Act Two: At Home Harlots, Housewives and Heroines: A 17th Century History for Girls

On 29th May 1660,

King Charles II returned from exile to reclaim his throne.

Everyone thought the Stuart dynasty had lost power for ever.

His father, Charles I,

had been publicly executed only ten years previously

and England was firmly in the grip of Oliver Cromwell's Commonwealth,

but now the monarchy was back in business.

The Restoration was a turning point in British history.

It marked the end of the medieval and the beginning of the modern age.

It affected the life of every single person in the country.

In this series,

I'm looking at the lives of women in the late 17th century.

This is a really exciting time to be a woman.

For centuries, they've been lurking about in the footnotes of history,

but now they come to prominence.

Some of them have such modern attitudes and ambitions

and we see them coming up against a world

that was still pretty male and misogynistic.

Over three programmes, I'm exploring their lives

at the lavish and liberated royal court,

out in public at work and play,

and now at home as wives and mothers.

You might have thought that Britain was swinging in the 1960s,

but it was the 1660s that really shook things up.

In 1662,

only two years after Charles II's dramatic restoration to the throne,

a new form of fun arrived in London from the continent...

You did what?

..the country's first ever Punch and Judy show.

You take that, that, that.

Like so much of what we know about Restoration England,

our picture of the first Punch and Judy show

comes from the diary of Samuel Pepys.

350 years later, nasty old Punch is still bashing up poor old Judy

here at Covent Garden, but behind the pretty spectacle,

there's a dark story here about 17th-century women

and their experience of childbirth,

and infant mortality, and domestic violence,

and their whole relationship

with their husbands.

In this programme, I'm looking at the lives of 17th-century Judys,

ordinary women, living at home.

What do their lives tell us

about these extraordinary years following the return of the King?

To get right inside 17th-century women's domestic lives,

I'm going to start off by looking at something pretty fundamental -

their marriages.

In the 17th century, every girl was expected to get married.

A woman was defined throughout her life by her marital status,

as either an unmarried maid, a wife or widow.

But during this turbulent century, how you actually got married

became a religious and political battlefield.

The terrain was constantly changing.

Do you think that as we go through the 17th century,

we can see its religious turmoil reflected

in the different types of marriages that people are having?

Oh, absolutely.

The whole history of the regulation of marriage in the 17th century

is a very good reflection of what's going on

politically and ideologically.

At a time when the state really needed to SEE people getting married

in order to know that they were married,

they wanted marriage to be public.

In 1604, James I had laid down the rules

for the traditional church wedding we still recognise today.

Banns had to be read, rings were part of the ritual,

but most importantly, his ceremony had to be carried out in church

by a Church Of England priest

But after the Civil War,

when Cromwell and his Puritans were in charge,

things were very different - THEY made adultery punishable by death.

Surprisingly though, the hyper-religious Puritans

took weddings outside the Church and favoured civil marriage.

When the Puritans come up with this new concept of civil marriage,

they have just executed the King, they've chopped his head off.

Are these two things connected? I'm guessing that they are.

Yes, I mean civil marriage is very political.

It's part of that whole rejection, not only of the King,

but also of hierarchy, of the Church of England.

So what did you actually have to do

to get this sort of minimalist marriage

that the Puritans had in the Commonwealth period?

You went before a Justice of the Peace,

exchanged vows in front of him.

-So no rings or anything like that?

-No rings, no.

You were meant to join hands, but there's provision

in the legislation for that to be dispensed with, if you have no hands.

And presumably if you've lost them fighting in the Civil War.

Presumably, yes.

And just when everyone had got used to that,

Charles came back and it all changed again.

What happens at the Restoration is really a sharpening up

of what it means to be Anglican

as distinct from any other denomination,

so it becomes very clear in this period that the only person

who can celebrate a marriage is an ordained Anglican clergyman.

After the Restoration, women knew exactly where and how

they were supposed to get married -

in an Anglican church by an Anglican priest.

And it was also made very clear who was in charge

once they'd got married.

If women were in any doubt about their position within marriage,

they would be reminded at church

through the regular reading of homilies,

like this one on matrimony.

This one says that women are the "weaker vessel."

It says here,

"You must obey your husband and cease from commanding him.

"Avoid all things that might offend him. Apply yourself to his will."

If you don't do this, everything'll go horribly wrong

and the whole world will be turned upside down.

In the 17th century, being second-class citizens

was just the price women had to pay for respectability.

Another painful fact about their marriage

was the huge sum of money their fathers had to cough up,

not just for the wedding, but also for the dowry.

The 17th century saw the beginning of the lonely hearts ads,

but don't expect tales of dreamy romance here,

they get right down to business.

Here we've got a gentleman who's got 30 years of age.

He would willingly match himself to some good young gentlewoman,

but there's no love of country walks or the cinema here at all.

He says he has a very good estate

and she has to have a fortune of about £3,000.

Then we've got a young man about 25 years of age.

He is in a very good trade,

but I don't think he's got a very good sense of humour.

It says here he's a sober man.

He would willingly embrace a suitable match,

but remember this, ladies, he's got £1,000 and you should have the same.

A dowry could be vast.

Mary Evelyn was a girl from a family reasonably well off, but not rich.

When she decided to get hitched, her father, John Evelyn the diarist,

had to fork out a whopping £350,000 in today's money.

Mind you, he did get off relatively lightly.

When Catherine Of Braganza married Charles II,

her dad had to hand over both Bombay and Tangier.

And the dowry wasn't the only thing the bride had to worry about.

