The Weaker Vessel: Women's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England

by Antonia Fraser

  Lord Falmouth, who was madly in love with his beautiful wife Mary Bagot (‘His Dearest Deare’), wanted her labour to be over before he returned from the Dutch war at sea, since he could not bear to see his beloved suffer: ‘I cannot endure to see you in pain or trouble.’ Later he wrote: ‘You are in my thoughts the first thing in the morning and last at night. ’Tis certain my Dearest Deare Child that, let your pain have been what it will, my torment in the belief of it has not been much inferior to it.’ (Falmouth’s daughter had in fact been born four or five days earlier, but Falmouth, killed at the Battle of Lowestoft a short while later, never saw her.)33

  How were these harrowing ordeals and deathbeds familiar to every household, and (unlike the state of pregnancy) never glossed over in contemporary accounts, to be explained in the divine order of things? Samuel Hieron made the origin of such sufferings quite clear in his prayer to be uttered by a woman in labour: ‘the smart of the punishment which thou [Lord] laidst upon me being in the loins of my grandmother Eve, for my disobedience towards thee: Thou hast greatly increased the sorrows of our sex and our bearing of children is full of pain’. The poet Edmund Waller put it another way when he threw a light-hearted curse over Lady Dorothy Sidney, who had rejected him for another: ‘make her taste the first curse imposed on womankind – the pains of becoming a mother’.34

  If woman redeemed herself from the sin of Eve by child-bearing, she was none the less condemned to suffer the pains of childbirth in order to fulfil that prophecy made in Genesis: ‘Unto the woman he [God] said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.’ This doctrine, upon which Catholics and Puritans were alike agreed, gave at least some spiritual context to the agonies of women. (It was Catholic belief that after Eve’s Fall, only the Virgin Mary, being born without original sin, did not suffer the pangs of childbirth, when she gave birth to the Infant Christ.) Faced with the perpetual prospect of their wives’ sufferings, there was even some relief for loving husbands in accepting the link with the sin of Eve; it alleviated a burden which was otherwise unacceptable.

  The penitential element in childbirth could even be carried further. The ceremony of ‘churching’ had, in its Judaic origins, been intended to ‘cleanse’ a woman after her delivery, but by the seventeenth century it was intended quite simply as a ceremony of thanksgiving. Certain women evidently believed that Archbishop Laud, in his plans for the Anglican Church, was attempting to bring back this penitential element to the ceremony, by insisting on a handkerchief or veil being worn; with indignation, protesters compared this head-covering to the white linen sheet which had to be worn by the ‘unchaste’. There are entries in the Essex and Colchester Courts for women refusing to cover their heads in this manner. In 1639 Dorothy Hazzard, wife of a Bristol parson, received women to her house for their lying-in, because they could thus avoid the more disagreeable churching ceremonies elsewhere.35

  If the cruel pangs of labour could be blamed upon Grandmother Eve, that other affliction endured by so many mothers of the seventeenth century, the death of the child itself in infancy, could hardly be laid directly at her door. Yet such a harrowing experience, as has been seen in the case of the Walkers and Fanshawes, was an inseparable part of parenthood in the seventeenth century. It might be the death of one child, of many children, of the entire flock; it was a rare and fortunate parent who escaped this tragedy altogether.

  It has been suggested in recent years, notably by Lawrence Stone in The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800, that the low expectation of infant life meant that people were as a whole less attached to their children or at any rate during the child’s first year of life, when its ability to survive the rigours of infant disease had not been established. He does, however, comment that the popular psychologist Richard Napier treated women disturbed by the deaths of infants; Napier’s notebooks concerning his patients (who were drawn from every social class) certainly include 134 cases of disturbing grief – nearly half of which were attributed to a child’s death. The vast majority of these sufferers were mothers, such as Ellen Craftes who ‘took a fright and grief that a door fell upon her child and slew it. Presently head, heart and stomach ill; eyes dimmed with grief that she cannot see well.’36

  In general one can only observe that this suggested indifference is not the attitude of those women literate or lucky enough to be able to express themselves. Since the maternal instinct of one sort or another is a universal one (if anything enhanced rather than diminished by the proximity imposed by poverty), it seems unlikely that a woman wailing without words for her baby felt the death less because she was inarticulate. As in any natural disaster, only the voice of the privileged (generally male) was heard, but everyone suffered alike.

