The Last Days of Henry VIII: Conspiracy, Treason and Heresy at the Court of the Dying Tyrant (18 page)

the same lord cardinal, knowing himself to have the foul and contagious disease of the great pox, broken out upon him in diverse places of his body, came daily to your grace, rowning [whispering] in your ear and blowing upon your most noble grace with his most perilous and infective breath to the marvellous danger of your highness if God, of his infinite goodness, had not better provided for your highness.
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The allegations about Wolsey’s syphilis, however, were treacherously provided to the Boleyn party at court by the cardinal’s own doctor, the enigmatic Venetian Augustine de Augustinis, who became a physician to the king in late 1537 and was also employed on various diplomatic missions by both Henry and his Lord Privy Seal, Thomas Cromwell.
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The wording of the accusation, asserting that Henry was protected against infection by divine providence, is perhaps indicative of the king’s perceived special relationship with God.

And there is no evidence of syphilis in his children, Mary, Elizabeth and Edward – none of them bore its visible stigmata – and Tudor doctors, well versed in the symptoms of what was euphemistically called ‘the French disease’, would have swiftly recognised a gumma as an indication of syphilis and treated the king accordingly. The rudimentary medical treatment of this venereal disease in the sixteenth century consisted of six weeks of sweating the patient and the administration of successive doses of mercury (although poisonous) which made the
patient’s gums red and sore and created ‘copious flows of saliva’.
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The ever-present ambassadors, constantly seeking scurrilous gossip to report to their royal masters abroad, would surely have spotted either a prolonged absence of the king from public life or the visible symptoms of the treatment. Neither was reported.

So, as we have seen, it is more probable that Henry suffered from varicose ulcers, which are sometimes linked to deep-vein thrombosis. More seriously, it is likely that injuries to the royal legs, perhaps sustained while hunting or, more likely, jousting, damaged the tibia and also caused chronic osteitis, a very painful bone infection. If the wound healed over with the bone still infected, then fevers would occur and the legs would become further ulcerated,
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requiring changes of dressings several times a day as the stench of the ulcers filled his Privy Chamber. This condition closely matches his known symptoms and had grave implications for his future life and health.

No wonder that Henry would today be recognised as a hypochondriac, always obsessed with his health and anxious to hide his infirmities from his subjects, as revealed in a letter to the Duke of Norfolk written on 12 June 1537 (which provides evidence of both legs being afflicted by ulcers):

To be frank with you, which you must keep to yourself, a humour has fallen into our legs and our physicians advise us not to go so far in the heat of the year …
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A public image of the strength and omnipotence of a ruler means everything for a government, then as now. The king was also fascinated with medicine for its own sake – part and parcel of a Renaissance prince’s interests and continued education in the fashionable subjects of theology, astronomy and music. A law passed early on in Henry’s reign intended to regulate medical practice discloses that quackery was

daily within this realm exercised by a great multitude of ignorant persons of whom the great part have no manner of insight into [medicine] nor any kind of learning … so far that common
artificers such as smiths, weavers and women boldly … take upon them great cures and things of great difficulty in which they partly use sorcery and witchcraft, partly apply such medicine unto the disease as be very noyous [noxious] … to the high displeasure of God … and the grievous hurt, damage and destruction of many of the king’s liege people, most especially of them who cannot discern the uncunning from the cunning.
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Henry was also curious about new pharmaceutical cures and had clearly acquired some practical knowledge of the medicinal properties of a large number of plants and herbs even before he became the unwilling and testy recipient of some of the less pleasant potions and nostrums. His interest is demonstrated by around 100 recipes for ointments, balms and poultices, apparently developed personally by him,
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contained in a water-damaged but still-legible book of prescriptions for Henry’s own use preserved in the British Library. The constituents of the ‘king’s own plaster’ included

roots, buds, different plants, raisins without stones, linseed, vinegar, rosewater, long garden worms, scrapings of ivory, pearls powdered fine, red lead, red coral, honeysuckle water, suet of hens, fat from the thighbone of calves.

