The Weaker Vessel: Women's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England

by Antonia Fraser

  In Venice Preserv’d, Thomas Betterton as Jaffeir gave Mrs Barry as Belvidera, on her first entrance, this lyrical salutation which sums up the romantic view of the female in the late seventeenth century:

  Sure all ill-stories of thy sex are false:

  O woman! lovely woman! Nature made thee

  To temper man: we had been brutes without you:

  Angels are painted fair, to look like you;

  There’s in you all that we believe of heaven,

  Amazing brightness, purity and truth!51

  It was ironic under the circumstances that Mrs Barry herself, angel painted fair on stage as she might be, was the focus of so many ‘ill-stories’ off it, which if only half of them were true, more than justified the opposing cynical view of the female sex. Mrs Barry was dissolute (‘She has been a Rioter in her time’, wrote Gildon): that in itself was not unusual. She was bad-tempered and at times even violent. Although her good breeding – more or less – was said to make her on stage ‘Mistress of that Behaviour which sets off the well-bred Gentlewoman’, Mrs Barry was capable of exhibiting quite another side to her character, stage or no stage. In a famous incident, Mrs Barry and ‘Chestnut-maned [Betty] Boutel’, acting in Lee’s The Rival Queens, quarrelled over a scarf as the play was about to begin. On the all-too appropriate line:

  Die, sorceress, die and all my wrongs die with thee!

  Mrs Barry as Roxana struck Mrs Boutel playing the rival queen Statira with such force that her blunted stage dagger managed to penetrate Mrs Boutel’s stays, and pierce the flesh beneath.52

  Furthermore Mrs Barry was mercenary. Where her professional life was concerned, that was understandable, in view of the low salaries paid to actresses at the time: for example, she insisted on receiving the proceeds of a benefit at the theatre, hitherto generally reserved for writers. But she was also mercenary where her affections were concerned, to an extent that amazed even this worldly age. It was not so much the settlement she was supposed to have secured from the playwright Sir George Etherege (Mrs Barry could see for herself what happened to the unendowed actress), but Tom Brown wrote: ‘Should you lie with her all night, she would not know you next morning, unless you had another five pounds at your service.’ The lampoons which blasted the private lives of all the famous actresses and courtesans of the time (with the ever-glowing exception of Mrs Betterton) showed in later years a particular bitterness towards the ‘slattern Betty Barry’.

  At thirty eight a very hopeful whore,

  The only one o’th’ trade that’s not profuse,

  (A policy was taught her by the Jews),

  Tho’ still the highest bidder she will choose.

  At the same time it had to be admitted that Mrs Barry was one whom ‘every fop upon the stage admires’.53 It was as though her defiant combination of talent and calculation was especially exacerbating.

  Thomas Otway despaired of Mrs Barry’s treatment of him: while accepting the parts, it is said that she would not even requite his besotted love with a kiss. Otway referred to himself as being fobbed off ‘with gross, thick, homespun friendship, the common Coin that passes betwixt Worldly Interests’. He addressed a series of agonized letters to his beloved, confessing that since the first day he saw her, ‘I have hardly enjoy’d one Hour of perfect Quiet’; and yet he could not break loose: ‘though I have languished for seven long tedious Years of Desire, jealously and despairingly; yet, every Minute I see you, I still discover something new and bewitching’.54

  Otway was bitter in the knowledge that Rochester had succeeded where he had failed: ‘I have consulted my Pride, whether after a Rival’s Possession I ought to ruin all my Peace for a Woman that another has been more blest in, though no Man ever loved as I did: But Love, victorious Love, o’er throws all that, and tells me, it is his Nature never to remember; he still looks forward from the present hour, expecting new Dawns, new rising Happiness, never looks back, never regards what is past, left behind him, but buries and forgets it quite in the hot fierce pursuit of Joy before him.’ On the other hand Rochester, on the evidence of his own letters (thirty-four survive, although they are undated and the originals have vanished), suffered equally from jealousy where Mrs Barry was concerned, for all the consummation of his desire. It was thought by contemporaries that Mrs Barry was the great love of Rochester’s life: she was ‘his passion’, wrote one, and another claimed that he never loved anyone else ‘so sincerely’ as Mrs Barry.55

  In poetry Rochester could serenade ‘The Mistress’ with elegance:

  An age in her embraces past

  Would seem a winter’s day,

  Where life and light with envious haste

  Are torn and snatch’d away.

