If Walls Could Talk

by Lucy Worsley

  Occasionally, though, when Wallington was suffering from mental-health problems, the devil tempted him to jump out of the garret’s window and end his life. He made

  Much ado to resist this temptation, But God of his great love and mercy caused me presently to go downstairs as fast as I could.

  Items kept in a closet included ‘Books of Hours’, the pre-Reformation prayer books which seeped out of monasteries into people’s private hands, and which were regularly used to inspire religious thoughts. Edward IV had his Keeper of the Great Wardrobe ‘dress’ his precious, valuable and well-beloved books in what sound almost like clothes. They were to be bound in velvet, blue and black silk, with laces and tassels of silk, ‘buttons’ of blue silk and gold, and clasps of copper and gilt adorned with roses and the royal arms. A fifteenth-century merchant’s wife in York, Agnes Hull, willed to her daughter a prayer book or primer, probably much less grand but no less highly valued. She described it as the book ‘which I use daily’. Such Books of Hours, made by hand, beautifully decorated and often even incorporating the owner’s name, were forbidden by the Protestant king, Edward VI, in 1549. Nevertheless, many medieval books were still kept and read in secret by Catholic families, the clandestine nature of their use making them even more personal items.

  Although they were originally connected with religion, closets also had secular purposes. Merchants used them for drawing up accounts and counting money. Letters to absent children were written here, and if you had any pornography, your private closet was a good place to keep it. The seventeenth-century Duchess of Lauderdale, Elizabeth Dysart, was a lady with many secrets. She is reputed to have been a lover of Oliver Cromwell’s, as well as a member of the Sealed Knot, the secret society that supported Charles II in exile, before marrying the powerful Duke of Lauderdale. At her home, Ham House on the banks of the Thames, she had no fewer than two closets, an outer one for visitors to see, and an inner one for her own private use. Here she kept paintings hinting at her potentially dangerous Catholic beliefs, two sets of shelves for her private books, and a japanned box in which she kept sweetmeats and – a valuable commodity – tea.

  You might also indulge in the very intimate activity of looking at miniatures in your closet. These tiny, valuable paintings of loved ones were kept wrapped and were only shown to confidants (rather as today you might show a friend photos of your children saved on your mobile phone). The Scottish ambassador was once awarded a rare privilege during a visit to Elizabeth I at Hampton Court Palace. He was taken into the queen’s bedchamber, where she ‘opened a little cabinet, wherein were divers little pictures wrapt within paper’. One of these proved to be a miniature of her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots, and they looked at it together. This intimate gesture was a compliment from Elizabeth I to the ambassador, and also, by implication, to the Scottish queen.

  Because closets were personal, intimate and desirable places to be, a genre of books developed which claimed to expose the goings-on in the closets of celebrities. Rather like kiss-and-tell magazine articles today, The Queen’s Closet Opened and The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby purported to be exposés by senior stewards or servants of what happened in these private places. Both are similar to recipe books, containing valued and secret methods for curing sickness and making special dishes and exotic toiletries. They were preceded in the sixteenth century by John Partridge’s The Treasurie of Commodious Conceites, and hidden Secrets, commonly called The good Huswives Closet (1584). It contained recipes ranging from a yellow dye for gloves to a treatment for ‘the loathsome disease of the French Pockes’.

  As they were exclusive little rooms, closets were often richly and wonderfully decorated. In the seventeenth-century closet at Bolsover Castle made for the arch-Royalist Duke of Newcastle, there is panelling ‘grained’ – decorated with the imaginary grain of wood – in gold paint. In his gold-grained room, its ceiling decorated with semi-pornographic images of the gods and goddesses of Mount Olympus, the duke took off the mask of the aristocrat from time to time. Here he reminded himself of his own humanity beneath the pomp of his ducal lifestyle. As the motto reads over his window, ‘All is but vanitie’.

