Life & Wisdom Quote by Margaret Cavendish

There is a particular kind of dignity that only appears when someone has been accused of not having any. Cavendish is doing damage control, but she does it with the weapons available to a 17th-century woman who refused to stay in her lane: precision, insistence, and a pointed refusal to play the role she’s been assigned.

The line reads like a legal deposition, and that’s the point. She piles clause upon clause - “never was,” “nor stood I ever,” “as I do know or can remember” - as if the sheer accumulation of certainty can outweigh the social reflex to doubt her. It’s not just denial; it’s a counter-performance. The phrase “beggar at the Parliament door” is vivid class theater: a woman literally outside power, reduced to public pleading. Cavendish rejects the image because she understands how quickly women’s presence in political space gets reframed as neediness, opportunism, or scandal.

Her subtext is sharper than the surface modesty. “Not as a petitioner I am sure” doesn’t merely correct the record; it rebukes the idea that she should have to petition at all. In the English Civil War’s long shadow - when Parliament was not just a building but a battleground of legitimacy - being seen at its door meant something. Cavendish, aristocratic and exiled with a Royalist court, is guarding her reputation against a culture that policed female ambition by calling it begging. She writes herself back inside the narrative, not as a supplicant, but as an author with standing.