by Amy Licence
If Catherine’s midwives tried any of these remedies, they were not successful. Raving bitterly about being mistreated, which may have referred to her treatment or her relations with Seymour, she was not strong enough to sign her will. She died in the early hours of 5 September, probably of the puerperal fever which also claimed the life of Jane Seymour. At some point during delivery, bacteria were spread on the hands of her assistants and lay dormant for several days before causing her to develop a fever and deteriorate. Modern hygiene means this rarely happens today and IS easily treatable with a course of antibiotics. Whilst seventeenth-century practitioners would report a death rate of between 20 and 25 per cent from the illness, the death rate among Henry’s wives was two in six, or 33 per cent. Catherine’s daughter, Mary, was given to the keeping of her friend Catherine Willoughby but does not appear to have survived infancy. The ambitious Seymour outlived his wife by only six months, losing his head for plotting to abduct the king.
Catherine herself was interred in the chapel at Sudeley with all the ceremony of a queen. Miles Coverdale’s epitaph to her concluded:
… a beauteous daughter bless’d her arms,
An infant copy of her parents’ charms.
When now seven days this tender flower had bloom’d
Heaven in its wrath the mother’s soul resumed…
Our loyal breast with rising sighs are torn,
With saints she triumphs, we with mortals mourn.13
10
Henry’s Legacy
1534–1553
Reform in the Birth Chamber
Blessings turned to blasphemies,
Holy deedes to dispites.
About these Catholic’s necks and hands are always hanging charms
That serve against all miseries and all unhappy harms.1
At the end of January 1547, Henry VIII died, leaving his nine-year-old son Edward as heir. After almost forty years of him struggling to secure the succession, it was entailed upon the heirs of Henry’s sister Mary Rose, rather than his own daughters Mary and Elizabeth. This was partly for religious reasons but also occasioned by the fluctuating legitimacy and favour of his female offspring. Edward, however, would not live long enough to father children of his own. Proposed marriages were mooted for him to his cousins Mary Queen of Scots and Jane Grey among others, yet he died before his sixteenth birthday, of what was probably tuberculosis. However, it would be a mistake to think that the reign of Edward VI has little relevance in the history of childbirth: ironically it would be a child whose reign had the most impact upon Tudor birth practices.
Major religious changes took place in the sixteenth century. The childbearing history of the family of Jane Yate of Berkshire ran parallel with these. With the dramatic dissolution of the monasteries and attacks upon many superstitions and customs of the time, Jane’s experiences and those of her offspring may serve to illustrate exactly what impact this had in the birth chamber. Jane was born in Berkshire in the 1480s, married a William or Philip Fettiplace and bore her first child, Elizabeth, in 1510, a generation before the English Reformation began. Her first pregnancy ran concurrently with that of Queen Catherine’s and a range of her female relatives would have been on hand to offer her advice and support, if not to attend her during her lying-in. Her stepmother, Alice, had three small children at the time and was pregnant with her fourth in 1510; one of her sisters-in-law was also a mother and she had nine other immediate female relations to offer their assistance. This, as well as friends and neighbours, formed a substantial body of knowledge based on experience and an oral tradition that encompassed a mixture of gynaecological, superstitious, herbal and quasi-religious practices that had been passed down through generations of women. An upper-class Catholic lying-in would have included all the prayers, blessed candles, holy water and devotional images and objects that the church had to offer; nearby monastic establishments may also have offered cures and advice. However, new laws meant that by the time Jane’s grandchildren arrived, many of these comforts and customs were prohibited. Jane died in 1557, meaning she was potentially witness to the births of sixteen children between 1526 and 1547: did she and her companions really obey the letter of the law when the door to the birth chamber was closed and the lives of her family hung in the balance?
