Mistress Bradstreet (29 page)

Finally, in a shocking breach of custom, Charles refused to allow the Puritan-controlled Parliament to convene. This was because in 1629 the House of Commons had refused to grant him the right to levy taxes to fund his passion for war. No other English monarch had dared to do such a thing. But Charles believed that he possessed the divine right to govern and that therefore no one should be allowed to disagree with him, let alone block his will.

Alarmed by Charles’s dismissive attitude toward Parliament, in 1637 the Massachusetts General Court had commissioned Ward to draft a legal document that ensured that such an outrage could never be perpetrated in New England. Anne watched as Ward threw himself into this task, resigning from his post as minister to devote himself entirely to the job.

Ward wanted his code to protect the colony from potential oppression by the General Court, but he also wanted to uphold the traditions of English common law in the New World. Each event back home directly impinged on his thinking as he sat up late into the night, researching and writing the
Body of Liberties.
New England, unlike old, should be bound by God’s Scripture, Ward believed. In his introduction to the
Body,
he wrote that no law should exist that could “be proved to bee morallie sinfull by the word of God.”
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Given the intrinsic loneliness of such an endeavor, it must have been sustaining to have an intelligent young acolyte who hung on his every word and seemed as obsessed as he was with the creation of a godly New England. Notwithstanding his questionable attitudes about women, Ward even defended wives against abuse from their husbands. Perhaps his relationship with Anne was teaching him to reconsider some of his entrenched ideas as he added the crucial sentence, “Everie marryed woeman shall be free from bodilie correction or stripes by her husband, unlesse it be in his own defense upon her assault.” Although it was typical of Ward to imagine women as the aggressors, still he called for a decisive split with English common law, which had allowed men to punish their wives with a “reasonable instrument” for hundreds of years.
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Ward penned his laws with painstaking care, and by 1641 the court had adopted a version of his work as the colony’s order of governance. This document was of profound importance for the settlement; now it had its own principles that would, they hoped, prevent the mistakes of the Old World. Suddenly Massachusetts Bay seemed more separate than ever before, with its own legal system, like any distinct national entity.

Meanwhile Charles raced on, brandishing his sword at the Scots, collecting money however he could without a Parliament-sanctioned tax (for example, by slapping people like Theophilus in jail for protesting), and thereby alienating his subjects even more. At last, in 1640, a year before Ward finished his legal code, the war-hungry king ran out of money and was forced to reconvene Parliament so that they could levy taxes to fund his ambitions. As the Puritans saw it, Charles had received his comeuppance and it was time to pay him back for curtailing the rights of the legislature and for mistreatment of the people. Everyone in New England, including Anne and Ward, must have realized what Charles did not, that calling Parliament back into session after a ten-year hiatus was like lighting the tail of a bomb. Charles flatly refused to compromise and would not “offer reprisals” for his past actions. In response, Parliamentary leaders became even more intransigent.
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The incendiary relationship between the king and his Puritan subjects had flared to a truly dangerous point.

Anne and her neighbors immediately felt the ramifications of this stalemate between Charles and his government. As soon as the confrontation began, the steady stream of pilgrims fleeing England stopped. English Puritans felt that at last there was hope and rallied to fight the restrictions they had been laboring under since Charles had acceded to the throne. By 1642 it was clear that the Great Migration was over and New Englanders would have to learn to fend for themselves, economically speaking. Crops were soon worth “little more than half what they had been, and cattle were down from twenty or twenty-five pounds a head to eight, seven, or even six.” No one was sure how the colonists would survive without the built-in market of new arrivals rushing off their ships and purchasing the settlers’ old tools and furniture; their cows, pigs, and food supplies; and even their warm clothing for the winter.
²⁰

During this suspenseful time, some pious New Englanders reversed the migration process and caught the next vessels back home in order to join the legal battle against the king. Those like Anne who stayed behind wondered about the fate of the colony: Would the faithful in Massachusetts abandon the New World to fight for purity in the Old? Reports from England declared that Puritans and other dissenters had become increasingly defiant as they arrayed themselves against the king and his policies.

Ward joined Winthrop and Dudley in anxiously following the struggle. Having practiced law for ten years in London, the minister still had many friends who were in the thick of things. Thus, it was probably from Ward that Anne learned how talks between the king and Parliament had ground to a standstill.

In the spring of 1642, both the Commons and Lords announced for the last time that they would not renounce their list of grievances against Charles. They wanted to abolish the ancient feudal tax laws that Charles had revived to fund his army. They demanded that Parliament be summoned every three years and that it could not be disbanded without its own consent. Finally, they wanted the end of the hierarchical system of bishops and archbishops. The king responded by declaring that his very existence depended on his repudiation of their claims: “If I granted your demands, I should be no more than the mere phantom of a king,” he raged.
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This stalemate was exactly what Ward sought to protect New Englanders from in his
Body of Liberties.
The old system seemed to be failing their beloved England. A full-fledged violent conflict loomed between Charles and his subjects; by the summer, both sides had put an end to negotiations and began to prepare for armed conflict. About halfway through her fifth pregnancy, Anne brooded over the future. No one knew what might happen to Massachusetts Bay. It seemed an inauspicious time to bring an infant into the world.

On July 21 Winthrop and Dudley responded to the crisis in England by calling for a fast day. Like Ward, most people in the colony still nurtured a traditional loyalty to the king even though they disapproved of many of his actions. He was the ruler and standard-bearer of the English people. How could there be an England without a monarch? Besides, it was unpleasant to consider how Charles might punish Puritans in general and Massachusetts in particular once he regained control of the government. For of course he would; after all, he was the king.

