Playing the Waiting Game: the Life and Letters of Elizabeth Wolley

Quidditas Volume 20 Article 4 1999 Playing the Waiting Game: The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Wolley Elizabeth McCutcheon University of Hawaii Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/rmmra Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, History Commons, Philosophy Commons, and the Renaissance Studies Commons Recommended Citation McCutcheon, Elizabeth (1999) "Playing the Waiting Game: The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Wolley," Quidditas: Vol. 20 , Article 4. Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/rmmra/vol20/iss1/4 This Special Gathering is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at BYU ScholarsArchive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Quidditas by an authorized editor of BYU ScholarsArchive. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. Playing the Waiting Game: The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Wolley Elizabeth McCutcheon University of Hawaii LMOST FIFTY YEARS AGO Wallace Notestein, an English historian, commented that while both the men and the women of late-six- Ateenth- and early-seventeenth-century England remain “strangers” and “shadowy figures” to us, the women are “much more shadowy.”1 Pointing out that “Our knowledge of women comes largely from the inci- dental mention of them by men who seldom took pains to characterize and individualize them,” he insisted that “It is as individuals that we must know them, if we are to understand them as members of a sex.”2 Obvi- ously a great deal has changed for the better. We know much more about the lives of some women in early modern England, thanks to recent devel- opments in women’s studies, the impact of feminist theory, and the sus- tained interdisciplinary research that has led to the recovery of diaries, memoirs, and letters; the exploration of records, inventories, and other documents (household, parish, and court); and biographies, sophisticated studies, and critical editions of the texts of writers and public figures— including Queen Elizabeth, Mary Sidney, the Cooke sisters, Anne Clif- ford, Lucy, countess of Bedford, and Arbella Stuart. But many women in early modern England remain in the shadows, whether they are royal or noble (groups for whom records are more likely to exist), gentry, middling, or granted little or no status.3 I want to discuss 1Wallace Notestein, “The English Woman, 1580–1650,” Studies in Social History: A Tribute to G. M. Travelyan, ed. John Harold Plumb (1955; repr. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1969), 71. 2Notestein, “The English Woman,” 71. 3In this connection, see Kathy Lynn Emerson, Wives and Daughters: The Women of Six- teenth-Century England (Troy, N.Y.: The Whitson Publishing Company, 1984); there are few entries for women who were not elite. J. T. Cliffe, The World of the Country House in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), includes a useful definition of the gentry, a notoriously slippery term. I am following that definition here: “families owning landed property which were headed by baronets or knights or men described as ‘esquire’ or ‘gentleman’ in such offi- cial documents as heraldic visitation records, subsidy rolls and hearth tax returns,” vii. For general information on gentry life, I have found the following especially useful: Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales, 1500–1700 (Stanford: Stanford Uni- XX QUIDDITAS 20 (1999) 31 32 Elizabeth McCutcheon the life and letters of one such woman, Elizabeth Wolley (to use the name she was best known by),4 who was born into the gentry and became a gen- tlewoman of the Privy Chamber of Elizabeth I.5 The queen referred to her with a special term of endearment, a sure sign of favor, and one historian has characterized her as a “leading member of the Queen’s household.”6 Literary historians remember her because John Donne secretly married her niece, Anne More, in December 1601, while he was a secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, Elizabeth Wolley’s third husband, and a member of Egerton’s household, where Ann More had been staying.7 Otherwise, she is almost invisible today,8 despite a variety of manuscript materials, some published in the early and mid-nineteenth century, which include an account of gifts presented and costs incurred for her first marriage and let- 4 versity Press, 1994); Kate Mertes, The English Noble Household 1250–1600 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), which, despite its title, also discusses gentry life; and Lena Cowen Orlin, Elizabethan Households: An Anthology (Washington, D.C.: The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1995).XX 4In fact, she can be discussed under one of four surnames—More, Polsted, Wolley, or Egerton; moreover, the first three names appear in variant spellings, including Moore, Pol- stead, and Wooley. 