Education for women fell out of fashion with the arrival of James I, whose daughter Elizabeth Stuart studied only ‘female arts’.200 When a female scholar, Bathsua Makin (1600–75), known as ‘England’s most learned lady’, presented the king with a book of poems in six languages, Musa Virginea, he is said to have asked: ‘But can she spin?’201

  Hilarious.

  Bathsua Makin survived the stupidity of King James and was invited by his son Charles I to teach his daughter six languages and mathematics. When the princess Elizabeth Stuart was arrested by the Parliamentarians, Bathsua Makin stayed with her as a servant, rather than abandon her to her father’s enemies. In 1673, Makin established a school for girls in Tottenham, London, where she practised her theories of women’s education outlined in her book An Essay to Revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen (1673). She did not demand equality for women, but recognition. This was not lack of conviction but doubt of success: ‘Let not Your Ladyships be offended that I do not (as some have wittily done) plead for female Pre-Eminence. To ask too much is the way to be denied all.’

  Many noblewomen not only studied languages and theology but published under their own names, as revealed by a 2012 exhibition, Shakespeare’s Sisters, featuring 50 women writers from these years, some of them hardly known, even now.202

  The nobility created a network of training and education for their daughters. Katherine Dudley, Countess of Huntingdon, wife of Henry Hastings, kept a ‘kind of finishing school for the children of the nobility’ at the end of the sixteenth century.203 Margaret Dakins (later Margaret Hoby, the diarist) lived with the childless countess, as did Dorothy Devereux, Dionys Fitzherbert and Penelope Devereux, who was fluent in French, Italian and Spanish. Other elite households employed educated gentlewomen as tutors and teachers for their children. Margaret Hexstall signed an indenture to care for the Duke of Buckingham’s children at Bletchingley during the indefinite absence of the parents. She worked with five staff – two other gentlewomen and a laundress – to look after four children.204

  Being an elite companion was not always an agreeable experience. Joan Thynne wrote to her fiancé:

  ‘My lady keeps her accustomed courtesy towards me which I may count a hell to heavenly joys or such lady’s love that will force me to leave this country, which I would be loath since your pleasure is to the contrary, but I hope you will not have me stay where I shall be so vilely abused as now. I am, more meeter for some servant than for one of my estate.’205

  Some of the nunnery schools for girls of middling class survived the dissolution: St Mary’s Winchester had 26 pupils, boys and girls, in 1535. There were also village schools or even private tutors: Mrs Evans, a brewer’s wife, took in a wealthy orphan girl and taught her lessons. Rivington Grammar School, founded in 1560, accepted girl pupils – Alice Shaw attended in 1615. Girls attended the free school in the old parish church of Wigston in Leicestershire, and at Norwich even the poorest girls were educated, though they might leave school to go to work at the age of six, while their brothers continued their studies. The wife of Richard Dawes had her own school in Essex in 1590 for boys and girls.206

  Some schools were founded between the 1590s and the 1630s for lower-class pupils. Bunbury School in Cheshire, a school in Essex and one in West Chilcompton in Sussex admitted girls but specified that they could only attend up to the age of nine or ten and were only to be taught to read English – not to write. Some schools specified that they would only teach boys: the 1590 rules at Harrow explicitly excluded girls, as did St Olave’s in Southwark, Felsted in Essex and Tiverton in Devon.207

  In the Tudor years, upper-class women left on the country estates, relied on writing to stay in touch with their husbands and kin. Lady Margaret Hoby’s spiritual journal from 1599 to 1600 recorded her thoughts and prayers.208 During the civil wars women joined the written political debate and – divided from their families – wrote personal letters. Even working women wrote and read: Susan Rodway, a common soldier’s wife, wrote to her husband who was serving Parliament in the London Trained Bands, besieging Basing House. Sir Simon Harcourt reminded his wife to write: ‘My dear, let me hear often from thee.’209

