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

by Antonia Fraser

  The power struggle between the midwives and the doctors was finally resolved by the victory of the latter. Education, as ever in the seventeenth century, was the real key to woman’s weakness. Members of the male sex were always likely by definition to have a far greater knowledge of medicine and anatomy than the average woman, if only for their ability to read Latin (as the midwife Jane Sharp herself admitted).36 As for women doctors, some women did continue to practise medicine on a casual basis – in 1683 one Prudence Ludford of Little Barkhampton was presented at court for unlawful surgery – but the examinations required by the Faculties of Medicine and Surgery in the City of London excluded women.37

  By the end of the century it had become customary to call in a ‘Man-Midwife’ for difficult cases. It has been suggested that the vogue for the ‘Man-Midwife’ among the upper classes may have spread from France (like other customs of an intimate nature as the use of the prophylactic sheath), after one of the mistresses of Louis XIV, Louise de la Vallière, had been attended by one. In 1780 the honouring of Sir David Hamilton by King George III, the first knighted obstetrician, indicated the course of the future in the medical profession. Those murmurs of feminine modesty at male examination which had persisted in the seventeenth century – Dr Willughby mentions cases where he was not permitted to gaze on the patient’s face – and had been evinced by the vocal midwives as support for their traditional claims, died away in view of the superior need for truly skilled attention.38 And that, it came to be agreed, could not be supplied by women.

  Ironically enough there was far more substance to the midwives’ claims to represent the correct – because it was divinely-ordained and thus natural – approach to labour than many people, including the doctors, realized at the time. Recent research has come to criticize the ‘meddling’ male doctors who with their forceps intervened with the natural process of childbirth.39 It is of course impossible (as was pointed out on p.92), to estimate with any certainty the figures for mortality in childbirth at this period; even the hazy figures available give no clue as to the relative responsibility of midwife, doctor, let alone that other important figure present at every childbed, ‘Dame Nature’ herself.

  Obstetrics in any modern sense was in its infancy where doctors as well as midwives were concerned. This was an age when the Caesarean delivery was popularly – if not quite correctly – believed to result in the inevitable death of the mother. The key work De Generatione Animalium by Dr William Harvey, described as ‘the father of English midwifery’,40 was published in Latin in 1651 and, with a thirty-nine-page section ‘Of the Birth’ translated into English in 1653 (it had a strong influence, for example, on Dr Percival Willughby). But even Harvey was capable of harbouring such misconceptions as attributing to the foetus an active role in breaking out of the womb, in addition to the mother’s contractions, on the analogy of the chicken breaking out of the egg.

  While some of the notions cherished by the midwife Jane Sharp have a ludicrous sound to modern ears, others are sensible enough. On the one hand she believed the liver rather than the heart to be the fountain of the blood, that boys were begotten from the right ‘stone’ (testicle) and girls from the left, and that after conception boys lived in the right of the womb and girls on the left. On the other hand Jane Sharp believed in sustaining the strength of women during labour and in keeping them warm afterwards, both sound principles. She was much against hurrying on labour, warned against the difficulty of a breech presentation, and she was aware of the threat of haemorrhage with the need to remove the ‘after-burden’ (placenta). Her chosen covering for a recently delivered woman – the newly flayed skin of a sheep and a hare-skin on her belly – may sound bizarre, but William Sermon, a doctor, enunciated the same principle in 1671 in The Ladies Companion (though Dr Sermon preferred the skin of an ox).41

  As for Dr Sermon, he too had his capricious notions: for example, he believed one flat breast to be a sign that one twin would be miscarried. Like many doctors and scientifically-minded people in the seventeenth century, he attached much importance to obtaining that popular talisman of the time, an eagle-stone, to aid an easy delivery. Lord Conway, husband of Anne Viscountess Conway and a Fellow of the Royal Society, took enormous trouble to find exactly the right size and shape of one before her delivery in December 1658; fabled to be found in the birds’ nests, an eagle-stone was in fact merely an accidental configuration of an ordinary hollow pebble.42

  In such a primitive state of medicine, the midwives were not so far out in their emphasis on the importance of womanly experience. An accomplished sensible midwife like Jane Sharp would not really do much less well than a doctor like William Sermon, because in so many cases both of them were effectively helpless. Dr Sermon himself recognized this when he suggested that the ‘discreet Midwife’ should encourage her patient to call on the Almighty for help: ‘and let them call to mind what God hath said with his own mouth; for it would be almost a miracle to see a woman delivered without pain’.

