Mistress Bradstreet (7 page)

After watching Dudley rein in the impulsive young nobleman, browbeat the tenant farmers into paying rent, and levy fines from those who strayed from manorial law, Simon started to absorb the basic tenets of good stewardship. Managing an estate like Sempringham was like running a small town. You were the magistrate, judge, tax collector, administrator, and financial planner all at once. Dudley even had the right to interfere in tenants’ family matters: For example, those who allowed their daughters to marry someone outside the lord’s estates or who sent their younger sons away from the earl’s service were punished with a fine. None of the older man’s hardheaded tactics bothered Simon. Instead he regarded Dudley’s rigidity as integrity and admired his legal experience as well as his business acumen. As a result, it did not take long for the young man to become Dudley’s devoted disciple. Like Anne, he would prove to be fervent in his loyalty for the rest of his life.

Once the two men had established their working relationship, Dudley, with his typical zeal, made it his business to ensure that Simon’s soul was in good health. The young man should attend church, listen to the conversation and counsel of the leading Puritans who came frequently to Sempringham, and participate in the Dudley family’s religious rituals, from daily prayers to theological discussions and meditations on readings from Scripture, whether they happened at the dinner table or late at night next to the fire.

Simon had little choice but to comply with this spiritual regimen, not that he minded. These sorts of “godly” activity must have reminded him of both his father and his college days. In the evening, after their work was completed, Dudley led the family’s talk by analyzing sermons they had heard, reading from various psalms, and of course, condemning the wrongdoings of the king and his bishops. For example, the Puritans were shocked by the recent publication of the king’s
Book of Sport
(1618), in which James dismissed the Puritans’ sober observance of the Sabbath and instead touted revelry, games, and drinking. This was a slap in the face for dissenters everywhere, although the king argued that he simply wanted his subjects to enjoy themselves after a week of drudgery. To Anne and her family, the Sabbath was a crucial ordinance of their God and certainly not a time for dashing after bowls on the common or for drunken cavorting.

Although Samuel and Anne were encouraged by their father to contribute their thoughts, it was with the reverence proper in children. On the other hand, Simon, while always deferential to his master, never gave any evidence of being afraid of Dudley. He chimed in with his own ideas, and as they listened, Samuel must have gotten his first taste of what college would be like, while Anne learned to admire Simon’s steadiness in the face of Dudley’s impassioned arguments.

Unusual though it was to include a girl in such exchanges, the times were extraordinary, Dudley felt, and he wanted his exceptional daughter to sharpen her wits for the challenges he believed lay ahead. If the king continued to wage war on the Puritans, Anne must learn to strike back, even if the only weapon she could use was her mind.

Thus Anne found herself in a startling—and even thrilling—new situation. She had never spent so many hours with a young man who came from outside her immediate network of family and friends, and Simon was gentle, handsome, wise, and kind. As for Simon, it is unlikely he had ever known such an intelligent, sensitive young girl, let alone one so well versed in Scripture, politics, and history. And so, before long, a delicate bond grew between the two young people. Anne turned to Simon for guidance in her spiritual travails, and Simon talked to her about his worries and ambitions.
²

When Simon first arrived at the manor, Anne was still considered a child, and this allowed their relationship to flourish without any apparent romantic complications or any danger of impropriety. For the truly devout Puritan like Anne and Simon, there were many daily events to discuss in order to dissect their possible divine meanings. Perhaps a sudden thunderstorm was God’s rage, or slow-churning butter was evidence of the family’s sinful condition, or a severe head cold was punishment for misdeeds.

The dark-paneled rooms of the estate lent themselves to the contemplation of darker thoughts as well. Despite her youth, Anne had been instructed by her mentors to cry out: “Lord search me and try me, see what ways of wickedness are in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”
³
She never complained about these spiritual exercises, but it was difficult to live with this insistent dread of damnation.

