‘Sacred Vessels’: Stuart Maternity, Infertility and Dynastic Politics at the Stuart Court

Abstract

The queens, queens consort and princesses who determined the Stuart succession were conceptualised as ‘sacred vessels’, their reproductive bodies carrying personal and public, dynastic and state, political and confessional ambitions. This comparative study considers the dynastic pressures and reproductive experiences of these women, offering both quantitative and qualitative analysis. The first section, ‘Measuring Dynastic Success’, charts their reproductive experiences through statistical patterns: the ages of marriage and first birth, the known number of conceptions and births as well as rates of mortality. The second section, ‘Scrutinising and Embodying Fertility’, examines the courtly optics of female fertility. The final section, ‘Treating Infertility’, considers their efforts to manage their bodies through physic, diet, prayer and patronage.

Keywords:

• Stuart queens
• fertility
• pregnancy
• childbirth
• women’s health
• succession

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Aphra Behn, Congratulatory poem to her most sacred Majesty, on the Universal Hopes of all Loyal Persons for a Prince of Wales (London, 1688), A1v.

2 See Susan Doran and Paulina Kewes (eds), Doubtful and Dangerous: The Question of Succession in Late Elizabethan England (Manchester, 2014); Andreas Gestrich and Michael Schaich (eds), The Hanoverian Succession: Dynastic Politics and Monarchical Culture (Farnham, 2015); Paulina Kewes and Andrew McRae (eds), Stuart Succession Literature: Moments and Transformation (Oxford, 2018).

3 Two more children were born in England: Mary (1605–07) and Sophia (1606).

4 Malcolm Smuts, ‘Royal Mothers, Sacred History, and Political Polemic’, in Kewes and McRae, Stuart Succession Literature, pp. 282-302.

5 Toni Bowers, The Politics of Motherhood: British Writing and Culture 1680–1760 (Cambridge, 1996); Mary Fissell, Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2004); Catriona Murray, Imaging Stuart Family Politics: Dynastic Crisis and Continuity (Aldershot, 2017); Daphna Oren-Magidor, Infertility in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2017).

6 See Smuts, ‘Royal Mothers’, pp. 295-302; Rachel Weil, ‘The Politics of Legitimacy: Women and the Warming Pan Scandal’, in Lois G. Schwoerer (ed.), The Revolution of 1688–89: Changing Perspectives (New York, 1992), pp. 65-82. For Mary of Modena and her commitment to a Catholic succession, see Susannah Lyon-Whaley, ‘Contesting (Catholic) Motherhood: Mary Beatrice of Modena, The “Glorious Revolution”, and Queenly Agency’, in Eilish Gregory and Michael Questier (eds), Later Stuart Queens, 1660–1735: Religion, Political Culture, and Patronage (Cham, 2023). For Anne, see H. E. Emson, ‘For the Want of an Heir: The Obstetrical History of Queen Anne’, British Medical Journal 304 (23 May 1992), pp. 1365-6.

7 Peter Razzell and Christine Spence, ‘The History of Infant, Child and Adult Mortality in London, 1550–1850’, The London Journal 32, no. 3 (2007), pp. 271-92.

8 For the English context, see Roger Finlay, Population and Metropolis, The Demography of London, 1580–1650 (Cambridge, 1981); T. H. Hollingsworth, ‘The Demography of the British Peerage’, Supplement to Population Studies 18 (November 1964); E. A. Wrigley, ‘Explaining the Rise in Marital Fertility in England in the “Long” Eighteenth Century’, The Economic History Review, New Series, 51, no 3 (1998), pp. 435-64. See p. 441 for the definition of stillbirth as death after twenty-eight weeks of pregnancy in modern medicine. Wrigley defines perinatal deaths as stillbirths and first week infant mortality.

9 Finlay, Population and Metropolis, pp. 83-110.

10 Finlay, Population and Metropolis, pp. 100-03; Chris Galley, ‘A Never-ending Succession of Epidemics? Mortality in Early Modern York’, Social History of Medicine 7, no 1 (1994), pp. 29-57, esp. p. 39.

11 Hollingsworth, ‘Demography of the British Peerage’, esp. pp. 29-31.

12 Hollingsworth, ‘Demography of the British Peerage’, pp. 53, 61.

13 Will Fisher, ‘The Renaissance Board: Masculinity in Early Modern England’, Renaissance Quarterly 54 (2001), pp. 155-87, at p. 121. See also Sara Read, Menstruation and the Female Body in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2013), pp. 57-8, 175-6. For the age of menstruation, see Aristotle’s Master-Piece, Or, the Secrets of Generation Displayed in all the Parts Thereof (London, 1694), pp. 2-3.

