In Bed with the Tudors: The Sex Lives of a Dynasty from Elizabeth of York to Elizabeth I (7 page)

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’.
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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 perspective 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.
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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.

The future Henry VIII was born at Greenwich, in the old manor house of Placentia, begun by Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and developed by Henry VI and Edward IV. As such, it was a smaller and less significant royal property, more of a country retreat than the symbolic locations chosen for the arrival of Arthur and Margaret. Within a few years, all that remained of Henry’s birth place would be completely demolished to make way for a grand new programme of building in the Burgundian style. Its positioning may have afforded the heavily pregnant queen a greater degree of privacy and quiet than she would have found at Westminster; apparently it was her favourite house. Assuming the physicians’ calculations had been correct, Elizabeth would have taken to her chamber early in June, to await the birth at the end of that month. The usual mechanism of preparations would have ensured all was ready for her enclosure in her chamber, from the yards of cloth and hangings about her bed, to the tapestries on the walls, cradles, pallet bed, all in the richest colours and fabrics as well as the indispensable reliquary. It was her first summer confinement; perhaps in the heat she requested that the one uncovered window might be left open, so she could look out down to the river and watch the distant craft sailing past in the long days of waiting. Finally, on 28 June 1491, the ordeal came to an end; she was delivered of a sturdy, golden-haired son.

A child’s safe arrival triggered the next phase in the frenzy of activity of the birth chamber. While Elizabeth lay back and rested, exhausted after her ordeal, the focus of her attendants shifted to the child, to secure its safety and establish the all-important gender and state of health. Superstition continued to govern this element of the procedure. While some gossips remained to comfort and congratulate the mother, it was the midwife’s next job to cut the umbilical cord; a task of immense significance, as a child’s navel was believed to hold the key to future fertility: if it was wrinkled, the mother would bear more babies, if smooth, her child-bearing days were over. The cord also had magical qualities of protection: some people carried a dried piece of it around as a charm to fend off witches, which was a very real fear for pregnant and labouring mothers, illustrated by a case of July 1582, when the Kent assizes found Elizabeth Johnson, a spinster of Kemsing, not guilty of having bewitched one Elizabeth Fremlynge so that she gave birth to a stillborn child. The caul and placenta were removed from the child and left to dry, thought to bring great fortune and an indicator of baby’s future health, although as superstition became increasingly frowned upon, midwives were directed to bury them. As usual, the child’s navel was dusted with powder of aloe and frankincense to speed recovery, while the midwife examined the new arrival carefully, checking his breathing and wiping his ears, eyes and nostrils. Cases of jaundice were treated with tree bark boiled in barley water or clarified whey. Then the little prince was washed gently in any of a number of substances; wine, milk, mallow, rue, sweet butter, myrrh, linseed and barley water, or rubbed with oil of acorns – supposedly another preventative measure against the perils of death before baptism – before being swaddled and laid in the cradle. Alternative methods of care included swathing them in roses ground up with salt to absorb moisture from their limbs and the mouth and gums cleansed with a finger dipped in honey. As she looked on the face of her sleeping newborn baby, Elizabeth cannot have predicted what the future would hold for him. As a second son, Prince Henry was the necessary ‘spare heir’, significant as a safe-guard but not expected to rule. His arrival was celebrated but few records were made of the event. His birth was a comparatively quiet business: it is symbolic that Margaret Beaufort only briefly mentioned his arrival in her Book of Hours, writing over a correction, whilst his elder brother and sister’s exact time of arrival had been noted. He was baptised in the nearby church of the Friars Observant, which had been decorated for the purpose with tapestries, cypress linen, cloth-of-gold and damask, around a temporary wooden stage on which stood the Canterbury silver font. Wrapped in a mantle of cloth-of-gold trimmed with ermine, he was anointed and blessed by Richard Fox, the Bishop of Exeter. Soon, this tiny prince would be sent away to join his sister at her Eltham nursery where he would be brought up among women and quickly learned to ‘rule the roost’.

