Chapter IV: Part 4

Philip, suspicious of everybody and everything, had given orders that, should Don John die, his confessor was to keep an accurate record of the circumstances; and it is from the report of this priest that the above account has been drawn by Stirling-Maxwell, so we can look upon it as authoritative. Philip was accused of poisoning him, and for a moment this supposition was borne out by the extreme redness of the intestines; but this is much more easily explained by the peritonitis. Again, Philip’s enemies have said that Don John died of a broken heart, because the priest reported that one side of his heart was dry and empty; but this too is quite natural if we suppose that the last act of Don John’s life was for his heart to pump its blood into his arteries, as so often happens in death. Young men do not die of broken hearts; “Men have died and worms have eaten them--but not for love!” as Rosalind says in her sweet cynicism. In elderly men with high blood-pressures it is quite possible that grief and worry may actually cause the heart to burst, and to that extent novelists are right in speaking of a “broken heart.” Otherwise the disease, or casualty, is unknown to medicine. No amount of worry, or absence of worry, would have had any effect upon Don John’s typhoid ulcer.

Besides the suspicion of poisoning, Don John was rumoured to have died of the “French disease,” even the name of the lady being mentioned. While he was certainly no more moral than any other gay and handsome young prince of his time, there is not the slightest reason for supposing the rumour to have been anything but folly. Syphilis does not kill a man as Don John died, while ambulatory typhoid fever most assuredly does. Therefore the lady in question must remain without her glory so far as this book is concerned, though her name has survived, and not only in Spanish.

Don John was a handsome young man, graceful and strong. There are many contemporary portraits of him, perhaps the best being a magnificent statue at Messina, which he saved from the Turks at Lepanto. He had frank blue eyes and yellow curls, and a very great charm of manner; but he was liable to attacks of violent pride which estranged his friends. He was the darling of the ladies, and was esteemed the flower of chivalry in his day; but William of Orange warned his Netherlanders not to be deceived by his appearance; in his view Philip had sent a monster of cruelty no less savage than himself. But William was prejudiced, and Don John is still one of the great romantic figures of history. It is difficult to speculate reasonably on what might have happened if he had not died. It has been thought that he might have led the Armada, in which case that most badly-managed expedition would at least have been well led, and no doubt England would have had a more determined struggle; but it seems to me more likely that Don John and Philip would have quarrelled, and that Fortune would have been even less kind to Spain than she was. Those who love Spain must be on the whole rather glad that Don John died before he had been able to cause more trouble than he did. It is difficult to agree entirely with those who would put the blame entirely on Philip for the troubles between him and Don John, or would interpret every act of Philip to his detriment. The whole story might be equally interpreted as the effort of a most conscientious and narrow-minded man endeavouring to follow out what he thought to be his father’s wishes and at the same time to keep a wild young brother from kicking over the traces. Compare Butler’s, _The Way of All Flesh_.

But the real interest to us of Don John is in his relations with Cervantes.

Cervantes on his galley puts his sword into its sheath
(_Don John of Austria rides homewards with a wreath_),
And he sees across a weary land a winding road in Spain
Up which a lean and foolish knight rides slowly up in vain.

And it will be a sad world indeed when Don Quixote at last reaches the top of that winding road and men cease to love him.

At Lepanto Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (please pronounce the “a’s” separately) was about twenty-five years of age, and was lying below deck sick of a fever. When he heard the roar of the guns of Don John he sprang from his bed and rushed on deck in spite of the orders of his captain; he was put in charge of a boat’s crew of twelve men and went through the thick of the fighting. Every man in Don John’s fleet was fired with his religious enthusiasm, and Cervantes’ courage was only an index of the wild fervour that distinguished the Christians on that most bloody day. He was wounded in the left hand, “for the greater glory of the right,” as he himself quaintly says, and never again could he move the fingers of the injured hand; no doubt the tendon sheaths had become septic, and he was lucky to have kept the hand at all. It has been sapiently remarked that the world would have had a great loss if it had been the right hand; but healthy people who lose the right hand can easily learn to write with the left. Cervantes remained in the fleet for some years until, on his way home, he was captured by Algerian pirates; put to the service of a Christian renegade--a man who had turned Mussulman to save his life or from still less worthy motive--Cervantes made several attempts to escape, but these were unsuccessful, and he remained in captivity for some years until his family had scraped up enough to ransom him. In _Don Quixote_ there is a good deal about the renegadoes, and much of the well-known story of the “escaped Moor” is probably autobiographical; from these hints we gather that the renegadoes were not quite so bad as has been generally thought, or else that Cervantes was far too big-minded a man to believe unnecessary evil about anybody.

