Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky.

Listener discretion advised.

If you've been listening to the show for a while, you're probably wondering why it's taken me so long to discuss any royal from the Kingdom of sv.

Really, the truth is, I'm embarrassed.

It's been a real oversight on my part, and I'm taking full responsibility and rectifying it immediately.

Just kidding.

I can't take this bit any further, mainly because the notion of England and France under a single monarchy is too absurd.

That's what the Kingdom of sv is.

It's an acronym for England, Scotland, France and Ireland, and it is in fact a fictional land in the sixteen sixty six Proto science fiction novel The Blazing World.

In the young novel, a young woman from sv E is kidnapped onto a boat by a spurned lover.

This act angers the gods, who blow the boat to the North Pole and spare only the young woman from hypothermia.

From there, the ship floats into a parallel land called the Blazing World, a utopia populated by human animal hybrids who believe the young woman is a goddess.

This new Empress, a student of the natural sciences and philosophy, uses her powers to open schools and form societies of learning, consulting with various human animal specialists.

For example, the parrotmen are orators and magicians, and the foxmen are politicians and spider Man Unfortunately, more arachnid than superhero are mathematicians.

This woman empress decides to create her own religion, but she knows she'll need a scribe to aid her.

She asks the spirit to call upon the souls of ancients like Aristotle and Plato, but they reply that those writers are too wedded to their own opinions to be scribes for someone else.

Then the empress requests a famous modern for her writer, like Galileo or Discarte, but the spirits say that those men are far too conceded to be scribes for a woman, and so instead they offer quote, there's a lady, the Duchess of Newcastle, which although she is not one of the most learned, eloquent, witty, and ingenious, yet she is a plain and rational writer.

For the principle of her writings is sense and reason.

And she will, without question be ready to do you all the service she can.

Incredibly complimentary and a little effusive, especially considering that the Duchess of Newcastle also happened to be the the author of that book, The Blazing World.

The Blazing World was jointly published with the real Duchess's nonfiction work Observations upon Experimental Philosophy.

The author saw them as companions.

Though these genres of the two books were quite literally worlds apart.

The Duchess believed that the fictional Blazing World reflected scientific and philosophical ideas from the real world.

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, was undoubtedly a trailblazer in both worlds.

As a science minded writer, she was the very first woman to attend a meeting of the Royal Society, which wouldn't admit women as members until nineteen forty five.

She published more than a dozen original texts under her own name in a time when doing so was still practically unheard of, becoming the first known woman to publish a collected volume of dramatic works in her own time and throughout modern history.

Margaret's transgressive approach to not only publishing but life as a woman in the seventeenth century has borne the weight of both renown and criticism.

If you know Cavendish's name but are struggling to place exactly where you know her from, it's possible you've read Virginia Wolf's A Room of One's Own.

In that book, Wolfe writes, quote, what a vision of loneliness and riot.

The thought of Margaret Cavendish brings to mind, as if some giant cucumber had spread itself over all the roses and carnations in the garden and choked them to death.

What a waste that the woman who wrote the best bred women are those whose minds are civilist, should have frittered her time away scribbling nonsense and plunging give her deeper into obscurity and folly till the people crowded around her coach when she issued out end quote.

Considering what a cultural juggernaut A Room of One's Own has been and remains in the canon of women's literature, you won't be surprised to learn it is difficult for modern scholarship of Cavendish's life and work to separate itself from Wolfe's colorful analysis.

But today as we learn about the life and times of the Duchess of Newcastle.

I invite you to consider that perhaps Margaret with someone who may have read that infamous cucumber description as a compliment.

I'm Danish forts and this is noble blood.

Margaret Lucas was born in Essex in sixteen twenty three.

She was the youngest daughter of Thomas Lucas, an unde titled but wealthy country landowner, and Elizabeth Layton, a londoner.

Margaret's parents had a rough start.

Margaret's older brother was conceived out of wedlock, and the scandal of that was made worse when Thomas was exiled that same year for dueling with a young courtier.

He was not pardoned for years.

His son was six by the time they first met.