  In another passage however, Dr Sermon did draw attention to a remarkable instance of childbirth without pain which he himself had witnessed by chance in 1644. The doctor was lurking in the hedgerows, hoping to shoot a hare, when he saw a woman on her way back from market ‘delivered of a lusty Child in a Wood by herself’. Presently she encased the infant in some oak leaves and wrapped it in her apron. She then marched ‘stoutly’ for half a mile to what happened to be the doctor’s uncle’s house. Within two hours the woman felt well enough, having secured some proper linen for the child, to proceed on her way ‘not in the least discouraged’. Dr Sermon knew of other examples in history of women delivered without pain. He also fondly believed that the contemporary women in America sprang out of a bed and ministered to their own husbands immediately after giving birth out of gratitude ‘because they [the American husbands] take some pains to beget them with Child’. If only English women were equally unselfish, reflected Dr Sermon, their husbands would give up kissing their ‘handsome Nurses’ and generally misbehaving themselves with the neighbours in a similar situation.43

  But such ‘natural’ childbeds were rare indeed in the conditions of seventeenth-century England. The real point about obstetrics and midwifery during this period (and for nearly 200 years to follow, until the invention of disinfectant by Joseph Lister in 1867 caused maternal mortality to decline sharply) was that the nature of bacterial infection itself was not understood. Here both doctors and midwives were alike in their ignorance.

  Dr William Harvey called for cleanliness to prevent the onset of fever. Handbooks advocated common-sensical measures of hygiene for midwives. Jane Sharp called for pared nails, and Dr William Sermon for comely and neat midwives, hands small, fingers long not thick, ‘nails pared, very close’. As for Jane Sharp’s recipe for a herbal bath at the onset of labour, to include hollyhocks, bettony, mugwort, marjoram, mint, camomile, linseed and parsley boiled up together, that must at least have involved cleansing the patient; if her recommendation that the woman’s ‘privities’ should be anointed with a compound of oil of sweet almonds, lilies, violets, duck’s grease, hen’s grease and wax, with butter, ground quince kernels and gum optional is less instantly appealing to modern sensibilities.44 But none of the endless herbal remedies recommended in handbooks and household books alike for the inexorable female ordeal of childbirth had any real relevance to the problem of sepsis.

  It was from septicaemia that the suffering patients died in their hundreds and thousands. This septicaemia was sometimes brought about by the unhygienic conditions of the home (although some immunity must have been established to those); more often it was brought about by that concomitant of most labours, ‘the examining hand’.45 Here both doctor and midwife were equally guilty. The doctor blithely and unknowingly brought with him infection from other cases which might include scarlet fever; the midwife from a daily round which might include the cow-byre and the farmyard generally as well as the lying-in of a neighbour.

  It was a hid
eous truth that progress in this field could lead to greater not lesser mortality, as the examining hand of the doctor grew more skilful, and the importance of internal examination was increasingly stressed. The establishment of the first lying-in hospitals led to the first epidemics of puerperal fever, the first one accurately recorded being in the middle of the seventeenth century.46

  It was in this sense that the least skilful midwives, lacking the knowledge to do much more than concentrate on their herbal remedies in the patient’s own home, might actually do less harm, by not spreading infection, than the most practised of the doctors.