Back in Spain, he went into the army for two years, until, in 1582, he gave up soldiering and took to literature. He found the pen “a good stick but a bad crutch,” and in 1585 returned to the public service as deputy-purveyor of the fleet. In 1594 he became collectors of revenues in Granada, and in 1597 he became short in his accounts and fell into jail. There he seems to have begun _Don Quixote_; he somehow obtained security for the repayment of the missing money, was released penniless into a suspicious world, and published the first part of _Don Quixote_ in 1605. It was enormously well received, and from that day to this has remained one of the most successful of all books. Ten years later he found that dishonest publishers were issuing spurious second parts, so he sat himself down to write a genuine sequel. This differs from most sequels in that it is better than the original; it is wiser, mellower, less ironical; Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are still more lovable than they were before, and one imagines that Cervantes must have spent the whole ten years in collecting--or inventing--the wonderful proverbs so wisely uttered by the squire.

Though Cervantes wrote many plays he is now remembered mainly by his one very great romance, which is read lovingly in every language of every part of the world, so that the epithet “Quixotic” is applied everywhere to whatsoever is both gallant and foolish; an epithet which reflects the mixture of affection and pity in which the old Don is universally held, and is more often considered to be a compliment than the reverse. Curiously enough, women seldom seem to like Don Quixote; only the other day a brilliant young woman graduate told me that she thought he was a “silly old fool!” That was all she could see in him; but he is universally now thought to represent the pathos of the man who is born out of his time. As has been so well said, “This book is not meant for laughter--it is meant for tears.” I can do no more than advise everybody to get a thin-paper copy and let it live in the pocket for some months, reading it at odd moments; it is the wisest and wittiest book ever published. “Blessed be the man who invented sleep,” is a typical piece of Panzan philosophy with which most wise men will agree.

But when we have done sentimentalizing over the hidden meaning that undoubtedly underlies Don Quixote, we must not forget that it is extraordinarily funny even to a modern mind. The law that the humour of one generation is merely grotesque to the next does not seem to apply to _Don Quixote_; and I dare swear that the picture of the mad old Don, brought home from the inn of Maritornes, looking so stately in a cage upon a bullock-wagon, guarded by troopers of the Holy Brotherhood, and escorted by the priest and the barber, with the distracted Sancho Panza buzzing about wondering what has become of his promised Governorship, is absolutely the funniest thing in all literature; all the funnier because the springs of our laughter flow from the fount of our tears.

Now I cannot help thinking that when Cervantes began to write _Don Quixote_ in prison, feeling bitter and sore against a world which had imprisoned him, and stiffened his hand for him, and condemned him to poverty and imprisonment, he must have had in his mind the story of the young bastard of Imperial Majesty who had risen to such heights of glory over Lepanto. It is not contended that Don Quixote was consciously intended to be a characterizature of Don Quixada or Don John, though his real name was Alonzo Quixana or Quixada, Don Quixote being a _nom de guerre_ born of his frenzy; but I find it hard to believe that Cervantes had not heard of the foolish loyalty of Quixada in the matter of Jeronimo, or of the romantic dreams of Don John. It would seem that in these two incidents we find the true seeds of _Don Quixote_. It is not true that “Cervantes laughed Spain’s chivalry away.” Chivalry, meaning the social order of the true crusades, had long been dead even in Spain, the most conservative of nations. What really laughed Spain’s chivalry away was the gay and joyous laugh of Don John himself, who would have plunged her into a great war for a dream. The man who seriously thought of dashing across the North Sea to marry Mary Queen of Scots would have been quite capable of tilting at windmills. In his inmost heart Cervantes must have seen his folly.

The death of Don Quixote is probably the most generally famous in literature, vying with that of Colonel Newcome, though more impressive because it is less sentimental. Cervantes had begun by rather jeering at his old Don, and subjecting him to uncalled-for cudgellings and humiliations; he then fell in love with the brave old lunatic, as everybody else has fallen in love with him ever since, and by the time that he came to die had drawn him as a really noble and beautiful character, who shows all the pathos of the idealist who is born out of his time. The death of Don Quixote is, except the death of one other Idealist, the most affecting death in all literature; the pathos is secured by means similarly restrained. The Bachelor Samson Carrasco, in his determination to cure Don Quixote of his knight-errant folly, had dressed himself up as “The Knight of the White Moon,” and vowed that there was another lady more fair than Dulcinea del Toboso. At that blasphemy Don Quixote naturally flew to arms and challenged the insolent knight. By that time Rosinante was but old bones, so the Bachelor, being well-mounted on a young charger, overthrew the old horse and his brave old rider, and Don Quixote came to grass with a terrible fall. Then the Bachelor made Don Quixote vow that he would cease from his knight-errantry for a whole year, by which time it was hoped that he would be cured. They lifted his visor and found the old man “pale and sweating”; evidently Cervantes had seen some old man suffering from shock, and described what he saw in three words. From this humiliation Don Quixote never really recovered. He reached home and formed the mad idea of turning shepherd with Sancho and the Bachelor, and living out his penance in the fields. But Death saw otherwise, and the old man answered his call before he could do as he wished. He was seized with a violent fever that confined him to his room for six days; finally he slept calmly for some hours, and again awakened, only to fall into one attack of syncope after another until he died; the sanguine assurance of Sancho Panza that Dulcinea had been successfully disenchanted could not save him. Like most idealists he died a sad and disappointed man, certain of one thing only--that he was out of touch with the majority of mankind.

