Brabbling Women

Disorderly Speech and the Law in Early Virginia

Terri L. Snyder

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780801469923
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

Brabbling Women takes its title from a 1662 law enacted by Virginia's burgesses, which was intended to offer relief to the "poore husbands" forced into defamation suits because their "brabling" wives had slandered or scandalized their neighbors. To quell such episodes of female misrule, lawmakers decreed that husbands could choose either to pay damages or to have their wives publicly ducked.But there was more at stake here. By examining women's use of language, Terri L. Snyder demonstrates how women resisted and challenged oppressive political, legal, and cultural practices in colonial Virginia. Contending that women's voices are heard most clearly during episodes of crisis, Snyder focuses on disorderly speech to illustrate women's complex relationships to law and authority in the seventeenth century.Ordinary women, Snyder finds, employed a variety of strategies to prevail in domestic crises over sexual coercion and adultery, conflicts over women's status as servants or slaves, and threats to women's authority as independent household governors. Some women entered the political forum, openly participating as rebels or loyalists; others sought legal redress for their complaints. Wives protested the confines of marriage; unfree women spoke against masters and servitude. By the force of their words, all strove to thwart political leaders and local officials, as well as the power of husbands, masters, and neighbors. The tactics colonial women used, and the successes they met, reflect the struggles for empowerment taking place in defiance of the inequalities of the colonial period.

1 Women, Misrule, and Political Culture

Now mark the late tragedy: Old Governor Barkly, altered by marrying a young wyff, from his wonted publicq good, to a covetous fools age.

“Complaint from Heaven with a Huy and crye and a petition out of Virginia and Maryland” (1676)

LADY FRANCES BERKELEY, the wife of Virginia’s governor, Sir William Berkeley, was as much involved in Virginia’s politics as her husband was. During Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, she bandied words with the rebel himself, Nathaniel Bacon, Jr., as well as volleyed taunts and jeers with his followers. She sailed to England in June 1676 as her husband’s emissary to the Crown and successfully petitioned the Privy Council for soldiers to put down the revolt. She returned to Virginia in February 1677, accompanied by three shiploads of troops and Sir Herbert Jeffreys, who subsequently both succeeded her husband as lieutenant governor and grew to seriously dislike Lady Berkeley for the power she wielded in colonial politics. She insulted the commissioners sent by the England’s Charles II to investigate the rebellion; yet when a commissioner asked her to do so, she helped to obtain a pardon for one of the rebels. Little wonder that she was both admired and feared: Lady Berkeley was an outspoken woman who had no qualms about attempting to broker the political crises that she witnessed in seventeenth-century Virginia.1

This was not exactly the role everyone envisioned for the governor’s wife. In 1650, one young woman, Virginia Ferrar, whose family had significant interests in the colony, wrote that the wife of Virginia’s governor ought to be “an instrument of welfare” for the colony. Ferrar conceived of Lady Berkeley (by which she meant not Frances Berkeley in particular but any woman married to Sir William) as one of a succession of politically powerful women who had contributed to Virginia’s development. These included Queen Isabella, who, although “slighted by the Kings of England and Spain,” was the means to Virginia’s discovery, and Queen Elizabeth, who, following Isabella’s “heroic lead,” encouraged its settlement. “Discovered by the means of one woman, planted by the commands of another,” in Ferrar’s eyes, Lady Berkeley was now to assume her place among the women who were instrumental in the founding and colonization of Virginia.2

For many of her contemporaries, however, Lady Berkeley was a paragon of female misrule. According to the Maryland petitioners cited in this chapter’s epigraph, Lady Frances Berkeley did not in any way fit into this illustrious sequence of female heroism. Instead, she corrupted her husband away from his sensible approach to governance: under her influence, he became greedy, reckless, and tyrannical. Other individuals and officials who observed and wrote about Virginia’s political instabilities, particularly Bacon’s Rebellion (1676) and, to a lesser extent, the Tobacco Cutting Riots (1682), also blamed disorderly women for destabilizing civil and domestic society. Women, of course, were not the only source of anxiety for Virginia’s leaders. Narratives of female misrule fit into a virtual constellation of instabilities that threatened Virginia’s leadership. Insurgency seethed from many quarters: Quakers gained converts; indentured servants and slaves plotted revolts; large planters challenged the governor’s policies; small planters destroyed their crops; and the tributary Pamunkey Native Americans were not always as cooperative as the English would have liked them to be.

