Elizabeth (Betty) Viscountess Mordaunt, who kept ‘a Private Diarie’, probably at the request of her spiritual adviser, also referred constantly within it to ‘the Great Blessing of many Children’.13 It was a blessing she herself certainly enjoyed, giving birth to seven sons and four daughters in under twenty years. It was, however, a tumultuous period, not only in the history of England but in her own life story and that of her husband, in which her repeated pregnancies can only have been an additional burden.
Betty Mordaunt was the only daughter and heiress of Thomas Carey, a son of the Earl of Monmouth. Besides that she was a beauty of whom it was said as a young girl:
Betty Carey’s lips and eyes
Make all hearts their sacrifice.
John Mordaunt was a staunch support of Charles I and Charles II in turn. Clarendon paid Betty this tribute: quite apart from her physical charms, she was ‘of a very loyal spirit and notable vivacity of wit and humour’, sharing her husband’s ‘honourable dedication’ to the Stuart cause.14 Betty needed all her wit and loyalty when John Mordaunt was among three men condemned to death by the High Court of Justice in the spring of 1658, for conspiring against Oliver Cromwell in favour of Charles II. Betty was pregnant with her second child at the time, but behaved with great courage and enterprise throughout the trial; not only was she present in court, but also tried – vainly as it turned out – to bribe the members of the Court of Justice. It was however Betty who managed to get a note to her husband that while it was useless to question the court’s jurisdiction (the normal Royalist reaction) the damning evidence against him was in fact comparatively slight.
For all this, Mordaunt was condemned to death. Now Betty Mordaunt paid a personal visit to the ageing Protector to plead with him for her husband’s life; she remarked afterwards that the Protector ‘played the gallant so well’ that she believed he would have been as good as his word, and ‘waited upon her the next morning’ had she encouraged him. Whether Betty’s pretty face, unaffected by pregnancy, and legendary lips and eyes ensnared the ageing Protector (who, contrary to the report of history, was never averse to an encounter with a pretty woman),15 at all events John Mordaunt was the only conspirator who was reprieved. He survived to continue his intrigues on behalf of the King, being created Viscount Mordaunt of Avalon in 1659.
On her husband’s tombstone, which listed his deeds of daring on behalf of the two Stuart monarchs, a gracious allusion was made to his wife: lectissima Heroina Elizabeth Carey. The private diary of this most excellent heroine, amid various ecstatic outpourings of a religious nature, chronicles a series of births which alone might justify the title. Betty Mordaunt wrote a prayer of thanksgiving after the birth of her son John in 1659 (the baby she had been bearing at the time her husband was condemned to death) ‘for my safe deliverance from the pain and the peril of Childbirth’. And for her daughter ‘Cory’, born on 29 July 1661, she recorded her gratitude for ‘the blessing of a live and perfect child’. But when she miscarried twins in 1674, on her birthday, she attributed this grave loss to her own spiritual transgressions. Pregnant once more at the time of her husband’s death, Betty prayed passionately: ‘preserve the child within me, the time it has to stay, from every ill accident … bless my child with perfect shapes’. Little George was born safely in January 1676: Betty called upon ‘my dearest Lord’ [God] to be his father, ‘he that was born without father, brought into the world by an afflicted mother’.16
It is obviously highly unlikely that women of this calibre or families like the Walkers and the Fanshawes practised any form of limitation whatsoever, given the rapid pattern of births. But was no attempt ever made to avoid the consequences of unlimited married sex, if only for the sake of the mother, condemned to what Betty Mordaunt aptly described as ‘the pain and the peril’ of childbirth? Or for that matter for the sake of the father and breadwinner, whose economic burden, when his numerous progeny actually survived infancy, might be well nigh intolerable during the years of their upbringing?
