by Amy Licence
There is little doubt that if Henry and Elizabeth were under the same roof, they would have at some point, shared a bed. Although they would often have been lodged in different chambers, depending on their residence, a king would customarily visit his wife, sometimes remaining with her all night, sometimes returning to his own bed to sleep. Elizabeth’s overall conception pattern shows that their physical relationship was fairly consistent. Tudor wives of all classes were under considerable pressure to acquiesce to their husband’s demands for sexual relations, or the ‘debt’ of marriage: Chaucer’s parson’s saintly wife ‘has the merit of chastity who yields the debt of the body to her husband, yes, though it be contrary to her liking and the desire of her heart’. A wife’s inclinations were not considered important. The feigned ‘headache’ had not yet emerged as a clichéd deterrent and levels of rape, undue force or at least reluctance among wives must have been high. If this was the case, it follows that married women had inconsistent control over their conceptions. Primitive forms of birth control and withdrawal methods were frowned upon at the very least, following the Catholic line that the prevention of pregnancy was sinful. The only arguments for marital abstinence were put forward by some enlightened religious and medical professionals on grounds of health. As early as the twelfth century, clerical voices had been raised in dissent against the dangers of unchecked fertility for women. Peter Cantor, Chanter at Notre Dame, put the case of a woman who had sustained such terrible injuries during repeated childbearing that her doctor advised against another pregnancy, which would certainly endanger her life. The debate focused on where her duty lay, whether she must submit to her insistent husband or refuse him the marital debt and save herself. It is possible that Henry and Elizabeth exercised some limited methods of control over the pace of their reproduction in the wake of Arthur’s birth, but this seems unlikely. Although various later sources have implied Elizabeth’s health may have been delicate, the successful delivery of one child and her subsequent recovery suggest no impediment to enjoying a full sexual relationship with her husband. As a queen and a woman, it was her marital and national duty to do so. On both religious and cultural levels, Elizabeth would have been considered receptive to her husband’s advances from the moment of her churching, in late October 1486, onwards. For the next two-and-a-half years, she would have been hoping to conceive.
Perhaps she succeeded. While the arrival dates of most of Henry and Elizabeth’s children are carefully recorded, some controversy surrounds the arrival of a short-lived prince named Edward, with at least one historian2 suggesting his birth must have occurred towards the beginning of the marriage, in 1487 or 1488, rather than its usual placing, somewhere between 1499 and 1502. Given the intervals of her subsequent conceptions, of ten months after her second child Margaret and then three months after Henry, her third, Elizabeth’s fertility appears to have been strong. The lengthening gaps between the births of her subsequent children are consistent with patterns of dwindling conceptions experienced by aristocratic and noble women married comparatively young and producing larger families. Typically, a rapid number of children were born in the years following marriage, before fertility tailed off and accelerated the arrival of the menopause in the mid-thirties. This pattern is illustrated by the conception rates of Jane Dudley, Duchess of Northumberland, who produced her first child at the age of seventeen and her tenth – and final – when she was thirty-six, and Elizabeth de la Pole, Duchess of Suffolk, who bore twelve children between her nineteenth and thirty-fourth years. Prolonged phases of infertility early in marriages did occur and Elizabeth’s failure to conceive may have been caused by the strains of political upheaval, illness or other, now irretrievable, health factors in both partners. It is not impossible that during this time she did conceive and miscarried, or delivered a short-lived heir. On balance, though, the expected arrival of a second heir during these years would have incited more comment, even in the event of a failed pregnancy, indicating a later birth date for Edward. If this is so, the question of Elizabeth’s fertility and the royal marriage remains uncertain. Perhaps after five centuries, these elusive answers may simply be those of timing, health and opportunity.
Throughout these early years, Elizabeth must have been alert to any potential indications of conception. Without modern testing methods, Tudor women could only rely on some rather unscientific physical symptoms. Contemporary accounts listed increased appetite, full breasts, tongue colour, dull eyes, swollen veins, vomiting, strange desires and the end of the menstrual cycle among the early signs. Yet these could still be open to misinterpretation, or caused by other illnesses, especially in an age of poor nutrition and inexplicable illness. A mother still may not have been certain she was expecting until she felt a stretching or quickening within her swelling belly, between four and five months in. During the 1480s, there were few written records for mothers to turn to, even if they had been able to read. Hali Meidenhad, a thirteenth-century alliterative prose homily based on the Psalms, graphically warned young girls against the unappealing physical changes pregnancy could bring: the face would grow thinner and shadowed, dizziness would make the head ache cruelly, the womb bulged like a water-skin, stitches developed in the side, discomfort in the bowels, painful backache, heaviness in the limbs and the dragging weight of the breasts. Once a woman was known to be pregnant, there was no lack of dietary advice for her to follow to ensure the birth of a healthy child. Bald’s tenth-century Leechbook, full of ancient remedies, charms and recipes, had been much recycled and reused by the Tudor era. It recommended pregnant women should not eat anything salty or sweet, nor eat pork or fatty foods or drink beer, nor the flesh of any other ‘animal that could beget’, or else the child would be hump-backed. Fruit and vegetables were best avoided but wine and ale were far safer to drink than milk or water. Only a very bland diet appears acceptable, although expectant mothers were at least exempt from the fasts that punctuated the Catholic year.
