A tale of high treason, prejudice and betrayal
Annelisa Christensen
The Popish Midwife
Published by The Conrad Press in the United Kingdom 2016
Tel: +44(0)1227 472 874
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ISBN 978-1-78301-967-0
Copyright © Annelisa Christensen, 2016
The moral right of Annelisa Christensen to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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To my parents, David and Signe Green,
who taught me to be true to myself
‘I hope the God of Truth and Justice will protect me,
and bring me through them all,
and pluck off the vails,
and discover both Truth and Frauds barefaced.’
-Elizabeth Cellier (1680)
‘If I did say so I lyed’
-Elizabeth Cellier (1681)
Preface
London, England
‘Hurrah! Hurrah! The king is taking his throne!’
On the 29th day of May, 1660, eleven years of Oliver Cromwell’s strict puritan rule that had begun with the execution of the first King Charles in 1649, ends with the restoration to the throne of the second King Charles, his son. A weight is lifted from London’s people. For the first time in eleven years, groups meet openly in taverns and coffee houses without being arrested; lords and ladies dare to wear colour again without fear of a turn in the stocks; and the assembly of people at fairs and celebrations is actively encouraged after years of bans.
Even Cromwell’s men tired of the strict soberness and austerity of the period, the Interregnum, following the end of the Civil War.
Suppression had been the only way for Cromwell to prevent reprisals from the Cavaliers, Royalist supporters, but now Cromwell is dead. His own parliament would rather the rightful King Charles II were fetched from exile in France and returned to the throne than have the country run by Cromwell’s weak son, or any longer bear the chaos reigning since their leader’s death.
It is time for England’s people to heal.
Though there is rejoicing for the return of the king, there is a darker side to London: there is no sanitation. All human garbage and waste is thrown to rot in the streets, attracting large numbers of rats. And with the rats comes the Black Death, an epidemic of the bubonic plague, killing thousands every day. Fathers, sons, mothers, daughters leave their dead in the street for the death carts to collect and dispose of.
From Sunday, the second day of September to Wednesday, the fifth day of September in the year of 1666, the plague is ended by a baker’s accident. A small fire begins in his oven and, fanned by strong wind, soon spreads through the wooden city, burning most everything in its path.
The plague had wiped out over seventy thousand of London’s people. The fire erases more than thirteen thousand homes.
People have already been through so much, yet there is more to come. With regular news of the ongoing war with Holland and, further, the torture of Protestants in Mediterranean countries and on the continent in the continuing Spanish Inquisition, people fear for the safety of their religion and their way of life. Strangers and foreigners are potential threats. Catholics are seen as worse than any other, for surely their ceremonies of eating the Lord’s body and blood are sacrilegious, their use of trinkets and idols violate the law of the Church of England, and their devotion to the Pope is traitorous to the king and his religion?
As the decade proceeds, anti-Catholic hysteria heightens: Catholics are banned from any government or civil post and even from the city itself. Catholics not yet gaoled are often beaten in the street. Priests are hanged; drawn and quartered for treason, for it is clear they cannot be loyal to both the king and the Pope. Loyalty must be to one or another.
Titus Oates is embittered by his expulsion from the Jesuit training college in St Omer for Sodomy. He quickly plans his revenge on Father Thomas Whitbread, and gathers to his side all those against the succession to the throne of the Duke of York, James, brother of King Charles and self-professed Catholic.
Oates ‘discovers’ a Popish1 plot, allegedly devised by the Catholic Duke of York to murder the king, his brother, and place himself on the throne. He produces papers he’d apparently found, naming and incriminating many priests, with Father Whitbread on top of the list.
1Catholic. Often used in a derogatory way.
Charles himself is reluctant to believe a man who cannot keep straight even simple stories, or descriptions of royalty and gentlemen he claims to know on the continent, whom the king knows well. However, the Government presses King Charles to allow full investigation, and he has Oates swear an affidavit to the magistrate, Sir Edmund-Bury Godfrey.
Sir Godfrey mysteriously disappears and is later found murdered. Oates is quick to point out how his death gives credence for the Popish Plot against the king. Soon, Oates and his men set out to accuse every priest and Catholic that ever crossed his path, until the gaols are overcrowded with the unjustly accused.
Into these gaols, a few charitable gentlewomen bring alms to prisoners, along with news and information from the coffee houses and courts. In exchange, they leave with vital accounts of the prisoners to share with families and other interested parties.
One of these women is Elizabeth Cellier, once midwife to the barren first Duchess of York, Anne Hyde, may her soul rest in peace.
1
26th day of March, 1678
Halfway home, the putrid smell of the cages in the Enchanted Castle of Newgate still stifled my nose. Though the street odours were vile, their comparable sweetness cleared the gagging substance that stuck to my airways.