The fallout from all of that drama meant Margaret grew up disconnected from court life and London social scene, despite the Lucases previous years spent building favor as a new money family.

Thomas ultimately died when Margaret was only two, leaving Elizabeth not only responsible for eight children, but for managing the family estate, the massive Lucas Manor, located on the grounds of Saint John's Abbey in Colchester.

Being the youngest of eight, having a single mother, and living on a vast estate meant that Margaret had a certain amount of freedom growing up.

As far as her education went.

She had, as she later accounted, tutors for quote singing, dancing, reading, writing, music and the like.

By and the like, Margaret means other traditionally feminine pursuits.

However, she goes on to note, quote, my mother cared not so much for our dancing and fiddling as that we should be bred virtuously.

Considering these circumstances and consequence of Margaret's mother's first pregnancy, you can probably guess why Margaret's mother prioritized virtue above all else in her daughters.

This might be the part in a typical episode where I would move on to another topic fast forward through Margaret's life, But Margaret's education, or rather lack thereof, has become a central point in her biography thanks to a room of one's own.

Wolfe's criticism of Margaret's quote overgrown prose isn't an indictment of her talent, but rather an indictment of a culture that doesn't prioritize women's education.

Quote what could bind, tame or civilize for human use that wild, generous, untutored intelligence, Wolfe asked.

Without schooling, Wolfe argued, Margaret's intelligence quote poured itself out Higgley pigglety in torrents of rhyme and prose, poetry and philosophy.

The future Duchess had a different view of things.

She once wrote, learning is artificial, but wit is natural.

Margaret was born in the cultural era of James the First, who notoriously feared educated women.

When asked if his daughter should receive a classical education, the king responded, quote to make women learned, and Fox's tame has the same effect, to make them more cunning.

In the absence of a uniquely progressive father, women with the natural wit Margaret defend, had to rely on that wit alone.

It's fascinating to me that Wolfe and James both chose the verb tame in their ideologically opposite arguments.

I'll let you construct your own analysis on that, but tame is definitely not a word Margaret would ever use to describe herself.

She was significantly younger than her other siblings, most of them marrying before she hit her preteens, so she picked up the favored pastime of many only children.

Creating worlds for herself, she lived in her imagination, later reflecting that she was quote addicted from childhood to contem rather than conversation, to solitariness rather than society, to melancholy rather than mirth, to write with the pen than to work with a needle.

Her first writing works were what she called baby books, which she made out of paper and filled with illegible scribbles.

Margaret may not have had a formal education, but she did have luck, the luck of being born into a wealthy family, the luck of being born with a natural curiosity, and the luck of having a mother who let her explore her passions freely, so long as those passions didn't involve boys.

At the same time, Margaret herself felt that she was cursed.

From her youngest to her eldest years, she suffered debilitating social anxiety alongside what she described as melancholy, but we might recognize today as a depressive disorder.

If she was not in the presence of her mother or one of her siblings in public, she could barely function.

She particularly adored her sister Catherine, but from that adoration stemmed more anxiety when she stayed with Catherine and Catherine's husband.

Margaret would often wake her eldest sister if she thought she was breathing too quietly for fear she had died in her sleep, and Margaret would inspect Catherine's food for safety before meals.

Margaret was clearly suffering from intense anxiety, even paranoia, but many of the young woman's fears about losing her family would tragically manifest as the country entered wartime.

Sixteen forty two marked the beginning of the English Civil War between the Royalists and Parliamentarians, with Margaret's family strictly on the side of the former.

The first major incident to affect the Lucas family was part of what historians now refer to as the Stour Valley Riots, a series of attacks against Royalists and suspected Catholics.

In the midnight hours of August twenty second, sixteen forty two, Margaret's elder brother, Sir John Lucas, was busy preparing his horses and weapons to be sent to the Royalist forces.

Unfortunately for John, his preparations had not been subtle, and townsfolk had suspected his plans for some time.

A group of local parliamentarians had been designated to watch the Lucas family home that night, and their stakeout ultimately escalated to ransacking the manor on the grounds of Saint John's Abbey.

