Abstract
At her death aged ninety, Mary, Lady Vere was celebrated as a famous ‘Protestant Dorcas, full of good works, and alms-deeds’. Throughout her long life, Vere had consciously moulded herself as a godly woman whose personal motto, God will provide, was to be found written in her own hand ‘in the front of most of her books in her closet’.1 Religious piety could, as Peter Lake has argued, allow women to exercise ‘personal potency’ and at her funeral Vere’s authority within puritan circles was duly recognised by the preacher. In his funeral sermon William Gurnall recalled that ‘few ever exceeded her, in loving and honouring’ the ‘faithful ministers of Christ’ and described her zeal in finding ‘able and faithful ministers for those livings she had in her dispose’.2
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Notes
I am grateful to Frank Bremer, Andy Hopper, Peter Lake, David Trim, and Tom Webster for their advice and help with references and quotations for this essay. I am also grateful for permission to quote from Lady Vere’s letters from the Newcastle Collection in the Manuscripts and Special Collections, University of Nottingham. William Gurnall, The Christians Labour and Reward (London: [n.p.], 1672), pp. 141, 126.
Peter Lake, ‘Feminine Piety and Personal Potency: the Emancipation of Mrs Ratcliffe’, Seventeenth Century 2:2 (1987), 143–65; Gurnall, The Christian’s Labour, pp. 138–9, 130.
James Daybell (ed.), Early Modern Women’s Letter Writing, 1450–1700 (Basing-stoke: Palgrave, 2001).
Jane Couchman and Ann Crabb (eds), Women’s Letters Across Europe, 1400–1700: Form and Persuasion (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).
James Daybell, Women Letter Writers in Tudor England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
Tom Webster and Kenneth Shipps (eds.), The Diary of Samuel Rogers, 1634–1638 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004).
See Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales, ‘Introduction: The Puritan Ethos’, in Durston and Eales (eds.), The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 1–31.
For an expanded discussion of the themes of women’s defence of family and faith see Jacqueline Eales, Women in Early Modern England, 1500–1700 (London: UCL Press, 1998).
G. W. Wheeler (ed.), Letters of Sir Thomas Bodley to Thomas James (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 1985), p. 175. I am grateful to David Trim for this reference.
Gurnall, The Christians Labour, pp. 126–7. The importance of the Protestant Tracy family tradition to Lady Vere was recorded as early as 1611 in Henry Hexham’s dedication to Vere of his translation of Polyander’s A Disputation against the Adoration of the Reliques of Saints Departed (Dordrecht: George Walters, 1611).
S. L. Adams, ‘The Protestant Cause: Religious Alliance with the Western European Calvinist Communities as a Political Issue in England, 1585–1630’, unpublished DPhil. Thesis, University of Oxford, 1973.
For the Fairfaxes see Andrew Hopper, Black Tom: Sir Thomas Fairfax and the English Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).
for the Harleys see Jacqueline Eales, Puritans and Roundheads: the Harleys of Brampton Bryan and the Outbreak of the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
JHC, Vol. II: 1640–1643, p. 148; Edward Hyde, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, re-ed. W. D. Macray (Oxford: [n.p.], 1888), vol. IV, p. 237.
John Geree, Katadynastes: Might Overcoming Right (London: for Robert Bostock, 1649), Dedication, fols. A2r-A3v.
For women’s involvement in early modern patronage politics see Barbara Harris, ‘Women and Politics in Early Tudor England’, HJ 33 (1990): 259–81.
Caroline Bowden, ‘Women as Intermediaries: an Example of the Use of Literacy in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries’, History of Education 22 (1993), 215–23.
For Ussher see Alan Ford, James Ussher: Theology, History and Politics in Early Modern Ireland and England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
Isabel M. Calder (ed.), The Letters of John Davenport Puritan Divine (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937), p. 19.
Tom Webster, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England: the Caroline Puritan Movement c. 1620–1643 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 284.
Nicholas Byfield, Directions for the Private Reading of Scriptures (London: E. Griffin for N. Butter, 1618), fols A2–A4.
Nicholas Byfield, The Rules of a Holy Life (London: Ralph Rounthwaite, 1622), pp. 403–9.
See also Nicholas Byfield, A Commentary: or Sermons upon the Second Chapter of the First Epistle of St. Peter (London: Humfrey Lownes for George Latham, 1623), fols A3–4, dedicated to the Veres by Byfield’s widow.
Thomas Gataker, The Ioy of the Iust (London: Iohn Hauiland for Fulke Clifton, 1623), fol. A1–A3.
Richard Sibbes, The Bruised Reede and Smoaking Flax (London: for R. Dawlman, 1630), fols A5–a2.
Isabel M. Calder, Activities of the Puritan Faction of the Church of England, 1625–1633 (London: S.P.C.K. for the Church Historical Society, 1957).
Thomas Watson, The Christians Charter Shewing the Priviledges of a Believer (London: by T.M. for Ralph Smith, 1652), fols A3-bl.
Thomas Washbourne, Divine Poems (London: for Humphrey Moseley, 1654), fol. A5r.
William Gurnall, The Christian in Complete Armour (London: [n.p.], 1662), fols A3–4 is also dedicated to Vere.
Manuscripts and Special Collections, The University of Nottingham, Newcastle Collection 15404, unfoliated; G. W. Johnson (ed.), The Fairfax Correspondence (London: R. Bentley, 1848) vol. 1, p. 313.
Alan Macfarlane (ed.), The Diary of Ralph Josselin, 1616–1683 (London: for the British Academy by Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 562.
Samuel Clark, Lives of Sundry Eminent Persons in this Later Age (London: Thomas Simmons, 1683), pp. 144–51.
For Clarke’s editing of women’s godly lives see Jacqueline Eales, ‘Samuel Clarke and the ‘Lives’ of Godly Women in Seventeenth Century England’, in W. J. Sheils and D. Wood (eds.), Women in the Church, (Oxford: for the Ecclesiastical History Society by Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp. 365–76.
Geree, Might Overcoming Right, fols A2r-A3v; see also, for example, John Chardon, A sermon Preached at Exeter (London: lohn Danter, 1595), p. 35, where he asked for God’s mercy in allowing Elizabeth to live and reign long as ‘an old mother in Israel’.
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Eales, J. (2010). ‘An Ancient Mother in our Israel’: Mary, Lady Vere. In: Harris, J., Scott-Baumann, E. (eds) The Intellectual Culture of Puritan Women, 1558–1680. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230289727_7
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