The Perfect Ambassador? The Life and Career of the Early Modern French Diplomat Jean-Antoine de Mesmes d’Avaux (1640–1709)

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Abstract

European diplomacy was born of the relations between northern Italian city-states during the Renaissance, and developed from occasional delegations to resident embassies in the early modern period. In the seventeenth century, the Kingdom of France became the protagonist of European political and military affairs, particularly under the reign of Louis XIV. This article analyses the personality, family background and professional career of Jean-Antoine de Mesmes d’Avaux (1640–1709) through a range of diplomatic documents to assess the extent to which he met the expectations and diplomatic objectives set by the Sun King. I argue that although d’Avaux was a successful and appreciated Louisquatorzien ambassador, his personal views and approach to diplomatic matters did not always align with royal guidelines.

Keywords: Early Modern diplomacy, Comte d’Avaux, ambassador, Louis XIV, Kingdom of France, Dutch Republic, Peace of Nijmegen, James II, Irish expedition

Author Biography

Elvira Tamus is a PhD student in History at Sidney Sussex College / Faculty of History, University of Cambridge. Her doctoral research focuses on Franco-Hungarian diplomatic relations in the 1520s and 1530s in the context of the Valois-Habsburg-Ottoman imperial rivalry. She obtained her BA in History and French language at the University of Leicester, and her MA in History (specialisation: Europe 1000–1800) at Leiden University. This article is a revised version of a paper written for a research seminar at Leiden.

 

The Perfect Ambassador? The Life and Career of the Early Modern French Diplomat Jean-Antoine de Mesmes d’Avaux (1640–1709)[1]

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In the seventeenth century, the custom of establishing permanent embassies and sending resident ambassadors to represent their sovereigns in other countries became common in Europe. The key actor in European diplomacy was King Louis XIV (r.1643–1715), whose large-scale political and military endeavours made France the principal power on the continent. The diplomatic machinery that evolved under his reign had a crucial impact on the foreign policy practices of various European states. Thus, along with the status quo set by the Peace of Westphalia which ended the European wars of religion in 1648, Louis instituted the roots of modern diplomacy.

The selection criteria of Louis XIV has been widely discussed in the historiography of French diplomacy. The seventeenth and early eighteenth-century evolution of ambassadorial characteristics, tasks, and responsibilities was carried out by Dutch diplomat Abraham de Wicquefort (1606–82) and French diplomat François de Callières (1645–1717). Wicquefort wrote in his L’Ambassadeur et ses fonctions that an ambassador should possess unquestionable loyalty towards his monarch and a perfect understanding of the issues under negotiation, in order to act in accordance with the interests of his prince.[2] Callières described ambassadors’ responsibilities as representing their princes’ interests and discerning the intentions of other sovereigns. He claimed that a negotiator is first and foremost the executor, rather than the originator of diplomatic decisions which should be made only in consultation with the prince or the principal ministers.[3]  In this regard, as William Roosen has argued, Jean-Antoine de Mesmes d’Avaux was an exception, since Louis relied heavily on d’Avaux’s insight into political conditions gained during his long experience in The Hague and in Sweden.[4]  Orloue N. Gisselquist has concluded that the decade of 1678–88 was a ‘critical period’ for Louis’ foreign policy.[5]  As the French ambassador in the Dutch Republic, d’Avaux frequently used bribery and propaganda (in the form of widely distributed pamphlets) to influence the many officials involved in decision-making, and to promote French interests.[6] Moreover, Gisselquist notes that the centralised nature of French diplomacy required that its ambassadors dealt only with the local issues around their residencies, and therefore, they were often provided with limited information regarding the broad horizon of French foreign affairs.[7] Due to this feature and the exceptionally long time spent in the Dutch Republic, d’Avaux occasionally misunderstood the king’s intentions. Marie-Hélène Côté highlights that the selection procedure of ambassadors included many aspects, such as their social and financial status, appearance, attitude, morals and education, along with the Louis’ personal confidence in the diplomatic candidates selected.[8]

Jean-Antoine de Mesmes d’Avaux served as Louis’ ambassador and envoy in several of countries throughout his own illustrious career and the Sun King’s reign.[9] This case study, therefore, offers an opportunity to consider a detailed picture of the lives, duties, personal and professional specialties of Louisquatorzien ambassadors.

In this article, I will analyse the personal background and diplomatic career of Jean-Antoine de Mesmes d’Avaux, with an emphasis on his service as Louis XIV’s peace negotiator during the Franco-Dutch War; as ambassador to the Dutch Republic; and as an envoy to James II of England’s Irish expedition. These missions represented a critical period of Louis’ reign when the king was engaged in several political and military conflicts. Thus, I will consider the extent to which d’Avaux carried out his diplomatic missions in line with the brief given to him by Louis. I argue that foreign service, remote from regular contact with the French court and his monarch, influenced d’Avaux to the extent that his diplomatic interactions became increasingly independent. Through these observations, I consider the developement of the ambassadorial role in this period. I further reflect on the shifting relationship between ambassador and their monarch back home, and the impacts of this for foreign policy decision-making.

 

Family background, youth and early career (1640–76)

Jean-Antoine de Mesmes d’Avaux was born in 1639 or 1640 into a highly prestigious intellectual family whose members had acquired their title for serving the French government in judicial, administrative and diplomatic positions –members of the Noblesse de robe.[10] His grandfather, Jean-Jacques was a knight (chevalier) and seigneur of Roissy, while his father, Jean-Antoine possessed one of the most significant mandates of justice at the Parlement of Paris as président à mortier.[11] His uncle, Claude de Mesmes, comte d’Avaux was a prominent diplomat and ambassador under cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin in Venice, Rome, Sweden and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The family’s involvement in state affairs is documented in Claude’s correspondence with his father, in which they frequently discussed French and European political news as well as the son’s career progress.[12] In the 1640s, Claude de Mesmes served at the peace negotiations in Münster which ended the Thirty Years’ War.[13] Although Jean-Antoine de Mesmes d’Avaux may be a less well-known diplomat than his uncle, he was nevertheless a crucial agent of French diplomacy in the Dutch Republic for a significant period of time, in one of the most critical periods of Franco-Dutch relations. Jean-Antoine followed a traditional judicial career, becoming firstly conseiller at the parliament in 1661, and then maître de requêtes in 1667.[14] These administrative offices provided the young noble with expertise in law and government. His sufficient but not ‘too high-level’ education and remarkable background accord with Wicquefort’s argument that a prestigious family was more influential in determining a potential ambassador’s success than were schooling and professional experience.[15] Additionally, Callières believed that it was beneficial for a diplomat to have a sufficiently pleasing face to charm an audience.[16] The French duke Louis de Rouvroy de Saint-Simon mentioned the Mesmes family several times in his memoirs and described d’Avaux’s appearance and behaviour as follows: ‘C’étoit un fort bel homme et bien fait, galant aussi, et qui avoit de l’honneur, fort l’esprit du grand monde, de la grâce, de la noblesse, et beaucoup de politesse.’[17] Saint-Simon also noted that d’Avaux had never possessed the title ‘comte d’Avaux’ but nevertheless liked to be referred to as count throughout his career.[18]

Due to a period of almost continuous warfare, Louis needed an efficient, professional diplomatic service to represent his interests abroad and, occasionally, to address disputes by diplomatic means. D’Avaux met these criteria, and was given his first ambassadorial commission to the Republic of Venice between 1672 and 1673. Although this period was relatively peaceful in the series of the Ottoman-Venetian wars, d’Avaux had an important diplomatic task. He needed to reconcile the relationship between the republic and France after the Cretan War (1645–69) in which the Venetians attributed the Ottoman victory at the Siege of Candia (1648–69) to the failures of the allied French army.[19] In addition to this effort, d’Avaux also dealt with commercial affairs by acting as mediator for the acquisition of Italian artefacts by the French court.[20] In a letter from Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–83) to d’Avaux, the Minister of Finances thanked the ambassador for sending him an item of luxury clothing as well as for his remarks on Venetian traders, suggesting that d’Avaux had contributed significantly to economic agreements between France and Venice.[21]

 

The Treaty of Nijmegen and the ambassadorial service in The Hague (1675–88)

One of the major political aspirations of the Sun King concerned the Spanish Succession, an ongoing European-wide dilemma of the late seventeenth century. The problem originated with Charles II of Spain, who was physically and mentally disabled and childless in both of his marriages. Louis initiated the War of Devolution (1667–68) by staking his claim for the Spanish throne through his wife, the sister of Charles, Maria Theresa of Spain. The Triple Alliance of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, England and Sweden in 1668 made Louis step back from his plans and thus became, along with the Dutch embargo on French products, one of the causes of the Franco-Dutch War between 1672 and 1679.[22]

Louis launched a war of conquest for territorial and commercial benefits and triumphed over the alliance that William III, Prince of Orange, had forged with Spain and the Holy Roman Empire. It was in the final stage of this conflict that the young d’Avaux truly grounded his future diplomatic career through his valuable negotiating skills. In 1674, Louis was primarily concerned with dismantling any form of alliance that opposed his interests, such as the one which was soon to emerge between the Dutch Republic and England. To negotiate the best conditions for France, the Sun King needed loyal, dedicated and well-trained diplomats. In December 1675, Louis appointed three plenipotentiaries to represent his interests directly in the negotiations: Colbert de Croissy (1625–96), brother of Minister of Finances Jean-Baptiste Colbert; Godefroi, Comte d’Estrade (1607–86); and Jean-Antoine de Mesmes d’Avaux.[23] Their main responsibility was to assure the delegates from other states of Louis’ benevolence and willingness to cooperate.[24] They relayed the King’s offers which consisted of trading benefits; the withdrawal of formerly installed restrictive duties; and the return of territories which had been occupied by French troops such as Maastricht and the Principality of Orange-Nassau. The latter concession was particularly important, since Louis had previously seized a number of European fortresses of strategic importance.[25] The mission enhanced the professional reputation of all three and proved to be an ideal entry-point into successful ambassadorial careers. From the French perspective, the treaty, which was signed by the representatives of France and the Dutch Republic on 10 August 1678, aimed to utilise and increase the political and military glory that Louis XIV had gained with his territorial captures.