Cervantes was far too great an artist to kill his old hero by some such folly as “brain fever”--which nonsense I guess to have been typhoid. I believe that in describing the death of Don Quixote he was thinking of some old man whom he had seen crawl home to die after a severe physical shock, disappointed and disillusioned in a world of practical youth in which there is no room for romantic old age--probably some kind old man whom he himself had loved. These old men usually die of hypostatic pneumonia, which has been called the “natural end of man,” and is probably the real broken heart of popular medicine. The old man, after a severe shock, is affected by a weakened circulation; the lungs are attacked by a slow inflammation, and he dies, usually in a few days, in much the same way as died Don Quixote. Cervantes did not know that these old men die from inflammation of the lungs; no doubt he observed the way they die, and immortalized his memories in the death of Don Quixote. I have written this to point out Cervantes’ great powers of observation. He would probably have made a good doctor in our day.

This theory of _Don Quixote_, that at its roots lie memories of Don John and Don Quixada, is in no way inconsistent with Cervantes’ own statement that he wrote the book to ridicule the romances of Chivalry which were so vitiating the literary taste of seventeenth-century Spain; at the back of his mind probably lay his own memories of foolish and gallant things, quite worthy of affectionate ridicule such as he has lavished on his knight-errant.

Philip II and the Arterio-Sclerosis of Statesmen

When the Empress Isabel was pregnant with the child which was to be Philip II, she bethought her of the glory that was hers in bearing offspring to a man so famous as the Roman Emperor, and she made up her mind that she would comport herself as became a Roman Empress. When, therefore, her relations and midwives during the confinement implored her to cry out or she would die, the proud Empress answered, “Die I may; but call out I _will not_!” and thus Philip arrived into the world sombre son of a stoical mother and heroic father. Doubtless she thought that she would show a courage equal to his father’s, hoping that the son would then prove not unworthy. Though she was very beautiful, as Titian’s famous portrait shows, she seems to have been a gloomy and austere woman, and Charles, being absent so long from her side at his wars, had to leave Philip’s education mainly to her. His part consisted of many affectionate letters full of good and proud advice. Yet Philip grew up to be a merry little golden-haired boy enough, who rode about the streets of Toledo in a go-cart amidst the crowds that we are told pressed to see the Emperor’s son. The calamity of his life was that Charles had bequeathed to him the kingdom of the Netherlands. Charles himself was essentially a Fleming, who got on exceedingly well with his brother Flemings, Reformation or no Reformation; they were quite prepared to admit that the great man might have some good reason for his religious persecution, peculiar though it no doubt seemed. But Philip was a foreigner; and a foreigner of the race of Torquemada who, so they heard, had so strengthened the Inquisition less than a century before that now it was really not safe to think aloud in matters of religion. So the Dutch rose in revolt under William of Orange, and the Dutch Republic came into being. Philip was only able to save the southern Netherlands from the wreck, which ultimately formed the kingdom of Belgium. Philip always thought that if he could only get England on his side the pacification of the Netherlands would be easy; so, at the earnest request of Charles, he married Mary Tudor, a woman twelve years older than himself, a marriage which turned out unhappily from every point of view, and has wrongly coloured our general opinion of Philip’s character. The unfortunate attempt to conquer England by the Armada, a fleet badly equipped and absurdly led, has also led us to despise both him and his Spaniards, whence came the general English schoolboy idea that the Spanish were a nation of braggarts ruled by a murderous fool, whose only thirst was for Protestant gore. But this idea was very far from being true. Philip was no fool; he was an exceedingly learned, conscientious, hard-working, careful, and painstaking bureaucrat, who might have done very well indeed had he been left the kingdom of Spain alone; but had no power of attracting foreigners to his point of view. He always did his best according to his lights; and if his policy sometimes appears tortuous to us, that is simply because we forget that it was then thought perfectly right for kings to do tortuous things for the sake of their people, just as to-day party leaders sometimes do extraordinarily wicked things for the sake of what they consider the principles of their party. Unfortunately for Philip he often failed in his efforts; and the man who fails is always in the wrong.

He was constantly at war, sometimes unsuccessfully, often victoriously. Unlike Charles he did not lead his armies in person, but sat at home and prayed, read the crystal, and organized. After the great battle of St. Quentin, in which he defeated the French, he vowed to erect a mighty church to the glory of St. Lawrence which should excel every other building in the world; and for thirty years the whole available wealth of Spain and the Indies was poured out on the erection of the Escorial, which the Spaniards look upon as the eighth wonder of the world, and who is to say that they are wrong? Situated about twenty miles from Madrid, in a bleak and desolate mountain range, it reflects extraordinarily well the character of the man who made it. Under one almost incredible roof it combines a palace, a university, a monastery, a church, and a mausoleum. The weight of its keys alone is measured in scores of pounds; the number of its windows and its doors is counted in hundreds; it contains the greatest works of many very great artists, and the tombs of Charles V and his descendants. It stands in lonely grandeur swept by constant bitter winds, a fit monument for a lonely and morose king. Its architecture is Doric, and stern as its own granite.

