CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The Modest Midwife

In 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.¹ 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.’²

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.³ 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.⁴ 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.⁵

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.⁶

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 £ 1,000.⁷

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.⁸ 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.⁹

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 1654.¹⁰ 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’.¹¹

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.’¹²

Jane Sharp then quoted the story of Shiphrah and Puah, the heroic midwives of the Israelites, in the first chapter of Exodus, who were instructed by the Egyptian King to get ready to kill any boy babies when they saw a Hebrew woman ‘upon the [ birthing] stools’. (It was this order which led to the concealment of the baby Moses in the bulrushes by his sister Miriam.) Shiphrah and Puah however ‘feared God, and did not as the king of Egypt commanded them, but saved the men children alive’. They pretended to the Egyptian King that Hebrew women, unlike the women of the Egyptians, had a habit of giving birth before they could be reached by a midwife. The story ended: ‘Therefore God dealt well with the midwives … he made them houses.’¹³ (This text in the hands of women, was to the concept of exclusive female midwifery what the famous text of St Paul in the hands of men was to the concept of exclusive male preaching.)

According to Jane Sharp, the very fact that men enjoyed a superior education and could unlike women gain a knowledge of anatomy at university, demonstrated God’s support for women as midwives. Without divine approval in the role, how should women have managed to preserve their reputation down the ages? ‘It is not hard words that perform the work,’ wrote Jane Sharp, ‘as if none understood the Art of midwifery that cannot understand Greek.’¹⁴ Like the heroism of Shiphrah and Puah, the innate and essentially natural skills of the midwives, handed down from generation to generation of women, were another cardinal point in the fierce discussions which broke out as to whether ‘Men-Midwives’ had any right to function at all.

This belief in the natural, inherited skill of a woman (as opposed to a man) to deliver a baby safely and healthily was implicitly supported by society; just as nursing in general was regarded as the prerogative of the weaker but tenderer vessel – ‘woman’s work’ wrote Sir Ralph Verney (see p.244). At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the mistress of the household would count among her accomplishments not only cooking and the use of medicinal herbs, but also the ability to attend to her servants and neighbours in childbirth (Elizabeth Walker, for example, counted this among her good works). Lady Margaret Hoby was the pattern of the great lady ordering her servants and her estates, although unusual in that she kept a diary, half personal half spiritual, between 1599 and 1605 (the first known British woman’s diary).¹⁵ Of one particular Wednesday she wrote: ‘In the morning at six o’clock I prayed privately: that done, I went to a wife in travail of child, about whom I was busy till one o’clock, about which time, she being delivered and I having praised God, returned home and betook myself to private prayer.’ There are numerous other references to her attendances at the labours of local women; delivery being a basic female skill it was not considered relevant that Lady Margaret Hoby was herself childless. Mrs Pepys for example, who also had no children, was summoned to the bedside of Betty Mitchell in July 1668 ‘when she began to cry out’; she helped to deliver the child, and when it proved to be a girl, acted as her godmother.¹⁶

None of this emphasis on the archetypal role of women in the great drama of childbirth could however obliterate the unpleasant fact that all too many professional midwives were but ill-equipped to play it; since ‘the business whereunto God hath ordained them [was] of so great and dangerous consequence as concerns the very lives of all such as come into the world’, Reuff wrote, and numbers of mothers and infants died unnecessarily or were mutilated or otherwise injured as a result.¹⁷ Jane Sharp was after all herself writing to remedy ignorance, while stoutly defending the exclusive right of her own sex to the work. As we shall see, a noted and independent-minded midwife of the time, Mrs Elizabeth Cellier, writing in the 1680s, ascribed an extraordinarily high figure of infant mortality to the mishandling of the midwives.

Horror stories of women and their babies being literally pulled apart, with fearful damage to both parties, abounded. Dr Percival Willughby, the son of Sir Percival Willughby of Wollaton in Cheshire, was a celebrated and skilful obstetrician He published an account of his cases, the Country Midwife’s Opusculum:¹⁸ in which he cited one incident which took place in Threadneedle Street, in the City of London, where the midwife tugged the mother one way and the other woman present tugged the emergent child the other. There were plenty of other tales of the protruding limbs of infants being cut off because they were holding up the process of birth.

