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Elizabeth Cellier, the Popish Midwife—a Woman for all Seasons
by Anne Barbeau GardinerHigh praise from an adversary is precious. Sir Roger North, a Protestant lawyer who was a contemporary of Elizabeth Cellier, remarked about her: “If these accounts of hers be true, as I see no reason to doubt them, there never was a woman more magnanimous and undaunted than she appeared to be.”1 North was not especially sympathetic to Catholics—he approved of their being driven out of the House of Lords in 1678— yet he acknowledged Cellier to be a woman without equal for courage and greatness of soul. Even her worst enemies conceded she had exceptional courage for a woman, as can be seen by the epithets they gave her: Lady Errant, Joan of Arc, Amazon, and Roman Virago.2
Little is known about Mrs. Cellier before she emerges as the heroine of the Popish Plot, 1678-1683, the last bloody persecution of Catholics in England. This Plot arose because James duke of York, heir to the crown, had become a Catholic in 1673. His conversion gave the enemies of monarchy a new ground of attack, and they started immediately to raise a panic about impending slavery with the constant cry of the “growth of popery.” Although Catholics were only one per cent of the English population, the Whigs3 were determined to create such fear and hatred of them in the populace that the Catholic lords would be ousted from parliament. They achieved this with the Popish Plot, the first fruit of which was the Test Act of 1678 that required an oath against the Mass as idolatry.4
Among the Whig leaders, fear of popery was insincere. The historian Dalrymple, himself a Whig, discovered a century later a secret correspondence between King Louis XIV and his ambassador Paul de Barrillon that proved how the Whigs were receiving huge bribes from France at the very time they were whipping up the Popish Plot.5 France paid them to create domestic turmoil, reduce the standing army, and keep the English King from interfering again with French expansionism. So while English Catholics were being executed for treason, the Whig leaders spearheading that persecution—Shaftesbury, his personal secretary Locke,6 Sidney, and Russell—were themselves committing treason by serving a foreign government.
From 1678 the Whigs systematically spread the lies of Titus Oates in incendiary pamphlets and made them pass for gospel truth across England. Oates swore that there were entire armies of Catholics ready to massacre English Protestants within ten days’ time—40,000 Irish, 20,000 English, 40,000 Spanish, besides French, Flemish, and other allies, totaling over 200,000 horse and infantry. Of course, no sign of these armies and their armories was ever found. Nor was any trace ever discovered of all the written commissions Oates swore the Pope himself had issued to English Catholics for every high office in the nation, commissions Oates said he had personally delivered. The tenor of these accusations can be gauged by this one example: the actor-playwright Matthew Medbourne—who often played the role of general onstage and indeed was performing the part of Agamemnon when arrested—was accused of being the real general of the papal army, despite his lack of military experience. The poor man died in prison on 19 March 1680, one of the many deaths of Catholics not included when the Popish Plot victims are counted up.
Years later, Sir Roger North lamented that the Plot had been “the grossest Perjury that ever was,” something “below idiots to credit,” with the chief witness Titus Oates being a man previously convicted for perjury. Even so, “anger, policy, inhumanity, and prejudice had, at this time, a planetary possession of the minds of most men,” he groaned, so that “one might have denied Christ with less contest than the Plot.” Indeed, Oates was called from the pulpit the “saviour” of the nation.7 His image in miniature graced ladies’ fans and could be found in nearly every home. In the next generation, the philosopher Bolingbroke would wish that, for the honor of his country, the “Popish Plot” might be razed from English history. But for the honor of the English Recusants it is well that it has not been. For the Plot was a crucible out of which emerged many Catholic heroes and saints. Among the three dozen or so publicly executed were a number accused only of being priests, under the Elizabethan law. Two of these were serving their flocks in old age—St. John Kemble, at ninety, and St. Nicholas Postgate, at eighty.8
