SOURCE: King, Kathryn R. and Medoff, Jeslyn. “Jane Barker and Her Life (1652-1732): The Documentary Record.” Eighteenth-Century Life 21, no. 3 (November 1997): 16-38.

[In the following essay, King and Medoff offer an account of the life of Barker that contrasts with the biography that has been erroneously reconstructed from her fictional works.]

Jane Barker's time has come. That this poet, novelist, lay physician, Catholic convert, exile, and Jacobite is an immensely intriguing figure has been an open secret among specialists for the past fifteen years. Now that much of her best work is finally available in modern editions, Barker's stock as a writer in the larger scholarly community is almost certain to rise. The 1996-97 academic year alone saw the publication of a paperback edition of three of her novels and a selection of her verse; the inclusion of her work in two important anthologies, one of which claimed for her first novel “nearly canonical” status; and an extended discussion of her poems in a critical study.¹ Since this recent spate of scholarship will surely generate further interest in an author whose life and personal circumstances have been, until quite recently, deeply shadowed, we offer here for the first time an extended, archivally based account of the life of Jane Barker.

To date, accounts of the life have relied heavily on Barker's own writings, especially the three seemingly autobiographical Galesia fictions (1713-26).² Their relationship to the actualities of the life has been more often invoked than investigated, however. A 1983 article that has been the starting point for much subsequent work on Barker asserts, for example, that readers are “safe in assuming her works to be autobiographical”—when, as Jane Spencer was the first to admit, almost nothing was then known about Barker.³ Critics since have been content to operate in a near vacuum so far as real biographical information goes. Less excusably, so have biographers, who regularly resort to the fictions for at least some portion of their biographical “fact.” Such incautiousness is not hard to understand. The novels certainly seem to be “about” their author: not only is Galesia's interior life rendered with a psychological complexity well in advance of anything then available in novelistic discourse, but as a heroine she behaves in ways unheard of in narratives of the time.⁴ Add to this the fact that details from the fictions could be seen to match what little was known about the life and it becomes only too easy to see why some biographers would permit themselves to quarry the novels as if they constituted alternate versions of the documentary record. Our research suggests, however, that this uncritical reliance on Barker's self-representations has distorted our understanding of the life and has blinded us to some of the more interesting features of the novels, as well.

The present account makes available biographical information that has come to light in the decade or so since Spencer wrote. Much of it was excavated by Jeslyn Medoff in connection with research on seventeenth-century women poets for the anthology Kissing the Rod (1989).⁵ She has since been joined in the archives by others, among them Carol Barash, Carol Shiner Wilson, and Kathryn King,⁶ whose endeavors make it at last possible to tell the story of the life independent of Barker's own accounts.⁷ Barker was not a public figure and was only indirectly involved in affairs of state; she belonged to the minor gentry; she never married; and from 1685 or thereabouts she belonged to an outlawed church. Much of her life, in other words, was played out on the edges of the official system of record-keeping. Nonetheless, a good deal of documentation is now available for analysis.

Our account relies mainly on four classes of evidence. First, materials drawn from a variety of local archives, as these permit more informed speculation about the social and economic standing of the Barker family. Second, a recently discovered Chancery case from 1717, which sheds light on Barker's personal circumstances during the period when she began publishing her novels. Third, two extraordinary letters by Barker, the only correspondence by her known to have survived, which offer glimpses of her involvement in the Jacobite network and illustrate in macabre detail or thinly veiled code her steadfast devotion to a lost cause. Fourth, the Magdalen Manuscript, a substantial volume of original verse produced by Barker while an exile at St. Germain at the turn of the century. The volume, now in the library of Magdalen College, Oxford, casts an invaluable light on Barker's circumstances during a hitherto obscure period of her life and contains besides an important conversion narrative in the voice of Fidelia, her Jacobite and Roman Catholic persona.⁸ Since we seek to sift fact from fiction, however, we generally refrain from using either the Fidelia or the Galesia narratives as biographical evidence, except as they suggest avenues for further investigation or illustrate Barker's tendency to recast personal experience in mythic or politicized terms.

Our aim is to supply materials for more informed readings of Barker's novels and for closer study of her purposes and strategies as an autobiographer, as well as to lay the groundwork for further biographical investigations. We do not seek to tease out the complex interplay of fact and fiction in Barker's novels, still less to theorize the link between life-writing and fiction in Barker's or early modern women's fiction more generally. This we must leave to others. But the gap between the “life-writing” and the “life” that our research exposes argues for more complicated understandings of the autobiographical tendency of her work.⁹ Barker was unquestionably a self-regarding writer, mindful always of her singularity and insistent on her otherness; her narratives exhibit a strong desire to “write the self.” But this self-fashioning impulse is bound up in a web of political and religious commitments whose threads we are only now coming to recognize. This much is clear: in Barker's hands life-writing is anything but unmediated life-story. It is, among other things, a vehicle for projecting the experience of the Catholic and Jacobite oppositional communities with which she strongly identified, and serves novelistic purposes that originate, paradoxically, in a retreat from the modernity with which her fictions are most often associated. If, then, the following account warns against undue confidence in the factual reliability of the Galesia and Fidelia narratives, it also challenges the received image of Jane Barker as exemplar of emerging bourgeois respectability and suggests that critics would do well to look beyond the coming-to-writing themes that have attracted virtually all commentary on the novels,¹⁰ and begin to explore the links between her novelistic experiments and her conservative political agenda.

FAMILY AND FRIENDS

The family Jane Barker was born into is invariably described as staunchly royalist, but not a great deal is known about either side beyond her own accounts, which tend to cast family history in terms of a mythology of loyal sufferings. On her mother's side, “many Heroes” (of the Connock family) “had shed their dearest Blood” during the civil wars;¹¹ on her father's, some “were in Battle slain, and some in Prison died; some were ruin'd in their Estates, some in their Persons.”¹² The oft-told story of gallant sacrifice and loss in the king's cause is rehearsed with full royalist panache in one of the manuscript poems:

          My father and his brother Cavaliers,
Stuck to their king as did their ancestors,
Wives portions, and paternal means they spent
To serve the King against the Parliment,
Thus for their Loyalty being both undone,
Were forc'd to quit the court, the camp, and town,
They sold their swords and other warlike things,
As did their wives, their petycotes and rings,
And therwithal, bought equipage for plows,
Betook themselves, to mannage sheep and cows,
Instead of scarlet, Russet now they wore,
And sheep-hooks were the leading staves they bore,
Free from court factions, and the discontents,
Which dayly rise in Rebell Parliaments. …
And for their Loyal losses, never felt regrett.(13)

This is just one of many places where, in the absence of external evidence, it is impossible to disentangle biographical truth from royalist mythology.

What can be established from external sources is quickly summarized. Her mother, Anne, was a Connock (or Connoch), a Cornish gentry family that produced a number of army officers,¹⁴ a scattering of members of parliament—not all of them staunchly pro-Stuart,¹⁵ and, in the eighteenth century, members of the Jacobite baronetage.¹⁶ The particulars of Anne's birth remain untraced, but it seems likely she was descended from an unlanded branch of the family. She was related to the noted Whig physician, Richard Lower (1631-91), who is made to address Jane Barker as “dear Cousin” in one of her published poems.¹⁷ Of Thomas Barker's family even less is known. It seems to have been armigerous, for the seal on his will bears a coat of arms; he is identified as a gentleman in most surviving documents. Barker tells us that her father “lost a very honourable and profitable Place” at the court of Charles I (BG, p. 3), a claim that might seem to owe more to royalist convention than fact. It is corroborated, however, by the entry recording Barker's burial (in St. Germain 29 March 1732) describing her as the daughter of the “Secretaire du grand sceau d'Angleterre”—meaning, perhaps, that Thomas had been one of the secretaries to the lord keeper of the Great Seal of England.¹⁸

By the late 1640s, Thomas and Anne Barker were living in Blatherwick, Northamptonshire, a village not far from Stamford, Lincolnshire.¹⁹ Here Jane was born in May 1652, the only daughter and second of three surviving children.²⁰ It is not clear what brought the Barkers to Blatherwick, but we do know that by the early 1660s Thomas was working in some capacity for (or with) Robert Clayton, the London “money-scrivener” who, with his partner John Morris, helped invent modern banking. (Described by his recent biographer as a “self-made Midas,” Clayton would be knighted in 1671 and in 1679-80 serve as lord mayor of London; but during the period of his association with Thomas Barker he was still an obscure figure, just beginning to build his immense fortune.)²¹ A signed letter of 14 July 1661 would seem to indicate that Thomas was acting as Clayton's agent in an area that included parts of Rutland, Lincolnshire, and Northamptonshire. The letter, addressed to Clayton at the Flying Horse (the shop in Cornhill that until 1666 was the site of Clayton's and Morris's bank), is signed “you ^r Loving ffrind,” implying a personal as well as professional relationship (NRO, Clayton MS 16). A bond signed by Clayton and Morris in May 1663 and countersigned by “Tho. Barker” suggests Barker may have been working at least part of the time in London, since in the early 1660s Clayton and Morris used their own employees to witness documents signed at the Flying Horse.²²

By August 1662 Thomas held the lease to the manor house and land in Wilsthorpe, Lincolnshire, a village six miles northeast of Stamford, just west of the low-lying region called “the Fens,” granting him use of some eighty acres of arable land, several acres of water meadow, a number of enclosed fields, and an orchard.²³ The hearth tax returns of 1665 charge “Mr. Barker” of “Wilstropp” with five hearths.²⁴ It was in the Wilsthorpe manor house that Jane lived, with intervals in London and St. Germain, from the 1660s until at least 1717.