14 For Galen’s humoral typology, see Galen, Works on Human Nature, volume 1, Mixtures (De Temperamentis), ed. and trans. by P. N. Singer and Philip J. van der Eijk (Cambridge, 2018). For early modern English deployment of humoral language for ages, see Thomas Elyot’s Castel of helth (London, 1539), 10v, which categorises adolescence as the period until age 25 and as constitutionally hot and moist, in contrast to old age’s cold and dry constitution. N. H., Ladies Dictionary (London, 1694), p. 30, positions adolescence between the ages of 14 and 22.

15 Vanessa Harding, ‘Families and Households in Early Modern London, c. 1550–1640’, in R. Malcolm Smuts (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Age of Shakespeare (Oxford, 2016), pp. 605-06; Finlay, Population and Metropolis, pp. 133-50; Vivien Brodsky Elliott, ‘Single Women in the London Marriage Market: Age, Status and Mobility, 1598–1619’, in R. B. Outhwaite (ed.), Marriage and Society: Studies in the Social History of Marriage (London, 1981), pp. 81-100, esp. 82-7.

16 Finlay, Population and Metropolis, p. 137.

17 Hollingsworth, Demography of the British Peerage, p. 18. See also Linda Pollock, ‘Embarking on a Rough Passage: The Experience of Pregnancy in Early Modern Society’, in Valerie Fildes (ed.), Women as Mothers in Pre-industrial England (London, 1990), pp. 39-67, at p. 54.

18 Brodsky Elliott, ‘London Marriage Market’, pp. 84-5.

19 For Anna, see Alan Stewart, The Cradle King: A Life of James VI & I (London, 2003), pp. 139-40; for Henrietta Maria, Mayerne, Opera medica, highlights the urgency and necessity of the queen conceiving, as in pp. 131-32.

20 Aristotle’s Master-Piece, p. 3, determines that women are ‘capable of conceiving … generally to Forty-four’.

21 This was from Abbé Rizzini in Paris reporting a rumour that she was pregnant. Cited in Martin Haile, Queen Mary of Modena (London, 1905), p. 51.

22 Hamilton attended the Queen from late 1708 until her death and kept a diary of his encounters with her from 1709 to 1714. See The Diary of Sir David Hamilton, 1709–14, ed. Philip Roberts (Oxford, 1975), pp. 3-4; for her menstruating, see p. 6.

23 Finlay, Population and Metropolis, pp. 146-8.

24 Emson, ‘For the Want of an Heir’.

25 See for example Anne’s response to her eleventh pregnancy in a letter to Lady Marlborough, cited by Edward Gregg, Queen Anne (London, 1980), pp. 99-100.

26 My thanks to Holly Marsden for discussing Mary’s pregnancies with me and the scant accounts that survive. See Calendar of State Papers Domestic [hereafter CSPD], Charles II, 1 March–31 December 1678 (London, 1913), pp. 126, 421-2. See also Henri and Barbara van der Zee, William and Mary (London, 1975), pp. 134-6, 141-3.

27 Eamonn Sheridan et al., ‘Risk Factors for Congenital Anomaly in a Multiethnic Birth Cohort: An Analysis of the Born in Bradford Study’, The Lancet 382, no 9901 (2013), pp. 1350-59.

28 See Haile, Mary of Modena, p. 102.

29 Hamilton, Diary, p. 3.

30 Diary of Dr. Edward Lake … in the Years 1677–1678, ed. George Percy Elliott (London, 1846), p. 15.

31 Royal Collection Trust, RCIN 1006014.

32 As outlined in Aristotle’s Master-Piece, pp. 123-8.

33 CSPD, 1678, p. 422.

34 George Marcelline, Epithalamium Gallo-Britannicum … for the most Happy Vnion, and Blessed Contract of the High and Mighty Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, and the Lady Henriette Maria (London, 1625), p. 138.

35 Marcelline, Epithalamium, pp. 134-8.

36 See Hammond, ‘King’s Two Bodies’, p. 17, who cites part of the satire below.

37 Cited in Elizabeth Lane Furdell, The Royal Doctors, 1485–1714: Medical Personnel at the Tudor and Stuart Courts (Rochester, 2001), p. 162.

38 Cited in Furdell, Royal Doctors, p. 162.

39 See Susannah Lyon-Whaley, ‘Catherine of Braganza and the Culture of Nature’ (PhD thesis, University of Auckland, 2023), p. 113.

