Accidents of Providence

by Stacia M. Brown

  She rose from the stone seat and stepped toward the far edge of the hill, which gave way to an encroaching thicket of rosebushes before beginning the long downward slide into wilderness. Legally this was still part of the Church of the Refuge’s property, but the pastor had abandoned this patch, had given up maintaining it. This was the place. Mary had purchased the burial plot with her own earnings. She moved forward, lifting her skirts to avoid tripping over field maple roots gnarled like old knuckles in the grasses. The mist hung heavier here than at the crest of the hill, and the trees shut out the light. She pushed through the bushes. Briars clung to her stockings. Behind the roses waited a secluded grove, guarded from the elements. It was a quiet plot, a mound of earth no larger than a confessional.

  Then Mary did what she came there to do. She did what any elder brother finally will do when he learns his curse is not to bear the consequences of breaking the law but to endure the long loneliness of upholding it. She pulled from her hip pocket a single white flower, tied around the stem with a sea green scarf. It was the same color scarf Leveler women had knotted in their hair as they streamed through the streets of London for the funeral of Rachel’s brother, for the army’s martyr. She left the colors beside the little girl, and then she stood there for a moment, and prayed safe passage.

  Afterword: Secret Births in Early Modern England

  The infant-murder trials of early modern England can be compared to the witch hunts of colonial North America, and some historians have identified common roots. Each reflected a shared Puritan concern with the damaging consequences of sin and the concealment of sin—the attempt to hide a trespass. Each also suggested a distrust of persons, especially women, who stood on the margins of the local community, and each attempted to control and regulate these women in ways that reduced whatever imagined threat they posed to the identity, cohesion, and moral order of the community.

  Infant-murder trials in early modern England—infanticide was not a word commonly used during this period—typically targeted the poor and the unmarried, usually women and girls of humble descent. Determining if an infant had been stillborn, had died of natural causes during or shortly after birth, or had died from neglect or an act of violence was notoriously difficult. The draconian law of 1624 attempted to resolve the prosecutorial problem of insufficient evidence by capitalizing on the defendant’s reluctance to speak; the law turned the act of concealment into proof of guilt. Put differently, the law stripped these women of the one defense upon which they might have relied in other circumstances—their silence. By conflating the concealment of the death of an illegitimate child with murder, the 1624 statute left little room for mercy, for pleas of accidental death, or for a defense that took into account the reasons prompting the mother’s behavior, whatever that action (or inaction) might have been. Although Rachel’s story and the contents of her trial are fictional, the dialogue in her trial is modeled loosely on transcripts from the Sessions House in Old Bailey covering infanticide trials in the late seventeenth century. These trials rarely asked about motive and focused instead on the material evidence—what could be seen, touched, and quantified, such as the condition of the child’s body, the state of the bedclothes, and the verification of the pregnancy. Defendants did not often speak at these trials; those who did usually did not speak at length. Historian Allison May has noted that this behavior can be understood in light of larger social conditions. During a pregnancy and after a traumatic delivery, an unmarried woman’s survival depended in no small part on her ability to keep silent, to deny what was happening. It is not so strange that she might struggle to speak in front of a courtroom; she had spent much of the previous year doing exactly the opposite—trying to remain silent.

  When a case such as Rachel’s was brought to trial, the judge and jurors and prosecutor could ask questions of the witness in whatever order they wanted—I suspect that chaos sometimes prevailed. I am not a legal scholar, and my depiction of Rachel’s trial relies far more on historical imagination than on any formal training in legal history. I was not able to verify whether or not witnesses during the specific time period of 1649 to 1650 were allowed to volunteer their testimony over a prosecutor’s objections, as I chose to imagine Elizabeth doing. But the transcripts of court cases from later decades and into the early eighteenth century suggested that friends and family members sometimes took it upon themselves to vouch for the character of the defendant without awaiting an invitation from judge or prosecutor.

  In the eighteenth century, public opinion in England gradually began to sway toward leniency as more people began to sympathize with the plight of the unwed mother, and as the law’s assumption that concealing an infant’s death was tantamount to murder began to come under increasing question. With the rise of modern judicial practices and new theories of the self as a complicated and competing array of instincts, drives, longings, principles, and impulses, infanticide trials began to incorporate accounts of motive into defendants’ cases. The motive most often pleaded was temporary insanity—which, one might argue, is not so much a motive as an attempt to prove a motive’s absence. The insanity plea marked a different kind of appeal than the mid-seventeenth-century argument from ignorance—the claim made by some women that they did not learn they were pregnant until they went to the outhouse (or house of office) to relieve themselves and there suffered a sudden miscarriage or stillbirth. Over the span of two centuries, then, our thinking about women in these situations has traveled a curious course, from actions made out of ignorance to actions undertaken by reason of insanity. One could argue that this is not a significant improvement.

