Bentley: Take Courage ! 1 Plot

Bradford Cathedral; the tower is probably the least changed part of Bradford since the days of the siege.

What stabilises the narrative is Bentley’s distinctive Social Realist concentration on economics.  The part entitled ‘WAR’ starts on p 173 of a book of 495 pages.  These opening pages concentrate of the problems faced by the wool trade in the run-up to civil war.    Even Cromwell in his days of Protector will be  judged by this yardstick: ‘The plight of the cloth trade grew desperate – so desperate, indeed that Oliver himself admitted to the Parliament his serious concern for this staple English trade,’ (V.3.400).      

The distinctive narrative voice that continually judges and accuses both itself and the nation belongs to ‘Penninah’.     ‘Penninah’ is a strange name for the Protestant 17th century to choose for a daughter.  Penninah is an obscure figure briefly mentioned in 1Samuel 1 as one of the two wives of Elkanah.   This in itself might have been enough to dissuade Protestants, who were prone to enforce monogamy rigorously but, in addition, Penninah does not appear to have any desirable personal qualities.  She derides Hannah, Elkanah’s other wife, because Penninah has ‘children’ (1 Sam 2) and Hannah appears infertile.   Nevertheless, eventually it is Hannah, not Penninah, who bears Samuel, an important judge and prophet of Israel.   It is not Penninah who is chosen to be a significant part of god’s plan.    Bentley’s Penninah is equally anonymous.   She is not the mother or wife of a Fairfax or a Cromwell; she is merely one of the many who will be caught up in a war they did not instigate and cannot control, like most of Bentley’s readers.    Penninah explains her name has been chosen by her father ‘because it sounds like the Pennine hills, which he loved dearly,’ (I.3.30).   This allows Penninah to be as tough as the Pennines and tell a tale as old as the hills with occasional echoes of the King James Bible.  Some of the last words in the book are these:

     But the land has not perished; the sheep still feed on the Pennine hills; women still conceive

     and bring forth and give their children suck; and while man lives, the hope of righteousness will    

     not die.  (PENNINAH REMEMBERS, p495)

In addition to word-play on ‘Pennines’, there is a pun in the heroine’s abbreviated name ‘Pen’.  Everything recorded by Pen is recorded by Bentley’s pen and passed through a feminist filter that is alert to irony.  This Penninah has a sex-drive and fertility that has allowed her to bear children to two men rather than being the second wife of one man.  Nevertheless, she suffers the deaths of lover and husband and friends and family to war and natural causes that earn her the right to displace the voice of the Old Testament prophets with her own.   Hers is the voice of the survivor not the hero trying to reassure an unheroic readership that there will be a future that is endurable.    However the last words of the book are more equivocal than optimistic: ‘The strife is sore while it lasts; …..some say the storm will pass, and the nation rejoice in the sweet air of peace,’ (PENNINAH REMEMBERS, p495).   Pen’s voice changes midsentence.  At the start of the sentence it seems as if she is speaking generally: ‘The strife is sore whilst it lasts’.  Midway through she speaks as ‘we’: ‘but if we keep a good heart’.  By the end of the sentence she passes the burden of hope on to ‘some’ (PENNINAH REMEMBERS, p495).   To readers of 1940, urged to carry gas-masks with them at all times, the ‘sweet air of peace’ [my emphasis] might seem to no longer exist.    Like the novels of Walter Scott a novel supposedly about history is speaking to the present.

The Pennines near Bradford 

The original ideas for the novel were conceived in the days of Chamberlain leading the nation as Prime Minister.   Chris, the heroine’s restless son sounds more like an adolescent of 1938 when he complains that the elder generation ‘are all so tedious,’ (V.3.406).  Pen, his mother, endorses the complaint: ‘in this age – its politics so confused, its principles so broken, all that was noblest in it huddled in a tame defeat,’(V.3.406).    She sounds like the W H Auden of ‘September 1, 1939:

I sit in one of the dives

On Fifty-second Street

Uncertain and afraid

As the clever hopes expire

Of a low dishonest decade:

 https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/september-1-1939

Politics:

Bentley is not always as scathing about Cromwell.  In 1938 she used him as an example of integrity in her open letter Creed of a Writer that criticised Chamberlin’s appeasement policy:

   Cromwell once observed to the House of Commons: “If we will have peace without a worm

   in it, lay we foundations of justice and righteousness.”   Quoted in “O Dreams, O Destinations” (XII.iii.211).

