BUTTERFLY ON THE WHEEL OF SCHOLARSHIP

Flitting from my habitat on Central Park West down to Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, I learned from 17th-century dictionaries in the collection of the New York Public Library that my poet's literary name was richly resonant in meaning. Its apparent stems, phelia and helio (helia), suggested Greco-Latin forms for "friendship" and "sun." But closer to the mark, I discovered that "Ephelia" could be a variant of the Classical ephelis, meaning sun-spots or marks. While this meaning was suggested in 1989 by the capable editorial team of Kissing the Rod: an Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women's Verse, these feminist scholars translated ephelis narrowly to mean (exclusively) "freckles"; but they did find two related fragments of anecdotal evidence, in the work of John Dunton in 1697 and Delarivier [e] Manley in 1709, which valuably identified "Ephelia" as a red-haired woman writer.

Fig. 3. "Lady Mary Villiers with Lord Arran, as Cupid," by Sir Anthony Van Dyck, c. 1636 (perhaps 1637). With kind permission of the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, North Carolina..

Examining ephelis through an entomological lens and against the new information of Mary Villiers' pet name "Butterfly," the pseud- onym's root word, ephelis, came into focus as a different kind of "spots"; namely, the decorative marks or eyespots on butterfly wings. The Classical ephelis was a plausible source, then, for the pseudonym; and not because it exclusively meant "freckles" and not because Mary Villiers happened to have (dark) auburn-red hair, as her many portraits show. As John Harold Wilson documents in his classic study, Court Satires of the Restoration (1976), red hair was judged a serious flaw at this time; indeed, red-haired women at court were often tagged with offensive nicknames because of their coloration. Had Mary Villiers been, in truth, a freckled redhead, she would not have been mentioned in contemporary writings as one of the great English beauties of the 17th-century. Yet this important link between the name "Ephelia" and red-haired women writers, supplied appreciatively in Kissing the Rod, is highly probative, and would appear to support my case for Mary Villiers' authorship of the Ephelia texts. Certainly, Lady Mary shows us the volatile temperament and high color often associated with red-haired women. In her revealing poem, "To a Proud Beauty," she gives her cousin, Barbara Villiers, Charles II's chief mistress, a taste of her pen:

Mary's quick temper is also displayed in "To Damon," a hot rebuke to the young town spark, Jack Howe, who falsely boasted of sexual favors from Mary's young niece, Frances Stuart (the "Beauteous Marina" in Female Poems). All this from the pen of a woman who, according to the Baroness Burghclere, was rumored to have dueled a female rival. And more about that duel a bit later.

Did Mary Villiers, this "Butterfly" of the Stuart court, know enough Latin to have constructed the unusual "Ephelia" pseudonym? Considering her class, rearing, and immediate family, the answer must be yes. As the daughter of a Catholic mother and schooled in the Classical education of a noblewoman, Lady Mary would have had a rudimentary knowledge of the Classical languages; and certainly she knew Latin by the 1670s, by which time she also had been a practicing Catholic convert and, moreover, the wife of a Catholic, Colonel Thomas Howard, for some years. I, therefore, adopted the Classical "ephelis" as a plausible root of the "Ephelia" pseudonym because it corresponded to butterfly language and to my candidate's pet name.

While I did not find variants of "ephelis" in 17th-century entomological sources, such as Sir Thomas Mouffet's Theatrum Insectorum (1634; English edition, 1658) and the interesting butterfly commentary of Jan Swammerdam and Ulysses Androvandi -- Maria Sybilla Marian's spectacular work on insects (Amsterdam, 1705) was too late for my survey -- I importantly found clinching evidence of the appropriateness of the name "Ephelia" to entomological language and taxonomy in the work of J. Max Schiner, who named a decorative species of Diptera in the new genus Ephelia in 1864 (Catalogus systematicus dipterorum Europae, p. 19, type 106; see also S. A. Neave (ed.), Nomenclator Zoologicus, 4 vol. (1936-49), 2:236).

If, as her contemporaries recorded, "Butterfly" was one of Mary Villiers' many names, it certainly followed that Sir Anthony Van Dyck's many portraits of her were likely to yield allusions of a lepidopterological nature. We know that she sat to Van Dyck on many occasions, as Erik Larsen's authoritative work has documented (2 vol., Milan, 1980); and we know that she was among the Flemish master's favorite female sitters. But students of his portraits of Mary Villiers have yet to fully appreciate their rich iconographic character. For example, the portrait of her at Petworth House, Sussex, seat of the Wyndham family (Larsen A279), includes, as background detail, the powerful trope of Mary's ducal coronet (see Appendix 1). Not only does this portrait closely mimic Van Dyck's portrait of Queen Henrietta Maria with her crown (circa 1638; Wilton House, Wilt\- shire), but it apparently was occasioned by some personal crisis in the life of the sitter. In addition to the elegiac tone of the picture, one is drawn to the position of Mary's right hand, placed fully over her lower abdomen. The portrait, as I read it, may commemorate her sorrowful response to the premature death of her first child and her husband's heir, the young Esm\'e9 Stuart, whose death abruptly ended this particular branch of the ducal Richmond line. (The date of Esm\'e9's death and of this portrait have been variously recorded.) Similarly, the double portrait of Mary Villiers and her faithful dwarf and page, Anne Gibson, who is delivering to her mistress a pair of long gloves, one of which Lady Mary holds up for the spectator (Fig. 1, Chapter 1), may wittily encode her poems' mode of conveyance at the court..

