The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (15 page)

Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick provides one of the few direct references to family limitation in her autobiography (although she does not state the method used). The giddy young girl who got married at fifteen to a younger son, against her father’s wishes, did not immediately ripen into the benevolent Puritan matron at the head of her household; as has been mentioned, a spiritual conversion had to intervene. Immediately after her marriage Mary Rich gave birth to two children in rapid succession: Elizabeth, who died as a baby, victim of two careless nursemaids who ‘tossed’ her between them, and a son called Charles after his father. She was not yet seventeen.

Twenty years later, young Charles Rich died at the age of twenty-one. Not only was his father, now Earl of Warwick, left without a direct heir, but the cousin who would inherit the title by default was considered by Mary to be of a highly unsuitable character. We have Mary’s own account of the stricken couple’s passionate wish to start a new family. Although she was still only thirty-seven, these hopes were not fulfilled, leaving Mary prey to further remorse that she had deliberately refrained from having further children in her youth. She gives two reasons for this resolve: first, at the age of seventeen, one of the youthful beauties of the court of Charles I, she feared to ruin her figure ‘if she
childed so thick’; secondly, Charles Rich, as a younger son, had worried that if he had ‘many to provide for, they must be poor’.
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Certainty is impossible; but if abstinence in a young couple, who had married for that troublesome emotion, love, is ruled out, one may suppose that coitus interruptus was the method by which Mary preserved her lissom figure, and Charles Rich his modest fortune – with ultimately such disastrous results.

In 1622 a woman of twenty-six expecting her first baby, called Elizabeth Josceline, wrote how she dreaded the painfulness of ‘that kind of death’ during childbirth. Born Elizabeth Brooke of Norton in Cheshire, she had been brought up by her grandfather William Chaderton, Bishop of Lincoln, a friend of Coke and Lord Burghley. In 1622 she had already been married for six years.
The Mothers Legacy to her Unborn Child
was an attempt to overcome that justifiable dread which possessed so many women of the time
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how would the child fare if the mother did not survive the ordeal? Elizabeth Josceline carefully garnered all the advice she would proffer her child in advance, to obviate that ‘loss my little one should have, in wanting me’. It proved a popular subject: by 1625
The Mothers Legacy
had gone through three editions, and it was reprinted unaltered in 1684.
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Naturally the child would have to be put out to nurse, but despite its tender age, this was to be in a house where there was no swearing or speaking ‘scurrilous words’ (Elizabeth Josceline wrote: ‘I know I may be thought too scrupulous in this’). Later the servants were to address the child by its Christian name, without the prefix ‘Master’ or ‘Miss’, to teach it proper respect. Throughout the book, Elizabeth Josceline modestly reminded herself that she was only writing for ‘a child’s judgement’, although at the same time she begged her ‘truly loving and most dearly loved husband Taurell Josceline’, to whom the book was dedicated, not to pardon its faults through fondness but to correct them.

Reading
The Mothers Legacy
today, in manuscript, still has the power to touch one, for nine days after the birth of her child
Elizabeth Josceline did undergo just ‘that kind of death’ she had feared. And she was wrapped in that very winding-sheet which she had already secretly bought for herself.
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At least in bequeathing to posterity a book, she had succeeded in her declared ambition to do something more for her child than ‘only to bring it forth’.

