Chapter II: Part 2

Not any single one of these symptoms is indubitable evidence of syphilis, but taken altogether there is no other reasonable explanation. In syphilis and self-indulgence we have the secret of the whole tragic development of this king’s character. Syphilis alone would doubtfully have accounted for it, even less perhaps gluttonous and bibulous self-indulgence. It is quite true that after his first marriage he seems to have abandoned all moral restraint, or at least guidance by ecclesiastics and the Church; but his dreadful degeneration was not a result of doing so; he did so because he was influenced by the spirochæte and gluttony combined. To-day, when a man gets into gaol for any particularly shameless offence—especially sexual—the very first thing that the police surgeon does is to perform a Wassermann test upon his cerebro-spinal fluid; and I am perfectly certain that if it were possible to do so upon Henry Tudor, the report would come back marked “Wassermann plus,” and probably towards the end of his life “plus plus plus!”

But when did he catch it? He does not seem to have _obviously_ infected any of his wives, so far as we can tell, so the inference is that he must have caught it several years before he married Catherine of Aragon. Well, he married her when he was little more than eighteen, so he must have caught it when he was thirteen or fourteen, at about the very earliest that a gay and showy boy of the Renaissance could manage to catch it. Then probably the primary lesion, so apparently innocent and harmless, healed up under the influence of some simple ointment,[3] just as it does to-day in thousands of men, who bitterly rue later the one little slip that was to cause them all their woes—and Henry went his life through, probably having quite forgotten the trifling incident. To this day we find that those cases of syphilis which are trifling at first, are just the very cases which, under the influence of worry, lack of treatment, or overstrain, go so tragically wrong at the end. The somewhat wicked pun is common among medical men: “Five minutes with Venus may mean a lifetime with Mercury,” a specimen of sardonic jesting with death that so appeals to many doctors, however kindly and serious they may really be.

In no way can we better trace his degeneration than in his treatment of his wives; so I propose to describe it alone of all his innumerable misdeeds.

Firstly, it is a great mistake to suppose that the only nervous result of syphilis is general paralysis. Among neurotic people it may cause serious mental troubles although it may not affect the actual brain-tissue so far as we can see with a microscope. As this is perhaps not generally known, I quote a sentence from the _Oxford Textbook of the Practice of Medicine_, by various authors, published in 1922. “Such patients are generally psychasthenic, ill-balanced and degenerate.” The writer is speaking of the effects of syphilis upon mental diseases, and its propensity to cause “phobias” and “obsessions.”

His first wife was Catherine of Aragon, who was some six years older than himself. After a fierce struggle with the pope the obliging Archbishop Cranmer pronounced a divorce between them. Martin Hume considers that this was entirely for personal reasons, because she had lost her personal charms, and because Henry had fallen in love with Anne Boleyn. Probably there was a great deal of the personal element in it, and it is quite possible that if Catherine had been willing to go into a convent and leave her husband to another woman—he actually proposed that the pope should allow him two wives—there might not have been the divorce that has been fruitful of such stupendous results for England. Catherine seems to have been a woman much under the influence of Spanish religiosity, and undoubtedly put up a strenuous fight to keep her husband; as was only right and proper. Probably the real degeneration in the king was yet to come; the spirochæte was still biding its time.

Since there seems to be a good deal of doubt about the exact dates of the famous premature births of Catherine, I give from Professor Pollard her actual record. On January 31st, 1510, seven months after marriage, she gave birth to a daughter still-born. Eleven months later, on January 1st, 1511, there was a son, who died in three days, as is still said because of the inordinate length of his christening. In September, 1513, there was another son, who was either still-born, or died immediately after it was born. In June, 1514, there was yet another son, but he, too, was no sooner christened than dead. Then, on February 18th, 1516, came the little Princess who, being born to misery, became “Bloody Mary.” Then, in 1517 “it is probable that there were several miscarriages.” On November 18th, 1518, came the last of the unhappy woman’s efforts. It was a boy and still-born. And Catherine was by now forty years of age and obviously could have no more children. She had done her best, poor lady, but found her husband’s spirochætes too much for her.

General experience is that the tendency in constitutional syphilis is to cause a string of prematurely born children or miscarriages; then a child born at full time, but showing evidences of disease; then, the tendency having worn itself out, one or more backward but seemingly healthy children. But, after Mary was born, apparently the tendency still remained. Probably local internal trouble still persisted in Catherine, and she had not entirely worn out the infection. Undoubtedly a good modern surgeon would have cured her and altered the history of England. That the stout-hearted daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella actually died of the syphilis which she had probably gained from her husband would appear to be shown by the account of the post-mortem examination which was secretly held by a man who was trying to prove that Henry VIII had poisoned her. He reported after getting the body ready for embalming, that she was all sound but the heart, which was “black and hideous, with a black excrescence which clung closely to the outside.” Doubtless this represented an aortic aneurysm, which is known to be a common result of untreated syphilis. I know that the findings have been attributed to cancer of the heart; but cancer of the heart is so rare, if it ever occurs, while aneurysm is so common, that I prefer the interpretation here given.