As the months passed, Anne would grow to feel that without Simon near, she was “oppressed” and plunged into “a Chaos blacker than the first.” In the years to come, she would describe not only how much she suffered from bouts of paralyzing spiritual anguish but also how much she relied on Simon to comfort her. He was her “sun,” the man who illuminated her darkness, which seemed to descend all too frequently.
⁴
To Simon the girl’s battles with misery marked her as an especially saintly individual, since Puritans believed that “being cast down” signaled a deepening of convictions on the part of the sufferer.

Happily, Anne and Simon did not have the leisure to spend all of their time repining over their spiritual condition. Living together in such close quarters, the two young people had many opportunities for other kinds of conversation; whether they were reading, eating, chatting, praying, walking, journeying to Boston, or laughing over the antics of Sarah or baby Mercy, the two young people were often together.

Although during these early years, Simon probably regarded Anne as nothing more than a dear sister, it is certainly possible he also regarded her as a prospective marriage partner. But he did nothing to alarm her and, it seems, took no action to further this plan. Eleven-year-old Anne was still too young to think much about the attractions of the opposite sex. The year after Simon had arrived in Sempringham, however, she witnessed a romantic drama that played itself out in the halls of the estate, its urgency driving home how crucial it was to find the right husband, since one’s future, and one’s standing in the community and the church, all hinged upon this terrible decision. As Anne would reflect later in life, getting married “changed [a woman’s] condition” entirely.
⁵

IN
1620
OR SO
, the earl’s nineteen-year-old sister, Arbella, had become an enthusiastic follower of Cotton and other dissenting ministers. Like her mother, this young woman was a single-minded and courageous advocate for her beliefs, and what she desired was a drastic change for England and the English church. But no young woman, regardless of her determination or her aristocratic pedigree, could sway the royal authorities who stubbornly resisted all attempts to modify the Anglican Church. Even Arbella’s brother and his prominent Puritan friends were failing to make any inroads on King James’s policies.

The situation took a promising turn, however, when Arbella encountered a young man named Isaac Johnson, a prominent Puritan whom Dudley and Theophilus had invited to visit Sempringham in 1622. Johnson seemed to combine all the elements they needed to render the dream of departure a reality, should the political climate for Puritans continue to worsen. Johnson shared Arbella’s passion for cleansing the English church of corruption and was excited about the idea of establishing a colony with other like-minded souls. An intelligent, thoughtful clergyman, Johnson was extremely wealthy and had enough resources to help fund such an enterprise. Conveniently, he was also a bachelor on the lookout for an appropriate wife.

Clearly, this was the right man for the idealistic Arbella, but Johnson was a commoner and Arbella was noble. They should find partners from inside their own social class, according to most people’s thinking. Both young persons, however, had an incentive to break the rules. Although Dudley had helped Theophilus clean up the debts his father had left behind, Arbella was far from being a rich woman, and a wealthy husband like Johnson would help her put all her plans into action. As for Johnson, his family stood to gain from a potential connection to nobility, and he seems to have been captivated by Arbella’s adventurous spirit. And so the two immediately became engaged, apparently untroubled by the scandal this might cause.

Anne could not help but follow these proceedings with excitement. Arbella’s mother promptly declared that the marriage was a grand idea, but the drama intensified when Isaac’s father refused to countenance it. At last Elizabeth approached Isaac’s grandfather to overrule the disapproving parent. To the delight of the Sempringham household, the old man was in favor of the union. In April 1623, Anne watched as Arbella and Isaac exchanged vows, an event that would be of great significance for the founding of New England.

A WEDDING IN THE HOUSE
naturally turned the thoughts of the other young people at Sempringham to their own prospective marriages. In the next few years, as Anne turned thirteen and then fourteen, Simon could no longer hold her at a distance as a beloved younger sibling. She was growing into a young woman whom he could love and desire. Anne’s status as the eldest daughter in the family made her seem more mature than her years—her next sister, Patience, was a full three years younger—and her piety and solemn dedication to prayer and books gave her the steady carriage and serious outlook of a much older person. Until his prospective bride had reached a more appropriate age for an engagement, however, twenty-three-year-old Simon was content to wait.