The character of Philip II has been described repeatedly, in England mainly by his enemies, who have laid too much stress on his cruelty and bigotry. Though he was fiercely religious, yet he loved art and wrote poetry; though he would burn a heretic as blithely as any man, yet he was a kind husband to his four wives, whom he married one after the other for political reasons; though he was gloomy and austere, yet he loved music, and was moved almost to tears by the sound of the nightingale in the summer evenings of Spain. His people loved him and affectionately called him “Philip the prudent”; they forgave him his mistakes, for they knew that he worked always for the ancient religion which they loved, and for the glory of Spain.

Unlike Charles his father, he was austere in his mode of life, and always had a doctor at his side at meals lest he should forget his gout. He was a martyr to that most distressing complaint, no doubt inherited from his father. He lived abstemiously, but took too little exercise; it would have been better for his health--and probably for the world--had he followed his armies on horseback like Charles, even if he had recognized that he was no great general.

His death, at the age of seventy-two, was proud and sombre, as befitted the son of the Empress Isabel, who had scorned to cry when he was born. We can understand a good deal about Philip if we consider him as spiritually the son of that proud sombre woman rather than of his glorious and energetic father. In June, 1598, he was attacked by an unusually severe attack of gout which so crippled him that he could hardly move. He was carried from Madrid to the Escorial in a litter, and was put to bed in a little room opening off the church so that he could hear the friars at their orisons. Soon he began to suffer from “malignant tumours” all over his legs, which ulcerated, and became intensely painful, so that he could not bear even a wet cloth to be laid upon them or to have the ulcers dressed. So he lay for fifty-three days suffering frightful tortures, but never uttering a word of complaint, even as his mother had borne him in silence for the sake of the great man who had begotten him. As the ulcers could not be dressed, they naturally became covered with vermin and smelled horribly. Stoical in his agony, he called his son before him, apologizing for doing so, but it was necessary. “I want,” he said, “to show you how even the greatest monarchies must end. The crown is slipping from my head, and will soon rest upon yours. In a few days I shall be nothing but a corpse swathed in its winding-sheet, girdled with a rope.” He showed no sign of emotionalism, but retained his self-control to the last; after he had said farewell to his son he considered that he had left the world, and devoted the last few days of his life to the offices of the church. The monks in the church wanted to cease the continual dirges and services, but he insisted that they should go on, saying: “The nearer I get to the fountain, the more thirsty I become!”

These seem to have been his last words; he appears to have retained consciousness as long as may be.

Let us reason together and try if we can make head or tail of this extraordinary illness. The first certain fact about Philip II is that he long suffered from gout, apparently the real old-fashioned gout in the feet. In the well-known picture of him receiving a deputation of Netherlanders, as he sits in his tall hat beneath a crucifix, it is perfectly evident that he is suffering tortures from gout and wearing a large loosely fitting slipper. These unfortunate gentlemen seem to have selected a most unpropitious moment to ask favours, for there is no ailment that so warps the temper as gout. When a man suffers from gout over a period of years it is only a matter of time till his arteries and kidneys go wrong and he gets arterio-sclerosis. We may take it, therefore, as certain that at the age of seventy-two Philip had sclerosed arteries and probably chronic Bright’s disease like his father before him. Gout, Bright’s disease, and high blood-pressure, are all strongly hereditary, as every insurance doctor knows; that is to say, the son of a father who has died of one of these three is more likely than not to die ultimately of some cognate disease of arteries or kidneys or heart, all grouped together under the name of cardio-vascular-renal disease.

But what about the “malignant tumours”? “Malignant tumour” to-day means cancer of one sort or another, and assuredly it was not cancer that killed Philip. Probably the word “tumour” simply meant “swelling.” Now, what could these painful swellings have been which ulcerated and smelt so horribly? Why not gangrene? Ordinary senile gangrene, such as occurs in arterio-sclerosis, neither causes swellings, nor is it painful, nor does it smell nor become verminous; but diabetic gangrene does all these things. Diabetes in elderly people may go on for many years undiscovered unless the urine be chemically examined, and may only cause symptoms when the arterio-sclerosis which generally complicates it gives results, such as sudden death from heart-failure, or diabetic gangrene. Thus a very famous Australian statesman, who had been known to have sugar in his urine for many years, was one morning found dead in his bath, evidently due to the high blood-pressure consequent on diabetic arterio-sclerosis.

Diabetic gangrene often begins in some small area of injured skin, such as might readily occur in a foot tortured with gout; it ulcerates, is exceedingly painful, and possessed of a stench quite peculiar to its horrid self. It does not confine itself to one foot, or to one area of a leg, but suddenly appears in an apparently healthy portion, having surreptitiously worked its way along beneath the skin; its first sign is often a painful swelling which ulcerates. The patient dies either from toxæmia due to the gangrene, or from diabetic coma; and fifty-three days is not an unlikely period for the torture to continue. On the whole it would seem that diabetic gangrene appearing in a man who has arterio-sclerosis is a probable explanation of Philip’s death. The really interesting part of this historical diagnosis is the way in which it explains his treatment of the Netherlands. What justice could they have received from a man tortured and rendered petulant with gout and gloomy with diabetes?