  Over time, closets developed in two contrasting directions. One use of the closet – as a storehouse for precious works of art – caused it to expand into the larger, more elaborate room known as a cabinet, and then, ultimately, into the picture or sculpture gallery. (Even today, the prime minister’s ‘cabinet’ takes its name from this room. At one time his inner circle could squash themselves into a closet or cabinet to hold their meetings.) Secondly, the Pilgrim Fathers took closets over to America, and to this day personal possessions in the US are stored in ‘closets’. The shoe-filled walk-in closet in her tiny New York apartment represents Carrie’s hopes and dreams in Sex and the City.

  Back in the British bedroom, though, the closet died out. For females, its purpose was to some extent replaced by the underwear drawer, the most obvious place to hide diaries and valuables today. And should the Duke of Newcastle be brought back to life as a modern man, he might well be found deep in contemplation in his garden shed.

  6 – Sick

  Take a fat cat, flay it well … roast the cat and gather the dripping, and anoint the sufferer with it.

  Fourteenth-century recipe for a medicine

  to treat a throat abscess

  Medicine is another, more painful avenue to explore in the history of the bedroom.

  It was in Henry VIII’s reign that the profession of medicine was formalised, after the king himself set up the Royal College of Physicians in 1518. Not until the nineteenth century, though, did doctors based outside the home win a monopoly on medicine. Until that happened, people went on treating themselves in their own bedrooms.

  Henry VIII was deeply interested in medicine, and would personally recommend cures to his staff. He advised Sir Bryan Tuke, his Treasurer of the Chamber, how to cure a tumour in the testicles, describing various ‘remedies, as any cunning physician in England could do’.

  He was not alone. Many of his subjects would likewise self-prescribe and self-medicate. In the sixteenth-and seventeenth-century bedchamber, women’s and ‘folk’ medicine fought a long-drawn-out rearguard action against the doctors. And some of their barmy-sounding techniques worked rather well, even if their ideas about illness were totally different to ours. For centuries sickness was conceived as God’s punishment. To pray was always one’s first line of defence; examining the patient’s actual body was sometimes thought frankly irrelevant. Consider, for example, this fourteenth-century doctor’s method of diagnosis:

  take the herb cinquefoil and, while collecting it, say a paternoster on behalf of the patient. Then boil it in a new jar with some of the water which the patient is destined to drink; if the water be red in colour after this boiling, then the patient will die.

  Until about 1700, most physicians believed that the body was made up of the four ‘humours’, as described by the ancient Roman doctor Claudius Galen, and that illness occurred when one humour grew too powerful and overwhelmed the others. That’s why most medical treatments involved removing liquids of one kind or another from the body. Popular remedies included vomits (medicine to make you sick), purges (laxatives), glisters (enemas) and blood-letting. The idea was to restore balance between the humours. These were absolutely basic parts of medical practice, even performed in the bedchambers of healthy people. Treatment varied from patient to patient because each individual was thought to have been born with a predominant humour which also explained their character:

  Today we might assume that medicine based on such a flawed concept had little chance of success. Draining much-needed blood from a sick person’s veins, for example, seems likely to hinder rather than help their recovery.

  But the extraordinary thing is that bleeding did actually do good. The enormous power of the placebo effect meant that a person placing him-or herself under medical treatment was given confidence, both in the healer and in the idea that t
hey would get better. And very often people did just that.

  Tudor medicine contained many wacky and gruesome-sounding recipes, but some of them were really quite efficacious. To take one example: a Tudor wife who did not desire her husband could be ‘cured’ of her frigidity, we are told, if her husband rubbed the ‘grease of a goat’ on her private parts. The intention was that something of the character of a goat – a very lusty animal – would be transferred to the woman. In practice, though, the lubrication of the grease might very well have stimulated the woman. So the medicine worked, if not for the reason that the Tudors thought.

  Everyone of rank at the Tudor court enjoyed using emetics, not least because their meaty diet led to constipation. Henry VIII (once again) excelled in this area. His Groom of the Stool, or most intimate servant, had the daily duty of informing the world on the condition of the king’s bowels. Enemas would be administered through a pig’s bladder filled with liquid, slowly trickled into his rear end down a tube. One night his doctors reported that a very successful enema had caused the king to wake and give his close stool a ‘very fair siege’. (Possibly this isn’t quite the image of spectacular bombardment that our modern understanding of the word ‘siege’ implies. ‘Sege’ was also the Middle English word for a turd.)

