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Last time, we started talking about the 1720s media's response to the Mary Toft case, and their treatment of the physicians Nathanael St André, James Douglas, Richard Manningham and Cyriacus Ahlers, and also the amateur astronomer Samuel Molyneux, who had gone to Godalming to try his hand at praeternatural obstetrics.

Another figure, who I've not actually mentioned yet, since he wasn't that important in the case itself, but who I'm about to mention at least a bit because he was one of the main people the press took the piss out of, was John Maubray. He'd recently published a book titled The Female Physician, containing all the Diseases incident to that Sex, in Virgins, Wives and Widows, TOGETHER With their Causes and Symptoms, their Degrees of Danger, and respective Methods of Prevention and Cure: To which is added, The Whole ART of New improv'd Midwifery; COMPREHENDING The necessary Qualifications of a Midwife, and particular Directions for laying Women, in all Cases of Difficult and Preternatural Births; together with the Diet and Regimen of both the Mother and Child. (I'll just call it The Female Physician from now on), and it broadly covered, in Maubray's own special way, the topic of obstetrics and gynecology, and especially for his description of an incident when, passing through the Netherlands on his way home from Germany, he was on a boat across the Zuiderzee from Harlingen to Amsterdam.

A fellow passenger had unexpectedly gone into labour and, being a renowned physician, Maubray was called upon to help with the delivery. The woman gave birth not only to a normal human baby, but also to a delightful little Dutch creature known as a sooterkin, or de suyger - which, according to Maubray, means "the sucker", (although this etymology is far from certain). Maubray describes it as:

"a Monstrous little Animal, the likest of any thing in Shape and Size to a Moodiwarp; having a hooked Snout, fiery sparkling Eyes, a long round Neck, and an acuminated short Tail, of an extraordinary Agility of FEET. At first sight of the World's Light, it commonly Yells and Shrieks fearfully; and seeking for a lurking Hole, runs up and down like a little Dæmon"

The creature on the boat ran around screaming for a bit until some other passengers, Dutch people for whom this kind of thing was apparently an everyday occurrence managed to kill it.

Maubray claimed that, according to "some of the most learned Men, of the several famous Universities in these Provinces", it happens to almost two-thirds of the "seafaring and meaner sort" of Dutch mothers, but presumably it wasn't actually commonplace in the Netherlands for women to give birth to daemons that run around screaming until you kill them, which sort of suggests Maubray just made it up. Indeed, in a pamphlet by James Douglas responding to The Female Physician, he says

"I have discoursed with the Dutch midwives and nurses about this animal, but they are all clear to give their affidavits that it has no existence in nature."

The notion of de suygher was not, however, simply an invention of Maubray's. If we go all the way back to 1559 we get a description from the Dutch physician Levinus Lemnius that sounds very similar to Maubray's story. He talks about a patient of his, a sailor's wife, giving birth (I'm using the translation from the Latin by Valerie Worth-Stylianou, from the excellent website birthingtales.org).

"the woman first, with great suffering and much distress, expelled a certain lump of flesh which was quite shapeless. I surmise that she had conceived this after she had already conceived a foetus legitimately. On both sides of this heavy lump were two long handles like arms, and it moved and seemed to be in some way animate, like sponges and sea urchins which in our region are called "Elschouve". We see great numbers of them floating on the sea in summer, and once they are pulled out of the water, they slide along amazingly, and if they are handled for a long time, they dissolve. Shortly after this there came from her womb a monster with a hooked beak, a long round neck, eyes which moved from side to side, a long pointed tail, and feet which ran fast. As soon as it saw the light, the monster started to make a great din, running all over the room, trying to hide itself somewhere. But finally the women caught it and with cushions and pillows suffocated it. Because this sort of monster had drunk all the blood of the child it is called a leach ('Suyghers' in our language). Finally, this woman gave birth to a boy who had been so injured and torn apart by this monster that he survived only a short time after being baptised."

The English got hold of stories like this pretty quickly in the 16th and 17th centuries, calling the creature a sooterkin, which, while it sounds like just about the most Dutch word imaginable, is only ever used in English sources. Possibly intended as a joke at the expense of Dutch women, who traditionally used to put small stoves under their skirts to keep their feet warm, the English came up with the idea that these bizarre things developed through the effect of the heat from these stoves.

In the English midwife Jane Sharp's 1671 work The Midwives Book, she associates de suyger with other European stories of monstrous births of non-human creatures.

