Roaring Girls. Holly Kyte

Margaret’s reinvention of herself as a fictional heroine was ambitious, the inclusion in Nature’s Pictures of her real-life autobiography was positively groundbreaking. Nothing quite like it had ever been published in English by a woman before. Their life writing had previously been either for private consumption or with a religious focus; ordinary, secular female existence was deemed unworthy of public attention. But Margaret begged to differ. At the age of just 33, in ‘A True Relation of my Birth, Breeding, and Life’, she set down her life story for posterity.

      Aware that she was yet again straying from the well-trodden path, she had her defence ready. Vanity would be the first accusation, but others had done it without censure, so why shouldn’t she? Some readers would consider it presumptuous, and wonder why she had written it all, ‘since none cares to know whose daughter she was, or whose wife she is, or how she was bred, or what fortunes she had, or how she lived, or what humour or disposition she was of’. Her answer to this was simple and unashamed: granted, it might be of no interest or purpose to the reader, ‘but it is to the authoress, because I write it for my own sake, not theirs’. Here was a woman who freely admitted that her ambition (which ‘inclines to vain-glory’) was so great that she always had one eye on her legacy, aiming ‘to tell the truth, lest after-ages should mistake, in not knowing’.[59]

      This was a fine claim, but like all autobiographies Margaret’s account was highly partial, glorifying her family as courageous, innocent victims of the Parliamentarians, and herself as a shy, melancholic writer who, despite her singularity and ambition, was a dutiful wife and loyal subject. For all her own spin-doctoring, however, here was also a prime opportunity to combat other people’s; to publicly answer some of the gossip and exaggerations that had a habit of springing up around her. She slapped down the rumours that she had stood ‘as a beggar at the Parliament door’ and ‘haunt[ed] the committees’ during her trip to England, and scoffed that ‘report did dress me in a hundred several fashions’. In producing this pioneering account of herself and attempting to set the record straight, Margaret was presciently asserting that women as well as men had a right to self-representation, to tell their own story as they wished, rather than languish at the mercy of other people’s interpretations.

      THE RETURN OF THE KING

      By 1656, Margaret had been writing continuously for four years, but then suddenly the stream of publications stopped. ‘My wit is drawn dry,’ she admitted later,[60] though a lack of funds may also have been to blame. Just as her writing juddered to a halt, however, the political situation began to shift. Charles II had been living in Germany, but when an offer of support came in from the Spanish government, he moved his court to Brussels and tried to rustle up some rebellions in England. None of them amounted to much; in the end, the Royalists’ plans had little impact compared with the death of Oliver Cromwell in September 1658 and the abdication of his son Richard as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth in May the following year. The Royalists had the power vacuum they needed, and in the chaos that ensued, the old stability of the monarchy began to look appealing once more. Negotiations with Charles began, and on 25 April 1660, Parliament voted unanimously for the return of the King. On hearing of the May Day celebrations, Samuel Pepys – once ‘a great roundhead’ in his youth[61] – reported dryly that there was ‘great joy all yesterday at London, and at night more bonfires than ever, and ringing of bells, and drinking the King’s health upon their knees in the streets, which methinks is a little too much’.[62]

      The country’s raptures continued when Charles arrived back in England on 26 May. William was so desperate to join his king that he followed in a rickety old boat that was barely seaworthy, and was overcome with emotion on his return home: ‘Surely … I have been sixteen years asleep, and am not thoroughly awake yet,’ he gushed.[63] For the time being Margaret had to remain in Antwerp as surety for William’s debts, and in her absence England banished Puritanism and roared back to life. William hastily joined the queue of Lords who in August were presenting private bills for the reparation of their losses, and once he’d received royal assent, was finally able to borrow the money to release his wife and start paying off his debts.

      When Margaret did finally return home, she wasn’t quite as delighted with what she found as William had been. Despite her relief that her exile was over, her husband was still living in reduced circumstances in London, unrewarded by the King for his loyalty, while others had been showered with honours. It fell to his children to step in with financial help this time until he managed to claw back the rest of his scattered estates in September. That same month, however, his devotion to the King was at last rewarded with a decent position at court, as Gentleman of the Bedchamber, and the important salaried role of Lord Lieutenant of Nottingham.

      Finances back on track, William announced that he and his wife would be settling in his Midlands estates of Welbeck, 20 miles from Nottingham, and Bolsover Castle, in Derbyshire. Margaret, who had never felt much at ease in garrulous urban society, was happy to retire to a quiet life in the country, though she and her husband would both be in for a shock when they arrived that autumn. William’s parks had been uprooted, his livestock killed, his houses looted, and Bolsover Castle – occupied, garrisoned and part-demolished – was a ruin. Margaret later worked out her husband’s financial losses to be a whopping £941,303.

      It would take more loans and a grand restoration project, but within two years Welbeck, at least, had risen from the ashes and William was finally in a position to secure Margaret’s jointure.[64] In the event of his death, he now granted his wife numerous properties, a yearly income of £1,025 and a life interest in Bolsover Castle, and over the next few years he would add even more to this inheritance – much to the consternation of his children.

      In her new life in the country, Margaret tried to apply herself to housewifery, but despite an aptitude for elements of estate management (just like her mother), the lure of returning to writing became too great, and in 1662 she embarked on another publishing binge. First came a collection of plays that had been waiting patiently in her desk drawer since her days in Antwerp. Written when the English theatres were closed, and ignoring all the rules of standard drama, these plays were unlikely ever to be performed. Often long and oddly structured, chopping and changing between several plot strands, they have more in common with modern-day TV series, unifying through theme rather than time, place and action. They are particularly remarkable, though, in giving almost all roles and lines to women and exploring the far reaches of what they might desire. Their stories include warrior women who lead an army out to war in Bell in Campo, a group of ‘academical ladies’ who have rejected patriarchal society to live in a utopian all-female enclave in The Female Academy, and in her 1668 play The Convent of Pleasure, Margaret imagines another free and independent female space, established by the wealthy heiress Lady Happy, where the women declaim on why ‘marriage is a curse’ and enact a series of skits dramatising the hardships of childbirth and living with violent, drunken, profligate or philandering husbands to illustrate their point. Into this atmosphere has come a foreign Princess, of androgynous allure, ‘a princely brave woman truly, of a masculine presence’, with whom Lady Happy falls in love. ‘Why may not I love a woman with the same affection I could a man?’ she reasons – and this time Margaret allows her same-sex couple a fervent kiss before the dream is shattered.

      It might seem odd that such gynocentric fantasies and anti-marriage sentiments should come from a woman so happily married, but Margaret’s own good luck didn’t prevent her from recognising the injustice inflicted on women by the institution, or from feeling the force of the oppression, loathing and derision that men routinely directed at them.[65] As in her fictions, Margaret’s renegade feminist plays are mostly brought back down to earth with a bump with awkwardly conventional ‘happy’ endings – the Princess in the Convent of Pleasure turns out to be a Prince; the Female Academy proves vulnerable to the outside world and the Amazons must return to their ‘proper’ domestic sphere when the war is over. All the same, Margaret was provoking much-needed debate about gender expectations here, and revelling in writing female characters who would surely have filled the patriarchy with dread.

      She followed these plays with a book of topical orations, fulfilling her ambition of becoming a female Cicero (though she never took to the podium; for a shy, tongue-tied woman with much