Lady Eleanor Davies

English writer and prophet

• Born: 1590
• Birthplace: England
• Died: July 5, 1652
• Place of death: London, England

Believing herself to be inspired by the prophet Daniel, Lady Eleanor addressed more than sixty religious and political tracts to the king, Parliament, and the public, alarming the authorities, who imprisoned her in the Tower of London and Bedlam.

Early Life

Lady Eleanor Davies (DAY-vihs) was born Eleanor Touchet, the fifth daughter of George Touchet, eleventh Baron Audeley, and his wife, Lucy, daughter of Sir James Mervin of Fonthill Gifford, Wiltshire. Her family home was in Stalbridge, Dorset. She had four sisters, Anne, Elizabeth, Mary, and Christian, and two brothers, Ferdinando and Mervin. Eleanor prided herself on her lineage and on her vocation as a prophet: In The Appearance or Presence of the Son of Man (1650), she insisted that the Audeley title was not a modern invented peerage but predated the Norman Conquest. She claimed that the family name derived from the Old Saxon title Audleigh or Old field. She explained that the letters A and O, standing for audleigh and old field, represented Alpha and Omega, the first and last, and so signified her ancient origins and the approaching judgment of her prophecies.

Nothing is known about Eleanor’s education, but one can deduce that she received some training in languages because of her discussions of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew in her tracts. It is likely that she depended upon a polyglot Bible for her discussion of Greek and Hebrew, but she may have composed the Latin text of her tract Prophetia de die Novissimo novissimis hisce temporibus manifestando: Item de excisione Ecclesiae and Redemptione Ex inferis (1644; A Prophesie of the Last Day to Be Revealed in the Last Times, and Then of the Cutting Off the Church and of the Redemption Out of Hell: The Word of God , 1645). Sometime between her tenth and her fifteenth birthday, Eleanor accompanied her mother to Ireland, where they rejoined her father. Baron Audeley had taken part in the Siege of Kinsale in 1601, but it was not until 1605 that he succeeded in obtaining lands in Ireland; he was created earl of Castlehaven in 1616.

Life’s Work

By 1609, Lord Audeley had amassed enough property that he could provide even his fifth daughter with six thousand pounds in money and land and, according to his discussion of her dowry, also supply her with valuable household plate and linen. At nineteen, Eleanor married Sir John Davies (1569-1626), attorney general of Ireland and a distinguished poet as well as a successful barrister and civil servant. More than twice her age, Davies was the coauthor with Christopher Marlowe of Epigrammes and Elegies (1590?). Eleanor would have been attracted to the acrostic format of his Hymnes of Astraea (1599), because her own work reveals an interest in word play, particularly in anagrams. She would also have been interested in the subject matter of Nosce Teipsum: This Oracle Expounded in Two Elegies (1599), a verse explaining the nature of the soul and arguing for its immortality.

Eleanor’s marriage to Davies resulted in the birth of two sons, Richard, who probably died in infancy, and John, who was alive on May 13, 1617, because he is mentioned in a letter written by Sir Robert Jacob. Clearly a diagnostic letter, it states that Jack can understand spoken language, indicating that his hearing is not defective but that his tongue may be. Her son’s apparent disabilities may have led Eleanor to sympathize with George Carr, a mute thirteen-year-old Scot who gained celebrity as a fortuneteller and whom she took into her home in 1625. Davies’s son John was drowned in Ireland sometime between 1617 and 1619. A daughter, Lucy, was born on January 20, 1613, in Dublin and named after her maternal grandmother. On October 31, 1619, Davies was relieved of his official responsibilities as attorney general, and he and Eleanor returned to England.

Eleanor attracted public attention in 1622, when she became involved in a quarrel with Lady Jacob. In a personal letter preserved among the domestic state papers for 1622, Kit Brooke, Lady Jacob’s husband, threatens Eleanor that if she does not leave his wife and child alone, he will scratch a mince pie out of her and curses her with the wish that she remain ever what she is.

In 1623, Sir John Davies purchased the manor of Englefield in Berkshire, not far from London. Also in 1623, he supplied his daughter, Lucy, with a dowry of sixty-five hundred pounds and arranged her marriage to Ferdinando Hastings, heir to the earl of Huntington; they were married on July 7 at Harefield, the home of Ferdinando’s maternal grandmother, Alice, countess of Derby. Lucy, who was only eleven, remained with her parents until going to live with the Hastings family in 1625.

