Fairy Tale Queens: Representations of Early Modern Queenship (10 page)

One other factor emerges in the discourse of monstrous births: as we have seen, childbirth typically took place within a female world circumscribed by secrecy and ritual. The period of lying-in and the delivery itself generally occurred in a space “where female companionship and help stood between the new mother and the male world outside.”
³⁵
However, as Laura Gowing argues, in situations where “pregnancy was an active problem for the household and community,” as in the case of unmarried women, the experience was often more threatening than supportive and festive. Nonetheless, childbirth was mostly conducted in an atmosphere shrouded in secrecy and seclusion and male participation was minimal or nonexistent.
³⁶

Even queens, whose reproductive lives were so subject to public expectation and speculation and who would have had some attention from male physicians, enclosed themselves in a space largely shielded by female attendants. When Mary Tudor retired to await her first childbirth, Renard wrote to Charles: “The Queen has withdrawn, and no one enters her apartments except the women who serve her and who have the same duties as the court officials. This is an ancient custom in England whenever a princess is about to be confined: to remain in retirement forty days before and forty days after.”
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Such a protected climate could be comforting, but when the delivery was fraught in any way, the seclusion also allowed for exaggeration, misinformation, accusations, and rampant gossip and slander, as was the case with so many unfortunate queens of early modern fairy tales.

Monstrous Births and Early Modern Queens: Mary Tudor and Anne Boleyn

The private thoughts of early modern queens, and all women, as they approached their lying-in have been largely lost to history, though some tracings surface in occasional writings.
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Women experienced the double apprehension that they might not deliver a healthy child and that they themselves might die in the process.
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For a queen, the anxiety surrounding childbirth was exacerbated because the security of her own position as well as the monarchy depended on her success. The fear of miscarrying or of delivering an imperfect or stillborn child cannot be underestimated. Sara Mendelson points out that early modern women’s diaries and memoirs reveal considerable anxiety “about the child to come, especially the oft-expressed fear that it might be born misshapen.”
⁴⁰
One woman recorded her gratitude when her child was born “not onely free from deformity but a goodly lovely Babe” while another thanked God for her child “which was born with all itts parts and limbs.”
⁴¹
The Countess of Bridgewater, who wrote so movingly about the loss of an infant daughter, also articulated concerns shared by all mothers when she prayed that her child would be “born without any deformity, so that I and its father may not be punished for our sins, in the deformity of our babe.”
⁴²

That divine retribution for one’s sins would be visibly manifest in the child was not merely a belief provincial or lower-class women internalized. Without diminishing the fears of all early modern women, queens would have felt this anxiety even more keenly because of the public expectations for their reproductive lives.

If the first wish was for a healthy baby, the second was overwhelmingly for a son.
⁴³
Still, some monarchs could rejoice in the birth of a healthy daughter, Henry VIII and James V notwithstanding. The birth of Mary, Queen of Scots was said to disappoint her father James’s dynastic hopes, as he commented wryly—and incorrectly—upon her arrival that the Stuart line “came with a lass, it will pass with a lass.”
⁴⁴
On the other hand, Mary’s mother, Mary of Guise, showed off her infant daughter to Sir Ralph Sadler, the English ambassador dispatched to the northern realms to view the latest addition to the royal network. The queen mother asked the nurse to unwrap her infant and display her naked for Sadler’s approval, who duly reported back to Henry, “I assure your majesty, it is as goodly a child as I have seen of her age, and as like to live, with the grace of God.”
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Weeks later the proud queen mother repeated the demonstration, declaring “that her daughter did grow apace and soon she would be a woman if she took of her mother.”
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In addition to claiming some family pride in height and hardiness, the need to prove—especially to official emissaries—that a child was without deformity or imperfection was paramount. Even Henry indulged in paternal boasting about his healthy daughter. Chapuys reported that when Elizabeth was not yet a year old, the proud king displayed her to the French ambassadors: “On Tuesday Catillon and La Pommeraye went to visit the King’s bastard, who was shown to them first in very rich apparel, in state and triumph as a princess, and afterwards they saw her quite naked.”
⁴⁷
Admiration for a healthy body, free from malformation, followed monarchs throughout their lives: even as an adult, Mary Tudor was described by the Venetian ambassador as having “no personal defect in her limbs, nor is any part of her body deformed.”
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At times, however, a healthy child alone was not satisfaction enough. Charles I’s queen consort, Henrietta Maria, gave birth to a hardy young son, James, but when she visited the infant in the royal nursery, she lamented, “He is so ugly that I am ashamed of him” although she acknowledged that his robustness was important, allowing that “his size and fatness supply the want of beauty.”
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Indeed, a healthy child was not taken for granted and fear of the contrary was profound. The last chapter described how some women, in their fervent desire to conceive, could falsely believe they were pregnant. Mary Tudor was not alone in experiencing phantom pregnancy though she has become its most visible historical representative; however, Mary’s dismal reproductive saga did not end with her failure to produce a child. Toward the end of her first presumed pregnancy and in the months following, gossip alluded to a substitution plot and a changeling baby.