Female misrule and, in particular, the brabbling speeches of women were persistent elements in the political conflicts that engulfed seventeenth-century Virginia. To a certain extent, the perception of disorderly women was a reflection of actual women who involved themselves on all sides of civil discord. Lady Frances Berkeley, as well as Sarah Drummond and Lydia Chisman, whose husbands were hung for their treason, Sarah Grendon, and even Cockacoeske, the leader of the Pamunkey Indians, all received commentary from the pens of those observing the rebellion. Both loyalists and rebels in Bacon’s Rebellion fastened explicitly on selected women who were powerful enough, or claimed to be powerful enough, to influence and direct the political sensibilities of men. These women were named, their offenses catalogued, and their reprisals, if any, carefully described. Other lower-ranking women, including possibly female slaves and servants, were not explicitly named; but officials nonetheless specifically marked the presence of women who joined the noisy and riotous mobs that constituted the rabble.

While accounts of Virginia’s political troubles focused on brabbling speech and disorderly women, they also employed metaphors of domestic instability to measure the damage done by the rebellion to the social and political fabric of Virginia. One of the most favored ways to illustrate the rebellion’s impact was to argue that it fissured domestic life. For instance, not the least of the rebel Bacon’s crimes was the “unhappy separation” that his “mischief” had caused between the governor and his “incomparable wife,” Lady Berkeley, when she traveled to England to plead with the Crown for troops.3 Evidently, their domestic relations still suffered after her return to Virginia, for Governor Berkeley, apparently exhausted from the rebellion, wrote the royal commissioners a letter with two curious postscripts. The first noted that he wrote from his bed, expecting his “feavor,” and the second explained that while Lady Frances “lay by mee last night… God Helpe us nothing but vocal kindnesse past betweene us.”4 Sheer “vocal kind-nesse” was indicative of a meager restoration of domestic harmony: the breakdown in intimate relations was in itself, wittingly or no, an appraisal of the rebellion’s ability to disrupt private life.

Taken together, women’s voices on both sides of the rebellion, narratives of brabbling speech and female misrule, and metaphors of domestic instability did more than measure breakdown. They shaped legal practices. In 1662, 1677, and 1699, lawmakers responded to the power of women’s voices in Virginia’s politics by writing statutes that directly sought to rehabilitate husbands’ authority over their wives by constraining female speech in the domestic realm and formally outlaw women’s voices in the political realm. The presence of disorderly women suggested that a lack of traditional authority and an imperfect translation of patriarchal practices led to civil and domestic disorder; they were in effect arguments that legitimized more authoritarian legal practices toward not only women but also servants and especially slaves. During Virginia’s crises, a variety of accounts focused on the power of women’s voices to move an already unhappy body politic further down the road toward civil revolt and outright rebellion. In doing so, they aimed not only to constrain Virginia’s brabbling women from politics but also to rehabilitate patriarchal authority in the domestic realm.

Seeing the infinite mischiefs and calamities such foolish opinions brought the country to, I did think it time to unravell this thread by giving an account that came to me without inquiry.

LADY FRANCES BERKELEY (ca. 1676)

Frances Culpeper Stephens Berkeley Ludwell, or Lady Berkeley as she was known from the time of her marriage to Virginia governor Sir William Berkeley in 1670 until her death, was not the only politically active woman in seventeenth-century Virginia, but she was undoubtedly the most notorious, (see fig. 4) Both loyalists and rebels on both sides of Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 and Virginia’s political leaders thereafter wrote venomously of her. Like other politically active women in Virginia, she was ardent, outspoken, and seemingly unafraid of reprisals. She differed from most women, however, by virtue of her rank: she was, for all practical purposes and however unofficially, an emissary and aide to her husband. Together, the Berkeleys were the representatives of colonial authority and colonial policy, and Lady Berkeley’s actions spoke as loudly as the governor’s in the official realm of politics. Loved, feared, reviled, and memorialized, Lady Frances Berkeley was easily one of the most powerful and influential women in seventeenth-century Virginia, one whose story illustrates the instabilities of the boundaries separating the worlds of men and women, domesticity and politics.

Clearly, Lady Berkeley’s family connections bolstered her influence. Born in 1634 in England to Thomas and Katherine Culpeper, she was a member of a family active in Virginia affairs. Her father was a member of the Virginia Company and a royalist who lost “life, liberty and estate” in the service of Charles I. In 1650, the remainder of his family, including Frances, emigrated to Virginia.5 Other relatives held colonial connections through official appointments or as investors or merchants. Her cousin, Thomas Lord Culpeper, baron of Thoresway, served on the council for foreign plantations, providing advice to the Privy Council on colonial affairs; he was also appointed governor of Virginia.6 Alexander Culpeper, her brother, was commissioned surveyor general of Virginia in 1671; and, probably in part through her influence, he remained in this post until 1694.7 Other cousins included Nathaniel Bacon, Jr., the rebel, and Mary Horsmanden, who married Samuel Filmer and, after his death, William Byrd I. When she arrived in Virginia in 1650 at the age of sixteen, Frances Culpeper was already a woman of high standing in the colony.

