The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (14 page)

It was hardly surprising that Margaret Duchess of Newcastle, whose husband had children by his first marriage, consulted the celebrated physician Sir Theodore Mayerne when she failed to conceive after two years. His advice was sensible: ‘Be in good health and then you may till your ground, otherwise it will be time lost if you enter that race frowningly.’ But Margaret did not conceive. As a result she came to write with considerable acerbity about her fertile sisters – women like ‘Lady S.M.’ who had only been married for four weeks, but knowing herself to be with child was already proudly ‘rasping wind out of her stomache … making Sickly faces … and bearing out her Body, drawing her Neck downward, and standing in a weak and faint Posture as great bellied Wives do …’
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Margaret Newcastle poured further contempt on the great fuss which was made about the business of childbirth itself: the making and buying of fine and costly childbed linen (although one should perhaps point out that the heiress Lady Anne Clifford used her husband’s three-year-old shirts as ‘clouts’). Then there was the fearful fuss over the baby, including an expensive christening – the money, she suggested, would be better spent on the child’s education – swaddling clothes, baby mantles, cradles, baskets and so forth.
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In Margaret Newcastle’s general scorn for women who prided themselves on their ‘great bellies’, one can detect the jealous voice of one who would never be able to form the centrepiece of such a celebration herself.

The constant emphasis on the virtuous work of bearing
children – in which the mothers, as well as the fathers, preachers and advisers all concurred – casts the whole subject of contraception within marriage (never wholly clear of the shadows in any age) into a particular obscurity. The pathetic case of Mistress Augier, mother of Elizabeth Heywood, provides an extreme example of how a large family was regarded as a mark of God’s favour. In 1642 Mistress Augier had been suffering from cancer of the breast for two years, enduring pangs ‘so painful that she often said she would be content to have her breast ripped open for a little ease’. Under the circumstances it might seem fortunate rather than the reverse that there had been a long gap in her child-bearing; however, her husband, a Puritan minister, did not view the situation in that light. When Mistress Augier conceived once more, her husband attributed it to divine intervention. She was delivered of her child a month early, with a very long hard labour, in the course of which the midwife pronounced – correctly – that there was no hope of saving the mother’s life. Mistress Augier died in terrible agonies. ‘God gave her conception after almost eight years’ respite,’ wrote her husband after her death, ‘having often put it into my heart to pray for the enlarging of my family.’ He went on: ‘Yet after her conception her weakness and weariness increased.’
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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’.
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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.
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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),
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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’.
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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.
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At the same time herbal medicines which might either prevent or cure
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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
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it being a ‘notorious Restorative of slender shapes and tender reputations’, as a pamphlet described it at the end of the seventeenth century.
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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’.
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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.
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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’.)
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The existence of this ancient twilight world of folkloric preventives demonstrates that both contraception and abortion were underground preoccupations of the seventeenth century
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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.
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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.
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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.
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