  But, oh! how slowly minutes roll

  When absent from her eyes,

  That fed my love, which is my soul,

  It languishes and dies.

  The letters were less controlled: ‘Madam, There is now no minute of my life that does not afford me some new argument how much I love you; the little joy I take in every thing wherein you are not concern’d, the pleasing perplexity of endless thought, which I fall into, wherever you are brought to my remembrance; and lastly, the continual disquiet I am in, during your absence, convince me sufficiently that I do you justice in loving you, so as woman was never loved before.’ And again: ‘Seeing you is as necessary to my life as breathing; so that I must see you, or be yours no more; for that’s the image I have of dying …’ Writing to Mrs Barry at three in the morning, a letter of furious expostulation, Rochester ended: ‘I thank God I can distinguish, I can see very woman in you … ’Tis impossible for me to curse you; but give me leave to pity myself, which is more than ever you will do for me.’56

  Rochester’s relationship with Mrs Barry lasted for about four years; towards the end of it, in 1677, she bore him a daughter. Rochester was by this time immured in the country, crippled and virtually blind from disease, moving towards that classic reprobate’s deathbed in which he would abandon his wicked ways for the consolations of religion. Savile broke the news to him: ‘Your Lordship has a daughter born by the body of Mrs Barry of which I give your honour joy.’ Savile added that the mother’s lying-in was not being held in ‘much state’ since Mrs Barry was living in great poverty in the Mall. The woman who had taken her in was ‘not without some gentle reflections on your Lordship’s want either of generosity or bowels [compassion] towards a lady who had not refused you the full enjoyment of her charms’.57

  Rochester was however at this point pursued by his creditors as well as cut off from London by his physical condition, so that it is difficult to see how he could in fact have helped his mistress financially. He contented himself with writing to her: ‘Madam, Your safe delivery has deliver’d me too from fears for your sake, which were, I’ll promise you, as burthensome to me, as your great belly could be to you. Every thing has fallen out to my wish, for you are out of danger, and the child is of the soft sex I love …’ The child, mentioned in Rochester’s will under the name of Elizabeth Clarke, where she was left £40, died in 1689 at the age of twelve. At some point before Rochester’s death in 1682 little Elizabeth Clarke was taken away briefly from her mother’s care because of her want of ‘discretion’ in bringing her up. Rochester wrote firmly but kindly on the subject: ‘Madam, I am far from delighting in the grief I have given you, by taking away the child: and you, who made it so absolutely necessary for me to do so, must take that excuse from me, for all the ill nature of it …! I hope very shortly to restore to you a finer girl than ever.’58

  Doubtless Mrs Barry did show lack of discretion in her way of life: ‘You have a character, and you maintain it’, wrote Rochester in one of the anguished letters.59 Yet her legendary rapacity and even her coldness and severity towards her admirers are at least explicable when one bears in mind the alternative: the wretched downfall experienced by an actress like Elizabeth Farley. Famous as Mrs Barry was, she had no alternative but to give birth to her child in poverty,
without support from husband or lover, and only the help of a ‘protectress’; that was the predictable fate of an actress who became pregnant. A little rapacity may be pardoned under the circumstances.

  Mrs Barry retired to Acton – then pleasant countryside – when she finally left the stage in her fifties after her long reign. She died there in 1713. She is said to have been the victim of a bite from a pet lap-dog, which she did not know had been ‘seized with madness’.60 If the story is true, it was an appropriately bizarre and tragic end for the first of the great English dramatic actresses, a line of descent leading down to Mrs Siddons in the next century.

