Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind

Anna Battigelli

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813183855
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Margaret Cavendish, duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673), led a dramatic life that brought her into contact with kings, queens, and the leading thinkers of her day. The English civil wars forced her into exile, accompanying Queen Henrietta Maria and her court to Paris. From this vantage point, she began writing voluminously, responding to the events and major intellectual movements of the mid-seventeenth century.

Cavendish published twenty-three volumes in her lifetime, including plays, romances, poetry, letters, biography, and natural philosophy. In them she explored the political, scientific, and philosophical ideas of her day. While previous biographers of Cavendish have focused almost exclusively on her eccentric public behavior, Anna Battigelli is the first to explore in depth her intellectual life. She dismisses the myth of Cavendish as an isolated and lonely thinker, arguing that the role of exile was a rhetorical stance, one that allowed Cavendish to address and even criticize her world. She, like others writing during the period after the English civil wars, focused squarely on the problem of finding the proper relationship between mind and world. This volume presents Cavendish's writing self, the self she treasured above all others.

1

Introduction

The Writing Life

To live over other people’s lives is nothing unless we live over their perceptions, live over the growth, the change, the varying intensities of the same—since it was by these things they themselves lived.

—Henry James

No seventeenth-century English woman focused her energies more intensely on the life of the mind than did Margaret Cavendish. This characteristic more than any other distinguishes her work. She became a compulsive writer, so furiously driven that by her own account she could not be bothered to revise for fear that doing so might “disturb [her] following Conceptions.”¹ That she considered her thoughts worthy of recording for a future audience, one that might evaluate them with greater equanimity than she credited her contemporaries with possessing, is not surprising. She led a sensational life marked by public and historic moments that brought her into close contact with kings, queens, and the leading thinkers of her day. By marriage and by birth, she was connected to families that paid huge sums, in money and in lives, to support Charles I’s losing cause during the English civil wars. For sixteen years she lived in exile, first in Paris, then in Rotterdam, and finally in Antwerp, together with her husband, William Cavendish, marquess and later duke of Newcastle. Their childless marriage provided her with secretaries, books, tutors, time, and even encouragement to write. Because William Cavendish was a known patron, officiating over a renowned literary and scientific salon, her marriage also introduced her to a world of political, scientific, and literary ideas to which women were generally denied direct access. In the twenty-three volumes she produced during her lifetime, she wavers between despair at the political chaos of her world and exhilaration at its new scientific discoveries; these volumes yield a rich and often prescient critique of the intellectual texture of seventeenth-century life.

The rough outlines of her life are well known. She was born Margaret Lucas, the youngest of eight children born to Elizabeth Leighton Lucas and Thomas Lucas of Colchester, Essex. The year of her birth is generally agreed to have been 1623. Her father died in September of 1625, leaving her mother to care for the family, a charge she seems to have handled capably with respect to family finances, though psychologically she created an insular family environment that had lasting and not entirely positive consequences for the formation of her daughter’s character.² Lucas’s early education was described by Lucas herself as minimal. She later wrote that

as for tutors, although we had for all sorts of Vertues, as singing, dancing, playing on Musick, reading, writing, working, and the like, yet we were not kept strictly thereto, they were rather for formalitie than benefit, for my Mother cared not so much for our dancing and fidling, singing and prating of severall languages, as that we should be bred vertuously, modestly, civilly, honorably, and on honest principles.³

She nevertheless claims to have begun writing at an early age, though this work is lost. With her brothers and sisters, she attended plays in London, and she seems to have been attentive to court fashions, a characteristic in keeping with her family’s royalism.

Hers might have been an unremarkable life were it not for the English civil wars, which, as she put it, “came like a Whirlwind,” altering forever everything in its sweep. The Lucas family house was plundered on 22 August 1642 by parliamentary soldiers, who rightly suspected her brother John Lucas of storing arms and ammunition for the king’s forces.⁴ This event may well have encouraged Margaret Lucas to seek protection, mistakenly, by joining the court of Henrietta Maria at Oxford as a maid of honor. As a consequence, in the fall of 1644, when Henrietta Maria fled into exile in France, Lucas was part of her entourage. The next spring in Paris, she met William Cavendish, who had come to Paris after having abandoned his post as commander of the northern forces following his devastating defeat at Marston Moor. There, he doubtless hoped to repair his relations with the queen. Outside of the royal family itself, he was the most notorious exile in Paris. By mid-December he and Margaret Lucas were married; Margaret Lucas became Lady Margaret, marchioness of Newcastle. Together, they remained in exile until the restoration in 1660.

