The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (84 page)

Doubtless Mrs Barry did show lack of discretion in her way of life: ‘You have a character, and you maintain it’, wrote Rochester in one of the anguished letters.
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Yet her legendary rapacity and even her coldness and severity towards her admirers are at least explicable when one bears in mind the alternative: the wretched downfall experienced by an actress like Elizabeth Farley. Famous as Mrs Barry was, she had no alternative but to give birth to her child in poverty, without support from husband or lover, and only the help of a ‘protectress’; that was the predictable fate of an actress who became pregnant. A little rapacity may be pardoned under the circumstances.

Mrs Barry retired to Acton – then pleasant countryside – when she finally left the stage in her fifties after her long reign. She died there in 1713. She is said to have been the victim of a bite from a pet lap-dog, which she did not know had been ‘seized with madness’.
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If the story is true, it was an appropriately bizarre and tragic end for the first of the great English dramatic actresses, a line of descent leading down to Mrs Siddons in the next century.

Although her plain memorial stone is still to be seen in the church at Acton where she lies buried, the words of Colley Cibber himself constitute her best epitaph: ‘Mrs Barry, in Characters of Greatness, had a Presence of elevated dignity, her Mien and Motion superb and gracefully majestick; her Voice full, clear, and strong, so that no Violence of Passion could be too much for her: And when Distress or Tenderness possess’d her, she subsided into the most affecting Melody and Softness. In the Art of exciting Pity She had a Power beyond all the Actresses I have yet seen, or what your Imagination can conceive.’
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Today Sir Rupert Bromley Bt represents the direct line of descent from Ruperta, Prince Rupert and of course Peg Hughes.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The Modest Midwife

‘It is observable that in all the ages of the world and throughout all countries in the world, the help of grave and modest women (with us termed Midwives) hath ever been useful for release and succour of all the daughters of Evah, whom God hath appointed to bear children into this world.’

JACOB RUEFF,
The Expert Midwife
, 1637

I
n the seventeenth century every woman who had the opportunity to conceive was likely to give birth at least once during her lifetime: the heiress, the Quaker, the prostitute and the actress were all equal in this respect. And if a woman did not actually give birth, she had some other form of obstetrical experience. In the absence of any form of birth control (even coitus interruptus being notoriously uncertain) it was celibacy not marriage which was the relevant fact. Under the circumstances there were few women of the time from the idealistic Margaret Fell to the exotic Elizabeth Barry who did not fall at some point into the hands of those ‘grave and modest women (with us termed Midwives)’ in the words of Jacob Rueff’s textbook of obstetrics.
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The midwives could also be the agents of drama beyond the mere expedition of birth. It was the midwives’ brutal ‘search’ of Frances Lady Purbeck, to prove her adultery with Sir Robert Howard, which caused her to flee her mother-in-law’s roof. Witches were also subject to a routine search by the local midwives to discover the devil’s marks; as were those women who sought to escape punishment on the grounds that they were pregnant.

The all-pervasive presence of the midwife in women’s lives
may be illustrated by the indignant sentiments of
The Midwives Just Petition
of January 1643: let war cease, men return again to their wives so as to ‘bring them yearly under the delivering power of the midwife’.
The Midwives Just Complaint
of 22 September 1646 echoed the thought: to the midwives, ‘whereas many miseries do attend upon civil wars’, nothing was worse than the gross interruption to their trade: ‘For many men, hopeful to have begot a race of soldiers, were there killed on a sudden, before they had performed anything to the benefit of midwives.’ Such a development was to be lamented: ‘We were formerly well paid and highly respected in our parishes for our great skill and midnight industry; but now our art doth fail us, and little getting have we in this age, barren of all natural joys, and only fruitful of bloody calamities.’
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At first sight there is something wonderfully solipsistic about this interpretation of recent military events in England as being aimed at the overthrow of the midwives’ ‘midnight industry’ rather than more political changes. Yet to most women of the time, caught up in their cycle of perpetual parturition, the complaint would have been perfectly comprehensible. For they too were caught up in the ‘midnight industry’ which touched most females far more closely than politics.

It could be said that nothing was more crucial to the life of the average woman than the character and skills of her midwife. Doctors were rarely in attendance at births, and when they were, concentrated on the rich, for obvious reasons. The rise of the so-called ‘Man-Midwife’ in the course of the seventeenth century, once again affected only the tiny percentage of people who could afford his services.
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For most women, lying-in meant the attendance of a female whom it was devoutly hoped would be skilled enough to bring about an easy birth and leave behind a live mother and live child when she left.

There were thus a vast range of professional helps available, from the grand midwives who attended the royal
accouchements
down to the humble helpmates of the poor. Where the latter were concerned a shilling or two was a normal fee at the beginning of the seventeenth century; whereas towards the end of it
the anonymous business diary of a midwife shows a prosperous trade with some form of sliding scale.
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In 1696 this midwife recorded about two deliveries a month, for payments varying from 5s to 10s. On 24 August 1698 Mrs Rowell paid her 12s 6d for the delivery of a daughter at the awkward time of seven o’clock on a Sunday morning – but since the midwife was also able to record that she ‘laid Mrs Clarke next door’ in the course of the same visit, she only charged the latter 2s 6d. By 1719, this midwife was attending approximately three confinements a month and charging an average of £1 a visit; all of which amounted to a handsome income. The midwife had a large practice in the Old Bailey area of the City of London, but a connection with the Barnardiston family – she attended to a number of their confinements – took her as far as Cornwall where she ‘laid Madam Barnardiston’. All the same, the midwife was also aware of her social duty: when she ‘laid a woman in the market’ no payment was recorded, presumably because the mother was of the poor.

