Mistress Bradstreet (35 page)

The news from England was more and more terrible. By 1649 the king, far from being above the law, had been declared by Parliament guilty of treason. On January 30, after donning two shirts so that he would not shiver in the cold and be thought fearful, he gazed up at heaven one final time, quietly laid his head down on the block, and was beheaded before a huge mob that miraculously remained silent until after the royal blood spilled onto the ground. Immediately, English Puritans sent gleeful accounts of the gruesome event to their contacts in the New World. But Anne’s friends and family were not so quick to jump on the bandwagon.

Even though she disparaged his behavior, his papist tendencies, and especially his traitorous dealings with the Irish, Anne was shocked. After all, Charles had been the king. Graphic reports made their way to Massachusetts. One eyewitness said the Puritans had lowered the height of the chopping block so that if Charles struggled, they could hold him down. Of course, as it turned out there was no need, since Charles had too acute a sense of history and theater to resort to such a last-minute wrestling match. Reportedly, though, the king’s last words concerned such details:

King. “It [the block] might have been a little higher.”

Executioner. “It can be no higher, sir.”

King. “When I put out my hands this way, then —”

Then having said a few words to himself, as he stood, with hands and eyes lifted up, immediately stooping down he laid his neck upon the block; and . . . his Majesty, thinking [the executioner] had been going to strike, bade him, “Stay for the sign.”

Executioner. “Yes, I will, and it please your Majesty.”

After a short pause, his Majesty stretching forth his hands, the executioner at one blow severed his head from his body; which, being held up and showed to the people, was with his body put into a coffin covered with black velvet and carried into his lodging.
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Another witness recorded that “such a groan as I never heard before and hope never to hear again” emerged from the mob.
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Of course this famous sigh was as symbolic as it was bloodcurdling. Charles had met his execution with such dignity that even some Puritans could not avoid regarding him as a martyr. To a people raised on
The Book of Martyrs,
nothing guaranteed a following more quickly than submitting to a seemingly unfair public execution.

Charles’s death annihilated centuries of English tradition. Certainly royal pretenders to the throne had been executed before, but no sitting monarch had ever been sentenced to die by his own people. Whether or not one supported his cause, his execution asked the English people to question what they believed and to whom they were loyal. As a result, people began to see that even kings were fallible, vulnerable to the will of the land, and not God’s chosen hand servants. There was a touch of empowered liberation to this sort of realization, as well as a growing cynicism. The future was frighteningly uncertain, and so it was only fitting that Cromwell, the military commander who rushed in to fill the vacuum, was compared to a rush of “three-forked lightning” by the poet Andrew Marvell.
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With the sacred links to the past severed, England seemed a volatile place to be. Anne could not help worrying about John, Mercy, and Ward. Winthrop’s son Stephen, who was stationed in London, wrote home in consternation, declaring, “New England seems to be the only safe place where I believe we must come . . . at length if we can.”
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Comparatively speaking, the colony did seem a far more peaceful and certain place than the Old World in the immediate aftermath of the execution. But then New England lost its own famous leader, John Winthrop. At the age of sixty-one, after a final illness, he died on March 26, 1649, in his home in Boston. For all but seven years of the colony’s existence, Winthrop had stood as its leader. To the colonists, the loss of both the king and their old governor in the space of two months seemed a double calamity. With Winthrop’s chair empty, the time seemed ripe for disaster to strike.

Anne coped with these events the best way she knew how, through the writing of poetry. She set herself the task of penning an elegy to the dead king, whom she had hated but who she did not think deserved to die. Cromwell and his band of followers had decreed it traitorous to lament Charles’s death, but Andover was a long way from London and Anne was used to employing literary disguises. It was not difficult for her to come up with a device that allowed her to mourn the king and protect herself and her friends at the same time, although it must have seemed strange to think that they faced danger from other Puritans.

She wrote with conviction and speed, perhaps because she suspected her manuscript was soon to be published and wanted this poem included, but she may also have hoped to comfort Ward in what she knew would be his profound grief. He had written
The Simple Cobbler of Aggawam
to forestall this violent event but had failed. Her brother-in-law, too, would likely feel he had not carried out his mission of mediation. But she could not be outright in her condolences. If anyone suspected the men of sympathizing with the dead king, they might be killed.

In her elegy “David’s Lamentation for Saul and Jonathan II Sam. 1:19,” Anne assumed the voice of David, the Israelite poet and ancient king of Israel who had ascended to the throne after the death of King Saul and his son, Jonathan. This was the only time she adopted a male identity in her poetry, and this was in keeping with her sense that she had to conceal her political views behind a blameless facade.

The verse begins innocently enough: “Alas, slain is the head of Israel.” But of course any mention of a “head” and a “slain” king in one line could only bring to mind Charles. In case anyone was inclined to miss her point, she emphasizes the actual royal scalp, writing, “The shield of Saul was vilely cast away, / . . . / As if his head ne’er felt the sacred oil.”
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After all, even if they hadn’t been there, her readers, too, were likely haunted by the images: the king’s head tumbling into the chute, the damp spray of blood shooting forth from his arteries, the awful gape of his ghastly neck.

It was a bleak poem that Anne rushed to finish. When at last they read her verse, Woodbridge and Ward knew immediately that this elegy belonged in her book. They placed it last, as her triumphal effort, the one that spoke most directly to her time and people.

Adopting David’s point of view had allowed Anne to make another point that New England Puritans found especially appealing. David had mourned the old king, but the fact remained that Saul had disobeyed the Lord and had even sought to murder David; that is why both he and his son had to die. Everyone understood that David was the rightful leader, and Anne’s assumption of his voice equated New England with the new, holier Israel, one that might mourn the passing of the old but represented the hope of the future. This final elegy reinforced Anne’s “Dialogue”; England, like Saul, was condemned to die. New England, like David, was bound for glory.