  Some seventeenth-century Englishwomen attempted to resolve their plights by ending their pregnancies prematurely, either alone or with the help of a midwife. Their methods included bloodlettings from the foot and the ingesting of steel filings and herbal abortifacients. The women who undertook these actions did not see themselves as ending pregnancy so much as restoring or bringing back the menstrual cycle. To us this might sound like a mental sleight of hand. But in the seventeenth century, pregnancy was a more contested and negotiable state than it is considered today. In early modern England, it was indeed possible to be “a little bit pregnant.”

  I am indebted to, among many other excellent resources, Laura Gowing’s “Secret Births and Infanticide in England,” in Past and Present 156 (August 1997), pages 87–115, which explores the “collective trauma” of illegitimate childbirth during the early modern period, particularly the effect of these births on relations among women, on the telling and keeping of secrets, and on societal ideas about maternal shame, allegiance, and remorse. Any errors in historical research or misjudgments in creative interpretation are wholly mine, of course, and should not be attributed to my sources.

  Author's Note

  Accidents of Providence is a work of fiction that borrows from history. The story takes place during the first year of the English interregnum, the tumultuous republican period that began with the 1649 execution of Charles I and the establishment of the English Commonwealth, continued with the Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell and later Richard Cromwell (1653–1659), and ended with the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660, when Charles II (son of Charles I) was returned to the English throne after an overseas exile.

  I drew some of my descriptions, characters, and events directly from historical artifacts and sources. Others are composites based on historical artifacts and sources but reinvented or recrafted for this story. I also invented descriptions for characters, places, and situations about which the historical record remains silent or unclear or where the story itself seemed to prompt it. For example, while we know that after the Great Fire of 1666, there was a windmill on top of Newgate Prison to provide ventilation, I could find no verifiable record of the windmill’s existence in the decades prior, so I simply chose to imagine it being there as early as the 1640s. To take another example, the collapsing of the scaffold at the Sessions House at the beginning of Rachel
’s trial is an imaginary event with a verifiable historical precedent: before the start of John Lilburne’s treason trial at Guildhall, the scaffolding inside the courthouse collapsed, delaying the proceedings.

  Historians have written a great deal about the English Levelers, and there are wide-ranging opinions about their influence, their ideas, their organization, their views on women, their activities, their household practices, their religious beliefs, and their members. Revisionist scholarship questions their existence as a coherent or unified group, claiming that accounts of the Levelers and their influence are exaggerated. At the other end of the spectrum are those traditionalists who see the Levelers as the principal forerunners of the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence. I have permitted myself to sidestep these scholarly disagreements in favor of imagining the Levelers’ inner circle as it might have looked in the final months of 1649, the waning days of their influence.

  Some of the characters in this book are based on real people who lived in London during the seventeenth century. I have combined verifiable information about their life histories with my own ideas about their personalities and with my own story line. John Lilburne was a writer, lieutenant colonel in the Parliamentary army, and well-known leader of the English Levelers. Although it is debated how organized the Leveler movement was after 1649, we know that Elizabeth Lilburne, John’s wife, led a march or two on her husband’s behalf in an attempt to obtain his release from prison. Elizabeth also seems to have been involved with several “petitions of women” that sought the Levelers’ release. We know that Elizabeth gave birth to one of her children in Newgate and seems to have named one of her sons Tower in honor of the prison her husband frequented. She fell ill with smallpox in 1649, and though she survived, she lost her two boys to the disease. John was released from the Tower in time to say goodbye to them. He returned soon after.

  Katherine Chidley was a haberdasher and Independent preacher who published several theological treatises and was known for despising Presbyterian conformity. She founded a church with her son. William Kiffin was a prosperous merchant and Particular Baptist minister. At one point he enjoyed a close collaboration with the Levelers, as did many of the independent churches, but in a period of shifting political and religious alliances, this bond did not last. Kiffin was rumored to be behind some of the personal attacks on William Walwyn’s character in the late 1640s. Gilbert Mabbott was a newsman and writer who edited the Moderate for a time before being removed by opponents who accused him of sympathizing with the Levelers.