In 1509, Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon were visible and active leaders of their faith, especially in relation to their desire to produce healthy surviving children. Along with many hopeful parents, they undertook pilgrimages to shrines across the country, offered prayers and gifts to the saints and deployed the relics and rituals of Catholicism. If she chose, Jane Yate could have been among those asking the Virgin Mary for assistance: after all, she bore her first child comparatively late for the times, possibly towards the end of her twenties, and may have sought the reassurance her faith had to offer. Those who spoke out against such practices were rebuked or punished, such as an Elizabeth Sampson of London, who visited the shrine of Our Lady at Willesden in the year of Henry’s accession and described the Black Madonna as a ‘burnt-tailed elf and a burnt-tailed stock’. Another of the early voices of criticism raised against Walsingham came from the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus, with whom Henry VIII had corresponded since childhood. In 1512, he produced the satire A Pilgrimage for Religion’s Sake after visiting the shrine, harshly portraying the requests and prayers of pilgrims as absurd and irrelevant. Additionally, rioters in Canterbury had refused to escort the noblemen bringing Henry’s annual gift to the shrine of Thomas Becket, instead attacking priory property and ill-treating the monks. Such incidents were isolated, rather than the norm. Those displaying such behaviour could expect to be dealt with severely by their pious king.
For centuries, labouring mothers in England had drawn strength and courage from the religious rituals and superstitions associated with their condition. Women had given birth clutching holy relics and other religious artefacts, praying to saints in symbolic female isolation: they had lit candles for their dead, sprinkled their beds with holy water, and recounted pseudo-religious texts and chants. Then after the traditional month of seclusion, they had processed to church in a veil to be purified and welcomed back into society: churching was Catholicism’s protection for women against the pressure of resuming potentially dangerous sexual and domestic duties too soon and for many, it was successful. Nor was the ritual and devotion confined to the reproductive chapters of her life: Catholicism defined every aspect of women’s existence until the 1530s. For a modern reader, it is difficult sometimes to appreciate how very powerful and pervasive the influence of the Church was over the rhythms of the rural year and the rites of passage that defined life. Conception, birth, baptism, churching, marriage and burial were the obvious points of personal contact, besides regular procession and prayer for the success of crops, good health, safe journeys, prosperity and the habitual ceremonies of the day, month and year. Hell, Heaven and Purgatory were very real; the divine intercession of saints, the Mass, feasting and fasting, observing saints’ days, pilgrimage, offering prayers for the living and dead were all accessible methods of easing the transition to eternal bliss and staving off the fires of torture. Each earthly action was a step closer to heaven or hell. Superstition, custom and religious practice mingled in a Pagan legacy that permeated and defined the medieval and early Tudor consciousness, providing motive and explanation for the mysteries and uncertainties of life.
At the time Jane Yate attended the lying-in of her own daughter Elizabeth in 1526, who was aged only sixteen, these upheavals still lay in the future. Jane and her female relations could draw on the practices they recalled their own mothers using years before. Elizabeth went on to have seven more children, the last in 1534, when things were beginning to change. By the time Jane’s daughter-in-law, Bridget, bore her children – one a year between 1540 and 1547 – many of the old comforts had been removed. As Jane and Elizabeth assisted her, they may have been forced to think twice about some of the methods they had previously tried
and tested. For women with little control over their gynaecological destinies, the sudden removal of these emotional supports cannot but have left a gaping hole in the lives of many. One example illustrating this sea-change in English culture took place in the year of Bridget Yate’s first confinement. A woman from Wells, in Norfolk, had imagined a miracle brought about by the image of Our Lady at Walsingham, an occurrence that would have been lauded and reported a few years before, giving hope to other women and mothers who attended her shrine. Now the unfortunate was set in the stocks at Walsingham on the market day with a paper about her head, calling her ‘a reporter of false tales’, before she was sent her round the town in a cart, while the young people and boys threw snowballs at her.2 Walsingham had been one of Henry VIII’s targets during his programme of monastic closures in the 1530s: although the prior was one of the first to comply with the new reforms, the sub-prior Nicholas Mileham and another man were hung for conspiring with rebels to suppress the changes. The Slipper Chapel, where pilgrims began the final barefoot stretch, became a farm building; the statue of Mary was taken to Chelsea and burned. A 1530s miscellany The Court of Venus included the ‘Pilgrim’s Tale’, probably by Richard Singleton, chaplain to Anne Boleyn, describing the visitors to Walsingham as having ‘sprung out of Antichrist’ and putting their trust in the ‘fabulous vayn’ virgin. It also came to be known as ‘Falsingham’ and the Virgin as the wyche (witch).
