Marvelous Margaret Cavendish

Marvelous is my word. The word most often used by her contemporaries in the 17th century was mad. Mad Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, was a marvel of contradictions. Painfully shy yet hungry for fame, barely educated yet a prolific author whose complete works fill twenty volumes, given to fits of melancholy yet possessed of a supreme self-confidence.

My ambition is not only to be Empress, but Authoress of a whole world.

She published poetry, fiction, plays, and essays on philosophy, science, and government. One of the most notorious and colorful characters of her day, she was renowned for her satirical wit and eccentric dress. In an age when women revealed a great deal of bosom Margaret went further. Attending the theatre in 1667 she wore a dress so low-cut that “her breasts were all laid out to view” according to one breathless report, with “scarlet trimmed nipples.” Among her favorite accessories were nipple tassels and black velvet philosopher’s hats. She “took delight in singularity” wrote an admirer. Samuel Pepys mentions her in his famous diary:

The whole story of this lady is a romance and all she do is romantic… her dress so antik.

None of this could have been foreseen in Margaret’s conventional childhood. She was born in 1623 to the wealthy Lucas family, growing up in Colchester, Essex, in the former Benedictine Abbey of St. John’s. Her family had purchased the Abbey after the dissolution of the monasteries. Margaret’s father John Lucas died when she was two, but her widowed mother was financially secure and with her three brothers and four sisters she led a privileged if secluded life. She had little formal education but delighted in reading, left to herself to explore the large family library. Her interest in fashion started at a young age. She designed her clothes herself, inventing her own idiosyncratic style.

This placid existence changed suddenly, for Margaret lived through one of the most tumultuous times in English history – the Civil Wars, Commonwealth, and Restoration – and spent many years living in exile in France.

As England descended into Civil War in 1642 violence broke out in the East Anglia region. Mobs of Parliamentary sympathizers attacked Royalist households, including St. John’s Abbey. A mob of townspeople invaded and looted the house, seized weapons and horses, killed the livestock, and even opened the family vault and stabbed the coffins. Margaret’s brother Sir John Lucas was imprisoned in London for a time and her mother Elizabeth Lucas was paraded through the town before jeering crowds and spent three days in jail. The family lost everything. Margaret and her mother found refuge with her married sister in London, and then moved to Oxford where Margaret joined Queen Henrietta Maria’s court as a lady-in-waiting. It was a fateful appointment that would change her life.

Charles I’s wife Henrietta Maria was French and a Catholic, a divisive figure scorned by the Parliamentary forces. In 1644, afraid for her safety, she and her court fled to France. It was a harrowing journey, their ship surviving an attack and a terrible storm, while Henrietta Maria was ill from recent childbirth. Eventually they were welcomed in Paris and given apartments in the Louvre. Margaret would live in exile until the Restoration in 1660, never to see her mother, two of her brothers, or a sister again. All died before her return. These traumatic experiences are reflected in her later fiction, full of sudden wars, young women losing home and family, storms at sea, and fatal shipwrecks. But it was in exile that she met her future husband, William Cavendish, Marquess of Newcastle.

William was a widower and thirty years older than Margaret, not unusual in those times of arranged marriages, but this was a love match. He was a close associate of Queen Henrietta Maria and had served as Royalist Captain-General before going into exile after the disastrous Battle of Marston Moor. William made a dramatic entrance to the court in Paris in a coach pulled by nine horses, gifting seven of them to the Queen’s mother; a flamboyant display of wealth and grandeur that immediately attracted Margaret’s notice. In fact the Marquess was deep in debt and in disgrace for leaving England after his defeat. He was known as a romantic who wrote poetry, not great qualities for a military leader, but winning for a suitor. During their courtship he wrote Margaret over seventy cringe-worthy poems, going so far as to imagine their wedding night: “Now you’re in bed / with trembling maidenhood.” Margaret’s letters, the first of her writing to survive, are full of cautious affection but also ideas and anguished commentary on current affairs. She sees their whole world “subject to alteration and change” and “our hopes as if they had taken opium.” For Margaret William was a port in a storm. They were wed at the end of 1645 and doted on one another throughout their marriage. William recognized his wife’s brilliance, helped her publish her writing, and tolerated her eccentricities. Each wrote an admiring biography of the other.

Margaret published her first book Poems and Fancies in 1653. This was a revolutionary moment for women’s writing for she published under her own name. Most women writers at the time circulated their work in manuscript, or published anonymously, or coyly as “A Lady.” Margaret’s subject matter was also unconventional. She did not write of motherhood (she had no children) or religious piety but on the science of atoms, the horrors of the civil war, her view that marriage was better for a man than a woman, the possibility of a women-only utopia, her ideas on proper government, and other philosophical topics. The opening poem announced the vastness of her interests: Nature calls a counsel…to advise about Making the World:

When Nature first the world’s foundation laid,
She called a counsel how it might be made.
Motion was first, who had a subtle wit,
And then came Life, and Form, and Matter fit.
First Nature spake: “My friends, if we agree,
We can and may do a fine work ,” said she.

In this creation story there is no creator deity but a female Nature who follows the laws of Motion, the most important scientific preoccupation of the age. Sir Isaac Newton would present his three laws of motion in 1686. While in exile Margaret met many of Europe’s leading scientists and thinkers and proved she could discourse on their level, absorbing their ideas and contributing her own. In one lovely verse she imagines a piece of jewelry as an image for the world:

An earring round may well a zodiac be…
That same which doth the earring hold, the hole,
Is that we call the North and Southern Pole
There nipping frost may be, and winters cold,
Yet never on the lady’s ear take hold.

