Resisting Silences: Gender and Family Trauma in Eighteenth‐Century England
2020; Wiley; Volume: 32; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/1468-0424.12473
ISSN1468-0424
Autores Tópico(s)Historical Economic and Social Studies
ResumoThe Newdigates were happy in the summer of 1683. There were four children under five, including newborn Juliana and six older siblings between five and fifteen.1 Sir Richard Newdigate's diary presents an idyllic time: eating cherries with his pregnant wife Mary; gorging on orchard fruit with his eldest son Richard; teaching Amphillis accounting; rounding up birds flying in the buttery; visiting friends and family; enjoying family meals and walks.2 Twenty years later, the family disintegrated amid accusations of greed, madness and unspeakable acts. Newdigate's biographers link the breakdown to Lady Mary's death in 1692.3 Whatever the cause, the decline of such a contented family was tragic. The explanation Newdigate gave in his pamphlet, The Case of an Old Gentleman, Persecuted by His Own Son (1707), concentrates around four events. The first is a trip to France taken by Newdigate, accompanied by his eldest son, Richard and his sixth daughter, Elizabeth, in 1699. In Newdigate's absence, second son John looked after the estate and family. The second event was Richard and John's attempt to have their father committed as a lunatic in May 1701 – although they were initially successful, Newdigate had the committal overturned. The third event was a petition to the House of Lords in February 1702 by four of the daughters (Amphillis, Jane, Elizabeth and Juliana) asking for relief from their father's cruel severities. The fourth event was the Family Settlement of March 1702, which divided property and money among the children and gave guardianship of Amphillis, Jane, Elizabeth and Juliana to their maternal uncle. In his pamphlet and account books, Newdigate blamed his eldest sons, Richard and John, for the family problems. His published story insisted on his daughters’ innocence, but other records indicate conflicted relationships with Amphillis, Frances, Elizabeth, Juliana and Jane. The remaining children – Mary, Anne, Frank and Gilbert – were faultless through absence (marriage or school) or illness.4 Newdigate's story is oblique on matters that reflected badly on his patriarchal control. He does not mention that his second-eldest daughter, Frances (Lady Sedley), eloped in 1695 (aged eighteen). Similar evasiveness is evident with regard to Amphillis, committed as a lunatic in 1706 (aged thirty-seven), and the ‘lunacy’ from which Gilbert suffered by 1702 (aged twenty-eight).5 Newdigate discussed these instances only to blame Richard and John for driving them mad through ‘cruel usage’.6 He likewise omitted discussing his scandalous second marriage to a young woman in 1703, which he kept secret until the bride's family legally forced him to acknowledge it. As to his alleged lunacy, Newdigate alluded to accusations of sexual improprieties, but never described the decisive event that induced his sons to commit him and his daughters to petition the House of Lords. The lunacy inquisition, however, gives a date (10 April 1701), while the petition offers details: ‘Sir Richard Newdigate did by frequent solicitacions by threats & by force with sword in hand attempt his Daughter Elizabeths Chastity so that she was forced to fly his presence and for the safety of her life and Honour to swear the peace against him’.7 Newdigate, unsurprisingly, denied his children's imputations of madness and incest. These events provide the chronology for my interpretation. Newdigate's perspective is easily uncovered through his diaries, account books and pamphlet, but the children left only traces of their legal resistance. Those fragmentary records, however, suggest a family trauma with profoundly gendered suffering. By family trauma, I mean the family's response to an event that shattered their seemingly happy world. The cause of the trauma is less clear. Was Newdigate an old man victimised by his lying family? Was he mentally ill? Was the violent attack of April 1701 unique? Was there long-term sexual abuse? When writing this article, I wondered whether the story should remain untold: was it my right as a historian to uncover the family's secret? But as the #metoo movement has shown, we have an urgent duty to listen to the survivors of abuse (sexual or otherwise) and to recognise the ways in which we have enabled perpetrators’ accounts to remain dominant.8 Attending to silences in the records can provide new ways of understanding family histories. This article considers Newdigate's account, putting the children at the centre. Building on my previous work on pain narratives (or, how to find meaning in sufferers’ circular accounts of pain), I argue that the Newdigates’ experiences can be read as a familial pain narrative; its gaps, uncertainties and seemingly unconnected complaints are like other eighteenth-century pain accounts on a meta-level.9 To