by Roger Powell
Knobsticks weddings, named after the staves of office carried by the churchwarden, were a means of forcing couples into marriage, whether they had to end up living under sacks in hedgerows or in the homes and beds of their parents. By Acts passed in 1610 ‘any lude woman having had a bastard chargeable may be sent to the House of Correction for a year’. If she offended again, she had to provide securities for her good behaviour or stay in the House of Correction, which meant being involved in hard labour for the duration of her sentence. These laws, of course, encouraged abortion and infanticide. Such goods as they might have were confiscated from any father or mother of a bastard who ran away from the overseer. The accounts of the overseer often give note of the costs incurred by the constable retrieving putative parents of a foundling bastard, paying for transport, court fees, meals and accommodation at an inn! There is a splendid measure of the consumption of ale in such accounts. When maintenance orders were imposed, they were seldom fulfilled more than once or twice and many questions yet remain to be answered, which will keep social and local historians at bay for many years to come.
Normally, an illegitimate child took the father’s or the mother’s settlement under the Poor Laws that were introduced in the sixteenth century, and by the Act of 1662. Responsibility for bastards was clearly laid down by the Vagrant Act of 1575/6. Two justices were empowered to make an order against the mother or the father and any offence against performance of the order would result in gaol until the next sessions, though often security was given for appearance. Later Acts dealt with the punishment of unmarried mothers, with incidents of infanticide and, not unnaturally, with the parents absconding. By the Act of 1732/3, it was laid down that a pregnant woman with a bastard child was bound to declare herself and to name the father. Until 1743, bastards had a legal settlement in their father’s birthplace but the 1732 Act had prescribed public whipping for the mother and ordained that the child should have the mother’s settlement. Of course, parochial records only described bastards who were baptised. The Lancashire Quarter Session records for 1590–1606, for example, record the reputed father of a bastard child being ordered to maintain the child until she is twelve years of age and then that he shall be whipped in the market place at Manchester. This sentence appears to apply to the child!
Often, the putative father was declared to have come from another parish and parish officers were under pressure to persuade the couple to marry, which could secure the ultimate legitimacy of the child, and settlement with the mother in the father’s parish, which would result in removal under the Act. Even bribing was used to achieve this, in order to legitimize the child. So the first child born soon after marriage might well be of suspect paternity, since a mother might appear to have had a predisposition for choosing to impute the man she wanted to marry rather than the real father, or, as on a number of proven occasions, the lord of the manor or the vicar or curate! This was not for reason of a ‘crush’, but for the prospect of a more secure life. By the seventeenth century ‘Gossips’ were paid to report the indiscretions of women in the parish. Records of archdeacon’s visitation and of ecclesiastical courts provide the stuff of evidence.
A somewhat bizarre selection of Latin terms was used to describe the status of illegitimate children in some parish registers up to the third quarter of the seventeenth century, while the English phrases were generally brutally frank. The naming of foundlings has always proved of interest and provided amusement for students of this subject. Mr Bumble in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist will be remembered as having named them by working through the alphabet ‘S-Swubble ... T-Twist … I named him … next one ... comes ... Unwin and the next Vilkins… !’
A foundling admitted to Cripplegate Charity School in 1716 by the parish officer of St Olave’s is described in the meeting book in the following entry:
‘Then by what name th’unwelcome guest to call
Was long a question and is posed them all;
For he who lent it to a babe unknown,
Censorious men might take it for his own:
They look’d about, they gravely spoke to all,
And not one Richard answered to the call.
Next they enquired the day, when, passing by,
Th’unlucky peasant heard the stranger’s cry;
This known, – how food and raiment they might give,
Was next debated – for the rogue would live;
At last, with all their words and work content,
Back to their homes the prudent vestry went,
And Richard Monday to the workhouse sent.’
Mr Crabbe’s poetic description of the vestry minutes and the fate of the foundling now named Richard Monday, after a name of no-one on the council and the day of the meeting gives some indication of the disdain in which the unfortunate were held.
