Elizabeth Isham

Early life and family

Elizabeth Isham, the eldest of three children was born at Lamport Hall in Northamptonshire, England in 1609. John Isham, Elizabeth’s great grandfather, started as a small mercer and merchant-adventurer and later became a wealthy woolens merchant and master warden of the Company of Mercers. He purchased Lamport Hall in 1560 from Sir William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley and it became the family estate. Her father was Sir John Isham (1582-1651), the first baronet of Lamport. He was knighted by James I before Elizabeth was born and made the first baronet of Lamport Hall by Charles I when Elizabeth was eighteen. Her mother was Judith Lewyn Isham (d. 1625), daughter of William Lewin (died 1598), who was an educated Anglican judge of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury and a master in chancery. The marriage between her father and mother played a crucial economic role in the family as well as assisting their social status and placed the Isham’s among the elite. Elizabeth’s sister, Judith, named after her mother, was born the following year after Elizabeth. Her brother, Sir Justinian Isham, 2nd Baronet, was born in 1611. He was the second baronet of Lamport and was an early member of the Royal Society. He was educated at King’s College in Cambridge. Justinian left for Oxford during the Civil Wars, which left Elizabeth to care for their father, his four daughters, and to manage the estate. The estate was later sequestered by Parliament.

Elizabeth’s mother, Judith Isham, had a close relationship with each of her three children. She taught and provided them with their earliest religious education. Judith was a pious and devout woman who played a significant role in Elizabeth’s religious upbringing. At the age of 8 or 9, Elizabeth learned the verses of the ‘Psalm Book’ by memorization. Judith also gave both her daughters Elizabeth and Judith a prayer book to pray with two or three times a day. Therefore, Elizabeth grew up to become an extremely pious young woman and was also able to self-examine her sins. Beginning early in her childhood, Elizabeth started to develop a relationship with God and a sense of her religious duties and calling.

Singlehood and marriage

Throughout her many trials and tribulations in life, she discovered she was left at a crossroads to make a decision between obeying her father’s wishes to marry and raise a family or devote her life to God and remain single. Elizabeth galvanized the rare power of freedom and to have a voice to determine the future of her life as a wealthy pious and intellectual single female during the seventeenth-century. She endeavors on a journey of self-realization of who she was throughout her life. Elizabeth is a rare and unique case compared to the other women of her time where most women are uneducated with the major role of women was to be married, raise children, and care for the entire family and household duties. Therefore, intelligent and wealthy women like Elizabeth choosing the road of singlehood with the father supporting her decision is rarely to never seen for women of seventeenth-century.

Personal life and death

Throughout most of her life, she lived on her family estate of Lamport Hall in Northamptonshire. However, she did on occasion visit her relatives that lived in London. Compared to Northamptonshire, London was the main epicenter and bustling city of England. A large city like London provided numerous opportunities for a young woman to meet with a future marriage partner. Therefore, at the age of eighteen Elizabeth was sent by her father to London to stay with her uncle, James Pagitt.

At eighteen, Elizabeth already had a strong piety instilled in her, and the city life and suitors were unsatisfying to her liking. The men in London were not as religious as she was, and this is what started her aversion to marriage. She found it difficult to choose between devoting herself to being a wife and mother or to God and she found that she could not engage in both to the fullest potential. Therefore, chose to pursue the religious life and reject marriage. Elizabeth Isham’s choice of to never marry, resulted from both the hardships faced from her failed relationships and difficult decisions made of her devotion to God and to remain single. She would have had all the benefits of marriage, of becoming a widow, and becoming a mother and heir to the estates if she had married her father’s choice of suitors. However, none of that mattered to her. This freedom during the seventeenth century for women was rare and eventually opened doors to a whole new light that being single was not strict grounds for rejection in society. Elizabeth was able to find and follow her vocational calling.

Another reason for staying single may have been that Elizabeth enjoyed solitude and privacy to pray and to spiritually connect with God. She was different from her mother and sister in that “she often preferred to be alone, busying herself with work.” Although she never had children herself, Elizabeth helped her brother raise his four young daughters after his wife, Jane, died soon after giving birth to a son. Elizabeth supported her brother and took on the role of a surrogate mother for the girls. In fact, she died along her most treasured work, the “Booke of Remembrance” to them for their religious education. Elizabeth died in 1645 at the age of 45, three years after her father's death.

Isham and herbalism

Women often practiced as herbalists in the midst of their household/domestic tasks. On the one hand women had a lot of practical medical knowledge but on the other hand they were not seen as respected members of the medical hierarchy. The one exception to this might be elite women who were respected for their skills.