Such stories fell into two main groups. In one the midwife accelerated the course of the labour unduly, instead of letting what Dr Willughby called ‘Dame Nature, Eve’s Friend’ do her own work, with far more satisfactory results: for example Dr Willughby related how ‘poor silly Mary Baker’ produced a perfectly good child on the bare freezing ground, having avoided being ‘miserably tortured’ by the midwives. In the other group, the midwife or midwives proved incapable of helping forward a highly difficult birth. Alice Thornton described in her autobiography how her son died in 1657 because the midwife lacked the skill to ‘turn’ him. Mrs Elizabeth Freke was another diarist, who wrote from 1671 to 1714, her literacy being due to the solicitude of her father, a Fellow of All Souls, who educated all his four daughters.¹⁹ She gave a chilling description of the birth of her son Ralph Freke in Wiltshire in June 1675: the labour lasted an agonizing five days, with four midwives in perpetual attendance, including a ‘Man-Midwife’ who half-way through the proceedings pronounced the baby dead. Mrs Freke’s benevolent neighbour Lady Thynne was also in attendance as a charitable duty, and it was Lady Thynne who eventually secured the services of yet another midwife, Mrs Mills; she it was who successfully delivered a living child. (Little Ralph Freke even survived another seventeenth-century peril a few months later when a careless nurse broke his leg, and hid him in bed to conceal the fact, pretending he was teething.)

Expert practitioners were highly prized: Dr Willughby educated his two daughters so well – once again in the great seventeenth-century tradition of benevolent educative fathers – that they both enjoyed thriving careers as expert midwives. One ‘Mrs’ Willughby began by accompanying her father on his rounds, with the advantage of being able to call in her father in a particularly difficult case. One such dilemma occurred with the confinement of the ‘wife of one of Oliver’s creatures’, under Cromwell’s Protectorate; Mrs Willughby hastened to call in the senior doctor for fear of the political implications. By 1658 she was practising in London with great success. Her sister specialized in the delivery of twins, never forcing the pace of the second birth. (Both Willughbys, incidentally, married, like most midwives of the time. The antiquary George Ballard and his clever sister were the children of a midwife.)²⁰

The fame of a Quaker midwife in Reading, Frances Kent, was sufficient for the Verney family after the Restoration to consider employing her despite her awkward beliefs (they were assured that Mrs Kent never discussed religious matters with her patients) and her price: she could command as much as £25. In 1684, however, when Sarah Fell was about to be delivered of her first child at the age of forty-two, Frances Kent’s Quakerism was of course an added bonus. ‘She is a fine woman’, wrote Sarah, following her successful accouchement. ‘It was the Lord sent her to me. It was the Lord’s mercy that I had her, who is a very skilful and tender woman for that employment.’²¹

The overseeing of Quaker midwives was one of the responsibilities of the Women’s Meetings: in February 1675 at Swarthmoor, a Meeting was informed that Mabel Brittaine had been so lacking in skill that the child was born dead. On examination, Mabel Brittaine was found sufficiently deficient in medical knowledge to be told to hire an assistant (if she did not, people who employed her did so at their own risk).²²

The care of the Quakers was not matched in other sections of society. The midwife was by the nature of her profession a powerful social figure, but she was not necessarily a particularly edifying one. A traditional connection with drink – ‘red-nosed midwives’ – existed in the popular imagination, which was not unfounded. Dr Sermon in The Ladies Companion, or The English Midwife of 1671 suggested that midwives should be sober and discreet, ‘not quarrelsome nor choleric’, above all not ‘rash and drunken women’. His picture of the ideal midwife – ‘very cheerful, pleasant, and of good discourse, strong, not idle, but accustomed to exercise, that they may be the more able (if need requires) to watch’ – makes it clear that the contrary was all too often to be found: that ‘pitiful, old, ugly, ill-bred woman in a hat’ for example, who married Pepys’s Uncle Fenner in 1662 and was a midwife.²³

