Aldershot, Chatham, Plymouth, Dover, Canterbury, Windsor, Southampton,
and others, provided for the registration and compulsory periodical
medical examination of the public women who infest the streets of
those places. Horrible diseases, spread by these abandoned creatures,
decimated the regiments and the crews of the ships that put in at
their ports; and thus, through them, the blood of future generations
was poisoned and contaminated. The women whose depravity and disease
spread foul disorders among not only the soldiers and sailors, but
also amongst the civil populations of these garrison towns, were free,
before the application of the C. D. Acts, to ply their trade no matter
what might be their bodily condition; but the operation of those
measures, at first providing for voluntary inspection and examination,
and afterwards making those precautions compulsory, rendered it
a criminal offence for a woman registered by the police to have
intercourse with men while knowing that she was suffering from disease.
Such an offence, or the offence of not presenting themselves at the
examining officer’s station at the fortnightly period prescribed by the
Acts, rendered women of this class liable to imprisonment. If at these
examinations a woman was found to be healthy, a certificate was given
her; if the medical officer certified her to be diseased, she was taken
by compulsion to hospital, and detained there until recovery.
Plymouth, Aldershot, and Chatham, in especial, were in a shocking
condition before the Acts came into force; but during the years in
which they were administered by the police, a diminution of disease by
more than one-half was seen in the Army and Navy, and the registration
of the women led to a very great falling-off of the numbers who
obtained so shameful a living. Evidence given before the Royal
Commission upon the Contagious Diseases Acts in 1872 proved this beyond
question, and also proved that these women not only had no objection to
the medical examinations, but regarded them and the hospitals as very
great benefits.
The shocking revelations as to the social condition of Plymouth,
Devonport, and Stonehouse, afforded by the evidence of the police,
cannot be more than hinted at in this place. It is sufficient to
say that over 2000 women were put upon the registers, either as
occasionally or habitually living a loose life, and that all classes
were to be found in these documents, but especially girls employed
behind the counters of shops during the day. The police seem everywhere
to have been conscientious in the execution of their duty, and to have
performed ungrateful and delicate tasks with great discretion. The
registers were private and strictly confidential official documents,
and both the medical examinations and the police visits to suspected
houses were conducted with all possible secrecy, the police in the
latter case being plain-clothes men, and not readily to be identified
by the public.
And yet, in spite of the very evident benefits derived from the Acts
and deposed to before the Commission by such unimpeachable authorities
as the foremost medical officers of the Army and Navy, commanding
officers, clergymen of the Established Church, Wesleyan ministers,
the entire medical and nursing staffs of hospitals, and the police
authorities themselves, these Acts were repealed, in submission to
the outcries of the ‘mules and barren women,’ who, headed by the
rancorous Mrs. Josephine Butler and the gushing sentimentalists from
the religio-radical benches of the House of Commons, called public
meetings, and shrieked and raved upon platforms throughout the country:
a chorus of shocked spinsters and ‘pure’ men, whose advocacy of what
they called, forsooth, ‘the liberty of the subject’ and the abolition
of what they falsely termed the ‘State licensing of vice,’ has resulted
in a liberty accorded these women to spread disease far and wide.
The nation, the men of Army and Navy, have reason abundant to curse the
sentimental women, the maiden aunts, the _religieuses_, the gorgons
of a mistaken propriety and a peculiarly harmful prudery, whose
interference with affairs which they were not competent to direct has
wrought such untoward results.
This is what a writer says in the _Westminster Review_: ‘The struggle
for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts was an ordeal such as
men have never been obliged to undergo. It involved not merely that
women should speak at public meetings, which was a great innovation,
but that they should discuss the most painful of all subjects, upon
which, up to that time, even men had not dared to open their mouths.
Yet so nobly did the women bear their part all through those terrible
years of trial, that they raised a spirit of indignation which swept
away the Acts, but never, by word or deed, did they deservedly incur
reproach themselves.’
