Lady Carey's Meditations, & Poetry, ... As also the late Thomas Lord Fairfax's Relation of his Actions in the late Civil Wars. Together With his Grace the Duke of Buckingham's Verses upon the Memory of the late Thomas Lord Fairfax

Language: English

Context and purpose

This is a presentation manuscript compiling the mid-seventeenth-century works of Lady Mary Carey and Lord Thomas Fairfax, copied by Charles Hutton in 1681. Lady Carey's original autograph manuscript is now in private hands; Fairfax's original manuscript is now at the Bodleian Library, Fairfax MS 36. It is arranged in two sections: the first comprising Carey's conversion narrative, her meditations, her poetry, and one elegy authored by her husband, George Payler; the second comprising Fairfax's memoirs of the civil wars, and Buckingham's elegy on Fairfax. Both authors had Yorkshire connections. The earliest of Carey's texts is dated 1649; the latest 1657 (all these dates agree with the autograph manuscript). The manuscript, therefore, presents exemplary female and male models of piety and parliamentarianism. Its copying at a later date for this purpose is significant in terms of the negotiation of private and public with regard to women's writing in the period. Ostensibly private texts authored by Carey-elegies on the deaths of children, records of religious experience-are read and adopted for the public construction of female spirituality and political ideology.

The manuscript is copied in Hutton's hand throughout; corrections are remarkably rare. His writing and presentation imitates contemporary print, to the extent of consistently using long 's' throughout. The poems by Carey and Payler are highlighted by the scribe: they are copied vertically, from the bottom of the page to the top. He makes a point of authenticity, signalling that his text of Fairfax is "from his owne Hand this being a true Copy of it" (p. 28 [fol. 131v])-these memoirs were not to be published in print until 1699.