I regret that my little essay on Henry’s second wife, Anne Boleyn, has been much misunderstood by readers of _Post Mortem_. The view I there took was that if the stories about her were true they could only be explained by the supposition that she was suffering from nymphomania. Nymphomania does not necessarily imply that a girl is of abandoned character; it is a pathological condition of the nervous system. To this day it sometimes comes on after childbirth, especially if accompanied by terror and anxiety. It is in these women part of the Curse of Eve.[4] It may happen to any woman, and sometimes causes scandal before it is discovered. What circumstances could be imagined more terrible than those in which the tragic second queen found herself.

Henry had married her in hopes of gaining a son and heir in spite of the curse which people believed lay upon him for the multifarious premature births of her predecessor, or rather for the mortal sin of marrying his deceased brother’s wife. Still further to complicate the matter, Catherine of Aragon had sworn that she had never had connection with the dead Prince Arthur at all. Truly the whole thing becomes more and more complex as we gaze. A canon law which looked upon a carnal act as a deed which must be sanctified by God whenever it was performed, either before or after marriage; a girl who desired to be queen; another older woman who fought fiercely for her rights as both wife and religious fanatic; a multitude of fierce partisans; racial, political, and religious animosities; over all a man enraged by “love,” fear, and brutality. Who could get at the truth about poor little Anne’s marriage? It is impossible; one can only sympathise with everybody, and try to understand.

As I said, if the stories are true they can only be explained on pathological grounds. What girl in her senses would go rushing about the Court soliciting promiscuously in the manner of which Anne is accused? Mr. Philip W. Sergeant has written a book to prove that all the stories are really based upon slanders set agoing by Chapuys, ambassador of Charles V; and it was to fierce religious and political animosity that Anne owed her bad reputation. According to him she was really a rather vindictive, free-spoken woman, a great worker with her hands, fond of dress, musical, and passionately fond of dancing. This is a new outlook on the Anne of Froude and most historians, but is confirmed by several known facts. For instance, some of her laborious needlework is said to be still preserved in Hampton Court Palace. I have not seen it, for it is many years since I was at that palace; but it must be very sad to gaze upon it and think how tragic was the fate of Mr. Sergeant’s dancing, singing, industrious little queen.

Another thing upon further reflection rather casts doubt even on the pathological explanation. Froude accused her of soliciting Sir Henry Norreys after the birth of Elizabeth—if I remember rightly, it was less than three weeks afterwards. Is it conceivable that Sir Henry Norreys would be allowed alone into Her Majesty’s sick-room only three weeks after the greatest event of any woman’s life—the birth of her first-born?

A lady who claims to be an Irish descendant of that George Boleyn who was accused of adultery and incest with Anne has written a long and interesting letter concerning her family and Anne in particular. Narrating the family traditions—and, as she says, family traditions must always be accorded great value—she tells me that the descendants of George Boleyn hold strongly that Anne may have been a gay little flirt, but that there was never anything really morally wrong with her; and that the whole accusation was in her own words—she is an American—a “frame-up” on the part of Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell. Quite possibly, therefore, Anne may really have given nothing more than nods and becks and wreathed smiles to the men who were accused of adultery with her; possibly even the musician, Mark Smeaton, may have had his confession wrung out of him entirely by torture and by Cromwell’s terrible personality.

The truth about her burial seems to be that she was not bundled into a cask as I heard from one of the caretakers at the Tower, but that she was hurriedly put into a partly filled box of arrows. According to Mr. Sergeant they dug up the box in 1876 and found her delicate skeleton, with slender bones and severed neck. It is all very tragic and very sad. The difficulty is that Cromwell seems to have taken care that all the evidence in her favour perished. We do not hear from her friends.

It was apparently during Queen Anne Boleyn’s reign that the first appearance began of that frightful physical degeneration in the King which so impressed all his contemporaries; and it was probably from that circumstance that Anne gained the discredit of being the great prime mover in his degeneration; it was not fair of Mr. P. C. Yorke, in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, to say that she appealed only to his lower nature. Some woman when he was about fourteen had done so most effectually, and years later Anne had to suffer for it. He probably appealed to Anne through his music, for he was a skilled musician, and one of the anthems which he wrote is still performed in English cathedrals.

There are still one or two things to remark when dealing with Anne Boleyn. First of all there was the birth of Elizabeth when she expected and fervently prayed for a son; secondly, the next was a miscarriage, said to have been brought on by seeing Jane Seymour sitting on her husband’s knee; another account is that it was a son prematurely born through anxiety because of a fall that he had when riding. Again these premature births! One would have thought that the constitutional syphilis in Henry VIII must have long worn itself out by that time!

Last of all we must glance at the conduct of the very obliging Archbishop Cranmer. He pronounced the decree of divorce—which, by the way, neither Catherine nor Henry himself ever seems to have recognised. Then he was present when Anne and Henry were married secretly. Then, when Anne, looking upon him as a friend, appealed to him in her desperate trouble at the end, he sent her a non-committal answer. As Mr. Sergeant dryly comments, it has only recently been proposed that this obliging man be made a saint of the Anglican Church.