This writer remembers in childhood a contemporary child found on the parish church porch and named by the vicar at baptism after the then prime minister, a then-famous aircraft company, and the subject matter of the silent film being shown in the parish hall (Ramsay Vickers Todd!). By the eighteenth century, the convenience of disposing of pauper children as apprentices became the lot of many an illegitimate child. The euphemistic description ‘to learn the art and the mystery of…’ or ‘the art and science of…’ led to the children becoming slaves as farm labourers, domestic servants or whipping boys of tradesmen. Life for most in the workhouses was hardly much better, and for some much worse.
For the earlier period, one has to remember that hand vesten was an ancient custom for the legitimisation of a union with a single concubine, that continued under the Danish code of Valdemar II until 1683, and probably survived in English common law down to 1901 and in Scotland, through to 1947. It is probable that royal bastards of the tenth and thirteenth centuries, if not somewhat later, were considered as nothi (as they were under Roman law) that is children born in concubinage and thereby entitled to the support of their fathers but with no right of inheritance from him.
Concubines formed part of the royal households of Europe well after the conquest of England; in a historical context, the behaviour of such men as King Henry I (Beauclerk), who is credited with at least nine sons and eleven daughters by some six women, was not then to be regarded as scandalous. Indeed it was part of his grand foreign policy to people the top tables of Europe with his progeny. However, it appears that the reputation of the mistresses suffered somewhat. Perhaps the goings on of more recent times in Paris, the Antibes, Micheldever Woods, SW1 or SW7, can barely be censured when what was accepted in the Middle Ages was made to appear licit. For a decree, or command, or an Act of Parliament, might right the position of royal children from one or more mothers other than the Queen or the legal wife. Kings, as well as commoners, no doubt salved their consciences and reconciled themselves with Holy Church by believing that they were constantly in love with one woman, though not always the same one at the same time.
The monkish historian, William of Malmesbury, in his De Gestis Regum was helped by King Henry I to excuse his lust in the great benefactions that he made to the church, though it seems that the Almighty took His vengeance in the end. It was Maud, one of Henry I’s illegitimate daughters by Edith, who called William Aetheling, the only legitimate son and heir of Henry I of England and Duke of Normandy back to the white ship that went down on the night of 25 November 1120. Several Earls and Barons and members of the household drowned with him, along with two of the royal bastards.
As already remarked, poorer folk fared less well and were far less protected or respected. The peasantry took their sport and left unfortunate mothers to care for themselves and their offspring, or to abandon themselves to the charity of parish Overseers of the Poor. On the other hand, a Hampshire clergyman, from a landed gentry family, had eleven children by four girls in his parish. In his Will he provided for each one of them and for their mothers. He died a bachelor. Some bastards of royalty were similarly cared for, not by mention in wills, but by
regular visits from court officials, even in plain clothes and high collared mackintoshes, arriving with a subsistence stipend at the home of a foster parent.
By the Victorian age, hypocrisy had reached its zenith and this continued well into the late 1940s, when the workhouses were still in action in providing a roof over the heads of the poor and indigent. The mother of an illegitimate child was as much ostracised in her lifetime as the child would be throughout its life. There are still frowns, even into the twenty-first century, when illegitimacy is mentioned. In his now classic God Stand Up For Bastards (1973), David Leitch provides a splendid and touching autobiographical account of relationships between his mother, his putative father and his adoptive parents, and many friends, and of course with himself. An experience in the task of tracing the origins of an illegitimate child brought this writer to the end of the quest by identifying the putative mother and the most likely father. The father, eventually cagey, admitted to the possibility of the offence and wanted to meet the son. The mother, however, denied all knowledge and fought off every possible approach that might have given comfort to the disturbed psyche of the son. In another instance, the parentage was traced but the mother had already died. The father refused to see his son but some three years later, when he himself was approaching the end of his life, asked for arrangements to be made for him to meet his only surviving child. In a Sussex village in the 1930s, a girl in trouble was sent to the workhouse for her confinement and released to become a kitchen maid in a local inn. She refused to be parted from her child, the father being a married man living in a neighbouring street, who denied all knowledge or responsibility. The mother took various jobs and cared for that child, working several jobs to have her properly educated. The child went into a career, eventually as a manager of a Cooperative store, but still, by the 1960s, she was stigmatised locally for her origins.
