The birth of Edward VI and the death of Queen Jane: the arguments for and against Caesarean section

Renaissance Studies Vol. 4 No. 4

The birth of Edward VI and the death of Queen Jane: the arguments f o r and

against Caesarean section RICHARD L. DEMOLEN

Here a Phoenix lieth, whose death To another Phoenix gave breath: It is to be lamented much, The World at once ne’r knew two such.

The author of this sixteenth-century epitaph inscribed on the royal tomb at Windsor, marking the death of Queen Jane Seymour in October of 1537, felt certain that there was an immediate connection between the birth of Prince Edward and the death of his mother. Indeed with these words the writer confesses that the queen actually died before the prince was born (‘whose death To another Phoenix gave breath . . . The World at once ne’r knew two such’). One can also assume that he believed Prince Edward was delivered by Caesarean section, since it is doubtful that the child could have been born naturally following the death of his mother. Armagil Waad (Wade), who was probably employed as a messenger in the service of Henry VIII between 1537 and 1540, is the presumed author. ‘

Two other contemporary documents, which, unlike the royal epitaph, did not have the offcal endorsement of the king, accused King Henry of causing the death of Queen Jane. One of the anonymous writers suggested that Edward was delivered (with the approval of the king) either by stretching unnaturally his mother’s limbs or by Caesarean section. The treatise, presently preserved in the Vatican Archives, reads:

And the following day he [i.e. Henry VIII] married Jane Seymour, whose death he caused when she was in severe labour in a difficult child-birth, by having all her limbs stretched for the purpose of mak- ing a passage for the child, or (as others stated) having the womb cut

I wish to thank Professor Albert Rabil, Jr, of the State University of New York. for criticizing an earlier version of this essay.

’ The original epitaph was composed in Latin and is still preserved in St George’s Chapel, Wind- sor. It reads: ‘Phoenix Jana jacet, nato Phoenice, dolendum / Saecula Phoenices nulla tulisse duos.’ For Waad’s assumed authorship, see John Foxe, The Acts and Monuments ofJohn Fore, ed. Stephen R. Cattley (London, 1837), V, pt 1, p. 148. There is a brief sketch of Waad in the Dictionary of National Biography.

0 1990 The Society for Renaissance Studies, Oxford Uniuersity Press

360 Richard L. DeMolen

before she was dead, so that the child ready to be born, might be taken out . . . 2

The other document, preserved in the Rolls Chapel Series MSS, insists that the king, when asked to choose between the lives of the queen and the baby, chose the latter. The baby was thereupon ‘cut out of his mother’s womb’.’ Later writers have accused historians who have adopted such a position of bias and have assumed that they were papist^.^

Added to these interpretations is one offered by Thomas Cromwell, then serving as Lord Privy Seal. In a letter to Lord William Howard and Bishop Stephen Gardiner, English ambassadors to the French court, drafted shortly after the queen’s death, Cromwell instructed them (no doubt on orders of the king) to inform Francis I that ‘Our Mastres thoroughe the faulte of them that were about her which suffred her to take greate cold and to eat thinges that her fantazie in syknes called for, is departed to But even among crown officials Cromwell’s explanation of the cause of the queen’s death was contradicted by an entry in the College of Heralds MSS, dated 12 November, which noted ‘A remem- brance of the interment of Queen Jane, mother to Edward VI, who died at Hampton Court, 24 October, on Wednesday, about 12 p.m. in childbed, 29 Henry VIII.’6 It is clear that the author of this entry was persuaded that the queen had died of puerperal fever and had not been the victim of a great cold (i.e. pneumonia) and an injurious diet.

Thus within a few weeks of the death of Queen Jane there existed con- flicting testimonies concerning the cause of her demise. The two official versions (carrying the approval of the crown) admitted to Englishmen at home that (1) Prince Edward had been delivered by Caesarean section after his mother had died, and to the English ambassadors and the French court that (2) the queen died of a great cold and improper foods some time after the birth of a son. The unapproved and anti-Henrician view offered another explanation and argued that (3) the queen had been

’ Vatican Archives Add. MSS 15,387. Printed by Nicholas Pocock in Records o f the Reforma- tion: The Divorce 1527-15?? (2 vols, Oxford, 1870), 1 1 , 564, under the heading ‘A contemporary account of Fisher and More, preserved at the Vatican.’ The Latin original reads: ‘Ac die posteri [i.e. after the death of Queen Anne Boleyn] Joannam Semeriam duxit, cui parturiendi difficultate graviter laboranti, laxatis omnibus membris, quo partui egressum patefaceret, necem attulit, sive (ut alii tradidere) antequam exanimaretur secari uterum, atque extrahi foetum imperavit, maturum . . .’

’ Rolls Chapel Series MS A 2, fol. 3”, in the Public Record Office. This document was discussed by James A. Froude, History of England (London, 1864), 111, 262.

‘ See below. [Thomas Cromwell] to Lord William Howard and Bishop Stephen Gardiner, October 1537.

For an accurate transcript of this letter, see Roger B. Merriman (ed.), L$e and Letters of Thomas Cromwell(2 vols, Oxford, 1902), 1 1 , 96-9. The following partial transcription is inaccurate: Letters and Papers Henry VIII [henceforth: L F3 PI, X ~ I , pt 2 (1537), pp. 348-9, no. 1004. There is also an accurate transcription of this letter in State Papers; King Henry the Eighth, Part v (London, 1849), V I I I , 1-4.

Printed in L B P, under date of 12 November 1537, X I I , pt 2 (1537), p. 372, no. 1060.

The birth of Edward VI and the death of Queen Jane 361

‘cut before she was dead’ in order to save the life of the child. This inter- pretation of the death of Queen Jane obviously blackened Henry’s reputation as a husband and silently warned European monarchs to reject matrimonial proposals from such a self-serving king. Since Caesarean section was permitted only on dead or dying mothers, and since there was considerable evidence that the queen lived a number of days after the prince’s birth, Henry’s actions in 1537 would have been universally condemned by the respublica Chrzstiana.’

In the following century, William Camden recorded Waad’s epitaph in his 1614 edition of the Remaim Concerning Britain and explained in his Annals (a year later) that Queen Jane died before Edward was born (and not as a result of surgery).* He assumed that the prince was ‘cut out of her womb’ in order to save his life. Accepting the theory of a Caesarean operation, John Hayward, author of a life of Edward VI, nevertheless disagreed with Camden and concluded about 1627 that Jane died ‘of the incision’ four days after the birth of the prince.’ Unlike Camden, he assumed that the queen died as a result of surgery rather than of natural causes.

In our own day, several historians have accepted Hayward’s view that Queen Jane died after a Caesarean operation but no one has maintained Camden’s position that she died before the prince was born. J. J . Scarisbrick, for example, believes that ‘Queen Jane was delivered by Caesarean section’ and that she died some twelve days after the birth of the prince as a result of ‘Tudor medicine’.’’ In one sense, however, Camden, Hayward and Scarisbrick are in agreement, because each one maintains that the prince was delivered by Caesarean section; what they disagree about is the exact cause and date of death.

Contrary to these writers who support the theory of Caesarean section stand several twentieth-century historians of prominence, among them W. K. Jordan, author of a two-volume life of Edward VI (1968, 1970). Jordan insists that ‘Edward was born, as his parents wished, at Hampton Court by a natural birth, Hayward’s story that he was delivered by

’ See John H. Young, Caesarean Section: The HiSto7jl and Development of the Operationfrom Earliest T i m e s . . . (London, 1944).

* William Camden, Remaines Concerning Britaine (London, 1614), 371. See also Camden, An- nales rerum Anglicarum, et hibernicarum, regnante Elizabetha (London, 1615), 6. This work was translated by Abraham Darcie in 1625, where the relevant passage reads (p. *2): ‘Iane, being in labour of Edward, (who succeeded his Father in the Kingdome) dyed before hee was borne, and hee cut out of her wombe.’

’ Sir John Hayward (d. 1627), The Life and Razgne oJXing Edward the S ix t , ed. John Hughes (London, 1630). The 1636 edition reads (p. 1): ‘Edward King of England the sixth of that name of the Norman Race, was borne at Hampton Court the seventeenth of October 1537 . . . All reports do constantly runne, that he was not by natural1 passage delivered into the world, but that his mothers body was opened for his birth, and that she dyed of the incision the fourth day following.’John G. Nichols incorrectly states that Hayward placed Queen Jane’s death on the 14th. See Nichols, Literary Remains of King Edward the Sixth (2 vols, London, 1857), I , p. xxv.

” J. J. Scarisbrick, H e n y VIII (Berkeley, Calif., 1968), 353.


Caesarean section being without foundation.”’ He finds evidence for his thesis in several sixteenth-century documents and histories, of which the letter of Cromwell to the English ambassadors to France is most important. In order to determine the correctness of one or the other of these positions, I shall review the contemporary evidence and the various historiographical interpretations from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries that have been offered to explain the connection between the birth of Prince Edward and the death of Queen Jane. In the end, I shall try to establish that Queen Jane underwent a Caesarean section on 12/13 October and that she died some twelve days after the birth of Prince Edward as a result of this surgery.

I

The date of birth of Edward VI has been generally assigned to 12 October, the vigil of the feast of St Edward the Confessor, after whom it was believed he was named. The principal basis for this attribution is the existence of a letter written in the name of Queen Jane Seymour to Thomas Cromwell, Lord Privy Seal, and bearing her signet and the date of 12 October. The letter reads:

Righte trustie and righte welbiloved, we grete you welle. And foras- muche as by th’inestimable goodnes and grace of Almighty God we be delivred and brought in child bed of a Prince conceived in moost Laufull Matrimony betwene my lord the Kinges Maiestie and us, doubt- ing not but that for the love and affection which ye beare unto us and to the commyn wealth of this Realme the Knowledge thereof shold be joyous and glad tydinges unto youe, we have thought good to certifie youe of the same. To th’intent ye might not only rendre unto God con- digne thankes and praise for so0 gret a benefite, but alsoo continually pray for the long continuaunce and preservacion of the same here in this lief, to th’onour of God, joye and pleasure of my lord the King and us, and th’universall weale, quiet and tranquillity of this hole Realme. Yevyn under our Signet at my lordes Manour of Hampton- courte the xij. day of Octobre.I2

There is further manuscript evidence for this particular date of birth in the British Library (Additional MSS 6,113, fols 81 and , , ) I 3 and an entry in the journal of Charles Wriothesley (Windsor Herald), written at the time, which asserts that Edward was born on the eve of Saint Edward at

“ W . K. Jordan, Edward VI: The Young King: The Protectorship of the Duke of Somerset (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 36.

‘ I Queen uane Seymour] to Thomas Cromwell, 12 October 1537, Cotton MSS Nero C. x , fol 1, in the British Library. Printed in L d P, x I I , pt. 2, p. 310, no. 889, and Nichols, Literary Remains, I ,

p. xx i i i . I ’ See L d P, X I I , pt 2 (1537), p. 318, no. 911, and p. 328, no. 939.


two o’clock in the rnorning.l4 Since these pieces of evidence are of an unofficial nature and seem to depend on the queen’s letter to Cromwell (in whole or in part), they cannot be regarded as positive proof. Never- theless, this contemporary evidence, together with the fact that all but three of the published chronicles and histories from the sixteenth century to the present concur with this date, does make a most persuasive case.”