With a monopoly on marriage, church and state had realised

that they could also make money from the transaction.

To get married officially and properly

could be really quite prohibitively expensive.

As well as coughing up the dowry for the bride,

you needed to buy entertainment for the guests and, from 1694,

there was a new tax on marriage too.

The government introduced stamp duty on every single ceremony,

but there were sneaky ways of getting out of paying this.

If you could avoid getting married in church, you could avoid the tax -

about £600 in today's money.

Don't involve your family and you could avoid the dowry too.

In the late 17th century, London became the centre

of a new cheap and easy black-market wedding industry.

Fleet Street takes its name from one of the lost rivers of London,

the Fleet, which ran down there behind me.

By the Restoration, it was quite an insalubrious part of town,

full of inns and brothels and the infamous Fleet Prison.

By the later 17th century,

it was also home to about 40 small businesses.

They were known as the marriage houses.

They didn't have anything to do with the local church,

in fact, they were pubs.

The inns and pubs of Fleet Street, even the Fleet Prison itself,

became venues for a shady phenomenon - the Fleet marriage.

Officially recognised, but only borderline legal.

In church, you had to get married between eight and twelve,

but the marriage houses were always open for business,

they simply changed the clocks.

You needed a priest, but the prison had plenty of defrocked debtors

who wouldn't ask too many questions.

In the year 1700,

Fleet weddings made up a third of all London marriages.

So here we are in our little chapel,

that's essentially the room over the pub, but none the worse for it.

What would have been going on in here then?

Well, we might actually have a marriage conducted in this room.

With a proper priest?

Well, with somebody who lives within the liberties of the Fleet,

which meant he'd have been here because he'd been incarcerated for debt.

-Oh dear, a dodgy priest is what you're saying.

-A dodgy priest.

And then they would have given you a marriage licence,

something that looked like this.

A certificate that looked like this, where you had your name on it

and the date, but of course it could be backdated

if you wanted to legitimise a birth, for example.

You could have anybody as a witness sign it.

You could even pull in witnesses at a later date as well.

And you get a proper certificate like this. It's a little later.

Says GR for George, but it looks official, doesn't it,

with the royal coat of arms?

But then you look at it and it says, "At the Hand and Pen".

So this certificates says, we got marriage at the pub.

Yes, it does.

-This is a proper one, isn't it, used in a church?

-Yes.

And we know this because it's got the stamp here,

they have paid their duty on it.

-That's the thing that is missing from here.

-That is missing.

However, you could, if you were so inclined,

bring your own stamped sheet of paper.

Were these cheap and dirty marriages good for women, do you think?

In some cases they were, in a sense that

if you wanted to legitimise the birth of a child, it was great.

You could have something backdated.

The family might not have to pay a large dowry.

Certainly you didn't have to jump through all the hoops

that were necessary in actually getting married.

These dubious wedding venues gave the less well-off

a chance of respectability without the cost,

but they also opened up the opportunities for abuse.

The marriage houses were perfect for bigamists,

and some women were even dragged here and married,

against their will.

Mrs Anne Leigh was worth £200 a year

and she was decoyed away from her friends in Buckinghamshire

and married at the Fleet Chapel against her consent.

-Oh, wow.

-Yes.

-She's been used barbarously.

-Yes, poor woman.

-So barbarously that she now lies speechless.

-I know.

She couldn't speak after this horrific experience

-she went through.

-Yes.

It must have been very traumatic, you can imagine.

Oh, poor Mrs Anne Leigh.

With women physically being held to ransom in pubs,

or financially held to ransom for a dowry,

they were like commodities in a commercial transaction.

This wasn't unnoticed by contemporary commentators.

As the fictional heroine, Moll Flanders, says,

"The market is against our sex just now.

"Nothing but money recommends a woman."

The writer, Daniel Defoe,

described marriage as being like the Smithfield bargain.

By this he meant that women were bought and sold

like the cows at the famous Smithfield meat market in London.

For women, the contract was binding, there was no escape

if they didn't like their husbands.

Divorce was practically unheard of,

it involved a special Act of Parliament.

For men though, there was a way out

if they weren't getting on with their wives.

In 1692, we hear that Mr Whitehouse of Tipton sells his wife

to Mr Bracegirdle.

And you've got to imagine fairs with women walking up and down,

wearing sandwich boards saying, "This woman is on the market."

Wife sales were completely illegal and fairly uncommon,

but the idea of marriage as a marketplace was totally accepted.

Love seemed to count for little and, from a young age,

women were treated rather like livestock.

Even if you were a maid, in other words a single woman,

you were still in a sense defined by your marital status,

it's just that you weren't married yet.

Marriage would be your destiny.

And you get the idea that these baby girls in the 17th century

are born and bred and reared and trained

all for the purpose of reaching the marriage market.

By the end of the 17th century though,

something previously unheard of was beginning to happen -

thousands and thousands of women weren't getting married.

By about the 1690s you're getting towns

where over half of the population are single women.

Where are all these extra single women coming from?

It may be something to do with the Civil War.

It had one of the greatest casualty rates

until you get to the First World War in England,

and so there are just fewer men available.

The Civil War had decimated the male population,

and had thrown the county into turmoil that lasted decades.

When times are hard, fewer people can marry

because you need the economic wherewithal to set up

a household and to be able to support a family thereafter.

So that's when you start to get the term spinster being used,

rather than an occupational term, a woman who spins for a living,

but being attached to a woman who isn't married,

and also the term, the old maid.