Elizabeth Isham’s primary motivation and interest in medicine and specifically herbalism peaked through the history of illnesses of many of her close family members. Her paternal grandmother (d.1621) who died due to a terminal illness, her mother (d.1625) died from chronic poor health and possible pneumonia, her sister (d.1636), who was both ill as well as experiencing several broken bones, and her sister-in-law (d.1639) who died while giving birth to her fifth child, the family’s heir, and Elizabeth’s nephew. Elizabeth’s mother died away at the age of 34 when she was 16 years old. Elizabeth’s decision to pursue herbal knowledge started in her mid-twenties. Because of all the man illnesses in the family, seeing physicians in the Isham household was common. Elizabeth found that she grew to distrust the methods of these respectable physicians, their faulty diagnoses and their invasive surgeries which often led to deaths. Hence, Elizabeth turned to herbal remedies and expressed to know more about them as an alternative means to physician’s invasive care. By consulting a skilled herbalist the family knew by the name of Mr. Naper, commonly called “Sandy,” she began to use cordials and herbal/medicines known as “physicks.” The cordials resulted in recovery of her mother, Judith, which helped her to live another year. This was the advent of Elizabeth thinking there were non-invasive alternatives to help cure people of illnesses.

Another reason that drove Elizabeth’s interest in herbals and medicine was that her great-grandmother and aunt had notable skills in medicine. Not only was Elizabeth’s great-grandmother a skilled surgeon, Elizabeth’s aunt was a strong motivator to drive her to pursue herbal knowledge through borrowed books. Elizabeth had great interest in gardening and from there she sought to learn more about herbals through gardening books. It was uncommon to see women during this era attend schools to obtain an education, but elite women did have an opportunity to learn Latin with tutors at home. However, Elizabeth took a different route in her leaning in that she went on to pursue learning more about herbals rather than Latin. She also attempted to learn French to acclimate with the women of the London society, but never completed her lessons. Elizabeth’s familial inheritance of females who already had medical knowledge, gave her the “authoritative background” necessary to pursue her interest in herbalism. Herbalism might have also been a part of Elizabeth’s religious life as another part of her “religious calling/duty” to help others. Elizabeth interpreted that “surrounding all is Christ’s example providing ‘the way.’” Being a very religious individual, she found a voice through God that this is her calling in life. There has also been “evidence that Isham was taking medical notes well into the 1640s, particularly from a translation of Giovanni da Vigo, the surgeon…” Elizabeth also noted what was incorporated in her mother’s cordials as well as in food such as meat and they included: rosemary, sage, marjoram, betony, and sassafras. She wrote many of these notes through her practice and observations rather than from her memory. Elizabeth found her own voice as an individual by her choice to practice herbalism, which was a far greater importance to her rather than learning Latin.

Diarist and “My Booke of Rememberance”

Elizabeth began to write at the early age of 7 or 8 and continued to write extensively throughout her lifetime. During her early and beginning years of writing, she had a natural inclination to write and to copy texts and use the vocabulary she learned in her own works. Cotterill mentions that from an early age, Elizabeth “constantly read, copied down, studied, memorized, and repeated prayers, psalms, chapters of the Bible, excerpts from collections of biblical ‘places,’ literary texts, and sermons.” She resorted to writing as an outlet from her depression due to the deaths of her mother and sister and debates with her father over her marriage. Writing was a means of comfort to Elizabeth and “she turned to writing as a way of using God’s word when she felt herself in danger of rejecting it.” Around 1638-1639 when Elizabeth was thirty, she composed her first extensive work called “My Booke of Rememberance”, where she recorded her thoughts, beliefs, explanations for her decisions, her struggles, and the freedom of her single life. She specifically talked about her struggles in dealing with the loss of her mother and sister who were close to her, the unsuccessful relationship between her and her father’s recommended suitor and her quest for a single life. She wrote this was her moment at “the pitts brinke of despair” since she wrote this during her most troubled times.

Personal hobbies and interests

Elizabeth Isham also had interests and hobbies such as gardening, needle work, painting, and reading, in particular religious literature. Her interests in needle work and gardening also provide the “occupational backdrop” that would be helpful for her in practicing herbalism. Through her enjoyment from gardening, she found there were links to gardening and her study of plants and medicine. She discovered that some of the plants, in particular herbs, could potentially be used for medicinal purposes. Elizabeth found hobbies, especially needle work to be a “kind of preventative cure” for depression. Elizabeth took herbalism seriously as her career and needle work was her outlet for relaxation and a “kind of calming medicine.” She was a very intellectual and knowledgeable woman in many areas, not limited her knowledge to religion. Julie Eckerle mentions that Elizabeth was strikingly independent in all matters, from poetry, ballads, and herbals to playing cards and reading romances. Elizabeth was an extraordinary woman of her time not just being a single Christian woman, but an intellectual Christian single woman.

List of works

1. Elizabeth Isham’s first diary (1608-1654) is held at the Northamptonshire Record Office (IL 3365). The first diary includes the period from her childhood until she reaches forty years of age.

2. The second diary called the ‘Booke of Remembrance’ records her life story including her courtship, her inner thoughts about choosing between a married life versus singlehood, and the medical hardships faced within her family. This diary was completed when she was thirty years old. This second diary has come to public attention recently and is housed at Princeton University Library, Robert H. Taylor Collection (RTC 01 no.62).