Rubbish, every word of it! The women who spoke upon these painful
subjects were under no compulsion, legal or moral, to initiate or take
part in the frenzy of wrong-headed emotion, which was exhibited upon
public platforms to the dismay and disgust of all right-thinking men
and women. It cannot be conceded that the subject was painful to these
persons, nor can the statement be allowed to go unchallenged that they
did not deserve reproach. Reproach of the most bitter kind was and
is deserved by the prejudiced persons who distorted facts and gladly
relied upon any hearsay evidence that would seem to square with their
theories, and even refused to admit the weight of incontrovertible
statistics produced against their rash and windy statements. The
examinations of Mrs. Josephine Butler[1] and of those two ridiculous
persons, the Unitarian pastor from Southampton and his wife, Mr.
and Mrs. Kell, are damning indictments of their good faith and good
sense. These are types of women and womanish men who take delight in
the investigation of pruriency, whose noses are in every cesspool and
their hands in the nearest muck-heap. Their kind stop at nothing in
the way of unfounded statements, and are greedy of rumour rather than
of accredited facts. Want of acquaintance with, or experience of, the
subjects they dogmatise upon deterred them as little then as now from
case-hardened obstinacy; and perhaps no one cut such a sorry figure
before the Commission as that illogical and contradictory person,
the late John Stuart Mill, the femininely-influenced author of the
nowadays somewhat discredited _Subjection of Women_. ‘His chief ground
for objection to the system’ (of the C. D. Acts) ‘was on the score
of the infringement of personal liberty’ (_i.e._, the liberty to
spread loathsome diseases); ‘but he considered it also objectionable
for the Government to provide securities against the consequences of
immorality. It is a different thing to remedy the consequences after
they occur’--as who should say, in the manner of the proverb, Lock the
stable door when the horse has been stolen.
This sham philosopher and political economist of ill-argued theories,
who is to-day honoured by an uncomfortable and ungainly statue on the
Victoria Embankment, forgot that England has not achieved her greatness
by the study or practice of morality: and shall we fall thus late in
the day by a Quixotic observance of it?
The sooner the statue of this woman’s advocate is cast into the Thames,
or melted down, the better.
Woman’s influence and interference in these matters have proved an
unmixed evil. It would be hopeless, however, to convince her of error:
as well might one attempt to hustle an elephant.
Political women are, fortunately, rare in England. A Duchess of
Devonshire, a Lady Palmerston, and the politico-social Dames of the
Primrose League, these are all the chiefest and most readily-cited
female politicians: and their interest was, and is, not so much in
the success or defeat of this party or the other as in the return of
their favoured candidate or the failure of a pet aversion. Politics
have no real meaning for women: their natures do not permit of their
comprehension of national and international questions. What does Empire
signify to woman if her little world is distracted? and what is a
revolted province to her as against a broken plate?
The Fates preserve us from Female Suffrage; for give women votes and
patriotism is swamped by the only women who would care to exercise the
privilege of voting: the clamorous New Woman, all crotchets, fads and
Radical nostrums for the regeneration of the parish and the benevolent
treatment of subjugated races in an Empire won by the sword and
retained by might.
IV.--SOME OLD-TIME TERMAGANTS AND ILL-MADE MATCHES OF CELEBRATED MEN.
The ‘strong-minded woman,’ as the phrase goes, we have always with us
nowadays; and as this species of strength of mind seems really to be
a violent and uncertain temper, there can be little doubt but that
the strong-minded woman has always been more frequent than welcome.
Certainly shrewishness and termagancy have been too evident throughout
the ages, from the days of Xanthippe to the present time. That much we
know from the lives--or shall we say, under the painful circumstances,
the ‘existences?’--of public men who have been cursed with scolding
wives. But what Asmodeus shall unveil the private conjugal tyrannies,
the hectorings, and the curtain-lectures that make miserable the
undistinguished lives of men of no importance for good or evil in
the State? How many women, in fine, ‘wear the breeches’ through the
‘strength of mind’ which may be justly defined as readiness of that
impassioned invective which in its turn may be reduced (like a vulgar
fraction) to its lowest common denominator of ‘nagging.’ Not a
pretty word, is it? And it is a practice even less pretty than that
cross-grained definition would warrant. We cannot, however, lift the
veil that hides the domestic infelicities of the lieges, but must be
content to recount the troubles and oppressions that have befallen
historic Caudles, who bulk a great deal larger in the history of
England than they did, in their own homes, to their wives.
Sir Edward Coke, the great law officer of James the First’s reign--the
revered ‘Coke upon Lyttleton’ of the law-student--was little enough of
an authority in his own household after he had married his second wife,
herself a widow--the ‘relict,’ in fact, of Sir William Newport-Hatton.