"As for Monsters of all sorts to be formed in the womb all nations can bring some examples; Worms, Toades, Mice, Serpents, Gordonius saith, are common in Lumbardy, and so are those they call Soote kints in the Low Countries, which are certainly caused by the heat of their stones and menstrual blood to work upon in women that have had company with men; and these are sometimes alive with the infant, and when the Child is brought forth these stay behind, and the woman is sometimes thought to be with Child again; as I knew one there myself, which was after her childbirth delivered of two like Serpents, and both run away into the Burg wall as the women supposed, but it was at least three months after she was delivered of a Child, and they came forth without any loss of blood, for there was no after burden. Again in time of Copulation, Imagination ofttimes also produceth Monstrous births, when women look too much on strange objects."

This last sentence ties all these stories in with the theory of maternal impressions, which was a belief that most people seem to have largely taken for granted at the time. But Sharp is also talking in strictly naturalistic, physiological terms. This account of a woman giving birth to "serpents" falls in the middle of a generally very reasonable chapter on molar pregnancies. This is a pregnancy complication where the cells that would normally become the placenta instead become a large growth in the uterus. In many cases there is no fetus at all, and when there is one it is almost never viable.

It's sometimes said that these are what sooterkin stories are talking about - there are simlarities, but, as a paper that I found by AW Bates points out, the descriptions of sooterkins that we have don't seem to be of things that would look similar to a hydatidiform mole, which would be a fairly indeterminate mass of flesh. Also that sooterkins are often accompanied, as in Maubray's account, by normal live births, which would be extremely unusual for a hydatidiform mole, and thirdly that hydatidiform moles were well-understood at the time, as we can in fact see in Jane Sharp's book that talks about them as a separate but related phenomenon to the sooterkin. Maubray also talks about moles and sooterkins as separate phenomena. Section 7 of The Female Physician has a whole chapter titled Of Moles (which Maubray also asserts are particularly common in the Netherlands), while De Suyger is discussed in a chapter of the same section titled Of Various Deformed Conceptions, following the chapter Of Monsters, where he is in fact talking about very severe birth defects, of which he asserts that

"such Prodigies, or rather Dæmonical Illusions, may appear, as well as Monstrous Births happen, by the Will and Pleasure of the great CREATOR, who would thereby signify and portend something extraordinary, or more than Natural to us Mortals."

Maubray's other category, Various Deformed Conceptions, groups de suyger together with less severe birth defects, which he says are most often caused by "an impure and unseasonable Copulation: Such as is not only precisely forbid by the Express Word of God, but also repugnant to right Reason, and even to common Sense", and the precise perverse and disgusting sex act he's talking about is clarified by a citation to Leviticus 15:24.

"If a man has sexual relations with her and her monthly flow touches him, he will be unclean for seven days; any bed he lies on will be unclean"

Interestingly, Maubray's discussion of deformities doesn't at any point consider maternal impressions as a potential cause. He instead seems to greatly prefer to talk in terms of abnormal births as examples of divine agency, either, in the case of "deformed conceptions", as punishments for the sin of period sex, or in the case of monstrous births as divine portents intended as warnings to humanity.

On account of this anecdote, John Maubray had become know as "The sooterkin doctor". He was one of many people who had visited Mary Toft in Lacy's Bagnio - he had only visited once, on December 4th, when the crowd had been eagerly awaiting another rabbit for five days, but in Hogarth's Cunicularii, he's there, in the mock nativity scene with the patient at the centre, labelled as "the sooterkin doctor astonish'd", eyes turned skywards as if in a religious ecstasy, saying simply "a sooterkin". And another engraving, "The Surrey Wonder", by George Vertue, illustrating a play of the same title, shows him entering the room where St André is delivering a rabbit, holding up a bottle that we can only assume contains some kind of sooterkin, maybe preserved in alcohol or something.

Given that he had such little direct involvement in the Mary Toft affair, it's perhaps not totally fair that the media associated him so closely with it. On the other hand, the affair became to some extent a vehicle for more generally mocking the credulity of the medical establishment, of which Maubray's Dutch sooterkin anecdotes were another prominent example, so in that way it makes complete sense that Maubray would become intimately associated in the popular imagination with Toft.

The pamphlet A letter from a Male Physician In The Country In Response To The Author Of The Female Physician In London Plainly Shewing, That for Ingenuity, Probity, and extraordinary Productions, he far surpasses the Author of the NARRATIVE, To which is added, A Short Dissertation upon Generation, whereby every Child-bearing woman may be satisfied. that 'tis as impossible for Women to generate and bring forth Rabbets, as tis impossible for Rabbets to bring forth Women, written in character as a less well-known physician writing with mock-fawning admiration to Maubray, explicitly draws a comparison between Maubray and St André.