There can be little doubt of the reason why Henry married Jane Seymour. Before he got Anne put out of harm’s way he had fallen in love, as he called it, with Jane; and the Seymours, being very powerful people who, observing that the king’s passions were already all-powerful with him (owing to his illness), took advantage of them to see that he married the new star, simply for the sake of their own particular sect, which happened to be Catholic. Here we see at once the fact that Henry, who thought himself so strong, was in reality already at the mercy of party politics.

Jane Seymour seems to have been a nondescript sort of woman, gentle and harmless. At the end of about a year she was delivered of the little son who, because his father’s syphilis had seemingly worn itself out, passed through the perils of his infancy only to die ultimately of what looks very much like pulmonary tuberculosis, the other curse of the Tudors. Childbirth killed the colourless Jane Seymour, undoubtedly through puerperal septicæmia, though once again the cock-and-bull story of an overlong christening has been revived.

Next came Anne of Cleves, the famous “great Flanders mare” of legendary reputation, of whom we have all learned at school. Again, according to Major Hume, Henry was so worked upon by his political advisers that he for once made an utter fool of himself, and married a picture by Holbein procured by Thomas Cromwell. In recommending this marriage Cromwell took a great risk, for, as is well known, no man can select either wife, pipe or hat for another. It is said that Henry had proposed to the French ambassador that he should hold a sort of Babylonian marriage-market among the damsels of France, whence he should select the prettiest; but it is also said, by Professor Pollard this time, that the Frenchman made such an answer that for the only recorded time in his life, Henry was seen to blush. It is difficult to imagine such a jape—even if French—as would make Henry Tudor blush.

The important thing to tell about Anne of Cleves is that Henry, having passed several nights in her room, proclaimed that he had discovered that she was not _virgo intacta_. There are also several indecent stories that he was said to have related of her, but as they are not entirely germane to my present object, and as I do not wish this to be a mere _chronique scandaleuse_ I omit them.

While he was thus uncertain, being almost in the position of Hajji Baba when he discovered that he had married a veiled woman who turned out to be excessively plain, Henry again strove for freedom. He secured it by simply repudiating his bride on the Euripidean method of “it was my tongue that swore,” not my soul. Anne seems to have been a good-natured sort of German frau who accepted the inevitable with a good grace, and doubtless she was not sorry to be left alone with her knitting. Henry gave her £4,000 a year and two country houses, and called her his sister. She was not above cracking a risky joke with her temporary husband when he became still more prodigious as to his size and gluttony. It was while he was worried about Anne that Luther announced that Squire Harry thought himself to be God.

Lady Catherine Howard was the most pitiful of all, as Anne Boleyn was the most tragic. Once again there was the inevitable see-saw of politics; Henry had got rid of Thomas Cromwell the Protestant by the simple method of cutting off his head in circumstances of unusual brutality even for the sixteenth century; and once more the Roman Catholics came on top. The result was the sacrifice of pretty Catherine Howard. That she was by far the best looking of all Henry’s wives can hardly be denied. Nobody looking at her gentle and thoughtful little face in the portrait that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery would ever dream that she was so immoral as people tried to prove. Her eyes were hazel, her hair was auburn; and she looks as virginal as though she had never been near the Court. Yet she was said to have had entanglements with at least three men. She had had a very unhappy childhood, and received due thrashings from her aunt the Duchess of Norfolk when that lady took a fancy to bestow them; but little education. She had no maternal supervision to keep her on the straight and narrow path in that sinful Court. Her music master, Mannock, boasted that she had promised to be his mistress; a kinsman named Dereham said that she was his wife; and she was reported to be engaged to her cousin, Culpepper. And now she was bestowed upon this new and dreadful suitor, His Gracious Majesty[5] himself. No wonder that Martin Hume became almost dithyrambic about it. Indeed, Catherine Howard had a hard fate.

I quote directly from Professor Pollard, who mercifully glosses over the piteous details. “Rumours of Catherine Howard’s past indiscretions had at length reached the ears of the privy council.... Twenty-four hours later Cranmer put in his hands the evidence of the queen’s misconduct. Henry refused to believe it in the rude awakening from his dreams; he ordered a strict investigation to be made. Its results left no room for doubt. Dereham confessed his intercourse; Mannock admitted having taken liberties; and finally the queen herself confessed her guilt. The king was overwhelmed with grief and vexation, and shed bitter tears. He offered his wife a pardon and she might have escaped with nothing worse than a divorce had not proofs come to hand of her misconduct with Culpepper during Henry’s recent absence in the north. This offence was high treason and could not be covered by Henry’s pardon for her prenuptial immorality.” Henry feared lest the blood royal be contaminated. In January, 1542, Parliament considerately relieved this blubbering and neurotic man of his responsibility by “passing an Act of Attainder directed against his new wife, which, to save him pain, was signed by a Commission in his stead. Catherine declined his permission to go down to the house of Parliament and defend herself in person.” In due course she was beheaded in the Tower. The story is that she said, “I had rather die a Culpepper than live a Queen.” Doubtless in confessing at the back of her mind was the thought that it were better to be dead than to be married to King Henry VIII at the moment that his mental syphilis was approximating to its greatest terrors with all its obsessions and phobias. Seemingly the Parliament of England was not always so brave as we now think it to be. But if he knew so much about women as he had professed in the case of his repudiation of Anne of Cleves, why had he not applied his knowledge to the case of Catherine Howard before?

