Читать книгу Roaring Girls - Holly Kyte - Страница 25

Despite their happiness together, the Cavendishes would be dogged in the first three years of their marriage by horrors both personal and national. By the summer of 1647, Margaret’s sister Mary had died of consumption, and her beloved mother soon after, and by the end of 1648, the numerous Royalist uprisings of that year had all been crushed. The King had been imprisoned at Hurst Castle in Hampshire and his supporters purged from Parliament, and Margaret’s brother Sir Charles Lucas, leader of the Essex rebellion, had been summarily executed by firing squad, without trial.[20]

The young woman who had anxiously checked her sleeping siblings for signs of life had now lost three members of her family in less than two years – one of them ‘inhumanly murdered’[21] – and the following year her eldest brother Thomas would die, too. This torrent of grief left Margaret plagued by fears of ‘death’s dungeon’. With no faith whatsoever in an after-life, she would later write of life’s cruel brevity, likening it to ‘a flash of lightning that continues not and for the most part leaves black oblivion behind it’.[22] To many, this was heretical talk; to Margaret it was a perfectly rational hypothesis that only magnified her already nagging desire for immortality.

Unsurprisingly, during these years Margaret was diagnosed with ‘melancholy’ – a condition believed to be caused by an excess of black bile but what in reality must have been the cumulative effect of intense grief, financial worries and the stress of the ongoing political turmoil. With her budding interest in science, Margaret habitually self-medicated, purging herself with ‘vomits’ (emetics) and bleeds to rid her body of the ‘humours’ that she – and her physician – believed were making her ill.[23]

All the while the Civil War was building to its nightmarish crescendo. While Prince Charles had retreated to The Hague, where his sister Mary, wife of William II of Orange, could offer him refuge, the Cavendishes had settled in the affordable town of Antwerp in September 1648, where William maintained his tactic of blinding his creditors with extravagance by leasing the grand Rubens House from the famous painter’s widow. Here, he, Margaret and his brother Sir Charles would resume their favourite pastimes of engaging in philosophical discussion, tinkering with telescopes and conducting scientific experiments in the family laboratory. And here, they would learn the shocking news of their King’s fate.

On 30 January 1649, Charles I was executed for High Treason on a specially built scaffold outside London’s Whitehall Palace for waging war against his own Parliament. In that moment, England forcibly rid itself of a monarchy that had survived for nearly a thousand years by pedalling a symbolic (if not literal) image of safety, order and stability, presided over by an untouchable, divinely appointed sovereign. Now the King was dead, that image was irreparably scarred, the body politic had no head and only the unknown remained.

For the Royalists, this cataclysmic event meant quickly regrouping, focusing their attention on their theoretical new sovereign, Charles II, and, despite further defeated rebellions in 1650 and 1651, never quite giving up on plans to restore him. For the Cavendishes, it meant accepting a life of indefinite exile in Antwerp. William learned that he had been banished from England on pain of death, putting his assets further out of reach than ever, and in early 1651, starvation once again became a genuine threat. ‘I know not how to put bread in my mouth,’ he fretted to a friend,[24] his panic rising – largely because his brother, whose financial contributions had kept this small family of exiles just about afloat, had now had his estates sequestered, too. The only way Sir Charles could regain them was to return to England and petition for them, which carried the risk of imprisonment or being forced to take the oath of loyalty to the new Commonwealth, which had replaced the monarchy. Reluctantly, Charles was persuaded to go, and as William’s own estates were due to be sold off by Parliament and his wife was legally entitled to petition for one-fifth of their worth, it was decided that Margaret should accompany him. They set sail in November 1651, and on 10 December, with her brother John’s help, Margaret nervously put her case before the Committee for Compounding at Goldsmiths’ Hall in London. She wasn’t quite prepared, however, for the callousness of their response. They refused her appeal outright, said they would sell off the entirety of William’s estates, giving her no share of their worth whatsoever. William, they argued, was of the King’s inner circle and therefore ‘the greatest traitor to the State’, which excluded him – and his wife, who had knowingly married him after his political exile – from their clemency.

Appalled to the point of speechlessness, Margaret’s timidity silenced her when she longed to speak: ‘I whisperingly spoke to my brother to conduct me out of the ungentlemanly place, so without speaking to them one word good or bad, I returned to my lodgings.’ Utterly disheartened and ‘unpractised in public employments’, she didn’t attempt to petition the Committee again.[25] As a relatively non-offending Royalist, Sir Charles would eventually have more luck, but for now his petition dragged on interminably.

Margaret was miserable: she missed William, worried about him, and was in no mood, and no position, to enjoy herself. London was a changed place since the war – it had now entered an age of aggressively enforced austerity: seasonal festivities were banned, the theatres closed, the royal pageantry gone. High-profile Royalists were wise to keep their heads down, so Margaret did just that, retreating to her rooms, and finding solace – therapy, even – just as she had as a child: in writing. Only now it took on a new significance. She kept it secret even from her husband at this early stage, but Margaret Cavendish no longer wished to write just for her own amusement. Never again did she intend to be silenced by powerful men or her own timidity. She had decided to become a published author.