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

by Antonia Fraser

  ‘What!’ exclaimed the King, scenting some sudden possibility of distraction in this interminable and boring tangle; ‘Can she speak Bawdy too?’

  The King refused to lose sight of the subject. ‘What did she say?’ he repeated. ‘Come, tell us the story’.

  Mrs Cellier’s official interlocutor began to stammer.

  ‘She said – she said – she said – that so long as she did not lose her hands, she would get money as long as –’

  It was Mrs Cellier who completed her own sentence: ‘So long as Men kissed their Wives.’

  At this the cross-examiner thought he perceived an opening. He swiftly added: ‘By the oath I have taken, she said their Mistresses too.’

  Mrs Cellier was more than equal to that. ‘Did I so?’ she inquired. ‘Pray what else do they keep them for?’

  ‘That was but witty’, said the Lord Chancellor drily, in the presence of his philandering sovereign.

  ‘’Twas natural to her Practice’, commented the kindly King.56

  All would perhaps have been well for the triumphant Mrs Cellier following her acquittal, had not the temptation to be a petticoat-author, as well as an uncontrolled female arbiter, overcome her. She had already pushed her luck by refusing to pay the traditional guinea apiece to the jury upon her acquittal. (Had she been convicted the King would have been obliged to pay up.) Instead she wrote to the foreman with a gracious offer of payment in kind: ‘Pray Sir accept of, and give my most humble Service to Your self, and all the Worthy Gentlemen of your Panel, and Yours and Their Several Ladies. And if You and They please, I will with no less Fidelity serve them in their Deliveries, than You have done me with Justice in mine …’57

  Soon after the trial she had her own narrative in pamphlet form ‘Printed for Elizabeth Cellier, and to be sold at her House in Arundel Street near St Clements Church.’ Entitled Malice Defeated, it was said to be ‘for the satisfaction of all Lovers of undisguised Truth’. Malice Defeated not only related all the circumstances of Mrs Cellier’s acquaintance with Dangerfield, and the course of her trial, but it also included some trenchant criticisms of conditions within Newgate prison itself. She described hearing the groans of prisoners under torture, which so much resembled those of a woman in labour that Mrs Cellier innocently offered her services in relief. She wrote of a special chamber for prisoners whose crime consisted in adhering to the wrong religion, known sarcastically to the gaolers as ‘The Chapel’; a grating permitted paying members of the public to witness their agonies. She wrote of instruments known as the shears, weighing forty to fifty pounds, affixed to the limbs of prisoners, which wore the flesh through to the bone. All of this made (and makes) Malice Defeated nothing if not a good read. As Sir Charles Lyttleton wrote to a friend in September: ‘if you have not seen Mrs Cellier’s narrative, ’tis well worth it’.58

  Mrs Cellier concluded with an ingratiating acknowledgement of her own weaknesses: ‘And as to my own Sex, I hope they will pardon the Errors of my story, as well as those bold Attempts of mine that occasioned it … though it may be thought too Masculine, yet was it the effects of my Loyal (more than Religious) Zeal to gain Proselites to his Service. And in all my defence, none can truly say but that I preserved the Modesty, though not the Timorousness common to my Sex.’59

  This did not save her from a further trial, once more before the King’s Bench – this time for libel. And this time Mrs Cellier was found guilty. She was fined £1,000, and sentenced to three sojourns in the pillory – from twelve to one at the Maypole in the Strand on market day, at Covent Garden and similarly at Charing Cross – while on each occasion a parcel of her publications was to be burnt by the common hangman. Even now Mrs Cellier was not quite vanquished. When the time came for her to take up her perilous position – the lot of a ‘Popish’ conspirator held at the mercy of the mob in the pillory in September 1680 was hardly enviable – Mrs Cellier began by feigning sickness. Unfortunately she was tricked into taking the emetic which she had procured for the purpose a day early. Then – at the age of fifty-odd – she declared that she was pregnant. Her groans and shrieks, as the women came to dress her for her fate, resulting in the calling of a physician; a pig’s bladder full of blood, with which Mrs Cellier had intended to implement her imposture, was then discovered. (This pig’s bladder proved an absolute boon to the writers of the broadsheets.)