"Sir, since no body has hitherto pretended to account for it, that you would be so good as to account for this remarkable Delivery, as you have elegantly done for many yet more remarkable Events in your Time: Tell us particularly, Learned Sir, how these Rabbets were generated, and whether you think they were stopp'd in the Fallopian Tubes, as his Majesty's Anatomist has wisely hinted; or whether you think they were bred in Utero, and forget not to tell us, how they came there; for out of the Uterus he certainly brought forth the Head of a praeternatural Rabbet, with the Furr on it, and delivered her of the entire Trunk of a Rabbet stript of its Skin, of about Four Months Growth"

This letter is followed by a fictionalised account of the origins of the hoax, told as a dialogue between a noblewoman and Mary Toft's mother-in-law, Ann (here called Margaret, which was in fact the name of Mary Toft's sister-in-law) who is here described as being a midwife, and has read The Female Physician.

Lady: Prithee Dame, speak sparingly of the Labours of the Learned, and let me know what those are you call Wonders.

Midwife: First, The Language is wonderful, such as neither I nor my Deputy can prehend, nay, not one Word in a Hundred; and I question whether your Top Midwives at London understand it; and, if it was not ill Manners, Madam, I might even venture to say your Ladyship would be puzzled with Ten Thousand Crambo Words that I don't understand.

Lady: You surprize me, Dame, is not the Book English?

Midwife: Yes, Madam, it is, and yet I defy your Ladyship to understand it.

Lady: Well, Goodie, so much for the Language of it; now tell us What other Wonderfuls it contains.

Midwife: Wonderful Stories of Womens being turned into Men! Wonderful Conceptions of Women without the Help of Men! Wonderful Births of wonderful and monstrous little Animals, that at first Sight of the World's Light made wonderful Shrieks, and ran up and down like wonderful little Daemons, and those none of the better Sort, the first time he saw them. The first of these, he says, made Its wonderful Egress filling his Ears with wonderful Shrieks, and...

Lady: These are really wonderful things, Goodie.

Ann goes on to explain to the Lady how The Female Physician gave her an idea:

Midwife: To be plain with your Ladyship, I'll tell you a strange Story about some Rabbets, perhaps as odd as his Sooterkins; for his Book gave me the first Hint to hatch and contrive Ways and Means to palm an English Rabbet on the World for his Dutch Sooterkins.

Lady: Prithee do, dear Goodie Toft, and thoul't extremely oblige me.

Midwife: Well, has not your Ladyship heard of the Woman that brought forth so many Rabbets? and has not your Ladyship seen and read a Short Narrative of that extraordinary Delivery?

Lady: Yes, yes, I have. The Publick have been pestered with that Rabbet-Woman a long time; and I had the Curiosity to go see her the Bagnio.

Midwife: To tell you the Truth, she's my Daughter-in-Law, that is, my Son Joseph's Wife, and a Sly Slut she is, as little as they think of her. But poor thing file's like to come into a great deal of Trouble yonder at London, for a silly, senseless Whim of mine, that came into my Head, after reading the Sooterkin Story, &c. in the Female Physician.

And this brings us to the question of what the media made of Mary Toft herself. Well, the press was absolutely savage. Personally, I like to think of Mary Toft as a sort of anti-establishment hero, who had put herself through tremendous hardship to pull off an extraordinary prank at the expense of Georgian England's high society. And I suspect the contemporary press might have seen her in a similar light if she'd been well-dressed, eloquent, charming like Claude Duval or Jack Sheppard, or the other dashing rogues that Georgian pop-culture idolised. But Mary Toft was profoundly uncharismatic, she was illiterate, from the small-town working class, and (perhaps worst of all) a woman. It's a bit odd that for all the media's delight in the humiliation visited on establishment figures like St André, the architect of that humiliation gets virtually no credit at all.