‘It’s the rich what gets the pleasure …. it’s the poor what gets the blame….’
Not so in royal circles. A good deal can be done to discover royal paternity by reference to coats of arms which first appear with the children of King Henry I. While the lion passant guardant or on Gules may well indicate royal bastardy, it could also indicate royal patronage. In the early heraldry, those royal children of the Middle Ages who made good in the court were often accorded land holdings and titles, but it was not really until Tudor and Stuart times that both illegitimate issue and concubines (vel mistresses) were accorded titles of nobility and peerage. To these were added substantial grants of funding, contrasting violently with the lot of the workhouse poor.
The great Samuel Johnson, who probably made much of his reputation for his substantial contributions to The Gentleman’s Magazine in the 1740s, collaborated strenuously with William Oldys in cataloguing the great library of the Harley brothers which, ultimately, went to the British Museum Department of Manuscripts. He also helped his old school-fellow from Lichfield, Dr Robert James, in the production of A Medicinal Dictionary and set out his plan for the Dictionary of the English Language. His splendid work, An Account of the Life of Mr Richard Savage, Son of the Earl Rivers, was as Mr Johnson claimed for himself ‘the best of biographies written by those who had eaten and drunk and lived in social intercourse with their subjects’. There was, however, considerable scepticism over his claim that Savage was the bastard son of the nobleman. In such cases as in that, the peer or putative father, while publicly disowning, privately made allowances to the mother and child. Contributing to the association of illegitimacy with poverty was the tendency to exclude the child by law and social circumstances from what the community regarded as customary in the structure of a respectable family.
Often, the identity of the putative father can be discovered from the names given by the mother at baptism or registration. Thus, William Harrison Smith, son of Mary Smith would automatically impute the father believed by the mother to be responsible for the child and somewhere in the community the said William Harrison can be discovered. Dangers for genealogists arise here when later generations hyphenate the ‘extra’ surname confusing it with those derived from estates and inheritance of blood. More oblique is the habit of naming children after places of birth in royal bastardy. Most scholars are now aware that the Tudors employed Polydore Vergil with a handsome purse to rewrite The History of England in their favour and, in the process, he destroyed much of the ancient documentation. His work was plagiarised by Hollingshed and others and these were the sources for Shakespeare’s historical plays. In his King John he has Philip Faulconbridge, half-brother of Robert Faulconbridge, declared to be Sir Richard Plantagenet, illegitimate son of King Richard the Lionheart.
Post Commonwealth anti-Catholicism brought the several divisions of English Protestants into some form of union against the survivors of the old faith. Anglicans persecuted Quakers and Baptists, and others of the Protestant sects, and when government claimed to have discovered a radical plot, thousands were imprisoned. It was in prison that John Bunyan wrote his Pilgrims Progress in 1678, he, amongst his dissenting followers, railed against and ridiculed the debased and debauched life of the court, actually naming the Duke of York, Charles I’s third son by Henrietta Maria Bourbon, daughter of Henry IV, King of France, and Mary, daughter of Francis I Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany. James had been designated Duke of York from birth. He was made a Knight of the Garter when he was only eleven and created Duke of York two years later. He succeeded his brother in 1685 and was crowned King by Catholic rites on 22 April 1685 at Whitehall Palace and by the traditional rite in Westminster Abbey on the following day by the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, William Sancroft.