  For the first time in English history there were women wanting to write about themselves and read about each other. A domestic servant, Isabella Whitney, taught herself to read and write and in 1566–67 published The Copy of a Letter, lately written by a gentlewoman in metre to her unconstant lover, the first volume of verse published by a lower-class Englishwoman, followed by a second book in 1573. Dorcas Martin, a townswoman, married to the Lord Mayor of London, published an essay in the two-volume anthology of religious and devotional writing The Monument of Matrons of 1582. Two years later, Anne Wheathill composed and published a book of prayers, A Handfull of Wholesome (though Homely) Herbs, linking women’s speciality – herbalism – with religious expression. Anne Dowriche composed a historical poem; Elizabeth Melville published A Godly Dream in 1603. Aemilia Lanyer – the mistress of Elizabeth I’s cousin Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon – published her book of verse in 1611. The daughter of an Italian Jew, she compared the original sin of Eve with the far worse sin of all men – that of executing Jesus Christ:

  Her sinne was small, to what you doe commit;

  This sinne of yours, surmounts them all as farre

  As doth the Sunne, another little starre.

  Then let us have our Libertie againe,

  And challendge to your selves no Sov’raigntie;

  You came not in the world without our paine,

  Make that a barre against your crueltie;

  Your fault beeing greater, why should you disdaine

  Our being your equals, free from tyranny?

  If one weake woman simply did offend,

  This sinne of yours, both no excuse, nor end.210

  The first childcare manuals by women written in English were published before the civil wars: Dorothy Leigh’s The Mother’s Blessing in 1616 and Elizabeth Jocelyne’s A Mother’s Legacy to her Unborn Child in 1624. Hannah Woolley wrote on cookery and also published a successful herbal and domestic advice book. The Protestant scholar and writer Anne Locke pioneered the spiritual journey style that was to become fashionable after the civil wars.211 Katherine Jones, Viscountess Ranelagh (1615–91), was an Anglo-Irish scientist, philosopher and political thinker, a member both of the ‘Hartlib Circle’ (a protestant spy network that spread from Europe to America), the Great Tew Circle of humanist philosophers, and the so-called ‘Invisible College’ around Robert Boyle.

  Not everyone was a fan: ‘When any of our Sex doth Write they Write some Devotions or Romances or Receipts of Medicines for Cookery or confectioners or Complemental Letters or a Copy or two of Verses . . . which express our Brief Wit in our Short Works.’212 This harsh critic was Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, who also aspired to the philosophical circles and spent a fortune on publishing her own books, which ranged from natural science to philosophy. She wrote a play and a science fiction romance. Original and eccentric, she was a determinedly innovative thinker, corresponding with philosophers and scientists of the day, respected mainly for the wealth of her husband’s fortune and her social position.

  Mary Evelyn (1636–1709) – a writer herself – argued that women should not study: ‘All time borrowed from family duties is misspent; the care of children’s education, observing a husband’s commands, assisting the sick, relieving the poor, and being serviceable to our friends, are of sufficient weight to employ the most improved capacities amongst us.’213

  Medicine

  Medicine, chemistry, herbalism and surgery were widely practised by elite women on their households, estate workers, tenants and – during warfare – injured soldiers.

  Margaret Colfe, wife of Abraham Colfe, rector of Lewisham, was described at her funeral, ‘for Yeares a willing Nurse, Midwife, Surgeon, and in part Physitian to all, both rich and poore; without expecting reward’.214

  All gynaecology and obstetric examinations and treatments were exclusively performed by women, some of them highly skilled practitioners. Some of the surgeons at the newly formed St Thomas’s Hospital in London were women.215 Elizabeth Hall was on call at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in the capital in the 1550s. Elizabeth Fysher cured Thomas Bedforde of Coventry of a very ‘great swelling’, buying spices from apothecaries to make her own medicines. Elizabeth Eston nursed her employer Thomas Gawen for 12 years, on the promise of a rental property on his death, a promise he died without honouring. Catherine Studley of Aldgate Street, London, received Henry VIII’s ward Thomas Philpot in her house when he was near to death. She nursed him back to health over eight months and charged the king, his guardian, 18s a week for his care, an extraordinarily high fee which reflected her skills. Most board and lodging was between 1s and 2s a week.216