Anne, on the other hand, was jolted by the shock of what she called her “carnal” feelings. At age fourteen, she was neither delighted nor enlivened by falling in love, but instead was deeply troubled. She worried that she had allowed “the follies of youth” to “take hold of me.” All too often, she would later remember, she found herself “sitting loose from God,” forgetting to contemplate her spiritual state and focusing too much energy on worldly matters such as her appearance and fashion. It was not easy to be a Puritan girl and love a man.
⁶

As a middle-aged wife, Anne would recall the sorry condition of her soul during this period in her life, describing how tempting it was to busy herself with being “fine”—“to curl, and pounce” her hair. Sadly, at the time of this spiritual crisis, Anne had no ability to stand back and gently take stock of her failings. It would take many years before she could invoke the uncontrollable feelings she had experienced by creating the allegorical figure of a young person in one of her most famous poems. “My lust doth hurry me to all that’s ill,” Youth declares in
The Quaternions,
“I know no law . . . but my will.”
⁷

In actuality, as long as Anne did not act on her impulses, she did not need to lash herself so strenuously. Sex within marriage was considered a pleasurable duty: “God has given us the pleasures of this world to enjoy. . . . We should therefore suck the sweet of them and so slake our thirst,” the minister Joshua Moody summarized.
⁸
For the Puritans (unlike their descendants, the Victorians), sexuality was not really the issue. The more worrisome problem was the social disorder uncontrolled behavior could cause, particularly when it jeopardized inheritance proceedings or the social hierarchy of man over woman. An earthy people who enjoyed their ale and a good feast when the situation permitted, the Puritans sanctioned and even believed in the virtues of sex, even premarital sex, as long as the partners ended up in a married state. Bastards and unwed mothers, not pleasure, were to be avoided.
⁹

Anne’s difficulty, then, was that her desire for Simon was “wild,” and Puritans treated any evidence of ungoverned sexuality with severity. In the New World, for example, where Puritans would rule the colonies in accordance with their theology, adultery—a transgression that disrupted the order of the family—was punishable by death, although this was rarely carried out.
¹⁰
Most Reformed ministers, like Cotton, relied on shame and public humiliation to enforce their moral code; in New England the entire community would become involved, as in Hawthorne’s depiction (nearly two centuries later) of the punishment meted out to the adulterous Hester Prynne in
The Scarlet Letter.
Anne had been taught to judge herself and others according to these severe standards, and so when she first experienced the strength of her own appetites, she was tortured by guilt.
¹¹

Eventually Anne must have made her anguish known to her family, as Dudley abruptly announced that the family would move from Sempringham to Theophilus’s property in Boston, while Simon would remain to manage affairs at the Sempringham estate. Though sad to be separated from Simon, Anne may well have been relieved. Dutiful Puritan that she was, she knew that if she allowed herself to roam down the path of licentiousness, “My wit evaporates in merriment,” “my woeful parents’ longing hopes are crossed,” and “my education lost.”
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For Simon’s part, the Dudleys’ move to Boston may have cost him some pain over losing Anne’s companionship, but it allowed him to come into his own as a man. He brought all of his charm, skill, and energy to his role as manager. Within a year, he had caught the eye of another noble dissenter, the Countess of Warwick. In 1627, presumably with Dudley’s support, as this was part of the progression everyone expected for Simon, he moved away from Sempringham to serve this difficult woman, who was so impossible she had supposedly driven her husband to “great perplexities” until he was “crased in braine”; in other words, she had driven him mad. That Simon “discharged” his duties for this forbidding woman with “an Exemplary discretion and Fidelity” was regarded by all as an extraordinary achievement.
¹³
He was truly an adult in the eyes of the world; all he needed was a wife. Although he now lived more than a day’s journey from the Dudleys, Simon did not forget his love for Anne. He was at something of a disadvantage, though, for there were no clear courtship rituals for Puritan young people, and he had no one to act on his behalf. In fact, the most prominent paternal figure in his life was the father of his beloved.