It is said that James married at Breda in Holland sometime in November or on Christmas Eve 1659, but there is much doubt about this. Certainly, when she was large with child he had a shotgun wedding at Worcester House in the Strand on 3 September 1660 to Anne, daughter of Edward Hyde, the first Earl of Clarendon. The child, Charles, died the following May. Anne bore him eight children in wedlock before dying on 31 March 1671. By proxy in September 1673 at the ducal palace in Modena, Italy, and at Dover on 21 November that year, James subsequently married Mary Beatrice Eleanor Anne Margaret Isabella, daughter of Alphonso d’Este, Duke of Medina. By Mary he had a stillborn child born in the late spring of the following year and eleven other legitimate children. By Arabella, daughter of Sir Winston Churchill, and sister of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, James had four illegitimate childen and perhaps others between 1667 and her death. His children by Arabella were called FitzJames. By Catherine Countess of Dorchester, daughter of Charles Sedley, James was having children from about 1679. They were given the name of Darnley. The family were scandalised and shamed, not least of all by the King himself, the Duke’s brother, who had produced at least fifteen illegitimate children by as many as seven paramours. His marriage with Catherine Henrietta, the daughter of John IV, King of Portugal and Duke of Braganza, was not successful, her four children were stillborn.
In the eighteenth century, the development of the lampooning satirist, the state of the royal illegitimate progeny and their perpetrators was put into some rational perspective. Perhaps the best example of this, without having to quote from the many journals and news sheets available to the frequenters of coffee shops and taverns is heraldic. A book that is rare simply because scholarly armorists have thrown it out as being poor heraldry is a work of social history.
In 1785 there was published, The Heraldry of Nature; or Instructions for the KING of ARMS: comprising, The Arms, Supporters, Crests, and Mottos [sic] both in Latin and English of the PEERS OF E--L--D. Blazoned from the Authority of Truth, and characteristically descriptive of the several Qualities that distinguish their Possessors. To which is added several Samples, neatly etched by an eminent Engraver. This was printed for M. Smith and was sold at booksellers in Piccadilly, the Royal Exchange and in Fleet Street. Arms (illustrated) for ‘The -----, First, argent, a cradle proper; second, gules a rod, and sceptre, transverse ways;
third azure, five cups and balls proper; fourth, gules, the sun eclips’d proper; fifth, argent, a stag’s head between three jockey caps; sixth, or, a house in ruins. Supporter. The dexter, Solomon treading on his crown; the sinister, a jack-ass proper. Crest Britannia in despair. Motto: Neque tangunt levia.’ (Translated as ‘Little things don’t move me’). Another example is B----K, DUKE OF ST A------- Arms. Quarterly; first and fourth, or, a prison door azure, second and third, sable, a scourge proper. Supporter. Dexter, a joilor, sinister, A Tityrus laboring, both proper. Crest A chain pendant. Motto; Uni lapsa virtus ? (‘Where is all my continence departed?’) A variation of the crest for this family was suggested recently, being ‘a penis rampant supporting a basket of oranges proper!!’
The stigma attached to bastardy whereby the child was blamed for the sins of the parents was brought to the fore by the puritanical reaction to the behaviour of the House of Stuart through to the twenty-first century partnership fashions, which produced some 40 per cent or more of children born out of wedlock in the United Kingdom, thus providing a genealogical nightmare for any who are truly interested in tracing their ancestries and discovering their family histories without insulting their true progenitors with false claims to others. Blood tests in the twentieth century assisted in determining who might not be responsible for paternity by excluding fathers. Only the advent of the examination of the DNA patterns has provided a more tenable means of identifying familial origins, for even the mother may not be the mother following IVF!
Appendix II
The Arms of Royal Bastards
By Cecil Humphery Smith, OBE, FSA, Principal of the Institute of Heraldic & Genealogical Studies
Somewhere in Edgar Wallace’s Four Just Men is a remark about the ‘bar sinister’ being used in the arms of illegitimate children. This expression was erroneous at its concept and has been employed erroneously by journalists ever since. In fact, the expression is a muddle between the French and the English words of blazonry, the language used to describe heraldic displays. The barre is the French term for a bend which is a diagonal band running from the top left hand top corner of the shield to the right hand base side (as you look at it), the left hand side being called the dexter and the right hand the sinister, because it is thought of from the point of view of the knight bearing the shield on his arm. The bar in English blazonry is a diagonal strip across the shield having no particular elevation either side. What, in fact, is intended is the bendlet sinister, that is a thin band running from the top right hand side of the shield to the bottom left hand side of the shield, as you look at it.