One of those who emerged as pure gold from the crucible of the Plot was the “popish midwife” Elizabeth Cellier, a middle-aged Englishwoman married to an elderly Frenchman named Peter Cellier, and the mother of two children. What we know about her she revealed at her trial. Raised a Protestant, she converted to Catholicism during the civil wars. Her family name was Dormer, and her father and brother were cavaliers who both died fighting for their king on the same day. Afterwards, her family lost its property in Buckinghamshire, but she still managed to help the royal family, for she tells us she ventured her “life through a sea and an army to serve” Charles II.9 Roger North calls Cellier a “gentlewoman,” one who served as midwife to “persons of quality and honour.” Indeed, in that capacity she served the two wives of James duke of York—the first duchess of York in the 1660s (the mother of Queens Mary and Anne) and Queen Mary of Modena in the 1680s (the mother of Prince James, in whose name the Jacobite rebellion of 1715 took place).10 When the Popish Plot raised a panic in 1678, Cellier thought it her duty “through all sorts of hazards to relieve the poor imprisoned Catholics” who were then “starving for want of bread.”11 She fed them from her own resources for a few months until January 1679, when their numbers had increased so much she was no longer able to take care of them on her own—for at one point there were 2,000 of them imprisoned in the area of London. The priest Robert Pugh (who would later die in prison) gave her a letter to the Countess of Powis so she might receive donations from other Catholics for her work. This gave Cellier the means to bail out some prisoners, such as the littlest papist Jeffery Hudson, whom she freed for five pounds just in time for him to die at home. He had once been the favorite dwarf of Queen Henrietta and been immortalized in Davenant’s mock-epic Jeffereidos (1638).
It was in the week of 9 January 1679, while on her daily rounds, that Cellier first became aware that torture was taking place in Newgate prison. She overheard Miles Prance groaning for hours on end and exclaiming that they would surely murder him unless he “belied” himself and others. He soon caved in and became one of the six witnesses who accused other Catholics in the Plot, though he wavered and recanted several times. Not long afterwards, Cellier discovered another victim of torture in Newgate—the hackney-coachman Francis Corral. For thirteen weeks he had been chained in heavy irons that left “great Holes in both his Legs,” and had lain so doubled up in a tiny “Dungeon under ground” that he could no longer stand upright. He told Cellier he had been starved, beaten, threatened with various forms of death, and offered a great bribe if he would be a Plot witness and accuse James duke of York and Queen Catherine of Braganza. But torture would not break the spirit of Francis Corral, another unsung hero of the Plot. Nine years later Roger L’Estrange, a Protestant, interviewed Corral in his home and confirmed Cellier’s account of his torture, observing that the holes from the heavy irons still remained visible in Corral’s legs. Corral told L’Estrange how Shaftesbury himself kept interrogating him, once laying a pile of gold on the table and saying, “We are the peers of the land; and if thou wilt not confess, there shall be a barrel of nails provided for thee, to put thee in, and roll thee down a hill.” When Corral insisted he would never accuse innocent people, the earl declared, “then thou shalt die.”12 In a recent book entitled Torture and English Law, the author observes that Cellier’s account of Corral’s torture is well corroborated by The Deposition of Francis Caryll [Corral], found in the Fairfax Papers.13
Cellier’s charities did not end at Newgate prison. She took into her own home the thirty boys from St. Omers who came to testify at the trial of the five Jesuits and Richard Langhorn. They swore that Oates had been with them at St. Omers across the sea at the very time he said he was in England delivering papal commissions to the alleged leaders of the Plot. The jury did not believe them because at the time it passed for dogma in England that Catholics had papal dispensations to lie under oath, even on the scaffold.
It was not long before Cellier herself was entrapped in the Plot. In April 1679, another midwife recommended to her an imprisoned Catholic convert named Willoughby. This man turned out to be the career criminal Thomas Dangerfield, son of a roundhead attorney and a law clerk by training. In June, she bailed him, partly to help collect the 4,000 pounds in desperate debts owed to her husband Peter Cellier, a broker to foreign merchants, and partly to spy on the Whigs in their coffeehouses and glean information that might help the Catholic lords imprisoned in the Tower. That same month, she was supposed to testify at Richard Langhorn’s trial for treason, but she was so terrified by the mob’s violence that she was unable to give witness on his behalf, fearing for her life. We can imagine how she reproached herself for her cowardice when she heard afterwards that he was to be hanged and quartered. Perhaps out of shame, she sent someone else to the execution to soak her handkerchief in his blood. Soon after, she grew bolder and met with William Smith, Oates’s tutor, a man already perjured, to urge him to come forward with the truth. He finally did so, but only six years later, in the safety of James II’s reign.
