Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle: A Seventeenth-Century Marvel

I was once flicking through many images of portraits from the seventeenth century, and I was stopped in my tracks by a stunning portrait of a lady. The gorgeous shine of her blue silk and velvet dress, the attention to detail and her striking gaze made this woman shine illustriously from the screen. She looked so lifelike, yet so dreamlike. I had no idea who she was. I saved the image onto my camera roll for a long time, and then I decided to see what I could find out about this captivating lady. Little did I know that she would have the most fascinating backstory.

Margaret Lucas was born in 1623 to a wealthy family in Essex. She was surrounded by strong, independent female figures from a young age and, like many of the female subjects of my blogs, she was surrounded by books. Her family also had a large library, and she had a private tutor, which was not common at the time for women of her station. At the age of twenty, she went to serve in the household of Queen Henrietta Maria, the French Catholic wife of King Charles I, against her mother’s wishes. During the uncertain times of the Civil War, Margaret was exiled with the Queen and her royal court to France and lived at the court of Louis the fourteenth. However, she struggled with the social aspect of life at court.

Whilst in exile, Margaret met a man named William Cavendish (a Marquess, later made Duke of Newcastle by King Charles II) who became drawn to her shyness. William was thirty years older than Margaret and despite objections to the marriage, they married in 1645. In 1653, during the time of Cromwellian rule, Margaret would write Poems and Fancies. In this work, she began to explore ideas of natural philosophy, a precursor to modern day scientific thinking. She laid out her theories on atoms through her poetry.

In the 1650s she frequently discussed notions of gender and sex and gender inequality. She questioned whether gender inequality was inherent in the sexes themselves or if it was caused by social restrictions within society. She was considered unusual by her contemporaries, and many considered her ridiculous. They criticised her sumptuous fashions and publications. She would often wear men’s dress.

She asserted herself within the sphere of men, not just through her clothing, but her writing too. Intellectual and creative writing was considered only a man’s domain. In the fabulous 1665 portrait I refer to in the beginning of this blog, Margaret is wearing her most sumptuous feminine court attire, but she is also wearing a cap - something men usually wore. She certainly made a statement!

Margaret and William returned to England after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and Margaret would go on to write Observations upon Experimental Philosophy in 1666. It provided a detailed criticism of what would become a major scientific and philosophical movement of the Early Modern era.

Along with the recently established Royal Society, the age began to embrace scientific experiment and observation and moved away from mere theory. However, Margaret was against the idea of cold scientific thinking and suggested that our own senses and thinking were far more reliable and well suited to understanding the natural world around us than the new instruments of observation. This went against the great experimental philosophers of the day, such as Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle.

To her, the entirety of the natural world was more soulful and self-aware than the popular cold, mechanical view of it. Margaret had immense courage and self-conviction by doing this. At a meeting held by the Royal Society in 1667, Margaret became the first woman to attend. Diarist Samuel Pepys was also in attendance but didn’t think much of her. He commented on her ‘comeliness’ but to him, it seemed that she had not much of worth to say.

To make her ideas more accessible, and most importantly accessible to women, she published the fictional The Blazing World in 1668, an early form of science fiction writing. She hoped that it would inspire women to take an interest in the study of science and philosophy. The story follows a young lady who is kidnapped and then left stranded in a mysterious new world that can only be reached via the North Pole. The lady marries the emperor and as Empress she wields total power, establishing a calm and ordered civilisation. The universe is filled with human-like creatures who practise various intellectual disciplines; birdmen are astronomers, spider and lice men are mathematicians, and bear-men are experimental philosophers. Margaret also published her work under her own name which, again, was very unusual for her time.

Margaret was an eccentric figure that stuck out of her time. Seeing herself as lacking the proper feminine skills of the time, she decided to use her position to think and to pursue intellectual endeavours. She wanted to utilise her thinking ability and hoped to inspire others to do the same. Remarkably, she asserted herself in the male-dominated academic and intellectual realms, and she seemed not to care much of what people thought of her. Margaret was a prolific writer and thinker, and I do not have enough space to discuss all her work in this blog, but I hope it gives you a small glimpse into just some of her most famous works and perhaps, her personality.

I also think that she did believe that women could be powerful thinkers and that it should not just be the occupation of a man. It also seems that she was concerned with being remembered and leaving a legacy, perhaps because so many talented women of her day went voiceless and nameless into the sea of history. In her own words, she would ‘endeavour to spin a garment of memory, to lapp up my name that it might grow to after ages’.