A midwife’s business, of its very nature, offered her the opportunity for certain murky sidelines, of which abortions were the most obvious; it was for fear of this that the authorities were zealous in their requirements that midwives were to report stillborn births. A practical woman who was not too particular might also most conveniently pursue the combined careers of midwife and procuress: several of the ‘Crafty Bawds’ mentioned in numbers of The Wandering Whore, such as Mrs Davies and Mrs Barber of Holborn, were also listed as midwives.²⁴

Under the circumstances, the most important gynaecological advance of the seventeenth century was the invention of the forceps, by the beneficial use of which in a difficult and prolonged labour the infant could be skilfully delivered without damage to either mother or child. In the absence of the forceps, types of instruments available were as crude as the techniques by which they were employed. Richard Gough, in The History of Myddle, described how the village blacksmith made some ‘iron hooks’ at the direction of the local midwife; she was then able to draw forth a dead child from its mother successfully. The sensible Dr Willughby condemned the use of ‘pothooks, pack-needles, silver spoons, thatcher’s hooks and knives’ to speed on ‘Dame Nature’ unnecessarily.²⁵ But of course where a birth was not straightforward, some form of instrument might have to be employed if mother and child were not to perish, immutably joined together (as so many did).

The man responsible for the invention of the forceps was a member of the Chamberlen family, probably Peter the Elder (so called to distinguish him from his brother and nephew, both also called Peter).²⁶ Unfortunately the character of Peter Chamberlen the Elder was that particular mixture of enlightenment and professional jealousy which has marked many inventors. On the one hand he called on King James I in 1616 to found a Society of Midwives: ‘That some order may be settled by the State for [their] instruction and civil government.’ On the other hand he deliberately and successfully guarded the secret of the forceps within the Chamberlen family: his motives being clearly financial, as were those of the Chamberlens who followed him and jealously kept up the tradition of secrecy. (Another member of the Chamberlen family, author of Dr Chamberlen’s Midwives practice of 1665, which attacked other ‘quacking’ obstetrical textbooks, defended his refusal to give details of the forceps on the disingenuous grounds that they were by now ‘a family secret’ and not his to reveal.) As a result the forceps had to be reinvented quite separately in the eighteenth century.1 In the seventeenth century much ammunition was given by this professional selfishness to those indignant midwives who protested that doctors and others tried to control and license them purely in order to restrict their activities and preserve their personal monopoly.

Many doctors were considered greedy and selfish, but many midwives were held to be ignorant, and there was something to be said for both points of view. Hitherto the licensing of the midwives had been performed by the bishops – Bishop Bonner is said to have been the first to do so²⁸ – a practice which had arisen in the previous century more for religious than for medical reasons. In an age of high infant mortality, it was very often left to the midwife, with mother and child in extremis, to perform the rite of baptism; it was her responsibility that the correct (Protestant) form should be used. At the same time, the ecclesiastical authorities were anxious that midwives should not invoke the darker powers of witchcraft to their aid; although the poor state of medical knowledge at the time, and the desperate sufferings of so many patients, must have made the invocation of supernatural aid where natural aid had failed irresistible to many caring midwives not otherwise connected with evil. (As early as 1486 Malleus Maleficarum had urged an oath upon midwives to eliminate the possibility of witchcraft being used.)²⁹

The oath administered to Eleanor Pead, seeking a licence as a midwife from the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1567, is the earliest which has survived.³⁰ She promised among other things to help the poor as well as the rich, and not to allow a woman to name a man falsely as the father of her child; some significance being attached to these allegations of paternity, extracted as it were by the pangs of labour, which put a responsibility upon the midwife either to remember them or forget them. In addition she had to swear to use no sorcery or incantation, to employ a simple form of baptism if necessary and to register the child’s birth with the curate, and not to use any cutting or dismembering in the course of the delivery.

