayner-Canham, Geoffrey, and H. Frenette. ‘Some French Women Chemists’.
Education in Chemistry 22, no. 6 (1985): 176–178.
Rayner-Canham, Marelene, and Geoffrey Rayner-Canham. Women in Chemistry:
Their Changing Roles from Alchemical Times to the Mid-Twentieth Century.
Philadelphia, PA: Chemical Heritage Foundation, 2001.
Sartori, Eric. Histoire des femmes scientifiques de l’antiquité au XXème siècle. Paris:
Plon, 2006.
Chemistry, Medicine, and Beaut y on the Edge: Marie Meurdr ac 69

Schiebinger, Londa. The Mind Has No Sex?: Women in the Origins of Modern Science.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Solsana-Pairó, Núria. ‘Los instrumentos de vidrio de Nicaise Le Fèvre y Marie
Meurdrac’. Educación química 26, no. 2 (2015): 152–161.
Tosi, Lucia. ‘La Chymie charitable et facile, en faveur des dames, de Marie Meurdrac,
une chimiste du XVIIe siècle’. Chronique de la chimie 2, no. 2 (1999): 531–534.
Whitehead, Barbara. Women’s Education in Early Modern Europe: A History, 1500
to 1800. London: Routledge, 2015.
Wiesner-Hanks, Merry. Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Zinsser, Judith, ed. Men, Women, and the Birthing of Modern Science. DeKalb:
Northern Illinois University Press, 2005.

About the author

Sarah Gordon is Associate Professor of French at Utah State University. She

earned her PhD at Washington University, and her MPhil at the University of
Oxford. Her publications focus on the body, food, and medicine in medieval
and early modern literature and culture. She has been awarded fellowships
from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation, UCLA, and the Huntington Library.
4. Anna Stanislawska’s Orphan Girl of 1685
Autobiography of a Divorce

Lynn Lubamersky

Abstract
Anna Stanisławska wrote an autobiography describing her forced marriage
to a mentally ill man who terrorized her, which she managed to escape.
This chapter analyses the autobiography, often translated as Orphan Girl, to
demonstrate that instead of accepting her fate, Stanisławska used the legal
system, patrons, and family connections to escape. Orphan Girl describes
the strategies she used to extricate herself, and concludes with a forceful
repudiation of the transacting in women. Stanisławska wins a divorce,
though not without loss. Her account reveals a woman of character from a
distant time, but whose desire for liberty and self-determination is timeless.

Keywords: Anna Stanisławska; women; women poets; Poland; marriage;

divorce

In 1685, Anna Stanisławska (1651–1701) wrote an autobiographical epic

poem in which she described her forced marriage to an unbearably violent
and mentally ill man who terrorized and humiliated her: a situation that
her culture expected her to stoically accept. Despite being in this terrible
situation, she prevailed. She managed to escape her husband and to ar-
range a divorce, a feat that made her both a virgin and a divorcée, a status
that cannot be described as anything other than ambiguous. Her case
was so extraordinary that one of the most significant poets of the Polish
Baroque, Jan Andrzej Morsztyn, briefly referred to her situation, describing
Stanisławska as ‘A Maid, for she knows no husband, and yet a wife, For he
lives, he to whom she was married’.1

1 Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, 10.

Hopkins, L. and A. Norrie (eds.), Women on the Edge in Early Modern Europe, Amsterdam University
Press, 2019.
doi 10.5117/9789462987500/ch04
72  Lynn Lubamersk y

Stanisławska’s autobiography of her divorce is a striking document.

With it, she sets forth solid grounds for divorce in a time when divorce
was uncommon, especially in Poland. The poem is unprecedented in its
detailed description of a woman’s strategy to escape a seventeenth-century
marriage, and no other Polish woman published any similar confession
until the twentieth century.2 Even beyond its historical significance, the
author of Orphan Girl shows a level of agency that would be noteworthy
even in a modern woman. Rather than be defeated by her situation,
Stanisławska used the systems of law, of patronage, and her family con-
nections to achieve her not-insignif icant goal: to get out of an abusive
marriage with her property and reputation intact. The autobiography
of her divorce shows that just as in many modern marriages, divorce
left her in relative poverty, and with a husband who felt that he was the
victim rather than the perpetrator. But in the end, she was able to get out
of the marriage, as the court ruled that the marriage was null and void.
Signif icantly, she took the trouble to set down these events, recording
the transactions of her life in print, so that others might learn from her
experience. Anna Stanisławska is a woman of great character who speaks
to us from a distant place and time, but whose desire for liberty and
self-determination is eternal.
In The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe, an extensive and well-
produced series of translated texts from all over Europe, the series’ editor,
Margaret King, recognizes the fact that ‘in early modern Europe, women
began to write and sometimes publish in their native languages, and their
writing established the presence of female voices for the first time in world
history’.3 King notes that Stanisławska’s verse is unique because, ‘to my
knowledge there is no autobiographical account in any European language
of the experience of coerced marriage so complete and powerful as that
of Anna Stanisławska’. 4 Stanisławska’s work is thus significant not only
in the history of Polish letters, but also in the history of European women
in general.

2 It is now possible to access her poem in Polish via the Greater Polish Digital Library (http://
www.wbc.poznan.pl/dlibra/doccontent?id=1307), which is a digitized version of the edition
published in 1935. In addition, there is an extensive article on her contribution to Polish letters
on the blog, Women and History: http://kobietyihistoria.blogspot.com/2013/10/77-postow-anki-s.
html. Of the 76 verses, 29 have been translated into English by Barry Keane.
3 ‘The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe’, http://www.othervoiceineme.com/index.html.
4 King, foreword, xi.
ANNA STANISL AWSK A’S ORPHAN GIRL OF 1685 73

Marriage Against Her Will

Stanisławska began writing Orphan Girl in 1685 at the age of 34, after the
death of her third husband, in an effort to make sense of her life (Figure
4.1).5 Her first person account was written in a 29-verse poem modelled on
Jan Kochanowski’s lament upon the death of his daughter. Kochanowski
was a Polish Renaissance poet who established the Polish literary language,
and is regarded as the greatest Polish poet prior to the nineteenth century.
While Kochanowski’s poem laments his dead child, Stanisławska laments
her own ‘death’—that is, she was metaphorically killed when her father
married her off to a ‘deviant’, despite serious misgivings from the very start.
She ‘contend[s] that we should sing of certitudes: That life will always swipe
the legs from under us […] And having seen Fortune ply its ruthless trade,
I can speak about lives robbed of happiness’.6 By placing Fortune in the
foreground, she shares the popular belief of the age. Fortune is personified,
and her autobiography is the story of both her relationship with her fate,
and her unceasing battle with Fortune.7 In the first stanzas of the poem
she makes clear that even though Fortune made her an orphan, taking her
mother when Anna was an infant (and her brother in his youth), she found
protectors in the nuns who raised her and sheltered her, and in powerful
guardians who watched out for her interests at various points in her life: ‘Yet
the heavens in their goodness, Knowing what a young person needs, Provided
me with a guardian’.8 By labelling herself an orphan, and underlining the
importance of protection afforded by influential guardians and patrons,
she emphasizes that she is a part of a society in which nobody achieved
anything in the legal, political, or economic sphere without the help of
influential friends.9
But over the course of her lamentations, Stanisławska admits that it was
not Fortune that caused her suffering: its immediate cause was an inattentive
father and a wicked stepmother. She states bluntly: ‘A girl had a callous
father, Who gave her away like barter’.10 Although the English language
translator of Orphan Girl bestowed that title on the work, Stanisławska’s
original title is Transactions. Transactions seems to be a rather boring and
incomprehensible title until one realizes that Stanisławska’s poem is a

5 Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, 12.

6 Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, 18.
7 Popławska, ‘Żalosne treny Anny Stanisławskiej’, 93.
8 Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, 23.
9 Mączak, Klientela, 125.
10 Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, 98.
74  Lynn Lubamersk y

Figure 4.1: Anna Stanisławska. Unknown artist. Oil on canvas. National Museum (Warsaw), MP4310.

manifesto against the transacting in women—their bartering off in marriage

in exchange for economic position and political alliances. Her manifesto is
against the transaction in which she was given in marriage to an abusive
and deviant husband.
Her father married her off to the son of the Castellan of Kraków. The
Castellan of Kraków was one of the most powerful men in the Polish–Lithu-
anian Commonwealth, since he was a member of the Senate, the senior
branch of the Polish Sejm, or Parliament. Her husband was a man she never
called by his real name, Jan Kazimierz Warszycki. Instead, she called him
‘Aesop’, since the Aesop of Antiquity was said to be one of the ugliest men
of all time.11 Stanisławska uses ‘Aesop’ as a kind of shorthand. She refuses
to say her husband’s name because she refuses to allow that he could be her
husband. Rather than writing, ‘He who shall not be named’, or something

11 Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, 7.

ANNA STANISL AWSK A’S ORPHAN GIRL OF 1685 75

similar, she simply calls him ‘Aesop’ to invoke the monster of indescribable
ugliness according to early modern Polish fables (Figure 4.2).12
Many women across time have been married against their will to men
they despised, and many treatises have been written about freedom of choice
in marriage.13 Stanisławska could have accepted her fate and tried to make
the best of it. But, from the very beginning, she makes clear that she is no
ordinary woman, and that she is not writing an ordinary poem. A strong will
and her force for life are the most essential features of Stanisławska that we
are introduced to in her autobiography. She is a woman of action, not dreams.
She is characterized by sobriety and practicality, and lacking a willingness
to engage in fantasy or feminine submission.14 She would prepare a legal
case for dissolution of the marriage, and she would use the legal system to
present her case to the Papal Nuncio by establishing a strong case via solid
evidence that this forced marriage violated all the standards for contracting
a valid marriage. After making her case for the invalidity of the marriage, she
next describes the strategies she used to extricate herself from the marriage
and obtain a divorce, and then finally she concludes by recapitulating the
most damning pieces of evidence in this manifesto against forced marriage.
She titles each one of the 29 verses in order to encapsulate its essence, and
by the fourth verse, there is a clear pattern of evidence establishing that her
marriage was invalid, because she did not consent to it, and that her husband
was incapable of contracting a valid marriage. According to canon law, there
were several requirements for a valid marriage: that the couple should freely
consent to marry each other, and have no impediments to marriage; that
the couple should be capable of consent (of the age and mental ability); and
that the vows of marriage be stated in the present tense within a church.15
Stanisławska argues that her marriage was never valid because she did not
consent, her husband was mentally ill, the rites were not performed in a
church, and that the marriage was never consummated.16 She titles the fourth
lamentation, ‘I Am to Marry into a House of Deviants’, and describes rather
clearly how ‘I had no wish to marry him’ on the grounds that he was depraved

12 Świderkówna and Skarżyński, Bajki z tematów Ezopa, 4. Available online: http://garazilus-

tracji.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/bajki-z-tematow-ezopa-jerzy-skarzynski.html. On the prevalence
of the Aesop Fable in early modern Poland, see: Brückner, Ezopy Polskie.
13 Freedom of choice in marriage was a well-developed principle of canon law by the medieval
period. For more information on canon law pertaining to freedom of choice in marriage, see:
Sheehan, ‘Choice of Marriage Partner in the Middle Ages’, 157–191.
14 Kotowa, ‘Introduction to Transakcyja’, vi.
15 Noonan, Power to Dissolve, 40.
16 Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, 30.
76  Lynn Lubamersk y

Figure 4.2: ‘Aesop, as depicted in Polish fairy tales’. From Bajki z tematów Ezopa [Fairy Tales on the
Theme of Aesop]. Warsaw: Nasza Ksęgarnia, 1953.

and mentally ill.17 Warszycki’s unsuitability for marriage was expressed rather
graphically. She described how her husband-to-be could not consummate a
marriage to a woman because he was too busy engaging in masturbation and
bestiality: ‘Let him be content enough With pleasures he can give himself.
Lampart [a pig who pleasures himself] would happily make do With his very
own house-trained doe’.18 This casual remark that her husband engages in

17 Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, 27.

18 Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, 26. Scholars of early modern Europe, such as Keith Thomas,
Erica Fudge, Polly Morris, and P. Maxwell-Stewart have investigated bestiality in England and
ANNA STANISL AWSK A’S ORPHAN GIRL OF 1685 77

masturbation and bestiality is not generally something that one would find
in a lady’s writing at this time in history. As Magdalena Ożarska has observed,
‘Since the secrets of one’s bedchamber were not divulged in public by people
of her social standing, Stanisławska’s liberal discussion of issues related to
sexuality is indeed remarkable’.19
Stanisławska was showing her husband in the worst possible light in
order to explain why she should not have had to marry him. In doing so, she
paints a picture of a mentally ill man whose behaviour was so appalling as
to be beyond the limits of social acceptability. Even in a tumultuous society
facing frequent warfare and subsequent devastation, it was important for
her to show that Aesop stood beyond the pale of acceptable behaviour. The
man of the Polish baroque might suffer from a wide array of psychological
and mental illnesses such as depression, manic depression, or other forms
of mania. All of these conditions were grouped in family almanacs and
doctors’ diagnostic manuals under the terms, ‘madness’ or ‘illnesses of the
nerves’.20 She attributed her husband’s mental illness to the fact that he was
ceaselessly and brutally beaten by his father to the point that he was struck
dumb with terror and tongue-tied. She witnessed the extent of the violence
once when her father-in-law visited and was displeased with the state of
the household and he placed the blame at the foot of Aesop:

The old man comes carrying a cane-

A father is looking for his son.
Blind with fury, he shouts and roars.
Stricken with fear, Aesop cowers
Behind the bed […] was it under?
But what bed has offered shelter
From a man so determined
To mete out deserved punishment?
He thrashes Aesop with his cane,
Leaving him stripe-cut to the bone.21

Stanisławska describes another instance when her father-in-law grabbed his

bone-crushing stick, and would have beaten a man to death if others had

concluded that it was a relatively frequently committed crime. Such study has not been done
for the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, but I have no reason to doubt what Stanisławska
has described. See: Thomas, ‘Not Having God Before His Eyes’, 150.
19 Ożarska, ‘Combining a Lament with a Verse Memoir’, 398.
20 Kuchowicz, Człowiek polskiego baroku, 98.
21 Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, 66.
78  Lynn Lubamersk y

not stopped him. So it seems clear that Aesop was mentally impaired, and
perhaps his cognitive issues were rooted in his father’s extremely violent
physical abuse. Nevertheless, Stanisławska establishes beyond a reasonable
doubt that Aesop’s behaviour was deviant.
Despite the fact that Stanisławska fell to her knees and pleaded to her
father that she would die if she had to marry this man, it was all to no avail;
she was forced to submit to her father’s choice and her youth was ‘sold down
the river’. She would be married to ‘the ugliest man [she’d] ever seen! He
hardly knows what’s going on here’, and the days of her bondage began.22
Neither the bride nor the groom was asked for their consent in the marriage.
Stanisławska continually reiterates that Aesop was mentally ill, and therefore
incapable of valid consent to marry, since ‘As he himself declares aloud: “I knew
nothing at all about Where we were going to today, Or why we were taking this
journey”’.23 Aesop was thus unaware of where he was and what he was doing
during the marriage ceremony, and this continued into the wedding feast that
followed. He therefore could not be considered mentally competent to consent.
In the early modern Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, elite wedding
feasts were opulent, and would last for several days. The feast was accom-
panied by music, and was followed by dancing that usually went on until
late into the night. The rule was to repeat the pattern of feasting every night
for three days. But Aesop was unable to fulfil any of the physical and social
expectations of a groom at the wedding feast. The groom was expected to
dance with his bride but he was unable to dance with her:

They are putting aside the chairs

And are preparing for the dance.
Having been told to act his role,
He is truly a sight to behold.
He could be a jester on stage,
Dancing as he is in his delia24
He’s a man too small for dancing;
More a partridge that likes prancing.25

22 Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, 33.

23 Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, 32.
24 A cloak worn by Polish noblemen.
25 Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, 36. Karolina Targosz, one of the foremost authorities on Polish
female writers of the early modern period, has highlighted how this framing of her husband’s
behaviour and description of him is a theatrical metaphor that would have carried weight to
those hearing the description. The metaphors and comparisons are evidence of her very real
contacts and experience with theatre. See: Targosz, Sawantki w Polsce XVII wieku, 302.
ANNA STANISL AWSK A’S ORPHAN GIRL OF 1685 79

[and] all of a sudden I’m left By him twirling and abandoned [on the
dance floor]. Someone walks me back to my seat.26

An important customary part of the marriage feast was a procession lead-

ing the couple from the feast to the marriage bed, together with bawdy
singing and jokes to engage in a collective marking of the consummation
of marriage.27 She writes, ‘Here the guests all rise to their feet And leave the
room in candlelight, Leading me, as custom dictates, To the table beside
our bed. Aesop […] winces at the sight’28 and does not spend the night with
her, never consummating the marriage:

And the next day, after breakfast,

I am getting myself dressed
When the ladies persuade Aesop,
With a big push, to step up
To the task. On entering my chamber,
He wipes the dust with his finger.
They say something, but the deaf man
Is squashing flies against the pane.29

By the third day of the wedding festivities, the marriage was still unconsum-
mated. The guests began their journey home, and her family concluded that
they married her off to someone who was ‘soft in the head’.30
Aesop could not perform the duties of a husband since he could not pay
the conjugal debt.31 He did not even seem to take the hint when others
spurred him on to the task:

Aesop is now going off to bed And by a woman he’s being led, Who urges
him to ‘Speak to her!’ And he to this, ‘Whatever for?’ […] All this takes
place on the third day, As for the groom, what can one say? They keep
pushing towards me, But he to this, ‘What for, tell me?’ On occasion, he
looks me over, Eyeing up my jewelry. Whenever he opens his mouth, Only
gibberish dribbles out.32

26 Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, 37.

27 Bogucka, The Lost World of the ‘Sarmatians’, 80.
28 Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, 37.
29 Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, 38.
30 Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, 48.
31 Makowski, ‘The Conjugal Debt and Medieval Canon Law’, 7.
32 Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, 44, 46.
80  Lynn Lubamersk y

Her father was grief-stricken, and wanted to take her home with him, but
her step-mother persuaded him not to, since she objected that they must
find reasonable grounds on which to challenge the marriage, even though
he acknowledged at the time that ‘I have placed my child with a wretch’.33
Verses 13–15 recount ‘My Hateful Life with Aesop’, a man who stamps
about, ranting and raving. He believes that all women are witches, so dia-
bolical that they should be burnt at the stake: ‘When rain wet his gown, he
ordered local ladies to be put to the fires for having let the rain in, he called
for seventy executioners because he couldn’t think of another number’.34
He blamed Stanisławska for what he says is his newly acquired drinking
habit, and their relationship worsened to the point that he would ‘silence
speech with a great shout, Or with a knife chasing me about. However,
when I do fall ill, He worries over every detail, Such as the wood for my
coffin. They’re told to find some decent pine!’35 This deadly rage bubbles
up on more than one occasion when Stanisławska was lucky to escape
with her life:

The inner rage he was born with

Rises and sees him sorely vexed.
He cannot control his passion.
For he knows nothing of reason.
And is bereft of good judgment.
His storm must rage until it’s spent.
He harangues the entire household.
Crying that he’d be better off dead.
How these rages leave him fixated
On the frailty of my throat
And nothing would make him happier
Than to open my veins and pour
The flowing blood into his bathtub
One day, I felt his choking grip
But my maid leapt into the fray
And bravely beat the beast away.36

33 Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, 50.

34 Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, 56.
35 Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, 57.
36 Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, 58.
ANNA STANISL AWSK A’S ORPHAN GIRL OF 1685 81

To Improve or Escape the Marriage

By lamentation XIV, Stanisławska has established that her husband was

mentally incompetent and would have strangled her had her maid not
intervened. She fell into depression and her spirit seemed crushed. For
many women, that would have been the end. She would have put up with
the situation and possibly been murdered by her husband. Married off
unwillingly to an incompetent deviant, Stanisławska would have had to
attempt to survive within the confines of a forced marriage. She writes of
her depression:

How can I express my sorrow

When it’s beyond me to do so
Lord, you have seen what they did
You have seen them crush my spirit […]
I contend with life as it stands.37

Given the desperate straits she found herself in, she had to devise a plan to
improve her life. The first arrow in her quiver came to her when her dying
father designated a powerful guardian for her on his deathbed. Jan Sobieski,
the future king of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, was made her
guardian.38 One can see how important the Stanisławski family was to the
future king, since they are mentioned in his diaries, and they accompanied
him in his travels to Germany, the Low Countries, France, and England.39 She
also inherited her father’s estate at Maciejowice, and with the inheritance
of that property, she recovered her strength of spirit and began to manage
her husband in their marriage. 40
This inheritance was the first great fortunate event in her life, since it was
not customary for a daughter to inherit her father’s property while his widow
was still alive. Beginning in the sixteenth century, a married couple would
contract a settlement in which there were mutual bequests of survivorship
from the property one owned. The Sejm, the Parliament of Poland, passed
an act defining the conditions under which a widow owned her deceased
husband’s landed property, and since this settlement was widespread by
the seventeenth century, one would have expected the estate to pass to the

37 Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, 69.

38 Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, 60.
39 Łożiński, Życie polskie w dawnych wiekach, 227.
40 Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, 70.
82  Lynn Lubamersk y

widow; but instead, Anna Stanisławska inherited it, and this encouraged
her to devise a strategy to improve her marriage. 41
She took two measures to tame her husband or, alternatively, to be
rid of him. First, she manipulated her husband’s home environment to
contain his deviance. She employed educated servants to try to teach him
to speak properly, thinking that he might learn from them and ‘would
be more malleable when he isn’t jabbering away to any old person’. 42
When this plan to ‘civilize’ him proved ineffective, she urged him to take
up the family’s standards, to join the regiment, to engage in chivalrous
exploits, and to go off and f ight the Turks. Poland–Lithuania and the
Ottoman Empire were engaged in frequent warfare in the seventeenth
century, primarily over the area that is present-day Ukraine. Given the
fact that her own father and many others had never returned from war,
there was a high probability that he might meet the same fate. But he so
feared death that he would not be taken in by these tales of glory, and
said, ‘I know ye would all celebrate If I were killed on the battlefield’. 43
Hearing his objections, Anna and her allies in the house tried to persuade
him that a soldier’s death would leave a heroic legacy, and tales of his
heroism would pass down through the ages. She went one step further,
arguing that a soldier’s death fighting the Turks would be a martyrdom
that would secure him a place in heaven: ‘Dying bravely with a knowing
smile, God will send a caring angel, Who will take your spirit to heaven’. 44
He would have none of this, reacting like other Poles of the distant and
more recent past who, according to Norman Davies, ‘were never very
zealous Crusaders. Their participation in the general Crusades to the
Holy Land was extremely limited, and the few Polish kings who made
Holy War against the inf idel had entirely normal political motives for
doing so’. 45 It was unusual for Anna and her allies to devise a Crusader’s
martyrdom, so it is perhaps unsurprising that Aesop would have none
of it. She was so depressed that both of her plans had failed that she took
to her bed on doctor’s orders.
The first ray of hope, or ‘chink of light’ came when she heard rumours
that her family was taking steps to get her away from Aesop, meaning that
there might be hope of escape. Her husband’s family heard the rumours

41 Zielińska, ‘Noblewomen’s Property Rights’, 85.

42 Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, 70.
43 Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, 72.
44 Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, 72.
45 Davies, God’s Playground, 128.
ANNA STANISL AWSK A’S ORPHAN GIRL OF 1685 83

too, and sent a priest to speak with her, hoping that she would confess her
plans. She would give nothing away of her plans for escape:

I have thrown them off the scent,

With them thinking I am content.
They have no idea that I plan
To flee both them and this prison.
But if my heart could only act,
I would run from here just as fast
As my two legs could carry me.
I’d be long gone before they knew. 46

After Anna’s father died, her family decided to take an active role to get
her out of her marriage. But the most significant factor in her ability to
get effective help was the fact that her father had designated Jan Sobieski,
the future Polish king, as her guardian. Anna writes that ‘his Highness,
the King, then commander of the army, met with me […] and he offers
me kingly advice and presents the alternatives’. 47 She would travel to
Warsaw and stay in a convent there for the election of Michał Korybut
Wiśniowiecki as king. She ended up seeking sanctuary in that convent
and refused to leave it when Aesop and his father came to deliver her
back home. Aesop

burst into the convent to beat up his wife and bring her back by force; she
was glad that metal bars separated them. His father also paid her a visit
at the convent and, having failed to persuade her to return to his house,
tried to have her kidnapped. 48

The convent turned out to be a secure sanctuary for her, as she was able to
shelter there during the entire divorce settlement proceedings. She would
be sheltered by Jan Sobieski’s sister, Katarzyna Radziwiłłowa, who was the
patroness of the convent, and who had also been married off against her
will. In Katarzyna’s youth, she was married to an ugly older man, despite
being in love with Michał Kazimierz Radziwiłł. She began an affair with
Radziwiłł just two weeks after she was married. Fortunately, her husband
turned a blind eye to the affair and had the good grace to die not long after

46 Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, 77.

47 Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, 78.
48 Peretz, ‘In Search of the First Polish Woman Author’, 476.
84  Lynn Lubamersk y

they were married, so Katarzyna understood Anna’s predicament and

counselled her to seek a divorce, as well as advising her on how to do it. 49
The reason that Radziwiłłowa could offer such protection to Stanisławska
was that her family were powerful magnates, who were not merely patrons
of the convent, but their ancestors had founded it—they were thus a highly
influential family whose power had endured many years.50

We begin annulment proceedings

By writing a detailed petition
To the Papal Nuncio, our argument
Being that Aesop is incompetent.
My father must also shoulder blame
We are forced to besmirch his name
I sue for divorce […]
The Papal Nuncio sends us
To an officiating Judge
Whose task is to hear all complaints
He is to reconcile us both
Or failing that, make a judgment.51

This short passage reveals a great deal about the history of divorce in Poland–
Lithuania. A twenty-first century historian, upon reading the passage above,
might think that Stanisławska was writing about separation or annulment,
but what she really meant was divorce. Histories of divorce simply take it as
a given that divorce in Catholic countries was impossible. Roderick Phillips
writes, ‘Divorce in Catholic doctrine: Finally we come to divorce in the strict
sense, divorce a vincula matrimonii (of the bond of marriage), but because
it was not permitted by Catholic doctrine in its developed form, there are
no case principles or examples to examine’.52 But even the most cursory
peek into diaries, memoirs, letters, or autobiographies of early modern
Poland–Lithuania (such as Stanisławska’s) show that the people of that time
did get divorced, and in exactly the way that she describes. Stephen Jones,
a British printer, wrote a history of Poland in 1795 in which he described
the court system and how it functioned in cases of divorce:

49 Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, 117.

50 Borkowska, Życie codzienne polskich klasztorów żeńskich, 239.
51 Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, 91, 93.
52 Phillips, Putting Asunder, 15.
ANNA STANISL AWSK A’S ORPHAN GIRL OF 1685 85

The Pope’s nuntio, which is the supreme ecclesiastical juridicature within

the kingdom, to which an appeal can be made from the decision of the
bishop and of the primate. In cases of divorce, dispensations of marriage,
and in other instances, the parties, as in all catholic countries, must apply
to the pope; by which means no inconsiderable sum of money is drawn
out of the country by the See of Rome.53

In 1685, just as in 1795, the Papal Nuncio heard petitions for divorce, and
decided whether or not to allow the bond of marriage to be broken. In
Stanisławska’s case, it appears that she was able to establish that Aesop
was incapable of consent due to mental incompetence. There have not
been many studies of divorce in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth,
but Bożena Popiołek has found that some of the grounds for divorce in
the case of women suing for divorce included degeneracy, cruelty, erotic
licentiousness, and inequality of property. For men, she found that the
causes for divorce included their wife’s infertility, mental illness, and lack
of submissiveness.54
In the end, the court heard the evidence and found in Stanislawska’s
favour. She believed that one reason she won her case was that the judge was
angry at her father-in-law, the Castellan of Kraków, since he threatened the
judge.55 But something unusual took place in Stanislawska’s case, since the
judge called for an Inquisition, stipulating that she find ‘twelve witnesses
who can relate in their own words how I was placed in this bondage’.56 This
was an unusual situation, since generally the judge decided the case, the
scribe wrote the verdict, and there was no need for an Inquisition to take
place after a judicial verdict was rendered. If an Inquisition were to take
place, it would be included as part of the discovery, or ‘fact-finding’ phase, of
the case. So even though the judge found in her favour, she still had to present
twelve witnesses to establish the truth of the facts presented in the case:

Even though she was granted her freedom, it came at a price.

I win the battle but not the war
The Judge has a surprise in store.
I must return every last gift
With an inventoried list

53 Jones, The History of Poland, 47.

54 Popiołek, Kobieccy świat w czasach Augusta II, 218–219.
55 Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, 97.
56 Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, 97.
86  Lynn Lubamersk y

Not only do I have to return

Aesop’s gifts, but every wedding
Present given by the guests
On this point, the judge will not budge.57

There is a very modern aspect to her discussion of the disposition of the

marital property. She must account for every trunk and drawer, every cup
and saucer, and even the tiniest diamond and sapphire on a pretty necklace.
Her husband wanted every stitch of clothing, and every piece of furniture,
and ‘If we don’t produce every item, We’ll never see the back of them’.58 She
had to go through extensive negotiations with her soon-to-be ex-husband
and his family to make sure that they were satisfied that all the gifts and
moveable property was surrendered. She found that some things that she
had were no longer working so she was forced to repair them, and even
went so far as to buy her husband a new pistol to replace the one that was
broken. In the end, she felt that ‘They are fixedly determined To take back
every last trinket, And to leave me with nothing’.59 In spite of this, she was
willing to do anything to make it all go away, so thoroughly was she fed up
by this listing of marital property. But ‘for all my acquiescence, I had hoped
to keep the carriage, so gleaming, stately and grandiose, if not a little worn
from use. Many have praised the upholstery which is a brighter shade of
white-blue. The seats have a velvet softness even though they have lost their
studs’.60 Unfortunately, she was not able to keep the carriage.
Just as in many modern marriages, divorce left Stanislawska in relative
poverty, and with a husband who felt that he was the victim rather than
the perpetrator. In the end, she was able to get out of the marriage, but it
left her without even a horse and carriage: ‘So I gave every last stitch, and
now I’ve nothing left, but my conscience is clear, I couldn’t have given more.
[Aesop] releases me from my oath. But he is not finished with me yet. He
draws up a list in his head of imaginary things he’s owed’.61
The court reads out its verdict: ‘Finally it has been decreed: the marriage is
null and void’, and even though the other side appealed to Rome, the verdict
stood. She would go on to marry twice more, and these happy marriages
are described in verses 30–76. Despite her victory in obtaining a divorce,

57 Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, 99.

58 Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, 101.
59 Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, 101.
60 Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, 102.
61 Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, 104.
ANNA STANISL AWSK A’S ORPHAN GIRL OF 1685 87

she believes that others regard her as ‘damaged goods’, and that she had
about her the taint of scandal. Nevertheless, she took the time to set down
these events, the transactions of her life in print, so that others might learn
from her experience. Unfortunately, this poetic autobiography, as frank
and moving as it was, remained in manuscript form from the seventeenth
century until it was finally printed in the twentieth century.62 In perhaps
a rather forward-looking conclusion, she reminds us what it all meant:

I have told them my sorry tale

They’ve heard every sordid detail
It’s the story of an innocent
Made the wife of a deviant63[…]
How can there be a marriage?
When the bride is but a hostage?
Dragged up the aisle by force
Given no choice but to say yes64 […]
A girl had a callous father
Who gave her away like barter65
I will bring this episode to an end.
I strike for freedom and honor!66

Works Cited

Primary Sources

Jones, Stephen. The History of Poland from Its Origin as a Nation to the Commence-
ment of the Year 1795. London, 1795.
Popławska, Halina. ‘Żalosne treny Anny Stanisławskiej’ [‘The Doleful Laments of
Anna Stanisławska’]. In Pisarki polskie epok dawnych [Polish Women Writers of
Olden Times], edited by Krystyna Stasiewicz, 93–95. Olsztyn: Wyższa Szkoła
Pedagogiczna, 1998.
Stanisławska, Anna. Orphan Girl. Translated and edited by Barry Keane. Toronto,
ON: Iter Academic Press, 2016.

62 Bystroń, Dzieje obyczajów w dawnej Polsce, 1:411.

63 Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, 90.
64 Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, 92.
65 Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, 97.
66 Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, 90.
88  Lynn Lubamersk y

Stanisławska, Anna. Transakcja albo opisanie całego życia jednej sieroty przez
żałosne treny od tejże samej pisane roku 1685 [A Transaction, or an Account of
the Entire Life of an Orphan Girl by way of Plaintful Threnodies in the Year 1685].
Edited by Ida Kotowa. Kraków: Polska Akademia Umiejętności, 1935.

Secondary Sources

Bogucka, Maria. The Lost World of the ‘Sarmatians’: Custom as the Regulator of
Polish Social Life in Early Modern Times. Warsaw: Polish Academy of Sciences,
Institute of History, 1996.
Borkowska, Małorzata. Życie codzienne polskich klasztorów żeńskich [Daily Life of
Polish Convents]. Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1996.
Brückner, Aleksander. Ezopy Polskie [The Polish Aesop]. Kraków: Polish Academy
of Science, 1902.
Bystroń, Jan Stanisław. Dzieje obyczajów w dawnej Polsce: wiek XVI–XVIII [Customs
and Traditions in Old Poland: 16th–18th century]. 2 vols. Warsaw: Państwowy
Instytut Wydawniczy, 1994.
Davies, Norman. God’s Playground: A History of Poland. Volume 1: The Origins to
1795. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
King, Margaret. Foreword to Anna Stanisławska, Orphan Girl, edited by Barry
Keane, xi–xiii. Toronto, ON: Iter Academic Press, 2016.
Kuchowicz, Zbigniew. Człowiek polskiego baroku [A Man of the Polish Baroque].
Łódż: Wydawnictwo Łódzkie, 1992.
Łożiński, Władysław. Życie polskie w dawnych wiekach [Polish Life in Centuries Past].
Lwów: Nakładem Księgarni H. Altenberga, 1908.
Makowski, Elizabeth M. ‘The Conjugal Debt and Medieval Canon Law’. https://
www.saylor.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/The-Conjugal-Debt-and-
Medieval-Canon-Law.pdf.
Mączak, Antoni. Klientela: Nieformalne systemy władzy w Polsce i Europie XVI–XVIII
w. [Clientage: The Informal System of Authority in Poland and Europe in the
16th–18th Centuries]. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Semper, 1994.
Noonan, John T. Power to Dissolve: Lawyers and Marriages in the Courts of the Roman
Curia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972.
Ożarska, Magdalena. ‘Combining a Lament with a Verse Memoir: Anna
Stanisławska’s Transaction (1685)’. Slavia časopis pro slovansou filologii 81, no.
4 (2012): 389–404.
Peretz, Maya. ‘In Search of the First Polish Woman Author’. The Polish Review 38,
no. 4 (1993): 469–483.
Phillips, Roderick Putting Asunder: A History of Divorce in Western Society. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
ANNA STANISL AWSK A’S ORPHAN GIRL OF 1685 89

Popiołek, Bożena. Kobieccy świat w czasach Augusta II [The Feminine World in the
Times of August II]. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Akademii Pedagogicznej,
2003.
Sheehan, Michael. ‘Choice of Marriage Partner in the Middle Ages: Development and
Mode of Application of a Theory of Marriage’. In Medieval Families: Perspectives
on Marriage, Household, and Children, edited by Carol Neel, 157–191. Toronto,
ON: University of Toronto Press, 2004.
Świderkówna, Anna, and Jerry Skarżyński. Bajki z tematów Ezopa [Fairy Tales on
the Theme of Aesop]. Warsaw: Nasza Ksęgarnia, 1953.
Targosz, Karolina. Sawantki w Polsce XVII wieku: Aspiracje intelektualne kobiet
ze śródowisk dworskich [Femmes-Savantes in 17th Century Poland: Women’s
Intellectual Aspirations at Court]. Warsaw: Retro-Art, 1997.
Thomas, Courtney. ‘Not Having God Before His Eyes: Bestiality in Early Modern
England’. Seventeenth Century 26, no. 1 (2011): 149–173.
Zielińska, Teresa. ‘Noblewomen’s Property Rights in 16th–18th Century Polish–
Lithuanian Commonwealth’. Acta Poloniae Historica 81 (2000): 79–89.

About the author

Lynn Lubamersky studied history at the University of California at Berkeley

and at Indiana University, where she received her PhD. She is Associate
Professor of History at Boise State University, where she teaches courses on
women’s history, the history of the family, and the history of early modern
Europe. She has published on noblewomen’s access to political power in
the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in English, German, and Russian.
She received a Core Fulbright Scholar Award to Vilnius, Lithuania, where
she researched a project on mapping the vanished communities of the past.
 Section II
Witchcraft and the Edge
5. Touching on the Margins
Elizabeth Sawyer’s Body in Performance and Print

Alex MacConochie

Abstract
This chapter considers the differing treatments of the alleged witch
Elizabeth Sawyer in the collaborative play The Witch of Edmonton, and
Henry Goodcole’s The Wonderful Discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer, Witch
(both 1621), focusing on acts of touch. The former, exemplifying common
contemporary attitudes, treats the witch’s touch as a demonic influence
over her victims; the latter employs acts of touch between Elizabeth and
others to model reciprocal forms of contact that contrast markedly with
hierarchical uses of touch in the community from which she is excluded.
Where the pamphlet constructs communal bonds by scapegoating Eliza-
beth, the play models alternative forms of association between elderly,
poverty-stricken women like Sawyer, and other figures on the margins
of the community.

Keywords: witchcraft; touch; community; reciprocity; embodiment

This chapter examines depictions of Elizabeth Sawyer, an elderly English

woman accused and convicted of witchcraft in 1621, with a focus on questions
of embodiment, and specifically the accused witch’s contacts with others.
Little is known of Elizabeth herself, a resident of the town of Edmonton,
some ten miles of north of London, until she was accused and convicted of
witchcraft, including the murders of several of her neighbours by demonic
means, brought to London for her trial, and executed on 19 April 1621. In the
wake of Elizabeth’s trial, London’s producers of popular literature rushed
to capitalize on the sensational case. Elizabeth Sawyer inspired ballads
(now lost); a pamphlet by Henry Goodcole, who had interrogated her in
his capacity as Visitor to Newgate prison, where she was kept between

Hopkins, L. and A. Norrie (eds.), Women on the Edge in Early Modern Europe, Amsterdam University
Press, 2019.
doi 10.5117/9789462987500/ch05
94  Alex MacConochie

her trial and her execution, titled The Wonderfull Discoverie of Elizabeth
Sawyer a Witch; and The Witch of Edmonton, a collaborative effort of the
playwrights Thomas Dekker, John Ford, and William Rowley, and perhaps
others.1 The two portrayals of Elizabeth speak to a widespread interest
in the body of the witch, a source of her power and, in the play’s more
sympathetic representation, of her vulnerability. Reading play and pamphlet
in conjunction can tell us a good deal about how women like Elizabeth
Sawyer—elderly, poor, and living on the edges of her community—might
be imagined in early modern England.
In this chapter, I focus on the play’s multi-faceted handling of Elizabeth’s
acts of touch. Touch, in The Witch of Edmonton, has the ambiguous potential
to both disrupt and cement bonds of fellowship between Elizabeth and other
members of the community. This ambiguous portrayal registers the complex,
often contested, status of touch in post-Reformation England. Reformation
suspicions of sensuous worship led to a devaluation of touch in religious
practice, and, in secular life, heightened existing associations of touch with
lust, which were compounded by neoplatonic evaluations of touch as a base
sense, associated with fleshly, animal experience.2 Yet, Joseph Moshenska
argues that if many in the period sought to restrict touch, this was itself a
measure of contact’s perceived importance in establishing social bonds.3
While Goodcole’s pamphlet largely supports the first of these narratives,
in The Witch of Edmonton, fears of tactility jostle uneasily against scenes in
which acts of touch help to establish and cement important social bonds
between friends, neighbours, and lovers. Furthermore, touch, in the play as
in early modern England, frequently embodies power relations, especially
between men and women.4 The Witch of Edmonton depicts touch in this way,
as embodying the symbolic violence of patriarchal hierarchy, within the
village community threatened by Elizabeth’s witchcraft. Yet, on the edge

1 Circumstantial evidence points to John Webster and Thomas Middleton as the most likely
candidates for the ‘&c’ of the original quarto’s title page (Munro, ‘Introduction’, 19–20). Most
editors, however, have focused on the three named contributors. The play’s most recent editor,
Rowland Wymer, characterizes the play as ‘an unusually close Ford–Dekker collaboration’, with
Rowley writing the clowning scenes (Wymer, ‘Introduction’, 133–134). My thanks to the editors
of this volume; to Rowlie Wymer for his timely and generous comments; and to the members of
Willing Suspension Productions, with whom I worked on a 2017 production of this play, especially
my co-director Julia Mix Barrington. When transcribing from early modern sources, the use of
u/v and i/j has been silently modernized.
2 On these developments, see: Classen, The Deepest Sense, 147–166; and Woolgar, The Senses
in Late Medieval England, 29–62 and 267–273.
3 Moshenska, Feeling Pleasures, 1–14.
4 Gowing, Common Bodies, 1–16.
Touching on the Margins 95

of village society, in encounters between Elizabeth, her familiar Dog, and

the yeoman’s son Cuddy Banks, the play develops a more equitable vision
of touch, one that offers an implicit critique of the social order ostensibly
defended against the witch’s own disruptive contact.
Reading the play’s treatment of touch in this way offers a new perspective
on the play’s treatment of ideas of community and sociability. Criticism of
the play frequently situates Elizabeth in opposition to ideas of community,
order, and sociability. Gail Kern Paster argues that the play participates
in the witch’s demonization, especially in terms of her sexualized body;
Viviana Comensoli, that her acts of witchcraft—including those of de-
monic touch—are employed to expose flaws within the community she
threatens. Julia Garrett reads the play as a sympathetic portrayal of an
excluded scapegoat figure, and a critical examination of early modern
scapegoating of witches.5 This chapter draws on each of these approaches,
while acknowledging that all three stances portray Elizabeth as wholly
isolated. I argue thus that her isolation from the normative social order
becomes an opportunity to develop new forms of community, never fully
realized, embodied in reciprocal forms of touch.

‘An old woman / Ill favoured grown with years’

Records of Elizabeth’s trial for witchcraft, the crime that has secured her
place of infamy in English history, do not survive. What we know of the legal
proceedings derives, instead, from Henry Goodcole’s pamphlet. He writes:

On Saturday, being the fourteenth day of Aprill, Anno Dom. 1621. this
Elizabeth Sawyer late of Edmonton, in the County of Middlesex Spinster,
was arraigned, and indited three severall times at Justice Hall in the
Old Baily in London, in the Parish of Saint Sepulchers, in the Ward of
Farrington without. (B1v).6

There is little reason to doubt the veracity of these facts. Goodcole’s pamphlet
competed in the literary marketplace with ballads and a popular drama,
whose truth, a saleable commodity in the case of such supernatural crimes,

5 See, respectively: Paster, The Body Embarrassed, 254–260; Comensoli, Household Business,
123–125; and Garrett, ‘Dramatizing Deviance’, 342–358.
6 All further signature citations to Goodcole, The Wonderfull Discoverie, will be made
parenthetically in text.
96  Alex MacConochie

he was attempting to discredit.7 Presenting the details of the arraignment,

with their air of juridical formality, helps to establish the legitimacy of his
own account. But his report should not be treated as the factual source for
the fictive drama. Goodcole’s pamphlet, consisting of a statement of the
legal facts, an interrogation conducted before witnesses and presented as
a dialogue, and Elizabeth’s scaffold confession, represents Elizabeth in
ways conditioned by the social and religious needs Goodcole attempts to
address. The play and pamphlet compete to define the terms—affective,
moral, sociological—in which Elizabeth should be understood.
Late in 1621, several dramatists collaborated on a tragicomedy for Prince
Charles’s men, The Witch of Edmonton. The play welds details found in
Goodcole’s pamphlet to a plot of domestic tragedy, in which Elizabeth’s
familiar, Dog, encourages the bigamist Frank Thorney to murder his second
wife. The play was first performed by Prince Charles’s Men in 1621, and
appears to have been performed at court the following year for King James,
whose interest in witches was well known.8 Yet, the drama outlived the
immediate flurry of interest in the trial, and it outlived James, the royal
author of Daemonologie, too. It was revived at least once, in 1634, during
a renewed spate of public interest in witches. The play was not printed,
however, until 1658, when Edward Blackmore released a quarto edition
titled The Witch of Edmonton: A known true story, advertising the authors
as ‘William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, John Ford, &c’. Evidently, Elizabeth
Sawyer’s story continued to speak powerfully to the concerns of audiences
and readers across multiple decades.
Little is known of Elizabeth Sawyer’s life prior to her conviction for
witchcraft. What little we know, and how we know it, underscores the
extent to which a marginal figure such as herself only enters the historical
record when she runs afoul of the very authorities who construct that record.
She was born Elizabeth Cronwell (date unknown), and married Edward
Sawyer in 1591, a ‘labourer’. In 1615, she was charged with stealing sheets
from a neighbour, but was not hanged due to their value—less than one
shilling.9 She was poor; her poverty drove her to crime. The rest of what we
know or can guess derives from The Wonderfull Discoverie and the drama.

7 Purkiss, The Witch in History, 231–233.

8 A manuscript from the Inner Temple library, thought to be a copy of the household book
kept by the king’s chamberlain, records on 6 March 1622, ‘A warrant for the allowance of XXtie
Marks for two plaies to the Princes Servaunts’, one of which was performed on 29 December,
‘called the Witch of Edmonton’ (Murray, English Dramatic Companies, 193).
9 Munro, ‘Introduction’, 27.
Touching on the Margins 97

Goodcole’s and the play’s representations of Elizabeth amplify this sense

of economic disenfranchisement. Goodcole reports that Elizabeth turned
to witchcraft ‘out of her malicious heart, (because her neighbours where
she dwelt, would not buy Broomes of her)’ (B1r). In Goodcole’s account,
Sawyer turns to witchcraft when neighbours refuse what amounts to a
charitable contribution to the poor. The play, by contrast, foregrounds not
only Elizabeth’s poverty, but also her exclusion from systems of private land
ownership. When the yeoman farmer Old Banks finds Elizabeth ‘gathering
sticks’ on property that he rents or owns, he demands, ‘Hag, out of my
ground’ and proceeds to beat her (2.1.0 SD, 2.1.27).10
In depicting the alleged witch as excluded from her community, both the
pamphlet and the drama elide one social network in which she was located.
Elizabeth and Edward had five children who survived to adulthood, and at
least six more that did not.11 Her children appear only once in either text.
Responding to Goodcole’s interrogation, she speaks of the family that, her
husband excepted, is otherwise of little interest to the Visitor:

Quest.
How came your eye to be put out?
Answ.
With a sticke which one of my children had in the hand: that night my
mother did dye it was done; for I was stooping by the bed side, and I by
chance did hit my eye on the sharpe end of the sticke.
Quest.
Did you ever handle the Divell when he came unto you? (D1v)

Elizabeth portrays herself in a scene of familial nurture, a self-representation

at odds with her neighbours’ accusations that she had ‘witch[ed] to death
their Nurse Children’. But Goodcole has little interest in this report of
domestic trauma. In the margin he notes, ‘The reason why I asked this was
because her father and mothers eye, one of theirs was out’ (D1v). But when
Elizabeth’s response does not yield evidence relevant to her status as a
witch, Goodcole abandons this line of inquiry.
The authors of The Witch of Edmonton show as little interest as Goodcole
in this detail of their subject’s life. In the drama, she is detached from all
familial relations: the mother whom she tends, the child who injures her, even

10 Unless otherwise specified, citations of the play are from Dekker et al., The Witch of Edmonton,
ed. Munro.
11 Munro, ‘Introduction’, 26.
98  Alex MacConochie

the husband from whom, she confesses to Goodcole, she concealed her visits
from the Devil are all absent (C4r–C4v). This erasure of family connections
does more than heighten Elizabeth’s isolation. By dislocating their witch
from normative domestic arrangements, the playwrights open a space to
imagine alternative social positions for an isolated, elderly woman such as the
fictive witch. The options appear to be limited. As Elizabeth herself reminds
the Justice of the Peace, ‘An old woman / Ill favoured grown with years, if
she be poor, / Must be called bawd or witch’ (4.1.139–141). However, the play
will imagine other social roles for women like Elizabeth. Before turning to
these other roles, however, it is important to note ways that the play also
reimagines the role of witch. I will focus, in the following section, on the
witch’s relationship with Dog, alias Tommy, her talking canine familiar, whose
acts of touch complicate our understanding of the witch’s power to do harm.