Between 1491 and 1501, Elizabeth bore four, possibly five, more children. She conceived again only three months after the birth of Henry and went into confinement shortly before his first birthday. Whilst awaiting the delivery, she was brought news of the death of her own mother Elizabeth Wydeville, who for the first time had declined to assist her during labour. When a second daughter arrived on 2 July 1492, the queen named her Elizabeth. The little girl was the first of the royal children to die in infancy, taken by an ‘atrophy’ or wasting disease at the age of three, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Regular, unpredictable infant mortality was a sad fact of Tudor deliveries and was no respecter of rank; in many families, rates of survival could be as low as 50 per cent, although some families suffered fewer losses. Those dying at birth or within a week were known as ‘chrisom children’, still wearing the white baptismal cloth, while those surviving the dangerous first months could still be prey to all manner of dangers. It is impossible to know, across time, exactly what factors contributed to specific deaths but undeniably traumatic deliveries, illness, poor hygiene, malnutrition, cot death, accidents and imperfect understanding of child care were contributing factors. In spite of their grief, Henry and Elizabeth knew their daughter had been in receipt of the best available care. In addition, Elizabeth was three months pregnant again. Princess Mary was born at Richmond on 18 March 1496.

Elizabeth’s childbearing record and advancing age, by the standards of the time, may have affected her fertility. She did not conceive again for over two years. Perhaps the pilgrimage to Walsingham she undertook in the summer of 1497 was related to conception; it had certainly been a difficult period with the presence of the pretender Perkin Warbeck at court and the great fire that had razed Sheen Palace to the ground that Christmas. Payments made by Henry to Elizabeth’s physician Master Lewis and her surgeon Robert Taylor in 1498 may have been related to a pregnancy or birth: certainly by May that year, she had fallen pregnant again. At the relatively advanced age, in Tudor terms, of thirty-three, she went into confinement for the sixth time at Greenwich in February 1499. Although this pregnancy went to term and the little prince Edmund was apparently healthy, something had caused concern in those attending the queen. The Spanish ambassador reported that there had been ‘much fear for her life’ but in the end, the delivery proved straightforward. Perhaps she had experienced a more difficult pregnancy or her age and general health provoked doubts: she had just passed her thirtieth birthday when she delivered Mary back in 1496 and those three extra years may have been considered significant. Possibly these fears combined with political and dynastic dangers: her confinement coincided with the culmination of years of threat from pretender to the throne Perkin Warbeck. In the event, however, the delivery proved comparatively easy and another male heir was welcomed and celebrated. Sadly though, the little prince died at fifteen months and was buried at Westminster: perhaps he was weak or underweight from the start, or Elizabeth’s unrecorded complications during the pregnancy gave grounds for concern at the time. Alternatively he may have fallen prey to any one of the infantile illnesses of the age, unpredictable and often untreatable with contemporary medicine. His death may have coincided with the conception of the mysterious Edward, putting this child’s delivery date somewhere in the summer of 1501; alternatively he pre-dated his brother in birth and death, arriving in 1497 or 1498. Perhaps the very closeness of these pregnancies lay behind the concerns for the queen’s health.

In late 1501, Elizabeth witnessed the arrival of the Spanish infanta Catherine of Aragon, whose marriage with Prince Arthur, just turned fifteen, had been planned since their early years. The queen’s eldest son had grown into a tall, slender, serious young man, much in the mould of his father; contemporary portraits show him thin-faced and delicate-looking with a certain tenderness about the eyes and mouth. His bride was to be the beautiful, golden-haired daughter of King Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, an extraordinary pair of joint rulers renowned for their warlike nature and ruthless, separate control of their individual territories. Catherine had arrived that October in Plymouth after an apparently smooth and uneventful crossing: they were married almost six weeks later. London turned out in its finery to watch the event. According to the chronicler Hall, the bride was conducted to St Paul’s through streets decked with beautiful pageants, wise devises and prudent speeches, with ballads and instruments making ‘heauenly noyes’. The city officials lined up to welcome her, dressed in ‘costly apparel both of goldsmythes work and embraudery, ryche iewelles, massy cheynes’ upon horses with glittering trappings, hung with gold spangles and bells. She was led into the church by the already charismatic ten-year-old Henry, Prince of Wales. A 6-foot wooden platform had been erected inside, covered in fine red worsted, making a sort of stage above the heads of the crowd. Here, Elizabeth and Henry watched as their son was married, both bride and groom dressed – unusually – all in white and being ‘both lusty and amorous’. This was followed by a four-course feast in the Bishop’s Palace, using plates from four cupboards, with dancing and ‘costly disguising’, before the formal bedding ceremony of the couple at Baynard’s Castle, much unchanged since Elizabeth’s day, for what was to become the most controversial wedding night in Tudor history.