'With so many spinsters on the scene,

'the old maid became a stock character in comedy and songs.'

Got a ballad here which is titled the Old Maid Mad for a Husband.

'The Old Maid Mad for a Husband is a touching ballad

'about a wealthy old spinster.

'When the story starts, she's on the lookout for a husband.

'"A man," she says, "is better than money to me."'

A young shoemaker comes to her

when he hears that she's on the lookout for a husband.

She tempts him into bed but, a few days later,

he starts to tell other people about this and her kindness.

No, he's blabbed! Look, look, look, so in the end she neglects him

because he kissed and told.

She rejects him, so at that point she's stopped the refrain,

-"A husband is better than money to me."

-She's stopped saying that?

-Yes, and she moved to, "Because like a rascal he did kiss and tell."

-Aah!

But there's a happy ending to it, because she then finds

a young stonecutter who does just what she wants.

He becomes her lover. She shares some of her gold with him.

But interestingly with this man, she doesn't seem to marry him,

so she manages to retain her economic independence.

My goodness, she is Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City, isn't she?

-She's dumping men, she's using men.

-Yes.

-Picking and choosing.

She's manipulating the men to suit her own ends.

When I read "Old Maid Mad for a Husband", I laughed.

I thought, "Ha, ha, ha!" It's like a mother-in-law joke.

There's something a bit misogynistic about that, I now realise.

Cos actually, she's a bit of role model, isn't she, for single women?

I think there's a questioning of marriage as a status.

-Well good on you, mad old maid.

-Exactly.

OK, these are just the words of a silly song, but they're part

of a much bigger phenomenon.

Women were beginning to question the accepted order of things.

Perhaps they shouldn't get married at any cost.

Perhaps they shouldn't just put up and shut up.

And for a woman to express these ideas was amazingly radical.

Not long before, a woman could suffer the most brutal

of punishments for simply speaking out of turn,

with the notorious scold's bridle.

A scold's bridle is a ferocious...

-Ooh, a nasty thing!

-..looking instrument...

-Oh, isn't that horrific?

-..which was fastened onto the head.

So is this put on to somebody who scolds her husband?

No, scolding was supposed to be sustained verbal harassment.

Who's to say where that line is?

You could just be a really outgoing, opinionated person.

That's absolutely right.

This is just such a striking illustration

-of women being silenced, isn't it?

-It is indeed.

I'm opinionated and you're going to silence me.

-Oh, right.

-That goes on there.

And I guess my nose goes in there...

..and that in my mouth.

-Oh!

-Yes, indeed.

MUFFLED SPEECH

There's a contemporary description of the punishment of a woman

called Anne Biddlestone being punished in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

It says that the tongue of iron pushed into her mouth,

caused blood to flow out.

Please take it off.

Oh, that's horrible, horrible, horrible.

Eugh!

It could be highly dangerous for a woman to speak out

in the 17th century.

Men did not want their status challenged, but extraordinarily,

in the Restoration that's exactly what some women were doing.

What's more, they were getting away with it,

and even winning over some of the most unlikely individuals.

This is Bolsover Castle in Derbyshire,

the family seat of William Cavendish, Duke Of Newcastle.

'Originally, he'd been an archetypal 17th-century man

'with archetypal views on women, love and marriage,

'and he was very explicit in the ways he expressed them.'

This crazy little castle was completed by William Cavendish

when he was still married to his first wife, Elizabeth.

He wasn't particularly faithful to her, and this place has been

decorated as a kind of monument to his love for women.

Lots of his different female relationships are expressed here.

This room, for example, is all about virtue and it stands for his wife.

We've got here Christianity. We've got the symbols of the passion.

It's all about being good and doing your duty.

But this second little closet off the bed chamber is the flip side

to the first, the theme in here is pleasure.

There's no more Christianity, here we've got the gods

and goddesses of Mount Olympus, basically having an orgy together.

And William wasn't alone amongst early 17th-century aristocrats

in thinking it was OK to have a wife for duty and mistresses for pleasure.

His first marriage to Elizabeth had all been about the merger

of two great estates and the production of children.

But when we get to the 1660s and his second marriage, it's a new

and much more modern form of relationship.

Following Elizabeth's death, William's conventional views

were transformed when he met the incredible Margaret Cavendish,

the 17th-century's most outspoken feminist thinker.

Margaret convinced him that marriage was a partnership of equals

based on love and mutual respect, and their new-style relationship

made them the John and Yoko of the Restoration age.

So this is Margaret Cavendish's own handwriting

and she's writing him a love letter during her courtship, isn't she?

That's right, she was in Paris in 1645.

He sent her 70 love poems in a space of just four months,

so that's several a week, and this is one of her letters.

Read out a bit, cos there's some good, romantic stuff here.

Absolutely, it really is.

"And yet, my lord, I must tell you I am not easily drawn

"to be in love for I did never see any man but yourself

-"that I could have married."

-Ah, he's the only man for her.

Absolutely. It really was a meeting of souls, I think.

They weren't forced into it by families?

No, there was no brokering, no dowry,

so that bargaining was left out of it.

In that sense it was a modern courtship,

because it was just between the two parties,

and then they had to square it with everyone else afterwards.

With a marriage based on romance and respect rather than money,

Margaret and William had defied convention.

But even more unusually, Margaret had published her views on marriage.

"For the most part," wrote Margaret,

"maids desire husbands upon any condition,

"but I am not of their minds for I think a bad husband

"is far worse than no husband."

And amazingly, William encouraged her to keep on writing.

