Is There a Nutmeg in the House? (19 page)

The Earl of Kent died in 1639, and whether or not she then married Selden, the Countess evidently continued to live in the grand style, for it was about 1642, at the time of the outbreak of the Civil War, that she employed Robert May, author of the famous
Accomplisht Cook
of 1660, and May was certainly not the man to tolerate a household where the provisions were less than lavish or the hospitality in any way second rate. May was accustomed to grand and noble households and a numerous staff of under-cooks and servants, and it was in a note at the beginning of his book listing some of his richest employers and signed W.W. that he was recorded as having worked for the Countess of Kent ‘at the beginning of these wars’.

Curiously, given her evident love of good living and Aubrey’s gossip concerning her promiscuous ways, it was for her generosity to the poor and her medical cures and receipts that the Countess seems to have been best known. It is an aspect of her character
which at first sight accords uneasily with her formidably commanding appearance – her portrait by van Somer, painted when she was about forty, is now in the Tate – and reports of her unpopularity at Court. ‘The Lady of Roxburgh is gone from Court’ wrote one John Chamberlain to Sir Dudley Carleton in October 1617 ‘and the Lady Grey de Ruthyn, though with much opposition, succeeds in her place.’
³
She certainly looks a very imperious lady, our Countess, and it comes as no surprise that she was unloved by her colleagues. All the same, tartar though she may have been, van Somer’s portrait shows that she was lively and intelligent – as Aubrey says, ingeniose – with it. She must also have performed her duties efficiently and have been liked by the royal family, for she seems to have returned to Court to serve Queen Henrietta Maria, perhaps at the time in 1626 when Charles I packed off his wife’s troublesome French retinue of four hundred courtiers and hangers-on, brought with her at the time of their marriage in the previous year. It would have been during this period that the young Sir Kenelm Digby knew the Countess, noting how she cooked her nourishing broth for consumptions ‘in a close flagon
in bulliente Balneo
, as my Lady Kent, and my Mother used’
⁴
and that a certain W.H., one of Henrietta’s scribes, or perhaps an apothecary, recorded the recipe for a powder presented by the Countess to the Queen. This was a concoction of white amber, crab’s eyes, red coral, harts-horn, saffron and pearl dissolved in lemon juice, the whole lot made into a paste and dried.
⁵
This powder was a specific ‘against all malignant and Pestilent Diseases’ including ‘French Pox, Small Pox, Measels, Plague, Pestilence’. It was known as My Lady Kent’s Powder, or Gascons Powder.

In December 1651 the Countess died at her London house at Whitefriars. Aged seventy, and childless – her husband’s title had passed to a cousin, Anthony Grey – she bequeathed most of her personal property, including the Whitefriars house, to Selden. It was only then, according to Aubrey, that Selden made public his marriage to the Countess. Aubrey further recounts that Selden had been carrying on with the women of the Countess’s household, including ‘my lady’s Shee Blackamore’ and a certain Mistress Williamson, ‘a lusty bouncing woman, who robbed him on his death-bed’. With his customary relish for scandalous tittle-tattle, Aubrey adds that his saddler, who had also served the Kents, had said that ‘Mr Selden had got more by his Prick than he had done
by his practise’. An envious allusion, no doubt, to the considerable fortune left him by the Countess. Selden, however, lived only three more years to enjoy his wealth and his bouncing Mistress Williamson. Afflicted with dropsy, he died at the Whitefriars house in November 1654.

In 1653, a year before Selden’s death and two years after that of the Countess, the book of medical receipts which bears her name was published. It was entitled
A Choice Manual, or Rare Secrets in Physick and Chirurgery Collected and practised by the Right Honourable the Countess of Kent, late deceased
. My edition, the 19th, carries the further subtitle
Whereto are added several Experiments of the Vertue of Gascons powder, and Lapis contra Yarvam by a Professor of Physick. As also most excellent ways of Preserving, Conserving, Candying etc
. The Nineteenth Edition, London, Printed for Henry Mortlock at the Phoenix in St Paul’s Church-yard, 1687. In all editions except the first, at any rate according to Oxford, there was a portrait of the Countess of Kent. This portrait is often missing, as it is in my copy, but I have seen three different versions of it. All three could, possibly, be extremely crude drawings taken from the van Somer portrait, since in one of them the Countess appears to be wearing the same cap with the aigrette on the back of her head. The portrait was in the collection of Charles I, and sold during the Commonwealth.

