It would be easier to say what was not the matter with this walking
pathological museum than to name his actual disease. From early youth
till death his life was one long pain. He could hardly walk until
he was nearly six years old, and this defect was attributed by his
physician, Sir Theodore Mayerne, to the bad milk of a drunken wet-nurse.
Mayerne,[11] who left a full account of James’s health, seems to have
been an acute man, but nowadays we should rather attribute the somewhat
neurotic troubles from which James suffered to his unconscious infantile
disgust at the drunken woman than to the influence of her bad milk.
He himself certainly did not use milk as his drink when he came to years
of “discretion.” He was afflicted with the normal gigantic appetite of
kings in those days. He ate anything and everything so long as it could
be eaten: not even Charles V could have excelled his prowess. He drank,
indiscriminately, beer, spirits, Spanish wines, cider, sweet French
wines, and muscatel, probably mixing them all right royally. His interior
organs were always too full, and he got rid of the vast surplus in
whatever disgusting way, up or down, happened to be convenient, so, in
every way, he must have been a most unpleasant companion.
He was subject to catarrh, and was much affected by cold and damp; he
was constantly spitting, hawking, and blowing his nose. As handkerchiefs
were not then in general use, I have heard that he used his sleeve or
his finger and thumb, which would not add to his “clubability.” He
had some difficulty in swallowing, owing, as Sir Theodore puts it, to
some narrowing of his fauces, inherited from his mother, Mary Queen
of Scots, and from his grandfather, James V of Scotland. Putting two
and two together, the constant blowing of his nose and the “narrowing”
of his throat, one imagines that probably the poor man suffered from
adenoids and enlarged tonsils. He occasionally suffered from gravel,
often accompanied by blood. He constantly suffered from another ignoble
trouble, which in the course of years bled copiously. If he was specially
worried in mind or body—and a king is always worried—he would become
jaundiced. Whenever anything more than usually alarming occurred, the
unhappy man would get diarrhœa, just like an anxious student awaiting his
interview with the examiners. He used faithfully to insist on his being
bled every day, until his least dignified ailment saved the doctors the
trouble. When he dismissed his Parliament of 1610 apparently his diarrhœa
became profuse. In fact, if you can think of any ailment that I have
not mentioned from which he suffered—so be it that it was excessively
undignified—I wish you would tell me what it was.
He had a truly psychasthenic dread of pain, yet hated all doctors,
possibly because he had suffered too much at our hands. His teeth
were all decayed, so that he could chew nothing, but had perforce to
bolt his food. A man with the decayed teeth that so distinguished the
“most learned fool in Christendom” would naturally in time suffer from
arthritis; and in middle age this complaint so crippled him that he could
hardly mount his horse. He detested purgatives, and considered that
any medicine, to do good, must act upon the bowels without griping the
patient; till late in his life he would not even allow an enema, probably
because it hurt him.
With death came, as usual, a little of that dignity that was so sadly
lacking in his life. S. R. Gardiner says that he died of a fever, but it
is impossible even to guess at its nature. Early in the morning of March
27th, 1625, he was so ill that he had to send for his son Prince Charles,
who came running into the king’s room in a nightshirt. Seeing his son,
King James tried to raise himself on his pillows and to say something;
but his voice had become so weak as to be inaudible, so that even then
he failed. He was understood to say “Veni, Domine Jesu,” and soon his
breathing ceased; in fact, like most people, he passed painlessly into
the sleep that knows no waking. He had done with all his pain and
constant discomfort, and, so far as he knew, with the misunderstanding
that afflicted him in his life in England and has certainly afflicted his
memory ever since. Poor James did not have a chance from his infancy. It
has been said that he failed because he did not understand the English
people; but how could you expect him to do that when he was constantly
worried by the most distressing and undignified of all ailments? And was
it not also equally their duty to try to understand him?
They held a post-mortem examination upon him, because there were the
usual accusations of poisoning, apparently founded largely upon the
swelling of his tongue. They found that his heart was enormously
enlarged, and that in his left kidney, which was greatly shrunken, there
reposed two stones, from which doubtless had come that gravel which had
so afflicted him during his life. Possibly his enlarged heart and swollen
tongue, together with his vast overeating and drinking, may have meant
that King James I had chronic Bright’s disease.
How far the drunken wet-nurse may have influenced his later life no
one can say; but it is quite possible that the unconscious infant may
have felt a disgust that went far to cause that nervousness and lack
of dignity of which his subjects complained. But how could any man be
dignified when he was suffering constantly from gravel and the other
tormenting, itching, weakening, and ignoble trouble?
But surely we have omitted the most important point in James’s supposed
character: the unnatural offences of which he was suspected. Well, Sir
Theodore Mayerne, who has told us so frankly all about his hawking
and spitting, his diarrhœa, his gravel, his stones, and his bleeding
hæmorrhoids, does not seem to know anything about the unnatural offences.
The pure mind always seems to turn towards this sort of offence when it
thinks of its neighbour. In 1642, according to the _American Mercury_ of
April, 1924, the Puritans, hardly settled down in the American colonies,
were already accusing each other of the most awful sexual offences. And
before convicting James of such offences one would prefer the evidence of
a level-headed doctor to that of all the seventeenth-century Puritans in
the world.
It is strange how minds, under the influence of fierce religious fervour,
always turn, and always have turned, to unnatural sexual offences. It
is not a product of patristic Christianity, as so many have thought.
On reading _The Golden Ass_, of Apuleius, one must be struck with the
amazing moral filth of the Roman Empire. After wading through hundreds
of pages of gay and libidinous dirt, one suddenly finds that one is
assisting in religious propaganda. Apuleius paints his fellow-countrymen
and women in such black colours simply because he wants them to join in
the worship of the Great Mother, which was then so formidable a rival to
Christianity in the Roman Empire.
So, considering the known facts of religious propaganda, I do not believe
a single word of the slanders upon James I. There were Puritans about.
It is possible that Petronius, in his _Satyricon_—if he wrote it—drew a
truthful picture of the Empire under Nero, because he does not profess to
moralise or to convert anybody whatever to any supposed better religion.
One is sometimes inclined to agree with Gibbon that “all (_organised_)
religions are equally false and equally useful.”
But it would be absurd to suppose that James the Sixth and First was
merely the ridiculous creature that I have depicted here. Those who wish
to prove that he was a coward have first to account for the known fact
that, until his knees stiffened under the influence of his decayed teeth,
he was a brave and first-class horseman. It may be true that he could
never bear the sight of a drawn sword; neither could Lord Roberts bear
the sight of a cat. Before he was dragged to England he did for Scotland
what the heavy-handed Tudors did for South Britain. By his skill and
diplomacy he welded even fierce little Scotland into an orderly country,
and taught the Scots lords and the ministers of the General Assembly that
the king was their master.