None at this time doubted that childbirth itself, whatever the desirability of founding a family, was both a painful and a dangerous ordeal. ‘These are doubtless the greatest of all pains the Women naturally undergo upon Earth’, wrote the midwife Jane Sharp. Margaret Duchess of Newcastle, herself of course barren, wrote that a husband who had heirs by his first wife should not complain if his second did not conceive children since ‘she hazards her life by Bringing them [children] into the world’.
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Nor was Elizabeth Josceline alone in her apprehensions. Anne Harcourt, in her diary, confessed to her ‘exorbitant fear’ of labour, ‘notwithstanding the former experiences of God’s goodness in helping me at like times’. The jilted Anne Murray, finding happiness at last in marriage with Sir James Halkett, gave birth for the first time at the age of thirty-four. She drew up a
Mother’s Instructions
before the birth of that child, and of each subsequent arrival, although in fact she lived safely on, dying in 1699 at the age of seventy-seven.
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Margaret Blagge, the lovely yet earnest Maid of Honour to Catherine of Braganza, John Evelyn’s adored young friend, was not so lucky.
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As a girl she had been markedly reluctant to abandon her virgin state; one of her reasons was her fear of childbirth. Evelyn hastened to reassure her: ‘Little women, I told her, had little pain.’ Even after marrying the young courtier Sidney Godolphin, Margaret remained full of melancholy presentiments. First she did not conceive for two years, and then when she did, she too, like Elizabeth Josceline and Anne Halkett, laid all her plans in the eventuality of her death. Enduring a very
difficult pregnancy and ‘growing bigger’, her public life was gradually reduced to visits to the chapel.

Margaret Godolphin went into labour during the night of Monday, 2 September 1678; about noon on the Tuesday ‘a Man Child’ was born, her husband, in attendance at court at Windsor, was informed. On the Thursday the child was baptized Francis. On the Sunday Evelyn, who was at his house at Deptford, received a letter while at church from Sidney Godolphin: ‘My poor wife is fallen very ill of a fever, with lightness in her head.’ Evelyn’s prayers were implored. But Margaret’s delirium increased. Matters were made worse when the doctors hung back and refused to act except in the presence of other physicians. Evelyn then arrived, with his wife, and by his own account took charge. (Even in her delirium, he noted, his chaste young friend said ‘nothing offensive’.)

But poor Margaret was now, as Evelyn wrote, ‘in a manner spent’; she had already endured ‘the pigeons’ – a medieval remedy by which live birds were applied to the patient’s feet, generally to reduce fever
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and blood-letting; the latter, from a vein in the arm, was commonly believed by doctors to stop haemorrhage.
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The momentary respite which was granted by Betty Viscountess Mordaunt’s famous strengthening cordial was soon over. Erysipelas, a kind of hot red rash described by Evelyn as ‘a fiery Trial’, began to spread over her back, neck and arms (it was in fact produced by the acute streptococcal infection causing her ‘puerperal’ fever). She lasted like this in ‘all the circumstances of pain and weariness’ until the morning of the next day. Then her paroxysms grew worse and she died at noon on Monday, 9 September, one week after the birth of her child, being in her twenty-fifth year.

Margaret Godolphin’s last letter to her husband was full of that submissive melancholy which had animated so much of her short life: ‘In the first place, my dear, believe me, that of all earthly things you were and are the most dear to me … and do not grieve too much for me, since I hope I shall be happy, being very much resigned to God’s will.’ In her letter to him concerning her legacies, however, she revealed that other apprehension
which haunted the dying wives of the seventeenth century: if Sidney Godolphin married again, he was to ‘be kind to that poor Child I leave behind, for my sake, who lov’d you so well’.
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But Sidney Godolphin, rare among his contemporaries as we shall see in the next chapter, never married again.