In her plays she often explored young women trying to choose

who to marry, or even whether to marry.

And there's some fiction and plays by her

where she imagines women not marrying

and going on to become heroic women

who are generals in command of armies,

or wise hermits advising people on how to live their lives.

Margaret's plays were quite shocking to people of the time.

Pepys called her a mad, conceited, ridiculous woman.

He says of William that he was an ass to suffer her to write what she did.

So it wasn't just Margaret who got the stick, it was William as well.

These two become very prominent in society

-and their marriage becomes a sort of role model, doesn't it?

-Absolutely.

And people pursued her round London trying to study her

and her relationship with William.

She became a real celebrity,

and this whole idea of a woman

as an equal and someone that a man could share things with,

that's sort of what she and William

were being a real subject of interest for.

This makes her an archetypical woman of the Restoration, doesn't it?

In a sense, but in a sense a lot of women were frightened of her.

I mean it may be the fascination...

Yes, the Restoration women are frightening,

-they're getting out of their box.

-That's true, yes.

I mean women like Mary Evelyn, married to John Evelyn,

-I mean she was appalled...

-Thumbs down.

..and she thought Margaret must really be distracted,

must be mad to be carrying on this way that no sane woman would.

Now Margaret's detractor, Mary Evelyn,

was the wife of the diarist John Evelyn,

who'd had to stump up that huge dowry.

'They're buried together in their private chapel in Surrey.'

While we learn a lot about the 17th century from John's diaries,

'Mary's writings are equally fascinating because she endorses

'the rather more conventional view on women and marriage.'

This is the tomb of John Evelyn's wife, Mary,

and she's described here as "The best daughter, wife, and mother."

That's how she's recorded for posterity,

but it wasn't always that way.

She married him very young, at the age of 14,

and she was worried about giving up her studies.

Once she was married though, she quickly gave up

her intellectual aspirations and she settles into this role of wife.

As she says herself here, "Women were not born to read.

"All time borrowed from family duties is misspent,"

and she esteems herself, "Capable of very little".

Mary and Margaret's polar opposite views on married life

kicked off a very modern debate.

'People don't realise it began in the Restoration -

'what should a women demand from her marriage, her husband and home?

'And with an increasingly literate middle rank in Restoration society,

'more and more women were jumping into the debate.'

'This is a typical rural 17th-century house of a middling family.'

And here's a main living area.

-This is all very shabby chic, isn't it?

-Isn't it lovely?

'It's interesting because, unlike the average family home in the past,

'it's not just one open space but it's divided up into rooms,

'each with a specific purpose.'

-Now, in here there would have been people sleeping.

-Bedroom one?

'The new style of house brought with it new responsibilities

'and for women, running it became a formidable and important job.

This was the age of the professional housewife.

Elaine, this is quite a reasonably substantial property, isn't it?

-Yes.

-What sort of people would have lived here?

Well, as it happens, we know exactly who lived here.

There was a man called Nicholas Austen, who was a yeoman,

-lived here in the Restoration period with his wife, Susannah.

-Susannah.

And six children.

Six! Daughter, daughter, son, son, daughter, son.

That's quite a household.

And that wouldn't have been the whole household,

because there would have been one or two live-in servants as well.

It's quite a responsibility.

Absolutely, really she's running a small business.

This is not just being a housewife in a 1950s style.

'A Restoration housewife like Susannah obviously didn't

'have any electric gadgets, but what she now had was published

'household advice books.'

You think that Susannah, at this level in society,

the yeoman level, would have been able to read?

In those days,

though most people wouldn't have had any reason to learn to write,

people could read, people needed to read their Bible for themselves.

So yes, I think she would very likely have been able to read.

'The books Susannah would have wanted were the bestsellers by

'the 17th-century's own domestic goddess, Hannah Woolley.'

-Here we've got roast salmon.

-Deer, baked.

Quaking pudding! Do you think that wobbled?

-Egg mince pie.

-Marinated carp.

-Mushrooms, fried.

-You don't need a recipe to fry mushrooms!

And who was Hannah Woolley?

What we know of Hannah Woolley is that she was married

to a schoolmaster.

He ran the school and she looked after the children,

and it was in the last months of his life that she turned

her hand to writing cookery books.

Hannah was one of the first women to earn a living from writing.

Between 1661 and 1672, housewives across the country

'lapped up Hannah's first four books and when the fifth,

'called the Gentlewoman's Companion,

'was published in 1674, it was an overnight success.

'But surprisingly, considering that Hannah had become the

'housewives' heroine, the tone of some of the advice in it

'wasn't particularly female-friendly.'

I'm not so keen on this.

"The wife ought to be subject to the husband in all things."

You've got to keep the house in good order,

you've got to have dinner ready when he comes home.

And you've got to make the food nice or else he'll go off to the tavern,

"Which many are compelled to do

"because of the daily dissatisfactions they find at home."

And that's quite shocking.

-Yeah, it's a bit of a letdown, I have to say.

-Yes.

But there's a reason for the rather sexist tone.

The book isn't by Hannah Woolley at all, it's written by a man.

-It's an impostor!

-An impostor.

That's just typical, isn't it?

He's putting male propaganda into the mouth of Hannah Woolley.

That's exactly what he's doing.

The Restoration housewife was becoming

a powerful force in the home,

and some men thought she should be kept in check.

With no laws against plagiarism,

what better ways to convey the message of,

"Know your place, ladies",

'than to put it into the mouth of every woman's idol, Hannah.'

The views about how a woman should behave

in no way resemble what Hannah Woolley says in her own book.