Like other families of only moderate prosperity, the Barkers pinned their ambitions and concentrated their limited resources on the eldest son and heir. Edward's academic career witnesses to the minor gentry's pursuit of advancement through the channels of elite education: when nearly thirteen he was sent to the prestigious Merchant Taylors' School in London;²⁵ he matriculated five years later (on 3 July 1668) at St. John's College, Oxford,²⁶ receiving a B.A. in 1672 and an M.A. from Christ Church on 8 March 1675.²⁷ (He may have changed colleges in order to become eligible for one of the Christ Church Studentships reserved for students pursuing medical studies.)²⁸ It is possible that he considered a career in law at one time, for on 9 March 1670 he was admitted a student at Gray's Inn, although he may instead have been following custom in cultivating the social connections offered by a stint at one of the inns of court.²⁹ In the poetry and novels the Edward-figure is consistently represented as a medical student.

By the fall of 1675 Edward Barker was almost certainly dead. The precise date and circumstances are unknown, though in “On the Death of my Brother” Jane explains in heroic couplets that he died of a “Feavour” in spite of the efforts of his medical colleagues (PR, p. 48). His death probably occurred between March, when he received his M.A., and November, for a new lease to the Wilsthorpe property dated 2 December names Jane Barker as “a life”: it was to be valid for Thomas Barker, “his Exec ^rs adm ^rs & assigns” for a “tenure of ffour score and nineteen years from these next ensuing if so be Jane Barker daughter to the s[ai]d Thomas Barker shall so long live.”³⁰ Were Edward still alive and healthy, Jane Barker would hardly be named as a life. Edward died, we may conclude, at twenty-five; Jane would have been twenty-three.³¹ She continued to lament his early death in verse and fiction published as late as 1723.

In at least one respect Edward's place in Jane's literary life has been exaggerated, however. He is often credited with introducing her to the university men with whom she exchanged much of her early verse (some of it printed in 1687 in Poetical Recreations), but whom we now know to have been students at St. John's College, Cambridge—not Oxford, where Edward took his bachelor's degree. Her prominent place in a Cambridge literary-exchange coterie gives evidence of her ability to forge intellectual friendships with young men, as perhaps does her friendship with the London bookseller Benjamin Crayle, who published Poetical Recreations when he was just twenty-seven. The younger son of a Newark gentleman, Crayle had university and inns of court connections and fancied himself something of a poet in the genteel amateur mode. Barker seems to have formed her Cambridge friendships through one John Newton, a man ten years her junior, who lived in the nearby village of Uffington. Newton is the St. John's Fellow who as “J. N.” and “Philaster” wrote commendatory verse for Poetical Recreations [PR] and who may have played a key role in getting her earliest verse into print.³² No evidence has emerged to support the claim, first made by William McBurney and since often repeated, that her earliest work was “written for a rural literary circle, which continued the tradition of the ‘Society of Friendship’” associated with Katherine Philips (“Orinda”).³³

A PATRIARCHAL PUZZLE

Some of the most puzzling bits of information about the family come from Thomas Barker's will.³⁴ Even the circumstances of his death are mysterious. Thomas composed his brief and hasty will in a quavering hand on 27 September 1681 in Shingay, Cambridgeshire, a parish located just west of the Old North Road leading from London to Stamford. Four days later he was buried in the Shingay chapel. In the will and burial register he is designated “Thomas Barker Gentleman of Shingay in the County of Cambridge.”³⁵ Shingay? What brought him to a parish of no more than six or seven households, some fifty miles from Wilsthorpe? Why was he buried in the chapel, a privilege generally reserved for persons of some standing in the community? We have found nothing to indicate the existence of family or property in or around Shingay, but we do know from one of Jane's poems that she spent time there herself: to a poetic correspondent she apologizes that her “Epistles grow on every Bow, / O'th' multitude of Shin-gay Trees” (PR, p. 95), and Shingay was, in fact, heavily wooded in the seventeenth century.³⁶ The highly generalized account of Galesia's father's death in A Patch-Work Screen, however, offers no clues.³⁷

The will itself contains one piece of information startling to anyone who comes to the Barker family history through the Galesia fictions: a younger brother, Henry. Nowhere do the fictions hint at the existence of this second brother, whereas the figure corresponding to Edward is highly visible, and the subject of a number of grief-stricken poems as well.³⁸ That Henry might have been something of a persona non grata in the family is a possibility his father's will does little to counter. Thomas leaves the Wilsthorpe manor house and land; property in nearby King's Cliffe, Northamptonshire;³⁹ and all other goods and chattels, both personal and real, to “my loving wife” Anne Barker and “my daughter” Jane Barker.⁴⁰ Wife and daughter are also named joint executors of his will. To his “sonne Henry Barker,” said to be “of Newgate Streete in London,” he leaves the sum of ten pounds.

Before speculating on the meaning of this bequest, it is best to set down such information as can be gathered about Henry. Of his first twenty-four years nothing is known beyond the date of his baptism. The archives of the sites of male learning that record so clearly the stages in Edward's educational progress—Merchant Taylors', St. John's College, Gray's Inn, Christ Church—register no trace of Henry. This is not too surprising, given his status as younger son in a family that appears never to have been wealthy. He was doubtless expected to follow a less expensive path to a career, perhaps by serving an apprenticeship in one of the London companies, a route not at all uncommon for younger sons of the gentry in the seventeenth century.⁴¹ However, one document identifies him as a gentleman, an unlikely designation had he entered a trade. His situation and standing in London remain shadowy.

The first trace of Henry in adulthood is a marriage allegation of 28 February 1679 between Henry Barker of the parish of Christchurch Newgate Street and Anne Phipps, daughter of William Phipps, of the parish of St. Andrew Holborn.⁴² Both the parish and the age of twenty-four given on the allegation fit what is known about Jane's brother Henry. Henry and Anne were married the next month in the parish of St. Mary Margaret Fish Street.⁴³ From 1679 to 1681 Henry Barker paid poor taxes in Christchurch Newgate St. parish, assessed in the middle ranges.⁴⁴ Two children are known to have been born to the couple,⁴⁵ including a daughter Mary, who will prove an important player later in the story: in 1717 she will take legal action against her aunt Jane.⁴⁶

We may now return to Henry's inheritance. Ten pounds was a considerable sum those days, for some laborers a year's wages; but compared with an inheritance in land it was a mere pittance. It was certainly odd for a daughter to come into land in these circumstances;⁴⁷ but it may mean no more than that Thomas settled money and property on his son when he turned twenty-one, some five years earlier, which was not uncommon at this time, or upon his marriage. Support for this possibility comes from a parish register entry identifying him in 1688 as “Henry Barker Gent.”⁴⁸ Complicating the picture, however, is his daughter's later claim that as a teenager she could have gone into service at four pounds a year: she “could have gott a Sufficient Livelyhood for her self and was offered four pounds a Year Wages in case she would have gone to Service” (Chancery Deposition, PRO, C11 237/28). Girls of genteel upbringing did, in fact, go into service, generally into elite “upper servant” positions, but this may be an indication that “Henry Barker Gent” was not exactly thriving.⁴⁹ Henry's ten pounds may be evidence of family antagonism or of a previous settlement—although, as has been pointed out to us, if the former, Thomas is more likely to have cut him off with the proverbial shilling.⁵⁰

LONDON, REVOLUTION, AND EXILE

The decade that began with Thomas Barker's death was a momentous one for Jane, now in her thirties. In the 1680s she lost her father, removed to London, lost her mother, was received into the Catholic Church, saw a large body of her verse published in the unauthorized Poetical Recreations, watched the fall of her beloved House of Stuart, and, in 1689, fled to France in the violent (for Catholics) aftermath of the so-called Bloodless Revolution.⁵¹ In the Patch-Work Screen version of the events following the death of the father, Barker places Galesia and her mother in lodgings near Westminster Abbey, a site chosen for its gentility and political resonance, one suspects, rather than for biographical veracity. Indeed, there is some evidence to suggest that Jane and Anne Barker took up residence in the City in the considerably less fashionable parish of Christchurch Newgate Street, presumably to be near Henry and his wife.⁵² Corroboration of her presence in London in the mid-1680s comes from a poem by her publisher Benjamin Crayle, whose bookshop at the west and of St. Paul's Churchyard was not far from Newgate Street. He claims in a 1687 poem to have known Barker (“Cosmelia”) for three years.⁵³

A Crayle publication from this period casts a tantalizing glimmer on Barker's London medical practice. In a book he brought out in 1685 he inserted a notice that at his shop was to be had, for the sum of five shillings a roll, something called Dr. Barker's Famous Gout Plaister, which “infallibly takes away the pain in Twelve Hours time, with the Paroxysm of the Distemper, and in time may effect a perfect Cure.”⁵⁴ It seems at first improbable that a country gentlewoman as mindful of decorum as Jane Barker would be selling a “Famous Gout Plaister” under the name “Dr. Barker,” but internal evidence for her involvement in such a scheme is fairly convincing. Crayle's “Cosmelia” poem indicates he and Barker were acquainted by this time. Though she never refers in her writings to Crayle, his bookshop, or her selling of medicines, in A Patch-Work Screen [PWS] she does ascribe to Galesia some reputation as a lay physician in London. In the Poetical Recreations verse “On the Apothecaries Filing my Recipes amongst the Doctors,” the speaker boasts of her ability as a “fam'd Physician” to “overcome” the “sturdy Gout” (PR, Pt. I, p. 31). When Barker reprints this same poem nearly four decades later, she appends a footnote indicating she had possessed “a particular Arcanum for the Gout” (PWS, p. 57).

That Barker converted to Catholicism during the reign of James II (1685-88) seems almost certain, but our only source is the “Fidelia” poems from the Magdalen MS.⁵⁵ These poems, along with others on affairs of state—such as “Fidelia weeping for the Kings departure at the Revolution”—register (in ways that remain to be explored) Barker's response to political and religious events in London during the troubled years of James' short reign. They suggest also that she fled to France early in 1689.⁵⁶ A poem written to accompany a gift to the Prince of Wales on his first birthday establishes her as part of the community of exiles at St. Germain-en-Laye by 10 June 1689.⁵⁷ She would live in St. Germain until 1704, when she returned to Wilsthorpe.

