Part 4

Philanthropy, of sorts, we have always with us, and the undeserving need never lack shelter and support in a disgraceful idleness while the tender-hearted or the hysterical amateur relieving-officers are permitted to make fools of themselves, and rogues and vagabonds of the lazy wastrels who will never do an honest day’s work so long as a subsistence is to be got by begging. The fashionable occupation of ‘slumming’ made many more paupers than it relieved, and the ‘Darkest England’ cry of Mr. William Booth, whom foolish folk call by the title of ‘General’ he arrogates, is the most notorious exhibition of sentimentalism in recent years. That appeal to the charitable and pitiful folks of England was, like the Salvation Army itself, engineered by the late Mrs. Catherine Booth, and it captured many thousands of pounds wherewith to succour the unfit, the criminal, the unwashed; the very scum and dregs of the race whom merciless Nature, cruel to be kind, had doomed to early extinction. But mouthing and tearful sentimentality has interfered with beneficent natural processes, and the depraved and ineffectual are helped to a longer term of existence, that they may transmit their bodily and mental diseases to another generation, and so foul the blood and stunt the growth of the nation in years to come.

Science, anthropology, and economics have no meaning for the femininely-influenced founders of Salvation Army doss-houses: the body politic--society, in the larger sense--national life, are phrases that convey no meaning to the sobbing philanthropists to whom the welfare of the dosser is a creed and Darwinian theories rank blasphemy.

The tendency of sentimental philanthropy is to relieve all alike from the consequences of their misdeeds, and to preserve the worst and the _un_fittest, and to enable the worst to compete at an advantage with the best, and to freely propagate its rickety kind. Philanthropy of this pernicious sort is essentially sentimental and feminine.

But the most disastrous interference, up to the present, of sentimental fanatics--women and femininely-influenced men--has been their successful campaign against those beneficent Acts of Parliament, the Contagious Diseases Acts, framed from time to time for the protection of Her Majesty’s forces of the Army and Navy.

Those Acts, applied to the garrison towns and the dockyard towns of Aldershot, Chatham, Plymouth, Dover, Canterbury, Windsor, Southampton, and others, provided for the registration and compulsory periodical medical examination of the public women who infest the streets of those places. Horrible diseases, spread by these abandoned creatures, decimated the regiments and the crews of the ships that put in at their ports; and thus, through them, the blood of future generations was poisoned and contaminated. The women whose depravity and disease spread foul disorders among not only the soldiers and sailors, but also amongst the civil populations of these garrison towns, were free, before the application of the C. D. Acts, to ply their trade no matter what might be their bodily condition; but the operation of those measures, at first providing for voluntary inspection and examination, and afterwards making those precautions compulsory, rendered it a criminal offence for a woman registered by the police to have intercourse with men while knowing that she was suffering from disease. Such an offence, or the offence of not presenting themselves at the examining officer’s station at the fortnightly period prescribed by the Acts, rendered women of this class liable to imprisonment. If at these examinations a woman was found to be healthy, a certificate was given her; if the medical officer certified her to be diseased, she was taken by compulsion to hospital, and detained there until recovery.

Plymouth, Aldershot, and Chatham, in especial, were in a shocking condition before the Acts came into force; but during the years in which they were administered by the police, a diminution of disease by more than one-half was seen in the Army and Navy, and the registration of the women led to a very great falling-off of the numbers who obtained so shameful a living. Evidence given before the Royal Commission upon the Contagious Diseases Acts in 1872 proved this beyond question, and also proved that these women not only had no objection to the medical examinations, but regarded them and the hospitals as very great benefits.

The shocking revelations as to the social condition of Plymouth, Devonport, and Stonehouse, afforded by the evidence of the police, cannot be more than hinted at in this place. It is sufficient to say that over 2000 women were put upon the registers, either as occasionally or habitually living a loose life, and that all classes were to be found in these documents, but especially girls employed behind the counters of shops during the day. The police seem everywhere to have been conscientious in the execution of their duty, and to have performed ungrateful and delicate tasks with great discretion. The registers were private and strictly confidential official documents, and both the medical examinations and the police visits to suspected houses were conducted with all possible secrecy, the police in the latter case being plain-clothes men, and not readily to be identified by the public.

And yet, in spite of the very evident benefits derived from the Acts and deposed to before the Commission by such unimpeachable authorities as the foremost medical officers of the Army and Navy, commanding officers, clergymen of the Established Church, Wesleyan ministers, the entire medical and nursing staffs of hospitals, and the police authorities themselves, these Acts were repealed, in submission to the outcries of the ‘mules and barren women,’ who, headed by the rancorous Mrs. Josephine Butler and the gushing sentimentalists from the religio-radical benches of the House of Commons, called public meetings, and shrieked and raved upon platforms throughout the country: a chorus of shocked spinsters and ‘pure’ men, whose advocacy of what they called, forsooth, ‘the liberty of the subject’ and the abolition of what they falsely termed the ‘State licensing of vice,’ has resulted in a liberty accorded these women to spread disease far and wide.

