Malice Defeated: Elizabeth Cellier
There are curious parallels between the life of Beatrice de PlanisolesΩ and that of Elizabeth Cellier (?1640–after 1688). Both were tried for their lives; both defended themselves coolly and with skill in the face of fanatical opponents.
The French Cathar sympathiser, once chatelaine, of fourteenth-century Montaillou and the English Catholic midwife and pamphleteer implicated in the notorious ‘Popish Plot’ of 1678–81 both found themselves in deeply compromising company. Both spent time in prison; both survived. In Elizabeth’s case, she ensured that history knew her side of the story largely by writing it herself. Had a Protestant coup against James VII/II in 1688 not forced her into exile, she might now be remembered as the founder of a Royal College of Midwives – which, in the event, had to wait almost two hundred years for its founding charter.Elizabeth was the graduate of an age in which women wrote and published their ideas about religion with increasing confidence, a confidence traceable to Puritans like Anne Bradstreet. Elizabeth speaks for herself: first of her childhood during the English Civil War (1642–51), her conversion to Catholicism and her loyalty to the monarchy:
…For my Education being in those times, when my own Parents and Relations, for their Constant and Faithful Affection to the King and Royal Family, were persecuted, the King himself Murthered, the Bishops and Church destroyed, the whole Loyal Party meerly for being so, opprest and ruined; and all as was pretended by the Authors of these Villanies, for their being Papists and Idolaters, the constant Character given by them to the King and his Friends to make them odious, they assuming to themselves only the Name of Protestants, making that the Glorious Title by which they pretended Right to all things.
These sort of Proceedings, as I grew in understanding, produced in me more and more horrour of the Party that committed them, and put me on Inquiry into that Religion, to which they pretended the greatest Antipathy, wherein I thank God, I found my Innate Loyalty, not only confirm’d, but encourag’d; and let Calumny say what it will, I never heard from any Papist, as they call them, Priest nor Lay-man, but that they and I, and all true Catholicks, owe our Lives to the defence of our Lawful King, which our present Sovereign Charles the Second is, whom God long and happily preserve so.4
In the early 1670s, apparently widowed, Elizabeth married a French merchant, Pierre Cellier.
She was well known among the Catholic middle classes of London, practising as a midwife and visiting the inmates of Newgate prison where, at considerable personal risk, she…thought it my duty through all sorts of hazards to relieve the poor imprison’d Catholicks, who in great numbers were lock’d up in Gaols, starving for want of Bread…5
In 1678, rumours were rife in London that Popish plotters planned to assassinate King Charles II (reigned 1660–85) and place his Catholic brother James (reigned 1685–8) on the throne. The agent provocateur Titus Oates managed to persuade the twitchy councillors of a sensibly sceptical king that the rumours were true. He seemed to be able to provide plenty of evidence of the intended sedition but, so far as we know, nearly all of it was fabricated. Public tolerance of Catholics was replaced by intolerance; then by a feverish antipathy during which conspirators were seen and heard everywhere and foreign invasion was feared to be imminent. Elizabeth was set upon by three men and seriously injured.
A year later, during a visit to Newgate, Elizabeth began to collect evidence that Catholic prisoners were being systematically degraded, starved and tortured:
…we all heard Terrible Grones and Squeeks which came out of the Dungeon, called the Condemn’d hole. I asked Harris the Turnkey, what doleful Cry it was, he said, it was a Woman in Labour. I bid him put us into the Room to her, and we would help her, but he drove us away very rudely, both out of the Lodge, and from the Door; we went behind the Gate, and there lissened, and soon found that it was the voice of a strong man in Torture, and heard, as we thought, between his Groans, the winding up of some Engine: these Cries, stop’d the Passengers under the Gate, and we six went to the Turners Shop without the Gate, and stood there amazed with the Horror and Dread of what we heard; when one of the Officers of the Prison came out in great haste, seeming to run from the Noise,
One of us catcht hold of him, saying, Oh! What are they doing in the Prison.
Officer: I dare not tell you.
Mistris: It’s a Man upon the Rack, Ile lay my Life on’t.
Officer: It is something like it…6
During one of these visits Elizabeth met a petty rogue calling himself Willoughby who, claiming to have been falsely imprisoned, supplied her with a dossier of exactly the sort of evidence of abuse that she needed to take her case to the law courts. In return, Elizabeth paid Willoughby’s fines and he was released. At about the same time she met another inmate claiming to be in possession of evidence that the Popish Plot was a Protestant conspiracy hatched by the Earl of Shaftesbury on behalf of the king. Suspicious of his motives, she paid Willoughby to investigate the claim. By the end of the year, Willoughby had succeeded in gathering damning evidence against Oates and his confederates; or so it seemed. But the whole affair was a web of deceit. Willoughby, now calling himself Thomas Dangerfield, publicly denounced Elizabeth for a conspiracy against the Earl of Shaftesbury and the king; compromising documents were found concealed in a meal tub in her kitchen, and she was arrested on suspicion of committing high treason:
November the first, I was examin’d before His Majesty and the Lords of the Councel where… Willoughby accused me of all the Forged Stories he tells in his Lying Narrative; and I unfeignedly told the Truth, and the whole Truth, and nothing but the Truth. But the Lord Chancellor told me, no body would believe a word I said, and that I would Dye. — To which I replyed, I know that my Lord, for I never saw an Immortal woman in my life: And then kneeling down, said,
Cellier: I beseech your Majesty that I may not be Tortur’d.