identify what caused their breakdown, I situate their health problems within the context of their family history. Bouts of illness occur at key narrative moments, hinting at a hidden wound of sexual abuse and/or mental illness. Newdigate's and the children's stories reveal how illnesses and the limitations of gender and age shaped the experiences of individual family members. In Newdigate's version, an unwell, ageing patriarch protected his family, despite being undermined by adult sons’ demands for independence. The children's story involves an indebted, domineering household head, sons lacking patriarchal privileges and vulnerable daughters needing protection. Either way, the case underscores the instability of patriarchy, the dangers posed by a bad patriarch and the intersection of illness, gender and family strategy. My analysis focuses on the question of why the children later concealed their trauma, despite their initial publicising of it. Their act of silence, I conclude, was the most powerful act of reclamation open to them. A gentry family, the Newdigates had their main seat at Arbury Hall, Warwickshire. They kept excellent household records, which historians have used for topics ranging from food to politics.10 Steve Hindle and Peter Edwards have examined Newdigate's account books to understand estate management, while Elaine Gooder and Lady Newdigate-Newdegate wrote detailed biographies.11 Although Hindle and Newdigate-Newdegate identify micro-managerial or autocratic behaviours, neither treat these as a problem. For Newdigate-Newdegate, Newdigate's tendencies were counterbalanced by his daughter Jane's respectful letter in 1706, asking him to godparent her baby.12 Only Gooder discusses the family disputes, depicting Newdigate as a loving father abandoned by his children.13 Gooder's interpretation fits with eighteenth-century understandings of familial and fatherly duty. Good fathers should balance patriarchal authority with affection. This was not entirely altruistic, as tenderness stifled potential rebellion. Ideal fathers were indulgent, but used education (moral training and consistent punishments) to avoid spoiling children.14 Tyrannical and indulgent fathers were obvious opposites – yet, the truly ‘bad’ father was indifferent: parents should be involved in their children's lives, even after marriage.15 A pervasive discourse of ‘natural affection’ framed parental duties in terms of love. As parents ‘naturally’ loved their children, they provided care. For a man, natural love was specifically equated with supporting his family financially.16 Children reciprocated with duty and love to their parents and siblings, creating a closely bonded unit fundamental to orderly society.17 Children who committed violence against parents were considered unnatural for transgressing familial hierarchies. Typical narratives centred on greed for parental money or lack of compassion for an elderly or ill parent. And, even in self-defence, it was inexcusable to murder a tyrannical parent (though understandable).18 Natural affection's dependence on a unified hierarchical family left little space to contest over-reaching authority, especially given the prioritisation of parental feelings.19 Families might fulfil mutual obligations lovingly, but power remained vested in fathers. Whatever happened between Newdigate and his children, the holes in their stories hint at a shared reality: family trauma. Newdigate's pain stemmed from abandonment by his family in old age; the children's suffering was caused by a tyrannical, possibly sexually abusive father. Although Elaine Scarry contends that pain is inherently inexpressible, historians have found an articulate language for pain in nuanced narratives, performed dramas and gestures. Early modernists have focused on shareable, socially recognised pains and certain sources (literature, hagiography, diaries and letters) or accounts (violence, martyrdom, childbirth, surgery and chronic illness).20 Given such rich materials, we have overlooked unwritten pain. What can we do with cases such as the Newdigates’, in which suffering is central to the story, yet never explicit? My approach here reflects the common ground between work by scholars of trauma, women's history and secrets, areas which offer usefully complementary insights as they regularly confront patchy evidence and confusing accounts.21 Reading silence is not new, though it is often easier for historians to ignore absences in records. As Lucy Delap noted in relation to twentieth-century child sexual abuse cases, historians need to confront the uncomfortable spaces in our records and not assume that absences indicate people's inability or unwillingness to discuss difficult subjects.22 Trauma, for example, is often concealed with silence, a survival tactic that relatively few sufferers move beyond. But silence is also a form of communication, which listeners can begin to hear.23 First, one must identify when omission is meaningful. Like pain scholarship, work on trauma