Charles V had taken no care of himself, but had gone roaring and fighting and guzzling and drinking all over Europe; Philip had led a very quiet, studious, and abstemious life, and therefore he lived nearly twenty years longer than his father. Possibly when he came to suffer the torments of his death he may have thought the years not worth his self-denial: possibly he may have regretted that he did not have a good time when he was young, but this is not likely, for he was a very conscientious man.

When Philip lay dying he held in his hand the common little crucifix that his mother and father had adored when they too had died; his friends buried it upon his breast when they came to inter him in the Escorial, where it still lies with him in a coffin made of the timbers of the _Cinco Chagas_, not the least glorious of his fighting galleys.

Arterio-sclerosis, high blood-pressure, hyperpiesis, and chronic Bright’s disease--all more or less names for the same thing, or at any rate for cognate disorders--form one of the great tragedies of the world. They attack the very men whom we can least spare; they are essentially the diseases of statesmen. Although these diseases have been attributed to many causes--that is to say, we do not really know their true cause--it is certain that worry has a great deal to do with them. If a man be content to live the life of a cabbage, eat little, and drink no alcohol, it is probable that he will not suffer from high blood-pressure; but if he is determined to work hard, live well, and yet struggle furiously, then his arteries and kidneys inevitably go wrong and he is not likely to stand the strain for many years. Unless a politician has an iron nerve and preternaturally calm nature, or unless he is fortunate enough to be carried off by pneumonia, then he is almost certain to die of high blood-pressure if he persists in his politics. I could name a dozen able politicians who have fallen victims to their political anxieties. The latest, so far as I know, was Mr. John Storey, Premier of New South Wales, who died of high blood-pressure in 1921; before him I remember several able men whom the furious politics of that State claimed as victims. In England Lord Beaconsfield seems to have died of high blood-pressure, and so did Mr. Joseph Chamberlain. Mr. Gladstone was less fortunate, in that he died of cancer. He must have possessed a calm mind to go through his furious strugglings without his kidneys or blood-vessels giving way; that, and his singularly temperate and happy home-life, preserved him from the usual fate of statesmen.

Charles V differed from Mr. Gladstone because he habitually ate far too much, and could never properly relax his mental tension. His arterio-sclerosis had many results on history. It was probably responsible for his extreme fits of depression, in one of which it pleased Fate that he should meet Barbara Blomberg. If he had not been extraordinarily depressed and unhappy, owing to his arterio-sclerosis, he would probably not have troubled about her, and there would have been no Don John of Austria. If he had not had arterio-sclerosis he would probably not have abdicated in 1556, when he should have had many years of wise and useful activities before him. If his judgment had not been warped by his illness he would probably never have appointed Philip II to be his successor as King of the Netherlands; he would have seen that the Dutch were not the sort of people to be ruled by an alien. And if there had been no Don John it is possible that there would have been no Don Quixote. Once again, if Philip had not been eternally preoccupied with his senseless struggle against the Dutch, it is probable that he would have undertaken his real duty--to protect Europe from the Turk. When one considers how the lives of Charles and his sons might have been altered had his arteries been carrying a lower blood-tension, it rather tends to alter the philosophy of history to a medical man.

Again, when we consider that the destinies of nations are commonly held in the hands of elderly gentlemen whose blood-pressures tend to be too high owing to their fierce political activities, it is not too much to say that arterio-sclerosis is one of the greatest tragedies that afflict the human race. Every politician should have his blood-pressure tested and his urine examined about once a quarter, and if it should show signs of rising he should undoubtedly take a long rest until it falls again; it is not fair that the lives of millions should depend upon the judgment of a man whose mind is warped by arterio-sclerosis.

Mr. and Mrs. Pepys

Samuel Pepys, Father of the Royal Navy, and the one man--if indeed there were any one man--who made possible the careers of Blake and Nelson, died in 1703 in the odour of the greatest respectability. Official London followed him to his honoured grave, and he left behind him the memory of a great and good servant of the King in “perriwig” (alas, to become too famous), stockings and silver buckles. But unhappily for his reputation, though greatly to the delight of a wicked world, he had, during ten momentous years, kept a diary. It was written in a kind of shorthand which he seems to have flattered himself would not be interpreted; but by some extraordinary mischance he had left a key amongst his papers. Early in the nineteenth century part of the Diary was translated, and a part published. A staggered world asked for more, and during the next three generations further portions were made public, until by this time nearly the whole has been published, and it is unlikely that the small remaining portions will ever see the light.