The King: The Law will not suffer it.
Cellier: Such things are frequently done in Newgate; and I have more reason to fear it than any other person, because of what I have done against the Keeper, and therefore I beseech your Majesty, If at any time I should say any thing contrary to what I have now said, that you will not believe me, for it will be nothing but lies forc’d from me by barbarous usage.7
Elizabeth was tried in June 1680.
With the benefit of an almost forensic memory and an exceptional understanding of the law, by challenging the Crown’s case at every stage with wit and skill and by producing witnesses exposing Willoughby/Dangerfield as a perjurer and convicted felon, she defended herself successfully, was acquitted and freed. In August she published a pamphlet entitled Malice Defeated or, A brief relation of the accusation and deliverance of Elizabeth Cellier wherein her proceedings both before and during her confinement are particularly related and the Mystery of the meal-tub fully discovered: together with an abstract of her arraignment and tryal, written by her self, for the satisfaction of all lovers of undisguised truth. Elizabeth had it privately printed and sold it from her home. With its vivid use of dramatic dialogue and finely tuned ear for rhetoric, including the martyrial defiance of a prisoner of conscience, it caused a sensation:I value not my Losses nor my Life, I’ll stay here this twenty Years, rather than Lie my self to Liberty. I am Prisoner for Truth sake, and that Cause, and the joy I have to suffer for it, makes this Dirty, Smoaky Hole to me a Pallace, 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.8
She followed Malice Defeated with a direct satirical attack on Dangerfield, called The Matchless Picaro; but her accusations of state-sponsored torture brought her once more to trial, this time for libel. She was fined £1,000, confined to the debtors’ prison until she could pay it, and sentenced to spend three spells in the pillory, during one of which she was pelted with stones and badly hurt. Effigies of her and her infamous meal tub were paraded through the streets.
Nothing more is heard of Elizabeth Cellier until after Charles II’s death in 1685 and the accession of James VII/II, during whose short reign Catholic communities in Britain felt, once more, sufficiently self-confident to participate actively in public life, with royal patronage on their side.
Elizabeth, seemingly engaged by the new queen, Mary of Modena, to attend her during pregnancy, took to print again, this time with ‘A scheme for the Foundation of a Royal hospital… and for the maintenance of a corporation of skilful Midwives…’, which she formally proposed to the king. It was a plan for the establishment of a Royal Hospital for foundlings; and since the cause of their predicament was necessarily related to high rates of perinatal maternal death, she proposed that a chartered college of midwifery be set up to teach male and female students the practical techniques that men had hitherto studied only in books and that women knew only by practice. She saw herself as its governess, under the administrative control of a ‘man mid-wife’ or director. Male students would pay higher fees than female students, who might be less able to support themselves financially.The scheme was confronted with immediate opposition from male professionals. In response, her pamphlet ‘To Dr. —— an answer to his queries concerning the Colledg [sic] of Midwives’, was articulate, reasoned, effective and logical. Confronting the exclusive preserve of those ‘learned Gentlemen’ licensed to practise midwifery by Anglican bishops, she cites contemporary bills of mortality to show how ineffective current textbook methods were:
I hope, Doctor, these considerations will deter any of you from pretending to teach us Midwifery, especially such as confess they never delivered Women in their lives, and being asked What would they do in such a Case? Reply they have not yet studied it, but will when occasion serves; This is something to the purpose, I must confess, Doctor: but I doubt it will not satisfy the Women of this Age, who are so sensible and impatient of their Pain that few will be prevailed upon to bear it in Complement to the Doctor while he fetches his Book, studies the Case, and teaches the midwife to perform her work, which he hopes may be done before he comes.9
With the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688 that brought William III and Mary to the throne, Elizabeth Cellier’s hopes of founding her teaching hospital were shelved; she seems to have followed James and his queen into exile, and nothing more is heard of her. For Elizabeth, womanhood, charity, compassion and Catholicism were inseparable from each other and from her being. It was her lot to be drawn into notoriety; she both endured and exploited celebrity and had the wit and literary talent to profit from it. She may have failed in her immediate objectives; but the next generation of women writers and campaigners, for whom she prepared the ground, would enjoy the fruits of her labours.