The more than six years of hostility had fundamentally damaged the relations between the two states, and careful diplomatic steps were needed to reconcile them. Louis sent an ambassadeur extraordinaire to reinvigorate his relationship with the United Provinces, to extend the political, diplomatic and commercial successes which he had gained from the war and, most importantly, to uncover more about William III’s potential future military endeavours. For this, Louis chose d’Avaux as the key figure of the diplomatic rapprochement between France and the United Provinces. When the Prince of Orange challenged the Treaty of Nijmegen in August 1678 and called for resistance against France with a planned coalition with England, d’Avaux was put in charge of disentangling the issue by convincing the Dutch leadership of Louis’ trustworthiness. The king justified his appointment by stating that d’Avaux’s ‘présence donnera beaucoup plus de force aux assurances’.[26] Additionally, he instructed the diplomat to communicate with other ambassadors in The Hague and to convince them that the ratification of the remaining treaties with France would bring peace and friendship.[27] After d’Avaux’s success in resolving post-war interstate issues with Venice, Louis had confidence that d’Avaux could facilitate trust between the two sides. The latter was pleased to receive his commission in September 1678 and travelled from Nijmegen to The Hague at the end of that month.[28]

Court life was particularly expensive and Louis’ ambassadors never felt they were provided with sufficient means to maintain an appropriate degree of opulence – the Sun King’s envoys were meant to represent his superiority both materially and ceremonially. Callières similarly argued that ambassadors should possess considerable wealth, ‘afin d’être en état de soutenir les dépenses necessairement attachées a cet emploi.’[29] In 1679, d’Avaux began his commission as the new French ambassador to The Hague with an impressive ceremony to celebrate French successes gained with the Peace of Nijmegen.[30] The language of d’Avaux’s Mémoirs shows that he, as any of Louis’ ambassadors, was primarily and almost exclusively to represent the Roi Soleil personally, rather than the gouvernement and still less the peuple. The King’s name, titles and laudation were permanent elements of d’Avaux’s records, negotiations and widely circulated pamphlets.[31] One of the main benefits he had gained in the preceding years was his great circle of acquaintances and a few confidential relations. Most importantly, Colbert de Croissy, his fellow negotiator, became Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in 1679. D’Avaux had several relatives and friends in high administrative positions at the royal court who provided him with a regular flow of information of considerable value in the following years.[32] During the negotiations, the policy of aggressive expansion that Louis had initially pursued fundamentally changed. Taking advantage of the political tension between the trading leaders and the Prince of Orange, Louis turned towards a more subtle approach by trying to create favourable conditions for the Dutch merchant elite.[33] In 1684, d’Avaux successfully negotiated with the Dutch provinces to have Louis’ proposals accepted by the States General, the legislature body of the Republic – in spite of the efforts of secrétaire général Gaspar Fagel (1634–88), a key representative of William III.[34]

A contemporary of d’Avaux, Louis-Henri de Loménie, comte de Brienne (1635–98) praised the diplomatic skills of the diplomat:

M. d’Avaux est un beau génie et fort facile; il a de grandes vues, beaucoup de pénétration et un grand usage des affaires. Il sait parfaitement les intérêts des princes de l’Europe, écrit et parle bien. Il seroit très digne d’être secrétaire d’État.[35]

D’Avaux dedicated considerable efforts to the resolution of two further issues. The first of these was the interception in the United Provinces of Huguenot refugees who had fled France after the enacting of the Edict of Fontainebleau in October 1685. With this decree, Louis revoked the Edict of Nantes, in which Henry IV of France had granted free exercise of religion for Calvinists in 1598. The persecution of French Protestants forced many of them to leave their home country for more religiously tolerant states, notably the Dutch Republic. The revived persecution of Protestants not only undermined the diplomatic relations of France, but caused economic harm due to the absence of a great number of Huguenots, who were diligent merchants and tradesmen.[36]  D’Avaux was trying to tempt some of these craftsmen back by offering them benefits, as long as they were willing to reconvert to Roman Catholicism. Politically, the growing number of Huguenot refugees in the Dutch Republic contributed to the deterioration of the States General’s attitude towards France, potentially frustrating d’Avaux’s plans to foster the conflict between them and William III.[37]

D’Avaux deployed espionage and bribery to gain access to the Huguenot community, with the intent that they be returned to France where they would have to abandon Protestantism. The ambassador addressed this problem with the help of a spy in Haarlem, Sieur de Tillières, who had been providing him with information about the refugees for years. This issue prompted d’Avaux to express his concerns regarding the negative impact of the persecutions. He indicated in his letters to Louis that the most effective technique to reduce the emigrations would be decreasing state aggression against the Protestants, instead of the continued policy of catching and returning them home.[38]

D’Avaux strongly encouraged Louis to cement his diplomatic relationship with the Dutch. However, William III of Orange, Stadtholder of the United Provinces approached the other Protestant maritime power, the Kingdom of England, hoping for an anti-French alliance. William had had aspirations to become the heir to the English throne since his marriage to Princess Mary in 1677, niece of the then sovereign Charles II. Mary’s father was crowned James II, King of England in 1685, but was not viewed favourably at home, due to his Catholic affiliations. His situation was threatened in June 1688, when a son was born to his second wife Mary of Modena. The birth of a Catholic prince provoked fears that through the heir, Catholicism would be restored and become the official religion.[39] D’Avaux was sufficiently confident to urge his king in the strongest terms: ‘J’avertis le Roi, pour la dixième fois, que tout ce qui se passoit de plus secret dans le Conseil du Roi d’Angleterre, étoit révélé au Prince d’Orange.’[40] Indeed, d’Avaux was proved correct when William ’invaded’ at England Protestant request in the Glorious Revolution in November 1688.[41]

Eventually, a large-scale European clash of political and economic interests developed in the guise of the Nine Years’ War (1688–97), mainly consisting of a Dutch, English (Williamite), and Holy Roman alliance against France’s ever increasing commercial and political superiority.[42] During the initial phase of the English dynastic rivalry, Louis had supported his cousin James, hoping that Catholicism, and his own influence, would be revived in England. D’Avaux dedicated considerable efforts to obtaining intelligence regarding William III’s maritime preparations. He reported on the danger he discerned in the plans of the Prince of Orange, particularly towards the English throne. To gather as much information as possible, d’Avaux followed Louis’s recommendation of establishing relations with the the republicans (members of the States party), who generally opposed the aspirations of the Stadtholder and the Orangist (pro-William) party.[43] He also found informants in the council of Amsterdam, a rich city with many republican supporters.[44] In addition, d’Avaux made use of William’s unpopular plan of increasing the size of the army against a possible French advancement in the Spanish Netherlands. D’Avaux was expected by the French administration to send alerts about every single movement of William and his Troupes, and his reports illustrate his diligence in this respect. Nonetheless, he did not hesitate to report about the States General’s decreasing sympathy towards the French cause:

Les Ministres du Roi d’Angleterre dirent que leur Maitre auroit une grosse Flotte en mer : cela servit de prétexte au Prince d’Orange pour faire un plus grand armement, car il étoit bien éloigné d’en rien craindre, puisqu’il étoit assuré que le Roi d’Angleterre n’étoit pas en état de mettre plus de sept á huit Vaisseaux. (…) Que supposé que le Prince d’Orange eut tous ces desseins, j’étois obligé de dire á Sa Majesté qu’il ne trouvat du secours dans les Etats-Generaux, que tous les fugitifs de France avoient tellement animé les Calvinistes de Hollande, qu’on n’oseroit se promettre que les Etats entrassent dans leurs véritables interets, comme ils auroient fait autrefois, si pareille occasion s’étoit présentée.[45]

From these reports, Louis learned that in addition to the followers of the prince, many supported William’s goal of promoting Protestantism and Dutch trade in England. However, the French court could not be fully aware of, or prepared for, the upcoming developments, due to William’s well-organised and cautious steps and the gradual erosion of d’Avaux’s intelligence circle. The inefficacy in providing sufficient information about William’s project can be regarded mainly as the result of the prince’s precautionary and increasing support, rather than d’Avaux’s failure as ambassador.

 

Irish expedition with James II (1689–90)

In early 1689, Louis appointed d’Avaux as advisor to James II of England, to help him reorganise his army in Ireland comprising both Protestants and Catholics.[46] D’Avaux’s correspondence from Ireland with Louis and Louvois, the French Secretary of State for War, provides us with a valuable insight into James II’s intentions and also into the diplomat’s endeavours and judgment of the situation during the campaign in Ireland in 1689–90. James II aimed to seize absolute control over Ireland in order to retaliate against William III, and thus to restore his royal power with a considerable social and military force behind him. However, the French king, and hence his ambassador, had a different priority in this campaign – to occupy William III’s attention and army away from the continent as much as possible.[47] Consequently, the clash of these interests was virtually inevitable.

William III was the central figure of the anti-French European coalition but his new English crown resulted in several challenges to this leadership.[48] Although d’Avaux did not arrive in Ireland in 1689 as an ambassador, he did bear a large share of the responsibility of Louis’s military success in Britain and Ireland. His extensive experience as both observer and influencer of public and political opinion facilitated his orientation in the Irish question. D’Avaux’s role in James II’s expedition in Ireland was essential as the diplomat realised the importance of William’s obstruction in the success of France and the Jacobites, and kept emphasising the interests of the French crown in the entire course of his engagement. In this expedition, James II was advised by the Irish soldier Richard Talbot, 1st Earl of Tyrconnell; the Scottish politician John Drummond, 1st Earl of Melfort; and d’Avaux. In the course of the first month, d’Avaux perceived a promising situation regarding the acceptance of James’ expedition. Nonetheless, upon arrival, d’Avaux found himself in disagreement with James over the crucial question of the Act of Settlement – the king wanted to maintain it, while the diplomat wished to terminate it. The 1662 law had caused problems because it had provided land for Protestants by taking land from Catholics. Consequently, either its upkeep or its dissolution would have resulted in dissatisfaction with James in Ireland. The land issue between Catholics and Protestants made Louis XIV reconsider his ideas about the clash of religious denominations. The Sun King appreciated d’Avaux’s suggestions of creating a compromise, and encouraged him to keep working on the improvement of James’ support among Irishmen:

En sorte que non seulement les Irlandois Catholiques . . . puissent espérer qu’il leur fera justice, mais aussy que les Protestants… puissent estre asseurez, que la différence de leur religion ne leur fera aucun prejudice aupres de luy.[49]

Nevertheless, a parallel can be drawn with the situation in The Hague, when the ambassador was closer to the actual situation than was the court he was serving, and thus assessed the situation differently from Louis. Firstly, d’Avaux’s judgement that the deteriorating situation was due to James’ incompetence and vanity was nurtured by his own experience of the English King. Secondly, Louis’ solution to the land question did not prove to be feasible—d’Avaux found out what the king had not: namely, that the religious division in Ireland was deeper than expected, and the initial objectives of the campaign should be adjusted to this reality. One of d’Avaux’s earliest reports expressed his discontent with James II’s leadership and organisational skills:

La seule chose, Sir, qui pourra nous faire de la peine, est l’irrésolution du Roy d’Angleterre, qui change souvent d’avis, et ne se détermine pas toujours au meilleur. Il s’arrête aussy beaucoup à de petites choses où il employe toujours son temps et passe légèrement sur les plus essentielles.[50]

D’Avaux urged James to thoroughly strengthen his social support and military forces in Ireland in order to prepare for the continuation of the war with William III. The diplomat believed that this support would be gained by reconciling with the Protestants of the north, or at least by ensuring they did not view James with hostility. D’Avaux urged caution, contrary to the King’s wishes to capitalise on his early successes and continue his campaign in Scotland as soon as possible. D’Avaux was confident enough – almost daring – to voice his disagreements with the royal decisions when he judged them to be hazardous or oppositional to French interests. This attitude, however, led to significant tension with James and the Earl of Melfort, the former’s chief counselor in military matters.[51]

Moreover, d’Avaux complained about the difficulty of acquiring adequate information about James II’s supporters and opponents, telling Louis that ‘le Roy d’Angleterre n’a nulle correspondence en Angleterre, ny en Ecosse’.[52] In spite of the relatively short time he had spent in Ireland, d’Avaux was already able to effectively measure the attitude of Irish society by the beginning of April: ’Le peuple et la noblesse d’Irlande sont également persuadez que c’est icy la seule occasion qu’ils pouvoient avoir de recouvrer leur liberté…’[53] He recognised that the tension between James’ main objective and that of his subjects would have unpleasant ramifications for the enterprise. D’Avaux did not hesitate to express his concerns regarding the efficiency of the recruitment, organisation and management of soldiers as soon as he noticed the first signs of inadequacy in the middle of April 1689. The diplomat concluded that these problems would weaken James’ influence and also increase William’s chances of attacking him in Ireland.[54] News about his growing popularity in Scotland bolstered James’s confidence and determination to go on fighting there.[55] Negligence remained a general feature of James’ policy regarding the physical condition, preparedness and armament of his Irish troops throughout the entire expedition. Altogether, the delay in army reform and increasing Protestant resistance gradually decreased the opportunities of the Franco-Jacobite forces. D’Avaux informed Louis about further issues in the army, such as the inefficient use of French military aid and the lack of adequate payment which caused indiscipline among the soldiers.[56] From late spring, d’Avaux was placed in charge of the army and made efforts to install some degree of discipline, a scheme of payment and the provision of weaponry. However, these belated attempts brought limited success and only increased his personal frustration.[57]

