Lady Hester Pulter

Lady Hester Pulter (née Ley) (1605–1678) was a seventeenth-century writer of poetry and prose, whose manuscript was rediscovered in 1996 in the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds. Her work includes poems, which are collected in the manuscript into sections titled "Poems Breathed Forth By the Noble Hadassas" and "The Sighes of a Sad Soule Emblematically Breath'd Forth by the Noble Hadassas," and an unfinished prose romance titled "The Unfortunate Florinda."

Life

Birth

From the discovery of Pulter's manuscript until 2021, the precise date of Pulter's birth was a matter of scholarly debate. Calculations based on dates referenced in Pulter's poetry produced conflicting results, and material evidence from the historical record was scarce. However, analyzing a manuscript known as "The Declaracion of Ley," which was composed by Pulter's father and documents his children's birth dates, allows for a precise determination of Pulter's date of birth as 8 June 1605.

Background

Pulter was the daughter of James Ley, who became the first Earl of Marlborough in 1626, and Mary Ley (née Petty), James Ley's first wife. Pulter was one of eleven children. It is speculated that the family had a strong connection to John Milton through his Sonnet 10 which addresses Pulter's sister, Margaret Ley, to a small degree, while focusing on James Ley, "that good Earl." In 1620, at the age of fifteen, Hester married Arthur Pulter and proceeded to spend much of her life at his estate, Broadfield Hall, near Cottered in Hertfordshire. (See image here) The Pulters had fifteen children, seven sons and eight daughters, only two of whom outlived their mother. During the English Civil Wars, the Pulters withdrew from public life, as a way for Arthur to remain politically neutral. Hester Pulter did not remain quiet like her husband, and began writing politically based poetry during the 1640s and the 1650s. Hester Pulter died in 1678; the exact date is unknown. She was buried on 9 April 1678. Her husband outlived both Hester and their children, dying on 27 January 1689. They were survived by their only grandson, James Forester, and he became the sole heir.

Career

Until the discovery of the Leeds manuscript found in 1996, Lady Hester Pulter was an unknown contributor to British literature. The only claim to fame that the Pulters previously had was a place in Sir Henry Chauncy's history of Hertfordshire. The connection between her sister, Margaret, and the London literary world through Milton might have been a way for Pulter to keep up with the newest literature, which shows in her own poetry.

The English Civil War ended when Cromwell won at the 1645 Battle of Naseby. Afterwards, King Charles I was imprisoned, and later executed, inspiring many of Lady Hester Pulter's poems.

Pulter's writings are mostly political bits about the English Civil Wars, from a royalist standpoint. The goal of Charles I was to defend the established church and state of England. Under the pen name Hadassas, Pulter began writing 130 folios of poetry and 30 folios of an unfinished prose manuscript. A majority of her poems were about the death of King Charles I, in which she condemned his killers and praised the dead monarch. The name Hadassas comes from the biblical Book of Esther.

Works

In the mid-1990s, early modernist literary scholar Mark Robson discovered "Poems breathed forth by the Noble Hadrassas", a previously unknown set of poems by Pulter, and "The Unfortunate Florinda" in the University of Leeds Brotherton Library. The manuscript includes about 130 folios of poems and 30 folios of an unfinished manuscript of a prose romance named "The Unfortunate Florinda." (See image here) It was likely written during the 1640s and 1650s, and copied in the mid-1650s. The manuscript demonstrates Pulter's knowledge in writing and astronomy, as well as her extreme royalism. Unlike her husband, Hester Pulter was not silent, nor cautious about taking sides. Her poems showed her outrage toward the murder of King Charles I.

"Poems breathed forth by the Noble Hadassas" and "The Sighes of a Sad Soule Emblematically Breath'd Forth By the Noble Hadassas"

(See image here)

The first ninety or so poems made up the section titled Poems breathed forth, as well as a smaller sub-section titled Hadassas Chast Fances. The second section, consisting of forty or so poems, is titled The Sighes of a Sad Soule Emblematically Breath'd Forth. These poems are of the lyrical and occasional verse. The first four poems show the diversity of Pulter's poetry: national politics, pastoral, spiritual astronomy, and light and dark mythology. A distinct characteristic of Pulter's poetry is her ability to mix personal, political, and planetary themes. One example of this is the section consisting of the literary works Of Night and Morning, Universall dissolution, and the series of poems following afterwards in which personal and national grief mix. For Pulter, political concerns and personal life were not separate. This is shown in how two poems about the death of her daughter are preceded by poems lamenting the death of other Royalists. With the mixing of the themes within "Poems breathed forth," it seems as if Pulter would have her audience think that the losses of her children, as well as those of the Royalists, are connected through the destruction of the earth that resulted from the English Civil War.

