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Constructing Wifely Identity: Prescription and Practice in the Life of Lady Sarah Cowper

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Anne Kugler
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Extract

July 25, 1700. My Custom hath been of late, to be in Bed from Nine to Six, the other 15 Hours I am 12 at least, alone. When I arose this Morn: I mett with a snare laid for me by an Instrument of the Enemy of Souls. … Since it is not possible for me to redress these Domestick greivances, I wou'd notice them to no other purpose, but to find by what means to sustain and bear them well. What if I try this expedient? Never to speak any thing but what is necessary to be said for some Use or End. that so my Mind may be kept more Close to the One thing Needfull, from which these vexations too much Distract it.

So began Lady Sarah Cowper's sixteen-year enterprise in self-justification. Between 1670 and 1700 this English gentlewoman had already filled a dozen commonplace books with extracts from poems, sermons, scripture, and essays, consciously searching for an emotional and intellectual outlet. But in July of 1700 with the added impetus of family scandal alongside long-term marital friction and financial instability, Lady Sarah started keeping a diary in which she reacted to her position—initially middle-aged and unhappily married, then elderly and widowed—and to events in her world. When she finally stopped writing because of ill health in September 1716, her daily entries totaled roughly 2,300 pages in seven volumes. This remarkable diary offers a specific link between the ideologies that institutions and authorities were concerned to promulgate and the outlook of the individual.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 40 , Issue 3 , July 2001 , pp. 291 - 323
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2001

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References

1 Diary of Lady Sarah Cowper (Diary), Penshanger MSS D/EP F29, Hertfordshire Public Record Office, 1:1. References to the diary are abbreviated hereafter to volume, year, and page.

2 Penshanger MSS, The Commonplace Books of Lady Sarah Cowper: Poems and Sayings (1670), D/EP F36; “The Medley” (1673), F37; Moral and Scriptural Collections (1675), F38; Bible Commentary and Notes on Heresies (1680), F39; Prayers (1680), F40; Uncatalogued Collection from Plutarch's Morals, Lives of Bishops, and Precepts (1683); “History of the World” and Life of Mohammed (1686), F41; Topical Index to Sermons (1686), F42; “Thoughts and Meditations” (1690), F43; “Collections from the Bible” and Lady Sarah Cowper's own Biblical Commentary (1700), F44; and Scrapbook (1700), F45.

3 Diary, Penshanger MSS D/EP F29–F35: vol. 1, 25 July 1700 to 31 December 1702, F29; vol. 2, 1 January 1703 to 31 December 1704, F30; vol. 3, 1 January 1705 to 21 November 1706, F31; vol. 4, 1 December 1706 to 30 June 1709, F32; vol. 5, 1 July 1709 to 30 June 1711, F33; vol. 6, 1 July 1711 to 30 September 1713, F34; vol. 7, 1 October 1713 to 30 September 1716, F35.

4 For the bare facts of Sarah and William's union, see Diary, 2 (1703–4): 20, 106, 174; and The Victoria History of the County of Hertfordshire (VCH), suppl. vol., Hertfordshire Families, ed. Warrand, Duncan (London, 1907), p. 138Google Scholar.

5 Will of Samuel Holled, reel 305, no. 125, and Will of Anne Holled, reel 314, no. 68, both in London Public Record Office, Prob. 11.

6 Memorandum Book of Sir William Cowper, Penshanger MSS D/EP F25, contains notes on the births of William (24 June 1665), Samuel (17 August 1666), John (5 December 1667), and Spencer (23 February 1669); and the deaths of Samuel (8 October 1666) and John (27 April 1686).

7 Diary, 1 (1701): 162.

8 For the discussion which follows on the careers of Sir William, William, and Spencer, see Dictionary of National Biography (DNB), ed. Stephen, Leslie and Lee, Sidney (Oxford, 1917; reprint, 1950)Google Scholar; VCH, pp. 137–38.

9 For details of the Stout case, see William Cowper's defense notes, affidavits, reports of the trial, and a copy of the inquest verdict, Penshanger MSS D/EP F96; Howell, T. B., Cobbett's Complete Collection of State Trials (1809–1826), 13:1106–1250Google Scholar (which includes pamphlets published about the case); Foss, Edward, The Judges of England (London, 1848–1854), 8:115–19Google Scholar, and his Biographica Juridical A Biographical Dictionary of the Judges of England from 1006 to 1870 (London, 1870), pp. 199–200Google Scholar; VCH, p. 145; DNB. See esp. Luttrell, Narcissus, A Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs from September 1678 to April 1714 (Oxford, 1857), p. 539Google Scholar: “We have a particular account by several gentlemen of good reputation, who were yesterday present at the tryal of Mr. Spencer Cowper, and the three others at Hartford, that there was no room to think that either of them were concerned in the murther of Mrs Stout the quaker … it appearing … in all probability she had drowned her self.”