Cellier’s servant Dangerfield was soon in the pay of the Whigs and appointed to entrap her. He brought news of an armed insurrection planned by Shaftesbury and left forged evidence of it hidden in her meal-tub— hence the name “Meal-Tub Plot.” On 31 October 1679, he suddenly turned informer, swore that the Catholics had paid him to forge the evidence left in Cellier’s meal-tub, and was given a pension with the other Plot witnesses. Ironically, there was an actual Whig Plot to murder the King and his brother, the Rye House Plot, which was exposed later in 1683, and the names listed in the meal-tub papers are a roster of those who would be involved in the Rye House Plot. The subtlety of the Whig contrivers is seen in that they made perjuries pass for truth, and truth pass for forgeries.
Cellier was arrested on 28 October 1679, and she spent the next eight months in prison resisting attempts to intimidate and suborn her. Told she was a “dangerous Woman” who had held “correspondence with traitors” by harboring thirty boys from St. Omers, she retorted with admirable presence of mind that none were traitors but those convicted of treason and she knew of none such that she had corresponded with. On 1 November when she was examined before the king and his council and told the truth, the chancellor tried to terrify her by saying that no one would believe her and she would die. She then made this delightful repartee: “I know that, my lord, for I never saw an immortal woman in my life.” Then kneeling down to the king, she begged him that she might not be tortured. King Charles assured her that the law forbade it, but she boldly insisted that “such things are frequently done in Newgate” and added that if at any time she said the opposite of what she had just testified, she was not to be believed, “for it will be nothing but lies forced from me by barbarous usage.”
After this interrogation, she was told she would be “close confined” in Newgate with felons. She was not yet the heroine she would become, so at this news fear overwhelmed her and she fell into dangerous convulsions. As she explains it, “though I be not the most timorous of my sex, and never had any kind of fit before, I fell into such convulsions, that I had like to have died at Whitehall gate.” Her jailers relented and left her in the prison gatehouse, but sent Dangerfield to tempt her from outside her window. As she puts it, he urged her to come in now whilst it is time, and join with the most powerful, you may make your own conditions; then he showed me gold, and told me what great advantages were to be made by becoming the king’s evidence. That the king was bought and sold, and here would be a republic.
All she had to testify to save herself was that James duke of York had given her the papers found in her meal-tub. If she took an oath to that,the earl of Shaftesbury and the rest of the confederate lords would raise ten thousand pounds among them , which I should pass over by bills of exchange whither I would, as soon as I had signed and sworn the depositions; and I should have twenty pounds per week settled on me by act of parliament as long as I lived.
Cellier laughed with scorn when she heard this. She told Dangerfield he was worse than Judas, who had “courage enough to hang himself: but you have betrayed and belied many innocents, and yet are such as coward to wait for the hangman, for hanged you will be.” Then Dangerfield groaned and showed the marks where he had been racked to “force him to accuse me.”
While imprisoned, Cellier was not even allowed to see her husband, son and daughter. Though the king once ordered that she be granted a visit from her husband, still no visit was permitted for twelve more weeks, and then only for a quarter-hour. In one of his interrogations, Sir William Waller reminded her of the comforts of home, saying he wondered how she could “endure to stay here” when she had “such a fine curious House to live in.” His words elicited this spirited, plucky response from Cellier:I am prisoner for truth sake, and that cause, and the joy I have to suffer for it, makes this dirty, smoky hole to me a palace, adorned with all the ornaments imagination can think upon; and I assure you, this is the most pleasant time of my whole life, for I have thrown off all care of earthly things, and have nothing to do but to serve God.
In prison she was visited by rats and weasels who “boldly robbed me before my face, and did not dance without music, squeaking as they ran up and down.” When Sir William Waller would come and flatter her by saying he had a “high esteem” for her “wit and courage,” and then urge her to “confess” what he wanted her to, she remarked wittily that she valued his expressions “much like the music of my other visitants.”
