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.”