‘One touch from me / Soon sets the body forward’

Dog’s acts of touch have been read by Sarah Johnson as extending Elizabeth
Sawyer’s agency, a view that is certainly consonant with many early modern
understandings of the witch’s touch and her relationship with her familiars.12
The play occasionally stages this view of witchcraft. When Anne Ratcliffe,
one of Elizabeth’s enemies in the village, enters in a state of madness, Sawyer
orders Dog to ‘touch her’, prompting further, finally suicidal madness in
Anne (4.1.206). Yet, more often, the play’s staging of demonic tactility tends
to raise questions about the relationship between Dog’s acts of touch and
Sawyer’s power. For example, in the scene where Frank Thorney murders his
second wife, Susan, Dog enters first, declaring: ‘Now for an early mischief
and a sudden: / The mind’s about it now; one touch from me / Soon sets the
body forward’ (3.3.1–3). Next, Frank and Susan enter, continuing an argument
begun in the previous scene, and, as Frank grows increasingly frustrated,
‘(Dog rubs him)’. Frank, possibly aware of Dog’s touch, says, ‘Thank you for
that’, produces a knife, and proceeds to murder Susan (3.3.15 SD). Dog’s
touch, together with Frank’s assertion that ‘I did not purpose to have added
murder;/ The devil did not prompt me till this minute’, has led Anthony
Dawson, in his influential reading of the play, to agree with Frank that the
devil compels his action (3.3.37–38).13 Yet, Dog’s opening lines suggest that

12 See: Johnson, ‘Female Bodies, Speech, and Silence’, 76–81. On the witch’s touch and fears of
female agency in early modern Europe more broadly, see: Classen, ‘The Witch’s Touch’, 71–74.
13 See, for example: Dawson, ‘Witchcraft/Bigamy’, 88.
Touching on the Margins 99

his demonic massage does not in any straightforward way cause Frank to
murder Susan, but rather releases a physical and moral tension in Frank, al-
lowing him to commit to an action that he has—if not consciously—already
contemplated. The murder scene implies that Dog’s touch, rather than
bringing discord into the world of Edmonton, ‘prompt[s]’ characters to act
on their own already-present discordant impulses.14 This accords with what
Dog tells Mother Sawyer. Her first command for her new familiar is, ‘Go,
touch [Old Banks’s] life’, but Dog explains that this is impossible: ‘Though
we have power, know it is circumscribed. […] Until I take him, as I late found
thee,/ Cursing and swearing—I have no power to touch’ (2.1.174–183). Dog’s
lines also mockingly remind Elizabeth that her new power, such as it is,
results from her having been ‘take[n]’ by the devil, underscoring her own
constrained position as a poor, elderly, persecuted woman.
Sawyer soon finds herself subject to her apparent servant’s demands,
her body as much at the mercy of his appetites as it is of her persecutors’
beatings. When Elizabeth says to Dog, ‘Comfort me; thou shalt have the teat
anon’, he replies a, ‘Bow-wow! I’ll have it now’. She replies: ‘I am dried up /
With cursing and with madness, and have yet / No blood to moisten these
sweet lips of thine’ (4.1.170–174). It is possible, I suggest, to hear strategic
excuses in this citation of humoral medicine. By contrast, Paster argues
that Elizabeth’s refusal simply reflects theatrical necessity, as it would be
impossible to portray the kind of contact Goodcole describes onstage.15 The
allusions to the teat, she argues, cater to a widespread ‘suspicion of a female
sensuality outlasting reproduction and marriage’.16 Such suspicions inform
a central line of inquiry in Goodcole’s pamphlet, as he asks Elizabeth, ‘In
what place of your body did the Divell sucke of your bloud, and whether
did hee himselfe chuse the place, or did you your selfe appoint him the
place?’ Elizabeth confesses that ‘The place where the Divell suckt my bloud
was a little above my fundiment’, where ‘there is a thing in the forme of a
Teate, at which the divell would sucke mee’ (C3r–C3v). Forced to confirm
male fears of female sexuality that outlives any reproductive purpose, she
confesses that, ‘When hee suckt mee, I then felt no paine at all’, and adds,
‘When I asked the Divell why hee would sucke my bloud, and hee sayd it
was to nourish him’ (C3r–C3v). Here, as in many contemporary texts, the

14 Bladen argues that ‘Frank’s general sinfulness makes him vulnerable to Dog’s approach’
(Bladen, ‘Supernatural Identity’, 111).
15 Paster, The Body Embarrassed, 258.
16 Paster, The Body Embarrassed, 253–260. On witches’ sexuality, see: Millar, ‘Sleeping with
Devils’, 207–231, and especially her discussion of Goodcole’s pamphlet on 216–219.
100  Alex MacConochie

witch’s relationship with the devil is portrayed as a demonic parody of

maternal nurture. And most importantly of all, Goodcole compels Elizabeth
to admit that although the devil ‘appoint[ed] the place’, ‘the Divell would
put his head under my coates, and I did willingly suffer him to doe what
hee would’ (C3v).
The Witch of Edmonton adapts these lurid details to emphasize Elizabeth’s
reluctance. If this were simply a matter of theatrical necessity, the witch
could have agreed to give Dog the teat, and then they could have exited
together. Instead, with Dog’s threatening demands, the playwrights pick
up on Elizabeth’s frequent reminders to Goodcole that the Devil would
threaten her with violence. When the playwrights do depict the witch’s
relationship with her familiar in even more luridly erotic terms, the dramatic
circumstances underscore her vulnerability. Elizabeth registers this sense
of entrapment when, abandoned by Dog in the final act, she cries out, ‘Have
I given up myself to thy black lust / Thus to be scorned?’ (5.1.4–5). Saying
that she is ‘lost without my Tomalin’, she apostrophizes the absent Dog, ‘I
am on fire, even in the midst of ice, / Raking my blood up till my shrunk
knees feel / Thy curled head leaning on them’ (5.1.6, 10–12). Here is a vivid
depiction of an elderly woman’s literally demonized erotic desire. And yet,
the effect is not so much to condemn Sawyer as to remind audiences of what
she does not have: any form of tactile comfort or affection.

‘The witch must be beaten out of her cockpit’

Both The Wonderfull Discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer a Witch and The Witch
of Edmonton appropriate this marginalized figure, not only for financial
profit, but also as a means of creating or reinforcing communal bonds by
means of her exclusion. These are not only those in Edmonton itself, but
those in the London communities of which Goodcole and the playwrights
are a part. Goodcole seeks not only to edify his readership about the dangers
of witchcraft, but also to bolster faith in the judicial and clerical apparatus
of which he is a part, reinforcing the sense of interdependence in London
by portraying Elizabeth’s interrogation as a communal endeavour. The
playwrights similarly employ metatheatrical references and an epilogue to
link Elizabeth’s expulsion from Edmonton to the construction of communal
bonds in the playhouse. But the play is more critical of its own community-
building project than is Goodcole’s Wonderful Discoverie.
Goodcole’s portrayal of Elizabeth is conditioned by his motives for enter-
ing the literary marketplace. As Visitor to Newgate prison, one of his chief
Touching on the Margins 101

duties was to extract public confessions of sin from condemned criminals.17

Furthermore, balladeers spread rumours ‘of the Spirits attending [Sawyer] in
the Prison’; such ‘most base and false ballets’, as Goodcole calls them, not only
distracted his readers from the spiritual lessons to be learned from Sawyer’s
case, but also besmirched the godly reputation of the newly-appointed Visitor
of Newgate (A3v). Thus, Randall Martin argues, Goodcole’s ‘most important
target readership was […] his employers and superiors’ whom he intends
to impress with his printed display of zeal and probity.18 But Goodcole not
only seeks to impress his institutional and social superiors, or to correct the
record on Elizabeth’s demonic visitations; he also takes the opportunity of
Elizabeth’s interrogation to portray himself as an integral member of the
community he represents. Thus, after his account of his interrogations, he
notes that several well-respected citizens were present with him in the cell,
and assures his readers that ‘the persons that were then present with mee
at her Confession, have hereunto put to their hands, and if it be required,
further to confirme this to be a truth, will bee ready at all times to make
oath thereof’ (B4r). The male citizens’ oaths contrast with the evidence
produced by women, through tactile means.
As was usual in such cases, Goodcole reports, the court appointed ‘three
women to search the body of Elizabeth Sawyer, to see if they could finde any
such unwonted marke, as they were informed of’ (B3r). It is this evidence,
derived from the matrons’ authoritative touch, which convinces the jury of
Elizabeth’s guilt. The searchers reported that they ‘found a thing like a Teate
the bignesse of the little finger, and the length of halfe a finger, which was
branched at the top like a teate’ (B3v). The women’s report, ‘which boldly
[Elizabeth] denied, gave some insight to the Jury, of her: who upon their
consciences returned the said Elizabeth Sawyer, to be guilty, by dibolicall
help, of the death of Agnes Ratcliefe’ (B3v). The witch’s body, handled by
the matrons, assumed like all women to have an authority in such tactile
medical matters, weighs more heavily in the evidentiary scales than any
oath she or anyone else makes.19
The play similarly portrays a community bound together by physically
marking Elizabeth as an outsider. When the villagers decide to punish
Elizabeth for her alleged crimes, they shout: ‘Out, witch! Beat her, kick

17 Martin, ‘Henry Goodcole’, 152–155.

18 On Goodcole’s finances and tenuous social position, at this early stage of his career, see:
Martin, ‘Henry Goodcole’, 157–162.
19 On women’s authority in tactile knowledge, and the practice of ‘searching’ for signs of
witchcraft, see: Gowing, Common Bodies, 43–51.
102  Alex MacConochie

her, set fire on her!’ (4.1.34–35). They evidently carry out these threats:
when confronted by the Justice of the Peace, Sawyer says, ‘If every poor old
woman be trod on thus by slaves, reviled, kicked, beaten, as I am daily, she
to be revenged had need turn witch’ (4.1.93–95). In early modern England,
kicking is a symbolically potent form of violence, frequently indicating the
sub-human status of its recipient. Thus, in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of
Venice, Shylock alleges that Antonio ‘did […] foot me as you spurn a stranger
cur / Over your threshold’.20 Elizabeth suffers not only pain, but also a form
of degradation that implies she has no right to be treated as a member of the
village community.21 She registers this degradation in her opening soliloquy,
describing herself, ‘buckled and bent together / By some more strong in
mischief than myself’, as the ‘common sink’ of the village’s malice (2.1.4–7).
These acts of violence are reiterated with a difference in Dog’s expulsion
from the world of Edmonton. Late in the play, when Cuddy Banks realizes
the extent of his friend Tom’s villainy, the pair have a tense interview that
concludes with Cuddy driving out his erstwhile ‘ningle’:

Come out, come out, you cur! I will beat thee out of the bounds of Ed-
monton, and tomorrow we go in procession, and after thou shalt never
come in again (5.1.211–214).

Cuddy figures his physical expulsion of Dog in terms of the Rogationtide

procession, during which residents would ‘beat the bounds’, or mark the
legal boundaries, of their community.22 Verbally joining the ceremony for
marking borders to the kind of violence repeatedly meted out to Elizabeth,
Cuddy underscores the extent to which community formation depends on
violent exclusion of those branded as demonic.
Dog’s banishment echoes one of his own lines, earlier in the same scene.
When Elizabeth questions his ominous change in colour, he replies, ‘Whiteness
is day’s footboy, a forerunner to light, which shows thy old rivelled face. Villains
are stripped naked; the witch must be beaten out of her cockpit’ (5.1.45–48).
With the last clause, Dog summarizes the scapegoating process by which
Cuddy’s father and his fellows hope to preserve order in their community.
The line simultaneously references the place of the play’s performance, the
Cockpit Theatre. This is more than a casual nod to the theatrical surroundings.

20 Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, 1.3.113–114.

21 On the relationship between physical violence and symbolic exclusions from the social
body, see: Garrett, ‘Dramatizing Deviance’, 347–350.
22 Hindle, ‘Beating the Bounds’, 205–228.
Touching on the Margins 103

Rather, Dog’s reference to the ‘cockpit’ underscores the extent to which the
play appropriates the excluded figure of Elizabeth Sawyer in order to foster
and reinforce a form of community in London: namely, that between theatre
professionals and their audiences.23 In the later Jacobean and early Caroline
years of the play’s performance, the companies that played at the West End’s
indoor playhouses, and the playwrights who wrote for these venues, were
increasingly self-conscious about their contributions to a ‘town culture’
specific to the neighbourhood. Here, the standards of value were taste, wit, and
sophistication, qualities both modelled and promoted in many plays written
for the indoor playhouses of the early Stuart stage.24 The Witch of Edmonton’s
title page may be capitalizing on nostalgia for this witty, glamorous West End
milieu, in locating the play’s performance quite specifically in the cultural
geography of London: ‘Acted by the Prince’s Servants, often at the Cockpit in
Drury Lane, once at court, with singular applause’.25 Like Goodcole’s pamphlet,
the play reinforces bonds between members of a community—here, the witty
society of the West End, rather than London’s citizenry—by first producing,
and then removing, the spectre of demonic forces.
The violent expulsions of witch and demon contrast with the role played
by touch in the restoration of communal fellowship between the convicted
bigamist Frank Thorney (whose body dog had ‘set forward’ to murder his
second wife), his first wife and true love Winifred, and the family of his
second wife, Susan Carter. On his way to the scaffold, Frank says to Winifred,
‘Give me thy hand, poor woman. Do not weep. / Farewell. Thou dost forgive
me?’ (5.2.125–126). After Frank’s exit to the scaffold, the community begins
to rebuild, as Kate announces her marriage to her suitor Somerton, and Old
Carter announces he will provide for the widowed Winifred. This second
reparative sequence begins with a tactile image. Promising support to Frank’s
father, Old Carter says, ‘Cheer up man. Whilst I can stand by you, you shall
not want to help to keep you from falling’ (5.2.165–167). Ultimately, the
printed play involves the audience’s own hands in this reconstructive work.
The epilogue, spoken in character by Winifred, begins, ‘I am a widow still,
and must not sort / A second choice without a good report’, and concludes,
‘All noble tongues are free; / The gentle may speak one kind word for me’
(Epilogue 5–6). Flattering the audience as ‘noble’ and ‘gentle’, the epilogue
frames the restoration of order as a return to hierarchical patronage. Here,

23 This argument expands on Stymeist, ‘Must I be … made a common sink’, 43–44.

24 On the role of West End’s theatres in fostering and sustaining an emergent ‘town’ culture,
see: Zucker, The Places of Wit, 102–143.
25 Dekker et al., The Witch of Edmonton, sig. A1r.
104  Alex MacConochie

Winfred asks her social superiors for aid, reversing her decision in the first
scene to refuse money from Sir Arthur.
The preceding scenes, however, undercut the notion that Dog and Eliza-
beth’s expulsion will restore harmony to both the fictive world onstage, and
the world of the playgoers themselves. Roberta Barker argues that with Dog’s
closing lines the play reminds audience members of their own vulnerability
to his power.26 But reading the audience as vulnerable to demonic influence
understates the force of the scene’s critique. When Cuddy beats Dog away,
he says, ‘If thou canst rub thy shoulder against a lawyer’s gown as thou
passest Westminster hall, do’ (5.1.215–217). If Dog’s touch only brings out
the demonic impulses of those whom he ‘rubs’, then his expulsion from
the village world of Edmonton in fact underscores his presence not only
among, but within, many Londoners, perhaps even those in attendance at
court or the Cockpit. The Londoners the playwrights have in mind are very
much the ‘noble’, ‘gentle’ patrons whose approbation will be solicited in the
epilogue. Cuddy suggests that Dog should have ‘translate[d himself] into
a lady’s arming-puppy’ rather than ‘creep under an old witch’s coats and
suck like a great puppy’ (5.1.188–191). Here, the force of the social critique
is briefly masked by the sensational image of perverted maternal nurture.
But Dog’s reply amplifies the criticism of aristocrats:

I am for greatness now, corrupted greatness.

There I’ll shug in and get a noble countenance,
Serve some Briarean footcloth-strider
That has an hundred hands to catch at bribes
But not a finger’s nail of charity (5.1.200–204).

Dog claims to have power over his targets only because they are already
‘corrupted’. In this play, the wealthy are not simply vulnerable to evil forces:
they are themselves a source of evil.27
The play has been developing this idea, in terms of touch, since the
opening scene. Before the witch or her familiar have even come onstage,
Sir Arthur greets his maid Winifred, ‘Thy lip, wench. [Kisses her]’ (1.1.157).
Arthur’s demand for a kiss, whether or not she consents, exemplifies common
attitudes regarding the sexual availability of female servants.28 As Winifred’s

26 Barker, ‘An honest dog yet’, 171–172.

27 On the play’s portrayal of Edmonton’s social ills as stemming primarily from the greed of
uncharitable wealthy members of society, see: Cox, The Devil and the Sacred, 172–176.
28 See: Gowing, Common Bodies, 59–65.
Touching on the Margins 105

response makes clear, her consent was a matter of her vulnerable position
in the structure of the household, not an expression of her own choice.
‘Had not my laundress / Given way to your immoderate waste of virtue /
You had not with such eagerness pursued / The error of your goodness’, she
tells Arthur (1.1.163–166).29 Elizabeth herself may allude to this affair in her
exchange with the Justice of the Peace. Comparing her own crimes to those
of wealthy ‘men-witches’, she says, ‘Dare any swear I ever tempted maiden, /
With golden hooks flung at her chastity / To come and lose her honour, and,
being lost, / To pay not a denier for’t?’ (4.1.157–160). This could well describe
Sir Arthur himself, who threatens to withdraw promised financial support
when Winifred refuses his continued advances. Sir Arthur certainly seems
to recognize himself in the description, telling the Justice, ‘By one thing she
speaks, / I know now she’s a witch, and dare no longer/ Hold conference with
the fury’ (4.1.163–165). In this context, Sir Arthur’s reminder of the rumours
about Elizabeth’s familiar appears to be an attempt to stop Elizabeth from
further mention of crimes like his own. ‘And now, sir, let me tell you’, he
interjects, ‘Far and near she’s bruited for a woman that maintains a spirit
that sucks her’ (4.1.108–110). The play does not contradict such an allegation;
however, it does suggest that the fascination with witches’ sexual crimes
functions as a means of deflecting attention from the even more costly crimes
of wealthy ‘men-witches’. Elizabeth’s behaviour will not, after all, leave an
expensive bastard on the parish’s hands; Sir Arthur’s easily could have.

‘A motherly woman’

The social order Elizabeth threatens, then, is one in which touch embodies
hierarchy. By contrast, she, the yeoman’s son Cuddy Banks, and Dog model
a form of community founded on reciprocity, embodied in gestures that,
unlike Arthur’s kisses for instance, enact equitable social and financial
transactions. There is some evidence that these marginal figures were
collectively a primary draw for the play’s early readers. When the play was
first printed in 1658, the title page illustration featured Dog, Mother Sawyer,
and Cuddy Banks.30 The title page may be meant, like the play performed in
1621, to capitalize on the renewed topicality of witchcraft cases in the 1650s:

29 Munro here departs from all other modern editors, including Rowland Wymer in the
Collected Works of John Ford, in printing ‘laundress’; the other editors follow Dyce in emending
‘laundress’ as ‘lewdness’ (see Wymer, 258n163).
30 Dekker et al., The Witch of Edmonton, sig. A1r.
106  Alex MacConochie

in the illustration’s speech bubbles Dog says, ‘Ho, have I found thee cursing’,
while Sawyer mutters her summoning spell, ‘Sanctubeceturnomentuum’.
This would seem to support Frances Dolan’s influential argument that the
play asks audiences to see the dangerous within the familiar.31 Yet, in many
cases, the play instead encourages audiences to rethink the apparently
dangerous in familiar terms, staging a sociability that crosses the dividing
lines running through the social world.
Cuddy Banks, in his interactions with Elizabeth, models a different
way for communities similar to Edmonton to relate to elderly women like
Elizabeth Sawyer. Immediately after the witch seals her contract with the
devil, Cuddy, in love with ‘Kate Carter […] the wealthy yeoman’s daughter’,
approaches her for a love charm (2.1.239–240). He offers her another contract:

Cuddy Banks: Witch or no witch, you are a motherly woman, and

though my father be a kind of God-bless-us, as they
say, I have an earnest suit to you. And if you’ll be so
kind as to ka me one good turn, I’ll be so courteous as
to kob you another.
Sawyer: What’s that? To spurn, beat me, and call me witch, as
your kind father doth?
Cuddy Banks: My father? I am ashamed to own him. If he has hurt the
head of thy credit, there’s money to buy thee a plaster
(2.1.218–227).

This treatment contrasts sharply with Cuddy’s prior behaviour towards

Elizabeth. In the company of the youth of Edmonton, Cuddy participates in
Elizabeth’s persecution, shouting ‘Away with the witch of Edmonton’ when he
spots her in the field and exiting ‘in strange postures’ that may be a mockery
of her deformity, or a response to her perceived demonic influence.32 So
Elizabeth’s bitter assumption that the son will ‘kind[ly]’ follow his father’s
lead seems justified. Alone, however, Cuddy professes himself ‘ashamed to
own’ his father. This profession gives an interesting shading to his nonce
title for Elizabeth, ‘Mother Witch’, suggesting an alternative to patriarchal
family relations outside the centres of village power.
That alternative involves, above all, reciprocity. After Cuddy requests
that Elizabeth charm Katherine into loving him, he says, ‘Do, and here’s my

31 Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, 220.

32 On editors’ competing explanations of this enigmatic stage direction, see: Munro, ed., The
Witch of Edmonton, 151.
Touching on the Margins 107

hand: I am thine for three lives’ (2.1.245–248). It hardly seems extraordinary:

a handshake, as part of a business transaction. And yet given the fears
that have clustered around Elizabeth, and the degrading violence she has
been subjected to, in offering this mutual form of touch, Cuddy implies
that she is more than the village’s ‘common sink’: she is on a plane where
‘courteous’ transactions are possible. Moreover, the ‘inward’, or palm, of
the hand could often be viewed as a metonymy for the inward self, and
early modern audiences may have recognized Cuddy’s gesture as having
real affective power to not only symbolize, but also create, amity between
agents.33 The natural philosopher John Bulwer asserts that ‘there is in the
Hand a certaine secret and hidden vertue, and a convenient force or philtre
to procure affection’.34 To shake hands was to risk a physiological transaction
with important emotional and sociable effects.
Of course this is a business transaction. Nonetheless, we should be wary of
divorcing social and economic concerns—early moderns rarely did. The link
between the two is exemplified by the word ‘credit’, used by both Elizabeth
and Cuddy. Credit encompasses financial transactions, social reputation,
and affective relations founded on mutual trust.35 Thus, Elizabeth’s loss of
reputation, due to rumours about her demonic transactions, has damaged her
ability to engage in the financial transactions that are also crucial linchpins
of sociability in early modern England. Just prior to Dog’s entry, in language
that establishes a symbolic link between the witch’s accuser and her familiar,
Elizabeth describes Old Banks as ‘this black cur / That barks and bites and
sucks the very blood/ Of me and of my credit’ (2.1.131–133).36 When Cuddy
acknowledges that his father has ‘hurt the head of [Elizabeth’s] credit’, he
echoes her own concerns. Furthermore, as Nina Levine has recently argued,
credit, which may be extended to anyone, has the potential to establish bonds
between any two agents who are willing to (in Cuddy’s terms) ‘kob’ and ‘ka’
each other good turns. Thus, on the early modern stage, credit often troubles
seeming rigid distinctions of status and place.37 Challenging patriarchal
forms of affiliation, Cuddy does not merely profess himself ‘ashamed to own’
his father. In speaking of credit, he actively works to redress the physical
and symbolic injuries Sawyer has suffered at the elder Banks’s hands, by
integrating her into a new set of social relations founded on credit.

33 Karim-Cooper, The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage, 172–176.

34 Bulwer, Chirologia, sigs. I2v–I3r.
35 Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation, 123–172.
36 On the implicit links between Banks and Dog, see: Johnson, ‘Female Bodies, Speech, and
Silence’, 74–75.
37 Levine, ‘Practicing the City’, 23–49.
108  Alex MacConochie

Granted, such alternative forms of association remain only potentialities,

compromised from before the dialogue begins. Old mistrusts remain, as
Elizabeth says in an aside: ‘I must dissemble, the better to accomplish my
revenge’ (2.1.230–232). Cuddy, meanwhile, with his back turned while Dog
performs the charm, expresses fears of the witch’s power. Nonetheless,
the abrupt shift into a comic scene—‘we shall have sport’ Elizabeth says
in an aside, as she agrees to the clown character’s proposal—gestures
toward another way of viewing elderly, marginal women such as Elizabeth.
Cuddy approaches her as the village wise woman, a ‘motherly woman’
valued for her facility with charms and spells. Cuddy’s father himself al-
ludes to one such figure when he addresses Elizabeth as ‘Mother Bombie’,
the title character of a John Lyly comedy from the 1590s (4.1.219). Lyly’s
play establishes a common pattern for portraying wise women and even
witches as ‘cunning and wise, never doing harm, but still practicing good’.38
Numerous plays, from Thomas Heywood’s The Wise Woman of Hogsdon
to Thomas Middleton’s The Witch, portray witches or wise women as, if
somewhat alien in their ‘cunning’, nonetheless beneficent members of the
social order, whose schemes and charms often—as Cuddy hopes—aid a
romantic plot’s comic resolution.39Such apparent tolerance nonetheless
excludes the benevolent witch or wise woman from membership in her
community. By contrast, in The Witch of Edmonton, the comic witchcraft
plot, a staple of the early modern theatre, leads not to resolution, but to
critique of the social order.
Elizabeth’s ‘sport’ with Cuddy employs an instance of refused touch to
embody the status distinctions that have pushed the younger Banks to seek
out the witch’s aid. Thus, in his next scene, Dog produces a spirit in the form
of Katherine, Cuddy’s beloved, who, when he attempts to ‘embrace’ her, leads
him into a pond where he is nearly ‘drowned’ (3.1.108–110). Cuddy’s inability
to embrace the spirit in Katherine’s form represents his social distance
from the real, wealthy Katherine through a bit of supernatural clowning.
Cuddy’s failure to embrace Katherine, however, is also the beginning of
an unlikely relationship between the tenant farmer’s son and the devil.
After Dog reveals himself to Cuddy, the latter forgives him the trick and
says, ‘Well, Tom, give me thy fist, we are friends’ (3.1.134–135). Dog/Tom
accepts, but insists on the same sort of reciprocal contract Cuddy offers
Elizabeth: ‘Dogs love where they are beloved’, he tells Cuddy. When Young
Banks promises him ‘jowls and livers’ to eat, Dog agrees to work mischief on

38 Lyly, Mother Bombie, 5.3.367–368.

39 Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, 217–218.
Touching on the Margins 109

Cuddy’s romantic competitors. They mark the bargain with a handshake:

‘Thy nieve’, or hand, Cuddy says to Dog/Tom, ‘Friends must part for a time’
(3.1.167–168). Between Dog and Cuddy, as between Cuddy and Elizabeth,
touch embodies reciprocal, mutually beneficial relations. On the edges of
the community, outsider characters embody a horizontal form of social
relations that contrasts with the hierarchies they implicitly, and often
explicitly, critique.
But does Elizabeth’s relationship with Dog ever embody the kind of
reciprocal relations modelled by the other two pairs in this triangle of
outsiders? To conclude, we return to Dog’s and Elizabeth’s negotiations over
the witch’s teat. In place of the teat, Elizabeth proposes a form of touch from
which she derives some benefit. ‘Kiss me, my Tommy’, she says, ‘And rub
away some wrinkles on my brow’ (4.1.174–175). We can read this, of course,
as another display of demonic sexuality, one that troubles the boundary
between human and animal. 40 Yet, it is also an assault on the boundaries
dividing Elizabeth from her social superiors, as it parodies behaviour com-
monly ascribed to wealthy ladies. Elizabeth frames her love of her familiar
in terms critical of luxury. ‘No lady loves her hound’, she insists, ‘Monkey or
parakeet as I do thee’ (4.1.180–181). But Elizabeth does more than criticize
those above her in the social hierarchy. She frames the kiss she asks of Dog
as embodying relations that are not themselves hierarchical, saying, ‘Up
on thy hind legs’ to kiss her (4.1.174). This is a potentially grotesque form
of touch—comic at best—that also serves as a reminder that mutuality
has been so rare in the world of the play that it can only be embodied as a
transgressive blurring of boundaries.
The witch’s touch does, then, threaten the community that ostracizes
her—but not only through murder and madness. Elizabeth’s contacts with
Cuddy and her familiar offer an alternative to the hierarchical violence, overt
or symbolic, that sustains the social order in the world of the play. Further-
more, they model a mutuality that muddles the boundaries—between high
and low, human and animal, innocent victims and guilty witches—that,
the play suggests, underpin the hierarchical social order it depicts. Where
Goodcole’s representation of the witch seeks to sustain that patriarchal
order, The Witch of Edmonton portrays a woman on the community’s edge
as modelling an alternative, more mutual order.

40 On the ways these acts of touch trouble the human/animal divide, see: Purkiss, The Witch
in History, 231–242. For a critic who assumes the audience would and could only have been
unsympathetic to Elizabeth in these moments, see: Johnson, ‘Female Bodies’, 78–79.
110  Alex MacConochie

Works Cited

Primary Sources

Bulwer, John. Chirologia, or The naturall language of the hand. London, 1644. Wing
B5462.
Dekker, Thomas, John Ford, and William Rowley. The Witch of Edmonton a known
true story. London, 1658. Wing R2097.
Dekker, Thomas, John Ford, and William Rowley. The Witch of Edmonton. Edited
by Lucy Munro. London: Bloomsbury, 2017.
Dekker, Thomas, John Ford, and William Rowley. The Witch of Edmonton, edited
by Rowland Wymer. In The Collected Works of John Ford, Volume 2, edited by
Brian Vickers, 133–289. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Goodcole, Henry. The Wonderfull Discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer a Witch. London,
1621. STC 12014.
Lyly, John. Mother Bombie. Edited by Leah Scragg. Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2010.
Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice. Edited by John Drakakis. London:
Bloomsbury, 2010.

Secondary Sources

Barker, Roberta. ‘“An Honest Dog Yet”: Performing The Witch of Edmonton’. Early
Theatre 12, no. 2 (2009): 163–182.
Bladen, Victoria. ‘Shaping Supernatural Identity in The Witch of Edmonton (1621)’.
In Supernatural and Secular Power in Early Modern England, edited by Victoria
Bladen and Marcus Harmes, 207–231. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015.
Classen, Constance. The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2012.
Classen, Constance. ‘The Witch’s Senses: Sensory Ideologies and Transgressive
Femininities from the Renaissance to Modernity’. In Empire of the Senses: The
Sensual Cultural Reader, edited by David Howes, 70–85. Oxford: Berg, 2005.
Comensoli, Viviana. ‘Household Business’: Domestic Plays of Early Modern England.
Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1996.
Cox, John D. The Devil and the Sacred in English Drama, 1350–1642. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Dawson, Antony. ‘Witchcraft/Bigamy: Cultural Conflict in The Witch of Edmonton’.
Renaissance Drama 20 (1989): 77–98.
Dolan, Frances. Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England,
1550–1700. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994.
Touching on the Margins 111

Garrett, Julia. ‘Dramatizing Deviance: Sociological Theory and The Witch of

Edmonton’. Criticism 49, no. 3 (2007): 327–375.
Gowing, Laura. Common Bodies: Women, Touch, and Power in Seventeenth-Century
England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003.
Hindle, Steven. ‘Beating the Bounds of the Parish: Order, Memory, and Identity in
the English Local Community, c. 1500–1700’. In Defining Community in Early
Modern Europe, edited by Michael Halvorson and Karen Spierling, 205–227.
London: Routledge, 2016.
Johnson, Sarah. ‘Female Bodies, Speech, and Silence in The Witch of Edmonton’.
Early Theatre 12, no. 1 (2009): 69–91.
Karim-Cooper, Farah. The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch, and
the Spectacle of Dismemberment. London: Bloomsbury, 2016.
Levine, Nina. Practicing the City: Early Modern London on Stage. New York: Fordham
University Press, 2016.
Martin, Randall. ‘Henry Goodcole, Visitor of Newgate: Crime, Conversion, and
Patronage’. The Seventeenth Century 20, no. 2 (2005): 153–184.
Millar, Charlotte-Rose. ‘Sleeping with Devils: The Sexual Witch in Seventeenth-
Century England’. In Supernatural and Secular Power in Early Modern England,
edited by Victoria Bladen and Marcus Harmes, 207–231. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015.
Moshenska, Joseph. Feeling Pleasures: The Sense of Touch in Renaissance England.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Muldrew, Craig. The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations
in Early Modern England. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998.
Murray, John Tucker. English Dramatic Companies, 1558–1642. 2 vols. New York:
Russell and Russell, 1963.
Paster, Gail Kern. The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in
Early Modern England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993.
Purkiss, Diane. The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Repre-
sentations. London: Routledge, 1996.
Stymeist, David. ‘“Must I be … made a common sink?”: Witchcraft and the Theatre
in The Witch of Edmonton’. Renaissance and Reformation 25, no. 2 (2001): 33–53.
Woolgar, C.M. The Senses in Late Medieval England. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2006.
Zucker, Adam. The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011.
112  Alex MacConochie

About the author

Alex MacConochie is a lecturer in English literature at Boston University. His

book project explores the social functions of touch in early modern English
drama. His essay on contested touch in Hamlet appeared in Renaissance
Drama 45 (2017). With Boston University’s Willing Suspension Productions,
he has directed a number of early modern plays, including The Witch of
Edmonton.
6. Anna Trapnel: Prophet or Witch?
Debra Parish

Abstract
Anna Trapnel came to prominence as a prophetess in England during the
1650s. One of hundreds of visionary women who identified as prophets
during the turbulent English Civil Wars and Interregnum period, Trapnel
gained a reputation and following for her compelling visionary trances
and prophetic declarations. She published several works giving accounts
of her visions and propounding God’s warnings to all outward political
and religious powers. Her controversial prophetic actions and utterances
put her at risk and led her into dangerous territory, where some of her
enemies would label her ‘mad’ and some would accuse her of witchcraft.
This chapter explores the writings and actions of this independent and
outspoken woman, analysing her shifting public identity from ‘prophet’ to
‘witch’, as she not only pushed boundaries of gender, but also challenged
the dominant political and religious institutions and authority.

Keywords: prophecy; witchcraft; Fifth-Monarchists; visionary;

­Millenarianism

England’s Rulers and Clergie do Judge the Lord’s handmaid to be mad and under
the administration of evil angels, and a witch, and many other evil terms they
raise up to make me odious, and abhorred in the hearts of good and bad.1

Anna Trapnel gained a reputation and following as a visionary prophet during

the religious and political upheavals of the English Civil War and Interregnum
(c.1640–1660). She was one of several women who claimed that God was
speaking directly through them, and subsequently gained public notoriety

1 Trapnel, Report and Plea, sig. A3r.

Hopkins, L. and A. Norrie (eds.), Women on the Edge in Early Modern Europe, Amsterdam University
Press, 2019.
doi 10.5117/9789462987500/ch06
114 Debr a Parish

for their prophetic utterances and activity. Trapnel constructed her identity
as one of God’s chosen saints and a prophetess, attracting a large following
for her prophetic displays and spiritual messages. Filled with millenarian
excitement, she experienced many visions of Christ’s imminent return
and rule, and drew audiences to witness her ecstatic trances and prophetic
warnings.2 Relying heavily on scriptural references and apocalyptic imagery
from the Books of Daniel and Revelation, she foretold the striking down of
all political rulers and religious powers, as Christ would now return to rule
through his saints. Although many were convinced of her visionary insights,
her public acceptance as a prophet was never fixed or guaranteed. Trapnel’s
prophetic actions and utterances also led her into dangerous territory, causing
her to be accused of witchcraft, and to be labelled a witch.
The Civil War and Interregnum period saw the overturning of political
and religious institutions, and the dismantling of the established Church
of England. King Charles I was publicly executed, Oliver Cromwell and his
armies took power, and a succession of parliaments debated the future of
both Church and State. Significantly, this religious and political vacuum
allowed for the growth of Independent churches and religious sects, which
pushed doctrines of toleration and liberty of conscience.3 This also led to the
spread of lay preaching and prophesying by unqualified men and women
who claimed spiritual authority directly from God. There were some 300
women visionaries active within the radical religious sects, as well as several
individual women—in addition to Anna Trapnel—who attracted public
attention for their visionary acts and published writings.4 Importantly, this
emergent prophetic ministry clashed with learned, ‘official’ ministers who
produced a proliferation of published works protesting this overstepping of
religious and ministerial boundaries.5 It was against this context of political
and religious division and contest, with the clergy pushing back to assert its

2 Bernard Capp explains that ‘Millenarianism may be defined broadly as belief in an imminent
kingdom of heaven on earth to be established with supernatural help; its inspiration sprang
from the biblical prophecies, especially in Revelation’. Capp, ‘The Fifth-Monarchists and Popular
Millenarianism’, 165.
3 Morrill, ‘The Church in England’, 92–94.
4 Mack, ‘Women as Prophets’, 24, 6. Mack notes that most visionary women active in the 1650s,
were Quakers. Other individual women such as Eleanor Davies, Mary Cary, and Anna Trapnel
gained notoriety for their prophetic displays and published writings and individual status as
prophets. The female prophets, Mary Cary and Sarah Wight, were also associated with Trapnel’s
congregation at All-Hallows, London.
5 See, for example: Lay Preaching Unmasked, 21; Tub Preachers Overturned, 13; and Bewick, An
Antidote Against Lay Preaching, 22–23. Purkiss, ‘Producing the Voice’, notes: ‘for the radical sects
of the seventeenth century, prophecy was any utterance produced by God through human agency’,
Anna Tr apnel: Prophe t or Witch? 115

authority, in which Trapnel was both revered as a prophet and demonized

as a witch. It is here, I argue, that the label of ‘witch’ was wielded by her
opponents to refute her prophetic status and credibility, and, importantly,
to defend their own positions. This chapter examines both the spiritual and
political force of Trapnel’s writings and visionary experiences to elucidate
the potency and threat of her prophecies to religious and political powers.
While Trapnel could be revered as a prophet in some circles, these same
examples of political and religious agency also put her in danger of being
labelled a ‘witch’, or a dangerous proponent of ‘witchcraft’.
Trapnel reveals that she experienced her first vision upon the death of
her mother in 1647, when God appeared to her declaring, ‘I will make thee
an instrument’.6 She was then inspired to follow a religious path, traversing
many personal spiritual struggles and conversion experiences.7 She went on
to experience many visions, and delivered prophetic warnings, concerning
matters of both Church and State. Trapnel also asserted that being unmarried
and financially independent, she had the means and freedom to travel freely
and carry out God’s work as a spiritual vessel.8 She was associated with the
radical Fifth-Monarchist movement of the early 1650s, who were fiercely
critical of Cromwell and his regime, and who envisioned the imminent
coming of the ‘New Jerusalem’ where a new order would be created, and all
outward powers would fall. Trapnel gained a reputation and was respected in
her London congregation as a visionary and a prophetess.9 Trapnel was also
associated with the Quaker prophets of the 1650s, as her ecstatic trances and
visions were similar to the Quakers, and both claimed divine inspiration and
authority directly from God. Trapnel appeared in negative contemporary
depictions of the Quakers with both being accused of devil worship and
witchcraft (Figure 6.1).10 At the height of her prophetic activity in 1654, she
followed God’s calling to travel to Cornwell to expand her prophetic activity,
but it was here that Trapnel met with political and religious enemies. She
was arrested and tried on charges of ‘vagrancy’ and ‘seditious libel’, and was

and that prophecy by women could therefore include, ‘hymns, moral exhortations, scriptural
exegesis, prayers, spiritual autobiography and mystical revelations, as well as predictions’ (139).
6 Trapnel, Cry of a Stone, 3.
7 Trapnel, Legacy for Saints, 24, 29.
8 Trapnel, Report and Plea, 26. When questioned on her marital status at her trial, Trapnel
answered that she was not married and therefore ‘having no hindrance, why may I not go where
I please, if the Lord so will’.
9 Graham et al., Her Own Life, 13–14, 73; Hobby, ‘Discourse so Unsavoury’, 26; Capp, The Fifth
Monarchy Men, 41, 174; Capp, ‘The Political Dimension’, 109.
10 Mack, Visionary Women, 165, 170, 249, 253.
116 Debr a Parish

Figure 6.1: A seventeenth-century engraving of Anna Trapnel by Richard Gaywood that depicts
her as a Quaker. It shows Trapnel preaching (or prophesying), but with the Devil standing behind
directing her actions and utterances. The caption beneath reads, ‘Hannah Trapnel: A Quaker and
Pretended Prophetess’. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University
Library, Syn 7.65.157.
Anna Tr apnel: Prophe t or Witch? 117

transported back to London to serve several months in Bridewell prison.11 It

was during her Cornwell arrest and trial that Trapnel was labelled a witch,
and made to answer accusations of witchcraft.
Studies of Trapnel have put forward a range of possible explanations for
this vulnerability of her prophetic identity. Earlier feminist studies focus on
gender, asserting that Trapnel was labelled a ‘witch’ in response to a woman
overstepping the perceived boundaries by daring to speak publicly, and
presuming the role and authority of a prophet. Female displays of prophetic
power, writes Diane Purkiss, was viewed as a ‘transgression of gender norms’
that produced ‘hostile scrutiny and male anxiety’.12 Trapnel and other vision-
ary women from the radical sects have been presented as contributing ‘to
the shaping of emergent female authorial consciousness’, constructing a
‘feminized discourse’ and challenging traditional male authority.13 Another
opinion argues that female prophets were taken seriously when perceived
as ‘God’s instrument’, but were also labelled ‘as a scold, a witch or a vagrant’
when seen as stepping outside their gender roles.14 Katharine Hodgkin asks
us to imagine how contemporaries might have reacted being ‘confronted by
a woman and a vision’ and then deciding if ‘she was a witch, or a prophet,
or insane’. Witchcraft as a category, she argues, is ‘gendered female’ and
women were therefore more susceptible to witchcraft accusations.15 Some
explored ‘madness’ as a category of analysis, connecting ‘prophet’ and ‘witch’
to irrational female behaviour. This approach asserts the blurred boundaries
for contemporary witnesses between ‘insanity, possession, witchcraft and
divine inspiration’, and that because ‘femininity is analogically connected
with madness’, any over-zealous behaviour by women was easily attributed
to mental disorder.16 Others have linked cries of witchcraft to contemporary
fears of demonic possession, and therefore a genuine reaction to the confront-
ing spectacle of a woman lying in ecstatic trance. Phyllis Mack also notes a
prevalence of accounts of witchcraft in contemporary discourse, and that
the sight of a woman experiencing a vision might be understood as prophecy,
or just as easily interpreted as madness or witchcraft.17 Another study of the

11 Bullard, ‘Textual Disruption’, 40–41.

12 Purkiss, ‘Producing the Voice’, 141.
13 Magro, ‘Spiritual Autobiography’, 422, 406–407.
14 Hughes, Gender and the English Revolution, 79.
15 Hodgkin, ‘Reasoning with Unreason’, 221, 224–225.
16 Hodgkin, ‘Reasoning with Unreason’, 233, 219; Purkiss, ‘Producing the Voice’, 140; Magro,
‘Spiritual Autobiography’, 414–415.
17 Mack, Visionary Women, 80–81, 79; Hodgkin, ‘Reasoning with Unreason’, 221, 224–225;
Magro, ‘Spiritual Autobiography’, 415; Purkiss, ‘Producing the Voice’, 140.
118 Debr a Parish

‘prophet’ and ‘witch’ in early modern England argues the ‘permeability’ of

these categories as both were associated with disorder, and any form of reli-
gious ‘enthusiasm’, such as ‘ecstatic prophecy’, could be read as witchcraft.18
More recent studies of female prophecy have seen a historiographical shift
to the view that prophecy had both a religious and a political dimension,
and came at a time where radical groups, such as the Fifth Monarchists,
were putting forward apocalyptic visions directly challenging religious and
political powers.19 Katherine Gillespie argues that there was a real fear of
the ‘potency and appeal’ of prophecy as a ‘speech act’ and that it was viewed
as a form of ‘popular political expression’. Furthermore, its ‘oppositional
discourse’ could claim authority directly from God and scripture.20 Other
studies of English witchcraft focus on the crucial role of language in the
construction of individual identity, and the need to consider wider discourses
and contexts that produced witchcraft accusations.21 Stuart Clark argues
for new questions where witchcraft is analysed as a ‘category in language’,
and for its ‘symbolic and metaphorical power’ within its wider political and
religious arena.22 Peter Elmer refers to the ‘politics of witchcraft’, arguing
that witchcraft during the Civil Wars period was used for rhetorical and
polemical purposes, and therefore the importance of the ‘broader political
climate’ which gave rise to witchcraft accusations.23 This chapter builds
upon this more recent methodology. It places Trapnel’s prophetic actions
and shifting identity within her context, to argue that it was the power,
and religious and political ‘potency’ of her prophetic writings and public
utterances, which led to accusations of witchcraft.

Trapnel’s Whitehall Trance and Published Writings

Trapnel came to public attention during her famous Whitehall trance in

1654. Having just attended the parliamentary inquest and questioning of

18 Uszkalo, ‘Dark Sisters’, 3, 4, 46.

19 Salzman, Reading Early Modern Women’s Writing, 108, 114.
20 Gillespie, ‘Prophecy and Political Expression’, 1, 3, 4, 10.
21 Elmer, ‘Towards a Politics of Witchcraft’, 103, 108, 111; Elmer, Witchcraft, Witch-Hunting and
Politics, 3, 5, 70; Clark, Thinking with Demons, 3, 5–6.
22 Clark, ‘Narrative Ideology and Meaning’, 6, 9, 12.
23 Elmer, ‘Towards a Politics of Witchcraft’, 103; Elmer, Witchcraft, Witch-Hunting and Politics,
3, 5, 70. For further discussion of this historiographical shift to a focus on context and language
in early modern witchcraft study, see: Gibson, ‘Thinking Witchcraft: Language, Literature and
Intellectual History’, 164–181; and Gaskill, ‘The Pursuit of Reality’, 1072, 1087.
Anna Tr apnel: Prophe t or Witch? 119

Vasavor Powell—a preacher from her congregation at All-Hallows24—she

fell into trance, and was carried to Mr. Robert’s inn. There, she lay in bed for
twelve days, taking no food, or ‘sometimes a very little toast in small beer’,
as she moved between silence, prophetic declarations, and spiritual songs:

Lying in her bed with her eyes shut, her hands fixed, seldom seen to move,
she delivered in that time many and various things; speaking every day
[…] and sometimes both in the day and night. She uttered all in Prayer
and Spiritual Songs for the most part, in the ears of very many persons
of all sorts and degrees, who hearing the Report came where she lay.25

While in trance, she acted as God’s mouthpiece, warning of Christ’s imminent

return and rule, and the tearing down of Cromwell and his armies, and all
outward religious powers.26 The spectacle of Trapnel’s trance drew many cu-
rious onlookers, who gathered at her bedside to witness her visionary display.
Trapnel used several voices as she moved between giving autobiographical
details, describing her many visions, spiritual song, and expounding biblical
references to reinforce her prophetic declarations and warnings. Presenting
herself as a vessel for God’s voice, she denied her own agency and assumed
the role of a prophet or spiritual messenger.27 Trapnel’s Whitehall visions
and spiritual songs were recorded by a scribe who intermittently refers to
himself as ‘the Relator’. He described the bedside scene, telling of her many
visitors, which included many ‘Colonels, Captains and Ladies and Ministers’,
and how the overcrowding and noise in the room sometimes interfered with
his ability to take down every detail of her utterances.28
The Whitehall trance launched Trapnel’s literary career. She produced
six works in total, which included transcripts of her visions and prophetic
utterances, her own writings, and books of spiritual verse. The bulk of her
work was published at the height of her prophetic activity, and during her
arrest and trial in 1654. Her writings have been described as a mixture of

24 Vasavor Powell was a prominent millenarian Fifth-Monarchist preacher who was being
questioned by the Council of State for denouncing Cromwell and the dismissal of the nominated
parliamentary assembly. See: Nevitt, Women and the Pamphlet Culture, 6–9.
25 Trapnel, Cry of a Stone, 2.
26 Trapnel, Cry of a Stone, 4–5, 1–2. For a detailed discussion of Trapnel’s Whitehall trance,
and Trapnel’s associations and earlier visions, see: Purkiss, ‘Producing the Voice’, 139–141, 143,
148; and Capp, The Fifth-Monarchy Men, 102, 266. Capp writes that Trapnel was a member of
John Simpson’s Fifth-Monarchist church and experienced millenarian visions from 1647. She
published works attacking the Protectorate from 1654–1658.
27 See: Wiseman, ‘Unsilent Instruments’, 187–188.
28 Trapnel, Cry of a Stone, sig. A2v, 1–2, 16, 46, 56.
120 Debr a Parish

‘prophecy, autobiography, admonition and warning’, and included genres

of ‘prophetic texts, spiritual autobiography and conversion narratives’.29
Trapnel’s Strange and Wonderful Newes from Whitehall and The Cry of the
Stone (1654) give vivid accounts of her visions and utterances, transcribed
from her bedside at Whitehall. They include her warnings to Cromwell, to
Parliament, and to the clergy of the great ‘overturnnings’ to come, which
would see the meek rise up and cause the powerful rulers and oppressors to
fall.30 Trapnel’s Report and Plea (also 1654) gives a detailed personal account
of her journey to Cornwall, and of her arrest and trial. It is a defence of her
prophetic actions and ‘reputation’, and details the ‘injustices’ of her arrest
and courtroom questioning. Described as ‘autobiographical and reflective’
as well as a ‘political argument’,31 this text contains Trapnel’s strongest and
most vivid account of how she was subjected to accusations and taunts of
‘witchcraft’ from her political and religious opponents. Written ‘in Defiance’
of all charges, she accused the clergy and political opponents of conspiring
against her, and making witchcraft accusations in their attempts to silence
God’s spirit.32
Later the same year, Trapnel published her A Legacy for Saints, which is
a detailed conversion narrative giving a detailed account of her suffering
on her long journey to spiritual awakening and final communion ‘amongst
the Saints’. She recalled that, ‘my spirit had thus been upon the rack […]
before I felt, heard and saw that glorious light and power […] The voice of
the spirit then began speaking directly to me’.33 This work’s introduction
is written by many of her supporters and fellow worshippers, who defend
Trapnel: praising her as a devout spiritual ‘sister’ and one of God’s chosen
‘Saints’, and as one of ‘exemplary temper’ and a pious model.34 It also includes
Trapnel’s reflections on the injustices of her Cornwall arrest and trial and her
imprisonment in Bridewell. It is presented as a vindication and exoneration,
as she asserts her innocence, and describes her suffering at the hands of
her false accusers.
Some years later, in 1657, Trapnel published her final work, A Lively Voice
for the King of Saints and Nations. Written in spiritual verse, and relying
heavily upon scriptural allegory and references, she continues her declara-
tions of Christ’s imminent return, and to praise and celebrate the power of

29 Hinds, God’s Englishwomen, 12.

30 Trapnel, Cry of a Stone, 66.
31 Graham et al., Her Own Life, 73–74.
32 Trapnel, Report and Plea, title page (A1r).
33 Trapnel, Legacy for Saints, 13, 7–8.
34 Trapnel, Legacy for Saints, sigs. A2r, A3v.
Anna Tr apnel: Prophe t or Witch? 121

the spirit over all outward religious forms and ministerial power.35 Trapnel
has also been attributed authorship of an unpublished manuscript or folio
of songs that appeared around 1659. It is described as a ‘thick volume’ of
1000 pages, which is a collection of ‘sermon-like songs’, ‘prophetic epistles’
and ‘psalms’ sung in private gatherings from 1657 to 1658.36 By the end of
the 1650s, there is no further evidence of Trapnel’s continued prophetic
activity or writing.