The rumors did not stop there. One doubtful subject nailed up a placard that read, “Shall we be such fools, oh noble English, as to think that our Queen will give birth to anything, except it be a marmot or a puppy?”
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Early modern queens joined women from all classes in their presumed capacity for producing monstrosities. Sir Philip Hoby wrote to ambassador John Mason about the gossip surrounding Mary, claiming that “such reports emanated from the French Ambassador, who is here for the recovery of his health, and who affirmed that on the 7th of May the Queen was delivered of a mole or lump of flesh, and was in great peril of death.”
⁵¹

Fairy tales conjure up stories of queens giving birth to pigs, dogs, cats, and moles, and other fictional exaggerations of aberrant births, but this last animal reference, the mole, marks a particular conflation between historical beliefs and fairy-tale lore. The French ambassador claimed that Mary delivered a “mole or lump of flesh.” Anne Boleyn’s final pregnancy ended prematurely in what was called, decades later, “a shapeless mass of flesh.”
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Similarly, when Marguerite de Navarre realized that her assumed late pregnancy was false, “the child she was carrying turned out to be a mole, a fleshy mass in the uterus formed by a dead ovum.”
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Whereas the fairy-tale mole appears to be one of many bestial candidates in the monstrous birth menagerie, the word “mole” had resonance beyond its animal connotations. The concept of the mole, or specifically the uterine mole, can be traced to the ancients. The earliest description of the mole in medical writing appeared in Hippocrates’ 
Diseases of Women
; Pliny and Galen also wrote about moles, and in the medieval period, several authors, including the Arabic physician Avicenna, continued discussion of the 
mola uteri.
 
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In the early modern period, gynecological treatises and midwifery manuals describe the mole in colorful and ample detail, creating careful taxonomies to account for its various manifestations, but with each analysis, the term becomes increasingly polysemous. What is clear is that the amorphous mole was seen as one more variation on the popular theme of the monstrous birth.

Amid the various discussions of molar birth, there was some agreement about definitions and causes. Early modern theories of reproduction were often inconsistent, but the most dominant paradigm suggested that successful conception involved the mingling of male and female seminal fluid or “seed” during intercourse.
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Nicholas Culpepper’s claim in his 
Directory for Midwives
 was typical of this view: “The Woman spends her seed as well as The Man.”
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Jane Sharp’s explanation in 
The
Midwives Book
 argued similarly: “True conception is then, when the seed of both sexes is good, and duly prepared and cast into the womb as into fruitful ground, and is there so fitly and equally mingled, the Man’s seed with the woman’s.”
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This model may suggest more equality than is warranted, since it was also believed that in conception “there must be an Agent [man] and a Patient or weaker vessel [woman], that she should be subject unto the office of the Man.”
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In his influential work on the history of sexuality, Thomas Laqueur emphasizes early modern theories of erotic and conceptual equality during intercourse, but Gail Kern Paster points out, “It is easy to be attracted to Laqueur’s account, for it historicizes an ideology of sexual pleasure, and offers women an apparently egalitarian space within it.” Such theories of “equally mingled” seed have suggested parity in the formation of the child as well as in erotic pleasure. Indeed, one popular argument maintained that women would not conceive if they had not experienced pleasure or climax during intercourse.
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Paster argues that this narrative of conceptual equality is “unduly optimistic” and she offers a counter-narrative in which many early modern theorists “emphasize a gendered assignment of responsibility—and thus potentially a gendered distribution of credit and blame, praise and shame—throughout the extended sequence of reproductive events.”
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Paster’s view of the gendered system of “credit and blame” of reproduction illuminates the plight of fairytale and early modern queens who struggled to conceive and sustain a pregnancy and normal delivery. Particularly in the case of the monarchy, a king would take credit for siring a healthy heir, but reproductive failures were invariably blamed on the queen’s body.