He married her but a few months after his wife’s death, privately and
in haste; probably urged to such an indecent speed by the necessity of
forestalling the Lord Keeper Bacon in the lady’s affections. But he
had not been wise in his haste; for affection--for him, at least--she
had none. She had probably buried all her kindly feelings in the grave
with Sir William Hatton, for she would never be known as Lady Coke, but
always as Lady Hatton, and, in truth, she led that distinguished and
bitter lawyer the life of a dog. One wonders, indeed, why she married
him at all, who was old enough to be her father. It was not ambition,
for she was by birth a Cecil and daughter of the second Lord Burleigh;
nor the want of money, nor the need of a protector, for she was very
well able to take care of herself, as Sir Edward presently discovered,
and she was sufficiently wealthy. They quarrelled incessantly--about
property, about the marriage of their daughter, about anything and
everything. Sir Edward Coke was only suffered to enter her house
in London by the back door, and she plundered his residence in the
country. She sent her daughter away to Oatlands to prevent a marriage
with Sir John Villiers, which Sir Edward was pressing forward; and
he, ‘with his sonne and ten or eleven servants, weaponed in violent
manner,’ repaired thither, broke open the door, and took her away. Lady
Hatton intrigued at Court against the distracted Coke, who was already
in disfavour at St. James’s, and procured an interference by the Star
Chamber, which condemned his ‘most notorious riot;’ but Coke eventually
gained the upper hand in this matter at least, and the girl was married
to the man of his choice. This did not end the enmity. For years they
contended together until death parted them. But she survived him by ten
years.
Legal subtlety and ability had no terrors for Lady Hatton, and martial
prowess daunted the wife of Monk as little, for, in very truth, Lady
Albemarle, the famous Nan Clarges, wife of that General Monk who was
created first Duke of Albemarle, was so awe-inspiring a termagant that
her husband declared he would rather fight a battle than dispute with
her, and that the roar of a whole park of artillery was not so terrible
to him as her tongue loosened in floods of abuse. There is no doubt
that he regretted his union with the washerwoman’s daughter whom he
had married, who was neither beautiful nor witty. Nan Clarges had all
the ancestry and upbringing that made for shrewishness. Her mother was
one of the five women barbers who gained notoriety by their vulgarity
even in that age, and her father was a blacksmith and farrier, one
John Clarges, who lived at the corner of Drury Lane and the Strand,
over his forge. Her mother became afterwards a laundress, and she
herself dabbled in the soapsuds before and after her marriage to Thomas
Ratford, whose father was also a farrier. This marriage took place in
1632, and she and her husband occupied a shop in the New Exchange in
the Strand, where they sold gloves, powder, and cosmetics. Her parents
died in 1648, and she and her husband separated in the following year.
Three years later she married Colonel Monk, whose laundress she had
been. Although the tongue of scandal was not idle when one re-married
who was not a widow, the farrier never reappeared to claim his wife,
and when the Restoration was accomplished (partly, it is said, owing to
her Royalist sympathies), and General Monk became Duke of Albemarle,
none were found to question her title of Duchess. But she became the
laughing-stock of the Court and gave general disgust to Pepys, who
calls her in good faith ‘a plain, homely dowdy,’ and ironically ‘that
paragon of virtue and beauty.’ On one occasion he ‘found the Duke of
Albemarle at dinner with sorry company; some of his officers of the
Army; dirty dishes and a nasty wife at table, and bad meat.’
But she was mildness itself compared with that ‘she-devil,’ Bess of
Hardwicke, who was wedded and a widow before her sixteenth year, and
saw four husbands into the grave. She was the daughter of a rich
Derbyshire gentleman, who died and left her his sole heiress at an
early age. She fascinated and married a neighbour, the young and
invalid Mr. Barley, whose property ranged with her own. He lived but
a short while, and left her a charming widow with a great access of
wealth.