10 Diary, 1 (1701): 104, the entry for 25 June: “The parlement is now prorogu'd without so much as having read M Stouts petition against Spencer.”

11 Diary, vol. 4 (1706), preface.

12 Diary, 3 (1706): 304.

13 For an extended discussion of the development of spiritual self-writing as a form of self-justification and then even self-promotion in the later seventeenth century, see Mascuch, Michael, Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and Self-Identity in England, 1591–1791 (Stanford, Calif., 1996), pp. 88–94Google Scholar. Mascuch also specifically argues in these pages that the notion of self-justification implies an audience and, therefore, a public aspect to these writings, that explains why there are few women's spiritual autobiographies, even though there are many women's spiritual notebooks.

14 Christopher Hill deals with analogous uses of Scripture to justify a particular agenda in The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (London, 1993), pp. 4–5, 401–9Google Scholar. He argues that the warring sides in the English Civil War produced multiple reinterpretations of the Bible to support rival political claims; this activity also included radicals reinscribing passages in the Bible to support a woman's right to preach and to be her husband's equal.

15 Anthony Fletcher, in his chapter on constructing femininity in Gender, Sex and Subordination in England, 1500–1800 (New Haven, Conn., 1995), pp. 409–11Google Scholar, argues that religion was an especially powerful means for women to contest the boundaries of patriarchy and that Lady Sarah exemplifies female self-affirming manipulation of prescription in this regard.

16 Stone, Lawrence, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York, 1977)Google Scholar. Trumbach, Randolph, The Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in Eighteenth-Century England (New York, 1978)Google Scholar is the other major proponent of this view.

17 Stone, Lawrence, Road to Divorce: England, 1530–1987 (Oxford, 1990), pp. 6–12Google Scholar, and Broken Lives: Separation and Divorce in England, 1660–1857 (Oxford, 1993), pp. 14–15Google Scholar. See, too, Stone's, Uncertain Unions (Oxford, 1992)Google Scholar.

18 See Wrightson, Keith, English Society, 1580–1680 (New Brunwick, N.J., 1982), pp. 66–88Google Scholar; and Houlbrooke, Ralph, The English Family, 1450–1700 (London, 1984), pp. 63–95Google Scholar.

19 Hunt, Margaret, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender and the Family, 1680–1780 (Berkeley, 1996), pp. 152–54, 82Google Scholar; Vickery, Amanda, The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England (New Haven, Conn., 1998), pp. 40–45, 60Google Scholar.

20 Ezell, Margaret, The Patriarch's Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1987), pp. 160–63Google Scholar.

21 This line of thought has a long history, instigated by Powell, Chilton L. in English Domestic Relations, 1487–1653 (London, 1917)Google Scholar. It was taken up by Haller, William and Haller, Malleville, “The Puritan Art of Love,” Huntington Library Quarterly 5 (1941–1942): 235–72Google Scholar; Johnson, J. T., “English Puritan Thought on the Ends of Marriage,” Church History 38 (1969): 429–36Google Scholar; Douglass, Jane Dempsey, “Women and the Continental Reformation,” in Religion and Sexism: Images of Women in the Jewish and Christian Traditions, ed. Ruether, Rosemary Radford (New York, 1974), p. 303Google Scholar; and at least the affection and respect elements of Protestant marital theology were again reiterated in Collinson, Patrick, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York, 1986), p. 93Google Scholar.

22 Davies, Kathleen, “Continuity and Change in Literary Advice on Marriage,” in Marriage and Society: Studies in the Social History of Marriage, ed. Outhwaite, R. B. (London, 1981), pp. 60–64Google Scholar. Her views on the continuity of the ideal of mutuality are accepted by Macfarlane, Alan, Marriage and Love in England, 1300–1840 (Oxford, 1986), pp. 175–208Google Scholar; and Houlbrooke, , The English Family, pp. 30–35Google Scholar. See, too, Collinson, , Birthpangs, pp. 62–63Google Scholar.

23 Collinson, , Birthpangs, pp. 70, 93Google Scholar; Amussen, Susan, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1988), pp. 41–47Google Scholar. Amanda Vickery also takes up this point, asserting that obedience remains in the eighteenth century the “indispensable virtue of a good wife” (Gentleman's Daughter, p. 59).