Louis insisted on taking the lead in the Irish expedition and, through d’Avaux, on shaping the events according to his own judgement. However, James’ defeat in his conflict with the Protestants at Derry made the Sun King realise that the expedition would be delayed due to the contradiction between their intentions. Both the king and Louvois started to endorse d’Avaux’s observations and suggestions regarding the steps to be taken in early summer.[58] Over the course of the summer, d’Avaux showed disapproval towards James’ attitude, this time towards the Irish parliament which intended to facilitate trade with France and introduce an embargo on English products.[59] D’Avaux’s disillusionment with the ideals of the French-supported Irish expedition derived from James’ ignoring of most of his political and military advice, as well as the increasing tension between French and Jacobite intentions. D’Avaux’s warnings about the necessity of strengthening power in Ireland were ignored, which led to the weakening of James’ authority and social support, which gradually decreased the chances of his restoration. By the end of the summer, d’Avaux’s relationship with the English king had permanently deteriorated due to the lack of confidence and mutual agreement.[60] His reports about the situation spurred Louis to modify his policies and the French king often simply approved d’Avaux’s evaluations. Importantly, d’Avaux took Louis’ other military commitments in the continent into account when advising James.[61] By November, his position as James’ counselor became obsolete, and he was dismissed shortly thereafter.[62] D’Avaux accepted this news with opposition and contempt for his successor Antoine Nompar de Caumont, comte de Lauzun: ‘il n’est pas assez fort pour soustenir le poids des affaires dont il est chargé.’[63] D’Avaux felt fully responsible for the failure of most of his efforts to save James’ campaign. We can also presume some degree of perfectionism since he was unwilling to leave before achieving his goals. From these accounts, a conscientious, experienced and attentive diplomat emerges, one unafraid to report accurately and offer his own advice, even when it contradicted his king’s intended strategic direction. As d’Avaux observed the English king ignoring his strategic and tactical recommendations, his reports became increasingly disenchanted and resigned. After all, d’Avaux’s accurate appraisal of the political, military, social and religious circumstances in Ireland led not to the implementation of his advice, but rather to his alienation from James II.

Despite the failed Irish expedition, d’Avaux remained an honoured member of Louis XIV’s diplomatic staff. Between 1692 and 1699, d’Avaux served as France’s ambassador to the Kingdom of Sweden where his chief task was to convince Charles XI of Sweden (1660-97) to act as mediator between France and the Holy Roman Empire in the peace negotiations that concluded the Nine Years’ War.[64] In 1701, d’Avaux briefly deputised the ailing French ambassador Gabriel de Briord in The Hague, before Louis’ diplomatic relations broke with the United Provinces due to the outbreak of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14).[65]

 

Conclusion

Jean-Antoine de Mesmes d’Avaux followed the family tradition of entering a judicial career, followed by the diplomatic profession. He met the requirements set for Louisquatorzien ambassadors by being French, Roman Catholic, noble, wealthy, middle-aged, legally trained (but not highly educated), good-looking, well-behaved, and by having an extended network of influential friends and relatives in illustrious social circles. On the other hand, he remained unmarried and did not speak many languages. Most importantly, d’Avaux was eager, inventive, dedicated and loyal to Louis XIV. The combination of these characteristics, along with the prominence of his origins, made him a perfect candidate for the highest diplomatic service.

D’Avaux was a prominent, acknowledged and a highly successful ambassador of the Louisquatorzien era. The main proof of this were the high number of places of service throughout his career; the exceptionally long period of time spent in The Hague, Europe’s major diplomatic centre; and more importantly, his active involvement in Louis XIV’s most significant diplomatic issues. D’Avaux’s correspondence from the time of his activities in the Dutch Republic – at Nijmegen and in The Hague—attested to his incessant fidelity, dedication, enthusiasm and creativity in seeking information in favour of his prince’s interests. Many of the analysed sources demonstrate that the king relied not only on the news and rumours provided by d’Avaux about the events at his residencies, but also on his personal opinion in crucial questions. It is an ongoing question as to whether Louis XIV’s diplomats followed the King’s diplomatic directions in a largely servile fashion, and the degree to which they were able to assert their own views and voice disagreements. We can argue that Louisquatorzien ambassadors represented Louis XIV in the first instance and that the King’s values, interests and ambitions hence largely defined their manoeuvres. Nevertheless, d’Avaux gained a detailed knowledge of home affairs at foreign courts while receiving only partial information from Louis XIV about his own large-scale international political endeavours. Therefore, d’Avaux’s life and career show that an experienced ambassador, who had spent much time far away from Paris and was actively involved in influencing the direction of politics at foreign courts, could develop his own approach and attitude in diplomatic questions.

D’Avaux continued to diligently represent French interests by James II’s side in Ireland with his diplomatic and martial expertise. In addition to promoting what he found best for the French crown, he also strived to help James’ cause and success against William, as long as these two goals ran parallel to each other. The main issue that d’Avaux faced during this expedition was James’ differing aspirations and unwillingness to compromise, or at least to listen to his advice. Thus, the Irish expedition can be called successful in terms of d’Avaux’s loyal dedication to serving Louis XIV, but unsuccessful in influencing James II to the extent of fulfilling French interests and restoring his power. To conclude, Jean-Antoine de Mesmes d’Avaux was one of the most influential, prominent and reliable ambassadors of Louis XIV. He remained a faithful servant of his king during his career. At the same time, however, the evidence suggests that a sufficiently confident and successful diplomat could act with a fair degree of independence in matters of French foreign service.

 

Bibliography

 Manuscript and Archival Sources

Leiden University Libraries — Special Collections, Leiden (UBL): Jean-Antoine de Mesmes d’Avaux, Mémoires de S.E. mr. le comte d’ Avaux, ambassadeur extraordinaire de sa majesté trés-Chrétienne, presenté aux États Généraux des Provinces Unies (le 28 avril 1685).

Leiden University Libraries — Special Collections, Leiden (UBL): Jean-Antoine de Mesmes d’Avaux, Négociations de Monsieur le comte d’Avaux en Hollande depuis 1679 jusqu’en 1688, vol. 6 (Paris, 1704).

Nationale Bibliotheek van Nederland — Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague (KL): Jean-Antoine de Mesmes d’Avaux, Négociations de M. le comte d’Avaux en Irlande, 1689–90, Hogan, J. (ed.) (Dublin, 1934).

Bibliothèque nationale de France, Gallica — The BnF digital library, Paris (BnF): Abraham de Wicquefort, L’ambassadeur et ses fonctions. Par Monsieur de Wicquefort, Marteau, P. (ed.) (Cologne, 1690, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k93844c, accessed 08.12.2019.

Bibliothèque nationale de France, Gallica — The BnF digital library, Paris (BnF): Claude de Mesmes, comte d’Avaux, Correspondance inédite du Comte d’Avaux (Claude de Mesmes) avec son père Jean-Jacques de Mesmes, Sr de Roissy (1627–1642), Boppe, A. (ed.) (Paris, 1887), https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k9601491s.texteImage, accessed 12.12.2019.

Bibliothèque nationale de France, Gallica — The BnF digital library, Paris (BnF): François de Callières, De la manière de négocier avec les souverains : de l’utilité des négociations, du choix des ambassadeurs et des envoyez, et des qualitez necessaires pour réussir dans ces emplois (Amsterdam, 1716), https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k936753, accessed 08.12.2019.

 

Primary Sources

François Michel Le Tellier de Louvois, Letters of Louvois, Hardré, J. (ed.) (Chapel Hill, 1949).

Correspondance administrative sous le règne de Louis XIV, entre le cabinet du roi, les secrétaires d’état, le chancelier de France, Depping, G. B. (ed.) (Paris, 1855), https://archive.org/details/correspondancead04depp/page/406, accessed 19.12.2019.

Gazette de France, no. 35, 20 August 1695, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k57029613.item, accessed 18.12.2019.

Jean-Antoine de Mesmes d’Avaux, A memorial of His Excellency the Earl of Avaux, extraordinary ambassador from the most Christian king; delivered to the States General, concerning the false interpretation, made to be the meanings of his intercepted letter (1684). London: Given at the Hague on 28 February 1684, and reprinted in London for Walter Davis, Early English Books Online (Imgaes reproduced by courtesy of Bodleian Library), https://search.proquest.com/eebo/docview/2240854408/fulltextPDF/B3750F6599ED4111PQ/1?accountid=12045, accessed 12.12.2019.

Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Lettres, instructions et mémoires de Colbert, Clément, P. (ed.) (Paris, 1863), https://archive.org/details/p2lettresinstruc02colbuoft, accessed 12.12.2019.

Louis-Henri de Loménie, Mémoires de Louis-Henri de Loménie, comte de Brienne, dit le jeune Brienne, Bonnefon, Paul (ed.) (Paris, 1916), https://archive.org/details/memoiresdelouish03brie, accessed 16.12.2019.

Louis Moréri, Le grand dictionnaire historique ou Le mélange curieux de l’histoire sacrée et profane, vol. 7, 3rd ed., Goujet, C-P., & Drouet, É. F. (eds.) (Paris, 1759), https://archive.org/details/MoreriGdDictHist07bnf.pdf, accessed 20.12.2019.

Louis de Rouvroy de Saint-Simon, Les grands écrivains de la France (tome XVII): Saint-Simon. Mémoires, Régnier, A. (ed.) (Paris, 1879), https://archive.org/details/memoiresdesaints17sain, accessed 16.12.2019.

Recueil des instructions données aux ambassadeurs et ministres de France depuis les traités de Westphalie jusqu’à la Révolution française. XXI–XXII: Hollande, André, L., & Bourgeois, É. (eds.) (Paris, 1922–1924).

 

Secondary sources

André, L., Louis XIV et l’Europe (Paris, 1950).

Chappell, C. L., ‘Through the Eyes of a Spy: Venom and Value in an Enemy’s Report on the Huguenot Emigration’, in McKee, J., & Vigne, R. (eds.), The Huguenots: France, exile & diaspora (Brighton, 2013), pp. 77–88.

Clark, G. N., The Dutch Alliance and the War Against French Trade, 1686–1697 (Manchester, 1923).

Côté, M-H., ‘What Did It Mean to be a French Diplomat in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries?’, Canadian Journal of History — Annales canadiennes d’histoire, 45 (2010), pp. 235–58.

Geyl, P., ‘Johan de Witt, Grand Pensionary of Holland, 1653–72’, History – New Series, 20 (1936), pp. 303–19.

Gisselquist, O. N., The French ambassador, Jean-Antoine De Mesmes, Comte D’Avaux, and French diplomacy in The Hague, 1678–1684 (Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1968).

Lynn, J. A., The Wars of Louis XIV, 1667–1714 (London, 1999).

Miller, J., James II (New Haven, 2000).

Ogg, D., Europe in the seventeenth century (London, 1960).

Roosen, W., The Ambassador’s craft: a study of the functioning of French ambassadors under Louis XIV (Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Southern California, 1967).

Roosen, W., ‘The True Ambassador: Occupational and Personal Characteristics of the French Ambassador under Louis XIV’, European Studies Quarterly, 3 (1973), pp. 121–39.