5Studies of women in waiting at court that I have found particularly valuable include Simon Adams, “Eliza Enthroned? The Court and Its Politics,” The Reign of Elizabeth I, ed. Christopher Haigh (London: MacMillan, 1984), 55–77; Elizabeth A. Brown, “‘Companion Me with My Mistress’: Cleopatra, Elizabeth I, and Their Waiting Women,” Maids and Mis- tresses, Cousins and Queens: Women’s Alliances in Early Modern England, ed. Susan Frye and Karen Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 131–45; Christopher Haigh, Elizabeth I, 2d edition (London: Longman, 1998), chapter on “The Queen and Court,” 90– 110; and Pam Wright, “A Change in Direction: The Ramifications of a Female Household, 1558–1603,” The English Court: From the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War, ed. David Star- key et al. (London: Longman, 1987), 147–72. There are also a number of more general books on ladies-in-waiting, including Dulcie M. Ashdown, Ladies-in-Waiting (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976); and Anne Somerset, Ladies-in-Waiting: From the Tudors to the Present Day (New York: Knopf, 1984). These proved less useful for my concerns, however. 6Louis A. Knafla, Law and Politics in Jacobean England: The Tracts of Lord Chancellor Ellesmere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 30. 7R. C. Bald, John Donne: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), has much on Donne’s marriage, easily located through the index. Lady Wolley, who had died the year before her niece was married, left her a bequest of one hundred pounds, which helped the Donnes during the very difficult years following their secret marriage (Bald 140, Plate VIIIa). See too I. A. Shapiro, “The Date of a Donne Elegy, and Its Implications,” English Renaissance Studies: Presented to Dame Helen Gardner in Honour of Her Seventieth Birthday (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1980), 141–43. As yet forthcoming, a biography of John Donne by Dennis Flynn, currently called “Nothing Else Is,” will focus upon Donne’s married years and promises to provide much new material about Anne More and their marriage, based on extensive archival research. 8Her name rarely appears in the standard histories of sixteenth-century England, in biographies of Queen Elizabeth I, or in studies of the Tudor court or of English waiting women. However, she is succinctly discussed in Emerson, 154 (as Elizabeth More), and in P. W. Hasler, ed., The House of Commons 1558–1603, 3 vols. (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1981) [hereafter cited as HOC]: see the entries for her father and each of her husbands. Life and Letters of Elizabeth Wolley 33 ters that she wrote to her brother and her father while she was in atten- dance upon the queen in the 1590s.9 Drawing on research in and recent interpretations of the English gentry, marriage and the family, the court, and patronage and clientage, I want to provide the contexts from which we can better understand Lady Wolley’s life and letters and see her both as an individual and by way of her family, status, and gender. Recovering even part of her life is a challenge, because so much of it is fragmentary and half-hidden behind references to her father or husbands. The elaborate funeral monument in the Loseley Chapel at St. Nicolas Church, in Guildford, for example, which her brother, Sir George More, erected in honor of the family, shows Elizabeth and her younger sister kneeling to the far right of their parents’ tomb, while the inscription above the figure of Elizabeth names her father, each of her husbands, and her son.10 Similarly, the tombstone erected for her second husband, Sir John Wolley, beside whom she was buried, dwells upon her marital relationship to him and to her third husband, although it also suggests a connection with the queen: “Clara domi per se: sed Elizam ascivit Eliza” (that is, [she was] celebrated by virtue of her house, but Eliza “adopted” Eliza).11 The risks, including overgeneralizing or extrapolating a too-coherent pattern, are obvious. But there are rewards, too. Her life and letters offer invaluable pic- tures of Elizabethan court life as seen by one of the very few women to participate in it as a member of a privileged community. More specifically, they show the influence that she enjoyed, thanks to her status, her connec- tions in general, and her place in the Privy Chamber as an attendant of the queen. As G. R. Elton has observed, “Access and exclusion mattered so much because the game of politics, unlike the government of the realm, remained so firmly fixed upon the monarch’s person.”12 And Pam Wright 9In addition to the studies of women-in-waiting, listed above, I have also found the following, on the Elizabethan court, invaluable: G. R. Elton, “Tudor Government: The Points of Contact: III: The Court,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 26 (1976): 211–28; Haigh, Elizabeth I; David Loades, The Tudor Court (London: B.

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