Jane’s daughter Elizabeth would have been easily able to undertake a pilgrimage to any of a number of shrines in 1526; Bridget, however, would have found it increasingly more difficult and even dangerous to do so. The late 1530s spawned a new series of parodic pilgrim badges, with saints and pilgrims depicted in lewd poses, displaying their genitals to illustrate the supposed sexual immorality of travellers. One by one, shrines were dismantled and pilgrimage censured, under the aegis of Thomas Cromwell. One of his agents described the dissolution of Caversham and dismantling of the shrine of Our Lady: ‘I have pulled down the image of your Lady at Caversham whereunto was great pilgrimage. The image is plated over with silver … I have also pulled down the place she stood in, with all other ceremonies, as lights, shrouds, crutches and images of wax’.3 At Willesden, as they dismantled the shrine, Richard Mores described how five people were still praying there: two old men, a woman and child and another bearing a gift of flowers. For the crime of being an idolatrous parish, the church of St Mary was fined £13. In 1539, the Lady Chapel of Ely, largest of its kind in England, was dismantled. It had been a popular pilgrim destination, containing a huge carved life-cycle and miracles of Mary made by John de Wisbech under the guidance of master craftsman Alan de Walsingham, which was completely mutilated. In the year Bridget gave birth, zealous locals took the destruction of Ely a stage further by riding horses inside and beheading the remaining statues of saints. The once-popular Suffolk Our Lady of Woolpit, with its supposed healing spring, was jeered as Our Lady of Foulpit. The cult of Mary was particularly attacked because it represented the excesses of idolatry and the perceived hollowness of Catholic guarantees of salvation. Critics saw it as allowing safe conduct for sinners to heaven and specific misogyny directed at the Marian cult became savage and sexually oriented. One Thomas Bilney called Our Lady of Willesden ‘a common paramour of baudry’ whilst Bishop Latimer attacked Mary for pride, arrogance, bad manners and reprimanding Jesus. William Thomas, Prince Edward’s tutor, said in 1546 that the Romish mother church was ‘an arrogant whore, a fornicatoress, an idolatress’.
Tudor women, including queens and princesses, had taken comfort from the possession of images, statues and icons of their favourite childbirth saints. These were present in the birth chamber, accompanied them on journeys and were objects of devotional focus: the most famous were lent out to aristocratic ladies but they must have been present in the minds and prayers of many others. Such focus can channel the mind and encourage relaxation and an illusion of control under extreme circumstances, such as labour and birth. After the 1535 proclamation that all false images and relics were ‘utterly to be abolished, eradicated and erased out’ so there must be ‘no memory of [iconography] in walls, glass, windows or elsewhere’, the majority of these icons were destroyed. Many statues of the saints were burned in 1538 at Thomas More’s old house of Chelsea, as well as at Tyburn and Smithfield. Cromwell organised a system of destruction that removed the most important icons of English Catholicism, in what has been referred to as the ‘long summer of iconoclasm’. Bishop Hugh Latimer described the statue of the virgin at Worcester as a ‘devil’s instrument’ as it burned at Chelsea along with its ‘old sister of Walsingham and her younger sister of Ipswich’. Statues from Doncaster and Penrhys would not be ‘all day in burning’; according to Latimer these had been ‘the instruments to bring many … to eternal fire’.4 Some statues from Canterbury were reportedly being given to local children to play with as dolls, holy bread was fed to dogs, altar stones became fireplaces and sinks and banners were burned.5