I'm shocked on her behalf.

What she could do, and what she did do,

was to bring out another book of her own, where she says,

"How dare they take my name to write that nonsense!"

-I love it! Hannah Woolley is great!

-Yes.

'During the Restoration, a woman's responsibility for running the house

'spanned across every social divide.'

Hannah believed that it was every woman's duty

to be an efficient housewife...

..although some houses were clearly a little bigger than others.

'This is Ham House in Surrey.

'The diarist John Evelyn described it as one of the best houses

'he'd ever seen.

'The wife of this house was a truly impressive Restoration woman,

'Elizabeth Dysart.'

This is Elizabeth, one of the 17th century's most formidable women.

She was a real survivor.

She survived two husbands, giving birth to 11 children.

She survived the Civil War and the Commonwealth and the Restoration.

She's said to have been the secret lover of Oliver Cromwell.

At the same time,

she was secretly sending money to the exiled King Charles II.

After the Restoration, she became best friends with his wife,

Catherine of Braganza, the Queen, and she was tough as old boots.

Elizabeth didn't just look after Ham House,

she gave it a complete makeover.

-So all of these rooms were added by Elizabeth.

-Absolutely.

After she married Lauderdale in 1672,

they filled in between these two turrets and she created this suite.

When you say SHE did these things, isn't that quite unusual?

Well it is unusual, but then it was her own family home,

she grew up here.

-Yeah.

-And she was a very strong character.

People said that she determined everything

-and had a great sense of detail.

-Yeah.

And here at Ham she does seem really to have done everything.

There may have been other cases where the women had done

a lot to a house, but the man always got the credit anyway.

How do you know Elizabeth did it herself?

She put her mark everywhere.

We can get some idea of this from this wonderful silver

hearth furniture which she had made in the 1670s,

and here on the bellows you have her own crest.

It just says Elizabeth Lauderdale.

-That's fabulously self-important, isn't it?

-Very.

-To sign your own bellows.

-Absolutely. And also on the grate.

Oh look, there she is again.

And she's there with her husband, she's let him in now.

And also she put her name over here on the floor.

-Oh wow! There it is, underfoot.

-A cypher.

And you see here the E for Elizabeth, a loop in the middle.

So when the Queen came, she would have been in no doubt

-about who was in charge of this place.

-Absolutely.

One look at the household accounts and the depth of detail

that Elizabeth mastered makes it quite clear

exactly who was in charge.

-Look, someone's bought a pig.

-Yes.

-And two carps.

-Yes.

-And a pound of butter.

-Butter.

-And what?

-And some mustard.

-Mustard!

-Then you see Elizabeth has signed it off.

-Yes, she's checked it!

Yes, and she checked so many of them.

And then over here, these are more supplies really for doing up

the house and things, such as dishes.

Or here, one case to hold a flagon.

-A flagon. Got a basin and a ewer.

-And a ewer.

And then down here, she signed it off, "Pay in full £6."

Basically she's authorised the signature.

And that's 1673, that's exactly when she's doing

all these wonderful apartments.

And then she personally had to manage the staff.

The chaplain, the page, the butler.

The coachman, the cook. The footman, the other footman, the groom.

Groom, the groom.

She is like the chief executive of a huge organisation, isn't she?

Mmm, definitely, definitely.

Do you think that the Restoration period caused any change

in the way women were doing their household duties?

I think it comes from what happened just before the Civil War,

because the men were away so much.

Elizabeth's father was away a lot, and her first husband, Sir Lionel,

and a lot of the time she was here, running the house

and so I think the women did get increasingly strong.

So when Elizabeth came to her second marriage and she just about

-allowed her husband to have his name on the stuff...

-Yes.

..in the house, she had this taste for power already.

Oh, I think so, definitely.

By the Restoration, the perfect housewife was expected to have

a phenomenal range of skills.

She'd even had to become the family doctor,

caring for the health and welfare of her children,

household and community.

Even Elizabeth, with her army of servants,

was expected to get her own hands dirty

and distil her own medicines,

and some of her recipes

still work today.

And this is the recipe that she has, which would be quite typical

of the day, and these would be

commonly found garden plants.

-That's rosemary, what's that good for?

-Circulation.

-What about that?

-Mint is good for digestion.

What's sage good for, as well as sausages?

Sage actually is very good for the digestive system.

It's very antimicrobial.

-It's probably why these plants were added to foods then.

-Really?

Cos they're actually antiseptics.

Oh. Here we go.

Eh, eh, eh, eh, eh!

-Now, does the brandy go in next?

-Yeah.

Oh yeah, look at that.

-Cover it.

-Oh, you've made me a mojito!

Oh, oh! Golly, very strong one.

And we're going to cover this.

And that's going to come to the boil,

it's going to turn into steam, the steam's going to

travel along this tube, the cold water is going to condense the steam

-and then out of this little tap come the magical cordial.

-Yep.

Going to make me 20 years younger in 20 minutes' time.

What other recipes did Elizabeth Dysart have in her book?

Pills for piles.

Pills for piles? Where did you take that pill?

-Up the fundament.

-Oh golly, what was in it?

Oil of poplar and burnt cork.

-As a herbalist, does that work?

-Well, actually it would do!

-No!

The bark of trees have a lot of tannins in them

which are astringent, and basically would astringe the piles.

It's actually working. The magic potion is coming out.

I can't wait to taste it.

Right, I'm going to taste it.

Ah, that is the elixir of life. Thank you, Elizabeth Dysart.

Oh, dear.