It seems a reasonable thing to glance at the other symptoms of syphilis that occurred at the time during the reign of Catherine Howard when his greatest degeneracy was coming on.

The ulcer on his leg sometimes closed, and the pain was so intense that he sometimes became speechless with agony and went black in the face.[6] He grew more and more corpulent every day. When he went on progress to the north he cleared the Tower by issuing orders that every prisoner in it was to be beheaded. If these in an absolute monarch are not symptoms of syphilitic psychasthenia, of a frightful moral and physical degeneration, what are they? Symptoms of whooping-cough, perhaps!

Next and last came Catherine Parr, who was said to have been degraded to the royal bed by the Protestants to gain their own ends. She must have been a brave woman to tackle the task of nursing this man, whose temper by that time was like that of a wild beast owing to his obsessions and phobias. She was no beauty; she was short in stature, but gifted with amazing tact. She had already been twice a widow, so evidently she thought she understood the art of nursing and managing men, even such a man as her new husband. She is said to have been at the time in love with Sir Thomas Seymour, whom she married after Henry’s death, only to die in a short time of puerperal fever. She reconciled Henry to his daughter, Elizabeth, and is said to have kept the peace between her and the Princess Mary. We are told that she once had a theological dispute with the king; a risky thing to do. “A good hearing it is,” said Henry, “when women become such clerks; and a fine thing it is to be taught in mine old days by my wife.” Catherine explained that what she had said was merely intended to “minister talk”; so Henry answered, “Is it so, sweetheart; then we are friends again,” and when Lord Chancellor Wriothesley came to arrest her Henry called him beast, knave and fool. She must indeed have been a remarkably clever woman, whatever her religious opinions.

As to his death it is quite impossible to get at the real truth. He had sent the Duke of Norfolk to the Tower and had ordered his execution to be fixed for February 28th, 1546. But, alas, on the 27th Henry lay dying. The exact details are so squabbled over for purposes of sectarianism, that it is impossible to distinguish between truth and falsehood. It is said on the one side that he died in an agony of conscience; on the other that Archbishop Cranmer came to ask him to give some token of his belief in Jesus Christ. The king is said to have roused himself from his stupor and pressed Cranmer’s hand. While there are not sufficient details to offer an opinion it is possible that his stupor was uræmic, due to the slow degeneration of his kidneys during the many years that his body and mind had been degenerating. But one would prefer to have some independent authority for the statement that the dying man understood sufficient of what Cranmer was saying to him to press his hand at the mention of the blessed name of Christ.

To the best of my ability and in accordance with the best modern historical knowledge, I have drawn as honestly as I can the true character of Henry VIII, Defender of the Faith, as seen by a doctor. There are many stories told about him that I purposely have omitted from fear of being accused of exaggeration. But the general atmosphere of lust, obscenity, grandiose ideas, such as were noticed by Luther, and violence combined with cowardice, especially about disease, is all very typical of syphilis; one might almost call it diagnostic. He never became an indecent honest lunatic such as Ivan the Terrible, for ingenious historians who know the exact circumstances so far as anybody can know them at this time of day, are still able to find logical reasons for even the most dreadful of his actions. He did not become terrible; he became loathsome. To use the words of a witty journalist friend of mine he was not Henry the Terrible; he was Henry the Horrible. He is the one man who ever disproved Shakespeare’s vaunt:

“This England never did nor never shall
Lie at the proud feet of a conqueror.”

For if England did not lie at the proud and probably dropsical feet of this obsessional syphilitic with doubtless a gigantic blood-pressure to add to his bad temper, words have no meaning.

The whole conduct of the English people throughout the Reformation is a beautiful example of the working of Dr. Wilfrid Trotter’s herd instinct. Like a swarm of bees England swept this way and that, uncertain how to fly, looking for a resting-place where it might start the new era just as the swarm searches for a place to start a new hive; and then, suddenly, with no obvious reason, darts upon its way, upon the usual English way of a compromise which doubtfully satisfies the strongest party.

It adds to the remark of R. L. Stevenson’s cynical old Frenchman: “The English are a stupid people who have sometimes blundered into good.”

How many men lost their lives owing to Henry’s syphilitic obsessions and phobias it is quite impossible to say. The comparatively slight derangement of judgment in those tyrannical times may have meant the block for scores. Perhaps when Sir Thomas More said, “Her Majesty Queen Anne Boleyn may dance and sing but her turn may still shortly come,” the acutest mind in England perceived that his king was not entirely normal in mind.

Henry VIII was never a despot. If the law did not allow him to do as he wished, he simply got Parliament to alter it for him.