24 Fletcher, Anthony, “The Protestant Idea of Marriage in Early Modern England,” in Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Patrick Collinson, ed. Fletcher, Anthony and Roberts, Peter (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 168, 175, 177CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Kelso, Ruth, Doctrine for the Ladies of the Renaissance (Urbana, Ill., 1956), p. 2Google Scholar.

26 Richard Allestree explained the relationship of allegiance and support a wife owed her husband in terms of duties owed to his person, his reputation, and his fortune. The Ladies' Calling (London, 1673), p. 191Google Scholar. See also Gouge, William, Of Domesticall Duties, 2d ed. (London, 1634), pp. 24–25Google Scholar. The same message is in sermons; e.g., Barrow, IsaacThe Works of the Learned Isaac Barrow …, 2d ed. (London, 1687), vol. 1Google Scholar, sermon 2, “The Profitableness of Godliness,” p. 16.

27 Allestree, , Ladies' Calling, pp. 210–12, 222–23Google Scholar.

28 Ibid., pp. 223–26.

29 Diary, 1 (1700): 7, 19.

30 Diary, 1 (1702): 185. See also 2 (1704): 200: “My Wedding day full 40 year Since, all which time I have lived with a greivous generation.”

31 Diary, 1 (1701): 130 and 2 (1703): 88; 2 (1703): 136; 1 (1701): 100 and 2 (1704): 194, 282; 2 (1703): 154.

32 Diary, 1 (1702): 207.

33 Diary, 1 (1700): 7.

34 Diary, 1 (1700–1702): 4, 203, 179.

35 Diary, 1 (1701): 162.

36 Diary, 1 (1701): 161: “Ffor a litle Ugly variety, a Visiting go I, where they tell of Ladies that mannage their Domestick affairs in Such manner as argues they have much power, then home I Come an humble Mouse gnawing on the thought that in 40 year I have not gaind the priviledg to Chang a Cook Maid upon any account whatsoever.”

37 Gouge, , Domesticall Duties, p. 152Google Scholar.

38 Diary, 2(1704): 316–17.

39 Diary, 1 (1701): 55.

40 Allestree follows a pattern of discussing first the areas “wherin Wives [or mothers or mistresses] are most frequently deficient” and then enjoining positives (Ladies' Calling, p. 200).

41 Ibid., p. 229.

42 Diary, 1 (1701): 194.

43 Allestree, , Ladies' Calling, p. 200Google Scholar.

44 Ibid., p. 201; Diary, 1 (1702): 194.

45 Diary, 2 (1704): 190; and copied out in her collection of Thoughts and Meditations, D/EP F43, pp. 544–45; the original is Astell, Mary, “Reflections upon Marriage,” 1706 ed., reprinted in The First English Feminist: “Reflections upon Marriage” and Other Writings by Mary Astell, ed. Hill, Bridget (Aldershot, 1986), pp. 90–91Google Scholar.

46 Savile, George, Marquess of Halifax, The Lady's New Year's Gift, or Advice to a Daughter, 5th ed. (London, 1696), pp. 46–48, 57–60Google Scholar.

47 Ibid., pp. 52–56.

48 Diary, 3 (1705): 82; Halifax, , Advice to a Daughter, p. 51Google Scholar.

49 Halifax, , Advice to a Daughter, p. 30Google Scholar.

50 Ibid., p. 32.

51 Diary, 1 (1701): 168.

52 Diary, 1 (1702): 288. There is even an indication he fulfilled his promise for some time, as six months later Lady Sarah wrote, “If the Next half year Concludes so Well as this, twill be the best as to Domestick Affairs that in almost 40 years I have known. Sir Wm having left off to Meddle with the Maids I dispose of them as is fitt” (Diary, 2 [1703]: 53).

53 See Son William to Lady Sarah, September[?] 1692, Cowper Family Correspondence, fol. 5, Penshanger MS D/EP 58.

54 Diary, 1 (1702): 200 ff.

55 Diary, 1 (1702): 230.

56 Ibid.

57 Sir William to Lady Sarah, 26 and 31 July, 1702, Correspondence of Lady Sarah and Sir William Cowper, fols. 2, 3, Penshanger MS D/EP F23.

58 Diary, 1 (1702): 249.

59 Diary, 1 (1702): 252.

60 Lady Sarah's own Biblical Commentary (1700), Penshanger MS D/EP F44, p. 88.

61 Ibid., p. 94.

62 Ibid., p. 96.

63 Patrick, Simon, A Commentary on the First Book of Moses (London, 1696)Google Scholar.

64 Lady Sarah's own Biblical Commentary, p. 91.

65 See Rogers, Daniel, Matrimonial Honour (London, 1642), pp. 169, 175–76Google Scholar, cited in Fletcher, , “The Protestant Idea of Marriage,” pp. 176–79Google Scholar.