The mole was one familiar manifestation of a reproductive failure. Variously described as a stunted embryo, a tumorous mass, or a “misshapen piece of flesh without figure or order”
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that either floated freely in the womb or was attached to the uterine wall until it was expelled or extracted, the mole was seen as the result of an incomplete or “unprofitable” mixture of the male and female seed. The primary reasons for this insufficient comingling were intercourse during menstruation or the presence of female seed that exceeded the male’s share in amount and quality. In his 
Child-birth, or The
Happy Deliverie of Women
 (1612) Jacques Guillemeau, the son-in-law of Ambroise Paré, represented popular opinion that coition during menstruation could lead to defective offspring: “The true Mole is fleshy, being nothing else but an unprofitable masse, without shape or form...fleshy Moles [are] bred when the mans seede is weake, barren, imperfect...and for the most part choked through the abundance of the menstruous bloud, which is grosse and thicke.”
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Any acknowledgement that the male’s contribution to successful conception was lacking—“weake, barren, imperfect”—is abruptly countered by the blame ascribed to the suffocating, overpowering activity of the female body.

Jane Sharp also addresses “the Mole or Moon-Calf” and concurs that intercourse during a women’s menstrual cycle will result in a mole: “It proceeds from a fault in the forming faculty, when the mans seed in Copulation is weak or defective or too little, so that it is overcome by the much quantity of the woman’s blood.”
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The language used to describe the behavior of the menstrual body—the man’s seed is “choked” or “overcome” by unruly female blood—suggests threat and imbalance. Sharp considers other causes that result in the production of moles, but it is primarily women’s carnal relations during their “terms...from whence Moles, and Monsters, distorted, imperfect, ill qualified Children are begotten.”
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An even greater threat from the female body—rampant sexual desire—could also produce moles or aberrant forms. This corroborates the more generalized monster-birth theories that blame pregnant women for excessive or inappropriate longings. Jacob Rueff’s influential treatise, published in German and Latin in 1554 and translated into English in 1637 as 
The Expert Midwife,
 recognizes that various conditions can produce moles, but the primary cause, Rueff claims,

“especially in those women which are somewhat more 
lascivious
 than others...by 
desire of the Matrix
, doe stirre up copious seede of their owne, which augmented with the flowers, by the heat of the Matrix, is congealed together, and by the defect and want of mans seed, the proper worke-man and contriver of it, doth grow together into such a lump.”
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(ital. mine)

In other words, the excited womb of the “lascivious” woman overproduces the seed and mixes it with “the flowers,” or menstrual blood, and this wild female admixture results in a mole or other abnormal issue. This unnatural process occurs in the absence of appropriate male input, the “proper work-man and contriver” of the reproductive act. As with monster-birth theory in general, the woman’s lewdness was at fault even if her desire was not acted upon.

Descriptions of the production of the uterine mole portray an out-of-control female body and a wild imagination undermining male participation and control. These claims are made by several authors, including Sharp, who suggests that though rare, moles could be “formed in their wombs by their 
own seed and blood
 that flows thither.”
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(ital. mine) In other words, if the desiring, unruly sexual body was not frightening enough, the thought that women could conceive “by their own seed and blood,” or without men, was even more monstrous and unnatural. Maurizio Calbi demonstrates that whereas some early modern authors rejected the notion of female self-insemination, others, like Sharp, entertained it. Calbi points to Giovanni Marinelli’s treatise of 1563 in which Marinelli gives “credence to the opinion that the mola owes its origin to the combination of female semen and menstrual blood, and that the intervention of the male seed is unnecessary.” Marinelli writes that women, “whilst asleep” could inseminate themselves: “moved by the ‘imagination’ of sexual intercourse with a man, they may involuntarily cast forth their seed and mix it with menstrual blood, thus conceiving what will eventually become a misshapen piece of flesh as hard as a rock.”
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Jan Lamzweerde, a Dutch physician who wrote the first book dealing entirely with the subject of moles, 
Historia Naturalis
Molarum Uteri
 (1686), takes a position against the notion of female self-insemination, but his argument acknowledges that the idea that women could self-inseminate molar births still had currency.
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Such discourse recalls the many fairy-tale queens discussed in the previous chapter who conceived “whilst asleep” and in a female sanctuary in which the king was absent.