The trouble with the bishops’ licensing was that their interests were all in the supernatural: in the course of ecclesiastical visitations, it was customary to ask after the use of prohibited sorcery rather than the progress of deliveries. Dr Peter Chamberlen, son of Peter the Younger, cried out vigorously against a system whereby any woman ‘with the testimony of two or three gossips’ could pay a fee for her licence, and then hasten into practice. It was a system, he averred, which produced innumerable and ‘uncontrolled female-arbiters of life and death’. In 1654 he attempted in his turn to form a Corporation of Midwives, with himself as governor; towards this end he seems to have held monthly meetings of midwives for the purpose of instruction at his home.³¹

This innovation aroused angry protests from the midwives at the interruption of their age-old business. Dr Chamberlen, it was asserted, had no greater skill than anyone else save for his ‘iron instruments’. Chamberlen was also accused of bargaining with the rich for larger fees, and neglecting the care of the poor altogether. Among those midwives who petitioned was that Mrs Hester Shaw who may have been the violent midwife of Threadneedle Street criticized by Dr Percival Willughby.³²

Hester Shaw, towards the end of her career, got into a dispute with Mr Thomas Clendon, the minister of Allhallows, Barking, over some stolen goods: her houses, and the other houses in her row, having been accidentally destroyed by gunpowder, a great deal of Hester Shaw’s property had, according to her version, ended up in the minister’s possession and stayed there.³³ The details of the case revealed incidentally how substantial could be the rewards of a lifetime of midwifery: two bags of silver, worth over £100 each, and quilted rolls of gold were mentioned as missing, as well as a quantity of silver plate. Hester Shaw was also described by the minister himself as of ‘a good education, and volubility of tongue, and natural boldness, and confidence’. In herself therefore she also stood for the midwife as an independent female professional, secure (as she had hitherto always believed) in work which a man was quite unable to perform.

The midwives argued in front of Archbishop Laud and the Bishop of London at Lambeth Palace on 22 October 1634. Their case rested in essence on the importance of experience: ‘it must be continual practise in this kind that will bring experience, and those women that desire to learn must be present at the delivery of many women and see the work and behaviour of such as be skilful midwives who will shew and direct them and resolve their doubts’. On the other hand there was a certain lack of logic in the way the midwives added that they also possessed books in English on anatomy, and ‘most of them being able to read’ (or so they claimed), these books would benefit them more than Dr Chamberlen’s lectures on anatomy.³⁴

After 1662, in the reversion to old ways brought about by the Restoration, the midwives proceeded as they had done formerly, taking an oath, paying their money, and returning home, in the words of a critical contemporary, ‘as skilful as they went thither’. Parts of the oath still conveyed a chilling impression of contemporary abuses through ignorance: ‘I will not destroy the child born of any woman, nor cut, nor pull off the head thereof, or otherwise dismember or hurt the same, or suffer it to be so hurt or dismembered.’³⁵

The power struggle between the midwives and the doctors was finally resolved by the victory of the latter. Education, as ever in the seventeenth century, was the real key to woman’s weakness. Members of the male sex were always likely by definition to have a far greater knowledge of medicine and anatomy than the average woman, if only for their ability to read Latin (as the midwife Jane Sharp herself admitted).³⁶ As for women doctors, some women did continue to practise medicine on a casual basis – in 1683 one Prudence Ludford of Little Barkhampton was presented at court for unlawful surgery – but the examinations required by the Faculties of Medicine and Surgery in the City of London excluded women.³⁷

By the end of the century it had become customary to call in a ‘Man-Midwife’ for difficult cases. It has been suggested that the vogue for the ‘Man-Midwife’ among the upper classes may have spread from France (like other customs of an intimate nature as the use of the prophylactic sheath), after one of the mistresses of Louis XIV, Louise de la Vallière, had been attended by one. In 1780 the honouring of Sir David Hamilton by King George III, the first knighted obstetrician, indicated the course of the future in the medical profession. Those murmurs of feminine modesty at male examination which had persisted in the seventeenth century – Dr Willughby mentions cases where he was not permitted to gaze on the patient’s face – and had been evinced by the vocal midwives as support for their traditional claims, died away in view of the superior need for truly skilled attention.³⁸ And that, it came to be agreed, could not be supplied by women.