Mary Toft is almost entirely presented as a 'mere simple tool', being dragged along by people like her husband, her mother-in-law, and John Howard. This coverage generally focuses on presenting Mary Toft as profoundly and impressively stupid, which is an impression a lot of people seem to have had of her just based on her appearance and how she carried herself. St André himself described her as "Of a very sullen and stupid demeanour", and that broadside I've mentioned before, with the comic strip, opens with

Poor Mary Toft in ignorance was bred
And ne'er betrayed a deep designing head

Indeed, the dialogue I gave earlier presents Ann Toft as very much the instigator, with Mary simply being her puppet. One of the accounts of the case, titled Much Ado About Nothing, was written in character as Mary Toft, in what I assume is a parody of a contemporary rural working-class dialect, littered with clumsy misspellings, and obviously crude sexual innuendo. Take as an example:

"so he tretid me with as fine a rawbit as effer I tastid in my born days. Now you must know his Rawbit had an indiffrunt tast from ani I had effer ete, for it wos not bylt , nor rostid, nor fricumceed, but tost up skin and aul with its eres prickt up. How effer, thank G-, I got it all down, and thote I nevur tastid a dellikittur morsil in my lyf; my huzbund had giffen me mani and mani a Rawbit before, but no comparrezon. So I neffur aftur vallid his Rawbits, no more then nutthink at all, but alwas honed and honed for my nabur's rawbit."

It's not clear whether Mary Toft actually was as stupid as everyone makes out. It was certainly in her interests to make out that she was simply the puppet of her in-laws, especially when the prospect of a criminal prosecution was looming. She could minimise her own agency by playing to the way everyone thought she was a complete idiot. On top of that, it suited the media as well, who wanted to dunk on St André. Emphasising Mary Toft's stupidity made St André seem even more stupid for having been duped by her.

Maybe it was part of the act from the beginning. It would have made her seem more trustworthy, and made it seem less likely that she was able to pull off an elaborate hoax. Or maybe they were all just being snobby about her working-class accent and mannerisms, Or maybe she actually just was extremely thick.

The other thing that's apparent in Much Ado About Nothing is the sexual innuendo, and the sort of insinuation that Mary Toft was some kind of depraved sexual deviant.

A satirical poem, written anonymously, although Dennis Todd thinks it was most likely actually written by the Physician and Satirist Dr. Arbuthnot, takes the piss out of this sort of reaction.

"Whip, said Sir Thomas, Whip the slut,
It is a breach of peace
That Woman any thing should put
But Pintles into that Place"

(Pintle being an old word for penis). Here we see the idea again that the anger at Mary Toft was mostly on account of her apparent sexual depravity, although it's certainly Sir Thomas Clarges, the Justice Of The Peace who comes off looking worse here. Indeed he was weirdly enraged about the whole thing, and Douglas and Manningham had to restrain him from sending Toft straight to prison before they could extract a confession.

Mary Toft's femininity was central to the hoax, and to its media coverage, and to some of the media, this made it even more humiliating for the doctors who had fallen for it (or who were presented as falling for it).

"Most True it is or dare I say,
E'er since the days of Eve,
The weakest woman sometimes may
The wisest man deceive"

Of course, we've got puns on that old pronunciation of Coney, like I mentioned in the last episode, which was all far too convenient to resist. For instance, in the cartoon strip I've referred to a few times:

"Strange turn of human life - unhappy Molly
Is now to Bridewell carry'd to mill dolly
The Coney Warren's Ruined and no more
Must ferrets hunt there as they did before"

Or indeed in the aforementioned ballad:

"On tiptoe then the squire he stood
(but first he gave her money)
Then reached as high as e'er he could
And cried 'I feel a Coney'"

(Pintle being an old word for penis). Here we see the idea again that the anger at Mary Toft was mostly on account of her apparent sexual depravity, although it's certainly Sir Thomas Clarges, the Justice Of The Peace who comes off looking worse here. Indeed he was weirdly enraged about the whole thing, and Douglas and Manningham had to restrain him from sending Toft straight to prison before they could extract a confession.

Mary Toft's femininity was central to the hoax, and to its media coverage, and to some of the media, this made it even more humiliating for the doctors who had fallen for it (or who were presented as falling for it).

"Most True it is or dare I say,
E'er since the days of Eve,
The weakest woman sometimes may
The wisest man deceive"

Of course, we've got puns on that old pronunciation of Coney, like I mentioned in the last episode, which was all far too convenient to resist. For instance, in the cartoon strip I've referred to a few times:

"Strange turn of human life - unhappy Molly
Is now to Bridewell carry'd to mill dolly
The Coney Warren's Ruined and no more
Must ferrets hunt there as they did before"

Now what became of everyone afterwards? For Douglas, Manningham and Ahlers, the affair pretty much blew over. The press moved on to other things, and they continued their medical careers as they had before.