Over and against the weight of the majority stand three lone dissenters, each proposing a different date of birth in their respective published histories: Polydore Vergil’s Anglica historica (1555), composed by a man who was resident in England at the time of Edward’s birth, asserted that the prince was born on 13 October, the feast of St Edward the Con- fessor.“j Nicholas Sanders, a Catholic priest and author of De origine ac progressu schismatis Anglicani liber (1585), also living in England in 1537 (though only a boy of seven years), claimed the 10th of October.” Finally, Sir John Hayward in his circa 1627 life of Edward VI proposed the 17th.’* Of this group, Polydore Vergil is the only dissenter who finds support for his dating in unpublished contemporary records. Dean Robert Aldrich (d. 1556), the registrar of the Order of Garter, for instance, noted ‘the birth of prince Edward [on], 13 October, St. Edward’s Day, about 4 o’clock, 1537’ - a full day after Wriothesley’s entry. I 9 Further- more, Polydore Vergil’s dating is strengthened by strong indications that Queen Jane’s letter to Cromwell, referred to above, was prepared for her in advance of the birth of Prince Edward and that is was sent to various government officers and members of the nobility a few days before the actual birth of the prince. Lord Henry Fitz-Alan Maltravers, for example, wrote to Cromwell on 7 October informing him that he had received ‘the joyful tidings that the Queen was delivered of a prince’2o that very morning. As if to contradict this evidence there is a letter (dated 12 October) from Cromwell to Sir Thomas Wyatt, English ambassador to the

“ Charles Wriothesley, A Chronicle of England During the Reigm of the Tudors. From A.D. 1485 to 1552, ed. William D. Hamilton (2 vols, London, 1875, 1877), I , 65: ‘And the morrowe after being Fridaie and the eaven of Sainct Edward [i.e. 12 October], sometime King of Englande, at tow of the clocke in the morninge the Queen [was] delivered of a man chielde at Hampton Court beside Kingston.’

’’ The major exception is Harvey Graham who claimed that ‘Jane died giving birth to Edward VI on October 24, 1537 . . .’ See Graham, Eternal Eve: The History of Gynaecology and Obstetrics (Garden City, NY, 1951), 140.

l 6 Polydore Vergil, The Anglica Histona of Polydore Vergil A . D . 1485-1537, trans. and ed. Denys Hay, Camden Society LXXIV (London, 1950), 337.

” Nicholas Sanders, De orzgzne ac progressu schismatis Anglicani liber (Cologne, 1585), 89. The passage reads: ‘Sexto autem idus Octobris natus est Henrico ex Iana Seimera filius quem vocauit Edouardum . ’

’* Hayward, The L$e and Ra2;gne of King Edward the Sixt (1636), 1 . l 9 Robert Aldrich recorded the birth of Prince Edward as ‘circiter horam quartam diei tertii

decim’. See John Anstis, The Register of the Order o f the Garter ( 2 vols, London, 1724), 11, 410. James Gairdner, the editor of L t3 P for Henry VIII, discounts Aldrich’s dating with the note: ‘clearly a wrong date, as appears by preceding letter’. See L B P, XII, pt 2 (1537), p. 316, no. 901.

’’ Lord Mawtravers to Cromwell, 7 October 1537. See L d P, XI1, pt 2, p. 311, no. 893.

3 64 Richard L. DeMolen

emperor, in which the Lord Privy Seal acknowledged receipt of the official letter from the queen, personally delivered to him on the morning of the 12th.2’ Lord Maltravers’ letter to Cromwell, however, makes it clear that the Lord Privy Seal had been informed unofficially of this news several days earlier. Cromwell’s letter to Wyatt simply withheld the formal announcement of the prince’s birth from a European head of state until after the date of the queen’s letter. Furthermore, there is a letter from John Husee to Lord Lisle (dated 16 October) in which Husee assumes that Lord Lisle has ‘long since’ learned of the birth of Prince Edward from ‘John Skarlet who went with the Queen’s letters’.22 It is doubtful in an age when messages travelled slowly that Husee would have used the expres- sion ‘long since’ had not the official announcement been in circulation well before 12 October. Because of the letters of Maltravers and Husee, one suspects that the official announcement by the queen was little more than a form letter sent at the behest of the king for political reasons as well as protocol. Its contents stress the legitimacy of Henry’s third marriage and is similar to that letter which announced the birth of Princess Elizabeth some four years earlier on 7 September 1533. Queen Anne Boleyn sent the following notice to Lord George Cobham:

Right trustie and welbiloved, we grete you well. And where as it hath pleased the goodnes of Almightie God. of his infynite marcie and grace, to sende unto us, at this tyme, good spede, in the delyveraunce and bringing furthe of a Princes, to the great joye, rejoyce, and inward comforte of my Lorde, us, and all his good and loving subjectes of this his realme; for the whiche his inestymable benevolence, so0 shewed unto us, we have noo litle cause to give high thankes, laude, and praising unto oure said Maker, like as we doo mooste lowly, humbly, and with all the inwarde desire of our harte. And inasmuche as we undoubtidly truste, that this oure good spede is to your great pleasure, comforte, and consolation, We, therefore, by thies our letters, advertise you thereof, desiring and hartely praying you to give, with us, unto Almightie God, high thankes, glorie, laude, and praising; and to praye for the good helth, prosperitie, and contynuall preservation of the said Princes accordingly. Yeven under our Signet, at my Lordis Manour of Grenewiche, the 7 day of September, in the 25th yere of my said Lordis ~e igne .*~

* ’ Cromwell to Sir Thomas Wyatt, 12 October 1537, in Harleian MS 282, fol. 211 (in British Library). Printed by R. B. Merriman, Life and Letters of Thomas Cromwell, 11, 94. See also L d P, X I I , pt 2, p. 310, no. 890.

’* John Husee to Lord Lisle (John Dudley), 16 October 1537. See L d P , XII , pt 2 (1537), p. 325, no. 922.

‘’ State Papers. . . Henry the Ezghth (London, 1830), I , 407. The editor of this volume has noted that the final letter Is’ has been added to the word ‘Prince’ in two instances, subsequently to the writing of the letter, ‘which was, no doubt, prepared before the Queen’s delivery. It is sealed with the Queen’s Signet. ’


James C. Robertson was the first scholar to point out that ‘Letters of this sort were prepared beforehand, when a queen’s delivery was expected. In those which announced the birth of Elizabeth, the word Prince had been written, and appears with the alteration into Princess.’24 In retrospect, one is tempted to question the 12th as the birth date of Prince Edward and to propose that of the 13th - a date supported by both Dean Aldrich and Polydore Vergil.

The reason for this discrepancy in the actual date of Edward’s birth may have been due to the elaborate precautions and secrecy that surrounded Queen Jane in the months before her delivery. The queen was subject to forced confinement in order to ensure the safe delivery of her child. Writing to the Duke of Norfolk (probably in September of 1537), King Henry declined to preside at the annual meeting of the Council of the North at York, partly because of his wife’s pregnancy. He reasoned:

A second cause is, for that being our said most dear and most entirely beloved wife, the Queen, now quick with child, for the which we give most humble thanks to Almighty God, albeit she is, in every condition, of that loving inclination, and reverend conformity, that she can in all things well content, satisfy, and quiet herself with that which we shall think expedient and determine; yet considering that, being a woman, upon some sudden and displeasant rumours and bruits that might by foolish or light persons be blown abroad in our absence, being specially so far from her, she might take to her stomach such impressions as might engender no little danger or displeasure to that wherewith she is now pregnant, which God forbid: it hath been thought to us and our Council very necessary that for avoiding of all perils that might that way ensue, we should not extend our progress this year so far from her; but direct the same to such place as should not pass 60 miles or thereabouts from her, when we should be at the furthest; specially she being, as it is thought, further gone by a month or more than she thought herself at the perfect quickening. Which counsel, therefore, remembering what dependeth upon the prosperity of that matter, we think not amiss to follow, both for our own quiet and for the common wealth of our whole realm.25

Since Henry considered women to be emotionally and psychologically fragile, he wished to protect the queen from any rumours that might upset her and lead to her having a miscarriage. Eucharius Roesslin had reminded his readers in 1513 that ‘very many [are] the perils, dangers,

’‘ See James C. Robertson, editor of Peter Heylyn’s 1661 edition of Eccleszu restaurafa (Cam-

’’ Henry VIII to the Duke of Norfolk, c. September 1537. See The Letters ofKing Henry VIII , bridge, 1849), 14.

ed. M. St Clare Byrne (London, 1936), 172.


and throngs which chance to women in their labour . . . ’26 Moreover, the king had good reason to take special precautions to protect Jane. He knew from personal experience with his two previous wives that pregnancy was a delicate condition: Queen Katherine’s six pregnancies resulted in four stillbirths at or in the eighth month, and one of the two safely delivered children, a son, lived for only fifty-two days. Likewise, Queen Anne Boleyn had a series of unsuccessful pregnancies, three of which were miscarriages. On 10 February 1536, for example, after learning that the king had suffered a severe fall from his horse while jousting (on 29 January), she miscarried a three-and-a-half month old male fetus. The king’s actions in September of 1537 thus easily explain them~elves.~’

It is also clear from the above quotation that Henry loved his wife because of her ‘reverend conformity’ and that he was more concerned with the welfare of his expectant child than the creature comforts or personal wishes of his wife. Above all, he made it clear to Norfolk that Queen Jane was under his authority when he insisted that ‘she can in all things well content, satisfy, and quiet herself with that which we shall think expedient and determine . . . both for our own quiet and for the common wealth of our whole realm’. For this reason, the king postponed the queen’s coronation a second time and prayers were said at Mass for her safe delivery.” Henry looked upon Jane as the instrument by which he could obtain the long-desired male heir. The untimely death of the illegitimate Duke of Richmond, his only son to survive infancy, on 23 July 1536 (at the age of seventeen) only accentuated the importance of a safe delivery for this third wife.29 As Neville Williams has written: ‘On Trinity Sunday [i.e. 27 May] 1537 a Te Deum was sung in St. Paul’s “for joy of the Queen’s quickening of child”, an unprecedented step in the chronicle of the English liturgy, itself reflecting the full significance of the royal s~premacy.”~ Furthermore, as a sign of his thankfulness, Henry commissioned Hans Holbein the Younger to prepare a fresco on the walls of the Privy Chamber which would portray his lineage from the royal houses of York and Lancaster by presenting likenesses of his parents in the

z6 Eucharius Roesslin, Der Swangern Frauwen und Hebammen Rosegarten (Strasbourg, 1513). This work was first translated into English in 1540 by Richard Jones under the title The Byrth of Mankynde (and dedicated to Queen Katherine Howard). The preceding quotation can be found in the London, 1626 edition, p. 91.

*’ For a summary of the obstetrical history of the wives and mistress of Henry VIII, see Frederick Chamberlin, The Private Character of Henry the Eighth (New York, 1931), 262-4.

