A Political Biography of Delarivier Manley

Rachel Carnell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781138663428
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317315421
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

A Tory pamphleteer, playwright and satirical historian, Delarivier Manley was regarded by her contemporaries Jonathan Swift and Robert Harley as a key member of the Tory propaganda team. This biography offers details about her life, including evidence about three illegitimate children by John Tilly, Governor of Fleet Prison.

1 ‘A LONG UNTAINTED DESCENT’: HER FATHER’S DAUGHTER?

Delarivier Manley was the daughter of the royalist military officer and historian Sir Roger Manley (c. 1621–87) and a French-speaking noblewoman from the Spanish Netherlands, Marie-Catherine (c. 1643–75). Manley was proud of her descent and her royalist heritage; she describes her family as ‘Ancient’ in her quasi-fictional autobiography, The Adventures of Rivella, presumably referring to the fact that the Manleys of Chester had held a coat of arms (a black left hand on a white background) since at least the thirteenth century.¹ The influence of her father’s royalist politics and the transformative experiences of his years in exile undoubtedly shaped Delarivier Manley’s own life and political work. In fact, it has been taken for granted by most scholars that Manley was to some extent a ‘chip off the old block’, her own work as a Tory satirist representing the logical next generation of her father’s staunch royalism, as both a military officer and a historian. An early twentieth-century dissertation on Manley underscored the presumed significance of Manley’s father to her own development by its subtitle ‘A Cavalier’s Daughter in Grub Street’.²

If we actually examine Roger Manley’s extensive published works, we notice an obvious difference between them and his daughter’s publications. While his histories are dry, chronological, and somewhat predictable products of an often obsequious royalist seeking patronage, his daughter’s works are satirical and anecdotal, full of colourful gossip designed to tarnish the reputations of her enemies. A closer look at her father’s rhetorical style, however, suggests a literary flair and a political flexibility in his letters that he might not always have been able to fully express in his official writings or his published histories. Moreover, his published histories themselves demonstrate a talent for partisan propaganda that his daughter would both inherit and develop with satiric panache.

In the preface to the original Latin version of his Commentariorum de Rebellione Anglicana (1686), subsequently published (without this preface) as The History of the Rebellions in England, Scotland and Ireland (1691), Roger Manley cites Juvenal’s well-known quip ‘Difficile est Satyram non scribere’ (it is difficult not to write satire), in order to remind his readers that the events of the Revolution (or ‘rebellions’, in royalist parlance) would be easy for him to satirize, although he is attempting to write an objective account, in which he neither ‘courts’ the reader, nor ‘holds him at a distance’.³ What Roger Manley suggests is an entirely objective account, of course, is an unmistakably royalist narrative of the ‘rebellions’, although the style itself is factual and dry, with almost no personalized observations or interjections.

Roger Manley’s letters to friends at court, family members and employers offer a more nuanced and colourful portrait of a royalist whose years in exile necessarily obliged him to make choices more complicated than simply deciding ‘for’ or ‘against’ the house of Stuart. As a military officer in exile, Manley found employment, like many English, Scottish or Irish officers abroad, as a paid soldier in the Dutch forces; forces that, between 1646 and 1665, were sometimes allied with the English, and sometimes at war with them. When employed by the Dutch, or the United Provinces, Manley also seems to have played a role as a secret agent, offering military information about the Dutch and European military operations to a Parliamentarian family member responsible for collecting intelligence for Cromwell’s government. Although Manley’s daughter never expresses any doubt about Roger Manley’s fundamental royalism, we do not know for certain whether this decision to work as a secret agent for Cromwell stemmed from an amor patriae stronger than his loyalty to the house of Stuart or simply from his need to earn a living.

Delarivier Manley invariably describes her father as full of integrity and royalist loyalty. Her perspective, however, was that of someone who was not born until after the Restoration and did not begin writing until after the Revolution of 1688–9. Roger Manley’s own letters show a soldier in the mid-seventeenth century making decisions about which army to fight for and to which country to offer his military and investigative talents without the benefit that hindsight would provide to others looking back on his decisions. His letters nevertheless offer probably the most significant point of similarity between father and daughter: their parallel capacities to define and redefine themselves rhetorically in order to survive the shifting political turmoil of their own eras.

This talent for self definition and redefinition shared by Manley père and fille might be likened to the efforts of modern-day celebrities and politicians to package and repackage their own media images.⁴ For Roger and Delarivier Manley, however, such rhetorical skills were not developed out of a mere desire for popularity, but stemmed from a fundamental need to survive. We might first imagine Roger Manley as a young man seizing the musket and the password of his captors and bluffing his way through the enemy ranks to escape from Powys Castle, then subsequently and painstakingly crafting a military career both on the Continent and at home, with few resources other than the power of his epistolary style. We then might imagine by what verbal powers Delarivier Manley – scarred by smallpox, bigamously married, mother of at least one and possibly four illegitimate children, and, by 1705, abandoned by her lover of five years and incarcerated in Fleet Prison – would emerge from this nadir and not only survive to tell her own tale, but become both feared and respected as a political satirist and secure a quasi-respectable place for herself in the household of a future mayor of London. The daughter, like the father, seems never to have lacked courage, certainty in her own worth, or confidence in her own powers of persuasion.

