The Popish Midwife

It’s a fair bet that Elizabeth Cellier didn’t start out to be the symbol of a political movement in late 17th century England. In fact, it’s unlikely that she ever intended to get into politics at all. She was just a midwife, plying her trade, trying to help out a few people with the tender healing arts.

But that’s not how she will be forever remembered. Elizabeth Cellier will always be “The Popish Midwife,” the woman who harbored the treasonous plot to turn over the English Crown (and by extension, the English people) to Catholicism.

The fact that she was undoubtedly innocent of the charges, and in actuality was acquitted at the Bar, is largely left in the footnotes of history.

To understand Mrs. Cellier’s plight, one needs a fairly thorough background on a hundred years of English history. Here, for those of you who don’t stay up nights reading Wikipedia (or who might be getting your English history from Philippa Gregory novels, and therefore need a dose of reality), is the Cliff Notes version:

While the bloody persecutions of Protestants at the hands of Bloody Mary and her zealot husband King Philip II of Spain (he of the Spanish Armada 34 years later) were still fresh in the minds of primarily Protestant England, a well-choreographed political dance put the Protestant James VI of Scotland (James I of England) on the throne with the death of the childless Virgin Queen Elizabeth in 1603. His son Charles I succeeded him in 1625. Charles was widely disliked, both because he sort of thought he was an absolute monarch and kept ignoring and dissolving Parliament, and because of a series of religious wars that did not go so well. The fact that he married a Catholic undoubtedly didn’t help in the time frame when English Protestantism was becoming more stringent and less ritualistic. Seven years of off and on again civil war led to Charles’ arrest and execution in 1649. Cromwell and the Puritans took over the State in a pseudo-theocracy known as the Commonwealth (if you like Puritanism) or the Interregnum (if you’re a Royalist). Cromwell died in 1658 and left it all in the care of his son, who wasn’t up to the task, so eventually the people called Bonnie Prince Charlie back from exile in Scotland (which had never recognized Cromwell’s government), crowning him Charles II in 1661, although documents were all re-dated to pretend that he succeeded his father in 1649.

Confused yet?

Charles II was a Catholic sympathizer. He married the Catholic Infanta of Portugal and signed a secret treaty with Louis XIV, in which he received a pension from France under the promise to convert to Catholicism at a later date (this he did on his deathbed). But, while he had upwards of 12 illegitimate children, he had no legal heir, so the throne would pass at his death to his brother, the Duke of York, who had converted to Catholicism when he married his second wife, a Catholic. The production of a male heir by that union meant that the next two generations of kings would be Catholic. Radical Protestant forces in England rebelled, attempting to exclude the future James II from taking the throne, in what is now termed the Exclusion Crisis.

Phew.

[Oddly, the Anglican Church officials were on James' side on this one. The bad blood between Anglicanism and Puritanism runs deep.]

Add in the Great Fire of London in 1666, which was widely blamed on a Catholic conspiracy–a French immigrant was hanged for it, but it probably started in a non-Catholic bakery–and you have a crucible just waiting for a spark.

Treasonous plots abounded. Most of them were made up. People were hanged, drawn and quartered, beheaded, and rarely acquitted. Conspirators confessed, recanted, recanted their recantations, recanted their recantations of their recantations. Accusations were laid on the king’s wife, the king’s mother, the king’s brother, the king’s counselors, the king’s best friends.

The people who were really plotting against the monarchy, apparently, largely got away with it.

Meanwhile, poor Mrs. Cellier had married a French Catholic and converted to his religion. She found a new avenue open to her profession, as her services as a midwife were requested by fellow Catholics in London, who mistrusted most midwives.

Midwives, at the time, were licensed by the Church, not so much as a competency check (really, how could a bunch of priests determine midwife competency?) but to make sure that the rituals of the Church were properly performed. They were instructed in how to perform a proper Baptism, just in case the child didn’t survive. They were charged with reporting such crimes as abortion and adultery. They were responsible for making sure that the postpartum women in question underwent the appropriate ritual purification known as “churching.”

In other words, they were stoolies for the Church. And they were often widely reviled for it, both among the Catholic dissenters, and, just as vehemently, among the radical Protestant factions which considered the Anglican church to be too popish.

So when one of those made up plots was made up by a no-goodnik that Mrs. Cellier and some of her Catholic friends had tried to help, she landed solidly in the middle of it. All of the anti-Catholic and anti-midwife sentiment came pouring out on poor Mrs. Cellier, who was supposed to have hidden some treasonous documents in her meal-tub.

The radical Protestant press had a field day–their two most reviled things all wrapped up into one nice, neat package, complete with the visual metaphor of a midwife “delivering” a Catholic plot from her meal-tub. The symbolism was just SO good, that the press didn’t seem to even take note when Mrs. Cellier and her lawyers demolished her accuser for the low-life that he was, and she was acquitted. Images of the Popish Midwife never left the public view throughout the Exclusion Crisis.

Poor Mrs. Cellier.

She might have gotten the last laugh, though. She became a prominent political pamphleteer, and  advanced her art of midwifery in the face of the male-midwife threat. Hell hath no fury, as they say.

[Charles II, BTW, avoided the whole exclusion issue using the same time-honored approach that got his dad into so much trouble. He just kept dismissing Parliament until the idea died out. James II took the throne as the last Catholic monarch of England.]

If you would like to catch up on the entire Nefarious History of Motherhood, click here.

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