L bP, XII , pt 1, p. 600, no. 1325. 2 8

n Chamberlin, The Private Character ofHenry the Eighth, 261-2. “ See Neville Williams, Henry VII I and His Court (London, 1971). 156. William Seymour

quotes the entry in L B P , X I I , pt 1, p. 600, no. 1325, and suggests that ‘The congregation at Oxford had been told in a sermon that, “upon Trinity Sunday, like one given of God, the child quickened in the mother’s womb”.’ See Seymour, Ordeal by Ambition: An English Family in the Shadow ofthe Tudors (London, 1972). 55. To be ‘quick with child’ in the sixteenth century was, according to the OED, ‘said of a female in the stage of pregnancy at which the motion of the foetus is felt [i.e. at about four months]’.


background and portraits of himself and his expectant queen in the foreground. Holbein’s fresco, which has been preserved only through copies, reveals a towering Henry VIII and a diminutive and submissive Jane - a depiction that accurately reflected the king’s image of queenship.

Despite Henry’s precautions, there is contemporary evidence that Queen Jane endured a painful period of labour prior to the actual delivery. The accounts range from one day to six weeks. An anonymous Spanish chronicler referred to a three-day illness and Dean Aldrich’s register of the Order of the Garter described a difficult two-day labour.” Moreover, the Windsor herald Charles Wriothesley observed that the queen was in labour on Thursday, the 11th of October, one day before the prince’s birth.3’ Finally, there are ten variants of a single ballad, one of which is directly traceable to the sixteenth century, that record a labour of thirty hour ‘and more’, another of three days ‘and more’, one of thirty days ‘and more’, and finally several of six weeks ‘or more’. They read as follows:

(1) The queen in travail pained sore Full thirty woful hours and more, And no ways could relieved be, As all her ladies wished to see.34

Queen Jeany has traveled for three days and more3’

Queen Jeanie was in labour full three days and more36

The queen in travell, pained sore Full thirty woeful daies and more, And no way could delivered be, As every lady wisht to see.37

(2)

( 2 4

(3)

I ’ For a discussion of the Holbein fresco, see Roy Strong, Holbein and H e n y V I I I (London, 1967), 3-10.

[Anonymous,] Chronicle of King Henry VIII, Being a Contemporary Record of Some of the Principal Events of the Re@ of H e n y VIII, and Edward VI. Written in Spanish by an Unknown Hand, trans. and ed. Martin A. Sharp Hume (London, 1889), 72. See also Aldrich in John Anstis, The Register of the Order of the Garter. 11, 410. The passage reads: ‘. . . soluta est gratiosissima Regina Joanna partu ill0 difficillimo, quem duos totos, plus minus, ante dies aegerrime pertulerat’.

” Printed in Agnes Stricklands Lives of the Queens of England (6 vols, London, 1890), 11, 282. Strickland first published her book in 1857. She states that this ballad was ‘nearly contemporary’. See her London, 1890 edition, ibid.

Francis J. Child (ed.), The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (5 vols, New York, 1957), III 374. This collection first appeared in London in 1889.

Wriothesley, A Chronicle of England, ed. Hamilton, 65.

’’ Ibid. 576. ” Richard Johnson, A Crowne-Garland of Golden Roses. Gathered out of England’s Royal1

Garden (London, 1612), ed. William Chappell (London: Percy Society, 1842), 29-32. It is clear that Johnson based this ballad on oral tradition. Johnson referred to the ballads in his volume as ‘Set forth in many pleasant new songs and sonetm neuer before imprinted.’ Chappell believes that ‘the ballads


(4) Queen Jane was in travail For six weeks or

Irrespective of the actual date of birth and the length of her labour, historians have debated for centuries the circumstances surrounding Ed- ward’s delivery. In addition to the above references, two contemporary sources repeat the belief that Queen Jane’s life had been sacrificed. The author of the Spanish chronicle of Henry VIII noted that ‘It was said that the mother had to be sacrificed for the child. I do not affirm this to be true, only that it was rum~ured.’~’ Writing circa 1558, Nicholas Harps- field observed in his unpublished ‘Treatise of Marriage’: ‘That she Dane Seymour] should die for the safeguard of the child in such manner as she did, yea, the child was to be born, as some say that adders are, by gnaw- ing out the mother’s w~rnb . ’~” A nearly contemporary ballad of the period supported Harpsfield’s contention and explained a causal relationship between the birth of Edward and the death of Jane, as well as Henry’s involvement :

Being thus perplexed with grief and care, A lady to him did repair, And said, ‘0 king, show us thy will, The queen’s sweet life to save or spill?’ ‘Then, as she cannot saved be, Oh, save the flower though not the tree.’ 0 mourn, mourn, mourn, fair ladies, Your queen the flower of England’s dead.’41

in the following collection were written at a much earlier period than the date of their publication in the form of a “Garland” . . . i t was probably about that time [i.e. 15921 he wrote, and printed in broadsides, many of the ballads which he afterwards collected in the present form’ (p. v). Johnson (1573-1659) titled the ballad ‘The woful Death of Queen Jane, Wife to King Henry the Eighth, and how King Edward was cut out of his Mother’s Belly’ and based the tune on ‘The Lamentation of the Lord of Essex’. It seems certain that the Johnson version of the ballad was composed only after the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603. See p. 32.

See Robert Bell (ed.), Early Ballads Illustrative of History, Traditions and Cus tom . . . (Lon- don, 1877); reprinted in Detroit, 1968, p. 334. Bell first printed this ballad in Ancient Poems, Ballads, and Songs of the Peasantry of England (London, 1857). He claimed to have ‘seen an old printed copy of this ballad, which was written probably about the date of the event it records, 1537’. He also noted that his version was ‘taken down from thr singing of a young gypsy girl, to whom it had descended orally through two generations’. See the Detroit edition of 1968, p. 333. The existence of ten variants of the same ballad should not tempt scholars to discount the historical nature of the contents. The difference in detail can be traced to contemporary documentary evidence that shows disparities.

39 [Anonymous,] Chronicle of King Henry V I I I , ed. Hume, 72. 4o Nicholas Harpsfield, ‘Treatise of Marriage’, MS book, iii, p. 107. Quoted by David Lewis,

trans. and ed. of Nicholas Sanders, Rzse and Growth o f the Anglican Schzsm, 1585 (London, 1877). 138.

Quoted by Strickland, Lives of the Queem ofEngland, 11, 282-3. See the variant in Johnson, A Crowne-Garland of Golden Roses (London, 1612), which repeats the same ideas, pp. 29-32 of the Percy Society edition (London, 1842), ed. W. Chappell.


Popular opinion was persuaded throughout the sixteenth century that Queen Jane had died either (1) before giving birth to Edward or (2) after offering her life to protect that of her unborn child. The royal epitaph and the following surviving ballad insist that the queen was dead before the incision was made. The ballad reads:

‘0 women! 0 women! Good wives if ye be, Go, send for King Henry, And bring him to me.’ King Henry was sent for, He came with all speed. In a gown of green velvet From heel to the head. ‘King Henry! King Henry! If kind Henry you be, Send for a surgeon, And bring him to me.’ The surgeon was sent for, He came with all speed. In a gown of black velvet From heel to the head. He gave her rich caudle, But the death sleep slept she. Then her right side was opened, And the babe was set free.4z

On the other hand, such contemporary writers as Dean Aldrich, the anonymous author of the College of Heralds MS, and Polydore Vergil attributed the queen’s death to child-bed fever a few days after Prince Edward’s birth. Indeed, with the exception of Waad, Camden and the anonymous author of the above ballad, all historians and writers have attributed Jane’s death to circumstances that developed after the birth of Prince Edward. Two contemporary officials of the crown, however, insist that Queen Jane’s death was unrelated to the birth of the prince. These two exceptions are well worth noting. Cromwell in his letter to the English ambassadors, referred to earlier, stated that the queen had died of a ‘great cold’; and John Leland, chaplain and librarian to the king, as well as the royal antiquarian, sided with Cromwell’s diagnosis (on which he based his own account)43 in a commendatory poem in honour of Prince Edward, first published in 1543, where he suggested that the queen died of colic and a It should be kept in mind that both of these men

‘’ Bell, Early Ballads (Detroit, 1968), 334. ” See Edward Burton, The Life ofJohn Leland (London, 1896), 12-14, 1 7 . ‘‘ John Leland, ‘Genethliacon Illustrissimi Eaduerdi Principis Cambriae . . .’ (1543), in The

I tznemq ofJohn Leland the Antzquaq, ed. Thomas Hearne, 3rd edn (9 vols, Oxford, 1769), IX, p.


were in the service of the king and probably wrote what they did as instruments of propaganda, as a deliberate effort to disguise the actual cause of the queen’s death in order to protect the king’s subsequent at- tempts to marry Mary of Guise - a point to which I shall return later in this essay.

It is obvious, moreover, that neither Cromwell’s secret dispatch to the English ambassadors nor Leland’s dedicatory poem influenced public opinion in the sixteenth century. The surviving versions of the sixteenth- century ballad, even though they differ in details, reflect popular belief. Sir Richard Morison tried to console fellow Englishmen in their grief by composing a ‘Comfortable Consolation, wherein the People may see howe far greater causes they have to be glad for the joyful Byrth of Prince Ed- ward, then sory for the Dethe of Queen Jane’. In underscoring the importance of a male successor to the throne at the cost of the life of a queen, Morison tacitly acknowledged a cause and effect relationship. 4 5 More- over, the popular image of the queen sacrificing her life for the child found its way into historical record. William Thomas, who was clerk of the council to Edward VI, described the queen as follows in his life of Henry VIII, written during the boy-king’s reign: ‘. . . Jane Seymour . . . brought into the world that happy Prince Edward that now succeedeth the father unto the Crown, in whose birth she died.’46 Now that Henry VIII was safely dead, Thomas felt no hesitancy in attributing the death of the queen to Edwards birth.

However, one must be careful to draw a distinction between the dif- ficulties of Queen Jane’s labour and the nature of her death. As the public spokesman of the king, Cromwell had good reason to disguise the actual cause of the queen’s death. William Camden recognized this point when he observed in his Annales: ‘The king being but little grieued for the death of his wife, forthwith applyes himselfe to new Loues both in Italy and France, to procure frinds . . .”’ Camden’s judgement in this matter is at odds with a number of contemporary and modem accounts. In Henry VIII and His Times (1962), J. J. Bagley insisted that ‘For the first time in his life Henry knew the grief of losing a loved one. He ordered that Jane’s body should lie three weeks in state before it was taken to Windsor for burial, and he received the congratulations which Francis sent him on the birth of Edward with the words “Divine Providence hath mingled my joy with the bitterness of the death of her who brought me this happi- ness.” For once a diplomatic dispatch might be accepted at its face

xi: ‘Sed Superis aliter visum est. Cruciatus acerbus / Distorsit vacuum letali tormine ven- trem / Frigora crediderim temere contracta fuisse / In causa: superat vis morbi . . .’

‘’ See Catalogus Bibliothecae Harleianae, led. Samuel Johnson et al.] (5 vols, London, 1743-5), I , no. 7783. The date of 1534 in the entry is an obvious error.

4 6 William Thomas, The Pilgrim: A Dialogue on the Life and Actions of King Henry the Eighth, ed. J. A. Froude (London, 1861), 57.