Setton, K. M., Venice, Austria, and the Turks in the seventeenth century (Philadelphia, 1991).

Symcox, G. W., Louis XIV and the war in Ireland, 1689–1691: A study of his strategic thinking and decision-making (Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California, 1967).

Tischer, A., ‘Claude de Mesmes, Count d’Avaux (1595–1650): The Perfect Ambassador of the Early 17th Century’, International Negotiations, 13 (2008), pp. 197–209.

Van Zuylen Van Nyevelt, S., Court life in the Dutch Republic, 1638–1689 (London & New York, 1906).

Wolf, J. B., Louis XIV (New York, 1968).

 

Further reading

Kossmann, E. H., ‘The Dutch Republic’ in Carsten, F. L. (ed.), The New Cambridge Modern History, vol. V (Cambridge, 1961), pp. 275–300.

Wilkinson, R., Louis XIV, 2nd ed. (London & New York, 2018).

Zeller, G., ‘French Diplomacy and Foreign Policy in their European Setting’ in Carsten, The New Cambridge Modern History, pp. 198–221.

 

Notes

[1] I would like to thank Dr. Maurits A. Ebben (Institute for History, Leiden University) for his valuable advice in the autumn of 2019 in the course of writing the paper which served as the basis of this article. Figure on the cover page: Hyacinthe Rigaud, Portrait of Jean-Antoine de Mesmes 4th son of Jean-Jacques de Mesmes (France, 1702), Wikimedia Commons, 2019, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_of_Jean-Antoine_de_Mesmes_(1640-1709)_by_Hyacinthe_Rigaud.jpg, accessed 23.12.2019. All translations are the author’s own unless otherwise indicated.

[2] Abraham de Wicquefort, L’ambassadeur et ses fonctions. Par Monsieur de Wicquefort, P. Marteau (ed.) (Cologne, 1690, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k93844c, accessed 08.12.2019, p. 6, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Gallica — The BnF digital library, Paris (BnF).

[3] François de Callières, De la manière de négocier avec les souverains (Amsterdam, 1716), https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k936753, accessed 08.12.2019, pp. 85–90, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Gallica — The BnF digital library, Paris (BnF).

[4] W. Roosen, The Ambassador’s craft: a study of the functioning of French ambassadors under Louis XIV (Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Southern California, 1967), p. 106.

[5] O. N. Gisselquist, The French ambassador, Jean-Antoine De Mesmes, Comte D’Avaux, and French diplomacy in The Hague, 1678–1684 (Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1968), pp. 336–60.

[6] The terms ‘Dutch Republic’ and ‘United Provinces (of the Netherlands)’ are used to refer to the same territory and political unity in this article.

[7] Gisselquist, The French ambassador, pp. 361–64.

[8] M-H. Côté, ‘What Did It Mean to be a French Diplomat in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries?’, Canadian Journal of History — Annales canadiennes d’histoire, 45 (2010), pp. 235–58, 242–50.

[9] These countries include the Republic of Venice, the Dutch Republic, Ireland, and the Kingdom of Sweden.

[10] W. Roosen, ‘The True Ambassador: Occupational and Personal Characteristics of French Ambassadors under Louis XIV’, European History Quarterly, 3 (1973), pp. 121–39, 122.

[11] The présidents à mortier were the principle magistrates of the parlements, the appellate courts of the Ancien Régime. Louis Moréri, Le grand dictionnaire historique ou Le mélange curieux de l’histoire sacrée et profane, vol. 7, 3rd ed., C.-P. Goujet, & É. F. Drouet (eds.) (Paris, 1759), https://archive.org/details/MoreriGdDictHist07bnf.pdf, accessed 20.12.2019, p. 495.

[12] Claude de Mesmes, comte d’Avaux, Correspondance inédite du Comte d’Avaux (Claude de Mesmes) avec son père Jean-Jacques de Mesmes, Sr de Roissy (1627–1642), A. Boppe (ed.) (Paris, 1887), https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k9601491s.texteImage, accessed 12.12.2019, pp. 197–99, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Gallica — The BnF digital library, Paris (BnF).

[13] A. Tischer, ‘Claude de Mesmes, Count d’Avaux (1595–1650): The Perfect Ambassador of the Early 17th Century’, International Negotiations, 13 (2008), pp. 197–209, 203.

[14] The maîtres de requêtes were judicial counselors of the Conseil d’État (Council of State). Gazette de France, no. 35, 20 August 1695, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k57029613.item, accessed 18.12.2019, p. 395.

[15] Wicquefort, L’ambassadeur et ses fonctions, p. 77.

[16]  ‘…il ait un noble exteriur & une figure agreable qui lui facilite les moyens de plaire.’ in Callières, De la manière de négocier avec les souverains, p. 47.

[17] Louis de Rouvroy de Saint-Simon, Les grands écrivains de la France (tome XVII): Saint-Simon. Mémoires A. Régnier (ed.) (Paris, 1879), https://archive.org/details/memoiresdesaints17sain, p. 100.

[18] ‘He was a strong handsome man and good-looking, also brave, and who had honour, strong spirit of the great world, grace, nobility, and a lot of politeness.’ Saint-Simon, Les grands écrivains de la France, p. 110.

[19] K. M. Setton, Venice, Austria, and the Turks in the seventeenth century (Philadelphia, 1991), pp. 225–27.

[20] Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Lettres, instructions et mémoires de Colbert, P. Clément (ed.) (Paris, 1863), https://archive.org/details/p2lettresinstruc02colbuoft, accessed 16.12.2019, pp. 660–61.

[21] Colbert, Lettres, instructions et mémoires de Colbert, p. 672.

[22] P. Geyl, ‘Johan de Witt, Grand Pensionary of Holland, 1653–72’, History – New Series, 20 (1936), pp. 303–19, 311.

[23] Recueil des instructions données aux ambassadeurs et ministres de France depuis les traités de Westphalie jusqu’à la Révolution française. XXI–XXII: Hollande, L. André, & É. Bourgeois (eds.) (Paris, 1922–1924), pp. 344–45.

[24] John B. Wolf, Louis XIV (New York, 1968), pp. 193–211.

[25] André & Bourgeois, Recueil des instructions … Hollande, pp. xxxviiil xl.

[26] ‘… presence will give much more strength to the assurances.’ André & Bourgeois, Recueil des instructions … Hollande, pp. xl–xliii.

[27] André & Bourgeois, Recueil des instructions … Hollande, pp. 396–98.

[28] André & Bourgeois, Recueil des instructions … Hollande, p. 382.

[29] ‘… in order to be able to support the expenses necessarily attached to this job.’ Callières, De la manière de négocier avec les souverains, p. 46.

[30] S. Van Zuylen Van Nyevelt, Court life in the Dutch Republic, 1638–1689 (London & New York, 1906), p. 292.

[31] For instance: Jean-Antoine de Mesmes d’Avaux, Mémoires de S.E. mr. le comte d’ Avaux, ambassadeur extraordinaire de sa majesté trés-Chrétienne, presenté aux États Généraux des Provinces Unies (le 28 avril 1685), Leiden University Libraries – Special Collections, Leiden (UBL).

[32] For example, during James II of England’s Irish campaign where he worked as the king’s advisor. D’Avaux to Louis XIV on 30 August 1689 in Jean-Antoine de Mesmes d’Avaux, Négociations de M. le comte d’Avaux en Irlande, 1689–90, J. Hogan (ed.) (Dublin, 1934), p. 428, Nationale Bibliotheek van Nederland – Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague (KL).

[33] Gisselquist, The French ambassador, pp. 9–10.

[34] François Michel Le Tellier de Louvois, Letters of Louvois, J. Hardré (ed.) (Chapel Hill, 1949), pp. 365–66.

[35] ‘M. d’Avaux is a nice and very easy-going genius; he has great views, a lot of understanding, and a great use of business. He knows the interests of the princes of Europe perfectly, writes and speaks well. He would be very worthy of being secretary of state.’ Louis-Henri de Loménie, Mémoires de Louis-Henri de Loménie, comte de Brienne, dit le jeune Brienne, P. Bonnefon (ed.) (Paris, 1916), https://archive.org/details/memoiresdelouish03brie, accessed 16.12.2019, pp. 261–62.

[36] D. Ogg, Europe in the seventeenth century (London, 1960), p. 293.

[37] Correspondance administrative sous le règne de Louis XIV, entre le cabinet du roi, les secrétaires d’état, le chancelier de France, G. B. Depping (ed.) (Paris, 1855), https://archive.org/details/correspondancead04depp/page/406, accessed 19.12.2019, p. 406.

[38] C. L. Chappell, ‘Through the Eyes of a Spy: Venom and Value in an Enemy’s Report on the Huguenot Emigration’, in J. McKee, & R. Vigne (eds.), The Huguenots: France, exile & diaspora (Brighton, 2013), pp. 77–88, 81–84.

[39] D’Avaux to Louis XIV on 20 July 1688 in Jean-Antoine de Mesmes d’Avaux, Négociations de Monsieur le comte d’Avaux en Hollande depuis 1679 jusqu’en 1688, vol. 6 (Paris, 1704), pp. 168–69, Leiden University Libraries – Special Collections, Leiden (UBL).

[40] ‘I warn the King, for the tenth time, that everything that is going on in the greatest secrecy in the Council of the King of England has been revealed to the Prince of Orange.’ D’Avaux to Louis XIV on 24 June 1688 in d’Avaux, Négociations… en Hollande…, p. 164.

[41] J. Miller, James II (New Haven, 2000), pp. 186–96.

[42] G. N. Clark, The Dutch Alliance and the War Against French Trade, 1686–1697 (Manchester, 1923), p. 1.

[43] André & Bourgeois, Recueil des instructions … Hollande, p. 399.

[44] A memorial of His Excellency the Earl of Avaux, extraordinary ambassador from the most Christian king; delivered to the States General, concerning the false interpretation, made to be the meanings of his intercepted letter (1684). London: Given at the Hague on 28 February 1684, and reprinted in London for Walter Davis, Early English Books Online (Images reproduced by courtesy of Bodleian Library), https://search.proquest.com/eebo/docview/2240854408/fulltextPDF/B3750F6599ED4111PQ/1?accountid=12045, accessed 12.12.2019.

[45] ‘The ministers of the King of England said that their master would have a large fleet at sea: this served as an excuse for the Prince of Orange to make a greater armament, for he was far from fearing anything, since it was assured that the King of England was not in a condition to apply more than seven to eight ships. (…) That supposing that the Prince of Orange had all these designs, I was obliged to tell His Majesty that he found no help in the Estates-General, that all the fugitives from France had invigorated the Calvinists of Holland so much that one would not dare to promise that the States would join their genuine interests, as they would have done in the past, if such an opportunity had risen.’ D’Avaux to Louis XIV on 10 June 1688 in d’Avaux, Négociations… en Hollande…, vol. 6, pp. 160–62.

[46] L. André, Louis XIV et l’Europe (Paris, 1950), pp. 256–57.

[47] J. A. Lynn, The Wars of Louis XIV, 1667–1714 (London, 1999), p 203.

[48] G. W. Symcox, Louis XIV and the war in Ireland, 1689–1691: A study of his strategic thinking and decision-making (Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California, 1967), pp. 97–98.

[49] ‘So that not only the Irish Catholics… can hope that he will do justice to them, but also that the Protestants… can be assured, that the difference of their religion will not do any harm to them by him.’ Louis XIV to d’Avaux on 12 March 1689 in d’Avaux, Négociations… en Irlande…, pp. 31–32.