  Finally captive in the pillory, Mrs Cellier was greeted by a hail of stones. She carried a board, a piece of wood something like a battledore, with which to defend herself, otherwise she would surely have been brained. She also managed to keep her head one side of the board instead of poking it through as intended, so that she had some measure of protection. And as Rachel Lady Russell (no friend to this enemy of the Whigs) noted in a letter to her husband: ‘All the stones that were thrown within reach, she took up and put in her pocket.’60

  Mrs Cellier returned to publishing with renewed zest. As the anonymous author of The Midwife Unmask’d complained: ‘This She-Champion and Midwife … now being cleared by the law’, she ‘rants and scratches like another Pucel d’Orleans or Joan of Arque; handling her Pen for the Papistical Cause, as the other did her Lance; and it is pity she has not likewise the Glory of her Martyrdom’.61

  Nor was that the end of Mrs Cellier’s public career. For all the hopeful ‘searches’ of other midwives, Queen Catherine of Braganza had never produced an heir for Charles II. Her own more successful midwifery had brought Mrs Cellier into that dangerous prominence where she had meddled, to her cost, with politics. Now with the succession of James II to his – officially – childless brother, Mrs Cellier was back in the centre of things again.

  In June 1687 she took the opportunity of this newly favourable climate of opinion to float a scheme for a midwives’ college.62 By this she hoped to reduce those fearful casualties of unskilled carelessness on the part of midwives which had disquieted the Chamberlens and others since early in the century. Mrs Cellier’s scheme was for a royal ‘corporation’ to be endowed to the tune of £5,000 or £6,000 a year ‘by and for midwives’, which in addition would serve as a hospital for foundling children.

  Mrs Cellier’s plan was on the surface well worked out. Women – to the limit of 1,000 – who were already skilled midwives were to be admitted on the payment of £5; they would then serve as matrons to twelve lesser houses or assistants to the governess. The next 1,000 would pay 50s on admission and 50s per year in fees; as their training proceeded, they would join the ranks of the matrons and assistants to the governess. The entire income of the first year (which according to these terms would be considerable) would be devoted to the building of the foundling hospital.

  There were other provisions: no married person was to be admitted to the government of the hospital, in order to protect the interest of the foundlings. A woman sufficiently expert in writing would act as secretary to the governess of the hospital. The principal physician or male midwife would give a monthly lecture in public at which attendance would be compulsory; afterwards all the lectures would be entered in a book to which the midwives would have free recourse.

  In a subsequent pamphlet the following year, Mrs Cellier showed herself capable of a humanitarian imagination where her foundlings were concerned.63 Their surnames, she wrote, were to be chosen from the ‘several Arts or Mysteries’, or from ‘Complexions and Shapes’ or even on a more mundane level from the days of the week, but such children were not to be stigmatized by such opprobrious surnames as ‘Bastard’, so that in after life they would be capable of any employment, or even honour, without reference to the misfortune of their birth.

  Combating the murmurs of the doctors in a pamphlet entitled To Dr– An Answer to his Queries, concerning the Colledg [sic] of Midwives, Mrs Cellier turned once more to the story of those enterprising Israelite midwives Shiphrah and Puah and expanded it. She argued that they could not have been merely midwives, for two women could not have coped with the whole tribe; therefore they were also teachers, and the scene
of such consultations ‘might well be called a College’. With that verve which the King’s Bench Court would have recognized, Mrs Cellier said that since the Bible stated God had built these midwives ‘houses’, then the midwives’ ‘college’ antedated the College of Physicians. For good measure, she threw in the fact that there had been colleges of women practising physic, coeval with the bards, before the arrival of the Romans; and that a college of women had centred round the Temple of Diana in London.64

  The flaw in Mrs Cellier’s scheme was the same flaw that had vitiated the corporation, suggested half a century earlier by Dr Peter Chamberlen. Without being granted a monopoly, it would be impossible for this new foundation to impose higher standards, since too many midwives would simply continue in their same bad old ways. On the other hand Mrs Cellier’s foundation was envisaged on far too small a scale to deal with the enormous number of midwives required by the female population of England, even if they had been willing and able to afford the fees.

