by Lucy Worsley
This change in biological understanding had enormous implications for society. Women gradually shed their medieval stereotype as insatiable temptresses in order to become the Victorian ideal of pure, chaste, virginal angels. A society where sexual order was maintained by physical chastisement gradually began to give way to internal moral codes, where behaviour was policed by social forces such as shame and expulsion from the community for sexual transgression. Even before the end of the seventeenth century, the historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich notes, the New England county courts which had dished out whippings and convictions in the early settler period began to lose their grip, and fines began to replace beatings. The result: less violence, but more psychological repression. So the modern mentality was born. Only when, in the later twentieth century, sex began to be considered as something pleasurable for women in its own right – not merely as wives or mistresses – did the female orgasm return to prominence in scientific and public discourse.
Despite the earlier emphasis on female pleasure, a respectable married woman was monogamous. In the medieval and Tudor ages, the sexual urges of young men were cleverly sublimated through the cult of chivalric love: they were supposed to devote themselves to the service of ladies of superior social status, and to expect nothing physical in return. (Favours, patronage and promotion at court were all acceptable alternatives.)
The chivalric cult had a strange parallel in the sleeping arrangement known as ‘bundling’, which was common both to rural areas of seventeenth-century Wales and to eighteenth-century New England. This was likewise a non-sexual relationship, where a young man and woman passed the night alone in a bedroom together, but remained fully clothed. Sometimes they were even tied down or a board was placed down the middle of their bed. The idea was to make it through to morning without having sex, in order to find out whether they got on well enough together to marry. Until 1800, when it began to arouse a new moralistic disapproval, to ‘bundle’ was considered both chaste and sensible as it led to more successful marriages:
Cate Nance and Sue proved just and true
Tho’ bundling did practise;
But Ruth beguil’d and proved with child,
Who bundling did despise.
The other explanation for this curious custom can be found in the architectural design of pre-modern rural cottages. Obviously, in an age when houses contained far fewer rooms than there were family members, the young people were short of private places in which to become acquainted. It was a kindness on the part of a girl’s parents to leave a young couple alone together in the upstairs bedchamber, the rest of the family gathering in the kitchen or parlour below instead. The ropes and the board assuaged the parents’ conscience, as they were responsible for finding their daughter a suitable husband, yet also for preserving her virginity. On the other hand, pre-marital sex was not seen as disastrous for people of the middling or lower sort, and a pre-marital pregnancy could be welcome proof of fertility. ‘You would not buy a horse without trying it first,’ explained one Norfolk farmer to his vicar.
The process of creating royal or aristocratic children, though, was the business of the whole nation, and its importance was so great that it took place in a semi-public context. The proxy bedding of Henry VIII’s sister, Mary, sounds rather undignified, yet the process saw her legally wed. Mary lay on a bed in what was described as a ‘magnificent déshabille’ with bare legs. The French king’s ambassador took off his own red stockings and lay beside her. As their naked legs touched, ‘the King of England made great rejoicing’. (When Mary finally reached France, its elderly king was delighted with his new bride and boasted ‘that he had performed marvels’ on his wedding night.)
A century later, another English princess named Mary, aged only ten, had to endure a public bedding with her brand-new husband, the fourteen-year-old Prince of Orange. The bride’s father, King Charles I, ‘had some difficulty in conducting’ his new son-in-law through the thick throng of spectators gathered around the bed where the young princess lay waiting. Once in bed, the boy prince ‘kissed the Princess three times, and lay chastely beside her about three-quarters of an hour, in presence of all the great lords and ladies of England’. After this, his duty was considered done.
We also know a good amount about what actually happened when a king and queen were left to it to attempt to produce an heir. Details of such matters survive because they were of vital political importance: the stability of the kingdom and alliances between nations hung in the balance.