Though Barker sought notice and patronage from members of the royal family—she addressed poems to Queen Mary of Modena, Arabella FitzJames (the illegitimate daughter of James II and Arabella Churchill), and Princess Louise Maria (the younger sister of the Prince of Wales), and dedicated an entire volume of scathingly anti-Williamite political verse to the twelve-year-old Prince of Wales (the future “Old Pretender”)⁵⁸—nothing has emerged to suggest she had personal access to court circles, still less a position there, as has been claimed. Her name appears in none of the surviving court-in-exile lists, and the only documentary trace of her presence in St. Germain is the parish register recording her appearance as godmother to Christine Winiffe, born to Dorothy (née Ford) and George Winiffe, a London lawyer.⁵⁹ The fact that her cosponsor was Robert Brent, a leading lawyer in the pre-Revolution Catholic world and an important figure at St. Germain until his death in 1695,⁶⁰ suggests that, although not part of the upper ranks of exile society, she did move through fairly distinguished circles. We know, too, that her verse circulated in manuscript among the exiles.⁶¹ A bound volume of her work would eventually come into the possession of Anne-Charlotte de Crussol de Florensac, duchesse d'Aiguillon, a member of one of the most eminent families in France.⁶²

From a marginal note in the Magdalen Manuscript we know that in 1696, when Barker was forty-three, she had an operation to have her cataracts couched.⁶³ (Couching involved the insertion of a needle into the eye; the needle was then used to work the clouded lens down out of the line of vision.) In the years following the operation, Barker represented herself as “a blind person”—and for good reason.⁶⁴ A person not fully blinded by the infections introduced by such an operation would afterwards be able to read and write, but only barely, and would require the assistance of a powerful magnifying glass. This explains why in 1700 she enlisted the services of her cousin, Colonel William Connock, to help her prepare the presentation volume of her verse. The presentation copy, or a prototype of it, is almost entirely in Connock's hand (BL Add. MS 21, 621).

CHANCERY

A rich body of information about Barker's life in Wilsthorpe after the turn of the century is found in depositions submitted in a Chancery case of 1717. They tell us that “sometime” early in 1704 Barker returned to England, “having been abroad beyond the Seas for a considerable time,” evidently with the intention of taking up management of the Wilsthorpe farm.⁶⁵ She arranged for her niece Mary, Henry's daughter, to return with her. Mary, then sixteen, may have welcomed an opportunity to live apart from her family; while Jane, nearly fifty-two and semiblind, would almost certainly have required help. Mary would be “extreemly serviceable to her in managing her house and upon other Occasions,” she is reported to have said. By May 1704, Mary was installed with her aunt on the farm in Lincolnshire, and there began the sequence of events—two marriages, two births, and a funeral—that culminated in legal action in 1717, when aunt and niece went to court against each other. To the Chancery documents we owe a glimpse of the aging Barker in her private, domestic existence and of a largely female household and its rather sordid family politics.

In the summer of 1717 Barker went to Chancery to stop proceedings initiated against her by Mary and her second husband, John Staton. The Statons were pressing for the return of money (about forty pounds) and household goods (worth an additional five pounds), which they claimed Barker owed her niece. Barker counterclaimed that she was holding the money and goods in trust for Mary's daughters by a previous marriage. (Mary's first husband, William Henson, had died intestate in 1710 when the elder daughter was only a year old. By law one-third of Henson's estate would go to his children.) In Barker's bill of complaint, dated 10 July 1717, she speaks as “next friend” of two grandnieces, whom she raised almost from birth. She charges the Statons with attempting to defraud the girls of their proper inheritance, and asks the court to stop their attempt to recover the money and goods. She was temporarily successful. The court issued a stay of injunction against John and Mary Staton on 23 July 1717. Shortly thereafter, however, the Statons submitted a long, detailed, and, it must be said, damaging answer to Barker's accusations. On 6 August the court found for the Statons and gave them permission to proceed. And there, so far as we know, the official documentation ends.⁶⁶ The outcome of the Statons' action is not known, but the extant evidence does not favor Barker.

Mary is a remarkable figure in this conflict. She was born 21 December 1687 and presumably lived with her father (no trace of her mother has survived) in London until May 1704, when she removed to Wilsthorpe.⁶⁷ For the next three years Mary lived in Wilsthorpe with her aunt. Concerning her life in the Barker household during those years we have only her statement, obviously biased, that she worked “in the nature of a Servant,” though without wages. In 1707, Mary, now nineteen, married William Henson, a yeoman from nearby Carlby, a village not three miles from Wilsthorpe.⁶⁸ By him she had two daughters, Mary and Anne, the grandnieces whom Barker would name as coplaintiffs in the 1717 proceedings. In the months after William died late in January 1710, aged thirty-four, Mary undertook to settle his affairs with what appears to have been uncommon energy and admirable resourcefulness.⁶⁹

By June 1710, some five months later, Mary, a twenty-two-year-old widow with two infant daughters, was once again living in the manor house at Wilsthorpe. At some point—when and why are at the heart of the dispute—she turned over to Barker the forty-odd pounds and household goods that may or may not have been part of William Henson's estate and may or may not have constituted her daughters' inheritance. In January 1714 she eloped with a craftsman from the nearby village of Irnham, John Staton, leaving behind her two young daughters.⁷⁰ She married “without your said oratrix Jane's knowledge,” Barker's bill charges. Indeed she did, Mary retorts, “nor do these Def[endants] know that either of them were obliged” to “ask her consent.” John Staton, her second husband, was either a cobbler (Barker's version) or a shoemaker (the Statons' version); either “a person of very meane and necessitous Circumstances” (Barker) or one who lived with his wife “comfortably in the world” (Staton). In any case, from 1714 Barker took over care of the two Henson girls, her grandnieces (they would have been about four and five at the time), and maintained them at Wilsthorpe for at least the next three years.⁷¹

The Statons began pressing Barker for the money—they “oftentimes” and “in a friendly manner” requested its return, as they would have it—but Barker steadily refused. At one point, if the Staton account can be relied upon, she directed a Mr. Newton to inform the Statons “she would sooner live a constant Prisoner to her house or leave the Kingdome rather than these Def[endants] should have Either money or Goods from her.” (The utterance does sound like Barker.) Eventually the Statons went to court. In July 1717 a “John Stayton” is named on a summons to appear in the midsummer Kesteven Quarter Sessions.⁷²

Even allowing for exaggeration on the Statons' part, the picture of Barker that emerges from the Chancery documents is of a woman hard driven by economic need. According to Mary, by 1714 she was “in necessitous Circumstances”; she was “in trouble” and involved in law suits; her “present wants” were many. Of course, Mary had good reason to construct her aunt as impecunious, and it might be argued that Barker's willingness to initiate a potentially costly Chancery case suggests some command of financial resources. It should be remembered, however, that Chancery was not especially expensive in its initial stages. Barker may have spent little more than a pound to obtain a stay against the Statons' action at law.⁷³ Against the forty-plus pounds the Statons were demanding, a pound may have seemed a good gamble, especially if Barker's circumstances were anything like as exigent as the Statons claimed and as other evidence does nothing to deny. It is certainly suggestive that she seems not to have pursued legal action beyond the relatively inexpensive initial stages. Her recourse to Chancery in summer 1717 may suggest not so much economic reserves as desperation.

Further light on her financial difficulties comes from another document from 1717, a deposition in response to the 1715 statute requiring papists to register their names and real estates.⁷⁴ (Barker registered her leasehold estate on 15 October 1717, the last Roman Catholic in the Kesteven division of Lincolnshire to do so.) In addition to confirming information from the 1675 lease,⁷⁵ her deposition tells us of the existence of a tenant, one Robert Arden, who sublet a portion of the estate, paying an annual rent of £24 17s. 8d. for the approximately forty acres that he farmed. This means that Barker did not actually pay a “sizable annual rent of £47.10s,” as has been asserted;⁷⁶ she paid £22 12s. 4d., a more manageable sum, especially as it was offset by Arden's yearly payment. Nonetheless, her financial difficulties may have been formidable. The strain of the heavy taxation required to finance the wars on the Continent, exacerbated by a series of bad harvests, had left many small landholders straitened. As a Roman Catholic she was subject to double land tax, and the 1715 registration was intended to make possible an additional special charge on two-thirds of any Catholic estate.⁷⁷

Ignorance of Barker's economic circumstances during the period when she published her fictions has resulted in erroneous speculations about the supposedly “leisured” character of her writing career. Especially misleading is the oft-repeated claim that she inherited a comfortable income in the form of a royal grant or pension, amounting in some versions to as much as eighty pounds a year—a version of events that gives the impression of a writer freed from economic necessity and thus able to turn her energies chiefly to writing.⁷⁸ The evidence of the Chancery case challenges such a picture; there is, moreover, nothing in the documentary record to indicate the existence of a royal grant or pension of any kind.⁷⁹ The evidence, admittedly fragmentary and, in the case of the Staton testimony, subject to bias, points quite clearly away from the life of rural quiet and modest independence envisioned by some commentators toward one marked by financial anxieties and the struggle of a middle-aged woman to keep the Wilsthorpe household going.