  For all this, and for all the queries raised by the doctors, King James II lent a sympathetic ear to Mrs Cellier’s propositions. He evidently promised to enrol the midwives into a corporation by his Royal Charter.65

  When Mrs Cellier published her second pamphlet on the subject of the foundation in January 1688, the Queen, Mary of Modena, was herself in the early stages of pregnancy. Her fruitful condition was a matter of some personal satisfaction to Mrs Cellier: had she not predicted that ‘her Majesty was full of Children’, and that therapeutic baths at a spa would assist her ‘breeding’? Mrs Cellier’s satisfaction was certainly shared by the royal parents-to-be, since Mary of Modena, who had lost a number of children at birth and in infancy, had not conceived for some years.

  But this was a pregnancy of more than personal importance. Catholic subjects like Mrs Cellier viewed the prospect of the birth of a male heir – who would be Catholic – with enthusiasm, while Whigs and fanatical Protestants envisaged with equal dismay the blighting of the succession hopes of Mary and Anne, James’s Protestant daughters by his first marriage.

  Mrs Cellier ventured further prophecy concerning the many ways in which her corporation of midwives would bring benefits to the King their founder: ‘And I doubt not but one way will be by giving him a Prince to his Royal consort, who like another Moses may become a mighty Captain to the Nation; and lead to Battle the Soldiers which the Hospital will preserve for him.’66

  Alas, this time Mrs Cellier’s prophesy was singularly wide of the mark. A prince was duly born to Mary of Modena – James Edward Stuart, born on 10 June 1688 – but he went into exile shortly after his birth; having by that birth precipitated the crisis which led to his father’s downfall and flight. Known to history as the old Pretender, in no conceivable sense was this prince another Moses, and the soldiers whom he ordered to battle in his various unsuccessful attempts to recapture the throne of his father were greatly drawn from other sources and other nations than the foundlings of England. With the departure of her royal patron, Mrs Cellier’s plans for a foundation collapsed.

  So determined were King James’s political enemies not to accept a Catholic succession – as represented by the baby prince born to Mary of Modena in June – that it was found convenient to believe that the baby himself was an imposter, smuggled into the palace in a warming-pan. Even Princess Anne (who should have known better) affected to credit this absurd story, because it conveniently supported her in her opposition to her father. At the time there were two midwives in attendance, Mrs De Labadie and Mrs Wilkins, both of whom received 500 guineas for what seemed to those within the royal chamber the joyful achievement of delivering the long-sought male heir (a daughter would have followed her Protestant step-sisters Mary and Anne in the succession and therefore would not have posed a threat). There were also doctors and a host of non-medical attendants, ladies of the court, many of them Protestants, amounting to a total of over sixty.67

  But as luck would have it, one royal obstetrician, the latest member of the Chamberlen dynasty, Dr Hugh Chamberlen, was not actually present at the birth, being away attending a patient at Chatham. This simple chance, added to the fact that the doctor was himself a strong Whig, played into the hands of another strong Whig, Gilbert (later Bishop) Burnet: he spread the story that the Queen had deliberately sent away her doctor in order to facilitate the smuggling in of the changeling.

  Years later Dr Chamberlen wrote to the Electress Sophia of Hanover about the events of that dramatic day, angry that he had been dragged into the scandal.68 He explained that there was nothing sinister about the fact that the footman sent to St James’s to fetch him when the Queen’s birth pangs started had not found him there. The plain truth was that the Queen gave birth earlier than was expected; not the first woman to do so. Had the footman reached him, as he must certainly have expected to do, Dr Chamberlen would in fact have arrived just in time to interrupt the act of smuggling – supposing such a stratagem had actually been planned.