I can see why they thought that this would cure all ills.

Mmm.

Whatever's wrong with you, a shot of this will make you feel better.

Healing the sick was the top domestic duty for a Restoration woman.

But she had to tread carefully.

To the 17th-century mind,

making up potions was perilously close to witchcraft.

In the years leading up to the Restoration, being labelled

as a witch was a real danger.

During the Civil War, the country had just witnessed

the largest witch hunt ever.

Between 1645 and '47 over 250 women

were investigated in East Anglia alone.

Martin, what if an innocent, law-abiding, 17th-century woman

like myself was accused of witchcraft, what would happen to me?

Well it's like any other major felony, you would be tried

at the assizes and, if you were found guilty, you could be hanged.

And what sort of evidence would they need to do that?

Perhaps searching your body for witch's marks.

Oh dear, I've got a mole on my leg just here.

That's not good news at all.

Some of the other tests were just as gruesome and possibly

as deadly as the hanging itself.

Ducking in the water from a great height,

or the rather horrendous swimming of the witch.

Thumb attached to your right foot.

So you're going to throw me in the river like this?

-Yeah, rope round your middle.

-And around the middle too?

Well I'm a goner, cos if I float I'm a witch and I will be hanged,

and if I sink I won't be a witch, but I'll be drowned.

If you sink, we hope we'll pull you out before you drown,

but if you float that doesn't mean you're convicted,

it means you're likely to be a witch, so you'll be sent for trial.

During the East Anglian witch hunt,

over 100 women were hanged for witchcraft.

And although witch prosecutions continued through into the 1700s,

the 17th century would see the end of the killings.

The last conviction of a witch is in 1712,

-the case of Jane Wenham in Hertfordshire.

-What happens to her?

She was reprieved. The judge was very sceptical.

This was a case where there was evidence that she could fly

and the judge said that there's no law against flying.

If the judges and the establishment are getting more sceptical

about witches that's one thing,

but do you think people round here

actually went on believing that they existed?

Yeah, I think this is an important issue.

By the end of the 17th century there's a gap

between what the elites think, particularly the legal elite,

and ordinary people.

And ordinary people are often scandalised in fact

that the courts, the judges, aren't prosecuting and hanging witches.

The 17th century grew increasingly enlightened as it went on...

'..but for many, ancient fears did still linger.

'This is Kew Palace.

'it was built in the 1630s on the outskirts of London.

'In recent years its curators have revealed that

'even in a grand house like this, superstition was still rife.

'The evidence lies in the servants' quarters up in the rafters.'

Goodness, pretty spooky and crumbly up here, isn't it?

It's the best part about it.

So what went on in these attics?

-Well, I think the servants lived up here.

-Yeah.

And perhaps they used it for storage as well.

Are these secret symbols to keep witches away?

Yeah, supposedly a witch mark.

And if you look at it, you can see a circle

with possibly rays of the sun coming down from it.

Perhaps it's the sun, but one theory is that the M might

stand for the Virgin Mary, possibly the initial M.

So we've got the sun to keep the witches away

because they come at night,

and we've got the M because the Virgin Mary might protect you?

Yeah, it's a mixture of folk magic and Christianity, I think.

This one is up on the rafters, why is that?

Where we find them is normally in places

where a witch could come in,

so vulnerable places like windows, doors,

staircases, fireplaces.

And here, although we're standing on floorboards now,

this was where the 1630s staircase came up through the building.

And through here I can show you one which is next to a window.

Now if you look at this one here.

-Oh, there it is, look at that!

-That's the same as the one out there,

but it's not an M it's reversed, it's upside down.

-It's upside down.

-Or perhaps double V.

-Oh, two letter Vs together like that.

-That's right.

Some people think it might stand for virgin of virgins,

so again it's a possible plea to the Virgin Mary.

It could be. Or maybe the servants who slept here were virgins.

What other evidence do we see of superstitious behaviour?

There's quite a bit.

You also get things hidden away in buildings - witch bottles,

urine bottles, shoes hidden in the rafters of roofs.

Do you hide an old shoe cos it's lucky?

I think you're trying to invest luck,

or whatever you want to call it, in some inanimate object.

The other possibility is that you're trying to deflect evil,

so something that will fool an evil spirit.

Now do you think that in the 17th century

we start to see this sort of thing tailing off?

Ironically, although the earlier period is said to be the more

superstitious one, the number of shoes which have been discovered,

and of course shoes are great because you can date them in the style

of the fashion, actually rises at the end of the 17th century.

So between 1690 and about 1710,

there are almost 100 pairs of shoes known

from different houses around the country.

That's really interesting to think that witchcraft superstition

is just as powerful at the end of the 17th century as it seems

-to have been at the beginning.

-It seems to be.

'It's more than likely that the people who were scratching marks,

'or hiding shoes, came from the lower and less literate classes,

'and for them the world remained a scary place.'

But for rising numbers of better off and better educated women,

books were now demystifying the world.

'Hannah Woolley's works, for example,

'reveal a fascinatingly modern approach to women's issues,

'in particular to sex.'

This one's How To Cure The Green Sickness,

and green sickness is essentially sexual frustration in young girls.

It says here that laziness and love are the common causes.

It can also be brought on if they are eating too much oatmeal,

or chalk, or cinders from the fireplace,

but you can cure it, not only by work,

but by this rather delicious drink.

You get a quart of fine claret wine, a pound of currants,

a handful of the tops of rosemary.

Then you take three spoonfuls every morning and evening.

That's not very nice.