There can be little doubt necessity played a role in Barker's decision to take up professional authorship in the eighteenth century. Novel writing was poorly paid, however, and there is no reason to suppose she garnered more than the five or ten guineas that a writer of prose fiction might expect for the sale of copy, especially as she was publishing with Edmund Curll, a bookseller not known for princely generosity. The need for income might explain why she sought aristocratic patronage for her earliest works. Bosvil and Galesia (1713) and Exilus (1715) were dedicated to the countess of Exeter, the former Elizabeth Brownlow of Belton, Lincolnshire.⁸⁰ Barker was evidently acquainted with both the countess and her youngest child and only daughter, Elizabeth, for the dedication ends with the hope that “my Young Lady,” who was then seven and “the Darling of Your Ladyship's Heart,” may “never intangle her Noble Person in those Levities and Misfortunes the ensuing Treatise describes me unhappily to have struggled with.”⁸¹ Barker's translation of The Christian Pilgrimage (1718), a collection of Lenten meditations from the French of François Fénelon made “to speak English in the Dialect of the Church of England,”⁸² was dedicated to the countess of Nottingham, who lived at this time at Burley-on-the-Hill, near Oakham, Rutland, less than twenty miles from Wilsthorpe. It is not clear whether Barker was personally acquainted with Lady Nottingham; in seeking her patronage, she may have been influenced by her dedicatee's reputed Roman Catholic sympathies.⁸³

“OUR HOLY KING”

Jane Barker's Jacobitism still awaits full investigation, but that she was a committed Jacobite is beyond dispute. During the 1690s she composed a considerable body of loyalist verse; and the volumes in the Galesia trilogy, especially the final The Lining of the Patch Work Screen, make it clear she never wavered in her devotion to the Pretender's cause. Two further documents indicate involvement in Jacobite politics and even conspiracy during the Hanoverian era. Each is sensational in itself and foregrounds a side of Barker that will come as a surprise to many admirers of her writing.

The first is an abstract in French of a letter intercepted in 1718 by the government's anti-Jacobite intelligence machine.⁸⁴ Dated 19 March, the letter was sent by Barker from London⁸⁵ to James Butler, second duke of Ormonde (1665-1745), who had been forced to flee to France in August of 1715. Using the thinly veiled language beloved of Jacobite correspondents, she informs Ormonde that swelling support for his “jeune amy”—the Old Pretender, “James III”—made the time ripe for an invasion. (Ormonde did, in fact, help organize an invasion effort that ended disastrously in March of the next year with the destruction of a fleet off Cadiz.) Barker's letter, in literal translation, reads as follows:

It has been a long time that we have been without letters from you. Mr. Hutchesson [Archibald Hutcheson]⁸⁶ is your strong supporter. He is ashamed of his past errors, and he disavows them publicly. Several of his friends who were not yours now place themselves in your party, the number of your friends increases every day. They strongly wish to see you with your young friend, and [wish] that he could dispossess those who unjustly withhold his goods; for it is very sad to see him thus wandering in foreign countries. But I must tell you that if you wish to find inexpensive houses here, you ought to come after the end of the session of Parliament, when everyone goes to the country.⁸⁷ I would never advise you to come during the session everything then being too expensive.⁸⁸

This letter is the basis for the claim, first made by McBurney (p. 390) and repeated by Moira Ferguson (p. 171), that Barker “engaged in clandestine correspondence with the exiled Jacobite peer, James Butler, Duke of Ormonde.” No further correspondence with Ormonde has come to light, and a note on the abstract indicates that the letter's signatory was a stranger to the Hanoverian authorities: “on ignore qui est Barker.” There can be no doubt, however, that Barker was engaged in Jacobite intrigue. It seems probable that she was used as an amanuensis to pass on information from plotters whose names and handwriting would be known to the authorities, perhaps information regarding Hutcheson's change of political sympathies (“He is ashamed of his past errors”).⁸⁹ There is, moreover, some reason to believe her name might have been known to Ormonde through her Connock relations.⁹⁰ It may seem a bit sensationalizing to call Barker a “Jacobite spy,” but active Jacobite she manifestly was, and willing to assist those seeking to overthrow the British government of George I.⁹¹

The second is an autograph letter, probably dating from 1730, to an unnamed woman she addresses as “Madam” and “your Ladyship.”⁹² The letter, which testifies to the healing power of the blood of the late James II, who died in 1701, appears to be Barker's contribution to one of several Jacobite efforts during her lifetime to secure James' canonization,⁹³ and suggests that she continued to support the Stuart cause long after any real hopes of a restoration had passed. It begins, remarkably enough, by offering the unidentified lady “so od a present,” a cancer from Barker's own breast (the “cancer” may have been a cyst of some kind) and goes on to rehearse its emergence and progress:

The first appearance of it, was in form of a grain of oatmeal, with great iching and between whiles, pricking and shooting, by which Symtoms I knew it to be a cancer, and therfore looked upon it as a deaths head, and so resolved to let it work its will, or rathe[r] the will of god, only addressd, my prayrs, to our holy King, touching it with his blood which I had on a little rag, but instead of deminiching, it grew to the bigness you see, see [sic], which was in the space of some years, still iching and pricking by fits, at last it seem'd to put its head out (as it were) from under its little mole-hill, by degree[s] put out farther, till its whole vile body came quite out, hanging by a little string like a white thred, of which there are divers witnesses. …

She names as witnesses her father confessor (still unidentified) and “my little neece [one of the Henson girls?], and Coll connocks neece,” and testifies that the cancer, through the agency of the king's blood, worked free of her breast with “no soar or any manner of corruptio[n] appearing.” She also attests to the efficacy of James's blood in curing “my little neeces eye,” which had been subject to a “bloodshed” since infancy:

I kneelld doun and touched it with the Kings blood in form of a cross, saying The Kings blood touch, God heal, the Eye retir'd into its place, the nose and face became well and and [sic] never had any return since, much nor little. …

Barker leaves the disposal of her “od” gift entirely to the discretion of the lady, but mentions sending on the evidence either to Lewis Sabran (1652-1732), rector of the Jesuit college at St. Omers, or Lady Nithsdale (d. 1749), both notable Roman Catholic Jacobites. She concludes by suggesting that the addressee—probably Lady Nithesdale's sister, Mother Lucy Theresa Joseph, Superior of the Augustinian Convent at Bruges—inform “our friends at Rome” of these miracles.

Two final glimpses of Jane Barker come from a pair of letters written from St. Germain by her cousin William Connock. On 14 January 1726 he reports receiving word that “Cos. Barker” was “very ill & had receivd the Blessed Sacrament.” On 26 May 1727 she is said to be on her way to France: “I expect every day a lettre from Cosin Barker of her beeing arived at Diep” (BL Add. MS 21, 896, f. 1; f. 11v.). Thereafter silence, save the canonization letter discussed earlier, until 1732, when an entry of 29 March in the parish register of St. Germain records her burial. In two more months she would have been eighty.

“JANUS” BARKER

These, then, are the facts as they can now be established. More doubtless remains to be discovered, but enough is known to permit some thoughts about Barker's practices as an autobiographer. First, and most obviously, the self projected in the autobiographical novels is an invention, and the narratives are idealized recastings of a life; they are not “the life.” In the novels the father is a virtuous gentleman-farmer, to take a single example, and the family lives in happy rural innocence. The archives tell another story, however. They give glimpses of a father associated with a City money-scrivener; a brother of uncertain occupation living in Newgate Street, London; a niece who may have cheerfully contemplated going out to service at four pounds a year and who married first a yeoman of modest means and later a shoemaker or cobbler. External sources point toward a range of middle-aged experience that goes unrecorded in the novels: conversion to an outlawed religion, life as an exile during a prolonged residence in France, and struggle in England to raise two grandnieces and to keep the Wilsthorpe household going. The novels give no hint of the bookshop in St. Paul's Churchyard where she may have offered for sale the Famous Gout Plaster; and they fail to recount her business dealings in her sixties and seventies with Edmund Curll, whose name, then as now, was a byword for piracy and salaciousness. They do not tell of the despair that must have accompanied her failing eyesight or the anxieties engendered by what she believed was breast cancer. If these omissions suggest a measure of status insecurity and doubtless some female anxieties of authorship as well,⁹⁴ they also suggest that at this moment the novel as a genre had not yet learned to accommodate the bodily and economic experiences of women no longer ingenues.

Information that has come to light regarding her political involvements suggests the need for a reassessment of her novelistic aims and strategies. That Barker—famously moral, decorous, and above all respectable—was attached to an insurrectionary politics certainly complicates the prevailing picture of her as “the new, moral woman writer, acceptable to later generations”⁹⁵—and not simply because her idiosyncratic novels failed to inspire imitations or even, for that matter, to find a wide readership, at least so far as we can tell. Barker, born during the Interregnum and living well into the Age of Walpole, continued all her life to inhabit a mental universe shaped by the political and religious crises of the seventeenth century. The texts she wrote exhibit that century's refusal to separate private and national, personal and public history. Though associated—rightly—with “the rise” of a genre that laid claim to and in part invented domesticity, interiority, female subjectivity, and the private sphere; though committed to exploration of the intensely individuated life; though displaying the self-consciously experimental attitude toward genre and form and multiple voicings that we think of as distinctively modern, Barker was herself looking in the other direction. Her fictions resist precisely those public/private disjunctions that have come to dominate our own thinking about the eighteenth century and the early novel. Considered historically, then, the current image of Barker as exemplar of the novelistic shift toward respectable privatized domestic fiction is almost comically wrongheaded. Not only does it assign Barker a role she would have found baffling at best, but it fails signally to take account of the specifically political aims and purposes of the novels, consistently ignoring or misrepresenting their Jacobite elements in favor of what is “pious,” “didactic,” “pure,” and “respectable” and contributing thereby to what we might call the dulling down of Jane Barker, with the further result that we miss much of what is most distinctive in her ambiguous, oblique, alienated and in some ways deeply reactionary texts.