‘’ Camden, Annales rerum Anglicarum, trans. Darcie, p. [*4v].


value.’48 But in light of Cromwell’s letters to the English ambassadors, one must question the extent of Henry’s grief. If indeed, as I have suggested, Cromwell deliberately disguised the actual cause of Queen Jane’s death in order to mislead Francis I, Henry’s letter to the same king ought to be viewed in the same light. Though Henry undoubtedly felt some genuine sorrow at the death of Jane Seymour, his grief was tempered by his joy. As A. F. Pollard has observed in his life of Henry VIII, ‘Queen Jane’s death was not to be compared in importance with the birth of Edward VI.’49 Upon learning of the birth of Prince Edward, Bishop Hugh Latimer wrote to Cromwell on 19 October as follows: ‘Here is no less rejoicing at the birth of our prince, whom we hungered for so long, then there was at the birth of John the Bapti~t.’~’ If it came to a choice between the life of a favourite wife and the life of an unborn child, who could be the long- sought male heir to the throne, Henry had to sacrifice the queen for the sake of the crown. Lady Lisle in a letter, dated 14 November 1537, to the Countess of Sussex summarized the general attitude of the age when she wrote: ‘I have received your letter and perceive your sorrow for the death of the Queen. Yet her Grace was fortunate to live the day to bring forth such a prince . . .’”

It is also important to keep in mind that Henry’s sense of proprieties did not prevent him from discreetly directing Cromwell to arrange, within days of Jane’s death, marriage negotiations for the hand of either one of two daughters of France, and, subsequently, to bargain for the Duchess of Milan. Cromwell first revealed his instructions in a letter to Lord William Howard and Bishop Stephen Gardiner. It reads in part:

The King, though he takes this chance [death of Queen Jane] reason- ably, is little disposed to marry again, but some of his Council have thought it meet for us to urge him to it for the sake of his realm, and he has ‘framed his mind, both to be indifferent to the thing and to the election of any persons from any part that with deliberation shall be thought meet.’ Two persons in France might be thought on, viz., the French king’s daughter (said to be not the meetest) and Madame de Longueville [i.e. Mary of Guise], of whose qualities you are to inquire, and also on what terms the King of Scots Dames V] stands with either of them.

The parting sentence of Cromwell to the English ambassadors under- scored the importance of secrecy in these negotiations for a new wife as well as success in executing the King’s will. Cromwell insisted: ‘Lord William must not return without ascertaining this, but the inquiry must

‘’ J. J. Bagley, Henry VIII and His Times (London, 1962), 123. ‘’ A. F. Pollard, Henry VIII (1905). The quotation is taken from the 1970 edition, p. 289.

’’ Lady Lisle to the Countess of Sussex, 14 November 1537, in L B P, XII, pt 2, p . 360, no. 1030. Latimer to Cromwell, 19 October 1537, in L B P, XII, pt 2, p. 331, no. 947.


be kept Though in mourning, King Henry was under considerable pressure from the council to remarry. Writing to Cromwell on 4 November, Norfolk revealed that he had personally urged the king ‘to accept Gods pleasure in taking the Queen, and recomfort himself with the treasure sent to him and this realm, viz., the Prince, and advised him to provide for a new wife’.53 Personal feelings aside, the crown had to be assured of a viable male offspring, and in an age of high infant mortality the birth of only one male heir did not guarantee that a son would succeed to the throne. In this connection, J. J. Scarisbrick has noted that within a week of Jane’s death

the search for her successor began . . . To begin to look so quickly for a replacement for Jane was extreme haste even for an age which did not associate marriage, and especially royal marriage, with romantic love -- and it was perhaps a sign of embarrassment that Cromwell, having reported that Henry had been bereaved but a few days before, should quickly have added that he was in no way disposed to marry again and had only overcome his feeling that it was his duty to set out once more on the ‘extreme adventure’ of matrimony. The truth may well have been that Henry’s evidently short-lived reluctance was not much to the fore and that what the Council (and especially Cromwell) did was to persuade him to look for a wife abroad. A foreign princess was less likely than the daughter of an English noble house to be the agent and pawn of festering hostility to the secretary. 5 4

As persuasive as this thesis is, one is tempted to suggest that Henry VIII may have looked abroad for a successor to Queen Jane because he had no other choice, Some Englishmen knew that Jane’s life had been sacrificed in order to save that of Prince Edward. Under such circumstances, it would have been a sign of callousness and disrespect to the memory of the queen, who had offered her very life for the crown, to have openly sought the hand of an English noblewoman within days of Queen Jane’s demise. Cromwell’s instructions to the English ambassadors had to be carried out in secrecy so as not to offend English subjects. One suspects that Henry ordered such secret negotiations in order to maintain the exterior pose of a grieving husband, Sir John Russell’s letter of 24 October 1537 to Cromwell (referred to below) in which he informed the Lord Privy Seal that the king intended to remove to Esher the next day despite the seriousness of the queen’s illness also reveals a great deal about Henry’s real attitude towards his wife.55 Above all, it should remind the reader

[Cromwell] to Howard and Gardiner, October 1537, in Merriman (ed.), Life and Letters of Thomas Cromwell, 11, 97.

” Norfolk to Cromwell, 4 November 1537, L B P, XI[, pt 2, p. 360, no. 1030.

I’ Russell to Cromwell, 25 October 1537, in L d P, xu, pt 2, p. 342, no. 977. The letter was prob- Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, 355.

ably written on 24 October.


that Henry’s fondness for Queen Jane was of a limited nature. Surely a devoted husband would not have left the side of his seriously ill wife even for pressing matters of state. Henry’s insistence that he intended to go to &her whether or not his wife recovered was symptomatic of his true feelings.

Writing about 1581, Nicholas Sanders, the much maligned priest- historian, repeated the contents of the Rolls Chapel Series MS (as well as one of the versions of the ballad) and noted that ‘the travail of the queen being very difficult, the king was asked which of the two lives was to be spared; he answered, the boy’s, because he could easily provide himself with other wives’. j6 Sanders also maintained that ‘Jane, having been opened for the birth by medical and surgical arts, accordingly died soon after of the pains of childbirth.’*’ Many eighteenth- and nineteenth- century historians have attributed Henry’s involvement in the birth of Prince Edward to Sanders alone, failing to identify the earlier documen- tation which Sanders undoubtedly depended on for his own interpreta- tion. The ballad tradition which is traceable to the birth itself and consists of more or less ten complete variants all agree that Edward was delivered by Caesarean section. Five of the variants insist that surgery was performed on a live mother at her request; the oldest variants (in Richard Johnson and Agnes Strickland) describe a Caesarean section on a live mother but at the king’s request: two other variants describe an operation on a dead mother; finally, one variant is silent on the ~ub jec t .~” With the exception of the two oldest variants, the authors of the various versions attempt to exonerate the king of direct responsibility for the queen’s death by placing the decision to perform surgery on the queen herself, or in the case of the dead queen on the physicians who were in attendance. Typical of this position is variant H, recorded by Child:

The doctor was sent for and to her he came: ‘Dear lady, fair lady, your labour’s in vain.’ ‘Dear doctor, dear doctor, will you do this for me? 0 open my right side, and save my baby’: Then out spake King Henry, That never can be, I’d rather lose the branches than the top of the tree. The doctor gave a caudle, the death-sleep slept she, Then her right side was opened and the babe was set free.’9

J6 Sanders, Rise cnd Growth o f the Anglican Schism (1585), ed. Lewis, 138. ” The Latin original is titled De origzne acpogressu schismatis Anglicani liber (Cologne, 1585).

The relevant passage reads: ‘Iana igitur, cum medicis chirurgicisque artibus ad partum laxaretur, ex dolore paulo post mortua est . . .’ David Lewis omits the translation of the key phrase ‘cum medicis chirurgicisque artibus ad partum laxaretur’ in his 1877 edition.

’’ Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 111, 372-6, and v , 245. Child reprints eight of the variants but does not include Johnson’s 1612 version nor the one quoted by Agnes Strickland in her Lives of the Queens of England.

’’) Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, V , 245.

r


In the face of these efforts to protect the reputation of Henry VIII stand the two oldest variants, which are more or less contemporary, and their assertion that the king was responsible for the operation on the queen.6o

Several seventeenth-century historians continued to maintain the thesis that Queen Jane was delivered by Caesarean section and that she died as a result: John Speed (1611),61 Bishop Francis Godwin (1616),62 Sir John Hayward (d. 1627)63 and Sir Richard Baker (1643)64 repeated the widely held view. Beginning with Thomas Fuller, however, seventeenth-century historians began to question the evidence behind the story of an incision. Writing in 1655, Fuller stated:

For his birth, there goeth a constant tradition that, Caesar-like, he was cut out of the belly of his mother, Jane Seymour; though a great person of honour, deriving her intelligence mediately from such as were present at her labour, assured me of the contrary. Indeed, such as shall read the calm and serene style of that letter which I have seen written (though not by) for that queen, and signed with her own signet after her delivery, cannot conjecture thence any such violence was offered unto her.65

Peter Heylyn (1661),66 Bishop Gilbert Burnet (1679)67 and Anthony a Wood (1691/2)68 concurred with Fuller and disclaimed the theory of Caesarean section.

Maintaining this position in the eighteenth century, Laurence Echard (1672-1730), author of TheHistory ofEngland (London, 1707), criticized those historians who defended the theory of Caesarean section. John Strype (in his Ecclesiastical Memorials, 1721) followed the example of Echard and levelled an attack on 'Saunders [i.e. Sanders], and other Papists, King Henry VIII's mortal enemies, that labour all they can to bespatter his name and memory; I mean, to disarm them of one instance of his pretended cruelty, in appointing this his son to be cut out of his mother's womb . . .' by insisting that the queen died twelve days after the birth of Edward: 'For if she lived twelve days after her delivery, this will sufficiently confute that spiteful tale.'69 Strype placed all those historians

See Johnson, A Crowne-Garland of Golden Roses, and the ballad quoted by Agnes Strickland in Liues of the Queens of England, 1 1 , 282-3.

6 ' John Speed, The History of Great Britain (London, 1611), p. [E5]. 6 z Francis Godwin, Annals of England (London, 1630), 157. This history first appeared in 1616.

'' Sir Richard Baker, A ChTonicle of the Kings of England (London, 1643). 48. " Thomas Fuller, The Church History of Britain (1655), ed. J. S . Brewer (London, 1845), 110. 66 Heylyn, Ecclesza restaurata (1661), ed. Robertson, 14. '' Gilbert Burnet, The History of the Reformation of the Church of England, ed. Edward Nares

in 4 vols (London [1830]), 1 1 . 1 . Anthony a Wood, Athenae Oxoniemes, ed. Philip Bliss (1813-20); reprinted in Hildesheim,

1969, I , 275. The first edition was published in 169112 (2 vols). The second edition appeared in 1721

69 John Strype, EccleszasticalMemorials (1721, 1733); reprinted in Oxford, 1822, 11, pt 1 , p. 11.

Hayward, The Life and Raigne of King Edward the Sixt, 1.

(2 vols).


who maintained the Caesarean-section theory in a special category and labelled them as papists, ignoring, of course, the religious preference of such avowed Anglicans as Camden, Speed and Bishop Godwin.