  Henry VIII set the pattern for people to make a regular habit of retreating to their bedchambers in order to be ‘physicked’ with enemas, baths and sweating treatments, all intended to get those humours back into balance. The Tudor and Stuart habit of retreating from the world for a few days of pampering sounds rather like a modern spa visit. But the intentions were serious, and the interventions sometimes quite extreme. Haemorrhoids, for example, could be cured – it was thought – by taking laxatives, and then ‘two days after the last purge apply 6 leeches to the haemorrhoidal veins, & draw 9 or 10 ounces of blood’. (Ouch.)

  This doctor is about to use his enormous syringe to administer an enema. The patient in the bed looks suitably nervous

  There were constant new fads. For once the English were ahead of the stylish French when Liselotte, Duchess of Orléans, described in 1714 a novelty from our side of the Channel: ‘a purge which was so effective that I had to retire to my closestool no less than thirty times’. The purge was ‘a new medicine, but so à la mode that all Paris is using it now. It is a salt from England called here du sel d’Epsom. You dissolve it in water.’ Even the prudish Queen Victoria took a purge once a week, and the Victorians were enthusiastic users of laxatives at levels not to be seen again until the protein-based Atkins diet suddenly became popular in Britain in the early years of the twenty-first century. (Atkins enthusiasts cut down on vegetables, decreasing their fibre intake and often suffering from constipation in consequence.) The author of a book for pregnant women published in 1853 set much store by the state of a woman’s bowels: ‘If pregnant females, who suffer from constipation,’ he wrote, ‘were to take small doses of castor oil, twice or thrice a week … difficult cases of labour would very rarely occur.’ For their enemas, the Victorians dropped the rectally damaging syringe, which had held sway since the seventeenth century, in favour of the pipe and squeeze-bag.

  ‘Cutting for the stone.’ Samuel Pepys underwent the operation to remove a stone from his bladder in his own home

  Even while the medical profession was becoming established, the bedroom at home remained the scene of many a crisis. When Samuel Pepys, for example, had a stone in his bladder removed, his surgeon came to his house to perform the operation. The preparations took place in his own bedchamber. He was tied down on a table so that he could not thrash about, and two strong men were also present to ‘hold him by the knees’ and ‘by the arm-holes’.

  With the Enlightenment, though, the bedchamber began to lose its role as an operating theatre. Those in need began to turn to the professionals. There were physicians who would still visit you at home for a fee, but also surgeons who could perform operations in their own shops, and apothecaries and chemists who could sell you herbal remedies and drugs from commercial premises. Early hospitals (places for the provision of hospitality) were mainly places for the relief of the poor and indigent, rather than for curing the middle and upper classes. So on into the nineteenth century a professional nurse might still arrive to help a wealthy family with a sick member turn a bedroom into a sickroom. Eventually, though, by the twentieth century, illness became firmly associated with the surgery and hospital. Today, the very idea of a doctor making a ‘home visit’ sounds unusual and retrograde: it seems like a practice from a more leisurely past.

  Medical drama in the bedroom is much rarer than it used to be. Now that 58 per cent of us take our last breath in a hospital, we’ve forgotten that once everyone expected to die at home.

  7 – Sex

  Would you rather sin with Elinor Glyn on a tiger skin?

  Or would you prefer to err with her on some other kind of fur?

  Verses on Lord Curzon’s lover, romantic

  novelist Elinor Glyn, 1864–1943

  We tend to assume, along with Philip Larkin, that ‘Sexual intercourse began/In nineteen sixty-three … Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ and the Beatles’ first LP.’ There was a curious reluctance to talk about sex for well over a century, between 1800 and 1960. Yet before that copulation was openly discussed, with much less stigma and shame.