Trapnel’s Congregation and Political Alliances

Trapnel’s prophetic utterances reveal both their spiritual and political

content, as well as her strong political allegiances. During her Whitehall
trance, Trapnel spoke of her religious fellowship with the Independent
‘Church meeting as All-hallows’, which has been described by historians
as a radical Fifth-Monarchist and Independent congregation.37 The Fifth-
Monarchists were known for their apocalyptic thought and language, and
were viewed by their contemporaries as a strongly millenarian ‘religious
and political sect’, preparing for Christ’s second coming.38 They were fierce
opponents of Cromwell, and the political direction of the new Protectorate,
and were also noted for their strong anti-clericalism.39 Guided by the Books
of Daniel and Revelation, they declared the destruction of earthly powers,
as the saints would now rule the new ‘fifth monarchy’. 40 They accused
Cromwell of abusing his power by dissolving the elected parliament, and
of being no better than the deposed king. They were angered by what they
saw as the political betrayal of their millenarian visions for the rule of the
saints, and their hopes for a more egalitarian political and social order. 41
Trapnel joined in with her strong rebuke of Cromwell for assuming too much
power, declaring he should be ‘ashamed of his great pomp and revenue,
whiles the poor are ready to starve’. 42 This millenarian and reformist

35 Trapnel, A Lively Voice, 13, 26.

36 Prineas, ‘The Discourse of Love and the Rhetoric of Apocalypse’, 93, 97, 95. Prineas notes
that the apocalyptic rhetoric found in the songs, and scriptural imagery, are drawn from the
Books of Daniel and Revelation.
37 Trapnel, Cry of a Stone, 3.
38 Capp, ‘The Political Dimension’, 115.
39 Capp, Fifth-Monarchy Men, 14; Nevitt, Women and the Pamphlet Culture, 9, 6, 13.
40 Capp, Fifth-Monarchy Men, 14, 20, 23; Freeman, ‘Anna Trapnel (1642–1660)’, 369.
41 Capp, ‘The Political Dimension’, 115; Capp, ‘The Fifth-Monarchists and Popular Millenarian-
ism’, 170–171.
42 Trapnel, Cry of a Stone, 12, 50.
122 Debr a Parish

Fifth-Monarchist movement has been described as a political party in

opposition to Parliament and Cromwell. Significantly, in 1654, when Trapnel
was most active, the Fifth-Monarchists were pushing their political reform
agenda in parliament. 43
Trapnel’s association with the Fifth-Monarchists, and her outspoken views
against Cromwell, did not go unnoticed. Using vivid scriptural imagery from
the Books of Daniel and Revelation, she declared the ‘Four Horns’ represented
the current rulers and armies, and described her ‘visions of Cromwell running
with his horn at many precious Saints’.44 Trapnel also likened Cromwell and
the political powers to the tall ‘oaks’ from Revelation, warning they would
now ‘crumble’ under the rule of the Spirit. 45 With millenarian fervour, she
declared that Cromwell, and his armies, would be defeated and cut down
when Christ returned to rule over all. She warned those powers who had
‘oppressed the Saints’, declaring: ‘Oh you searjeants! Then your hearts shall
tremble to put forth your hand against one of the Prophets or people of the
Lord […] that have prophesied and prayed’. 46 Trapnel’s prophetic warnings
were brought to Cromwell’s attention, who reportedly had her put ‘under
surveillance’, leading to a warrant being issued for her arrest.47

Anna Trapnel, Prophetess: Construction of an Identity

Trapnel constructed her public identity as a prophetess who, having received

the power of God’s spirit within, would fulfil her role as a spiritual vessel
and messenger. In her published writings and visionary utterances, Trapnel
drew heavily upon scriptural references and imagery, presenting herself as
both a chosen saint and a prophetess, who was compelled to act as God’s
mouthpiece. Trapnel describes her earlier spiritual struggles until she finally
came to that ‘glorious light and power’. Here, she discovered the ‘doctrine
of free grace’, and the ‘community of Saints’ joined by the power of God’s
spirit. Trapnel declares that she had also received the gift of prophecy, and
that the saints ‘have in the pourings of the Spirit, which God hath said he
will pour out in the latter days upon all flesh; his Sons and Daughters shall

43 Graham et al., Her Own Life, 71, 73.

44 Trapnel, Cry of a Stone, 4–6, 12.
45 Trapnel, Cry of a Stone, 12–13.
46 Trapnel, Cry of a Stone, 23; Trapnel, Strange and Wonderful Newes, 4–5, 56. Trapnel’s biblical
references to the four horns and crumbling oaks are drawn from Daniel 7, and her prophecies
regarding the rule of the saints are from the Book of Revelation.
47 Purkiss, ‘Producing the Voice’, 139–140.
Anna Tr apnel: Prophe t or Witch? 123

Prophesie’. 48 In her introduction to Report and Plea, she likens herself to

those biblical ‘hand-maids’ and ‘prophetesses’ through whom Christ was
now speaking and living:

And though I am a poor inferior, unworthy to be compared with any of

the holy men or women reported of in Scripture; yet I can say with Paul,
Through grace, I am what I am, and I live yet not I, but Christ lives in me […]
who died and gave himself for a weak handmaid. […] And if hand-maids
in these dayes pray and weep for their Lord, begging his coming to rule
in them, and in the Nation, and to teach all sorts of people his statutes. 49

Trapnel also constructed her prophetic identity in the likeness of the biblical
Hannah, that ‘approved prophetess’ (1 Samuel 1). She identified strongly
with Hannah’s spiritual struggles, often assuming her title and persona
as one of God’s chosen handmaids, as one who also suffered persecution
from unbelievers. Trapnel asks her readers to ‘well observe the ensuing
Discourse’ so that they ‘may understand the voice of malice and envie
uttered and acted by the Clergie and Rulers against me’. She described to her
audience God’s first appearance and words to her that: ‘the universality of
the Saints shall have discoveries of God through thee’.50 At the beginning of
her Whitehall trance, Trapnel outlined her prophetic credentials and earlier
visionary experiences. She detailed her many visions concerning the recent
wars, and how she had foreseen the outcomes of various battles across the
city, and had won the respect of ‘many Captains’ for her visionary insights
and predictions.51 She drew upon biblical example to assert her spiritual
authority as one of God’s prophets, and scriptural prophecies showing God
appearing in his chosen Saints:

Two things are foretold by the Prophets, shall be brought to pass, […] The
Lord’s appearing in his Glory upon Mount Sion, and the darkening of Sun
and Moon, that is, the shaming, confounding and casting out of all wisdom
and power, […] if we see these high and precious effects beginning to put
forth either in sons or daughters, in handmaids or servants, let us rejoyce
[…] it was the desire of this Maid to present this her Testimony to you.52

48 Trapnel, Legacy for Saints, 7–8, 15, 22.

49 Trapnel, Report and Plea, sig. A2v.
50 Trapnel, Report and Plea, 3.
51 Trapnel, Report and Plea, 4–5, 7.
52 Trapnel, Cry of a Stone, sigs. A2r–A2v.
124 Debr a Parish

Trapnel was able to side-step her adversaries and critics by presenting

herself as a spiritual vessel, and denying her own agency in her work as God’s
instrument. She described herself as a ‘weak’ and ‘unworthy’ instrument,
and was therefore more receptive to the power of the spirit and making
‘his power more manifest’. She explained that God in these times would
make use of ‘silly handmaids’ and ‘low creatures’ as vessels of his spirit and
divine utterances:53

Thy handmaid has always desired that she might be swift to hear, slow
to speak; but now that thou hast taken her up into thy Mount, who can
keep in the rushing wind […] who can stop thy spirit?54

Trapnel reveals that as God’s ‘instrument’, and as one who had received the
gift of prophecy, she was forced—at times against her will—to speak and
deliver God’s messages. Historians have argued that it was this ‘denial of
self’ that gave women such as Trapnel access to the public sphere. Hilary
Hinds argues that by declaring, ‘there is no self in this thing’, Trapnel
constructed herself as a passive instrument, which gave her licence to speak
and write publicly.55 Prineas argues that denying agency or authorship
helped to affirm Trapnel’s prophetic identity. By constructing herself as
a ‘passive vessel’, and claiming her texts were ‘divinely imposed’, Trapnel
could assert her prophetic identity and authority.56 Maria Magro argues
that as a ‘mystic prophet, Trapnel’s ecstatic fits (her transcendence of body)
legitimate her utterances’ and her ‘visually compelling raptures’ gave her
‘authenticity’ as a ‘visionary prophet’.57 This denial of agency, therefore,
assisted Trapnel in gaining authority and identity as a prophetess and
vessel for God’s spirit.
While lying in a trance at Whitehall, and again on a bed at Cornwall,
Trapnel presents herself, at times, as a reluctant spiritual vessel, declar-
ing: ‘for thou hast cast thy servant where she would not’.58 The ‘Spirit’, she
declared, had the power to ‘inform and teacheth’ and ‘it doth declare the
great overturnings and disappointments that men shall meet with’.59 Her
writings also reveal a strong self-awareness that her words and visions would

53 Trapnel, Report and Plea, 37; Trapnel, Cry of a Stone, 62; Trapnel, Legacy for Saints, 42.
54 Trapnel, Cry of a Stone, 17.
55 Hinds, God’s Englishwomen, 90, 135.
56 Prineas, ‘The Discourse of Love’, 97.
57 Magro, ‘Spiritual Autobiography’, 420, 414.
58 Trapnel, Cry of a Stone, 67.
59 Trapnel, Cry of a Stone, 65.
Anna Tr apnel: Prophe t or Witch? 125

place her in opposition to those religious and political powers aiming to

protect their authority, who would inevitably accuse her of over-stepping
her boundaries. Some of her enemies, who would seek to deny her status
as a prophetess, would even go so far as to label her a ‘witch’.

Shifting Identities: From Prophetess to Witch

Why is thy servant come forth to proclaim your sin, and lay open your
iniquity, and is this not to be considered by you? Oh, you cannot abide to
think it comes from God; for then you tremble; they say we will not own
it to be from God, but from some evil Spirit, some witchcraft.60

Trapnel showed her awareness that her identity as a prophet was never
guaranteed, and that her prophetic utterances exposed her to the charge of
witchcraft. In Report and Plea, where she gives her own personal account of
her arrest and trial in Cornwall, she described how she was made to defend
her actions and narrowly avoided being charged as a witch. Trapnel explains
that she travelled to Cornwall to expand her prophetic influence following the
urgings from her congregation and followers, and receiving guidance directly
from God.61 She was given lodgings by her supporters Colonel Bennet and his
wife, and later Captain Langden, where she again lay in trance for many days,
attracting many visitors and onlookers.62 She also observed, however, that
some, most notably local clergymen, disapproved of her prophetic warnings
and activity, calling her a ‘dangerous deceiver’, and claiming that ‘an imposter
had come into these parts’.63 Trapnel observed that among those who did
not who did not approve of her spiritual activities were several local church
ministers. She observed that ‘Mr Welsted’, a Presbyterian minister, had sided
with the rulers and he had protested ‘the people would be drawn away if the
Rulers did not take some course with me’. She later recalled that this minister
was present at her arrest and had ‘called out in the chamber door […] saying
a whip will fetch her out’.64 She wrote that she experienced visions of the
‘Clergie-man and the Jurors contriving an indictment against me’, which

60 Trapnel, Cry of a Stone, 69.

61 Trapnel, Report and Plea, 1–2.
62 Trapnel, Report and Plea, 9–10. Colonel Bennet and Captain Langden were also present at
Trapnel’s Whitehall trance, and were associates and supporters of Trapnel (Cry of a Stone, 2).
63 Trapnel, Report and Plea, 16, 18.
64 Trapnel, Report and Plea, 18, 21.
126 Debr a Parish

was then followed by two warrants given for her arrest.65 Trapnel’s account
clearly recognized the important role of the local clergy in her indictment,
whom she asserts were present at her arrest and interfered at her trial.
Although there was no mention of witchcraft being included in the initial
warrant or charges, cries of ‘witch’ were heard at the scene of her arrest,
and Trapnel was made to answer witchcraft accusations at her trial. She
recounts how she was first presented to the jurors as ‘a dangerous, seditious
person’ who would ‘stir up and raise discord, rebellion and insurrection
among the good people of England’.66 She wrote how ‘Justice Lobb told me
I made a disturbance in the town. […] He said by drawing so many people
after me […] I set open my chamber doors and my windows for people to
hear’.67 Although there appears no evidence that Trapnel was officially
charged with witchcraft, she wrote that the ‘justices’, who ‘made a great
tumult’, came and dragged her from her bed, ‘crying, “A witch, a witch”’. Then
she reveals how, at her trial, it was asserted by the initial ‘report’ that she
would be revealed as a ‘witch’, and that she was made to prove otherwise:

But the report was that I would discover myself to be a witch when I came
before the justices, by having never a word to answer for myself; for it
used to be so among witches, they could not speak before the magistrates.
And so they said it would be so with me, but the Lord quickly defeated
them herein, and caused many to be of another minde.68

Trapnel wrote that by speaking and answering the justices’ questions, she
had satisfied the court that she was not a ‘witch’. She asserted that God had
protected her from these dangerous and false accusations, helping her to
avoid the local witch-trier with her ‘great pin’.69 She described how, ‘The
Lord kept me this day from their cruelty […] and that witch-tryer woman
of that Town, some would have had her come with her great pin which she
used to thrust into witches, to try them but the Lord my God in whom I trust,
delivered me from their malice’.70 Trapnel described the courtroom scene,

65 Trapnel, Report and Plea, 10–11, 18, 20.

66 Trapnel, Report and Plea, 52.
67 Trapnel, Report and Plea, 28.
68 Trapnel, Report and Plea, 21, 25.
69 See Larner, Enemies of God, who explains: ‘The witch pricker therefore was a key f igure
in the process of gathering evidence. His role was to examine the suspect for unusual bodily
marks and then to test these marks by pricking them to find out whether they were insensible’
(110–111).
70 Trapnel, Report and Plea, 22.
Anna Tr apnel: Prophe t or Witch? 127

and how she managed to deflect any questions of witchcraft. Defending

her innocence, she declared that ‘witch’ was one of many false names and
labels used against her, as she was named a ‘deluder’ and a ‘witch’ and ‘other
vile terms’. Trapnel was clear in identifying her enemies who labelled her a
‘white Devil’, and her prophetic utterances as ‘witchcraft’, as some ‘devout
women, Learned clergy and self-seeking Rulers’.71
It is significant that at the scene of her arrest, where she was called a
‘witch’, Trapnel observed the close power relationship between ‘rulers’ and
‘clergy’, asserting each depended upon the other to maintain their authority.
She recalled how:

The justices came to fetch me out of bed […] crying, A witch, a witch […]
And this Clergie-man durst not come, till the Rulers came, for then they
say, The witches can have no power over them, so that one depends upon
the other, Ruler upon Clergie, and Clergie upon Rulers.72

Here, Trapnel demonstrates her own perception of the rulers and clergy
conspiring against her, and falsely labelling her a ‘witch’. Trapnel was later to
observe how in the courtroom the ‘justices’ had ‘a clergyman at their elbow
who helped to make up their indictment’.73 Although she was not initially
arrested—or later charged—with witchcraft, what is of importance here
is how accusations of witchcraft entered the courtroom, and how easily
Trapnel’s prophetic activity could be read as witchcraft.
The title page of her Report and Plea shows it was written primarily as
a defence of her actions and of her innocence, and in ‘defiance’ of those
‘powers’ and ‘clergy’ who she asserted had made false and ‘scandalous’
claims (Figure 6.2). The charges that she claimed were brought against her
by Cromwell and ‘Cornwall jurors’, demonstrate how Trapnel’s prophetic
actions and utterances were treated as a threat to political and religious
authority and order. Her accusers characterized her as ‘one of devilish
minde, and wicked imaginations’, but she struck back, arguing: ‘Such
praying cannot be borne by the Inhabitants of this Nation; there is such
an old evil Spirit of mis-construing, and judging holy actions to carry in
them evil consequences’.74 Trapnel argued that she was misrepresented by
those who challenged her prophetic identity, asserting that ‘the Divel nick

71 Trapnel, Legacy for Saints, 49, 59.

72 Trapnel, Report and Plea, 21.
73 Trapnel, Report and Plea, 23.
74 Trapnel, Report and Plea, title page, 52.
128 Debr a Parish

Figure 6.2: Title Page of Report and Plea, where Trapnel proclaims Christ’s return to rule over all,
and she accuses ‘professors’ and ‘clergie’ of spreading ‘abusive and scandalous’ reports against
her which led to her arrest in Cornwall. C 8348.460.15*, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

names Saints’. She protested that her political and religious enemies would,
for their own ends, falsely label her a ‘witch’ and her prophetic actions as
‘witchcraft’.75
Trapnel also described the dangers of these ‘false’ names and identified
with all those other ‘Saints’ of her time, accused of evil and madness by
their religious enemies, observing that,

75 Trapnel, Legacy for Saints, 15, 49, 59.

Anna Tr apnel: Prophe t or Witch? 129

Saints who are now counted Novices and shallow fellowes, and frantique
hand-maids not fit to stand to speak plainly, phantick, and under the
administration of evill Angels and seditious whimsicall headed ones.76

Trapnel showed that her prophetic utterances and warnings drew her
into the wider field of religious and political debate, where she would be
falsely labelled, ‘disputed’, and ‘remonstrated with’. She asserted that those
‘Rabbies’ and powers, who she named the voices of ‘Anti-Christ’, would use
their ‘arguments’ in their efforts to ‘over-rule’ and ‘put her to silence’.77 She
demonstrated awareness of her vulnerable public identity, as she accused
outward rulers and clergy of being ‘against the Spirit’, and of using a range
of false labels, including ‘witch’, to deny her role as a visionary prophet.

Trapnel’s Prophetic Warnings: The Power of the Spirit versus

Outward Ministry

Trapnel asserted that her utterances and writings would draw opposition
from those outward powers who would not accept her as one of God’s
‘handmaids’, nor heed the voice of the spirit. In her introduction to Report
and Plea, Trapnel asked the ‘Christian Reader’ to ‘well observe the ensuing
discourse whereby you may understand the voice of malice and envie uttered
and acted by the Clergie and Rulers against me’.78 She directs her attack
toward her political and religious opponents, warning Cromwell and his
armies who ‘slight thy handmaid’ that their ‘hearts shall tremble to put forth
your hand against one of the prophets’.79 Speaking out against the clergy for
what she saw as their prominent role in her arrest and imprisonment, she
accused them of refusing to listen to ‘true Prophesie’ or the voice of the spirit:

Anti-Christian Clergy hearing the sound were not able to bear it […] and
therefore, because they saw so many adhere to the extraordinary things
discovered by and through a weak instrument, it was grievous to them
and they would not admit of any discourse with me but cryed out to the
Magistrate to lay bonds upon me.80

76 Trapnel, Legacy for Saints, 54.

77 Trapnel, Cry of a Stone, 41, 37.
78 Trapnel, Report and Plea, sig. A3r.
79 Trapnel, Cry of a Stone, 29, 56.
80 Trapnel, Report and Plea, 53; Trapnel, Legacy for Saints, 49.
130 Debr a Parish

Trapnel’s prophetic utterances, which provoked fierce opposition, were

clearly located within the binary divide of an outward ministry competing
with the voice of the spirit. Her claim that God was now speaking through
chosen instruments or prophets came with a warning that those ministers
and their supporters who spoke against the utterances of God’s spirit, would
soon be overturned as God’s spirit would rule over all. Trapnel warned those
outward powers of their imminent downfall declaring:

Oh, this is not time for man to reign, but for the Lord Jesus, and his voice
sounds out here and there by a son or a Daughter. […] Oh come all you
Disputants, Monarchs, scribes and Rabbies of the world, come forth now
and let us see what Arguments you can bring forth against the Spirit, the
pourings forth of it […] you shall be the men of a stammering lip and of
a stuttering tongue.81

Here, Trapnel warned all those who have disputed with her that their voices
would be silenced upon the return of Christ, when the Spirit would rule over
all outward powers. She described her role as one of God’s chosen sent forth
to bring down the ‘Anti-Christ’, here represented by all outward religious
powers and ministries:

And how has thy servant disputed, declared, remonstrated and appeared
in the field against Anti-Christ and how is this language now confounded
[…] Oh thy servant must now come forth against the great Rabbies of
the world […] but thou hast overruled her and hast put her to silence.82

Trapnel accused the learned clergy of denying God’s spirit in their quest
to hold onto religious power, and asserted the power of the spirit over all
learning. Constructing herself as one of God’s instruments, whose authority
came directly from the spirit, she denied the spiritual authority of a learned or
‘National’ clergy who she declared lived on ‘greed and pay’, strongly criticizing
their reliance on ‘maintenance’ and ‘revenues’. She questioned the authority
of those ‘great Professors’, declaring: ‘what is their wisdom if they have not thy
feare, thy spirit among them?’83 She warned the learned clergy from ‘Cambridge
and Oxford’, with their ‘Latin Tongue’, that the ‘spirited ones’ would rise above
the ‘learned’ when Christ comes to rule and take ‘power’. She admonished

81 Trapnel, Cry of a Stone, 37.

82 Trapnel, Cry of a Stone, 41–42.
83 Trapnel, Cry of a Stone, 43–44, 57, 63.
Anna Tr apnel: Prophe t or Witch? 131

those outward ministers she named ‘Pulpit-deriders’ and ‘mockers’ who ‘jeer
at those that are for Christ’s reign’, as she upheld the authority of a prophetic
ministry receiving its power directly from God’s spirit.84
Trapnel’s attack on the clergy, and her denial of their spiritual authority,
was central to her prophetic utterances and writings, and to her defence
against her prosecution and arrest in Cornwall. Reflecting later upon the
events leading to her imprisonment, it is the clergy and their struggle to
maintain legitimacy and power, which she has clearly in her sights, declaring:

Their hatred is because their standing quivers, and their fat benefices are
almost at an end; sure I am they are Christ’s greatest enemies, that hath
been and now is […][they] take false oaths, or do anything to ingratiate
with the Rulers […] but their time will not be long, I am confident […]
for woe and great fury is against them, being the greatest enemies Christ
hath in England.85

Trapnel contested that her persecution and trial was driven and influenced
by the clergy who had joined with other powers to contrive false accusations.
She described visions of a ‘clergie-man and the jurors’ conspiring against
her, and how the clergy had ‘left their Pulpits’ so they could appear at her
trial to control proceedings and to ‘make up their indictments’. It was the
clergy, Trapnel declared, who gave false information about her, calling her
‘an imposter’ and a ‘dangerous deceiver’. Her Postscript to Report and Plea is
a direct attack upon those ‘Cornwall Clergy and Justices’, who she asserted
had deliberately conspired against her and had denied the voice and power
of the Spirit. She goes so far to accuse them of acting against God, asserting,
‘what you have done to me is small, when compared with your trespasse
against the living God’.86 Trapnel views the actions of the clergy, and those
powers responsible for the arrest and imprisonment of one of God’s chosen
Saints, as equally an attack upon God’s spirit.
The witchcraft accusations against Trapnel were situated within the
dominant religious power divide and conflict between the learned ministry
and the spirit within. Trapnel demonstrated her own perception that ‘witch-
craft’ was one of the many labels used against her, and that her subsequent
arrest, was the result of the threat her prophetic warnings posed to the
clergy’s religious authority and entitlement. She protested that because

84 Trapnel, Report and Plea, 55.

85 Trapnel, Legacy for Saints, 50, 59.
86 Trapnel, Report and Plea, 20, 24, 18, 53.
132 Debr a Parish

she had foreseen and professed their ‘downfall’, they ‘could not abide me’.87
Trapnel contended that the clergy, aiming to protect their ‘tithes and power’
and their fear they would ‘lose their fleece’, drove them to cry out and rise
up against her. She argued that, not willing to hear the voice of Christ’s
spirit speaking directly through her, the clergy cried out and aimed to
silence her. She asserted that ‘the Clergie, with all their might, rung their
jangling bells against me, and called for the Rulers to take me up’.88 Trapnel
demonstrated an awareness that, in this context, she was vulnerable to a
range of persecutory labels and accusations of witchcraft, from those aiming
to protect their own power against the rise of a new prophetic ministry. She
warned that ‘wise-observing-spirited ones’ must come to ‘understand the
cunning works of the politick sophister’ as she pointed out the deceptions
and falsehoods put forward by those outward rulers and clergy, struggling
to protect their own political and religious authority.89

Conclusion: Context and the Construction of Identity

Trapnel recognized her vulnerable position within the broader political and
religious context, where her identity could be constructed by her audience
as either prophet or witch. Her prophecies put her in direct conflict with
political and religious powers. Trapnel asserted her position within this
context when she warned of Christ’s return to establish his rule—or ‘Fifth-
monarchy’—which would see all other outward powers cut down. Trapnel
prophesied Christ’s ‘great fury’ against ‘Priests’ and ‘Rulers’, demonstrating
not only the oppositional discourse of her prophecies, but her role within the
power division and contest between the prophet and priest. She explained
this as a binary divide between the:

Priest’s office against the prophetical and Kingly power of King Jesus, I
must declare for him, and while I have tongue and breath I shall go forth
for the fifth-Monarchy-Laws teaching and practice.90

This chapter has demonstrated that Trapnel’s shifting public identity from
‘prophet’ to ‘witch’ occurred against this backdrop of conflict and debate

87 Trapnel, Legacy for Saints, 59.

88 Trapnel, Report and Plea, 18.
89 Trapnel, Report and Plea, 19, 55.
90 Trapnel, Legacy for Saints, 59.
Anna Tr apnel: Prophe t or Witch? 133

over the issue of political and ministerial authority. Although Trapnel was
not formally charged or tried for witchcraft, accusations of witchcraft, I have
argued, were used against her by the clergy and political powers to refute
her prophetic status and to interrupt the growing public interest in her
prophetic activity. Trapnel’s prophetic writings and utterances demonstrate
not only her role as spiritual vessel, but also as a vocal and active participant
in contemporary political and religious and power struggles. Using scriptural
authority, her prophecies included direct attacks and challenges to all
political powers, and the role of a learned, outward ministry. To understand
Trapnel’s fluid public identity from prophet to witch, it is important to look
beyond issues of gender, or contemporary fears of demonic possession. Doing
so reveals the power and perceived threat of Trapnel’s prophetic visions and
utterances, and demonstrates that witchcraft is understood as a persecutory
label, wielded by those aiming to defend their own authority, and to silence
a woman emboldened by the power of the spirit.

And ‘tis for him that spirit speaks;

O that poor hearts would hear
And not have countenance so bent;
‘Gainst what of spirit appears.91

Works Cited

Primary Sources

Bewick, John. An Antidote Against Lay Preaching. London, 1642. Wing B2192.
Graham, Elspeth, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby, and Helen Wilcox, eds. Her Own
Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen. London:
Routledge, 1989.
Lay Preaching Unmasked. London, 1644. Wing L750.
Trapnel, Anna. The Cry of a Stone. London, 1654. Wing T2031.
Trapnel, Anna. A Lively Voice for the King of Saints and Nations. London, 1657.
Wing T2035.
Trapnel, Anna. A Legacy for Saints, being Several Experiences of the Dealings of God
with Anna Trapnel. London. 1654. Wing T2032.
Trapnel, Anna. Report and Plea. London, 1654. Wing T2033.

91 Trapnel, A Lively Voice, 13.

134 Debr a Parish

Trapnel, Anna. Strange and Wonderful Newes from Whitehall. London, 1654. Wing
T2034.
Tub Preachers Overturned. London, 1657. Wing T3207.

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Bullard, Rebecca. ‘Textual Disruption in Anna Trapnel’s Report and Plea (1654)’.
The Seventeenth Century 23, no.1 (Spring 2008): 34–41.
Capp, Bernard. ‘The Fifth Monarchists and Popular Millenarianism’. In Radical
Religion in the English Revolution, edited by J.F. McGregor and B. Reay, 165–189.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.
Capp, Bernard. The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth-Century English
Millenarianism. London: Faber and Faber, 1972.
Capp, Bernard. ‘The Political Dimension of Apocalyptic Thought’. In The Apocalypse
in English Renaissance Thought and Literature, edited by C.A. Patrides and Joseph
Wittreich, 93–125. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984.
Clark, Stuart. ‘Narrative, Ideology, and Meaning in Early Modern Culture’. In
Languages of Witchcraft: Narrative, Ideology and Meaning in Early Modern
Culture, edited by Stuart Clark, 3–13. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001.
Clark, Stuart. Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Elmer, Peter. ‘Towards a Politics of Witchcraft’. In Languages of Witchcraft: Narrative,
Ideology and Meaning in Early Modern Culture, edited by Stuart Clark, 101–118.
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001.
Elmer, Peter. Witchcraft, Witch-Hunting and Politics in Early Modern England.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Freeman, Curtis. ‘Anna Trapnel (1642–1660)’. In A Company of Women Preachers:
Baptist Prophetesses in Seventeenth Century England, edited by Curtis Freeman,
369–371. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2011.
Gaskill, Malcolm. ‘The Pursuit of Reality: Recent Research into the History of
Witchcraft’. The Historical Journal 51, no. 4 (December 2008): 1069–1088.
Gibson, Marion. ‘Thinking Witchcraft: Language, Literature and Intellectual
History’. In Palgrave Advances in Witchcraft Historiography, edited by Jonathan
Barry and Owen Davies, 164–181. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Gillespie, Katharine. ‘Prophecy and Political Expression in Cromwellian England’.
In The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution, edited by Laura
Lunger Knoppers, 462–480. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Hinds, Hilary. God’s Englishwomen: Seventeenth Century Radical Sectarian Writing.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996.
Anna Tr apnel: Prophe t or Witch? 135

Hobby, Elaine. ‘Discourse So Unsavoury: Women’s Published Writings of the 1650s’.

In Women, Writing, History 1640–1740, edited by Isobel Grundy and Sue Wiseman,
17–26. London: B.T. Batsford, 1992.
Hodgkin, Katherine. ‘Reasoning with Unreason: Visions, Witchcraft and Madness’.
In Languages of Witchcraft: Narrative, Ideology and Meaning in Early Modern
Culture, edited by Stuart Clark, 217–233. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001.
Hughes, Ann. Gender and the English Revolution. London: Routledge, 2012.
Larner, Christina. Enemies of God: The Witch-Hunt in Scotland. Edinburgh: John
Donald, 2000.
Mack, Phyllis. Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth Century England.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
Mack, Phyllis. ‘Women as Prophets During the English Civil War’. Feminist Studies
8, no. 1 (1982): 18–45.
Magro, Maria. ‘Spiritual Autobiography and Radical Sectarian Women’s Discourse:
Anna Trapnel and the Bad Girls of the English Revolution’. Journal of Medieval
and Early Modern Studies 34, no. 2 (2004): 405–437.
Morrill, John. ‘The Church in England, 1642–9’. In Reactions to the English Civil War
1642–1649, edited by John Morrill, 89–114. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1982.
Nevitt, Marcus. Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England,
1640–1660. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006.
Prineas, Matthew. ‘The Discourse of Love and the Rhetoric of Apocalypse in Anna
Trapnel’s Folio Songs’. Comitatus 28, no. 1 (1997): 90–110.
Purkiss, Diane. ‘Producing the Voice, Consuming the Body: Women Prophets of the
Seventeenth Century’. In Women, Writing, History 1640–1740, edited by Isobel
Grundy and Sue Wiseman, 139–158. London: B.T. Batsford, 1992.
Salzman, Paul. Reading Early Modern Women’s Writing. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2006.
Uszkalo, Kirsten. ‘Dark Sisters: Witches and Prophets in Early Modern England’.
PhD diss., University of Alberta, 2006.
Wiseman, Sue. ‘Unsilent Instruments and the Devil’s Cushions: Authority in
Seventeenth-Century Women’s Prophetic Discourse’. In New Feminist Discourses
Critical Essays on Theories and Texts, edited by Isobel Armstrong, 176–196.
London: Routledge, 1992.

About the author

Debra Parish is a PhD candidate in History with the Institute of Advanced

Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland, Australia. Her
research interest is women’s religious and prophetic actions and writings
136 Debr a Parish

during the English Civil Wars period (c.1640–1660). Having completed her
Masters’ dissertation on female religiosity and prophecy in this period, her
current research examines the use of witchcraft discourse and accusation in
attempts to silence women who exerted religious and prophetic influence.
 Section III
Courtly Women on the Edge
7. Wife, Widow, Exiled Queen
Beatrice d’Aragona (1457–1508) and Kinship in Early Modern
Europe

Jessica O’Leary

Abstract
This chapter analyses how the Queen of Hungary and Bohemia, Beatrice
d’Aragona (1457–1508), negotiated her shifting marital status and identity
in central Europe and southern Italy. She was twice married—the first
marriage resulting in widowhood, and the second in exile—with her
entire adulthood spent as an outsider in Hungary, or on the edge of courtly
Naples. A close analysis of Beatrice’s exile shows that women could survive
widowhood using natal networks, since, though their marital identities
changed, their status as sister, daughter, and aunt did not. This chapter
contributes to the literature on early modern European kinship networks
by demonstrating that the presence of these networks protected women
in difficult marital situations, and how their absence made widowhood
without wealth a marginalised existence.

Keywords: Ippolito d’Este; letter-writing; exile; queenship; early modern

Europe

In the final months of the fifteenth century, the banished Queen of Hungary
and Bohemia lamented her isolation in the archiepiscopal seat of Esztergom.
Writing to what remained of her family, Beatrice d’Aragona petitioned the
husband and sons of her deceased sister, Eleonora d’Aragona, the Duchess of
Ferrara, to remember her plight following her second husband’s attempts to
dissolve their marriage.1 In a sharp letter to Ippolito d’Este, the nephew she

1 I am very grateful to Carolyn James for her helpful recommendations and advice at various
stages of this essay, to Kathleen Neal for her thoughts on various iterations of this research,
and to Péter Farbaky and Guilherme Duque for their assistance. I also wish to acknowledge

Hopkins, L. and A. Norrie (eds.), Women on the Edge in Early Modern Europe, Amsterdam University
Press, 2019.
doi 10.5117/9789462987500/ch07
140  Jessica O’Leary

had raised as a son in the late 1480s and early 1490s, Beatrice condemned his
lack of epistolary affection and concern for his beleaguered adopted mother:

We received a letter from your most Reverend Lordship and, despite its
tardiness, we were extremely grateful to hear of your good health. But
there was one thing that was very upsetting. Maybe it was the secretary’s
fault, but the way you wrote treated us as if we were a foreigner and not
your mother—which we always will be until the end of our days. It was as
if your Lordship’s letters were written with a stamp—they were nothing
more than a “we are well, we hope the same for Your Majesty.” We ask
you not to treat us as a foreigner and to not use that kind of tone because
we promise Your Lordship that if you do, we will not reply because such
behaviour does not merit a response.2

This chapter analyses how a childless woman, far from her natal family,
resisted, and then negotiated, exile, using the diplomatic and epistolary
networks of her kinsmen and women. While her marital relationships
changed, she remained a daughter, a sister, cousin, and an aunt. Beatrice
sought diplomatic shelter through these identities, and reinvented herself as
necessary to be useful to her kinsmen, particularly her father, her nephew
Ippolito, and her cousins, Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic monarchs. For
each party she was able to offer alliances, political influence, mediation, or
simply news. Her correspondence shows that she developed and articulated
a sophisticated rhetoric of kinship to demand that her dynastic superiors
continue to support her, as politically and financially enfeebled as she was.
Through an analysis of the epistolary and chancery record, this chapter will

the expertise and generosity of the staff at the Archivio di Stato di Modena and of Mantova,
the Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár, and the Österreichisches Staatsarchiv. I would like to further
thank Aidan Norrie and Lisa Hopkins. I also extend my gratitude to the Bill Kent Foundation
and the Fondazione Cassamarca for supporting the research on which this article is based. All
translations are the author’s own unless otherwise indicated.
There is no recent published monograph on Beatrice d’Aragona in English or in Italian. On
her life, see: Berzeviczy, Beatrice d’Aragona. See too: Farbaky, ‘The Sterile Queen’, 419–428.
2 Beatrice d’Aragona to Ippolito d’Este, 7 March 1499, in Guerra, Carteggio, 212. ‘recepissomo
una de Vostra reverendissima Signoria qual, quantunche fusse tarda, tamen ce fu gratissima
intendendo dela sanità di quella; ma de una cosa se lamentamo de la Signoria Vostra che pare
che nel modo del suo scrivere, o sia defecto de quella overo del secretario suo, ce tracta da
forastera e non da matre, quale li siamo e sempre li serrimo finchè ce durarà la vita. Et pare
che le littere de Vostra Signoria siano facte a stampa non scrivendoce mai altro se non: “siamo
sano, lo simile desideramo intendere de la Maestà Vostra”; sichè preghimo quella non ce voglia
trattare da forastera e usando tal modo de scrivere per lo advenire promettimo a Vostra Signoria
che non li responderimo perchè non ce pare che meritamo questo da epsa’.
Wife, Widow, Exiled Queen 141

contribute to the literature on early modern kinship networks, how they

protected women in ambiguous marital situations, and how their absence
made aristocratic widowhood without wealth a life lived on the margins
of society.
Beatrice grew up in the gilded court of Naples, where she was considered
‘second to none in beauty and virtue’—the latter cultivated by an education
befitting a princess of Italy’s largest kingdom.3 The little that remains of
contemporary Neapolitan chancery sources reveals she had an excellent
tuition and frequently received gifts of books, fine clothing, and even, on
one occasion, a pack of playing cards. 4 Although initially promised by her
father, Ferrante d’Aragona, to a cousin who proved traitorous, she eventually
married Matthias Corvinus of Hungary, the match designed to secure an
alliance with one of the Ottoman Empire’s greatest enemies.5 Married by
proxy in Naples, the newlywed left Castel Nuovo in September 1476, through
the Arco Trionfale, a towering monument to her Aragonese grandfather and
her family’s domination of the Neapolitan landscape.6 She would not return
for almost thirty years, to a Naples politically transformed.
Beatrice’s letter to her nephew (above) was written almost a decade
after her second marriage, to Władysław Jagiellon, the King of Bohemia.
Władysław had been pushing for the annulment of their marriage since the
pair wed secretly in 1490.7 Beatrice’s first husband, Matthias Corvinus, had
died suddenly in 1490—apparently due to a seizure—and his widow coveted
the throne of Hungary. Promised succession, Beatrice agreed to marry the
Bohemian king at the behest of the wily prelate and court advisor, Tamás
Bakócz, who conducted the ceremony away from the prying eyes of the
crown’s pretenders. Bakócz, however, tricked Beatrice. The marriage was a
ruse to claim part of the vast property holdings Beatrice had accumulated, as
well as a generous dowry she pledged from her own funds, a promised total of
500,000 gold florins to bolster Hungarian coffers.8 Shortly after the nuptials,
Bakócz and Władysław, who had been elected King of Hungary, petitioned
the pope for dissolution, citing, variously, lack of consummation, coercion,
and sterility.9 Beatrice fought back, threatening to dispatch her army and
to rescind her dowry and property donation. Her husband successfully

3 Lignamine, Inclyti Ferdinandi regis vita et laudes. Cited in Pàsztor, ‘Beatrice d’Aragona’.
4 Barone, ‘Le cedole di Tesoreria’, 26, 219, 214–216, 223, 231, 237, 244, 390, 408, 417.
5 Guerra, Carteggio, 11.
6 Filangieri, Una cronaca napoletana, 34.
7 Berzeviczy, Beatrice d’Aragona, 273.
8 Berzeviczy, Beatrice d’Aragona, 217.
9 The saga is discussed more fully in Berzeviczy, Beatrice d’Aragona, 273–279.
142  Jessica O’Leary

kept her fooled for a short period, but her father grew impatient with his
son-in-law’s secrecy, leaking the marriage to the papal court and to Milan.10
For the next decade, Beatrice and her natal family successfully fought each
request for the dissolution of the marriage, securing several papal briefs in
favour of the marriage, but dissolution soon became inevitable. Through
death and distraction, her family began to abandon their kinswomen in order
to attend to the French invasion of Italy, and of Naples in particular. The
Queen of Hungary, despite significant epistolary protest, began to lose her
political utility, and her marriage was finally dissolved by Pope Alexander
VI in 1500, exiling her to Naples.

Queen of Hungary

Beatrice was crowned Queen of Hungary just before Christmas 1476 in

Hungary’s former medieval capital and traditional coronation site, Székes-
fehérvár.11 She soon moved to Buda with her husband, Matthias Corvinus,
but travelled often in the 1480s to the recently conquered city of Vienna.
Berzeviczy suggests that the pair enjoyed an amicable relationship, at least
until it became clear that Beatrice was sterile.12 Without an heir, the Queen
petitioned her abundantly fertile sister, Eleonora d’Aragona, Duchess of
Ferrara, to send two of her sons, Ippolito and Ferrante d’Este, to be trained at
the Hungarian court for religious and military careers respectively.13 While
both Ercole d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara, and Eleonora refused to send Ferrante,
Beatrice offered the primacy of Hungary, the archbishopric of Esztergom,
to Ippolito. Though the boy’s parents initially baulked at its compulsory
residency requirement, they eventually yielded to Beatrice’s demands and
agreed to send Ippolito, aged only seven, to Hungary for his training.
Evidence about Ippolito’s childhood in Hungary survives in epistolary
interludes, with picturesque anecdotes and dutiful accounts of his education
speckled throughout correspondence to his parents.14 While his parents were
adamant that Ippolito receive an education in line with Italian standards,
so that he would assimilate easily into Roman ecclesiastical circles when
returned, Beatrice had other plans. When it became clear that Corvinus

10 Berzeviczy, Beatrice d’Aragona, 226.

11 Berzeviczy, Beatrice d’Aragona, 56–60.
12 Berzeviczy, Beatrice d’Aragona, 76–77.
13 Beatrice d’Aragona to Eleonora d’Aragona, 4 August 1486, in Guerra, Carteggio, 79–80.
14 Ippolito’s letters are located at the Archivio di Stato di Modena (hereafter, ASMo), Carteggio
dei principi, Casa e Stato, busta 135.
Wife, Widow, Exiled Queen 143

was planning for his illegitimate son to inherit the throne, she called Ip-
polito to live with her and took custody of the boy’s education.15 Letters to
Ferrara from his guardian and Ferrarese ambassador, Beltrame Costabile,
markedly decreased and the Queen introduced Ippolito to a lavish lifestyle
fitting a young prince.16 The Archbishop of Esztergom was traditionally the
second-most powerful position in the kingdom of Hungary, and Beatrice
hoped to rule with Ippolito by her side.
Though Beatrice considered herself an eminently suitable potential ruler,
her husband did not. Corvinus was adamantly against Beatrice’s succession,
and attempted to pass legislation to secure his illegitimate son’s inheritance
of the throne.17 Aware that this might anger his father-in-law, Corvinus wrote
to Ferrante in 1489, explaining why he could not and would not facilitate
Beatrice’s ambitions:

[Beatrice], aspires, if not obviously, at least in secret, to something which

is not in our ability to do. The Queen desires after our death, should I die
before her, to succeed to the throne and take in her hands the reigns of
the government, which we cannot allow her to do, even if we wanted,
because we cannot propose such a thing to our subjects, unless we want
to inspire in them a perpetual hate towards us and the Queen.18

Although Beatrice experienced the initial popularity enjoyed by most

dynastic brides, long-lasting affection failed to develop. While it is likely that
Corvinus exaggerated the depths of Hungarian antipathy towards the Queen
to appease Ferrante, he did write that ‘we also must add with all frankness
that the Queen is not in the slightest loved by our subjects […][she] does
not even try to gain their affection’.19 The king further explained that he

15 Ippolito d’Este to Eleonora d’Aragona, 7 March 1488, in ASMo, Carteggio dei principi, Casa
e stato, busta 135.
16 Beatrice d’Aragona to Eleonora d’Aragona, 1 May 1488, in Guerra, Carteggio, 143–144. Costabile
was later expelled by the king for denouncing his former mistress as a witch. See: Farbaky, ‘The
Sterile Queen’, 422.
17 Farbaky, ‘The Sterile Queen’, 422–426.
18 ‘la quale aspira, se non palesemente, per lo meno in segreto, a una cosa che non è nelle nostre
facoltà di fare. La Regina desidera dopo la nostra morte, nel caso muoia prima di lei, succederci
al trono e prendere nelle sue mani le redini del governo, ciò che non potremmo concedere anche
volendo e che non possiamo neppure proporre ai nostri sudditi, se non vogliamo eccitare in questi
un perpetuo odio contro di Noi e contro la Regina’. Matthias Corvinus to Ferrante d’Aragona,
no date, 1489, in Berzeviczy Acta Vitam, 98–99.
19 ‘Dobbiamo aggiungere con tutta franchezza che la Regina non è punto amata ai nostri
sudditi, cosa che constatiamo con dolore, ma d’altronde non possiamo infonder loro l’amore,
144  Jessica O’Leary

had tried to negotiate and propose alternative post-mortem arrangements,

should there be no children, but Beatrice had outright refused to consider
them. Unfortunately, the matter was not settled before his death, and his
demise sent the kingdom into chaos.
When Matthias Corvinus died unexpectedly in April 1490, Beatrice
almost immediately married the King of Bohemia, Władysław. Władysław,
however, quickly sought an annulment, which set off a chain of events for
the Aragonese and Este dynasties that made an existing rift between the
Francophile Ercole d’Este and his father-in-law grow even wider. Ferrante
used all rhetorical and political measures at his disposal to force his daughter
and his other kin to support Beatrice’s second marriage to Władysław, and
to pressure the papacy to resist dissolution. Relying on epistolary motifs
of blood, honour, and filial duty, Ferrante demanded that his grandson
Ippolito stay in Hungary.20 Eleonora, however, refused to follow her father’s
directive, instead prioritizing Ippolito’s future career. She arranged for
Ippolito to return from Esztergom earlier than planned (with only the
distracted approval of Ercole who was preoccupied with the imminent
French invasion and his alliance with Ludovico Sforza).21 Ferrante, however,
was not given to capitulation. The King of Naples was eventually able to rely
on his cousins, King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile, to
offer their support via their representative in Rome.22 This proved to be a
game-changing move that protected Beatrice for a considerable period of
time, even after her father died.23
Ferrante’s sudden death in January 1494, however, had an immediate
and grave effect on the fortunes of the Neapolitan branch of the Aragonese
dynasty. Several short months after Ferrante’s departure, Charles VIII finally
invaded Italy after almost a decade of whispers of a French invasion. He had
a claim to the Neapolitan throne through his Angevin ancestry and, with
the encouragement of the ruler of Milan, Ludovico Sforza, swept through
Italy with little mercy for those who dared resist. By February 1495, the King
of France had seized Naples with negligible Aragonese opposition and the
support of the citizenry.24 Ferrante’s successor, Alfonso II, abdicated the

e la Regina non si sforza affatto di conquistare’: Matthias Corvinus to Ferrante d’Aragona, no

date, 1489, in Berzeviczy Acta Vitam, 98–99.
20 O’Leary, ‘Keeping It in the Family’, 79–100.
21 Eleonora often deputized for her husband while he was absent or preoccupied with other
matters. See: O’Leary, ‘Politics, Pedagogy, and Praise’.
22 Trinchera, Codice Aragonese, 314–315.
23 Spieß, Aufklärungen, 285, cited in D’Avray, Papacy, Monarchy and Marriage, 177.
24 Mallett and Shaw, The Italian Wars, 26–28.
Wife, Widow, Exiled Queen 145

throne before Charles’s arrival in favour of his son, Ferrandino, but not before
divesting the treasury of its gold to fund his escape. Practically penniless,
Ferrandino ruled intermittently for less than two years in one of the most
unstable periods of Neapolitan history.
Between 1494 and 1500, the Neapolitan branch of the Aragonese dynasty
were pawns of the various powers vying for dominance in Italy.25 Though
Ferrandino was briefly restored to the throne by the Venetians in 1495, this
was in exchange for key ports following the successful expulsion of the
French by the League of Venice (which included Spain and the papacy).
In September 1496, Ferrandino’s uncle, Federico d’Aragona, inherited the
throne, which he held until he was betrayed by his Aragonese cousins in
late 1500: Ferdinand and Isabella had agreed to share the kingdom of Naples
with Louis XII of France. Deposed by papal bull in June 1501, Federico left
Naples shortly thereafter, eventually settling in Tours where he died in 1504.
Before he left, he had his child baptized in Naples with Beatrice present
to witness the occasion. This ritual was likely the last for the Neapolitan
Aragonese kings in the Castel Nuovo in Naples.26
With her family’s decline, Beatrice rapidly lost what little political capital
she possessed, as her kinsmen became the pawns of the Republic of Venice,
of the French, and of the Spanish. Federico’s brief tenure as king granted
her some financial breathing space, when she was granted the investiture
of the city of Salerno in 1497, but for the most part, her financial situation
worsened considerably.27 Previously, her father’s wealth and military influ-
ence over Rome had been siphoned off by the Queen, and exploited in her
relationships with the Hungarians and the Estense of Ferrara. However,
with her father and sister dead and her remaining brothers having little
control over the Aragonese throne, Beatrice turned to her nephew, Ippolito,
and his father, Ercole, to respect the bonds of blood and reciprocate the
assistance the Queen had conferred on the Estense during her tenure in
Hungary. Her surviving letters to the Estense show that Beatrice was rapidly
consuming her remaining funds—many of her most lucrative assets had
been seized—and she hoped that she could continue grooming Ippolito to
take care of her best interests when she, inevitably, could not.28
Beatrice began to change the scope of her relationship with her adopted
son by petitioning the teenage Ippolito to use the privileges he enjoyed as

25 Mallett and Shaw, The Italian Wars, 29–33.

26 Beatrice d’Aragona to Sigismondo d’Este, 7 June 1501, in Guerra, Carteggio, 220.
27 Berzeviczy, Beatrice d’Aragona, 264
28 Berzeviczy, Beatrice d’Aragona, 226.
146  Jessica O’Leary

the Archbishop of Esztergom to cover the cost of her living arrangements.