As a group, nineteenth-century historians are unevenly divided on the issue. The anonymous author of a manuscript history of the Seymour family (written about 1830)70 and the published histories by Sharon Turner (1826) and Henry W. Herbert (1855)71 share the idea that Ed- ward was delivered by a Caesarean operation. On the other hand, Ed- ward Nares (1828), James C. Robertson (1849), John G. Nichols (1857), Agnes Strickland (1857-60), James A. Froude (1864), William D. Hamilton (1875) and Sir Sidney Lee (1891-2) deny the theory.72 The author of the ‘Annals of the Seymours, 1540-1598, with notes, 1500- 1769, appendix, and correspondence, 1595-1762’ (preserved in manuscript at the Folger Shakespeare Library) disregarded the more recent conclusions of Fuller (1655), Strype (1721) and others, and chose Bishop Godwin (1616) as his authority on the subject of the birth of Edward and the death of his mother. The writer described the event as follows:

After a most painful time, the Queen underwent an operation by which her child was saved at the cost of her own life. She died in two days after it [i.e. 14 October]. It was in allusion to this circumstance that the King gave to her brother the Phoenix as his crest, and the epitaph on her tomb in the midst of the Quire at Windsor is painted with the same c~nce i t .~ ’

While denying the theory that Edward was actually born by Caesarean section, Edward Nares in his Memoirs of William Cecil did suggest that surgery may have assisted his birth. He went on to acquit Henry VIII of any participation in the decision to ‘spill or spare’ the life of the queen. Writing in 1864, James A. Froude related in some detail the evidence that supported the theory of Caesarean section, tracing it ultimately to the Rolls Chapel Series MSS. Paraphrasing the manuscript, he reported:

I 0 [Anonymous,] ‘Annals of the Seymours, 1540-1598, with notes, 1500-1769, appendix, and correspondence, 1595-1762’, 5 vols. This manuscript was written about 1830 and copied about 1892-3. See II (Notes: 1500-1769), fol. 24. The Folger Shakespeare Library shelfmark is W. b.

” Sharon Turner, The His toy of the Reign of H e n y the Eighth, 2nd edn ( 2 vols, London, 1827), 11, 476, and Henry W. Herbert, Memoirs o f H e n y the Eighth ofEngland (New York, 1855). 383.

’* Edward Nares, Memoirs of. . . William Cecil, Lord Burghley ( 3 vols, London, 1828), I , 165-7: James C. Robertson (ed.), Peter Heylyn, Ecclesia restaurata (Cambridge, 1849), 13-14; Nichols, Literary Remaim of King Edward the Sixth, I , pp. xxiv-xxv; Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, 1 1 , 282-6; Froude, His toy of England, 111, 262-3; William D. Hamilton (ed.), Wnbthesley’s Chronicle (London, 1875), I , 69-70; and Sir Sidney Lee, ‘Jane Seymour’, Dictionary of National Biography, x (1891-2), 690.

” [Anonymous,] ‘Annals of the Seymours’, II (Notes: 1500-1769), fol. 24 (under date of 12 and 14 October 1537).

262-266.


Owing to the prenatural excitement of the public imagination, groundless rumours instantly gained currency. It was said that, when the queen was in labour, a lady had told the king that either the child must die or the mother; that the king had answered, Save the child, and therefore ‘the child was cut out of his mother’s womb’.

Froude also insisted that this manuscript establishes beyond doubt that the theory of Caesarean section was circulating within a month of Jane Seymour’s death. He, therefore, argued that Sanders must be held ac- quitted of the charge of having invented it. In the end, however, Froude discounted the theory and maintained that ‘The circumstances of the death itself are so clear as to leave no trace of uncertainty.’ He asked the reader: ‘How many of the interesting personal anecdotes of remarkable people, which have gained and which retain the public confidence, are better founded than this? Prudence, instructed by experience, enters a general caution against all anecdotes particularly ~triking.”~

In the final decade of the nineteenth century, Sir Sidney Lee, the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, penned a biographical sketch of Jane Seymour in which he described the circumstances surrounding the birth of Prince Edward. He maintained that ‘The report that the Caesarean operation was performed in her case was an invention of the Jesuit Nicholas Sanders. Her health at first did not cause anxiety, but the excitement attending the christening of the boy enfeebled her, and owing, it was said, to a cold and to improper diet, she died about midnight on Wednesday, 24 October [1537].’75 In addition to mistaking Sanders for a Jesuit, it is interesting to note that Sir Sidney Lee used a contemporary ballad to buttress his argument that Henry displayed genuine sorrow at the death of Queen Jane, but disregarded the very same ballad when it suggests that Prince Edward was delivered by Caesarean section. He also seems to have rejected the evidence contained in the royal epitaph and the Rolls Chapel Series MS, not to mention the historical accounts of contemporary writers. Such selective use of data is a serious flaw in Lee’s biographical sketch.

Of the many twentieth-century historians who have commented on the circumstances that surrounded Prince Edward’s birth, three important biographers of Henry VIII defend the sixteenth-century tradition that Queen Jane was delivered by Caesarean surgery: Sir Arthur S. MacNalty, MD (1952), J. J. Scarisbrick (1968) and Robert Lacey (1972).76 It is important to note, however, that only one of these authors attributes the queen’s death to the surgery itself MacNalty reasons that the queen died later of ‘puerperal sepsis’. He also suggests that Dr George Owen,

’‘ Froude, History ofEngland, 1 1 1 , 262-4. ’’ Lee, ‘Jane Seymour’, DNB, X , 690. Cf. the entry on Nicholas Sanders in the same volume. ’‘ Sir Arthur S . MacNalty, Henry VII I : A Difficult Patient (London, 1952), 98; Scarisbrick,

t i e n y VIII , 353; and Robert Lacey, The Life and Times o f H e n y VI I I (London, 1972), 169.


physician to Henry VIII, performed the surgery.77 Scarisbrick, on the other hand, wryly observes that she died of ‘Tudor medicine’ while Lacey proposed several contributing causes:

For poor Jane Seymour, ripped open by barbaric Tudor surgery for the sake of her son’s life, lay ill with puerperal fever . . . Cromwell, who was her friend, said she had been the victim of those ‘who suffered her to take great cold and to eat things that her fantasy called for’. Whatever the reason for her death, Henry’s grief was massive and sincere. ”

The rest of the historical profession tends to reject the theory of Caesarean section and to argue, as does Walter C. Jerrold (1926), that ‘The story, which is demonstrably wrong, was obviously elaborated by those whose object was to blacken the character of a King who had decreed to defy the Church of Rome, and had been repeated as a dramatic item without any regard to the facts.’79 Moreover, A. F. Pollard, author of a 1905 biography of Henry VIII, charged: ‘The fable that the Caesarean operation was performed on her Dane], invented or propagated by Nicholas Sanders, rests upon the further error repeated by most historians that Queen Jane died on the 14th of October, instead of the 24th.”’ In fairness to Sanders as an historian, however, Martin Hume, writing in 1905, rose to the occasion and pointed out that Sanders did not invent the story of Caesarean surgery but simply copied it from the anonymous (Spanish) contemporary Chronicle of Henry VIII - though, as he noted, ‘the story is there made as an unsupported rumour only’. He believed that the queen ‘died, a sacrifice to improper treatment and heartlessly exacted ceremonial’. ’

In retrospect, most historians from the sixteenth to the twentieth century have denied the theory that Edward was delivered by Caesarean section, arguing, as did James C. Robertson, that ‘the common story may safely be regarded as a fiction, invented for the purpose of exaggerating Henry’s cruelty’.’’ As for the queen’s death, these same historians fail to agree on a common cause. Instead they have produced a plethora of prob- able causes:

(1) a cold (and/or colic) and improper diet due to the carelessness of the attendants;

” For a biographical sketch of Dr George Owen, see William Munk, The Roll of the Royal Col-

7 8 Lacey, The Life and Times of Henry VIII, 169-70. ’’ W. C. Jerrold, Henry VIII and His Wives (London, 1926), 219. ’” Pollard, Henry VIII (1919), 360. This book was first published in 1905 and most recently ap-

peared in 1970. “ Martin Hume, The Wives of Henry the Eighth (London, 1905), 306 n. 1. Previously Agnes

Strickland admitted as much when she wrote: ‘The following historical ballad tells, in its homely strains, the same tale in a version meant to be complimentary to the king, long before Sanders had embodied it in his prejudiced history . . .’ See Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, 1 1 , 282.

lege OfPhysicians of London, 2nd edn (2 vols, London, 1878), I , 36-7.

” Robertson (ed.), Heylyn, Ecclesia restaurata, 13.


(2) the effects of the long christening festivities on October 15; (3) puerperal fever arising from childbirth; (4) the unskilfulness of the midwives and/or physicians; and ( 5 ) various combinations of the above.

Such historians have also insisted that the queen could not have been delivered by Caesarean section because of one or more of the following factors :

(1) the Queen’s letter to Cromwell (dated 12 October); (2) Rutland’s letter to Cromwell; (3) the belief that children born of Caesarean section grow up to be

(4) Fuller’s testimony that he had spoken to a person of character who

( 5 ) several letters or documents proving that the queen died twelve

I shall attempt to show why this circumstantial evidence does not refute the thesis that the queen was delivered by Caesarean section, and also to identify the persons who have maintained such positions.

‘great enterprisers’;

knew some of the attendants present at the queen’s labour; and

days after the birth of the prince.

I1

We now know that Queen Jane Seymour’s pro forma letter to Cromwell (cited earlier) was composed in advance of the birth of the prince and, therefore, does not constitute proof that she had a normal delivery (or for that matter that she survived Edward’s birth). With regard to Rutland’s letter to Cromwell there is no indication whatsoever of the nature of the queen’s delivery in its contents. The letter does establish, on the other hand, that the queen survived Edward’s birth. Dated Wednesday, 8 a.m., it reads in part:

Yesterday afternoon the Queen had ‘an natural laxe’, by reason of which she seemed to amend till toward night. All night she had been very sick, and rather ‘appares’ than amends. Her confessor has been with her this morning, and is now preparing to minister the Sacrament of Unction.83

*’ Earl of Rutland to Cromwell, Cotton MSS Nero C. x, fol. 2. Printed in Fuller, The Church Hirtory of Britain, I V , 1 13. The letter was also signed by the bishop of Carlisle, Edward Baynton (the vice-chamberlain of the queen’s household), and three royal physicians, John Chamber, William Butts and George Owen. Jordan mistakenly identified John Chamber (who was also a priest) as one of ‘the Queen’s chaplains’. See Jordan, Edward VI, I, 37. We know that Chamber was a physician because of a group portrait of the king’s surgeons by Holbein, commissioned by the Barbers’ Com- pany, identifying him as one of the kings’ physicians. The painting was produced in 1541. Jordan also insists that Rutland’s medical bulletin was issued on 17 October (ibid. 37). Nichols, on the other hand, dates it on ‘the fatal Wednesday [i.e. 24 October]’. See Nichols, Literary Remazm of King Ed- ward the Sixth, I , p. xxv. For a sketch of Chamber, see Munk, The Roll of the Royal College of Physicians, I , 10-12.


