Even in decadent, showy Restoration London, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, caused a stir. According to a contemporary diarist, she turned up one evening at the theatre in a carriage pulled by eight white bulls and sat with “her breasts all laid out to view” and accessorised with “scarlet trimmed nipples”. Samuel Pepys was desperate to catch a glimpse of her when he was out and about on May Day, but failed because she was “being followed and crowded upon by coaches all the way she went”; ten days later, he observed, she had “100 boys and girls running looking upon her”.
It was not just her outrageous outfits that made Margaret (1623-73) a celebrity. Her exhibitionism extended to her work. She was a feminist, a philosopher and a poet who published under her own name — an extraordinary thing for a woman of her class to do at the time. Not that her efforts won her undiluted respect, among contemporaries or in subsequent centuries. She was dismissed as “Mad Madge of Newcastle” by a Victorian cultural historian and as a “giant cucumber” crushing the delicate blooms of 17th-century literature by Virginia Woolf. She knew she was regarded as ridiculous, but it didn’t shut her up. For that alone, you have to like her.
If she was a bit bonkers, it is hardly surprising. Her family were Royalists. When her home in Colchester was stormed by the Parliamentary army, the soldiers opened the graves of her recently interred mother and sister, cut off the corpses’ hair, made wigs of them and killed her beloved brother. Margaret fled to France with the court. The boredom of being a maid of honour to Henrietta Maria, Charles I’s wife, sounds nearly as maddening as the brutality meted out to her family. She had to sit around in the queen’s presence doing nothing from 11am to suppertime. Still, it was at least a good place to meet eligible chaps — although her future husband barely qualified as such.
William Cavendish, Charles II’s former tutor and a poet, had, perhaps not surprisingly, proved to be a hopeless military commander. After a disastrous defeat he abandoned the fight, left for France and, although in bad odour even with his side, hung around the court. Despite the 30-year age gap, he and Margaret fell in love. Her impecunity and his poetry suggest that the passion was real.
Skint, the couple moved to Antwerp, where they could live cheaply. Margaret had no education and couldn’t spell, so at her request William set about tutoring her. She started writing — possibly to make money, possibly, as she says in the introduction to her first book, Poems and Fancies, to assuage her “melancholy”.
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After the Restoration, things looked up somewhat. William was made a duke, which clearly suited Margaret: the title page of her books describes her as “the thrice noble, excellent and illustrious Princess, the Duchess of Newcastle”. The couple were still short of cash, but that didn’t stop Margaret from spending huge sums on her clothes. They hung out in the best intellectual society, dining one evening with Descartes. Hobbes couldn’t make it, but he did lend William money, and demanded William’s telescope as security for the debt. Margaret was the first woman to be invited to a meeting of the Royal Society. The eminent scientists, divided over whether she should visit, put the matter to a vote. She turned up wearing a man’s hat and a dress with a massive train.
Margaret’s books ranged remarkably widely. She produced the first collection of plays to be published by an Englishwoman, serious philosophy about the nature of matter, whimsical poems about fairies and one of the earliest works of science fiction. Although said to be shy, she was not afflicted by modesty. The Duchess of Newcastle turns up in the sci-fi book as the beautiful, clever and humble soulmate to an empress. Making money does not seem to have been her main motivation: she wanted “Beauty, Wit, Titles, Wealth or Power”, she wrote, only “as they are steps to raise me to Fames Tower”.
Since she seems to have been genuinely radical in her opinions, she may have sought celebrity not just for its own sake, but also to make an intellectual mark. She was an outspoken feminist. “Men are so unconscionable and Cruel to us,” she wrote of women, “as they . . . would fain Bury us in their Houses or Beds, as in a Grave; the truth is, we live like Bats or Owls, Labour like Beasts and Die like Worms.” She was passionately concerned — and way before her time — by humanity’s behaviour towards animals: “no Creature doth usurp so much as Man,/ Who thinks himself like God because he can/ Rule other Creatures.” That she has never been taken seriously as a radical thinker may be in part because she was, from the progressive point of view, on the wrong side in the civil war.
It may also be because so much of what she wrote was rubbish. Woolf complained that she “frittered her time away scribbling nonsense and plunging ever deeper into obscurity and folly” and thought that by inciting contempt for the female intellect she did women a disservice. “The crazy Duchess became a bogey to frighten clever girls with.” But the clever girls — Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Mary Wollstonecraft, Fanny Burney — kept popping up, apparently unperturbed by Madge’s madness, and even Woolf admits to warm feelings for the daft duchess. “Though her philosophies are futile, her plays intolerable and her verses mainly dull, the vast bulk of the duchess is enlivened by a vein of authentic fire . . . There is something noble and Quixotic and high-spirited, as well as crack-brained and bird-witted, about her.”
Francesca Peacock’s enjoyable book is enriched by accounts of other women who lived remarkably in those remarkable times. Anna, Lady Cunningham, raised a mixed-sex regiment in Berwick to resist not just the king but also her own son, who had turned Royalist. She led a troop of horse with guns dangling by her side and silver bullets reserved for her son. There were clearly enough women masquerading as men to join the army that Charles I issued a proclamation forbidding it. Even his wife took an active part in the war. She set herself up in Bridlington to help to direct the armies in the north, gave birth on the run, hid “under a pile of litter”, boarded a ship to France and told the captain that if they looked like being captured, he should blow the ship up.
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The book does not, however, make any powerful new points about Margaret Cavendish, a woman whose career and eccentricities were already as well known as they deserve to be. A good biography of her, Mad Madge by Katie Whitaker, was written 20 years ago. It is not clear that she needed another.
Pure Wit: The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish by Francesca Peacock (Head of Zeus, 384pp; £27.99). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