40 On this point, see Marisa N. Benoit, ‘Attitudes towards Infertility in Early Modern England and Colonial New England, c. 1620–1720’ (PhD thesis, University of Oxford, 2014), pp. 44-52. On providence, see Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2001); and in relation to infertility, Oren-Magidor, Infertility, pp. 6-7, 17, and Smuts, ‘Royal Mothers’, pp. 283, 288.

41 Humoral assessment of reproductive problems is found throughout John Pechey, The Compleat Midwife’s Practice (London, 1698); see pp. 200-01, 222.

42 Pechey, Midwife’s Practice, pp. 273-4.

43 As in Lorenzo Magalotti at the Court of Charles II his Relazione d’Inghilterra of 1668, ed. and trans. W. E. Knowles Middleton (Waterloo, Ontario, 1980), p. 30.

44 For body weight and reproduction, see Sarah Toulalan, ‘“To[o] Much Eating Stifles the Child”: Fat Bodies and Reproduction in Early Modern England’, Historical Research 87, no 235 (2014), pp. 65-93. On beauty, see Erin Griffey, ‘The Rose and Lily Queen: Henrietta Maria’s Fair Face and the Power of Beauty at the Stuart Court’, Renaissance Studies 35, no 5 (2021), pp. 811-36; Erin Griffey, ‘Beauty’, in Erin Griffey (ed.), Early Modern Court Culture (Abingdon, 2022), pp. 406-27.

45 Jean Riolan, Sure Guide … to Physick and Chyrurgery, trans. Nicholas Culpeper (London, 1657), p. 195.

46 See for example Thomas Jeamson’s description of this in Artificiall Embellishments (Oxford, 1665), p. 85.

47 For accounts of Henrietta Maria, see Cabala, Sive, Scrinia Sacra. Mysteries of State and Government (London, 1663), pp. 276-81.

48 For ‘good colour’ and ideals of beauty especially in relation to Henrietta Maria, see Griffey, ‘Rose and Lily Queen’.

49 Sir Thomas Ireland, Speeches Spoken to the King and Queen, Duke and Duchesse of York, in Christ-Church Hall, Oxford, Sept. 29, 1663 (London, 1663), p. 5; my thanks to Susannah Lyon-Whaley for this reference. The Diary of John Evelyn (Woodbridge, 2005), p. 128.

50 In Robert Halstead, Succint Genealogies of the Noble and Ancient Houses (London, 1685), pp. 415-29, with the quotations on pp. 417 and 419.

51 Succint genealogies, p. 419.

52 Haile, Mary of Modena, p. 19.

53 For Henrietta Maria, see Marcelline, Epithalamium; for Catherine, see Samuel Holland, The Phaenix, Her Arrival & Welcome to England: it being a Epithalamy on the Marriage of the Kings Most Excellent Majesty with the Most Royal and Most Illustrious Donna Katharina of Portugal (London, 1662); Lancelot Reynolds, A Panegyrick on Her Most Excellent Majestie, Katharine, Queen of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland (London, 1662); William Cottrell, Britannia Iterum Beata (London, 1662); To the Queens Majesty on her happy arrival (London, 1662).

54 Marcelline, Epithalamium, pp. 92-100, quotation on p. 92.

55 Bryant, Letters of Charles II, p. 178; letter of 9 February 1665.

56 Diary of Dr. Edward Lake, p. 26. For the pregnancy, see Van der Zee, William and Mary, p. 134.

57 Cited in Haile, Mary of Modena, p. 136.

58 For pale skin, sees Pechey, Midwive’s Practice, p. 201; for a slender body, see Lorenzo Magalotti, p. 30.

59 The case notes were transcribed and published by Joseph Browne, Opera Medica (London, 1703), pp. 99-142. For Mayerne’s case notes on the medical management of Henrietta Maria’s reproductive body, see Erin Griffey, ‘Blooming Fertility: Henrietta Maria and the Power of Plants as Physic and Iconography’, in Susannah Lyon-Whaley (ed.), Floral Culture and the Tudor and Stuart Courts (Amsterdam, 2024), pp. 153-76.

60 Mayerne, Opera Medica, p. 112.

61 Mayerne, Opera Medica, pp. 128-9.

62 Mayerne, Opera Medica, pp. 134-6.

63 The Diary of Samuel Pepys, eds Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols (London, 1970–82) [hereafter Pepys], vol. III, p. 191.