The nation, the men of Army and Navy, have reason abundant to curse the sentimental women, the maiden aunts, the _religieuses_, the gorgons of a mistaken propriety and a peculiarly harmful prudery, whose interference with affairs which they were not competent to direct has wrought such untoward results.

This is what a writer says in the _Westminster Review_: ‘The struggle for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts was an ordeal such as men have never been obliged to undergo. It involved not merely that women should speak at public meetings, which was a great innovation, but that they should discuss the most painful of all subjects, upon which, up to that time, even men had not dared to open their mouths. Yet so nobly did the women bear their part all through those terrible years of trial, that they raised a spirit of indignation which swept away the Acts, but never, by word or deed, did they deservedly incur reproach themselves.’

Rubbish, every word of it! The women who spoke upon these painful subjects were under no compulsion, legal or moral, to initiate or take part in the frenzy of wrong-headed emotion, which was exhibited upon public platforms to the dismay and disgust of all right-thinking men and women. It cannot be conceded that the subject was painful to these persons, nor can the statement be allowed to go unchallenged that they did not deserve reproach. Reproach of the most bitter kind was and is deserved by the prejudiced persons who distorted facts and gladly relied upon any hearsay evidence that would seem to square with their theories, and even refused to admit the weight of incontrovertible statistics produced against their rash and windy statements. The examinations of Mrs. Josephine Butler[1] and of those two ridiculous persons, the Unitarian pastor from Southampton and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Kell, are damning indictments of their good faith and good sense. These are types of women and womanish men who take delight in the investigation of pruriency, whose noses are in every cesspool and their hands in the nearest muck-heap. Their kind stop at nothing in the way of unfounded statements, and are greedy of rumour rather than of accredited facts. Want of acquaintance with, or experience of, the subjects they dogmatise upon deterred them as little then as now from case-hardened obstinacy; and perhaps no one cut such a sorry figure before the Commission as that illogical and contradictory person, the late John Stuart Mill, the femininely-influenced author of the nowadays somewhat discredited _Subjection of Women_. ‘His chief ground for objection to the system’ (of the C. D. Acts) ‘was on the score of the infringement of personal liberty’ (_i.e._, the liberty to spread loathsome diseases); ‘but he considered it also objectionable for the Government to provide securities against the consequences of immorality. It is a different thing to remedy the consequences after they occur’--as who should say, in the manner of the proverb, Lock the stable door when the horse has been stolen.

This sham philosopher and political economist of ill-argued theories, who is to-day honoured by an uncomfortable and ungainly statue on the Victoria Embankment, forgot that England has not achieved her greatness by the study or practice of morality: and shall we fall thus late in the day by a Quixotic observance of it?

The sooner the statue of this woman’s advocate is cast into the Thames, or melted down, the better.

Woman’s influence and interference in these matters have proved an unmixed evil. It would be hopeless, however, to convince her of error: as well might one attempt to hustle an elephant.

Political women are, fortunately, rare in England. A Duchess of Devonshire, a Lady Palmerston, and the politico-social Dames of the Primrose League, these are all the chiefest and most readily-cited female politicians: and their interest was, and is, not so much in the success or defeat of this party or the other as in the return of their favoured candidate or the failure of a pet aversion. Politics have no real meaning for women: their natures do not permit of their comprehension of national and international questions. What does Empire signify to woman if her little world is distracted? and what is a revolted province to her as against a broken plate?

The Fates preserve us from Female Suffrage; for give women votes and patriotism is swamped by the only women who would care to exercise the privilege of voting: the clamorous New Woman, all crotchets, fads and Radical nostrums for the regeneration of the parish and the benevolent treatment of subjugated races in an Empire won by the sword and retained by might.

IV.--SOME OLD-TIME TERMAGANTS AND ILL-MADE MATCHES OF CELEBRATED MEN.

The ‘strong-minded woman,’ as the phrase goes, we have always with us nowadays; and as this species of strength of mind seems really to be a violent and uncertain temper, there can be little doubt but that the strong-minded woman has always been more frequent than welcome. Certainly shrewishness and termagancy have been too evident throughout the ages, from the days of Xanthippe to the present time. That much we know from the lives--or shall we say, under the painful circumstances, the ‘existences?’--of public men who have been cursed with scolding wives. But what Asmodeus shall unveil the private conjugal tyrannies, the hectorings, and the curtain-lectures that make miserable the undistinguished lives of men of no importance for good or evil in the State? How many women, in fine, ‘wear the breeches’ through the ‘strength of mind’ which may be justly defined as readiness of that impassioned invective which in its turn may be reduced (like a vulgar fraction) to its lowest common denominator of ‘nagging.’ Not a pretty word, is it? And it is a practice even less pretty than that cross-grained definition would warrant. We cannot, however, lift the veil that hides the domestic infelicities of the lieges, but must be content to recount the troubles and oppressions that have befallen historic Caudles, who bulk a great deal larger in the history of England than they did, in their own homes, to their wives.

