Anne Bradstreet: High and Mighty
As a writing mentor for the Royal Literary Fund, I was once inundated with student essays on a long verse of praise by the seventeenth-century American poet Anne Bradstreet (1612–72), of whom I knew nothing.
The verse in question is called In Honour of that High and Mighty Princess, Queen Elizabeth, of about 125 lines, written in iambic pentameter: each line comprising five pairs of ‘de-dum’ syllabic pairs:Now say, have women worth, or have they none?
Or had they some, but with our Queen is’t gone?10
That a female poet of the period should write in praise of Elizabeth I (reigned 1558–1603) is hardly surprising. As the two lines above suggest, the poem bears a strong message of feminine solidarity, which continues with this rather neat pay-off:
Nay Masculines, you have thus tax’d us long,
But she, though dead, will vindicate our wrong.
Let such as say our sex is void of reason
Know ’tis a slander now, but once was treason.
Bradstreet’s theme here is that Elizabeth’s feminine virtues of goodness, clemency, wisdom, justice and learning were proof against those learned men who denied women’s fitness to rule; and Anne enjoys, in passing, sly digs at both the Catholic Spanish monarchy, for whom Elizabeth was a heretic, and that of France, whose Salic Law proscribed the accession of a female ruler:
Who was so good, so just, so learn’d, so wise,
From all the Kings on earth she won the prize.
Nor say I more than truly is her due.
Millions will testify that this is true.
She hath wip’d off th’ aspersion of her Sex,
That women wisdom lack to play the Rex.
Spain’s Monarch sa’s not so, nor yet his Host:
She taught them better manners to their cost.
The Salic Law had not in force now been,
If France had ever hop’d for such a Queen.
But can you Doctors now this point dispute,
She’s argument enough to make you mute…
As for those martial virtues traditionally associated with princes, Elizabeth possessed them in abundance: she put down rebels in Ireland, came to the aid of the king of France and, in facing up to Philip II of Spain’s planned invasion of 1588, taught him manners…
She rack’t, she sack’d, she sunk his Armadoe.
With Elizabeth’s passing in 1603, the ‘Rose, once so lovely fair’ may now have withered but the queen’s example as a ‘Virago’, an ‘Amazon’, a ‘glorious sun’, was without parallel among rulers. The poem is hagiography, a portrait of a secular sainthood much cultivated by Elizabeth herself. There are puzzles, however. On the face of it, Anne might have made more of the ironies inherent in Elizabeth’s unique position as a female ruler: that she, a virgin queen, was both mother to her nation and, in her own words, married to her people. The virgin mother being something of a literary and spiritual trope, the poet’s apparent failure to, as it were, sink the putt, needs some explaining. But it turns out that the Virgin Mary is not the only elephant in this room. In learning more about Anne Bradstreet’s life and career, one is drawn to a surprising conclusion: that her poem in praise of Elizabeth I actually carries a more intriguing and subversive coded message whose target is, in fact, male.
Anne Dudley was born in 1612 in Northamptonshire. Her father, Thomas Dudley, who had fought at the siege of Amiens in 1597 under Queen Elizabeth’s banner, was a steward in the service of the Puritan Earl of Lincoln and married to a Dorothy Yorke. Anne was betrothed at the age of sixteen to one of her father’s younger associates, Simon Bradstreet. In the same year, 1628, she survived a smallpox outbreak. At the same time her father and new husband became involved with the Massachusetts Bay Company, whose formation was propelled in part by the lure of wealth and in part by antipathy towards the Catholic sympathies of the new king, Charles I (reigned 1625–49). In 1630 they sailed for New England on board Arbella, the flagship of John Winthrop’s fleet. A year later they established a capital for the colony at what is now Cambridge, just 5 kilometres (3 miles) or so up the Charles River from the Shawmut Peninsula on which Boston had recently been founded.
Anne’s social and cultural milieu was politicised and intellectual.