In addition to the kinds of destruction you'd expect, records show the family coffins were stabbed through with swords.

Just to give you an idea how unpopular the Lucases and Royalists were.

Where was a nineteen year old Margaret during this fateful night?

We don't exactly know.

Documentation is unclear, and there's no mention of the riots in the Duchess's later autobiography.

That's not to say Margaret shied away from the subject of war.

Her writing dives into discussing it both philosophically and materially.

One quote from her autobiography reads, quote, this unnatural war came like a whirlwind which felled down my siblings' houses, where some were crushed to death, as my youngest brother Sir Charles Lucas and my brother Sir Thomas Lucas.

Yes, the war would ultimately claim the lives of two of Margaret's three brothers, while her mother and one of her sisters would also die during that same period.

Before those fateful days, however, most of the family relocated to London, where they, as Royalists, were in the minority.

In the summer of sixteen forty three, Parliamentary led London was actively preparing for war.

At the same time, Margaret was making a dangerous and notably illegal journey.

Her fifty plus mile trek took her from London to Oxford, where she was going to go to the front lines to join the Royalist army and meet Queen Henrietta Maria.

Upon hearing that the Queen did not have, in her words, the same number of maids of honor she was used to have, the horror, Margaret begged her family to let her go to Henrietta Maria's side.

Margaret's mother and siblings were understandably reluctant to a after all, Margaret shut down in social situations without them, but Margaret was so persistent that they relented.

When Margaret predictably begged her family to return, finding that her anxiety was in fact debilitating, her family made her stay like the English Court was sleep away camp that she was committed to attending.

Margaret's decision to join in spite of her limitations was representative of an underlying drive that would motivate her for the rest of her life.

Margaret's shy, bookish disposition was accompanied by an intense desire to learn and observe, as well as the kind of self importance you'd find in a wealthy youngest daughter.

In the absence of a university system that valued women, the kind that Wolf advocated for, Court was Margaret's only option to spread her wings in young adulthood.

If you asked her, However, Margaret's decision was purely born out of her sense of duty as a good Royalist daughter.

As a royalist, Margaret almost certainly idolized Queen Henrietta.

Maria.

The Queen was a heavily publicized figure at that time, the subject of many headlines for her trip to Holland to pawn the crown jewels for war funds.

When she returned, she toured the country with the King's army, where she was known to, as one account put it, ride astride her horse without the effeminacy of a woman, and to live with her soldiers as if they were her brethren, as is expected.

Parliamentarian newspapers focused on building resentment toward her supposed gender transgressions instead of her politics.

Quote this kingdom is woefully ruined one read by a conjugal conspiracy by a plot in matrimony.

Henrietta Maria, in response to their claims, called herself the she Majesty General Lissima, which as far as I know, is still up for grabs as a drag name.

In Margaret's sixteen sixty two play Bell in Campo, Margaret writes of a general's wife, Lady Victoria, who assembles a troop of wives to accompany their husbands to the front lines.

Lady Victoria is described as the general, less instructuresque, ruler and commanderess, and her troop of women even don Amazonian armor to fight, ultimately winning a battle where the men fail.

Lady Victoria delivers a speech condemning the quote masculine sex who believe that women quote are only fit to breed and bring forth children, and contradicts the idea that women have quote no ingenuity for inventions, nor subtle wit for politicians, nor judgment for counselors, nor secrecy for trust, nor method for keeping the peace, nor courage to make war.

It's not hard to imagine from whom Margaret was drawing inspiration for Victoria in that proto feminist piece of fiction.

By the time Margaret arrived at the Queen's side in Oxford, however, the Queen wasn't exactly living in the barracks.

Instead, she was residing in Merton College, where her rooms had been redecorated to model the royal household.

As a maid of honor, Margaret's job would be to be quote in presence.

What did that mean in practice?

A lot of standing around.

She would arrive at the Queen's presence chamber at eleven each morning and sit on the sidelines until Henrietta Maria wished for entertainment or needed news relayed.

This continued all day until supper time, when the maids retired to their own chambers.