Though their marriage was in many senses a successful one, its early years were marked by her depression, undoubtedly intensified by the news in 1647 of the deaths of her niece, her sister, and her mother. She also learned in 1648 that her brother Sir Charles Lucas had been tried by court-martial and shot after defending their hometown of Colchester. Finally, with the news that Charles I had been executed on 30 January 1649, the exiled Royalists were forced to confront the fact that returning home was now indefinitely delayed, though they could not, even then, have foreseen the full duration of their exile. The seriousness of her husband’s situation in England was made clear when on 14 March he and twelve others, including Charles Stuart and his brother James, were “proscribed and banished as enemies and traitors, and [would] die without mercy, wherever they shall be found within the limits of this nation.”⁵ By October the Newcastle household moved to Antwerp, which soon became a meeting ground for exiled Royalists; there they lived in the mansion formerly owned by the painter Peter Paul Rubens. For Margaret Cavendish, now secluded in Rubens’s magnificent home, it must have come as something of a relief during those tumultuous years to turn away from the hostile external world to the worlds of philosophical and scientific ideas to which she had first been exposed at her husband’s salon in Paris; there she had met and begun reading the works of some of the most illustrious thinkers in Europe, René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, and Pierre Gassendi among them. She turned to studies of natural philosophy in part because, like many seventeenth-century thinkers, she read the new scientific systems as metaphors for the political chaos of her world.

She began her prolific publishing career in 1653, during a trip to England with her brother-in-law, Sir Charles Cavendish. They left for London in November of 1651 to try to compound for their sequestered estates. Her effort at compounding for her husband’s estate was unsuccessful; with Charles II at large in Europe, Parliament was unlikely to compromise with the loyal duke or with his wife.⁶ Charles Cavendish was more successful; he compounded for his estate and, at great cost, bought his brother’s estates at Welbeck and Bolsover, saving the latter from destruction. Meanwhile, Margaret Cavendish published her first two volumes, Poems and Fancies and Philosophicall Fancies. These caused an immediate sensation. Hearing about the publication of Poems and Fancies, Dorothy Osborne wrote to Sir William Temple, asking him to procure a copy. Before he could do so, she had found and read a copy and had concluded “that there [were] many soberer People in Bedlam.”⁷

From this point on, Cavendish wrote compulsively, thus entering public life officially and puzzling her readers as much by the sheer mass and variety of her literary production as by her strange social manner. Although her most frequently read works have been her biography of her husband and her brief autobiography, her twenty-three volumes also include volumes of plays, romances, poetry, letters, and natural philosophy. In them she explored the leading political, scientific, and philosophical ideas of her day. The diarist Samuel Pepys, like Osborne, eventually concluded that the duchess was a “mad, conceited, ridiculous woman.” John Evelyn, who was initially charmed by the duchess, grew irritated by her scientific pretensions and noted that she “was a mighty pretender to Learning, Poetrie, and Philosophy, and had in both published divers books.” But it is important to remember that others seemed to consider her something of an oracle. Bathsua Makin wrote that Cavendish “by her own Genius, rather than any timely Instruction, over-tops many grave Gown-Men.” And even Mary Evelyn, who wrote a scathing description of Cavendish’s social manner, unhappily acknowledged that Cavendish was considered by wise men to be the equal or better of Katherine Philips: “[M]en who are esteemed wise and learned, not only put them in equal balance, but suffer the greatness of the one to weigh down the certain real worth of the other.”⁸ The juxtaposition of Cavendish with the Royalist Philips, like her juxtaposition with the parliamentarian Lucy Hutchinson, has never benefited Cavendish; she lacks their poise and restraint. They understood how to use their status as women to their benefit in ways that she either did not understand or refused to follow.

With the restoration of Charles II to the throne of England in 1660, the couple returned to London, which they found to be a much changed and now alien environment. Though William Cavendish was created duke of Newcastle in 1665, he was profoundly disappointed to find himself excluded from the king’s inner circle; and Margaret Cavendish, by now a cult phenomenon because of her prolific publishing record, was relieved when they retired to the Newcastle estate at Welbeck Abbey. They visited London occasionally, and she continued to be an item of intense public curiosity. Samuel Pepys wrote in 1667 that “all the town-talk is nowadays of her extravagancies.” Never one to dismiss a fad, he joined the crowd chasing the duchess’s coach in order to catch a glimpse of her. An early attempt was, he writes, frustrated by “a horrid dust and a number of coaches, without pleasure or order. That which we and almost all went for was to see my Lady Newcastle; which we could not, she being fallowed [sic] and crowded upon by coaches all the way she went, that nobody could come near her; only, I could see she was in a large black coach, adorned with silver instead of gold, and so with the curtains and everything black and white, and herself in her cap; but other parts I could not make.” Nine days later, he was again prevented from seeing the duchess on account of the “100 boys and girls running looking upon her.”⁹ That spring she caused an even greater sensation when she arranged to be invited to a meeting in May of the Royal Society. Controversial, bewildering, and fascinating to her last day, the duchess died on 15 December 1673. She was buried in Westminster Abbey on 7 January 1674, where her husband had a magnificent monument built in her honor.

Those are the external facts of her life. They tell us surprisingly little about her life as a writer. When we look for evidence of her writing life, we are confronted with her extraordinary and flamboyant self-invention. One of the liabilities of leading a life so intricately bound to major historical events is that one’s life so readily takes the form of a two-dimensional silhouette cast against a historically rich background; background becomes foreground as the life recedes into the distance.¹⁰ No one appears to have been more aware of this possibility than Cavendish, who invented herself within her texts, writing herself into history. In her hands her life story and her husband’s become iconic myths of the “exiled cavalier.”

