Mistress Bradstreet (6 page)

In later years she would remember that when she read his poetry, it was as though she were gazing at “glittering plate and Jewels,” a “brave wealth” that she wanted to possess. This poet made her hunger to write poetry herself. She yearned for “some part (at least)” of his store of technique and knowledge. And she was not alone. Du Bartas so thrilled John Milton that the young poet attempted to imitate him in his own heroic undertaking, explaining the ways of God to men in
Paradise Lost.
But Anne knew that such literary dreams were “empty wishes” for a “silly prattler” like herself, since intellectual ambition was an inadmissible desire for a young woman of her time and place.
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Females could not be poets, the experts said; their brains and constitutions were not strong enough, and too much learning might distract them from their proper station in life. The day would come when Anne would ignore these warnings, and then it would be Du Bartas’s example that would spark her into action, leading her to hammer out her own poem about Creation,
The Quaternions.

This brave act, however, would take place many years in the future on the distant shores of America. In the 1620s writing such grand verse would have been unthinkable for the young Anne. There was her own humility to contend with, as well as the societal taboo against intellectual women. Even worse, her frail health seemed to confirm the critics’ feeling that learning weakened the female constitution.

A year or so after the Dudleys arrived at Sempringham, Anne had her first painful experience with illness, an indeterminate fever that confined her to bed for many tedious weeks. At least, she wrote, she had the opportunity to “commun[e] with my heart.”
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Unable to perform the domestic duties so prized by her mother, Anne could take part only in quiet activities while she convalesced. Encouraged by her minister and parents to reflect on her sins and to view her illness as a “correction” from God, Anne suffered spiritually as well as physically. Because she was separated from the flurry of everyday life as well as from the lively chatter of her younger sisters, Anne’s misery became even more pronounced, until her father began to bring her books from the earl’s well-stocked library and from his own. At last Anne had found consolation in her loneliness.

This was an extraordinary act for a Puritan father, not only to allow his daughter such weighty reading, but to promote her encounter with these writers. But to Dudley, history was a devotional tool, and so it makes sense that he would choose this time to bestow heavy tomes about this serious subject on his frail, bedridden daughter. Perhaps the thought that she might be facing death prompted him to overlook conventions. Before long, behind her heavy linen bed curtains, the nine-year-old could venture forth into realms of learning far beyond those of her sisters, mother, and even her older brother, Samuel. She devoured John Speed’s
Historie of Greate Britaine,
William Camden’s
Britannia,
Richard Knolle’s
Generall Historie of the Turkes,
and Raleigh’s
History of the World,
while, of course, never neglecting the study of her beloved Bible.
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Anne was fortunate that her father’s unbridled passion for Puritan theology, which emphasized reading and writing, had allowed him to overlook his culture’s prejudice against women and learning. Now, in the unlikely person of a sickly young girl, he had discovered an intellectual companion blessed with an inquisitive nature like his own, a voracious appetite for knowledge, and a capacity to immerse herself in her studies with ever-increasing determination. For a serious-minded Puritan child like Anne, history was a dramatic recital of the ways God moved in the world. He left His footprints everywhere, and because her father tended to dwell on periods of terror and woe, Anne became a kind of expert in disasters. Later, her history poems would sweep from one catastrophe to the next as she would attempt, in print, to wage her father’s war against the enemies of Puritanism.

As Anne approached adolescence, it was impossible not to see her preternatural aptitude for poetry. Dudley had long held that he was related to the sixteenth-century poet Sir Philip Sidney, whose famous words “Look into thy heart and write” had inspired a raft of writers from Spenser to Raleigh.
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Whether or not they were actually connected to Sidney by blood is arguable, but because Dudley believed so, he exploited the significance of this relationship to the fullest, telling his daughter of her family’s poetic birthright. Anne was born to write poetry, Dudley seems to have thought, although it would take many years and an ocean voyage to the New World before his dreams for her were fully realized.