Anne might well have rejoiced to be living in the promised land, but though she might prophesy that Israel (in the guise of New England) would flourish and conquer the Philistines, it was sad to see the new sweep away the old, even if ordained by God. “How are the mighty fall’n into decay?” she lamented, bearing witness to New England’s glorious ascent, while old England’s bloodied corpse lay in the sand.
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There was another significance in her speaking with David’s voice—a rush of exhilaration came from identifying herself with the man who was not only Israel’s greatest king but also the author of the most beautiful poems in history, the Psalms. If only in the lines of this poem, she could at last speak with the authority of the greatest male poet of all time.

ON JULY
1, 1650, a little book, measuring only five and a half by three and three-quarter inches, was offered for sale. It was called
The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America,
a title John had chosen himself. It was easier for men to envision a woman as an inspiration, or a muse of poetry, rather than an author, and so Woodbridge’s title was well conceived. Anne’s work, he implied, was worth reading not because she claimed to be a poet in her own right but because it would encourage other, male, writers to produce new poems. In his prefatory letter he suggested that Anne had had no intention of allowing anyone to read her work. Indeed, the only person’s “displeasure” he “fear[ed]” in publishing the book was hers (a disingenuous remark, since the reading public, too, was liable to attack him for publishing a woman). John wrote that “contrary to her expectation, I have presumed to bring to public view, what she resolved should . . . never see the sun.”
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John’s presentation worked, and Ward’s seal of approval finished the job.
The Tenth Muse
thrilled the public, taking it by storm. Given the tense mood of the country, Anne’s poetry struck the perfect note. She spoke on behalf of harmony and peace, even as she advocated violence against infidels. Her New England seemed the repository of hope for the Old World and held forth the promise of healing.

This was balm for her readers, when optimism was rare and doom seemed inevitable (except for the eager Puritan extremists, whose spirits had never been more buoyant). Far from being threatened, English readers saw the volume as a curiosity—few women had ventured into the literary marketplace, let alone one who had ventured to “the Occidentall parts of the World”—and sales steadily mounted as everyone eagerly read this pioneer woman’s words.
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There are no records of any of the criticism Woodbridge, Ward, and Anne herself had feared. Instead, Anne Bradstreet became a kind of heroine. She embodied the spirit and the voice of these Puritan times. And, indeed, seven years after publication,
The Tenth Muse
was still selling briskly on both sides of the Atlantic.

For some the event was as strange as if a monkey or a parakeet had published a volume of verse. Women were not supposed to have brains capacious enough to hold the enormous amount of information Anne wielded. Perhaps they could write a letter or a prayer or two, but they could never master the noblest form of all—verse. Even Woodbridge had declared,

Some books of women I have heard of late,

Perused some, so witless, intricate,

So void of sense, and truth . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . I might with pity,

Have wished them all to women’s works to look,

And never more to meddle with their book.
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Despite the clamor that erupted when
The Tenth Muse
arrived in the marketplace, Anne did not at first know her poems were in print. It took several months for the news to sail across the ocean. In some ways it was fortunate for her that there was this delay, because once the letters began to arrive telling her of her little book’s good fortune, and once the volume itself landed on the shores of America, there was nothing she could do to stop the printing press.

At last, at thirty-eight years old, Anne held her book in her hands. It must have been with a mixture of joy and trepidation that she grasped the leather binding and sliced the pages apart. She knew that at this point there was nothing she could do to fix her poems; the many mistakes she found scrambled across every page were there to stay. Whether they were the result of publisher’s errors or her own lack of skill, she “blush[ed]” at the many “irksome” imperfections.
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In her poem “The Author to Her Book,” she called
The Tenth Muse
the “ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain” and then extended this metaphor, saying that since she had “affection” for her child, she had attempted to “amend” the book’s “blemishes,” but had failed.
¹⁹

I washed thy face, but more defects I saw,

And rubbing off a spot still made a flaw.

I stretched thy joints to make thee even feet,

Yet still thou run’st more hobbling than is meet;

In better dress to trim thee was my mind,

But nought save homespun cloth i’ th’ house I find.
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Cleverly, Anne adjusted her meter to reflect her poetic apologies, adding an extra syllable to the “hobbling” line so that the verse itself appeared to limp. The “homespun” material she used to dress her “brat” was an assertion of her new style.
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No more aping the learned English male poets. She was a Puritan mother living in America, and as such her poetry could only be roughly hewn. Of course, as in “The Prologue,” the announcement of her humility would serve her well, according to the Puritan ethic.

Although there are no records of how many colonists bought
The Tenth Muse,
one indicator of the book’s popularity in New England is that it was the only book of poetry in the library of Edward Taylor (the next generation’s distinguished poet) fifty or so years later.
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This meant the volume’s popularity was widespread as well as long lasting, since Taylor lived in the western part of the state. Some historians have felt it fair to surmise that nearly every Puritan home in New England contained a copy of
The Tenth Muse.
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And Anne herself became one of the few women to gain an entry in Cotton Mather’s history of the period, written forty years after her book’s publication. Looking back on Anne’s achievement with nostalgia, Mather called her poems “a monument for her Memory beyond the Statliest Marbles.”
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In the opening lines of “The Author to Her Book,” Anne reiterated John’s prefatory letter and declared that she had never thought to publish her poems herself. Instead, she claimed, the manuscript was “snatched” by “friends” who were eager to publish her work, and she was shocked to be catapulted into the public eye. Although she admitted she had sent the book “out of door,” she insisted she was free of ambitious aspirations.