Castles, Customs, and Kings: True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors (36 page)

Francis Drake was the first Englishman to realise the vulnerability of the Spanish bullion supply while it was in transit over the Royal Road, and after several raids along the coast and attacks on shipping for little gain, many setbacks, and a thwarted attempt to ambush the “Silver Train” (as the bullion pack trains were called), he finally achieved a remarkable victory in April 1573 by capturing a convoy carrying almost 30 tons in silver and over half a ton in gold.

This was Drake’s first great enterprise—the triumph that began his meteoric rise to fame, fortune, and a place in English history books.

After that attack, the Spanish began to store their treasure at Puerto Bello to the west of Nombre de Dios. (Drake later died of dysentery near Puerto Bello after a failed expedition to raid the City of Panama; he is buried at sea in the bay.)

The
Camino Real
and its offshoot connecting the Chagres river with the City of Panama—
el Camino a Cruces
(part of which still survives as Las Cruces Trail)—continued to be used to carry bullion north and merchandise south for another two hundred years.

In 1671, the buccaneer Henry Morgan used Las Cruces trail to reach the old city of Panama which he then looted and burned to the ground, and in the nineteenth century prospectors used the trail to cross the isthmus on their way to join the gold rush in California. The trail finally came to an end with the construction of the Panama Railroad in 1855. The railway reduced the time needed to cross the isthmus from a minimum of three days, and sometimes several weeks, to only an hour.

With the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 most of the old road was lost forever, flooded by the damming of the Chagres to form Lake Gatun and by the Madden Dam behind which Lake Alajuela now covers a large part of the old trail. The development of Panama City as a metropolis has obliterated much more, and the forest and rivers have swallowed up the rest.

There are only a few traces left of the highway that once played such an important part in the history of world affairs, traces like the Puente del Matadero in Panama la Vieja, the bridge over which
Camino a Cruces
began.

English Ladies-in-Waiting

by Sandra Byrd

H
aving close friends is an important part of most women’s lives from girlhood thr
ough womanhood. These friends might be especially valuable when the woman’s position is exalted, public, and potentially treacherous—such friendships take on an even more important role.

When Oprah Winfrey started her empire she brought along Gayle King. When Kate Middleton was preparing to become Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, her sister Pippa was her constant companion. And when Anne Boleyn went to court to stay, she took her friends too. Among them was her longtime friend, Meg Wyatt, who would ultimately become her Chief Lady and Mistress of Robes.

Ladies-in-waiting were companions at church, at cards, at dance, and at hunt. They tended to their mistress when she was ill or anxious and also shared in her joys and pleasures. They did not do menial tasks—there were servants for that—but they did remain in charge of important elements of the Queen’s household, for example, her jewelry and wardrobe.

They were gatekeepers; during the reign of Elizabeth I small bribes were offered for access to Her Majesty. The Queen was expected to assist her maids of honor in becoming polished and finding a good match; they in turn were loyal, obedient, and ornaments of the court. Married women had more freedom, better rooms, and usually more contact with the Queen.

In her excellent book,
Ladies in Waiting
, Anne Somerset quotes a lady-in-waiting to Queen Caroline as saying,
“Courts are mysterious places.... Intrigues, jealousies, heart-burnings, lies, dissimulations thrive in (court) as mushrooms in a hot-bed.”
This is exactly the kind of place where one wants to know whom one can trust. Somerset goes on to tell us that,

At a time when virtually every profession was an exclusively masculine preserve, the position of lady-in-waiting to the Queen was almost the only occupation that an upperclass Englishwoman could with propriety pursue.

Although direct control was out of their hands, the power of influence, of knowledge, of gossip, and of relationship networks was within the firm grasp of these ladies.

Appointment was not only by personal choice of the King or Queen, but was a political decision as well. Queen Victoria’s first stand took place when her new Prime Minister, Robert Peel, meant to replace some of the ladies in her household to reflect the bipartisan English government and keep an equal political balance. According to Maureen Waller in
, Sovereign Ladies
, Victoria was adamant.

“I cannot give up any of my ladies,” she told him at their second meeting.

“What ma’am!” Peel queried, “Does Your Majesty mean to retain them all?”

“All,” she replied.

Keeping a political balance was a concern during the Tudor years too. Ladies from all of the important households were appointed to be among the Queen’s ladies, though she held her personal friends in closest confidence. Queen Katherine of Aragon understandably preferred the ladies who had served her for most of her life right up till her death. Queen Anne Boleyn numbered both Wyatt sisters among her closest ladies as well as Nan Zouche.

