Not Just Dutiful Wives and Besotted Ladies: Epistemic Agency in the War Writing of Brilliana Harley and Margaret Cavendish Joanne H

Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 2009, vol. 4 Not Just Dutiful Wives and Besotted Ladies: Epistemic Agency in the War Writing of Brilliana Harley and Margaret Cavendish Joanne H. Wright ritish women’s writings in response to the First World War have gen- Berated a great deal of scholarly inquiry, such that it is possible both to refer to a category of women war writers, and to break that category down into multiple genres and ideological approaches.1 Where might an investigation of women’s war writing during the English Civil War begin? Certainly the Civil War occasioned an increase in women’s public, political activity, including an increase in the publication of political tracts by women.2 Many of the women writing explicitly political tracts and peti- tions combined religious and political arguments, taking exception to specific policies or registering their pleas for the release of male family members from prison. Stepping aside from the pamphlet literature, is it possible to create a distinct category of women’s war writing, writing by women that directly engages the politics of war, its causes and meanings, and that reflects upon the lived experience of war? In this essay I approach this question by considering the constraints on our thinking about women as political thinkers and particularly war writers, and the failure of historians of political thought and military historians alike to acknowledge women’s perspectives on war. I suggest that an investigation of women Civil War writers might fruitfully begin with an examination of the writings of Brilliana Harley and Margaret Cavendish, both of whom served as valuable historical witnesses to the English Civil War and, even more importantly, attempted to construct political 1 2 EMWJ 2009, vol. 4 Joanne H. Wright knowledge of it. In terms of political sympathies, Harley, as a supporter of Parliament, and Cavendish, as a Royalist (albeit an ambiguous one3), would have shared little. Yet they each had to negotiate difficult epistemo- logical terrain to assert their knowledge claims about war, terrain marked by deeply ingrained assumptions about their gender, their status as gentle- women or nobility, as well as their lack of authority in the field of war. Brilliana’s letters about the impending military siege of Brampton Bryan, together with Cavendish’s multiple narratives and stories of war, particularly in Orations of Divers Sorts (1662), Bell in Campo (1662), and Sociable Letters (1664), make possible an alternative kind of knowledge about war that is not available in either the traditional military history or the political theory of the Civil War period. Placing the narratives of Harley and Cavendish at the center of this inquiry allows us to disrupt the dominant, phallocentric picture of the Civil War, while at the same time giving sub- stantive meaning to an early modern category of women war writers. Phallocentric perspectives: surveying the military history of the Civil War In thinking about women political writers and war writers in the seven- teenth century, the challenge is not so much that no women were writing on war but that scant attention has been paid to this aspect of their writings. Most importantly for my purposes, even less attention has been paid to women writers’ knowledge of war and politics. In the light of these deficiencies, how do we begin to think of women as having authoritative knowledge about war? To begin to shift our thinking about women’s knowledge of war, it is necessary to address some of our basic assumptions about how women’s texts fit into both the larger societal conversation about war and what kinds of responses their writings engender. Quentin Skinner’s introductory comments in his examination of Thomas Hobbes’s use of the concept of representation are helpful in this regard. Skinner clarifies that his consideration of other relevant contem- porary uses of the idea of representation is not about “providing mere ‘background’ to the understanding of Hobbes’s thought.” In fact, he is Not Just Dutiful Wives and Besotted Ladies 3 attempting to “question any strong distinction between the background of partisan political tracts on the one hand and Hobbes’s systematic works of political philosophy on the other.”4 This is a point which holds particular significance for scholars interested in women’s intellectual history, that the traditional positioning of great thinkers in relief, against a background or context which itself received little attention, creates a misleading picture of these thinkers in relation to their contemporaries. Part of this positive project of re-embedding the canonical thinkers must involve new attention to the women who were active participants in the larger societal conversation about the meaning(s) of war and politics in early modern England. While Hobbes and his contemporaries may have had their own reasons for disregarding a political writer such as Margaret Cavendish (and indeed some very specific