  Although her plain memorial stone is still to be seen in the church at Acton where she lies buried, the words of Colley Cibber himself constitute her best epitaph: ‘Mrs Barry, in Characters of Greatness, had a Presence of elevated dignity, her Mien and Motion superb and gracefully majestick; her Voice full, clear, and strong, so that no Violence of Passion could be too much for her: And when Distress or Tenderness possess’d her, she subsided into the most affecting Melody and Softness. In the Art of exciting Pity She had a Power beyond all the Actresses I have yet seen, or what your Imagination can conceive.’61

  1Today Sir Rupert Bromley Bt represents the direct line of descent from Ruperta, Prince Rupert and of course Peg Hughes.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The Modest Midwife

  ‘It is observable that in all the ages of the world and throughout all countries in the world, the help of grave and modest women (with us termed Midwives) hath ever been useful for release and succour of all the daughters of Evah, whom God hath appointed to bear children into this world.’

  JACOB RUEFF, The Expert Midwife, 1637

  In the seventeenth century every woman who had the opportunity to conceive was likely to give birth at least once during her lifetime: the heiress, the Quaker, the prostitute and the actress were all equal in this respect. And if a woman did not actually give birth, she had some other form of obstetrical experience. In the absence of any form of birth control (even coitus interruptus being notoriously uncertain) it was celibacy not marriage which was the relevant fact. Under the circumstances there were few women of the time from the idealistic Margaret Fell to the exotic Elizabeth Barry who did not fall at some point into the hands of those ‘grave and modest women (with us termed Midwives)’ in the words of Jacob Rueff’s textbook of obstetrics.1 The midwives could also be the agents of drama beyond the mere expedition of birth. It was the midwives’ brutal ‘search’ of Frances Lady Purbeck, to prove her adultery with Sir Robert Howard, which caused her to flee her mother-in-law’s roof. Witches were also subject to a routine search by the local midwives to discover the devil’s marks; as were those women who sought to escape punishment on the grounds that they were pregnant.

  The all-pervasive presence of the midwife in women’s lives may be illustrated by the indignant sentiments of The Midwives Just Petition of January 1643: let war cease, men return again to their wives so as to ‘bring them yearly under the delivering power of the midwife’. The Midwives Just Complaint of 22 September 1646 echoed the thought: to the midwives, ‘whereas many miseries do attend upon civil wars’, nothing was worse than the gross interruption to their trade: ‘For many men, hopeful to have begot a race of soldiers, were there killed on a sudden, before they had performed anything to the benefit of midwives.’ Such a development was to be lamented: ‘We were formerly well paid and highly respected in our parishes for our great skill and midnight industry; but now our art doth fail us, and little getting have we in this age, barren of all natural joys, and only fruitful of bloody calamities.’2

  At first sight there is something wonderfully solipsistic about this interpretation of recent military events in England as being aimed at the overthrow of the midwives’ ‘midnight industry’ rather than more political changes. Yet to most women of the time, caught up in their cycle of perpetual parturition, the complaint would have been perfectly comprehensible. For they too were caught up in the ‘midnight industry’ which touched most females far more closely than politics.

  It could be said that nothing was more crucial to the life of the average woman than the character and skills of her midwife. Doctors were rarely in attendance at births, and when they were, concentrated on the rich, for obvious reasons. The rise of the so-called ‘Man-Midwife’ in the course of the seventeenth century, once again affected only the tiny percentage of people who could afford his services.3 For most women, lying-in meant the attendance of a female whom it was devoutly hoped would be skilled enough to bring about an easy birth and leave behind a live mother and live child when she left.

  There were thus a vast range of professional helps available, from the grand midwives who attended the royal accouchements down to the humble helpmates of the poor. Where the latter were concerned a shilling or two was a normal fee at the beginning of the seventeenth century; whereas towards the end of it the anonymous business diary of a midwife shows a prosperous trade with some form of sliding scale.4 In 1696 this midwife recorded about two deliveries a month, for payments varying from 5s to 10s. On 24 August 1698 Mrs Rowell paid her 12s 6d for the delivery of a daughter at the awkward time of seven o’clock on a Sunday morning – but since the midwife was also able to record that she ‘laid Mrs Clarke next door’ in the course of the same visit, she only charged the latter 2s 6d. By 1719, this midwife was attending approximately three confinements a month and charging an average of £1 a visit; all of which amounted to a handsome income. The midwife had a large practice in the Old Bailey area of the City of London, but a connection with the Barnardiston family – she attended to a number of their confinements – took her as far as Cornwall where she ‘laid Madam Barnardiston’. All the same, the midwife was also aware of her social duty: when she ‘laid a woman in the market’ no payment was recorded, presumably because the mother was of the poor.