His Majesty’s gaol overflowed with those falsely accused of plotting against the king. How those poor wretches lived on such solid foulness day after day I could not tell, but could only surmise the body, being a wondrous thing, must alter itself to survive when the spirit gives it strength to do so. At the least, being free to leave, I was not forced to test this idea for myself.
Unlike in the countryside, where the winter season tests a person most fully, I pondered whether the worst season in the city is the summer, when a lavender soaked hand-kerchief is small protection against swarms of flies circling unavoidable shoe-deep waste. Unavoidable only if you are not well enough placed to use a coach or hackney carriage. Moreover, the best season in London is the frozen winter, when ice locks tight all noxious odours beneath the feet, and casts the Thames in such ice that it becomes the place of the Winter Fayre.
That time was past, and now regular rain had washed much dirt into the river. Despite the vernal purging, there still remained a single stream of sucking
mud in the middle channel of the street that, in my distraction, I stepped deep into. The putrid dregs of city life drenched my shoe and spilled over the top of it. The awful day might have ended there, with my thinking that the day had shown me its worst had it not been for the sky squeezing out a sudden shower, but I would yet be downtrodden by Dame Nature, for the rain was a blessing to me. I raised my face and thanked God for the cool, clear water that washed over me and cleansed me, lifted my skirts out of the gutter to lessen the spattering and splashing of the muck and continued walking, trying to wash my filthy foot as much as I could in any fresh puddle before I reached home.
Even as it purged the stench from my nostrils and clothes, the rain could not reach inside and expel every persistent sordid memory of the day from my mind. I blinked equally persistent raindrops from my lashes as I remembered the morning’s events.
‘Madame Cellier! Madame Cellier, aidez-moi s’il vous plaît!’ Marie Desermeau, the young Huguenot midwife that lived near by me, pleaded as we left Newgate.
Though my French was much improved, she spoke fast in her mother tongue, and I did not comprehend all she then said.
‘Parlez lentement, Marie. Je ne peux pas vous comprendre,’ I said. Speak slowly, Marie, I cannot understand you. The French my husband had taught me was little enough to comprehend his people.
Using a combination of gestures and the occasional English word, she asked that I call on the wife of a local carpenter, Mrs Potter whom, she feared, did not receive proper care as she should. I did not question that the woman was Catholic, else I would not ever be asked to visit with her.
Nor would a Protestant midwife do the task of a Catholic sister. Each tended her own. That strict law caused the death of many a poor mother and infant, but was, nevertheless, the law we abided by. Religion had no bearing on success in the art and, indeed, some of our kind on both sides had no training at all and dealt us badly.
Marie communicated her fear that the one tending the carpenter’s wife was such a one. She gestured until I understood that this was a wicked, wicked woman and I should not tarry, so I did not.
My arrival at the house was greeted by screams that rent the air, with so much urgency that I deemed the woman already in delivery and the baby wrongly placed. The cries and howls were such that my heart stopped, for no person hearing that unparalleled noise expelled from living flesh could believe life would remain long in a body! My knock was unanswered and, fearing the woman to be birthing alone and in danger, I went in.
Manners and civilities be damned, I hurried through the house, following my ears to the source, though at times the noise perplexed me by seeming to come from all directions. I barely noticed the man kneeling beside the fireplace, praying. He stoked the customary fire to keep evil spirits from taking the innocent newborn soul. Kneeling beside him, a boy of six or seven covered his ears with his hands and cried.
No child should hear such agonies in his mother!
I did not waste time asking if I might enter; the woman’s cries were invitation enough. Neither stood to stop me as I continued to the back chamber. I expected to find the woman with gossips – kinswomen or neighbours – but found a lone midwife, performing heinous rituals banned from the craft for a matter of centuries, if ever they were acceptable.
Her red cloak lay over a nearby chair, but she may as well have worn it for all the red that covered her. Every part of her was stained with the blood of the woman, or maybe the unborn child’s; it could have been either. In her hand she wielded as a sword an instrument, the likes I did never wish to see in the hands of such a one, or any other. She poked the long stick, unsmoothed by any carpenter, curved at the end like a shepherd hook in and out of the woman’s womb to hook out the baby, missed and tried again, oblivious to the pain she caused the mother. The pool of blood laid testimony to how ineffectual her method. She murdered the woman with ignorance.
‘Desist, woman! What hellish deed is this you do!’ I shouted, surprising her into stopping her abhorrent act. ‘Unhand that devil’s stick!’
‘Stay out of my business, Mrs Cellier, this is my task!’
Her meaning was clear. She would take payment for it, not me, with nary a thought for mother nor unborn child. How she knew my name I did not give a thought to.