After her move to Esztergom, Beatrice virtually only controlled her mining
interests, and her income was limited to the taxes she was able to impose
on salt and some metals. 29 Despite the Hungarian Diet attempting to
pass laws to control Ippolito, so he could not help the unpopular queen,
Beatrice managed to continue to drain the income of the archbishopric of
Esztergom.30 For instance, in February 1496, a resident of Pispeki known
as Rhodoan died without heirs.31 Beatrice informed Ippolito that the
little that Rhodoan had left behind ‘immediately goes to Your Reverend
Lordship’.32 However, as Ippolito’s ‘most beloved mother’, she asked that
the young cardinal:

out of love for us, show your gratitude to the esteemed Augustino Benci,
your most Reverend Lordship’s doctor, who, for his care and loyalty, as
much towards your Reverend Lordship as to us, deserves a great many
things.33

Beatrice’s funds were slowly being bled dry and she evidently had little
money to maintain her lifestyle. To continue living with an approximation
of a queenly image, she asked her then sixteen-year-old nephew to use an
unexpected inheritance to help her survive a little bit longer. This would have
been exceptionally humbling for the materialistic Queen who had previously
invited Ippolito to partake in the magnificence of Matthias Corvinus’s
Viennese court in the 1480s. The next part of the letter underscores the
difficulty of the Queen’s position. Rather than being able to procure Ippolito’s
support directly, she had to ask him to seek his governor’s approval in writing.
Legally, the Cardinal-Archbishop of Esztergom was still a minor until the
age of twenty. Until then, the Queen of Hungary and Bohemia had to rely
on the boy’s governor dutifully assigning ownership of Rhodoan’s property
to Benci so that she could continue to access the latter’s care.
Even so, Beatrice kept up the rhetoric of queenship and kinship to main-
tain the appearance of queenly prerogative. In March 1496, a month after

29 Berzeviczy, Beatrice d’Aragona, 244.

30 Berzeviczy, Beatrice d’Aragona, 257.
31 Beatrice d’Aragona to Ippolito d’Este, 10 February 1496, in Guerra, Carteggio, 201.
32 ‘pervengono immediate ad Vostra reverenda Signoria’. 10 February 1496, in Guerra, Carteggio,
201.
33 ‘de li quali pregamo quella multa che, per amor nostro, ne volia fare gratia alo eximio maestro
Augustino Bentio, medico de Vostra reverenda Signoria […] quanto noi, merita magior cosa’.
10 February 1496, in Guerra, Carteggio, 201.
Wife, Widow, Exiled Queen 147

petitioning her nephew to forgo his entitlement to Rhodoan’s estate, Beatrice

reminded Ippolito of her enduring, if tenuous, connection to the kingdom
of Naples. Tommaso Amedei, Ippolito’s governor in Esztergom, was making
the round trip journey to Italy to meet with his master, carrying Beatrice’s
letters and other business associated with maintaining the archbishopric.
However, Tommaso was also carrying Beatrice’s letters for the ambassador
‘to King Ferrando [of Naples]’ in Venice for Ippolito to forward on her behalf.
This gesture served both to assert her authority over her former ward, and
as a reminder of her contact with the King of Naples. Indeed, in the same
breath, she wrote that ‘[the ambassador] sends a horseman each month
to visit me’ and suggested that Ippolito would be doing a very good thing
indeed to assist her.34 Yet, Ippolito would have been privy to the fragile
nature of Ferrandino’s rule. At this time, the French had not yet formally
surrendered, and the king’s continued claim to the throne was a result of
the League of Venice’s preference for a French-less Naples and the support of
the Spanish. As such, her attempts at queenly posturing were unconvincing,
and she relied on maternal bonds to bridge the divide and to reinforce this
relationship for later use.
Beatrice wrote both the letter concerning the estate and to the Venetian
ambassador in her own hand to invoke intimacy and reinforce the maternal
hold Beatrice had over Ippolito. Writing in one’s own hand was tiresome
work and considered manual labour best performed by someone paid to do
it. However, the act of applying oneself to such protracted and painstaking
tasks was a means to show humility. If she were summoning her identity as
the Queen of Hungary, she would not have written in her own hand: indeed,
Beatrice’s letters to Ercole d’Este were still written by a scribe despite the
expense. Yet, Ippolito’s ‘amantissima matre’ sought to convey tenderness
by imbuing the letter with her own physical toil, reminding the boy of the
aunt who had raised him to be her son, and who had given him his present
success. Beatrice returned to this trope again and again, especially after
Ippolito’s father, Ercole, and Bakócz succeeded in convincing the pope to
swap the archbishopric of Esztergom for Agria.
By the mid 1490s, Ercole had no desire to repeatedly send his son to
Hungary and sought to find a way to keep him in Italy. Equally, the Diet, her
estranged husband Władysław, and Bakócz all wanted the archbishopric
out of Beatrice’s hands. Writing to Beatrice shortly before Ippolito was
required to return in 1496, Ercole attempted bravado to intimidate the

34 ‘che omne mese ne manda cavalaro qua’: Beatrice d’Aragona to Ippolito d’Este, 15 March
1496, in Guerra, Carteggio, 202–203.
148  Jessica O’Leary

Queen into granting Ippolito the bishopric of Agria (Eger) instead.35 While
less prestigious, Eger was lucrative, and, most importantly, did not require
its bishop’s physical presence in the diocese. Beatrice called his bluff and
the teenager still departed in November, his father gruffly telling the
Queen in a short letter that it was ‘for the consolation of Your Majesty’
and asked that she ‘look after him as your son, as you have done in the
past’.36 Beatrice’s victory, however, was short-lived. A messenger of the
king’s met Ippolito in Trento and sent the boy back to Italy, telling him
papal approval for the episcopal switch would happen soon.37 Soon was
apparently relative, as the decision was delayed until December 1497,
when Alexander VI f inally allowed Ippolito to exchange Esztergom for
Eger, and the Queen’s nemesis, Bakócz, gained Esztergom.38 Beatrice lost
not only the physical support of Ippolito, but also his authority as the
primate of Hungary, and the income and fortresses within the archbish-
opric that Beatrice used to survive.39 With Esztergom under his control,
Bakócz now governed Hungary while the King of Bohemia attended to
his other territories, relying on his chancellor for almost all matters of
state. Meanwhile, Ippolito was settled in Italy, ready to take his place in
Rome as one of the red-hatted elite.
In 1497, Ippolito entered Rome with a 250-person entourage that included
Ascanio Sforza and Federico Sanseverino. This was designed to display the
wealth of the Este and their relatives, the Aragonese and the Milanese Sforza,
as they entered the city from Santa Maria del Popolo, the traditional point of
entry by visiting legates. By 1498, Ippolito had received papal nomination for
the archbishopric of Milan and was even caretaker of the state for a period
before being driven out by the Milanese, who were disgruntled by the boy’s
youth. When Charles VIII died in the same year and his cousin, Louis XII
succeeded to the French throne, Ippolito closely followed the shifting sands
of Italian politics, aligning himself with the more suitable parties after an
ill-judged escape from Milan to Innsbruck with the Milanese ruler, Ludovico
Sforza. 40 By contrast, Beatrice was unable to wriggle her way back into the
right circles. Writing to Ercole d’Este, she lamented her inability to satisfy
her political dues:

35 Ercole d’Este to Beatrice d’Aragona, 8 April 1496, in Guerra, Carteggio, 203–205.

36 Ercole d’Este to Beatrice d’Aragona, 9 November 1496, in Guerra, Carteggio, 207–208.
37 Berzeviczy, Beatrice d’Aragona, 260.
38 Berzeviczy, Beatrice d’Aragona, 261.
39 Berzeviczy, Beatrice d’Aragona, 255.
40 Byatt, ‘Ippolito d’Este’.
Wife, Widow, Exiled Queen 149

It pains us greatly that at the moment we find ourselves, as Your Lordship

has noted, unable to show the love and generous spirit that we have for
Your Lordship, and your entire illustrious House, and that we can only
in part satisfy our debt. 41

With little to persuade Ercole, she could only ask that he keep her informed
and that she would do the same; news and knowledge fast becoming the
only weapons left at her disposal.

Annulment

On 3 April 1500, Pope Alexander VI dissolved Beatrice’s marriage to

Władysław to facilitate the Christian resistance to the Turks, ending her
hopes of reclaiming the power she once had. Alexander wanted Władysław,
the King of Hungary and Bohemia, to marry a French princess, so that
France and Hungary could unite against the Ottoman threat. 42 The official
document printed on 7 April made it clear that the ruling was a dissolution
and not an annulment, since the marriage was genuine, but never proven to
have been consummated. To add insult to injury, the Pope ordered Beatrice to
pay 25,000 ducats according to one source, and as much as 60,000 according
to another—funds that Beatrice did not have readily available.43 Without a
husband or an heir, Beatrice was forced to return to Naples where she lived
out the remainder of her years in exile. 44
Marino Sanuto in his diaries supposes that Ippolito accompanied Beatrice
from Hungary to Ferrara and then to Capua, but there is little indication
of this in the archives. 45 Retaining some of her pomp, she entered Ferrara
escorted by 150 knights, and accompanied by the Neapolitan and Span-
ish ambassadors, who left Hungary when she did, apparently outraged
by the injustice. 46 Ercole hosted a ball in her honour and treated her to a

41 ‘dolerce multo che al presente ce trovamo, come a Vostra Signoria è noto, per non possere
demonstrare lo amore et bono animo quale havimo verso Sua Signoria, et tutta sua illustrissima
Casa, et che possessimo in parte satisfare al nostro debito’. Beatrice d’Aragona to Ercole d’Este,
9 November 1499, in Guerra, Carteggio, 214–215.
42 D’Avray, Papacy, Monarchy and Marriage, 179.
43 Berzeviczy, Beatrice d’Aragona, 271.
44 No letters immediately address the dissolution, and a lone letter from 1500 written to her
nephew Sigismondo d’Este asks him to recommend her to his father. Beatrice d’Aragona to
Sigismondo d’Este, 1 August 1500, in Guerra, Carteggio, 216–217.
45 Cited in Pàsztor, ‘Beatrice d’Aragona’.
46 Berzeviczy, Beatrice d’Aragona, 275.
150  Jessica O’Leary

performance of Plautus’s Menaechmi, while Ippolito used card games to

distract her. 47 After her departure, however, the Estense did not repeat
these grand gestures. Ippolito’s f inancial records from his time as the
commendatario Bishop of Capua, starting in July 1502, show that he only
modestly supported Beatrice after the last of the Aragonese had been forced
from the throne and escaped to France. 48 The former Queen lived with
an ill-fated company of Aragonese women cast out of the limelight by the
seismic political crises of the first decade of the Italian Wars. 49
Beatrice’s first few years in Naples were spent in ignominy, attempting
to needle Ippolito into financially supporting his ‘mother’—using the same
rhetoric we have seen previously. On 4 January 1502, the Queen wrote to the
Cardinal, and as she was no longer permitted to stay in the Castel Nuovo,
she asked him to take greater care of her welfare as she had done for him
as a child.50 Although light on content, the letter’s rhetorical flourishes
reveal the extent of Beatrice’s desperation punctuated by the introduction
of what would become her customary farewell: ‘from your dearest mother,
the unhappiest Queen of Hungary and Bohemia’.51 Bemoaning the financial
restrictions that prevented her from visiting Ippolito in person, she instead
resolved to ‘visit Your Lordship with the present letter’.52 Although the
epistle was largely written by a scribe, Beatrice used her own hand to
write a long sentence in the middle, seemingly to imbue the letter with
the physicality of a ‘visit’, but also to highlight the signif icance of her
request. She wrote:

I am the true and good mother of Your Lordship who has always been and
always will be someone you can turn to for any and every need, not only
in terms of material goods, but because one’s own blood requires it, and
I do not expect any remuneration, unless you agree to it.53

47 Berzeviczy, Beatrice d’Aragona, 275.

48 The records of Ippolito’s administration are located at ASMo, Ambasciatori, Napoli, buste 7–8.
49 She lived with Isabella, Federico’s wife, and another Isabella, widow of the Duke of Milan,
all three dethroned and all three widows. Berzeviczy, Beatrice d’Aragona, 280–281.
50 The emotion of this letter stands alone among the few that survive between 1502 and 1504.
The six that do are simpler letters of introduction and petition on behalf of local gentry who
presumably paid her to recommend their sons to Ippolito for work in the Vatican. Guerra,
Carteggio, 221–228.
51 Beatrice d’Aragona to Ippolito d’Este, 4 January 1502, in Guerra, Carteggio, 221.
52 ‘havendo havute la commodità, de scrivere et visitare Vostra Signoria con la presente’:
Beatrice d’Aragona to Ippolito d’Este, 4 January 1502, in Guerra, Carteggio, 221.
53 ‘io essere quella verdatiera et bona matre de Vostra Signoria quale sono stata sempre et
che in omne occurrentia me trovarà prontissima, non solum con exponerence dela roba, ma el
Wife, Widow, Exiled Queen 151

Far from the Queen who made a seven-year-old boy the Primate of Hungary,
Beatrice finished her letter begging her nephew to not forget her and to
prostrate himself on her behalf at the feet of the pope. The letter, epistolarily
debasing herself for Ippolito’s assistance, strongly contrasts with letters to
Ippolito’s sister Isabella d’Este, Marchioness of Mantua, around the same
time. Beatrice wrote a number of letters to the Marchioness, congratulating
her on the birth of her children, as well as general exchanges of pleasantries
that she signed as ‘Queen Beatrice’.54 Beatrice apparently still refused to
reveal her vulnerability to anyone other than her ‘son’.
The decline in Beatrice’s influence coincided with the political ascents of
Ippolito d’Este and Tamás Bakócz. In 1500, Ippolito was named fifth richest
cardinal in Rome, aged just 21, thanks to the diocese of Eger. His political
fortunes were, however, slightly shaky, and he was at times on the wrong side
of the pope. By contrast, Bakócz’s star in Rome was rising rapidly. He was
made cardinal in 1500, patriarch of Constantinople in 1507, and considered
himself to be a viable candidate for the papacy. Already, by 1504, he had
claimed so much Hungarian property that Beatrice begged Ippolito to write
to the prelate and stop him from taking the assets she had hidden.55 Beatrice
also petitioned Isabella d’Este to intercede personally with the ‘Duke [sic]
of Venice […] because we cannot live without our money, we ask that Your
Ladyship, out of the love you have for us, to attend to these affairs’.56 A
similar letter was written to her husband, but neither Ippolito nor his sister
intervened, and it was not until Beatrice’s Spanish cousins arrived in Naples
that her fortunes began to change. Her blood ties with Iberian royalty enabled
Beatrice to re-enter the Estense dynastic networks as a quasi-valuable player,
armed with news and the ear of the Queen Consort of Aragon.
After King Ferdinand and his new wife, Germaine de Foix, arrived in
Naples in 1506 to manage the throne, its lucrative territories, and strategic
ports, Beatrice immediately set about further exploiting her blood ties to
improve her stock. In earlier years, she had relied on Aragonese munificence,
together with Ippolito’s, to survive alongside her exiled kinswomen.57

proprio sangue bisognando, et non per aspectar da quella altra remoneratione, se non che la
apcepte’. Beatrice d’Aragona to Ippolito d’Este, 4 January 1502, in Guerra, Carteggio, 221.
54 The letters are contained in the Archivio Stato di Mantova (hereafter, ASMa), Archivio
Gonzaga, busta 803.
55 Beatrice d’Aragona to Ippolito d’Este, 29 May 1505, in Guerra, Carteggio, 233–235, 234.
56 ‘Noi perché non possimo venire meno ad nostri denari pregamo Vostra Signoria per amore
nostro operarse in lo negocio’. Beatrice d’Aragona to Isabella d’Este, 2 September 1504, in ASMa,
Archivio Gonzaga, busta 803, f. 21.
57 Berzeviczy, Beatrice d’Aragona, 265–268.
152  Jessica O’Leary

Between 1506 and 1508, however, Beatrice saw an opportunity to reinvent

herself as an intermediary between the Estense in Ferrara, and particularly
her itinerant nephew, and the King and Queen of Aragon during their brief
sojourns in Naples and Italy. In early November 1506, Beatrice wrote to
Ippolito rapturously of their arrival, a significant tone change from the
previous letters begging the Cardinal for legal assistance and references.
She wrote:

The officials of this city gave the keys to the city to His Majesty […] richly
dressed atop a steed, in white slippers, and similarly, the most Serene
Lady, the Queen, his consort, who also wore a pair underneath a train of
a rich brocade carried by gentleman behind her.58

Conveniently for Beatrice, the arrival of her cousin coincided with the
Queen’s latest attempt to retrieve her lost wealth in Hungary. The Queen
had attracted the sympathy of the new pope, Julius II, who sent a letter to
Władysław on her behalf, asking him to reinstate the Queen’s dowry. The
pontiff explained that Beatrice was so destitute that she would have been
reduced to begging had her Aragonese cousins not offered assistance.59
When Bakócz and Władysław took a year to return a negative response, the
Pope intervened once more, this time with the assistance of Ferdinand and
Germaine.60 Citing blood and honour, but likely because Bakócz’s local and
Roman ambitions had been funded by the Venetians, the King and Queen
offered financial support to Beatrice, including ambassadorial representation
in Rome, to push Bakócz to return Beatrice’s dowry and assets.61
Beatrice’s successful wrangling of Spanish co-operation was testament to
her diplomatic agility and her swift exploitation of kinship ties. According
to Ludovico Sacrato, one of Ippolito’s employees in Naples, Beatrice had
demanded that the Cardinal defend her as a sign of his gratitude for ‘for
loving him not only as a nephew, but still as a son, as he was raised’.62 As a

58 ‘li electi de quista cità donaro le chiave de Aquilla a sua Maestà et li presentaro li capituli
expediti in Hispania li quali, iterum, per sua Maestà […] ricamente vestita muntò a cavallo, in
una achineia biancha, et, similmente, la Serenissima Signora Regina, sua consorte, se possero
sotto lo palio de richissimo brocato portato per li gentilhomini deli segii’. Beatrice d’Aragona
to Ippolito d’Este, 8 November 1506, in Guerra, Carteggio, 240–241.
59 Berzeviczy, Beatrice d’Aragona, 288.
60 Berzeviczy, Beatrice d’Aragona, 291.
61 Beatrice d’Aragona to Ippolito d’Este, 22 November 1506, in Guerra, Carteggio, 241–242.
62 ‘amandola non solum come nepote, ma ancora come figliolo per la creanza’. ASMo, Ambas-
ciatori, Napoli, busta 8, 38/2. Ludovico Sacrato to Ippolito d’Este, 11 December 1506.
Wife, Widow, Exiled Queen 153

means of justification, Sacrato wrote that the Queen ‘having already spoken
about her case in Hungary with the most Catholic King found His Majesty
very warm and favourable to her’.63 Beatrice used her familial connection
with some of the most powerful monarchs in Europe to emphasize the
importance of Ippolito to prioritize a robust relationship with his aunt-cum-
mother. For example, Beatrice later informed Ippolito that she had received
a letter from the Aragonese consort when she stayed as a guest of the Estense
in Ferrara. Germaine apparently spoke in glowing terms of her reception,
news Beatrice chirpily and proudly passed along.64 Beatrice’s good humour
was no doubt due to finding a means to re-fashion her Aragonese identity
into one intimately tied with Aragon, despite never visiting the land of her
namesake. Ippolito was receptive to his aunt’s shrewd political manoeuvring
and soon set up a scheme to use her for his own diplomatic gain.
Between 1506 and 1508, Ippolito sent men to Beatrice and set up a cipher
for the pair to use to discuss matters privately.65 As such, the letters remain
quite opaque, but what is significant is that Beatrice was able to force her
way back from oblivion into a position of influence by proxy. She became
relevant again and her letters, as vague as they necessarily were, showed
a little of the pride she bore as the Queen of Hungary. In January 1507, the
she recounted the trip of King Ferdinand through Naples, and spoke of her
satisfaction for ‘working with such important affairs for the satisfaction of
your most Reverend Lordship’.66 Beatrice exploited Ippolito’s dutiful funding
of her political participation to draw external attention to her renewed
relevancy. For example, instead of writing a letter to Ippolito, she sent ‘one
of her own men’ to the court of Julius II, ostensibly to meet with Ippolito,
but also for others to note that the Queen of Hungary was sending men to
Rome. Similarly, in another letter, she expressed false concern regarding
the security Ippolito’s incoming mail and elected to send Francesco Pianoso
to speak with Ippolito instead of wasting time on a cipher (and to show
those close to Ippolito that she had the financial backing to send men in
her name).67 Yet, the regal façade slipped away in her closing farewell; she
was still the unhappiest Queen, and now, she added, dedicated to Ippolito

63 ‘come epsa ha facto cum la Cattolica Maestà del caso suo de Ungaria: ha ritrovato Sua Maestà
multo caldo in volerla favorire: et volere che tale caso sia discusso’. ASMo, Ambasciatori, Napoli,
busta 8, 38/2. Ludovico Sacrato to Ippolito d’Este, 11 December 1506.
64 Beatrice d’Aragona to Ippolito d’Este, 22 May 1508, in Guerra, Carteggio, 270.
65 See, for example: Beatrice d’Aragona to Ippolito d’Este, 15 December 1506, in Guerra, Carteggio,
243.
66 Beatrice d’Aragona to Ippolito d’Este, 20 January 1507, in Guerra, Carteggio, 245–247.
67 Beatrice d’Aragona to Ippolito d’Este, 9 January 1507, in Guerra, Carteggio, 244–245.
154  Jessica O’Leary

‘to whom we offer ourselves’.68 She was queen in name only, and reliant on
her continued cultivation of kinship ties to maintain a reasonable degree
of autonomy.
Beatrice’s friendly relationship with the Aragonese proved useful for
rekindling Estense interest in her existence, not just from Ippolito, but also
from the new Duchess of Ferrara, Lucrezia Borgia. Lucrezia was both the
daughter of the man who had forced her from Hungary, and was implicated
in the murder of her nephew, Alfonso d’Aragona. Beatrice appeared to hold
no long-term ill will: instead she cultivated, almost literally, ties with her
niece by marriage. Beatrice sent the Duchess of Ferrara unspecified fruit
trees native to Naples, via Venice, apparently because Lucrezia was very fond
of the variety.69 Indeed, Beatrice’s last letter reflects this growing closeness
with the new generation of Estense rulers—writing that she was well and
hoped to hear the same of ‘that most illustrious lord, the duke, the most
illustrious lady, the duchess, and the illustrious lord, their son, and your
most Reverend Lordship’.70 This prospective intimacy, however, was never
fully brought to fruition.
In September 1508, Beatrice died of what was likely malaria, leaving
behind little by way of material possessions, but a surprising amount of
affection in her hometown. She was buried in the church of San Pietro
Martire and was bid a public farewell with a modest funerary procession,
‘before a grand company of all the clergy of this city, eleven officials, and
followed by the entire citizenry’.71 She was laid to rest with golden brocade
and expensive silk adorned with the arms of the House of Aragon. It was
fitting that Beatrice was buried with the mark of the Aragonese emblazoned
upon the remains of her physical body. During her life, she, through her
actions, her speech, and her material self-fashioning, adopted various guises,
some voluntary some by choice, to survive. Her one constant that she wore
with pride was her Aragonese identity, a vestment that rarely failed. This
case study serves to show that women could survive widowhood using natal
networks, though this required skill and expertise to manage. Indeed, it
required constant reinvention: the art of which Beatrice was queen.

68 ‘ala quale multo ne offeremo’. Beatrice d’Aragona to Ippolito d’Este, 20 January 1507, in
Guerra, Carteggio, 245–247, 246.
69 Beatrice d’Aragona to Ippolito d’Este, 29 August 1507, in Guerra, Carteggio, 257–259.
70 ‘de quella del illustrissimo Signore duca, et illustrissima Signora duchessa, et
illustre Signore suo figliolo; et Vostra reverendissima Signoria’. Beatrice d’Aragona to Ippolito
d’Este, 24 June 1508, in Guerra, Carteggio, 271–272.
71 ‘prima da granda compagnia da tutti li relligiosi de questa cità et dapoi tutti li ordini de li
officii et segi cum tutto questo populo’. Guerra, Carteggio, 15–16.
Wife, Widow, Exiled Queen 155

The Many Edges of Beatrice d’Aragona

From 1490 until her death, Beatrice lived on the edges of Hungarian and
then Neapolitan society, surviving for almost twenty years on the outskirts
of politics. Her sterility barred her from the political security many other
dynastic wives enjoyed—like that of her sister, Eleonora d’Aragona, the
Duchess of Ferrara. Rather Beatrice, like many of her elite contemporaries,
lived the majority of her adult life in a foreign court, alien in language and
culture, in which she never fully assimilated, having failed her basic dynastic
duty of bearing children. Even so, Beatrice amassed significant financial
and political resources during her tenure as queen that were unfortunately
exploited by her second husband. It did mean, however, that when Corvinus
died, she was in a better bargaining position than one might expect as a
result of her astute plundering of the Hungarian treasury.
Beatrice’s shrewdness continued even when cast out by Władysław,
and she was able to use dynastic ties to survive exile, despite having very
limited fiscal resources and negligible political connections. Beatrice was
a dynastic chameleon, shapeshifting into the familial guise she needed to
extract money and support from those beholden to contemporary codes
of blood and honour. Her remarkable ability to persist is testament to the
sophisticated rhetoric she developed throughout her life as a queen and
quasi-mother, and to the intelligent plans she initiated as early as the 1480s
to safeguard against the pitfalls of childless widowhood. The Queen of
Hungary and Bohemia, as unhappy as she was, was a survivor and an expert
technician of dynastic networks. Her example serves to show how women,
and widows particularly, could emerge from unhappy marriages imprisoned
by unfortunate circumstances, but with some capacity to reshape their
destiny by refashioning their identity to combat the moods and modalities
of contemporary politics.

Works Cited

Primary Sources

Archivio di Stato di Modena

Carteggio dei principi, Casa e stato, buste 69, 132, 135.
Ambasciatori, Napoli, buste 7–8.
Carteggio dei principi, Ungheria e Boemia, busta 1623/2.
156  Jessica O’Leary

Carteggio dei principi, Minute di lettere ducali a principi e signorie (fuori

d’Italia), Ungheria, busta 1664/unica.
Archivio di Stato di Mantova
Archivio Gonzaga, busta 803.

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1460 al 1504’. In Archivio storico per le province, 9 (1884): 5–34, 205–248, 387–429,
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Byatt, Lucy. ‘Ippolito d’Este’. In Dizionario Biografica degli Italiani. Rome: Treccani,
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D’Avray, David. Papacy, Monarchy and Marriage, 860–1600. Cambridge: Cambridge
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Farbaky, Péter. ‘The Sterile Queen and the Illegitimate Son: Beatrice of Aragon
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Kniha k poctě Ivo Hlobila, edited by Helena Dáňová, Klára Meziohoráková, and
Dalibor Prix, 419–428. Praha: Artefactum, 2012.
Filangieri, Riccardo, ed. Una cronaca napoletana figurata del Quattrocento. Naples:
L’arte tipografica stampa, 1956.
Guerra, Enrica. ‘Ippolito I d’Este, arcivescovo di Ezstergom’. Rivista di Studi Ungherese
11 (2012): 15–25.
Guerra, Enrica, ed. Il carteggio tra Beatrice d’Aragona e gli Estensi (1476–1508).
Rome: Aracne, 2010.
Mallett, Michael E, and Christine Shaw. The Italian Wars, 1494–1559: War, State and
Society in Early Modern Europe. London: Routledge, 2015.
O’Leary, Jessica. ‘Keeping It in the Family: The Diplomatic Role of Eleonora and
Beatrice D’Aragona in Dynastic Networks’. MA diss., Monash University, 2017.
O’Leary, Jessica. ‘Politics, Pedagogy, and Praise: Three Literary Texts Dedicated
to Eleonora D’Aragona, Duchess of Ferrara’. I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renais-
sance 19, no. 2 (2016): 285–307.
Pàsztor, Edith. ‘Beatrice d’Aragona, regina d’Ungheria’. In Dizionario Biografica
degli Italiani. Rome: Treccani, 1970.
Pontieri, Ernesto. Per la storia del regno di Ferrante 1 d’Aragona re di Napoli. 2nd
ed. rev. and enlarged. Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1963.
Wife, Widow, Exiled Queen 157

Rees, Valery. ‘Devotional Matters in the Life of Beatrix of Aragon, Queen of Hungary’.
Colloquia 12, nos. 1–2 (2005): 1–22.
Senatore, Francesco. ‘La cultura politica di Ferrante d’Aragona’. In Linguaggi politici
nell’Italia del Rinascimento, Atti del convegno, Pisa, 9–11 novembre 2006, edited
by A. Gamberini, G. Petralia, 113–138. Rome: Viella, 2007.
Trinchera, Francesco. Codice aragonese: lettere, regie, ordinamenti ed altri atti
governativi de’ sovrani aragonesi in Napoli riguardanti l’amministrazione interna
del reame e le relazioni all’estero. 2 vols. Naples, 1866–1870.
Zsemlye, Aniko. Beatrix von Aragon (1457–1508), Königin von Ungarn:
Politische,höfisch-kulturelle und wirtschaftliche Aspekte ihres Wirkens in Ungarn.
PhD thesis, University of Vienna, 1999.

About the author

Jessica O’Leary is a social and cultural historian of Europe and the early mod-
ern world. She is currently a doctoral candidate in the Centre for Medieval
and Renaissance Studies at Monash University. Her essay on power-sharing
between elite couples in northern Italian courts won the Royal Studies
Journal/Canterbury Christ Church University prize for best essay by a
Postgraduate or Early Career Researcher. Her first monograph, Elite Women
as Diplomatic Agents in Early Modern Italy and Hungary: The Aragonese
Dynastic Network, 1470–1510, is under contract with ARC Humanities Press.
She has forthcoming book chapters on the history of emotions and letter-
writing (co-authored with Carolyn James), and on cultural encounter, trade,
and diplomacy in the early modern period.
8. On the Edge of the S(h)elf:
Arbella Stuart
Lisa Hopkins

Abstract
Lady Arbella Stuart (1575–1615) was potentially heir to the thrones of both
England and Scotland, though in the end she inherited neither. Before
James VI had children, Arbella was arguably his closest heir; even after
that, she had a credible claim to succeed Elizabeth I, since unlike James
she was born in England. This chapter considers how Arbella’s actual
and potential identities were shaped and represented by both herself
and others in the various Renaissance plays that seem to echo her story,
and also the various role models available to her: her aunt Mary, Queen
of Scots; her formidable grandmother Bess of Hardwick; Elizabeth I; and
the two Grey sisters, Lady Jane and Lady Catherine, with whom she seems
to have felt a special affinity.

Keywords: starvation; drama; succession

Lady Arbella Stuart (1575–1615) sat on the edge of two thrones, though in the
end she inherited neither. As the daughter of Charles Stuart, Earl of Lennox,
the younger brother of James VI’s father Lord Darnley, Arbella could trace
her ancestry back through her paternal grandmother Margaret Douglas to
a royal great-grandmother, Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII, sister of
Henry VIII, and wife of James IV of Scots. Before James VI married and had
children, Arbella was arguably his closest heir; even after that, she retained
a very credible claim to be considered as the successor of Elizabeth I, since
she shared James’s Tudor blood but not his disadvantage of having been
born outside the realm. In this chapter, I consider both what Arbella was,
and what she might have been, and how her actual and potential identities
were shaped and represented by both herself and others.

Hopkins, L. and A. Norrie (eds.), Women on the Edge in Early Modern Europe, Amsterdam University
Press, 2019.
doi 10.5117/9789462987500/ch08
160  Lisa Hopkins

While her maternal grandmother, Bess of Hardwick, sewed the self and
built the self, Arbella Stuart wrote the self.1 Sara Jayne Steen notes that ‘At
court, she was acknowledged to be a fine writer, one whose words were read
aloud in the king’s Privy Council and commended’. She may have written
poetry: Aemilia Lanyer seems to have thought so, and Steen notes that
‘Bathsua Makin in 1673 commended Stuart’s “great faculty in Poetry” and
several later writers echoed this point’, though no verse by her has ever been
identified. In any case, her ‘political importance meant that in some cases
even the drafts of her letters were filed as state papers’.2 Steen suggests of
Arbella that ‘Extending to women Stephen Greenblatt’s thesis about male
power to fashion a self, we can watch an intelligent and well-educated
Renaissance woman fashion a self in prose’.3
But what was that self? Uncertainty besets every aspect of Arbella’s
career, beginning even with her name. Early biographers often referred to
her as ‘Arabella’ until purists observed that she invariably signed herself
‘Arbella’. Bess, however, often writes her name as ‘Arbell’, the Venetians
sometimes spelled her name Arabella, and it might also appear as Arabel-
lay. 4 It is striking that, to the best of my knowledge, no one before Arbella
had ever been given either form of the name. Certainly, no member of the
royal family had, and although Sarah Gristwood speculates that Arbella
may have been named after Annabella Drummond, who became queen
consort of Scotland after her marriage to Robert III,5 there is an obvious
difference between the two names.6 The situation is hardly clarified by
Gristwood’s observation that the New Exchange ‘was originally to have
been called “Armabell”, in compliment to Arbella’; 7 did some people,
then, think she was called Armabell? It would not be impossible for
pronunciation of a name to differ signif icantly from its orthography:
Arbella’s own uncles might write their name ‘Cavendish’, but it was very
often pronounced ‘Candish’, while Ben Jonson’s Walk to Scotland contains
a mention of ‘Worthingsop, alias Worsop’ (modern Worksop), and the
information that ‘The next day Sir William Candish carried my gossip to

1 For more on Bess, her textiles, and her political nous, see: Hopkins, ed., Bess of Hardwick:
New Perspectives.
2 Steen, Letters, 8–9, 56–57.
3 Steen, Letters, 10.
4 Gristwood, Arbella, 377, 424.
5 Gristwood, Arbella, 40.
6 Ann Wroe, in her book on Perkin Warbeck, calls Huntly’s wife ‘Arabella Stuart’ (266), but
cites no evidence for any contemporary naming her thus.
7 Gristwood, Arbella, 320.
On the Edge of the S(h)elf: Arbella Stuart 161

see Bolsover, alias Bozers, castle’.8 Moreover, an odd detail emerges from
the trial of Sir Walter Ralegh, at which he said ‘I never heard so much as
the name of Arbella Stuart […] but only the name Arbella’.9 There was no
other Arbella of whom Ralegh could have heard, still less whom he could
have been plotting to place on the throne, so the apparent implication is
that the name ‘Arbella’ had some independent meaning of its own, though
there is no clue to what that might have been.

Writing the Self

The public faces that Arbella presented varied almost as much as her name.
Steen observes of her correspondence with her aunt and uncle Mary and
Gilbert Talbot, the relatives to whom she was arguably closest, that ‘In these
letters, the Arbella persona she creates is often at ease, allusive, teasing,
affectionate, and, especially in the early letters, a perceptive recorder of court
life’.10 Other letters, however, create a very different effect. Although Steen
notes that Arbella could write in French and Latin as well as apparently
understanding Spanish, Greek, and Hebrew,11 there are times when she
seems barely coherent in English. Certainly, Sir Henry Brounker found her
letters difficult to follow, suggesting that ‘much writing’ had led to ‘the
distempering of her brain’.12 This is particularly the case in the notorious
letter in which Arbella describes a mysterious lover whom she is evidently
imagining, and who is decked out in the wildly heightened colours of teenage
fantasy: ‘I may compare the love of this worthy Gentleman […] to gold which
hath binne so often purified that I cannot find one fault […] Jelosy onely
excepted’.13 Matters became even worse when she was finally persuaded
to put a name to the mystery man, for she declared that it was her cousin
James of Scotland, whom she had never met and who was already married,
and persisted in this assertion in the face of Brounker’s obvious incredulity.
She had said that the mystery lover dared not declare himself for fear of the
consequences, and now assured Brounker that this timorous creature was
James: ‘Beinge demaunded whether the King of Scottes dare not geve his
consente till he have pardon for him selfe and his friendes she aunsuered

8 Loxley, Groundwater, and Sanders, Ben Jonson’s Walk to Scotland, 54, 57.
9 Gristwood, Arbella, 275.
10 Steen, Letters, 9.
11 Steen, Letters, 24.
12 Gristwood, Arbella, 221.
13 Steen, Letters, 129.
162  Lisa Hopkins

she thinks not’.14 Was it seriously credible that James, the adult male ruler
of an independent nation, could be so terrified of anyone’s disapproval that
he did not dare confess he loved her? Yes, said Arbella cheerfully.
Steen, however, points to evidence of craft and control in even the most
apparently disordered passages, observing of the fantasy lover letter that
‘Stuart occasionally had to alter a phrase like “your Majesties knowledge” to
“your Ladyships knowledge” as she recollected whom she was supposed to
be addressing’; for Steen, Arbella’s letters allow her ‘to formulate on paper an
identity she can accept’.15 There is certainly evidence of both care and skill in
some of the language chosen by Arbella for the benefit of Elizabeth, as when
she refers to ‘that most evident and natifue affection which your Majesty
hath ever from my cradle showed unto me above all other of your Highnesse
most Royall linage’, or when she assures the Queen that ‘I have had as great
care and have with more […] meere innocence preserved your Majesties most
royall linage from any blott as any whosoever’.16 She also appears deliberately
to echo the Queen’s own rhetoric when she assures Brounker ‘I am free from
promise, contract, marriage, or intention to marry’: Gristwood points out
the similarity to Elizabeth’s alleged profession of virginity.17
The apparent attempt to sound like Elizabeth should alert us to something
else. Arguably, even more important than who Arbella was—in many
ways a distinctively modern question that would not much have troubled
her contemporaries—was the question of who Arbella was like. Her sense
of her own position and destiny was inevitably heavily affected by the
Queen apparently saying, when Arbella was still only a teenager, that
Arbella would ‘one day be even as I am’.18 In fact—and greatly to her own
disadvantage—Arbella consistently failed to be like Elizabeth in any of the
ways that mattered. Gristwood notes that Arbella ‘begged for “two lines” in
her majesty’s own hand; […] just so had the young Elizabeth, on her way to
the Tower, once begged some direct communication from her sister Mary’,
but that when Arbella was interrogated by Sir Henry Brounker, ‘She didn’t
answer as cannily as the fifteen-year-old princess Elizabeth had done,
when Sir Robert Tyrwhitt interrogated her about her relationship with her
stepmother’s husband, Thomas Seymour’.19 Only in danger and death did
she begin to come close to the Queen: in the Tower, she may have been

14 Steen, Letters, 144.

15 Steen, Letters, 34, 37, 40.
16 Steen, Letters, 125, 126.
17 Gristwood, Arbella, 222.
18 Steen, Letters, 20.
19 Gristwood, Arbella, 206, 209–210.
On the Edge of the S(h)elf: Arbella Stuart 163

held where Elizabeth was, and when dying she refused food and medical
attention as Elizabeth had done.20 Nor did she successfully emulate another
potential role model, her formidable grandmother. She did display some
of Bess’s business acumen: Steen notes that ‘Stuart actively sought patents
and monopolies and bought and sold lands’,21 following in the footsteps of
Bess who bought land for her as well as giving her money and jewels,22 and
a rare lucid moment in one of the wildest of her letters also shows whose
granddaughter she was when she compares her planning to that of ‘a wise
Architect’.23
In everything that mattered, though, Arbella disappointed her grand-
mother’s hopes for her. In particular, she failed to become a countess. 24
This was something that Bess herself achieved with her fourth marriage,
to George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, in 1567. Moreover, she was in fact
technically the premier countess in England, since Shrewsbury was the
premier earl, by virtue of the fact that the earldom of Shrewsbury is the
oldest surviving independent creation, dating back to 1442 (that of Chester,
which predates it, being granted always in conjunction with the title of
Prince of Wales, and that of Arundel being held by the Duke of Norfolk).
In the same year, the third wife of the Duke of Norfolk died and he did not
take another, though rumours that he might marry Mary, Queen of Scots
were repeatedly commented on in Bess’s correspondence. This left only
one surviving duchess in England, the Duchess of Suffolk, who lived until
1580; however, she was a friend of Bess’s (she even visited Chatsworth)25 so
her rank is unlikely to have irked, and she had in any case sunk in prestige
since her second marriage to a man much lower in rank. There was one
dowager marchioness—Helena Snakenborg, dowager marchioness of
Northampton, who had remained in England after the visit of Princess
Cecilia of Sweden (see Aidan Norrie’s chapter below)26 —but England’s
only surviving marquess, William Paulet, 1st Marquess of Winchester,
was a widower (as Bess would know, since one of her gentlewomen had

20 Gristwood, Arbella, 393, 432.

21 Steen, Letters, 59.
22 See: Lovell, Bess of Hardwick, 387–388; Gristwood, Arbella, 175.
23 Steen, Letters, 131.
24 I discuss this further in the introduction to Bess of Hardwick: New Perspectives.
25 Durant, Bess of Hardwick, 83.
26 Bess would have known this because as a young woman she had lived in ‘a London house
in Newgate Street, just north of St Paul’s and rented from the Marquis of Northampton’; when
her second son William was born ‘The sole godmother was Elizabeth Brooke, wife of William
Parr, Marquess of Northampton’; and when her daughter Elizabeth was born Northampton was
godfather (Durant, Bess of Hardwick, 16, 24, 28).
164  Lisa Hopkins

been in correspondence with the late Marchioness), 27 so this left Bess as

effectively second only to the Queen in the ranks of the female nobility
of England.28
Moreover, it was a concomitant of Bess’s marriage to Shrewsbury that
her daughter would succeed her in the title, for as part of the alliance Mary
Cavendish, Bess’s daughter by her second husband, married Gilbert Talbot,
Shrewbsury’s second son. One of the primary tasks of a countess was to
secure the succession to the earldom, and Bess would have thought that
she had done that when the death of his elder brother in 1582 left Gilbert
as the heir; she was not to know that neither this marriage nor that of her
son Henry to Shrewsbury’s daughter Grace would produce surviving male
offspring. Bess also, of course, notoriously connived at her daughter Elizabeth
marrying the Earl of Lennox, and the resulting title of countess was clearly
one of the things she valued about the marriage. In one of the chambers at
Hardwick, ‘two elaborate fireplaces […] celebrate the two daughters who
achieved places amongst the peerage, Mary, Countess of Shrewsbury, and
Elizabeth, Countess of Lennox. It is clear that Bess put enormous value on the
acquisition of a coronet and the social power that goes with it’.29 Similarly, in
the heraldic plasterwork of the ‘Shipp bed chamber’, ‘precedence on the top
line is given to the three members of the family who achieved countesses’
coronets, Bess herself, represented by the Hardwick arms alone, and Mary
and Elizabeth, represented by their married arms’.30 Gillian White points
out that neither of these women was heiress of Hardwick (indeed Elizabeth
had been dead since 1582),31 but Bess clearly valued their status. Arbella
by contrast has no place in the decorative language of Hardwick: David
Durant observes that ‘It is the story of Bess’s life told in heraldry and there
is but a single reference to Arbella—Hardwick was built for Bess and her
dynasty, not Arbella’,32 and Gillian White, noting that ‘The heraldry places
Bess symbolically at the heart of her household’, observes that in Arbella’s
room, the arms of Talbot and Hardwick are displayed under one coronet