[50] ‘The only thing, Sir, that can hurt us, is the irresolution of the King of England, who often changes his mind, and is not always determined to the best. He also stops a lot at little things where he always takes his time and spends it lightly on the most essential [things].’ D’Avaux to Louis XIV on 23 March 1689 in d’Avaux, Négociations… en Irlande…, p. 23.

[51] Symcox, Louis XIV and the war in Ireland, 1689–1691: A study of his strategic thinking and decision-making, p. 106.

[52] ‘… the King of England has no correspondence in England, nor in Scotland.’ D’Avaux to Louis XIV on 4 April 1689 in d’Avaux, Négociations… en Irlande…, p. 50.

[53] ‘The people and the nobility of Ireland are also convinced that this is the only opportunity they can have to regain their freedom…’ D’Avaux to Louis XIV on 4 April 1689 in d’Avaux, Négociations… en Irlande…, p. 50.

[54] D’Avaux to Louis XIV on 14 April 1689 in d’Avaux, Négociations… en Irlande…, pp. 50–54.

[55] D’Avaux to Louvois on 16 April 1689 in d’Avaux, Négociations… en Irlande…, p. 77.

[56] D’Avaux to Louis XIV on 6 May 1689 in d’Avaux, Négociations… en Irlande…, p. 111.

[57] D’Avaux to Louis XIV on 27 May 1689 in d’Avaux, Négociations… en Irlande…, pp. 183–85.

[58] Louis XIV to d’Avaux on 24 May 1689 in d’Avaux, Négociations… en Irlande…, p. 239; Louvois to d’Avaux on 13th June 1689 in d’Avaux, Négociations… en Irlande…, pp. 271–72.

[59] D’Avaux to Louis XIV on 6 August 1689 in d’Avaux, Négociations… en Irlande…, pp. 341–42.

[60] D’Avaux to Louis XIV on 14 August 1689 in d’Avaux, Négociations… en Irlande…, pp. 378–79.

[61] Louis XIV to d’Avaux on 29 June 1689 in d’Avaux, Négociations… en Irlande…, pp. 409–10.

[62] Louvois to d’Avaux on 11 November 1689 in d’Avaux, Négociations… en Irlande…, p. 585.

[63] ‘…. he is not strong enough to bear the weight of the matters he is in charge of.’ D’Avaux to Croissy on 22 December 1689 in d’Avaux, Négociations… en Irlande…, p. 618.

[64] Lynn, The Wars of Louis XIV, 1667-1714, p. 253.

[65] Lynn, The Wars of Louis XIV, 1667-1714, pp. 267-70.

 

 

 

Close To Goodness, Close to Sin: Cultural Meanings of Milk in England between 1500 and 1650

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Link to PDF

Featured image courtesy of Brooklyn Museum, object 34.493

Author Biography

Ilya Maude is a recent graduate of the University of Nottingham. This article formed part of Ilya’s undergraduate dissertation supervised within the Department of History.

Abstract

In early modern England, milk was a culturally potent substance, laden with meanings and symbolism. These meanings were varied among individuals and groups, and subject to change over time. The cultural changes that took place in England between 1500 and 1650 can be found reflected in the changing cultural conceptions of milk and breastfeeding. Historical study of the meanings of milk in this time can serve as a case study for the ways wider cultural changes played out in ordinary life. By examining representations of milk in different spheres, this paper draws together apparently disparate cultural associations, and suggests at ways the major religious changes of this period could have affected them.

Close To Goodness, Close to Sin: Cultural Meanings of Milk in England between 1500 and 1650

 

When a baby is born leaking milk from its breast, midwives are unconcerned.  Roughly one in twenty infants lactate soon after birth, and odd as it seems, it is not associated with negative health outcomes.[1] The only really remarkable thing is its quaint, old-fashioned name – ‘witch’s milk’. More than simply old-fashioned, in fact, the name dates back to the seventeenth century.[2] It is an echo of a time both like and unlike our own, a time when ‘witch’s milk’ was a deadly serious affliction, and milk held a potent set of cultural meanings. It is also the tip of an iceberg, the tiny visible part of a mostly hidden cultural inheritance. Milk and breastfeeding were much debated in early modern England, and although these debates took place in a completely different cultural landscape, they bear an eerie resemblance to present-day conversations. This is not an artefact of milk having some kind of universal Freudian significance; between 1500 and 1650 the cultural meanings of milk in England fundamentally changed. Rather, it is part of the first emergence of a set of broader cultural beliefs about the proper function of the body and what it means when bodies fall outside that, beliefs that still run through parts of English language and culture. Milk sat at an uneasy intersection in early modern England: both a vital foodstuff and, inescapably, a bodily fluid.[3] Although human milk and animal milks shared many of their cultural and medical significances, they were related to the body in different ways – this article focuses primarily on the former.[4] By its very nature, milk ran between categories, and overlapped boundaries. It was at once intimate, and commonplace, nutritious, and vulnerable to spoilage. It is the very in-betweenness of milk, its ambiguities and liminalities, which make it a powerful tool through which to approach wider cultural knowledge.

Milk has been the subject of a number of attempts at ‘global’ cultural history.[5] The best of these, like Deborah Valenze’s 2011 work Milk: A Local and Global History, are really a series of narrow historical case studies, and emphasise the heterogeneity of cultural meaning.[6] Attempts to fashion a global, pan-historical narrative for the cultural meaning of milk are problematised by the wealth of excellent, more narrowly focused, histories of milk in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.[7] There is no reason to believe that the early modern world was any less imbued with complex and changing cultural associations than the modern one, and in homogenising the cultural significances of milk into one pan-European narrative, historians risk achieving simplicity at the expense of accuracy. For this reason, this article is focused on the cultural meanings of milk in a single country, between 1500 and 1650. By examining representations of milk in different cultural spheres, it is possible to draw together apparently disparate associations, and suggest the ways in which the major religious change of this period could have affected them.

 

Religious Context

In early modern Europe, culture and religion were interwoven.[8] Never simple or unequivocal, the religious significances of milk were thrown into contradiction and conflict by the English Reformation. This had a real impact on diet and practise. It is also a key piece of cultural context, central to understanding and reconciling the conflicted cultural significances of milk in the seventeenth century.

In England in 1500, the Catholic Church provided a set of religiously prescribed, albeit contradictory, meanings for milk. In culinary terms, it was a kind of white meat, subject to the strictures of fasting and abstinence.[9] Symbolically, it was strongly linked with nurture and purity, and was particularly associated with the Virgin Mary.[10] Although their influence had waned over the centuries, St. Bernard of Clairvaux’s interpretive sermons on the Song of Songs had done their work in establishing milk as a symbol of divine grace, prayerful communion and Christian nurture.[11] St. Bernard argued for Mary as Mediatrix, and emphasised her maternal capacity in an unsettlingly literal, and powerful, reflection on rebirth.[12] St. Bernard’s Marian sensibility had its impact, as did his focus on lactation and milk – although the way suckling was presented in Christian imagery shifted from the eleventh century to the thirteenth, it remained a core piece of religious imagery.[13] By the start of the thirteenth century, the cultural centrality of ‘milk and honey’ and of the Song of Songs had given way to a softened boundary between Christ’s blood and Mary’s milk which, perhaps because of its congruence with scholarly understandings of the origin of milk, persisted well into the sixteenth century.[14] More a sensibility than a strict piece of theological meaning, the symbolism of ‘giving suck’ persisted in Catholic religious iconography, most frequently in images of the nursing Madonna, but also in some depictions of the wound in Christ’s side.[15]

To the extent that milk was contaminated in Catholic imaginings, it was by its inseparability from female sexual anatomy. It was academic consensus that women ceased to menstruate when pregnant because their menstrual blood instead fed the growing baby. When the child was born, the blood travelled upwards, and was transformed by the heat of the breast into milk.[16] This presented quite a problem to theologians; in addition to being implicitly tied to original sin, menstruation should also have been physically impossible for Mary, based on the physical specifications of the Doctrine of Perpetual Virginity.[17] It was a microcosm of a greater contradiction between the milk and honey of Deuteronomy and the sin assigned to the lactating body. Although there were some attempts to suggest that Mary’s milk came directly from heaven, the conflict was for the most part resolved simply through avoidance.[18] Depictions of the Nursing Madonna positioned her breast unnaturally close to her neck, and although milk frequently appeared in religious iconography, it was abstracted from physical realities.[19] In Catholic religious symbolism, milk was at its purest and holiest when it appeared in abnormal places, flowing from the neck of the beheaded St. Catherine, or arcing from a statue of the Madonna to the mouth of St. Bernard.[20] Its Biblical significance and association with Marian devotions could then be enjoyed, unsullied by its base origin.

By 1650, however, this imagery had started to go off. Mary had fallen from her pedestal, and belief in minor miracles had become a Catholic shibboleth, invoked by Jesuits and seminary priests.[21] Protestants increasingly saw God as communicating his message through the ‘natural’ order and anything perceived to be outside that order became spiritually suspect.[22] Whether milk was to be permitted when fasting fell into insignificance next to the question of whether fasting was required, or even permissible.[23] The English Civil War was ongoing, religious tension and suspicion was rife, and the old cultural rules, rites, and protections had been largely discredited or condemned. Milk-imagery was still invoked regularly in religious writing, but through the imagery of the nursing mother, rather than the miraculous fluid. Phrases like ‘as milk to children’ were used to evoke nurture and sustenance, in spiritual form, but also to chastise. In 1619, for example, Thomas Adams (a Church of England clergyman and prolific writer of Calvinist theology) warned against seeking spiritual sustenance outside the true Christian Church by comparing it to a ‘strange’ nurse, as opposed to the ‘pure milke of your owne mother’.[24] These trends were not absolute – English-language Catholic treatises published abroad still referred to the Lactatio Bernardi and the Virgin’s holy milk – but they were broadly representative.[25] In Protestant England, milk was holy, but only in its proper, ‘natural’, place.

 

Breastfeeding

Words and categories can be manipulated in a way that bodies cannot, and no amount of cultural censure could make lactation and breastfeeding entirely the preserve of respectable married mothers, before or after the English Reformations. As well as a symbolic component of the ‘natural’ family order, woman’s milk was a vital physical commodity, both for the nourishment of infants and its purported curative powers. The contraceptive powers of breastfeeding were well-known in early modern England, and placed new mothers and wet-nurses under suspicion of immorality, regardless of what they did.[26] Breastfeeding one’s own child may have been the epitome of female virtue, but many women would or could not do so. As breastfeeding was a divinely assigned duty, women unable to breastfeed were spiritually suspect, and were offered such unhelpful advice as ‘fast and pray’.[27] The women who sent their babies to wet-nurses had always been the subject of scholarly critique, but as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries wore on, wet-nurses themselves became the targets of religious ire.[28] The construction of motherhood as the ideal state of womanhood was nothing new – it was almost inherent in the paradoxical Virgin Mother, who embodied motherhood without sexuality. Nor was the spiritually suspect nature of women who could not or would not fill this role.[29] Rather, the shift that can be observed is in the framework through which this was understood, justified, and enforced. Where wet-nursing had been understood as so ideally noble that the Virgin Mary was often represented in the role and garb of a wet-nurse, it was now the subject of a peculiarly Protestant genre of attack.[30] Women’s virtue, ability to breastfeed, and the quality of their milk was subject to scrutiny from Catholic and Protestant writers. In broadly Protestant countries, however, this scrutiny took on the language of the ‘natural order’, and the imagery of the saintly wet-nurse, the lactating Madonna and Christ giving suck to his followers gave way to a stricter idealisation of ‘natural’ maternal relations.[31] Woman’s milk was close to goodness, but also to sin. This dual proximity is clearest in the two figures most closely linked to it: the mother and the wet-nurse.