By the end of Take Courage Cromwell is no longer the incorruptible moral force or the quasi dictator but the man Chris calls ‘fat old Noll’ and does not find inspiring (V.3.406).   

Cromwell ‘Fat old Noll’

 Somehow the revolutionary has been turned into a figure representing a complacent, Chamberlain-like establishment.   As in Rosemary Sutcliffe’s The Rider of the White Horse (1959), it is Sir Thomas Fairfax, not Cromwell, who has a leading role in the text.  In both books Fairfax is a principled human and humane figure and Bentley can present his resignation from the army and public life as the moment when the youthful idealism of the revolution, embodied by Pen’s husband John is lost: ‘Yes; when Black Tom [Fairfax]ceased to be the Parliament’s General, John Thorpe ceased to be a young man,’ (V.2.396).   The two men reminisce: ‘“Where did we fail, Jack?” said Lord Fairfax sadly.  “Where did we stray from the true path?”’ (VII.2.481), though each has a different answer.  For Fairfax the answer would have been to depose the king and set up Charles II, but Pen, and implicitly John, have more radical ideas: ‘all pretentions of birth or wealth seem to me very strange in the sight of God,’ ((VII.2.481).   Despite the idealism of this dialogue, Fairfax is shown as a man arranging his daughter Moll’s marriage for political reasons:

      One sign of this strange confusion of belief and parties was the marriage of Lord Fairfax’s

      daughter, which had taken place about that time.  .….  That her husband should be the Duke

      of Buckingham seemed very strange to me.   He was a great nobleman, no doubt, and no

      doubt a handsome and attractive man, but that Black Tom’s daughter should marry such a

      royalist, the  son too of that abominable Duke whose exactions has begun the troubles which led

      to the Civil War – that I could not contemplate calmly.  (V.3.408)

Lord Fairfax.

Nevertheless this places the Fairfax family in an advantageous position during the Restoration, whereas Pen’s family have found themselves at odds with Cromwellians, Levellers and Royalists.   When Pen and John visit Fairfax’s Appleton house it seems an Eden of ‘green flat meadows stretching down to the river,’  secure from the political or physical dangers outside: ‘No highwaymen … attacked us and we reached Tadcaster safely and got to Nun Appleton in the late afternoon,’  (VII.1.478)

Bentley’s description of the house follows the depiction of the house in a 17th century engraving (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nun_appleton-house-1656.jpg)

    The house was new, not yet thirty years built, a very great fine house of brick, with a very steep  

    roof and many chimneys; it had a centrepiece with a kind of tall dome atop, and two long wings,

    so that the buildings formed three sides of a square. (VII.1.478)

Appleton House

Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’ may inform the references to ‘a flower garden bright with tulips’  and ‘the bright flower beds heaped up in the fashion of little forts’ (VII.1.478):

xxix

See how the Flow'rs, as at Parade,

Under their Colours stand displaid:

Each Regiment in order grows,

That of the Tulip, Pinke, and Rose.

xxxvi

But laid these Gardens out in sport

In the just Figure of a Fort;

And with five Bastions it did fence,

As aiming one for ev'ry Sense.

http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/marvell/appleton.htm

Considering Bentley’s literary interests it is odd that she doesn’t mention Fairfax’s employment of the poet Andrew Marvell as tutor for Maria Fairfax or Marvell’s subsequent career as MP for Hull. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/andrew-marvell  The downbeat tone of Take Courage has no place for Marvell’s tough lyricism, satire or wit.

This idyll only lasts for three days and occupies pages 478-483.  On page 484 ’in the fall of that year that great and good man died,’ (VII.1.484).    The chapter finishes with a description of Fairfax’s funeral and tomb and quotes part of Buckingham’s elegy: ‘He never knew what envy was nor hate;’ [italics in the original](VII.1.484). 

A modern memorial on the wall of Bilborough Church  has extracts from this elegy and an account of Fairfax’s life as well as what Moll his daughter, says is his chosen epitaph; ‘The memory of the just is blessed,’ [italics in the original](VII.1.485).   

 Nevertheless the tomb reminds viewers of the status of the Fairfax family: Fairfax Arms on tomb.   