But then you eat some of the currants as well and,

because they've been soaked in the winey herby stuff,

they're quite tasty. Mmm.

Now, the idea that young girls should be suppressed

and their desires brought in check may not surprise you,

but I do think it's really intriguing that these young girls

are expected to have such a high sex drive in the first place.

It wasn't just the existence of women's sexual desire

that was acknowledged, but also their need for sexual pleasure.

Sarah, I think lots of people will have the idea that female

sexual pleasure was only invented in the 1960s,

-but this is utterly wrong, isn't it?

-It certainly is.

It was all there in the 17th century and the 16th century.

Women were thought to be completely sexually voracious and we find

it there in ballads and chat books, like this ballad Nine Times a Night.

-It doesn't exhaust a woman, but the poor man can't keep up.

-Oh!

I love the way it ends, "Nine times a night is too much for a man,

"I can't do it myself," he says, "but my sister can."

She certainly can.

She can do it as often as she needs to, for her own pleasure.

Now if, in the 17th century, female sexuality was important,

I'm having problems imagining the Puritans

being terribly keen on this.

Well, they weren't keen on having sexual pleasure

outside of marriage, but within marriage it was hugely important.

Stopped a man straying, stopped adultery,

so it was key to a couple having a loving marriage.

The Puritans are pretty unkeen,

-aren't they, on extramarital relationships?

-Absolutely.

In 1650 they brought in the Adultery Act

that made adultery and fornication capital crimes,

so you could be executed for having sex outside marriage.

So the Puritans are promoting married sex,

but then we get the Restoration.

It is a more permissive age, isn't it?

Well, I don't think there's any major shift in knowledge particularly,

but there's a burgeoning print culture.

And you have books like Aristotle's Master Piece, for example,

that women who were literate may well have had.

'This Master Piece was the ultimate Restoration sex guide,

'a 17th-century Joy Of Sex.

'And no, it wasn't written by THE Aristotle, it's actually anonymous,

'but some cunning publisher stole the Greek's name

'to boost sales and give it an air of respectability.'

It's very technical. We've got here a description of the clitoris,

which, "Both in form and colour resembles the comb of a cock.

"It looks fresh and red."

SHE LAUGHS

Sorry. Your face!

-Well it's, it's, it's very, very...

-It's explicit.

THEY LAUGH

It's full of good and very practical information.

It says here that the clitoris

is the female equivalent of the man's "yard".

In the second half of the 17th century you get

a focus on the clitoris and on women's pleasure.

And also this is key, key, key thing, and to conceive.

If you're not getting any pleasure, you're not going to conceive.

'This obsession with female sexual pleasure sounds incredibly modern,

'way ahead of its time, but in the 17th century

'men actually cared about giving women satisfaction'

'because of a medical misunderstanding.

'They believed that their wives had to have an orgasm to get pregnant.'

There was an idea that male and female bodies

were essentially the same,

so a women has to have sexual pleasure in order to orgasm

and release a seed to produce a baby,

so women's pleasure was hugely important.

'During the Restoration, married women were presumably

'enjoying a lot of good sex,

'because getting them pregnant

'and producing a child was their husband's ultimate goal.'

John Evelyn makes it pretty clear that marriage is for procreation.

He says that a wife is like an orchard,

it's her job to produce fruit for her husband.

His wife, Mary, was pregnant eight times,

a good part of her life, and each time it must have been traumatic,

given the odds of the mother dying or the baby dying.

In fact, half of her children did not make it to adulthood.

In the 17th century every family had to come to terms with

the dangers and difficulties of childbirth.

The birth of children was surrounded by fear and superstition.

There were qualified midwives on hand to help,

'but in an age still hovering between the medieval and the modern,

'they were viewed with suspicion as well as respect.'

You could spot a 17th-century midwife by her special red cloak,

and these women had special freedoms.

They could come and go, day and night,

in and out of anybody's house.

With this freedom though, came suspicion.

They had to swear an oath to their local bishop

saying that they would be diligent and faithful.

They would help every woman.

They had access to human body parts, like the foetus, the placenta,

blood, and these could be used in spells,

and this is why they also had to swear not to exercise,

"Any manner of witchcraft, charme or sorcery."

People were ambivalent about midwives because they had power

over a process that was still feared and misunderstood.

Women's experience of childbirth hadn't changed for centuries.

Well, let's assemble our 17th-century birthing chair, then.

-OK.

-And I put my legs up like that.

We'll tie you down cos we don't want you trying to get away,

not after we've got you this far. Both legs up there, excellent.

And it's simple, the midwife

comes round to the front here,

gets between your legs and receives the baby.

There shouldn't be any problem.

Were there any major improvements for women in childbirth

throughout the 17th century?

At the end of the 17th century we do start to see some shifts.

One of them is we get a book written by a midwife for midwives.

This is the work of Jane Sharp.

This is great. Look, look, look!

She says to them,

"To the celebrated midwives of Great Britain and Ireland. Sisters."

She's a midwife, they're midwives.

And it's signed from "Your affectionate friend

-"and well wisher, Jane Sharp."

-It's wonderful.

And she's got in it various pictures which are really interesting.

So this edition has a frontispiece which shows the birthing chamber.

And this lady is giving her alcoholic porridge to restore her.

Yes, absolutely, you need that after that.

-And what's going on down here?

-Well, here's the whole family

and they seem to be going off to church for the baptism.

That's part of the midwife's role.

-It's interesting, they're pillars of the community.

-Absolutely.

She's very much supporting organised religion and moral values.

