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Then she must overboard, most wretched queen! And now this unhappy prince went to take a last view of his dear wife, and as he looked on his Thaisa, he said: 'A terrible childbed hast thou had, my dear; no light, no fire; the unfriendly elements forget thee utterly, nor have I time to bring thee hallowed to thy grave, but must cast thee scarcely coffined into the sea, where for a monument upon thy bones the humming waters must overwhelm thy corpse, lying with simple shells.
For he was proud to have such a strong wife, "not so affected as the others." It led however to her death. Somehow she must have become infected, for soon after a severe childbed fever broke out. Even as a young wife she, the poor humble cottager's daughter whose childhood was pinched by bitterest need, shed a wealth of love and joy upon all who dwelt about her.
There the fire was burning, and by the flickering light she saw a woman a young woman then lying on a bed, and beside her the man she herself had risen from her childbed to seek. And at the sight of them her heart died in her. She would have cried aloud, but only a groan came from her lips, and she went back, dreading at every step lest her legs should fail her...."
By Hugh L. Hodge, M. D., Professor of Obstetrics in the University of Pennsylvania. Delivered Monday, October 11, 1852. Philadelphia, 1852. On the Nature, Signs, and Treatment of Childbed Fevers: in a Series of Letters addressed to the Students of his Class.
Poor Lady Anne Percy, daughter of the Earl of Northumberland, and niece of the faithless Lady Carlisle of whom we read in these letters, was already married at this date to Lord Stanhope, Lord Chesterfield's heir. She died probably in childbed in November of next year , and was buried at Petworth with her infant son.
Crispe had told her that she did intend, by means of a lady that lies at her house, to get the King to be godfather to the young lady that she is in childbed now of; but to see in what a manner my Lady told it me, protesting that she sweat in the very telling of it, was the greatest pleasure to me in the world to see the simplicity and harmlessness of a lady.
"You must give me a little time to turn it over," said the marquis. "Isna twenty year time eneuch, my lord?" rejoined Miss Horn. "I swear to you that till this moment I believed her twenty years in her grave. My brother sent me word that she died in childbed, and the child with her. I was then in Brussels with the Duke."
Reviewing the evidence as a whole, we may conclude that the worship of Diana in her sacred grove at Nemi was of great importance and immemorial antiquity; that she was revered as the goddess of woodlands and of wild creatures, probably also of domestic cattle and of the fruits of the earth; that she was believed to bless men and women with offspring and to aid mothers in childbed; that her holy fire, tended by chaste virgins, burned perpetually in a round temple within the precinct; that associated with her was a water-nymph Egeria who discharged one of Diana's own functions by succouring women in travail, and who was popularly supposed to have mated with an old Roman king in the sacred grove; further, that Diana of the Wood herself had a male companion Virbius by name, who was to her what Adonis was to Venus, or Attis to Cybele; and, lastly, that this mythical Virbius was represented in historical times by a line of priests known as Kings of the Wood, who regularly perished by the swords of their successors, and whose lives were in a manner bound up with a certain tree in the grove, because so long as that tree was uninjured they were safe from attack.
In November, 1817, his oldest child, the Princess Charlotte, married to Leopold, since King of Belgium, died in childbed; in 1818, the aged Queen Charlotte died; in January, 1820, the old King, in the eighty-second year of his age, departed this life.
For it is not to be denied, a baleful star hovers over Henry's queens, and none of them has descended from the throne in a natural way." "Yet, father, Jane Seymour did so in a very natural way; she died in childbed." "Well, yes, in childbed. And yet by no natural death, for she could have been saved. But Henry did not wish to save her.
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