In Bed with the Tudors: The Sex Lives of a Dynasty from Elizabeth of York to Elizabeth I (31 page)

The role of the midwife also came under lasting attack during this period, as recognition of the widespread pseudo-religious nature of birth room practices. In the fabric rolls of York Minster, a condemnation can be found of ‘charms, sorcery, enchantments, invocations, circles, witchcraft, soothsaying or any like crafts or imaginations invented by the devil and specially in times of women’s travail’.
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Old chants were replaced by new, religious ones, which often substituted female saints for male ones, an interesting indication of the imposition of patriarchal authority into the traditional female preserve of the birth chamber: if men could not be there in person, their Biblical representations would be:

There are four corners to her bed
Four angels at her head:
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John:
God bless the bed that she lies on,
New moon, new moon, God bless me,
God bless this house and family.
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In 1538, Nicholas Shaxton, Bishop of Salisbury, urged midwives not to resort to the use of ‘girdles, purses, measures of Our Lady or such other superstitious things’, which was echoed in the first midwives’ oath of 1567. In Kent, the same year, an inquiry asked women to inform against any midwives who used sorcery, witchcraft, charms, unlawful prayers or invocations in Latin. This perceived overlap between female gynaecological practice and malevolent secrecy was a key step along the road to the witchcraft trials of the later Elizabethan and Stuart eras. One traditional identifying factor of a witch was her knowledge and use of herbs, to good effect or ill. This body of wisdom was yet another casualty of earlier reforming zeal, as prioresses and nuns had been a long-standing repository of oral medical tradition. From almonries and specialist infirmary gardens, medicine and assistance was dispensed that represented the best of ecclesiastical tradition, often after monks and nuns had swapped ‘horticultural knowledge’ and resources. Scribes copied classical herbals, which were adapted to use native English plants and flowers; the devotional roses and lilies featured alongside traditional cures such a sage, rue, clary and hyssop. Benedictine nuns in particular were known for their curative wisdom and work.
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The embargo on growing and using herbs and flowers in monastic gardens, as well as the dissemination of their remedies and knowledge in the community, represented an irrevocable loss. While women could still grow their own flowers and herbs at home, this could not compete with the scale and body of knowledge that was lost when monastic infirmary gardens were destroyed along with their establishments. The church had long encouraged the use of prayers whilst gathering medicinal herbs, suggesting their efficiency was improved by being picked in a highly ritualistic way, a view which survived long after the Tudor era. It is easy to imagine later interpretations of old women muttering chants as they picked herbs by moonlight.

This is not to condemn the reformers by any means. There is little doubt that Catholicism had been open to abuse for centuries, most famously documented in Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales
. Many fake relics were exposed such as the holy blood of Hailes, topped up by the monks with that of slaughtered ducks, and the proliferation of relics that meant many saints would have posthumously ended up with twenty fingers and several heads! Undoubtedly some undertook pilgrimages for the sake of it, which played on the stereotype of vulnerable women sacrificing their virtue on the journey, either by accident or design. The fourteenth-century writings of Sir John Mandeville, Chaucer’s contemporary, had secularised the religious aspects of his travels as a ‘feast of delights’, reducing the experience to sight-seeing by recounting lists of marvels and distractions along the route. Equally, many reformers were female, including Anne Boleyn and Catherine Parr, as well as the Grey sisters, and would have welcomed these changes. Anne herself went into nunneries to berate the nuns about their corrupt practices. However, the theological motives for the reformation of Catholicism are less significant to the history of childbirth than its effects upon Tudor women’s lives. For those previously reliant on such important placebo comforts, personal faith could come into conflict with cultural change in unprecedented ways. Even if the girdle they held had never belonged to the Virgin and had indeed been cynically manufactured for profit, what mattered was that women believed it had: this could induce a calmer mental and physical state resulting in conception or an easier birth as well as giving them a feeling of control over an otherwise critical and volatile area of their lives. The belief that God was on their side went a considerable way to dispel terror in the Tudor mind. Just as modern mothers might burn candles, listen to music or use their own talisman and mascots in order to relax, these ancient practices, even if they were abuses, served an invaluable purpose to many women. The annihilation of such Catholic trappings meant the denial of women’s ‘life-affirming comforts’: even for those women who were reformers or Protestants, religious liberation came at a cost.