Her second venture was Sir William Cavendish, a Suffolk gentleman of
good family and great property, whom she married and constrained to
sell his Suffolk lands and settle with her in Derbyshire. She ruled
him thoroughly, and he seems to have been little better than her chief
director of works in the building operations that were a passion with
this singular woman through the whole of her long life. Her home was at
Hardwicke Hall; but she now began to build a very much more magnificent
house at Chatsworth. She had not proceeded very far with this work
before Sir William Cavendish, probably wearied out with being ruled in
all things, followed her first husband to the grave. Lady Cavendish
mourned him for a decent period, keeping her eye open the while for
another eligible, whom she presently found in the person of the
widower, Sir William Saint Lo, a captain in Queen Elizabeth’s guard and
a gentleman of considerable property in the neighbourhood of Bath. But
Sir William had a family, and she could not think of wedding him until
he had made a settlement upon her of all his lands. He did so readily,
this bluff soldier; for he was absurdly fond of her, as his letters
show. He was, however, detained much in the service of the Queen, in
London and at Windsor, and died very soon.
[Illustration:
ELIZABETH,
COUNTESS OF
SHREWSBURY.
]
Lady Saint Lo was now become extremely wealthy, with her own fortune
and the added wealth of three husbands deceased, but she was far from
content. She was building incessantly, both terrestrial habitations
and airy castles, and hungered both for more wealth and greater social
distinction. For some while she cast about for another partner, and at
length found a suitable quarry in George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury,
another widower with a grown-up family. Him she married, and from that
time he knew but little peace. True, the first year or so of their
union seems to have been comparatively mild, but the storms that ensued
were beyond anything. The Earl was for nineteen years the custodian of
Mary, Queen of Scots, and she seems to have aroused the jealousy of the
Countess, for the unfortunate Talbot was surrounded with his wife’s
spies, and the espions whom the English Queen’s suspicious nature also
set around him made his life a misery. Poor Talbot! two queens and
a wife--and such a wife--to serve, guard, and pacify. How wretched
he must have been in that gorgeous palace of ‘Chattysworth,’ as the
old-time spelling had it! His wife embittered his own sons against
him, while her family of Cavendishes hated him cordially, and, as he
had foolishly made over his property to her upon his marriage, he
lived practically upon sufferance. Queen Elizabeth, in whose service
he continually expressed the greatest loyalty, took the part of his
wife, and ordered him to be content with an allowance of 500_l._ per
annum which the Countess vouchsafed him--‘to my perpetual infamy and
great dishonour,’ as he wrote, ‘thus to be ruled and overranne by my
wief, so bad and wicked a woman. But your Majesty shall see that I will
observe your commandments, though no curse or plage on earth colde be
more grievous to me.’ Poor fellow! his faults were few, probably the
greatest of them being a weak amiability which led him to be reconciled
time and again to his wife, who used every reconciliation as a means to
the end of entreating him even more shamefully than before. He died at
length, wearied out with lawsuits, the ingratitude of his own children,
and the bitter animosity of his wife. She survived him for many years,
and died, aged eighty-eight, in the winter of 1607, during a hard frost
which put a stop to the building works which she was carrying on here
and there over all her possessions. She was passionately fond of bricks
and mortar, or else was mindful of a prophecy that she should live
so long as she continued building. That prophecy was fulfilled by the
frost, which rendered her workmen idle.
Ann Clifford, Countess of Dorset, Pembroke, and Montgomery, was another
insatiate builder, and a woman of very great independence of character;
not a vindictive fiend, like old Bess of Hardwicke, but, all the same,
a woman who would have her way. She married the Earl of Dorset, as weak
and vicious a man as she was a strong and virtuous woman, with whom she
lived most unhappily. When he fortunately died, she declared that she
would not wed a man who was either a curser, a courtier, or a swearer,
or who had children; and it so happened that in marrying Philip
Herbert, Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, she allied herself to a
widower with a family, who was both a courtier and a proficient in vile
language and fancy swearing. He, however, soon joined the majority, and
his widow took no more chances in the lottery of marriage. She busied
herself in rebuilding her castles, which had been destroyed during
the Civil War, six of them throughout Cumberland and Westmoreland;
and spent the remainder of her long life in journeying from one to
another, carrying with her the huge volumes in which she had collected
the records of the Clifford family and the memoirs of her own life.