  Ralph Verney’s wife Mary was delirious for two days and nights with sorrow when her baby died suddenly of convulsions; when the news of the death of her daughter Pegg reached her she felt totally unable to care for two little girls, relations of Ralph’s, because to do so would simply exacerbate her own grief. Oliver Heywood, in his account of the life of his mother, described ‘how great an affliction’ was the death of her first-born. The poet Katherine Philips (known as the ‘Matchless Orinda’) wrote of the death of her baby son in 1655 in a poem entitled ‘Orinda upon little Hector Philips’.

  I did but see him, and he disappeared,

  I did but pluck the Rose-bud and it fell …37

  In the simple pain of the sentiment she spoke for all the countless women who had also glimpsed their babies only once, and mourned in silence.

  As for the slightly older children, the desperation of many contemporary comments on these deaths speaks for itself. Sir Hugh Cholmley of Scarborough described how when one of their children, known as ‘little Betty’, died aged four and a half ‘to the great grief of my wife and myself’, he took the stricken household away on a holiday to try and recover from a sorrow unendurable amid the familiar surroundings38 – a reaction to loss which does not alter down the ages.

  A comment by Samuel Clarke, who wrote The Lives of Sundry Eminent Persons in this Later Age, printed the year after his death, in 1683, explains the difference in the approach to suffering of that period. There is a parallel to be drawn between the public guilt felt about the emotion of love (although love itself was undoubtedly experienced), and the guilt felt about grief over the death of a child. Clarke included among his pious ladies his own wife Katharine Overton, whom he married in 1625, when she was twenty-four. He tells us that she experienced the most terrible grief at the deaths of her children, but thought it her duty to try and overcome it.39 Poor Lettice Falkland felt that the devil himself was tempting her because she was overcome with desolation at the death of her son Lorenzo; she began to imagine herself responsible for his death by her own transgressions – a guilt which can only have added to the natural despair of the stricken mother. Anne Digby, the cool Countess of Sunderland, provided a glimpse into the reality of contemporary suffering when she wrote to John Evelyn over the death of his beloved grandson at the age of a year: ‘We are so comfortably sure that the poor innocent babies are taken out of a naughty world to be very happy, that I have often wondered at the excessive sorrow I have sometimes seen on these occasions.’ She added piously: ‘but … we always prefer our own satisfaction, be it never so transitory, to the most solid good for others’.40

  Sir William Brownlow was a brother of that Sir John Brownlow of Belton who recommended mares’ milk for conception; no such expedient was necessary in the case of his wife, Elizabeth Duncombe. William Brownlow kept a meticulous record of her child-bearing from 27 June 1626 when their first child Richard was born, who died in the October of that year, down to the birth of their nineteenth child twenty-two years later; a daughter who lived – unmarried – till 1726. One third of this vast progeny survived – two sons and four daughters – which on a larger scale was something like the average survival rate for upper- and middle-class families of the time,
in so far as it can be estimated.41

  At one point, between 1638 and 1646, seven children, born at almost exactly yearly intervals, died in a row; Thomas, Francis, Benjamin, George, James, Maria and Anne. William Brownlow’s exclamations of grief as each new tragedy struck show some attempt at reconciliation to the workings of providence – ‘Though my children die, the Lord liveth and they exchange but a temporal life for an eternal one’ – but absolutely no diminution in grief. Little George, for example, his fifteenth child, managed to live from October 1641 to 29 July of the following year; when he died, his father wrote: ‘I was at ease but Thou O God hast broken me asunder and shaken me to pieces.’ That was doubtless the truth. Parents, in their heart of hearts, could not reconcile themselves to a doctrine which left the little one happier in heaven – and their arms empty.

  ‘My dear mother, why do you mourn and weep so much for my brother Willy?’ asked Alice Thornton’s little daughter Naly. ‘Do you not think he is gone to heaven?’