To make sure strict household rules were followed, Margaret and her fellow maids were under constant surveillance by the appointed Mother of Maids, who was to report them to the Lord Chamberlain for any transgressions.

This was undoubtedly an oppressive environment for Margaret, who was used to her solitude.

She later described herself in those early years at court as like one that had no foundation to stand on, and she apparently was so afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing that she opted for near constant silence.

In spite of her shyness, or perhaps because of it.

Margaret was also known for designing her own clothes to her personal tastes, which often made her stand out for better or worse in such a conform armist environment.

They would also contribute to her later reputation as the quote crazy Duchess.

Things began to rapidly change at Court in the summer of sixteen forty four.

Henrietta Marie was at that time then heavily pregnant and began to fear for her safety and the safety of her unborn child in Oxford, so she and her court began a journey to leave England.

After escaping in disguise, the group made it to Falmouth, where a ship was ready to take them to France.

They set sail, but they were quickly pursued by cannon fire from a parliamentary ship.

Henrietta Maria, like Margaret's lady Victoria, decisively took charge of the situation.

Margaret and her fellow ladies cried in horror when the queen told the captain that in the event that escape became impossible, he was to blow up the ship rather than let her be taken alive.

Things did not become that dire, but as soon as they were clear of the political threat, nature's cruel neutrality offered another, as a terrible storm nearly destroyed the Chip.

Storms would ultimately become a repeated motif in Margaret's fiction, The Blazing World begins with one, and in a sixteen fifty six poem, Margaret tells the story of a woman who is shipwrecked in the Kingdom of Sensuality, where she is sold into prostitution, shoots her would be solicitor, and cross dresses to escape by boat.

That woman's second journey at sea brings another storm fortune, Margaret writes, irritated the gods against them, making the clouds and seas to meet them, Showers to beat them, winds to toss them, thunder to affront them, lightning to amaze them.

This description is evocative, but her own experience with a tempest is another traumatic event that Margaret avoids recounting in her memoir.

We don't know how Margaret felt during this actually haerlleoss journey, but through her prose we can see storms become a source of both fear and awe, both a metaphor for trauma and a reflection of life's painful realities.

The ship ultimately arrived in France, where Margaret would remain until sixteen fifty one.

If she felt isolated in the English court, the experience was magnified tenfold upon her arrival in the French court, where she could not speak the language fluently and where she was a sea away from her family.

Despite all of that, Margaret managed to find a bright spot in a dark place.

In sixteen forty five, Margaret and her ever boored fellow ladies witnessed an exciting spectacle when one of the King's Lords of the Privy Council arrived at the French court in a lavish carriage pulled by nine horses.

This dramatic man was William Cavendish, the Marquis of Newcastle, and he would marry Margaret before the year was out.

William was a prominent, respected literary and scientific patron.

History has given a name the Wellbeck Academy to the intellectual circle that he curated.

He hosted many gatherings at Wellbeck, the Cavendish family seat, for the likes of the playwright Ben Jonson, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, the naturalist Robert Payne, and many more.

However, William did not have a stellar reputation at the time of his flamboyant arrival, which was in reality an elaborate display of supposed wealth designed to trick creditors into lending him more money.

His name currently bore the weight of his rather disastrous loss as a commander in the Battle of marston Moor, which was a loss so spectacular that he opted for a self imposed exile.

The writer and politician Sir Philip Warwick wrote that Cavendish was a generous, loyal man, but his failing was that he had a tincture of a romantic spirit and had the misfortune to be somewhat of a poet.

That apparently made him a lousy general, but a wonderful match for our Margaret.

Their attraction was quick and mutual.

In Margaret's own words, William pleased to take some particular notice of me and express more than an ordinary affection for me.

More than ordinary may be an understatement.

Between April and December of sixteen forty five, aka the beginning of their courtship to their marriage, Margaret wrote William at least twenty one love letters.

In response, he wrote her over seventy poems.

That's more than one every two days.

Their match was surprising due to, in part, the difference in their statutes, a thirty ish year age gap, and Margaret's earlier declaration that she generally shunned men's company as much as she could.

Friends tried to keep them apart, Margaret's friends cautioning her that William had a reputation as a casanova.