The 1687 edition is a tiny 24mo volume, in two quite separate parts. The medical receipts run to 238 pages, of which 43 contain the additional Experiments announced on the title page. There is also a Table of Contents of the Additions running to five unnumbered pages. Then comes the cookery part, separately paginated, and titled
A True Gentlewomans Delight. Wherein is contain’d all manner of Cookery Together with Preserving, Conserving, Drying, and Candying. Very necessary for all Ladies and Gentlewomen
. Published by W. G. Gent
⁶
London. Printed for Henry Mortlock, at the Phoenix in St Paul’s Church-yard, 1687. There is a dedicatory Epistle addressed ‘To the Virtuous and Most Hopeful Gentlewoman, Mrs Anne Pile, Eldest Daughter of the Honourable Sir Francis Pile Baronet, Deceased’, signed W.J., and another addressed ‘Friendly Reader’ and signed W.L. The Table of Contents follows, again unnumbered, then the receipts, running to 140 pages.

At no place in the book, then, is there the slightest printed claim that the cookery receipts were those used by the Countess of Kent
or that they came from any MS. found among her papers. It seems fairly likely that the MS. receipt book was the property of W.J., the gent of the title pages, or of some friend of his, and that the Countess of Kent’s book of medical secrets had also fallen into his hands. When he decided to publish it, whether with or without Selden’s consent we do not know – the two MSS. were put together in order to increase the size of the volume or to make it more complete and thus attract more sales.

The sole connecting link between the two books is provided by the dedicatory Epistle to the
Choice Manual
, addressed to the ‘vertuous and most Noble Lady, Laetitia Popham, wife of the Honourable and truly Valiant Col. Alexander Popham’
⁷
and like the one addressed to Mistress Anne Pile in
The True Gentlewoman
, signed W.J. The same W.J. – the initials were on the title page of the earlier editions of the
Choice Manual
– also signed the Epistle introducing the additional
Experiments
of the later editions of the book. From this we learn that the said W.J. had been given some of these receipts for ‘select cordial spirits’ by a certain Dr Samuel King who had them from Sir Walter Rawleigh, with whom he had ‘lived long time in the Tower, and in his Expeditions’. This Samuel King, continues W.J., was ‘my loving friend, and School-fellow both in Canterbury and Westminster Schools’. It sounds very much as if W.J. were himself a physician, the ‘Experiments of Gascons powder, or the Countesse’s’, having been tried ‘upon several persons by my self and divers others by my directions’. Could W.J. perhaps have been a doctor or apothecary in the Kent household, assisting her in her ministrations to the sick, and therefore having access to her book of medical receipts and rare secrets?

When it comes to the famous receipts and secrets, many of them turn out to be for delightful herbal mixtures and syrups, compounded of flowers and spices, oils and beeswax, almonds, milk, honey, ale, cordial waters, French white wines, muscadine, malmsey. There are broths of chicken and raisins, distillations of water-cresses, water-mint and spearmints. Honeysuckle, celandine, comfrey, cowslips and wild white roses all make their appearance among the commoner herbs such as marjoram and wild thyme, parsley root, marigold flowers and violet leaves. The receipts are written literately and with much style. Reading them one appreciates once again how closely the arts of medicine and cookery were related in the Countess of Kent’s day, although it
has to be admitted that the less enticing brews of the period are not absent from the Kent manual. ‘Take three round Balls of Horse-dung, boil them in a pint of white wine’; ‘Take a Hound’s turd’; and for a Pin or Web in the Eye ‘take two or three lice out of one’s head, and put them alive into the eye that is grieved, and so close it up and most assuredly the lice will suck out the Web in the eye and will cure it and come forth without any hurt’. Such were conditions and the state of medicine in Stuart England.