emphasises the elusiveness of its object. Traumatic events can remain hidden from consciousness, but echo in dreams, automatic actions or performances.24 Written on the body, they shape long-term physical and mental health outcomes.25 There is a perpetual interpretative tension between reading the signs and inability to know. Whereas memory needs a narrative, traumatic recollections, like pain, are suspended in time, without a clear beginning, middle and end.26 What narratives exist might be changeable, avoiding particulars or lacking facts, but the truth at their core is fear.27 Looking for evidence to understand silence is necessary in other fields, too. Feminist scholarship typically considers voice as agency, but silence can enable resistance, offering protection and space to negotiate difficult situations. Researchers must be attuned to linguistic and bodily signs and alternative readings.28 As for work on secrecy, studies of early modern Europe elucidate how secrets were a form of power. They occurred within a social context, binding those who shared them, while establishing hierarchical relations between those who knew everything, something or nothing. Secrets that became open knowledge could be more subversive than concealed ones.29 What these different approaches foreground is that silences can be more than absences or suppressions, representing instead meaningful omissions. Attending to silences, secrets and physical signs of trauma offer insight into gendered experiences of family dysfunction. This article contains multiple narratives. One motivating factor here is that I could not remain objective, being sceptical of Newdigate's claimed victimhood and sympathising with the children's actions. By separating the voices of victim and perpetrator (and historian), I leave room for an empathic unsettlement – by which I mean the avoidance of easy closure, excessive speculation and over-empathising with one side.30 The children's counter-narrative challenges and informs Newdigate's dominant account. Reading the semi-symmetrical versions together elucidates imprecise, interlinked storylines, revealing the family's trauma.31 When presenting two narratives, considering emplotment is helpful.32 Newdigate structured his pamphlet as a romance with archetypal characters (hero and villain), along with themes of family betrayal and honour, all of which would have resonated with older members of his early modern audience familiar with Restoration political romances like Percy Herbert's Princess Cloria.33 William Reddy's concept of ‘emotives’ is useful for analysing Newdigate's language: descriptions that reflected and reinforced his emotional state and could create change (people's perceptions of the family and his children's behaviour).34 Indeed, as I pieced the children's story together, it seemed to me like a mid-eighteenth-century novel's plot, centring on motives for divulging or concealing their secret. This version highlights the limits of ‘emotives’ as a concept. Examining the children's emotions points to their resistance, but their emotions emerge through silences not ‘utterances’.35 The siblings’ actions need to be understood in terms of gendered social expectations and the lack of opportunity to resist patriarchal authority. The family adopted multiple strategies to protect their honour, from Newdigate's creation of a more respectable narrative to the children's legal defences against a tyrannical father.36 Using two narratives allows me to tease out the Newdigates’ hidden story of collective suffering, which briefly became public before disappearing once more. Newdigate's Account Book D refers to the family breakdown: ‘This begins at Ladyday 1701 which contains the most uncomfortable Part of my Life’.37 The Newdigates’ troubles became widely known: ‘the By-ward of all Taverns and Coffee-houses about Town’. Gossip rekindled in November 1707, despite the Family Settlement, when twenty-four-year-old Juliana repeated ‘The Infamy which was thrown upon [Newdigate] in 1701’.38 Publishing a defence was common in causes célèbres and an obvious response for Newdigate (aged sixty-three), who had studied law, read avidly and penned bad verse.39 Lawyers were also renowned for telling effective emotional stories.40 The father deployed archetypal imagery and pain descriptions to elicit sympathy and reinforce his innocence. Three themes framed his narrative of suffering: independent manhood, loving fatherhood and vulnerable old age. Although a focus on old age served to buttress his contention that he could not be guilty, it potentially destabilised his claims to masculine honour. Newdigate counterbalanced this with extensive evidence that he remained an independent man and good father, despite his children's bad behaviour.41 His defence was self-serving, but it also may have been a strategy to protect the family by replacing insinuations of incest and insanity with the trope of a father-son property dispute. Newdigate needed to persuade readers that he was an