Edward VI

This poor little boy, in whom all the tragedy of the Tudors seems to have concentrated itself, was born to Henry VIII and Queen Jane Seymour in 1537. Henry had already forgiven himself for his conduct to Anne Boleyn, and was deeply attached to his new queen; during the progress of the christening he sat by the side of his wife and held her hand in order that she might not be too exhausted by the strain. She, poor thing, had to wear a great gown of ermine, and to sit upright on a state pallet to welcome and bless her little son as the service terminated. But her loving arms could not save him; already within him were implanted the seeds of death, a tuberculous tendency from his grandfather, Henry VII, and actual spirochetes from his father, Henry VIII. And, as Queen Jane clutched him to her bosom, she herself began to shiver; no doubt she thought her shivering was from fear lest she lose her son; but within a week of his birth she lay dead, probably from puerperal septicæmia. Henry was heart-broken; but at least the curse of the Church had been lifted; he could now honestly say that he had begotten a legitimate and living son, and that the succession of the English throne was safe. Where the brilliant little Anne Boleyn had failed, this commonplace and featureless Queen Jane, so colourless that everybody liked her, or at least did not hate her, had succeeded. So she being dead, Henry at once communicated with the Court of France in order to get him another wife, if possible; that the Pope might see how impotent he was to affect human destiny. This was not because he was incurably lustful, but because it was still important to have another heir, should little Edward turn sick and die. Already, one thinks, the English Prometheus was scaling Olympus with determined, though engrossed, footsteps; already Zeus might well tremble at the ponderous footfalls of this fat and syphilitic man.

But little Edward did not seem likely to die; for, to all appearances he was a strong and healthy little boy. If the Court of England had purposely meant to deny that Edward was syphilitic it could not have chosen better words to do it in, for, as the message announcing the glad news of his progress said, “he sucketh like a child of puissance.” In the typical infantile hereditary syphilis the baby suffers from “snuffles,” and its sucking powers are, to say the least, inadequate. But the spirochæte has other ways of taking its revenge upon its host. It may lie latent for years, and so poison the child’s resisting powers that he falls an easy victim to some deadly bacterium. In the case of little Edward it seems to have been the tubercle bacillus that first seized upon its chance; and when, fifteen years later, just after puberty, it was working its deadly will upon him the spirochæte of syphilis joined the assault.

Edward was an affectionate little boy, of good impulses. Of course it was unthinkable that a prince should ever be flogged; so the fond father appointed a whipping-boy to act vicariously in his stead. It was Barnaby Fitzpatrick who was honoured by receiving the royal thrashings, though Edward was such a good little boy that Barnaby was seldom called upon for duty, and grew up a firm friend of the little king who might have suffered in his person but for him. Edward’s wet-nurse was a motherly woman whom he later called his “mother-jak.” I do not know what childish utterance that may have represented, but it is silly enough a term to have come from the mouths of babes and sucklings. At eleven months old no less a personage than Thomas Cromwell visited him officially and, no doubt, dandled him upon his knee. Says Cromwell’s secretary, speaking of this time, “And I do assure your lordship that I never saw so goodly a child of his age; so merry, so good and loving a countenance, and so earnest an eye, as it were exercising a judgment towards every person who repaireth to his grace; and, as it seemeth to me, his grace encreaseth well in the air where he is.” (Already he had been sent to the country for his health.) “And, albeit a little of his grace’s flesh decayeth, yet he shooteth out in length and waxeth firm and stiff and he can steadfastly stand.” So clearly he was a nice little boy of eleven months, if anything rather forward for his age.

When he was about two, his father, the king, used to take his little son in his arms and stand at the window to show the multitude how bravely his boy was fighting life; and the crowd would clap and cheer for joy, for King Henry VIII was still beloved, and the Tudor succession was at every Englishman’s heart; the awful mental and physical degeneration in the king was still to come, and there is no more delightful scene in Henry VIII’s life than that of him standing at the window holding up his son to be cheered by the crowd. How little we really know of our public men! Who could have foretold that this smiling king was to become the most murderous tyrant who ever sat upon the throne of England? For the present let him be glad, and his little son with him, smiling and chuckling with true Tudor tact. The tragedy to both comes soon enough.

Some time before this, the proud wet-nurse announced that her foster-child “has three teeth and a fourth appeareth.” I cannot discover the exact age at which this announcement was made. It would be interesting to know whether his dentition was entirely normal; but probably little Edward seemed normal enough. When he came to be educated the amount of learning that was stuffed into that poor child’s head was simply amazing—worthy of Elizabeth; worthy of bluff King Hal himself. He could speak both Latin and Greek; he habitually wrote in Latin, and could translate a Latin author into Attic Greek. For his friend he selected little Jane Dormer, a girl of his own age; the two ran about and played together. The two made a pretty picture, if you can forget the fate that was hanging over the little boy. He kept a journal, and a day came, April 2nd, 1552, when he noted “this day I fell sick of the measles and the smallpox.” The young diagnostician must have been very sure of his insight. The fact that two dissimilar eruptions came out on the little boy at the same time rather seems to indicate that there was some other toxin at work, probably syphilitic.