Valerie Fildes’ extensive analysis of breastfeeding and infant care in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries demonstrates that, in elite and educated circles, a woman choosing to breastfeed her own child was exceptional.[32] Elite medical advice was for the most part reflected in elite practice; the age of weaning advised in medical texts was very similar to the age in practice, and there was a large volume of medical writing advising on how to select a wet-nurse.[33] Practically speaking, wet-nurses were one of the facts of life, perfectly ordinary and widely employed. Despite this, wet-nurses and the mothers who employed them were the subject of a disproportionately large volume of writing by learned Protestant moralists, mostly in the form of instructions, admonitions and warnings.[34] These admonitions did not just come from theologians, or even male writers – Elizabeth Clinton, Countess of Lincoln published a pamphlet in 1622 advising women to nurse their own children.[35] The change that took place over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not a shift from a culture in which women were granted relative freedom over their bodies to one in which they were not, but rather a shift in the theoretical and cultural underpinnings of misogynistic critique and control.

Newly-Protestant England did see a profusion of publications warning against the practice of wet-nursing but this was perhaps as much the result of an increase in published material as an increase in paranoia about the risks posed by wet nursing.[36] Anti-wet-nursing arguments in sixteenth and seventeenth century English published material can be usefully divided into two overlapping categories. The first is broadly medical, and included authors from a variety of denominations, including translations of the writings of physicians from Catholic countries, such as the work of the French physician Jacques Guillemeau (published in England in 1612).[37] Medical warnings against wet-nursing were often premised on the role of woman’s milk as a primary agent of heredity, as at least in elite medical writing, it was through breastfeeding that humoral balance could be shared.[38] The humoral balance of the mother or wet-nurse was, therefore, of utmost importance to the health, appearance, and character of the baby.[39] Some writers advised that nurses be selected based on the physical traits that indicated their humoral balance, whereas some, like Guillemeau, believed that the milk itself was sufficient to determine the humoral qualities; a blueish tinge indicating melancholy, yellow suggesting choler, and a reddish tinge either showing an excess of the sanguine humour or a failure of the heat of the breasts to fully transform uterine blood into milk.[40] Humoral balance was also understood as a sexed characteristic carried in milk, albeit one on a spectrum. A prospective wet-nurse needed to have a child of the right sex or risk making a male baby grow into effeminacy, or a female baby ‘a man-like Virago’ – the latter of these was sometimes treated as a potentially desirable outcome, whereas the former was despised.[41] Guillimeau, for example, advises choosing a nurse who has had a male child as the milk will be ‘hotter, better concocted; and not so excrementitious’.[42] The potential problems of an improper wet-nurse were not, however, merely physical, and it was the behavioural criteria for wet-nurses that drew the most hysterical, and telling, commentary.

The second category can be described as arguments grounded in medicine and morality. The character and behaviour of the nurse were understood as intimately connected to the material quality of the milk, but were dangerously hidden – from the wrong nurse, even the sweetest, richest milk could be riddled with corruption.[43] Protestant moral polemicists gave the impression that a wet-nurse of good character and speech was a rare find among the ‘drowsie drunkards’, ‘sawsie sluttes’ and ‘gawde gossips’.[44] Good milk was, of course, good, but it was also rare, and milk concealed sin as easily as it did disease. The risks of a morally dubious wet-nurse were twofold; as Presbyterian non-conformist Robert Cleaver stated in his 1598 publication on household government, ‘the temperature of the minde followes the constitution of the bodie, needes must it be, that if the nurse be of a naughty nature, the child must take thereafter’.[45] Not only might the child become morally degraded by the humoral content of the milk, but they also were placed at risk of neglect or even deliberate injury. Where Catholic Guillemeau described wet-nurses who ‘deserve to be whipt’, for secretly feeding their charge water instead of milk, Protestant writers drew a more direct connection between the immorality of the nurse and the quality of the milk – Barthélemy Batt warned against not only the ‘corrupt maners’, ‘unseemly words’ and ‘fained & dissembled love’ of a wet-nurse, but also ‘pernicious contagion’, ‘odious errours’, and ‘detestable diseases’.[46] Milk could aspire to only one kind of goodness, but was at risk from all kinds of sin.

The major difference was not the extent of the suspicion and ire directed towards wet-nurses and women who did not breastfeed their children, but the way it was framed. In Protestant literature, mothers who chose to employ the services of wet-nurses were subject to the most vitriolic tirades because they had committed the ultimate betrayal of their natural role.[47] This is clearest in Elizabeth Clinton’s writing. Clinton described women choosing not to breastfeed as an ‘vnnaturall practise’, and asserted that the urge to breastfeed was ‘the worke that God worketh in the very nature of mother’.[48] The mother’s first duty was understood to be to her child, and a woman who was capable of nourishing an infant but chose not to flouted the first principles of Christian womanhood – to Clinton, these women were literally going ‘against nature’.[49] These women, memorably derided by Robert Cleaver as ‘daintie halfe-mothers’, were rejecting God’s intended use for their ‘two breasts’, and relegating them to the distinctly un-Godly purpose of ‘ostentation’.[50] It was not only milk that found itself precariously close to sin and virtue – the maternal body was caught in the same impossible position. For women, simply having breasts was potentially sinful, unless their bodies were sanctified by their ‘proper’ function of the nurturing of infants.

The demonisation of wet-nurses and women who did not breastfeed resists a simple narrative. It was not, for example, just men writing against the practice of wet-nursing. Similarly, although there is a clear change over time in the framing of fears about wet-nursing that coincides with the English Reformations and appears to be thematically linked to the cultural changes they wrought, by the seventeenth century Catholic and Protestant English writers were using the language of the ‘natural order’ to assert the importance of women nursing their own babies.[51] Attitudes to breastfeeding bore a relation to theological change, but it was not always linear or predictable. The same can, in fact, be said of the critiques’ relation to material reality. The same two centuries that saw an explosion of anti-wet nursing tracts saw an increase in the uptake of the services of wet-nurses by the aristocracy.[52] This did not necessarily mean that these ideas were not widely shared – the way sex workers have been related to culturally suggests that it is perfectly possible for someone to pay a woman for labour, and also believe that she is inherently immoral for performing that labour, especially when misogyny and unequal wealth informs the relationship. This does, however, raise the greatest contradiction in this body of writing – men, for the most part, had the power to choose whether or not to hire a wet-nurse, and yet the admonitions are primarily directed towards women.[53]

The position of breastfeeding in sixteenth and seventeenth century England is therefore best understood as part of a continuity of misogynistic control of women’s bodies, newly framed by a developing religious and cultural idea of ‘natural order’. Wider fears about the behaviour of mothers coalesced around the ways they did or did not use their milk, and the privacy and uncontrollability of breastfeeding made it a focus for misogynistic anxiety and censure. Woman’s milk was potent, and impossible to truly regulate. It was intimately connected to an unpredictable, and emotionally dangerous endeavour – the raising of infants. Tied by the logics of humoral medicine to menstruation, the original sin of the female body, milk straddled the holy and the sinful. Where it had once stood between the ideal of motherhood and the sin of female sexuality, it was now caught between the natural and the unnatural. How it was understood seems to have been powerfully situational; breastfeeding may have sanctified a mother’s body, but the private milky communion between a wet-nurse and her charge was deeply suspect. Valuable as a commodity, it was nonetheless troubling as a phenomenon. In a humoral understanding of the body, breastfeeding was a moment of vulnerability, where the boundary between two bodies briefly became permeable. In a formal wet-nursing relationship, one of those bodies was necessarily that of a poor woman. This was milk out of place. The abstract good of late-medieval milk had given way to a precarious virtue, no less powerful, but possibly more dangerous to the women touched by it.

 

Witchcraft

Although the historiography of the witch-trials themselves is remarkably well populated, the sources have been surprisingly underused by food historians.[54] Though limited in many respects, these records have great potential; many of them contain transcriptions of illiterate people’s accounts of the events, being one of the only situations in which the narrated experiences of labourers were deemed worthy of recording. They are, of course, profoundly distorted – due to the nature of English court recording, depositions being neither detailed nor routinely preserved, most of the detailed sources available are publications after the fact, by individuals who had no legal obligation to record accurately, and may have filtered what they heard through their own, usually learned, gaze.[55] A further problem is that some of the testimonies they contain were extracted under torture, or threat of it, and are often so fantastical that they clearly cannot be taken as literal truth.[56]

That said, there are few discernible reasons for writers to consistently alter the references to food in recording the events of witch-trials, or for individuals giving testimonies to thoroughly misrepresent their own attitudes to food. Furthermore, the more fantastical references to milk and breastfeeding, understood within the context of the types of imagery which occur repeatedly in the English witch-trials, can be useful in their own right, as a window into the symbolic and folkloric meanings of the substance. References to milk and other dairy products, and breastfeeding-type imagery, occurred disproportionately frequently in published records of English witch-trials. Historians of milk have generally considered it to be culturally and culinarily in decline in this period, losing its associations with piety and its status as healthy and nourishing, and yet to acquire its implications of purity and modernity.[57] The evidence of the witch-trials suggests that not only was milk central to the diets of rural families, but that it held a cultural significance that reflected that centrality.

Even if early modern milk was nourishing, it was also deeply culturally dangerous. Animal milks were vulnerable to all kinds of magical manipulation, and feature disproportionately frequently in the accounts of the English witch trials. Human milk was even more risky. While breastfeeding mothers might be fulfilling their role in a divinely ordained natural order, other instances of lactation in humans could be assigned no such purpose. In the uneasy religious climate of the seventeenth century, there were only two potential explanations for ‘unnatural’ happenings; divine or satanic. Across Europe, neonatal lactation was feared, called ‘witch’s milk’, ‘hexenmilch’ and ‘lait de sorcière’, and implicated in accusations of witchcraft.[58] The connection between witchcraft and milk was shared between a number of countries and regions. Michael Ostling argued that the importance of milk-magic to many of the Polish witch-trials was due to centrality of milk-yields in what Lyndal Roper described as ‘the economy of bodily fluids’.[59] The yield of a cow was at once a physical and symbolic indicator of a family’s prosperity, and the witch drained that prosperity.[60] Although the English witch-trials shared much with those of Poland, the abundance of milk-magic and milk-imagery in them seems to have had a slightly different symbolic significance, one as much connected to woman’s milk as it was to cow’s milk.

A feature common to many of the European witch-trials is the imagery of inversion. This is exemplified by the witches’ sabbath, an unholy gathering which perverted and inverted the rituals of the Christian sabbath. English witch-trials generally lacked the imagery of the witches’ sabbath, but were not lacking in inversion imagery. One of the key sites on which this imagery was focused was the lactating body. While breastfeeding mothers were fulfilling their role in a divinely ordained natural order, other instances of lactation in humans could be assigned no such purpose, and were highly suspect.