  Then there were the payments traditionally made by the godparents to the midwife as well as the nurse (for this, if for no other reason, the midwife had a vested interest in delivering a live infant, for no baby meant no baptism, no ‘gossip’, and thus no present). In 1661 Pepys as godfather made a payment of 10s to the midwife. At the end of the century Sir Walter Calverley Bt was in the habit of giving a guinea or 20s regularly to the midwives of his godchildren.5

  Attendance at a royal birth brought heavy responsibilities, a fact acknowledged by the handsome rewards which followed. James I’s Queen, Anne of Denmark, gave birth to a number of children both before and after her arrival in England from Scotland: Alice Dennis, an English midwife, was paid £100 on two occasions. Another English midwife, Margaret Mercer, set off for Heidelberg in 1616 with a train of attendants in order to deliver the baby of Elizabeth of Bohemia, the Queen’s daughter; for this she received a total of £84 4s.6

  On the other hand Charles I’s Queen, Henrietta Maria, as a French Princess, preferred a French midwife. In May 1629, Henrietta Maria was confined with her first child ten weeks prematurely; this was unfortunately far too early for the attendance of the famous French midwife Madame Péronne, who was much in demand – the baby died. The royal doctor Sir Theodore Mayerne hastened to send a message to France that Madame Péronne’s services were now no longer needed in England; she should be directed instead to the bedside of the Princess of Piedmont. The next year the Queen was pregnant again. This time Madame Péronne arrived well in advance, dispatched by Henrietta Maria’s mother, Marie de Medici. The successful delivery of a healthy boy – the future King Charles II – after a labour of eight hours, was rewarded by the elated royal father with a payment to Madame Péronne of £ 1,000.7

  Henrietta Maria had the advantage of her English in-laws because midwifery was in a more advanced state in France, with a noted school for midwives being established at the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris, including six weekly lectures on anatomy. The first midwife to enjoy an international reputation had indeed been a Frenchwoman named Louise Bourgeois, who published sever
al books on obstetrics in the early seventeenth century.8 One of England’s most celebrated midwives in the first part of the seventeenth century was herself of foreign origin: Aurelia Florio, one of the midwives who examined the supposed witches of Lancashire, was the daughter of the scholar John Florio, Groom of the Privy Chamber and Reader in Italian to Anne of Denmark. She married the surgeon James Molins, member of a celebrated English medical family, and herself bore at least seven children, the majority of whom, no doubt as a result of their parents’ abilities, grew to adulthood. Aurelia Florio died in 1641, but recent research in the registers of St Andrew, Holborn, has shown that her accomplished handling of her patients was commemorated by the unusual name Aurelia being bestowed on at least seven girls she had delivered, who were not apparently related to her.9

  Alas, the very tribute indicated how few English midwives approached the standards and skill of an Aurelia Florio. The problem was partly one of language – as it so often was where women were concerned in this period. Only a handful of women could read Latin, the language of medical textbooks, and very few of the midwife class were to be counted among their number. But there was a remarkable scarcity of manuals written in English. The first one printed in England, entitled The Byrth of Mankind, had actually been translated from the Latin, which in turn had been translated from the German; after publication in 1540, it ran through thirteen editions, the last in 1654.10 Such a long reign without medical updating demonstrated not only the desperate need for such sources, but also the primitive, virtually stationary nature of obstetrical knowledge at this time.

  Jacob Rueff’s textbook The Expert Midwife printed in an English translation in 1637, first appeared in Latin under the title De Conceptu et Generatione Hominis in 1554. Rueff, himself an expert surgeon, paid tribute in his introduction to the ancient origins of the midwives’ profession: ‘It is observable that in all the ages of the world and throughout all countries in the world …’ such women had ever been useful ‘for release and succour of all the daughters of Evah, whom God hath appointed to bear children into this world.’ At the same time he pointed to the undeniable weakness of women as active obstetricians: the two methods of learning being the use of books or ‘conference with the skilful’, women were unhappily liable to fall behind in the former, since they were traditionally unable to understand anything except their native tongue.