  Dr Chamberlen’s clinching argument was the presence of another vociferous Whig at the scene of the birth – the midwife, Mrs Wilkins. She, who was wont to cry out against the Jesuits who infested the place (finding a sympathetic ear in Dr Chamberlen), had been in no doubt about the circumstances of the baby prince’s birth. To Dr Chamberlen now she expatiated indignantly on these rumours of substitution: ‘Alas, will they not let the poor infant alone! I am certain no such thing as the bringing of a strange child in a warming-pan could be practised without my seeing it: attending constantly in and about all the avenues of the chamber.’

  Lecky regarded the prostitute as ‘the eternal priestess of humanity’. But in the seventeenth century it was the midwife who could best claim that title: grave if not always modest, pursuing her profession in and about all the avenues to every chamber, where history was made and where poverty was rampant, from the palace of St James (for 500 guineas) to the market-place where a busy midwife noted in her diary that she ‘laid a woman’ for nothing.

  1In the nineteenth century Dr Peter Chamberlen’s famous forceps were discovered, still tucked away in their box.27

  EPILOGUE

  How Strong?

  A prophetess observing the ‘brave viragos’ of the Leveller movement who petitioned outside the House of Commons in April 1649, despite the pained astonishment of its male inmates, might have predicted that women would be still ‘stronger grown’ half a century later.

  The prophetess would have been wrong. By 1700 women were not in fact ‘stronger grown’. In 1649 one Member of Parliament had exclaimed indignantly: ‘it was not for women to Petition, they might stay at home and wash the dishes’, an answer treated at the time with energetic disdain.1 Fifty years later however women were staying at home and washing the dishes as they had always done, as though this eruption of an all-female body – thrilling or menacing depending on your point of view – had never taken place.

  In fact where the status of the so-called weaker vessel was concerned, the seventeenth century saw very little improvement in real terms. On the contrary, since the general disturbance of society in the middle decades brought about a temporary unplanned elevation of certain women’s authority, the graph of female progress, far from ascending in a straight line from the death of Queen Elizabeth to the accession of Queen Anne, rose during the middle decades to dip again with the restoration of the old order in 1660. (This cyclical pattern, whatever the special factors which brought it about in the seventeenth century, is perhaps worth bearing in mind; as with all forms of liberation, of which the liberation of women is only one example, it is easy to suppose in a time of freedom that the darker days of repression can never come again.)

  It so happened that Anne, while still a princess, identified herself with the great Elizabeth; ill-educated and unhistorically-minded as she might be, the youthful Anne equated her own aggravation by her brother-in-law William III with that of Elizabeth by Mary Tudor: ‘the Pr. discoursing her sufferings often made a parallel between herself an
d Qu. El.’ wrote Abel Boyer, who tutored her son. Shortly after she ascended the throne, Queen Anne adopted the Latin motto Semper Eadem – Always the same – on the explicit grounds that it had been used by ‘her predecessor of glorious memory’.2 But in many ways Semper Eadem was a more appropriate motto for the fate of women in general in 1702, than for this one woman monarch in particular – not least because Queen Anne, unlike Queen Elizabeth, had been taught no Latin.

  Of course there had been certain advances. But most of them, being shared equally with men, did not affect the relative standing of the sexes in respect to each other.

  Literacy came into this category: there was an advance among women as a whole from the virtual illiteracy which prevailed (outside members of a tiny class) in 1600. But with progress came peril. The new differentiation between the types of education thought suitable for the respective sexes meant that male and female education, two ships sailing from the same harbour, now set very different courses, and it was only in rare instances in the future that they would catch sight of each other’s sails.

  The lack of Latin instruction in particular was a miserable handicap – remember the desperate plea of Basua Makin that ‘tongues are learnt in order to [learn] things’. One historian has written of this period: ‘Not to be able to read Latin was to go in blinkers.’3 Such a lack could even affect those areas of traditional womanly skill such as midwifery and nursing: inevitably the woman (unskilled because she could not study in Latin, the language of medicine) lost out to the man (skilled because he could). As for those few females who did gamely surmount these obstacles, they also had to put up with ‘those wise Jests and Scoffs that are put upon a Woman of Sense and Learning, a Philosophical Lady as she is call’d by way of Ridicule’, in the words of Mary Astell in 1706;4 these constituted a hazard undreamt of by the philosophical ladies of the late sixteenth century.