Bentley quotes a later line from Buckingham’s elegy because of the implicit contrast it offers between Fairfax and Cromwell:

How much it is a meaner thing

To be unjustly great than honourably good,

(VII.1.484).

   https://www.bartleby.com/332/149.html

Though Cromwell equalled Fairfax as a general and took over the public roles Fairfax resigned from he does not appear personally in Pen’s world.  Instead he appears to be an impersonal force who continually reshapes government with no constitutional or rational aim: ‘Cromwell did not understand how he had betrayed the people;’ (V.3.398).    Pen detects ‘an uneasy, almost querulous’ tone in his proclamations as Protector but she is certain that this leads to the exercise of ‘an arbitrary power’ (V.3.399).    Consequently the Chapter is unequivocally titled ‘A Commonwealth Becomes a Tyranny’.     Here the word ‘tyranny’ has been taken back to its origins.  Cromwell is a tyrant both in the ancient Greek sense of a man achieving and exercising power  ‘without legal restraint’  (https://www.britannica.com/topic/tyranny) and the 20th century sense of a man overriding the political and social rights of the individual: ‘We had fought ourselves free, and were not inclined to become his slaves,’ (V.3.399).     The word ‘arbitrary’ is equally well chosen, epitomising Bentley’s view of Cromwell the ruler who tolerated no check or balance and Cromwell the person whose decisions seem to be motivated by personal whim.    Surprisingly he slips out of the narrative almost unnoticed: ‘On his deathbed, Oliver, perhaps because he was afraid to trust anyone else, named his son Richard as his successor,’ (VI.1.431).      Bentley ignores the dramatic tradition that Cromwell died on a night of violent storms, summarised in Butler’s satirical Hudibras

Toss’d in a furious hurricane,

Oliver give up his reign,  (II.215-6)

https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/b/butler/samuel_1612-1680/hudibras/complete.html#canto8Did

Though the chapter is called ‘A Man is Buried with his Cause’ Bentley teases readers who expect the chapter will be about Cromwell.   Instead it mostly refers to her bother Will who is inspired by ideas like those of the Fifth Monarchists (https://www.britannica.com/event/Fifth-Monarchy-Men).   Will believes that the last days of Revelation are nigh when God will rule the earth directly: ‘cried out that the day of the Lord was at hand,’ (VI.1.436).    He dies of ‘apoplexy’ when the news of the Restoration reaches him: (VI.1.441).      

 Cromwell death mask.  

He is still a figure who divides historians and haunts British history.   As the war develops Bentley, like so many, is inspired by Churchill’s leadership.  1966’s A Man of His Time does not mention the Labour Prime Minster Harold Wilson but describes Churchill’s funeral as confirming: ‘The era was over,’ (A Man of His Time V.41.236).   Despite Bentley’s final focus on Churchill, the idiosyncratic socialist J B Priestley reviewed A Man of His Time and ended with the words: ‘bravo our generation!’   The mood of Take Courage is more ‘hang on our generation!’   

 King Charles II 

The image of a self-indulgent dandy disguised his shrewd realpolitik;  the opposite of Cromwell's image and praxis. 

The novel summarises the effects of the Restoration locally showing both good and bad.   Though religious persecution of dissenters intensifies the text also mentions: ‘The Bradford Grammar School receiving a new Charter from the King,’ (VI.2.442).  However the stabilising of government means that London, not Yorkshire becomes the site of power.    In order to accommodate this shift and bring the Plague and the Great Fire of London into the narrative Bentley installs Sam, one of Pen’s sons, to trade in the capital.  He survives the Plague but loses goods in the fire: ‘so that the damage he sustained was very heavy and he was vexed by it,’ (VI.3.470).  Nevertheless Penn rates material damage less heavily than the restriction of conscience; the two priests in the family, Thomas and David, ‘were kept by law from exercising toil and skill and care in the profession they had given their whole lives to,’ (VI.3.470).   

Further afield Bentley allows a glimpse of Chris’s activities in America: ‘after Chris’s notable feat against the Indians,’ [emphasis in the original] (VI.3.468).      Though Bentley represents herself as against imperialism: ‘the liberation of India gave me particular joy, ‘(“O Dreams, O Destinations” (XIV.II.239) she is more casual than ideological about Chris’s involvement in the colonisation of America and what his ‘feat’ was: ‘But I never have heard;’ (VI.3.469).    It is hard to imagine writers of the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries accepting without questioning the designation of ‘Indians’ and the feats of the white men who displaced them.   

