Bloody Mary (5 page)

I
pray daily ther paynys to asswage

And sone to sende where they faynest wolde be,

Withoute disease or adversyte.

In the winter of 1517 a great frost struck London in the middle of January. The streets were slick with ice, and the Thames froze solid. Men with business at the courts had to travel from London to Westminster on foot instead of by boat, and when the river showed no signs of a thaw the townspeople cleared a “common way,” or high road, in the ice. The weather was no better in February. Giustinian, who had to go to Greenwich to see the king, complained that going by boat was still impossible and that the “frozen and dangerous roads” made travel of any kind hazardous. The frost came in the midst of a great drought. No rain fell in southeastern England from September to the following May. The lush green pastures turned brown, small streams dried up and farmers had to drive their cattle three or four miles to water.
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And soon after the first long-awaited rains fell, the sweating sickness broke out all over London.

The sweat, now thought to have been influenza with pulmonary complications, struck its victims “with a great sweating and stinking, with redness of the face and of all the body, and a continual thirst, with a great heat and headache.” A pimply rash appeared on the head or body, sometimes accompanied by pricks of blood, and almost before treatment could be applied the sufferer was dead. It was the pitiless suddenness of death from the sweat that horrified survivors. People fell ill on the street, at their work, at mass; they rushed home to collapse and die. A doctor who studied the disease closely wrote that it killed “some in opening their windows, some in playing with children in their street doors; some in one hour, many in two, it destroyed; . . . some in sleep, some in wake, some
in mirth, some in care, some fasting and some full, some busy and some idle; and in one house sometime three, sometime five, sometime more, sometime all.”
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Often there was no time to make a will, or to send for the priest, and those who died either intestate or without the last rites were denied burial in consecrated ground.

All who could fled the city at once, but most had to stay—to bury their dead, to guard their goods, to earn their livings. And before long there was nowhere to go, for the countryside was as full of infection as the city. By midsummer Londoners had become acclimatized to the fear of death—to the barred windows and doors, the self-professed healers selling cures and preventives in the streets, and the panic that went through a crowd when a passer-by, moaning and holding his head, stumbled past on his way to die. The French ambassador in London wrote home describing how he saw men and women “as thick as flies rushing from the streets or shops” when they felt ill; the sight of an infected person was enough to clear the street. Tens of thousands died in the summer of 1517; for the survivors it was a return to the nightmare mortality of the medieval plague. Many accounted this affliction worse than the plague, which at least gave warning to its victims and allowed them to linger for days or even weeks before they died. They christened the sweat “Know thy Master” and “The Lord’s Visitation,” and they made black jokes about friends who had been “merry at dinner and dead at supper.” They drank the preventive medicines sent by other friends whose households had escaped infection, and murmured prayers at each sounding of the death bell.

The epidemic of 1517 was not the first of its kind. In the summer of 1485 and again in 1508 the same mysterious disease had swept through southern England, brought on, it was said, by divine displeasure at the severity of Henry VII’s government. Its reappearance in his son’s reign called forth an array of cures, preventives and restoratives; clearly this contagion that had come in with the Tudor line was here to stay. One remedy was compounded of endive, sowthistle, marygold, mercury and nightshade; another called for “three large spoonfuls of water of dragons, and half a nutshellful of unicorn’s horn.” (Swordflsh blades were reverently preserved in English treasuries as unicorns’ horns.) The latter potion was said to have brought Lord Darcy and thirty members of his household safely through one pestilent summer without illness, though they were all exposed to the sweat. A third preventive was called the “philosopher’s egg,” and was made from a crushed egg, its white blown out, mixed shell and all with saffron, mustard seed and herbs, and more unicorn’s horn. This electuary could be kept in glass boxes for twenty or thirty years, and improved with age.

The most thoroughgoing treatment for the sweat was the series of
medicinal recipes ascribed to the king himself. Probably because of his phobic dread of illness and in particular of epidemic diseases he became an amateur apothecary, and liked to send remedies for all sorts of ailments to friends and relatives. The first stage in the king’s cure was a preventive made from “sawge of virtue,” herb of grace, elder and briar leaves and ginger; mixed with white wine and drunk in small quantities every day for nine days, this kept one “whole for the whole year, by the grace of God.” If the sweat should strike before the ninth day of the treatment, the second element—water of scabiosa, betony water and a quart of treacle—should be drunk. And if the disease should after all reach the critical stage marked by the appearance of the rash, the ingredients of the first medicine, made into a plaster and applied directly to the skin, would be certain to “draw out all the venom,” and restore health.

Henry’s medicines did not succeed in keeping his household free of infection. His Latin secretary Ammonius died the day before he was to leave for a sweat-free country house. Wolsey barely escaped death shortly afterward, and a number of his servants died. The bishop of Winchester, the ambassador Giustinian and his son were all stricken, and when the pages who slept in Henry’s bedchamber began to die off one by one the king panicked and sent the entire court away. With Katherine and the infant Mary, three of his trusted gentlemen and his favorite organist Dionysius Memo, he traveled to “a remote and unusual habitation” to wait out the epidemic. But even there the infection haunted him, and rumors of deaths from the sweat drove him from one country place to another, keeping just ahead of its ravages. Meanwhile his courtiers too moved from one palace to another in hopes of escaping danger, but in the spring of 1518, when the sweat reappeared more strongly than ever and the measles and smallpox that now accompanied the disease increased its morbidity, the king’s pages again began to die. Now every man or woman who had lost a relative or servant to the disease was ordered not to leave the house without carrying the white rod that symbolized infection, and had to hang wisps of straw from the doorway to warn visitors and others to stay away.