reasons for giving her at least respectful attention as the wife of William Cavendish, one of Hobbes’s patrons), contempo- rary historians of political thought and political theorists construct what I suggest is a phallocentric picture of early modern political discourse in failing to acknowledge the perspectives of women writers and activists in their work. Phallocentrism, as Elizabeth Grosz defines it, is a mode of representation in which the experiences and perspectives of the two sexes are collapsed into “a single model, called ‘human’ or ‘man, ’ ’’ when actually the experience or perspective in question is “congruent only with the mas- culine.” As a “universalization of particular features of masculinity, as if these were genuinely representative of both sexes,” phallocentrism, Grosz explains, “leaves women no conceptual space for developing autonomous interests and points of view other than or different from men’s.”5 Thus, when political theorists, historians of political thought, and, we might add at this point, military historians take the conversation between men about arms, military strategy, military leadership, and the causes of the Civil War to represent the whole of the human experience of the Civil War, eclipsing the women who, as activists, writers, wives, and family members contrib- uted to and shaped the discourse in important ways, they employ a phallocentric framework. Since historically war has been the business of men, the phallocentrism of military history and war writing has been at once invisible and “normal.” Alternatively, to disrupt phallocentrism requires that we foreground the gendered politics of knowledge construction and 4 EMWJ 2009, vol. 4 Joanne H. Wright ask questions about whose perspectives are counted as authoritative and whose downplayed, downgraded, or undermined in a variety of unac- knowledged ways. As a means to investigate how early modern women’s perspectives on war are treated and evaluated, I have surveyed a selection of early and con- temporary military histories of the Civil War for references to Margaret Cavendish’s works.6 While many of Cavendish’s published works have been identified as having explicitly political themes, they have yet to be fully incorporated into the larger conversation of early modern political thought.7 However, military historians have historically made and con- tinue to make use of her military biography of her husband, The Life of . William Cavendishe (1667), in their attempts to reconstruct the details of the famous battle of Marston Moor in which William suffered his historic defeat. For example, in his 1992 study of the experience of the Civil War, Charles Carleton draws upon Cavendish’s descriptions of grieving for her brother, Sir Charles Lucas, who was killed by Parliamentary forces: “Depression haunted Margaret for years. ‘Black despair like melancholy night, muffles my thoughts, and makes my soul blind,’ she wrote in 1648.”8 In Marston Moor 1644: The Campaign and the Battle (1970), Peter Young refers to Cavendish several times, stating at one point, “the Duchess of Newcastle to some extent confirms this story: ‘my Lord asked his Highness what service he would be pleased to command him . ’ ”9 Thus, while Cavendish remains all but invisible in the history of political thought, she does register in military history. Still, a small cross section of the field reveals ambivalence toward Cavendish as a legitimate source in military history. Her writing, it seems, is useful where it can supply the necessary corroboration of events, or as a record of the emotional turmoil of war, but its value as a credible account of what happened is called into question. She is judged useful for supplying raw information, but not genuine or objective knowledge.10 Consider the remarks of C. H. Firth in his highly regarded and formative 1898 interpre- tation, Marston Moor: The account of the battle given in the Life of the Duke of Newcastle by the Duchess is extremely general, and confined mainly to an account Not Just Dutiful Wives and Besotted Ladies 5 of Newcastle’s personal adventures and a complaint of Rupert’s rash- ness in giving battle against Newcastle’s advice.11 Or C. V. Wedgewood’s subsequent dismissal in The King’s War 1641– 1647, which begins with her assertion that Clarendon’s account of the battle is wholly misleading, and so is the account given by the Duchess of Newcastle many years later in her Life of her husband, although this besotted lady’s rendering of her husband’s smug exculpations are sometimes cited as an authority.12 Undoubtedly influenced by these earlier assessments, Young accuses Cavendish of telescoping events, describing her account of her husband’s actions as “confused enough,” and concludes that “The Duchess gives a very general account of the battle, which is chiefly of interest for her sometimes rather improbable account of her husband’s adventures.”13 In the chapter in which he offers this summation, Cavendish’s is the only account offered by a woman, and it is the only one prefaced by skepticism of its accuracy.

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