17th Century pic of ‘Indian’

Illustrators often based their interpretations of Native Americans on figures taken from European antiquity.  John White’s illustrations to Thomas Hariot’s A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia point out the similarity to the pre-Roman Celtic inhabitants of Britain.  This illustration is derived from a less well known engraving but the longbow might have reminded viewers of the medieval English weapon and the large shield of Homer’s Ajax with his ‘seven fold shield’. 

The part of America Chris chooses to go to is Virginia, described in the text as ‘a Royalist kind of place’, though with opportunities for wealth: ‘Sam replied that there were plenty,’ (V.4. 418).  What the text doesn’t say is that Virginia will become wealthy and notorious because of the use of African slaves to grow tobacco.  The first few slaves were brought over in 1619 https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Virginia_s_First_Africans but by 1860 the slave population of Virginia was 550,000: virginiahistory.org/what-you-can-see/story-virginia/explore-story-virginia/1825-1861/slavery.  Take Courage does not use hindsight to point out Chris’s legacy. 

Tobacco advert

As early as the late 17th century images of African workers are identified with America and the cultivation of tobacco.  This is the central image of William Gribble of Barnstaple’s ‘Best Virginia Tobacco’ tobacco wrapper.   https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/media_player?mets_filename=evm00003260mets.xml

The novel deliberately takes little notice of Chris so its centre of gravity can remain Yorkshire and the wool trade: ‘Beside our cloth began to sell again – not as it had in the old days before the war, but better than of late,’ (VII.1.474).   This comparative prosperity creates a new kind of entrepreneur: the highwayman.    The man who describes them to Pen makes them sound like Robin Hoods: ‘They profess to take only from the rich, and give part of their booty to the poor,’ (VII.1.477).   Pen is not convinced and thinks ‘“That is what Chris would have become, had we kept him in England”’  (VII.1.477).    Plainly Chris occupies much of her unconscious mind.  When she describes the ‘great wide plain,’ of the Vale of York, she imagines ‘Virginia was like this, since Chris said often that it was a rich country, but John thought differently,’ (VII.1.477).     At this point readers might be expected to pause and fill in the tragic difference between the time honoured agriculture of Ainsty: ‘the cows too were fat, with very lustrous brown coats,’ (VII.1.477), and the crops of Virginia that depended on slave labour.

Pen is more worried by the imminent fear of robbery than the distant injustice of slavery. .  A kingdom full of disaffected men, trained in arms, who have fought for a variety of causes, is likely to produce a large number of armed robbers.

17th Century Highwayman.   

This is derived from the picture used in the Whitchurch site shows a scruffy figure on a camel-lipped horse, more of a nag than the speedy and beautiful Black Bess of legend.   http://www.whitchurch-heritage.co.uk/tag/highwaymen/.  The image has not acquired the glamour that the late 18th and 19th century will create; this man is not a ‘gentleman of the highway’.  Despite the 17th century setting, Bentley’s description of the highwayman owes more to the romanticised early 19th century tradition that follows Harrison Ainsworth’s idealisation of Dick Turpin in Rookwood (1834).

19th Century Dick Turpin Figurine

The success of Ainsworth's cult of Dick Turpin was reflected by the commercial manufacture of ceramic figures showing Dick Turpin as a dandy highwayman.  They adorned the  mantelpieces of many respectable middle-class families druing victoria's reign.

As Take Courage reaches an end, so does the century but Pen is still the commentator.   She describes herself as a child in 1625.  She is still alive after her husband dies, as a consequence of Lord Fairfax’s death in 1670, 45 years after the accession of Charles I.     This makes her around 57-60 years old but she sounds older, worn out by experiencing and observing the political and economic fluctuations of her day.  Like the fictional Laura of Sleep in Peace or Bentley herself in “O Dreams, O Destinations” she speaks for a lost generation but urges those who follow to ‘Take courage.  I have known trials so bitter that my whole course seemed darkened,’ (PENNINAH REMEMBERS, 494).     However the text has little to offer in the way of comfort for its first readers.  Instead it reflects a world of shameful compromises, constant tension between democracy and dictatorship and the suppression of free speech.   The only hope the last few pages open up is the toleration of Dissenters.  Thomas and David are finally ‘allowed to preach in any licensed meeting-place not a church, ‘ (VII.2.489).    To a generation brought up on trade-slumps and Appeasement before being plunged into a total war in which towns were targets, elections postponed and free-speech curtailed, Bentley’s 17th century must have been uncomfortably familiar.