66 Diary, 1 (1701): 61.

67 Hammond, Henry, Paraphrase and Annotation upon All the Books of the New Testament, 2d ed. (London, 1659)Google Scholar. Hammond was a leading defender of Anglicanism during the interregnum. He juxtaposed chastity and purity again regarding 1 Cor. 6:13 (“Now the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord”), where he commented: “Your bodies are to be consecrated to God in chastity whether in marriage or single life, and being kept pure here, must be made capable of rising to everlasting life.” Lady Sarah also copied out this passage in her collected Bible Commentary and Notes on Heresies (Penshanger MSS D/EP F39 [1680]).

68 Margaret Olofson Thickstun uses these verses in Timothy to help build her case that there was a literary effort to denigrate women through identifying their sex with the flesh, in which writers indirectly asserted that for women, childbirth was what saved, not faith through God's grace. See Thickstun, Margaret Olofson, Fictions of the Feminine: Puritan Doctrine and the Representation of Women (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988), p. 25Google Scholar. Hammond's commentary did not present it that way at all; he took childbearing in this passage to refer specifically to Mary bearing the Messiah, humankind's promise of redemption, not to all women being required to bear children for their salvation. Moreover, Lady Sarah interpreted it in precisely the opposite direction, connecting abstinence with virtue and therefore redemption, not childbearing. Whatever may have been happening in some sections of the literary world of this period, Henry Hammond and Lady Sarah certainly did not see the passage that way.

69 Diary, 4 (1707): 27.

70 Luke 2:36–37.

71 In Domesticall Duties, p. 130, e.g., Gouge specifically declared that it was undutiful for either partner to deny sex to the other; Jeremy Taylor said the same thing in The Marriage Ring in The Whole Works of Jeremy Taylor, ed. Eden, Charles (London, 1861), 4:211Google Scholar. Patricia Crawford notes that clergy and medical advisors in general condemned abstinence. See Crawford, Patricia, “The Construction and Experience of Motherhood,” in Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England, ed. Fildes, Valerie (New York, 1990), p. 20Google Scholar.

72 Diary, 1 (1702): 305.

73 For example, Gouge, , Domesticall Duties, p. 130Google Scholar.

74 Crawford notes the expectation that gentlewomen would continue to have children until they had produced at least one son (“Construction,” p. 20).

75 Crawford (“Construction,” p. 20) asserts that “little contraception was under exclusive female control.” True as this may be, in A History of Contraception: From Antiquity to the Present Day (Oxford, 1990), pp. 153–56Google Scholar, Angus McLaren argues that in the early eighteenth century women in England may well have been increasingly active on their own behalfs in limiting births, by employing a “doctor's excuse” on medical grounds for refusing sexual relations and perhaps convincing their husbands to practice coitus interruptus. In the French case, J. L. Flandrin sees an “epidemic of migraines” among elite women in the eighteenth century. See Flandrin, J. L., Families: Parente, maison, sexualité dans l'ancienne société (Paris, 1976)Google Scholar, translated as Families in Former Times: Kinship, Household and Sexuality (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 217–22Google Scholar. Randolph Trumbach even suggests that sexual abstinence was not uncommon in elite marriages and resulted in husbands turning to prostitutes. See Trumbach, Randolph, The Rise of the Egalitarian Family (New York, 1978), pp. 170–79Google Scholar.

76 Diary, 1 (1700): 13.

77 Diary, 1 (1700): 20–21. The only other entry that hints that Sir William was unfaithful is in 4 (1708): 155: “It is Said by Some that tho' a Mans Wife be better than any Woman, yet Variety is Better than She, and that to Keep two Mistresses is Safest, ffor Poisons Mixed will Do no hurt…. I find Sometimes in Ashes Deep, Ly Kindled Coals of Fire. If they that read Mark well my Mind. They may a Meaning Strang here find.” This passage is more self-consciously cryptic than usual, as if Lady Sarah, on the one hand, wanted to signal its importance to a future audience, but on the other, did not want to be too explicit.

78 Blodgett, Harriet, Centuries of Female Days: English Women's Private Diaries (New Brunswick, N.J., 1988), pp. 207–23Google Scholar.

79 See Sara Mendelson's survey of women's diaries and memoirs in which she considers twenty-one marriages, of which fifteen were “loving and companionable” and six were “unsatisfactory.” See Mendelson, Sara, “Stuart Women's Diaries and Occasional Memoirs,” in Women in English Society, 1500–1800, ed. Prior, Mary (London, 1985), p. 193Google Scholar. More recently, in their Women in Early Modern England, 1550–1720 (Oxford, 1998), p. 132Google Scholar, Mendelson and Patricia Crawford assert that at least among the literate classes, there is plenty of evidence for abundant affection in marriage. Moreover, “While we cannot determine how typical such marriages were, we can at least infer that the subservient role which society imposed on women did not preclude the possibility of passionate love and devotion by wives as well as husbands.”