By the time Margaret’s exile ended with the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 she was the author of four books and had achieved the fame she craved.

The last year of the second Civil War had been particularly cruel to the Lucas family. In 1648 the Parliamentary army led by Sir Thomas Fairfax laid siege to Colchester for eleven weeks, until all the dogs, cats, and rats in the town were eaten. On July 7 the soldiers stormed St. John’s Abbey and opened the family vault in the chapel, this time opening the coffins containing the corpses of Margaret’s mother and sister. In a grotesque scene they cut the hair from the bodies and wore it as wigs, cavorting around scattering the bones of the Lucas ancestors. Royalist army leaders were rounded up and sentenced to death. Margaret’s beloved brother Sir Charles Lucas, who had led the fight against Fairfax, was shot in the yard of Colchester Castle. Though Margaret didn’t witness such scenes her writing shows she had no illusions about the nature of war:

Some, their legs hang danglingly by the nervous strings,
And shoulders cut, hung loose, like flying wings.
Here heads are cleft in two parts, brains lie mashed,
And all their faces into slices hashed.

The Restoration was a glorious opportunity to recover from all the violence and loss of the wars. But for the Cavendishes the world was changed, not restored. Margaret’s home and family were gone and William’s finances never fully recovered from all he had contributed to the Royalist cause. He had been tutor to the future Charles II and hoped this closeness to the royal family would lead to a major appointment. It never came, but he was elevated to Duke of Newcastle allowing Margaret to style herself as Duchess and Princess in her future works. Now she achieved the heights of fame and notoriety as part of the cultural renaissance that followed the repressive Commonwealth era. Comments about her by contemporaries vacillated between shock at her revealing costumes and penchant for cross-dressing, and genuine admiration for her mind. The writer John Evelyn called her “a mighty pretender to learning, poetry, and philosophy.”

In 1667 Margaret became the first woman invited to a meeting of the Royal Society, an honor she had long desired. The invitation was controversial and opposed by many members. It would be another three centuries before the Society elected a female fellow. Margaret was allowed one visit which became the talk of London. Crowds gathered to see her arrival. What would she wear? She did not disappoint, arriving fashionably late in a gilded coach wearing an elaborate dress with a long train “half a road at least” carried by her maids of honor. A large masculine brimmed hat “so like a Cavalier” completed the look. Pepys “did not like her at all.” But inside the meeting all was serious scientific discussion. Margaret was skeptical of the Royal Society’s dedication to experiments as the way to knowledge and wanted to see for herself. Among the demonstrations shown her that day were “of colours, loadstones, microscopes and of liquors” and Robert Boyle’s air pump, a device that could weigh the air. When Margaret left with an “elaborate curtsey” the men made plans to measure the earth in St. James’s Park .

Margaret’s most famous work, The Blazing World, can be read as a satire of the Royal Society, a condemnation of the Civil War, and a feminist fantasy. One hundred and fifty years before Mary Shelley published Frankenstein Margaret published the first science fiction novel. She was aware that she was doing something revolutionary, blending the genres of “reason” and “fancy,” science and fiction. She felt the need to explain herself in an introduction, saying she has “joined them as two worlds at the ends of their poles.” The Blazing World tells the story of an imaginary Utopian world reached through the North Pole. A young woman is shipwrecked in the frozen North and is rescued by kindly talking bears who guide her to this new world. She becomes Empress and studies the science and philosophy of her new home. Among the inhabitants are lice men who, like the men of the Royal Society, demonstrate their experiments. But they fail.

They endeavored to measure all things to a hair’s breadth, and to weigh them to an atom; but their weights would seldom agree, especially in the weighing of Air.

Margaret becomes a character in her own story, for the Empress decides she needs a scribe to help her write down her own ideas. She rejects Aristotle, Pythagoras, Plato, and Epicurus because:

they are so wedded to their own opinions, that they would never have the patience to be scribes.

She decides that “a Lady” she has heard of, the Duchess of Newcastle, is perfect for the job. The Empress and the Duchess become “spiritual lovers” exchanging kisses and embraces as well as ideas. Margaret describes this as a “platonic relationship” but inevitably contemporary critics have called it a “Sapphic fantasy.” In later chapters the Empress and the Duchess visit London together and meet the Duke of Newcastle who complains about the loss of his estates in the Civil War. After their return to the Blazing World the Duchess hears that another war has broken out in her country. She leads a fleet of golden ships to destroy the enemy and restore the King. They are victorious and the Duchess is worshipped as a goddess. In an epilogue Margaret encourages her readers to imagine fantasy worlds of their own.

The Blazing World gave Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, the lasting fame she craved, for it is the one of her books that has survived the test of time. She dreamed that if her contemporaries did not appreciate her work, future generations would:

But say that Book should not in this Age take,
Another Age of great esteem may make;
If not the second, then a third may raise
It from the Dust, and give it wondrous praise:
For who can tell but my poor Book may have
Honour’d renown, when I am in the Grave?
And when I dye, my Blessing I will give,
And pray it may in after Ages live.

When Margaret died suddenly in 1673 her grieving husband gave her a funeral with all the extravagant pomp of a royal event. A black velvet draped hearse displaying her coat of arms was followed by a procession of nobles. It was a dramatic pageant worthy of a dramatic character. She was laid to rest in a vault in Westminster Abbey where William would join her in 1676.