The implications of these changes for Tudor women were obviously dependent upon personal belief. As such, the story of childbirth during the mid-Tudor Reformation is as much the story of the dissolution of shrines and the banning of Catholic practices and folklore that had formed centuries of female wisdom: the cultural construct of birth would have been experienced differently by an expectant mother withdrawing into her chamber in 1525, to one in 1540 and others in 1555 and 1595. The secrecy of birthing rituals, female illiteracy and the confusion and dangers arising over religious change mean that many more questions regarding mid-sixteenth-century motherhood can be raised than answered. Each case was a matter of health, personal circumstances and conscience, yet as a collective, women’s experiences were complicated by the wider national interplay of dynastic and religious change. Only through deliberate acts of defiance and the privacy of documents like wills can it be judged just how far the Reformation managed to turn the tide against traditional childbirth and maternal practices. Where women were prepared to engage in risky acts of open insubordination, they must have experienced few qualms about private rebellion.

So what did Jane Yate and her fellow women do when it came to the lying-in of their daughters and granddaughters? Some may have developed new approaches to delivery in response to religious reforms but for others, attended by their experienced mothers and grandmothers, outlawed traditions simply went underground. Closing the chamber door on the men during lying-in also provided protection and solidarity for the airing of dissenting and heretical opinions and beliefs, for both Protestant and Catholic women. Nor was religion that easily polarised. Religious views and practices didn’t just change overnight; shrines were being dismantled as people arrived to worship at them, so in the extremes of pain, overshadowed by the possibility of death, some women must have struggled to determine whether religious conviction or obedience to their sovereign was more important. A sense of female authority and separation from the male-determined culture may have given them confidence to privately override political vicissitudes. Local assize court records in Kent and Essex, dating from the late 1570s to 1580s are full of women who had failed to attend church, such as Jane Wyseman, ‘wife of Thomas Wyseman of Wimbish, esquire, [who] doth wilfully absent herself from her parish church and hath not been there at divine service by the space of this whole year last past’
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and ‘Mistress Gonnell who has been in Walthamstowe by the space of a year and a quarter has not in all that time come to church but once and that was before Easter last, neither has she received the communion since her coming thither’.
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The Wysemans were in trouble again in 1592 for attending a Mass delivered ‘contrary’ Elizabeth’s acts.
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The list could go on; dozens of them appear. If women were prepared to disobey religious changes openly, they were surely prepared to do so behind closed doors. If Jane Yate’s mother and grandmother had taught her certain ‘charms’ and ‘invocations’, and passed her down images and practices for use in the birthing chamber, wouldn’t she pass these on to her daughter and her daughter’s daughter?

Women clearly did. Of course, the most zealous female reformers would have rejected the practices they saw as abuses, yet for many others, their centuries-old traditions didn’t change overnight. Later accounts document the survival of the superstitions and charms that Bishop Shaxton had attempted to suppress in the 1530s. Among the artefacts left by a Jane Daniell of Hackney was an eagle stone used in her labour of 1601. The seventeenth-century midwife Jane Sharp was advising the use of the eagle stone in her 1671 book, and a Canterbury cleric’s wife still used such a stone well into the eighteenth century, lending it out to friends and parishioners. There was also the problem of disposal; to reject or destroy such symbolic items out of fear or even religious conviction may have been a step too far for many. The surprising resurfacing of many ‘banned’ objects during the reign of the Catholic Mary, such as crosses, statues, images and altar cloths, is indicative of many private attitudes towards the Reformation. Many had been simply hidden away until such times as it was safe for them to be used again. Reports of the theft and use of holy water appear frequently, such as Cardinal Pole’s instruction that the font should be locked in Cambridge in 1557; priests administering the sacrament were also told to place the Host in the recipient’s mouth to prevent them carrying it home and using it for other ‘superstitious or wicked’ purposes. Long into the seventeenth century, labouring mothers dedicated their children to saints and infertile ones promised to devote them to the church, if they conceived and bore a live child. In further, rural corners of the kingdom, such practices lasted much longer; recusant midwives produced girdles and artefacts and as late as 1584, one Puritan document claimed ‘three parts at least of the people’ were ‘wedded to their old superstition still’.
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As Edward lay on his death bed, months before his sixteenth birthday, frantic plans were made to prevent the accession of his elder sister and the undoing of recent reforms. The terms of Henry VIII’s will passed the crown through the heirs of Frances Grey, daughter of Mary Tudor, excluding the Scottish line borne by his elder sister Margaret. The attempt to supplant her with the Protestant Jane Grey was notoriously short-lived. Support for Mary was strong enough, nationally and politically, to override religious concerns.