The subject of contraception within marriage at this date is complicated by the fact that the most effective form known (until the invention of the Pill in the present day), the sheath or condom, was not introduced to England generally until the eighteenth century. Its original purpose was prophylactic: the good news arrived in English aristocratic circles as early as the 1680s via France (where Madame de Sévigné for example wrote in praise of this hygienic measure in 1671). But Pepys, whose promiscuous life with the unofficial whores of Westminster Hall would have benefited from such a form of protection, was ignorant of it: instead he spent some anxious time calculating whether he could have been responsible for one particular pregnancy.17
At the same time herbal medicines which might either prevent or cure – the line between a contraceptive and an abortifacient being not always an easy one to draw – were, as they had always been, part of the folkloric knowledge of the times. Swallowing a hot mixture of spices was advocated for both contraception or abortion, as was the juice of the herb savin; hence its nickname Cover Shame – it being a ‘notorious Restorative of slender shapes and tender reputations’, as a pamphlet described it at the end of the seventeenth century.18 Marjoram, thyme, parsley, lavender and ‘brake’ (bracken) were all proposed with the general object in view of preventing birth. Nicholas Culpepper’s edition of the College of Physicians’ Directory suggested that honeysuckle was able to ‘procure barrenness, and hinder conception’. John Swan’s almanacs also suggested that the juice of honeysuckle, drunk continuously by a man for thirty-seven days, would make him so that he could ‘never beget any more children’. In Defoe’s Conjugal Lewdness, early in the next century, there was advice concerning powders ‘in Warm Ale’; after taking these ‘she shall be out of danger’.19
Some of the advice on the subject might be surreptitious. It did not take much wit to appreciate that those herbs described as best avoided to prevent miscarriage, would, if administered, have exactly the opposite effect. (Women were warned, for example, that proximity to sowbread would cause abortion.) Similarly, herbs to be carefully avoided by the barren – such as rue – could be enthusiastically swallowed by those who did not wish to conceive. Violent movements during intercourse were said to inhibit conception; these same movements, if indulged, might ward off the danger.
Many of the herbal remedies were based on the sensible if slightly drastic premise that the dampening of masculine desire prevented the problem from arising in the first place: rue once again was said by the female astrologer Sara Jinner to make a man no better than a eunuch. One emetic mixture proposed consisted of radish root, agarick, and saram, boiled in barley water, to be drunk when cool.20 Castor oil was suggested for the same purpose, as was lettuce (the purgative effects of the one and the soporific effects of the other must certainly have given them a high rate of success in extinguishing ardour).
Other measures recommended, of varying degrees of unpleasantness to the modern ear, included pessaries for the female – rue featured here again, or ground-up bitter almonds – and a uterine clyster (what would now be called a douche) employing such herbs as camphor, castor oil and rue. The male organ might be anointed with salves of a vaguely anaesthetic nature or bathed in cold liquids, vinegar, or the juice of nightshade or henbane. For the desperate, there was always blood-letting. According to the medical theories of the time it was the special heat of the blood which was responsible for producing that superior male seed which was considered to be ‘the generative faculty’. A woman was generally believed to have ‘seed’ too, the ovaries being the equivalent of the testicles, but just as ‘her heat is lesser and weaker than his’, so her ‘seed’ was thought to be cold and watery, in short far less important in the procreative process. (The biological role of the female in procreation was only properly understood after the invention of the microscope revealed the existence of the female ‘egg’ as opposed to ‘seed’.)21
The existence of this ancient twilight world of folkloric preventi
ves demonstrates that both contraception and abortion were underground preoccupations of the seventeenth century – at least where sexual intercourse outside marriage was concerned (not a very surprising conclusion in view of the social consequences to both parties if illicit love resulted in pregnancy). The question of whether the same preventives were taken within marriage is far more difficult to establish; clearly the same medicines were available to be swallowed, applied, or otherwise employed, by the married as by the single. The whole subject of contraception within marriage is ignored by contemporaries, even by those whose revelations are otherwise fairly intimate. The diaries of the Puritan Ralph Josselin, as their editor has remarked, leave us to guesswork on this subject.22 For instance he records his wife’s miscarriages and these do tend to coincide almost exactly with the first moment when she could have known she was pregnant (and thus used an abortifacient), but since this early stage of pregnancy would also be the likeliest time for a spontaneous miscarriage, the mystery remains unsolved.