Sir Edward Coke, the great law officer of James the First’s reign--the revered ‘Coke upon Lyttleton’ of the law-student--was little enough of an authority in his own household after he had married his second wife, herself a widow--the ‘relict,’ in fact, of Sir William Newport-Hatton. He married her but a few months after his wife’s death, privately and in haste; probably urged to such an indecent speed by the necessity of forestalling the Lord Keeper Bacon in the lady’s affections. But he had not been wise in his haste; for affection--for him, at least--she had none. She had probably buried all her kindly feelings in the grave with Sir William Hatton, for she would never be known as Lady Coke, but always as Lady Hatton, and, in truth, she led that distinguished and bitter lawyer the life of a dog. One wonders, indeed, why she married him at all, who was old enough to be her father. It was not ambition, for she was by birth a Cecil and daughter of the second Lord Burleigh; nor the want of money, nor the need of a protector, for she was very well able to take care of herself, as Sir Edward presently discovered, and she was sufficiently wealthy. They quarrelled incessantly--about property, about the marriage of their daughter, about anything and everything. Sir Edward Coke was only suffered to enter her house in London by the back door, and she plundered his residence in the country. She sent her daughter away to Oatlands to prevent a marriage with Sir John Villiers, which Sir Edward was pressing forward; and he, ‘with his sonne and ten or eleven servants, weaponed in violent manner,’ repaired thither, broke open the door, and took her away. Lady Hatton intrigued at Court against the distracted Coke, who was already in disfavour at St. James’s, and procured an interference by the Star Chamber, which condemned his ‘most notorious riot;’ but Coke eventually gained the upper hand in this matter at least, and the girl was married to the man of his choice. This did not end the enmity. For years they contended together until death parted them. But she survived him by ten years.

Legal subtlety and ability had no terrors for Lady Hatton, and martial prowess daunted the wife of Monk as little, for, in very truth, Lady Albemarle, the famous Nan Clarges, wife of that General Monk who was created first Duke of Albemarle, was so awe-inspiring a termagant that her husband declared he would rather fight a battle than dispute with her, and that the roar of a whole park of artillery was not so terrible to him as her tongue loosened in floods of abuse. There is no doubt that he regretted his union with the washerwoman’s daughter whom he had married, who was neither beautiful nor witty. Nan Clarges had all the ancestry and upbringing that made for shrewishness. Her mother was one of the five women barbers who gained notoriety by their vulgarity even in that age, and her father was a blacksmith and farrier, one John Clarges, who lived at the corner of Drury Lane and the Strand, over his forge. Her mother became afterwards a laundress, and she herself dabbled in the soapsuds before and after her marriage to Thomas Ratford, whose father was also a farrier. This marriage took place in 1632, and she and her husband occupied a shop in the New Exchange in the Strand, where they sold gloves, powder, and cosmetics. Her parents died in 1648, and she and her husband separated in the following year. Three years later she married Colonel Monk, whose laundress she had been. Although the tongue of scandal was not idle when one re-married who was not a widow, the farrier never reappeared to claim his wife, and when the Restoration was accomplished (partly, it is said, owing to her Royalist sympathies), and General Monk became Duke of Albemarle, none were found to question her title of Duchess. But she became the laughing-stock of the Court and gave general disgust to Pepys, who calls her in good faith ‘a plain, homely dowdy,’ and ironically ‘that paragon of virtue and beauty.’ On one occasion he ‘found the Duke of Albemarle at dinner with sorry company; some of his officers of the Army; dirty dishes and a nasty wife at table, and bad meat.’

But she was mildness itself compared with that ‘she-devil,’ Bess of Hardwicke, who was wedded and a widow before her sixteenth year, and saw four husbands into the grave. She was the daughter of a rich Derbyshire gentleman, who died and left her his sole heiress at an early age. She fascinated and married a neighbour, the young and invalid Mr. Barley, whose property ranged with her own. He lived but a short while, and left her a charming widow with a great access of wealth.