William's friend reminding him of the out of wedlock circumstances of Margaret's eldest brother's birth and the scandal that still hung over the family name.

But their protests were all in vain.

It was love in their courtship.

Margaret was hindered by her own anxiety, but William understood her true nature and continued to pen passionate, sometimes excessively passionate poems.

I simply cannot continue this episode without reading you a couplet from a poem he wrote about the couple's age gap, quote, no man can love more, or Love's higher, old and dry wood makes the best fire.

If I have to sit with that innuendo, so do you.

Margaret's letters to William are also the first pieces of writing we have from her.

They were not just declarations of love, but observations of life at court and reflections of her own state of mind.

Suppose me now, in a very melancholy humor, she writes to William, for I see all things subject to alteration and change, and our hopes as if they had taken opium.

But I should be lost to those things if I did not meet some of yours to restore me to myself again.

Even in a simple letter at a low point, we can see Margaret's clever grasp of language.

I find the description of hopes as if they had taken opium as a particularly evocative metaphor for the bleakness of depression.

We also see how she had quickly come to rely on William to alleviate those dark thoughts in place of her mother and siblings across the sea.

As a listener of the show, you may be waiting for the other shoe to drop, knowing how often unhappiness plagues marriages among nobility.

But this is a rare noble blood love story with a happy ending.

Their marriage was both long, last day and mutually supportive.

William's unconditional support of his wife was more important than ever when it came to the issue of having children, or rather not having children.

It appears the couple did initially try, but after two years with no success, William sought a doctor for advice.

The doctor essentially told William that Margaret's intense melancholy, which was believed at the time to be the result of an excess of black bile in the body, would make pregnancy and birth incredibly difficult and likely result in losing the child.

William already had children, more importantly, heirs from his first marriage, but he was disappointed to learn he would not have more with Margaret.

Margaret was only disappointed on William's behalf, but noted that her apparent infertility quote never lessened his love and affection for me.

Not only did Margaret accept the reality that she would never become a mother, she fully embraced it.

In her writing.

She repeatedly explains how the absence of children and chores of quote housewifery as she described it, allowed her to devote her time to her true babies her books.

In her sixteen sixty four collection of fictional Correspondence Sociable Letters, Margaret even proposes the idea that having children is gainless for women.

Sons carry on the legacy of the father, while daughters will be quote ingrafted into the stock of another family.

Margaret takes this second notion even further, daughters are to be accounted as movable goods or furniture.

It would be easy to write that off as cynicism after her own experience, but even if there is some defensiveness present, there's no denying the fact that she's putting to paper ideas that wouldn't be part of mainstream feminist conversations or debates for centuries to come.

Following their first few years of married life in Paris, the couple moved to Antwerp in the late sixteen forties, where they rented the house of the famous Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens from his widow.

Their desire to live in an artistic home apparently outranked their desire to live in a well staffed home.

Money was tight, with William still in debt, so they let go of most of their servants upon the move.

What was a childless couple in a cultured home to do but create a space for intellectual gatherings.

William, as we know, had the connections to do so.

One dinner even hosted his friend Hobbes and his philosophical rival Descartes at the same table.

I can imagine, and the atmosphere felt like talking politics with the family at Thanksgiving.

A fixture in the home during this time was William's brother Charles.

He either lived with or nearby to the couple during these years and became an important person in Margaret's life.

The Cavendish brothers devoted time to giving Margaret the education that she was not afforded in her childhood.

William, to his credit, had provided his own daughters from his first marriage with a rare formidable education.

From her husband, Margaret learned about politics and history, and became well acquainted with Hobbes's work on society and government.

From her brother in law, she learned about science.

Charles was a mathematician and was working on his own experiments in the new age of scientific discovery.

He was a good teacher.

He brought Margaret a model of the Copernican planetary system, so she could visualize the movements and translated theories about atoms that were only available at the time in Latin.

He also gave Margaret access to his experiment's first hand, which was her first time using a microscope.

It would become a repeated point in later writings that Margaret now somewhat famously did not endorse the instrument that she called the artificial informer, believing that it quote more deludes than informs.