Henry told his sixth wife, Queen Kateryn Parr, that she might,
“choose whichever women she liked to pass the time with her in amusing manners or otherwise accompany her for her leisure.”

Many Queens, like Elizabeth I, regularly surrounded themselves with family members, in her case, often those through her mother’s side, hoping that they could trust in their loyalty and perhaps, like all of us, because they most enjoyed the company of those they loved best.

Childbirth in Early Modern England

by Sam Thomas

W
hen we think about the difference between the past and present, our minds often tu
rn to medicine, and with good reason. Who in their right minds would want to return to a world of leeches and blood-letting, of pregnancy without doctors and high death-rates for both mothers and children? But as so many of the writers on this blog have made clear, there is far more behind the history than modern stereotypes, and childbirth is no exception.

If you were to peek in on a woman in labor (or “in travail” as she might have said), the first thing you might notice is the people in the room. There would be a midwife rather than a doctor, of course, and you’d not find her husband—until the eighteenth century at the very earliest, childbirth was the business of women.

Rather than doctors, nurses, and bright lights, the mother would be surrounded by her female friends and neighbors—her god-sibs or gossips—who came to help, socialize, to see and be seen, and at a more general level, just to make sure that everything went right.

(Before we join hands and start to sing
Kumbaya
, it’s worth noting that sometimes gossips argued with each other, with the midwife, and even with the mother. Imagine if your own mother were present—and giving you advice—when you were in labor.)

Unlike today, when most women deliver while lying on their backs (good for the doctor, not so good for the mother), early modern women gave birth in a more upright position, either held by two of her gossips or sitting on a birthing stool, or both. While other women could participate in the delivery of the child, only the midwife had the right to touch the mother’s “privities.”

Once the child was born, the midwife would cut the umbilical cord (for boys, the longer the cord, the longer his, um, equipment; for girls, the shorter the cord, the tighter her privities), swaddle the child, and hand her over to the mother.

The question of maternal mortality has been much discussed, and our best guess is that 5-7% of births ended in the death of the mother. In some cases, death might be caused by an obstructed birth, but more often mothers died some weeks after delivery, usually of puerperal fever, a bacterial infection contracted during childbirth. Thus, while individual incidents of maternal death were not terribly common, most women would know a woman who had died in labor.

After giving birth, the mother would enjoy a period of lying-in. During these forty days, she would be confined to her room, free from the demands of household labor. During this time, her neighbors would visit, but she would not go out into public. At the end of her lying-in, the mother would go to her parish church and give thanks to God for her survival, and resume the heavy work of a wife and mother.

Mother Mourning: Childbed Fever in Tudor Times

by Sandra Byrd

B
lack death. The Great Pestilence. Plague. Sweating Sickness.
The very words t
hemselves cause us to shudder, and they certainly caused those in centuries past to quake because they and their loved ones were often afflicted by those diseases. But when we survey the physical ailments that afflicted sixteenth century women, there is one death that caused the deepest fear among women: Childbed Fever, also known as Puerperal Fever and later called The Doctors’ Plague.

Medieval and Tudor medicine centered around both astrology and the common belief that all health and illness was contained in balance or imbalance of the four “humours” of bodily fluids: blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm. Therefore, the letting of blood or sniffing of urine were common practices to address or diagnose illness.

Although it seems ludicrous to us today, this understanding of medicine had reigned supreme for nearly 2000 years, coming down from Greek and Roman philosophical systems. It’s been said that perhaps only 10-15% of those living in the Tudor era made it past their fortieth birthday. Common causes of illness leading to death? Lack of hygiene and sanitation.

Decades before the germ theory was validated in the late nineteenth century, Hungarian physician Ignac Semmelweis noticed that women who gave birth at home had a lower incidence of Childbed Fever than those who gave birth in hospitals. Statistics showed that,
“Between 1831 and 1843 only 10 mothers per 10,000 died of Puerperal Fever when delivered at home...while 600 per 10,000 died on the wards of the city’s General Lying In Hospital.”

Higher born women, those with access to expensive doctors, suffered from Childbed Fever more frequently than those attended by midwives who saw fewer patients and not usually one after another.