Ironically enough there was far more substance to the midwives’ claims to represent the correct – because it was divinely-ordained and thus natural – approach to labour than many people, including the doctors, realized at the time. Recent research has come to criticize the ‘meddling’ male doctors who with their forceps intervened with the natural process of childbirth.³⁹ It is of course impossible (as was pointed out on p.92), to estimate with any certainty the figures for mortality in childbirth at this period; even the hazy figures available give no clue as to the relative responsibility of midwife, doctor, let alone that other important figure present at every childbed, ‘Dame Nature’ herself.

Obstetrics in any modern sense was in its infancy where doctors as well as midwives were concerned. This was an age when the Caesarean delivery was popularly – if not quite correctly – believed to result in the inevitable death of the mother. The key work De Generatione Animalium by Dr William Harvey, described as ‘the father of English midwifery’,⁴⁰ was published in Latin in 1651 and, with a thirty-nine-page section ‘Of the Birth’ translated into English in 1653 (it had a strong influence, for example, on Dr Percival Willughby). But even Harvey was capable of harbouring such misconceptions as attributing to the foetus an active role in breaking out of the womb, in addition to the mother’s contractions, on the analogy of the chicken breaking out of the egg.

While some of the notions cherished by the midwife Jane Sharp have a ludicrous sound to modern ears, others are sensible enough. On the one hand she believed the liver rather than the heart to be the fountain of the blood, that boys were begotten from the right ‘stone’ (testicle) and girls from the left, and that after conception boys lived in the right of the womb and girls on the left. On the other hand Jane Sharp believed in sustaining the strength of women during labour and in keeping them warm afterwards, both sound principles. She was much against hurrying on labour, warned against the difficulty of a breech presentation, and she was aware of the threat of haemorrhage with the need to remove the ‘after-burden’ (placenta). Her chosen covering for a recently delivered woman – the newly flayed skin of a sheep and a hare-skin on her belly – may sound bizarre, but William Sermon, a doctor, enunciated the same principle in 1671 in The Ladies Companion (though Dr Sermon preferred the skin of an ox).⁴¹

As for Dr Sermon, he too had his capricious notions: for example, he believed one flat breast to be a sign that one twin would be miscarried. Like many doctors and scientifically-minded people in the seventeenth century, he attached much importance to obtaining that popular talisman of the time, an eagle-stone, to aid an easy delivery. Lord Conway, husband of Anne Viscountess Conway and a Fellow of the Royal Society, took enormous trouble to find exactly the right size and shape of one before her delivery in December 1658; fabled to be found in the birds’ nests, an eagle-stone was in fact merely an accidental configuration of an ordinary hollow pebble.⁴²

In such a primitive state of medicine, the midwives were not so far out in their emphasis on the importance of womanly experience. An accomplished sensible midwife like Jane Sharp would not really do much less well than a doctor like William Sermon, because in so many cases both of them were effectively helpless. Dr Sermon himself recognized this when he suggested that the ‘discreet Midwife’ should encourage her patient to call on the Almighty for help: ‘and let them call to mind what God hath said with his own mouth; for it would be almost a miracle to see a woman delivered without pain’.