As she grew more intrepid, she was no longer terrified by the menace of being sent to the worst parts of Newgate. When Waller once threatened to put her “into a more rigorous confinement,” she retorted, “have you ever a place to put me in where God is not?” Waller conceded, “he is everywhere.” Then she exclaimed, “do your worst, I defy you all, and him that sets you on.” Every time she demanded a speedy trial she was told that she would then “certainly be put to death.” Once her riposte was, “I’ll venture that.” Another time she declared, “I shall come out ere long to a glorious death, or an honourable life, both which are indifferent to me, blessed be God.” In mid-January 1680, when she was brought before a committee of the House of Lords, she was again told, when she pressed urgently for her trial, that she would then certainly die. This time she said, “Blessed be God, then I hope the play is near an end, for tragedies, whether real or fictions, seldom end before the women die.” One of the Lords rebuked her: “what, you make a play of it?” She replied unflinchingly, “If there be no more truth in the whole story than there is in what relates to me, every play that is acted has more truth in it.”
Thus, Cellier’s spirit was not crushed by repeated intimidation and solitary confinement. On the contrary, she became ever more resolved and undaunted. On the title-page of her book Malice Defeated, she printed her motto in large letters, “I Never Change,” showing how highly she valued fidelity. Indeed, her story is an exemplum of that virtue. She was not at all cast down by huge financial losses, either. According to her calculations, her husband lost many hundreds of pounds in the Court of Chancery because, as a foreigner, he did not know how to proceed without her help. Also, up to the summer of 1680, she rated her own losses as about a thousand pounds and said no one gave her money except a condemned priest, who left her ten pounds.
At last, on 11 June 1680, after eight months’ incarceration, the day of her trial arrived. She provides an abridgement of it in Malice Defeated, but the complete trial can be found in Howell’s State Trials. With extraordinary aplomb she acted as her own defense attorney (no attorney being allowed in cases of treason) and proved Dangerfield’s pardon from the king to be so seriously defective that he could not legally serve as a witness. His pardon did not include the crimes of felony, burglary, perjury, and forgery, and she produced records proving him guilty of all those serious crimes. With her usual wit, she also managed to get the other two witnesses to withdraw the evidence they had been terrified into giving against her. Then, seeing that the criminal Dangerfield was the only remaining witness, the Lord Chief Justice instructed the jury as follows: “we ought not to hoodwink justice for such a stigmatized, whipped, pilloried, burnt-in-the-hand fellow as he notoriously appears to be.”
Despite her great victory, Cellier’s troubles now began in earnest. It was extremely dangerous in 1680 to cast doubt on the Plot witnesses. Just for making fun of them, Roger L’Estrange had to leave the country in the fall of that year. Cellier thus stood all alone in the mid-1680s when she published her bold attack on the Plot, entitled, MaliceDefeated: or a Brief Relation of the Accusation and Deliverance of Elizabeth Cellier. So sensational was her book that it was immediately translated into French and published as La Malice Decouverte. It received high praise from Dr. Arnauld, who was “touched” by Cellier’s sincerity and courage.14
What got Cellier into great trouble was that her exposure of the perjuries, subornations, and tortures of the Plot was done in the open. Instead of an anonymous pamphlet, she produced one with her name on the title page. She wrote it in a white heat within three weeks of her acquittal for treason. Then she had it printed at her own expense, announced its publication to the press, and sold it from her own house. Now the stage was set for her next ordeal. On 16 August, the government stopped the printer. But she refused to be intimidated and took her book to another printer. Dangerfield published a reply to her book, which she answered with The Matchless Rogue, a clever satire on his well-documented criminal career.
