Margaret Cavendish: Promoting a Virtuous Life

A 17th-century female philosopher's response to modern-day 'feel-good' ethics

Margaret Cavendish and her husband, William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, are shown in this detail from “Portrait of a Married Couple in the Park,” 1662, by Gonzales Coques.

The idea of virtue elicits mostly yawns these days. And to say that virtue is real, not relative, or that all virtues aren’t equal, is likely to provoke hostility.

What would someone from centuries past have to say about the “do what feels good” ethic of laziness that dominates society today? We seldom consider what the dead would think about the behavior of the living. But if we did, we might act differently.

A prolific woman philosopher once wrote about what comprises the virtuous life. While not widely appreciated in her own lifetime, her ideas are as relevant as ever.

Margaret Cavendish lived through tumultuous times. Born Margaret Lucas, she was a teenager when the English Civil War broke out in 1642. Two years later, as maid of honor to Queen Henrietta Maria, she fled to Paris. There, she met William Cavendish, marquis of Newcastle, who wooed and wed the 21-year-old.

William had commanded a Royalist army before being defeated and banished. His vast estates were confiscated. She was nevertheless smitten with the charismatic nobleman, who was penniless and 30 years older than her. He was one of the world’s foremost experts in the “art of manage,” or horse training, as well as a poet, playwright, art patron, and amateur scientist. British and French philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes frequented his dinner table in Paris. Margaret listened to their debates and familiarized herself with their theories.

After the Puritans executed King Charles I, the Cavendishes moved to Antwerp, Belgium, where Margaret began writing and publishing books. Her energy was titanic: a dozen volumes in 15 years, in genres ranging from poems to plays, fiction stories, philosophy, and science. While the last two subjects were considered unsuitable for women, she made original contributions to them despite lacking a formal education.

The Desire for Fame

A recurring theme throughout Cavendish’s writings is the subject of fame. In a book on the art of rhetoric, “Orations of Divers Sorts,” she places her views into the mouthpiece of a general inspiring his mutinous soldiers: “Fame is the Heaven wherein/ Worthy and Honorable men and actions are Glorified, and live to all Eternity.” She contrasts this with oblivion, which is “the Hell of Meritorious and Gallant men.” For a man, fame and oblivion are represented by battlefield courage and cowardice.

Being a woman, though, Cavendish had to seek fame by a different route—through the pen. In her epilogue to “The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World,” an early science fiction novel, she wrote that she takes “more delight and glory” in creating her fictional places than “ever Alexander or Cesar did in conquering this terrestrial world.”

Seeking fame through authorship embodied what were, for Cavendish, the two supreme virtues: wisdom and honor. In her writings, she displayed prudence through subtle thinking and fortitude by publishing in her own name (a rare practice for women during that time). Prudence and fortitude, of course, are two of the four cardinal virtues, the others being justice and temperance.

When the monarchy was finally restored under Charles II, the Cavendishes returned to England in 1660. The penurious William, who had been constantly hounded by creditors in exile, was made a duke. In a radical reversal of fortune, Margaret became the duchess of Newcastle. She became a subject of public fascination not only for her writings, but her extravagant fashion sense. The diarist Samuel Pepys wrote that people came to see her at court “as if it were the Queen of Sheba.” A month later, he described a scene in Hyde Park where she was “followed and crowded upon by coaches all the way she went.”

‘The Blazing-World’

Cavendish’s most famous book, “The Blazing-World,” analyzes the scientific ideas of her day in a fictional form. In another nonfiction work, “Observations upon Experimental Philosophy,” she rejects her day’s prevailing view that nature can be understood solely through mechanical explanations. God, Cavendish wrote, was “a spiritual, supernatural, and incomprehensible infinite” who created the universe to be a self-moving continuum of matter blended with spirit.

She would apply these implications to explore the intersection of science and morals in “The Blazing-World.”

The plot is simple: A virtuous woman travels to an imaginary civilization, where she is given absolute power. As empress, she resolves to rule with justice and temperance, appointing none other than the duchess of Newcastle to advise her on the best ways to promote wisdom and honor in the body politic. The empress gathers a group of scientists—modeled after London’s Royal Society—to conduct investigations into nature and explain their results to her.

The scientists become quarrelsome, however, and are unable to agree. The duchess advises the empress to dissolve their club on the grounds that excessive devotion to academic speculations promotes skepticism and faction. The message here, Cavendish reminds us, is that facts and values are distinct: Science can’t provide a grounding for morality.

The empress then turns to practical politics, undertakes a brilliant military campaign, and subdues the country’s enemies. The fictionalized duchess of Newcastle encourages this policy, saying, “I had rather die in the adventure of noble achievements, then live in obscure and sluggish security; since by the one, I may live in a glorious Fame; and by the other, I am buried in oblivion.”

Seeking Virtue

If it seems like Cavendish is advocating a bellicose view here, it’s because the Civil War fundamentally shaped her outlook on life. She had spent much of her adulthood in exile while the Puritans committed atrocities against her family, including executing her brother and desecrating the graves of her mother and sister. She believed revolutionary zeal must be opposed and that absolute monarchy was the best system for cultivating classical virtues.

In “The Blazing-World,” Cavendish’s husband appears as a character. She paints a devoted picture of his excellent qualities that comprise her ideals of wisdom and honor. The duke of Newcastle, she wrote, was wise, witty, honest, erudite in conversation, could sing and make music, and was a master of swordsmanship and riding. Cultivating such skills, she said, was “fit and proper for noble and heroick Persons.”

Some of these aristocratic pastimes require sufficient resources and leisure hours to pursue. Even for a person of modest means, though, seeking personal excellence through intellectual, physical, and spiritual improvement is a perfectly realizable goal. Cavendish’s “archaic” list of qualities represents progress over watching television and playing video games.

Cavendish died suddenly in 1673 at the age of 50. Although she was the first woman to visit London’s Royal Society, in general, the scholarly community didn’t take her scientific ideas seriously and considered her literary productions mere curiosities. Her books fell out of print.

Today, interest in Cavendish’s work is widespread. Many regard her as a hero of early modern thought who bravely challenged the intellectual fashions of her time. Her writings have been made newly available in inexpensive editions. A quick name search in JSTOR, a leading digital library of academic publications, yields more than 8,000 books, chapters, and journal articles discussing her ideas. Three and a half centuries after her death, Cavendish has finally defied oblivion and won the acclaim she sought.

For More Information

Biography: PoetryFoundation.org

Digital Cavendish Project: DigitalCavendish.org

Margaret Cavendish,“Political Writings”