All of this has implications for the growing body of revisionist work devoted to seeking new approaches to early eighteenth-century narrative—the Novel Before. Serious attention to the political underpinnings of Barker's novels will, we believe, compel a rethinking of our paradigms of female authorship in this period. Barker is almost invariably placed in the so-called pious school of female novel-writing (with, among others, Penelope Aubin and Elizabeth Rowe) as part of the habitual separation of women into the opposing camps of “daughters of Behn” (scandalous, outspoken, sexually explicit) and the “daughters of Orinda” (moral, ladylike, modest)—a good girl/bad girl split that, remarkably, remains largely unchallenged, even in feminist literary histories. A close look at Barker's practices would go a long way toward dismantling a dichotomy that may have outlived its usefulness. We suggest that as a maker of fictions of political opposition Barker practices “a complex form of (auto)-biographizing” that shares much with the aims and strategies of the amatory writers analyzed by Ros Ballaster,⁹⁶ and that in her politicized use of a variety of highly crafted authorial self-images she has much in common with Aphra Behn and Delarivière Manley, two “scandalous” women writers to whom she is habitually (and misleadingly) opposed.⁹⁷ Barker chooses, however, not to eroticize her autobiographical personae, but to construct them as figures of the alienated Other, so shaped as to express the disaffection of a whole range of people marginalized in Hanoverian Britain—among them a tiny Roman Catholic minority, a more widespread community of Jacobite dissidents, and an assortment of odd women. Like Behn and Manley—and a host of male poets, as well, among them her coreligionist Pope—Jane Barker does not so much “write the self” as use the materials of her own life to create myths and stories for readers estranged from the new political order. That in her hands the novel was a reactionary instrument, written in resistance to the very modernity it expressed, is just one of the paradoxes of her strange, and compelling, art.

Notes

1. Carol Shiner Wilson, ed., The Galesia Trilogy and Selected Manuscript Poems by Jane Barker (N.Y. & Oxford: Oxford Univ., 1997); Robert DeMaria, Jr., ed., British Literature (1640-1789): An Anthology (Oxford & Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996); Paula R. Backscheider and John J. Richetti, eds., Popular Fiction by Women (1660-1730): An Anthology (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), p. xix; Carol Barash, English Women's Poetry, 1649-1714: Politics, Community, and Linguistic Authority (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996).

2. The Galesia trilogy—so called because the narratives recount different phases in the life of their narrator and protagonist, Galesia, before and after her residence in France—comprises The Amours of Bosvil and Galesia, As related to Lucasia in St. Germain's Garden. A Novel (1713, under the title Love Intrigues: Or, The History of the Amours of Bosvil and Galesia, rev. 1719); A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (1723), and The Lining of the Patch Work Screen: Design'd for the Farther Entertainment of the Ladies (1726).

3. “Creating the Woman Writer: The Autobiographical Works of Jane Barker,” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 2 (Fall 1983): 166. It is a measure of Barker's obscurity that the only biographical source in English available to Spencer in 1983 was a notice from the 1920s where the “what-is-known”—much of it speculative, and much of that wrong—filled all of five paragraphs. See G. S. Gibbons, “Mrs. Jane Barker,” Notes and Queries ser. 11, no. 12 (30 Sept. 1922): 278-79. A German dissertation contains some biographical information, but it appears to have been derived entirely from Barker's writings. See Karl Stanglmaier, Mrs. Jane Barker: Ein Beitrag zur Englischen Literaturgeschichte (Berlin, 1906), available on microfilm from Research Publications (New Haven).

4. Myra Reynolds, The Learned Lady in England 1650-1760 (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1964), comments, for example, “Galesia's recourse to hard study and responsible farm management as a cure for a wounded heart sets her as a heroine in a class by herself. She is so sensible and reasonable as to seem out of place in a romance” (pp. 164-65).

5. Some of these findings were summarized by Margaret Doody in “Jane Barker,” British Novelists, 1660-1800, vol. 39, pt. 1 of Dictionary of Literary Biography, ed. Martin C. Battestin (Detroit: Gale Research, 1985). Their documentary basis was recorded in the headnote to the Barker selections in Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women's Verse, ed. Germaine Greer, Susan Hastings, Jeslyn Medoff, & Melinda Sansone (N.Y.: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989).

6. We are grateful to Barash and Wilson for allowing us to read unpublished versions of their work, and to Wilson for generously making available to us information from the documents she uncovered. King is in the final stages of a book on Barker's texts and literary career that emphasizes her political engagements.

7. Barker's published work includes the verse printed in Part One of Poetical Recreations (1687; title page has 1688), the Galesia fictions (see n. 2), Exilius (1714; the title page has 1715), and a translation from the French of Lenten meditations by Bishop Fénelon, The Christian Pilgrimage (1718). A revised version of Bosvil and Galesia was published with Exilius in 1719 as The Entertaining Novels of Mrs. Jane Barker.

8. Magdalen MS 343. The three-part volume, completed probably by 1704, incorporates poems composed over a period of at least a quarter century, as well as what may be later revisions. Parts Two and Three are in Barker's quirky hand, Part One in the more finished hand of her cousin, William Connock. The Part One poems are copied into a volume now in the British Library, Add. MS 21,621, also in Connock's hand. For a detailed discussion of the two volumes, see Kathryn R. King, The Poems of Jane Barker: The Magdalen Manuscript, Magdalen College Occasional Paper No. 3, forthcoming 1998.

9. Movement in this direction can be seen in Wilson (see n. 1), who has discovered a brother absent from Barker's writings and argues partly on this basis for a consideration of the “selective silences” in the Galesia narratives. Wilson's biographical account is weakened, however, by its tendency to conflate the fictions and the documentary record.

10. The inaugural text is Spencer (see n. 3); but see Kristina Straub, “Frances Burney and the Rise of the Woman Novelist,” in The Columbia History of the British Novel, ed. John Richetti (N.Y.: Columbia Univ., 1994), pp. 203-5, for a perceptive rereading of Spencer.

11. Barker, A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (London, 1723), p. 112. Subsequent refs. will be cited parenthetically as PWS. A Colonel Connock was among the conspirators led by Colonel John Gerard, whose plans to assassinate Cromwell in May 1654 were quickly thwarted (Thomas Newcomb, A True Account of the Late Bloody and Inhuman Conspiracy Against His Highness the Lord Protector [1654]; rpt. The Harleian Miscellany in 10 vols. [1808-13], 10:248). We are grateful to Sharon Valiant for drawing this information to our attention.

12. Barker, Bosvil and Galesia (London, 1713), p. 3. Subsequent refs. will be indicated parenthetically as BG. The only Barker who turns up in P. R. Newman's Royalist Officers in England and Wales, 1642-1660: A Biographical Dictionary (N.Y. & London: Garland, 1981) is a Lt. Col., either a George or a Daniel Barker, who was acting commander of Col. Henry Bard's Horse in May of 1645; of his background nothing is known (p. 16).

13. “A dialogue between Fidelia and her little nephew, Martius, as they walk in Luxembourg. disguis'd as a shepherdess or country maid,” Magdalen MS 343, Pt. II, 25v. Subsequent refs. will be cited parenthetically as Mag. MS.

14. The military branch of the Connocks descends from Captain George Connock (b. 1575). Letters dated 1726 and 1727 from his grandson, the exiled Jacobite Colonel William Connock (d. 1738), to his son, Timon, an aide-de-camp to Philip V of Spain (d. ca. 1731), refer to Barker as “cosin” (BL Add. MS 21, 896, ff. 1 and 11v). According to his burial notice, which was made available to us by Edward Corp, William served with Sir Toby Bourke in the Nine Years' War; from Barker's verse it appears he fought in the Irish campaign. He is probably the addressee of the poem, “To My dear cosen Coll—at his return out of Irland into France,” which describes “Connocks battery” at the seige of Limerick in 1690 (Mag. MS 343, Pt. II, 8-9). He may be the father of the Major William Connock (d. 1704) who served in the earl of Pemboke's regiment of foot, one of six regiments of the Anglo-Dutch Brigade stationed in Holland. In the summer of 1685, the regiments were summoned back to England to assist James in crushing Monmouth's rebellion; in “Fidelia alone lamenting her parents lately dead, and her relations gone into the west against Monmoth,” Fidelia fearfully imagines her “aged Uncles dying groans” and “his grandson's shattered bones,” as well as “a cousin wounded, brother dy” (Mag. MS 343, Pt. I, 1). Early in 1688, a Catholic Major William Connock was one of forty officers who voluntarily gave up their commissions in the Anglo-Dutch regiments and returned to England to join newly formed (but short-lived) regiments of foot, composed almost entirely of Roman Catholics, in the pay of Louis XIV (Charles Dalton, ed. English Army Lists and Commission Registers 1661-1714, 6 vols. [1892-1904], 2:155 & 2:230). G. S. Gibbons' claim in Notes and Queries (see n. 3) that Barker's mother was sister to the Col. William Connock who fought for James II in Ireland cannot be substantiated.

15. John Connock (ca. 1654-1730), of Tweworgy, Cornwall, who gained the seat for Liskeard in 1679, initially supported the Whig side in the Exclusion crisis, voting for the first exclusion bill. He sat also during James II's Parliament, and is known to have accepted the Revolution (Basil Duke Henning, The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1660-1690, 3 vols. [London: Secker & Warburg, 1983], 2:117).

16. See marquis of Ruvigny and Raineval, The Jacobite Peerage, Baronetage, Knightage, and Grants of Honour (Edinburgh, 1904), p. 37-38. For the Connock family more generally, see C. S. Gilbert, An Historical Survey of the County of Cornwall, 2 vols. (London, 1817-20), 2:79, and John Lambrick Vivian, The Visitations of the County of Cornwall … 1530, 1573, and 1620 (Exeter, 1887), p. 93.

17. “A Farewell to Poetry, with a Long Digression on Anatomy,” Poetical Recreations (London, 1688), p. 104. Subsequent refs. will be cited parenthetically as PR. Though he spent most of his life in London, Richard Lower was Cornish, born and buried at Tremeer, in the parish of St. Tudy, near Bodmin. His wife, Elizabeth (Billing) Lower, was grandaughter to Elizabeth (Connock) Billing, sister of Captain George Connock (see ns. 14 & 16). Since Lower's mother was also a Billing, he may have been related to his wife, and therefore related to the Connocks and Jane Barker, by blood as well as marriage. See Vivian, Visitations, pp. 32, 93, 302.