Pepys seems to have set down every thought that came into his head as he wrote; things which the ordinary man hardly admits to himself--even supposing that he ever thinks or does them--this stately Secretary of the Navy calmly wrote in black and white with a garrulous effrontery that absolutely disarms criticism. In its extraordinary self-revelation the Diary is unique; it is literally true that there is nothing else like it in any other language, and it is almost impossible that anything like it will ever be written again; the man, the moment, and the occasion can never recur. I take it that every man who presumes to call himself educated has at least a nodding acquaintance with this immortal work; but a glance at some of its medical features may be interesting. The difficulties at this end of the world are considerable, because the Editor has veiled some of the more interesting medical passages in the decent obscurity of asterisks, and one has to guess at some anatomical terms which, if too Saxon to be printable in modern English, might very well have been given in technical Latin. Let us begin with a brief study of the delightful woman who had the good fortune--or otherwise--to be Pepys’s wife. Daughter of a French immigrant and an Irish girl, Elizabeth Pepys was married at fourteen, and her life ended, after fifteen somewhat hectic years, in 1669, when she was only twenty-nine years of age. Pepys repeatedly tells us that she was pretty--and no one was ever a better judge than he--and “very good company when she is well.” Her portrait shows her with a bright, clever little face, her upper lip perhaps a trifle longer than the ideal, bosom well developed, and a coquettish curl allowed to hang over her forehead after the fashion of the Court of Charles II. She spoke and read French and English; she took the keenest interest in life, and set to work to learn from her husband arithmetic, “musique,” the flageolet, use of the globes, and various accomplishments which modern girls learn at school. Mrs. Pepys imbibing all this erudition from her husband, while her pretty little dog lies snoring on the mat, forms a truly delightful picture, and no doubt our imagination of it is no more delightful than the reality was three hundred years ago. I suppose it was the same dog as he whose puppyish indiscretions had led to many a fierce quarrel between husband and wife; Pepys always carefully recorded these indiscretions, both of the dog and, alas, of himself. It is clear that the sanitary conveniences in Pepys’s house could not have been up to his requirements.

Husband and wife went everywhere together, and seem really to have loved each other; the impression that I gather from Pepys’s exceedingly candid description of her is that she was a loyal and comradely wife, with a spirit of her own, and a good deal to put up with; for though Pepys was continually--and causelessly--jealous of her, yet he did not hold that he was in any way bound to be faithful to her on his own side. So they pass through life, Pepys philandering with every attractive woman who came his way, and Mrs. Pepys dressing herself prettily, learning her little accomplishments, squabbling with her maids, and looking after her house and his meals, till one day she engaged a servant, Deb Willet by name, who brought a touch of tragedy into the home. In November, 1668, Deb was combing Pepys’s hair--no doubt in preparation for the immortal “perriwig”--when Mrs. Pepys came in and caught him “embracing her,” thus occasioning “the greatest sorrow to me that ever I knew in this world,” as he puts it.

Mrs. Pepys was “struck mute,” and was silently furious. Outraged Juno towered over the unhappy Pepys, and so to bed without a word, nor slept all night; but about two in the morning Juno became very woman; woke him up and told him she had “turned Roman Catholique,” this being, in the state of politics at that time, probably the thing which she thought would hurt him more than anything else she could say. For the next few days Pepys is sore troubled, and his usual genial babble becomes almost incoherent. The wrong dating and the expressions of “phrenzy” show the mental agony that he passed through, and there can be no doubt that the joy of life passed out of him, probably never more fully to return. The rest of the Diary is written in a style graver than at first--some of it is almost passionate. He describes with much mental agitation how he woke up in the middle of one night, and found his wife heating a pair of tongs red-hot and preparing to pinch his nose; gone for ever were the glad days when he could pull her nose, and the “poor wretch” thought none the worse of the lordly fellow. Twice had he done so, and, as he says, “to offend.” One would like to have Mrs. Pepys’s account of this nose-pulling, and what she really thought of it. Some people have found the struggle of Pepys to cure himself of his infatuation for Deb humorous; to any ordinarily sympathetic soul who reads how he prayed on his knees in his own room that God would give him strength never again to be unfaithful, and how he appealed again and again to his wife to forgive him, and how he, to the best of his ability, avoided the girl, the whole business becomes rather too painful to be funny, even though the unhappy man has the art of making himself ridiculous in nearly every sentence. Finally, in a fury of jealousy, she forced him to write a most insulting letter to Miss Willet, a letter that no woman could ever possibly forgive, and Pepys’s life appears to have settled down again. His sight failing him[9]--it is thought that he suffered from hypermetropia combined with early presbyopia--he abandoned the Diary just at the time when one would have dearly liked to hear more; and we never hear the end either of Deb or of their married happiness. Reading between the lines, one gathers that probably Deb was more sinned against than sinning, and that Mrs. Pepys had more real reason to be angry about many women of whom she had never heard than about the young woman whose flirtation was the actual _casus belli_. It is an unjust world. The two went abroad for a six-months’ tour in France and Holland, and immediately after they returned Mrs. Pepys fell ill of a fever; for a time she appears to have fought it well, but she took a bad turn and died. Considering her youth, the season of the year, and that they had just returned from the Continent, the disease was possibly typhoid. Pepys erected an affectionate memorial to her, and was later on buried by her side. He took the last sacrament with her as she lay dying, so we may reasonably suppose that she died having forgiven him, and it is not unfair to imagine that the trip abroad was a second honeymoon. They were two grown-up children, playing with life as with a new toy.

