Abortion and the Secret Language of Elizabethan Women’s Medicine
- Dorothea Dickerman
- Nov 4
- 6 min read
Updated: Nov 5
What Anne Cecil Didn’t Dare Tell Her Mother
Elizabethan women kept many secrets, but none more forbidden than how to end an unwanted pregnancy.
🕵️ Secrets in Code: Elizabethan Euphemisms for Abortifacients
Elizabethans were masters of saying one thing and meaning another—especially about women’s bodies. “Abortion” was a forbidden word, almost never spoken or written. It was shrouded in a straightjacket of legal risk, sin and moral condemnation. If church and society were strict, Elizabethan law was stricter: rape victims were considered blameless, unless they unluckily conceived. Then the law condemned them.
So what did women do?
Herbal abortion remedies, what we today would call “abortifacients” (a 19th century term), hid under euphemisms like “provoke the terms,” “bring down the courses,” or, very prettily “procure the flowers.” Everyone knew what these phrases meant but pretended not to know.
Herbalists from John Gerard to Nicholas Culpeper tucked this knowledge into their great tomes: fennel “helps bring down women’s courses,” angelica “heats the womb” and “procures women’s courses.”
“Receipt” or recipe books that literate wives and midwives created employed those same euphemisms: “To stop their flowers, let women take of pennyroyal, savin and rue. . .” and “A bath to break the flowers”. Remedies largely passed in whispers from mother to daughter, midwife to neighbor, because most Tudor women were illiterate.
No mention of pregnancy. Or abortion. Only the secret code of women’s medicine.
🔍 The Hidden World of Tudor Women’s Medicine
Tudor women’s medicine was derived from the considerably more frank prescriptions of ancient Greece and Rome. If you search today for the word “abortion” tied to the herbs “fennel” and “angelica” in early modern texts, for example, you’d miss all this. But fennel and angelica, as well as pennyroyal, savin, rue and other herbs, have been recognized as abortifacients for thousands of years. The knowledge was there – if you knew the secret language and the code.
🤐 Anne Cecil’s Secret
Imagine the winter of 1574. My third heroine, eighteen-year-old Anne Cecil, has a problem. She is throwing up - and late. Yes, that kind of “late”.
Anne’s problem runs deeper than most in her predicament. Although married for three years, she had still been a virgin - until she was recently “deflowered” by someone not her husband, forced her against her will in an act of revenge. Her rapist? The most powerful man in England.
He warned her to keep silent. She believes he will kill her husband and her father if she doesn’t.
Her mother, Mildred Cooke Cecil, is no ordinary Tudor matron. One of the most learned women in England, Mildred’s fluent in English, French, Italian, Latin and ancient Greek. She corresponds with scholars across Europe and subscribes to strict Calvinist doctrine condemning abortion as a mortal sin.
A formidable herbalist, Mildred can read the original ancient medical texts of Galen and Dioscorides and prepare recipes for curing almost any ailment. See: 🌿 👉 The Three Cooke Sisters: Were They the Real "Witches" in Shakespeare's Macbeth?
But although Anne habitually leans on her mother for almost everything else, she doesn’t dare ask Mildred for help with this problem. Mildred Cecil isn’t the type of mother a daughter can tell that she’s pregnant, and not by her husband.
🌾 The Solution to Anne Cecil’s Problem
We don’t know whether Anne confessed or whether her husband guessed she was pregnant. But her problem and looming disgrace became his. And he wasn’t about to involve his mother-in-law either.
His worst enemy had committed a violent crime against his wife, poisoned his household and seeded a bastard into his bloodline. Nevertheless, he commanded more than “a little” Greek and Latin himself. He may have done his own research before contacting his old tutor: Sir Thomas Smith, linguist, ambassador, and sometime alchemist in the secret language of women’s medicine.
Smith prepared a custom cordial, an herbal-infused “water”, for Anne. She took it quietly until her mother found out. Then Mildred erupted, writing Smith a letter (now lost to time) that must have burned through the page.