It was another matter for St André. His career and reputation were in ruins. The "Full Account of this Discovery, with Some Considerations on the Extraordinary Circumstances of this Case" never ended up being published. Roger Lacy, the owner of the bagnio where Mary Toft had stayed, ended up having to sue him for unpaid bills. It came to £57, or about £7000 in modern currency. Now popularly known as 'the rabbit doctor', St André's life continued to be weird. In 1728, Samuel Molyneux, the amateur astronomer and secretary to the Prince of Wales who we've already introduced when he visited Mary Toft in Guildford, collapsed in the House of Commons. In spite of St André's ministrations as physician, he died a few days later. Not waiting a moment, the very same night he died, St André eloped with Molyneux's widow. They were married two years later.

Obviously the suspiciously convenient timing of Molyneux's death gave rise to rumours that St André had poisoned him. While there wasn't enough evidence to actually prosecute him for murder, this only did further damage to his already shattered reputation. Generally it's not a good look for a doctor if everyone thinks they're in the habit of murdering their patients in order to steal their wives. He actually won a defamation lawsuit, but still was never able to recover his prestige as a physician, which to be fair was improbable to begin with. Him and his wife, Elizabeth, moved to Southampton and lived in quiet obscurity on Elizabeth's inherited wealth, until Elizabeth died, his house burned down and he lost all his money in some bad investments. He died in an almshouse in 1776, aged 93.

Howard also came off badly. He was charged with conspiring with Mary Toft, and the case ended up being moved to the King's Bench, the highest court in England. He was bound over for £400, about £47,000 in modern currency. In the end the case was dropped. Howard returned to Guildford and continued to practice medicine. I suppose he had less to lose than St André, being less closely involved with London high society and court intrigues where reputation counted for everything, so he was to some extent able to recover his career.

As for Toft herself, she was released from Bridewell after four months in April 1727, without charge. While the evidence that she had carried out the hoax was unquestionable, Karen Harvey points out that a prosecution for fraud would require evidence that she had actually profited in some way. There's plenty of discussion of potential financial gain as a motivation (in the words of Dennis Todd, "giving birth to rabbits was an uncommon but not unreasonable way to make money in the eighteenth century"), but the evidence that any money actually changed hands is limited to a single mention of Ahlers (who didn't actually believe her in the first place, so can hardly be said to have been defrauded) giving her a Guinea. Ahlers says that Howard asked for a pension from the King, but there's no smoking gun that proves the Tofts themselves had the same idea. The other reason was that the affair had been very embarrassing for a lot of important people (not least the King himself, who had been sending all these doctors to Guildford), and the press interest was starting to die down. Bringing it all back up again for a trial that would go into great detail about how they'd all fallen for such a blatant scam was the last thing they wanted.

Indeed, the motive remains a bit of an open question. I think it's probably most plausible that the Tofts were after a royal pension, or some other financial gain, maybe charging people to watch, in a setup a bit like the freak shows that were popular at the time, but like I said, there's no smoking gun. I kind of like the idea, even if it's a bit more far-fetched, that they just thought it would be funny.

In one strange episode, while Mary Toft she was in prison, a newspaper printed what they claimed was her suicide note, also seeming to confuse her with her mother-in-law, Ann Toft:

"I Ann Toff, finding myself in the hands of justice and could by no means get from it, I took this mathoad to rid myself of so great a torment which I must have suffered in this world the matter being of my own contrivance from the very first hoping to get some money of the country people to help to maintain me under so pretended a misfortune but little thought It would come to so great a head as it did so hoping to recover more mercy from god then I deserve I depart this world fell of confusion"

Presumably at some point someone would figure out that Mary Toft actually wasn't dead, and also wasn't called Ann, but I suppose by that point people would still have bought the paper so it wouldn't matter.

We don't hear much about Mary Toft after that. She returned to Godalming, became pregnant again in 1728, leading to a bit of media speculation, but resulting in no doubt crushing disappointment when the baby turned out to be a human. In 1740, she was apparently arrested again for receiving stolen goods, and she remained at least a bit notorious for decades afterwards. She was apparently invited to dinners at the Duke of Richmond's residence in Godalming for his guests to gawk at her, and in 1762, she appeared in the foreground of Hogarth's print Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism, lying back with a strange, tortured expression amid mocking depictions of witches, demons and religious fanatics, with a line of rabbits bounding out from between her legs.

And then in 1763 she died, in Godalming, aged 62. The entry for her burial in the parish register reads "January 13 Mary Toft (Widow) the Imposteress Rabbit-Breeder."

That's all on Mary Toft. Thank you for listening, keep an eye on the podcast's social media channels on Instagram, Facebook, Bluesky, and the Website Formerly Known As Twitter, for details of the next miniseries.