Although the English witch trials lacked much of the sexual imagery common to many of the European witchcraft traditions, they were still highly linked to the physicality of the sexed body, through the way the demonic familiars who fed on the blood of witches were described.[61] The descriptions of these familiars feeding use the same language as descriptions of breastfeeding; familiars ‘suck’ from witches, and witches ‘give suck’ to familiars, the same language used to describe babies feeding from nurses or mothers.[62] How exactly this took place varied quite significantly between witch trials. In some cases, such as the accounts of the testimonies of Anne Whittle in the Pendle Witch trials in 1612, and Elizabeth Francis at Chelmsford in 1566, the familiar merely sucked blood from an inconspicuous body part of an accused witch, leaving a mark like a mole, which could then be used to determine their guilt.[63] Many descriptions, however, verge much closer to the image of the nursing mother. In some cases, where the familiar sucked, a raised teat developed.[64] In others, an entirely new ‘dugge’ or ‘pappe’ (breast) was formed where the familiar was ‘given suck’.[65] The positioning on the body was also not always simply neutrally hidden. Some familiars sucked from the breasts as true babes, or from the flank or just under the breast. Many, however, took their nourishment from much more intimate places, such as inside the mouth, behind the ear, the buttocks, and the ‘secrets’.[66]

Belief in familiars, historically linked with popular belief in fairies, has been used as evidence of a reciprocal relationship between elite and popular culture in early modern England, a relationship this thesis advocates for in food history.[67] Intellectual belief in demonic familiars was contested and fraught, but they nonetheless occur in the vast majority of English witch-pamphlets from the period and became codified in Matthew Hopkins’s instructions for the determining of guilt of an accused witch, making them an ideal focal point through which to explore the relationship between popular and elite attitudes to breastfeeding, milk, and the maternal body.[68] One particularly interesting facet of the familiar beliefs is the way they seem to reflect and interact with humoral understandings of milk and breastfeeding. Whereas milk was blood, transformed through the heat of the breast into a digestible and nourishing state, witches fed their familiars with blood, and one of the identifying characteristics of the witches’ teat was that it was cold to the touch. This was one among many maternal inversions.[69] Women killed their children, struck their husbands lame and had them killed, and with the assistance of the devil aborted their foetuses with herbs and potions. The image of the woman suckling a demon in the form of an animal, with blood instead of milk, makes sense within the context of such inversion. The popular origin of belief in familiar spirits suggests that there may have been a popular association between milk and blood, that did not directly come from elite medical theory.

It was not only women suspected of witchcraft who were accused of suckling their familiars, however. There are several instances of men, accused of witchcraft, being described as doing similarly. The octogenarian vicar John Lowes, accused of witchcraft in the Matthew Hopkins-led witch trials in Suffolk in 1645, was described as having ‘a teat on the crown of his head and two under his tongue’.[70] Thomas Evered, a cooper, who was accused of witchcraft alongside his wife Mary Evered in the same 1645 set of trials, was described as giving suck to imps.[71] This is a particularly interesting example, despite meriting only two sentences in the account of the largest witch-hunt in English history, because the particular crime Evered was accused of was so distinctly gendered; in addition to having imp familiars, the couple were accused of having bewitched beer to smell so ‘odious’ that the stink and taste of it killed many people.[72] As Lara Apps and Andrew Gow observed in their book Male witches in early modern Europe, male witches were implicitly feminised, both through being accused of witchcraft, itself a profoundly gendered accusation, and through being associated with sensory domains typed as female in early modern constructions of gender, specifically smell and taste.[73] Evered was therefore doubly feminised, through the nature of his crime, and the sexed nature of the standard elements of an accusation of witchcraft.[74] This was not milk out of place, so much as everything out of place – milk inverted as blood, and woman as man.

The use of breastfeeding-type imagery in the English witch trials is further evidence of the fraught cultural meaning of the maternal body. Breastfeeding’s precarious holiness lent any kind of distortion of it a profound cultural potency. The sucking familiars resembled an unholy communion, a taking of blood meaning damnation, rather than a receiving of blood as salvation. It inverted religious and natural order, intertwined as they were. It demonstrates just how precarious, and how potent, milk really was.

One aspect of the witch-trial evidence which seriously challenges the historical consensus on early modern dairy consumption is simply the centrality and prevalence of milk, cheese, and butter, in so many of the depositions. In elite circles there was a decline in the unique cultural position milk had previously possessed as a culinary ingredient going into the early modern period.[75] The Pendle witch trials, in particular, provide a potential insight into the cultural significance of milk to people with very little immediate contact to the medical theorising that knocked milk off its medieval pedestal. Milk and dairy products were the subjects of many of the magical acts apparently witnessed. In the Examination of Edmund Robinson in 1633, an act of magic is described where ropes attached to the roof of a house are pulled, rather like church bells, and butter, milk, and smoking meat shower down into buckets.[76] Butter was made from milk without ever depleting the quantity of milk, the spilling of milk caused familiar spirits to disappear, and when a man kicked over a can of milk he had given in charity, his cow died the next day.[77] Boiling a can of milk brought forth a toad-like spirit (toads were themselves associated with the female body in medical writing due to their apparent resemblance to the shape of a uterus).[78] Milk begged and denied brought fear and sickness to the denier – the sheer prevalence of milk in the imagery of the English witch-trials is enough to suggest at its huge cultural power and danger.

As Michael Ostling argued about the Polish witch-trials, milk’s status as an indispensable yet vulnerable commodity may have contributed to its particular centrality to accusations of spell-casting. Milk spoils suddenly and repulsively, cows die without warning or explanation, and when cheese-making goes awry, it is often for reasons invisible to the naked eye. Milk-magic was not, however, solely responsible for the prevalence of milk in the English witch-trials. Witch’s milk, the witch’s teat, and the suckling demon all suggest at another dimension to the cultural significance of milk. Layered into narratives of the inverted ideals of Christian motherhood, they call to a substance which was uniquely close to virtue and vulnerable to sin. Milk in its proper place was a blessing, sanctifying and justifying the body of the mother, but outside of that was deeply spiritually troubling. When animal milks and woman’s milk are treated as culturally linked, their significance to the witch-trials can be understood multidimensionally. Milk was both physically and spiritually vulnerable, inhabiting a tenuous place of virtue but unable to escape its connections to menstruation, and consequently original sin. It is no surprise that it flowed through the language of the witch-trials – it was the body out of order, unruly, uncontrollable, and potentially unholy.

 

Conclusion

Milk has been the subject of a number of attempts at ‘global’ cultural history.[79] The best of these, like Deborah Valenze’s 2011 work Milk: A Local and Global History, are really a series of narrow historical case studies, and emphasise the heterogeneity of cultural meaning.[80] Attempts to fashion a global, pan-historical narrative for the cultural meaning of milk are problematised by the wealth of excellent, more narrowly focused, histories of milk in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.[81] There is no reason to believe that the early modern world was any less imbued with complex and changing cultural associations than the modern one, and in homogenising the cultural significances of milk into one pan-European narrative, historians risk achieving simplicity at the expense of accuracy. For this reason, this article is focused on the cultural meanings of milk in a single country, between 1500 and 1650. By examining representations of milk in different cultural spheres, it is possible to draw together apparently disparate associations, and suggest the ways in which the major religious change of this period could have affected them.

Milk did not have one simple set of cultural associations in sixteenth and early seventeenth-century England, but rather had an array of meanings, governed by subculture, but also by situation. It invoked associations of nurture, purity, barbarity, charity, poverty, and motherhood. Although it was undoubtedly gendered as feminine, through the realities of average human biology and traditional gendered divisions of labour, it was not exclusively associated with women, and association with it was used to situate some men closer to womanhood. It was heavily used in Christian religious language and imagery, but in very different ways by writers in Catholic and Protestant regions. As the religious landscape of England shifted, the religious significance of milk also changed, as close as ever to goodness, but perilously close to sin. The religious meanings of milk became ever more contested and fraught during the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and its significance became less about it as a substance, and more about whether it occurred without the bounds of the ‘natural’ function of a body.

The conflicted cultural meanings of milk were not merely an artefact of the variety of cultural, social, and material factors affecting individuals’ perspectives on it. Milk was a profoundly liminal fluid, and this liminality is reflected in certain major conflicts in its meaning. Straddling the intersection of the virtuous and the sinful, and the body and that which lay outside it, milk was steeped in contradiction and conflict. The well-populated genre of vitriolic Protestant tracts against mothers choosing not to breastfeed and the widespread presence of distorted breastfeeding-type imagery in the English witch-trials both highlight how crucial milk and breastfeeding was to the virtuous female body. Like milk, the maternal body was unpredictable, vulnerable to spiritual spoilage and hidden corruption. Milk, and the act of breastfeeding, had huge spiritual and cultural potency, and no exact prescribed religious meaning. Set at the table of blood and meat, and their eucharistic counterparts, wine and bread, milk was uniquely ambiguous, and therefore uniquely dangerous.

 

Notes

[1] D. J. Madlon-Kay, ‘Witch’s Milk: Galactorrhea in the Newborn’, American Journal of Diseases of Children, 140/3 (1986), p. 252.

[2] M. Potts and R. Short, Ever Since Adam and Eve: The Evolution of Human Sexuality (Cambridge, 1999), p. 145.

[3] Human breastmilk was consumed by adults for its curative properties. Although the modern distinction between the culinary and the medical had started to emerge in 16th and 17th century England, it was still less clearly defined than it is now. Milk, and particularly human milk, straddled the two, moving from food to medicine as one aged out of infancy, and then sometimes back to the former in old age.
D. Valenze, Milk: A Local and Global History (New Haven, 2011), p. 70; W. Wall, Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern Kitchen (Philadelphia, 2016), p. 4.

[4] K. Albala, ‘Milk: Nutritious and Dangerous’, in H. Walker (ed.), Milk: Beyond the Dairy – Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 1999 (London, 2000), p. 26.

[5] Including Valenze’s Milk: A Local and Global History, there are five, although one – R. Schmid’s book – is an historically dubious argument for the consumption of raw milk.
M. Kurlansky, Milk!: A 10,000 Year Food Fracas (New York, 2018); A. Mendelson, Milk: The Surprising Story of Milk Through the Ages (New York, 2008); R. Schmid, The Untold Story of Milk – Revised and Updated (Washington DC, 2009); H. Velten, Milk: A Global History (London, 2010).

[6] Valenze, Milk: A Local and Global History, p. 5.

[7] P. Atkins, Liquid Materialities: a history of milk, science, and the law (Farnham, 2010); K. Smith-Howard, Pure and Modern Milk: An Environmental History Since 1900 (Oxford, 2014).

[8] K. Von Greyerz, Religion and Culture in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800 (Oxford, 2008), p. 2.

[9] C. Yeldham, ‘Use of Almonds in Late-medieval English Cookery’, in H. Walker (ed.), Milk: Beyond the Dairy, Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 1999 (London, 2000), p. 352.

[10] Valenze, Milk, p. 18.

[11] St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Commentary on ‘The Song of Songs’, ed. D. Wright, Sermon 9.

[12] St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons of St. Bernard on Advent and Christmas, (Chicago 1909), Sermon 39.

[13] C. Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (London, 1987), p. 269.

[14] Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, p. 269.

[15] Quirizio da Murano’s late fifteenth century depiction of Christ showing his chest wound to a nun applied the stylistic conventions of the Madonna Lactans to the adult Christ, showing him tenderly proffering a wound where his nipple would be with two fingers, surrounded by inscriptions of the most cannibalistic passages of the Song of Songs.
Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, p. 271.

[16] Albala, ‘Milk: Nutritious and Dangerous’, p. 82.

[17] Valenze, Milk, p. 47.

[18] M. Fissell, ‘The Politics of Reproduction in the English Reformation’, Representations, 87 (2004), p. 56.

[19] Valenze, Milk, p. 47.

[20] Valenze, Milk, pp. 43, 48.

[21] A. Walsham, ‘Miracles and the Counter-Reformation Mission to England’, The Historical Journal, 46/4 (2003), p. 781.

[22] A. Walsham, ‘The Reformation and “the Disenchantment of the World” Reassessed’, The Historical Journal, 51/2 (2008), p. 509.