27 Durant, Bess of Hardwick, 118.

28 That the Queen herself was aware of this seems clearly indicated by a letter written to Bess
by her half-sister Elizabeth Wingfield on 21 October 1567, which reports the Queen as saying ‘I
have bene glade to se me lady sayntloa but now more dyssirous to se my lady shrewsbury I hope
sayd she my lady hath knowne my good opennon of her and thus much I assure there ys no lady
ys thys land that I beter love and lyke’. Bess of Hardwick’s Letters, http://www.bessofhardwick.
org/letter.jsp?letter=96.
29 White, ‘“that which is needful and necessary”’, 195.
30 White, ‘“that which is needful and necessary”’, 195.
31 White, ‘“that which is needful and necessary”’, 196.
32 Durant, Bess of Hardwick, 163.
On the Edge of the S(h)elf: Arbella Stuart 165

and those of her parents under another, though there is no symbol personal
to Arbella herself.33
This omission is almost certainly because of her failure to attain the
status of countess. Such a status brought with it privileges both tangible
and intangible. Sumptuary laws allowed duchesses, marchionesses, and
countesses to wear cloth of gold, tissue, and sable fur, and there were also
special regulations for gentlewomen attendant upon duchesses, marchion-
esses, and countesses. While it would be absurd to say that Bess could not
have achieved what she did without the rank of countess—for one thing,
she would never have risen to be a countess in the first place if she had been
wholly dependent on title—the attainment of the position was nevertheless
of service to her. Certainly, she clung to its trappings. Mark Girouard notes
that the 1587 directions for the funeral of an earl require the coffin to be
shrouded in black velvet;34 Bess’s coffin was draped in black velvet and she lay
in state for over two months.35 The effigy on her tomb has a coronet; so too do
the letters above Hardwick. Perhaps most strikingly, Bess’s embroidered panel
of Penelope (her favourite heroine, perhaps because she ruled a household
and managed for twenty years without a husband) represents her wearing
a countess’s coronet. And although Sarah Gristwood’s excellent biography
of Arbella is subtitled England’s Lost Queen, the title Bess was specifically
concerned to secure for Arbella was countess. Although Philip II suggested
that she should marry the Duke of Parma’s son, and Henri IV declared himself
willing to marry her if she was named heiress presumptive,36 all the efforts
made by Bess herself were aimed solely at achieving the estate of countess
for her granddaughter. Margaret Lennox tried to secure the earldom of
Lennox for Arbella, but ‘the Scottish Regent disagreed, responding that
the Lennox estates had descended directly to Lord Darnley’s son James,
and as a consequence were now the property of the Crown of Scotland’,
and though ‘In May 1578, a few weeks after the funeral of the Dowager
Countess, the Lennox title was formally conferred on a brother of the 4th Earl
of Lennox, the ageing and childless Bishop of Caithness’, Bess nevertheless
commissioned a miniature of Arbella which shows her ‘wearing a gold
chain and shield containing the motto of the old Countess of Lennox, ‘I
endure in order to succeed’, and which describes her as ‘Arbella, Countess

33 White, ‘“that which is needful and necessary”’, 191, 194.

34 Girouard, Life in the English Country House, 90.
35 Lovell, Bess of Hardwick, 471.
36 Lovell, Bess of Hardwick, 352, 405.
166  Lisa Hopkins

of Lennox’37—although Arbella herself referred to her Lennox inheritance

as ‘an earldom’.38 At eight, Arbella was betrothed to Leicester’s son Denbigh,
and Esme Stuart was also suggested as a possible bridegroom.39 Not until
Arbella had thoroughly disgraced herself in her grandmother’s eyes did Bess
write to Elizabeth ‘ffor my owne part, I shoulde have little care how meanly
soever she were bestowed, so as it were not offensive to your Highnes’.40 Until
then, all Bess’s efforts were focused on ensuring that Arbella emulated her
grandmother, mother, and aunt by becoming a countess.
Arbella herself may of course have had other designs. For much of her
youth, the household included Mary, Queen of Scots, who was not only her
aunt by marriage, being the widow of her father’s brother, but also a queen
regnant, a queen dowager, and a potential claimant to the throne of England.
Arbella may have dreamed such dreams. However there was only one way
in which she really resembled Mary, and that is that both women seem to
have suffered from porphyria, one of the less fortunate consequences of
Stuart royal descent (Mary presumably inherited it from her father, who
died young, ostensibly of despair). In Natura Exenterata, the book of recipes
and remedies compiled by Arbella’s cousin Alethea, Countess of Arundel,
to whom she was very close, ‘A Fomentation for the swelling of the spleen
or the stitch in the side’ is one of many remedies for pains in the side, 41 a
classic symptom of porphyria:42

Take wild Mallowes, Camomile, and the flowers if you have them, Beers
and Cummin, Anniseed and Liquorice, boil these al in a Gallon of fair
water till the fourth part be sodden away, and then put the one half into
a bladder with the Herbs and all, and lay it to your side as hot as you can
suffer it, and use this the space of three or four hours in your bed, and so
you shall find great ease, and it will cause you to sleep. Use this three or
four times in the year, and it is very good. 43

37 Lovell, Bess of Hardwick, 260, 276, 278.

38 Gristwood, Arbella, 210.
39 Lovell, Bess of Hardwick, 306, 351.
40 Bess of Hardwick to Elizabeth I, 29 January 1602/3, Bess of Hardwick’s Letters, http://www.
bessofhardwick.org/letter.jsp?letter=129.
41 [Talbot], Natura Exenterata, 27. No author is named for Natura Exenterata, but Alethea’s
portrait appears opposite the title page and it is catalogued under her name in the Arundel
family library.
42 In Margaret Cavendish’s The Unnatural Tragedy, Frere suffers from a pain in the side. Since
Cavendish’s husband William was Arbella’s cousin, this may also encode a family memory of
the disease.
43 [Talbot], Natura Exenterata, 27.
On the Edge of the S(h)elf: Arbella Stuart 167

Perhaps this offers us an insight into Arbella’s treatment, and it is also

not inconceivable that it was a remedy tried in the first instance on Mary,
Queen of Scots.
However, the person with whom Arbella most strongly identified herself
appears to have been Lady Jane Grey, an ill-starred choice. Above all, what
mattered to a Renaissance woman was whom she married. In Arbella’s
case, this became particularly important after James promised to restore
her property when she married, 44 since a shortage of funds was a perennial
problem for her. The prospective bridegroom might have been almost
anyone: husbands suggested or rumoured for her included ‘Duke Mathias,
the Earl of Gowrie, the Earl of Northumberland, Sir Robert Cecil, the Prince
of Condé, the Duke of Nevers. In 1596 the Pope even offered to release
Cardinal Farnese, Rainutio’s brother, from his religious vows in order that
he might marry Stuart’. 45 The person she herself approached was, however,
the Earl of Hertford, to whom she wrote suggesting a possible marriage to
his grandson, and she asked him to send, as a proof that any answer came
from him, ‘somm picture or handwriting of the Lady Jane Gray whose hand I
know. and she sent hir sister a booke at hir death which weare the very best
they could bring, or of the Lady Catherin, or Queene Jane Seimer, or any of
that family which we know they and none but they have’.46 Arbella says ‘we’,
and Mary Lovell points out that after Jane’s execution, ‘for the rest of her life
Bess kept a portrait of Jane Grey on a table beside her bed’, 47 so this could
be a sign of Arbella aligning herself with her grandmother as well as with
Lady Jane. However, Leanda de Lisle suggests an alternative explanation:
she argues that the salient point about the book Arbella mentions was
that it was directly connected to Lady Jane’s execution, so it could be an
emblem of a claim to the throne. 48 There has always been disagreement
about the extent of Arbella’s ambition. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski says of her
marriage to William Seymour that ‘Her choice makes sense only as a bid
for the succession’ and that ‘her fixation on the Seymours […] has to be
explained as an effort to give her progeny—and possibly herself—some
chance at the throne’, 49 and Gristwood points out that Arbella’s attempt
to marry into the Seymour family coincided with the 1608 unearthing

44 Steen, Letters, 57.

45 Steen, Letters, 22.
46 Steen, Letters, 121.
47 Lovell, Bess of Hardwick, 89.
48 Lisle, After Elizabeth, 98.
49 Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England, 71, 84.
168  Lisa Hopkins

of the clergyman who had married Hertford and Lady Catherine Grey,50
giving a considerable fillip to the potential claims of Hertford’s grandsons
to the throne. It is perhaps suggestive that in one of her letters (apparently
written on 9 March 1603) she asks ‘Had the Earle of Essex the favour to
dy unbound because he was a Prince, and shall my hands be bound from
helping myself in this distress?’;51 here, Arbella seems to be imagining
herself as equivalent to Essex, and the term she applies not only to him
but also implicitly to herself is ‘Prince’, which was of course also a term
used for Elizabeth.

Writing Arbella

As well as writing herself, Arbella was also written about, often specifically
in ways that bore on the question of the succession. Because of the delicacy of
the topic, literary treatments of Arbella’s story tend to be almost as shrouded
and non-committal as Arbella’s own letters, but some of them are richly
suggestive. Unfortunately, the most potentially intriguing literary connection
is also one for which there is no proof. As long ago as 1937 it was suggested
that the playwright Christopher Marlowe was the person meant in Bess’s
letter to Lord Burghley on 21 September 1592 describing how

On Morley who hath attended on Arbell & red to hyr for the space of
thre yere & a half shoed to be much discontented since my retorn into
ye cuntry, in saying he had lyued in hope, to haue som annuitie graunted
him by Arbgell out of hyr land during hys lyfe, or some lease of grounds
to ye value of forty pound a yere, alledging yat he was so much damnified
by leuing of ye vniuersitie; & now saw yat if she were wyllinge yet not of
abylitye to make him any such assurance. I vnderstanding by dyuers yat
Morley was so much discontented, & withall of late hauing some cause
to be dobtfull of his forwardnes in religion (though I can not charge him
with papistry) toke occasion to parte with him after he was gone from my
howse and all hys stuff caried from hence, the next day he retorned ageyn,
very importunate to serue, without standinge vppon any recompence,
which made me more suspicious & ye wyllinger to parte with hym.52

50 Gristwood, Arbella, 333.

51 Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England, 76.
52 Bess of Hardwick to Lord Burghley, 21 September 1592, Bess of Hardwick’s Letters, http://
www.bessofhardwick.org/letter.jsp?letter=163.
On the Edge of the S(h)elf: Arbella Stuart 169

Various objections have been made to the proposed identification on the

grounds that Christopher Marlowe is known to have been elsewhere for some
of the relevant period, but Sarah Gristwood has recently pointed out that so
too were some known members of Bess’s household: she observes that ‘There
are, in fact, no certain records of Marlowe being in the south when Bess and
her family weren’t in town’, though she concludes that ‘The identification is
a possibility; no more than that’,53 as too does Charles Nicholl: ‘On internal
evidence it is possible—not convincingly probable, but possible—that Arbella
Stuart’s tutor, who attended on her and read to her, and whose “stuff” was
carted away in September 1592”, was Christopher Marlowe’.54
If this were so, it would raise the possibility of some intriguing connec-
tions. There are some suggestive intersections between Bess’s household and
Marlowe’s plays. In a letter of 4 March 1623, Arbella writes ‘Damnata iam
luce ferox’, a quotation from Lucan’s Pharsalia, part of which Marlowe had
translated.55 In plot terms, Margaret de Clare is an unnecessary character
in Edward II; she could, however, reflect Marlowe’s experiences with Arbella
at Chatsworth and Hardwick Old Hall (not the New Hall, which had not
yet been built), and maybe even let us see an early warning of the romantic
fantasies which were later to become apparent in Arbella’s dealings with Sir
Henry Brounker. It also does not seem to have been previously noticed that
Bess’s letter to Burghley implies that it was during 1589 that ‘One Morley’
began ‘reading to’ Arbella, and that during the course of 1589 Bess received
a letter from Gilbert Talbot which might conceivably find reflection in one
of Marlowe’s plays:

I assure my selfe that before this letter shall cum to your Ladyship’s handes
you shall have harde of the wycked murther of the ffrenche Kynge In this
manner a freare of a new order which this Kynge him selfe erected caled
The order of Dominickes desyred to have private accesse to his owne person
for matters tendynge hylye to his honor & servyce And beynge admytted
he delivered vnto the Kynge a lettre importynge an offer of one of the
chefe gates of Paris to be at the Kynges commandement but before the
sayde lettre was fully redd that cruell varlett (with a long sharpe poynted
knyfe yat he hadd in his wyde sleve for yat purpose) stabbed the Kynge
into ye syde therwith the king havynge sum glympse of the knyfe stroke
it sumwhat doune with his arme wherby it perced not so depe into his

53 Gristwood, Arbella, 459, 461.

54 Nicholl, The Reckoning, 341.
55 Gristwood, Arbella, 224.
170  Lisa Hopkins

boddy but yat ther was hope of his recovery the Kynge him selfe wrested
that knyfe out of the vyllanes hande (sum sayes he pulled it oute of his
owne boddy) but certayne it is that the King stabbed the varlett two or
three tymes into the face & hedd therwith & so by those yat were nereste
the Kynge he was Instantly slayne in ye place The King immediately sente
for the King of Navar to him who was incamped nere vnto him with many
others of the nobilitie And after he hadd hadd sum private speche with
the King of Navarr he desyred all thos noble men ther presente to receve
him for theyr Kinge and no other which they all faythfully vowed to doe.56

Marlowe’s account of this event in The Massacre at Paris concurs strikingly

with this. Marlowe agrees with Gilbert Talbot in the following respects: the
friar tells the king he comes on business concerning Paris (‘the President
of Paris greets your grace’);57 the king grabs the knife and strikes the friar,
though in what part of the body is not specified; and he says ‘O no, Navarre,
thou must be King of France’ (Scene 24, line 86). There is one apparent
difference: Gilbert Talbot identifies the friar as a Dominican, but Marlowe
makes him a Jacobin and actually has him pray to ‘Sancte Jacobe’ (Scene 24,
line 33) as he strikes. In fact, however, Jacobin was the term used in France
for Dominicans because their convent was attached to the church of St.
Jacques, so Marlowe’s apparent change may in fact signal superior rather than
defective knowledge, as well as the term used in other English references to
the assassination, such as that by Edward Aggas. Marlowe certainly had ac-
cess to other sources for The Massacre at Paris,58 but Bess’s household would
doubtless have been of interest to him, not least her ‘bad son’ Henry, who
visited Constantinople in company with one of Walsingham’s spies, Richard
Mallory (who was later arrested for counterfeiting Turkish currency).59 The
author of the map-obsessed Tamburlaine would also doubtless have been
pleased to find that Sir William St. Loe had bought A Cosmography of the
Levant for Bess’s children.60
Much attention has been paid to what the possible implications of this
might be from the point of view of those interested in Marlowe, but rather
less from the point of view of those interested in Bess. If Marlowe was there,

56 Gilbert Talbot to Bess of Hardwick, 1 July 1589, Bess of Hardwick’s Letters, http://www.
bessofhardwick.org/letter.jsp?letter=88.
57 Marlowe, The Massacre at Paris, Scene 24, line 29. All further quotations from the play will
be taken from this edition and reference will be given in the text.
58 See: Briggs, ‘Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris: A Reconsideration’, 257–278, esp. 271n38.
59 Wood, Mr Harrie Cavendish, VIn2.
60 Lovell, Bess of Hardwick, 151.
On the Edge of the S(h)elf: Arbella Stuart 171

it was because this was a household which was being spied upon, and which
knew so. Shrewsbury, refusing some of Elizabeth Lennox’s former servants,
said ‘I have too many spies in my house already’,61 and Arbella herself wrote
to Gilbert ‘My olde good spy mr. James Mourray desireth his service may be
remembred to your Lordship and my Aunt’.62 This is someone who knew she
was under constant observation, and who tailored her actions accordingly.
It is partly because of this tailoring that it can be sometimes more instruc-
tive to see how Arbella was represented by others, rather than by herself.
Both during and after her life, her situation was understood in theatrical
terms. In 1610, the Venetian ambassador reported that Arbella ‘complains
that in a certain comedy the playwright introduced an allusion to her person
and the part played by the prince of Moldavia’, since in 1610 there was talk of
a marriage between Arbella and the Moldavian pretender Stephen Bogdan
(Stephen Janiculo).63 The unnamed play is usually supposed to have been
Ben Jonson’s Epicoene, but could conceivably have been Francis Beaumont’s
The Knight of the Burning Pestle.64 Steen writes that when she fled from the
Tower, Arbella escaped ‘cross-dressed like one of Shakespeare’s heroines’, and
notes possible references to her in The Duchess of Malfi, The Second Maiden’s
Tragedy, The Noble Gentleman, and Cymbeline,65 while Sarah Gristwood
observes that in the fantasy lover letter, ‘She described a scene so complicated
one thinks of Shakespeare’s plots’, and that ‘Arbella referred to herself and
her supposed companion in the language of the theatre—as “actors”, who
made themselves merry “making ourselves perfect in our parts”’.66 The
comparison to a Shakespearean heroine may be appropriate, for Arbella
saw a play at court which may have been As You Like It.67 Arbella herself
wrote to her uncle Edward Talbot, ‘I am as unjustly accused of contriving
a Comedy as you […] a tragedy’, although, as is so often the case, it is not
entirely clear what she meant,68 while the Venetian ambassador commented

61 Lovell, Bess of Hardwick, 299.

62 Steen, Letters, 208–209.
63 Gristwood, Arbella, 325. See also: Graves, ‘Jonson’s “Epicoene” and Lady Arabella Stuart’,
525–530.
64 Gristwood, Arbella, 327.
65 Steen, Letters, 68, 94–96. On the possibility that Beaumont and Fletcher’s A Noble Gentleman
may comment on Arbella’s situation, see: Gristwood, Arbella, 310. For possible allusions in The
Second Maiden’s Tragedy, see: Gristwood, Arbella, 385–386. Cadman, Sovereigns and Subjects
in Early Modern Neo-Senecan Drama, suggests that in Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam,
the stress on Mariam being more legitimate than Herod glances at Arbella (190).
66 Gristwood, Arbella, 200, 201.
67 Steen, Letters, 193.
68 Steen, Letters, 139.
172  Lisa Hopkins

of her attempted escape from her grandmother’s custody at Hardwick

that ‘the joy of Arbella’s ill-matched and unconsummated marriage may
be changed into a bloody tragedy’, and said of her effective incarceration
there ‘Some call the affair a comedy, others a tragi-comedy’.69 The parallel
between Arbella’s story and The Duchess of Malfi was particularly striking,
not least in that, as Steen observes, ‘Both Stuart and Seymour maintained
that their engagement, entered into before the marriage had been forbidden,
had bound them to each other’.70 The fact that Arbella owned a house in
Blackfriars would increase the likelihood that her story would come to the
minds of the audience of this Blackfriars play.71
The Duchess of Malfi, in which, as in Marlowe’s Dido, a young widow seeks
a second husband, recalls the story of the Trojan war when Antonio says of
French horsemen, ‘As out of the Grecian horse issued many famous princes,
so, out of brave horsemanship arise the first sparks of growing resolution,
that raise the mind to noble action’ (I.i.142–143). It also repeats several lines
from William Alexander’s The Alexandraean Tragedy, which is set in ancient
Greece. Arbella too draws on the story of Troy during her first attempt to
ally herself with the Seymours. The letter as a whole reads in many places
almost as if its writer were demented, but there is one stable element, and
that is that Arbella repeatedly has recourse to classical imagery:

For whearas if the Noble gentleman you would needes suspect had binne
transported by somm Archimedes to Newstead as miraculously especially
to him selfe as certaine Romanes (those Romanes weare full of unsuspi-
cious magnanimity) weare hoised ovre the walles of the besieged Siracus
and drawne by one poore Scholler (who lightly are not the wisest nor
strongest faction) through the towne, which feate I thinck unlesse you
will beleeve for the Author my disgraced frend Plutarkes sake, you are
like never to see executed by any Architect, Mathematicien, or Ingenier
living, I will not sweare but tell you as I thinck. Now suppose he should
land at Bludworth haven.72

Her thoughts turn first to the siege of Syracuse in Sicily—‘Magna Grae-

cia’—and she finds herself thinking of Archimedes, who helped defend
Syracuse, and ultimately died there. With bewildering suddenness, though,

69 Gristwood, Arbella, 238, 219.

70 Steen, Letters, 243, note on line 17.
71 Gristwood, Arbella, 316.
72 Steen, Letters, 149–150.
On the Edge of the S(h)elf: Arbella Stuart 173

the focus switches to a ‘he’ who cannot be Archimedes, and the idea that
this mystery man might ‘land at Bludworth haven’. However, her thoughts
are soon back with the story of Troy and its aftermath: ‘I finding my selfe
scarse able to stand <on my feete> what for my side and what for my head,
yet with a commaunding voice called a troupe of such viragoes as Virgilles
Camilla that stood at the receit in the next chamber’.73
Camilla, being a virgin, is not an inappropriate analogue for her ladies-in-
waiting, whom she summoned at this point, but neither is she a particularly
or specifically appropriate one. More strikingly, if her ladies-in-waiting are
like Camilla, there is no one for Arbella herself to be. There were no ready-
made roles available to Arbella, and it would have seemed premature and
presumptuous in her to develop an iconography of her own. As a child, she
was painted holding a doll dressed as an Elizabethan lady; as a woman, she
becomes that lady, but with nothing to distinguish or even really definitively
to identify her. Perhaps, though, she thinks of Virgil because her thoughts,
as they often do, turn to Essex, whose sister was named Penelope, and who
was himself, as Andrew Hiscock notes, often figured in classical terms,
particularly as Achilles.74 Arbella herself implicitly does this when, writing
on the anniversary of Essex’s execution, she demands, ‘how overviolently
hasty […] to recover [the Queen’s favour] he was this fatall day Ashwensday
and <the> newdropping teares of somm might make you remember if it
were possible you could forgett. Quis talia fando Temperet a lachrimis?
Myrmidonum Dolopumque aut duri miles Ulissei?’.75 She also connects
Essex and Greece (and perhaps, via Dido, Queen of Carthage, by association
with the Troy story) when she writes:

it pleased his Majesty to give me leave to gaze on hir and by triall

pronounce me an Eglett of hir owne kinde <as> worthy [to] even yet
(but for my [ ]) to carry hir […] Thunderbolt and prostrat my selfe at
hir feete (the Earle of Essex fatall ill sought [desire] unobtained desire
as <any> Hebe whose disgraces may be blushingly concealed but not
unseene. or Ganimed though he may minister Nectar in more acceptable
manner. But whether do my thoughts transport now? Let me live like
an Owle in the wildernesse since my Pallas will not protect me with
hir shield.76

73 Steen, Letters, 152.

74 Hiscock, ‘“Achilles alter”: The heroic lives and afterlives of Robert Devereux’, 101–132.
75 Steen, Letters, 167.
76 Steen, Letters, 162.
174  Lisa Hopkins

Maybe the thought of Essex is what prompts Arbella’s image when she says
‘my little circuite is capable of resolve rather to indure a .10. yeares siege and
even loose my Hector then you shall get my love into your danger’.77 In these
lines, she herself becomes Troy, with Essex, perhaps, as the Hector whom
she has indeed already lost. It is a valiant and defiant image, but it is also
one in which the certainty of defeat is always already inscribed.
If The Duchess of Malfi echoes Arbella in its use of the Troy story, though,
it also does something that Arbella herself never could: it connects her to
Elizabeth. The Duchess’s famous defiance, ‘I am Duchess of Malfi still’,
echoes Elizabeth’s motto of ‘semper eadem’, and the imagery of progress
used in the play also recalls the Queen. I think Arbella’s story also finds
a reflection in two plays by the Caroline playwright John Ford, first The
Broken Heart, and second Perkin Warbeck, and they too connect her to
the Tudors. In the case of The Broken Heart, the case is a simple one, and
I have already made it elsewhere: 78 the play’s presentation of a virgin
queen being succeeded by her cousin, the king of a neighbouring land,
obviously glances back at the circumstances of the Stuart succession in
general, and the fact that the heroine Penthea goes mad, dies childless,
and starves herself to death makes her look like a reflection on Arbella
Stuart in particular. In the case of Perkin Warbeck, which Ford dedicated to
Arbella’s first cousin William Cavendish, the points of similarity are more
complex and suggestive, and have not to my knowledge been previously
explored. In the first place, there is a particularly striking moment in the
letters describing the fantasy lover when Arbella speculates ‘suppose he
should land at Bludworth haven’. Steen glosses this as an ‘unidentif ied
haven in the Blidworth area southeast of Mansfield, in Sherwood Forest;
perhaps Stuart refers to the area’s reputation as the haven for Robin Hood
and his band’.79 However, the primary meaning of ‘haven’ is undoubtedly
‘harbour’, and Arbella refers specifically to the possibility of a landing.
No one then or now seems to have commented on the improbability of
anyone, whoever he might be, sailing into Sherwood Forest, but those
acquainted with the topography might beg to differ. However, the idea
of landing at a haven had obvious resonance in the context of aiming
for a crown, as Perkin Warbeck recalls when it has its pretender remind
Henry VII that

77 Steen, Letters, 154.

78 See: Hopkins, ‘“I am not Oedipus”’, 259–282; responded to by Verna Ann and Stephen Foster,
and by Willy Maley, Connotations 7, no. 1 (1997/98): 104–115.
79 Steen, Letters, 150.
On the Edge of the S(h)elf: Arbella Stuart 175

yet then a dawning glimmered

To some few wand’ring remnants, promising day
When first they ventured on a frightful shore
At Milford Haven.80

Bishop Goodman, writing shortly after James’s death, wrote that one of
Arbella’s crimes had been to ‘match with one of the blood royal who was
descended from Henry the Seventh’,81 and a letter referring to Arbella’s
husband William Seymour as ‘a prince of England’ also mentions Henry
VII’s landing at Milford Haven. 82 In addition, De Lisle points out that
one of Arbella’s chosen go-betweens in the marriage negotiations was
the resonantly named Owen Tudor, and the fact that when the plan went
wrong Owen Tudor fled to Anglesey suggests that he was, or thought he
was, connected to the actual Tudors, who came originally from Anglesey.

Remembering Arbella

In the year in which Perkin Warbeck was first published, 1634, Cymbeline
was performed at Whitehall on 1 January after Charles’s return from his
Scottish coronation. I noted earlier that Cymbeline is another of the plays in
which echoes of Arbella’s story have been detected,83 and she was present
at Prince Henry’s investiture as Prince of Wales, to which Cymbeline is
undoubtedly connected. When Katherine Gordon, the heroine of Perkin
Warbeck, enters in a riding-suit (V.i.3 s.d.), Ure notes that Imogen calls for
one in Cymbeline. This may be incidental, but it is impossible not to feel
that something more pointed is intended when Perkin mentions Milford
Haven (V.ii.66), the goal of Imogen’s journey. As I have discussed elsewhere,
Perkin Warbeck clearly bears on questions about the succession, and even
hints that the Stuart claim to the Scottish throne might not be valid by
surfacing a scandal about the earldom of Strathern, something to which
Scottish commentators were quick to draw the attention of King Charles I.84
Suggestively, Steen notes that Arbella’s marriage seems to have polarized
English and Scottish courtiers, with one observer suggesting ‘that the

80 Ford, Perkin Warbeck, V.ii.63–66.

81 Gristwood, Arbella, 389–390.
82 Gristwood, Arbella, 426.
83 Gristwood, Arbella, 451.
84 See: Hopkins, Drama and the Succession to the Crown, Chapter 6.
176  Lisa Hopkins

Scots were irrationally outraged and were inflaming James’s fears’,85 so

that in Arbella’s case too, Scots genealogists were more on the qui vive
than their English counterparts. There are other parallels too. After
Arbella’s death, her aunt, Mary Talbot, was interrogated about rumours
that Arbella had borne a child,86 and I have argued elsewhere that Perkin
Warbeck may be playing with a similar suggestion that its hero had left
descendants.87 When in disgrace, Arbella sought the intercession of Jane/
Jean Drummond, ‘her own kinswoman and one of Anna’s closest ladies’;88
the female attendant whom Ford invents for Perkin’s wife, Lady Katherine
Gordon, is named Jane, and Ford clearly (though erroneously) believed
Lady Katherine herself to be descended from Annabella Drummond, wife
of Robert III, the Queen after whom Gristwood suggests Arbella might
have been named. Finally, William Seymour escaped from the Tower,
and Ford lays considerable stress on the fact that Perkin too had done
so. Arbella and Perkin share a story: one was, and one claimed to be, the
cousin of a King James of Scotland, and both lived or died by the mercy of
that James. The fact that Mary Talbot died in 1632 might have made the
story of Arbella topical, or perhaps even safe. In Perkin Warbeck, I think
Ford glances at it. In doing so, he suggests that whatever else Arbella was
or might have been, she was an object of interest and of pity to many
observers. Her short, sad life brought her little happiness, but it did secure
for her a place in cultural memory.

Works Cited

Primary Sources

Ford, John. Perkin Warbeck. Edited by Peter Ure. London: Methuen, 1968.
Loxley, James, Anna Groundwater, and Julie Sanders, eds. Ben Jonson’s Walk to
Scotland: An Annotated Edition of the ‘Foot Voyage’. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press 2015.
Marlowe, Christopher. The Massacre at Paris. Edited by Mark Thornton Burnett.
London: J.M. Dent, 1999.

85 Steen, Letters, 72.

86 Gristwood, Arbella, 353.
87 See: Hopkins, John Ford’s Political Theatre, Chapter 2.
88 Gristwood, Arbella, 354.
On the Edge of the S(h)elf: Arbella Stuart 177

Steen, Sara Jayne, ed. The Letters of Lady Arbella Stuart. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1994.
[Talbot, Alathea]. Natura Exenterata: Or Nature Unbowelled by the most Exquisite
Anatomizers of Her. London, 1655.
Wiggins, Alison, Alan Bryson, Daniel Starza Smith, Anke Timmermann, and
Graham Williams, eds. Bess of Hardwick’s Letters: The Complete Correspondence,
c.1550–1608. April 2013. http://www.bessofhardwick.org.
Wood, A.C., ed. Mr Harrie Cavendish his Journey to and from Constantinople 1589
by Fox, his Servant. London: Royal Historical Society, 1940.

Secondary Sources

Briggs, Julia. ‘Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris: A Reconsideration’. The Review of English

Studies 34 (1983): 257–278.
Cadman, Daniel. Sovereigns and Subjects in Early Modern Neo-Senecan Drama.
Farnham: Ashgate, 2015.
De Lisle, Leanda. After Elizabeth: The Death of Elizabeth and the Coming of King
James. London: HarperPerennial, 2006.
Durant, David N. Bess of Hardwick: Portrait of an Elizabethan Dynast. London:
Peter Owen, 1999.
Graves, T.S. ‘Jonson’s “Epicoene” and Lady Arabella Stuart’. Modern Philology 14,
no. 9 (January 1917): 525–530.
Girouard, Mark. Life in the English Country House. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980.
Gristwood, Sarah. Arbella: England’s Lost Queen. London: Bantam, 2003.
Hiscock, Andrew. ‘“Achilles alter”: The Heroic Lives and Afterlives of Robert
Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex’. In Essex: The Cultural Impact of an Elizabethan
Courtier, edited by Annaliese Connolly and Lisa Hopkins, 101–132. Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2013.
Hopkins, Lisa. Drama and the Succession to the Crown. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011.
Hopkins, Lisa. ‘“I am not Oedipus’: Riddling the Body Politic in The Broken Heart’.
Connotations 6, no. 3 (1996/1997): 259–282.
Hopkins, Lisa. John Ford’s Political Theatre. Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1994.
Hopkins, Lisa, ed. Bess of Hardwick: New Perspectives. Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2019.
Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer. Writing Women in Jacobean England. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1994.
Lovell, Mary S. Bess of Hardwick: First Lady of Chatsworth. London: Abacus, 2006.
Nicholl, Charles. The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe. London:
Jonathan Cape, 1992.
178  Lisa Hopkins

White, Gillian. ‘“that which is needful and necessary”: the nature and purpose
of the original furnishings and decoration of Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire’. PhD
thesis, University of Warwick, 2005.
Wroe, Ann. Perkin: A Story of Deception. London: Vintage, 2004.

About the author

Lisa Hopkins is Professor of English at Sheffield Hallam University. She is

co-editor of Shakespeare, the journal of the British Shakespeare Association,
of Arden Early Modern Drama Guides, and of Arden Studies in Early Modern
Drama. Her publications include Renaissance Drama on the Edge (Ashgate,
2014), Drama and the Succession to the Crown, 1561-1633 (Ashgate, 2011), and
Shakespeare on the Edge (Ashgate, 2005). She has recently edited a collection
of essays, Bess of Hardwick: New Perspectives, published by Manchester
University Press, and is co-editing (with Tom Rutter) A Companion to the
Cavendishes: Writing, Patronage, and Material Culture (ARC Humanities
Press).
9. Cecilia of Sweden:
Princess, Margravine, Countess, Regent
Aidan Norrie

Abstract
Cecilia Vasa (1540–1627)—Princess of Sweden, Margravine of Baden-
Rodmachern, and Countess of Arboga—is perhaps best-known for her
(in)famous trip to England in 1565–1566 to visit the court of Elizabeth I.
Little else of Cecilia’s life is discussed or analysed in the current English-
language scholarship, despite the fact that she lived to be 86. This chapter
presents a biography of Cecilia that focuses on the way her gender caused
her to exist on the edge, demonstrating that no matter the royal, political,
or social authority Cecilia managed to wield at various points in her life,
she was ultimately defined by the men—present or absent—in her life.

Keywords: marriage; dower; pregnancy; debt and debtors; royal visits

In 1865, William Brenchley Rye published England As Seen By Foreigners In

The Days of Elizabeth and James the First, an edition of accounts of aristocrats
and traders who visited England in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth
centuries. In his introduction, Rye boasts—in the great Whiggish tradi-
tion—of the way that Elizabeth’s reign caused an increase in the visitors to
England, ‘their curiosity […] naturally excited to behold with their own eyes
those much-vaunted charms, extraordinary virtues, and princely qualities
with which the maiden Majesty of England was endowed’.1 Of all the people
who visited England during Elizabeth’s reign, Rye devotes the most attention
in his introduction to Princess Cecilia of Sweden. He recounts how:

1 Rye, England As Seen By Foreigners, li.

Hopkins, L. and A. Norrie (eds.), Women on the Edge in Early Modern Europe, Amsterdam University
Press, 2019.
doi 10.5117/9789462987500/ch09
180  Aidan Norrie

One of the most extraordinary of these visits was made by a woman—by

no less a personage, no meaner beauty, than Cecilia, daughter of the great
Gustavus Vasa, King of Sweden, and sister of that Eric who was one of
the disappointed suitors for the hand of Elizabeth. This Swedish lady,
who is a very prototype of the wayward and eccentric Christina, had an
intense longing to travel.2

Perhaps without meaning to, Rye laid the foundation for the way that Cecilia,
and indeed her visit to England, would be characterized in English historiog-
raphy. Despite being a princess, the ‘Swedish Lady’s’ political role was defined
by her father and by her brother (himself defined by his unsuccessful bid for
Elizabeth’s hand). Her description is almost entirely focused on her ‘beauty’,
and perhaps most damningly, she is linked to the infamous Queen Christina of
Sweden—Sweden’s first female king, who abdicated her throne, converted to
Roman Catholicism, and eventually became the first foreign monarch buried in
St. Peter’s Basilica.3 Princess Cecilia, later Margravine of Baden-Rodemachern,
gave birth to seven children—including a daughter born four years after the
death of her husband—and lived to be 86. So why are her beauty, and a visit
to England she undertook in her mid-twenties, the focal points of her life?
As Rye demonstrates, Cecilia is most remembered for her (in)famous trip
to England in 1565–1566 to visit the court of Elizabeth I, which ended when
she was forced to leave the country pursued by numerous creditors. Little
else of Cecilia’s life is discussed or analysed in the current English-language
scholarship. This chapter will present a biography of Cecilia that focuses
on the way her gender caused her to exist on the edge, whether this was
because of her status as a female royal; her husband’s untimely death while
absent from Baden; the belated—and hard fought—recognition of her right
to serve as regent for her son, who succeeded his father while a minor; her
conversion to Catholicism for political purposes, and to secure her dower
lands; or the birth of her illegitimate daughter, four years after the death
of her husband. By focusing on Cecilia’s entire life, rather than simply on
her visit to England, this chapter will demonstrate that no matter the royal,
political, or social authority Cecilia managed to wield at various points in
her life, she was still at the mercy of men.
As previously mentioned, virtually all of the scholarship that references
Cecilia focuses only on her trip to England, or her role in the marriage

2 Rye, England As Seen By Foreigners, li.

3 See: Roberts, ‘The Abdication of Queen Christina’, 823–833; and Rodén, ‘The Burial of Queen
Christina of Sweden in St Peter’s Church’, 63–67.
Cecilia of Sweden: Princess, Margr avine, Countess, Regent 181

negotiations between her brother, Erik, and Elizabeth. Incredulously, to date,

the most comprehensive biography of Cecilia in English is her Wikipedia
article. 4 Her entry in A Biographical Encyclopedia of Early Modern English-
women is likely her longest academic biography, but even that focuses heavily
on her visit to England—indeed, the events of the sixty years of Cecilia’s
life after the visit comprise the final two sentences of the entry.5 My point
is not to disparage the work done on Cecilia, but rather to remind us that
the way gender pushed women to the edge in the early modern period is
still reflected—and perpetuated—in the scholarship written about them.
There is limited recent scholarship in English on sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century Sweden. The field is still dominated by the work of
Michael Roberts, whose work on ‘imperial’ Sweden in the early modern
period, published between the 1950s and the early 1980s, has largely not
been revisited. More recently, scholars in Sweden have reconsidered the
lives of Gustav’s daughter. Most importantly, historian Karin Tegenborg
Falkdalen has made use of Swedish archival sources to bring these royal
women in from the edge, and has provided the first biography of Cecilia,
albeit intertwined with the lives of her four sisters.
Cecilia’s visit to England has received unusually close attention largely
because of the publication of a contemporary account. An account of the
Princess’s journey from Stockholm to her lodgings in London was written by
James Bell, and was presented to Elizabeth shortly after Cecilia’s departure
from England—the unpopularity of the Princess at her departure probably
explains why the account was never printed in pamphlet form, and indeed
why the account ends shortly after Cecilia’s arrival.6 Little is known of James
Bell. He had been elected a Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, and a lecturer
in rhetoric in 1556—positions he resigned soon after due to his support of
the Reformation. In 1595, he was a prebendary in Wells Cathedral, and his
other publications include translations of the works of Luther and Foxe.7
There are two modern editions of Bell’s manuscript—Margaret Morison’s
‘A Narrative of the Journey of Cecilia, Princess of Sweden, to the Court of
Queen Elizabeth’ (1898), and Ethel Seaton’s Queen Elizabeth and a Swedish
Princess (1926)—which provide the most comprehensive English-language
studies of Cecilia, despite their focus on the visit itself. This chapter is thus

4 See: ‘Princess Cecilia of Sweden’, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_Cecilia_of_Sweden.

5 Martin, ‘Princess Cecilia Vasa (1540–1627)’, 84.
6 B[ritish] L[ibrary] Royal MS 17 C XXIX. There are even blank pages at the back of the account,
and the end mark appears to be a later addition.
7 Malone, ‘Bell, James (d. 1606?)’.
182  Aidan Norrie

primed to re-assess these commentaries of Cecilia’s visit (themselves made

a century ago), and to fill the lacuna in the English-language scholarship
surrounding Elizabeth I’s most (in)famous foreign visitor.

Princess

Excepting her visit to England, the most re-told part of Cecilia’s life is the
period leading up to her marriage. Unfortunately, as is the case with many
women in early modern Europe, this is because of the various ‘scandals’
centred around the princess. While Cecilia certainly demonstrated poor
judgement at times, her early life is often mentioned with the purpose of
pre-empting the end of her visit to England, or as a reason to subvert Cecilia’s
own political agency.
Princess Cecilia was born on 6 November 1540 in Stockholm, Sweden, to
King Gustav I and his second wife, Queen Margaret Leijonhufvud.8 Gustav
had led the Swedish War of Secession against Christian II of Denmark; he was
subsequently elected as king on 6 June 1523, and Sweden became a hereditary
monarchy. One of Gustav’s most lasting legacies was his overseeing of the
Swedish Reformation: the assets of the Roman Catholic Church became the
property of the Crown, and the Lutheran Church of Sweden was established
under his personal control.9 Gustav had eleven children—three of whom
would eventually succeed him as King of Sweden. He married his first
wife, Catherine of Saxe-Lauenburg (1513–1535), in Stockholm Cathedral on
24 September 1531. The only child of the marriage was the future Erik XIV
(1533–1577). After Catherine’s death in 1535, Gustav married Margareta
Leijonhufvud (1514–1551). Their children were John III (1537–1592), Katarina
(1539–1610), Cecilia (1540–1627), Magnus (1542–1595), Carl (1544), Anna Maria
(1545–1610), Sten (1546–1547), Sofia (1547–1611), Elisabeth (1549–1598), and
Charles IX (1550–1611).10 After Margareta’s death from pneumonia in August
1551, Gustav married Katarina Stenbock (1535–1621) on 22 August 1552 in
Vadstena Abbey: the couple had no children.
In 1556, at the age of 16, Cecilia and her sisters were given a dowry of
100,000 silver daler, had their portraits painted, and their personal qualities
described in Latin by the court poet Henricus Mollerus, as a preparation for
marriage. That same year, Gustav entered into a trade treaty (which was to be

8 Martin, ‘Princess Cecilia Vasa (1540–1627)’, 83.

9 Roberts, The Early Vasas, 114–116.
10 Roberts, The Early Vasas, 470.
Cecilia of Sweden: Princess, Margr avine, Countess, Regent 183

cemented by matrimonial alliance) with Edzard II, the Count of East Frisia,
who controlled the valuable port of Emden.11 The Treaty was concluded in
1557, and Edzard visited Sweden in 1558 to meet Gustav’s daughters. Edzard
met both Cecilia and her older sister, Katherine. Edzard chose Katherine,
and the two were married in Stockholm on 1 October 1559.12 Edzard and
Katherine left for East Frisia in November, accompanied by Cecilia and
Edzard’s brother, John II. Gustav had been reluctant to allow Cecilia to
accompany the couple, as he was negotiating a marriage treaty between
Cecilia and George John I, Count Palatine of Veldenz, but he acquiesced.
The party reached Vadstena Castle—the residence of Prince Magnus, Ce-
cilia’s younger brother—in December. This Castle would become synonymous
with Cecilia. For several nights during the stay, the night watch observed
a man climbing into Cecilia’s room via her window. The guards informed
Prince Erik, who then travelled to the castle, and decided that the window
should be watched, with a party assembled to burst into the room to prevent
any escape if the visit occurred again. On the night of 13–14 December, a man
was seen climbing into Cecilia’s room, and Erik dispatched the guards. The
guards found Cecilia alone with John II, who did not have any breeches on.13
John was imprisoned, Katherine and Edzard were placed under house arrest
in Västerås Castle, and Erik and Cecilia were ordered back to Stockholm.
Gustav’s somewhat infamous temper came to the fore in the aftermath of
what became known as the Vadstenabullret: the Vadstena Thunder. Gustav
assumed the worst. He was furious at his daughter—Cecilia claimed that
he beat her and ripped chunks of her hair out; he blamed Katherine for not
keeping a closer eye on Cecilia; and Erik was admonished for not dealing
with the issue secretly, and thereby allowing a public scandal to erupt.14
Both John and Cecilia insisted that no improper activity happened: the
visits were nothing more than an imprudent prank. Erik, who had always
been especially close to his half-sister Cecilia, continued to advocate for
her, and in June 1560, Katherine was allowed to see her father, and she
acted as a mediator. Eventually, in order to draw a line under the scandal,
Erik suggested that John and Cecilia should marry, but Gustav did not
approve of the match. John was finally released from prison in the summer
of 1560—more than six months after his imprisonment—after swearing
in front of the King and the Royal Council that nothing untoward had

11 Roberts, The Early Vasas, 154.

12 Seaton, Queen Elizabeth and a Swedish Princess, 87.
13 Seaton, Queen Elizabeth and a Swedish Princess, 87.
14 Roberts, The Early Vasas, 104.
184  Aidan Norrie

Figure 9.1: Medallion struck by Crown Prince Erik, c.1560. The obverse side (left) features a portrait
of Cecilia (the legend translates to ‘Cecilia, Princess of Sweden’); the reverse side (right) depicts
Susanna bathing. Images courtesy of the Statens historiska museum, Stockholm, KMK 23290.
Photography by Gabriel Hildebrand.

happened between him and Cecilia. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Count George

John I withdrew his marriage proposal, although he did later marry Cecilia’s
younger sister, Anna Maria, on 20 December 1562.
Despite both John and Cecilia’s protestations of innocence, the scandal
affected Cecilia’s honour. In her defence, Erik had a medallion struck that
featured Cecilia’s portrait on one side, and the image of the biblical heroine
Susanna on the reverse (Figure 9.1).15 The medallion, which Erik presented

15 The story of Susanna can briefly be summarized as follows. Susanna, the wife of Joachim,
decided to bathe in her garden because it was hot; she sent her attendants away, and assumed she
was alone. However, two men (‘elders’ of the people), who were employed by Joachim, decided to
act on their ‘lust’ for their employer’s wife, and spied on her while she bathed. As Susanna made her
way back to her house, the men accosted her, and threatened to claim she was meeting a young man
for sex in the garden if she did not agree to have sex with them. Susanna refused to be blackmailed;
the two elders accused her of adultery, and she was sentenced to death. Susanna prayed to God:
‘Thou knowest that they have borne false witness against me […] I never did such things as these
men have maliciously invented against me’ (The History of Susanna 1:43 [Authorised Version]).
God heard her prayer, and sent the prophet Daniel to intervene. He interrupted the proceedings to
argue that the two men should be questioned separately to ensure that an innocent person—given
Susanna’s claims of innocence—was not put to death. The two men, when questioned alone by
Daniel, could not agree on the tree under which Susanna met her lover—the first said they were
under a mastic tree, while the second said the were under an evergreen oak tree. The obvious
difference between the two trees revealed the men’s lies: Susanna was thus exonerated, and the
two elders were executed in her stead. While this story is recounted in Chapter 13 of the Book
Cecilia of Sweden: Princess, Margr avine, Countess, Regent 185

to Cecilia himself, was intended to link the two women, as two lascivious
voyeurs had falsely accused Susanna of adultery.
The Vadstenabullret is an interesting example of the way royal women
existed on the edge. One of Cecilia’s most important roles for her father was
participating in an economically or politically advantageous marriage—a
role that was severely tarnished by the public questions over her chastity.
Likewise, it is important to note that while both Cecilia and John protested
their innocence, it was John’s public oath that allowed the scandal to be
brought to a messy end—Cecilia’s claims not being proof enough. Gustav’s
death on 29 September 1560, and the accession of Erik as Erik XIV, was
likely one of the main reasons the scandal was put to rest. Erik’s accession,
however, did not solve all of Cecilia’s public relations woes.
During this time, Cecilia’s interest in England and Elizabeth had been
growing. In 1557, Gustav, before Elizabeth had even ascended the throne,
had sent an embassy to England to assess the possibility of a union between
Elizabeth and Erik.16 The embassy failed: a fact attributed to Mary I’s hos-
tility to the Protestant Erik marrying an already religiously ambiguous
Elizabeth.17 A second embassy was sent in 1560, led by the second eldest
Vasa brother, John. This too failed, and Elizabeth sent a letter back to Erik
all but ruling out the possibility of a marriage.18 Of all Elizabeth’s numerous
marriage suitors, Erik was one of the few who was both an adherent of a
Protestant religion, and was also of an acceptable noble status for marrying
a queen. The marriage, however, would have benefitted Sweden far more
than England. While Sweden would have gained a pivotal trading partner,
England’s economic situation would barely have benefitted. Sweden was
also involved in various conflicts in northern Europe—particularly in
Poland and Denmark—which England would likely have been drawn into
as a result of the ensuing political alliance.19 Finally, the union of Sweden
and England, while creating a religious union, did nothing to address the
political reality of England’s uneasy relationship with Catholic Spain and
France.20 So, while the union may have initially received a positive reception
from Elizabeth’s privy council, it was ultimately dismissed.

of Daniel in the Catholic Bible, due to the story not surviving in Hebrew, it was relegated to the
Apocrypha by Protestants, and referred to as ‘The History of Susanna’.
16 BL Cotton MS Vitellius C XVI, fols. 334r–335v.
17 Doran, Monarchy and Matrimony, 30–32.
18 Roberts, The Early Vasas, 159.
19 Martin, ‘Princess Cecilia’s Visitation’, 27.
20 Doran, Monarchy and Matrimony, 31.
186  Aidan Norrie

By the early 1560s, Cecilia was firmly interested in Elizabeth—and her

brother John’s first-hand accounts only increased her fervour. In 1562, she
was proposed to by Johan Tenczynski, a visiting envoy of Sigismund II
Augustus, the King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania.21 Erik approved
of the match, especially in light of her reputation post-Vadstena (as memory
of the scandal still lingered in and around the Baltic states), and because
of the previous failed proposals. According to a letter Cecilia wrote to
Elizabeth in January 1563, Erik had forced her to accept Johan’s offer, but
she was greatly relieved that the marriage did not eventuate, for reasons
that remain unclear.22
Erik’s tolerance of his sister’s antics came to an end in 1563. On a frosty
December evening, Erik was informed there was loud noise coming from
the princesses’ rooms; fearing a repeat of the Vadstenabullret, he went to
investigate. As he approached, he heard music and laughter. Opening the
doors, he discovered Cecilia and her sister Sophia hosting a party, replete
with wine, and the court’s Italian musician. Cecilia managed to forestall
her brother’s anger—which was instead directed at the night watchmen for
allowing the guests into the castle, and for not keeping a closer watch on the
court musician—and the siblings shared a glass of wine.23 Falkdalen argues,
however, that this incident confirmed the doubts Erik was having over his
sister’s trustworthiness. Soon after, he introduced new court protocols
that required the unmarried princesses be under constant supervision to
prevent them doing anything further to harm their reputations. As part
of these new rules, they could not leave the palace at night or in the early
morning, they could not receive guests without prior permission, they
would be accompanied whenever they left the palace, and there were to
be no more parties.24 Most offensively for Cecilia, the new rules forbade
the princesses from ‘interfering’ in affairs of state; namely, they were not
to receive petitions, or to make supplications on behalf of others. Erik’s
threat that he would leave the princesses ‘defenceless’ seems to have been
what made Cecilia begrudgingly agree to the new rules.25 Again, Erik’s
protection—particularly after the Vadstenabullret—curtailed Cecilia’s
independence and her own political agency, and it is perhaps unsurprising
that she was married less than a year later.