Anne, however, was a young girl during an era when her most important teacher was supposed to be her mother. Naturally, Dorothy found it difficult to comprehend her daughter’s obsession with literature. Although she supported Anne’s studies because they had her husband’s sanction, she emphasized that household duties must come first. Still, when Anne had fully recovered her strength, Dorothy seems to have allowed her to spend a few hours a day away from domestic chores, not only to study with the noble family’s tutor, but also to read with her father. By the time Anne was ten or eleven years old, it had become clear that Dudley had anointed his eldest daughter as his favorite, even over Samuel. As the years passed, father and daughter established an intimate bond that excluded the rest of the family. Together they moved beyond the English historians and tackled the classics available in translation: Homer, Aristotle, Hesiod, Xenophon, Pliny, Virgil, Seneca, Ovid, Thucydides, and Plutarch, while continuing to study Scripture and the religious writings that were the more customary texts for literate Puritans.

Their closeness was accepted by everyone except Anne’s younger sister Sarah, who suffered from the loss of her father’s attention. Patience and Mercy were content to follow in their mother’s footsteps, but Sarah, like Anne, resembled Dudley—too restless and passionate to be confined exclusively to her feminine role and religious duties. The time would come when the entire family would have to endure the results of Dudley’s neglect of Sarah, but as it was, Dudley always did exactly as he pleased no matter the cost to his loved ones. Sarah would have to make do with the crumbs she received from her father, and Anne would have to bear the brunt of her younger sister’s jealousy and anger throughout both their lives.

At some point during their long hours closeted in his study, Dudley must have taken the revolutionary step of teaching his gifted daughter to compose verse. But before she could even begin to compose poetry, Anne would have to master the mechanical act of writing, a rare undertaking for a ten-year-old girl of this time. In fact, there were really two kinds of literacy during this period. Most Puritan women could read, since everyone wanted them to be able to study Scripture for themselves, but fewer could actually shape their own letters.
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Fiercely determined, Anne set herself the task of learning to use a pen. Her father made the alphabet look deceptively easy. When he dipped his pen in the ink,
l
s and
r
s, entire sentences, even poems, appeared in rotund and stately splendor, as if by divine grace. But her first attempts with a quill were not as graceful, and this was a blow to her dignity. Eventually, though, the figures she traced would become elegant, accurate, and, best of all, easy to read.

Of course, Dudley had no interest in fomenting any sort of feminist rebellion on Anne’s part. With the support of the dowager countess, an excellent example of a writing woman whose wits had not become addled through her intellectual exertions, Dudley told Anne that writing and Christianity went hand in hand, that the poet’s job was not simply to invent a line of pentameter but to consider how best to serve God while reading and composing. In fact, too much concern for flourish and romance, he warned, would lead poet and reader astray; the temptation to overadorn one’s verse must be avoided. One Puritan minister whom Dudley particularly admired wrote: “The task of true art is to conceal art.”
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Anne quickly learned, therefore, that poetry reading and writing should not be simple intellectual or emotional acts. Rather, they should be like ladders to God, like prayers.

Chapter Four

A Man of Exemplary Discretion and Fidelity

W
HEN DUDLEY DECIDED
to invite a young man named Simon Bradstreet to join his household in 1622, no one could anticipate the impact this would have on the family, and especially on ten-year-old Anne. Simon, who was fresh from Cambridge, was to serve as Dudley’s new assistant, since after two years of managing the earl and his affairs on his own, Thomas Dudley was savvy enough to understand that he needed help. Although he was loath to give up control of the estate, he had found he had less and less time to spend on reading, studying the Bible, writing his own poetry, and educating his favored scholarly daughter. Theophilus’s financial situation had improved steadily—thanks to Dudley’s diligent efforts—and now he could afford to pay for more help managing his properties. Simon was hired, therefore, and the Dudley children began to count the days until his arrival. It was, after all, a momentous event: A young man, whom they had never met, would be arriving in their midst. He would lay claims on their father as his master and their mother as his own, and would even regard them as his surrogate sisters and brother.

This rather odd adoption process was fully in accordance with both English custom and Puritan theology, which held that it was the duty of the father of a household to guard the spiritual well-being as well as the physical health and safety of all of those who slept under his roof, including servants, friends, apprentices, and guests. A solid family unit was the most important building block for creating a Christian society, or so Cotton and the other ministers believed, and English law supported them. Dudley, therefore, became liable for Simon’s behavior and responsible for all aspects of the young man’s care the moment he walked in the door.

