Didn Jane Seymour have a Caesarean section to give birth to Edward?
No. There is nothing in the historical record that indicates that Jane Seymour underwent a Caesarean, and the facts definitively rule out this particular legend. We forget that medical practice was primitive at the time, and that no-one would have survived an abdominal surgery for eleven days — which is the amount of time that Jane Seymour lived after giving birth to Edward! In fact, she seemed quite well for several days after the birth, received guests after the baby was christened and wrote letters. Abdominal surgery was not performed in the Tudor period — it wasn’t to become standard medical practice until the end of the nineteenth century, and even then, until the antibiotics became readily available after World War II, abdominal surgery was accompanied by a high death rate from infection. The legend that Jane Seymour sacrificed her life by insisting on a Caesarean section seems to have come from a ballad called Quene Jane — in it, she begs Henry to “cleave her side open to sav