independent man. Early modern credibility was attached to gender and status, with independent men exercising self-mastery at the apex of a hierarchy. Not obligated to anyone politically or financially, independent men were loyal to the monarch and possessed moral rectitude.42 Good citizenship was key to Newdigate's claims of masculine honour. Several expenditures listed in his pamphlet were for the country: defence funding in 1666 and 1677, treating with Freeholders of the County of Warwick when he was a Knight of the Shire and digging up a local traitor's armoury in 1696. He even loaned the king money.43 The Newdigate daughters’ accusations of incest made proving political loyalty essential. Late-seventeenth-century cultural anxieties associated unnatural behaviours (like incest) with rebellion and illegitimate authority, whereas good citizenship corresponded to moral uprightness.44 Newdigate's loyalty was a counterpoint to his sons’ failures as independent men, whom he likened to and presented as in league with Catholic traitors. For example, Richard was ‘persuaded by his Father-in-law and Priests and Jesuits’ to commit his father.45 His sons, Newdigate complained, ‘took a Hint from those Traitors and Enemys to the State’ and followed ‘the Popish Maxim, cast Dirt enough and some of it will stick’.46 Newdigate emphasised his sons’ ‘treachery’, ‘villainy’, ‘ruin’ or ‘persecution’ thirty-five times and used words of conquest or violence fifteen times (e.g. danger, shield, sword, seize). If a household was the foundation of the state, then traitorous sons were dangerous to society.47 Newdigate thus established credibility by undercutting his sons’ integrity. Newdigate also emphasised his capability for estate management in contrast to his sons. In 1699, Newdigate toured France – a trip seemingly taken out of curiosity. He had been corresponding (via his second-eldest son, John, aged twenty-seven) with a Huguenot, the Marquis de Souligné, about his book The Desolation of France (1698).48 While Newdigate was away, he left John to manage the estate. John, however, fell into debauchery, neglected the estate and ‘shut up’ his brother Gilbert (aged twenty-five), ‘ma[king] him stark mad’. Called to account when his father returned home, John fell ill.49 Newdigate and Richard also regularly argued about property. In his pamphlet, Newdigate maintained the main issue was Richard's ‘treacherous contrivance’ to have another £1000 annually.50 Part of the problem may have been Richard's ambiguous status as an independent man. He married in 1694 but returned home in 1695 (aged twenty-seven) when his wife died. Newdigate's estate expenses (like his ‘mighty Coal-work’), moreover, seemed to squander his inheritance.51 The relationship was fractious by 1700 when Newdigate complained about Richard's ‘Cross grained letter’.52 The Newdigate men fought constantly about estate management. Tensions escalated on 10 April 1701. The House of Lords petition has few details of the violent attack, while the lunacy investigation provides a formulaic description (derangement with periods of lucidity).53 Newdigate claimed that he suffered from a fever and delirium in May 1701. John and Richard allegedly used this incapacity to have him committed, attempted to poison him and organised a humiliating capture by ruffians.54 Gooder thinks the lunacy accusations were false. First, the charge was at odds with the daughters’ withdrawn petition to the House of Lords, which presumed sanity. Second, Newdigate legally re-established his sanity.55 However, Newdigate's behaviour must have been concerning and well-evidenced over a longer term. At least one well-known physician, Gideon Harvey, participated in the inquiry.56 The Lord Chancellors who oversaw lunacy investigations, moreover, focused on protecting individuals, particularly when family members misused the proceedings. Lunacy investigations were intended to restore family order, to provide care to long-term lunatics and to ensure good property management. If the lunatic was cured, a committal could be overturned.57 For Newdigate, it was a long process to re-assert control. His diary shows unresolved legal issues until late 1702. In July, for example, Newdigate spoke to the Lord Keeper (Sir Nathan Wright), who believed Newdigate was sane. However, given the evidence, ‘he could do no lesse then he did’.58 Richard remained estranged, the situation worsening by 1705 after both men remarried. Richard began evicting tenants for unpaid rents, demanding his father take a new mortgage. Worse yet, Richard had ‘shut [Amphillis] up as a Mad woman’ to control her money.59 In 1706, Newdigate granted Richard £2,500 annually to reduce ‘temptation to wish or contrive his father's Death’ and proposed dividing the land to spread out debts, ensuring that ‘this noble Estate be preserv'd to the Family’.60 Newdigate legally regained power, but Richard contested and subverted it through contrary estate management practices. Masculinity and personal character were also visible