That fall, news came that New Englanders’ forebodings were coming true. Back in August, the king had fled from the capital; Parliament howled that Charles must be returned to them immediately “by battle or other way.”
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Although at first it seemed that Charles had few supporters and could easily be cowed into submission, Royalists mustered their forces and began to march on London. The reports broke off at this point, so when Anne went into labor, she could only picture the worst: the demise of Puritanism in England and America. Happily, Anne delivered another healthy baby, little Hannah, and perhaps she derived some comfort from the new infant’s plump legs and tiny face. But while Anne suckled Hannah, more bad news sailed across the Atlantic. Guns had been fired. Englishmen had killed Englishmen. The king’s forces had trounced the Parliamentary army at Banbury on October 23. A civil war had begun.

Anne seems to have been frustrated at waiting helplessly to receive more news. No longer simply interested in her own ambition or, for that matter, in showing the world that pious women could read, write, and think for themselves, Anne’s ideas about her identity as a poet had enlarged. This elevation of purpose seems to have occurred in part because of her relationship with the politically minded Ward, but also because of her role as a “deputy husband” in Ipswich. Over the last decade, she had been increasingly pushed into public matters as a prominent citizen of the town. She longed to rattle her spear against corruption and heresy like a man, and from watching Ward, she saw that the pen could serve as a redoubtable weapon. It was true that she couldn’t write laws, but she could still write verse, and this verse could be political, angry, and “manly” in tone, even if she was only a woman.

Cooped up indoors but fully recovered from the birth of her new baby, Anne was ready to launch herself into her new work. The poem she planned was longer than any of her earlier attempts. She would have to chant the lines to herself over and over, storing her ambitious work in her mind, since parchment was so scarce. But faced with the deadening hardship of daily life, nothing was probably more helpful for warding off despair, boredom, and a sense of purposelessness than the endless mental activity of composing, revising, and memorizing. In fact, the process was akin to prayer, just as her father had once taught her.

But unlike male poets of the time, Anne came up with her lines as she rocked her baby to sleep in the middle of the night, as she stirred the soup on the fire, or as she bathed a child’s cut. And so, as she turned her attention to the martial poem she wanted to write, she again decided not to underplay her identity as a woman but to put it to good use.

The idea must have flashed into her mind with the glitter of a gem. The poem would feature two characters: a mother, who represented Old England, and a daughter, who personified New England. Through their dialogue, Anne would find an opportunity to display her impressive knowledge of English history and politics and also fight for the Puritan side of the argument. Old England would wail, and her daughter would try to ease her suffering. But they would also argue—a situation that must have been all too familiar to this headstrong daughter of the stern and traditional Dorothy. Not to mention that she now had three lively girls of her own who must have frequently challenged her rule of the house.

It is true, of course, that Anne’s idea of Old England as New England’s mother was common enough. Her own father had used this figure more than ten years earlier onboard the
Arbella
in “A Humble Request,” when he and the other writers depicted themselves as children of their mother country. Perhaps the most famous example was the English Puritan John Milton. In an essay chastising Charles’s government, Milton evokes a weeping Mother England who bears a strong resemblance to the mother Anne would create only a year or so later. Reflecting on the fact that tens of thousands of colonists had already fled the oppression of the king’s bishops, he wrote,

O if we could but see the shape of our dear mother England, as poets are wont to give a personal form to what they please, how would she appear, think ye, but in a mourning weed, with ashes upon her head, and tears abundantly flowing from her eyes.
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But Anne would not present Old England in a static or solitary fashion. Instead, “A Dialogue between Old England and New” would read almost like a play. She infused tension, suspense, love, and anger into the story, even as she expressed her own feelings over the looming civil war. It was no accident, for example, that New England utters the initial word of the poem, “Alas,” as she describes her mother’s decrepit condition. Here Anne speaks in the voice of the New World, a vantage point that was impossible for the England-bound Milton to achieve. Old England, Anne declares, is a wrecked old woman bound for damnation unless strong, healthy New England can save her.

Not that Anne wanted England to go up in flames. New England, in Anne’s version, is saddened by her mother’s “ailing” condition and regards it as her duty to help her. Thus the daughter demands a catalog of her mother’s “woes” that she might “sympathize.” Eventually, England confesses that her illness is caused by her “sins”:

. . . the breach of sacred laws.

Idolatry . . .

With foolish superstitious adoration,

Are liked and countenanced by men of might,

The Gospel trodden down and hath no right;

Church offices were sold and bought for gain,

That Pope had hope to find Rome here again.
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Instead of regarding the colonists as an inspiration, England acknowledges that the New Englanders “wert jeered . . . / Thy flying for the truth was made a jest.” As for the venerable Puritan ministers, who had attempted to point out the corruption of their mother country, Old England admits:

I mocked the preachers . . .

The sermons yet upon record do stand

That cried destruction to my wicked land;

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Some lost their livings, some in prison pent,

Some find, from house and friends to exile went.
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Under pressure from her daughter, the mother admits she deserves her punishment. “Their silent tongues to heaven did vengeance cry, / Who say their wrongs and hath judged righteously / And will repay it sevenfold in my lap.” But New England cannot sit idly by as her mother plunges into despair; the fates of parent and child are intertwined. As Old England says, “If I decease, doth think thou shalt survive?”
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Anne understood all too well the resentment that often lies between mothers and daughters. At last New England dispenses with the customary reverence that children are supposed to feel toward parents and takes over the poem with a shocking ferocity. The daughter’s final speech outlines what Old England would have to do (with New England’s help) to save herself from destruction.

These are the days the Church’s foes to crush,

To root out Popelings head, tail, branch, and rush;