In 1501, the ritual for the bedding of Katherine of Aragon with Henry VIII’s older but short-lived brother, Arthur, was similarly well recorded. The princess was led from the wedding feast by her ladies, undressed and ‘reverently’ placed in bed. Prince Arthur entered the bedchamber in only his shirt, accompanied by a crowd of courtiers and musicians. The shawms, viols and tabors died away for a change of mood: the solemn blessing of the marriage bed by bishops. The young lovers were then left alone.
But the business of what happened next was mightily raked over in later times because it became central to the issue of whether or not Henry could divorce Katherine of Aragon. Henry argued that his marriage to Katherine had been fatally flawed because the Bible decreed that he shouldn’t have married his brother’s widow. Meanwhile, Katherine herself argued that this was irrelevant because she hadn’t been truly married to Arthur: he had never penetrated her. Yet Henry’s supporters claimed to ‘remember’ the young Arthur coming out of the bedroom the morning after his first night with Katherine and calling for wine to refresh him after his ‘long journey into Spain’ and back.
The success or failure of Henry VIII’s own sex life could literally result in life or death for his intimate servants. In June 1540, Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s latest chief minister, was arrested. He had been the prime mover behind Henry’s fourth marriage, to Anne of Cleves. Henry had been persuaded into marrying Anne only because Cromwell thought an alliance with the German state of Cleves was a good idea. When he actually met his promised bride, however, Henry was gravely disappointed by her appearance. He was desperate to find a way out of his marriage, and required Cromwell to put it about the court that it had been unconsummated because of Anne’s lack of physical charms. Cromwell obediently spread reports recounting the king’s words to him: ‘I have felt her belly and her breasts, and thereby, as I can judge, she should be no maid. Which struck me so to the heart … that I had neither will nor courage to proceed any further.’
But once Cromwell had contributed his ‘evidence’ that the marriage was invalid, and once the divorce from Anne was under way, Henry had no reason to keep his former favourite minister alive. He was executed on 28 July 1540.
The undressing of a bride remained a semi-social bedroom ritual right into the early nineteenth century, and it involved throwing things around just as bouquets and confetti are still thrown today. The bride’s men would ‘pull off the bride’s garters’ and fasten them to their hats, while the bride’s maids would carry the bride into the bedchamber, ‘undress her, and lay her in bed … the bridemen take the bride’s stockings, and the bride maids the bridegroom’s; both sit down at the bed’s feet and fling the stockings over their heads’.
In the seventeenth century, Lady Castlemaine, Charles II’s mistress, once had herself married to her friend Mrs Stuart as a saucy joke which mirrored the contemporary ceremony of getting the bride ready for bedding. Their ‘wedding’ was solemnised with the aid of a ‘church service, and ribbons and a sack posset in bed, and flinging the stocking’. At the end of all the titillation, though, it was said that ‘Lady Castlemaine, who was the bridegroom, rose, and the King came and took her place’.
This idea that a newly married couple needed the encouragement of spectators persisted into the early nineteenth century, but by then it was starting to look old-fashioned. When Percy Bysshe Shelley eloped with and married Harriet Westbrook in 1811, he found himself blissfully alone at last with his bride in a bedroom in an Edinburgh
lodging house. Suddenly there was a knock at the door. It was the landlord, with the unwelcome news that ‘it is customary here at weddings for the guests to come, in the middle of the night, and wash the bride in whisky’. The sight of Shelley brandishing his pistols convinced the disappointed landlord that no whisky-washing would be taking place that particular night.
Only in the Victorian period does the bedroom door swing closed upon the newly married couple, though in her own journal Queen Victoria records her pleasure at having Albert, her new husband, help her on with her stockings. Once sexual matters had become a matter of private business for the couple involved, rather than a concern for their wider community and subject to open discussion, information grows harder to come by.