"The Unfortunate Florinda"

The Unfortunate Florinda contained many references to the Rape of Lucretia within it

The last section of the Leeds manuscript is titled The Unfortunate Florinda. A prose romance, it was left unfinished and was transcribed between March and December 1661. It seemed to be written after Poems breathed forth by the Noble Hadrassas. Furthermore, the romance seems to have been a second thought, even though in the same script as the original manuscript. The volume was reversed and it began from the back. The apparent lack of preparations could mean that Pulter didn't consider The Unfortunate Florinda to be equal to Poems Breathed Forth By the Noble Hadrassas.

According to scholar Peter C. Herman, in the poem Pulter "adapts the historical legends of how King Roderigo's raping the daughter of Count Julian led to the Islamic conquest of Spain to express her dismay at the sexual corruption of King Charles II's court". Pulter's reconsideration of political views she had previously held led her to "challenge the primacy of Christianity by giving a sympathetic portrait of pagan belief; the dominant view of sexual violence by endorsing the Augustinian view of rape as blaming the rapist, not his victim; and conventional views of race by depicting the African women as fair while contrasting their virtue with the sexually corrupt West, Spain in particular".

Plot summary

The story takes place in Spain, when King Roderigo has taken over the throne. A group of African noblewomen are shipwrecked on the Spanish coast. Roderigo falls in love with the Moorish princess Zabra, and marries her after she converts to Christianity. However, Roderigo then lusts after Florinda, the daughter of a Spanish courtier and diplomat. Using his friend, Alphonso, Roderigo pursues Florinda. However, Florinda rejects him, causing Roderigo to hate her.

The narrative turns from the primary storyline to focus on Fidelia, Zabra's companion who was in Africa all this time, who arrives unexpectedly and tells her own story of adventure. In it, another African king, whom Pulter does not name, demanded Fidelia as his mistress on pain of death. Fidelia and her lover, Amandus, who is the Prince of Naples, kill the African king through a trick in bed. They escape, but are captured by pirates and separated.

In the main storyline, Roderigo rapes Florinda and threatens her with terrible things should she tell anyone else what occurred. Florinda, promising revenge, tells her father of the rape, and he joins in her search for revenge. The entire family, after learning what happened, are outraged by King Roderigo's actions. They all proceed to travel to Africa and ask King Almanzar to invade Spain, deeming regicide as an appropriate punishment for rape. Almanzar agrees to invade Spain, and the manuscript ends here.

Astronomy in Pulter's works

Astronomy as a means for spiritual reflection

Astronomical discoveries of the seventeenth century were embraced through many facets of Hester Pulter's poetry. Poems such as "Universal Dissolution", "The Revolution", "A Solitary Complaint", and "Why Must I Thus Forever Be Confined" are examples of Pulter's literary work that express an interest in astronomical imagery. Tamara Mahadin points out that Pulter embraced Copernican cosmology, as seen in the beginning of her poem "A Solitary Complaint" with the lines, "Whenas those vast and glorious globes above/ Eternally in treble motions move." The phrase "treble motions" reaffirms the Copernican theory of the planets revolving around the sun due to the new heliotropic center of the universe. Mahadin describes Pulter's use of the cosmos as a means for comfort since this interest offered an escape from the many pains she endured. Pulter's knowledge of recent astronomical discoveries acted as an opportunity for spiritual reflection within her domestic life. She examined the planets as significant to life on Earth, embracing them as non separate. Pulter's poem "A Solitary Complaint" examines the sadness she felt in relation with the planetary system, "Must I still be confined to this sad grove."

The escape the Pulter yearns for can be found in many of her poems such as "Why Must I Thus Forever Be Confined," where she imagines her own death to cause the dispersal of her atoms around the universe to be used in the creation of a new world. The final lines, "Until, by other atoms thrust and hurled/ We give a being to another world," suggest this insight. A similar message is found in Pulter's "The Revolution." Leah Knight and Wendy Wall explain that Pulter's allure with the reuse of her physical body in the heavens is present in this poem, proving an embrace of cosmology. Pulter was fascinated with the purification of ancient life forms through disintegration into a final unknown form. The disintegration is a vehicle for exhilaration for a Pulter who imagined her thoughts to travel from a confined body, due to childbearing or illness, to an intricately detailed universe.