Eleanor began her prophetic career on July 28, 1625, when she received her first vision from Daniel and wrote a prophetic text, probably an early version of the text later published as Warning to the Dragon and All His Angels (1625). Illustrating how her prophecy would act as a mirror, she printed her own name, Eleanor Audeley backward and her anagram of it, REVEALE O DANIEL forward. She personally delivered her prophecy to Archbishop Abbot of Canterbury in Oxford, where he was attending Parliament. Eleanor was fiercely anti-Catholic and unwisely warned King Charles I that he must guide his wife Henrietta Maria away from popery.

Lady Davies reported in The Lady Eleanor Her Appeal: Present This to Mr. Mace the Prophet of the Most High, His Messenger (1646) that her husband burned the book containing her first prophecy. She retaliated by using an anagram of his name to prophesy his death: JOHN DAVES, JOVES HAND. She told Davies that he would die within three years, and she began wearing mourning immediately. When they were at dinner in December, 1626, she began to cry, and Davies told her, “I pray weep not while I am alive, and I will give you leave to laugh when I am dead.” He died three days later, and Eleanor remarried Sir Archibald Douglas after only three months in March, 1627. This remarriage weakened her claim to Davies’s estate, which the Huntingdon family claimed through Lucy. Records of the litigation over Davies’s estate are preserved at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

By 1631, another member of Eleanor’s family had attracted public attention. On May 14, 1631, after a notorious trial, her brother, Mervin, eleventh Baron Audeley and second earl of Castlehaven, was executed for sodomy and for being an accessory to the rapes of his wife and his stepdaughter by a servant. Anne Stanley, the aggrieved wife of Castlehaven, was the sister of Eleanor’s daughter Lucy’s mother-in-law, making Eleanor’s relationship with the Hastings family even more difficult.

For the rest of her life, Eleanor concentrated upon publishing her prophetic writing, amounting to more than sixty pamphlets. The first serious repercussion occurred in October 23, 1633, when she was called before the Court of High Commission after she returned from publishing several tracts in the Netherlands. Her books were burned in front of her, and in 1635, after she destroyed altar hangings, which she regarded as too popish, she was committed to Bedlam. She was released by 1640, but she continued to prophesy the end of the world. She was imprisoned off and on until her death in 1652, because she continued to foresee retribution overwhelming government officials. Her daughter Lucy buried her in Saint Martin-in-the-Fields with an epitaph describing her as “learned above her sex” and “in a woman’s body, a man’s spirit.”

Significance

Lady Eleanor Davies, though previously ridiculed as a madwoman and dismissed because of her unconventional style, is now regarded as an important seventeenth century author. Prolific, extremely clever, and highly literate, Davies’s work portrays and comments upon both the turbulent public events of her time and her own private, domestic, and religious experience, juxtaposing the one with the other. This juxtaposition of public and private, often characteristic of women writers in patriarchal societies, places her as an important member of a tradition extending from Julian of Norwich through Virginia Woolf and beyond. It also renders her texts invaluable as sources in the cultural history of seventeenth century England.

Bibliography

Cope, Esther. Handmaid of the Holy Spirit: Dame Eleanor Davies, Never Soe Mad a Ladie. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. A revisionary biography of Lady Eleanor offering a sympathetic view of her life and works. Supplies a useful seventeenth century context for female prophets.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, ed. Prophetic Writings of Lady Eleanor Davies. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Selections from the prophetic tracts of Lady Eleanor.

Herrup, Cynthia B. A House in Gross Disorder: Sex, Law, and the Second Earl of Castlehaven. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Account of the politics of the trial and execution of Lady Eleanor’s brother for rape and sodomy.

Pickard, Richard. “The Anagrams, Etc.: The Interpretive Dilemmas of Lady Eleanor Douglas.” Renaissance and Reformation 20, no. 3 (1996): 5-22. Study of the unusual prose style favored by Lady Eleanor.

Porter, Roy. “The Prophetic Body: Lady Eleanor Davies and the Meaning of Madness.” Women’s Writing 1, no. 1 (1994): 51-63. Approaches Lady Eleanor from a feminist perspective.

Travitsky, Betty. “The Possibilities of Prose.” In Women and Literature in Britain, 1500-1700, edited by Helen Wilcox. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Excellent overview of Lady Eleanor in the context of other seventeenth century women writers.