Fig. 4 Title-page of Female Poems . . . by Ephelia (1679), with butterfly-and- swords ornament used as a logogram for the author, Mary Villiers. This calligraphic line device of the cul-de-lampe variety (Rahir catalogue 203) emanated from the Mathys firm of Leiden. It is styled on a popular design associated with many unusual and controversial books printed and/or published by the great House of Elzevier, Holland (Author's copy, purchased from James Cummins-Bookseller, New York city, 1986).

My butterfly search in Lady Mary's portraits seemed successful when I examined details in Van Dyck's most poetic portrait of Mary Villiers: the double portrait of her and the young Lord Arran (Fig. 3). The most interesting detail in her elaborate costume, to my eye, is the gold fastener of her floral headpiece, which appears to be in the shape of a butterfly. A small (even tenuous) detail? Perhaps not. The date of this portrait, listed as "circa 1636" in most catalogues, could have been slightly later, say 1637, thus dating the painting to the early months of her second marriage to Richmond, by which time she certainly was known as "The Butterfly." Supporting such a reading is a second detail in the portrait, the sitter's short ermine-trimmed cape, which could allude to her new ducal class and title. We know that her father, the powerful first Duke of Buckingham, evidently favored his ermine ducal cape in which he is depicted in death by Hubert Le Suer, who cast the family's black marble sarcophagus in Henry VIIth Chapel, Westminster Abbey (Lockyer, Buckingham [1981], 458) The eureka! piece in the "Ephelia" puzzle, as I wrote in 1995, 1996, and 1999, is the striking, oversized ornament or vignette on the title-page of Mary's book,Female Poems . . . by Ephelia (1679) (Fig. 4). The specialists who worked with me on this leg of the project are appreciatively acknowledged in my two recent essays in American Notes & Queries (Fall, 1996; Summer, 1999). As I demonstrated in 1999, the typographical mark in this lovely octavo originates in the book ornament stock of the Mathys firm of Leiden, a firm specializing in imitation Elzevier books and imitation Elzevier book ornaments. Édouard Rahir's great illustrated bibliography of Elzevier imprints and devices (Paris, 1898) suggested to me that this particular class of cul-de-lampe book ornament on the title-page of Mary's octavo had become associated by 1679 with a special class of outré book, which included anonymous, pseudonymous, clandestine, and controversial texts, by, for example, Spinoza, the editors of the Port Royal Bible, and Claude de Saumaise ("Claudius"), whose bold apologetics in support of the Stuart monarchy stirred the pen of John Milton. Many of these books, some bearing false or surreptitious imprints, were published by the liberal Elzevier book firm. I suggest that Mary Villiers was drawn to the Mathys ornament, which she could have seen in books by Spanheim and Causubon, both on the London market around this time, because it resembled, to her eye, a butterfly.

But the piece of research which galvanized my work on her book's title-page mark, however, were the lateral fleurs-de-lys which flank the butterfly image. These two design details may represent the handles and hilts of swords, thus alluding to Mary Villiers' rumored duel with a romantic rival, as reported by Winifred (Gardner), Baroness Burghclere, one of the earliest (1903) of reliable Villiers biographers. Mary's rival, according to my upcoming "Key to Female Poems" in the new scholarly e-journal, (Re) Soundings, appears to have been Lady Catherine Crofts, the "thin and ugly Mopsa" of Female Poems by Ephelia. Lady Catherine, evidently a bitter rival of Mary Villiers, was the longstanding mistress of Henry (Jermyn or German), first Earl of St Albans ("J.G."), who evidently maintained a tormented four-year liaison with Mary Villiers, circa late 1640s to early 1650s, an affair abruptly ended by his clandestine marriage to the newly widowed Queen Henrietta Maria, Mary's surrogate mother and the "excellent," "Commanding Eugenia" in Mary's poetry book of 1679. The large title-page device in Mary's book, therefore, is an ingenious logogram for the author herself. In this witty graphic conceit, Mary Villiers hid in plain sight on the very title-page of her own book these three centuries. Appropriately, this emblem of her authorship and identity is placed directly under the book's credit line, "Written by Ephelia."

Called "The Butterfly" since the mid-1630s, Lady Mary Villiers devised an entire repertoire of tricks and devices related to her pet name. As a former friend of the project pointed out to me, she even presents herself as a night butterfly in one of her pastoral songs: "Ranging the Plain, one Summer's Night, / To pass a vacant hour, / I fortunately chanc'd to light / On lovely Phillis' bower" (Female Poems). Mary masterfully exploited a pet name from girlhood as a flexible persona, one which could embrace multiple identities and multiple voices. She mimicked the decorative beauty and transformative magic of the butterfly in her portraits, in her poetry, and in her multiple lives. My case, set out in full in (Re)Soundings, is an integrated case which can explain almost all of the longstanding complexities of the "Ephelia" subject. As a measure of the success of this bold hypothesis, my updated edition of "Ephelia"'s writings will be available from Scolar/Ashgate in about 2003; a first multimedia virtual archive of the "Ephelia" project will be available shortly on the (Re)Soundings website; and this elusive papillon of 17th- century Stuart London shall soon be honored with her first patronym.