In Bed with the Tudors: The Sex Lives of a Dynasty from Elizabeth of York to Elizabeth I (12 page)

The role of the midwife was complex and emotive. Women had little choice but to put their trust in such assistants, literally putting their lives in their hands. Trusted midwives were clearly prized and received recompense for their efforts, like the woman who successfully delivered a son at Longleat House in 1560, who received 40
s
for her trouble. Others were recommended by word of mouth, tending to members of the same family and their friends. Their reputations quickly spread. William Howard of Reigate wrote to Sir William More in 1576, regretting that the midwife who had attended his wife and baby son could not be spared for his daughter-in-law, as she was required by Lady Sidney, who was soon to visit. Oral social networks could be used to denounce careless practitioners, like the Mrs Buckland who a John Genifer claimed, in 1601, was not fit to bring a dog to bed, much less a woman. Equally, the midwife could be a figure of moral dread to an unmarried mother, playing an increasingly central role in court paternity examinations and the report of illegitimate births such as the 1573 labour of Agnes Hollway in Canterbury, which was reported to the ecclesiastical court and the 1578 bastardy case of Sussex midwife Denise Clarke. Labouring mothers were considered vulnerable to supernatural influences as they lay hovering on the margin of life and death and in Catholic eyes, midwives were uniquely placed to exploit this. Clergymen worried about the use charms and old practices associated with witchcraft, magic and Pagan rites, suspecting them of making extra money by supplying witches with the spoils of the birth for their cauldrons; the caul, placenta and umbilical cord, even body parts, like Shakespeare’s ‘finger of birth-strangled babe’, delivered in a ditch. Cauls were thought to prevent death by drowning so were particularly sought after by sailors. Controversial or inept as some midwives were, not to ask for help could lead a woman into far worse trouble; concealing a pregnancy was against the law and in the event of infant death, a woman could be left vulnerable. In May 1583, Parnell Richarde, a servant from Frinton, was found guilty of delivering a female child alone, which died through her negligence in not asking for the assistance of women. Worse still were attempted deals with midwives, struck by desperate women such as Agnes Bowker in January 1569, whose dead child was bizarrely substituted for a skinned cat with collusion from her midwife. In later centuries, the presence of bystanders in the delivery room was considered essential to prevent the smuggling in of a baby during the phantom, faked or failed pregnancy of untrusted royalty.

Catherine was lucky in that she need not concern herself with practical arrangements. She knew her every need would be catered for in the lying-in chamber. In many cases, though, the role would be determined by area and chance. Not all women had the luxury of choice, especially those in the lowest orders, such as servants or vagrants. Often the office would be performed by whichever females were to hand, especially in the delivery of the poor or those far from home. Some developed a particular reputation and were repeatedly called for; on other occasions, dependent on circumstance, delivery was assisted by the best available alternative. It might have been a neighbour, friend, relative or local woman who had experience in the field; in some cases, though, the resulting debt to the community could be a factor. In October 1593, a woman making ‘casual passage’ through the ‘very poor’ Essex parish of Ardleigh had lodged there for two nights, during which time she gave birth. Out of charity, the residents assisted her ‘who otherwise with her child might have utterly perished’ but then found themselves supporting both, unwilling for the baby to be ‘severed from the sucking brestes’.
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A similar story occurred in the village a decade later, when the village acted to prevent responsibility falling on its shoulders again. Three ‘rogue’ women with pedlar’s packs stayed for two days and nights in an unlicensed alehouse. Perhaps they had been selling wares to pilgrims or travelling between key towns and religious sites to ply their trade. When one of them went into labour late one evening, they were thrown out into the street and looked about for a house to rent so that the child might be born there safely. The constables intervened, carrying the three in a cart to the house of an honest farmer in the next parish of St Botolph, within the district of Colchester. However, the farmer refused to take them in, asking by what warrant the constables brought them and the constables refused to return them to Ardleigh, so the women were dumped at his door in the pouring rain. Out of pity he let them lie in his barn that night, where the labouring woman delivered her child. They remained in the barn for seven or eight days and then disappeared, abandoning the baby in the nearby parish of Langham. Despite the efforts of the constables, the Justices ruled that the parish of Ardleigh should support the infant until the mother could be located.
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The prospect for women giving birth in poverty was grim.