Then there were the payments traditionally made by the godparents to the midwife as well as the nurse (for this, if for no other reason, the midwife had a vested interest in delivering a live infant, for no baby meant no baptism, no ‘gossip’, and thus no present). In 1661 Pepys as godfather made a payment of 10s to the midwife. At the end of the century Sir Walter Calverley Bt was in the habit of giving a guinea or 20s regularly to the midwives of his godchildren.
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Attendance at a royal birth brought heavy responsibilities, a fact acknowledged by the handsome rewards which followed. James I’s Queen, Anne of Denmark, gave birth to a number of children both before and after her arrival in England from Scotland: Alice Dennis, an English midwife, was paid £100 on two occasions. Another English midwife, Margaret Mercer, set off for Heidelberg in 1616 with a train of attendants in order to deliver the baby of Elizabeth of Bohemia, the Queen’s daughter; for this she received a total of £84 4s.
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On the other hand Charles I’s Queen, Henrietta Maria, as a French Princess, preferred a French midwife. In May 1629,
Henrietta Maria was confined with her first child ten weeks prematurely; this was unfortunately far too early for the attendance of the famous French midwife Madame Péronne, who was much in demand – the baby died. The royal doctor Sir Theodore Mayerne hastened to send a message to France that Madame Péronne’s services were now no longer needed in England; she should be directed instead to the bedside of the Princess of Piedmont. The next year the Queen was pregnant again. This time Madame Péronne arrived well in advance, dispatched by Henrietta Maria’s mother, Marie de Medici. The successful delivery of a healthy boy – the future King Charles II – after a labour of eight hours, was rewarded by the elated royal father with a payment to Madame Péronne of £ 1,000.
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Henrietta Maria had the advantage of her English in-laws because midwifery was in a more advanced state in France, with a noted school for midwives being established at the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris, including six weekly lectures on anatomy. The first midwife to enjoy an international reputation had indeed been a Frenchwoman named Louise Bourgeois, who published several books on obstetrics in the early seventeenth century.
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One of England’s most celebrated midwives in the first part of the seventeenth century was herself of foreign origin: Aurelia Florio, one of the midwives who examined the supposed witches of Lancashire, was the daughter of the scholar John Florio, Groom of the Privy Chamber and Reader in Italian to Anne of Denmark. She married the surgeon James Molins, member of a celebrated English medical family, and herself bore at least seven children, the majority of whom, no doubt as a result of their parents’ abilities, grew to adulthood. Aurelia Florio died in 1641, but recent research in the registers of St Andrew, Holborn, has shown that her accomplished handling of her patients was commemorated by the unusual name Aurelia being bestowed on at least seven girls she had delivered, who were not apparently related to her.
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Alas, the very tribute indicated how few English midwives approached the standards and skill of an Aurelia Florio. The problem was partly one of language – as it so often was where women were concerned in this period. Only a handful of women
could read Latin, the language of medical textbooks, and very few of the midwife class were to be counted among their number. But there was a remarkable scarcity of manuals written in English. The first one printed in England, entitled
The Byrth of Mankind
, had actually been translated from the Latin, which in turn had been translated from the German; after publication in 1540, it ran through thirteen editions, the last in 1654.
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Such a long reign without medical updating demonstrated not only the desperate need for such sources, but also the primitive, virtually stationary nature of obstetrical knowledge at this time.

Jacob Rueff’s textbook
The Expert Midwife
printed in an English translation in 1637, first appeared in Latin under the title
De Conceptu et Generatione Hominis
in 1554. Rueff, himself an expert surgeon, paid tribute in his introduction to the ancient origins of the midwives’ profession: ‘It is observable that in all the ages of the world and throughout all countries in the world …’ such women had ever been useful ‘for release and succour of all the daughters of Evah, whom God hath appointed to bear children into this world.’ At the same time he pointed to the undeniable weakness of women as active obstetricians: the two methods of learning being the use of books or ‘conference with the skilful’, women were unhappily liable to fall behind in the former, since they were traditionally unable to understand anything except their native tongue.

Rueff’s book, in its English translation, was intended to remedy this state of affairs. Nor did it approve in principle of the rise of the ‘Man-Midwife’. On the contrary, it stated that some men had already gone far too far – ‘perhaps for private profit’ – in encroaching ‘upon women’s weaknesses and want of knowledge in these their peculiar businesses’.
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Rueff’s argument that midwifery was the peculiar business of women (only sacrificed to men by default of learning) was certainly one with which the midwives themselves agreed. ‘We knowing the cases of women better than any other’, wrote a famous London midwife, Mrs Hester Shaw. Jane Sharp was another experienced midwife; in 1680 she either died or retired after forty years of active work.
The Midwives Book
of 1671, based
on her experiences, was the first book of its sort written by an Englishwoman in English and as such is an interesting guide to women’s own preoccupations on the subject. Like Rueff’s book, that of Jane Sharp went through many editions, the last appearing in 1725 under the title of
The Compleat Midwife’s Companion
, by popular demand, according to the printer. Jane Sharp was at pains to point out the range of her own studies: that she had had French, Dutch and Italian books on the subject translated in order to consult them. Like many others in her period, Jane Sharp took her stand on the Bible, and the fact that midwifery as a craft had been designed by God exclusively for the practice of women: ‘Men-Midwives are forced to borrow the very name they practise by … The holy Scriptures hath recorded Midwives to the perpetual honour of the female Sex, there being not so much one word concerning Men-midwives mentioned there.’
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