The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (87 page)

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.
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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.’
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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 …’
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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 children. 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.
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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.

‘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.
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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 …’
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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’.
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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.’
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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.’
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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’.
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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.