The Popish Midwife: A tale of high treason, prejudice and betrayal

by Annelisa Christensen

  Every laugh and frown line of Pierre’s sleeping face was more familiar to me than my own. I cherished the curl of his surprising dark lashes, the deep-set greying hairline, the slant of his crumpled narrow lips, and how his ageing skin hung loosely from his cheekbones onto his hand. This man had saved me over and over, and for him I would surely give my life, as I knew he would for me.

  That Pierre had watched over me was all the more endearing. I watched his stillness for some time, and the warmth that travelled through me had me try to reach out my hand to touch his face. But I could not move my arm, and I could not touch my husband’s dear face. I tried to speak. I still could not. Nothing came but a croak.

  Though barely audible, the noise was enough to wake Pierre. His eyes came upon me the moment he opened them as though he had never slept. When he saw I was awake, he sprung to his feet, took my hand in his, knelt by the bed and thanked God for my deliverance.

  ‘Lizzie. Lizzie, ma chérie. You are returned to me!’

  Not waiting for any reply from me, he told me I was lost for two nights and a day, and he had feared for my life more than he had ever feared for anything. The doctor had come and bandaged my chest tight, and all he could do was pray, he said, and pray he had. All he could do was hope, and hope held his hand as he had held mine. Memories of our every time together had given him strength to pray such times would continue.

  On the eighth Instant2 of April, almost fourteen nights after I nearly died, I insisted on being carried in the coach to the Sessions of Peace to see Susanna and John Atterbury found guilty of their violence against me, only to be insulted by the paltry sum of twenty shillings they were fined for my grave injury and for my husband despairing for my life. Their children – John, Sara and Elizabeth – though they had intended me harm and attacked me, were out of britches but not considered old enough to be charged, so they were merely cautioned. I made sure to give them the evil eye throughout the hearing though I had no doubt from their gestures and expressions they had no remorse for what they had done.

  2 Archaic term for eighth day of April.

  As far it concerned the judges, the Atterburys’ attack on me was merely another chapter in the growing book of such assaults. That I took a foreign husband made it worse to some than being foreign myself. Foreigners were first to be hoisted and beaten, along with Catholics, for the cause of any calamity, whether plague or fire or other. Again, I say, I was doubly condemned, and the judges spared no sympathy.

  With the advance of the Catholic faith across the continent into Holland, many feared its poison would soon infect our kingdom through the war with the Dutch. The judges told me I could have suffered the fate of other unfortunate Catholics all over the city. I should be grateful, they said, I had not finished my life dangling from the nearest sign, or at the end of a dark alley with a knife in my back.

  ‘Tis thirteen years since the plague,’ I said when I was allowed to speak, ‘yet those of my religion are unforgiven for so many carried away in dead carts and thrown into common graves of every parish. Tis a dozen years since the Great Fire, yet we are still blamed for a lazy baker’s folly. One nature’s disease, the other an accident. I ask every one of you, when will truth be unveiled? When will blame for Spain’s death, torture and inquisition fall where it belongs, in Spain?’

  My speech only served to act as bellows on embers.

  But now I knew the fear of persecution.

  Such persecutions, of the Protestant minority by Catholics in Spain and other places, were repeated here by Protestants against the Catholic minority. ‘Twas the very same oppression and torment with roles merely reversed. What difference the matter of sides but the place the sides are taken?

  2

  9th day of January, 1679

  I made it my habit, on occasion, to break bread with prisoners of the debtors’ prison so that I might appreciate something of what they must endure. The sparse meal was all they would have, but barely filled a space in their stomachs nor kept them warm. I would not eat more than each of them was given, as I sat with them awhile and heard the latest prison news.

  On this bitter, bitter day in January that I would tell about, I left the room they called The Castle, and tightened my cloak against the cold, and outside met Maria Desermeau and Mrs Mary Ayrey, who came hither from other directions. Although we were glad enough of the company and greeted one another cordially, recent memory of the conditions inside removed any reason to smile. This group of good women I had established a year ago had the common aim of alleviating the suffering of prisoners in whatever way we could.