64 See Pepys, vol. IV, pp. 337-58; for the delirium about children, see pp. 348-53.

65 5 February 1666; CSPD, Charles II, October 1665–July 1666, ed. Mary Anne Everett Green (London, 1864), p. 232.

66 Lorenzo Magalotti, pp. 70-71.

67 Arthur Bryant (ed.), The Letters, Speeches and Declarations of King Charles II (London, 1935), p. 219.

68 9 May 1668, Pepys, vol. IX, p. 191.

69 Bryant, Letters, pp. 235-6.

70 Pepys, vol. IX, p. 552.

71 Pepys, vol. IX, p. 557.

72 Bryant, Letters, p. 239.

73 CSPD, Charles II, 1668–1669, ed. Mary Anne Everett Green (London, 1894), p. 369.

74 An Account of the Reasons of the Nobility and Gentry’s Invitation of His Highness the Prince of Orange into England (London, 1688), p. 10.

75 Account, pp. 18-20.

76 England and Wales Privy Council, At the Council-Chamber in Whitehall, Monday the 22th. of October, 1688 this Day an Extraordinary Council Met … by His Majesties Desire and Appointment (London, 1688).

77 See Cathy McClive, ‘The Hidden Truths of the Belly: The Uncertainties of Pregnancy in Early Modern Europe’, Social History of Medicine 15, no 2 (August 2002), pp. 209-27, esp. 212.

78 Mayerne, Opera Medica, p. 135.

79 The Several Declarations, together with the several depositions made in council on Monday Oct. 22, 1688 (London, 1688), pp. 34-5. My thanks to Susannah Lyon-Whaley for this reference. The poem commemorates Mary of Modena’s quickening in 1682: A Rapture Upon the Report of Her Royal Highness being with Quick-Child (Edinburgh, 1682); discussed in Smuts, ‘Royal Mothers’, p. 296.

80 Thomas Chamberlayne, The Compleat Midwifes Practice (London, 1656), p. 66.

81 Benoit, ‘Attitudes towards Infertility’, esp. pp. 46-52.

82 William Salmon, Systema medicinale, a compleat system of physic (London, 1686), p. 237.

83 See Benoit, ‘Attitudes Towards Infertility’, pp. 212-13. Nicholas Culpeper treats the range of ‘what hinders Conception, together with its Remedies’, in A Directory for Midwives Or, a Guide for Women, in their Conception, Bearing, and Suckling their Children (London, 1651), pp. 81-113. This includes ‘natural barrenness’, ‘accidental barrenness’, and ‘barrenness against nature’. See also Aristotle’s Master-Piece, pp. 74-86.

84 As in Aristotle’s Master-Piece, p. 5.

85 Pechey, Compleat Midwife’s Practice, p. 243. He acknowledges, though, that men can also be the cause of infertility, pp. 58-9.

86 Catsley [Lady Catherine Stanley?] to James Strange [Charles Stanley, 2^nd Baron Strange?], 10 August 1663; CSPD, Charles II, 1663–1664, ed. Mary Anne Everett Green (London, 1862), p. 234.

87 Pepys, vol. VIII, p. 269.

88 Cited in Jennifer Evans, Aphrodisiacs, Fertility and Marriage in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 2014), pp. 20-21.

89 For a range of treatments, see Pechey, Midwife’s Practice, pp. 243-6. On treatments for infertility, see also Oren-Magidor, Infertility, pp. 121-62.

90 Bryant, Letters, p. 219.

91 See for example Salmon, Systema medicinale, pp. 236-45.

92 See her undated letter to her mother thanking her for the chaise as well as an added note from Charles I, in Mary Anne Everett Green (ed.), Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria (London, 1857), pp. 14-16.

93 Green, Letters, p. 15.

94 Narcissus Luttrell, A Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs from September 1678 to April 1714 (Oxford, 1857), vol. I, p. 422. My thanks to Susannah Lyon-Whaley for this reference.

95 Conduct, pp. 104-05

96 Beatrice Curtis (ed.), The Letters and Diplomatic Instructions of Queen Anne (London, 1968), p. 38. With thanks again to Susannah Lyon-Whaley for this reference.

97 On the Recovery of our most Gracious Queen Katharine from Her Late Grievous and Deplorable Fit of Sicknesse a Vision (London, 1664).

98 Recovery of our most Gracious Queen Katharine, p. 7.

99 Lorenzo Magalotti, pp. 31-2, 70.

100 Susannah Lyon-Whaley, ‘Queens at the Spa: Catherine of Braganza, Mary of Modena and the Politics of Display at Bath and Tunbridge Wells’, The Court Historian 27, no 1 (2022), pp. 24-41.