  Nor was sex restricted to the bedroom. Edmund Harrold, a priapic wig-maker living in late-Stuart Manchester, kept a detailed diary of his sex life, including comments such as ‘did wife 2 tymes couch & bed in an hour an[d] ½ time’. In 1763, James Boswell exceeded him with a clever actress/prostitute named Louisa: ‘a more voluptuous night I never enjoyed. Five times was I fairly lost in rapture … I was somewhat proud of my performance.’ On this occasion they were in a bed, but it’s only fair to point out that the lanes and fields were far more attractive to medieval and Tudor young people who lived in otherwise communal spaces. The fact that early bedrooms were shared could certainly inhibit romance. The seventeenth-century Abigail Willey of Oyster River, New England, would stop her husband ‘coming to her’ when she didn’t feel like it by making her two children sleep in the middle of the bed rather than taking their usual position at the sides.

  We don’t hear Harrold’s wife’s or Louisa’s side of the story, and there’s a widely held notion that the church has always encouraged the missionary position as it kept a woman in her rightly subordinate place. But Harrold would have sex with his wife both in the ‘old fashion’ (missionary position) and the ‘new fashion’ (her on top), the latter especially when she was pregnant. And in fact, pre-modern female sexuality was considered to be powerful, formidable and valuable.

  Medieval women who considered their husbands to be unsatisfactory could always pray at the shrine of St Uncumber in Westminster Abbey to be rid of them. (‘If the man’s member is always found useless and as if dead, the couple are well able to be separated.’) Alison, Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘Wife of Bath’ in The Canterbury Tales, devoured no less than five husbands in her attempt to satiate her sexual appetite, and male impotence is no modern bedroom problem. Sir Tristram in Sir Thomas Malory’s King Arthur and his Knights could not perform with his wife because of intrusive memories of his former lover, Isolde. As soon as Isolde popped into his mind, he became all ‘dismayed, and other cheer made he none’. And having spoken of Henry VIII’s impotence was one of the accusations made of Anne Boleyn at her trial in 1536.

  Medieval women were considered to have a right to an orgasm. As the author of the thirteenth-century Romance of the Rose put it, ‘one should not abandon the other, nor should either cease his voyage until they reach port together’. One fourteenth-century Oxford doctor recommended that frustrated sisters should simply do it for themselves: a woman should get her midwife to lubricate her fingers with oil, insert them into the vagina and ‘move them vigorously about’.

  Yet society also condoned a long-standing division of labour between a mistress (provider of pleasure)
and a wife (mother of children), and only a minority made a successful transition from the former to the financial security of the latter. Anne Boleyn was a notable exception, and did so by making Henry VIII wait six years before consummating their relationship. She allowed him addictive tasters along the way. As he wrote to Anne when they were apart, Henry was often lost in daydreams about her: ‘wishing myself … in my sweetheart’s arms, whose pretty duckies I trust shortly to kiss’. Once Anne was married, though, she had to put up with the occasional infidelity, especially during her pregnancies, when she was curtly told by her husband to ‘shut her eyes and endure as her betters had done’.

  To modern eyes, a striking emphasis was placed upon a woman’s sexual pleasure in medieval times. This was because in medical terms the medieval female body was thought of as simply a weaker version of the male, a kind of mirror image of it, with the sexual organs placed inside rather than outside. The female orgasm, therefore, was thought essential to conception, just as the male orgasm was. (At the same time, Tudor medicine books contained remedies for complaints affecting a man’s ‘womb’.) The idea that a female orgasm led to conception was put like this in the seventeenth century: if a man feels during intercourse ‘a kind of sucking or drawing at the end of his yard … a woman may have conceived’. This was why Samuel Pepys was careful not to allow his many and varied mistresses to enjoy themselves, even while he insisted on taking his own pleasure. For women, another dreadful drawback to this belief was what happened in cases of rape. If a raped woman became pregnant, she must have experienced an orgasm, therefore she was not raped.

  However, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the female orgasm entered into decline, and people began to question its very existence. Physicians discovered, during the course of the Enlightenment, that orgasm is not in fact necessary for conception. As a result, the importance society attached to sexual pleasure for women plummeted. Thus we get the stereotype of the frigid Victorian age, with females frightened of sex. Victorian women were not expected to experience orgasms; the official line was that their doctors and husbands thought them incapable of it.