Hers was the borough of Appleby, for which Sir John Williamson,
Secretary of State, proposed a candidate. But the Countess, who had
despised Cromwell and loathed the viciousness of Charles the Second’s
_entourage_, replied, in a characteristic note, ‘I have been bullied by
an usurper; I have been neglected by a Court; but I won’t be dictated
to by a subject. Your man shan’t stand.--ANN DORSET, PEMBROKE, AND
MONTGOMERY.’ She was a wonderful woman. She spoke five languages
fluently, and was accomplished in many ways, and, according to Bishop
Rainbow, of Carlisle, who preached her funeral sermon, ‘she had a clear
soul shining through a vivid body: her body was durable and healthful,’
he continues; ‘her soul sprightful and of great understanding and
judgment faithful memory, and ready wit.’ She was ‘a perfect mistress
of forecast and aftercast,’ and, according to Doctor Donne, ‘knew well
how to converse of all things, from predestination to slea-silk.’ She
was no less great as a builder than Nimrod was mighty as a hunter, and
Bess of Hardwicke was scarce her equal in the piling up of bricks and
mortar.
[Illustration:
ANN CLIFFORD, COUNTESS OF DORSET,
PEMBROKE AND MONTGOMERY,
AGED 18.
]
She spent over 40,000_l._ in this way, and the good bishop who preached
her funeral sermon took, as an apt text, ‘Every wise woman buildeth her
house.’ She rebuilt the castles of Brougham, Appleby, Skipton, Bardon
Tower, Pendragon, and Brough; she restored the churches of Bongate,
Skipton, and Appleby, and the chapels of Ninekirks, Brougham, Bongate,
and Mallerstang; she erected a monument to Spenser in Westminster
Abbey, another--on the old Penrith road--to her mother, the Dowager
Countess of Cumberland, and another still to her tutor, Samuel Daniel,
and she founded and restored almshouses besides.
But the first Duchess of Marlborough was a prize termagant, although in
early life a woman of winning ways. Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, was
the ruler of that great commander and military genius, John Churchill,
first Duke of Marlborough, and victor of such hard-fought fields as
Blenheim, Ramillies, and Malplaquet.
The rise of the Churchills reads like a romance, so constantly was
their progress maintained for so many years. He was the son of an
impoverished country gentleman who had lost his all in a chivalric
attachment to Charles the First, and gained little consideration for it
when the Restoration brought Charles the Second to Dover, and the King
enjoyed his own again. All the recompense the ruined Cavalier received
was the reception of his son, afterwards to become the most famous
soldier and general of his time, as a page in the service of the King’s
brother, the Duke of York.
[Illustration:
ANN CLIFFORD, COUNTESS OF DORSET,
PEMBROKE, AND MONTGOMERY,
AGED 81.
]
Macaulay’s Whiggish prejudices forbade him writing anything to the
credit of the Duke of Marlborough; and so he seized upon the gossip
of the time, which has come down to us, and has stated as a fact that
John Churchill owed this initiatory post to the interest of his sister
Arabella, who had become an acknowledged mistress of the Duke of
York. ‘The young lady was not beautiful,’ he says, in his _History of
England_, ‘but the taste of James was not nice, and she became his
avowed mistress. She was the daughter of a poor Cavalier knight who
haunted Whitehall, and made himself ridiculous by publishing a dull and
affected folio, long forgotten, in praise of monarchs and monarchy. The
necessity of the Churchills was pressing, their loyalty was ardent, and
their only feeling on Arabella’s seduction seems to have been joyful
surprise that so plain a girl should have obtained such height of
preferment.’
But Churchill’s good looks and gallant bearing stood him in better
stead than this in that profligate court. He captivated the fancy
of his distant cousin, Barbara Palmer, the most beautiful of the
King’s mistresses, already created Duchess of Cleveland as the price
of her dishonour. Buckingham afforded the King ocular proof of this
attachment, and we are told that Churchill was sent into practical
banishment, but to an ostensible command in Tangier, or into the Low
Countries. The Duchess of Cleveland made her kinsman a present of
5000_l._, with which he promptly purchased an annuity of 500_l._, and
so laid a foundation to his fortunes.
England was for a time in close alliance with France, and it was
then and there that the young officer--he held a commission in the
Guards--learned scientific warfare under those past-masters in the
art of war, Condé and Turenne. He remained for five years in Flanders,
and during that time distinguished himself at numerous places, more
especially at the siege of Maestricht, where ‘the handsome Englishman,’
as Turenne called him, was thanked for his services by Louis XIV.