  ‘Yes, dear heart’, replied Alice Thornton, ‘I believe he is gone to heaven, but your father is so afflicted for his loss, and being a son he takes it more heavily, because I have not a son to live.’ At this Naly asked the logical child’s question: ‘Would you then have him out of heaven again?’ Alice Thornton in her autobiography does not record her reply, only that she felt reproved out of ‘the mouth of so young a child’ for her ‘immoderate sorrow’.42

  Alice Wandesford was born at Kirklington in Yorkshire in 1627 a member of the minor gentry of the North Riding, and married William Thornton of East Newton in 1651. A woman of strong character emerges from the pages of her autobiography; she declared that her motive for writing it was to make some sense of her husband’s failure in life (he ended up a bankrupt), and her own subsequent struggles to bring up her family in poverty. Memories of a golden girlhood in Ireland, when her father’s cousin the Earl of Strafford was Deputy, provided a bitter contrast. Nevertheless Alice Thornton does not write bitterly, although her financial worries were compounded by her sufferings as a mother. Her sister Catherine, wife of Sir Thomas Danby, had given birth to sixteen children, of whom six were stillborn, and died as a result of a long and painful delivery at the age of thirty.

  Alice hesitated for some time before accepting the suit of William Thornton through a personal wish to be single; possibly affected by the spectacle of her sister’s sufferings. Conceiving Shortly after marriage, she was very sick in the early stages of her first pregnancy, and the child died after half an hour. Her second child was nearly ‘overlaid’ by its nurse – a gruesome contemporary fate, whereby the wet-nurse fell asleep and stifled or crushed the baby. Hearing the baby ‘groaning troublesomely’ Alice rushed in and extricated the infant from its perilous position. As a result of this, Alice suckled the next child – ‘my sweet Betty’ – herself, being ‘overjoyed’ to do so. However, at the age of eighteen months sweet Betty died of a combination of rickets and a cough: ‘When Mr Thornton and I came to pray for her, she held up those sweet eyes and hands to her dear Father in heaven, looked up and cried in her language, “Dad, dad, dad” with such vehemency as if inspired by her holy father in heaven to deliver her sweet soul into her heavenly father’s hands.’43

  Then there was the son who died because the midwife lacked skill. After this Alice, fearing that she might now be barren, went to Scarborough Spa. She did conceive a child. This was ‘my dear Willy Thornton’ whose death at the age of fourteen days was taken not only by his father but by Alice very hard.

  In giving birth to her next child Robert, Alice suffered repeated haemorrhages, although she was able to feed him herself for two years. Expecting her eighth child, Alice nervously worried herself over their fate if she should die, and Mr Thornton married again: ‘as I had been told that it would be necessary for him for his health’.44 But it was William Thornton who died, not Alice. Despite the fact that the birth of her ninth child left her very weak, with gangrene of the breast, Alice Thornton recovered after four months spent in bed. She lived on until 1706.2 Three out of her nine children survived. Little Naly was evidently a highly strung as well as a precocious child: she fell into convulsions when taken by the maids to see the show put on to celebrate the coronation of King Charles II at Richmond – soldiers, drunks, noise, and firing muskets provoked from her a series of paralysing screams. Despite this, at the age of fourteen she was ‘spoken for’ by the curate of Stonegrave, Thomas Comber, later a venerated Dean of Durham and Naly lived, like her mother, to a great age.

  The true figures for deaths in childbirth at this time cannot be established with certainty, owing to what one scholar has called the ‘exasperating rarity’ of evidence in the parish registers as to why the person buried there died. One estimate gives a figure varying from 125 to 158 per 1,000 in the first half of the seventeenth century and from 118 to 147 in the second half. Research among aristocratic women has produced the statistics that 45 per cent died before the age of fifty, one quarter from the complications of childbirth; these figures do not however allow for the debilitations caused by constant parturition.45 Many women must have died of diseases and conditions related to ‘the pain and the peril’, worn through by ceaseless child-bearing, who did not actually die in labour.