80 Studies of family interaction that deal with wives' responses to husbandly authority in the early modern period include Friedman, Alice, House and Household in Elizabethan England: Wollaton Hall and the Willoughby Family (Chicago, 1989)Google Scholar; Slater, Miriam, Family Life in the Seventeenth Century: The Verneys of Claydon House (London, 1984)Google Scholar; Wall, Alison, “Elizabethan Precept and Feminine Practice: The Thynne Family of Longleat,” History 75 (1990): 23–37Google Scholar. The women I discuss here were selected for comparability to Lady Sarah in terms of the nature of their writing—the surviving evidence is in the form of manuscript diaries, meditations, and recollections rather than letters or posthumous publications edited by male relatives.

81 Diary of Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick (1666–78), British Library Additional (BL Add.) MSS 27351–6. For a thorough discussion of Mary Rich's outlook and immersion in guilt, see Mendelson, Sara, The Mental World of Stuart Women: Three Studies (Brighton, 1987), pp. 62–110Google Scholar.

82 Diary of Mary Rich, 24 June 1667, BL Add. MS 27351. The spelling has been modernized in this and succeeding entries from her diary.

83 Diary of Mary Rich, 20 January 1673, BL Add. MS 27353.

84 Diary of Mary Rich, 25 January 1673, BL Add. MS 27353.

85 For instance, on 9 October 1670, BL Add. MS 27352: “My Lord fell into a most violent passion with me without the least cause given, but by me but only my advising him with great humility to sanctify the Lord's day better, he was very bitter.”

86 See her confession on 29 November 1672, BL Add. MS 27353, where her sins included being backward in “speaking to my Lord about his everlasting condition, because I found my doing so did often displease him.”

87 In the entry for 24 August 1673 (BL Add. MS 27353) she wrote that she received from the doctor the news of her husband's death “with unexpressable grief and found my self more sadly afflicted than ever in all my life I was, but did sincerely strive with my passion, and endeavored to submit to God's will … but this night with grief I found my self very ill.”

88 Diary of Mary Rich, 29 August 1673, BL Add. MS 52373.

89 For her consultations with clergy, see, e.g., 31 October 1666 and 10 February 1667, BL Add. MS 27351 (discussions with a Mr. Lavender and Dr. Wilkins, respectively); for charity, see 25 December 1669, BL Add. MS 27352; for matchmaking, see 28 April 1673, BL Add. 27353; for advice given, see 21 June 1667, BL Add. MS 27351; 13, 15 October 1670 and 24 February 1671, BL Add. MS 27352; and again raising the issue of the contentious side of such exemplary piety, see 23 June 1671, BL Add. MS 27352, where she gave Lady Ann Barrington “good counsell, and I did with much earnestness beg her to live better, and I did too with great faithfulness and honestness tell her of the vanity of her life, and begged her to repent, and live better, though she was displeased at my doing so.”

90 Pollock, Linda, With Faith and Physic: The Life of A Tudor Gentlewoman Lady Grace Mildmay, 1552–1620 (New York, 1993), pp. 8–10, 14–16Google Scholar. See also Warnicke, Retha, “Lady Mildmay's Journal: A Study in Autobiography and Meditation in Reformation England,” Sixteenth-Century Journal 20 (1989): 55–68Google Scholar.

91 Pollock, , With Faith and Physic, pp. 41–42Google Scholar.

92 Ibid., p. 12.

93 Ibid., p. 11.

94 Acheson, Katherine O., The Diary of Anne Clifford, 1616–1619: A Critical Edition (New York, 1995)Google Scholar.

95 Ibid., p. 32. For further discussion of empowerment through claiming aristocratic privilege, see also Lamb, Mary Ellen, “The Agency of the Split Subject: Lady Anne Clifford and the Uses of Reading,” English Literary Renaissance 22 (1992): 347–68Google Scholar; and Lewalski, Barbara, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge, Mass., 1993)Google Scholar.

96 Acheson, , Diary of Anne Clifford, p. 35Google Scholar; from Lives of Lady Anne Clifford, Countess of Dorset, Pembroke and Montgomery (1590–1676) and of Her Parents, Summarized by Herself, ed. Gilson, J. P. (London, 1916), p. 40Google Scholar. This edition includes Lady Anne's autobiography, The Life of Me, written in 1652–53.