This changed once more with the 1950s revolution in Britain’s bedrooms. In this decade, British marriage rates were at their highest ever. It was partly a result of the post-war housing shortage: young people forced to live with their parents saw marriage as a step on the way to finding a home of their own. The return of the men from the war to the workplace meant that many women lost their jobs, or found their earning power reduced. So they devoted themselves instead to home improvement and enthusiastic baking.
The 1950s are often seen as a conservative, stable period, optimistic but with an undertone of prudery and repression. Despite this urge for conformity, though, a new model for marriage now emerged in which husband and wife were considered to be equals in a ‘companionate’ relationship. A mutually satisfying sex life began to be prized, and numerous authors went into print to help the nation achieve it.
Helena Wright was a pioneer with books such as The Sex Factor in Marriage (1930) and More About the Sex Factor in Marriage (1947), and this kind of writing ended up in the Marriage Guidance Council’s famous series of 1950s pamphlets. They now seem quaint, gingerly administering rather limited advice, but they did give much-needed information about sex in a straightforward fashion. (‘Husbands and wives should get rid of the feeling that there is anything indecent, immodest, or wrong about their sex relationship.’)
Additionally, books which actually spelt out that a man should not have intercourse with a woman against her will were still very necessary. ‘The first point to remember is that sexual intercourse must not be attempted till the wife is ready for it; and it is the husband’s business to make her ready,’ reads one of the Marriage Guidance Council’s guides. Meanwhile, the Family Planning Association, which promoted birth control, finally became respectable. Until 1956, when the Minister for Health, Iain Macleod, visited the association to celebrate its silver jubilee, the media had been forbidden to mention its existence and work.
Despite these steps forward, the respectable married couples of the 1950s who might have read and profited from the Marriage Guidance Council’s leaflets still remained largely ignorant and dismissive of homosexuality and pre-marital sex – both were still thought immoral and dangerous. But they would become much more acceptable after 1960 and the lifting of the ban on the publication of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. During the trial, the judge was widely derided for asking the jurors to imagine whether they would like their ‘wife or servants’ to read it. His idea of social relationships seemed deeply anachronistic. Now the Swinging Sixties would see more and more people having more than one partner.
So the image of twin beds flanking a Teasmade may represent repression to us today, but the seeds of the Swinging Sixties were planted in the bedrooms of the 1950s. Many think these seeds have sprouted and grown too vigorously, with porn available via the computer in the corner of many bedrooms, and children exposed to sexual imagery at a younger and younger age.
The fact that sex has become a matter for public conversation is a dramatic reversal of the silence of a hundred years ago. But it’s often pointed out that we’ve only exchanged one sort of silence for another. The Victorians were reticent about sex, yet they were far better than we are at talking openly and with acceptance about ageing, death, grief and mourning.
8 – Conception
Your breeches and your very balls be blessed!
Fourteenth-century compliment
Nowhere did biology determine female destiny more than in the area of fertility. For a princess, quite bluntly, your health and happiness depended upon your abilities in the bedroom, where your task was to provide your husband with an heir.
The queens who suffered accordingly included Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn (neither were strictly infertile, as both frequently conceived, but they produced only one healthy baby apiece). The Stuart Queen Anne became pregnant no less than seventeen times in a desperate but ultimately futile attempt to produce an heir. Royal doctors were always adamant that the failure lay with the woman, while the properties of royal sperm were never questioned. When Anne of Cleves, Henry VIII’s fourth wife, failed to produce a child, the king made sure that his physician Dr Butts spread word round the court that Henry – in truth by now quite possibly impotent – was very ‘able to do the Act with other than with her’ and still had wet dreams in the night.
At the other extreme end of the scale, we hear of distressingly fertile young women, like poor Elizabeth Chappin of Kent, a servant without a husband who was unfortunate enough to give birth in 1602. (This was despite the fact that recipe books often contained instructions for potions to ‘bring on the courses’, code for abortion. The herb rue was especially valued for its ability to cause uterine contractions.) Elizabeth’s parish elders wanted to know the name of the father, because unless he took responsibility she and her baby would become a charge upon the parish. Only in her very worst childbirth pains – while she was ‘wishing that all the devils in hell might tear her in pieces’ – did Elizabeth finally admit that ‘the right father of her child’ was her master and employer. He refused to help, she and her baby had to claim poor relief, and her life was ruined.