According to J. S. Brewer, the editor of Fuller. ‘The date of this letter must be either the 17th, which is the first Wednesday after the 12th of October, 1537, or the 24th of October, which will be the Wednesday f~llowing.”~ Whatever the actual date, Rutlands letter substantiates the fact that the queen had been ill previous to her temporary recovery (‘a natural laxe’) and later relapsed into a fatal illness. Moreover, such a case history would be in keeping with the nature of Caesarean surgery. Writing in 1661, Peter Heylyn refuted the idea of a Caesarean operation on the grounds that persons delivered by surgery succeeded later on in life as men of great achievement. Heylyn concluded that Edward himself died ‘without performing any memorable action, either at home or abroad, which might make him pass in the account of a fortunate Prince, or any way successful in the enterprising of heroic actions’.85 In addition Thomas Fuller insisted that he had the testimony of someone who had known persons in attendance on the queen at the time of her delivery and that such first-hand observers had maintained that she had a normal delivery.86 Such evidence, of course, is highly suspect since Fuller was not born until 1608 and his history was not published until 1655. At best his information must have been third-hand. The last group of historians who argued that the queen could not have been delivered by surgery because she lived twelve days after the birth of Edward corrected an important error in the historical record by establishing beyond question that the queen died on 24 October, rather than 14 October, but failed at the same time to disprove the thesis that the queen was delivered by Caesarean section. The mere fact that the queen lived twelve days after the birth of her son does not preclude the possibility of surgery.

The actual date of death of Queen Jane Seymour has produced an enormous debate. Various historians have argued that she died on any one of eight days in October of 1537, beginning as early as the 12th and ending with the 28thl Camden was the first printed source (1615) to insist that the queen died on the day Edward was born (i.e. 12 October). Writing in 1679, Bishop Burnet claimed that Edward ‘lost his mother the day after he was born - that is, on the 13th.’’ Until the nineteenth century, 14 October was the date generally acknowledged as the death day of Queen Jane. There are also several contemporary manuscripts that lay claim to 14 October. Among these are the anonymous Spanish chronicle and the Wriothesley MS (though the latter source may have been deliberately altered from the 24th to the 14th by a contemporary transcriber).88

“ Brewer (ed.), Fuller’s The Church Histoy of Britain (1845), p. 112n. ” Heylyn, Ecclesza restaurata (1661), ed. Robertson, 13. 86 Brewer (ed.), Fuller, The Church Histoy of Britain, p. 1 1 1 . The relevant passage reads:

‘though a great person of honour, deriving her intelligence mediately from such as were present at her labour, assured me of the contrary’.

’’ Burnet, The Histoy of the Church of England (1679), ed. Nares, 1 1 , 1 . ’’ [Anonymous,] Chronicle of King Henry VIII , ed. Hume, 73, and Wriothesley, Chronicle, I ,

69. Hamilton argues: ‘This date [i.e. 14 October] has evidently been tampered with by the


It is equally interesting to note that the anonymous nineteenth-century biographer of the Seymour family also believed that the queen died on the 14th.89 On the other hand, the sixteenth-century historian Polydore Vergil maintained in his 1555 history that the Queen died on the 15th while the seventeenth-century historian Sir John Hayward believed that she died on the 2 l ~ t . ~ ’ Next to the 14th, the most popular date for the queen’s death is 24 October. Before John Foxe’s 1563 Acts and Monu- ments and George Lily’s 1565 Chronicon, there were only manuscript references to this death date.91 The chief ones are to be found in the Col- lege of Heralds MSS, the Cecil MSS and the Barbaro MS of 1551 . 9 2 Begin- ning with John Strype (1721), who assumed that he was the first printed author to identify this date of death, most historians rejected the earlier tradition that the queen died on the 14th and adopted the 24th as the date of her death. Strype, writing in his Ecclesiastical Memorials (1721), noted that Queen Jane died

about 12 o’clock on Wednesday night, the 24th day of the same month, that is, twelve days after the Prince’s birth; as it is expressly set down in one of the manuscript volumes belonging to the Heralds’ Office, where under the particular date of each day, are shewn the ceremonies done to the Queen’s corpse, from her death to her funerals and to the interment. What credit is to be given to the aforesaid manuscript book I leave to the readers, especially when in this particular it disagrees with all our common historians, as Fox[e], Stowe, Holingshed [i.e. Holinshed], the Lord Herbert, and others, that write she died on Sunday the 14th day of October, two days after her delivery. But I suspect they borrowed one from another: and the first having mistaken might soon draw on the rest, in a matter so easily to be slipt over.93

October the 24th was also adopted by such historians as Edward Nares (1828), J. S. Brewer (1845), Nichols (1857), Strickland (1857-60),

transcriber to make it correspond with Stow, Hall, Godwin, and others, who assign the Queen’s death to the 14th, whereas it took place on the 24th, which was evidently correctly given by the original writer of this Chronicle, as he makes it Wednesday, whereas the 14th would have been Sunday.’

89 [Anonymous,] ‘Annals of the Seymours’, I I (Notes: 1500-1769), fol. 24.

9 ’ Foxe, The Acts and Monuments, v , pt 1, p. 148, and George Lily, Chronicon sive brevzs enumeratio regnum et principum . . . Frankfurt, 1565), 73: ‘Iana Semeria Regina iiij. Idus Octobris Edouardum filium ad Vindesorium castrum enixa, duodecimo post die rnoritur.’

’’ College of Heralds MS I , 1 1 , fol. 37 (printed in L @? P, X I I , pt 2, p. 373, no. 1060); William Cecil’s ‘Journal’ (identified in Nares, Memoirs of William Cecil, 166); and ‘Barbaro’s Report on England, May, 1551’ (printed in Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts, Relating to English Affairs, Existing zn the Archives and Collections of Venice, v (11534-541, ed. Rawdon Brown, Lon- don, 1873, p. 347, no. 703).

Polydore Vergil, The Anglica Historia (1555), ed. Hay, p. 337.

’’ Strype, Ecclesiastical Memoriak (1721); reprinted (Oxford, 1822), 11, pt 1, p. 10.

The birth of Edward VIand the death of Queen Jane 38 1

Hamilton (1875) and James C. Robertson (1875).94 Moreover, many twentieth-century historians maintain the same date: for example, Frederick Chamberlin (1931), J. J. Scarisbrick (1968) and Robert Lacey (1972).95 On the other hand, another group of twentieth-century writers have adopted the 25th as the date of Queen Jane’s death. All of these biographers apparently followed the lead of Hester Chapman (1959), and they include such writers as J. J. Bagley (1962), John Bowle (1964) and William Seymour (1 972). 96 Finally, Henry W. Herbert, writing in 1855, suggested that the queen died on the 28th of October - some four days after the date most commonly claimed by his nineteenth-century col- leagues. 97 Thus previous historians have proposed an enormously wide range of dates in deciding the actual date of death of Queen Jane: 12, 13, 14, 15, 21, 24, 25 or 28 October. William Hamilton, believing that Jane had died on the 24th, noted in 1875: ‘It is very remarkable that the date of an event of so much interest at the time as the Queen’s death should have been misplaced by no less than ten days by nearly all ancient chronicles . . . ’ 9 8 The basis for arguing that the queen had died on 14 October was most compelling before the eighteenth century. As Hamilton observed, all of the published chronicles in the sixteenth century reported that Queen Jane gave birth to Edward on the eve of the feast of St Edward (i.e. 12 October) and that she died on the 14th. Indeed, with the exceptions of John Foxe (1563), William Camden (1615), Sir John Hayward (1627) and Gilbert Burnet (1679), all historians before Laurence Echard (1707) claimed the 14th as the date of death of the queen. John Foxe was the first published author to insist that Jane died on the 24th (that is, ‘the twelfth day after’ the birth of Edward). Though he himself was not present in England at the time of Edward’s birth he did rely on the reports of eyewitnesses and official records for his Acts and Monuments which first appeared in 1563.99 With all due respect to the defenders of the 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th, 21st, 25th or 28th, the weight of evidence is clearly on the side of those advocating 24 October.

There are in all six interlocking pieces of evidence that substantiate ‘midnight, October 24th’ as the date of death of Queen Jane Seymour. The first contemporary source is a letter of Sir John Russell (from Hamp- ton Court) to Thomas Cromwell, dated 25 October (the address on the

’)‘ Nares, Memoirs of William Cecil, 166; Brewer (ed.), Fuller, The Church History of Brztazn, 112n.; Robertson (ed.), Heylyn’s Ecclesia restaurata, 13; Nichols, Literary Remains of King Edward the Szxth,I, p. xxiv; Hamilton (ed.), Wriothesley, Chronicle, I , 69; and Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, 11, 285.

’)’ Chamberlin, The Private Character of H e n y the Eighth, 234; Scarisbrick, Henry V I I I , 355; and Lacey, The Life and Times of Henry VIII , 169.

p6 Chapman, The Last Tudor King, 30; Bagley, Henry VIII and His Timss, 123: John Bowle, Henry VIII (London, 1964), 215; and Seymour, Ordeal by Ambition, 58.

’)’ Herbert, Memoirs of Henry the Eighth of England, 385. ’)’ Hamilton (ed.), Wriothesley’s Chronicle, I , 69. ’)’) J. F. Mozley,John Foxe and His Book (London, 1940), 118-51.


verso is dated 24 October), reporting that the queen was still alive but in grave danger. Russell confided to Cromwell that

Today [i.e. the 24thl the King intended to remove to Asher [&her], and because the Queen was very sick this night [23rd] and today [24th], he tarried, but he will be there tomorrow [25th]. ‘If she amend he will go and if she amend not he told me this day he could not find in his heart to tarry . . .’ She was in great danger yesternight [23rd] and today [24th] but, if she sleep this night, the physicians hope that she is past danger. l o o

Secondly, there is a letter of Sir Thomas Palmer to Lord Lisle, dated 26 October, reporting that Jane had been alive on ‘Wednesday night’ - i.e. the 24th. Palmer noted:

The bruit was that the Queen died on Tuesday [i.e. the 23rdl but she was alive on Wednesday night [24th] ‘and if good prayers can save her, she is not like to die, for never [a] lady was so much plained with every man, rich and poor’.’’’

Thirdly, there is a letter of Lord William Sandys to Cromwell, dated 28 October, in which Sandys reported that

This Sunday, 28 October, I received a letter from my friend John Nor- ris, gentleman-usher [at Hampton Court?], with most sorrowful and heavy news of the departure of the Queen’s grace, whose place of interment is not yet decided. ’’*

If the queen died at midnight on the 24th, which was a Wednesday, it is conceivable that news of her death did not reach Sandys until the following Sunday; but if she had died on the 17th it would have been highly unlikely that Sandys would have had to wait until the 28th to learn of the news. Fourthly, we have Rutland’s letter to Cromwell, notifying the coun- cillors in London of the queen’s imminent demise. The letter was signed by the Earl of Rutland, the bishop of Carlisle, Sir Edward Baynton (vice- chamberlain in the Queen’s household) and three physicians, John Chamber (also a priest), William Butts and George Owen, on Wednesday at 8 p.m. The letter reads:

[On Wednesday, there occurred] an natural laxe by reason whereof she began to lighten and (as it appeared) to amend, and so continued till toward night. All this night she hath been very sick and doth rather appaire (?) than amend. Her confessor hath been with her grace this morning [i.e. the 24th?] and hath done that to his office appertains,

Russell to Cromwell, 25 [i.e. 241 October 1537 in L d P, XII , pt 2 , p. 342, no. 977. Palmer to Lisle, 26 October 1537, in L d P, X I I , pt 2 , p. 345, no. 988. Sandys to Cromwell, 28 October 1537, in L d P, X I I , pt 2 , p. 346, no. 994.