  ‘What is the debtors’ lot? Fare they well?’ asked Mrs Ayrey.

  ‘Well enough, considering they are starved, frozen and filthy,’ I said. ‘They will die of cold before they die of dysentery, though their souls may die from lack of light ere that happens. How fared those you saw?’

  ‘Dire, Mother Cellier. As with the debtors, they are so cold, the rags they wear barely cover half their skin, and the other half is damp and exposed to icy stone that saps any warmth they might glean from meagre rations.’

  ‘We must find more blankets for them.’

  ‘I know a stable where some sit on the side unused.’ This came from a youngster with Mrs Ayrey, who I knew to be barely out of the schoolroom. Her father had died in prison, and she now tried to improve the lot of others that were equally undeserving of their fate. ‘I could take maybe one or two, if they are still there tonight?’

  ‘An excellent idea, Miss.’ I took out my purse and gave her a couple of coins to cover the cost of the blankets. ‘But we will not become thieves, no better than some inside these wall. Please offer this recompense to the owner.’ She wore no gloves, and her hands fumbled to clasp the coins as she put them into her drawstring purse. ‘Is there any other urgency?’ I asked the women, noting their ruddy cheeks and noses.

  Prison work was hard on the stomach and hard on fair skin, but we never forgot we could leave that place at the end of the day, and we would warm our hands by a burning fire and eat hot broth before we slept. Those left lying on the cold stone floor, their own water soaking into the tattered remnants of their clothes, had less chance to see the morning each and every night they remained there, especially during the winter. Summer brought its own problems of stench and disease, but they were not the problems of now. The cold and lack of food were immediate and demanded our attention.

  ‘We will find whatever we can to cover them up and keep them warm. Will the Turn-key let us give them?’ Mrs Ayrey rightly considered.

  ‘I know not the answer to that. They have been stricter lately. But we must try,’ I said. As the eldest, they often deferred to me as if I had every answer, and I allowed them to do so since, more times than not, it allowed me my own way.

  The winter sun already sunk behind the buildings as we talked, and so we walked towards the Gate-Lodge.

  ‘Might I ask if you are full recovered, Mother Cellier? Our concern for you has been diligent.’

  ‘I am most grateful for your concern. I am much recovered.’ I considered the pains I still suffered in my joints, particularly when the cold wind bit through the layers. My convalescence after the beating had been long and arduous, and even nine months after the episode, my chest continued to complain when I exerted myself too much, but worse was how jumpy I had become when I saw any huddle of persons in the street that looked as if it might have a purpose other than good.

  ‘Écoutez. Qu’est-ce que?’ said Maria, stopping suddenly. She moved her head as if to locate an elusive sound and frowned.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Mrs Ayrey.

  ‘Perhaps ‘tis a dog.’ The young woman with Mrs Ayrey held up her finger, signing for quiet.

  We listened to the silence so intently, when the sound came it caused every one of us to jump with fright.

  ‘Hark! What noise is that? Can it be an unnatural
animal of the night?’

  We listened some more. Our ears were assailed by sporadic sounds: horrible groaning interspersed with a terrible squealing and screeching that sent shivers through my scalp, skin and into the base of my stomach, making me want to expel what little I recently ate.

  That was no animal, of that I was certain. It was a sound I would never forget. It was a sound that echoed a woman tortured nine months since. Poor Mrs Potter. It was sound caused only by the agony of body and searing of spirit that one man could inflict on another man or animal, the sound of a broken, or breaking, man.

  ‘It comes from in there.’ The young girl pointed towards the Condemned Hole, or simply The Hole as it was called, the dungeon where unspeakable acts took place, so they said.

  The sound came once more, and again brought to mind the midwife I had yet to find in this city, that should be charged for murder if I did. Harris, the rough and toothless turnkey, stood near the entrance, looking the other way, his occasional flinch and the tightness of his features clearly demonstrating his failure to ignore the sound.

