Deborah Aldrich-Watson, The Verse Miscellany of Constance Aston
Fowler: A Diplomatic Edition (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval
and Renaissance Studies in conjunction with Renaissance English Text
Society, 2000), lxii + 206 pp., ISBN 0866982523
Constance Aston Fowler’s verse miscellany (Huntington Library MS, HM
904) is a relic of one of seventeenth-century England’s most prolific poetic
coteries—that surrounding the Aston family at Tixall, Staffordshire,
between about 1630 and 1660. Sir Walter Aston, Constance’s father, was a
ward of Sir Edward Coke and served James I as an ambassador to Spain
between 1619-1625 and 1635-1638, negotiating on the first visit Prince
Charles’ proposed marriage to the Spanish Infanta. Aston converted to
Catholicism at some point in the 1620s and 1630s, and his children—
notably Herbert, Constance and Gertrude, who are all involved as poets or
compilers in HM 904—all married into prominent recusant families. Tixall
was, in fact, the centre of Catholicism in Staffordshire in the 1620s and
1630s, and HM 904 indicates connections with recusant writers across the
Midlands.
Equally importantly, the Aston family and their papers exemplify the
practice of poetic composition and circulation in a provincial family and
social context. Walter Aston, a poet and a translator, brought up children
who came to write verse as a means of comment and correspondence on
family events, social interactions and religious feelings. HM 904 contains
verses as delightful as the apology of Katherine Thimelby (Herbert’s wife,
and Constance’s dear friend) to her friend, Lady Dorothy Shirley, on the
occasion of her moodiness during a visit, ‘upon the LD saying KT could be
sad in her company’. The Tixall circle has, in fact, long been known as a
prototype of the friendship-poetry coterie: Arthur Clifford published in 1813
Tixall Poetry, drawn from three other familial manuscript collections and
miscellaneous loose sheets (all now lost), and followed the volume with
Tixall Letters in 1815. Herbert, Constance’s older brother, was the circle’s
most talented and prolific poet, and his commonplace book is extant at the
Beinecke Library, Yale, as MS Osborne B4, 1634 (it contains no poems in
common with HM 904). Constance’s verse miscellany is no second-rate
collection, despite the lack of an edition to date. H.R. Woudhuysen has
described it as one of the important collections of verse put together by
families, and Arthur Marotti calls it ‘a good example of how a young
woman assembled an anthology of poems in the context of family relations,
personal devotion and literary interests, and Catholic royalist politics’.
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Watson’s edition is thus an important contribution to the fields of
seventeenth-century manuscript studies, gender and literature, and literature
in relation to society and politics.
Watson’s introduction provides an enlightening account of the Aston
family’s social circle, elucidating the (frequently complicated) social
connections which underpin the occasional verse. HM 904, as she
describes, is comprised of religious poems, poems by or about family
members or friends, and ten or so miscellaneous poems, which fit into
neither category. Many of the religious poems are overtly Catholic, and
four of these are verses of Robert Southwell, SJ. Watson attributes a poem
‘On the Passion of our Lord and sauiour Iesus’ to Constance herself, on the
basis of a ‘characteristic sense of drama’ detectable in the poem and in
Constance’s letters. This is one of very few unattributed verses in
Constance’s miscellany (she is usually assiduous in assigning initials to
authors’ work) and there is to date no other evidence of Constance the
miscellany compiler having been a writer herself. It is tempting to claim
this collector, sister and associate of lively coterie poets for the phalanx of
emergent early modern women writers, but the evidence is a little too slim.
Problems also arise with Watson’s attribution of the hands in the
manuscript. Constance Aston Fowler’s hand co-exists with ‘Hand B’,
responsible for fourteen of the sixteen religious poems and Watson believes
this to be the hand of Constance’s sister, Gertrude Aston Thimelby.
Watson’s attribution ramifies into another key recusant manuscript of the
mid-century, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet. b. 5, which contains a section
of twelve Catholic poems (including three which also occur in HM 904),
also copied in Hand B. Watson consequently believes Gertrude Aston
Thimelby also to be responsible for the transcriptions in the Bodleian
manuscript. Watson is the first person to date to ascribe Hand B to Gertrude
(F.M. McKay believed the Bodleian manuscript to have been compiled by
Thomas Fairfax, a recusant Warwickshire yeoman), but she does not give
reasons for her attribution. Given the frequent difficulty of identifying
hands in seventeenth-century manuscript miscellanies, and the precise social
connections which careful identifications can reveal, it would have been
desirable for Watson to present her reasons for her identification. It also
seems a shame that the edition does not include more numerous plates from
the manuscript, or plates which serve to illustrate the different hands.
These are pitfalls ever-present in seventeenth-century women’s
writing and manuscript studies. It is tempting to claim compilers as authors,
and scholars need to be vigilant in attributing to women precisely that for
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which they are responsible. That being said, Watson’s transcription of the
manuscript itself is excellent; her introduction is well-researched; the
apparatus is helpful; and the poems themselves are thus clear, user-friendly
and suitably contextualised. Watson and the Renaissance English Text
Society are to be thanked for making available at last a printed edition of
this remarkable example of the familial and social use of seventeenthcentury verse, the practice of miscellany compilation, and women’s
participation in it.
Sarah Ross
University of Warwick
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