[23] George Abbot, The reasons which Doctour Hill hath brought, for the upholding of papistry, which is falselie termed the Catholike religion: unmasked and shewed to be very weake, and upon examination most insufficient for that purpose (Oxford, 1604), p. 380.
P. Kaufman, ‘Fasting in England in the 1560s: “A Thinge of Nought”?’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte. Ergänzungsband, 32 (2003), p. 178.

[24] Thomas Adams, The happines of the church (London, 1619), p. 56; J. S. McGee, ‘Adams, Thomas (1583-1652), <https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-131>, accessed 12.05.2019.

[25] Thomas Vincent and Arthur Anselm Crowther, Jesus, Maria, Joseph (Amsterdam, 1657), p. 31.

[26] V. Fildes, Breasts, Bottles and Babies (Edinburgh, 1986), p. 109.

[27] Robert Cleaver, A godlie forme of householde gouernment for the ordering of priuate families, according to the direction of Gods word. Whereunto is adioyned in a more particular manner, the seuerall duties of the husband towards his wife: and the wifes dutie towards her husband. The parents dutie towards their children: and the childrens towards their parents. The masters dutie towards his seruants: and also the seruants dutie towards their masters. Gathered by R.C (London, 1598), p. 238.

[28] St. Bernard of Clairvaux, for example, greatly chastised women who employed the services of wet-nurses, using the example of his mother who bore seven children and nursed them all.
B. Åström, ‘Sucking the Corrupte Mylke of an Infected Nurse: regulating the dangerous maternal body’, Journal of Gender Studies, 24/5 (2005), p. 576.

[29] Valenze, Milk: A Local and Global History, p. 49.

[30] B. Williamson, The Madonna of Humility: Development, Dissemination & Reception (Suffolk, 2009), p. 132;  Åström, ‘Sucking the Corrupte Mylke of an Infected Nurse’, p. 576.

[31] Walsham, ‘The Reformation and “the Disenchantment of the World” Reassessed’, p. 509; Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, pp. 270-272; Åström, ‘Sucking the Corrupte Mylke of an Infected Nurse: regulating the dangerous maternal body’, p. 576.

[32] V. Fildes, ‘The age of weaning in Britain 1500-1800’, Journal of Biosocial Science, 14/2 (1982), p. 235.

[33] Although whether that is because the medical advice was followed or because it simply reflected established practise is not possible to determine from the information given.
Fildes, ‘The age of weaning’, p. 223.

[34] P. Crawford, ‘‘The sucking child’: Adult attitudes to child care in the first year of life in seventeenth-century England’, Continuity and Change, 1/1 (1986), p. 31.

[35] Clinton was no less stern in her admonitions than her contemporaries, but perhaps a little kinder – she herself had not breastfed her own children (a choice, the text suggests, that was taken from her) and regretted it.
Elizabeth Clinton, The Countesse of Lincolnes nurserie (Oxford, 1622), p. 16.

[36] Crawford, ‘‘The sucking child’, p. 31.

[37] Jacques Guillemeau, Child-birth or, The happy deliuerie of vvomen VVherein is set downe the gouernment of women (London, 1612), p.7.

[38] Åström, ‘Sucking the Corrupte Mylke of an Infected Nurse’, p. 577.

[39] S. Prühlen, ‘What was Best for an Infant from the Middle Ages to Early Modern Times in Europe? The Discussion Concerning Wet Nurses’, Hygiea Internationalis: an Interdisciplinary Journal for the History of Public Health, 6/2 (2007), p. 205.

[40] Guillemeau, Child-birth or, The happy deliuerie of vvomen, p.7.

[41] Virago was a culturally complex term- positive, for its associations with virtues constructed as male, but also always implying a subtle gendered transgression.
J. A. Schroeder, Deborah’s Daughters: Gender Politics and Biblical Interpretation (Oxford, 2014), p. 107; Prühlen, ‘What was best for an Infant’, p. 205; Åström, ‘Sucking the Corrupte Mylke of an Infected Nurse’, p. 578.

[42] Guillimeau, Child-birth, p. 8.

[43] Valenze, Milk, p. 156.

[44] Barthélemy Batt can be presumed to have belonged to some Protestant denomination, as his work contains references to ‘Papists’ alongside ‘Iewes, Turkes, Infidels’.
Barthélemy Batt, The Christian man’s closet Wherein is conteined a large discourse of the godly training up of children: as also of those duties that children owe unto their parents, made dialogue wise, very pleasant to reade, and most profitable to practise, collected in Latin by Bartholomew Batty of Alostensis, And now Englished by William Lowth, (London, 1591), pp. 16, 54.

[45] Robert Cleaver, A godlie forme of householde gouernment, p. 238.

[46] Batt, The Christian man’s closet, pp. 54 -55.

[47] Åström, ‘Sucking the Corrupte Mylke of an Infected Nurse’, pp. 576, 578.

[48] Clinton’s pamphlet contained a foreword by a Catholic doctor (Thomas Lodge), but was steeped in the distinctly post-Reformation language of natural law pp. 1, 8.

[49] Clinton, The Countesse of Lincolnes nurserie, p. 8.

[50] Cleaver, A godlie forme of householde gouernment, p. 240.

[51] Thomas Lodge ended his foreword to Clinton’s pamphlet with a verse about ‘Gods and Natures lawes’, for example.

[52] Fildes, ‘The age of weaning in Britain 1500-1800’, p. 235.

[53] Valenze, Milk: A Local and Global History, p. 279.

[54] With the significant exception of Christopher Kissane, who has not only produced a focused study of food in the early modern witch trials, but has also argued that such analysis is necessary to understand early modern perception and experience of witchcraft.

Kissane, Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe (London, 2018), p. 130.

[55] M. Gaskill, ‘Witches and Witnesses in Old and New England’, in S. Clark (ed.), Languages of Witchcraft: Narrative, Ideology and Meaning in Early Modern Culture (London, 2001), p. 55.

[56] Torture was generally prohibited in English law, allowed only extrajudicially against traitors in order to get information about their accomplices. Between 1645 and 1647, however, local authorities did torture witchcraft suspects; B. Levack, ‘Witchcraft Trials in England, Scotland, and New England’, in B. Levack (ed.), The Witchcraft Sourcebook (2nd ed.) (Abingdon, 2015), p. 241.

[57] M. Kurlansky, Milk!: A 10,000 Year Food Fracas (New York, 2018), p. 28.

[58] M. Potts and R. Short, Ever Since Adam and Eve: The Evolution of Human Sexuality (Cambridge, 1999), p. 145.

[59] M. Ostling, ‘Witchcraft in Poland: Milk and Malefice’ in B. P. Levack (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America (Oxford, 2013), p. 3.

[60] Ostling, ‘Witchcraft in Poland’, p. 3.

[61] J. M. Garrett, ‘Witchcraft and Sexual Knowledge in Early Modern England’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 13/1 (2013), p. 36.

[62] The Wonderful Discouerie of the Witchcrafts of Margaret and Phillip Flower, daughters of Joan Flower, near Beaver Castle, Executed at Lincoln, March 11, 1618, in B. Levack (ed.), The Witchcraft Sourcebook (2nd ed.) (Oxford, 2015), p. 258;
A True Relation of eighteene Witches that were arraigned, tried, and convicted at a Sessions holden at St. Edmunds-bury in Suffolk, 1645, in B. Levack (ed.), The Witchcraft Sourcebook (2nd ed.) (Oxford, 2015), p. 274;
A. M., Queen Elizabeths closset of physical secrets, with certain approved medicines taken out of a manuscript found at the dessolution of one of our English abbies and supplied with the child-bearers cabinet, and preservative against the plague and small pox. Collected by the elaborate paines of four famons [sic] physitians, and presented to Queen Elizabeths own hands. (London, 1656), p. 19.

[63] The Examination and Confession of Certain Witches at Chelmsford in the County of Essex before the Queen’s Majesty’s Judges, the XXVI Day of July Anno 1566, in B. Levack (ed.), The Witchcraft Sourcebook (2nd ed.) (Oxford, 2015), p. 244;
Thomas Potts, The vvonderfull discouerie of witches in the countie of Lancaster VVith the arraignement and triall of nineteene notorious witches, at the assizes and general gaole deliuerie, holden at the castle of Lancaster, vpon Munday, the seuenteenth of August last, 1612. (London, 1613), p. C.

[64] A True Relation of eighteene Witches that were arraigned, tried, and convicted at a Sessions holden at St. Edmunds-bury in Suffolk, p. 276.

[65] The Confession of Margaret Johnson, in J. Crossley (ed.), Pott’s Discovery of Witches in the County of Lancaster, Volume 6 (Manchester, 1845), p. lxxv.

[66] A True Relation of eighteene Witches that were arraigned, tried, and convicted at a Sessions holden at St. Edmunds-bury in Suffolk, p. 276.
The Wonderful Discouerie of the Witchcrafts of Margaret and Phillip Flower, p. 259.

[67] G. Warburton, ‘Gender, Supernatural Power, Agency and the Metamorphoses of the Familiar in Early Modern Pamphlet Accounts of English Witchcraft’, Parergon, 20/2 (2003), p. 96.

[68] A True Relation of eighteene Witches that were arraigned, tried, and convicted at a Sessions holden at St. Edmunds-bury in Suffolk, p. 277.

[69] S. Clarke, ‘Inversion, Misrule and the Meaning of Witchcraft’, Past & Present, 87 (1980), p. 86.

[70] A True Relation of eighteene Witches that were arraigned, tried, and convicted at a Sessions holden at St. Edmunds-bury in Suffolk, p. 274.

[71] A True Relation of eighteene Witches that were arraigned, tried, and convicted at a Sessions holden at St. Edmunds-bury in Suffolk, p. 274.

[72] A True Relation of eighteene Witches that were arraigned, tried, and convicted at a Sessions holden at St. Edmunds-bury in Suffolk, p. 274.

[73] L. Apps and A. Gow, Male witches in early modern Europe (Manchester, 2003), pp. 128-9.

[74] This particular account bears a sad resemblance to Quirizio da Murano’s bleeding messiah – set against an ideal of natural order, the once-holy image became damning.

[75] Valenze, Milk: A Local and Global History¸ p. 4, p. 59.

[76] Thomas Potts, The vvonderfull discouerie of witches in the countie of Lancaster, p. lxiii.

[77] Thomas Potts, The vvonderfull discouerie of witches in the countie of Lancaster, ‘The Examination of Allizon Device’, para. 4.

[78] Thomas Potts, The vvonderfull discouerie of witches in the countie of Lancaster, ‘The Examination of Iennet Booth’, para. 1; E. Gradvohl, ‘The Toad and the Uterus: the symbolics of inscribed frogs’, Sylloge epigraphica Barcinonensis, 10 (2012), p. 440.

[79] Including Valenze’s Milk: A Local and Global History, there are five, although one – R. Schmid’s book – is an historically dubious argument for the consumption of raw milk.
M. Kurlansky, Milk!: A 10,000 Year Food Fracas (New York, 2018); A. Mendelson, Milk: The Surprising Story of Milk Through the Ages (New York, 2008); R. Schmid, The Untold Story of Milk – Revised and Updated (Washington DC, 2009); H. Velten, Milk: A Global History (London, 2010).

[80] Valenze, Milk: A Local and Global History, p. 5.

[81] P. Atkins, Liquid Materialities: a history of milk, science, and the law (Farnham, 2010); K. Smith-Howard, Pure and Modern Milk: An Environmental History Since 1900 (Oxford, 2014).

 

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