Mistress Bradstreet (32 page)

The optic nerve, coats, humours all are mine,

The wat’ry, glassy, and the crystaline;

O mixture strange! O colour colourless,

Thy perfect temperament who can express?

He was no fool who thought the soul lay there,

Whence her affections, passions speak so clear.
¹⁷

When Phlegm goes on to describe the mechanics of the spine and ligaments, she gloats over her attributes, giving her recital far more verve than the textbook versions of anatomy that Anne had studied so copiously. Like a playwright, Anne transformed the inert knowledge of the specialists into lively monologues her readers could follow.

Anne’s politics were not far beneath the surface of “Of the Four Humors.” The most warlike of all the sisters, Choler appears rash, foolish, and overly aggressive. She also declares that her martial humor is dominant in males: “Yet man for Choler is the proper seat: / I in his heart erect my regal throne, / where monarch like I play and sway alone.”
¹⁸
Choler’s pride and machismo do not speak well of the swaggering men she governs. Anne could not resist this dig against the pointless bellicosity of males, and of Charles in particular.

Anne drove this point home by making the last, most “yielding,” and feminine of the cousins, Phlegm, the one who is able to stop the violence in her family. Anne was well versed in the scriptural tenet that the last shall be first and the weak shall be made strong. She based much of her life as an intellectual woman on this premise. Thus it is Phlegm who unites her cousins and then the four mother elements too.

Let’s now be friends; it’s time our spite were spent,

Lest we too late this rashness do repent,

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

Let Sanguine with her hot hand Choler hold,

To take her moist my moisture will be bold:

My cold, cold Melancholy’s hand shall clasp;

Her dry, dry Choler’s other hand shall grasp.

Two hot, two moist, two cold, two dry here be,

A golden ring, the posy
UNITY.

Nor jars nor scoffs, let none hereafter see,

But all admire our perfect amity;

Nor be discerned, here’s water, earth, air, fire,

But here’s a compact body, whole entire.
¹⁹

Phlegm’s vision of harmony was Anne’s own. Each humor accepted the fact that she needed the others to make a whole that was greater than the warring parts. In this time of civil war, when Parliamentary forces were battling the king’s army and when no one knew which side would win, there was nothing Anne yearned for more than this kind of “UNITY.”

Although her vision was essentially a cooperative one, Anne acknowledged that it could come about only after fierce competition, revealing her hope that the bloodshed and warfare in England would cease. Of course, Anne also had a subsidiary hope: that men might learn to bend an ear to women and that what they heard might change the course of history.

As the civil war showed no sign of letting up, many of Anne’s friends and neighbors continued to be torn about where their duties lay. Leaders of New England, such as Winthrop, began to receive letters begging them to come back and lend support to the Puritan cause against Charles. One old friend of Winthrop’s who sat in Parliament lamented, “Now we see and feele how much we are weakened by the loss of those that are gone from us, who should have stood in the gap, and have wrought and wrasled mightily in this great business.”
²⁰

It was hard to resist such pleas for help, but most prominent New England Puritans were not particularly eager to jump into the fray, as they were worried about the direction of their coreligionists back in England. Old World Puritans agreed that royalist principles must be dismantled but were less clear about what to put in their place. Increasingly, they seemed to be leaning toward the Bay colony’s biggest bugaboos. Either they wanted to cling to Presbyterianism, where a synod of elders had control over the administration of all the churches—a hateful idea to New England Puritans, who felt that each church should be self-governing—or they sought complete freedom to form the kinds of churches they wanted regardless of whether they adhered to the laws of the “true religion.” To the colonists, this libertarian approach would result in a ghastly proliferation of dissenters, from Anabaptists to Familists to Quakers, all of whom were anathema to the stern folk in Massachusetts.

Winthrop and Dudley therefore deemed it important to remain in New England and safeguard their system of church governance. But a divide was emerging between Old and New World Puritans. Without continuity, could American Puritans still think of themselves as English? Were they the true English Puritans, while the Old World folk had simply lost their way?