She choreographed her public appearances so as to appear in the role of the female cavalier, sometimes donning men’s clothes or the cavalier hat or resorting to masculine gestures such as bows rather than curtsies.¹¹ According to John Evelyn, she arrived at her meeting with the Royal Society looking “so like a Cavalier / But that she had no beard.” Sir Charles Lyttelton records meeting her in 1665 “dressed in a vest,” noting that “insteed [sic] of courtesies, [she] made leggs and bows to the ground with her hand and head.”¹² In her work and in her conversation she called attention repeatedly to her husband’s financial losses, to his unrewarded loyalty and self-sacrifice, to their long banishment. Listeners like Mary Evelyn grew irritated by her catalog of greatness and loss:

I found Doctor Charlton with her, complimenting her wit and learning in a high manner; which she took to be so much her due that she swore if the schools did not banish Aristotle and read Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, they did her wrong, and deserved to be utterly abolished. My part was not yet to speak, but admire; especially hearing her go on magnifying her own generous actions, stately buildings, noble fortune, her lord’s prodigious losses in the war, his power, valour, wit, learning, and industry,—what did she not mention to his or her own advantage? . . . Never did I see a woman so full of herself, so amazingly vain and ambitious.¹³

The extravagance of Cavendish’s self-fashioning before Walter Charleton and Mary Evelyn suggests the construction of a mask, and, like most writers, she hid behind the masks she created. We must turn to her work if we are ever to learn something about the elusive self behind the mask of the exiled cavalier to which she so frequently resorted. What we find, inevitably, are additional masks, but these may more closely approach what Leon Edel calls the “palpable projections of the impalpable and wholly personal inner experience.”¹⁴

An intellectual life history is easier to explore and convey coherently when it is placed within a social context in which interactions with other people can be traced and explored. But Cavendish’s social contacts, as opposed to her intellectual contacts, were minimal and problematic. As Mary Evelyn’s description suggests, Cavendish never seemed able to come out from behind the mask of the “exiled cavalier” long enough to establish anything like an intimate friendship with people outside of her family circle. Thus, although everyone seems to have known about her and many recorded their observations of her, her only intimate female friend seems to have been her maid, Elizabeth Chaplain.¹⁵ Similarly, the many letters written to her and collected for publication by her husband after her death reveal, with the possible exceptions of those from Walter Charleton, Sir Kenelm Digby, and Joseph Glanvill, respect for her family name and position more than an informed response to her work. Her own self-portraits, both those she wrote and those she had engraved as frontispieces for her volumes, typically project a woman alone with her thoughts.

And yet it seems to have been true in her case that when she was alone with her thoughts she felt least alone. Her public manner was not likely to encourage sociability. From childhood, she had been painfully bashful; she claims to have feared strangers and to have found more delight “with thoughts than in conversation.” No contemporary description of her alters this characterization. Her eccentric fashions, her theatrical manners, her odd self-portraits—each of these gestures is calculated to engage people while keeping them at a comfortable distance. We might conclude that for Cavendish this distance was in some way convenient, and yet for someone as interested in the world of ideas as she was, it cannot have been wholly satisfactory. Although she met the leading thinkers of her day and read their works, she never seems to have felt comfortable speaking with them. They, in turn, seem to have felt awkward around her. When, for example, during her trip to London in 1651-53, she ran into her husband’s intimate friend, Thomas Hobbes, and invited him to dinner, he refused. She records as his excuse that he claimed to have had “some businesse,” which, she speculates, “I suppose required his absence.”¹⁶ One senses in this remark that she longed to talk with Hobbes and others with the kind of ease her husband and her brother-in-law found so natural. Prevented both by social conventions and by temperament from interacting fully with others in public, she turned to her writing. Writing provided her with a means of intellectual engagement that was not possible for her through ordinary conversation. Whatever other selves existed—wife, stepmother, sister-in-law, sister, daughter—became of secondary interest to her compared to the writing self she invented within her texts.

As a writer, she identifies herself consistently throughout her work as an exile, transforming her comparative social isolation into a rhetorical stance, a position of advantage from which to address her world. Her life story can be said to have consisted, in fact, of a series of exiles—first from her childhood in an insular Colchester family to the displaced court at Oxford, then to Henrietta Maria’s exiled court in Paris, to her husband’s banished households in Paris and Antwerp, to her study at Welbeck Abbey, and, ultimately, to the worlds within her texts. She turned this life story to use in her work, using her very real experience as an exile as a privileged rhetorical stance from which she might address and even critique her world authoritatively.

We need to be watchful, however, that her rhetorical stance as an exile not distract us from the very real fact that she was familiar with the work of the leading thinkers of her day. Her social isolation was not an intellectual isolation, though she frequently portrays herself as a lonely and isolated genius creating volumes of natural philosophy exclusively through the use of her imagination. In fact, however, she read Hobbes and Descartes and was introduced to the ideas of Gassendi; if she lacked the kind of discipline expected of a serious response to these writers, she nevertheless grasped—more presciently than many of her contemporaries—some of the major consequences of their...