Not surprisingly, she was arrested anew on 10 September and put on trial for libel the very next day, allowing her no time to prepare a defense. As the judge told her, she would have been guilty of libel even if her book had been entirely true, for there was a Licensing Act that limited the freedom of the press, but she was being charged with making these false statements: first, that the Plot witnesses were liars and that perjurers were getting rich, while the innocent suffered; and secondly, that Miles Prance and Francis Corral had been tortured in Newgate to turn them into Plot witnesses. Apparently unaware of what was going on in prison, Judge Weston told her that torture had long been illegal in England and had not been practiced since Elizabethan days. The judge’s remarks to Cellier are cited in a modern book on torture as evidence of how the public was “ignorant” regarding “Government practice.”15
Cellier was found guilty of libel and sentenced on 13 September to pay a thousand pounds or stay in prison till it was paid. She was also condemned to stand on the pillory three times for a hour each time, with some of her books to be burned on each occasion. She suffered now as a martyr for freedom of the press, but one would look in vain for her name among the heroes and heroines of this cause. She stood on the pillory on 18 and 27 September and on 23 October, holding a wooden shield to protect herself from the mob that stoned her.16 Always keeping her presence of mind, she was careful to collect and pocket the stones that were thrown at her, so they could not be used again. Despite her pleas, her fine was not remitted, and so she was still in prison two years later, in 1682, petitioning for release.17 The date of her emancipation is not known, but it was before 1684, since in her last work, dated 1688, she mentions her four years of service as midwife to Queen Mary of Modena.
Our last glimpse of her shows her possessed of the same compassion and high spirits as in 1680. In June 1687 she presented King James II with a proposal for a combined college of women-midwives and foundling hospital. She wrote in 1688 of the mothers who murdered their newborn children because they were very poor, lacked “fit ways to conceal their shame” and could not “provide” for their offspring. She would provide a place of refuge for them and a training hospital for midwives. The king approved her plan in September 1687, but she probably had trouble convincing the London midwives to pay five pounds a year to enter such an association. So when her adversary, probably Dr. Hugh Chamberlen, a Whig man-midwife, asked her sneeringly whether there had ever been such a college of women-midwives, Cellier decided on the spot to write a history of midwifery dating back to Exodus. She entitled her little pamphlet, To Dr. — , An Answer to his Queries concerning the Colledg of Midwives and wrote this, too, in a white heat. She says she promised the doctor an answer on 12 January, and her pamphlet is dated 16 January 1688.18 In this work she announces triumphantly that Mary of Modena is pregnant, and predicts that she will have several children. The prospect of a Catholic heir to the throne who might displace William and Mary in the royal succession was just what Protestant England feared the most. But Cellier was in her usual fearless mode. She imagined that the male foundlings she would raise in her hospital might someday be in the army led by the little Prince of Wales. Sadly, the birth of the Prince of Wales in June triggered the revolution and the exile of James, Mary of Modena, and the little prince. Perhaps Cellier herself followed them into exile. We hear no more of her in England.
Thomas Dangerfield once sneered that Cellier was building castles in the sky and designing to be a “a Saint in Heaven.” He was not the only one who noticed that she was unworldly. There is a manuscript at Stonyhurst that conveys to us how much she was revered by the Catholics of her era. This document attests that when Cellier stood in the pillory, two members of the Whig party—Stephen College, popularly known as the Protestant Joiner (i.e., a carpenter) and one Feilding—incited the mob to stone her and paid some of them to do it. Both these men are said to have received divine punishment shortly afterwards by being executed. In addition, it is reported that one lad who stoned her and who died a few days later, could be heard murmuring at the end, “Cellier.”19 And so, perhaps Sir Roger North was right: there have been precious few women “more magnanimous and undaunted” than this Popish midwife.
Anne Barbeau Gardiner is Professor Emerita in the Department of English, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY. Her recent publications include Ancient Faith and Modern Freedom in John Dryden's The Hind and the Panther, (Catholic University of America Press, 1998).
End Notes1 Roger North, Examen, (London, 1740), 263. I have modernized the orthography in all the quotations of this essay.
2 These epithets appeared in 1680 in Modesty Triumphing over Impudence; The Popes Letter, to Maddam Cellier; Tho. Dangerfield’s Answer to a Certain Scandalous Lying Pamphlet; and The Scarlet Beast Stripped Naked.
3 The name Whig for the anti-monarchist party emerged in the Popish Plot years; it was the Scottish term for sour whey. Likewise the name Tory emerged at this time for the Church of England party; it was the term for an Irish bog-trotter.