  The ideal midwife (from the point of view of a masculine-dominated society, and no doubt from the point of view of most patients as well) might be ‘modest and grave’, but there was something about the intimate power of the position, the fact that most midwives acted throughout their careers as ‘uncontrolled female arbiters’ in the indignant phrase of Dr Peter Chamberlen, which could lead to the development of an altogether bolder type of woman. Mrs Elizabeth Cellier was that outspoken midwife who in 1687 announced that over 6,000 women had died in childbed within the last twenty years, more than 13,000 children had been abortive, and another 5,000 had died in the first month of their life; about two thirds of these had ‘in all probability perished, for want of the due skill and care, in those women who practise the art of midwifery’.47

  Her career previous to the initiation of her campaign for better training in midwifery had been equally bold, if not quite so judicious. For the details of her early life, we have to choose between the tales of her enemies – that she was born Elizabeth Marshall, the daughter of a brazier or tinker living near Canterbury – and her own account in one of her self-justificatory pamphlets.48 According to the latter, she was brought up by parents who were fervent Royalists – Protestants, but accused of papistry and idolatry on account of their Royalist sympathies. These perverse accusations led the young Elizabeth to inquire into the truths of the Catholic religion, as a result of which she herself became converted to it.

  Elizabeth’s first husband seems to have been an English merchant who went to Leghorn and died (the broadsheets had her indulging in a tripartite love affair the while with an Italian and his negro servant, as a result of which an illegitimate son was born). Her second husband vanished to Barbados leaving her with five children; whereupon Elizabeth moved to the City of London and set up as a midwife. Finally she married a French merchant named Pierre Cellier. At which point the dramatic part of her story began.

  Clearly there were exciting opportunities for an expert Catholic midwife in London in the 1670s when so many great ladies, including the wife of the heir to the throne, were Catholics: Mrs Cellier ministered to Mary of Modena as well as other Catholic aristocrats. The autumn of 1678 however brought public tragedy into these domestic circles: the false accusations of Titus Oates and others concerning a ‘Popish Plot’ resulted in the arrest of five ancient Catholic noblemen, including the Earl of Powis and Lord Arundell of Wardour, on the highly unlikely charge that they had been conspiring to kill Charles II. Other Catholics, Jesuit priests, were also arrested on the same charge, possibly with slightly more substance. When witnesses for the defence of the Jesuits were brought from St Omer for their trial in the summer of 1679, it was natural that Mrs Cellier, with her intimate knowledge of the York household, and her continental connections through her husband’s business, should lodge them. She also visited the prison and attempted to alleviate the lot of some of her humbler co-religionists there.

  The details of the aftermath of the ‘Popish Plot’ are virtually impossible to disentangle.49 First, plots had become good business, and any rascal was likely to invent them if he discerned profit in it. Second, both factions, that of Whig courtiers, headed by Shaftesbury, determined to exclude the Duke of York from the eventual succession, and that of the Catholics anxious to preserve him in it, were at the mercy of agents provocateurs. Unfortunately it was one of these, Thomas Dangerfield (although he masqueraded under a false name), that Mrs Cellier encountered in the course of one of her merciful visits to Newgate, where he lay in the debtors’ prison.

  When Dangerfield confided to Mrs Cellier the details of a plot that involved the Earl of Shaftesbury, he found a ready listener; not only was the Catholic York household under threat, but the husband of one of her patrons, the Earl of Powis, was actually in prison, for all of which Shaftesbury was to be blamed.

  Mrs Cellier was kind to Dangerfield. She paid off his debts; she spent 16s redeeming his coat out of pawn. She took him into her employ. From this vantage point a plot was said to have been hatched, by which material, incriminating the Earl of Shaftesbury in a plot to kill the King, was planted in the rooms of Mansell, a leading Whig; other conspirators included the Countess of Powis. That at least was Dangerfield’s story, for, being rearrested for debt once more, and carried back to Newgate, Dangerfield quickly turned his plot on its head, and made it a conspiracy of the Catholics against Shaftesbury.

