To My Dear and Loving Husband - Anne Bradstreet

 To My Dear and Loving Husband - Anne Bradstreet

One of Anne Bradstreet’s most renowned poems, To My Dear and Loving Husband is a simple, straightforward and, admittedly, elegant statement of love.

Context is everything. 

The Bradstreets arrived in Massachusetts Bay with the Winthrop Fleet in 1630. From his arrival, Simon Bradstreet played a significant part in the politics of the colony.

Simon Bradstreet was one of the judges in the trial of Anne Hutchinson. The record of the trial reveals the sexism and religious intolerance of the leaders of the colony. The Antinomian Controversy, as the sectarian division was known, lasted throughout the years of 1636-1638.

Although a number of sources refer to King Philip’s War as the ‘First Indian War’, the colonists entered a sustained period of armed conflict with the Pequot in the years 1636-1638. The Mystic Massacre in 1637 was God laughing ‘His Enemies and the Enemies of His People to scorn’, according to Captain John Mason, whose men burned the Pequot settlement and killed those who tried to escape. In the following year, surviving members of the Pequot were sold into slavery.

According to the Massachusetts government website, ‘African slaves first arrived in Massachusetts in the 1630s’. Slavery was legally sanctioned in the colony in 1641.

In 1647, John Woodbridge took Anne Bradstreet’s poetry to England, where it was published in 1650. Now, American history sees Bradstreet as the first published colonial poet. In 1650, the work of a woman had to be taken to England to be published. At the time of the publication of The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up In America, England was under Parliamentary rule; and still, seemingly, more tolerant of a woman writing.

At the time of the scandal surrounding Dominic Cummings and the trip to Barnard Castle, Mary Wakefield, Cummings’s wife, made the statement that ‘Dom is an extremely kind man whatever people assume’. Arguably, the man who has done more to undermine representative politics in Britain, the British Steve Bannon, is seen as ‘extremely kind’, by his aristocratic wife. I wonder how many of the people who have lost family members to the current pandemic would agree with that assessment of the man who pushed for the policy of herd immunity. We cannot ask the slaves, the Pequot, the people ostracised after the Antinomian Controversy, or the victims of King Philip’s War, what they think of Simon Bradstreet and the other members of the council that governed the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

It is said that Hitler, a vegetarian, loved animals. And Aryan children. I wonder if Eva Braun would have written of his kindness, or of her love for him. Or, perhaps, Clara Petacci for Mussolini.

Are these excessive comparisons? Simon Bradstreet was a member of the Massachusetts Bay Colony government that gave slavery legal sanction, and that permitted the sale of Pequot natives into slavery, and that permitted the slaughter of the Pequot. If genocide and slave labour are crimes, the colonists of Massachusetts Bay are as guilty as the Nazis. Antiquity is no defence. The use of ‘His People’ as opposed to ‘the Heathen’ is as clear as ‘Aryan’ as opposed to ‘untermensch’. 

Simon Bradstreet willed his slaves, Hannah and Bilhah, to his second wife. Did the Bradstreets own slaves during Anne’s lifetime? 

It is traditional to place emphasis on the piety of the first settlers in New England. It is also, therefore, traditional to sweep the genocide, slavery and autocracy under history’s carpet.

I wonder how we would feel about a love poem by Eva Braun? Or Clara Petacci? Or Mary Wakefield? I also wonder why we don’t think of Anne Bradstreet in those terms.