As he grew up he began to show signs of both obstinacy and religiosity, which, with a little encouragement, might have become as fanatic as those of Mary Tudor herself and led to a real good old sixteenth-century religious persecution. It was perhaps fortunate for England that the clever little boy died before he could do any real mischief. We know a great deal about his actual death. For a long time his health had been failing; he was racked with a constant and incurable cough, and apparently showed all the symptoms of a rapid consumption. The regular doctors having failed to cure him, England’s Majesty was entrusted to the care of a woman who professed to have acquired possession of a cure-all. Under her treatment the king became rapidly worse. “His legs swelled, his complexion became sallow, his hair fell out; the terminal joints of his fingers fell off” (syphilitic dactylitis?). “Eruptions came out on his skin, and he lost his fingers.” The luckless laundress who washed his shirts also suffered from terrible things; she lost her nails and the skin off her fingers, which gave rise to the suspicion that some one had been trying to poison the king her employer. But probably either she had been using some cheap soap or else she had syphilis herself. So, the quack having proved that her cure-all was doing the king more harm than good, was sent about her business, and the regular doctors were recalled. Froude thought that she had been using some mineral poison, and that in truth Edward VI had actually been poisoned by her, though not intentionally. As for me, I am quite prepared to believe that she had somehow got hold of a preparation of mercury which she was using on the light-hearted assumption, which was probably true, that in 1550 everybody was suffering from syphilis, and that when she tried it on Edward’s form, already wasted and powerless by the long struggle with tuberculosis, the spirochætes that had been lying latent within him suddenly became active during the “storms of puberty” with the terrifying results that we have just seen. Possibly the woman may have bragged of her discovery about mercury; and everybody would at once say, “See what you are doing to our beloved young king with your mineral poisons!” There is much virtue in a name. Call mercury a “mineral poison,” and it is at once damned as much as if you had called it a “drug.” But vegetable poisons are far worse than mineral poisons; yet nobody dreams of saying that we should not take strychnine to “buck us up,” nor morphine to relieve us of intolerable pain. Probably it was that woman’s hard luck that she tried mercury at the very moment when the king’s latent syphilis was about to come to the surface; and no doubt it was just such incidents as this which have given to mercury such a bad name, that the moment one prescribes it the patient always says, “Not mercury, doctor, please.”

But that unfortunate woman was dismissed and the regular practitioners returned to their prey with the good old sixteenth-century remedies for coughs, which, if they could not cure, would certainly not bring the patient all out in a rash. The rumour went about that they were poisoning the king, that he was already dead. As young Edward lay gasping and coughing and sweating on his death-bed his attendants said to him that it would be wise for him to let himself be seen; so, with true Tudor sense of duty, he dragged himself to the window and looked out at the crowd waiting like ghouls to hear that he was dead. When they saw his face, grey, pinched and dying, the crowd cheered as it cheered when it saw him held up in his father’s arms. Though some cheered, yet some held to it that a man who could look so ghastly must be dead, and indeed the rumour that he was dead was but confirmed by the sight of him.

His last prayer was “O Lord God, free me, I beseech you, from this calamitous life.” What was that poor young lad doing that he had already begun to wonder why he had ever been born, as many men have wondered about themselves since him? Tuberculosis of the lungs is often accompanied by a sense of euphoria, that is to say, the patient does not feel so ill as he should feel. But syphilis of the lung is gloomy enough, and sometimes gives rise to symptoms indistinguishable from tuberculosis. On the whole, therefore, I might rather be inclined to hazard a guess that it was syphilis of the lung that killed little Edward VI. I grant that this guess might be based mainly on that sad prayer, coupled with all the other symptoms that I have narrated. Then, after he had been trying to look upon his subjects with eyes that probably saw nothing, he suddenly cried, “I faint—Lord, receive my soul,” and fell back dead.

But is it not rather fantastic to summon either in particular of the two Earthly Twins, tubercle and syphilis, to the final assault, especially a manifestation of syphilis so rare as syphilis of the lung? These two form an alliance when it occurs that is not like the alliance of States; they do not quarrel, but never let go their grip until the patient dies. And it is in an alliance between delayed hereditary syphilis and pulmonary tuberculosis that we must probably seek for the death of Edward VI.

Probably it was lucky for him, and lucky for England that he died; and he did well by wondering why he was ever born. How much more violently would the wonder of life have shocked him when he came to learn how thorny is the path of a man who is too religious! _Sed Dis aliter visum._ It needed no inscrutable wisdom on the part of the Almighty to realise that Edward Tudor was “better dead.”

Mary Tudor

I have already discussed the character of this unhappy woman in _Post Mortem_. To the psychology that I there enunciated I have nothing to add; and I still believe that if she had not been for so long an old maid, if she had not been neglected by Philip II, or if she had been married, as she probably would have preferred, to Charles V, England would not have had occasion to call her “Bloody Mary.” She but supplies another instance, if one were needed, that religion and sex[7] are not far apart.

For details as to her physical health I am indebted to the _British Medical Journal_ for 1910, where there appeared that noteworthy series of articles on Royal Deathbeds which has been so useful to historically minded doctors.

As a child she was always sickly, though as she grew up she had to undergo the rigid mental discipline that Henry enforced on all his children. Being a very learned man himself, he naturally tried to imbue them with his own hunger for knowledge; and all three rivalled their father in intellectual endeavour.

With better fortune, better health, and perhaps we might say with a less exacting father, Mary might have been as great as he. Instead her really great parts turned her into the road of tyranny and persecution, and “Bloody Mary” she will remain for all time.