4 The first part of the oath now required for public office was as follows: “I, A.B., do solemnly and sincerely in the presence of God profess, testify and declare, That I do believe that in the sacrament of the Lord’s supper there is not any transubstantiation of the elements of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ at or after the consecration thereof by any person whatsoever: And that the invocation or adoration of the virgin Mary or any other saint, and the sacrifice of the mass, as they are now used in the church of Rome, are superstitious and idolatrous.” The Statutes at Large, ed. Danby Pickering (Cambridge and London: Charles Bathurst, 1763), 8:392 . The Test Act of 1678 was repealed in 1828.
5 Sir John Dalrymple, Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland, 3 vols. (Rpt., Farnborough, U.K.: Gregg, 1970). This correspondence in code was deciphered interlinearly for Louis XIV. It fills over 30 volumes at the Quai d’Orsay Archives in Paris.
6 As the intimate associate of the earl of Shaftesbury, Locke would have been privy to the French bribes and to the subornations in the Plot, often managed by his patron in person. Since the Whigs caused oaths against “transubstantiation” to be enacted in 1673 and 1678 to deprive Catholics of public employment, Locke’s philosophical writings, especially about “substance,” might well replay study in the context of his party’s hostility to the Real Presence.
7 Sir Roger North, Examen, 193-94, 205-6, 177.
8 John Kenyon, The Popish Plot (London: Heinemann, 1972), 178-82, 272. For a list of those who died only for their priesthood in the Plot, see Henry Foley, Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, 7 vols. In 8 (London: Burns and Oates, 1877-83), 5:95-7. A valuable history is John Warner, S. J.’s The History of English Persecution of Catholics and the Presbyterian Plot, 2 vols., transl. John Bligh, S. J., ed. T. A. Birrell (London: for the Catholic Record Society, 1953). This work remained in a Latin manuscript from the 1680s.
9 The Tryal and Sentence of Elizabeth Cellier (London, 1680), 30; and T. B. Howell, A Complete Collection of State Trials, 33 vols (London, 1816-26) 7: col. 1203.
10 Examen, 260-1; also, Tryal and Sentence, 30.
11 Elizabeth Cellier, Malice Defeated and The Matchless Rogue [1680], introd. by Anne Barbeau Gardiner (Los Angeles: Augustan Reprint Society #249-50, William Andrews Clark Library, 1988), 2.
12 A Brief History of the Times, in 3 Parts (London: R. Sare, 1688), Part 3, 102-6. Shaftsbury’s personal subornation of witnesses by terror or bribery is also shown in the case of the Protestant Samuel Atkins, clerk to Samuel Pepys. See John Harold Wilson, The Ordeal of Mr. Pepys’s Clerk (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1972), ch. 3 and 4. Even Protestants who served James duke of York, such as Pepys and his workers, were vulnerable to attack.
13 Memorials of the Civil War: Comprising the Correspondence of the Fairfax Family, ed. Robert Bell, 2 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1849), 2:300-4. Cited in James Heath, Torture and English Law (Westport CT, and London: Greenwood, 1982), 174.
14 Antoine Arnauld, Apologie pour les Catholiques (Liege: Bronkart, 1681). Arnauld, the Jansenist who had previously incited Pascal against the Jesuits, amazingly took up the pen at this juncture and defended, among others, the English Jesuits who had been executed in the Plot!
15 Heath, Torture and English Law, 179.
16 There is a cartoon of her on the pillory holding her shield in the eighth plate of The Popish Damnable Plot against Our Religion and Liberties, lively Delineated in several of its Branchest (London: Richard Baldwin, 1681). It is reproduced in the reprint of Malice Defeated.
17 Calendar of State Papers Domestic 1682, 613. Here she says she is “sick and weak” from two years’ imprisonment. See also CSP Dom 1660-1685, 481.
18 For more on this topic, see my essay, “Elizabeth Cellier in 1688 on Envious Doctors and Heroic Midwives Ancient and Modern,” in Eighteenth-Century Life 14 (1990), 24-34. Also, see Antonia Fraser, The Weaker Vessel (New York: Knopf, 1984), 454-70.
20 “A true relation of some judgments of God against those who accused the priests and other Catholics after the pretended plot in England,” Stonyhurst MSS, cited in Foley, Records, 5:74-75