$ 0 ,

i O 2


and even now [at 8 a.m.] is preparing to minister to grace the sacrament of unction. l o 3

Although one cannot be absolutely certain that the Wednesday on which Rutland sent this report to Cromwell was the 24th (it could have been the 17th), the seriousness of the illness almost certainly meant that the queen was on her death-bed. Fifthly, there is a letter from Norfolk to Cromwell, dated 24 October, 8 p.m., in which Norfolk urges Cromwell

to be here tomorrow early [i.e. the 25thl to comfort our good master, for as for our mistress there is no likelihood of her life, the more pity, and I fear she shall not be on lyve at the time ye shall read this. At viij at night. I o 4

Finally, there is the report of the undertakers in the College of Heralds MSS, which certified that Queen Jane had ‘died at Hampton Court, 24 October, on Wednesday about 12 p.m. in childbed . . .’Io5 This last piece of evidence makes it certain that the queen died before the 25th of October; that indeed she lived some twelve days after the birth of her son. Moreover, from the descriptions of the queen’s illness which are recorded in the above letters, it seems reasonable to conclude that the queen suffered from puerperal fever or sepsis, thereby accounting for her temporary period of recovery and for the optimism of those who saw the possibility of a return to good health. Since it is customary for puerperal pyrexia to develop a few hours to a few days after the birth of a child, we may assume that the queen contracted it shortly after Edward’s delivery. I o 6

Those historians who prefer to attribute Jane’s death to such natural causes as a cold or colic, the carelessness of her attendants, or to the rigours of the christening ceremony find little support for their theories in the surviving records of the period. It is extremely doubtful that one can give very much credence to Cromwell’s diplomatic dispatch that the queen died from a great cold and improper diet. The very fact that Rutland made so much of the queen’s temporary recovery on the 24th in- dicates that she must have been ill for some time and that she was in the hands of concerned physicians and nurses, who were not only solicitous but reported her deteriorating health so solemnly and sadly in the letter to Cromwell. Nevertheless, in fairness to the Lord Privy Seal, Cromwell may have blamed the difficult labour itself on the midwives and sus- pected that they had given the queen improper foods during the last few months of her pregnancy. In this matter Eucharius Roesslin had warned his sixteenth-century readers against a rich diet:

Rutland to Cromwell, Wednesday, 8 a.m., 1537, in Cotton MS Nero C. x, fol. 2; printed in I 0 3

Fuller, The Chuwh Histoy ofBritain, ed. Brewer, IV, 113. ID‘ Norfolk to Cromwell, [24 October] 1537, in L @ P, XII , pt 2, p. 339, no. 971.

College of Heralds MS I , 11 , fol. 37; printed in L @ P, XII, pt 2, p. 372, no. 1060. Graham, Eternal Ewe, 376.

I D S


And further, if the woman have vsed to eate commonly such meate or fruits which doe exiccate or drye, and constraine or binde, as Medlers, Chestnuts, and all sowre fruits, as Crabbes, Chokepeares, Quinces, and such other, with overmuch vse of Vergeus, and such like sowre sauces, with rise, Mell, and many other things: all this shall greatly hinder the byrth. lo’

The other suggestion that Queen Jane Seymour died as a result of the strenuous activities demanded by the christening ceremony (which took place on 15 October) is without foundation. The earliest defender of this position was Agnes Strickland (1857), and, as a result, it has enjoyed a wide following among later historians. Strickland argued that

It was the rule for a queen of England, when her infant was christened, to be removed from her bed to a state pallet, which seems anciently to have fulfilled the uses of a sofa . . . The queen reclined, propped with four cushions of crimson damask with gold; she was wrapped about with a round mantle of crimson velvet, furred with ermine.

Strickland has assumed that Queen Jane followed the precedent of the Countess of Richmond and was a participant in her son’s christening. She based her judgement on the assumption that Lady Margaret Beaufort’s ordinances were required of all royal mothers, irrespective of the state of their health. ‘09 Unfortunately for Strickland and her followers there is no documentary evidence that Queen Jane actually took part in the christening festivities. Though it is true that the ceremonial procession originated in the royal apartments of the queen and that, after the ceremony, Prince Edward was ‘then borne to the King and Queen and had the blessing of God, Our Lady, and St. George, and his father and mother . . .’, there is no indication that the queen either received the many guests or was en- throned on the royal pallet in the presence chamber.’” With the exception of offering the child her blessing, there is no evidence connecting the queen with the day-long ritual. On the contrary, one suspects that the queen’s name does not appear in any of the documents because she was in a very precarious condition, having endured a severe labour and undoubtedly suffering from the traumatic effects of the delivery itself. Moreover, in deference to the post-delivery state of all mothers, the ordinances themselves specifically restrict the participation of the mother to a few minor duties in the festivities.

l o ’ Roesslin, Der Swangem Frauwen und Hebammen Rosegarten (Strasbourg, 1513); translated by Richard Jones under the title The Byrth of Mankynde. The quotation is taken from the London, 1626 edition, p. 94.

Strickland, Lives o f t h e Queens of England, 283. lo’ See ‘Ordinaunces by Margaret Countesse of Richmond and Derby, as to what Preparation is to

be made against the Deliveraunce of a Queen, as also for the Christening of the Child of which she shall be delivered’, in Harleian MS 6079 (British Library); printed by John Leland, Derebus Brztan- nicis Collectanea, ed. Thomas Hearne (London, 1774). I V , 179-84.

‘ I o L d P, X I I , pt 2 , pp. 318-20, no. 911.


It is also worth noting that some of the historians who have read anti- Protestant sentiments into the histories of those who argue for the theory of Caesarean section have themselves been guilty of religious bias. Thomas Fuller, for example, writing in 1655, insisted that Queen Jane was forced to receive the sacrament of Extreme Unction because of her grave illness. He argued:

Impute we here this extreme unction administered to her, partly to the over-officiousness of some superstitious priest, partly to the good lady's inability, perchance insensible what was done unto her in such ex- tremity; otherwise we are confident that her judgment, when in strength and health, disliked such practices, being a zealous Protes- tant: which unction did her as little good as the twelve masses said for her soul in the city of London at the commandment of the duke of Norfolk, whether he did it to credit their religion with the countenance of so great a convert, or did it out of the nimiety of his own love and loyalty to the queen, expressing it according to his own judgment, without the consent, if not against the will, of the queen's nearest kindred. ' I I

Since the ritual of the Catholic Church had not been set aside at this period, it is clear that Queen Jane received the sacrament of Extreme Unction because she believed in its efficacy. Neither her confessor nor the Duke of Norfolk nor her relatives had anything to do with her decision to accept the last rites of the Church. Jane's religious tastes were in keeping with the practice of Henry VIII, who ultimately was responsible for the liturgy of the Church of England. In retrospect we can also see that the allegations made by John Strype (1721), John G. Nichols (1857), Sir Sidney Lee (1891-92), A. F. Pollard (1905) and others that Nicholas Sanders 'and other Papists' were responsible for the theory that Prince Edward had been cut from his mother's womb is itself a prejudicial judgement, based on conjecture. On the contrary, there is ample docu- mentation to establish beyond doubt that Edward VI was delivered by Caesarean surgery and that his mother died of puerperal sepsis or childbed fever at about midnight on 24 October.

I11

Throughout western Europe, even in antiquity, it was not uncommon for a child to be delivered by Caesarean section after his mother had died. Pliny the Elder (23/4-79 AD) is one of the earliest authors to refer to Caesarean surgery and to provide a list of famous persons who had been so delivered. 'I2 According to Gustav Klein, the editor of Eucharius

' I ' Brewer (ed.), Fuller, The Church History of Britain, 113. ' I 2 Pliny the Elder, The Natural History of Pliny, trans. John Bostock and H. T. Riley (London,

1855), 11, 143. He included the names of Scipio Africanus, Caesar, the Caesones and Manilius. Pliny


Roesslin’s Der Swangern Frauwen und He bammen Rosegarten (Stras- bourg, 1513), Julius Caesar was neither the first person to be so delivered nor the person after whom the operation was named. He explained:

It was Numa Pompilius, ruler of Rome from 715 to 673 B.C., who decreed that ‘. . . if any woman died while she was pregnant the child was immediately to be cut out of her abdomen’. This was part of the Lex Regis, which under the emperors became the Lex Caesare, so that the operation was known as the Caesarean operation or section . . . ‘ I 3

Moreover, Roesslin himself in his 1513 treatise on birth recommended Caesarean surgery in order to save the life of the unborn child, providing, of course, that the mother was already dead. Roesslin reasoned as follows:

if it chance that the woman in her labour should die, and the child hauing life in it: then shall it be meete to keepe open the womans mouth and also the neather places, so that the childe may by that meanes both receiue and also expel1 ayre and breath, which otherwise might be stopped, to the destruction of the childe. And then to turne her on the left side, and there to cut her open, and so take out the child. I l 4

It seems clear that before the sixteenth century, Caesarean operations were never performed on live mothers. Harvey Graham in his book on the history of gynaecology and obstetrics, entitled Eternal Eve (1951), described the first known example of a successful Caesarean section in 1500. It was performed by Jacob Nufer, a pig-gelder, on his own wife. Graham writes:

Jacob Nufer was a Swiss sow-gelder. In the year 1500 his wife went into labour. Her pains were protracted but she could not deliver herself. All the local midwives were brought to her assistance but the thirteenth of them was as little successful as her twelve sisters. In despair, and despite the acid comments of the village matrons on the impropriety of the whole business, Jacob called in two lithotomists. These gentlemen were good at removing stones from bladders but they could not shift this difficult child from its mother’s womb. Jacob knew nothing about midwifery but he had his sow-gelding instruments and he did the obvious thing. The baby was delivered by this primitive Caesarean section and lived. So did Jacob’s wife. She lived to the age of 77, still at the village of Sigershauffen, and after this first difficult baby was delivered

also insisted ‘that those children, whose birth has cost the mother her life, are evidently born under more favorable auspices [than those who are born “feet first”]’. See p. 143.

‘ I ’ Gustav Klein (ed.), Eucharius Roesslin’s 1513 edition of Rosengarten; reprinted at Munich, 1910, p. 64.