In any case many of the above remedies have something of an air of desperation about them; even if employed they would not have affected overmuch the child-bearing capacity of a healthy and fertile woman having regular sexual intercourse. It seems far more likely that those married couples who did for any reason wish to limit their families practised coitus interruptus, a method of birth control which, as it has been observed, it is possible for each generation to rediscover for itself.23 Once again, first-hand information about the subject is hard to come by.
It has recently been suggested, albeit with caution, that the use of this type of family limitation was gradually rising among the middle classes as the century progressed. There are certain significant statistics: the fertility among women over thirty generally, and the age at which women bore their last child in particular, fell in the second half of the seventeenth century. Other researches point to a significant gap between the birth of the penultimate and the ultimate child.24
Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick provides one of the few direct references to family limitation in her autobiography (although she does not state the method used). The giddy young girl who got married at fifteen to a younger son, against her father’s wishes, did not immediately ripen into the benevolent Puritan matron at the head of her household; as has been mentioned, a spiritual conversion had to intervene. Immediately after her marriage Mary Rich gave birth to two children in rapid succession: Elizabeth, who died as a baby, victim of two careless nursemaids who ‘tossed’ her between them, and a son called Charles after his father. She was not yet seventeen.
Twenty years later, young Charles Rich died at the age of twenty-one. Not only was his father, now Earl of Warwick, left without a direct heir, but the cousin who would inherit the title by default was considered by Mary to be of a highly unsuitable character. We have Mary’s own account of the stricken couple’s passionate wish to start a new family. Although she was still only thirty-seven, these hopes were not fulfilled, leaving Mary prey to further remorse that she had deliberately refrained from having further children in her youth. She gives two reasons for this resolve: first, at the age of seventeen, one of the youthful beauties of the court of Charles I, she feared to ruin her figure ‘if she childed so thick’; secondly, Charles Rich, as a younger son, had worried that if he had ‘many to provide for, they must be poor’.25 Certainty is impossible; but if abstinence in a young couple, who had married for that troublesome emotion, love, is ruled out, one may suppose that coitus interruptus was the method by which Mary preserved her lissom figure, and Charles Rich his modest fortune – with ultimately such disastrous results.
In 1622 a woman of twenty-six expecting her first baby, called Elizabeth Josceline, wrote how she dreaded the painfulness of ‘that kind of death’ during childbirth. Born Elizabeth Brooke of Norton in Cheshire, she had been brought up by her grandfather William Chaderton, Bishop of Lincoln, a friend of Coke and Lord Burghley. In 1622 she had already been married for six years. The Mothers Legacy to her Unborn Child was an attempt to overcome that justifiable dread which possessed so many women of the time – how would the child fare if the mother did not survive the ordeal? Elizabeth Josceline carefully garnered all the advice she would proffer her child in advance, to obviate that ‘loss my little one should have, in wanting me’. It proved a popular subject: by 1625 The Mothers Legacy had gone through three editions, and it was reprinted unaltered in 1684.26
Naturally the child would have to be put out to nurse, but despite its tender age, this was to be in a house where there was no swearing or speaking ‘scurrilous words’ (Elizabeth Josceline wrote: ‘I know I may be thought too scrupulous in this’). Later the servants were to address the child by its Christian name, without the prefix ‘Master’ or ‘Miss’, to teach it proper respect. Throughout the book, Elizabeth Josceline modestly reminded herself that she was only writing for ‘a child’s judgement’, although at the same time she begged her ‘truly loving and most dearly loved husband Taurell Josceline’, to whom the book was dedicated, not to pardon its faults through fondness but to correct them.
Reading The Mothers Legacy today, in manuscript, still has the power to touch one, for nine days after the birth of her child Elizabeth Josceline did undergo just ‘that kind of death’ she had feared. And she was wrapped in that very winding-sheet which she had already secretly bought for herself.27 At least in bequeathing to posterity a book, she had succeeded in her declared ambition to do something more for her child than ‘only to bring it forth’.
