If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home Read Online Free PDF Page A

emotions of hopeful parents, they were able to use ‘magic’ to predict and to protect in a manner at which science would scoff. For aristocrats, the gender of the baby was of huge significance, and a male heir for the estates was always desperately sought after. A seventeenth-century midwife would try to win a bigger fee by predicting a boy rather than a girl. Clues would be provided by the condition of the mother’s breasts: ‘ye Nipple red, rising like a strawberry’ was a good sign.
    While childbirth was often a communal experience, sometimes harrowing, sometimes joyful, there could be other people present in the birthing room for reasons of surveillance rather than support. For example, events that took place in the bedchamber of Mary of Modena, the wife of the unpopular King James II, led to a revolution. James II had long been annoying his subjects with his despotic and Catholic policies, and when his young Italian wife gave birth in 1688 to a healthy baby boy, the king’s enemies were chagrined that his position had been so strengthened. To discredit him, they put it about that Mary’s baby had in fact died and that an imposter had instead been smuggled into her bed in a warming pan.
    The rumour grew into a long-lasting and damaging smear against James II, and the baby would never be king. James II was overthrown soon afterwards, and his son grew up to be the ‘Pretender’, a rival, Catholic and unsuccessful bidder for the throne now seized instead by James II’s firmly Protestant daughters.
    There are two reasons for mistrusting the story of the warming pan, which is said to have taken place in the velvet bed now standing in the Queen’s Bedchamber at Kensington Palace ( plate 5 ). Firstly, a warming pan itself, a kind of frying pan containing hot coals to warm cold sheets, is hardly big enough to hold a baby. Secondly, to avoid any such monkey business a royal confinement was attended by many members of the court and church acting as witnesses. Mary of Modena gave birth with at least fifty-one other people present, plus ‘pages of the backstairs and priests’, and it seems unlikely that such a large number could have maintained a conspiracy with success.
    This concern about the birth of a true heir to the British monarchy persisted into the twentieth century. When the Queen Mother gave birth to our current queen in 1926, the Home Secretary came to the house to wait and watch (though he wasn’t actually in the room itself). This undignified custom was only suspended by George VI, who thought it ‘archaic’.
    At lower levels in society, the midwife could spill the secrets of her clients, and feminine betrayal took place in some bedchambers. A midwife could detect a woman’s adultery, infanticide or pre-marital sex. A ‘monstrous’ birth or malformed foetus would suggest that immoral behaviour had taken place: the seventeenth-century governor of New England, Sir Henry Vane, for example, had two women servants in his household; ‘he debauched both, & both were delivered of monsters’.
    During the course of the seventeenth century, men finally began to penetrate the birthing chamber and its mysteries. They brought with them a healthy dose of scepticism about many of the ancient customs surrounding childbirth, and they also introduced a new and important piece of birthing-chamber equipment: the forceps. These iron tongs were invented around 1600 by one Peter Chamberlen, but he kept them as a family secret, thereby building up an extremely impressive reputation for the dynasty of doctors that he founded. But it’s William Smellie ofScotland (1697–1763) who’s usually given credit for bringing the forceps into wider use.

    The forceps which revolutionised childbirth: the original set belonging to the Chamberlen family
    There’s no doubt that using them saved many lives. Previously, an iron hook had been used to drag out babies reluctant to emerge, which inevitably killed them. Yet midwives had