In another passage however, Dr Sermon did draw attention to a remarkable instance of childbirth without pain which he himself had witnessed by chance in 1644. The doctor was lurking in the hedgerows, hoping to shoot a hare, when he saw a woman on her way back from market ‘delivered of a lusty Child in a Wood by herself’. Presently she encased the infant in some oak leaves and wrapped it in her apron. She then marched ‘stoutly’ for half a mile to what happened to be the doctor’s uncle’s house. Within two hours the woman felt well enough, having secured some proper linen for the child, to proceed on her way ‘not in the least discouraged’. Dr Sermon knew of other examples in history of women delivered without pain. He also fondly believed that the contemporary women in America sprang out of a bed and ministered to their own husbands immediately after giving birth out of gratitude ‘because they [the American husbands] take some pains to beget them with Child’. If only English women were equally unselfish, reflected Dr Sermon, their husbands would give up kissing their ‘handsome Nurses’ and generally misbehaving themselves with the neighbours in a similar situation.⁴³

But such ‘natural’ childbeds were rare indeed in the conditions of seventeenth-century England. The real point about obstetrics and midwifery during this period (and for nearly 200 years to follow, until the invention of disinfectant by Joseph Lister in 1867 caused maternal mortality to decline sharply) was that the nature of bacterial infection itself was not understood. Here both doctors and midwives were alike in their ignorance.

Dr William Harvey called for cleanliness to prevent the onset of fever. Handbooks advocated common-sensical measures of hygiene for midwives. Jane Sharp called for pared nails, and Dr William Sermon for comely and neat midwives, hands small, fingers long not thick, ‘nails pared, very close’. As for Jane Sharp’s recipe for a herbal bath at the onset of labour, to include hollyhocks, bettony, mugwort, marjoram, mint, camomile, linseed and parsley boiled up together, that must at least have involved cleansing the patient; if her recommendation that the woman’s ‘privities’ should be anointed with a compound of oil of sweet almonds, lilies, violets, duck’s grease, hen’s grease and wax, with butter, ground quince kernels and gum optional is less instantly appealing to modern sensibilities.⁴⁴ But none of the endless herbal remedies recommended in handbooks and household books alike for the inexorable female ordeal of childbirth had any real relevance to the problem of sepsis.

It was from septicaemia that the suffering patients died in their hundreds and thousands. This septicaemia was sometimes brought about by the unhygienic conditions of the home (although some immunity must have been established to those); more often it was brought about by that concomitant of most labours, ‘the examining hand’.⁴⁵ Here both doctor and midwife were equally guilty. The doctor blithely and unknowingly brought with him infection from other cases which might include scarlet fever; the midwife from a daily round which might include the cow-byre and the farmyard generally as well as the lying-in of a neighbour.

It was a hideous truth that progress in this field could lead to greater not lesser mortality, as the examining hand of the doctor grew more skilful, and the importance of internal examination was increasingly stressed. The establishment of the first lying-in hospitals led to the first epidemics of puerperal fever, the first one accurately recorded being in the middle of the seventeenth century.⁴⁶

It was in this sense that the least skilful midwives, lacking the knowledge to do much more than concentrate on their herbal remedies in the patient’s own home, might actually do less harm, by not spreading infection, than the most practised of the doctors.

The ideal midwife (from the point of view of a masculine-dominated society, and no doubt from the point of view of most patients as well) might be ‘modest and grave’, but there was something about the intimate power of the position, the fact that most midwives acted throughout their careers as ‘uncontrolled female arbiters’ in the indignant phrase of Dr Peter Chamberlen, which could lead to the development of an altogether bolder type of woman. Mrs Elizabeth Cellier was that outspoken midwife who in 1687 announced that over 6,000 women had died in childbed within the last twenty years, more than 13,000 children had been abortive, and another 5,000 had died in the first month of their life; about two thirds of these had ‘in all probability perished, for want of the due skill and care, in those women who practise the art of midwifery’.⁴⁷

Her career previous to the initiation of her campaign for better training in midwifery had been equally bold, if not quite so judicious. For the details of her early life, we have to choose between the tales of her enemies – that she was born Elizabeth Marshall, the daughter of a brazier or tinker living near Canterbury – and her own account in one of her self-justificatory pamphlets.⁴⁸ According to the latter, she was brought up by parents who were fervent Royalists – Protestants, but accused of papistry and idolatry on account of their Royalist sympathies. These perverse accusations led the young Elizabeth to inquire into the truths of the Catholic religion, as a result of which she herself became converted to it.