  Mother Edwin worked as a surgeon at Christ’s Hospital, London, in 1563; Mrs Cock was the surgeon-apothecary there in 1576, as was Alice Gordon in 1598. Cecily Baldrye got her surgery licence from the Bishop of Norwich in 1568. Only one woman in Exeter was licensed to be a surgeon in the whole of the reign of Elizabeth: Mary Cornellys of Bodmin.217 Isabel Warwike was allowed to practise as a surgeon in York in 1572 because of her good reputation. Two named women physicians emerge from the Kent probate records: Mrs Wright, who provided physic and advice and was fetched from her home in Canterbury to a dying patient in 1635, and Mrs Jacob of Canterbury, who was one of a family of physicians in 1613. She was probably still working, with her son, in 1649 when she was named in the probate records of her patient.218 A midwife in Southampton was so skilled that she was rewarded with the freedom of the city in 1601. The honour was given to her husband because she had been ‘for many years the chief midwife in the town and hath taken great pains and honest care in her function’.219

  Women nurses, rockers and governesses who bonded with their young noble charges often became permanent members of the household or were paid a lifetime salary or pension. Alice Davy, a wet nurse in Henry VII’s royal nursery to Princess Margaret Tudor, went on to serve the new baby Princess Elizabeth Tudor in 1492.220 In 1553, 25 nurses were employed at Christ’s Hospital, in the capital, to look after orphan children.221

  Nursing opportunities for low-paid women expanded as the Elizabethan parishes were obliged by law to provide poor houses and hospitals for the poor. As it was disagreeable, dangerous and badly paid, male professionals did not compete for the work. Elderly poor women were employed by Norwich in 1570 to nurse patients in almshouses. By the end of the century, women were working in most parishes to inspect dead bodies for cause of death, to prevent the spread of plague.222

  A law regulating physicians and surgeons passed in 1512, apparently to prevent ‘sorcery’ and ‘witchcraft’ among medical practitioners, signalled the start of a campaign to drive folk-healers and cunning women out of business.223 The College of Physicians, formed six years later, claimed that any practitioner outside the college was not to be trusted – and, of course, women could not join the college or attend men-only universities. Wealthy patients were persuaded: moving from female healers to members of the college in the sixteenth century. The College of Physicians undertook 29 prosecutions of women between 1550 and 1600, and issued unknown numbers of formal warnings and exclusions to prevent anyone from practising surgery and doctoring without one of its licences.224 In Norwich in 1561, the male barber-surgeons drew up new rules to ban all women from practising medicine and surgery in the town.225

  A dangerously incompetent woman doctor is held back from killing a patient, by an angel: frontispiece, Popular Errors or the Errors of the People in Matter of Physick, 1651

  Title page from James Primrose, Popular Errors or the Errors of the people in matter of Physick, W. Wisson for Nicholas Bourne, 1651, British Museum (agefotostock/Alamy)

  James Primrose published Popular Errors or the Errors of People in Physicians in 1651, with a frontispiece that shows a female doctor being held back from the bedside of a sick patient by an angel so that a male doctor can save a life.

  The only patients left to women practitioners were poor people and those in remote areas who could not afford to send for an expensive male doctor. Gynaecology and obstetrics remained women’s specialities – unpopular among medical men because of the intimacy with women in labour, the long hours and the fear of failure.226

  The campaign against female physicians created a prejudice against all traditional healers that played into the rising persecution of wise women and cunning women from the Tudor laws to the witch-hunts of the 1600s.227

  Witchcraft

  The declining respect for women healers may have been caused by the failure of remedies to prevent the plague, and by men moving out of ‘cunning work’ and folk medicine, for which payment was also falling, and into ‘medical’ work as apothecaries, physicians and different grades of surgeons. The Physicians’ and Surgeons’ guilds tried to professionalise medical work by rejecting experience as a qualification and requiring a university degree to enter the profession (which women could not attain), by publishing medical books in Latin (which no one but highly educated women could read) and by informally banning entry to women healers. They improved their own status by speaking derogatively of women practitioners. As the status of folk medicine and herbalism fell, as the pay for healing fell, men moved out of the craft of healing and tried to enter the professions of medicine and surgery, leaving folk-healing and cunning work to women.

