Читать книгу Roaring Girls - Holly Kyte - Страница 23

It’s little wonder Pepys was unimpressed with Margaret Cavendish’s behaviour that day at the Royal Society; it was precisely the kind of public social engagement that made her inwardly squirm. From childhood, Margaret Lucas (as she was born) had been debilitatingly shy, so uncomfortable and tongue-tied among strangers that they thought her ‘a natural fool’. But Margaret was no fool; addicted ‘to contemplation rather than conversation, to solitariness rather than society, to melancholy rather than mirth’, she was a dreamer, an observer, a sensitive soul.[4]

The one place she felt at ease as a girl was with her family, and the Lucases were one of the wealthiest in Essex. Descended from generations of self-made men, her father, Thomas Lucas, was something of a cavalier figure – in 1597 he was banished by Elizabeth I for killing one of her favourite courtiers in a duel, leaving his lover Elizabeth Leighton to bear the shame of giving birth to their illegitimate son. It would be six years, on James I’s accession, before Thomas was pardoned and the couple were able to marry. They settled at St John’s Abbey near Colchester and would go on to have a happy, respectable marriage and seven more children.

Margaret was the youngest, and although she would always regard her father as honourable and courageous, she would never know him personally – he was dead by the time she was two. Elizabeth took over the management of the Lucas estate (as the legitimate heir was not yet of age) and, as it happened, found she had a talent for the job. With the estate thriving under Elizabeth’s captaincy, Margaret had an impressive role model in her mother, whose ‘heroic spirit’ and ‘majestic grandeur’ she was always quick to praise. Her glowing account paints Elizabeth as a doting, lenient mother, who raised her children with all the proper virtues – modesty, civility and respectability – though not without some snobbery; they were never ‘suffered to have any familiarities with the vulgar servants’ and were always decked out to look ‘rich and costly’.[5]

While all this made for an idyllic childhood in Margaret’s eyes, it left her ill-prepared for the adult world in one crucial respect. As was standard among the rich gentry, the three Lucas boys were all formally educated and sent to Cambridge, while the five girls were given only a rudimentary education, by an unfortunate governess whom Margaret remembered only as ‘an ancient decayed gentlewoman’.[6] Like all high-born girls, the Lucas daughters were taught a few conventional feminine ‘virtues’ – singing, dancing, music, reading, writing, needlework – but even these were ‘rather formality than benefit’.[7]

Most of these accomplishments were of little use to Margaret. She had no interest in domestic pursuits and would later write with some pride: ‘I cannot work, I mean such works as ladies use to pass their time withal … needle-works, spinning-works, preserving-works, as also baking, and cooking-works, as making cakes, pies, puddings, and the like, all which I am ignorant of.’[8] Her interest lay elsewhere. For hours on end she would wander, lost in contemplation, and soon found that she preferred to ‘write with the pen than to work with a needle’. The blank page was a safe place, where her thoughts and ideas could roam freely. Even before she’d reached her teens she’d begun to write prolifically, filling 16 ‘baby-books’ with observations, poetry and stories – though she later dismissed them as childish ramblings, which perhaps explains why they haven’t survived.

Dress was another creative outlet, for Margaret had a bold sense of style and favoured creative, sometimes odd, ensembles – ‘especially such fashions as I did invent myself’ – to ensure that she came across as a true one-off, ‘for I always took delight in a singularity’.[9] As an introvert who found it difficult to express her personality verbally, Margaret allowed her idiosyncratic outfits (which often had a masculine edge) to do the talking for her, and this, too, would set her apart from most of her sex. It was all very well to indulge her whimsy and burgeoning imagination in the cossetted environment of St John’s Abbey, but in the wider world of seventeenth-century England, which valued obedience and conformity over flamboyance and originality, it left her rather more wilful and eccentric than was deemed acceptable in a woman.

The Lucases were a close-knit family. Margaret – a self-confessed physical coward who would jump at the sound of a gun and abhorred violence of all kinds[10] – was always so anxious that ‘an evil misfortune or accident’ might befall one of them that she would wake her siblings in the night to check they were still alive. Her fears were strangely prescient, for in 1642, when the Civil War broke out, there would be no escaping the unrest for the Royalist Lucases who, by then, were deeply unpopular in the Puritan county of Essex, thanks to their close involvement with Charles I’s regime.[11] When local anger erupted into the Stour Valley riots on 22 August, mobs descended on St John’s Abbey, ransacking and looting the Lucas home. The women in the house were imprisoned for several days while Margaret’s brother, John, now head of the family, was held at the Tower for a month for raising an army for the King.

Margaret was 19 at the time and blindsided by the violence, writing later that ‘this unnatural war came like a whirlwind’,[12] but her loyalty to Charles I was unshaken, not least because she had developed an intense fascination with his French queen. In Henrietta Maria, the Parliamentarians saw only a dangerous woman whose influence over the King encouraged popery and tyranny; Margaret, however, saw the heroic queen of her dreams. Nursing a desire to ‘see the world abroad’, she offered her services to her heroine as Maid of Honour, and although her siblings worried that their gauche little sister might make a fool of herself in the worldly, sophisticated court milieu, Margaret got her way. She arrived in Oxford, where the court had been transplanted for safety, in the summer of 1643.

It didn’t take long for Margaret’s new life to pall. The daily routine at court was tedious, involving little more than waiting around in the presence chamber for orders or standing to attention for hours on end. The freedom she’d had at home to write was gone and she now found herself constantly on show, which, as her siblings had predicted, left her so crippled by shyness that she was rendered almost mute. Maids were expected to charm court visitors with their dazzling wit and conversation, but Margaret, ‘dull, fearful and bashful’ as she was, felt it safer to play dumb and ‘be accounted a fool’ than to make a poor attempt at worldliness and ‘be thought rude or wanton’.[13]

So excruciating was this experience that Margaret would later fictionalise it in her 1668 play The Presence, in which she cast herself as Lady Bashful, the novice Maid of Honour who similarly gives the impression at Princess Melancholy’s court of being ‘a clod of dull earth’. But just as Lady Bashful turns out to be more than appearances would suggest, so Margaret felt there was a goldmine of ideas beneath her own gawky exterior. No doubt she was voicing her own aspirations when her alter-ego proclaims: ‘I had rather be a meteor singly alone, than a star in a crowd.’

There was little chance of being a meteor at court, and inevitably Margaret came to feel she’d made a mistake, but her mother refused all her appeals to come home, feeling ‘it would be a disgrace for me to return out of the court so soon after I was placed’.[14] She had no choice but to stick it out. And with the war intensifying, this would have life-changing consequences for young Margaret Lucas.