Midwives were a frequent, obvious scapegoat for medical men although some of their criticism was clearly deserved. Early midwifery was not regulated; the job description did not imply training, qualifications or social acceptance. The fourteenth-century John of Mirfield complained of ‘worthless and presumptuous women who usurp this profession to themselves and abuse it; who, possessing neither natural ability nor professional knowledge, make the greatest possible mistakes and very often kill their patients’. The authors of Tudor and Stuart pamphlets were rarely friends of the profession; a 1632 ballad described a ‘constant wife of Sussex’, whose midwife suggested she substitute the baby girl she had just delivered for a male child, to save her husband’s shame, while another pamphlet told the story of a murdering midwife, whose secret was betrayed by the apparitions of her victims which rose to haunt her house: ‘desiring midwives to take heed, how they dispose their bastard-breed’.
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Other seventeenth-century broadsheets presented midwives as ‘the worst of Women-kind’ who murdered ‘sweet infants from their mother’s womb’
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and others guilty of various barbarous acts of cruelty; to fan the flames even more, some were based on true tales of baby-farmers, lured into the profession in anticipation of easy financial gain. Other scare stories had them tightly swaddling newborns to conceal birth defects as well as drinking and neglecting their charges, often at the cost of their lives. While there were cases of abuse, the successful and popular midwives were scarcely lauded in any comparable way. While popular pamphlets and songs would have been passed on by word of mouth, actual medical texts would have had little circulation among those women practising their own brand of medicine.

Midwives were also excluded from the profession through illiteracy. The intimate details of their private lives rarely went recorded: their stories emerge at points of conflict and social transgression or as edited marginalia in the lives of husbands, fathers and sons. Although female education among the upper classes spread with mid-century reforms to faith, the poor survival of texts such as letters and diaries is a sign of the low general priority given to women’s literacy. David Cressy has estimated that in 1500, only 1 per cent of women could sign their names, rising to 5 per cent in 1558 and 8 per cent in 1600.
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In some cases, a few literate women may have read male-authored medical texts owned by their husbands, fathers and brothers. London accounts list some female medical practitioners as the wives of licensed doctors. If such works were available to them, through legitimate means or not, the information they found may well have been at odds with the experiences of the female community.

Possibly the most influential birth manual of the century was produced by a German doctor, Eucharius Rosslin in 1513. His
Rose Garden for Pregnant Women and Midwives
addressed a contemporary gap in the market, drawing on his own observations and common sense, to become the standard midwifery text. Rosslin was an apothecary in Freiburg, attending to royalty and the nobility but also overseeing practices in the town, which dismayed him in their carelessness and poor standards, resulting in unnecessarily high infant and maternal mortality. He incorporated classical writings, emphasized the importance of the male in reproduction and urged midwives to be patient and gentle, threatening that God would call them to account. His manual was significant for its descriptions of the use of the birthing stool, covered with cloths for comfort and the emphasis on positive thinking, the ‘sweet words’ to give the mother ‘hope of a good speedie deliverance’. The first English edition was translated by Thomas Raynoldes as
The Birth of Mankynde
and dedicated to the short-lived Catherine Howard, fifth wife of Henry VIII, in 1540. An anonymous treaty named
The Knowing of Woman’s Kind in Childing
was already extant and clearly aimed at a male audience, while a third important manual,
The Expert Midwife
, by Swiss Jacob Rueff, appeared in 1554, in Latin and German, building on much of Rosslin’s work. While an English edition was not available until 1637, it would have been accessible to a learned elite and summarized much existing practise. This publication has been identified as marking a transitional period between the confinement of female remedies to the domestic sphere and the development of gynaecology as an increasingly masculine discipline. Rueff addressed different parts of his manuscript to men and women separately, indicating that women were expected to be the ones involved in the birth process whilst men were excluded from touching the female genitalia and must rely instead upon surgical instruments.
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The full and detailed
Happie Delivery of Women
by Jacques Guillemeau would be published in London, in English, in 1612, marking a further shift away from the herbal and superstitious towards the theoretical and physiological. At the time of Catherine of Aragon’s pregnancy confusion, however, none of this material was yet accessible to those advising her.