Tudor medicine lacked any detailed or thorough understanding of the workings of the female body or reliable diagnostic tools. Misdiagnosis must have been common. It could lead to the prescription of cures for similar conditions before pregnancy was suspected. A woman experiencing nausea or giddiness in her first trimester might be prescribed powders made from the stones found in a swallow’s belly, or the liver of a kite. She might be encouraged to drink ‘fine leaved grass’ for thirty-three days or the juice of cowslip for nine, or a month’s worth of rennet from a hare, or to eat the boiled heart of a stork. Another experiencing swelling in her body or legs might be advised to take elderberries boiled in ale with sparrow’s grease; another with stomach pains could be prescribed to make up a little bag filled with wormwood, egremony, spearmint, vinegar, rosewater and a dead chaffinch and lay it on her stomach. The effects of these can only be imagined. Pregnant women needed to be careful from whom they sought advice. Complaints were made against physicians and midwives who prescribed potions and powders that did expectant mothers more harm than good, or caused death. London midwife Cecilia Pople’s fumigations in 1598 ended in the premature death of Dorothy Gatersby of Aldersgate and, although she promised to cease practise, the following year she gave pills and purgatives to a Mrs Kennyck in exchange for the payment of a feather-bed cover.3 Elizabeth could at least rely on the advice of the best physicians in the land, even if their knowledge was imperfect.
Henry and Elizabeth spent Christmas 1488 at Sheen, their fourteenth-century manor house in Richmond. Surrounded by friends and family, the old moated royal lodgings allowed them some privacy from the rest of the court and there must have been much feasting and pageantry. Elizabeth loved music and ‘disguisings’, the allegorical interludes peopled by saints and dragons, virtues and vices, set to the accompaniment of fiddles and drums. When it came to providing for his family’s entertainment, the king spent regularly. Payments recorded by his treasurer John Heron for the court’s indoor entertainments a few years later included players, fools, minstrels, music
ians, tumblers, card and dice games. By the following Easter, they were resident at Hertford, at which time Elizabeth may have begun to suspect that she was pregnant. At once, she would have made some small changes to her daily routine. A woman was believed to nourish her child with her blood and shape it with her imagination, so once her body had started to display the physical symptoms, all manner of rituals, superstitions and precautions were considered necessary for the growth and delivery of a healthy foetus. To the medieval mind, evil influences were ever-present, waiting to pounce on those who forgot themselves: ritual and observation were essential precautions for personal protection and salvation. The performance of certain actions could be mirrored in ‘sympathy’ by the unborn child so activities that involved winding or grinding could cause the child to strangulate in the womb and mats must be rolled a certain way to prevent twisting injuries. The noise of guns and bells was to be avoided, as were exuberant dogs who might jump up and cause deformity; the sight of hares might engender a hare lip, a snake would give the baby green eyes and woe betide those who tiptoed through the May dew, as they would certainly miscarry. A mother looking at the moon would produce a lunatic or sleepwalker; ill or deformed people could imprint their maladies, certain places must be avoided for danger and rituals followed to prevent birthmarks. Such marks were considered the sign of a werewolf, as were stubby fingers and excessive body hair. Expectant mothers were not to run, leap or rise up suddenly, nor should they lift heavy burdens or lace too tightly. They should beware extremes of temperature and emotion and sleep as much as they could. Shocks, certain foods, extreme emotions and lasciviousness could all be communicated to an unborn child. Conceiving around the end of February, Elizabeth must have been increasingly aware of her condition by the Feast of St George, 23 April, when Henry made gifts to her including cloth of black velvet, russet cloth and squirrel fur as well as cloth of white blanket, canaber cloth, cords, beds of down and feather, carpet, London thread, crochettes, tappet hooks, hammers of iron and sheets of Holland cloth to furnish her bed. Perhaps these last items were prompted by solicitousness for her comfort, given her delicate state.
At the end of October 1489, Elizabeth went into confinement at Westminster, after hearing Mass and taking a ceremonial meal of spices and sweet wine. The queen’s main chamber, with its attendant chapel and views across the river, would have been prepared in advance, with the late summer months seeing a flurry of activity as carpenters, furnishers, painters and fitters of all kinds set to work. It is unclear exactly how the day of admittance was decided; possibly a combination of Elizabeth’s increasing size, the onset of practice contractions and the predictions of her women and doctors. It may have been calculated well in advance, according to the child’s quickening or else determined on the day by the expectant mother’s health. With no accurate means of anticipating due dates and mistakes frequently made, confinement could be as short as seven days, or stretch for up to six weeks or more until ‘late’ babies made their arrival. In the autumn of 1489, Elizabeth probably played a part in the decision-making process, along with her mother-in-law, as the court machinery was set in motion for the big changes ahead; after all, this was an important State occasion. The witnesses, led by her Chamberlain, prayed for her safe delivery, as she and her women entered the inner chamber, hung with blue arras embroidered with gold fleurs-de-lys. Her bed and separate birthing pallet were hung with canopy of gold and velvet with many colours, ‘garnished’ with the symbolic red roses of Lancaster. To one side stood an altar, ‘well furnished’ with relics, on which Elizabeth would rely to assist her labour, while a cupboard ‘well and richly garnished’ held other necessaries for the coming weeks. Attending her were Margaret Beaufort and her own mother, Elizabeth Wydeville, temporarily leaving her religious seclusion in Bermondsey Abbey. During this confinement, the strict rules of attendance were briefly suspended to allow her mother’s visiting cousin, Francois de Luxembourg, and a group of French Ambassadors to visit her. It must have been a welcome break from the long month of waiting.