Mrs. Pepys was liable to attacks of boils in asterisks; and a Dr. Williams acquired considerable merit by supplying her with plasters and ointments. On November 16, 1663, “Mr. Hollyard came, and he and I about our great work to look upon my wife’s malady, which he did, and it seems her great conflux of humours heretofore that did use to swell there did in breaking leave a hollow which has since gone in further and further till it is now three inches deep, but as God will have it did not run into the body-ward, but keeps to the outside of the skin, and so he will be forced to cut open all along, and which my heart will not serve me to see done, and yet she will not have no one else to see it done, no, not even her mayde, and so I must do it poor wretch for her.” Pepys is in a panic at the thought of assisting at the opening of this subcutaneous abscess; one can feel the courage oozing out at the palms of his hands as one reads his agitated words. To his joy, next morning Mr. Hollyard, on second thoughts, “believes a fomentation will do as well, and what her mayde will be able to do as well without knowing what it is for, but only that it is for the piles.” Evidently the “mayde’s” opinion was of some little moment in Mrs. Pepys’s censorious world. Mr. Pepys would have been much troubled to see his wife cut before his face: “he could not have borne to have seen it.” Mr. Hollyard received £3 “for his work upon my wife, but whether it is cured or not I cannot say, but he says it will never come to anything, but it may ooze now and again.” Mr. Hollyard was evidently easily satisfied. Of course, there must have been a sinus running in somewhere, but it is impossible to guess at its origin. Possibly some pelvic sepsis; possibly an ischio-rectal abscess. A long time before he had noted that his wife was suffering from a “soare belly,” which may possibly have been the beginning of the trouble, but there is no mention of any long and serious illness such as usually accompanies para-metric sepsis. On the whole, I fancy ischio-rectal abscess to be the most likely explanation. Later on she suffers from abscesses in the cheek, which “by God’s mercy burst into the mouth, thus not spoiling her face”; and she had constant trouble with her teeth. It is thus quite probable that the origin of the whole illness may have been pyorrhœa, and no doubt this would go hard with her in the fever from which she died. Possibly this may have been septic pneumonia arising from septic foci in the mouth; but, after all, it is idle to speculate.

Mrs. Pepys never became pregnant during the period covered by the Diary, though there were one or two false alarms. There is no mention of any continuous or constant ill-health, such as we find in pyo-salpinx or severe tubal adhesions; and such being the case, her sterility may quite likely have been as much his fault as hers.

One cannot read the Diary without wishing that we could have heard a little more of her side of the questions that arose. What did she really think of her husband when he pulled her nose? Twice, too, no less! Stevenson calls her “a vulgar woman.” Stevenson’s opinion on every matter is worthy of the highest respect, as that of a sensitive, refined, and artistic soul; but I cannot help thinking that sometimes his early Calvinistic training tended to make him rather intolerant to human weakness. His judgment of François Villon always seems to me intolerant and unjust, and he showed no sign in his novels of ever having made any effort to comprehend the difficulties and troubles which surround women in their passage through the world. He understood men--there can be no doubt of that; but I doubt if he understood women even to the small extent which is achieved by the average man. Personally I find Mrs. Pepys far from “vulgar”; generally she is simply delightful. True, one cannot concur with her action over the letter to Deb. It was cruel and ungenerous. But she probably knew her husband well by that time, and judged fairly accurately the only thing that would be likely to bring him up with a round turn, and again we have not the privilege of knowing Deb except through Pepys’s possibly too favourable eyes. Deb may have been all that Mrs. Pepys thought her, and she may have richly deserved what she got. After all, there is in every woman protecting her husband from the onslaughts of “vamps” not a little of the wild-cat. Even the gentlest of women will defend her husband--especially a husband who retains so much of the boy as Pepys--from the attempts of wicked women to steal him, poor innocent love, from her sacred hearth; will defend him with bare hands and claws, and totally regardless of the rules of combat; and it is this touch of cattishness in Mrs. Pepys which makes one’s heart warm towards her. For all we know Deb Willet may have been a “vamp.” Mrs. Pepys was certainly the “absolute female.”

Mr. Pepys suffered from stone in the bladder before he began to keep a diary. He does not appear to have been physically a hero; had he been a general, no doubt he would have led his army bravely from the rear except in case of a retreat; but so great was the pain that he submitted his body to the knife on March 26, 1658. Anæsthetics in those days were rudimentary, relaxing rather than anæsthetizing the patient. There is some reason to believe that they were extensively used in the Middle Ages, and contemporaries of Shakespeare seem to have looked on their use as a matter of course; but for some reason they became less popular, and by the seventeenth century most people had to undergo their operations with little assistance beyond stout hearts and sluggish nervous systems.