Her second venture was Sir William Cavendish, a Suffolk gentleman of good family and great property, whom she married and constrained to sell his Suffolk lands and settle with her in Derbyshire. She ruled him thoroughly, and he seems to have been little better than her chief director of works in the building operations that were a passion with this singular woman through the whole of her long life. Her home was at Hardwicke Hall; but she now began to build a very much more magnificent house at Chatsworth. She had not proceeded very far with this work before Sir William Cavendish, probably wearied out with being ruled in all things, followed her first husband to the grave. Lady Cavendish mourned him for a decent period, keeping her eye open the while for another eligible, whom she presently found in the person of the widower, Sir William Saint Lo, a captain in Queen Elizabeth’s guard and a gentleman of considerable property in the neighbourhood of Bath. But Sir William had a family, and she could not think of wedding him until he had made a settlement upon her of all his lands. He did so readily, this bluff soldier; for he was absurdly fond of her, as his letters show. He was, however, detained much in the service of the Queen, in London and at Windsor, and died very soon.

Lady Saint Lo was now become extremely wealthy, with her own fortune and the added wealth of three husbands deceased, but she was far from content. She was building incessantly, both terrestrial habitations and airy castles, and hungered both for more wealth and greater social distinction. For some while she cast about for another partner, and at length found a suitable quarry in George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, another widower with a grown-up family. Him she married, and from that time he knew but little peace. True, the first year or so of their union seems to have been comparatively mild, but the storms that ensued were beyond anything. The Earl was for nineteen years the custodian of Mary, Queen of Scots, and she seems to have aroused the jealousy of the Countess, for the unfortunate Talbot was surrounded with his wife’s spies, and the espions whom the English Queen’s suspicious nature also set around him made his life a misery. Poor Talbot! two queens and a wife--and such a wife--to serve, guard, and pacify. How wretched he must have been in that gorgeous palace of ‘Chattysworth,’ as the old-time spelling had it! His wife embittered his own sons against him, while her family of Cavendishes hated him cordially, and, as he had foolishly made over his property to her upon his marriage, he lived practically upon sufferance. Queen Elizabeth, in whose service he continually expressed the greatest loyalty, took the part of his wife, and ordered him to be content with an allowance of 500_l._ per annum which the Countess vouchsafed him--‘to my perpetual infamy and great dishonour,’ as he wrote, ‘thus to be ruled and overranne by my wief, so bad and wicked a woman. But your Majesty shall see that I will observe your commandments, though no curse or plage on earth colde be more grievous to me.’ Poor fellow! his faults were few, probably the greatest of them being a weak amiability which led him to be reconciled time and again to his wife, who used every reconciliation as a means to the end of entreating him even more shamefully than before. He died at length, wearied out with lawsuits, the ingratitude of his own children, and the bitter animosity of his wife. She survived him for many years, and died, aged eighty-eight, in the winter of 1607, during a hard frost which put a stop to the building works which she was carrying on here and there over all her possessions. She was passionately fond of bricks and mortar, or else was mindful of a prophecy that she should live so long as she continued building. That prophecy was fulfilled by the frost, which rendered her workmen idle.

Ann Clifford, Countess of Dorset, Pembroke, and Montgomery, was another insatiate builder, and a woman of very great independence of character; not a vindictive fiend, like old Bess of Hardwicke, but, all the same, a woman who would have her way. She married the Earl of Dorset, as weak and vicious a man as she was a strong and virtuous woman, with whom she lived most unhappily. When he fortunately died, she declared that she would not wed a man who was either a curser, a courtier, or a swearer, or who had children; and it so happened that in marrying Philip Herbert, Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, she allied herself to a widower with a family, who was both a courtier and a proficient in vile language and fancy swearing. He, however, soon joined the majority, and his widow took no more chances in the lottery of marriage. She busied herself in rebuilding her castles, which had been destroyed during the Civil War, six of them throughout Cumberland and Westmoreland; and spent the remainder of her long life in journeying from one to another, carrying with her the huge volumes in which she had collected the records of the Clifford family and the memoirs of her own life. Hers was the borough of Appleby, for which Sir John Williamson, Secretary of State, proposed a candidate. But the Countess, who had despised Cromwell and loathed the viciousness of Charles the Second’s _entourage_, replied, in a characteristic note, ‘I have been bullied by an usurper; I have been neglected by a Court; but I won’t be dictated to by a subject. Your man shan’t stand.--ANN DORSET, PEMBROKE, AND MONTGOMERY.’ She was a wonderful woman. She spoke five languages fluently, and was accomplished in many ways, and, according to Bishop Rainbow, of Carlisle, who preached her funeral sermon, ‘she had a clear soul shining through a vivid body: her body was durable and healthful,’ he continues; ‘her soul sprightful and of great understanding and judgment faithful memory, and ready wit.’ She was ‘a perfect mistress of forecast and aftercast,’ and, according to Doctor Donne, ‘knew well how to converse of all things, from predestination to slea-silk.’ She was no less great as a builder than Nimrod was mighty as a hunter, and Bess of Hardwicke was scarce her equal in the piling up of bricks and mortar.