101 As in the case of a bath prescribed by Mayerne for Henrietta Maria; Mayerne, Opera Medica, p. 116.

102 Mayerne, Opera Medica, p. 131. On Tunbridge Wells and claims to fertility, see Patrick Madan, A Phylosophical and Medicinal Essay of the Waters of Tunbridge (London, 1687), pp. 6-7. On the city of Bath and fertility, see Robert Pierce, Bath Memoirs: Or, Observations in Three and Forty Years Practice, at the Bath what Cures have been there Wrought (Bristol, 1697), pp. 195-205.

103 Calendar of State Papers, Venice [hereafter CSPV], 1626–1628, ed. Allen B. Hinds (London, 1914), p. 297.

104 CSPV, 1626–1628, p. 342.

105 On Henrietta Maria’s subsequent visits to mineral spas in England and France, see Hembry, English Spa, pp. 58-60.

106 Edmund Gayton, The Art of Longevity (London, 1659), p. 20. Gayton studied medicine but was not a practicing physician; in 1659 he was a beadle at the University of Oxford and a writer.

107 For her visits, see Pepys, vol. IV: 22 July (p. 240), 27 July (p. 251) and 11 August 1663 (p. 272) at Tunbridge Wells; Pepys, vol. IV, 31 August 1663 (p. 292) at ‘the Bath’; and Pepys, vol. VII, 22 July 1666 (p. 214), with the King there on 31 July 1666 (p. 228). See also Thomson, Illustrated Guide, pp. 9-11, for the visit in 1669, including a reference to a warrant of 19 March 1669 to erect tents there for her use.

108 Haile, Mary of Modena, pp. 168-88.

109 Gregg, Queen Anne, p. 158.

110 For Anne’s visits to the spa, see Gregg, Queen Anne, p. 36; Thomson, Illustrated Guide, pp. 16-17.

111 Gregg, Queen Anne, p. 54

112 Gregg, Queen Anne, p. 82.

113 James Anderson Winn, Queen Anne: Patroness of Arts (Oxford, 2014), p. 244.

114 Mayerne, Opera Medica, p. 116.

115 On the integrated medical-religious framework for understanding fertility, see Oren-Magidor, Infertility, pp. 121-63.

116 Green, Letters, p. 15.

117 Cited in Winn, Queen Anne, p. 244.

118 Fissell, Vernacular Bodies, pp. 14-52.

119 See Erin Griffey, On Display: Henrietta Maria and the Materials of Magnificence at the Stuart Court (New Haven and London, 2016), pp. 96, 115.

120 Alexandra Walsham, ‘Holywell: Contesting Sacred Space in Post-Reformation Wales’, in Will Coster and Andrew Spicer (eds), Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 211-36, at p. 230.

121 Oman, Mary of Modena, p. 102; Walsham, ‘Holywell’, p. 213.

122 Thomas Pennant, The History of the Parishes of Whiteford and Holywell (London, 1796), p. 230; Mary Hopkirk, Queen Over the Water: Mary Beatrice of Modena, Queen of James II (London, 1953), pp. 112-13.

123 See Pennant, History, for a discussion of what pilgrims did at the well, p. 230.

124 Walsham, ‘Holywell’, p. 230.

125 Walsham, ‘Holywell’, p. 230.

126 This is cited in numerous sources, such as Guy Miege, A Complete History of the Late Revolution …  (London, 1691), p. 23; Catholic Hymn on the Birth of the Prince of Wales (London, 1688).

¹²⁶A Compleat History of the Pretended Prince of Wales from His Supposed Conception by the Late Abdicated Qeen [Sic] (London, 1696).

127 ‘Woman of Quality’, The Amours of Messalina Late Queen of Albion (London, 1689), p. 26.

128 A Compleat History of the Pretended Prince of Wales from His Supposed Conception, p. 3.

129 Hopkirk, Queen Over the Water, p. 114.

130 Rare Verities. the Cabinet of Venus Unlocked, and Her Secrets Laid Open: Being a Translation of Part of Sinibaldus, His Geneanthropeia (London, 1658), p. 23.

131 Marcelline, Epithalamium, p. 53.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Erin Griffey

Erin Griffey

Erin Griffey is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Auckland. She is the author of On Display: Henrietta Maria and the Materials of Magnificence at the Stuart Court (Yale, 2016), as well as many other publications on women at the early modern court.