Lord Falmouth, who was madly in love with his beautiful wife Mary Bagot (‘His Dearest Deare’), wanted her labour to be over before he returned from the Dutch war at sea, since he could not bear to see his beloved suffer: ‘I cannot endure to see you in pain or trouble.’ Later he wrote: ‘You are in my thoughts the first thing in the morning and last at night. ’Tis certain my Dearest Deare Child that, let your pain have been what it will, my torment in the belief of it has not been much inferior to it.’ (Falmouth’s daughter had in fact been born four or five days earlier, but Falmouth, killed at the Battle of Lowestoft a short while later, never saw her.)
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How were these harrowing ordeals and deathbeds familiar to every household, and (unlike the state of pregnancy) never glossed over in contemporary accounts, to be explained in the divine order of things? Samuel Hieron made the origin of such sufferings quite clear in his prayer to be uttered by a woman in labour: ‘the smart of the punishment which thou [Lord] laidst upon me being in the loins of my grandmother Eve, for my disobedience towards thee: Thou hast greatly increased the sorrows of our sex and our bearing of children is full of pain’. The poet Edmund Waller put it another way when he threw a light-hearted curse over Lady Dorothy Sidney, who had rejected him for another: ‘make her taste the first curse imposed on womankind
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the pains of becoming a mother’.
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If woman redeemed herself from the sin of Eve by child-bearing, she was none the less condemned to suffer the pains of childbirth in order to fulfil that prophecy made in Genesis: ‘Unto the woman he [God] said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.’ This doctrine, upon which Catholics and Puritans were alike agreed,
gave at least some spiritual context to the agonies of women. (It was Catholic belief that after Eve’s Fall, only the Virgin Mary, being born without original sin, did not suffer the pangs of childbirth, when she gave birth to the Infant Christ.) Faced with the perpetual prospect of their wives’ sufferings, there was even some relief for loving husbands in accepting the link with the sin of Eve; it alleviated a burden which was otherwise unacceptable.

The penitential element in childbirth could even be carried further. The ceremony of ‘churching’ had, in its Judaic origins, been intended to ‘cleanse’ a woman after her delivery, but by the seventeenth century it was intended quite simply as a ceremony of thanksgiving. Certain women evidently believed that Archbishop Laud, in his plans for the Anglican Church, was attempting to bring back this penitential element to the ceremony, by insisting on a handkerchief or veil being worn; with indignation, protesters compared this head-covering to the white linen sheet which had to be worn by the ‘unchaste’. There are entries in the Essex and Colchester Courts for women refusing to cover their heads in this manner. In 1639 Dorothy Hazzard, wife of a Bristol parson, received women to her house for their lying-in, because they could thus avoid the more disagreeable churching ceremonies elsewhere.
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If the cruel pangs of labour could be blamed upon Grandmother Eve, that other affliction endured by so many mothers of the seventeenth century, the death of the child itself in infancy, could hardly be laid directly at her door. Yet such a harrowing experience, as has been seen in the case of the Walkers and Fanshawes, was an inseparable part of parenthood in the seventeenth century. It might be the death of one child, of many children, of the entire flock; it was a rare and fortunate parent who escaped this tragedy altogether.

It has been suggested in recent years, notably by Lawrence Stone in
The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800
, that the low expectation of infant life meant that people were as a whole less attached to their children or at any rate during the child’s first year of life, when its ability to survive the rigours of infant disease had not been established. He does, however, comment
that the popular psychologist Richard Napier treated women disturbed by the deaths of infants; Napier’s notebooks concerning his patients (who were drawn from every social class) certainly include 134 cases of disturbing grief
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nearly half of which were attributed to a child’s death. The vast majority of these sufferers were mothers, such as Ellen Craftes who ‘took a fright and grief that a door fell upon her child and slew it. Presently head, heart and stomach ill; eyes dimmed with grief that she cannot see well.’
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In general one can only observe that this suggested indifference is not the attitude of those women literate or lucky enough to be able to express themselves. Since the maternal instinct of one sort or another is a universal one (if anything enhanced rather than diminished by the proximity imposed by poverty), it seems unlikely that a woman wailing without words for her baby felt the death less because she was inarticulate. As in any natural disaster, only the voice of the privileged (generally male) was heard, but everyone suffered alike.

Ralph Verney’s wife Mary was delirious for two days and nights with sorrow when her baby died suddenly of convulsions; when the news of the death of her daughter Pegg reached her she felt totally unable to care for two little girls, relations of Ralph’s, because to do so would simply exacerbate her own grief. Oliver Heywood, in his account of the life of his mother, described ‘how great an affliction’ was the death of her first-born. The poet Katherine Philips (known as the ‘Matchless Orinda’) wrote of the death of her baby son in 1655 in a poem entitled ‘Orinda upon little Hector Philips’.

I did but see him, and he disappeared,

I did but pluck the Rose-bud and it fell …
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