Exiled Royalist and Second Son

As she suggests in her description of her family as ‘Ancient’, Delarivier Manley came from a family of established pedigree, certain of its own social position. Delarivier suggests in an autobiographical passage in The New Atalantis that her family suffered materially because of the civil war, which she credits as leaving her ‘Grandfather’s Possessions in its Ruins’.⁵ We do not know the exact extent of the family possessions that may have been sacrificed or forfeited. The home of Roger Manley’s older brother, Francis Manley (d. 1684), was ‘taken’ in 1645, although it may have been restored, either when he made peace with Parliament in 1655, or else after the Restoration.⁶ In his will Roger Manley bequeaths to his children ‘certain houses … at Wrexam’, which he himself may have inherited from his older brother.⁷ Manley Hall, an estate in Erbistock just south of Wrexham, stayed in the Manley family until the nineteenth century.⁸

Despite the national political circumstances that clearly shaped his life, Roger Manley would, as a second son, not have expected to inherit the family landholdings in Denbighshire or Cheshire, whatever their exact extent before the Revolution. It would also appear that even before the start of the Revolution the family landholdings were not so extensive that the eldest son necessarily expected to earn his living merely from the rents from his land: Francis Manley became a member of Gray’s Inn in 1642,⁹ and eventually embarked on a successful career as a judge in northern Wales. Roger Manley’s own life’s path, by contrast, seems to have been more complicated partly because he was a second son and partly because war broke out before he could finish his education.

Delarivier Manley asserts in The Adventures of Rivella that her father, whom she describes as a ‘Scholar in the Midst of a Camp’, ‘left the University at Sixteen Years of Age to follow the Fortunes of K. Charles the First’.¹⁰ Although there is no official record of his matriculation at Oxford or Cambridge, Roger Manley might well have begun his studies with a private tutor at either university, or he might have considered following in the footsteps of his elder brother at Gray’s Inn, had the Revolution not intervened. He became a captain in Lord Byron’s regiment, which was formed in August 1642, its first task to secure Oxford (which, if Manley had been studying there, may explain why he ‘left the University’ and joined the regiment).¹¹ After being taken prisoner at Powys Castle in 1644, then probably helping to defend Denbigh Castle in 1646, Roger Manley fled to the Continent and spent almost two decades in exile, employed during much of this period as soldier for the United Provinces (the political union of northern states of the Netherlands). Following the Restoration in 1660 Manley began a career in the English military, serving first as a captain in an English regiment in the United Provinces, then as captain of a regiment in Portsmouth, then from 1667–71 as lieutenant governor of the royal forts and castles on Jersey, where several of his five or more children, probably including Delarivier, were born. He was subsequently captain of a royal regiment of footguards and posted to various locations, including Portsmouth, where he served as deputy governor between 1675 and 1680 and where he was knighted by Charles II in 1675.¹² In 1680, by which time his daughters were of an age to be married, Roger Manley had been appointed governor of Landguard Fort in Suffolk, where he served until his death in 1687.

Roger Manley was, in other words, modestly successful as a career military officer; he was also modestly successful as a military historian, having translated several works from Dutch and written several detailed histories of foreign and domestic tumults, including A History of the Late Warres in Denmark (1670), The Russian Imposter: or, The History of Muskovie, under the Usurpation of Boris and the Imposture of Demetrius, Late Emperors of Muskovy (1674), ‘The History of the Turkish Empire continued from the Year 1676 to the year 1686’ (which was published as a final section in Paul Rycaut’s History of the Turkish Empire from the Year 1623 to the year 1677 (1687)),¹³ and his Commentariorum de Rebellione Anglicana, for which he may also have written the English translation, which was published after his death.¹⁴ His historical works have been of use to subsequent military historians (his Warres in Denmark, for example, was for a long time the only English work to treat the Dano-Swedish war of 1657–60), but they did not make him any remarkable fame or fortune. At his death in 1687, Roger Manley’s fortune amounted to slightly less than £600, as well as a share in various family houses, not an insignificant fortune but not a great sum with which to launch the careers of two sons or provide dowries for two unmarried daughters.

Survivor and Satirist

Scarred by childhood smallpox and with little provision for a dowry, Delarivier Manley seems to have been seduced shortly after her father’s death, by her first cousin, John Manley, who was about fifteen years her senior. He had been educated at least in part by Roger Manley, and was probably one of Delarivier’s legal guardians. Manley claims in an autobiographical sequence in The New Atalantis that John Manley married her bigamously by persuading her (falsely) that his first wife Ann, née Grosse (b. c. 1656), had recently died. As Manley explains in this passage, she was in short order, ‘marry’d, possess’d, and ruin’d’.¹⁵ In the summer of 1691, their child, John, son of ‘John and Dela Manley’ was born and christened at St Martin-in-the-Fields, Westminster.¹⁶ This early bigamous union with her first cousin seems to have ruined Manley’s prospects for any subsequent, legal marriage; it also shut her out from most polite society. However, this move to London with her cousin John Manley, who would later become a Tory MP for various boroughs in Cornwall, probably helped determine Manley’s subsequent career as a writer.