Cutting for the stone was one of the earliest of surgical operations. In ancient days it was first done in India, and the glad news that stones could be successfully removed from the living body filtered through to the Greeks some centuries before Christ. Hippocrates knew all about it, and the operation is mentioned in that Hippocratic oath according to which some of us endeavour to regulate our lives. At first it was only done in children, because it was considered that adult men would not heal properly, and the only result in them would be a fistula. The child was held on the lap of some muscular assistant, with one or two not less muscular men holding its arms and legs. The surgeon put one or two fingers into the little anus and tried to push the stone down on to the perineum, helped in this manœuvre by hypogastric pressure from another assistant. He then cut transversely above the anus, strong in the faith that he might, if the gods willed, open into the neck of the bladder. Next he tried to push out the stone with his fingers still in the anus; it is not quite clear whether he would take his fingers out of the anus and put them into the wound or vice versa; this failing, he would seize the stone with forceps and drag it through the perineum. As time went on it was discovered that more than three or four assistants could be employed, using others to sit on the patient’s chest, thus adding the _peine forte et dure_ to the legitimate terrors of ancient surgery and surrounding him with a mass of men. Imbued with a spirit of unrest by the struggles of the patient the mass swayed this way and that, until it was discovered that by adding yet more valiants to the wings of the “scrum,” who should answer heave with counter-heave, the resultant of the opposing forces would hold even the largest perineum steady enough for the surgeon to operate; and men came under the knife for stone. Next the patient was tied up with ropes, somewhat in the style we used in our boyhood’s sport of cock-fighting. What a piece of work is the Rope! How perfect in all its works--from the Pyramids--built with the aid of the Rope and the Stick--to the execution of the latest murderer. One might write pages on the influence of the Rope on human progress; but for our purpose we may simply say that probably Mr. Pepys was kept quiet with many yards of hemp. Those who cut for the stone were specialists, doing nothing else; their arrival at a patient’s house must have resembled an invasion, with their vast armamentarium and crowds of assistants. By Pepys’s time Marianus Sanctus had lived--yes, so greatly was he venerated that they called him “Sanctus,” the Holy Man; Saint Marianus if you will. He it was, in Italy in 1524, who invented the apparatus major, which made the operation a little less barbarous than that of the Greeks. This God-sent apparatus consisted mainly of a grooved staff to be shoved into the bladder and a series of forceps. You cut on to the staff as the first step of the operation; it was believed that if you cut in the middle line in the raphe the wound would never heal, owing to the callosity of the part; moreover, if you carried your incision too far back you would cause fatal hæmorrhage from the inferior hæmorrhoidal veins. Having, then, made your incision well to the right or left, you exposed the urethra, made a good big hole in that pipe, and inserted a fine able pair of tongs, with which you seized hold of the stone and crushed it if you could, pulling it out in bits; or if the stone were hard, and you had preternaturally long fingers, you might even get it out on a finger-tip. It was always considered the mark of a wise surgeon to carry a spare stone with him in his waistcoat pocket, so that the patient might at least have a product of the chase to see if the surgeon should find his normal efforts unrewarded. Diagnosis was little more advanced in those days than operative surgery; there are numbers of conditions which may have caused symptoms like those of a stone, and it was always well for the surgeon to be prepared.

This would be the operation that was performed on Mr. Pepys. The results in many cases were disastrous; some men lost control of their sphincter vesicæ; many were left with urinary fistulæ; in many the procreative power was permanently destroyed by interference with the seminal vesicles and ducts. Probably some of us would prefer to keep our calculi rather than let a mediæval stone-cutter perform upon us; we are a degenerate crew. It is not altogether displeasing to imagine the roars of the unhappy Pepys, trussed and helpless, a pallid little Mrs. Pepys quaking outside the door, perhaps not entirely sorry that her own grievances were being so adequately avenged, although the vengeance was vicarious; while the surgeon wrestled with a large uric acid calculus which could with difficulty be dragged through the wound. It is all very well for us to laugh at the forth-right methods of our ancestors; but, considering their difficulties--no anæsthesia, no antiseptics, want of sufficient surgical practice, and the fact that few could ever have had the hardness of heart necessary to stand the patient’s bawlings, it is remarkable that they did so well and that the mortality of this appalling operation seems only to have been from 15 to 20 per cent. Moreover we may be pretty sure that no small stone would ever be operated upon; men postponed the operation until the discomfort became intolerable. It remained for the genius of Cheselden, when Pepys was dead and possibly in heaven some twenty years, to devise the operation of lateral lithotomy, one of the greatest advances ever made in surgery. This operation survived practically unchanged till recent times.

Pepys’s heroism was not in vain, and was rewarded by a long life free from serious illness till the end. March 26 became to him a holy day, and was kept up with pomp for many years. The people of the house wherein he had suffered and been strong were invited to a solemn feast on that blessed day, and as the baked meats went round and the good wine glowed in the decanters, Mr. Pepys stood at his cheer and once again recounted the tale of his agony and his courage. Nowadays, when we are operated upon with little more anxiety than we should display over signing a lease, it is difficult to imagine a state of things such as must have been inevitable in the days before Simpson and Lister.