5: Her Temper, Occasioning These Troubles of Mind
5
HER TEMPER, OCCASIONING THESE
TROUBLES OF MIND
[Richard, as a pastor-widower, describes Margaret’s temperament as a young Christian and thereafter. She was reserved, intense, highly strung, restless, ardent, fearful, passionate and perfectionist, sad and self-condemning. She experienced recurring headaches (migraines?), but not the kind of depression (“melancholy”) that impedes rational thought.]
The soul while in the body works much according to the body’s disposition. She was of an extraordinary sharp and piercing wit. She had a natural reservedness and secrecy, increased by thinking it necessary prudence not to be open; by which means she was oft misunderstood by her nearest friends, and consequently often crossed and disappointed by those that would have pleased her. And as she could understand people much by their looks and hints, so she expected all should know her mind without expressing it, which bred her frustrations and discontents. And she had a natural tenderness and troubledness of mind upon the crossing of her just desires: too quick and ungovernable a sense of displeasing words or deeds. She had a diseased, unresistable fearfulness; her quick and too sensitive nature was over timorous. And to increase it, she said she was four times, before I knew her, in danger of death, of which one was by the smallpox. And more to increase it, her mother’s house,19 being a garrison, was stormed whilst she was in it, and part of the housing about it burnt, and men lay killed before her face. And all of them were threatened and stripped of their clothing so that they were obliged to borrow clothes. And the great work upon her soul, in her conversion, moved all her passions. And then her dangerous sickness, and the sentence of death to so young a convert, must needs be a very awaking thing; and coming on her before she had any assurance of her justification, it did increase her fear. And in this state of mind she lived in the churchyard side, where she saw all the burials of the dead, and kept a death’s head [i.e., skull] in her closet always before her. And other such mortifying spectacles increased her sad disposition.
And the excessive love which she had to her mother did much increase her grief when she expected death.
Though she called it melancholy that by all this she was cast into, yet it rather seemed a partly natural and a partly adventitious diseased fearfulness in a tender over-passionate nature, that had no power to quiet her own fears, without any other cloud on her understanding.
And all was much increased by her wisdom so stifling all the appearance of it, that it all inwardly wrought and had no ease by vent.
And having keen spirits and thin sharp blood, she had a strong hemicrania or headache once a month and oft once a fortnight, or more, from the age of fifteen or sixteen years. All these together much tended to hinder her from a quiet and comfortable temper.
And in a word, all the operations of her soul were very intense and strong; strong wit, and strong love, and strong displeasure. And when God showed her what holiness was, she thought she must presently have it in so great a degree as the ripest saints do here attain; and that because she had not as much heavenly life and sense and delight in God as she knew she should have and desired, she concluded of it that she had none that was sincere.
One of the first things by which her change was discovered to her mother and her friends was her fervent, secret prayers; for, living in a great house of which the middle part was ruined by the [Civil] wars, she chose a closet in the further end, where she thought none heard her. But some that overheard her said they never heard so fervent prayers from any person.
Yet she desired me to draw up a form suited to her own condition, which I did, and find it now reserved among her papers; but I cannot tell whether she ever used it, having affections and freedom of expression without it. I had thought to have annexed it for the use of afflicted penitents, but it will be but a digression in this narrative.