  It was ironic, if a subtle form of social justice, that the one natural form of contraception in existence at this time was the breast-feeding of the previous baby. While lactation did not give universal protection, it certainly afforded some.46 What was more, the general prohibition against intercourse while the woman was still feeding her baby at the breast (even if not universally respected) exercised its own restraint. But the great ladies, and even those much further down the social scale, such as the Lancaster grocer’s wife Mrs Coward, to whom William Stout was apprenticed, did not propose to feed their own children; it being customary to pay someone else, known as a ‘wet-nurse’, to do the job (the word was first introduced in 1620; before that the general term ‘nurse’ was used).47 So the richer women enjoyed – endured might be a better word – a higher rate of fertility than their poorer sisters, who not only nursed these wealthy cuckoo babies for money, but also suckled their own children. Both processes gave the women of the poor some kind of short respite from the eternal process of giving birth, which brought so many women of the time into mortal danger, pain and peril year after year.

  In general, breast-feeding was so unusual in that section of society where the mothers could afford to pay others to perform the duty for them as always to be worthy of remark. It was the subject of comment for example when Sarah, daughter of the Quaker Margaret Fell, nursed her son herself, born when she was forty-two. Lucy Hutchinson’s mother was said to love her ‘above the rest of her children’ just because she had suckled her. Essex Cheke, third wife of the second Earl of Manchester, had her prowess in that respect commemorated on her tombstone when she died in September 1658. She had left Lord Manchester with six sons and two daughters, seven of them suckled ‘with her own breasts’. The memorial added: ‘Her children shall rise up and call her blessed.’ On the other hand another Essex, that Lady Essex Rich who was the beloved first wife of Daniel Finch, Earl of Nottingham, was criticized for her rashness in feeding her own child; this eccentric behaviour was thought to have contributed to the baby’s death.48

  Why did the mothers of this time refuse to feed their own children, except in rare cases? This was after all a time when the alternative of animal milk was not used except for syphilitics. Baby bottles as such were also virtually unknown, although there were drinking horns (and nipple shields also existed, made of lead, tin or silver).49

  It was not as if the character of the wet-nurses in themselves inspired much confidence. Every domestic handbook abounded in advice on how to choose a wet-nurse; the constant reiteration that she should be healthy and full of milk shows how often the contrary was discovered to be the case. (Complexion was rated exceptionally important: red hair and freckles for example were dangerous because they b
etokened sour milk; a healthy ‘brown’ was best.) Sexual relations between the wet-nurse and her husband (or anyone else) were also considered dangerous but it is highly doubtful that such prohibitions actually brought about celibacy. Babies in general seemed to be in constant threat from ‘overlaying’, the fate of Alice Thornton’s baby. Under the circumstances Mary Lady Verney probably made a prudent decision when she chose the wife of Ralph Rode to wet-nurse little Ralph Verney on the grounds that her own family appeared healthy: ‘she [Mrs Rode] looks like a slattern but she sayeth if she takes the child she will have a mighty care of it, and truly she hath two as fine children of her own as ever I saw’.50 Yet the circumstances in which a feeling mother would surrender a beloved baby to a woman who looked ‘like a slattern’ are difficult for the modern imagination to encompass.

  On the one hand the importance of the bond was understood: mental and spiritual qualities also were believed to be imbibed with the wet-nurse’s milk, as Oliver Heywood wrote of his wife Elizabeth that ‘she being nursed and nourished at home partook of her natural parents’ excellent dispositions’. The wet-nurse to two monarchs, Mrs Katharine Elliott, appealed for a grant to sell silk stockings as a reward for such intimate services, while her own daughter petitioned Charles II at the Restoration for some financial recognition of the fact that she had sucked ‘at the same breast as so great a monarch’. Mrs Martha Farthing claimed a pension of £300 when her former nursling Queen Anne ascended the throne, on the grounds that she was ‘the only wet-nurse to her present Majesty’. Martha Farthing had fed the Princess for fifteen months, which was slightly longer than the median age established by contemporary reports, although some medical authors recommended weaning as late as twenty-one months.’51