Most of these accomplishments were of little use to Margaret. She had no interest in domestic pursuits and would later write with some pride: ‘I cannot work, I mean such works as ladies use to pass their time withal … needle-works, spinning-works, preserving-works, as also baking, and cooking-works, as making cakes, pies, puddings, and the like, all which I am ignorant of.’[8] Her interest lay elsewhere. For hours on end she would wander, lost in contemplation, and soon found that she preferred to ‘write with the pen than to work with a needle’. The blank page was a safe place, where her thoughts and ideas could roam freely. Even before she’d reached her teens she’d begun to write prolifically, filling 16 ‘baby-books’ with observations, poetry and stories – though she later dismissed them as childish ramblings, which perhaps explains why they haven’t survived.
Dress was another creative outlet, for Margaret had a bold sense of style and favoured creative, sometimes odd, ensembles – ‘especially such fashions as I did invent myself’ – to ensure that she came across as a true one-off, ‘for I always took delight in a singularity’.[9] As an introvert who found it difficult to express her personality verbally, Margaret allowed her idiosyncratic outfits (which often had a masculine edge) to do the talking for her, and this, too, would set her apart from most of her sex. It was all very well to indulge her whimsy and burgeoning imagination in the cossetted environment of St John’s Abbey, but in the wider world of seventeenth-century England, which valued obedience and conformity over flamboyance and originality, it left her rather more wilful and eccentric than was deemed acceptable in a woman.
The Lucases were a close-knit family. Margaret – a self-confessed physical coward who would jump at the sound of a gun and abhorred violence of all kinds[10] – was always so anxious that ‘an evil misfortune or accident’ might befall one of them that she would wake her siblings in the night to check they were still alive. Her fears were strangely prescient, for in 1642, when the Civil War broke out, there would be no escaping the unrest for the Royalist Lucases who, by then, were deeply unpopular in the Puritan county of Essex, thanks to their close involvement with Charles I’s regime.[11] When local anger erupted into the Stour Valley riots on 22 August, mobs descended on St John’s Abbey, ransacking and looting the Lucas home. The women in the house were imprisoned for several days while Margaret’s brother, John, now head of the family, was held at the Tower for a month for raising an army for the King.
Margaret was 19 at the time and blindsided by the violence, writing later that ‘this unnatural war came like a whirlwind’,[12] but her loyalty to Charles I was unshaken, not least because she had developed an intense fascination with his French queen. In Henrietta Maria, the Parliamentarians saw only a dangerous woman whose influence over the King encouraged popery and tyranny; Margaret, however, saw the heroic queen of her dreams. Nursing a desire to ‘see the world abroad’, she offered her services to her heroine as Maid of Honour, and although her siblings worried that their gauche little sister might make a fool of herself in the worldly, sophisticated court milieu, Margaret got her way. She arrived in Oxford, where the court had been transplanted for safety, in the summer of 1643.
It didn’t take long for Margaret’s new life to pall. The daily routine at court was tedious, involving little more than waiting around in the presence chamber for orders or standing to attention for hours on end. The freedom she’d had at home to write was gone and she now found herself constantly on show, which, as her siblings had predicted, left her so crippled by shyness that she was rendered almost mute. Maids were expected to charm court visitors with their dazzling wit and conversation, but Margaret, ‘dull, fearful and bashful’ as she was, felt it safer to play dumb and ‘be accounted a fool’ than to make a poor attempt at worldliness and ‘be thought rude or wanton’.[13]
So excruciating was this experience that Margaret would later fictionalise it in her 1668 play The Presence, in which she cast herself as Lady Bashful, the novice Maid of Honour who similarly gives the impression at Princess Melancholy’s court of being ‘a clod of dull earth’. But just as Lady Bashful turns out to be more than appearances would suggest, so Margaret felt there was a goldmine of ideas beneath her own gawky exterior. No doubt she was voicing her own aspirations when her alter-ego proclaims: ‘I had rather be a meteor singly alone, than a star in a crowd.’
There was little chance of being a meteor at court, and inevitably Margaret came to feel she’d made a mistake, but her mother refused all her appeals to come home, feeling ‘it would be a disgrace for me to return out of the court so soon after I was placed’.[14] She had no choice but to stick it out. And with the war intensifying, this would have life-changing consequences for young Margaret Lucas.
EXILES IN LOVE
By 1644, the Parliamentarians were gaining strength and the Queen, now pregnant with her ninth child, was in particular danger. Parliament had put a price on her head for high treason, citing her Catholic influence on the King as the primary cause of the war, so in April that year it became imperative for her to leave not just Oxford, but the country. With Margaret and the rest of her entourage in tow, Henrietta Maria went on the run, enduring a difficult birth and grave illness along the way. The group fled to Falmouth and on 30 June boarded a boat to the Queen’s native France, where they were confident of a warm reception.
But first they had to survive the voyage. Buffeted by storm winds, they lurched over the waves, the Parliamentarian ships in hot pursuit, pelting them with shots. Henrietta Maria was as impressive as ever during the onslaught, commanding that if it should come to it, the captain should blow up the ship’s ammunition store rather than allow them to be captured. Thankfully it didn’t come to that; they reached Brittany alive, only to be faced with the dangerous coastal cliffs that stood between them and safety. A treacherous scramble to the top followed, before they eventually found asylum at a small fishing village, a ragged and far from regal-looking bunch.
This daring great escape had shown Margaret rather more of the world than she had bargained for. At 21, she was suddenly an exile and a refugee, and the harrowing experience left an indelible mark on her psyche. Time and again in the stories she would later write, beautiful, virtuous young ingénues would endure perilous voyages and find themselves shipwrecked in strange lands.
Traumatised but safe, Margaret was living an isolated, miserable life with the Queen at King Louis XIV’s court at the Louvre in Paris when, in April 1645, William Cavendish, Marquess of Newcastle, arrived – a fellow Royalist exile who, having fled England in despair after a humiliating defeat at the Battle of Marston Moor, was also looking for comfort. On the surface, William was everything Margaret wasn’t: a courageous soldier and renowned horseman, confident, worldly, charming and, as the former tutor of Prince Charles, highly educated. He was also a ladies’ man, a rich widower and, at the age of 52, a full 30 years older than Margaret. And yet the pair had much in common: both were deeply romantic in nature and harboured high ideals, literary aspirations and a veneration of poetry, philosophy and plays. It wasn’t long before William was wooing Margaret with passionate verses on a daily basis.
Unused to male attention, Margaret was wary at first. Marriage was not on her mind – on the contrary, ‘I did dread marriage’, she would later admit.[15] To a free-spirited woman of the seventeenth century, it meant a caged life of household management, the dangers of childbirth and unquestioning submission to one’s husband, even if he turned out to be a drunkard, philanderer or tyrant. In later life, Margaret would even argue forcefully against marriage in principle, reckoning that ‘where one husband proves good … a thousand prove bad’.[16] Had circumstances been different, she might well have chosen the shame of spinsterhood over the shackles of marriage, but as it was, she fell in love and married William in a quiet