3 By contrast, Houlbrooke argues that while puritan children did suffer brief spells of ‘acute anxiety’, many ‘died in a state of cheerful confidence’. Stannard claims that godly children were made to ‘tremble’ about death: the new emphasis placed by Protestants on the ‘depraved and damnable’ nature of the young led parents to teach their offspring that they were destined for ‘the most hideous and excruciating fate imaginable’, hell. Although both scholars focus on puritans, they reach rather different conclusions. 2 Notable exceptions include David Stannard’s article, ‘Death and the Puritan Child’, published in 1974, and Ralph Houlbrooke’s more recent chapter, ‘Death in Childhood’ (1999). While much valuable scholarship has been produced on parents’ emotional responses to the deaths of children, the reactions of the young themselves have rarely been explored. It is this disarming juxtaposition of the familiar and the foreign that intrigues me most about early modern children, and which inspired the subject of this chapter, the child’s emotional response to death in early modern England. In some respects, Caleb appears no different from a modern child-he loves his family and is preoccupied with toys and pets. It captures vividly the heart-breaking poignancy of child death. This account is taken from the biography of Caleb Vernon, which was written by his father, Dr John Vernon, and published a year after the boy’s death in 1666. Hearing his father coming, Caleb gasped, ‘O Father, what shall I do!’, and then ‘immediately lay back’, uttered ‘God, God’ and died. Returning quickly, he saw his son ‘thrusting, first, his finger, and then his whole hand in to his mouth’ to clear his throat.
Caleb began to grow breathless, ‘as if choaked with plegm’, and his father, who was ‘in great care for him’, ran downstairs to fetch some medicines ‘for his relief’. He bequeathed ‘all his toyes’ to his sisters Nancy and Betty, and told his mother, ‘ Mother, I love your company dearly’. His father ‘gushed out into tears’ and the boy seeing him called out, ‘Father do not weep, pray for me, I long to be with God’. Later that day, Caleb overheard his little sister Nancy asking, ‘Who shall have Caleb’s … when he is dead?’ Caleb told his father, ‘Now I think I shall die’. Caleb’s parents agreed, and decided that a squirrel would be best because ‘it might easily be procured’ from a local meadow. Feeling miserable and sore, Caleb asked his parents if ‘some living creature’ could be brought to his bed ‘to prevent Melancholly thoughts’ he suggested ‘a young Lamb, Pigeon, Rabbit’. Over the next month, the illness worsened, and Caleb became so weak that he was ‘not able to be got up out of his bed’. His mother put him to bed, wrapping him in ‘warm blankets, and propping him up with pillows’. One day in 1665, twelve-year-old Caleb Vernon from Battersea began to feel hot and feverish.