  ‘Harris,’ I asked. ‘What goes on in there?’ Harris had worked there a long time, so I was surprised to see any thing disconcert him. He could not hide his guilt as he informed us, ‘‘Tis old Mrs Turner having a long labour.’

  ‘If that is a woman on her birthing bed then I am old Mother Hubbard! Are you ashamed to tell us the truth, Harris?’ He knew I knew he lied. I looked at him closely until he looked away.

  ‘Tis a woman in labour, I tell you.’

  ‘In that case,’ I said, calling his bluff, ‘I am a midwife and I will aid her with these good friends of mine.’ I started towards the source of the noise.

  ‘You cannot go in there.’ Harris had the decency to look to his feet as he spoke.

  ‘Harris, if there is a woman needing my skills you had better let me past.’

  Perhaps he foresaw himself as the next poor soul in the The Hole, and on the wrong side of unspeakable acts, for he straightened and became sharp and scathing in his response.

  ‘What! What can you do, woman? You cannot do anything for that one! Go! Go back to your servant filled homes and stop your pretence with the lives of villains!’

  I did not waiver.

  ‘If it is a man in there, Harris,’ I persisted, ‘what is he called?’

  There came a scream, like a hundred wolves at night, redoubled by the inside of that cavernous entrance.

  Each of us stood silent and listened. I could barely breathe. That cry was of a man in more pain than any woman giving birth to a sideways child, worse than a man with his leg crushed beneath the iron wheel of a cart. The sound would stretch winter nights in the coming weeks longer than they should ever have been, a gentle torture in comparison, but one that would replay over and over into every silence.

  I took hold of the cross around my neck and gripped it tightly, praying for the fellow’s soul, and for the strength to save him. My fellow alms givers also assumed a stance of resolve. Heads bent, we prayed together for his deliverance from pain. When we had done, we confronted the turnkey once more.

  ‘Let us down there, Harris,’ I said, confronting him face on. ‘We must stop this now.’

  Harris had passed the moment by when he might be sympathetic to us, and came down on the other side. ‘Return to your own business, Papist whores. You are not welcome here. Begone with you!’

  ‘Some of us be Catholic, but some are not,’ I said. ‘If we are or are not makes no difference to our charity, nor does it alter our resolve. Where is your compassion that you can stand by here and do nothing? That man is worse than dying!’

  ‘Papists or Papist-lover, the one is as bad as the other! Begone from here!’ Then with a more urgent gesture, ‘Begone, I tell you!’

  I sensed his imperative nature was not that his job required him to be sharp, but that the screams, enough to make any man weep, made him jittery. Indeed, the women standing before him, tougher than many, cowered at each harrowing howl. The screams mingled with the screeches of some metal thing grating against metal, or perhaps stone, was enough to make us all wish to run.

  I rarely took notice of Harris – a useless scab that spent half his time looking into an empty ale mug, and the other half engaged in achieving that view – sparing only obligatory pleasantries to keep in with him. He was far from sweet-talking now.

  We were no longer mere gadflies biting his back, a nuisance to be swiped away, but witnesses to some heinous act, outlawed and renounced in this country for more than one hundred years. If he were discovered marking time with us he might lose more than his job. His own and his family’s lives might depend on his ridding us from this gate. Later, when I thought of it, I knew how fear played the larger part in his next actions. I did not condone what he did, but I understood it.

  ‘Get thee gone from here, Mrs Cellier! Take your women and go!’ With which he took up the broadsword he had left lying in the shelter, an unnatural weapon for him despite his occupation, and swung the heavy iron round him like a madman. Then he raised it above his head and ran at us, screaming in a way we could not ignore. In horror, we also screamed and fled towards the gate, with him flailing the blade back and forth in the air behind us, more dangerous for his lack of authority over it.

  I do not know when he stopped chasing us, but we did not stop running until we had left the Lodge behind us, and escaped through the main entrance.

  There, the four of us stood outside the gate with our backs against the rough stone wall of Turner’s Shop. Heaving with exertion, the cold banished from our bodies by the effort, the bellowed air from our mouths hung suspended in a vapour cloak before us.