‘ I 4 E. Roesslin, The Birth of Man-kinde; Otherwise Named the Womam Booke (London, 1626), 97.


naturally of one pair of twins and four other children. Jacob’s was the first of fifteen successful Caesarean sections performed in the sixteenth century. I I s

Even in the face of Nufer’s success as a surgeon, Caesarean surgery was considered extremely dangerous for both mother and child and was generally administered only to those women who were moribund. Thus the earliest illustration of Caesarean section in an edition of Caius Suetonius Tranquillus’ Lives of the Twelve Caesars (Venice, 1506), ap- pearing on the title-page, clearly shows a dead woman being delivered of a child. It is also apparent from Ambrose Pad’s Briefe collection anatomique (Paris, 1551) that Caesarean sections were performed occa- sionally on live women throughout the first half of the sixteenth century. Pare‘ (1510?- 1590), himself a distinguished surgeon, condemned such surgery because he felt that it nearly always resulted in the certain death of the mother. He wrote:

But I cannot sufficiently marvaile at the insolency of those that affirme that they have seene women whose bellies and wombe have bin more than once cut, and the infant taken out, when it could no otherwise be gotten forth, and yet notwithstanding alive; which thing there is no man can perswade me can be done, without the death of the mother, by reason of the necessary greatnesse of the wound that must be made in the muscles of the belly, and substances of the wombe, for the wombe of a woman that is great with childe, by reason that it swelleth, and is distended with much blood, which of necessity must be mortall. And to conclude, when that the wound or incision of the wombe is cicatrized, it will not permit or suffer the womb to be dilated or ex- tended to receive or beare a new birth. For these and such like other causes, this kinde of cure, as desperate and dangerous, is not (in mine opinion) to be used.

Towards the end of the sixteenth century, Francois Rousset responded to Pare”s criticisms and offered a defence of Caesarean section in two of his treatises. I ” Present-day writers, however, tend to concur with Pare’s find- ings and insist that Caesarean operations before the twentieth century ‘meant almost certain death to the mother from infection’.

Since women faced considerable danger from childbirth, John Mirkus (alias Myrc), a canon regular of St Augustine at Lilleshall in Shropshire,

”’ Graham, Eternal Eve; 138. See also Young, Caesarean Section. ‘ I b Ambrose Pare, Bsiefe Collection Anatomique (1551) in The Workes of . . . (London, 1634),

923. ~~

“’ Francois Rousset, Dialogus apologetzcw pro caesareo partu, in maleuoli cujusdam pseudo pro- teidictena (Paris, 1590) and . . . Caesareipartw artertio histosiologica . . . Pars medicae a7tis inter- dum naturae extrema patienti perqzlam necessaria (Paris, 1590).

‘ I 8 Walter Radcliffe, The Secret Instrument: The Bzrth of the Midwifey Forceps (London, 1947), 4 .


prepared about 1450 some instructions for parish priests in which the clergy were enjoined to instruct midwives in how to save the lives of children whose mothers had already died before they could be delivered. Using a rhyme scheme, Mirkus wished to drill the following advice into the head of every midwife:

And thaghe the chylde bote half be bore Hed and necke and no more, Bydde hyre spare, neuer the later, To crystene hyt and caste on water; And but scho mowe se ye hed, Loke scho folowe hyt for no red: And ef the wommon thenne dye, Teche the mydwyf that scho hye For to vndo hyre wyth a knyf, And for to saue the chyldes lyf, And hye that hyt crystened be, For that ys a dede of charyte. Rather thenne the chylde scholde spylle, Teche hyre thenne to calle a mon That in that nede helpe hyre con For ef the chylde be so y-lore, Scho may that wepen euer more.119

It was important to Mirkus that children, who were in danger of death, be baptized by midwives, even if the baptism had to be in utero. These instructions for parish priests were frequently printed throughout the fif- teenth and early sixteenth centuries and served as the basis for reference in matters involving the ethics of childbirth.

IV

In the previous section I have tried to show that Caesarean operations were sometimes performed in the sixteenth century on live mothers. Ac- cording to Sir Thomas More, King Richard I11 was born by Caesarean section and came into the world feet first. What was unusual in this period was the chance of survival for women who underwent such surgery. Undoubtedly, this fact alone convinced Armagil Waad and the author of one of the ballad variants, as well as William Camden, that if Prince Edward had been delivered by Caesarean section the queen must have been dead or very near death before the operation was performed. It would have been unthinkable - indeed immoral - to have performed surgery on a live woman when the chance of survival was almost zero. We now know, however, that Queen Jane lived some twelve days after the birth of Edward - a fact which leads one to suspect that the queen was not

' I p John Mirkus, Instructionsfor Par& Priests (c. 1450), ed. from Cotton MS Claudius A . I I by Edward Peacock (London, 1868); revised by F. J . Furnival in 1902.


at the point of death when surgery was performed on her. Thus those contemporary sources that have accused King Henry of contributing to the death of Queen Jane had good reason to do so. Before surgery could have been performed on the queen, the physicians would have had to have royal consent. When the midwives asked the king to decide which of the two lives, mother or child, he wished to spare, these same sources readily admit that the king chose to save the life of the child. The very thought of a fetal craniotomy was rejected out of hand. The ballad reads:

‘0 king, show us thy will, The queen’s sweet life to save or spill?’ ‘Then, as she cannot saved be, Oh, save the flower though not the tree.””

Having been required to sacrifice the life of Queen Jane, the king quite naturally felt compunction and sorrow at her demise. The three-week period of lying-in-state, the four-month period of official mourning at court, his choice of Queen Jane as his partner in the burial vault at St George’s Chapel all testify to his external display of grief. Like his con- temporaries, Henry knew full well that Queen Jane was far more than a symbol of wifely devotion; she was a sacrificial offering, who had been asked to forfeit her life for the benefit of the crown and the future of the commonwealth. Writing to Henry VIII on 13 November, Bishop Cuth- bert Tunstal expressed a qualified sense of loss when he observed: ‘The news of the Queen’s death has caused all men to lament, especially considering that the Prince is left an orphan.’”’ Even in death, the queen was lamented because she could not now succour the heir to the throne. It was small recompense indeed to be honoured after death with such hollow expressions of bereavement,

For those Englishmen who recognized the heavy penalty that Queen Jane was required to pay, the Rolls Chapel Series MSS contain a bitter contemporary prophecy - one which tried to shift the blame for her death from the king to Prince Edward. The manuscript reads: ‘He should be killed that never was born, and nature’s hand or man’s hand brought it to pass, or soon would bring it to pass.’122 One is here reminded of the passage in Shakespeare’s Mucbeth (1 606-7) where the apparition assured Macbeth: ‘Fear not, Macbeth; no man that’s born of woman Shall ere have power upon thee’ (V.iii). But since ‘Macduff was from his mother’s womb Untimely ripped’ (V.vi), Macbeth did indeed suffer at his hands.Iz3

I z 0 Printed in Strickland, Lives o f the Queens ofEngland, 11, 282-3.

lz2 Rolls Chapel-Series MS A 2, fol. 30, in the Public Record Office. ”’ William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. G. K. Hunter (Harmondsworth, 1967), 127, 136. ‘As for

the term Caesares’, Suetonius asserts, ‘those usually the Roman tongue surnamed so, who were born, either by ripping their mother’s womb, or with a bush of hair growing on their heads, or else grey- eyed.’ See Suetonius, Histoy ofthe Twelve Caesars, trans. Philemon Holland (1606), ed. J. H. Freese (London, 1923), 3.

Tunstal to Henry VIII, 13 November 1537, in L @ P, XII, pt 2, p. 378, no. 1075.


In the minds of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Englishmen, children who were born by Caesarean section were unnatural beings and represented ill omens. They had only to recall the name of Nero who had been born of Caesarean section and who eventually murdered his mother.

Other signs of sorcery were to follow. Some three months after the birth of Prince Edward and the death of Queen Jane, Fulk Vaughan was ex- amined in January of 1538 by a jury consisting of Thomas Wriothesley, afterward Lord Chancellor, Paul Withypoll [alias Withipol], a Merchant Taylor, and Thomas Starkey, a chaplain to the king. He reported that the clerk of his parish discovered ‘a piece of cloth knit like a winding sheet and ripped it and found therein an image of wax made in the form of a young child with two pins thrust into it. When the clerk had taken out the image, this depondent took up the sheet and went straight with it to one Pole, a scrivener, in Crooked Lane, and asked him what it meant. “Marry, quote Pole, it was made to waste one.” ’ I z 4 In the minds of these jurors the object of the witchcraft was none other than Prince Edward. Some time the following year, Richard Guercey confessed to Sir Martyall in the kitchen of Corpus Christi College [Oxford], that a man of Peckwaters Inn, called Osmond, had informed him that there was a wax image found in London with a knife sticking through its head or its heart representing the Prince, ‘and as that did consume so likewise should the Prince’.’25 Finally, within two years of the birth of Prince Edward, John Ryan reported to the Privy Council (on 22 August 1539)

that he had heard an old prophecy of Marlyn [i.e. Merlin] that Edward should succeed Henry and wear the crown of England, and that there should be more murder and traitors in his time than in his fathers, and that the same prophesyer said to him: ‘0 thou child that murdered thy mother in her womb, thou shalt have so much treason wrought in thy time more than ever thy father had, and yet thou shalt prosper and go forth.’ The man who told him the prophecies is in the King’s service, a cunning prophesier and the best ‘cronacler’ in England, but he re- fuses to give his name till he has spoken with some of the council.’26

The chronicler who offered such prophetic visions based them on information gathered from court. He represented a widening circle of infor- mants who believed that Edward’s future reign would be tainted and subject to murderous intrigues. Geronimo Cardano (1501-76), the emi- nent Milanese physician, corroborated this prophetic vision when he mused on the brief reign of Edward VI in his Autobiography of 1576:

Printed in L eS P, XI]], pt 1, p. 15, no. 41. Printed in L d P, XIII , pt 1 , p. 505, no. 1200.

t 14

‘ M Printed in L @ P, XIV, pt 2, p. 21, no. 73. James Gairdner, the editor of this volume, identified the chronicler on page 21 as Robert Fayery, Portcullis pursuivant. See also Mark Noble, A Hzitory of the College of A r m (London, 1805), 130, 147.

The birth of Edward VI and the death of Queen Jane 39 1

Outside my professional skill in diagnosis, anyone might be amazed, surely, at the predictions I made in the consulation regarding Edward VI, King of England, how I discerned what calamities, and from what quarter, were threatening. ’*’

It is irony indeed that the surgical operation which succeeded in preserv- ing the life of Edward VI at the expense of his mother would eventually spawn an historical literature that identified his tragic early death with the machinations of trusted confidants. *’ It is equally unfortunate that popular sentiments among a segment of sixteenth-century society went so far as to demand retribution from the child whose birth had been responsible for the death of his mother in October of 1537.

Erasmus of Rotterdam Society

I * ’ Jerome Cardan, The Book of My Life (De vita propria liber), trans. Jean Stoner (New York, 1930), 200. Writing in 1615, Camden shared Cardano’s view: ‘The King being vnprouided of his faithful1 Guard, is snatched away (vncertaine whether by sicknesse or poyson) before hee was ripe . . .’ See Abraham Darcie’s 1625 translation, p. [*4”], of Camden’s Annals.

’” S e e William Baldwin, The Funeralles of King Edward the Sixt. Wherzn are declared the causers and causes of his death (London, 1560) and PEietro] V[ermigli], Historical Narration of certain events that took place in the Kingdom of Great Britain in the month ofJuly, in the year of our Lord 1553. Written by P. V. Edited by J. Ph. Berjeau. Translated by J. B. Inglis (London, 1865), pp. i-ii.

Documents

The birth of Edward VI and the death of Queen Jane: the arguments for and against Caesarean section