21 Roberts, The Early Vasas, 207, 207n1.

22 Falkdalen, Vasadöttrarna, 171.
23 Falkdalen, Vasadöttrarna, 136.
24 Falkdalen, Vasadöttrarna, 137.
25 Falkdalen, Vasadöttrarna, 137–138.
Cecilia of Sweden: Princess, Margr avine, Countess, Regent 187

Margravine

In June 1564, Cecilia married Christopher II, the Margrave of Baden-

Rodemachern, in Stockholm. Nathan Martin takes a rather clinical approach
to Cecilia’s marriage, especially in light of her previous attitude to marriage:

Cecilia, however, was coerced into marriage with Christopher, the Marquis
of Baden, before she was able to travel to England. The marriage was
arranged by Erik and took place in 1564. She apparently agreed to the
marriage with Christopher in part because he agreed to allow her to visit
England within a year of marriage.26

This appears to be a rather simplistic summary of the marriage. Certainly,

the wedding was far less lavish than the celebrations held for the wedding of
Cecilia’s sister, Anna. However, Anna’s union with George John I, the Count
Palatine of Veldenz, served a far more overt political purpose. The outbreak
of the Northern Seven Years’ War between Denmark and Sweden in August
1563 was exhausting the country’s coffers, which offers a much more realistic
explanation for the relative difference in the two sisters’ weddings.27 The
negotiations for the wedding were also conducted rather quickly: the first
marriage contract seems to have only been signed in March 1564, a second
signed a month later, with the third and final contract—which specified
the instalments that Erik would pay Cecilia’s dowry to Christopher—was
signed the morning before the wedding.28 Christopher may have offered
to provide mercenaries to help Erik in the war, but this offer—whether it
actually was made or not—is certainly not reason enough for the marriage;
which, when coupled with the haste that the marriage negotiations were
undertaken, underscores the absence of a political purpose behind the
marriage. A cynical reading of the union—that Cecilia only agreed to marry
Christopher because he promised to take her to England—has no supporting
evidence, and appears to be nothing more than a pointed comment on
Cecilia’s previous, subversive, views pertaining to marriage. The speculative
nature of those comments can be found in a dispatch from Guzman de
Silva, the Spanish Ambassador to England, to Philip II. He writes, without
a direct source, and thus presumably to pass on gossip, that Cecilia ‘is now

26 Martin, ‘Princess Cecilia’s Visitation’, 31.

27 For more on this war, and indeed the military relations between Sweden and Denmark, see:
Frost, The Northern Wars, 29–37.
28 Falkdalen, Vasadöttrarna, 152.
188  Aidan Norrie

married to the marquis of Baden, but they say on condition that he should
bring her here to see this Queen’.29 Instead, the union may have been one
based on mutual affection. The timing of the birth of the couple’s first child
also proves that there was no urgency to marry due to an impending birth.
There is also a lingering view in the scholarship that claims Cecilia’s
visit to England was intended to further Erik’s bid for Elizabeth’s hand.
Even by Elizabeth’s standards, the rejection of Erik’s suit in 1560—‘we
do not conceive in our heart to take a husband but highly commend this
single life, and hope that your Serene Highness will not longer spend time
in waiting for us’—was fairly resolved.30 Cecilia’s role in the negotiations
receives some support in the diplomatic dispatches, but they seem to only
repeat court gossip, rather than any specifics. For instance, on 28 June, the
French ambassador, Paul de Foix, wrote to Catherine de’ Medici claiming:
‘Some people think that it [her visit] is for negotiating on the marriage of
the King of Sweden, her brother’.31 Shortly after, on 2 July, de Silva wrote
to Philip: ‘It is suspected that she is coming to try again to bring about
the marriage of her brother with the Queen’.32 The timeline of Erik’s suits,
however, demonstrates the absence of truth behind the gossip. The final
attempt to secure Elizabeth’s hand was led by the Swedish Chancellor, Nils
Gyllenstierna. He arrived in England in 1560—just after John had left—and
remained at the English court as Sweden’s ambassador until late 1562.33
Gyllenstierna failed to persuade the Queen or her council, and by 1563, Erik
had given up his designs; he married Karin Månsdotter—his mistress from
spring 1565—morganatically in 1567, and officially in 1568.34 Finally, that
Cecilia was not at all tasked with advocating the marriage suit is borne out
by de Silva himself. He wrote on 5 November 1566—less than two months
after Cecilia’s arrival—claiming: ‘They tell me she is not proposing her
brother’s marriage, but is doing her best to urge Leicester’s suit with the
Queen, praising him highly’.35 In addition, there is no evidence that Erik
gave Cecilia instructions to promote the suit, nor do any of Elizabeth and

29 ‘Guzman de Silva to Philip II of Spain, 2 July 1565’, in CSP Spain, 445.

30 ‘Elizabeth to Eric, King of Sweden, 25 February 1560’, in Harrison, The Letters of Queen
Elizabeth, 32.
31 ‘Monsieur de Foix to the Queen Mother, 28 June 1565’, in Teulet, Relations politiques de la
France et de l’Espagne avec l’Ecosse au XVIe siècle, 5:211. My translation, with the assistance of
Robert Norrie. Original French: ‘Quelques ungs pensent que c’est pour négocier sur le mariage
du Roy de Suède, son frère’.
32 ‘Guzman de Silva to Philip II of Spain, 2 July 1565’, in CSP Spain, 445.
33 Martin, ‘Princess Cecilia’s Visitation’, 41n1.
34 Roberts, The Early Vasas, 235, 237.
35 ‘Guzman de Silva to Philip II of Spain, 5 November 1565’, in CSP Spain, 505.
Cecilia of Sweden: Princess, Margr avine, Countess, Regent 189

Cecilia’s interactions demonstrate that they discussed political matters.36

Thus, while Cecilia’s visit was not a part of the negotiations, it was certainly
a by-product of them.
It does seem, however, that Christopher had agreed that the couple
would visit England as part of their honeymoon. Despite several months
of delays, Cecilia and Christopher eventually left Stockholm for England on
12 November 1564. The various alliances between states, and the wars being
fought across Europe, necessitated that a rather convoluted travel-route
be taken. The couple travelled first to Finland, then to Livonia, Prussia,
Pomerania, Mecklenburg, Flanders, Antwerp, and finally to Calais.37 After a
few days in Calais, and two aborted attempts at sailing due to unfavourable
winds, Cecilia and Christopher’s party crossed the Channel and arrived in
Dover on 9 September 1565.38 The Margrave and Margravine were received
at Dover by William Brooke, Baron Cobham and the Lord Warden of the
Cinque Ports, and his wife, Lady Cobham, Elizabeth’s Mistress of the Robes.
The couple travelled in Elizabeth’s horse-litter to London via Canterbury,
Rochester, and Gravesend, where ‘six of the Queen’s servants awaited her’.39
According to de Silva, Cecilia was received into her accommodation at
Bedford House in London with great ceremony:

On the 11th instant the king of Sweden’s sister entered London at two
o’clock in the afternoon. She is very far advanced in pregnancy, and was
dressed in a black velvet robe with a mantle of black cloth of silver, and
wore on her head a golden crown. […] At the water gate of the house where
she was to stay she was met by the countess of Sussex and her sister-in-law,
the wife of the Chancellor, and Secretary Cecil. 40

Elizabeth visited Cecilia on 14 September:

the Queen arrived from Windsor and descended at the lodgings of the
Swedish Princess who is called Cecilia. The latter received her Majesty
at the door, where she embraced her warmly, and both went up to her
apartments. After the Queen had passed some time with her in great
enjoyment she returned home. 41

36 Martin, ‘Princess Cecilia’s Visitation’, 28.

37 Seaton, Queen Elizabeth and a Swedish Princess, 85n11.
38 Martin, ‘Princess Cecilia’s Visitation’, 33.
39 ‘Guzman de Silva to Philip II of Spain, 17 September 1565’, in CSP Spain, 475.
40 ‘Guzman de Silva to Philip II of Spain, 17 September 1565’, in CSP Spain, 475.
41 ‘Guzman de Silva to Philip II of Spain, 17 September 1565’, in CSP Spain, 475.
190  Aidan Norrie

De Silva recounts that in his meeting with Elizabeth on 17 September,

Elizabeth praised Cecilia ‘very much to me, both for her good looks and el-
egance and for the grace and facility with which she speaks English’. 42 This
comment from Elizabeth reveals a side to Cecilia that is often overlooked:
her strong, humanist education. Already educated in several European
languages, including Latin, Cecilia—with the help of her brother John, who
brought back works on English grammar from his visit in 156043—learned,
according to Bell, ‘A Language not verie easie to be Learned [by] the greate
noumbre of Straungers’. 44 What took Italian, Portuguese, Irish, French, and
Dutch visitors upwards of twenty years to do—according to Bell—Cecilia
did ‘within foure yeares’. 45 This feat demonstrated not only her genuine
interest in visiting England—it was not merely a childish folly—but it
was also a clever tactic that allowed her communicate more easily with
Elizabeth, thereby both breaking down a lingo-cultural barrier that would
have prevented their friendship from growing, and also enhancing her
social status by de-emphasising her alterity.
The day after meeting with Elizabeth, Cecilia went into labour. She
gave birth to a son, Edwardus Fortunatus (‘Edward the Fortunate’), on
15 September 1565. Elizabeth, who was the boy’s godmother, chose his name
(as was traditional) because ‘God had so graciously assisted his mother in so
long and dangerous a journey, and brought her so safe to land in that place
which she most desired, and that in so short time before her deliverance’. 46
Edwardus was baptized two weeks later, on 30 September, in the Chapel
Royal at Whitehall. 47 In addition to Elizabeth standing as godmother,
Matthew Parker, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Thomas Howard, the
4th Duke of Norfolk, stood as godfathers. 48 While it was not unusual for
Elizabeth to stand as godmother for the child of a noble—she did so for
at least 110 children throughout the course of her reign—the combination
of the three high-ranking godparents demonstrates the genuine affection
that existed between Elizabeth and Cecilia. 49 Indeed, the baptism caused

42 ‘Guzman de Silva to Philip II of Spain, 17 September 1565’, in CSP Spain, 476.

43 Martin, ‘Princess Cecilia’s Visitation’, 35.
44 BL Royal MS 17 C XXIX, fol. 8v.
45 BL Royal MS 17 C XXIX, fol. 8v.
46 Stow and Howes, Annales, 658.
47 ‘Guzman de Silva to Philip II of Spain, 1 October 1565’, in CSP Spain, 486. The ceremony is
described in great detail in ‘The Maner of the Christening of the Child of the Lady Cicile’, which
is transcribed in Hearne, Joannis Lelandi Antiquarii de rebus britannicis collectanea, 2:691–694.
48 Martin, ‘Princess Cecilia’s Visitation’, 34.
49 Kruse, ‘Elizabeth as Godmother’, 181.
Cecilia of Sweden: Princess, Margr avine, Countess, Regent 191

Elizabeth to grant Christopher a pension of £2000 a year for as long as Cecilia

remained in England.50 In the preamble to the patent for Christopher’s
pension, Elizabeth declares that Cecilia:

was great with child which she desired to bring forth to the world in this
Island, as (praised be God) she hath enriched our realm with a fine son,
whom we have also, by our assistance, brought into the society of the
Church by baptism.51

The importance that Elizabeth placed on the additional soul for the Church
of England—one who would one day rule Baden—does demonstrate the
practical benefit her role as godmother played. Finally, the grant to Chris-
topher also emphasizes the gendered issues Cecilia faced. While the grant
provided for her as long as she was in the country—regardless of where her
husband resided—it was still made out to Christopher. It was not unheard of
for women to receive pensions from the Crown, so the grant—made out to
a man who was known to be departing the country soon after—reinforced
Cecilia’s existence of the edge, which affected both her financial independ-
ence, and her identity as a royal woman.
As is well known, and much discussed in the scholarship that deals with
Cecilia’s visit, the princess amassed large debts in England. Cecilia and
Christopher—who, despite spending half as long as Cecilia in England, also
accumulated considerable debts—appear to have enjoyed living lavishly,
and giving ostentatious gifts.52 According to a creditors’ report, ‘She had
fourteen large chests containing all types of jewelry, necklaces, rings, pre-
cious gems (including diamonds and rubies), clothes, books, and pictures’.53
While some of these were probably brought to England from Sweden, and
some undoubtedly given to Cecilia as gifts, most of the goods were likely
purchased in England, which explains her mounting level of debt.
Cecilia’s desperation to pay off her debts can be seen in her dealings with
notorious alchemist, Cornelius de Lannoy (known as Alneto). Lannoy was
known to the Queen and her council: he wrote to the Queen on 7 February
1565 to offer his services, which included the transmutation of base metals
into gold (at the incredible rate of 50,000 marks per year) and the distillation

50 Kruse, ‘Elizabeth as Godmother’, 192.

51 ‘Preamble to a Patent, granted by Queen Elizabeth to the Marquis of Baden, for a Pension,
23 November 1565’, in Morison, ‘A Narrative of the Journey of Cecilia’, 213.
52 See: Martin, ‘Princess Cecilia’s Visitation’, 36–40.
53 Martin, ‘Princess Cecilia’s Visitation’, 37.
192  Aidan Norrie

of elixirs of eternal youth.54 Cecilia, who had likely heard of Lannoy at court,
sought the alchemist’s services. On 20 January 1566, the pair entered into a
bond that pledged Lannoy to lend Cecilia ‘on the 1st day of May 1566 the sum
of ten thousand pounds sterling, which the Princess on her part covenants
to repay in twelve years by yearly instalments of one thousand pounds,
and also to pay the said Cornelius for the trouble he has taken a further
sum of £300 sterling’.55 Cecilia’s creditors, however, appear not have been
satisfied with payment in May, for on 2 March, she wrote again, this time
entreating ‘him to lend her immediately a sum of three thousand pounds
which would enable her to pay off half her debts, and also a further sum
of ten thousand pounds for five years, for the payment of which she will
pledge her dowry’.56 This plea means that in just under a year, Cecilia had
amassed debts of £6000.
So great were the clamours of Cecilia’s creditors that Elizabeth was forced
to intervene. In addition to the £2000-a-year pension the Queen had issued
at the baptism of Edwardus, Elizabeth granted Cecilia a payment of £3500
to satisfy the princess’s creditors.57 Even this did not provide much respite,
however. Cecilia would later complain to her brother, John, that as she was

walking within the court of England, divers[e] Englishmen cried out ‘pay
us our money,’ and as she went to her lodgings plucked off her slippers
and made in the street a fire of old shoes and slippers, and cried out, ‘this
is a banquet for this sovereign lady’.58

While the veracity of this story will never be known, Cecilia’s creditors were
not nobility alone. On 4 April 1566, seven creditors—‘Richard Bramley,
butcher; Rob[ert] Audrey, poulterer; George Saltus, grocer; Davy George,
baker; John Palmer, fishmonger; Nicholas Gomporte, brewer; […] and Richard
Sherman, butterman’—appealed directly to the Privy Council.59 Their
appeal included a reference to the very real impact the debts were having
on them: ‘Otherwise both they, their poor wives, children and families be
utterly undone’.60 While it was probable that the truth was exaggerated for
rhetorical effect, such appeals likely forced Elizabeth’s hand.

54 Archer, ‘Queen Elizabeth I as Lady Alchymia’, 54.

55 ‘Cornelius de Alneto and the Princess Cecilia, 20 January 1566’, in CCP, 325.
56 ‘Princess Cecilia to Cornelius de Alneto, 2 March 1566’, in CCP, 330.
57 Martin, ‘Princess Cecilia’s Visitation’, 34, 36.
58 ‘The Lady Cecilia of Baden, 30 November 1571’, in CSP Foreign, 567.
59 Morison, ‘A Narrative of the Journey of Cecilia’, 215.
60 Morison, ‘A Narrative of the Journey of Cecilia’, 216.
Cecilia of Sweden: Princess, Margr avine, Countess, Regent 193

In March, Christopher, who had departed for Baden in late 1565, returned
to England in secret and attempted to extract Cecilia from her creditors. He
was discovered, and imprisoned in Rochester for his debts.61 He was only freed
with Elizabeth’s intervention, but this action all but ended the friendship
between Elizabeth and Cecilia. Christopher left England soon after, and
waited for his wife in Calais. De Silva claims she was only allowed to continue
preparations for her departure after giving ‘pledges for the payment of much
greater value’.62 She even pawned her jewellery, and some of her dresses.
These promises, and the pawning, proved not enough: agents of two of her
creditors, George North and John Dymoch, confiscated not only her luggage
to satisfy the debts, but also that of Cecilia’s ladies—who themselves had
no debt, and who claimed for the rest of their lives to have been robbed.63
Cecilia left England on 27 April 1566. She was only able to travel from
Greenwich to Dover and board her ship because of the ‘safe conduct to
the harbour’ afforded by ‘the magnificent body of men appointed by your
Majesty’—it seems that she now required an armed guard in order to travel
unmolested.64 This ignominious departure from a country where she arrived
with such high hopes has—perhaps unsurprisingly—become the focus
of studies of Cecilia’s life. While Seaton’s Whiggish claim that Cecilia’s
‘Medieval autocratic ideas’ clashed with ‘the Elizabethan commonality’
is exaggerated, she does emphasize the cultural differences between the
English and Swedish courts—differences that Cecilia seemed unable to
fully reconcile.65 Writing of her departure, de Silva recognized that, ‘She has
exhibited spirit and courage in her troubles, which have not been light’.66
So, while she certainly brought on herself the trouble with her creditors, it
was more a reflection of her cultural alterity, rather than the behaviour of
a spoilt and impetuous princess.

Countess

Cecilia, after arriving in Rodemachen in Baden, remained there for the next
five years. Despite the recent birth of Edwardus, she had conceived again
during her stay in England (likely meaning she fell pregnant not long after

61 Seaton, Queen Elizabeth and a Swedish Princess, 25.

62 ‘Guzman de Silva to Philip II of Spain, 29 April 1566’, in CSP Spain, 546.
63 Falkdalen, Vasadöttrarna, 171.
64 Morison, ‘A Narrative of the Journey of Cecilia’, 223.
65 Seaton, Queen Elizabeth and a Swedish Princess, 27.
66 ‘Guzman de Silva to Philip II of Spain, 29 April 1566’, in CSP Spain, 546.
194  Aidan Norrie

her Churching on 14 October). Cecilia gave birth to a son on 13 August 1566

in Rodemachern, who was named Christopher Gustav.67 Christopher was
born partially paralysed, and, according to some accounts, blind. Cecilia
blamed her son’s disability on the stress of the creditors who hounded her
in England, and she harboured resentment towards them for the rest of her
life—resentment that she was later able to act on.68 Christopher’s disability
was clearly pronounced, and excluded him from governing: he outlived his
brother, Edwardus—who died on 16 August 1600, after falling down a flight
of stairs while drunk—but Cecilia’s third son, Phillip, succeeded Edwardus
as margrave. After Edwardus, Christopher (who died on 18 January 1609), and
Philip (15 August 1567 to 6 November 1620), Cecilia had four more children:
Karl was born on 7 March 1569, and died sometime in 1590; Bernhard was born
in December 1570, and only lived to February 1571; and Johann Karl, born in
November 1572, who joined the Knights Hospitaller, and died on 29 January
1599. A daughter, Charitas, was born in late 1579—more on her below.
The Eighty Years’ War in the Low Countries spilled into Baden-Rodemachen
when Fernando de Toledo, the Duke of Alba, occupied part of Baden. Alba
was known for his brutal treatment of Protestants, and Cecilia planned to
return to Sweden. In late 1570, she wrote to her brother John—who had
been crowned king as John III after Erik was deposed in September 1568 in
response to his brutality caused by his bouts of insanity—asking for permis-
sion to return to Sweden, which was subsequently granted. Christopher,
Cecilia, and their five children arrived at Kalmar Castle in August 1571.69
Shortly after her return to Sweden, John made Cecilia the ‘feudal’ ruler
of the city of Arboga; from then, Cecilia was known as the Countess of
Arboga.70 While not owning the city, Cecilia earned incomes from mining
and farming undertaken on royal land, and she was able to levy taxes on
imports and exports. She was also able to (unexpectedly) use her newfound
political power to exact revenge on her English creditors. Informed of her
return to Sweden—and thus no longer under the direct protection of her
husband—John Dymosh, the English merchant who claimed to be Cecilia’s
largest creditor, and one of the creditors who seized her luggage, sailed
into the harbour in Kalmar with fifty ships. Dymosh reckoned without
Cecilia’s resolve: she alerted John to his arrival, and was granted permission
to confiscate Dymosh’s fleet. Dymosh was arrested, and spent five years

67 Falkdalen, Vasadöttrarna, 174.

68 Falkdalen, Vasadöttrarna, 195.
69 Falkdalen, Vasadöttrarna, 195.
70 Falkdalen, Vasadöttrarna, 199.
Cecilia of Sweden: Princess, Margr avine, Countess, Regent 195

in prison. Unsurprisingly, none of Cecilia’s English creditors would again

attempt to exact payment of their debts.
Another reason Cecilia had returned to Sweden was to push for the
balance of her dowry to be paid. John was in no position to pay, and so
gave Cecilia a fleet of ships as part-payment for the balance owed.71 Cecilia
used the ships to attack pirate vessels in the Baltic Sea, confiscating the
captured goods. Unfortunately, she ordered attacks on pirates who had
been given permission to travel through Swedish waters by John, which
led to a short-lived conflict between the siblings.
Cecilia was also caught up in the plot to assassinate her brother John
III in October 1573. Led by Charles de Mornay, a French-born courtier who
had been in the service of Gustav and Erik, the plot planned to have John
killed during a sword display performed at a party for the king’s Scottish
mercenaries, and have the youngest Vasa brother, Charles, placed on the
throne.72 The assassination was never attempted, mainly because Mornay
was unable to bring himself to give the order at the party. John found out
about the plot only in September 1574; while Mornay was tried and executed,
it was not clear who else was involved in the plot. While never directly
accused, Cecilia was suspected because known conspirators held meetings
in Princess Elisabeth’s apartments—meetings Cecilia was reported to have
attended.73 John was more careful with his sisters from then on: he ordered
that Cecilia be barred from entering Stockholm Castle during his absences,
and after the trial of De Mornay, he ordered that Cecilia’s movements be
watched, and that she not have unplanned admittance to any of the royal
castles.74 John’s distrust of Cecilia—while likely more precautionary than
anything more serious—does highlight the real political agency Cecilia
must have wielded, contrary to claims otherwise.

Regent

On 2 August 1575, Cecilia’s husband Christopher died, aged 38.75 Their son,
Edwardus, succeeded him as Margrave of Baden-Rodemachern. Edwardus
was only ten at the time of his father’s death; Cecilia’s marriage contract had

71 Roberts, The Early Vasas, 309.

72 Roberts, The Early Vasas, 247.
73 Roberts, The Early Vasas, 248.
74 Falkdalen, Vasadöttrarna, 216.
75 Sachs, Einleitung in die Geschichte der Marggravschaft, 274.
196  Aidan Norrie

specified that she would be installed as regent should any of her children
succeed as minors. The timing of Christopher’s death, however, proved
problematic: Christopher had died on Ösel, an island of Estonia, which
John had granted to him (and any income made from economic activity
on the island) in return for military service. Likewise, both Cecilia and
Edwardus were in Sweden. The succession was also complicated by the
division of Baden between sons of margraves, and the partitioning of land to
brothers who died childless had led to a patchwork of margravates in Baden:
between the first partition of Baden in 1190 until its final reunification in
1771, Baden was divided between two and five margraves, depending on
the various familial descendants.76 Between 1536 and 1577, Baden was split
into three margravates: Baden-Baden, Baden-Baden-Rodemachern (the full
title of Christopher’s margravate) and Baden-Durlach. At Christopher’s
death, the family of the Baden-Badens seized their chance to annex Baden-
Rodemachern. Albert V, Duke of Bavaria (regent for Philip II, the Margrave
of Baden-Baden, who had succeeded his father Philibert I as Margrave in
1569, also at the age of ten), had the documents that secured Cecilia’s rights
at regent confiscated, and took control over both her dower lands as well
as the rule of all Baden-Rodemachern, being officially proclaimed as the
guardian and regent of her son.77 Cecilia sent representatives to Baden in 1576
to assert her rights: they were dismissed and turned away.78 Albert appears
to have used his Catholicism (and the support of the Holy Roman Emperor,
Rudolf II), against Cecilia and Edwardus’s Protestantism, as reason to deny
the succession. Faced with this political impasse, Cecilia took advantage
of the visit of the papal legate, Antonio Possevino, to Sweden in 1577 and
converted to Roman Catholicism.79 Edwardus would later convert in 1584.
Again, Cecilia was forced to deny her own autonomy and convert religions
to secure her political fortunes.
While Cecilia was still in Sweden, John III sought an alliance with Spain,
which was intended to prevent Denmark and Poland joining with Russia
in the Livonian War.80 The Spanish envoy, Carlos de Eraso, arrived in late
1578.81 John, recognizing the political value of Cecilia’s recent conversion
to Catholicism, suggested that the princess be made governor of a Spanish

76 Payne, Haydn’s Dictionary, 4.

77 Falkdalen, Vasadöttrarna, 237–238.
78 Falkdalen, Vasadöttrarna, 238.
79 Seaton, Queen Elizabeth and a Swedish Princess, 31.
80 Falkdalen, Vasadöttrarna, 238–239.
81 The scholarship often names the envoy as Francisco de Eraso: this is impossible, as he
died on 8 December 1570. His son, Carlos, however, succeeded to many of his father’s roles, and
Cecilia of Sweden: Princess, Margr avine, Countess, Regent 197

territory—like Luxembourg—as demonstration of the alliance between Swe-

den and Spain. De Eraso negotiated with Cecilia at Arboga; Cecilia offered
her fleet to the Spanish to help their wars in the Low Countries—especially
if it would secure her governorship. The negotiations for a Swedish–Spanish
alliance eventually failed, but Cecilia and de Eraso were still meeting.82 John
was suspicious, and eventually had de Eraso placed under house arrest, and
banned him from having contact with Cecilia. On the night of 17–18 June
1579, Cecilia bribed her way into de Eraso’s prison. She was caught before
reaching him, and John upbraided his sister harshly. Soon after, Cecilia left
Sweden for the last time, and returned to Baden to secure her dower lands.
De Eraso was expelled soon after.
While Cecilia was fighting with the Baden-Badens for control of her
lands, and to be recognized as Edwardus’s regent, she and de Eraso lived
together. During this time, in December 1579, Cecilia gave birth to a daughter.
Christopher had been dead for four years: de Eraso was clearly the father.
The child was placed in Lichtenthal Abbey—a Cistercian nunnery—and
is only known by the name she took as a nun, Charitas.83 Cecilia did not
see her daughter again until 1622, and nothing more is known of this child.
In her struggle with the Baden-Badens, Cecilia sought the help of the
Spanish. This alliance angered John, who refused her permission to return
to Sweden in 1581. Then, in a blow to Cecilia’s financial independence, her
opposition to John’s marriage to the commoner Gunilla Bielke caused her
brother to revoke her control of Arboga in 1585.84 Cecilia had relied on that
income to support herself in Baden, and the next few years saw repeated
run-ins with creditors.
Cecilia received some (initial) financial security in 1588.85 Philip II of
Baden-Baden died childless at the age of 29: as Philip’s closest living rela-
tive, Edwardus inherited Baden-Baden, briefly reuniting the lands of their
grandfather, Bernhard III. Edwardus, however, shortly after abdicated as
Margrave of Baden-Rodemachern, allowing his brother to succeed as Philip
III. He remained Margrave of Baden-Baden until his death in 1600. Two of
Cecilia’s children were now margraves.
Edwardus, however, seems to have inherited his parents’ fondness for
living beyond their means, and in an attempt to pay back some of his debts,

was absent from Spain until 1581—his first child, a son, also called Francisco, was baptized on
11 November 1581. See: Alvarez y Baena, Hijos De Madrid, 87–89, 162.
82 Falkdalen, Vasadöttrarna, 239–240.
83 Falkdalen, Vasadöttrarna, 276.
84 Falkdalen, Vasadöttrarna, 290.
85 Falkdalen, Vasadöttrarna, 277.
198  Aidan Norrie

he re-confiscated Cecilia’s recently-returned dower lands.86 Nevertheless,

Cecilia used her Catholicism for political ends during this period, and she
became a well-known diplomat in the various Catholic courts of Europe,
advocating for beneficial financial arrangements for Baden. Since the loss
of Arboga and her dower lands, Cecilia lacked financial security, so she used
these diplomatic contacts to gain credit and to minimize her living expenses.
In 1594, Ernest Frederick, Margrave of Baden-Durlach—a staunch
Calvinist—invaded and occupied Upper Baden—called the Oberbadische
Okkupation (‘Upper Baden Occupation’)—partially in response to the
Catholic Edwardus’s morganatic marriage with Maria van Eicken of 1591
(although it was regularized in 1593).87 Edwardus now had little control
over the margravate, and Cecilia relied on loans to support herself, once
again bringing her into conflict with her creditors.
Cecilia’s fortunes changed with the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War.
Baden’s Protestant margraves were deposed by the invading Imperial army,
and Cecilia’s grandson (and Edwardus’s eldest son), William, was able to
succeed as Margrave of Baden-Baden in 1621.88 William restored to Cecilia
her dower estates, and the princess, who was now in her eighties, was able
to live in relative comfort. She died in Brussels on 27 January 1627, at the age
of 86, and was buried inside the Church of St. Nicholas in Rodemachern.89
Excepting her daughter Charitas, Cecilia outlived all of her children.

A Life on the Edge

There can be little doubt that Cecilia, Princess of Sweden, Margravine of

Baden-Rodemachern, and Countess of Arboga, led a remarkable life. She
weathered numerous scandals before her marriage; had numerous suitors,
many serving a political purpose, before marrying a noble of limited political
worth, most likely out of genuine affection; gave birth to seven children,
including an illegitimate daughter, and outlived all excepting her daughter;
fought to be recognized as her son’s regent, and to secure her dower lands;
converted to Roman Catholicism for political purposes; engaged in diplomacy
with various powers across Europe; and, despite numerous creditors chasing
payment for debts all through her life, died peacefully in her home at the age

86 Falkdalen, Vasadöttrarna, 277–278.

87 Press, Kriege und Krisen, 50, 98.
88 Press, Kriege und Krisen, 375.
89 Martin, ‘Princess Cecilia Vasa (1540–1627)’, 84.
Cecilia of Sweden: Princess, Margr avine, Countess, Regent 199

Figure 9.2: Cecilia, c.1625. Unknown artist. Oil on Canvas. Nationalmusem (Sweden), NMGrh 441.

of 86—to say nothing of her eight-month visit to England. Cecilia’s only con-
firmed portrait likeness—a painting from c.1625 (Figure 9.2)—emphasizes
the problem in focusing on her trip to England. While her gender caused her
to exist on the edge at numerous stages of her life, she continued to fight for
her political rights—many of which were denied despite their legality—in
an increasingly fragmented and violent landscape.
In addition to two of her sons, and two of her grandsons, her descendants
continued to rule Baden-Rodemachern until her great-great-great-grandson,
200  Aidan Norrie

Augustus George, died childless in 1771. The margravate reverted to Baden-

Durlach, reuniting the lands of Baden under Charles Frederick, the final
Margrave of Baden—a distant descendant of her husband’s uncle.90 William
Rye concluded his section on Cecilia by telling his readers that she died in
1627 ‘after leading a rambling and dissolute life’.91 While certainly bringing
difficulties upon herself by her extravagant living, Cecilia’s 86 years, living
across disparate parts of Europe—and the vast majority of them without a
husband—demonstrates the force with which she asserted her autonomy,
and the way she subverted her alterity by consistently challenging her
relegation to the edge.

Works Cited

Primary Sources

British Library, London

Cotton MS Vitellius C XVI.
Royal MS 17 C XXIX.
Calendar of the Cecil Papers in Hatfield House [CCP]. Volume 1: 1306–1571. London, 1883.
Calendar of Letters and State Papers relating to English Affairs, preserved principally
in the Archives of Simancas [CSP Spain]. Volume I: Elizabeth, 1558–1567, edited by
Martin A.S. Hume. London, 1892.
Calendar of State Papers, Foreign: Elizabeth [CSP Foreign]. Volume 9: 1569–1571, edited
by Allan James Crosby. London, 1874.
Harrison, G.B., ed. The Letters of Queen Elizabeth. London: Cassell and Company
Ltd., 1935.
Hearne, Thomas, ed. Joannis Lelandi Antiquarii de rebus britannicis collectanea.
6 vols. London, 1770.
Morison, Margaret, ed. ‘A Narrative of the Journey of Cecilia, Princess of Sweden,
to the Court of Queen Elizabeth’. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society,
n.s., 12 (1898): 181–224.
Seaton, Ethel, ed. Queen Elizabeth and a Swedish Princess: Being an Account of the
visit of Princess Cecilia of Sweden to England in 1565, from the original Manuscript
of James Bell. London: Frederick Etchells and Hugh MacDonald, 1926.
Stow, John, and Edmund Howes. The Annales, Or Generall Chronicle of England.
London, 1615.

90 Payne, Haydn’s Dictionary, 4. See also: Bunk, Karlsruhe–Friedenstein, 9, 16.

91 Rye, England As Seen By Foreigners, liv.
Cecilia of Sweden: Princess, Margr avine, Countess, Regent 201

Teulet, Alexandre, ed. Relations politiques de la France et de l’Espagne avec l’Ecosse

au XVIe siècle; papiers d’etat, pièces et documents inédits ou peu connus, tirés des
bibliothèques et des archives de France. 5 vols. Paris, 1862.

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Alvarez y Baena, Joseph Antonio. Hijos De Madrid: Ilustres En Santidad, Dignidades,

Armas, Ciencias y Artes [Sons of Madrid: Illustrious in Holiness, Dignity, Weapons,
Sciences and Arts]. Madrid, 1790.
Archer, Jayne Elisabeth. ‘“Rudenesse it selfe she doth refine”: Queen Elizabeth I as
Lady Alchymia’. In Goddesses and Queens: The Iconography of Elizabeth I, edited
by Annaliese Connolly and Lisa Hopkins, 45–66. Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2007.
Bunk, Veronika. Karlsruhe–Friedenstein: Family, Cosmopolitanism and Political
Culture at the Courts of Baden and Sachsen-Gotha-Altenburg (1750–1790). Stuttgart:
Franz Steiner Verlag, 2011.
Doran, Susan. Monarchy and Matrimony: The Courtships of Elizabeth I. London:
Routledge, 1996.
Falkdalen, Karin Tegenborg. Vasadöttrarna. Lund: Historiska Media, 2010.
Frost, Robert I. The Northern Wars: War, State, and Society in Northeastern Europe,
1558–1721. 2001. Reprint, London: Routledge, 2014.
Kruse, Elaine. ‘“A Network of Honor and Obligation”: Elizabeth as Godmother’. In
Queens Matter in Early Modern Studies, edited by Anna Riehl Bertolet, 181–198.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
Malone, Edward A. ‘Bell, James (d.1606?)’. In Oxford Dictionary of National B
­ iography,
edited by David Cannadine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. doi:10.1093/
ref:odnb/2008.
Martin, Nathan. ‘Princess Cecilia Vasa (1540–1627)’. In A Biographical Encyclopedia
of Early Modern Englishwomen: Exemplary Lives and Memorable Acts, 1500–1650,
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London: Routledge, 2017.
Martin, Nathan. ‘Princess Cecilia’s Visitation to England, 1565–1566’. In The Foreign
Relations of Elizabeth I, edited by Charles Beem, 27–44. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011.
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1870.
Press, Volker. Kriege und Krisen: Deutschland 1600–1715. Munich: C.H. Beck, 1991.
Roberts, Michael. ‘The Abdication of Queen Christina’. History Today 4, no. 12
(December 1954): 823–833.
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Roberts, Michael. The Early Vasas: A History of Sweden, 1523–1611. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1968.
Rodén, Marie Louise. ‘The Burial of Queen Christina of Sweden in St Peter’s Church’.
Scandinavian Journal of History 12, nos. 1–2 (1987): 63–67.
Rye, William Brenchley. England As Seen By Foreigners In The Days of Elizabeth
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Sachs, Johann Christian. Einleitung in die Geschichte der Marggravschaft und des
marggrävlichen altfürstlichen Hauses Baden. Carlsruhe, 1769.

About the author

Aidan Norrie is a historian of monarchy, and is a Chancellor’s International

Scholar in the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at The University
of Warwick. He is the editor, with Marina Gerzic, of From Medievalism to
Early-Modernism: Adapting the English Past (Routledge), and, with Mark
Houlahan, of On the Edge of Early Modern English Drama (MIP University
Press). Aidan is working on a study of Elizabeth I’s depiction in modern
films and television series, and is currently developing a monograph that
analyses Elizabeth’s engagement with the Old Testament.
10. ‘Elizabeth the Forgotten’
The Life of Princess Elizabeth Stuart (1635–1650)

Jessica L. Becker

Abstract
Elizabeth Stuart (1635–1650), the second daughter of Charles I and Henrietta
Maria, influenced both Royalists and Parliamentarians as a symbol of pros-
perity, piety, and scholarly excellence despite effectively being Parliament’s
hostage during the first half of the English Civil War. She was a persistent
force for causes she believed in, influencing politics with both her private
writing and public countenance. This influence was even remarked on by
political foes including Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell. Tragically,
Elizabeth did not survive her imprisonment, dying days before Parliament
ordered her release, and she was mourned by her family, her public, and
the rest of Europe’s monarchies as a great loss. The modern historical
narrative, however, has largely forgotten her, and recognising her influence
enhances our understanding of the English Civil War.

Keywords: female influence; royal images; historical revisionism; English

Civil War; Royalists and Parliamentarians

For two centuries, the chancel of St. Thomas’s Church in Newport, on the Isle
of Wight, held the obscured remains of Princess Elizabeth Stuart (1635–1650),
marked only by the letters ‘E.S.’ carved into the wall nearby.1 In 1856, dur-
ing the church’s renovations, Queen Victoria ordered that a monument
be erected as ‘a token of respect for her virtues, and of sympathy for her
misfortunes’.2 Around the same time as Victoria’s public honouring of the
Stuart princess, Elizabeth was (re)introduced to popular culture: Mary Anne

1 Goodwin, ‘Elizabeth, Princess (1635–1650)’.

2 Strickland, Lives of the Tudor and Stuart Princesses, 380.

Hopkins, L. and A. Norrie (eds.), Women on the Edge in Early Modern Europe, Amsterdam University
Press, 2019.
doi 10.5117/9789462987500/ch10
204  Jessica L. Becker

Everett Green published the multi-volumed Lives of the Princesses of England:

From the Norman Conquest in 1855, which was followed in 1888 by Agnes
Strickland’s Lives of the Tudor and Stuart Princesses. Both texts included
biographical chapters on Elizabeth that detailed her life as a child in the
royal court, as well as her actions and involvement during the English Civil
War. However, Elizabeth is still a figure on the edge of Stuart scholarship,
and is routinely absent from accounts of the period. She is absent from the
recent Biographical Encyclopedia of Early Modern Englishwomen, and her
entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is no more detailed
than the Wikipedia article about her life.3 The most recent work to include
an account of her life is Linda Porter’s Royal Renegades. Porter recounts
the lives of each royal child during the war found in various contemporary
diaries, journals, and parliamentary records, and nineteenth-century royal
biographies. 4 While Porter does demonstrate the importance of Elizabeth’s
life, and credits her actions during the period, she continues the practice
of discussing all the Stuart princesses together.
What these biographies invariably neglect to emphasize is Elizabeth’s
contemporary political and cultural value. Nadine Akkerman’s extensive
work in editing the correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia
(1596–1662), reveals the Queen’s concern:

the Princess of Orenge [Amalia of Solms-Braunfels] has tolde me of a match

almost concluded on betwixt her sonne [William II of Orange] and my
second Neece […] I cannot see what the king can gaine by precipitating this
mariage but onelie to give a pledge to the states for this good behaviour.
They doe seek to gett my eldest niece but I hope will not be granted it
being too low for her.5

The Queen of Bohemia considered such a match between either Mary,

her eldest niece, or Elizabeth, her second eldest niece, to be both beneath
them and disadvantageous for Charles I. This observation demonstrates
Elizabeth’s perceived contemporary political worth.
Princess Elizabeth also had an impact on early modern culture, which
scholars have only recently begun to discuss. For instance, Nicole A. Jacobs

3 Levin, Bertolet, and Carney, eds., A Biographical Encyclopedia of Early Modern English-
women. For her Wikipedia entry, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Stuart_(daugh-
ter_of_Charles_I).
4 See: Porter, Royal Renegades.
5 Akkerman, The Correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart, 943.
‘Elizabeth the Forgot ten’ 205

has demonstrated Elizabeth’s political influence by revealing her as John

Milton’s target in Eikonoklastes (1649). According to Jacobs, ‘Elizabeth’s
age and social status actually made her uniquely equipped to move an
audience sympathetic to the plight of the Stuarts and of the Episcopacy
that they supported’.6 Elizabeth’s emotional account of her final moments
with her father in Eikon Basilike provoked Milton to respond with a scathing
attack on Stuart women as manipulative Catholics in effort to undercut
Elizabeth’s influence on the public. Likewise, Robert Miola has noted that
Christopher Wase’s 1649 translation of Sophocles’ Electra presents the
play’s main characters as members of the royal family, with Charles I as
Agamemnon, Prince Charles as Orestes, and Princess Elizabeth as Electra,
while Cromwell is cast as Aegisthus.7 Miola and Jacobs have both recognized
Elizabeth’s influence during the aftermath of the regicide, uncovering
her importance in the historical narrative in the last year of her life. The
historical narrative’s exclusion of Elizabeth obscures the contemporary
narrative. Elizabeth’s legacy is often overlooked, despite holding a unique
position of influence over both royalists and parliamentarians through her
reputation for religious piety, astute intellect, and ingenuity.

Royal Birth and Publicity

The Caroline court celebrated the birth of each royal child as ‘a sign of God’s
favour’; while a war may tax a kingdom, civil war was toxic to a kingdom,
and the threat of civil war diminished with each royal heir.8 Over two
hundred poems were composed in honour of the royal children, with the
public praising Charles I and Henrietta Maria and rejoicing ‘in the promise
of their children’.9 This was because several heirs increased the security
of the succession, and offered long-term political stability.10 For instance,
the University of Oxford’s Coronae Carolinae Quadrature (1636) lauded the
King and Queen as ‘common parents who not only sired offspring but gave
the world its life’.11 The suggestion that the public considered daughters as
boons equal to sons invites new reflection on the role of women in early

6 Jacobs, ‘Robbing His Shepherdess’, 228.

7 Miola, ‘Early Modern Antigones’, 240.
8 Sharpe, Image Wars, 176.
9 Anselment, ‘Clouded Majesty’, 384–385.
10 For a specific example relating to Elizabeth’s birth, see: Richard Crashaw’s ‘Upon the birth
of the Princesse Elizabeth’ (1634).
11 Sharpe, Image Wars, 176.
206  Jessica L. Becker

modern England. Elizabeth’s importance to the future of the kingdoms is

manifested further in poetry aligning her with her eldest brother, Charles.
For example, John Cleveland’s ‘On Princess Elizabeth Born the Night before
New Year’s Day’ (1638), claimed:

Astrologers say Venus, the self-same star,

Is both our Hesperus and Lucifer;
The antitype, this Venus, makes it true;
She shuts the old year and begins the new.
Her brother with a star at noon was born;
She, like a star both of the eve and morn.
Count o’er the stars, fair Queen, in babes, and vie
With every year a new Epiphany.12

Here, Cleveland not only presents the children as symbols of Charles I’s
divine right to rule, but also highlights how the public considered Elizabeth
a blessing equal to the Prince of Wales. Additionally, the public welcomed
Elizabeth for balancing the sexes in the royal family as the fourth child and
second daughter.13 William Cartwright’s poem, ‘On the Birth of the King’s
Fourth Child, to the Queene’ (1636), exults Elizabeth as ‘once more a Child,
whose ev’ry part / May gaine unto our Realme a severall Heart, / So giv’n
unto You King, so fitly sent, / As we may justly call’t your complement’.14 If
the poetry is an indication of public sentiment, then the public considered
Elizabeth a gift to the monarchy, since she was expected to devote herself to
the kingdom. They doubly glorified Elizabeth for being born on 28 December
1635, the Feast of Holy Innocents, which commemorates the victims of
King Herod’s infanticide.15 A rare Christmas snow emphasized the holy
day’s religious connotations of purity, and the public connected Elizabeth’s
birth with the snow’s symbolic purity.16 In addition to these auspicious
circumstances, Elizabeth’s name enhanced her public identity; her parents
named her after her aunt, Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, who was beloved by
the English for the role she played against the Catholics in the Thirty Years’
War.17 Furthermore, the name’s mythos ran deep in the culture of early
modern England because Elizabeth I set the standard for her successors; the

12 Cleveland, Minor Poets, 85.

13 Green, Lives of the Princesses, 335–336.
14 Cartwright, The Life and Poems, 78.
15 Cole, A Flower of Purpose, 1.
16 Green, Lives of the Princesses, 335–336.
17 Cole, A Flower of Purpose, 1.
‘Elizabeth the Forgot ten’ 207

memory of her rose with each misstep of their reigns, adding to the public
popularity of the royal princesses who shared her name.18

Early Childhood and Family Life

The young Princess Elizabeth would grow to earn the reputation bestowed
upon her by the public through a combination of continued luck, her per-
sonality, and her innocuous actions. Like her father, Elizabeth suffered
from ill-health, including rickets and a weak immune system, which gave
her a pale complexion, a sombre face, and silvery blonde hair.19 Charles and
Henrietta Maria saw the survival of each of their children as a divine blessing,
especially after the heartrending loss of their first-born son who only lived
for a few hours.20 Evidently, the public agreed with their sentiments, so
Elizabeth continued to remain a popular figure.
Throughout her early, fragile years, poets glorified Elizabeth as an allegory
for renewal and life. They often compared her with symbols of spring and
beauty, and—as can be seen in the examples of Cartwright and Crashaw—
omitted references to her poor health. According to Cartwright, Elizabeth
was ‘more gracious, more divine, more fresh’ than the cupids he described
as flocking to her cradle.21 Furthermore, Crashaw associated Elizabeth with
her older and healthier sister Mary in a scene of the crowned girls blissfully
reading together, sharing in each other’s joys like twin flowers in a garden.22
The English people thus remained hopeful that Elizabeth’s survival would
contribute to the monarchy’s promise of future happiness.
Passionate art lovers, Charles and Henrietta Maria commissioned several
family portraits from masters like Anthony Van Dyck, which helped to
celebrate the royal family’s unity. In Van Dyck’s paintings The Five Eld-
est Children of Charles I (1637), and Princess Elizabeth and Princess Anne,
Daughters of Charles I (1637), Elizabeth thoughtfully focuses on the squalling
baby in her lap with an ‘almost maternal solicitude’.23
Charles and Henrietta Maria created a close and affectionate family
environment for their heirs by regularly spending time with their children,

18 Doran and Freeman, ‘Introduction’, 1–23.

19 Cole, A Flower of Purpose, 1–2.
20 Sharpe, Image Wars, 176.
21 Cartwright, The Life and Poems of William Cartwright, 78.
22 Crashaw, Minor Poets, 167–168.
23 Cole, A Flower of Purpose, 1. The two images can be viewed online at: http://www.scheve-
ningen1813-2013.nl/ballingschapstuarts/9elizabeth1650/1elizabethenanne/index.html.
208  Jessica L. Becker

and often indulging in family dinners.24 The parents fostered a deep familial
connection, which was important for Elizabeth, because it gave her a strong
foundation to lean on during the Civil War. The King and Queen even
discussed major decisions of state as a family. When Elizabeth received her
first marriage proposal in 1640, her parents consulted her in their decision
to accept by presenting her with a tiny portrait of her suitor, William of
Orange, to which she wisely stated, ‘He is very handsome, but, I think, better
suited to my sister than to me’.25 This statement, despite its ambiguity,
shows her awareness, especially considering the outcome of William’s suit:
after meeting both princesses, he decided to change his attention from
Elizabeth to Mary, and their marriage secured an alliance between the
two Protestant realms.26
It is important to remember that Charles remained a devout Protestant,
despite Puritan fears and Catholic pressure to convert. While he tolerated
his wife’s Catholicism, he had their children raised in the Church of England.
When the King travelled, however, Henrietta Maria took charge. Once,
when Elizabeth was a restless two-year-old, she attended her mother’s
vesper service. Instead of joining in the traditional Catholic ceremonies
with her mother, Elizabeth sat with a priest and his Book of Devotions, which
included a depiction of Christ tied to a pillar. Immediately upon seeing the
image, Elizabeth excitedly exclaimed, ‘Poor man, poor man’, and kissed
the image many times, much to the delight of her mother and the clergy.27
This sympathetic response to such a poignant image of Christ proved that
Elizabeth already possessed sensibility and compassion, and a proud Charles
proclaimed, ‘She begins young’.28
A few years later, her intelligence impressed artists such as Vaughan and
Hollar; the former painted her portrait in 1640, and the latter engraved its
likeness. This engraving was included in the book The True Effigies of the
Royal Progeny, which contained a poem describing Elizabeth as being the
combination of the muses: she was ‘Heaven’s darling and Great Britain’s
ornament’, whose ‘name and fame may curb the powers of Rome’ in time.29
This poem implies that while Elizabeth had initially been considered a
symbol of hope for the future of the monarchy, writers now expected her
to become a Protestant hero, defending them against Catholicism like the

24 Strickland, Lives of the Tudor and Stuart Princesses, 121.

25 Strickland, Lives of the Tudor and Stuart Princesses, 348.
26 Strickland, Lives of the Tudor and Stuart Princesses, 348.
27 Green, Lives of the Princesses, 337.
28 Green, Lives of the Princesses, 337.
29 Green, Lives of the Princesses, 337–338.
‘Elizabeth the Forgot ten’ 209

late Tudor Queen. Elizabeth’s image thus evolved to represent stability in

the kingdom through both royal succession and security against invasion.

