”They wept together”: Investigating miscarriage, taboo and support in early modern Scotland

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Dr Philippa Woodcock has recently been awarded the David Berry Fellowship for the History of Scotland and the Scottish People by the Royal Historical Society, and this funding will support her research on this project. 

We look forward to sharing further details on the project shortly. 

Traquair: ‘A lady’s letters’ content

Traquair: ‘A lady’s letters’

Traquair: ‘A lady’s letters’

This day-long visit in June 2026 was kindly supported by Lady Catherine Maxwell Stuart and Margaret Fox, archivist at Traquair House, both of whom afforded me all their help possible. I thank both for their permission to use the archive and work with it in an academic context.

To drive to Traquair from Cardona is to move through the landscape of a past age: the lanes become twistier and narrower, and sunlight barely reaches the carriageway, such is the abundance of tightly knitted branches overhead. Waterways skim the roadsides whilst tracks vanish into the forests. Veering off, and descending to Traquair House, its gardens, brew house and mill, the visitor could easily be in the eighteenth-century, perhaps 1745, when the house’s Bear Gates were apocryphally shut.

When I left this idyllic estate that same evening after an intense but wonderful day in its archives, I could now people that landscape in my mind’s eye. In particular, I had discovered the family of Lady Mary, née Maxwell and the 4th Earl, John (1659-1741): Mary gave birth to 17 children between 1695 and 1711. As she herself recorded, all of these children survived immediate infancy, except one of the couple’s two sets of twins, born prematurely. Accounts for the children’s nursing also endure, as do tallies of the drink money given to each child’s wet nurse by visitors to the house, including neighbour Lady Cardona, Lady Nithsdale and others key to the Jacobite rebellions.

Traquair is of particular value to historians of family history, for a vast deal of Lady Mary’s papers survive, illustrative of a huge epistolary network. On any day she might receive, for example, news from daughter Catherine at Drummond, promising not to ‘durty’ her night shirt or describing a vexed chamberlain ‘for he has had a very grim countenance since the malt tax began to be spock of’, Letters came from further afield from son Charles in France, grumbling that he could not find a good guide to Italy, for ‘... If we were to look out for a Frenchman we could never reckon upon finding one who has travelled into Italy, for there are few Frenchmen, if you accept the soldiers, that travell out of their own country’. On another day, letters from Mary’s mother-in-law, Mary Marischal, might repeat her request that ‘your la[dyship] to come to town that I may enjoy it with pleasure... The companie that will be in town is already come which I thinke ought to be an argument for your la[dyship]'s young familly to desire it because it will be less diverting in some weeks after.’ Somewhat grimly, Lady Mary’s children also wrote to their mother from Edinburgh of their enjoyment ‘of the hangin’ show’.

Most of all, I returned home pleased with the love – filial, marital and respectful –  evident in the archive. The family cared for each other and shared advice for the ups and downs of life. Marriages were arranged with thought and spirit, Lady Perth writing to Lady Mary of her son, that ‘If my Lord John be happy as to get y[ou]r la[dyships] daughter she’ll not only deserve the gamon of bacon att the years ende but still more shen thrice seven years are out’. At the same time, a fine English squire at Terregles, who was ‘making proposals to Ninny’ was laughed at.

When the Stuarts’ friends and relations suffered problems with physical and mental health, help and support was offered. Political and religious choices brought imprisonment and economic hardship, but nonetheless, the 4th Earl’s passion for his wife endured. Suspected of involvement in a Jacobite conspiracy in 1708, he was confined in Edinburgh Castle, from where he wrote ‘I long extremely my Dearest hart to see you so if your health can allow I would have yo take the opportunity of your Mothers coatch to come here.’ This seems to have been a family with a very healthy set of relationships which endures all that life could throw at them. The contribution of the archive to the study of early modern Scottish emotional and medical history has been invaluable to my project’s progress.