A single woman whose baby was stillborn stood in grave danger of being suspected of infanticide, hence the many heartbreaking court records which reveal women being sharply interrogated about bad birth experiences. Elizabeth Armitage, another spinster, gave birth in 1682 and told the magistrate that her labour pains had woken her in the night. Nobody came to help her, the baby was certainly born dead, and ‘she had had a night would have killed a horse’. In 1668, a court instructed a team of expert midwives to conduct a forensic examination of the clothes of a single woman accused of having done away with an illegitimate baby. They reported that her petticoat had indeed been ‘the first receptacle of a child born into the world very lately’, and that a murder charge should certainly be considered.
Men were never criminalised in the same way for becoming parents outside marriage – how could they be? The master who made his maid pregnant had huge power over her. Society saw him as the deputy of the king, indeed of God, in the little kingdom of his own household. To criticise him would be to suggest that there was something wrong with the social order, and this was impossible. In 1593, the House of Commons considered plans to punish men as well as women for having illegitimate children, but, as one member baldly put it, it wouldn’t work. The requirement to undergo a whipping ‘might chance upon gentlemen or men of quality, whom it were not fit to put to such a shame’.
For female servants in a large household, the predatory habits of their employers were a constant curse. The eighteenth-century Jane Peareth had the misfortune to work for the ‘low, lewd and wicked’ Mr Hall, who told her he had ‘lain with all his maids, and that he would lie with her’. Mr Hall’s wife, a straight-talking woman, told him ‘that if he must have a whore he should go abroad for one and not meddle with her maids’. But it cannot have led to domestic harmony.
Mary Mercer, Samuel Pepys’s maidservant, was high in her master’s favour, but had to endure his indulging himself daily by the ‘handling of her breasts in a morning when she dresses me, they being the finest that ever I saw in my life’. Eliza Haywood, author of A Present for a Servant-Maid (1743), ha
d some stout advice for maids like Mary who had to negotiate life in the house of an amorous master. On such occasions, a maid should ‘remonstrate to him the Sin and Shame he would involve you in’, Haywood warned. ‘Let no wanton Smile, or light coquet air give him room to suspect you are not much displeased with the Inclination he has for you.’ Jonathan Swift had more mercenary (if satirical) advice for the serving maid: ‘never allow him the smallest Liberty, not the squeezing of your Hand, unless he puts a Guinea into it … Five Guineas for handling your Breast is a cheap Pennyworth … never allow him the last Favour under a hundred Guineas, or a Settlement of twenty Pounds a Year for Life.’
These were wise words, for ‘servants and the poorer sort of woman have seldom an opportunity of concealing a Big Belly’, according to another commentator named Bernard Mandeville. But one particularly sad form of Georgian impregnation was performed by the ‘child getters’ whose services were known to be available for hire in prisons such as Newgate. They would enable convicted women to ‘plead their bellies’ and escape from the gallows for a few more months until their babies were born.
Illegitimate babies were no strangers even in high society, but there their birth could be much more easily hushed up. In the chapel of Georgian St James’s Palace, some babies mysteriously ‘dropped in the court’ were baptised; no one knew who their mothers were, but various Maids of Honour seemed suspiciously willing to stand as godmothers. By the early nineteenth century, poor Princess Sophia, daughter of George III, could not be found an appropriate Protestant prince as a husband because of a shortage in supply, and marriage to a commoner was out of the question. So, in desperation, she embarked upon an affair with one of the very few men she knew: an equerry of her father’s called Colonel Garth, thirty-two years older than herself and described by his colleagues as ‘a hideous old devil’. She gave up her child.