Apples, Apricots, and the Stories of Two Early Modern Pregnancies

As I was browsing substack last week, Helen Castor’s lovely post about biographies of Elizabeth I caught my eye. I am an absolute sucker for those old-fashioned, gossipy biographies that mid-twentieth-century historians of the Tudors did so well. I was taught history by a dyed-in-the-wool Tudor fan, who left no myth unrecounted: young prince Arthur announcing ‘last night I was in the deeps of Spain’ after wedding Catherine of Aragon; Henry VIII alternately charmed and horrified by the risque French-inspired flirtations of Anne Boleyn; poor Anne of Cleves totally unaware that sexual intercourse required more than a kiss on the cheek. Mrs Armstrong invariably followed these anecdotes with an energetic deconstruction of their veracity - she knew her stuff - but pleasure of settling down with one’s basket of dubiously-edible products from Food Tech in the previous period, and listening to a ‘story,’ hasn’t ever really left me.

Somehow, despite all of that, I’d never come across the opening lines of Neville Williams’ 1967 Elizabeth, Queen of England, which Castor quotes in her piece:

Like Eve, it had all begun with an apple. The courtiers who had gathered in the whispering gallery of politics, outside Anne Boleyn’s chamber in Whitehall Palace, one February morning in 1533 first heard the news.

Isn’t it wonderful? The ‘whispering gallery’; the image of courtiers tip-toeing outside the bedchamber; that brilliant gesture to Genesis and the archtypal story of the downfall of humanity. Sexy French-educated Anne is transformed into another Eve the Temptress, merely through an arch reference to fruit. Mrs Armstrong would have loved it.

You’d think this would be an announcement of a birth, but no. By 1533, Anne and Henry’s long courtship appears to have progressed into a sexual relationship. Henry wasn’t yet divorced, but the wheels were well in motion. Electrifying the royal court, Anne casually let slip that she had ‘a furious desire for apples’. In Tudor England, a woman alluding to an appetite for fruit was roughly equivalent to today’s TV trope of a woman of childbearing age mentioning feeling a bit sick. It’s a clever beginning to a biography of Elizabeth I. In most versions of the story of Henry and Anne, any desire or temptation is understood to be sexual. Here, it’s Anne’s pregnancy cravings that set in motion the changing of the world. A woman’s yearning will result in the tearing down of humanity’s relationship with God and the inception of a new world order.

The rest of the story, we know. The baby Anne gave birth to was not the desired boy; no living male children followed, and Henry soon began to distrust those flirtatious French manners and to convince himself of Anne’s infidelity.

Eighty years later, when Elizabeth had been dead for ten years, we encounter another pregnant woman’s craving for fruit - this time, on the early modern stage. In Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, written in about 1613, the eponymous heroine betrays her pregnant state by greedily eating apricots. Secretly married to her steward Antonio, the duchess is brought down by the malcontent Bosola, who offers her the fruit. ‘They taste of musk, methinks, indeed they do,’ she responds approvingly, just before he reveals that they have been ripened in horse dung, and should have been peeled before consumption. The scene is laden with hints about the duchess’s deception in hiding her marriage, and about the inappropriateness of her sexual relationship with a social inferior - a kind of sexual faux pas Bosola will compare to the practice of grafting fruit. Indeed, the duchess betrays her own ‘low’ tastes when she fails to distinguish the aroma of musk - the high-class perfume ingredient, derived from the anal glads of civet cats - from common-or-garden horse dung.

The duchess’s desire for apricots is not a coincidental choice. For pun-obsessed, sex-obsessed early modern writers, the very name of the fruit was a gift: apricot is usually spelt and pronounced apricock (a-prick-cock), and lends itself to associations with sex and pregnancy. But until I read about Anne’s apples, I hadn’t thought it was more than that.

Apricots, however, earn their place in English gardens around the same time Anne made it home from the French court. It has been suggested they were brought to England in 1529, by Henry VIII’s French gardener, John Woolf*. To say that they were not universally popular would be an understatement. The contemporary physician Thomas Moffett offers a memorable description of the fruits as

plums dissembled under a peach’s coat, good only and commendable for their taste and fragrant smell, their flesh quickly corrupting and degenerating.

Reading this, I wonder. Did Webster remember the apples Anne Boleyn used to announce her pregnancy - and the good dose of Francophobia surrounding that episde - and search around for a fruit even more easily associated with the corruption of the flesh, with false appearances and with foreign deceptions? It would be entirely in keeping, for the man whom T. S. Eliot claimed always ‘saw the skull beneath the skin’.

*
For John Woolf and apricots, see J. Woudstra’s cautious comments in ‘Fruit Cultivation in the Royal Gardens of Hampton Court Palace,1530-1842, Garden History 44.2 (2016): 255-271.