18. Carol Shiner Wilson, intro., The Galesia Trilogy and Selected Poems by Jane Barker (N.Y. & Oxford: Oxford Univ., 1997), p. xviii. The persons filling these positions prior to the disruptions of the Civil War remain unidentified. According to G. E. Aylmer, The King's Servants: The Civil Service of Charles I, 1625-1642 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), p. 470, the lord keeper's personal staff consisted of two chief secretaries and two other secretaries.

19. The Hearth Tax of 1662 charges “Mr Thos Barker” with four hearths; the returns show thirty households in Blatherwick (PRO [Public Record Office], E179 254/11).

20. Jane was baptised 17 May 1652. A son George was baptized 8 Oct. 1648 and buried five months later, on 18 Mar. 1649. Edward, the oldest known surviving son, was baptized 16 Apr. 1650; Henry on 31 July 1655 (NRO [Northamptonshire Record Office], Blatherwick Parish Register, 1621-1689 [Blatherwycke 34 P/1]).

21. Frank T. Melton, Sir Robert Clayton and the Origins of English Deposit Banking, 1658-1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 1986), p. 5.

22. Melton, p. 74. Melton briefly discusses Barker's services on Clayton's behalf, calling him Clayton's “commissioner” (p. 80). The bond is in the Osborn Collection, Clayton Papers (1589-1664), Yale Univ. Beinecke Library. Additional information about Thomas Barker's relationship with Sir Robert Clayton may turn up. Among the many lots of Clayton correspondence sold at Sotheby's on 20 Mar. 1940 was an autograph letter signed by Thomas Barker dated 1660, lot 699, sold to Maggs (for someone designated “Ry”) and now unlocated. For an account of the vast and widely dispersed Clayton archives, see Frank T. Melton, “The Clayton Papers,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 52 (May 1979): 91-99.

23. A covenant not to assign the lease without written permission of the owner, John Cecil, fourth earl of Exeter, dated 30 Aug. 1662 and signed by Thomas Barker, is preserved among other estate papers at Burghley House, Ex 62/74. We are grateful to Lady Victoria Leatham for granting access to the Burghley Archives and to Felix Pryor for his generous help in locating and interpreting relevant documents.

24. PRO, E179 140/754. Five hearths would place the Barker household just below the gentry level; of the eighteen or so households in Wilsthorpe, most had one or two hearths. Thomas appears again in the Wilsthorpe hearth tax records in 1670 (PRO, E 179 [140/791]); in 1672 he was a signatory in the bishop's transcripts of the parish register of Gretford-cum-Wilsthorp.

25. Charles J. Robinson, ed., A Register of the Scholars Admitted into Merchant Taylors' School, From A.D. 1562 to 1874, 2 vols. (Lewes: Farncombe & Co., 1882-83), 1:264; E. P. Hart, ed., Merchant Taylors' School Register 1561-1934, 2 vols. (London & Reading: for the Merchant Taylors' Co., 1936).

26. The Subscription Register, SP 41, Oxford Univ. Archives shows his signature for 3 July 1668 next to an entry that reads, “Edwardus Barker e Coll: Di: Jo: Bapt: gen: filius.” It is the only example of Edward's hand known to survive.

27. Joseph Foster, Alumni Oxonienses: The Members of the University of Oxford, 1500-1714, 4 vols. (Nendeln/Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1968), 1:70.

28. These studentships did not carry the obligation to enter holy orders. We are grateful to Mark Curthoys, archivist of Christ Church, for this suggestion. He adds, however, that there is no indication of Edward's having been nominated to a studentship among the “extremely sparse” records surviving from the mid-17th century. The fictionalized brother in the Galesia narratives is said to have studied medicine in Paris and the Univ. of Leiden (PWS, p. 2; BG, p. 23). Edward's name does not appear in R. W. Innes Smith's thorough English-Speaking Students of Medicine at the University of Leyden (London & Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1932), though it is possible he may have studied there informally. We have not examined the records of the Univ. of Paris.

29. Joseph Foster, ed., The Register of Admissions to Gray's Inn, 1521-1889 (London: Hansard, 1889), p. 309.

30. The lease, drawn up between Thomas Barker and John Cecil, fourth earl of Exeter, is dated 2 Dec. 1675 (NRO, S[T] 674).

31. In PWS Galesia describes herself as “little more than Twenty” when her brother died (p. 27).

32. For more on Newton and the Cambridge circle, see Kathryn R. King, “Jane Barker, Poetical Recreations, and the Sociable Text,” ELH 61 (1994): 551-70.

33. “Edmund Curll, Mrs. Jane Barker, and the English Novel,” Philological Quarterly 37 (1958): 389.

34. The registered copy of the will is in the PRO, PROB 11/367; the original, signed by Thomas and possibly bearing his seal, is PROB 10/1124.

35. Thomas Barker's burial is recorded in the register of the neighboring parish of Croyden-cum-Clopton. The Shingay chapel was later pulled down.

36. When she revised the poem (“To my brother, on my frequent writing to him, a sort of borlesk”) for the Mag. MS, “Shin-gay,” was changed to “Willsthorp.” The man playfully named “brother,” elsewhere identified as George P., remains untraced.

37. Galesia recalls “that I had the real Affliction of losing my dear and indulgent Father; and so was left the only Consolation of my widow'd Mother. I shall not mention the Grief, Care, and Trouble which attended this great Change; these Things being natural and known to every-body” (p. 39).

38. The manuscript poem “Fidelia alone lamenting her parents lately dead, and her relations gone into the west against Monmoth” may contain a reference to Henry: “I see a cousin wounded, brother dy” (Mag. MS, Pt. I, 1). If read literally, the reference places Henry at the Battle of Sedgemoor; it is possible she is fictionalizing, however.

39. A Latin court roll dated 6 Oct. 1670 held at the NRO (LB 35) indicates that Thomas Barker was then admitted tenant to property (mainly arable and meadow land) in the manor of King's Cliffe that had previously been conditionally surrendered to him by two copyhold tenants, as security for loans of £144 4s. and £61 18s. Curiously, he is identified as “situate in Blatherwick in the county of Northampton.” Our thanks to Peter Beal for locating this document, and to Mrs. J. A. Minchinton for translating and helping us to interpret it.

40. The will at once glosses and obliquely confirms Galesia's statement: after her “Affairs [were] adjusted,” following her father's death, the “World knew what Fortune I had to depend upon, and that in my own Power” (PWS, p. 40).

41. Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London 1660-1730 (London: Methuen, 1989), pp. 6-7. According to Alan Everitt, large numbers of Northamptonshire younger sons “became merchants, goldsmiths, grocers, stationers, chandlers, ironmongers, or gunsmiths; whilst their numerous daughters more frequently married London merchants than local Northamptonshire gentry” (“Social Mobility in Early Modern England,” Past & Present 33 [1966]: 68).

42. Lambeth Palace Library, Faculty Office Marriage Allegations. According to the International Genealogical Index, an Anne Phipps, daughter of William and Katherine Phipps, was christened 18 Nov. 1660 in Holburn St. Andrew.

43. Society of Genealogists, Boyd's Marriage Index.

44. Henry was a rated occupier of the parish's second precinct; see the Christchurch Poor Rate Ledger, Guildhall Library, MS 9, 163. He also appears during these years in the Farringdon Ward Within Assessments in the Corporation of London Record Office; see, for example, Assessment Box 7, MS 7 (6 Months Tax for 1680).

45. A daughter Catharine, of whom no more is heard, was christened in Christchurch Newgate Street parish on 8 Apr. 1680 (Willoughby A. Littledale, ed., The Registers of Christ Church, Newgate, 1538 to 1754, Harleian Society, vol. 21 [London: Harleian Society, 1895], p. 49). The parish register was destroyed in World War II.

46. She was born 21 Dec. 1687 and christened 9 Jan. 1688 in St. Giles Cripplegate (Guildhall Library, St. Giles without Cripplegate General Register, MS 6419/10).

47. Fathers seldom left land to daughters when they had sons. Of 41 cases in Lincoln-shire and Sussex studied by Amy Louise Erickson (Women and Property in Early Modern England [London & N.Y.: Routledge, 1993]), only two left land to daughters (p. 61). The fact that Jane and her mother were named coexecutors was not unusual, however. In “appointing executors from among their children,” she finds, “both married men and widowers were more than twice as likely to choose daughters or youngers sons, or a combination thereof, in preference to the heir” (p. 71).

48. Guildhall Library, St. Giles without Cripplegate General Register, MS 6419/10.

49. According to Bridget Hill, “upper servant” positions—waiting women, ladies' maids, and companions—were “to be occupied only by those of genteel upbringing who had enjoyed a ‘polite education’” (Women, Work, and Sexual Politics in Eighteenth-Century England [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989], p. 132).

50. Barbara Todd, letter of 30 Aug. 1995.

51. See J. C. H. Aveling, The Handle and the Axe: The Catholic Recusants in England from Reformation to Emancipation (London: Blond & Briggs, 1976), esp. pp. 240-45.

52. The same Christchurch Poor Ledgers (Guildhall Library, MS 9, 163) that record Henry's presence in Christchurch parish for the years 1682 through 1685 record the presence of a “Widow Barker” and, for 1684 and 1685, a “Mdm Barker” as well. No female Barkers appear in subsequent years. According to The Registers of Christ Church, Newgate on 24 Apr. 1685, an Ann Barker was buried in the parish (Harl. Soc. 21, p. 299). It is impossible to be certain that the “Widow Barker” who paid the poor rate between 1682 and 1685 and the Ann Barker who died in 1685 are the same person, or that either or both are Jane Barker's mother; but their identity is consistent with Barker's fictional account of Galesia's removal to London with her mother. The only difference is that the novel places them within sight of Westminster Abbey (St. Margaret's parish, Westminster). The St. Margaret's Overseers Accounts for 1685 (Westminster Archives, E193) names a “Madame Barker” as a rated occupier of Ship Yard in Petite France. There is no record of the death of an Anne Barker in the St. Margaret's parish register.