Education and Scholarship

The princess seemed to have inherited her paternal grandfather’s passion

for scholarship, and her father’s aff inity for religious debate. All of the
royal children began their academic and courtly educations early, but their
parents adjusted the education to the needs of each child. For example,
Charles was particularly gifted in oral presentations, and sat with his
parents during meetings with foreign ambassadors before he was two years
old. Two years later, he gave audiences with his younger siblings present;
however, he still struggled with writing at the age of nine.30 In contrast to
Prince Charles, Elizabeth excelled in literacy, and her parents recognized
her advanced ability. In response to Elizabeth’s personal academic needs,
Charles I hired the ‘most learned Englishwoman of her time’, Bathsua
Makin, to tutor Elizabeth in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, in addition to the
standard French, Italian, Spanish, music, dancing, writing, mathematics,
and needlework.31 Under Makin’s tutelage, Elizabeth learned to read and
write in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, and Italian by the age of nine, and
mastered the classics and was able to analyse biblical passages.32 Elizabeth’s
intellectual prowess inspired scholars to dedicate books and translations
to her, even during her years as a Puritan captive of the Civil War. Within
the space of a few years, several scholars had dedicated their work to her,
such as William Greenhill’s exposition of the f irst f ive chapters of the
Prophet Ezekiel (1650):

Your writing out the Lord’s Prayer in Greek, some texts of Scripture in
Hebrew, your endeavour after the exact knowledge of these holy tongues,
with other languages and learned accomplishments, your diligent hearing
of the Word, careful noting of sermons, understanding answers at the
catechizing, and frequent questioning about holy things, do promise
great matters from you. If the harvest be answerable to the spring, your
Highness will be the wonder of the learned, and glory of the godly.33

30 Whitaker, A Royal Passion, 120.

31 Cole, A Flower of Purpose, 4.
32 Cole, A Flower of Purpose, 4.
33 Greenhill, The Prophet Ezekiel, 10.
210  Jessica L. Becker

Here, Greenhill described Elizabeth’s ‘sweetness of nature and choiceness

of wit’, praised her religious fervour, her interest in the ancient languages,
and admitted that her learning did ‘breed in us hopes that you will exceed
all your sex, and be without equal in Europe’.34 His recognition of Elizabeth’s
potential shows the expectation that she would demonstrate greatness on
the European stage during the turbulent religious conflict. Again, Elizabeth’s
advanced gifts—despite being outside of ‘normal’ womanly duties—were
recognized and rewarded. She responded to this treatment well, but also
sought to pass on her advantages when she could.
Elizabeth’s reputation grew to inspire the improvement of the under-
educated, when Alexander Rowley dedicated the Scholar’s Companion (1648)
to her. The pocket book translated interpretations of the bible into Latin
and English to function as an easy aid for the learned, as well as a guide for
the unlearned, so they ‘may come to the knowledge of both Testaments in
the original tongues’.35 Rowley admired the ‘peerless Princess Elizabeth’,
and he claimed he felt compelled to dedicate his work to her after learning
of her ‘rare inclination’ to study the Bible in its original languages. Further,
he hoped that the ‘most excellent princess’ would ‘proceed with the greater
joy […] in those lovely royal ways [she had] begun to tread, to the example
of all worthy women, the women of Europe, and (which is worth more
than all the world,) the everlasting happiness of your own soul’.36 Rowley’s
appraisal of Elizabeth as not only a princess, but also as a scholar, indicates
that during this period women could be known for their own, intellectual
merits. Elizabeth became a positive female icon for the education of the
masses during the period because of her self-earned, independent reputation
as a mature, pious, and intelligent scholar.

Civil War and Imprisonment

Unfortunately for Elizabeth, her increased public renown coincided with

the Civil War. Charles I travelled the country with his elder sons, while
Henrietta Maria escorted the newly married Mary to the Dutch Republic,
and stayed to help the young bride feel settle into her new home. This left
Elizabeth and her youngest brother Henry, Duke of Gloucester, in the care of
their attendants at St. James’s Palace. At the outbreak of war in late August,

34 Greenhill, The Prophet Ezekiel, 10.

35 Green, Lives of the Princesses, 348.
36 Green, Lives of the Princesses, 348.
‘Elizabeth the Forgot ten’ 211

the court relocated to Oxford, but Elizabeth and Henry were left in the St.
James’s palace nursery.37 Soon after, Parliament took control of the young
princess and prince, effectively reducing them to a state of captivity.
Elizabeth’s first clash with Parliament began when it refused to levy
taxes that normally supported St. James’s palace. The poor living conditions
caused Elizabeth’s health to decline due to her deprivations, and her servants
exhausted themselves pleading with Parliament to improve the children’s
situation. Parliament also attempted to strip the children of their servants,
demanding that ‘all persons employed about the brother and sister should
be compelled to take the Covenant, and whoever rejected it should be
dismissed without delay’.38 Elizabeth refused to replace her beloved, familiar
attendants with strangers and parliamentarian spies. The nine-year-old
approached her Parliamentary custodian, Lord Pembroke, and handed him
a carefully written letter to deliver to the House of Lords:

My Lords,
I account myself very miserable that I must have my servants taken from
me, and strangers put to me. You promised me that you would have a
care of me, and I hope you will shew it, in preventing so great a grief as
this would be to me. I pray, my lords, consider of it, and give me cause to
thank you, and to rest.
Your loving friend,
Elizabeth.39

Unsettled by the news that the House of Commons planned to remove

the children’s servants, the House of Lords challenged the Commons, who
admitted their plans and claimed it was in reaction to a royalist plot to
move the children to Charles I’s current capital, Oxford. Dismissive of the
Commons’ concerns, the House of Lords admonished the Commons for
breach of privilege and took control of the children’s care. In respect of the
children’s status, the Lords also demanded an oath of protection from all
members of the court, specifically where they promised ‘in the presence of
the Almighty God, that I will not hinder the education of any of the King’s
children in the true Protestant religion, piety, or holiness of life’.40 Elizabeth’s
initiative thus influenced her father’s enemies to act on her behalf in regards

37 Cole, A Flower of Purpose, 4.

38 Cole, A Flower of Purpose, 4.
39 ‘16 December 1643’, House of Lords Journal, 340–341.
40 Thornton-Cook, Royal Elizabeths, 116–117.
212  Jessica L. Becker

to her imprisonment, and revealed the overreaching machinations of the

House of Commons, fissuring the Parliamentarian unity against the King.
Despite Elizabeth’s triumph, the news from St. James’s worried the already
anxious King and Queen. Henrietta Maria wrote to Charles I, begging him
to rescue their youngest children, not knowing he had already renewed his
rescue efforts. 41 Though each rescue attempt failed, the family and their
royalist allies never stopped trying to recover Elizabeth and Henry. After
Parliament denied his initial requests for the return of his children, the
King offered them an exchange of prisoners: the children in exchange for
prominent Parliamentarians. This too was vetoed by Parliament, which
claimed, ‘the royal children were not prisoners and therefore were ineligible
for ransom’.42 Parliament officially considered the royal children ‘two pledges
of the crown of England, Scotland and Ireland, royally kept and maintained
by the Parliament’ until such regard was considered unnecessary after the
execution of their father, Charles.43 In other words, Parliament had reduced
the children to properties of the state.
Parliament’s control of Elizabeth and Henry exemplified contradictions
about women’s roles within the time period. Civil law considered a princess
as property of the state, but religious law considered women the property of
their father or husband. Although Parliament refused to release an English
princess to the King, the law required they release a wife to her husband.
In a desperate effort, Charles I agreed to marry Elizabeth to the ‘learned
and chivalric son of the loyal Marquis of Worcester, Edward Lord Herbert’,
promising him the royal name of Plantagenet, the title of Duke of Somerset
for their future progeny, and a dowry of £300,000.44 Parliament continued to
deny her father’s authority in arranging Elizabeth’s marriage and her fiancé’s
claims to her as a wife—in direct defiance of the very laws they claimed
to fight for with their continued imprisonment of the royal children. 45
Parliament’s actions towards Elizabeth invite historians to reconsider
Parliament’s political motives and religious ideologies, as Elizabeth was
not allowed to be married while in their control.
Elizabeth and Henry ultimately remained captive in London until 1645,
when the Countess of Dorset’s failing health provided an opportunity for
Lord Algernon Percy, Earl of Northumberland, to volunteer to care for the

41 Thornton-Cook, Royal Elizabeths, 117.

42 Thornton-Cook, Royal Elizabeths, 116–117.
43 Cole, A Flower of Purpose, 4.
44 Strickland, Lives of the Tudor and Stuart Princesses, 353.
45 Strickland, Lives of the Tudor and Stuart Princesses, 353.
‘Elizabeth the Forgot ten’ 213

children. He had the resources and authority to move them into the country,
and away from the strict control of Parliament. Percy, a loyal friend to Charles
I, insisted that Parliament allow him to treat the children in a manner their
status deserved, and a reluctant Parliament agreed. Percy undertook the care
of the children with consideration and respect, even at great personal cost.
Elizabeth’s poor health earned his sympathy, and he allowed her to write
to her sister Mary for the first time since the war started. 46 Even though
she had not spoken to her sister in years, Elizabeth’s long-awaited letter to
Mary was a simple declaration of her love, and a confession of her happiness
in the simple chance to communicate with her sister. 47 Though this form of
contact paled in comparison to the warmly affectionate household Elizabeth
grew up in, she wrote to them as often as she could.

Imprisonment and Family

In an effort to remember important family details, Elizabeth made a list of

her siblings’ birthdates and birth locations. However, just as she began to
succumb to her loneliness and as her health worsened, she was reunited with
her second oldest brother, Prince James. Parliamentary forces captured the
twelve-year-old prince while he led an army in defence of the royalist camp
at Oxford. Four years of war had distanced the siblings, and James’s arrival
filled her with as much dread as it did joy. 48 James’s companionship was
‘one of the greatest boons that could have been granted to her comparative
solitude’, but she was acutely aware the danger he faced in the hands of
their father’s foes. 49 She repeatedly confessed, ‘Were I a boy, I would not
long remain a captive, however light and glittering might be the fetters
that bound me’.50 Her comment reveals that not only was she fully aware
of her precarious position as a prisoner, but also the limitations her gender
imposed on her. Her popularity could not help her if the people failed to
recognize her outside the walls of St. James’s Palace. Similarly aware of the
danger, Charles I sent a letter to James, urging the boy to join him or his
mother should an opportunity present itself.51 Unfortunately, Parliament
discovered the letter and used it as evidence of James’s plan to escape. They

46 Cole, A Flower of Purpose, 6–7.

47 Strickland, Lives of the Tudor and Stuart Princesses, 357.
48 Cole, A Flower of Purpose, 7.
49 Green, Lives of the Princesses, 351.
50 Cole, A Flower of Purpose, 7.
51 Cole, A Flower of Purpose, 7.
214  Jessica L. Becker

placed more restrictions on the children, before moving them to Hampton

Court to be reunited with their father.
After his capture by the parliamentarians in 1647, Charles I convinced Sir
Thomas Fairfax to allow him access to his children, and Parliament arranged
for the four to reunite at the Greyhound Inn in Maidenhead. The news of
this event became public, and royalist supporters ‘thronged the roadway,
strewing flowers, sweet herbs, and green boughs before the procession of
carriages’.52 The leader of the parliamentarians, Oliver Cromwell, presided
over the meeting of the royals, perhaps to help ensure the King would not
try to escape. However, he found himself quite taken back by Elizabeth,
when she took it upon herself to personally thank General Fairfax ‘for the
happiness she and her brothers now enjoyed in the sight of their dear father,
which she knew was procured by his goodness, and assured him she should
always be grateful to him’.53 Elizabeth impressed Fairfax with her initiative
and political savvy, and the parliamentarians began to call her ‘Temperance’,
which strengthened the princess’s connection with the late Queen Elizabeth,
and strengthened her influence with the parliamentarians.54 By the age of
twelve, she had established a powerful reputation beyond her royal status
without marriage or scandal, and her accomplishment deserves a much
more prominent place in the historical narrative than has been previously
afforded.
The emotional reunion between the family members moved General
Fairfax to forget his duty, so he left out of respect for their intimacy. Later,
he recounted how Cromwell had ‘wept plentifully at the sight thereof, and
shed abundance of tears at the recollection of it’.55 The scene between Charles
I and his children moved two of the most powerful and battle-hardened
parliamentarians, and the public shared in their response. A pamphlet
described the children rushing to meet their father, greeting him with
‘exclamations of wild delight, and the first warm embraces, the royal father
might be seen with his two younger children on his knees, and the Duke
of York clinging to his side’.56 Five years of war had separated the family
members; Prince James and Princess Elizabeth still remembered him, but
seven-year-old Prince Henry was barely two years old when the war began,
so his father was a virtual stranger. The newspapers reported the King’s

52 Cole, A Flower of Purpose, 8.

53 Cole, A Flower of Purpose, 9.
54 Cole, A Flower of Purpose, 9.
55 Cole, A Flower of Purpose, 9.
56 Green, Lives of the Princesses, 355.
‘Elizabeth the Forgot ten’ 215

regret that his youngest son did not know him: ‘I am your father, child; and
it is not one of the least of my misfortunes that I have brought you and your
brothers and sisters into the world to share my miseries’.57 The publishing of
such a touching scene between a father and his children served to remind
the public of the royals’ image as a family blessed by God with six heirs,
and as a loving family torn apart by Parliament’s war.
Charles I took advantage of his time with his children, instilling in them
principles of royal conduct, and giving spiritual advice. He advised Elizabeth
‘to remain patient, obedient to her mother and eldest brother and to never
allow herself to be united in marriage without their approbation’.58 Witnesses
considered the King’s relationship with Elizabeth to be especially endearing.
The printed news often focused on Charles I and Princess Elizabeth’s interac-
tions, such as that first meeting when Elizabeth took in the sight of her father,
a ‘grey-haired, plainly-dressed man with an expression of melancholy which
closely accorded with her own’, and immediately ‘conceived her passionate,
absorbing, and ultimately fatal devotion to the doomed King’.59 In return,
Charles found his daughter ‘a graceful and still delicate girl of twelve, with
an expression of meek and thoughtful sorrow on her brow that was only too
much in unison with his own feelings’.60 The news’ focus on their tender
relationship suggests that the public disagreed with Parliament’s com-
modification of the royal children as properties of state, and the publishing
of these tragically sweet interactions helped to further establish Elizabeth’s
exemplary image as a pious daughter and graceful princess.

Regicide and Writing

In addition to the print media, Elizabeth continued to exert influence in

captivity through her familial conversations. Inadvertently, she influenced
her father’s attempt to escape when she complained to him that his sentinels
marched up and down the hall at night and ‘disquieted her’.61 Charles ap-
proached his keepers on the matter and they agreed to move the guards
farther away from the bedchambers. Later, this became an advantage in his
escape effort. A few days after his children left him to return to St. James’s

57 Green, Lives of the Princesses, 355.

58 Green, Lives of the Princesses, 358–359.
59 Cole, A Flower of Purpose, 8.
60 Green, Lives of the Princesses, 355.
61 Cole, A Flower of Purpose, 11.
216  Jessica L. Becker

Palace, on 11 November 1647, Charles made his escape from Hampton Court,
but fled into a trap set by Colonel Hammond at Carisbrooke Castle on the
Isle of Wight. He remained there until his trial in London, and he would
not see his children again until the day before his execution.
The King’s fate deeply affected Elizabeth and her brother James. After
years of persuasion, Elizabeth finally convinced James to escape in the spring
of 1648. Elizabeth’s plan involved playing typical, innocent games to trick
their guards. She introduced the routine of starting a game of hide-and-seek
before bed. After weeks of play, their guards hardly noticed if one sibling
went missing for a time, giving James an opportunity to escape. During
their last nightly game, Elizabeth joined Prince Henry in a search for James,
giving James over an hour to abscond with a gardener’s keys over the back
wall of the palace. The prince, dressed as a girl, was able to flee to a Dutch
skiff before anyone grew suspicious.62 Elizabeth’s ingenious plan guaranteed
James’s freedom, even at the cost of her own.
Despite the increased severity of their imprisonment, Charles and Eliza-
beth continued to write to one another with concern and hope for each
other’s well-being.63 Fully aware of the tragedy facing her and her family,
she attempted to influence Parliament with another letter on 22 January
1649, requesting permission to go live with her elder sister, Mary, in the
Netherlands. Unfortunately, this time her letter was completely ignored.64
During Charles I’s trial, Elizabeth’s melancholy became public knowledge,
earning her public sympathy, and the public was made aware of the King’s
last wish to see Elizabeth and Henry one last time. The royal family’s
heartbreaking last meeting was a matter of public interest, reported by
the King’s last remaining attendant, Sir Thomas Herbert, who described
Elizabeth as ‘the most sensible of her royal father’s condition, as appeared
by her sorrowful look and excessive weeping’.65 Herbert described the scene
as a ‘demonstration of pious affection’. The King sat each of the children on
his lap, kissing and blessing them. He them reminded them of their duty to
their mother and eldest brother, before he gifted them his jewels. This caused
the princess to openly cry with such sorrow she ‘moved others to pity that
formerly were hard-hearted’, and Charles I was so comforted and grateful
‘he went immediately to prayer’.66 Herbert’s report further supported the

62 Green, Lives of the Princesses, 363.

63 Green, Lives of the Princesses, 366–367.
64 Green, Lives of the Princesses, 368.
65 Cole, A Flower of Purpose, 14.
66 Green, Lives of the Princesses, 370.
‘Elizabeth the Forgot ten’ 217

royals’ established image as a family torn apart by Parliament; but it was

Elizabeth’s personal account of the scene that cemented it.
Ever the scholar, Elizabeth promised to write down their final conversa-
tion, swearing through weeping tears, ‘I shall never forget this whilst I live’.67
She not only wrote their conversation down, but she also published it twice in
her father’s posthumous book, Eikon Basilike. In her first account, Elizabeth
expanded on Herbert’s summary of her father’s last words, claiming that he
‘bid [her] tell [her] mother, that his thoughts had never strayed from her, and
that his love should be the same to the last’, and to obey her.68 Moreover,
she detailed his wishes for her ‘not to grieve and torment [myself] for him,
for that would be a glorious death that he should die, it being for the Laws
and Liberties of this land, and for maintain the true Protestant Religion’.69
She concluded her account with his confession that he ‘had forgiven all
his enemies, and hoped God would forgive them also, and commanded
us and all the rest of my brothers and sisters to forgive them’; however, he
advised her never to trust them, ‘for they had been most false to him, and
to those that gave them power, and he feared also to their own souls’.70 In
Elizabeth’s second account, she detailed the King’s last words with Prince
Henry as an intimate conversation between a kingly father and his princely
son. According to Elizabeth, Charles I gently advised:

Sweetheart, now they will cut off thy father’s head. Heed, my child, what
I say: they will cut off my head and perhaps make thee a King. But mark
what I say. Thou must not be a King as long as thy brothers Charles and
James do live; for they will cut off your brothers’ heads when they can
catch them, and cut off thy head too at the last, and therefore I charge
you, do not be made a King by them.71

Here, Elizabeth’s account of her father’s last words to his youngest son
detail the terrible predicament her family faced, as well as alluding to the
potential despair looming should Parliament ignore the line of succession.
More importantly, she described Prince Henry’s fervent response, ‘I will
be torn in pieces first!’ as so remarkable for his age that her father rejoiced
before continuing to advise Henry on the welfare of his soul, and to keep his

67 Green, Lives of the Princesses, 370.

68 Green, Lives of the Princesses, 370.
69 Green, Lives of the Princesses, 370.
70 Green, Lives of the Princesses, 369.
71 Cole, A Flower of Purpose, 16.
218  Jessica L. Becker

religion, commanding him to fear God, who would then provide for him.72
Elizabeth thus not only reminded the public of the potential consequences
of Parliament’s decision to execute the King, but also of the royal family’s
honour, and their devotion to Protestantism.
Elizabeth’s provocative descriptions of their father’s last words to them
helped fuel the public backlash over the regicide. Her public influence grew
so powerful that parliamentarians wanted her silenced. John Milton took
it upon himself to insult her publicly in Eikonoklastes—his response to the
late King’s book—by exposing the many manipulative Catholic women
in her lineage. Elizabeth’s autobiographical writings stood firm against
Milton’s slander, ‘implicitly [redeeming] the role of Stuart women as it
defends the actions of Charles I’.73 However successfully Milton criticized
the monarchy itself, he failed to tarnish her reputation. She became a
hero, remembered as the ‘consummate mourner’, and synonymous with
her father’s martyrdom.

Aftermath of the Regicide and Unexpected Death

After her father’s death, Elizabeth and her youngest brother Henry fell into
a void between obscurity and salacious notoriety. Rumours of Elizabeth’s ill
health spread like wildfire, starting with the guards at her father’s prison,
whispering that she ‘was truly about to die of grief’, and within days, news
reports incorrectly announced her death to the public.74 John Quarles wrote
an elegy honouring both her and her father: ‘Although Heaven hath been
pleased to diminish your joys in this miserable Kingdom, yet no question
but He will hereafter multiply your pleasures in His own’.75 Quarles’ poem
is reminiscent of the poetic celebrations of her birth in the happy decade
before the war. Additionally, Christopher Wase dedicated his translation of
Sophocles’ Electra to Elizabeth, and included her engraved portrait in the
front of the book with the following request: ‘Be secure, most illustrious
princess, you are not so much guarded from flattery by the arts and vigilancy
of the States as by the transcendency of your own merits’.76 Wase’s efforts
reinforced her image as a scholarly icon.

72 Cole, A Flower of Purpose, 16.

73 Jacobs, ‘Robbing His Shepherdess’, 255.
74 Cole, A Flower of Purpose, 16.
75 Cole, A Flower of Purpose, 18.
76 Cole, A Flower of Purpose, 18.
‘Elizabeth the Forgot ten’ 219

In contrast to these expressions of grief, royalists spread reports that

Parliament had either given the children trade occupations, put them in
convenient hospitals or charity schools under the names Bessy and Harry
Stuart, or married them into puritan families. Worse still, it was rumoured
that Parliament had done away with the children altogether with poison.77
Whether or not these were true did not matter: the f ictitious rumours
successfully manipulated Henrietta Maria into commanding the future
Charles II ‘to use his utmost efforts to rescue her poor Princess Elizabeth
from the hands of her enemies’.78 As a publicly beloved fourteen-year-old,
Elizabeth was even more the embodiment of her family’s potential and the
monarchy’s future than ever before.
Elizabeth, however, began to lose her public influence when Parliament
refused to acknowledge the Stuart children as royalty, and demanded the
same attitude of their caretakers. They still refused to release them and allow
the children to join their family on the Continent. Due to financial complica-
tions, Parliament removed the children from the Duke of Northumberland’s
care and placed them with the Countess of Leicester with orders to treat them
not as royals, but as the children of a private nobleman.79 Defiantly, Lady
Leicester and her husband disobeyed Parliament and treated the children as
they believed their royal blood demanded. During her year with the Leicesters,
Elizabeth stayed abreast of the war and her family’s situation. The news that
her eldest brother had made agreements with the men who had betrayed their
father troubled her greatly. She reportedly wept daily for him at his signing
of the Covenant and for her broken faith in him as her brother. However, just
as with her father’s demise, her plight spurred her brother to her defence.80
In June 1650, Charles claimed the Scottish Crown and began his effort to
rescue his captured siblings. Frightened by Charles’s landing in Scotland,
Parliament decided to move the children to Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle
of Wight by August. Aware of her own ill health, Elizabeth was resoundingly
against this move, but Parliament ignored her complaints.81 On 12 March 1649,
Sir Theodore Mayerne, her personal physician, had recorded her ailments,
which included a pale face, rapid pulse, an attenuated frame, weakened or
sickly stomach, complaints of her spleen, scurvy, and the appearance of a
large, hard tumour.82 Mayerne continued to diagnose her with depression,

77 Green, Lives of the Princesses, 377.

78 Green, Lives of the Princesses, 377.
79 Green, Lives of the Princesses, 373–375.
80 Cole, A Flower of Purpose, 18–19.
81 Cole, A Flower of Purpose, 18–19.
82 Green, Lives of the Princesses, 372.
220  Jessica L. Becker

which he said, ‘whereby all the other ailments from which she suffered were
increased’.83 After prescribing a concoction of medicines, he re-evaluated
her a month later and found the tumour had reduced in hardness but not
size, and also that her stomach was still upset by most medicines. Over a
year later, Elizabeth was still greatly ill and deeply depressed by her father’s
death.84 Now, as her brother began his nominal reign, Elizabeth found
herself stripped of her royal status, surrounded by strangers, and doomed to
live out her final weeks in her father’s last prison.85 Still, she retained some
public influence through the printed news; for instance, they reported both
children catching chills on 22 August, less than a week into their stay at
Carisbrooke Castle.86 The young and healthy Henry recovered quickly from
his illness, but Elizabeth did not.87 She spent the next few weeks slowly dying,
bedridden by 1 September.88 On Sunday, 8 September, her chambermaid
found her dead body lying with her head on her father’s Bible, opened to the
passage: ‘Come unto Me, all ye that travail and are heavy laden, and I will
give ye peace’.89 Her final actions immortalized her reputation as a pure and
pious daughter of Protestantism. Moreover, Parliament further enhanced
the tragedy of her death when the agreement to her long-awaited release
to her sister Princess Mary arrived within days of her death.
Royalists used Parliament’s ill treatment of Elizabeth—of their ‘Temper-
ance’, the most mature, religious, and intelligent of princesses, the most pure
and pious of women—as fuel for their antagonism. Elizabeth was denied the
traditional Church of England funeral rites and a proper royal burial; instead,
her body was placed in a simple grave in the cellar of a church marked only
by the letters ‘E.S.’. Officially, Parliament banned anyone from mourning the
late King’s daughter, but they could not fully suppress the public affection
for her. English mourners wrote elegies in her honour that commemorated
her purity and piety, while each European court officially lamented her
loss. Devastated by Elizabeth’s death, Henrietta Maria could not even find
solace in knowing that her daughter had finally found freedom from her
sufferings.90 Eventually, however, both royalists and parliamentarians
began to distance themselves from Elizabeth: the former because she was

83 Green, Lives of the Princesses, 372.

84 Green, Lives of the Princesses, 372.
85 Cole, A Flower of Purpose, 19–20.
86 Green, Lives of the Princesses, 384.
87 Cole, A Flower of Purpose, 20.
88 Green, Lives of the Princesses, 384.
89 Cole, A Flower of Purpose, 21. The passage is Matthew 11:28.
90 Cole, A Flower of Purpose, 21–22.
‘Elizabeth the Forgot ten’ 221

a constant reminder of their loss and suffering, and the latter because
honouring her, a royal, was in direct conflict with their political ideologies.91

Elizabeth ‘the Forgotten’?

206 years after Elizabeth’s death, church workers accidentally discovered her
grave. Once royal officials confirmed her identity, Queen Victoria reburied
Elizabeth in a manner fitting her status as a royal princess. In recognition
of her pious reputation, Victoria commissioned a Carrara marble sculpture
of the young girl, in a simple white nightgown, lying with her head on her
bible with a shattered portcullis above her, signifying her final freedom
and ‘erected as a token of respect for her virtues and of sympathy for her
misfortunes’.92 As had been the case in her life, her story inspired nineteenth-
century artists and writers. Despite the obstacles she had faced in her short
life, Elizabeth had made her mark on history. When she was born, she
served as a symbolic promise of the monarchy’s prosperous future, and she
grew into a popular religious figure known for her seemingly natural piety,
and her remarkable intellect and scholarly interests. Moreover, Elizabeth
earned the respect of both royalists and parliamentarians alike. Despite
these impressive achievements for one so young, and under such duress, she
is often excluded from the historical narrative of the seventeenth century.
Her complexity as a historical figure invites new perspectives of the role of
women, and the monarchy as a family, during the Civil War period. A richer
understanding of this period of British history could emerge once the impact
of the life and actions of this otherwise dismissed woman are recognized.

Works Cited

Primary Sources

Akkerman, Nadine, ed. The Correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia.

Volume 2: 1632–1642. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Cartwright, William. ‘The Birth of the King’s Fourth Child (1634)’. In The Life
and Poems of William Cartwright, edited by R. Cullis Coffin, 78. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1918.

91 Jacobs, ‘Robbing His Shepherdess’, 227.

92 Strickland, Lives of the Tudor and Stuart Princesses, 380.
222  Jessica L. Becker

Cleveland, John. ‘On Princess Elizabeth Born the Night before New Year’s Day’. In
Minor Poets of the Caroline Period, Volume III, edited by George Saintsbury, 85.
London: Oxford University Press, 1921.
Crashaw, Richard. ‘Lady Elizabeth (1634)’. In Steps to the Temple, Delights of the
Muses, and Other Poems, edited by Alfred Rayney Waller, 167–168. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1904.
Crashaw, Richard. ‘Upon the Birth of the Princesse Elizabeth’. In Steps to the Temple,
Delights of the Muses, and Other Poems, edited by Alfred Rayney Waller, 357–358.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904.
Greenhill, William. An Exposition of the Five First Chapters of the Prophet Ezekiel.
London, 1649.
House of Lords Journal, Volume 6: 1643. London, 1767–1830.

Secondary Sources

Anselment, Raymond A. ‘“Clouded Majesty”: Richard Lovelace, Sir Peter Lely and
the Royalist Spirit’. Studies in Philology 86, no. 3 (1989): 367–387.
Cole, Susan. A Flower of Purpose: A Memoir of Princess Elizabeth Stuart. Ilford: The
Royal Stuart Society, 1975.
Doran, Susan, and Thomas S. Freeman. ‘Introduction.’ In The Myth of Elizabeth,
edited by Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman, 1–23. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2003.
Goodwin, Gordon. ‘Elizabeth, Princess (1635–1650)’. Revised by Sean Kelsey. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2004. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/8637.
Green, Mary Anne Everett. Lives of the Princesses of England: From the Norman
Conquest, Volume 6. London, 1855.
Jacobs, Nicole. ‘Robbing His Shepherdess: Princess Elizabeth, John Milton, and the
Memory of Charles I in the Eikon Basilike and Eikonoklastes’. Criticism 54, no.
2 (Summer 2012): 227–255.
Levin, Carole, Anna Riehl Bertolet, and Jo Eldridge Carney, eds. A Biographical
Encyclopedia of Early Modern Englishwomen: Exemplary Lives and Memorable
Acts, 1500–1650. London: Routledge, 2017.
Miola, Robert. ‘Early Modern Antigones: Receptions, Refractions, Replays’. Classical
Receptions Journal 6, no. 2 (2104): 221–244.
Porter, Linda. Royal Renegades: The Children of Charles I and the English Civil Wars.
New York: St. Martin’s, 2018.
Sharpe, Kevin. Image Wars: Promoting Kings and Commonwealths in England,
1603–1660. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010.
Strickland, Agnes. Lives of the Tudor and Stuart Princesses. London, 1888.
‘Elizabeth the Forgot ten’ 223

Thornton-Cook, E. Royal Elizabeths: The Romance of Five Princesses 1464–1840. New

York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1929.
Whitaker, Katie. A Royal Passion: The Turbulent Marriage of King Charles I of England
and Henrietta Maria of France. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012.

About the author

Jessica L. Becker received her MA in English Literature, and her BA in English

Literature and History, with a minor in Classics, from Wright State University.
Her scholarly interests focus on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century British
literature and history, with special interests in the culture, politics, and
people during the reign of Charles I.
 Epilogue
The Early Modern Edge in the
Twenty-first Century
11. Catalina de Erauso—‘the Lieutenant
Nun’—at the Turn of the Twenty-First
Century
Eva Mendieta

Abstract
This chapter discusses recent scholarship on Catalina de Erauso—‘the
Lieutenant Nun’—one of the more controversial figures of the early sev-
enteenth century. Erauso fled from a convent at age fifteen; from then on,
she dressed as a man and lived a life of travel, violence, and adventure. Her
autobiography replicates the fluidity of her gender assignment, showing
elements from different religious and secular writings. Both the person
and the text are characterized by their defying of categorization. In
Erauso, binary oppositions such as male/female, saint/sinner, Basque/
Spaniard seem to be subsumed. Erauso’s Basque origin emerges as a
key element for the understanding of her life, and her story becomes a
privileged documentation of the Basque experience in America in the
early modern era.

Keywords: early modern Spain; Basques in America; transvestism; gender

identity; seventeenth-century autobiographies; literary genre classification

In the early modern period, political borders were often in flux, and people
were ‘strongly aware of the potentially shifting, unstable nature of borders,
which are arbitrary and political’.1 This fluctuation, however, was not
confined merely to political boundaries. Humans have long understood
that edges—whether they be of countries, between the spiritual and the
secular, and indeed between categories of classification and study—are, in

1 Hopkins, Renaissance Drama on the Edge, 106.

Hopkins, L. and A. Norrie (eds.), Women on the Edge in Early Modern Europe, Amsterdam University
Press, 2019.
doi 10.5117/9789462987500/ch11
228  Eva Mendie ta

the words of Lisa Hopkins, ‘arbitrary and subject to radical change through
time’.2 While this collection has shown that gender was an important and
sometimes impermeable edge in early modern Europe, this edge has also
been perpetuated by scholars in the proceeding centuries, with ‘arbitrary’
edges created to limit and contain women deemed contradictory and
conflicted. One of the best examples of this is Catalina de Erauso, ‘the
Lieutenant Nun’. The subsequent retellings of her story, and the way that
edges were reinforced by successive generations of scholars, help to show
what was at stake in the various and different ways in which early modern
women might be on the edge.

***

Catalina de Erauso, the daughter of a Basque family of noble ancestry,

was born in Donostia-San Sebastián in 1592. At the age of 4, she entered
the convent of San Sebastián El Antiguo, like two of her sisters had done
before her. She lived there until, following an argument with a nun who
beat her, she went into the chamber of her aunt, the Mother Superior, stole
the keys of the convent, and escaped forever. Catalina was fifteen years
old. Just outside the convent, she hid in a nearby forest, cut her hair, and
fashioned a man’s garb from the nun’s habit she was wearing. She would
live and dress as a man for the rest of her days. When she discarded her
nun’s habit, Erauso also symbolically discarded the restrictions of her sex,
and began a personal adventure in which she tried to discover her true self.
A woman, yet a man; a soldier, yet a nun; Spanish, yet Basque, Catalina de
Erauso embodied some of the very real contradictions and conflicts of her
historical period, and she transcended them in her own way.
After leaving the convent, Erauso travelled through Spain, working for
several masters, and ended up in Seville where she sailed to the New World.
There, she spent her adult life; and there, without her sexual identity ever
being discovered, she starred in the picaresque and military adventures that
brought her fame. In Latin America, we learn of Erauso’s tumultuous life,
punctuated by numerous masters, battles, travels, gambling fights, slayings,
and frequent problems with the law. Although the periods of relative calm
are few, her success as a soldier and as a merchant is noteworthy. Through
many vicissitudes and hardships, Erauso endured. Conflict, struggle, and
flight appear time after time as motifs in her narrative. She was sentenced
to death twice; she killed seven people, including her own brother; got into

2 Hopkins, Renaissance Drama on the Edge, 15.

Catalina de Er auso —‘the Lieutenant Nun’ 229

gambling scrapes, and into more than one unsavoury relationship with
women. For many years, no one suspected she was a female until, badly
wounded and at death’s door, she revealed herself in a confession to the
Bishop of Guamanga and overnight became a celebrity, ‘The Lieutenant Nun’:

Your Grace, all of this that I have told you […] in truth, it is not so. The truth
is this: that I am a woman, that I was born in such and such a place, the
daughter of this man and this woman, that at a certain age I was placed
in a convent with a certain aunt; that I was raised there and took the veil
and became a novice, and that when I was about to profess my final vows,
I left the convent for such and such a reason, went to such and such place,
undressed myself, dressed myself up again, cut my hair, traveled here
and there, embarked, disembarked, hustled, killed, maimed, wreaked
havoc, and roamed about until coming to a stop in this very instant, at
the feet of Your Eminence.3

Though this moment marks the end of her public deception, Erauso did not
alter the way she lived, dressed, and felt, consistent with her self-definition as
a man. The public disclosure of her sexual identity made her wildly famous,
as she became ‘the celebratory object of contemporary curiosity and the pro-
tagonist of enduring fame’.4 While her story appeared in a variety of letters,
notices, and broadsides, the autobiography Erauso arguably wrote during
her trip back to Spain is the text that carried her story through the centuries.
We do not know with certainty who actually wrote the autobiography of
Catalina de Erauso: all the known editions are based on copies of an original
that was never found, and since we have no manuscript that dates from the
sixteenth century, the history of the text is unknown. However, the wealth
of historically authentic details is so great that one has to believe that they
were narrated by an eye-witness. While some of the episodes portrayed are
widely accepted to be fabricated additions to her life, the authenticity of
her existence and of her many travels and jobs—particularly her military
service—are documented by multiple records and witnesses’ accounts.5
Nun and soldier, enveloped in the myth of the New World, a leading player
in duels, in real and legendary battles, Catalina de Erauso’s life story had all
the ingredients to make it wildly popular in both Spain and Latin America,

3 Stepto and Stepto, ‘Introduction’, 64.

4 Douglass, ‘Introduction’, 11.
5 Vallbona, Vida i sucesos; and Velasco, The Lieutenant Nun, include copies of many of these
documents.
230  Eva Mendieta

and for it to even reach other European countries. When she returned to
Spain, she was received as a celebrity. She travelled to Cádiz, Seville, and
Madrid, where she hid from crowds who had come to see her dressed as a
man. Upon her return to Europe, she had two objectives: first, that King
Philip IV recognize her military service and grant her a pension, in which
she succeeded: ‘They received me and ruled in my favor, granting me at
the King’s suggestion, a pension of eight hundred crowns a year, which is a
little less than the sum I had asked for’.6 She knew how to make the most
of the social values of her era, and so she stated publicly that her motives
were patriotic and religious:

The Lieutenant doña Catalina de Erauso […] says that of the last nineteen
years, she has spent fifteen in the service of Your Majesty in the wars of
the kingdom of Chile and the Indians of Peru, having traveled to these
parts in a man’s garb owing to her particular inclination to take up arms
in the defense of the Catholic faith and in service to your Majesty.7

The King was quite aware of the propagandistic value attached to the fact
that even women were inspired to fight under his banner, and granting a
reward was used as a way of promoting the Crown.
After securing a pension, Erauso travelled to Rome to request dispensation
from Pope Urban VIII to continue dressing in men’s clothing:

I left Genoa for Rome. I kissed the feet of the Blessed Pope, Urban the
Eighth; and told him in brief and as well as I could the story of my life
and travels, the fact that I was a woman, and that I had kept my virginity.
His Holiness seemed amazed to hear such things, and graciously gave me
leave to pursue my life in men’s clothing.8

Thus, she accomplished her second objective. Her virginity, verified by the
Church and by the King, was what protected her from civil and ecclesiastical
punishment. Although she had passed for a man, because she was a virgin
she had not challenged the social order. Erauso’s narrative leaves her in the
streets of Naples, but we know, through other documents, that shortly after
she returned to Latin America, from whence she would never return. Having

6 Erauso, The Lieutenant Nun, 74.

7 ‘Catalina de Erauso, petition presented to the Council of the Indies’, in Vallbona, Vida i
sucesos, 131. My emphasis.
8 Erauso, The Lieutenant Nun, 78.
Catalina de Er auso —‘the Lieutenant Nun’ 231

procured the recognition of church and state, in 1630, she returned to the
New World and spent the last twenty years of her life in Mexico working
as a muleteer, using the name Antonio de Erauso, until her death in 1650.
The interest in this radically unconventional and original woman has
varied, mirroring the cultural and philosophical world associated with a
given particular historical period. Following her extraordinary popularity
during her own lifetime, we find no mention of her after her death, and dur-
ing the Enlightenment her figure was consigned to almost total oblivion. In
the eighteenth century, she stirred the curiosity of only a few learned scholars
who pored over documents and historical accounts. In 1829, this all changed
when Joaquín María Ferrer published his Paris edition of the Historia de la
monja alférez Doña Catalina de Erauso escrita por ella misma (The Story of
the Lieutenant Nun Doña Catalina de Erauso, written by herself). Ferrer
became Erauso’s adoptive father, and almost two centuries after her death,
he launched her again into the orbit of historical celebrity. A year after
its publication, it appeared in both French and German translations. The
original work spawned innumerable re-workings, translations, plays, and
poetry, all based on the protagonist. Since the end of the twentieth-century,
the re-awakened critical interest in the Lieutenant Nun was followed by
numerous adaptations of her life in novels, movies, and plays, and her
complete autobiography, or the surviving fragments of it, are now included
in an increasing number of contemporary anthologies and textbooks.9
By the end of the twentieth century, scholarship on Erauso began to
show an increasing awareness of the identity politics implicit in narrating
the lives of individuals who transgress traditional prescriptions for gender
roles and sex assignment. As scholars sought to analyse both peninsular
and colonial texts with complex issues of gender, ethnicity, race, class, and
sexuality, they found in Catalina de Erauso and her autobiography fertile
ground for their investigations. The text has now made its way into the
literary and cultural canon of the Spanish Golden Age and Latin American
Colonial texts. Contemporary scholarship has moved from a focus on gender
identity to concentrate on the polyphony of textual traditions present
in the autobiography. In many ways, the text, as well as the person, defy
categorization. Catalina places herself away from binary oppositions of
gender and sexual preference (male/female, homosexual/heterosexual),
but in her also disappear the traditional national and occupational borders
(Europe/America; Spanish/Basque; arms/letters), to name a few. This same

9 Mendieta, In Search of Catalina de Erauso, 22. See Velasco, The Lieutenant Nun, for a detailed
review of nineteenth- and twentieth-century adaptations of Erauso’s story.
232  Eva Mendie ta

duality is replicated in the difficulty posed by the identification of the

literary genre to which her autobiography belongs. What follows is a review
of this and other approaches that have dominated the critical attention on
Erauso at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

New Findings in the Documentation of Erauso’s Story

Research of the autobiography of Catalina de Erauso has been hampered

because the original manuscript of the text has never been found. In 1784,
Juan Bautista Muñoz made the oldest known copy of the original, which
bore the title Vida i sucesos de la Monja Alférez (Life and Adventures of The
Lieutenant Nun) and donated it to the Biblioteca de la Real Academia de
la Historia. The same manuscript is the one reproduced by Joaquín María
Ferrer in the first (1829) and second (1838) editions, under the title Historia
de la Monja Alferez, Catalina de Erauso, escrita por ella misma (The Story of
the Lieutenant Nun Doña Catalina de Erauso, written by herself). Ferrer’s
edition was later to be the basis of numerous translations and re-workings. To
these documents, it was necessary to add two new manuscripts discovered
in 1995 by Pedro Rubio Merino in the Archivo Capitular of Seville. These
manuscripts are copies that date either from the end of the seventeenth or
the beginning of the eighteenth century, and, in some respects, they contain
significant variations from both Vida i sucesos (1784) and Historia (1829).
While all these early versions of Erauso’s autobiography do relate similar
events, ‘we can see by the minor variations among the copies that her story
has been open to interpretation from the very beginning’.10 The very history
of the text, as it circulated in multiple copies of an original that was never
found, adds to the uncertainty and confusion about her life.
Ever since the appearance of Ferrer’s first edition, the publication of
this work has usually been accompanied by other documents that attest
to the historical truthfulness not only of Erauso’s life story, but also to the
veracity of the adventures narrated in her biography. The historicity of
most of the characters has been confirmed in documents and in records of
various kinds. Among the most important are the two Peticiones made by
Erauso to the Crown in which she asks to be compensated for the military
service rendered, and a third in which she asks to be compensated for having
been robbed while she was in France. These manuscripts can be found
in the Real Academia de la Historia de Madrid, and the originals survive

10 Velasco, The Lieutenant Nun, 5.

Catalina de Er auso —‘the Lieutenant Nun’ 233

in the Archivo General de Indias. Accompanying Erauso’s Peticiones are

numerous affidavits made by witnesses, two Relaciones (news pamphlets,
or broadsides), published in 1625, and three Relaciones published in Mexico.
These accounts, written by different anonymous authors and sold to the
public, serialized Erauso’s life, narrating it in instalments. To grasp the
extent of Erauso’s popularity in her time on both sides of the Atlantic, one
only has to notice that in these Relaciones, her name is not even mentioned
because it is assumed that everyone knew who she was.11
A recent significant finding was Gabriel Andrés’ recovery in 2014 of four
previously unknown pamphlets printed in Seville between 1618 and 1625,
and so contemporary to the life of Erauso. The survival, and then loss, of
these documents had been recorded by publishers of Erauso’s biography,
and their recovery is particularly significant as efforts to find original
manuscripts from the early seventeenth century have previously proven
unsuccessful. The oldest document, dated 1618, was found in Madrid, at the
library of the Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana, and is a chapter
from a letter sent to Cadiz and Seville from Cartagena de Indias, giving an
account of Erauso’s life.12 Andrés discovered a second set of manuscripts
in the Biblioteca Nacional; they consist of another copy of the same letter,
along with copies of three Relaciones published in Seville, all dated 1625. The
study of these manuscripts will give new insights on the textual journey that
led from those pamphlets to other textual genres, ‘in particular Catalina’s
supposed autobiography that was continually revised across the years, and
also the production of narrative (and also theatrical) texts that go to make
up, until modern times, the profile of this legendary figure in the Iberian
and Latin American collective imagination’.13 A first analysis of all known
documents to this day brings Andrés to postulate two chronological points
in time where the interest of publishers and public tend to coalesce. The
first one took place around 1625, with a cycle of publications centred on
Erauso’s return from America to Spain, when she was acclaimed in cities and
salons by an expectant public, fascinated by her brave deeds.14 The second

11 Merrim, ‘Catalina de Erauso’, 179.

12 ‘Capítulo de una de las cartas que diversas personas enviaron desde Cartagena de las Indias
a algunos amigos suyos a las ciudades de Sevilla y Cádiz. En que dan cuenta cómo una monja en
hábito de hombre anduvo gran parte de España y de Indias’. Published in Seville by Juan Serrano
de Vargas, 1618. Pérez-Villanueva had access to a 1903 reprint of the Seville original housed at
the New York Public Library in the rare book division. Pérez-Villanueva, The Life of Catalina de
Erauso, 29.
13 Andrés, ‘Construcciones autobiográficas’, 163–164.
14 Andrés, ‘Construcciones autobiográficas’, 165.
234  Eva Mendie ta

one is set around 1653, and involves the publication of a cycle of broadsides
that in part are a new edition of the old material, but add the last part of
her life in Mexico. It seems that by 1625, the basic elements of Catalina’s
biography were already consolidated, a situation that was not yet reached
in the recently found letter from 1618, where some last names diverge from
the ones that appeared in the 1625 broadsides from Seville.
These new findings bring us again to the realization that the history
of the Lieutenant Nun is really the history of the different versions of her
life.15 All we have are multiple versions—copies of copies, really—leaving
us wondering whether an original text ever existed: ‘In many ways the
original manuscript, if we can speak of such a thing, is very much like the
transvestite author’.16

New Perspectives of Analysis at the Intersection of Gender and

Genre

Scholarship by the end of the twentieth-century turned the attention to

Erauso’s sexual and gender identity as focal points of the analysis, and Erauso
is now regarded as an ‘exemplary subject for the study of gender and sexuality
in seventeenth-century colonial Latin America and imperial Spain’.17 This
new critical interest was driven in part by efforts to recover women writers
from the past, and was facilitated by new editions of the text, particularly
Rima de Vallbona’s 1992 rigorous edition and in-depth textual study, as well
as Michele and Gabriel Stepto’s 1996 translation into English.18 Feminist and
gender-aware critiques have highlighted approaches that favour the cultural
significance of Erauso’s cross-dressing, her gender transgression, and her
lesbian identity, most notably in the work of Garber, Merrim, Perry, and
Velasco.19 In her influential study on Catalina de Erauso’s transgenderism
and lesbian desire, Velasco analyses the changes in the construction and
interpretation of the ‘Lieutenant Nun’ in a variety of artistic forms from
the seventeenth century to the present; the author concludes that ‘Erauso’s

15 Castro Morales, ‘Catalina de Erauso’, 228.

16 Pancrazio, ‘Transvested Autobiography’, 458.
17 Goldmark, ‘Reading Habits’, 215. See also: Paganini, ‘La Monja Alférez’, 170–171.
18 In 1992, Tellechea, Doña Catalina de Erauso, provided another edition of the text, accompanied
with multiple documents and an extended study.
19 Pérez-Villanueva remarks that some of the translation and editorial decisions made in
Stepto and Stepto translation into English were a factor in highlighting the sexual content of
the story. Perez-Villanueva, The Life of Catalina de Erauso, 44.
Catalina de Er auso —‘the Lieutenant Nun’ 235

life becomes the mirror in which each reader/spectator finds a reflection of

his or her own preferences and values’.20 As such, during the seventeenth
century, ‘her hybrid nature allowed the church and state to present her as
their symbol of Catholic imperial pride’, while at the same time mainstream
audiences ‘were intrigued by the swashbuckling action and erotic nature
of both her clothing and her interaction with other women’.21 By the end of
the twentieth century, ‘representations gradually reappropriate a lesbian
profile of the protagonist’ and an interest in her as a transgendered figure.22
In this sense, Erauso’s efforts to inhabit a masculine identity invite ‘modern
critics to assess her psychological and sexual identity through the prism
of twentieth-first-century sexual politics’.23 Erauso’s gender ambiguity is
felt to this day, and is expressed in the conflict critics feel when having to
choose pronouns to refer to the narrator, some opting for a dual system that
includes both genders, in order to ‘avoid having to take an either/or position
regarding Erauso’s “real gender”’.24
An important point of departure in some recent studies is an acknowledge-
ment of early modern conceptions of sex and gender as fluid categories that
show a level of indeterminacy absent in the binary system that characterized
later theoretical approaches. The galenic anatomic theories follow a ‘one sex
model’, ‘where two genders correspond to but one sex, where the boundaries
between male and female are of degree and not of kind’.25 Contemporary
medical treatises postulated that a woman could turn into a man through a
burst of heat, causing her interior male-like genitals to be expelled. The body
was seen as something less fixed, more mutable, and thus the transformation
from one sex to another appeared to be plausible.26 Rutter-Jensen utilizes
these theories to explain the successful transition of Erauso into a male
persona, and the acceptance of her tranvestism by institutions. Sex and
gender are seen as sociological, not ontological, categories: but for this
transformation to be valid, the necessary physical characteristics must
occur, and in the case of Catalina, they do not. At this juncture, definitions

20 Velasco, The Lieutenant Nun, 9.

21 Velasco, The Lieutenant Nun, 169.
22 Velasco, The Lieutenant Nun, 169.
23 Howe, Autobiographical Writing, 152. Howe warns against ‘fascination with Erauso’s gender
identification and sexual preferences’ (153), as it can overshadow the narrative of the life and
adventures of the text. Similarly, Pancrazio criticizes ‘appropriating Erauso for a homosexual
or lesbian agenda, rather than examining the implications of cross-dressing’ (‘Transvested
Autobiography’, 469).
24 Pancrazio, ‘Transvested Autobiography’, 455. See also: Howe, Autobiographical Writing, 167.
25 Merrim, ‘Catalina de Erauso’, 14.
26 Mendieta, In Search of Catalina de Erauso, 172.
236  Eva Mendie ta

seem to fail us: Erauso’s ‘transexuality’ ignores physical changes, and the
notions of ‘feminine masculinity’ and ‘transgender’ do not incorporate the
early modern theories of a single sex that permitted the transit from one
gender to the other.27 Erauso’s successful transition into a man depended
then on the representation of masculinity based on a person’s actions, and
not on the birth association between man and masculinity.28 Segas finds
the solution to this conundrum within the text: since her body has not
substantially changed her sex alignment, Erauso’s ‘validation’ as a man is
rendered through a narrative process.29 Part of that process involves the
confusion and convergence in the text of different literary genres, a major
topic in twenty-first century scholarship that will be discussed below.