The concoction would be poisonous and is certainly not one to be tried at home. Henry sent his own recipe for curing ‘the sweat’ to the courtier Sir Bryan Tuke, Treasurer of the Privy Chamber and Henry’s secretary, during the great epidemic of 1517–18, which involved drinking a little wine ‘with the pills of Rasis’ – probably Rhases, an Arabian physician. But following his normal cautious, if not neurotic, practice, Henry himself fled diseased London to the safety of the countryside, moving from palace to palace ahead of the spread of the scourge. Henry also had his own patent recipe for curing bubonic plague. His ingredients were exotic in the extreme:

Take one handful of marigolds, a handful of sorrel and a handful of burnet,
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a handful of feverfew,
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half a handful of rue
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and a
quantity of dragons
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of the top or else the root and wash them clean in running water and put them in a pot with a potel
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of running water and let them seethe easily. From a potel on to a quart of liquor and then set it back till it be almost cold and strain it with a fine clothe and drink it. If it be bitter, put thereto sugar. And if it be taken before the purpulls [buboes, swelling in the glands of the armpit or groin] do appear, it will heal the sick person with God’s grace.
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Divine intervention therefore remained essential.

The royal staff of doctors, surgeons and apothecaries was extensive and frequently consulted, but their advice not always obeyed due to Henry’s obstinacy and relentless, restless energy. The king was, in all senses, a difficult patient,
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ignoring pleas to rest and the protests of his doctors. But he was also very generous in his gifts and rewards to his medical team, possibly a sign of his growing concern over his declining health.

Henry began his reign with three doctors on the Privy Purse payroll – Thomas Linacre, who had been tutor to his sickly brother, Prince Arthur; John Chambre; and the Spaniard Fernando de Victoria or Vittoria, who had arrived in England with Catherine of Aragon’s entourage in 1501. The king granted letters patent in 1518 to all three to set up

a college in perpetuity of learned and wise men who make any practice of medicine in our City of London and suburbs and within seven miles thereof.
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However, this college was not established until 1523 because Parliament had to override the Bishop of London’s traditional right to grant licences to practise medicine in the city. What became the Royal College of Physicians was granted its own, very appropriate arms in 1546, displaying ‘
an ermine cuff with a hand feeling the pulse of an arm
’
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as a heraldic pun.

In addition, in 1540, Henry approved a parliamentary Act
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that merged two city companies, the Mystery of Barbers and the Company of Pure Surgeons, into one incorporated body, creating a powerful
regulatory authority that, like the physicians’ college, strove to take the magic out of medicine.

Despite these attempts to put medical science on a more rational footing, religion and ancient dogma continued to play important roles in the careers of the leading doctors of the time. Medicine was still rooted in the ideas of the classical anatomists and physicians of centuries before, such as Galen, the Greek who became doctor to the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius in AD 163. New ideas were now emerging, some bizarre, such as the requirement for ‘lusty singing’ recommended in 1537 by the diplomat and scholar Sir Thomas Elyot as an exercise for those confined to the sick bed,
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but others more familiar such as the belated recognition that an irregular pulse could be a sign of ill health. The patient’s room could have been a noisy place. The colour and appearance of urine also figured strongly in diagnosis, samples being taken in straw-covered bottles from midnight to midday, with physicians sternly urged not to shake the specimens.

Sixteenth-century medical treatment, to modern eyes, was crude, if not downright cruel. Enemas, to which Henry was subjected increasingly in his last years for frequent bouts of stubborn constipation, were firmly applied to a patient’s anus by means of a pig’s bladder to which a greased metal tube was fixed. The bladder normally contained more than a pint of a weak solution of salt and infused herbs that had to be retained by the patient for between one and two hours. Another favourite mixture was soothing honey and ‘pap’ – cow’s milk
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– used particularly for the treatment of haemorrhoids, a common affliction particularly prevalent in those who spent long hours in the saddle in all weathers, perhaps wearing armour.