53. PR, Pt. II, p. 180. The poem is “On His Secret Passion for Cosmelia.”

54. The advertisement appears in the anonymous Delightful and Ingenious Novels: Being Choice and Excellent Stories of Amours, Tragical and Comical (1685).

55. See esp. “Fidelia having seen the Convent at St. James's,” “Fidelia and her friend on her becoming a Catholick,” and “Fidelia arguing with her self on the difficulty of finding the true Religion.” In the last she concludes her spiritual struggle with a resolution to reject all “worldly joys” along with “Benit's sons,” that is, the Benedictines, who evidently received her into the Church.

56. She left one highly mythologized account of her own exile and wanderings in “A dialogue between Fidelia and her little nephew, Martius,” which depicts Fidelia as driven from her homeland by “curssed Orange”: “Thus helpless, friendless, destitute forlorn, / 'Twixt debters, creditors, and lawyers torn, / I wander'd on, in hopes of better chance, / Till curssed Orange drive us all to France, / And here we wander vagabons alone, / Not knowing any, or to any known, / And all methinks do our acquaintance shun. / But honour, conscience, vertue brought us here, / We cannot sink, since they the vessel steer” (Mag. MS, Pt. II, 27v).

57. “To His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, on His birth day 1689: or 99: The author having presented him a Calvary set in a vinyard” (Mag. MS 343, Pt. II, 40-41v).

58. BL Add. MS 21,621. A group of twenty “Poems Refering to the times” arranged to tell the story of the trials of the Stuarts and their followers from the accession of James II to the defeat of his troops in Ireland in 1691 (followed by a joyful coda occasioned by events in Nov. 1700), they were prepared at Barker's direction for presentation to the prince by way of wishing him “a happy new Century.”

59. 29 Jan. 1691 (The Parochial Registers of St. Germain-en-Laye: Jacobite Extracts of Births Marriages and Deaths, ed. C. E. Lart, 2 vols. [London: St. Catherine, 1910-12], 1:137).

60. Paul Hopkins (letter of 18 June 1995) informs us that Brent was head of the commission of “regulators” who in 1687-88 attempted to pack Parliament in a pro-Catholic direction.

61. “At the sight of the body of Our late gracious sovereign Lord King James As it lys at the English Monks” (Mag. MS 343, Pt. II, 20-21v) appears with only a few significant variants in BL Add. MS. 10, 118, ff. 410v-411, a history of James drafted by the Benedictine monks in Paris. “A rough first draught of the History of England's late … King James II” (1706) is attributed in the BL catalog to Joseph Johnston, prior of the English Benedictines of St. Edmund in Paris; but Dom Geoffrey Scott identifies the author as Ralph Benet Weldon, one of Johnston's monks (“Sacredness of Majesty”: The English Benedictines and the Cult of King James II, Royal Stuart Papers 23 [Huntingdon: Royal Stuart Soc., 1984], pp. 5-6).

62. BL Add. MS 21,621. A modern pencil note beneath the bookplate identifies the arms represented in it as those of Armand-Louis du Plessis-Richelieu, the duc d'Aiguillon (1683-1750). In fact the dual arms are those of his wife, after their marriage in 1718. The volume was later sold for 19s. at Sothebys, on 21 Nov. 1856, lot 255, described in the catalog as belonging to a library formed by a collector “during his residence abroad.”

63. The note beside “To Her Majesty the Queen, on the Kings going to Callis this carnival 1696” indicates her eyes were then “bound doun” as a result of a cataract operation. King James was in Calais by 7 Mar. (Historical Manuscripts Commission, Calendar of the Stuart Papers, 7 vols. [London: HMSO, 1902], 1:113).

64. Mag. MS 343. The dedication (from late 1700) opens with a reference to “blindness and misfortunes”; a preface (also from late 1700) attributes “slips of the pen, and defects in the English” to “long absence and blindness”; an undated preface “to the Reader” (probably no later than 1704) asks that the poems be “consider'd as the work of a blind person.”

65. The information in this paragraph comes from a statement submitted by the defendants (PRO, C11 237/28).

66. Records of this case are in the PRO. We are indebted to Carol Shiner Wilson for uncovering the Statons' undated answer, which is now bound with Jane Barker's bill of complaint, dated 10 July 1717, in C11/237/28. The court's order in response to Barker's Bill is recorded in an entry for 23 July 1717 in Chancery Decrees and Orders (C33/327 f. 382); the court's response to the Staton answer dated 6 Aug. 1717 is recorded in C33/329 f. 23.

67. According to her Chancery statement, at the age of “seventeen” she was living with and maintained by her father.

68. William Henson was christened 12 Nov. 1675, according to the International Genealogical Index. In 1709, the year before he died, he was churchwarden of the Carlby parish (LAO [Lincolnshire Archive Office], Ch. P. 1709, Box 4/14b). William appears to have been the eldest son of Robert Henson of Carlby, yeoman, and Ann Figge, of Wilsthorpe, who married in 1672 (LAO, Gretford-cum-Wilsthorp parish register). In 1683 Robert was named one of the constables of the wapentake of Ness (LAO, Kestevan Session Bundle 49). He died in Feb. 1706, leaving his estate to his wife, whom he named his sole executrix, providing that she pay off all his debts and “save harmless & indemnified my son William Henson from a bond for five pound in which he is bound with me to the Overseers of the Poor of Carlby” (LAO, LCC Will 1707/141). Robert's signature to the will, dated 1 Jan. 1705, suggests the barest ability to write.

69. An inventory of his goods preserved in the Lincolnshire Archives estimates the value of his estate at the time of his death as £101 14s. 8d. (LAO, LCC Admon 1710/62). It shows him possessing, in addition to household goods, considerable livestock (including horses, eleven head of cattle, fifteen pigs, and over a hundred sheep), and twenty-one acres of land, at least seven of them arable. This would place him somewhat below the level of a substantial yeoman. David Cressy found that the mean probate estate of an English yeoman in 1640 was £195 (Coming Over: Migration and Communication Between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 1987], p. 121).

70. There is irony in Staton's coming from Irnham. This village, some eleven or twelve miles north of Stamford (and about the same distance from Wilsthorpe), was site of the highest concentration of Roman Catholics in Lincolnshire, though Staton was not one of them, and in the 17th century a hotbed for Roman Catholic women writers. See the Thimelby entries in Virginia Blain, Isobel Grundy, and Patricia Clements, The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present (New Haven & London: Yale Univ., 1990). It is likely Barker would have attended mass at the chapel at Irnham Hall, home of the Thimelby family. The Compton Census of 1676 shows 149 recusants over the age of sixteen in Kesteven; fifty-six were in Irnham, with a total population of only 137. Wilsthorpe, with a population of 95 in 1665 (based upon the Hearth Tax Return), had none. See Appendix A of vol. 25 of The Publications of the Lincoln Record Society, esp. p. cxxxiii. For the Compton Census, see Anne Whiteman, ed., The Compton Census of 1676: A Critical Edition, Records of Social and Economic History n.s. 10 (London: Oxford Univ. for The British Academy, 1986).

71. No trace of the Henson girls beyond 1717 has been found.

72. The summons, from July 1717, appears to be all that has survived from the Staton proceedings in the Kesteven Quarter Sessions (LAO, Kesteven Sessions Bundles, 1717, KQS A/2/32).

73. According to Erickson (see n. 47), in the 17th century The Country-Man's Counsellor reckoned the cost of an injunction to stay proceedings at £1s. 6d. (p. 117).

74. The Lincolnshire Archives Office holds two documents relating to Barker's registration of her estate. “Schedules and Letters of Attorney, 1717” is a statement she prepared (although not in her own hand) describing her estate; it bears her signature. “Kesteven Quarter Sessions. Papists' Estates. Rolls. 1717,” also bearing her signature, is an official enrollment of the information provided above. The same information is recorded in documents in the PRO: FEC 1/1200 (Abstracts of Papists Estates) and FEC 1/1201 (Returns). The LAO “Schedules” document, in what is surely a scribal error, refers to Barker as a “Widow.” The only reference to her as something other than “spinster” on any official record, it is corrected on the “Rolls” document.

75. That is, she holds land subject to a rent of £22 12s. 4d. (as it was in her father's time) by virtue of a lease from the earl of Exeter, deceased, made to her father, gentleman, from 22 Dec. 1675 for 80 years. On this latter point the documentary record is discrepant: the lease preserved in the NRO (S[T]674) is for 99 years and dated 2 Dec. 1675.

76. This corrects the account offered in Kissing the Rod (see n. 5), p. 354.

77. For the 1715 statute and registration, see Edgar E. Estcourt and John Orlebar Payne, The English Catholic Nonjurors of 1715: Being a Summary of the Register of their Estates (London: Burns & Oates, [1885]).

78. Various biographical entries have Thomas Barker living on a royal grant or pension. Moira Ferguson makes Thomas the recipient of “an annual grant of eighty pounds from Charles I from 1675 onward” (First Feminists: British Women Writers 1578-1799 [Bloomington: Indiana Univ.; Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1985], p. 171); Janet Todd implies that Barker was spared the necessity of marrying when “a small income from a royal grant made to her father” gave her the “option of spinsterhood” (British Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide, ed. Janet Todd [N.Y.: Frederick Ungar/Continuum, 1989], p. 42); John T. Shawcross, in an especially error-ridden account, says of Barker that after 1685 she “continued to live on the inheritance from her father” (Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 131: Seventeenth-Century British Nondramatic Poets, 3rd ser., ed. M. Thomas Hester [Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1993], p. 3). Alison Shell's more reliable entry in the recent Dictionary of National Biography: Missing Persons, ed., C. S. Nicholls [Oxford Univ., 1993], p. 43) still repeats the story of the fictive royal grant.