  The increasingly negative definitions of the ‘nature’ of women found in the women-hater pamphlets matched the supposed ‘nature’ of witches: emotional, angry, credulous, easily tempted, indecisive and uncontrollably oversexed.228 Most of those accused of witchcraft were women – and two-thirds of them were poor single women.229 The Malleus Maleficarum – the paranoid 1486 handbook for finding witches – focused almost exclusively on women, especially old, poor and marginal women, depicting their easily tempted natures, hunger and greed, and describing them as viciously resentful of their wealthier neighbours, the new middling classes.

  The medieval world remained a highly superstitious society. When anyone was struck by bad luck – illness or death or accident – they sought an explanation from the spirit world. Yorkshire landowner Lady Margaret Hoby believed that God had sent her illness as a ‘gentle correction’ in 1599:

  After priuat prairs I went about the house and read of the Bible and wrought tell dinner time: and after dinner it pleased for a Just punishment to correct my sinnes, to send me febelnis of stomak and paine of my head, that kept me up on my bed tell 5:a clock: at which time I arose haveing release of my sickness, according to the wonted kindnes of the Lord, who, after he had Let me see how I had offended, that so I might take better heed to my body and soule hereafter, with a gentle corriction let me feele he was reconsiled To Me.230

  Protestant theology suggested that God Himself sent trials, that the devil and his agents walked the world making mischief, and disaster could be called down on a prosperous house by an envious neighbour or someone with a grievance, landless because their shared fields had been enclosed, envious of the rise of the ‘middling’ people; some were squeezed out of profitable work and named as quacks and witches; and some were genuinely cursing their ‘betters’ and wishing them ill – regretting the loss of ‘good lordship’ when they could have expected help from the kitchen door of the grand house. The idea of a fatal ‘Beggar’s Curse’ originated in the folklore of the past and would hold sway for centuries.

  A new law brought in by Henry VIII in 1542 to make witchcraft a hanging offence was expanded by Elizabeth I in 1563 to make a new crime of the summoning of spirits and causing death by witchcraft, punishable by death.231 A witch who killed a farm animal would serve a year in prison. The first woman to be prosecuted under the new law was Agnes Waterhouse – her trial was reported in a pamphlet widely sold at the time.

  ‘The examination and confession of certaine wytches at Chensforde’, 1566, by John Phillips, detailing the trial of Elizabeth Fraunces, Agnes Waterhouse and her daughter Joan

  John Phillips, ‘The examination and confession of certaine wytches at Chensforde’, Willyam Powell for Wyllyam Pickeringe, 1566 (Granger/Bridgeman Images)

  Agnes, her sister Elizabeth Fraunces and her 18-year-old daughter Joan, from Hatfield Peverel, were accused at the Chelmsford Assize court of killing a neighbour, William Fynee, by witchcraft. Agnes admitted the crime – and more. She also confessed that she had murdered her husband because they lived ‘somewhat unquietly’ together. Her sister Elizabeth had given her a cat called Sathan – and it was Sathan who had performed the murders.

  Agnes’ daughter Joan was also accused of tormenting a neighbour, 12-year-old Agnes Brown, with a black dog that came to their dairy holding a key, damaged the butter and offered the young girl a knife to kill herself, telling her that it was his ‘sweet dame’s knife’. The girl told the court that the dog had indicated that he came from the Waterhouse cottage: ‘he wagged his head to your house, mother Waterhouse’.

  ‘Sathan’: first described as a white cat, a toad and then a black dog with an ape-like face and horns

  [And Cover] ‘Sathan’ in ibid. (Public domain)

  Agnes Waterhouse confessed to the murder of two men; but denied the satanic dog, and the knife. She might have been guilty of the murders, or she may have been exhausted and delusional after witch tests and sleep deprivation and made a false confession, or she may have pleaded guilty to the murders in order to make a more convincing ‘not guilty’ plea to the joint accusation with her daughter Joan – and save her. If that was the plan, she succeeded. Agnes Waterhouse was executed for witchcraft, but she saved her daughter: Joan was declared innocent.232