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.⁴⁹ 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.’⁵¹ 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 …’⁵³

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:

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.⁵⁶

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 …’⁵⁷

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’.⁵⁸

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.’⁵⁹

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.’⁶⁰

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’.⁶¹

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.

In June 1687 she took the opportunity of this newly favourable climate of opinion to float a scheme for a midwives’ college.⁶² By this she hoped to reduce those fearful casualties of unskilled carelessness on the part of midwives which had disquieted the Chamberlens and others since early in the century. Mrs Cellier’s scheme was for a royal ‘corporation’ to be endowed to the tune of £5,000 or £6,000 a year ‘by and for midwives’, which in addition would serve as a hospital for foundling children.

Mrs Cellier’s plan was on the surface well worked out. Women – to the limit of 1,000 – who were already skilled midwives were to be admitted on the payment of £5; they would then serve as matrons to twelve lesser houses or assistants to the governess. The next 1,000 would pay 50s on admission and 50s per year in fees; as their training proceeded, they would join the ranks of the matrons and assistants to the governess. The entire income of the first year (which according to these terms would be considerable) would be devoted to the building of the foundling hospital.

There were other provisions: no married person was to be admitted to the government of the hospital, in order to protect the interest of the foundlings. A woman sufficiently expert in writing would act as secretary to the governess of the hospital. The principal physician or male midwife would give a monthly lecture in public at which attendance would be compulsory; afterwards all the lectures would be entered in a book to which the midwives would have free recourse.

In a subsequent pamphlet the following year, Mrs Cellier showed herself capable of a humanitarian imagination where her foundlings were concerned.⁶³ Their surnames, she wrote, were to be chosen from the ‘several Arts or Mysteries’, or from ‘Complexions and Shapes’ or even on a more mundane level from the days of the week, but such children were not to be stigmatized by such opprobrious surnames as ‘Bastard’, so that in after life they would be capable of any employment, or even honour, without reference to the misfortune of their birth.

Combating the murmurs of the doctors in a pamphlet entitled To Dr– An Answer to his Queries, concerning the Colledg [sic] of Midwives, Mrs Cellier turned once more to the story of those enterprising Israelite midwives Shiphrah and Puah and expanded it. She argued that they could not have been merely midwives, for two women could not have coped with the whole tribe; therefore they were also teachers, and the scene of such consultations ‘might well be called a College’. With that verve which the King’s Bench Court would have recognized, Mrs Cellier said that since the Bible stated God had built these midwives ‘houses’, then the midwives’ ‘college’ antedated the College of Physicians. For good measure, she threw in the fact that there had been colleges of women practising physic, coeval with the bards, before the arrival of the Romans; and that a college of women had centred round the Temple of Diana in London.⁶⁴

The flaw in Mrs Cellier’s scheme was the same flaw that had vitiated the corporation, suggested half a century earlier by Dr Peter Chamberlen. Without being granted a monopoly, it would be impossible for this new foundation to impose higher standards, since too many midwives would simply continue in their same bad old ways. On the other hand Mrs Cellier’s foundation was envisaged on far too small a scale to deal with the enormous number of midwives required by the female population of England, even if they had been willing and able to afford the fees.

For all this, and for all the queries raised by the doctors, King James II lent a sympathetic ear to Mrs Cellier’s propositions. He evidently promised to enrol the midwives into a corporation by his Royal Charter.⁶⁵

When Mrs Cellier published her second pamphlet on the subject of the foundation in January 1688, the Queen, Mary of Modena, was herself in the early stages of pregnancy. Her fruitful condition was a matter of some personal satisfaction to Mrs Cellier: had she not predicted that ‘her Majesty was full of Children’, and that therapeutic baths at a spa would assist her ‘breeding’? Mrs Cellier’s satisfaction was certainly shared by the royal parents-to-be, since Mary of Modena, who had lost a number of children at birth and in infancy, had not conceived for some years.