Vida i sucesos de la Monja Alférez: A Text that defies

Categorization

Most studies of Vida i sucesos have traditionally acknowledged the impos-

sibility of aligning the text with one particular literary genre. The analysis of
the text in terms of the elements it shows from a variety of genres has moved
centre stage in the scholarship at the turn of the twenty-first century.30
Moreover, the literary indeterminacy of the text is seen as echoing the
confused identity of the protagonist. As already discussed, Segas relates
the ‘validation’ of Erauso as a man with the presence in the text of various
popular literary genres and their archetypical characters; through this
narrative process, a picaresque story morphs into an account of merits
(relación de méritos), a woman into a man, a forbidden conduct into some-
thing rewarded and celebrated.31 In her search for an epithet that captures
Erauso’s many dual dimensions, Segas settles for ‘trans’: text and character
are ‘trans’, ‘transgender’/‘transgenre’, and they force the reader to abandon
a logic based on gender or genre and to rethink the arbitrariness of systems
based on them.32

27 Rutter-Jensen, ‘La transformación transatlántica’, 92. Zinni, ‘Cuerpo transvestido’, 80–95,

considers Erauso’s sexual identity and narrative crisis in the context of the New World, as she
emerges as the founding figure of a new identity: the New World tranvestite.
28 Rutter-Jensen, ‘La transformación transatlántica’, 90.
29 Segas, ‘Más allá de los problemas de género(s)’, 214.
30 Pérez-Villanueva, The Life of Catalina de Erauso, provides a recent theoretical framework
to examine Vida i sucesos in relation to Golden age first-person singular narratives.
31 Segas, ‘Más allá de los problemas de género(s)’, 219.
32 Segas, ‘Más allá de los problemas de género(s)’, 203.
Catalina de Er auso —‘the Lieutenant Nun’ 237

Erauso’s image as a juvenile delinquent who robs, murders, and deceives

as she travels incessantly from one place to another evokes the principal
characteristics of the picaresque novel, and as such has been traditionally
classified. The first five chapters of the book, in particular, read like a
picaresque novel, a type of novel where a young rogue character leaves
the familiar behind for a life of drifting. In a first moment, the pícaro stays
closer to home, but moves further away as time goes by. He lives by his
wits, working for different masters, and through his adventures, paints
a portrait of the varied social types he comes across. Much like a pícaro,
after escaping from the convent, for three years Erauso moves from one
city to the next, serving different masters, amidst violent adventures and
gamble fights, and surviving, in no small way thanks to her wits, skills,
and natural intelligence.33 In her 2014 monograph on Catalina de Erauso,
Pérez-Villanueva compares Vida i sucesos with other picaresque narratives,
and concludes that, while Vida i sucesos and Erauso may embody some
picaresque characteristics, ultimately it is a different kind of text. In Erauso’s
case, narrator and protagonist coincide in the same voice, taking the shape
of autobiography, while picaresque novels are not autobiographical, as
their protagonists ‘lack historical referents for their narrator-protagonists
and deliberately follow fictional traditions of prophecy, caricature, and a
humiliating form of humor to provide a satirical view of Spanish society’.34 In
Vida i sucesos, ‘while comic elements are included, the narration ultimately
respects the character development of the protagonist’, which is taken as
aim of the narration.35 The text also lacks the social criticism and plural
structure characteristic of picaresque texts.36 Nonetheless, the life of Catalina
de Erauso, with its cross-dressing and boundary-crossing adventures does
show, ‘a hint of the picaresque’.37
A better structural and thematic frame is found in soldiers’ autobiog-
raphies, where the writer’s motive is to foster and record his heroic ac-
complishments, often supported by verifiable historical documents. An
example of such documentation would be the petitions Erauso sent to
the King, which include the names and background of her commanders,
‘list military appointments, and mention memorable exploits, all of which

33 See: Vallbona, Vida i sucesos, 47–48, 52, 87, 124; Velasco, The Lieutenant Nun, 50–51; Pancrazio,
‘Transvested Autobiography’, 456; Segas, ‘Más allá de los problemas de género(s)’, 210; Merrim,
‘Catalina de Erauso’, 195; and Juárez, El cuerpo vestido, 131.
34 Pérez-Villanueva, The Life of Catalina de Erauso, 106.
35 Pérez-Villanueva, The Life of Catalina de Erauso, 106.
36 Galindo, ‘Historia de un sujeto ejemplar’, 161.
37 Pérez-Villanueva, The Life of Catalina de Erauso, 106.
238  Eva Mendie ta

can be cross-referenced and compared to other available records’.38 The

importance of Erauso’s military career to her life and story also connects
Vida i sucesos with these soldiers’ narratives. Pérez-Villanueva compares
the text with the soldier Alonso de Contreras’s Discurso de mi vida, and she
finds strong similarities; both present ‘a unity of narrator and protagonist
with historically verifiable referents’, and the experiences portrayed are
‘grounded in the lives of the narrators outside the texts’.39 The life of the
narrators in both cases produced official documentation that function
as historical records for key elements of each story, but the differences
are also clear: while Alonso de Contreras’s text develops the protagonist’s
character in the context of a soldier’s life, Erauso defines her story ‘in the
multiple and evolving identities of its subject rather than staying within the
confines of a soldier’s life’. 40 Ultimately, Vida i sucesos is the autobiography
of a woman, not a soldier, ‘and while the text may incorporate a soldier’s
life and a soldier’s narrative style, the text presents a series of episodes that
place greater emphasis on the development of the protagonist’. 41 Further
differences are found in the fact that, unlike most soldiers’ autobiographies,
Erauso’s text is not motivated by failure, but originates instead from a
position of unqualified success, where Erauso does not request, but rather
states, her positive reception by King and Pope.42 Similarly, Vida i sucesos is
not only an account of heroic actions, but it also includes events of Erauso’s
personal life that cannot be encompassed in that frame of discourse. 43 One
such event is Erauso’s confession to the Bishop of Guamanga, an element of
the text that has being associated with yet another type of early modern life
stories, the confessional autobiography. When Catalina, believing herself
to be on her deathbed, makes this confession, she moves from an ‘objective
way of narrating to an emotionally charged passage’. 44 It is true that the
confession to the Bishop connects the text to the nun’s accounts of spiritual
transformation at the behest of her confessor, but what we encounter in this
case is not the repentance of a sinner. On the contrary, Erauso ‘exudes pride
in the accomplishments and adventures related’. 45 Myers points to a role
reversal, when instead of seeing Erauso cry in the face of ‘the manifestation

38 Goetz, ‘Problematics of Gender/Genre’, 96. See also: Juárez, El cuerpo vestido, 131.
39 Pérez-Villanueva, The Life of Catalina de Erauso, 177.
40 Pérez-Villanueva, The Life of Catalina de Erauso, 177.
41 Pérez-Villanueva, The Life of Catalina de Erauso, 177.
42 Harden, ‘Military Labour’, 157.
43 Paganini, ‘La Monja Alférez’, 165.
44 Goetz, ‘Problematics of Gender/Genre’, 98.
45 Howe, Autobiographical Writing, 156.
Catalina de Er auso —‘the Lieutenant Nun’ 239

of God’s grace’, what we witness is actually the bishop’s face streaming

‘with hot tears upon hearing the confession’. 46 Also absent is ‘any sense
of self-reflection or emotional investment in the episodes recounted’, that
would more firmly relate this part of the text to religious autobiographies. 47
Finally, the text also shares some features with the Chronicles, the great
number of relaciones, diaries, and letters written by explorers, sailors, and
officers of the Crown, in the first historical accounts of the New World.
Erauso travelled far and for long periods, an aspect that relates Vida i sucesos
to this type of writing. From the time she abandoned the convent, Erauso
was always on the move. None of her jobs lasted very long, and when they
ended, she was forced to leave in search of a new post. In Spain alone,
and over a period that spans less than three years, she travelled through
Bilbao, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Valladolid, Lizarra, Donostia-San Sebastián, Cádiz,
and Seville. Once in the Americas, the distances she covered increased,
encompassing territories that today belong to Panama, Ecuador, Peru,
Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina. Upon her return to Spain, she took to the road
again, visiting Madrid, Barcelona, France, Rome, and Naples. In Naples, her
story ends. We know, however, that later she returned to Latin America and
worked transporting cattle and merchandise from one place to another until
her death. Pérez-Villanueva compares Vida i Sucesos with an early modern
chronicle, Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios, and finds that in both texts there
is a conflation of narrator and protagonist, and they are both referential
to a real person outside the text. Though grounded in history, both texts
represent a hybridity of fact and fiction told by the subjective first person
of the narration. 48 But other important aspects of the text make this new
categorization also problematic. In the case of the Chronicles, the narrative
is directed to the King, and centred on a journey of geographical discovery,
and ‘it is through the “discovery” of the new land and new people that
Cabeza de Vaca discovers his own narrative voice’. 49 In Erauso’s case, the
text does not contain an intended recipient, and, while the New World also
represents the unknown, ‘Vida i Sucesos, is not a journey of self-discovery
as much as a journey of self-creation’.50
An important issue in this general discussion relates to the eminently
masculine character of the autobiographical genre. Catalina, as a woman,

46 Myers, ‘Writing of the Frontier’, 190.

47 Howe, Autobiographical Writing, 156.
48 Pérez-Villanueva, The Life of Catalina de Erauso, 141.
49 Mendieta, In Search of Catalina de Erauso, 72.
50 Pérez-Villanueva, The Life of Catalina de Erauso, 141–142.
240  Eva Mendie ta

lacks the authority to talk about herself and can only become the subject
of an autobiography if she becomes a man. In the very act of telling her
life, Erauso is manifesting a male identity, thus Erauso ‘both traverses and
transgresses gender roles on more than one level’.51 From this perspective,
the soldiers’ memoirs genre can be seen as the narrative dress that perfectly
matches Erauso’s masculine garb. By choosing a self-representational genre
exclusively associated with the masculine, Erauso hides the female body
‘privileging readings that frame her as masculine’.52 Ultimately, we are
confronted with an autobiography that is also hybrid in the sense that
narrates the life of both, a man and a woman.53
This confluence of genres, along with the problem of gender, has brought
some scholars to question the very autobiographical nature of the text. Based
on the anachronisms and on the dubious historical authenticity of some facts,
Goetz believes the text is in reality a ‘fictional pseudoautobiography’.54 Other
approaches disagree with this perspective, invoking the hybrid and subjec-
tive character of the autobiographical genre, which may include fictional
elements, or point to the specific characteristics of the genre in the early
modern era.55 For example, Lejeune’s requirement that the autobiographical
text provide a focus on the individual life, ‘“in particular the story of his
personality” would have to be rendered as invalid and anachronistic’ when
analysing narratives such as the Chronicles, the soldiers’ narratives, and
the picaresque novel.56
Pancrazio considers that, regardless of who actually wrote the original
manuscript, the notion of apocrypha is already inscribed into the reading
of the text: ‘How can Vida i Sucesos be Catalina’s autobiography when it is
the story of Antonio’s exploits? […] His was the life that she did not live’.57
Catalina cannot be the autobiographical author of Antonio’s story, because
‘even if Catalina penned the work with her own hand, she can only forge
Antonio’s signature’.58 The autobiographical character of the text is further
compromised by the intrinsic ‘effacement, lack, and illegibility of Erauso’s

51 Howe, Autobiographical Writing, 157. See also: Juárez, El cuerpo vestido, 130; and Myers,
‘Writing of the Frontier’, 190.
52 Kark, ‘Latent Selfhood’, 528–529.
53 Juárez, El cuerpo vestido, 130.
54 Goetz, ‘Problematics of Gender/Genre’, 94.
55 For example, see: Juárez, El cuerpo vestido.
56 Pérez-Villanueva, The Life of Catalina de Erauso, 54.
57 Pancrazio, ‘Transvested Autobiography’, 472.
58 Pancrazio, ‘Transvested Autobiography’, 464–465.
Catalina de Er auso —‘the Lieutenant Nun’ 241

female persona’.59As a result, the autobiographical pact between author,

narrator, and protagonist is doubly confounded and we are left with an
author that ‘neither corresponds to the narrator, the protagonist, nor his
and her own self. How can critics speak of anything but apocrypha?’60 In
other words, we are left with the puzzling enigma of decoding a man who
writes as a woman pretending to be a man, a type of literary transvestism.61
Recent scholarship has thus emphasized how Erauso’s gender, and the
genre of the text, are infused with the same hybrid quality. The text is
problematic at the intersection of gender and genre: its generic characteristics
are uncertain, and it is ‘assumed to have been written by a person whose
gender identification is equally suspect’.62 Ultimately, ‘the voice of Erauso
in not that of a nun, or a soldier, or a pícara. Rather, it is the voice of a hybrid
character, a singular personality embodying multiple identities’.63

Erauso and Basque Identity in Early Modern Spain

The relevance of Erauso’s Basque identity in the narrative of her life has been
traditionally acknowledged, but recent scholarship has emphasized the
significance of this text for the study of the Basque presence in Spain and the
New World at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth
centuries.64 Erauso’s life appears in Vida i sucesos as a representative Basque
person of her time, and her life ranks as a privileged portrait of the colonial
society, and of the role played in it by the Basques. In Douglass’s words,
Erauso’s narrative ‘demonstrates the individuation of Basque ethnicity for
strategic (often self-defensive) purposes in the everyday life of the Hispanic
world’65 and, in this regard, ‘Catalina’s story is an illuminating window on
a largely undocumented process’.66
Central to this approach are the different layers of support Erauso received
from a Basque collectivity that is never too far away. During the historical
period that concerns us, Spain had only recently begun to exist as a modern

59 Pancrazio, ‘Transvested Autobiography’, 472.

60 Pancrazio, ‘Transvested Autobiography’, 472.
61 Pancrazio, ‘Transvested Autobiography’, 473.
62 Goetz, ‘Problematics of Gender/Genre’, 91–92. See also: Howe, Autobiographical Writing,
151.
63 Pérez-Villanueva, The Life of Catalina de Erauso, 177.
64 For a more detailed study of this perspective, see: Mendieta, In Search of Catalina de Erauso.
65 Douglass, ‘Introduction’, 12.
66 Douglass, ‘Introduction’, 12.
242  Eva Mendieta

state, and was constructing a national identity that had no relationship

to the respective identities of the various regions that comprised it. This
reality was particularly strongly felt in America, where the political ties
among fellow ‘compatriots’ happens among peoples who do not know each
other, from very distant geographical areas, as opposed to the community
of neighbours of the past.67 The text repeatedly foregrounds the advantages
that belonging to the Basque collectivity has for Erauso in the course of her
life. This national group is defined by strong and deep social networks of
solidarity: networks that, for example, assured her a passage on a sailing
ship destined for colonial America, provided employment upon reaching
the continent, and on more than one occasion saved her life.68 Time and
time again, Erauso turns to her countrymen when she is seeking help,
employment, lodging, or protection, all of which she receives on the grounds
of her origin.
By virtue of the education she received, the kinds of work she did, the
language she spoke, and the social relationships she cultivated, Erauso was
a representative Basque person of the period. From the moment she leaves
the convent, to her final trip back to America, Erauso emerges as a subject
critically connected with a Basque tradition and with a community that
facilitates her life. When Erauso abandons the convent at age fifteen and
journeys through Spain and America, she will not be blazing new trails
in her journeys, but will follow instead itineraries determined by factors
that had shaped the social and economic history of her community of
origin. It is not by chance, for example, that during her travels in Spain,
her steps led her to Seville and Cádiz. Documents show that her parents
and grandparents, like many other neighbours from her native city, had a
long-standing tradition of maritime and commercial ties with Andalusian
seaports and with its Basque colony. Similarly, her passage to the New
World followed the steps of many other countrymen, including four of her
brothers, and was made possible through the intervention of a captain,
who was ‘a native of my land’.69 The assistance provided by the Basque
collectivity does not stop with the facilitation of her travels, but is even
more repeated and systematic when we consider her ‘job history’ in the
New World. It comes as no surprise that the four merchants for whom she

67 Galindo, ‘Historia de un sujeto ejemplar’, 163.

68 Mendieta, In Search of Catalina de Erauso, 14. See also: Segas, ‘Más allá de los problemas de
género(s)’, 228–231.
69 Mendieta, In Search of Catalina de Erauso, 57–81; Tellechea, Doña Catalina de Erauso, 39–59.
Catalina de Er auso —‘the Lieutenant Nun’ 243

worked upon arriving to America were Basques.70 A Basque was also the
Chief Commander of the regiment in which Erauso started her military
career. Most of the activities Erauso performed fell within the professions
traditionally associated with the Basques, such as those connected with
the mining and commercial sectors, as well as the so-called ‘oficios de
pluma’, professions that involve keeping written records of bureaucratic
and administrative services. But perhaps the most dramatic impact of
Basque networks of support is evidenced when we consider Erauso’s many
scrapes with the law and how she managed to get out of them and save her
neck, thanks to the intervention of other vizcaínos (Biscayans), as they
were generically called. Be it in her many gambling fights, her quarrels of
honour, or the times when she falls victim of false accusations, it becomes
abundantly clear that, without the intervention of other Basques, Erauso
would not have emerged unscathed.
Galindo suggests that the relevance of Erauso’s Basque identity in the
text can be seen as a means to portray herself as an exemplary subject of the
King. Her Basque origin gives Erauso the frame to foreground all the qualities
that the Basque contingent was supposed to have added to the Imperial
enterprise, such as ‘honour, courage, their warring and commercial skills,
and their sense of community’.71 Erauso’s shortcomings are thus forgotten
in the light of the Basque contribution to the maintenance of the Spanish
power in the colonies. She appears, then, to be occupying the ambiguous
role of being hailed as a banner of the Basque ‘nationalist’ cause, with her
constant references to the Basque community in America, and also as a
national symbol of the Spanish Empire, as she promoted national unity
and alliance to the ecclesiastical and political powers.72
Erauso found herself involved in events in which, for good or for bad, her
compatriots as a collective group played decisive roles. She availed herself of
the protection that her Basque identity provided, and this advantage assured
her survival in a life that was full of adventure and recurrent insecurity.
In the turbulent and dynamic seventeenth-century Baroque world Erauso
inhabits, the loyalty of a well-defined regional community was decidedly an
advantage, particularly for a character who, through her own transgressive
actions, placed herself on the outer edges of society.73

70 Mendieta, In Search of Catalina de Erauso, 83–102.

71 ‘el honor, el valor, sus habilidades guerreras y comerciales, y su sentido de comunidad’.
Galindo, ‘Historia de un sujeto ejemplar’, 163.
72 As exemplified by her exchanges with the Bishop of Guamanga, King Philip IV, and Pope
Urban VIII. Galindo, ‘Historia de un sujeto ejemplar’, 165.
73 Mendieta, In Search of Catalina de Erauso, 14.
244  Eva Mendieta

Catalina de Erauso: A Life on the Edge

Critical attention on Erauso and her narrative at the turn of the twenty-first
century stresses the resistance of character and narrative to fit into the
mould of existing categorizations. Binary systems are rendered inadequate,
as they cannot contain a persona and a story that are fascinatingly blurred
at the edges. Erauso is, above all, ‘a quintessential liminal character caught
up within not a single identity crisis but several’, and the narrative of her
life mirrors the same indeterminacy.74 Current perspectives stress the need
to address the hybrid quality of a story that ‘manipulates genres and their
inherent gender-related rules to create a truly unique text’.75 The recovery
of new seventeenth-century manuscripts offers new insights to the textual
journey of Eruso’s life story, and full consideration of the relevance of the
Basque identity of Erauso enriches our understanding of the character
and of the Basque contingent in Early Modern Spain. Ultimately, Erauso
emerges once again as a fascinating subject, still able to uncover new and
compelling levels of significance.

Works Cited

Primary Sources

Erauso, Catalina de. Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New
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Vallbona, Rima de, ed. Vida i sucesos de la Monja Alférez: Autobiografía atribuida
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Andrés, Gabriel. ‘Construcciones autobiográficas y relaciones de sucesos sobre la

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74 Douglass, ‘Introduction’, 11.

75 Myers, Neither Saints nor Sinners, 301.
Catalina de Er auso —‘the Lieutenant Nun’ 245

Castro Morales, Belén. ‘Catalina de Erauso, la monja amazona’. Revista de Crítica

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Myers, Kathleen Ann. ‘Writing of the Frontier: Blurring Gender and Genre in the
Monja Alférez’s Account’. In Mapping Colonial Spanish American: Places and
Commonplaces of Identity, Culture, and Experience, edited by Santa Arias and
Mariselle Meléndez, 181–201. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2002.
Paganini, Mateo. ‘La Monja Alférez, problemáticas de género en el estudio de
época’. Caracol 8 (2014): 158–176.
246  Eva Mendieta

Pancrazio, James. ‘Transvested Autobiography: Apocrypha and the Monja Alférez’.

Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 78 (2001): 455–473.
Pérez-Villanueva, Sonia. The Life of Catalina de Erauso, the Lieutenant Nun: An
early-modern Autobiography. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University
Press, 2014.
Perry, Mary Elizabeth. ‘From Convent to Battlefield: Cross-Dressing and Gendering
the Self in the New World of Imperial Spain’. In Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures,
and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, edited by Josiah Blackmore
and Gregory S. Hutcheson, 394–419. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.
Rutter-Jensen, Chloe. ‘La transformación transatlántica de la monja alférez’. Revista
de Estudios Sociales 28 (2007): 86–95.
Segas, Lise. ‘Más allá de los problemas de género(s): El enigma del reconocimiento
de la Monja Alferez a partir del relato ‘trans’ de la Historia de la Monja Alferez
(1625)’. Studia Aurea 9 (2015): 203–240.
Stepto, Michelle, and Gabriel Stepto. ‘Introduction’. In Lieutenant Nun: Memoir
of a Basque Transvestite in the New World, by Catalina de Erauso. Boston, MA:
Beacon Press, 1996.
Tellechea Idígoras, José Ignacio. Doña Catalina de Erauso: la Monja Alférez, IV
Centenario de su nacimiento. Guipúzcoa: Sociedad Guipuzcoana de Ediciones
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Velasco, Sherry. The Lieutenant Nun: Transgenderism, Lesbian Desire and Catalina
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Zinni, Mariana. ‘Cuerpo transvestido y autoescritura en una biografía colonial:
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Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, Facultad de Filosofía, 2013.

About the author

Eva Mendieta is a native of Bilbao, and Professor of Spanish at Indiana

University Northwest. She completed her PhD in Hispanic Linguistics at
the University at Albany. Her research focuses on the society and culture
of early modern Spain, particularly as it concerns the lives of women in the
Basque Country, and the role played by language in the negotiation of social
roles. A second area of research is devoted to the sociolinguistic study of
Spanish in situations of language contact, particularly the Spanish spoken
in the United States.
 Index
Aesop: 74–80, 82–86 Carter, Old: 103
alchemy: 50, 56n26, 59–60, 61n34, 64, 65n41, Carter, Susan: 103
191–92 Cartwright, William: 206–07
Allaway, Jane: 39 Cary, Mary: 114n4
All-Hallows, London: 114n4, 119, 121 Catherine of Saxe-Lauenburg, Queen-consort
Andrés, Gabriel: 233 of Gustav I: 182
Anna Maria, Princess of Sweden, daughter of Catholics and Catholicism: 84–85, 140, 153, 180,
Gustav I: 182, 184 182, 185, 196, 198, 205–06, 208, 218, 230, 235
Anti-Christian: 129 Cavendish, Elizabeth see Hardwick, Bess of
Apocalyptic: 114, 118, 121 Cavendish, Margaret: 46n3, 52, 166n42
Arboga: 194, 197–98 Cecil, William, Lord Burghley: 168–69
Autobiography: 19, 71–73, 75, 87, 114n5, 120, 227, Cecilia, Princess of Sweden, Margravine of
229, 231–33, 237–38, 240 Baden-Rodemachern, Countess of Arboga:
Autobiography of Catalina de Erauso (Life 21, 163, 179–200
and Adventures of The Lieutenant Nun): Channel Row: 36
21, 227–44; authorship and authenticity: Charitas, daughter of Cecilia: 194, 197, 198
229; literary genres reflected in: 236–41; Charles I, King of England, Scotland, and
manuscripts and editions: 231–32; reception Ireland: 21, 96, 114, 175, 203–18
of: 231; related manuscripts: 232–34 travel Charles II, King of England, Scotland, and
history in: 228–31 Ireland: 219
Charles IX, King of Sweden: 182
Baden: 188, 191, 193, 196–98, 200 Charles VIII, King of France: 144–45, 148
Bakócz, Tamás: 141, 147, 148, 151–52 chemistry: 18, 45–56, 59–64, 66
ballads: 93, 95 Christian II, King of Denmark: 182
Banks, Cuddy: 95, 102, 104–09 Christina, Queen of Sweden: 180
Banks, Old: 97, 99 Christopher Gustav, son of Cecilia: 194
Barker, Roberta: 104 Christopher II, Margrave of Baden-Rodemach-
Basque solidarity and mutual support: in Latin ern: 187, 189, 191, 193–97
American colonies: 243; role of, in Catalina chronicles of the New World, literary genre:
de Erauso’s life: 242–43 239–40
Bayly, Widow: 37 Clarington, Sir Arthur: 104–05
Béguin, Jean: 54, 59 Clarke, Henry: 39
Bell Court: 38 Clarke, Thomas: 34
Bell, James: 181 clergy: 114, 120, 125–27, 129–33, 154, 168, 208
Bernhard, son of Cecilia: 194 clerical: 100, 121
Bernhard III: 197 Cleveland, John: 206
bestiality: 76–77 Cockpit theatre: 102–04
binary systems, identity: 130, 132, 227, 231, 235, Codpiece Court: 36
244 Cole, Marie: 37
Bird, Widow: 37 Collier, Elizabeth: 40
Blackadder II (1986): 15–16 colonial texts, Latin America: 228–34
Boleyn, Anne, Queen-consort of England: 16 consent: 75, 78, 85, 104–05, 161
Botany: 46, 52-56 consummation of marriage: 79, 141
Bourgeois, Louise: 62n36 Conway, Anne: 46n3, 52
Bow Street, London: 38 Cornwall: 120, 124–25, 127–28, 131
Boyle, Robert: 63 Corvinus, Matthias, King of Hungary: 20,
Bridewell Prison: 117, 120 141–44, 146, 155
Brounker, Sir Henry: 161–62, 169 Cosmetics: 45–47, 52, 60, 63
Bulwer, John: 107 Crashaw, Richard: 205n10, 207
Butler, Mary: 37 credit: 106–07, 198
Butler, Rachel: 36 creditors: 180, 191–95, 197–98
Cromwell, Oliver: 114–15, 119–22, 127, 129, 203,
Carisbrooke Castle: 216, 219–20 205, 214
Carl, Prince of Sweden, son of Gustav I: 182 Cronwell, Elizabeth see Sawyer, Elizabeth
Carter, Kate: 106 Crooke, Mary: 37
248 Index

Crooke, William: 37 Ellis, Elizabeth: 40

cross-dressing: 171, 234–37 English Civil War: 19, 21, 113–14, 118, 203–05,
Curie, Marie: 45n1 208–10, 221
Curzon, Mary, Countess of Dorset: 212 Eraso, Carlos de: 196–97
Cuthbert, Elizabeth: 38 Erauso, Catalina de: 21, 227–44; sexual and
gender identity: 234–36; Basque identity:
d’Aragona, Beatrice: 18, 20, 21, 139–55 241–43; hybrid nature: 235, 239–40
d’Aragona, Eleonora: 139, 142–44, 155 Erik XIV, King of Sweden: 181–88, 194–95
d’Aragona, Ferrante: 141–44 Ernest Frederick, Margrave of Baden-Durlach: 198
d’Este, Ercole: 142, 144–45, 147–49 experimentalism: 47–60
d’Este, Ippolito: 139–40, 142–54
Davies, Eleanor: 114n4 Fairfax, Thomas Sir: 203, 214
Davis, Joan: 37 Falkdalen, Karin Tegenborg: 181, 186
De Foix, Paul: 188 familiars, witches’: 95–96, 98–100, 104–05, 107,
De Gournay, Marie: 49 109
De Guiche, Comtesse: 50–51, 58 Farringdon without, ward of: 95
De la Guette, Madame: 50 feast: 78–79; Feast of Holy Innocents: 206
De Lisle, Leandra: 167, 175 feminist: 21, 48, 55, 117, 234
De Mornay, Charles: 195 Ferdinand II, King of Aragon: 140, 144–45,
De Silva, Guzman: 187–90, 193 151–53
Dean’s Yard: 36 Ferrara, Duchy of: 145, 149, 152–54
debt, conjugal: 79 Ferrer, Joaquín María: 231, 232
Dekker, Thomas: 94, 96 Fifth-Monarchists: 113–14, 118, 119n26 121, 122,
demonic possession: 117, 133 132
Denmark: 182, 185, 187, 196 Fletcher, John: 171n65; The Noble Gentleman: 171
devil: 98–100, 104, 106, 108, 115–16, 127 Ford, John: 94, 96, 105n29; The Broken Heart:
discourse: 46, 48, 56, 59, 117–18, 132, 238 174; Perkin Warbeck: 174–76
disease: 18, 29, 31, 33, 35, 41–42, 61–63, 166 France: 45–46, 50, 53–54, 60, 62, 65n40, 81,
divorce: 19, 71–72, 75, 83–86 144–45, 149–50, 170, 185, 232, 239
Dog alias Tom or Tommy: 95–96, 98–100,
102–09 gender: 15–18, 19n13, 20–22, 45–46, 47n5, 48–50,
dogs, pet: 108 55–56, 58, 60, 63–64, 66, 113, 117, 133, 179–81,
Dolan, Frances: 106 191, 199, 213, 227–28, 231, 234–36, 240–41, 244
Douglass, William: 241 gender and genre, intersections: 234–41
dowry: 141, 152, 182, 187, 192, 195, 212 gender identity: 20, 66, 113, 117, 133, 227–28, 231,
Dudley, Robert, Earl of Leicester: 166, 188 234–36, 240–41, 244
Dymosh, John, English merchant: 194 George John I, Count Palatine of Veldenz:
183–84, 187
Edmonton: 95, 99, 102, 104, 106 Goodcole, Henry : 19, 93, 94, 96, 97, 99–101, 109;
Edwardus Fortunatus, Margrave of Baden- Wonderfull discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer,
Rodemachern, Margrave of Baden-Baden: witch, The: 19, 93–101, 103, 109
190, 192–98 Gray, Jane: 37
Edzard II, Count of East Frisia: 183 Greenhill, William: 209–10
Eikon Basilike (1649): 205, 217 Grey, Lady Catherine: 20, 159, 168
Eikonoklastes (1649): 205, 218 Grey, Lady Jane: 16, 20, 159, 167
Elisabeth, Princess of Sweden, daughter of Gristwood, Sarah: 160, 162, 165, 167, 169, 171, 176
Gustav I: 182, 195 Guamanga, Bishop of: 229, 238, 243n72
Elizabeth I, Queen of England: 15–16, 20, 21, 32, Gustav I, King of Sweden: 180–83, 185, 195
159, 162–63, 166, 168, 174, 179–82, 185–86, Gyllenstierna, Nils: 188
188–93
Elizabeth, Princess of England, Scotland, and handmaid: 113, 123–24, 129
Ireland, daughter of Charles I: 21, 203–21; Hardwick, Bess of, later Elizabeth Talbot,
royal birth and publicity: 205–07; early Countess of Shrewsbury: 159, 160, 163–70
childhood and family life: 207–09; educa- Heard, Dorothy: 37, 38
tion and scholarship: 209–10; Civil War and Heard, Robert: 37, 38
imprisonment: 210–13; imprisonment and Hearth Tax of 1666: 36–40
family: 213–15; regicide and writing: 215–18; Henri IV, King of France: 165
aftermath and unexpected death: 218–21 Henrietta Maria, Queen-consort to Charles I:
Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia: 204, 206 203, 205, 207–08, 210, 212, 219–20
Index 249

Henry VIII, King of England: 16, 159 letters and letter-writing: 49, 64, 84, 139–43,
Henry, Duke of Gloucester (brother to Princess 145–54, 160–75, 185–86, 211, 213, 216, 229,
Elizabeth): 210 233–34, 239
Herbert, Thomas: 216–17 Lewes, Alice: 37
Heywood, Thomas: 108; Wise Woman of Lewis, Katherine: 38
Hogsdon, The: 108 literary genres: 48, 120, 232–41, 244
Hilliard, John: 37 London: 18, 29–34, 36, 39–42, 93, 95, 100, 103–04,
Hilliard, Sarah: 37 114n4, 115, 117, 163n26, 181, 189, 212, 216
Hodges, Nathaniel: 30, 34 Louis XII, King of France: 145, 148
Hollar, Wenceslaus: 208 Lyly, John: 108; Mother Bombie: 108
Hopkins, Lisa: 16, 139n1, 228
House of Commons: 211–12 madness: 77, 98–99, 109, 117, 128
House of Lords: 211 Magnus, Prince of Sweden, son of Gustav I:
Howard, Thomas, 4th Duke of Norfolk: 190 182, 183
Hungary, Kingdom of: 20, 139, 141–55 Makin, Bathsua: 160, 209
Margaret Leijonhufvud, Queen-consort of
Iatrochemistry: 63 Sweden: 182
identity, construction of: 118, 122, 132, 234 Marlowe, Christopher: 168–70, 172; Massacre
incapacity: 75, 78, 85 at Paris, The: 170; Dido, Queen of Carthage:
inheritance: 81, 143, 146, 166 172–73
Inquisition: 85 marriage: 19–21, 37–38, 50, 71–87, 96, 99, 103,
Interregnum: 19, 113–14 115, 139, 141–42, 144, 149, 154–55, 159–68,
Isabella of Castile: 140, 144–45 171–72, 175, 180, 182–88, 195, 197–98, 208, 210,
Italian Wars: 150 212, 214–15, 219; validity of: 75, 78
Martin, Nathan: 187
Jagiellon, Władysław: 141 Martin, Randall: 101
James VI & I, King of Scotland, England, Mary I, Queen of England: 16, 162, 185
and Ireland: 96, 159, 161–62; 167; 175–76; Mary I, Queen of Scotland (Mary, Queen of
Daemonologie: 96 Scots): 20, 159, 163, 166–67
James, Duke of York (later James VII & II, King Mary, Princess Royal and Princess of Orange
of England, Scotland, and Ireland): 213–217; (sister of Princess Elizabeth): 204, 207–08,
capture: 213–14; escape: 216–17 210, 213, 216, 220
Jardin du Roi: 53, 53n17 Matilda, Empress: 16
Johann Karl, son of Cecilia: 194 Mayerne, Sir Theodore: 219
John II of East Frisia: 183–185 medicine: 35, 45–47, 52–55, 58, 60–64, 99, 220
John III, Duke of Finland, King of Sweden: 182, Meurdrac, Marie: 18, 45–66
185–186, 188, 190, 192, 194–97 Middlesex, county of: 40, 95
Jones, Margery: 38 Middleton, Thomas: 94n1, 108; Witch, The: 108
Julius II, pope: 152, 153 midwives: 39, 62n36
Justices of the Peace: 98, 102, 105 Milan, Duchy of: 142, 144, 148
Millenarianism: 114, 119n24, n26, 121–22
Kalmar Castle: 194 Millet, Alexander: 37
Karl, son of Cecilia: 194 Millet, Anne: 37
Katarina Stenbock, Queen-consort of Gustav Milton, John: 205, 218
I: 182 ministerial authority: 114–15, 117–18, 123–25,
Katarina, Princess of Sweden, daughter of 127, 130–33
Gustav I: 182 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin): 50
Keate, George: 36 Montaigne, Michel: 49
Kochanowski, Jan: 73 Morison, Margaret: 181
Kraków, Castellan of: 74, 85 Morsztyn, Jan Andrzej: 71
Moyes, Elizabeth: 40
laboratory: 45–47, 51–52, 54, 58, 61, 64–66
Lannoy, Cornelius de: 191–92 Naples, Kingdom of: 139, 141–42, 144–45, 147,
Lavoisier, Antoine-Laurent: 49n10 149–54, 230, 239
Lavoisier, Mary Anne Paulze: 49 natural philosophy: 46, 52–53, 62n37, 63
Le Fevre, Nicolas: 54 New Way: 37
Lee, Elizabeth: 37 Newgate Prison: 93, 100–01
Lemery, Nicolas: 54 Northern Seven Years’ War: 187
nurses and nursing: 15, 18, 29–42, 97
250 Index

Oxford: 130, 181, 205, 211, 213 saints: 114, 120–23, 128–29, 131
Sawyer, Edward: 96–97
Pancrazio, James: 235n23, 240 Sawyer, Elizabeth: 18–19, 93–103, 105–07
papacy: 144–45, 151 scapegoating: 19, 93, 95, 102
Papal Nuncio: 75, 84–85 searchers: 32–33, 101
paracelsus: 62 Seaton, Ethel: 181, 193
Parker, Matthew, Archbishop of Canterbury: 190 Segas, Lise: 236
Parliamentarians: 203, 205, 211–12, 214, 218, Sejm: 74, 81
220–21 self-fashioning: 154
Paster, Gail Kern: 95, 99 sexual identity: 228–29, 231, 234–36
Paulet, William, 1st Marquess of Winchester: 163 Shakespeare, William: 102, 171; As You Like It:
Percy, Algernon, 10th Earl of Northumberland: 171; Cymbeline: 171, 175; Merchant of Venice,
212–13 The: 102
Pérez-Villanueva, Sonia: 233n12, 234n19, 237–39 Sigismund II Augustus, King of Poland and
Petty, Isabella: 40 Grand Duke of Lithuania: 186
Petty, Widow: 37 Singleton, Jane: 37
Philip II, King of Spain: 165, 187–88, 196–97 Singleton, John: 37
Philip IV, King of Spain: 230, 243n72 Snakenborg, Helena, Dowager Marchioness of
Philip, son of Cecilia, later Philip III, Margrave Northampton: 163
of Baden-Rodemachern: 194 Snow, Mary: 36–38
Picardet, Claudine: 49 Sobieski, Jan: 81–83
picaresque genre: 228, 236–37, 240 Sofia, Princess of Sweden, daughter of Gustav
piety: 203, 205, 211, 220–21 I: 182
plague: 18, 29–42; Plague of 1665: 18, 29, 32, 34, soldiers’ autobiographies (literary genre):
36, 38–41; Plague Orders of 1583: 32 237–38, 240
poetry: 51, 57–58, 63, 71–73, 75, 160, 205–06, Spain: 145, 185, 196–97, 228–30, 233–34, 239,
208, 218, 231 241–42, 244
Poland: 72, 75n12, 81–82, 84, 185–86, 196 St. Botolph without Aldgate, parish of: 40
politics: 118, 148, 155, 203, 231, 235 St. Bride’s, Fleet Street, parish of: 31, 36, 39, 41
Presbyterian: 125 St. Giles in the Fields, parish of: 40
Privilège du Roi: 51 St. James’s Palace: 210–11, 213, 215–16
Property: 35, 72, 81, 85–86, 97, 141, 146, 151, 165, St. Margaret’s, Westminster, parish of: 29–31,
167, 182, 212 36–40, 42
prophecy: 114n5, 117–18, 120, 122, 124, 237 St. Peter’s Street: 38
prophetess: 19–20, 113–16, 122–25184n15 Stanisławska, Anna: 19, 71–87
Prophet Ezekiel (1650): 209 Steen, Sara Jayne: 160–63, 171–75
Protestant and Protestantism: 33, 185, 194, 196, Sten, Prince of Sweden, son of Gustav I: 182
198, 208, 211, 217, 218, 220 Stepto, Michele, and Gabriel Stepto: 234
Puritan: 208, 209, 219 Stiffany, Margery: 29–31, 37
purity: 206, 220 Stuart, Charles, Earl of Lennox: 159
Stuart, Elizabeth, nee Cavendish, Countess of
quarantine: 18, 29–36, 39–42; practice of: Lennox: 164–65
29–34, 39–42; polemic arguments against: Stuart, Lady Arbella: 20–21, 159–69, 171–76
34–36 Susanna, biblical heroine: 184–85, 184n15
Querelle des femmes: 48 Sweden: 21, 163, 179–85, 187–89, 191, 194–99

Radziwiłłowa, Katarzyna: 83–84 Talbot, Alethea, later Countess of Arundel: 166;

Ratcliffe, Anne: 98 Natura Exenterata: 166
religious sectarianism: 114, 117, 121 Talbot, Gilbert, 7th Earl of Shrewsbury: 161, 164,
Rodemachern: 194, 196, 198–99 169–71
Round Yard: 38 Talbot, Mary, Countess of Shrewsbury: 161,
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: 48–50 164, 176
Rowley, Alexander: 210 Taylor, Elizabeth: 37
Rowley, William: 94, 96 teat, witch’s: 99–101, 109
Royal Society: 46n2 Temperance: 214
Royalists: 203, 205, 211–14, 219–22 Thorney, Frank: 96, 98, 103
Rutter-Jensen, Chloe: 235, 236n27 touch: 19, 93–95, 98–99, 101, 103–05, 107–09
Rye, William Brenchley: 179–80, 200 trance: 19, 113–15, 117–19, 121, 123–25
transgender: 234–36
Index 251

Trapnel, Anna: 19–20, 113–33 Warszycki, Jan Kazimierz: 74, 76

Turks: 20, 82, 149 Wase, Christopher: 205, 218
Twyfords Alley: 36 Webster, John: 94n1; The Duchess of Malfi:
171–72, 174
Urban VIII, pope: 230, 243n72 wedding: 78–79, 86, 187
West End, the: 36, 103
Vadstena Castle: 183 White Alley: 36–37
Vadstena Thunder see Vadstenabullret Whitechapel: 40
Vadstenabullret: 183, 185–86 Whitehall Palace: 36
Vallbona, Rima de: 234 widowhood: 20, 139, 141, 154–55
Van Dyck, Sir Anthony: 207 Wight, Isle of: 203, 216, 219
Van Schurman, Anna Maria: 49 William, Margrave of Baden-Baden: 198
Vasa, Gustavus see Gustav I Williams, Elizabeth: 40
Västerås Castle: 183 Winifred: 103–05
Vaughan, Robert: 208 Wiśniowiecki, Michał Korybut: 83
Velasco, Sherry: 229n5, 231n9, 234 Witch of Edmonton, The: 19, 93–94, 96–109
Venice, Republic of: 145, 147, 154 witchcraft: 19, 93–98, 100n19, 105, 108, 113–15,
Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great 117–18, 120, 125–28, 131–33; male witchcraft:
Britain and Ireland: 203, 221 19n13
Vincent, Thomas: 34–35 women’s writing: 19n12, 57, 72, 114–15, 118–19,
visionary: 19, 113–15, 119, 122–24, 129 124, 133, 168, 218
Wright, Sarah: 114n4