Shrines were also stripped of their relics, purported health benefits and wealth. Cromwell’s agents razed the shrine of St Anne at Buxton, removing the saint’s relics, locking and sealing the healing baths so the wells couldn’t be used. Among the relics taken were the girdle from Bath Abbey, as well as three combs dedicated to St Mary Magdalen, St Dorothy and St Margaret; an image of St Moodwyn used by labouring women taken from Burton on Trent; St Mary Magdelen’s red silk girdle from Bruton in Somerset, as well as girdles from Basedale in Yorkshire, Kirkstall, Rievaulx, Newbury, Kelham, York and Haltemprise. The very girdle from Westminster that Elizabeth of York, Catherine of Aragon and Margaret Tudor had given birth clutching was removed and destroyed. Yet a number of icons and images, pilgrim badges and ritualistic items may have existed within wealthier private homes and the fate of these is less certain. Following the accession of Edward, the rules became even stricter. Jane Yate’s daughter-in-law Bridget may still have delivered her children whilst calling upon assistance from St Anne or St Margaret, in a bed which had been blessed and sprinkled with holy water. This was about to change. Injunctions of 1547 banned the use of rosaries, the undertaking of pilgrimage and prayers for the intercession of particular saints; there was to be no reciting of the rosary, no casting of holy water, ringing of holy bells, or blessing of candles. If Jane had owned a rosary, did she manage to smuggle it under her gown into the birth chamber? Would Bridget have wanted it?
The role of the midwife also came under lasting attack during this period, as recognition of the widespread pseudo-religious nature of birth room practices. In the fabric rolls of York Minster, a condemnation can be found of ‘charms, sorcery, enchantments, invocations, circles, witchcraft, soothsaying or any like crafts or imaginations invented by the devil and specially in times of women’s travail’.6 Old chants were replaced by new, religious ones, which often substituted female saints for male ones, an interesting indication of the imposition of patriarchal authority into the traditional female preserve of the birth chamber: if men could not be there in person, their Biblical representations would be:
There are four corners to her bed
Four angels at her head:
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John:
God bless the bed that she lies on,
New moon, new moon, God bless me,
God bless this house and family.7
In 1538, Nicholas Shaxton, Bishop of Salisbury, urged midwives not to resort to the use of ‘girdles, purses, measures of Our Lady or such other superstitious things’, which was echoed in the first midwives’ oath of 1567. In Kent, the same year, an inquiry asked women to inform against any midwives who used sorcery, witchcraft, charms, unlawful prayers or invocations in Latin. This perceived overlap between female gynaecological practice and malevolent secrecy was a key step along the road to the witchcraft trials of the later Elizabethan and Stuart eras. One traditional identifying factor of a witch was her knowledge and use of herbs, to good effect or ill. This body of wisdom was yet another cas
ualty of earlier reforming zeal, as prioresses and nuns had been a long-standing repository of oral medical tradition. From almonries and specialist infirmary gardens, medicine and assistance was dispensed that represented the best of ecclesiastical tradition, often after monks and nuns had swapped ‘horticultural knowledge’ and resources. Scribes copied classical herbals, which were adapted to use native English plants and flowers; the devotional roses and lilies featured alongside traditional cures such a sage, rue, clary and hyssop. Benedictine nuns in particular were known for their curative wisdom and work.8 The embargo on growing and using herbs and flowers in monastic gardens, as well as the dissemination of their remedies and knowledge in the community, represented an irrevocable loss. While women could still grow their own flowers and herbs at home, this could not compete with the scale and body of knowledge that was lost when monastic infirmary gardens were destroyed along with their establishments. The church had long encouraged the use of prayers whilst gathering medicinal herbs, suggesting their efficiency was improved by being picked in a highly ritualistic way, a view which survived long after the Tudor era. It is easy to imagine later interpretations of old women muttering chants as they picked herbs by moonlight.