Medical care of ‘humours’ or ulcers – the chief amongst Henry’s painful afflictions – was based on the principle of counter-irritation: draining them by means of a chronic inflammatory reaction, maintained, if necessary, as a running sore. This involved the so-called ‘seton’, a horsehair or silk filament threaded through a loose fold of skin around the ulcer, tightened and left to suppurate. The wound, of course, stank. With what seems a surprising nod to modern ideas of hygiene, the
needle used in this process would be first heated red hot and then handled by the doctor with forceps. At other times, an ‘issue’ was deployed: a bulky object such as a small gold or silver ball would be inserted below a flap of skin, previously cut open with a lancet,
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to achieve the same efficacious effect.

Who comprised this diagnosis of doctors responsible for the increasingly difficult, if not dangerous, task of maintaining Henry’s health and wellbeing in the face of his numerous temper tantrums and irascibility?

Linacre, born in 1460, translated a number of Greek and Latin treatises on medicine and was the first president of the College of Physicians, with their meetings held at his house in Knightrider Street in the City of London. He was appointed tutor to the seven-year-old Princess Mary in 1523 but died the following year ‘from the [gall] stone’
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and was buried, as a mark of his status, in St Paul’s Cathedral, where his fulsome Latin epitaph was recorded more than a century later, just before the Great Fire of London destroyed the medieval cathedral
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and all the grand tombs within it.

Chambre, or Chamber (1470–1549), fellow and later warden of Merton College, Oxford, became a doctor to the king after studying medicine at the University of Padua and was promoted to chief physician on Linacre’s death in 1524. He also collected a number of lucrative ecclesiastical appointments such as Canon of St George’s, Windsor, and Dean of St Stephen’s, Westminster. He supervised the confinement of Queen Anne Boleyn and safely delivered Princess Elizabeth on 7 September 1533. Chambre also probably attended (with two other royal doctors – William Butts and George Owen) the prolonged labour of Jane Seymour in 1537 and her subsequent infection, from which she died soon afterwards.

Fernando de Victoria, who qualified at a Spanish university, inevitably fell from royal favour when he was dispatched by Catherine of Aragon to inform Charles V of Henry’s attempts to divorce his aunt. He died in 1529
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and was succeeded by Edward Wotton, born around 1492, the son of the beadle of Oxford University and a natural historian of some repute. His studies included the use of insects as a source of
medicinal drugs. Wotton died in 1555 and was buried in St Alban’s, Wood Street, in London’s Cheapside.

We have already met Augustine de Augustinis who, when working for Wolsey, famously asked Cromwell for leeches for bloodletting – ‘hungry ones’ – to be procured for his master, then lying ill at Esher, Surrey. They were to be applied by another Italian, Balthasar Guersie, surgeon to Catherine of Aragon. After Wolsey’s disgrace and death, Augustine was employed on diplomatic service overseas for the Duke of Norfolk and Cromwell, as well as suffering a spell of imprisonment in the Tower,
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before being appointed a physician to the royal household around 1537 at £50 a year, receiving a good brooch from the jewel collection of the recently deceased Jane Seymour
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for his pains. In addition to his royal medical duties, he was also engaged in shadowy, if not sinister, diplomatic espionage on behalf of the king. For example, the Spanish ambassador Chapuys wrote to the emperor on 31 October 1540:

Last week, an Italian physician attached to this King’s household and very familiar with the Lord Privy Seal
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came to dine at this embassy on four different days.

He is the king’s spy and has come, as I have reason to think, for no other purpose than to learn what I am about and persuade me to intercede with your majesty for a closer and particular friendship and alliance to be made with him …

The Italian at first dissembled as much as he could, trying to make me believe the suggestions came from him, not from anyone else; yet I had no difficulty in guessing, by various loose remarks he made, who had sent him onto me. For in the course of conversation he alluded to various facts which could not be known to him except through the channel of the Lord Privy Seal.
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Augustine may have also liaised with the French ambassador Charles de Marillac, perhaps in furtherance of the Howard faction’s interests.
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Later, as the king’s health deteriorated, Augustine, long personally and irretrievably linked to the Duke of Norfolk, probably decided that public affairs at court were becoming unhealthy for him, too, and he applied for
and was granted a passport to leave England in early July 1546, with £50 as a reward from Henry in his purse. He went to Venice and died in the walled city of Lucca in Tuscany on 14 September 1551.
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