None at this time doubted that childbirth itself, whatever the desirability of founding a family, was both a painful and a dangerous ordeal. ‘These are doubtless the greatest of all pains the Women naturally undergo upon Earth’, wrote the midwife Jane Sharp. Margaret Duchess of Newcastle, herself of course barren, wrote that a husband who had heirs by his first wife should not complain if his second did not conceive children since ‘she hazards her life by Bringing them [children] into the world’.28 1 Nor was Elizabeth Josceline alone in her apprehensions. Anne Harcourt, in her diary, confessed to her ‘exorbitant fear’ of labour, ‘notwithstanding the former experiences of God’s goodness in helping me at like times’. The jilted Anne Murray, finding happiness at last in marriage with Sir James Halkett, gave birth for the first time at the age of thirty-four. She drew up a Mother’s Instructions before the birth of that child, and of each subsequent arrival, although in fact she lived safely on, dying in 1699 at the age of seventy-seven.29
Margaret Blagge, the lovely yet earnest Maid of Honour to Catherine of Braganza, John Evelyn’s adored young friend, was not so lucky.30 As a girl she had been markedly reluctant to abandon her virgin state; one of her reasons was her fear of childbirth. Evelyn hastened to reassure her: ‘Little women, I told her, had little pain.’ Even after marrying the young courtier Sidney Godolphin, Margaret remained full of melancholy presentiments. First she did not conceive for two years, and then when she did, she too, like Elizabeth Josceline and Anne Halkett, laid all her plans in the eventuality of her death. Enduring a very difficult pregnancy and ‘growing bigger’, her public life was gradually reduced to visits to the chapel.
Margaret Godolphin went into labour during the night of Monday, 2 September 1678; about noon on the Tuesday ‘a Man Child’ was born, her husband, in attendance at court at Windsor, was informed. On the Thursday the child was baptized Francis. On the Sunday Evelyn, who was at his house at Deptford, received a letter while at church from Sidney Godolphin: ‘My poor wife is fallen very ill of a fever, with lightness in her head.’ Evelyn’s prayers were implored. But Margaret’s delirium increased. Matters were made worse when the doctors hung back and refused to act except in the presence of other physicians. Evelyn then arrived, with his wife, and by his own account took charge. (Even in her delirium, he noted, his chaste young friend said ‘nothing offensive’.)
But poor Margaret was now, as Evelyn wrote, ‘in a manner spent’; she had already endured ‘the pigeons’ – a
medieval remedy by which live birds were applied to the patient’s feet, generally to reduce fever – and blood-letting; the latter, from a vein in the arm, was commonly believed by doctors to stop haemorrhage.31 The momentary respite which was granted by Betty Viscountess Mordaunt’s famous strengthening cordial was soon over. Erysipelas, a kind of hot red rash described by Evelyn as ‘a fiery Trial’, began to spread over her back, neck and arms (it was in fact produced by the acute streptococcal infection causing her ‘puerperal’ fever). She lasted like this in ‘all the circumstances of pain and weariness’ until the morning of the next day. Then her paroxysms grew worse and she died at noon on Monday, 9 September, one week after the birth of her child, being in her twenty-fifth year.
Margaret Godolphin’s last letter to her husband was full of that submissive melancholy which had animated so much of her short life: ‘In the first place, my dear, believe me, that of all earthly things you were and are the most dear to me … and do not grieve too much for me, since I hope I shall be happy, being very much resigned to God’s will.’ In her letter to him concerning her legacies, however, she revealed that other apprehension which haunted the dying wives of the seventeenth century: if Sidney Godolphin married again, he was to ‘be kind to that poor Child I leave behind, for my sake, who lov’d you so well’.32 But Sidney Godolphin, rare among his contemporaries as we shall see in the next chapter, never married again.
The Weaker Vessel: Women's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England Page 10