on the men's bodies, reflecting a wider understanding that bodily deportment bared one's soul.61 Newdigate stressed his embodiment of age and rank throughout the pamphlet. There are sixteen references to him as a gentleman, while his actions revealed innate gentility: caring for his family, discovering a traitor, or building lucrative coal works. ‘Old Gentleman’ appeared six times in the appendix, with a linkage of age and status that implied he deserved respect.62 This contrasted with the prodigal John and reprobate Richard. Bad behaviour might be forgiven, but a father needed to decide when a son was irredeemable or dangerous. For Newdigate, his son's bodies offered clues.63 After the French trip, John's remorse was discernible through his fever. John reconciled with Newdigate in 1701, apologising ‘with Tears and great Compunction’. Richard also apologised, but ‘put all the Slights and Affronts’ on his father.64 Richard's true disposition surfaced after he was widowed. For example, Richard advised his father to lease some land to avoid taxes, which Newdigate rewarded with a prime lease. However, the account indicates that Richard's body betrayed ill intentions, as he ‘blush'd, and then lookt pale, which his Father did not take much notice of then, but has since often thought thereof’.65 Newdigate embodied masculine gentility, while his sons were untrustworthy men. Newdigate framed fatherhood in terms of natural affection. ‘Father’ was one of the most common nouns in the pamphlet, appearing fifty-nine times. Twenty-seven words referred to family or love (e.g. family, estate, duty, affection, reconciliation). He also stressed the size of his family – fifteen children, ten surviving to adulthood – and his desire to treat them equitably. Newdigate spared no expense in medical care, clothing, education and travel, even giving more to his children than inheritance? settlements required.66 Paternal benevolence emerged elsewhere. Newdigate welcomed the newly widowed Richard home and remained an ‘indulgent father’ despite the children's abandonment.67 He was even familiar with advice literature. Alluding to his daughters’ petition (‘cruel Severities and unreasonable Usage and Practices’), he used a curious phrase (‘by reasons of his unnatural and Cruel usage’) that came from a section on parental duties in a popular advice book by William Fleetwood.68 In the passage, Fleetwood exhorted parents to treat one's children patiently, not harshly. Newdigate's point was that a father possessed of such natural affection would surely not act unnaturally to his child. The family settlement promoted a continued relationship of paternal affection and filial duty. Settlements, which used the language of natural affection, aimed to strengthen family unity by preventing property disputes.69 For the Newdigates, the settlement might even reunite the fractured family: ‘for the reconcileing of all differences which have unhappily arisen … and to the End Paternall Affection & Filiall obediences may be continued’. Newdigate gave the children considerable financial support. Each unmarried daughter, for example, was to receive £5,000 through an annual allowance of £60 (£150 after ten years), with the remainder payable at marriage.70 The annual amount for the first decade was paltry, but if Newdigate followed the pattern of his forebears, it would be paid – contrasting with the eldest son's indebted estate.71 According to Newdigate, the sum was more generous than his father allowed: £571 8s 6d each and ‘3 farthings to have been divided among them’ if there was no son.72 But the settlement also required Amphillis (thirty-three), Jane (twenty-one), Elizabeth (twenty) and Juliana (nineteen) to move to the guardianship of their maternal uncle, Sir William Bagot, within ten days.73 Despite the financial settlement, the family was broken. Newdigate defended the family's honour by preserving the children's reputations and trying to reconcile their differences. From the pamphlet's first page, Newdigate portrayed himself as a forgiving protector, promising to ‘bury all in oblivion’ and ‘never vent any thing that might tend to the disrepute of his dear Children’. Given the importance of maintaining family honour, Newdigate's public statement may have been part of his family strategy.74 For example, he tried to hide any potential indications of familial madness by insisting that Gilbert and Amphillis had been falsely locked up by their brothers who wanted to control their money.75 Newdigate also confirmed his daughters’ innocence. Richard, he argued, was behind the petition to the House of Lords. The four ‘poor innocent young Women’ had not read the petition, believing it discussed finances.76 Newdigate's reference to Fleetwood provided an opportunity to redefine what ‘cruel’ and ‘unnatural’ meant in the petition: unjust overreaching of his authority.77 Definition was vital, as ‘unnatural’ in this period could denote sexual immorality, wickedness or excessive cruelty.78 Newdigate thus reframed the