Read In Bed with the Tudors: The Sex Lives of a Dynasty from Elizabeth of York to Elizabeth I for Free Online Page B

A crowded reliquary in the birth chamber would display a range of artefacts such as holy bones and girdles, phials of blood, tears or milk and shards of the true cross, through which Elizabeth might commune with those saints associated with childbirth. During her ordeal, she may well have held the famous Westminster girdle, supposedly made and used by the Virgin Mary, 15 which the next generation of Tudor mothers would favour. Pre-Reformation Catholics believed in the real, comforting presence of saints during labour as well as the power of prayer. Mary, whose cult following in medieval England was profound and ubiquitous, could stand above the complexities of womanly status and identity as a parallel, or objective correlative, of shared experience: through her, all labouring mothers could be brought closer to God in time of danger.
    In the long dark hours of labour, Catholicism, pseudo-religious practice and superstition were easily blurred. As Elizabeth hovered between life and death, devoid of any pain relief and uncertain how long her travail would last, she would have sought whatever comforts her ladies could offer. The earliest surviving manuals relating to pregnancy and childbirth were recipe (receipt) books, including the Anglo-Saxon Lacnunga or ‘Remedies’, and the ninth-century Bald’s Leechbook , containing a number of magic charms or incantations to be invoked against disease, misfortune and attacks by demons, often through the ritualistic repetition of words or actions in patterns of three or nine. One of the charms relates to ‘a delayed birth’, intended to induce overdue labour, while another assists in the onset of sudden stabbing pains, supposedly caused by the machinations of ‘mighty women’. Pagan ritual and Christian rites were mingled in many early medical texts, translating into a variety of practices in the Tudor delivery chamber. The Catholic church had its own prayers to combat these customs, including one included in a 1425 prayer book, containing an English rubric and Latin prayer composed by St Peter for labouring women. Interestingly though, the Latin was written with feminine endings, indicating that it was intended to be read by a woman, which, in practical terms, could only have been accessed by a tiny literate minority. The benefit of charms and prayers alike lay in their formulaic, repetitive patterns, which could help concentrate the mind and the exercise of some small form of control over a bewildering and helpless experience. The word ‘abracadabra’, now associated more with stage magic, was a popular part of a repetitive chanting formula. It is not difficult to picture commoners and queens alike incanting verses through gritted teeth as their contractions take hold. One tenth-century charm, from the South of France, written in Occitan, would have been recited by midwives to establish a rhythm in accordance with a woman’s contractions and to establish a pattern of regular breathing. Similar English secular and religious lyrics would have been used in many birth chambers around the country, from those of queens downwards. Such traditional rhymes must have been part of an experienced midwife’s repertoire:
    A swollen woman
sat in a swollen road;
a swollen child
she held in her lap;
swollen hands
and swollen feet,
swollen flesh
that will take this blow,
swollen wood
and swollen iron
that will give out this blow.
The pain goes out
from bone to flesh,
from flesh to skin
from skin to hair
from hair to grass
let Mother Earth receive the pain. 16
    No record is made of the midwives in attendance on Elizabeth, although at least one would undoubtedly have been present. They were indispensable as the only females allowed to physically intervene during the process and touch the queen’s reproductive organs. It is possible that Elizabeth was attended by her mother’s favourite midwife, Marjory Cobbe, who had attended Elizabeth Wydeville’s final confinement only six years before.