79. This error originated with McBurney (see n. 33, p. 390), who claimed on the basis of a misreading of Gibbons (see n. 3) that in 1715 Jane Barker possessed “a small annual income which had been granted to her father, Thomas Barker, for eighty years by Charles I.” Gibbons had said that in 1715 Barker had “an estate of annual value £47 10s., which was granted to Thomas Barker, gent., for eighty years from Dec. 2, 1675.” Thomas had been granted lease of the Wilsthorpe estate by the earl of Exeter, not the king.

80. Elizabeth Brownlow, daughter of Sir John Brownlow of Belton, Lincs., married John Cecil, sixth earl of Exeter, in 1699 and lived at the family seat, Burghley House, near Wilsthorpe, until her death in Nov. 1723.

81. Barker revised and substantially expanded the dedication for the 2nd edn. of Bosvil and Galesia, which appeared in the 2nd vol. of The Entertaining Novels of Mrs. Jane Barker (1719). Elizabeth Cecil (1706-33), daughter of the sixth earl of Exeter and Elizabeth Brownlow, married William Aislabie, son and heir of John Aislabie of York, the chancellor of the exchequer, in 1724, soon after her parents' deaths and a few months before her 18th birthday. See Oswald Barron, ed., Northamptonshire Families. Victoria History of the Counties of England, 2 vols. (London: Archibald Constable, 1906), 1:35.

82. The Christian Pilgrimage: Or, A Companion for the Holy Season of Lent (London: E. Curll & C. Rivington, 1718), pp. ii-iii. The original is evidently an unidentified work by Fénelon, the Archbishop of Cambrai.

83. The Countess was Anne Hatton, second wife of Daniel Finch, second earl of Nottingham, and a kinswoman of the Cecil family (earls of Exeter). Though not herself Roman Catholic, she was reputed to be devoted “to the forms and ceremonies thought to be ‘papist’ by less rigid Anglicans” (Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satirical Verse, 1660-1714, ed. William J. Cameron et al., 7 vols. [New Haven & London: Yale Univ., 1963-75], 5:206). It may also be relevant that two years earlier, in 1716, her husband was dismissed from office when he tried unsuccessfully to dissuade King George I from executing the Scottish lords captured in the 1715 Jacobite rising.

84. BL Stowe 232, f. 93. In 1718 a Secret Office was established to open, search, and reseal all foreign correspondence. For more on the anti-Jacobite intelligence system, see Paul S. Fritz, The English Ministers and Jacobitism between the Rebellions of 1715 and 1745 (Toronto & Buffalo: Univ. of Toronto, 1975), esp. pp. 51-58.

85. Though Barker appears on the title page of A Patch-Work Screen (1723) as “of Wilsthorp,” the preface, dated Candlemas Day, 1722/3, i.e., 2 Feb. 1723, places her in Richmond. The preface to The Lining of the Patch Work Screen (1726), gives no place. Barker may have left Wilsthorpe after 1717, perhaps to reside in London or its outskirts, or even to return to St. Germain. Timon Connock, the son of Barker's cousin William, wrote in 1720 to Brigadier John Hay (later titular earl of Inverness) in Rome, thanking him for his kindness to Timon's “poor Ant,” but described himself as “very much mortifyed [that] shee has taken the desperate resolution to go so far to starve,” wishing that she had remained at St Germain (Windsor Castle, Royal Archives, Stuart Papers 46/14). If indeed Barker is the “poor Ant” of this letter, this would indicate she traveled to St. Germain and then on to Rome at this time. We are grateful to Edward Corp for bringing the Connock letter to our attention.

86. Hutcheson (ca. 1659-1740)—lawyer, economist, and maverick Whig M.P.—was Ormonde's “man of business” after he went into exile (Romney Sedgwick, ed., The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1715-54, 2 vols. [London: HMSO, 1970], 2:163).

87. According to Sedgwick the parliamentary session ran until 21 Mar. in 1718.

88. The original reads: “Il y a longtems que nous sommes sans lettres de vous. m r. Hutchesson vous est fort devoüé. Il a honte de ses et Erreurs passèes, Et il les desavoüe publiquement, Plusieurs de ses amis qui n'ont pas essè des vostres se rangent à present à vostre party, le nombre de vos amis s'augmente tous les jours. Ils souhaitent fort de vous voir avec vostre jeune Amy, et qu'il puisse deposseder ceux qui luy retiennent injustem[ant] son bien; Car il est bien triste de le voir ainsy errer dans les Païs estrangers. mais je dois vous dire que si vous voulez trouver icy des maisons à bon marché, il y faut venir apres la fin de la session du parlem[ent], lors que chacun va à la Campagne. je ne vous conseilleray jamais de venir pendant la session tout estant alors trop cher.” Our thanks to Lindsay Kaplan for assisting with the translation.

89. John Menzies, a London-based Jacobite intelligence agent, reported in a letter of 28 Feb. 1718 to Lewis Innes that “Mr. Hu[t]chi[n]son, a great friend personally to the late D[uke] of Orm[onde] from whom he had received signal obligations” is “at present a malcontent, for he was not enough considered, and so sides highly with the Prince.” Previously he had been “a mighty man for the Government” (Historical Manuscripts Commission, Calendar of the Stuart Papers, 7 vols. [London: HMSO, 1912], 5:524).

90. A letterbook of the duke of Ormonde in the British Library, Add. MS 33,950, contains copies of eighteen letters written by Ormonde in 1719 to Sir Timon Connock, son of Barker's cousin William. On 20 May 1720, Timon wrote from Spain that he expected a visit from “the Duke of O.” that night (Royal Archives, Windsor Castle, Stuart Papers 47/3) and in 1732 Timon's widow, Mary, acknowledged to “James III” that the duke of Ormonde was prompted by his “friendship” for Timon to solicit a baronetcy for Timon's father, William, which would devolve to Timon's then-underage son upon William's death (Royal Archives, Windsor Castle, Stuart Papers, 152/81). According to Micheline Kerney Walsh, “Toby Bourke, Ambassador of James III at the Court of Philip V, 1705-13” (The Stuart Court in Exile and the Jacobites, ed. Eveline Cruickshanks & Edward Corp [London & Rio Grande: Hambledon, 1995]), Timon [whose name she misspells Simon], figured prominently in Bourke's reports from the Spanish court; he “became brigadier-general, officer of the king's guards, and later governor of the infante, son of Philip V” (p. 151). For more information on the Connocks, see ns. 14 and 16.

91. We are grateful to Paul Hopkins for helping us interpret this document. He observes (in a letter of 18 June 1995) that Barker would hardly be one of those accustomed to receiving letters from Ormonde—“but she might hold the pen for those who did.”

92. Royal Archives, Windsor Castle, Stuart Papers 208/129, misdated 1738. The letter is difficult to date. The date reads “Aug 14:73 0.” which may mean [17]13 0—the “7” possibly being a 1. Internal evidence suggests, however, that the correct interpretation is [1]730. The letter is reprinted in Henrietta Tayler, Lady Nithsdale and Her Family (London, Lindsay Drummond, [1939]), pp. 239-40, misdated 1739 and attributed to an “I. Barker.” Tayler thinks it was written to Lady Nithsdale's sister, Mother Lucy Theresa Joseph, Superior of the Augustinian Convent at Bruges, and forwarded by her to Lady Nithsdale in Rome.

93. More than forty miraculous cures occurring through James' intercession were verified as part of a commission to consider James' canonization. Many of the cured were women, and women were active in promoting the canonization effort. The Visitation nuns at Chaillot distributed relics, mostly fragments of cloth that had touched the king's coffin or had been placed under his heart. One Ursuline nun claimed, as Barker did, to have been cured by a rag that had been dipped in the king's blood by officials present at the embalming (Scott, “Sacredness of Majesty” [see n. 61], pp. 3-4; correspondence from Dom Scott, 12 May 1986). Most of the attested cures date from 1701 and 1702, but Barker's must have occurred later: her letter indicates that the cure took place “over the space of some years.”

94. They may also express the discomforts of writing for money. It is notable that in the fictions Galesia consistently identifies herself as writer with the 17th-century poet Katherine Philips (“Orinda”) and the nostalgic world of literary amateurism and virtuous rural retirement over which Orinda symbolically presided. The prefaces are another matter: those to A Patch-Work Screen and Lining in particular offer richly ambivalent representations of “Jane Baker”—another of the author's fashioned self-images—as marketplace professional.

95. Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford & N.Y.: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 42. An earlier and no less influential formulation of this view is found in John Richetti's characterization of Barker as maker of “pious polemics” whose work represents a “deliberate attempt to sell female fiction to a wider audience by making it impeccably respectable” (Popular Fiction Before Richardson: Narrative Patterns: 1700-1739 [1969; Oxford: Clarendon, 1992], p. 239).

96. Seductive Forms: Women's Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), p. 3.

97. Some of the most interesting recent work on the relationship between gender and the early novel has stressed the political dimensions of women's amatory fiction. Ballaster is especially good on Behn and Manley; for another view of Manley, see Paula McDowell, The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace 1678-1730 (Oxford: Clarendon, forthcoming); for suggestive work on Eliza Haywood, see Toni O'Shaughnessy Bowers, “Sex, Lies, and Invisibility: Amatory Fiction from the Restoration to Mid-Century,” in The Columbia History of the British Novel, ed. John Richetti (N.Y.: Columbia Univ., 1994). We would like to see a downgrading of the status of “scandal” in their work so as to permit us to see the shared political commitments that link these writers and their so-called decorous or “Orindan” counterparts.