These rudimentary efforts at quarantine were intended to contain infection, but the more grave agencies of contamination—germ-infected food, water and living conditions—were left alone. London in the early sixteenth century was a medium-sized city rapidly growing into an overcrowded, slum-ridden metropolis. Every decade saw thousands of peasants and villagers from the economically troubled countryside move to the capital, settling into the ramshackle suburbs and putting added demands on the inadequate water supply. Since medieval times water had been available to Londoners in stone cisterns, inspected yearly by the Lord Mayor with much ceremony, but as the city grew those who lived
at the outskirts had to buy their water from the growing group of professional water carriers who sold it by the three-gallon tankard. There was barely enough of it for drinking, cooking and perhaps rinsing out the chamber pots; cleaning and bathing were a luxury even in the great houses of the rich. There were fleas and lice everywhere—in the woodwork, the floors, the beds and wardrobes. Bugs of many kinds lived in the food stores and in woolen clothing; spiders invaded the city every spring, and flies every summer. There were public bathhouses (which were also brothels), and fastidious people bathed now and then in wooden tubs in front of the fire. But clothing was really clean only when it was new, for when they came to London country people continued to do their laundry as they always had, with cow dung, hemlock, nettles, and remnants of soap, and clothes may well have smelled worse clean than dirty. Clothing was always in short supply among the poor, and beggars were said to welcome the sweating sickness if only because they inherited the coats and shoes of the dead.

If the houses of Tudor London were unhygienic its streets were corridors of filth. Unpaved, rutted, alternately muddy and dusty, they were repositories of every kind of leavings, waste and ordure. Household garbage and the outscourings of cooking pots and dye tubs mingled with the droppings of horses, dogs and fowl. Chamber pots from every house facing the street were emptied out of front doors or upper windows into that street every morning. As the mounds of refuse grew they were raked into heaps at street corners and infrequently dumped into the river or along the highways leading out of the city, but not before they had become unimaginably foul-smelling. The heady and lingering perfumes of the age were in part designed to counteract the stench of the streets, putting a sweet-smelling barrier between the wearer and his or her surroundings. The fastidious Wolsey never left the palace without holding a scented pomander to his nose.

To be sure, there were critics of these conditions who argued that dirt must augment disease. The king was among them, but though he tried to command clean surroundings for himself and especially for his daughter, he did nothing to improve the plight of his subjects. The best-known opponent of unhygienic English customs was the Dutchman and famed humanist Erasmus. In letters to friends he gave careful descriptions of how English houses were built to maximize drafts yet minimize exposure to fresh air and sunlight. The streets, he declared, should be cleaned of mud and urine, and, above all, the dirty habit of spreading rushes over the clay floors of houses to catch food scraps, spilled ale and bones should be abandoned. The rushes were changed when their smell became intolerably sour, but a bottom layer, stuck fast to the floor by years of accumulated spit, vomit and “the leakage of dogs,” remained,
according to Erasmus, for decades. He objected to other practices on the grounds that they spread disease: overcrowding in badly ventilated inns, infrequently changed bed linen, communal drinking cups and the propensity of the English to kiss one another when they met. Erasmus’ views met with some sympathy, but some ridicule as well. He went too far, some thought, in claiming that even the hallowed religious customs of confession, the communal baptismal font and pilgrimages to distant shrines spread infection! And besides, his hypochondria was proverbial; he corresponded with numerous doctors on the subject of his own health problems, and sent one of them daily reports on the condition of his urine.
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Most people connected disease not with unsanitary living conditions but with supernatural forces. For every doctor who treated his patients afflicted with the sweat by bleeding their veins or sealing them (usually with fatal results) in a hot room wrapped in blankets, there were a dozen practitioners of superstitious and occult healing. An act of Parliament complained of a “great multitude of ignorant persons,” including “smiths, weavers and women,” who were undertaking to perform amazing cures involving sorceries and witchcraft and medicines of questionable value, “to the high displeasure of God.” These self-educated healers used the prayers and holy formulas of the church as incantations, invoking the cross of Christ, his “title of triumph” Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews, the Christian mystical sign of the Greek letter
Tau,
and even estimates of the exact “measures,” or heights, of Mary and Jesus. One spiritual preventive called for the Pater Noster and Ave Maria to be recited by the practitioner under the patient’s right ear, then his left, then under both armpits, at the back of both thighs, and finally over the heart. Biblical or cabalistic words spelled backward were believed to bring about cures by magic, especially when written in certain ways. “Write these words on a laurel leaf,” a charm to break fever begins. “Ysmael, Ysmael, Ysmael, I adjure you by the Angels that you cure this man.” The sufferer’s name was added and the leaf placed under his head. When accompanied by a diet of lettuce and seeds ground in ale, any fever, even the sudden and fiery fever of The Lord’s Visitation, would cool.

Behind these occult treatments lay a fundamentally providential view not only of disease but of all human affairs. The men and women of the Tudor age accepted the ravages of the sweating sickness as they did the destruction of floods or the mass deaths of cattle and sheep—as part of a vast hidden design. The author of this design was God, but it was only in the broadest sense religious: it was more a matter of faith in the power of order over chaos. No one welcomed the sweating sickness, yet everyone
took a morbid comfort in the belief that it had been sent by a higher power for a distinct purpose.

This belief was strained, though, by the fact that the sweat struck hardest those who should have been least vulnerable to it. The “youngest and likeliest” men and women were carried off, and the “men of middle age and sanguine complexion.” The poorest and weakest in the population were, paradoxically, those most likely to survive. Children, women of childbearing age, exceedingly thin men and laborers of all kinds were either spared or, if they caught the disease, survived its crisis phase and eventually recovered. Men of substance in their middle years died in great numbers.