  Even as I caught my breath, another scream chased after us. Other passers-by stopped to hear what sound that was, asking each other if they knew. Obviously puzzled, they waited a while to identify it when it came again but, being quieter here, most walked away shaking their heads unsatisfied, the mystery unsolved. It was not a sound anyone expected to hear, nor recognise, since it so often stayed behind closed doors.

  Or in isolated houses in the countryside, as I remembered from my own childhood.

  More than Mrs Potter’s dying screams, it conjured up every worst nightmare in me from my younger years: the large, wooden entry door bursting open to admit Cromwell’s men; their taking whatever they wanted in the way of possessions or the body, violently and without permission. I saw my mother held down by those men. Then there were cries and screams as well.

  Those attackers were the very ones to cause me to question both my own religion and the other. I could not deny, I did not wish to be in league with such cruel devil-beasts and, upon my soul, their very actions against those of their own kind turned me to the religion they reviled, and put me into a religion that gave meaning to my life I would otherwise never have known.

  But, terrible as were those far distant memories, I could not recollect any night that I could match what noise came hence from the dark entrance of The Hole. Not one of the horrors I imagined the poor wretch suffering could match the severity of these screams. Perhaps unimaginable horrors were always worse than imagined ones. Whatever that man experienced was the worst Hell and had no right to be found on this Earth.

  Without warning, footsteps came fast towards us from the gate. Marie heard them too, because we both stood out from the wall together and stepped in the way of the runner. He was dressed in the garb of an officer of the prison, a ring of keys jangled rust against his fitted coat, mud clung to tight breeches and his cheap periwig was sent askew by such a fast pace that he would not have slowed down if the two of us had not stood in his way. Even then he tried to pass through us, as though we were insignificant in his need to escape.

  Mrs Ayrey caught hold of his arm and said, ‘For crying out loud! What hounds chase you so fleet-footed from the prison?’

  Big eyed, the officer looke
d at the hand on his arm, momentarily taken aback that he was stopped, as if he had not seen us there. ‘What?’

  ‘I asked you, what are they doing in there?’ Mrs Ayrey said emboldened

  The officer looked back towards Harris guarding the door, shook his head and pulled his arm from Mrs Ayrey’s grasp. ‘I dare not tell you.’

  I interjected, ‘‘Tis a man upon the rack. I’ll lay my life on it!’

  Again the officer shook his head. ‘I know not, but I do know that if I stop here those demons will surely come for me.’

  ‘Who is it? Is it the silversmith? Is it Prance?’ I asked.

  I heard there were some none too happy with the goldsmith of Covent Garden. A short time since, he took the part with Titus Oates as a witness to the murder of the anti-Catholic knight, Sir Edmundbury Godfrey that London was in such a buzz about. They said the murder was under instruction of some Catholic priests.

  Having first denied any involvement, Prance then turned about to confess his part of the murder, only to recant it all once again before the king, proclaiming the innocence of himself and those he had named. It was to be supposed, it was one thing to lie before the council, and another to perjure yourself before His Majesty. They said the king promised him a pardon to allay his fears, for what was to become of him if he spoke the truth?

  Word in the prison was that the lives of the three men– Mr Hill, Mr Green and Mr Berry – rested upon his not spinning another time, for he had claimed to hold guard for them, and two others, whilst they strangled the knight and ran him through with his own sword. When Prance denied his part the second time, he was returned to Newgate, whether for the first lies or the next, and kept in the insufferable coffin-cell they called the Little Ease, so that he may decide against his foolishness and speak another time for Oates.

  ‘Please, Madam, do not ask me, for I dare not tell you. Everything I know is that I cannot more listen to this noise. Release me.’ He had already released himself from Mrs Ayrey’s grasp, so his request was to release him from our company. With clenched lips, my neck stiff with strain, I could barely nod, but with this, and another scream from yonder, he took his leave, running in the direction of Holborn faster than before, as if the Devil himself were after his soul.