petition to emphasise his daughters’ purity. Of course, he also claimed that the House of Lords believed in his innocence (because of his good record-keeping) and that – as a good father – he took the blame on the advice of the Archbishop of Canterbury rather ‘than utterly to ruin the Reputation of his said Sons’ and, presumably, daughters.79 Indexed in Account Book D is a ‘Family Scheme for the Happinesse of it’, displaying Newdigate's perpetual hope of family reunification.80 His attempts to maintain family unity demonstrated his good fatherhood, while connecting his masculine honour and family honour. At the same time, Newdigate drew on tropes about vulnerable old age to make clear that his sons were unnatural, not him. In 1701, fifty-seven-year old Newdigate was healthy, recently returned from his European travels. The children attacked their father's independence when he was at a stage in life that he might expect family support – a common enough tale.81 Although Newdigate did not mention it, his pamphlet recalls King Lear, with madness and troubled father-daughter relationships. Nahum Tate's The History of King Lear (with a happier ending and less incest than Shakespeare's version) was familiar to late seventeenth-century theatregoers, including Newdigate who had inherited an extensive collection of playbooks.82 Moreover, Newdigate was religious. To illustrate the horror of his situation, he referred to the account given in Genesis 9:18-29 of how Noah left the Ark to plant a vineyard, but drank too much wine and was discovered naked by the disloyal Ham, who told his brothers. This brazen indiscretion contrasted with the filial piety demonstrated by Shem and Japhet, who covered their father. Indeed, Newdigate's children ‘were so far from imitating the Blessed Shem and Japhet, viz. covering their Father's Nakedness, that they outdid cursed Ham’; they ‘pretended Nakedness where there really was none’.83 Thus Newdigate's imagery vividly exploited cultural anxieties about masculinity and ageing. His papers, though, suggest that he keenly felt the pains of old age and betrayal.84 His diary mentions gouty spells and a steady diet of pills until his death in 1709, while his remarriage in 1703 to an eighteen-year-old woman (Henrietta Wigginton), the stereotypical ‘old man's nurse’, points to a genuine dread of loneliness.85 At the start of Account Book D, Newdigate included a Latin epigram with English discussion about an old man who remarried: ‘But now grown Feeble, & scarce Like to Live, I've got a Helper, to who no Help I give’.86 Historian Vivienne Larminie connects the pamphlet's publication to renewed family hostilities after Newdigate's marriage to Henrietta.87 But Newdigate's cancelled will of 1707 signposts another reason: justifying the disinheritance of unkind children in favour of his second wife.88 Newdigate, an ageing man, feared lost independence, helplessness and isolation. Newdigate encouraged readers’ compassion by focusing on illness, which he characterised as the true cost of his sons’ actions. Ageing and illness appear together fifteen times in the pamphlet's second half, with most in his illness description (five) and the appendix (six).89 The fifteen-page pamphlet was structured around seven illnesses, which functioned as narrative transitions and character descriptions. The first bout was that of Richard (thirty-one) and Elizabeth (seventeen), which forced them to return from their French trip of 1699. It marked the end of family unity, with Newdigate, who continued his tour, finding himself separated geographically from all his children. The second and third illnesses occurred after his arrival home from his travels to find that John had mismanaged the estate, destroyed his own health and driven Gilbert mad.90 The initial ailments reflected the beginnings of familial breakdown. The main account of illness was Newdigate's, comprising two middle pages. During Newdigate's fever and delirium of 1701, John and Richard had him committed. The removal of power during illness played on fears about vulnerability. Newdigate defended himself ‘Sword in hand for five Hours’, a martial image evidently intended to nullify any intimation of weakened masculinity.91 The subsequent poisoning attempt inadvertently cured Newdigate's fever. When a hamper from Warwickshire arrived, the footman ‘suspect[ed] the drink to be poison'd’. The poison caused Newdigate to vomit, curing his fever.92 The poisoning underscored the insidiously treacherous nature of the sons’ attacks. As a crime, poisoning typically occurred in intimate relationships and directly attacked the domestic order; moreover, it was widely associated with womanly deceit.93 The final two illnesses – John's death from smallpox (1705) and Amphillis's lunacy committal (1706) – represented the family's dissolution. Illnesses signified critical moments in the family's history and contrasted Newdigate's manliness (even in illness) with his sons’ un
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