  Mrs Cellier, on the other hand, stuck stoutly to her original story. When incriminating documents were found concealed in ‘a Meal-Tub’ in her house (hence the appropriately ludicrous nickname given to this plot-that-never-was) she maintained that it was indeed information written by Dangerfield which had been found ‘between the Pewter in my Kitchen’, but this information contained details of a real conspiracy by the Whigs against the King: ‘and as the Father of Lies did once tell the truth, so he hath inserted this one truth in his lying Narrative’. She added: ‘from my part it was no motive but my Loyalty and Duty to his Majesty, and Love to Truth and Justice, that engaged me in this affair.’50

  The Jesuit Father John Warner, who later gave a full account of these events from the Catholic point of view, described Mrs Cellier as a woman of strong and ‘almost’ masculine temperament. It was a fatal caveat: ‘Nature had endowed her with a lively, sharp and clean mind, but her powers of judgement were not of the same order; as was to be expected in the weaker sex.’51 Certainly it is possible to see in Mrs Cellier’s unwise championship of Dangerfield the rashness of one who was accustomed to trust her own decisions in one important if domestic sphere with success, and could not believe she would not be equally successful in the much wider world of politics and intrigue.

  At all events she paid the penalty. The Meal-Tub Plot as a whole, with its alternative versions, was considered too fantastic even for this plot-hungry age. But Mrs Cellier was arrested and flung into Newgate, where of course she encountered her old protégé and new-found betrayer, Dangerfield. A prolonged pamphlet war subsequently broke out between Dangerfield and Mrs Cellier, when both were once more at liberty. Dangerfield in The Grand Impostor Defeated referred to Mrs Cellier as ‘Mother Damnable’ (the nickname of a notoriously foul-mouthed character who dispensed ale in Kentish Town).52 Mrs Cellier for her part gave a superb version of the dialogue which ensued when she met Dangerfield in prison (even if it owed something to esprit de l’escalier, one hopes that she delivered at least a few of the following lines at the time):

  DANGERFIELD: ‘Madam, Madam, Pray speak to me, and tell me how you do.’

  MRS CELLIER: ‘I am sick, very sick of the Bloody Barbarous Villain.’

  DANGERFIELD: ‘Pray Madam speak low, and do not discompose yourself.’

  MRS CELLIER: ‘Nothing you do can discompose me: I Despise you so much, I am not Angry …’

  DANGERFIELD: ‘I am very sorry for your Confinement, but I could not possibly help what I have done.’

  MRS CELLIER: ‘Bloody Villain, I am not confined, for Stone Walls and Iron Bars, do not make a Prison, but a Guilty Conscience: I am innocent …’53

  Dangerfield was pardoned by the King in response to political pressure. But despite constant petitions, it was not until June 1680 that Mrs Cellier was brought to trial at the King’s Bench Court on a charge of high treason, having been a prisoner in Newgate for thirty-two weeks, for much of this in close confinement, unable to see her husband and ch
ildren. Her conduct at her trial showed however that her spirit at least was unbowed. For example she demanded that Dissenters be excluded from the jury, on the grounds that the plot of which she was accused had been aimed against their interests. It was however in her vigorous attack upon the whole basis of Dangerfield’s testimony that Mrs Cellier showed most courage – and enjoyed most success. She argued that Dangerfield might have been pardoned for his part, whatever it was, in the so-called Meal-Tub Plot, but he was still a convicted felon for other previous offences including burglary and perjury, which had brought upon him an unpardoned sentence of outlawry. ‘The King cannot give an Act of Grace to one subject’, argued Mrs Cellier, ‘to the prejudice of another.’54

  So Mrs Cellier was acquitted of high treason.

  Before that, she had given good account of herself in the course of the trial, before the Lord Chief Justice and King Charles II, among others. A piece of broadsheet verse commemorated her courage:

  You taught the judges to interpret laws;

  Shewed Sergeant Maynard how to plead a cause;

  You turned and wound, and rough’d them at your will.55

  Humour as well as courage was one of the weapons at her disposal, a weapon incidentally always likely to disarm King Charles II. At one point Mrs Cellier was accused of jesting about the alleged ‘Presbyterian’ plot in a tavern, in the course of which she told a bawdy story thought too immodest to repeat in court.