The “storms of puberty” that had shattered the frail barque of Edward VI, and brought his latent spirochætes to the surface, beat hard upon Mary’s body, and left her an embittered and sickly woman, with an intellect below her station, and a conscience above it. But what she mistook for the love of God—religion—was probably a love more fleshly; the desire of the moth for the star, as Shelley puts it poetically. Indeed, it is difficult to describe this primitive instinct in language that shall not be poetical; the great brain of man has idealised love until it is the emotion furthest from prose that humanity is capable of suffering; and that which is originally common to man and the brutes becomes the noblest feeling of the human brain; transcendental. And when again sublimated it may lead to the fiercest of injustices, to the most savage of religious persecutions. To that goal it led Mary Tudor, the most unhappy woman in English history.

As a girl she suffered from menstrual troubles that caused her great pain; her normal menstruation was often scanty; and this has been attributed to overstudy. To this day we find that any overstrain, or even a sudden change of climate, may cause amenorrhœa in a young woman; many of our English girl-immigrants, having left the depths of an English summer for the mildness of a Sydney winter, suddenly terrify their friends by becoming amenorrhœic, often to their unfounded mental distress. Later on she suffered from what she called her “old guest,” of which the chief symptom was amenorrhœa. The probability is that soon after her marriage with Philip she really did become pregnant, and miscarried. The disappointment weighed heavily on her mind. Was it possible that she, who was so earnest, virtuous and religious, should be affected by the same curse as the wives of her father? She became cachectic—that is to say, her complexion assumed the ashy hue of a person dying of cancer; and her abdomen swelled as though she were again pregnant. Sir Spencer Wells in 1877 hazarded the guess that she probably suffered from “ovarian dropsy,” an old-fashioned term for what we should now call “parovarian cyst,” a tumour that takes its origin from a little body adjacent to the ovary, and, being distended with fluid, causes enormous swelling of the abdomen. It is the one abdominal tumour which, if tapped, may possibly not return, and the patient may be cured with no further ado.

For years before she died she had suffered from very bad health; she was never well, and could never attend to her work properly, owing to the terrible headaches that afflicted her; these were possibly due to her bad eyesight. With these also went palpitation of the heart. She never became old, for she died at forty-two; and most likely the proverb was as true with her as it still is with every young person—“If you feel your heart, it is not your heart; it is something else, generally your stomach.”

It is quite true that she, like Charles V, felt the loss of Calais desperately; her exact words to her ladies-in-waiting were, “When I am opened you will find Calais lying on my heart.” Probably the fluttering at her heart put the idea into her head; and equally probably that fluttering ultimately came from her pelvic distress, which in turn would doubtless cause indigestion. We often see similar cases to-day.

Her father had compelled her to sign a statement that his marriage with Catherine of Aragon had been “by God’s law and man’s incestuous and unlawful”; thereby forcing her to declare herself a bastard. The parliament of her brother Edward VI passed an Act of Uniformity that enjoined services in English and did not permit of the Mass. To Mary, as a devout Roman Catholic, this appeared to be a form of persecution. She therefore appealed to her cousin the Emperor who intervened on her behalf, as he had tried to intervene on behalf of her mother during the divorce. But this time he was more successful, for he threatened England with war unless Mary’s freedom of worship was restored to her, and her right of hearing Mass in her own chapel after the old canons. It is easy to see that the great Tudor dictator was dead and that only a sick woman sat on his throne. But Mary seems to have had no approximately impartial adviser. Throughout her reign she had no one to help her but the Emperor, who, great as he was, could not be called impartial in those dreadful times.

She was by no means personally cruel; she was lenient to political prisoners and restored out of her own privy purse some of the monasteries which her father had robbed. When her tumour—if it was a tumour—returned, in 1557, she drew up a will in expectation of the dangers of childbirth. She added a codicil to this in October, 1558, which showed that she had abandoned all hope of children. Her husband had not returned to her after he had gone to Belgium to see Charles V abdicate, and the elderly wife at last saw that no child of hers was to govern England.

In 1558 she suffered from what was then called “the new burning ague,” which is now thought to have been the influenza; in that year it was raging in England, killing thousands of people.

She died suddenly in November, 1558, in full possession of her mind, while she was hearing Mass in her own private chamber, a right that she had won after such bitter struggles. Although no post-mortem examination was held, it is generally thought that she died of an ovarian tumour, though that is not likely to be correct, because an ovarian tumour would not cause sudden death. Nor is there any record of any sickness that would cause a heart disease that might kill her suddenly, unless perhaps the influenza may have weakened her heart. I rather fancy that my own guess is correct as given in _Post Mortem_ that she died of “degeneration of heart and arteries,” not necessarily but probably syphilitic and inherited from her father.

Any doctor looking at the portrait of her wizened, lined, and prematurely aged face would probably say, “That woman must have been a hereditary syphilitic,” especially if he knew the history of Henry VIII. I am surprised to see that in the actual record of her life there appears to be none of the usual symptoms of hereditary syphilis beyond the general ill-health that was hers all her days, poor creature. Doubtless the illness in her father was working itself out by the time that she was born.