Of the Dudley children, Anne and Samuel would have been the most interested in Simon’s arrival. Samuel hoped that he would soon be attending Emmanuel College, from which Simon had just graduated. As for Anne, it would be useful if this ready-made older brother turned out to be learned and wise. Perhaps he would join her father and Cotton in guiding her exploration of her faith.

Neither child was to be disappointed. When Simon arrived at Sempringham, the young Dudleys turned out to meet a relaxed, ruddy-cheeked fellow unlike any man they had ever encountered. Their own irascible father rarely laughed and was more likely to lose his temper than tell a joke. Simon, on the other hand, was affable and eager, loved good food, and found the world a generally pleasant place to live. His genial attitude made him easy to like, though, thankfully, from the Dudley parents’ perspective, he never allowed his good-natured bonhomie to overreach the decorous standards of a good Puritan gentleman.

Simon had been well trained not only in proper manners—he never would have dreamed of disobeying the precepts of his new master—but in the political and theological concerns that preoccupied Puritan leaders. Most important, he had been taught to believe that the reformation of the English church was his duty as a God-fearing individual. A vicar and a devout man in his own right, Simon’s father had died suddenly when the boy was only fifteen, but not before he had arranged for Simon to study with the premier reformed divines at Emmanuel College. With no siblings, and having lost his mother many years earlier, the young Simon was bereft, but the Puritan faith and community filled the chasm left in the boy’s life, just as it had for Dudley many years earlier.

At Emmanuel, the center of Puritan foment in England, Simon quickly learned that English dissent was in more trouble than he had ever suspected. His tutors were under constant attack from the king’s bishops, and Simon was instructed to believe that Anglicans and Catholics, who in Puritan eyes were practically the same entity, were not just misguided but were evil persecutors.

From a theological standpoint, the young man’s mentors at Cambridge preached the same tenets as Anne had learned from Cotton. This was not a coincidence. Many of Simon’s teachers had been taught by the famous minister when Cotton had been a tutor at Emmanuel. The older ones had attended college with the great man when he had been the most brilliant undergraduate of their generation. At their hands, Simon learned the Puritan premise that King James was leading the country toward destruction and that the king’s officials were miscreants.

A position at Sempringham was a coup for Simon, since Thomas Dudley was regarded as one of the most virtuous Puritan civic leaders in Lincolnshire. But once he finally entered the doors of the manor, the young Puritan must have been overwhelmed by the sheer size of the burgeoning Dudley family. Dorothy had given birth to her last child, Mercy, soon after their arrival in Sempringham, and the child’s name clearly expressed the beleaguered wife’s sentiments on at last being able to settle into their new home. It had been a long road to the manor.

With three young daughters under the age of ten, the house was full of more activity and chatter than Simon had ever experienced, and certainly many more females. His old life had been rather spartan, having consisted largely of the companionship of men, and women were a phenomenon that must have taken him some time to get used to. From all accounts, however, the demands of the toddler, Mercy; the prattle of Sarah and Patience; and the bustling of female servants did not dismay Simon; instead the busy swarm of women and girls seems to have delighted him, since he would one day create just such a household for himself.

Even if he started off on the right foot with the children and Dorothy, Simon still had to pass the standards of the ramrod-straight Dudley. Since Dudley already approved of Simon’s theology and politics, this was less of a challenge than it at first appeared. The older man could immediately see that he had gained a hardworking, admiring youth who would help ease the burdens of being the earl’s overseer. Simon was thoughtful, smart, patient, and in contrast to Dudley, had a pleasant way with people. It also helped that Simon and Dudley were from the same class background. Both men were of the rising middle class, although Dudley may have thought of himself as possessing closer ties to the aristocracy. For Dudley, the similarity in their background made nineteen-year-old Simon a far more congenial and compliant student than Theophilus. Simon was well behaved, obedient, and reverential, while the impulsive Theophilus was arrogant, never listened to advice, and was always on the verge of trouble, since he “was wont to be very quick in his notions.”
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