One of her disavowals of the microscope found in sixteen sixty six's Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, focuses on the recent discovery that flies possessed clusters that contained about fourteen thousand eyes.

We know today that that figure is a misconception, but flies do in fact have come pound eyes made up of hundreds of smaller photoreceptors.

Margaret's natural philosophy was grounded in the principles of reason and rationality, which she believed nature functions according to.

In that case, what sense would it make that flies have thousands of eyes but can't see as well as humans do with two?

In her words, quote, if two eyes be stronger than a thousand, then nature is to be blamed.

That she gives such a number of eyes to so little a creature.

But nature is wiser than we or any creatures able to conceive, and surely she would not work to no purpose or in vain.

But there appears as much wisdom in the fabric and structure of her works as there is variety in them.

Margaret speaks of nature with a romantic, even religious reverence.

Today we understand that her perspective lacks nuanced, but her work is also cautious of a very relevant subject, the hubris of man.

While this work comes from a writer much more certain in her convictions.

It was during this period of education around sixteen fifty that Margaret began writing formally, experimenting with essays, allegories, and more.

In writing, Margaret found not only a way to understand the world as she always longed to, but peace of mind in a way she had never experienced.

In her words, quote, my mind is become an absolute monarch, ruling alone, my thoughts as a peaceable commonwealth, and my life an expert soldier which my Lord meaning William Settled, composed and instructed.

This description tells us as much about Margaret's state of mind as it does her politics.

Only a royalist could describe alleviation from their depression as a benevolent monarch enforcing peace.

Putting aside the political implications for a second, however, this statement is also telling when juxtaposed against the perception of Margaret's work popularized by Virginia Woolf.

The quote crazy duchess who had become a bogey to frighten clever girls with, was, in fact, by her own analysis, at her most composed when writing she should have had a microscope put in her hand, wolf declared she should have been taught to look at the stars and reason scientifically.

Her wits were turned with solitude and freedom.

No one checked her, no one taught her.

We know that this was actually untrue.

Margaret did have a microscope in her hand.

She just didn't like what she saw.

She had teachers invested in her education, just not formal ones, and just not when she was exclusively young.

Perhaps the truth is more simple than what Wolfe tries to argue.

Margaret had more passion for the written word than talent for it.

To pursue that passion formally for a woman of her time, was a remarkable feat in itself.

While Margaret had found her passion, her career would not begin until she returned to England in sixteen fifty three.

Shoppers in London bookstores could find a rare site a book openly written by a woman.

If they opened the cover of Poems and Fancies, they would be greeted with a title page in large print written by the right Honorable the Lady Margaret, Countess of Newcastle.

As Wolf remarked in a room of one's own, any woman who published under her own name risked being thought a monster.

Margaret agreed, if I am condemned, she reflected, I shall be annihilated.

That's part one of our episode on Margaret Cavendish.

But keep listening after a brief break to hear a little bit more about Virginia Wolf's take on the Crazy Duchess.

Wolfe's opinions on Margaret's work were highly critical, yes, but also carried an undercurrent of admiration in the common reader.

Wolf approaches Cavendish's work with a different perspective.

Quote though her philosophies are futile and her plays intolerable, the vast bull of the Duchess is levined by a vein of authentic fire.

One cannot help following the lure of her erratic and lovable personality as it meanders and twinkles through page after page.

Her simplicity is so open, her intelligence so active, her sympathy with fairies and animals so true and tender.

She has the freakishness of an elf, the irresponsibility of some non human creature, its heartlessness, and its charm.

While these compliments are arguably not very complimentary and surely double edged, there is something genuinely earnest to them.

Perhaps Wolff had some cavendish her after all.

Noble Blood is a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky.

Noble Blood is hosted by me Dana Schwartz, with additional writing and research by Hannah Johnston, Hannahswick, Courtney Sender, Amy Hit and Julia Melaney.

The show is edited and produced by Jesse Funk, with supervising producer rima il Kaali and executive producers Aaron Manke, Trevor Young, and Matt Frederick.

For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.