After almost a month in confinement, Elizabeth was delivered of a daughter at about nine in the evening of 28 November. The birth of a girl was not always as welcome as that of a boy: it went unrecorded by the London Grey Friars chronicler who did note the arrivals of princes Arthur and Henry, yet girls had their dynastic uses, forging foreign alliances through marriage treaties. There is no reason to suspect that little princess’s arrival was treated with anything less than delight by her parents, considering the existence of a healthy heir and the ability of her mother to go on and bear more sons. The christening was held at Westminster, on 30 November, again using the traditional silver font from Canterbury Cathedral. The marchioness of Berkeley carried the child from the queen’s chamber at the front of a procession bearing 120 torches, followed by Elizabeth’s sister Anne holding the lace christening robe. She was lowered into the font and baptised Margaret, after her paternal grandmother. The party partook of spices and wine, trumpets sounded and the child was carried back to her mother. The court would remain at Westminster for Christmas but an outbreak of measles delayed Elizabeth’s churching until 27 December, when it was held in private. As the illness had claimed several victims among her ladies, this was a wise decision considering Elizabeth’s vulnerable post-partum condition. By Candlemas, in early February, she was well enough to celebrate the purification of the Virgin Mary by watching a play in the White Hall. Seven months later she was pregnant again.
By now Elizabeth knew what to expect in the delivery chamber. Hali Meidenhad described the birth process in graphic terms: that ‘cruel, distressing anguish, that fierce and stabbing pain, that incessant misery that torments upon torment, that wailing outcry … fear of death, shame added to that suffering by old wives … whose help is necessary to you, however indecent it may be’.4 Such advice was designed to help prevent unwanted and illegitimate pregnancies but more practical advice was on hand for those who were well beyond this stage. Early sixteenth-century birth manuals instructed midwives not to encourage the mother to push before such time as the child was ready to be born, before which ‘all labour is in vaine, labour as much as yee list’: if all the mother’s energy was spent too early, it could become a ‘perilous case’ indeed. She was to walk up and down until the ‘matrice’ or womb ruptured, after which she could rest and keep warm. If the waters did not break naturally, it was up to the midwife to rupture them with her fingernail or, terrifyingly, shears or a sharp knife. To strengthen her, a woman might then take a little sustenance in the form of an egg, with butter and bread, wine and water. Babies were delivered in all positions; standing, lying, kneeling, squatting, although many manuals advised the traditional lying flat on the back, braced on the bed with the feet against a log of wood, the better to push against. A pillow might be placed under her back and hips, to prevent them sinking down into the mattress, whilst a long ‘swathe’ of fabric under her body allowed her to be raised a little by her women on either side, if necessary. Those present in the room with her had to be careful about their positions too: sitting with crossed legs, arms or fingers was thought to contribute towards a difficult birth. As she prepared to deliver, the midwife would stroke and massage the womb to encourage the child’s passage, whilst continually anointing her genitals with butter or grease until the head began to crown. Traditionally with queens, only the leading woman would be allowed such intimate physical contact: strict protocol dictated even the most unappealing of tasks.
This was the stage when, in the extremities of pain, women made oaths of allegiance and promises to undertake pilgrimage and dedicate their children to God. The realities of medieval and Tudor childbirth were learned through experience, passed down through generations of female oral traditions; Elizabeth’s mother and mother-in-law would have been invaluable to her during her confinements. Few descriptions of childbirth have survived in public or private texts. Hardly any pre-Reformation letters and diaries detail the event from a female perspectiv
e and published accounts tend to be either literary or medical. It might be assumed that those involved were too busy to prioritise writing the process down, even if they had been able to. The rare female memoirs that survive have usually been preserved by families, particularly when portraying husbands and heirs in a positive light, some of whom edited diaries and memoirs in order to suppress critical voices: Pepys would not have been unique in tearing his wife’s writings to pieces before her eyes for his unpleasant portrayal.5 Medical advice manuals were largely produced for a small, predominantly male readership. Midwives, either formal or informal, would have had little access to them; their collective body of information belonged firmly in the oral tradition, transmitted through inheritance and the female support networks that had their basis in domestic relations. By the time of her third pregnancy, Elizabeth and her women knew what they were doing.