In 1795, Dr. Alexander Gordon wrote,
“It is a disagreeable declaration for me to mention, that I myself was the means of carrying the infection to a great number of women.”
Although they did not realize it at the time, it was, in fact, the sixteenth century doctors themselves who were transmitting death and disease to delivering mothers because the doctors did not disinfect their hands or tools in between patients.

Because illnesses are often transmitted via germs, doctors (and busy midwives) could infect the young mothers one after another, most often with what is now known as staph or strep infection in the uterine lining. Semmelweis discovered that using an antiseptic wash before assisting in the delivery of the mother cut the incidence of Childbed Fever by at least 90% and perhaps as much as 99%, but his findings were soundly rejected.

Infected women had no antibiotics to stop the onslaught of familiar symptoms once they began: fever, chills, flu like symptoms, terrible headache, foul discharge, distended abdomen, and occasionally, loss of sanity just before death.

This kind of death was not only no respecter of persons, as mentioned above, but it perhaps struck the highborn more frequently than the lowborn. In fact, fear of Childbed Fever is often mentioned when discussing Elizabeth I’s reluctance to marry and bear children.

In the Tudor era, Elizabeth of York, the mother of Henry VIII, died of Childbed Fever as did two of Henry’s wives, Queen Jane Seymour and Queen Kateryn Parr. Parr’s deathbed scene is perhaps one of the most chilling death accounts of the century, beheadings included.

Although Semmelweis was outcast from the community of physicians for his implication that they themselves were the transmitters of disease, ultimately, science and modern medicine prevailed. Today, in the developed world, very few of the newly delivered die due to Puerperal Fever. Moms no longer need fear that the very act of bringing forth life will ultimately cause their own deaths and therefore can happily bond with their babies instead.

The Truth about Halloween and Tudor England

by Nancy Bilyeau

I
have a passion for 16th century England. My friends and family, not to mention my a
gent and editors, are accustomed to my obsession with the Tudorverse. For me, all roads lead back to the family that ruled England from 1485 to 1603. Could it be possible that Halloween, one of my favorite days of the year, is also linked to the Tudors?

Yes, it turns out, it could.

The first recorded use of the word “Halloween” was in mid-16th century England. It is a shortened version of “All-Hallows-Even” (“evening”), the night before All Hallows’ Day, another name for the Christian feast that honors saints on the first of November.

But it’s not just a literal connection. To me, there’s a certain spirit of Halloween that harkens back to the Tudor era as well. Not the jack o’ lanterns, apple-bobs, and haunted houses (and not the wonderful Christopher Lee “Dracula” movies that I watch on TCM network every October, two in a row if I can). It’s that mood, frightening and mysterious and exciting too—of ghosts flitting through the trees, of charms that just might bring you your heart’s desire, of a distant bonfire spotted in the forest, of a crone’s chilling prophecy.

In pre-Reformation England, the Catholic Church co-existed with belief in astrology and magic. It was quite common to attend Mass regularly
and
to consult astrologers.
“The medieval church appeared as a vast reservoir of magical power,”
writes Keith Thomas in his brilliant 1971 book
Religion and the Decline of Magic
.

Faithful Catholics tolerated the traditions of the centuries-old Celtic festival of Samhain (“summer’s end”), when people lit bonfires and put on costumes to scare away the spirits of the unfriendly dead. In fact, an eighth century pope named November 1 as the day to honor all Catholic saints and martyrs with an eye toward Samhain.

Nothing shows the merger of Celtic and Christian beliefs better than “soul cakes.” These small, round cakes, filled with nutmeg or cinnamon or currants, were made for All Saints’ Day on November 1. The cakes were offered as a way to say prayers for the departed (you can picture the village priest nodding in approval) but they were also given away to protect people on the day of the year that the wall was thinnest between the living and the dead, a Celtic if not Druid belief. I am fascinated by soul cakes, and I worked them into my first novel,
The Crown
, a thriller set in 1537-1538 England. Soul cakes even end up being a clue!

In the early 16th century, Halloween on October 31, All Saints’ Day (or All Hallows’ Day) on November 1, and All Souls’ Day on November 2 were a complex grouping of traditions and observances. Life revolved around the regular worship, the holidays, and the feast days that constituted the liturgy. As the great Eamon Duffy wrote:
“For within that great seasonal cycle of fast and festival, of ritual observance and symbolic gesture, lay Christians found the paradigms and the stories which shaped their perception of the world and their place in it.”