Motifs in Pulter's works

Circle motif in Pulter's work

Circles and circle imagery appear numerous times within Pulter's works. Some examples of the circle motif show up in the poems, "The Circle", "The Welcome", "The Eclipse", and "Upon the Death of my Dear and Lovely Daughter Jane Pulter". However, Elizabeth Scott-Baumann observed that the word circle is missing throughout the set of "The Circle" poems, except within the titles and once in "The Circle [1]", making the meaning behind the imagery possibly ambiguous to the reader. The circle motif appears in various poems sparking from Pulter's interest in the theological, alchemical, and astronomical spheres of the world. The theme of repetition and returning to one's beginning or to a feeling is present in Pulter's work.

Circles in a theological sense

Leah Knight and Wendy Wall describe Pulter's theological poems as fixated on eschatology, a theology which focuses on death, the end times, and what happens after. Pulter believed that in her death, her soul would return to the heavens, indicating that life works in a circular motion. Elizabeth Kolkovich notes that this was a source of comfort for Pulter as seen in "The Circle [1]" with the line "No grief shall so emergent be/ To separate my soul from Thee". This line expresses Pulter's feeling that although she will die, she will feel no grief as her soul is returning to God. The circle motif is found within Pulter's views on the cycle of life and death, within the circular motion of returning to the dust God created life from.

A similar sentiment is expressed in "The Circle [2]" with the line "Forgetting quite that they were once refined/ By time and fate to dust are all calcined". Pulter ridicules the goal of alchemists who tried to find a cure for death as impractical due to the circular nature of life she believed in. While also referring to the alchemical cycle of calcination, Jayne Archer explains that these alchemical references can also be read as metaphor in a religious aspect. The circle motif is found again with the parallel of the process of calcination turning the silver and gold into dust with the process of death and the human body eventually turning to dust, in which dust has the context of the same material God is said to have created mankind from, thus returning once more to the state of origin.

However, within "Upon the Death of my Dear and Lovely Daughter Jane Pulter", Kolkovich observes that this poem expresses Pulter's struggle to find the comfort she had in her faith that death reunites the soul with God and is trapped within the cycle of grief. While Pulter has the belief that Jane is reunited with God, her grief is something she cannot move past and finds herself continuously coming back to despite how many years it has been. Her repeated feelings reflect the same circular nature of life. The circle motif is found within Pulter's faith, but also reconciled with the expression that while she remains on Earth, she will be in the cycle of grief which only death can break her from.

Bibliography

• Eardley, A. (2010). "Lady Hester Pulter's Date of Birth". Notes and Queries. 57 (4): 498–501. doi:10.1093/notesj/gjq153.
• Herman, Peter C. (2010). "Lady Hester Pulter's the Unfortunate Florinda: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Rape". Renaissance Quarterly. 63 (4): 1208–1246. doi:10.1086/658510.
• Robson, Mark (2004). "Pulter [née Ley], Lady Hester". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 1 (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/68094. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
• Christian, Stefan G. (2012). The Poems of Lady Hester Pulter (1605?–1678): An Annotated Edition (PhD thesis). University of Massachusetts Amherst. ProQuest 1240643123.
• "Milton: Sonnet 10 - Notes". www.dartmouth.edu. Retrieved 2016-04-20.
• Eardley, A. (2008). Lady Hester Pulter's Book of Emblemes (Unpublished PhD Thesis). University of Warwick.

Further reading

• Lady Hester Pulter: A Digital Companion
• Pulter, Lady Hester (2014), Eardley, Alice, ed., Poems, Emblems, and the Unfortunate Florinda, Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, ISBN 978-0-7727-2164-8.
• https://library.leeds.ac.uk/special-collections-explore/7610
• http://orlando.cambridge.org/public/svPeople?person_id=pulthe
• https://episteme.revues.org/729
• The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making
• Dunn, Rachel. "Breaking a Tradition: Hester Pulter and the English Emblem Book." The Seventeenth Century 30, no. 1 (2015): 55–73.
• Eardley, A. "[null Hester Pulter's 'Indivisibles' and the Challenges of Annotating Early Modern Women's Poetry]." SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 2012 Winter 52, no. 1: 117–141. MLA International Biography.
• Robson, M. "Swansongs: Reading Voice in the Poetry of Lady Hester Pulter." English Manuscript Studies 1100-1700 Vol. 9 (2000): 238–256. MLA International Biography.