  William Walwyn, husband of Anne and father of “almost 20 children,” as he later phrased it, was a leading intellectual force behind the Leveler program in the 1640s, though he dropped out of active participation after 1649. There is no historical evidence that he was involved in any kind of clandestine relationship, although his enemies in the Baptist and Congregational churches liked to accuse him of sexual improprieties. Walwyn was known in the seventeenth century as a “Seeker”—someone who eschews one particular theology or doctrine in favor of thinking broadly about the nature of faith, posing Socratic questions about the meaning of belief, duty, love, and the divine nature. Walwyn, Lilburne, Overton, and Prince resided together in the Tower of London for nine months in 1649 under suspicion of treason against the new Commonwealth government, although only John was brought to trial. Bonfires burned in the streets of London after John’s acquittal. Walwyn was imprisoned again briefly in 1652, but scholars are uncertain about the reason why or how he obtained his release.

  Robert Lockyer was a private in the New Model Army (the remodeled Parliamentary army under radical and disciplined Puritan oversight) and was court-martialed and executed at the age of twenty-three for his involvement in a mutiny within Captain Savage’s company. The cause of the standoff was the refusal of Lockyer’s commanding officers to pay past-due wages to their soldiers. Little is known about Robert’s family, though some reports indicate that his mother and sisters walked beside the coffin at his funeral. In The Army’s Martyr, a Leveler martyrology published in 1649, the author—probably John Lilburne—described Robert’s funeral as a spectacular procession that swept through the city of London, with recorders estimating that four thousand mourners attended. Many donned the sea green color of the Levelers. Women brought up the rear of the processional, wearing scarves of the same color.

  Mary du Gard is a fictional character. The idea for Mary came to me when I read a reference in a work of English social history to a twenty-seven-year-old “singlewoman” who paid a fee to earn the freedom (a merchant’s license) to be a glover—a rare accomplishment in those days. Women in early modern England could work and participate in business, but their involvement usually came about through the name or oversight of a husband, brother, or father. It was rare for a woman to become a business owner or proprietor on her own.

  Rachel Lockyer is also a fictional character. The idea for her came to me when I read several 1651 pamphlets detailing the execution, trial, and “miraculous” recovery of a young unmarried woman from Steeple-Barton who was hanged after being convicted of killing her infant. This young woman, Anne Green, claimed she had not known she was pregnant before delivering the infant stillborn in the privy. The jury did not believe her. She survived her hanging, most likely because the noose was not sufficiently tight. The final report by Thomas Bartwain—also a fictional character—is modeled after the 1651 accounts of Anne Green’s remarkable story. Green was alternately revered and reviled in print after her recovery. Several sentences and turns of phrase in Bartwain’s treatise are taken directly from a 1651 report of Green’s hanging and its aftermath.

  When Thomas Bartwain warned William Walwyn about an anticipated act against adultery, he was making an accurate prediction—though he misunderstood whom the act would target. Adultery briefly became a capital offense in England in 1650, but the statute proved difficult if not impossible to enforce. The statute made the adultery of a married woman punishable by death, but not the adultery of a married man. That is, while both a man and a woman could be put to death under the 1650 act against adultery, the punishment was only applicable in cases where a married woman had strayed. Historian Keith Thomas has suggested that this double standard reflected the Puritan assumption that a woman’s sexuality was not hers to govern as she chose.

  In the 1650s, William Walwyn left the world of Leveler politics and became a lay physician, dispensing medicines from his apothecary in Moorfields. He outlived most of his companions, dying in his eighties.

  John Lilburne continued to pursue his calling as a voice for the oppressed, undergoing several more trials for seditious writings and being banished from England for a brief time. He finally renounced political life altogether and became a Quaker. His wife, Elizabeth, remained the most enterprising and resourceful of the group. She had more children with John after they lost their two sons. During his period of banishment, John left her under the protection of a powerful clergyman, since he was unable to ensure her welfare in person. That clergyman was William Kiffin. Elizabeth outlived her husband.

  Acknowledgments

  I am grateful to Brooks Holifield, David Pacini, and Bobby Paul for challenging me to become a better reader and so a better writer; to Kat Carrico, Carol Flowers, Elizabeth Gallu, Claire Meyer, Claire Sterk, Donna Troka, Aubre Wells, Jennifer Wheelock, and Melissa Wiginton for their support and encouragement; to S. Alex Alexander for the outstanding research assistance; to my editor, Jenna Johnson, and my copy editor, Tracy Roe, for their incisive and helpful comments; to Mary Campbell, Beth Burleigh Fuller, John Scott Randall, Yishai Seidman, and Johnathan Wilber for their contributions at various stages of the publication process. I am grateful to my parents, Gordon and Marion Brown; to my sister, Candace; and to my many aunts and uncles for cheering me on from afar. Thanks also go to the members of my indefatigable book group: Shawn, Cathy, Matt, Gerhard, Anna, and David. Finally, I’d like to express my gratitude to Henry Dunow, perspicuous reade
r and generous spirit, who discerned in my writing the prospect of a book.