But she was very short-sighted; and possibly, as Sir Clifford Allbutt points out, this may have been due to “interstitial keratitis,” an affection of the cornea of the eye which is almost confined to hereditary syphilitics. So that in Mary also we see the effects of the “tragedy of the Tudors.” I am certain that that wizened face must come from hereditary syphilis, because one of the first patients I ever had looked extraordinarily like Mary Tudor, and the swellings on her arms for which she consulted me melted rapidly under the influence of mercury. Her photograph lies in my desk to this day as a perfect illustration of delayed hereditary syphilis.

Queen Elizabeth

No decent man would add to the slanders that have been passed upon this extraordinary woman, who stood at the head of the English nation when it was engaged in one of its fiercest struggles for very existence. These slanders are so numerous in quantity, but in quality so much alike, that they may all be summed up in one—slander against her sexual morality. Professor Chamberlin(2), evidently considering that the morals of a great queen of the sixteenth century should resemble those of a great queen of the nineteenth, spent many years in ascertaining the nature of the sicknesses from which she was said to have suffered. The farrago of somewhat quackish-sounding symptoms that he discovered has no meaning in modern medicine. She has been slandered quite enough, poor lady, and I for one shall not add anything to it. Rather than seek an explanation for the innumerable contemporary physiological slanders I propose to see whether they are possible.

They may be said to have been summed up by the kindest, most gentle and most sympathetic of historians, Professor A. F. Pollard(1), whose immense industry and meticulous fairness will at once absolve him from any obvious conscious bias, sectarian or otherwise. Writing of her extraordinary juggling with her numerous suitors he says: “There is evidence that she had no option in the matter and that a physical defect precluded her from hopes of issue. On this supposition her conduct becomes intelligible, her irritation at parliamentary pressure on the subject pardonable, and her outburst on the news of Mary Stuart’s motherhood a welcome sign of genuine feeling. Possibly there was a physical cause for Elizabeth’s masculine mind and temper, and for the curious fact that no man lost his head over her as many did over Mary Queen of Scots. To judge from portraits, Mary was as handsome as her rival; but apparently Elizabeth had no feminine fascination, and even her extravagant addiction to the outward trappings of her sex may have been due to the absence or atrophy of deeper feminine feelings. The impossibility of marriage made her all the freer with her flirtations, and she carried some of them to lengths which scandalized a public unconscious of Elizabeth’s real security.”

To analyse such remarkable slanders as those passed by Mary Queen of Scots(3), and many years after Elizabeth’s death by Ben Jonson(4) in his tipsy tattling would need a paper more suited for a gynæcological journal than for general publication. Without emulating Ben by going into unpleasant physical details I content myself by saying that so far as I know there is _no_ physical defect of the female form obvious to the sufferer which will preclude hope of offspring, and yet allow her to reach the age of nearly seventy. Before coming to that conclusion the author laid down four postulates to himself[8] which will occur to every critically minded doctor; and it seems to him that every suggestion fails miserably in at least one of these postulates. And since, when tested in this way, every slander founded on the physical appearance of her body necessarily fails, it is equally possible that the suspicions thus based may be equally without foundation. Such rumours about her are founded upon a lamentable want of knowledge of woman’s physiological and anatomical necessities.(11)

It seems to me, that we can gather better evidence from contemporary portraits than from contemporary religious slanders; it is well known that whenever sixteenth-century religion came in at the door objective truth flew out at the window. No one can study the beautiful portrait of Queen Elizabeth which Miss Gwen John allows me to publish without thinking: “That is not the portrait of a loose woman! She may have been cruel, vindictive, merciless, but she cannot have been loose and sensual.”

Her amazing personality is best explained by the new science of the ductless glands—endocrinology.[9] Sometimes she seems to have had all the male qualities, such as swearing, roughness of speech, freedom from convention. Sometimes she seems to have behaved like a doting old maid, in her inordinate love of dress, jewellery, and flattery. Rather than believe that she was abnormal in form, which I think to be impossible considering the known facts of her physiology, I find it easier to believe that in some way her “endocrine balance” was abnormal. It is now rather more than suspected that no individual is entirely male or entirely female; the psychic qualities of both sexes are more or less mingled in everybody, and thus we could easily explain the remarkable fact noted by Professor Pollard that no man ever seems to have fallen in love with Elizabeth sufficiently to risk his head for her. A century before, Owen Tudor fell in love with Katherine of Valois(7), and risked death by marrying her secretly. But no such vehement lover appeared for Elizabeth; and, if he had, her want of “endocrine balance” would not have prevented her from child-bearing. When she shouted to Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, “God’s death, villain, I’ll have thy head,”(3) the violence of the male in her came to the surface; when she fondled and fooled with the Duke of Alençon and called him her “little frog”(6) and other silly names, the doting old maid in her was paramount. Major Hume considers that it was with the Duke of Alençon that Elizabeth was in love for the first and only time in her life; and it is quite possible.

The only thing that my speculation does not explain is the bitter cry from the heart that was wrung from her when she heard of the birth of King James I to her great rival, Mary Queen of Scots: “The Queen of Scots is the lighter of a fair son, but I am a barren stock!”(3) How did she know? Was she thinking of the amazing number of miscarriages that befell two of her father’s wives, which to us now appear such certain evidence that he was probably suffering from constitutional syphilis? That is the best suggestion I am able to make.