This last was the conclusion of most of Anne’s family and friends. Any other idea was too threatening to consider. Suddenly Anne’s poems from this period, “A Dialogue,” “The Four Elements,” and “Of the Four Humors” seemed to speak to the moment. Anne was now writing as a serious-minded, learned poet and a social critic. Already her poetic accomplishments were impressive, although no one seems to have realized that one day her work would garner the attention of the English-speaking world.

Chapter Sixteen

Foolish, Broken, Blemished Muse

The subject large, my mind and body weak

With many more discouragements did speak.

—
ANNE BRADSTREET,
“The Four Monarchies”

A
NNE KNEW THAT HER DAYS IN IPSWICH
were numbered when Simon announced his dream of moving his family from the relative ease of the settled town and plunging them deeper into the wilderness. Like his father-in-law, Simon felt impelled to conquer the wilderness in the name of Puritanism. It was against the creed of his religion to sit back and rest on his laurels; a pious man or woman must continually strive to please God, no matter the challenge. Anne agreed with her husband, but it was still awful to consider yet another wrenching move.

She had little choice in the matter, however. Over time, Simon must have reminded Anne more and more of her father, with that same relentless drive to succeed, selfless dedication to the colony’s success, devotion to Puritanism, and slightly quixotic idealism. Of course, Simon was far more genial and relaxed than Dudley had ever been. But as he grew into a civic leader in his own right, he modeled himself after the father-in-law he revered.

By the end of 1643, Simon had completed most of his work for the colony and could devote himself to building his estate. His work as a mediator among the strong-minded New Havenites, the rigid Plymouth Pilgrims, and his own colony’s leaders had helped him grow in confidence.

Now, just like his father-in-law, Simon was dissatisfied with his current situation and believed he could establish a true utopia, this time in Cochichawicke, a fertile territory fifteen miles west of Ipswich, bounded to the north by the Merrimack River and “two miles eastward to Rowley.”
¹
In 1634 John Winthrop Jr. had bought this land from an Indian sachem for six pounds and a coat, and Simon had been hoping to make this move ever since he had heard of the virgin territory.

The dream of yet another new settlement was a family affair. John Woodbridge, the husband of Anne’s sister Mercy, was among those who had originally raised the idea in 1638, when he and others sought from the General Court the right to “begin a plantation.”
²
For years Woodbridge had cherished the dream of being the minister of a new Puritan settlement. This seemed the perfect opportunity, but there was one stumbling block. When he was a young man, Woodbridge had fled England before he could be ordained. Dudley, who was eager to have a clergyman in the family, urged the young man to “perfec[t] your former studies” so that he could assume the pulpit in the new territory.
³
Woodbridge went to Harvard to complete his preparation, and when at last the happy day came—in 1645 he was anointed as a Puritan minister—Dudley immediately saw to it that he was appointed to head the church of the new settlement. That same year Chochichawicke was renamed Andover, a comforting improvement from the English point of view, and a meetinghouse was constructed for Woodbridge to preach in.

Now that Mercy’s husband had attained his dream position, he was eager to move at once. Simon, who seemed to have been waiting for his brother-in-law’s ordination before he made his move, agreed. And so Anne and Mercy knew that it would soon be time to say good-bye to their homes in the thriving town of Ipswich and to their sister Patience. Although none of the women left any record of complaint about being separated, it must have been difficult to face their leave-taking.

Fortunately for Anne, Simon had the good sense to build his new home before transplanting his large family. He had erected a sawmill on the Cochichawicke Brook the year before, and since it was the only one within miles, money and goods began to pour into the Bradstreets’ already overflowing coffers. Simon and Anne had arrived in the New World as one of the colony’s wealthiest families, and by the 1640s Simon’s real estate investments, as well as his sale of livestock and agricultural produce, had made them even richer.