By the end of May 1510, as she emerged to face the shame of her mistake, Catherine was genuinely pregnant again. She must have conceiving during her period of confinement or very soon after. According to the Catholic practice of churching, sexual relations between husband and wife should not be resumed until she had emerged from her chamber and been purified; of course, the confusion over her pregnancy invalidated this and the pair may have attempted conception in response to the failed appearance of any child. Equally, there may have been a second reason for Catherine’s eagerness to invite Henry back into her bedroom: it appeared that, less than a year after her wedding, she had a rival for his affections. Distressingly for her, whilst she had been closeted at Greenwich awaiting the child that did not come, Henry’s attention had strayed to the younger sister of the Duke of Buckingham, the married Anne Hastings. The affair had been conducted under the pretence that the wooing was on behalf of Henry’s Groom of the Stool, William Compton: from 1519, he certainly lived in an adulterous union with her and probably did procure women for Henry to visit at Compton’s home in Thames Street. Between them, Buckingham and Hastings removed the king’s paramour from court but the incident sparked the first argument between Henry and Catherine. The queen may have first heard of the incident when an angry Henry ordered her to dismiss Elizabeth Fitzwalter, Anne’s sister, one of her favourite waiting women, who had first raised the alarm. Although Henry considered it was little more than a timely dalliance, Catherine was wounded by the quarrel and the breach was visible to the whole court. Yet the queen held the trump card. She was pregnant again.

Catherine was still deeply embarrassed and ashamed by her previous experience. No doubt she approached the possibility of pregnancy with caution this time, waiting until she was certain before making any sort of announcement. In the meantime, she rested and relinquished unnecessary journeys and risks; that summer she stayed in the relative peace and safety of Eltham Palace and did not accompany Henry on his annual progress. Chastened by recent memories, the couple took especial care with Catherine’s welfare, ordering the best available food and medical advice. Constipation was a recognised side effect of pregnancy and expectant mothers were advised to eat spinach mixed with butter. If this failed, they might use ‘suppositors’ made of honey and egg yolk, or Venice soap; the last eventuality was the prescription of a ‘decoction’ of senna leaves by a medical practitioner. She would have tried not to exert herself at all, taken lots of rest and avoided the extremes of thought and emotion as dictated by custom. The precautions proved successful. Her second confinement took place at Richmond in December 1510, where the court had moved that autumn. A suite of rooms were prepared on the first floor, overlooking the gardens and river. Following a special communion service to prepare her for the process, she was led in ceremony through the palace to the specially prepared quarters on the first floor, staffed only by women. Again, the chambers were hung with rich tapestries, lined with carpets and scattered with cushions: no expense was spared for her comfort: an 8-foot by 8-foot bed dominated the room, dressed in rich material lined with fur. She also had a simpler pallet stuffed with wool and down, encased in Brussels cloth. Her linen had been prepared long in advance; fine robes and petticoats, cloaks and necessaries to keep her warm and comfortable, as well as clothing, swaddling bands, pads and blankets for the child. A cradle of estate, large enough to hold a full-grown man, sat beside a smaller crib, showing the contrast between ceremony and the practicalities of sleep. The traditional single window was left uncovered, allowing for the view south over a walled garden, down to the Thames. A wet-nurse was on hand, as were other experienced women and the future godparents, whilst the gentlemen of Henry’s chapel prayed constantly for her success and recovery. Her ladies may have rubbed her belly with powders made of cumin seeds, date stones, dried saffron and white amber to soothe her pains. One religious ritual that may have appealed to Catherine was the laying on her belly of a cross, which may have given her a point of focus to calm her and channel the pain. This time, her hopes and preparations were well founded. In the early hours of the morning of New Year’s Day, 1511, Catherine was delivered of a son, whom they named Henry. The little boy would have been washed gently in a mixture of wine and herbs, swaddled and laid in the cradle, whilst Catherine began the slow period of recovery. She had done her duty. England had its prince.