Figure 4 Lady Frances Berkeley, Unknown artist, ca. 1660. Courtesy of the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts; Winston-Salem, N.C.

In addition to her family connections, Lady Berkeley’s influence was reinforced and increased by three extremely well made marriages. By the time of Bacon’s Rebellion she had married two colonial leaders, both governors. Her first marriage in 1652, at the age of eighteen, was to Samuel Stephens, second governor of Carolina. His death in 1670 left her in possession of 1,350 acres of land. In 1671, she made an even better bargain with her second marriage to Sir William Berkeley: not only was he already the governor of an established colony, but by the marriage articles she received estates in England worth £600 annually.8 After Berkeley’s death in 1677 she married Philip Ludwell, whose power had been rivaled by only the governor himself and whose influence in the colony was probably buttressed by his marriage to Lady Berkeley.9 She appears never to have borne children.

Lady Berkeley’s family, royal connections, and marriages sanctioned her foray into Virginia’s politics and nurtured her sometimes eccentric but ultimately shrewd political sense. Given her unofficial status as advisor to the governor, she could speak her mind: her rank and her sex protected her from legal, official, or honor-based reprisals. She deeply angered and frustrated the powerful men who opposed her husband. Even after Governor Berkeley left office and returned to England, where he died in 1677, lieutenant governor Sir Herbert Jeffreys complained loudly that Lady Berkeley called frequent “caballs” at Green Spring and acted “still in the same maner as if her husband were still livinge.”10 Jeffreys, too, was unable to check her influence.

Lady Berkeley did not in any sense embrace a wifely or matronly role, preferring instead to involve herself in the most pressing political issues of her day. Although it did not elicit explicit negative comment, her childlessness also must have rendered Lady Berkeley and her marriages somewhat suspect to those around her. Virginia lacked the Puritan emphasis on childbearing. Nevertheless, there, as in much of the early modern west, the presence of children was a key indicator of a successful marriage.11 William Byrd I debated in several letters whether Lady Berkeley was really pregnant during her marriage to Ludwell. In February 1684, when she would have been about fifty years of age, he wrote that she was “not yet brought to bed” and so questioned whether or not she was actually with child.12 Later in the same year Byrd wrote again, noting that Lady Berkeley continued to be indisposed because of pregnancy, but could not say when she might deliver and feared that her condition would “bring her to her end.”13

Lady Berkeley’s appetite for politics and skill in political brokering became most evident during 1675 1676, when, in Bacon’s Rebellion, her husband faced the biggest political crisis of his administration. The rebellion, which sprang from many causes, toppled his authority as governor and effectively ended his career. In 1676, he wrote of the great difficulties of ruling “a people when six parts of seaven at least are poore endebted discontented and armed and to take away their armes now the Indians are at our throates [would] rayse an universal mutiny.”14 The discontent Berkeley referred to was real and widespread. Large and small planters alike were generally unhappy over depressed tobacco prices and high taxes. Recently freed servants found it difficult to enter the ranks of householders or obtain land and, after 1670, were barred from voting because of the “tumults” they caused. Slaves and servants, who appear to have joined the rebels and were the last to surrender, had more than ample reasons to revolt against the status quo.15

While the growing discontent endemic in Virginia unquestioningly fueled Bacon’s Rebellion, hostilities with local Indians precipitated the revolt. What was to become a significant rebellion had its origins in a seemingly small event. In July 1675 Doeg Indians trading in Stafford County took some hogs belonging to a Thomas Mathew after he refused to compensate them. Mathew pursued and killed or injured one of the Doegs, who subsequently retaliated. A militia marched out against the Doegs but mistakenly massacred fourteen friendly Susque-hannahs who, again in retaliation, although outnumbered and poorly armed relative to the English, conducted surprise raids and attacks throughout the fall and winter of 1675–76. More discontent sprang from Governor Berkeley’s silence and unwillingness to act. Finally in Jan...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Brabbling Women in Early Virginia
• 1. Women, Misrule, and Political Culture
• 2. Sexual Stories: Narratives of Consent and Coercion
• 3. Unwifely Speeches and the Authority of Husbands
• 4. Freedom, Dependency, and the Power of Women’s Speech
• 5. Widows, Fictive Widows, and the Management of Households
• Conclusion: Toward the Eighteenth Century
• Notes