Reflecting on the Countess of Kent’s haughty appearance and scandalous sexual conduct (Aubrey was not alone in reporting it) I think they are less incompatible with her ministrations to the sick and her charitable hospitality to the poor
⁸
than it would at first seem. The Countess was rich, she was childless, all châtelaines of great houses were expected to be conversant with medicine, the arts of distilling cordials and healing waters and the cooking of restorative broths.

Charity was a natural duty, and if the Countess practised it on the scale reported by de la Pryme then she was exercising the organising capacity and administrative ability of a high-powered woman such as the one depicted in the van Somer portrait. The Countess had certainly inherited some of her famous grandmother’s commanding characteristics. As for brazenly cuckolding her husband and subsequently living with John Selden in ‘open whoredom’ as de la Pryme wrote in his Diary, at the period neither circumstance was any great rarity. The Jacobeans were not prudish about sex. As Oliver Lawson Dick wrote in the foreword to his edition of
Aubrey’s Brief Lives
:
⁹
‘In the seventeenth century sex had not yet been singled out as the sin par excellence, it was merely one among many failings, and Aubrey no more thought of concealing it than he dreamed of avoiding the mention of gluttony or drunkenness.’ Or, it might be added, the presence of ‘lice in one’s head’.

What then of the little book of cookery receipts which for so long had gone under the Countess of Kent’s name? Whatever its provenance,
A True Gentlewoman’s Delight
is a collection of much charm, someone’s personal receipt book not written for publication any more than was the
Choice Manual
.
¹⁰
Like many such family receipt books it is somewhat higgledy-piggledy and inconsistent. Some of the receipts date back to Tudor days, a few are survivals from medieval cookery, others are for the typical dishes of the first Stuart period – delicious creams and junkets,
spiced yeast cakes, pottages enriched with raisins and dates, an artichoke pie, ‘a potato pie for supper’, a tart with green pease and a tart of hips. Many other receipts reflect that preoccupation with preserving, candying, crystallising and comfit-making common during the first half of the seventeenth century and stressed in the sub-title of the book.

Together with the medical receipts of the first part those were evidently the ones which the publishers counted on to sell the book. And sell it they did. By 1654, a year after its first appearance, it had already gone into four editions, and by 1659 into twelve. At some time between the appearance of the fourth and eleventh editions (also 1659) the Additions to the medical receipts supplied by W.J. were inserted. The latest edition of which I have heard is the twenty-first, published in 1708. From 1658 to 1708 makes a remarkably long life for so small a book, and is perhaps a testimonial to the selling power of the Countess of Kent’s name.

It is unlikely that we shall ever know the identity of the
True Gentlewoman
. One thing I think I can say with certainty.
If
the Countess of Kent wrote the medical receipts then she did not write the cookery receipts. The style of the two books is quite different, a point I have only recently perceived. Nor is it the cookery receipt book of a rich noblewoman who entertained sixty or eighty poor people every other day and sent out food to those who could not come (de la Pryme again). I would say that the collection came from a much more modest household, and this is very much part of its appeal. I have owned the little book for about fifteen years, have studied the cookery receipts – and used some – always with joy and fascination, but only lately have I thought to read the medical ones with anything other than passing curiosity.

References

1
. John B. Nichols, FSA,
The Progresses, processions… of King James the First… collected from original mss, etc
, London 1828.

2
. The Countess’s elder sister, Lady Mary Talbot, married William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, in 1604.

3
. Nichols, op. cit.

4
.
The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digbie, Kt. Opened
, 1669, p. 141 of the 1910 edition.

5
. The Receipt of the Lady Kent’s powder presented by her ladyship to the Queen.
A Queen’s Delight
, 1658 edition. First
published 1655. This version differs slightly from the one in the Kent manual.

6
. The G. is evidently a misprint. In earlier editions it was W.J.

7
. Born 1605, one of the three brothers Popham who fought for the Parliament in the Civil War.

8
.
The Diary of Abraham de la Pryme
, ed. Charles Jackson, Surtees Society 1869–70, Vol 54. In the year 1686 de la Pryme reported that his aunt, who knew the Countess, said ‘that she spent twenty thousand pound a year on physick, receipts and experiments, and in charity towards the poor’.