However, Smith’s reply survived. It reveals Mildred’s seething over two ingredients: fennel and angelica water, both known and ancient abortifacients. If Anne were finally pregnant (as her symptoms indicated), why had Smith given them to her daughter? Initially, to Mildred, Anne could be carrying her husband’s son and heir! Or at least a daughter proving the marriage was consummated and Anne was fertile.
What on earth did Smith, Anne and Anne’s husband think they were doing?
📜 Thomas Smith’s Elixir and the 1574 Letter That Gave it All Away
Smith backpedaled like a man caught with his hand in an apothecary’s jar. He wrote:
“Madam, I sent yesterday of my water to my Lord for my Lady Oxford. Methinks there is some doubt made of it . . . . There is nothing in it but such as is daily eaten & drunken . . . .the fennel and the angelica water can be vomited out . . . I can say no more. But I would be as sorry that my Lady of Oxford should miscarry as if she were five times my daughter . . . . giving but a spoonful, if life were in the body, for it should disperse straight and comfort the vital spirits.”
—Thomas Smith to Mildred Cecil, Nov/Dec 1574 (Lansdowne 19/50, ff. 116–17)
Smith claimed it was harmless and that Anne could vomit out just the fennel and angelica. (Really?)
But look closer. “I can say no more.” “Miscarry.” “If life were in the body.” Those are not words about a digestive cordial, but Elizabethan code words for abortion.
🫗 Masters & Smith Spill the Truth
Mildred must have then realized why Anne and her husband had sought help from Smith. She knew exactly what fennel’s giant relatives and distilled angelica water could do. Since Anne’s only job was to produce a legitimate heir for her husband, her mother, of all mothers, knew something very serious was afoot.
Anne’s desperation deepened. In her fifth month of pregnancy, she approached her family’s physician, Dr. Richard Masters, begging for another abortifacient. But Masters betrayed her secret to her father, William Cecil, Lord Burghley (the second most powerful man in England), including how distraught and teary Anne had asked for some “medicines ad mensus promotiones” – “medicines for the promotion of mensus” -- another code, this time in dignified Latin.
And Dr. Masters’ medical advice to Anne?
He counseled her to “wait a while longer.”
Burghley, the Queen’s Lord High Treasurer, was justifiably terrified at the thought of both the Queen’s and the rapist’s wrath. He ordered Masters to tell Queen Elizabeth I about his daughter’s “joyful” news, thereby covering up the rape and the rapist.
🍶 A Dark Secret at Elizabeth’s Court and in Housewives’ Pantries
Smith’s single letter cracks open a hidden door into the world of Elizabethan women’s medicine. Through it we see that abortifacient knowledge was everywhere, at court and in country cottages, but heavily veiled under euphemisms.
Hidden behind those euphemisms are the real human secrets:
✨ A rapist serial
✨ A mother furious
✨ An herbalist defensive
✨ A doctor duplicitous
✨ A father cowardly
✨ A faithful wife desperate
✨ A dishonored husband trying to quietly solve the problem
They all came to understand that the child Anne carried was not her husband’s. But revealing her rape and her rapist’s identity was far more dangerous.
Are you brave enough to hazard a guess?
🤓 For the Deep Divers
If you loved this intersection of secret Elizabethan history and women’s medicine, these are some modern sources that unlocked the door for me:
Alex Gradwohl, Herbal Abortifacients and their Classical Heritage in Tudor England. University of Pennsylvania, Penn History Review 20.1 (2013).
John M. Riddle, Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance. Harvard University Press, 1992.
Gina Kolata, “In Ancient Times, Flowers and Fennel for Family Planning.” New York Times, March 8, 1994.
If you want to learn more about Anne Cecil, check out this video lecture on YouTube: 🐭 👉 The Roar of the Mouse: Anne Cecil de Vere and What She Tells Us About Shake-speare
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