‘I cannot allow it. You murder the woman and her child!’ I grabbed the stick as she made to start again. She slapped me with her bloodied hand, but I held fast and pulled. Then I slapped her back. She put her hand to her cheek and bloodied it. She let go of the stick.
‘Do not dare teach me my job, French leech! Some of us must eke a living from the poor, and some of us must take any job, even a doomed job as this. Go away and drink from the gold cup you keep in the palace!’
‘Remember your oath, woman. Rich and poor alike! And if this woman is doomed, ‘tis all your doing!’ I spat on the floor.
‘Oath be damned!’ She spat toward me rather than the floor. ‘I took none. When they denied us licence, they took our living. This stubborn baby must come forth now. I have another laying in today.’
‘Then let me have this one,’ I said. ‘You cannot be in two places at one time.’
‘No, this one is mine. ‘Tis I that tended her these last months.’
‘You deserve no payment for your foul work here. Leave now, or shall I call a magistrate and have you indicted for assault.’ I tried to snatch the stick from her hand, but she held fast, and pulled back.
‘What! But you cannot be serious. I have done the most work on this!’
‘Still your busy hand, woman! Your work here is that of the Devil, and you cannot take pride in it. If that woman loses more blood she will surely die.’ If I could not save this one’s life, I might at the least prevent further torture.
‘Her baby refuses to come forth, and is stuck fast as Excalibur in the stone!’ The woman stopped her jabbing, freed the bloody stick from my hand and pointed it at me. I grabbed it again.
‘Stuck? Has the baby released its waters then? It was my understanding she was to lay in another month.’
‘‘Tis her time, I tell you.’ She tried to raise the foul hook once more, but I held tight.
‘Well, if it is her time then leave me to tend her, for you are not fit to be at her side!’
Something in my voice must have warned her of my intention. She looked at me warily. ‘I will not leave until I have taken payment.’
Without a thought, I opened my purse and gave her some coins.
‘Take these and begone.’ I meant no reward for this devil, but wished her leave so I might attend the poor tortured creature atop the bed.
The moment she had silver in her bloodied palm, the evil incarnate dropped the coins in her pocket, threw down the stick and wiped her hands on her filthy apron.
‘You may clean your hands with my grease,’ I said, thinking of the next woman she would attend.
She paid me no mind, but took her red cloak from the chair, donned it, then left saying no more. I intended to relate the story of this woman to all that would listen, that none other would give her custom. Her future prey would be only the innocent and ignorant my word did not reach.
Looking to the bed, I felt shame to wear the same red cloth. Mrs Potter had stopped screaming and lay bleeding and still. Her silence was ominous. I doubted if there was any single thing I could do for her or the baby.
I took the pot of goose fat from my bag and cleaned my hands, while shouting to the husband to boil some water as a matter of urgency. Soon thereafter, Mr Potter came in wary as a man found guilty of treason awaiting sentence, and looked to the bed.
‘Does my wife live? Never have I heard such noise in childbirth!’
I thought of the boy covering his ears, rocking back and forth with wet cheeks. He might be motherless tonight, and the man a widower.
‘She is direly wounded.’
�
��Has that creature murdered her?’ he asked, gesturing towards the door.
Betraying my kind, I nodded, but comforting words hid from me.
‘Will the baby…is it...?’ He did not have to finish. I shrugged. There was no way of knowing what damage that monster did until I examined the poor woman.
‘Bring the water as soon as it is ready,’ I said, as I returned to the bedside.
I did not wish the man to see what I was to do to his poor wife.
It did not take long to confirm Mrs Potter’s heart no longer beat, and her breath did not wet the looking glass. I should look to the unborn child.
With no reason now to think of the mother, still bleeding over the bed, I reached my hand deep inside and felt the baby’s soft warmth... and a movement so small I might have missed it had I not stayed steady. I could not feel the head – it was breach, perhaps that saved it. If it would survive the inflictions of that stick it must be taken from the body now. When a woman had no life left in her, the child would not choose to come out the customary way. I must cut her open and take it out.
I considered my tools in the open bag. Amid small glass lotion bottles and articles for a poultice were a knife, forceps, a needle and cloths, as well as some alcohol. I took the knife, honed sharp for such times as this. Had the woman been alive, I would have set it in the fire to cleanse, but such a time-consuming task was needless now. I opened the poor woman’s mouth, so that the child might receive breath, rolled her onto her left side and cut smart and neat into her belly.
I withdrew the infant. It no longer moved. Was it too late?
I wiped the remains of the sac from the face, stuck my finger into the tiny black mouth to check for blockage, and then took the tender little ankles in one hand and hung the small body upside down and slapped it hard to clear its lungs. I did not know if it was still warm from its mother or from its own self. There was damage to its legs from that woman’s stick but it seemed otherwise whole.
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