Let's look at this other picture here.

Now is this pretty accurate,

this information about the positions of the baby?

Well, you can see for yourself that the babies are not

exactly nine months old.

He doesn't look like a baby really.

He's a toddler really, a toddler in the womb.

Look at his pectorals!

But this is giving you the basics of what position

could the child be in if it's not the normal head-first position.

So you've got foot presentation, bottom presentation, hands,

twins, all sorts of things.

I guess that if you could tell that you had twins though,

and one was upside down like that, this could really help you

imagine what might be going on inside.

Yes, and there is evidence that they were used like that.

By setting out her stall in print,

Jane Sharp introduced a scientific approach to midwifery,

dispelling some of the myths and horrors

that had previously surrounded childbirth.

But her book wasn't the only 17th-century breakthrough.

Midwives had always had some rather gruesome tools at their disposal.

'These ones were used to extract dead babies from the mother.'

But now came the arrival of a potentially lifesaving instrument.

This is the forceps and you have two separate blades.

And what you do is you put one on top of the other.

-Is that how you get them in?

-That's right.

You go in like that and, once you're in the womb, you'll guide

with your hand and then you open them up inside the womb and then...

-Oh, then you can grab his head.

-..you can grab the head, exactly.

Who invented these and when?

These were invented by the Chamberlain family,

a French Huguenot family, probably 1630s, maybe as early as that.

These are men, what are they doing getting involved in childbirth?

They've realised this is a really lucrative area.

If you know that there is a chance if your baby's stuck

that the Chamberlains can help, you'll employ them,

-you won't employ anybody else.

-Right.

And they keep these a secret within their family for about 100 years,

and when the secret comes out, when it's finally published

after the death of one of the Chamberlains,

immediately other people go into this.

They can see this is a really important area.

-So the forceps are invented by men and used by men.

-That's right.

They're used by men in difficult births

that a midwife couldn't deal with.

So that these ones are associated with the midwife

and with the old ways, this is the new future of midwifery.

Is it good or bad for women?

I suppose it's good in the sense

that they are going to save babies' lives.

The trouble is that men are moving, in the Restoration period,

from difficult births where nothing else will help,

to any birth, so women are getting gradually squeezed out

of the normal childbirth, which is their role.

To have a man in at the start of the process implies that giving birth

is somehow wrong, it's not a normal thing to do,

it needs male medical intervention,

even if it's going perfectly normally.

-We lose the birthing chair as well, don't we?

-We do.

This is all to do with gravity.

It helps the woman, but once the doctor comes along he doesn't want

to be squatting down on the floor.

No, you can't use forceps if someone's in that situation.

So the women gets tilted backwards on her back

and it's a less empowering position, isn't it?

-Absolutely.

-You're completely at his mercy.

You are an object in a way that you weren't, there.

-You were an active participant there.

-Yeah.

By the end of the 17th century, male doctors were pushing

the midwife out of her traditional role,

but women and their babies had a greater chance of surviving childbirth,

'and that must have been one of the greatest breakthroughs of the age.

'For any family, a healthy child was cause for celebration.

'For the Royal Family, it was essential

'for the stability of their reign.'

Charles II had 11 children by his mistresses,

but his wife Catherine was barren.

Ironically, Charles never produced a legitimate heir

'and so, at his death in 1685, the Crown passed to his brother James...

'..and childbirth became a red-hot political topic.'

The Queen's pregnancy became a real problem in the reign

of the unpopular, autocratic James II.

His big problem was that he converted to Catholicism,

and the one thing people feared was a return to a Roman Catholic regime.

In 1687 his young, Italian, Catholic wife, Mary of Modena,

got pregnant, and this caused a huge panic.

With the unpopular Catholic king

about to get his own Catholic male heir, was Catholicism back for good?

Nine months later the King's enemies' worst fears were realised

when the palace announced that Mary had produced a legitimate male heir.

But had she really?

Not everyone believed that the child had survived,

'and the contested birth set off a media feeding frenzy

'that would make a modern journalist squirm with excitement.'

James II's Protestant enemies put it about that the Queen's baby

had died almost immediately,

that the true heir to the throne was dead,

and that it had been replaced by an impostor baby,

somebody else's baby smuggled in.

The rumours got quite elaborate.

They said that the baby had travelled inside a warming pan

to get into the palace.

This is kind of like a big, metal hot water bottle.

You put hot coals in there and it warms up the sheets of your bed.

There were even maps printed to show the route along which

the baby is supposed to have been smuggled in to St James's Palace.

It came in through this little door here,

along through these rooms, along through here,

through these apartments,

round here and into the Queen's bed chamber here.

And these rumours did James II an awful lot of damage,

even though it was a total load of old rubbish.

When the Queen gave birth there were 40 people present in the room

to act as witnesses specifically to stop

this kind of scandal-mongering anyway.

And secondly, how on earth do you fit a baby into a warming pan?

There just isn't room.

Nevertheless the incident had major consequences, contributing

directly to James' downfall and what became known

as the Glorious Revolution of 1688,

when William of Orange and his wife Mary ousted James from the throne.

By the end of the 17th century the country had now put aside

the medieval and was heading for the modern age.

Some things had indeed got better for ordinary women.

'There was increased literacy and the ending of brutal punishments

'for witchcraft, and there were new ideas about marriage

'and health and childbirth.

'In the next programme, I'm going to explore how the Restoration

'allowed some of the most extraordinary women of

'the 17th century to break the mould, as female pioneers in the theatre,

'in science and even on the battlefield.'

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