Both she and her husband were closely involved with the founding of Harvard University in 1636. Two of the Bradstreets’ sons – she bore eight children, all but one of whom survived infancy – were graduates. She must have known Anne Hutchinson, the charismatic Massachusetts midwife and Puritan firebrand for whom England became too dangerous and who was to be excommunicated and banished from the colony in 1638.Anne Bradstreet accumulated a substantial library and seems to have written poetry as a natural expression of her social, domestic, religious and philosophical life, immersed in the governance of the colony and in the politics and theology of non-conformism. Her poems express love for her children and husband; extol the seasons and contemplate the ages of man. She wrote, too, of the heartbreak of losing the family home to fire in, of all years, 1666. Her audience was primarily familial, but there is a strong sense that the artist wanted to communicate more publicly: she turned her creative thoughts to monarchy and the relations between Old and New England, in a poem in which the colony – Old England’s daughter – laments their estrangement while the mother country shares its own pains, of civil war…
Art ignorant indeed of these my woes,
Or must my forced tongue these griefs disclose,
And must my self dissect my tatter’d state,
Which Amazed Christendom stands wondering at?
And thou a child, a Limb, and dost not feel
My weak’ned fainting body now to reel?
This physic-purging-potion I have taken
Will bring Consumption or an Ague quaking…11
In 1647, at the height of that conflict, with King Charles recently imprisoned, Anne’s brother-in-law, the Rev. John Woodbridge, sailed to England and, apparently without Anne’s knowledge, presented a collection of her poems for publication as The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, ‘by a gentlewoman in those parts’. It was printed in London in 1650. Anne, naturally enough, recorded her reaction to this underhand compliment in verse, in which the sharp wit and sly humour that has won her so many admirers is fully displayed…
The Author to Her Book
Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain,
Who after birth did’st by my side remain,
Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true,
Who thee abroad, exposed to public view,
Made thee in rags, halting to th’ press to trudge,
Where errors were not lessened (all may judge).
At thy return my blushing was not small,
My rambling brat (in print) should mother call.
I cast thee by as one unfit for light,
Thy visage was so irksome in my sight;
Yet being mine own, at length affection would
Thy blemishes amend, if so I could:
I washed thy face, but more defects I saw,
And rubbing off a spot still made a flaw.
I stretched thy joints to make thee even feet,
Yet still thou run’st more hobbling than is meet;
In better dress to trim thee was my mind,
But nought save homespun cloth, i’ th’ house I find.
In this array ’mongst Vulgars may’st thou roam.
In critic’s hands beware thou dost not come,
And take thy way where yet thou art not known;
If for thy Father asked, say thou hadst none;
And for thy Mother, she alas is poor,
Which caused her thus to send thee out of door.12
In Anne’s world, full of tensions between her old home and new life, of spiritual and political convulsions and the incompatibilities of radicalism and conservatism, we find at least partial explanations for some of the undercurrents of her praise for Elizabeth. In her poetic failure to explore and exploit Elizabeth’s paradoxical relationship with symbolic marriage and actual chastity can, perhaps, be read an aversion to drawing on the Catholic trope of the biblical mother of Christ and the theological and liturgical trappings of the old faith.
But what of the coded message of the poem, which must have been composed after about 1630 and before 1647? I believe that in showering praise on Elizabeth’s ‘high and mighty’ majesty, on her Protestant virtues, on her combination of female wisdom, justice and clemency and her martial – even virile – defence of her country’s interests, Anne is showing the queen to be in conspicuous possession of all that King Charles I, who presided over civil and religious war and (for Puritans) betrayed his people by rejecting the Protestant Reformation, was not. He is the poem’s unspoken object. If, by the time of the poem’s publication, Charles had not lost his head, then Anne Bradstreet’s verse might well have been read as sedition in the old country. As it was, in 1650 she found herself in perfect harmony with the new Commonwealth of Oliver Cromwell.