Delarivier Manley seems to have stayed in London for about three years, living first with John Manley. During the first six months of 1694, after she either left him or was left by him, she lived in the household of Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland. Subsequently, for reasons that are not well understood, she left for the west of England, taking a stagecoach to Exeter in the summer of 1694. Manley had returned to London by the spring of 1696 and oversaw the production and publication of her first two plays: The Lost Lover; or, The Jealous Husband: A Comedy (1696) and The Royal Mischief: A Tragedy (1696). A short epistolary work, one in which she began her career-long attempt at rhetorical self-definition, Letters Writen by Mrs. Manley, was also published that year.

Having already met with some limited success at playwriting and epistolary prose, Manley tried her hand at poetry. Two of her poems were published in The Nine Muses (1700), a collection of poems by women writers, in honour of the recently deceased Tory playwright John Dryden. The collection, which Manley helped plan and execute, was obviously intended to position strategically these female ‘muses’ in the literary-political publishing world of their day. Between 1697 and 1702, Manley was the mistress of John Tilly, governor of Fleet Prison, and was involved with him in an attempt to intervene in the famous Bath-Albemarle lawsuit, an attempt they hoped would produce a financial reward for themselves, although the suit was not resolved to their advantage. Manley was briefly imprisoned in November 1705, possibly for debt. In late 1706, her third play, Almyna: or, The Arabian Vow. A Tragedy (1707), was produced on stage. In 1707 Manley also brought out another epistolary miscellany, The Unknown Lady’s Pacquet of Letters, which appeared in two parts, published in January and September. In this work she recounts gossip about others with whom she was once friends, including Richard Steele and the Duchess of Cleveland, and narrates, as amusing fictionalized vignettes, certain events in her own life.

By 1709, Manley had launched her career as a Tory political satirist. Her New Atalantis appeared in two parts, the first in May and the second in September or October of 1709. This is a work in which she both inaugurates her version of ‘Varonian’ political satire and continues to define herself rhetorically by including fictionalized third-person anecdotes about events in her own life, always narrated in such a way as to lend a sympathetic spin to her situation. In October 1709, Manley was arrested and interrogated as the author of this work, on what appears to have been a charge of libel. She was subsequently released and charges were dropped a few months later. This arrest did not deter her from bringing out in short order Memoirs of Europe, which was just as strongly critical of the Whigcontrolled administration as its predecessor.

From 1711 to 1713, Manley worked actively as part of Robert Harley’s Tory propaganda team, writing pointedly satirical pamphlets critiquing a range of Whig policies. She was especially critical of governmental strategy in the War of Spanish Succession, which she and other Tories felt was being unnecessarily prolonged by the military leader John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough. In the summer of 1711, she replaced her friend Jonathan Swift as author of the Tory periodical the Examiner, writing the final six issues that year. Extant letters to Robert Harley from this period reveal Manley’s sense of herself as a professional pamphleteer, and party loyalist.

In June 1714, Manley brought out her quasi-fictional autobiography, The Adventures of Rivella, which appeared shortly before the death of Queen Anne (1 August 1714). With the Whigs back in power in the autumn of 1714, Harley under investigation, and Jonathan Swift back in Ireland, Manley’s opportunities for writing Tory propaganda were greatly diminished. For her most successful play, Lucius, the First Christian King of Britain. A Tragedy (1717), her former friend and subsequent political opponent in pamphlet wars, Richard Steele, then governor of the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, reputedly paid her the generous sum of 600 guineas. In late 1719, shortly after Eliza Haywood’s debut as a novelist with the first two volumes of her phenomenally popular Love in Excess (the third volume was published in 1720), Manley turned back to early Continental sources to produce The Power of Love. This is a work with which she may have tried to capture some of Haywood’s success and by which she was clearly once again attempting to redefine her own narrative voice and style.

In looking at this varied mixture of publications across two and a half decades, it is easy to see the difficulty faced by subsequent generations in understanding Manley’s place in literary history. While she wrote some successful plays, Manley never established herself as her generation’s Aphra Behn. While she wrote some fascinating epistolary miscellanies, these short, highly innovative pieces are not eas...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• A Note on Dates
• Manley Family Tree
• Introduction
• 1 ‘A Long Untainted Descent’: Her Father’s Daughter?
• 2 Roger Manley: ‘A Scholar in the Midst of a Camp’
• 3 A ‘Liberal Education’: Youth and Early Life in London
• 4 A ‘Female Wit’: 1694–6
• 5 ‘Some More [and Less] Profitable Employ’: 1697–1705
• 6 Not Yet a Propaganda Writer: 1705–8
• 7 ‘[T]hrowing the First Stone’: 1709
• 8 Writing under a Tory Ministry: 1710–14
• 9 A Celebrated ‘Muse’: 1714–24
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index