If any family were determined to adhere to their old faith, it was the Yates. In 1538, Jane’s father acquired Lyford Grange – then in Berkshire, now Oxfordshire – an impressive fifteenth-century quadrangular building which had formerly been part of Abingdon Abbey. After his death, Jane’s half-brother Thomas inherited the house and, following him, his son Francis. Francis Yate was a well-known recusant; a Catholic refusing to attend Church of England services. In 1580, he was imprisoned for his faith as was his wife the following year. His mother Alice, Jane Yate’s sister-in-law, remained in the house; Jane may have attended her during her delivery of Francis back in 1535. Alice invited the Jesuit missionary Edmund Campion to visit her and preach at Lyford but he was captured there, imprisoned and martyred in 1581. In the twentieth century, an Agnus Dei, banned by Elizabeth, was found hidden in the roof at Lyford, dated to 1578. These consecrated wax discs, symbolic of the flesh of Christ and impressed with the image of a lamb, were supposed to extend Papal protection from, among other things, sickness, sudden death and the malice of demons. It is typical of the personal talisman that people retained and concealed in their homes and among their possessions when the law ruled against their faith. Its presence makes the resistance of Jane, Elizabeth, Bridget and Alice to changes in the birth chamber more likely.

1553–1603

A Dwindling Dynasty

God prosper her highness in every thinge,
Her noble spouse, our fortunate kynge
And that noble blossome that is planted to spring
Amen, sweet Jesus, we hartelye singe.
Blysse, thou sweet Jesus, our comforters three,
Our Kynge, our Quene, our Prince that shalbe;
That they three as one, or one as all three
May governe thy people to the pleasure of thee.
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The above lines formed the conclusion to a ballad written to commemorate the pregnancy of Mary I, printed by William Riddell early in 1555. Yet the writer was misinformed, along with numerous chroniclers, citizens, courtiers and even Mary herself. There was no child. Despite the swelling in her belly and supposed quickening she had experienced, despite the elaborate preparations and prepared declarations, despite Mary’s prayers and hopes, she was not pregnant. She would never bear a child and would die heartbroken, only months after her final false hope: among the effects she left at her death was a book of prayers, with a page devoted to intercessions for women with child, supposedly stained with tears. On a purely personal level, setting aside other issues of her reign, Mary’s life was a tragedy.

Yet it began with a blaze of popular success. Following the death of Edward VI in 1553, months short of his sixteenth birthday, Protestant factions led by the Duke of Northumberland followed the terms of his will over that of Henry VIII, excluding Mary and Elizabeth whose legitimate status was cast into doubt. Next in line were the heirs of Henry’s younger sister Mary Rose Tudor, through her daughter Frances Brandon. The eldest was Lady Jane Grey, famously England’s queen for nine days before a surge of support established the Catholic Mary on the throne. The history of the thirty-seven-year-old had been one of uncertainty, ill-health and emotional turmoil under the previous reigns; at times she had even feared for her life or been the focus of plots to flee the country; her religious practises had been curtailed, her faith challenged and her place in the succession dramatically overturned. Separated from her mother and estranged from her father, her religion had made her into a figurehead for the old ways, yet her accession was never guaranteed. Attempts in the 1530s to marry her to the German Duke, Philip of Bavaria, had come to nothing; aged twenty-three, she disliked his religion but saw him as a route out of her unhappy life. He made her a gift of a diamond pearl cross and kisses were exchanged. A marriage treaty was drawn up but never concluded; Henry VIII’s deteriorating relations with Cleves may have been a factor. Through Edward’s reign, as the Protestant faction pushed through even more dramatic reforms and the possibility of marrying her off to a foreign prince was mooted, her chances of accession appeared very slight. Edward was young and might have lived for years and fathered many children. Then, in a sudden reversal of fortune, due partly to her popularity and the failure of Northumberland’s efforts, Mary found herself as queen. Her support was particularly strong in the East of England, the previous Catholic stronghold of the cult of the Virgin Mary. Lauded as the Marigold, she was celebrated in ballads as having shown ‘great cheare in heate and cold’, enduring storms patiently, and had been brought to her ‘estate’ though some ‘dyd spite this marigolde’: she had been saved by God to right all wrongs.
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She was the English ‘jewel and joy’ – merciful, meek, good and wise.
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In spite of all these qualities, though, Mary was the first female to inherit and retain the throne: as such, she could not expect to rule alone. Tudor understanding of gender politics dictated that she swiftly find a husband to guide and support her: she was merely the vessel for the rule of men. Her next duty would to be to produce a male heir.