With Anne and the children safely installed in their old home in Ipswich, Simon did not have to rush the building of this new house, nor did he have to cut costs, since he could get his logs sliced into boards at his own mill. It was a luxurious opportunity, and Simon made the most of it, hiring carpenters and lavishing money on paneling, doors, imported windows, and perhaps even a gable or two. Within a year or so, his workmen had created a splendid homestead situated on twenty acres of land, the finest location and the most beautiful English structure in Andover.

Sometime early in 1646, when Anne was pregnant with their sixth child, Simon announced that they were ready to move. If the prospect of yet another long journey through the forest, this time with five children in tow, was alarming, Anne left no evidence that she dreaded it. Instead, she might well have been excited at the prospect of her new home.

When she first walked inside, she would have been able to smell the freshly cut wood that was bright and pure, as yet undarkened by smoke. The wide floorboards would have been yellow pine, with the curving white ripples typical of that grain. The fireplace was so enormous that more than one person could stand inside it. The tiny paned windows let in light but not cold, and the door fit snugly to keep out drafts.

In addition to the Bradstreets, twenty-two other homesteaders had settled on the edge of the virgin forest. Firewood was stacked for the winter, and the land surrounding the house plots was cleared of stones and trees and leveled as much as possible to make room for planting.

Still, despite the solace of her beautiful house, it must have been wrenching for Anne to leave behind Ward, her mentor and confidant. With whom would she talk about poetry, history, and politics? Who would guide her thinking and answer her questions? How could she continue to grow as a poet and a Puritan without his care and focused attention? Her father, too, would be even farther away; visits would be more difficult and mail more unreliable.

These sorrows were partially eclipsed by the situation in England. A fierce Puritan general, Oliver Cromwell, had risen to power and had shocked the world by announcing, “If I met the King in battle I would fire my pistol at the King as at another.”
⁴
Much as the New England Puritans hated Charles, this was still an alarming flouting of tradition. To residents on both sides of the Atlantic, it seemed that the world was being turned upside down. On June 14, 1645, Cromwell and his New Model Army won the decisive battle of the war at Naseby, and Charles and his men fled. It seemed only a matter of time before the king would be captured.

In the midst of this unsettling crisis, Ward had hastily finished
The Simple Cobbler of Aggawam,
the manuscript Anne had watched evolve. Ward’s middle-of-the-road position about the war seemed to appeal to people; he believed in the sanctity of the king even as he asserted the glories of true Puritanism. Published in London, the book went through four editions in the first year.
⁵
Overnight, Ward was a celebrity, and moderate English Puritans begged him to come back to the Old World to speak on their behalf. Like other New Englanders, Anne was proud of his success, but for her it was a bittersweet sort of joy, since she knew his fame would take him away from her for good. At seventy years old, once Ward left America, it was unlikely he would ever return.

But for Ward there was no real incentive to stay in Ipswich. With Anne in Andover, he had lost what was probably his greatest pleasure in life—their long hours talking about each other’s writing and the excitement with which they read each other’s work. At any rate, he felt he had a mission to accomplish back in England. In 1647, a year or so after Anne’s trek to the wilderness, he left for England.

Heartbroken though she must have been, Anne did not utter any “moans.” Perhaps she did not have time to give way to despair now that she was plunged back into life on the frontier. She had delivered a sixth child, Mercy, and had a new homestead to get in order. But in Andover, whether she complained or not, Anne was in something of an intellectual desert. There were few people in this remote outpost with whom she could share books and ideas, no one who would read her poetry or discuss international politics. She had been separated from all the libraries of the Ipswich intellectuals, and though she knew that she was not completely alone in her new home, it must have seemed that way at times.

It was no coincidence, then, that Anne named her new daughter after her reliable sister. Although she and Mercy were separated by nine years and might sometimes seem as different as the quarreling siblings Choler and Melancholy, or Earth and Air, they needed each other just as much, especially on the frontier. Anne’s world would have been incomplete without her sister’s steady loyalty and quiet appreciation.