But this was a pregnancy of more than personal importance. Catholic subjects like Mrs Cellier viewed the prospect of the birth of a male heir – who would be Catholic – with enthusiasm, while Whigs and fanatical Protestants envisaged with equal dismay the blighting of the succession hopes of Mary and Anne, James’s Protestant daughters by his first marriage.

Mrs Cellier ventured further prophecy concerning the many ways in which her corporation of midwives would bring benefits to the King their founder: ‘And I doubt not but one way will be by giving him a Prince to his Royal consort, who like another Moses may become a mighty Captain to the Nation; and lead to Battle the Soldiers which the Hospital will preserve for him.’⁶⁶

Alas, this time Mrs Cellier’s prophesy was singularly wide of the mark. A prince was duly born to Mary of Modena – James Edward Stuart, born on 10 June 1688 – but he went into exile shortly after his birth; having by that birth precipitated the crisis which led to his father’s downfall and flight. Known to history as the old Pretender, in no conceivable sense was this prince another Moses, and the soldiers whom he ordered to battle in his various unsuccessful attempts to recapture the throne of his father were greatly drawn from other sources and other nations than the foundlings of England. With the departure of her royal patron, Mrs Cellier’s plans for a foundation collapsed.

So determined were King James’s political enemies not to accept a Catholic succession – as represented by the baby prince born to Mary of Modena in June – that it was found convenient to believe that the baby himself was an imposter, smuggled into the palace in a warming-pan. Even Princess Anne (who should have known better) affected to credit this absurd story, because it conveniently supported her in her opposition to her father. At the time there were two midwives in attendance, Mrs De Labadie and Mrs Wilkins, both of whom received 500 guineas for what seemed to those within the royal chamber the joyful achievement of delivering the long-sought male heir (a daughter would have followed her Protestant step-sisters Mary and Anne in the succession and therefore would not have posed a threat). There were also doctors and a host of non-medical attendants, ladies of the court, many of them Protestants, amounting to a total of over sixty.⁶⁷

But as luck would have it, one royal obstetrician, the latest member of the Chamberlen dynasty, Dr Hugh Chamberlen, was not actually present at the birth, being away attending a patient at Chatham. This simple chance, added to the fact that the doctor was himself a strong Whig, played into the hands of another strong Whig, Gilbert (later Bishop) Burnet: he spread the story that the Queen had deliberately sent away her doctor in order to facilitate the smuggling in of the changeling.

Years later Dr Chamberlen wrote to the Electress Sophia of Hanover about the events of that dramatic day, angry that he had been dragged into the scandal.⁶⁸ He explained that there was nothing sinister about the fact that the footman sent to St James’s to fetch him when the Queen’s birth pangs started had not found him there. The plain truth was that the Queen gave birth earlier than was expected; not the first woman to do so. Had the footman reached him, as he must certainly have expected to do, Dr Chamberlen would in fact have arrived just in time to interrupt the act of smuggling – supposing such a stratagem had actually been planned.

Dr Chamberlen’s clinching argument was the presence of another vociferous Whig at the scene of the birth – the midwife, Mrs Wilkins. She, who was wont to cry out against the Jesuits who infested the place (finding a sympathetic ear in Dr Chamberlen), had been in no doubt about the circumstances of the baby prince’s birth. To Dr Chamberlen now she expatiated indignantly on these rumours of substitution: ‘Alas, will they not let the poor infant alone! I am certain no such thing as the bringing of a strange child in a warming-pan could be practised without my seeing it: attending constantly in and about all the avenues of the chamber.’

Lecky regarded the prostitute as ‘the eternal priestess of humanity’. But in the seventeenth century it was the midwife who could best claim that title: grave if not always modest, pursuing her profession in and about all the avenues to every chamber, where history was made and where poverty was rampant, from the palace of St James (for 500 guineas) to the market-place where a busy midwife noted in her diary that she ‘laid a woman’ for nothing.

1In the nineteenth century Dr Peter Chamberlen’s famous forceps were discovered, still tucked away in their box.²⁷