Elizabeth Cellier Great Missenden Church, Buckinghamshire. She wrote: Mrs. Cellier is an important character in Alison Macleod's historical novel "The Portingale", a biography of Queen Catherine of Braganza. Elizabeth Cellier Elizabeth Cellier (commonly known as Mrs. Cellier and dubbed the "Popish Midwife"), flourished 1668–1688, London, England, was a notable Catholic midwife in seventeenth-century England. She stood trial for treason in 1679 for her alleged part in the "Meal-Tub Plot" against the future James II but was acquitted. She later became a pamphleteer and made attempts to advance the field of midwifery. Elizabeth Cellier was a noted London midwife, who came into prominence
Thomas Dangerfield about a Presbyterian plot against the throne, and this having been proved a lie, he pretended to have discovered a Catholic plot against Charles II. This was known as the Mealtub Plot, from the place where the incriminating documents were hidden at his suggestion, and found by the King's officers by his information. Mrs Elizabeth Cellier, in whose house the meal tub was found, was a well- known Roman Catholic midwife and almoner to the Countess of Powis; she had rescued Dangerfield from a debtors' prison and befriended him when he posed as a Catholic. She was, with her patroness