As the best thing that we hear of the life of King Charles II is the
manner of his leaving it, I confine myself to a description of his
death. You will get a moderately good account of it in Bishop Burnet’s
history, of which Swift was so scornful; and a recognisable account
of it in Lord Macaulay, written with all the fixed ideas of the early
nineteenth century colouring the ink; but the real truth appeared in an
article in the _British Medical Journal_ for 1910, which again was drawn
largely from Dr. Raymond Crawfurd’s _Last Days of Charles II_. As Dr.
Crawfurd gives the official report of Sir Charles Scarburgh, one of the
consultants in attendance at the time, probably we may take it that we
have the exact details so far as the medical science of 1685 could give
them.
Towards the end of 1684 the king did not feel quite well: he was
irritable and depressed, and thought it wise to remain indoors during
the mornings, instead of taking his usual active walks. He attributed
his illness to gout. It would be interesting to speculate on what the
disease actually was that so often was called “gout” in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. There are many conditions which cause symptoms
such as might be mistaken for gout; let us leave it at that, for even
to-day a doctor, forced to give to a vague complaint a name, sometimes
takes refuge in the euphemism “rheumatic gout.” During these few days
indoors he amused himself by playing with mercury in his laboratory,
for, as is well known, he was of scientific bent. At last came the
fateful morning, Monday, February 2nd, 1685. At eight o’clock the king,
while being shaved, fell back with a cry into the arms of an attendant,
Lord Aylesbury. According to Dr. Scarburgh, “Charles, having just left
his bed, was walking about quietly in his bedchamber when he felt some
unusual disturbance in his brain, which was followed by loss of speech
and violent convulsions.” There happened to be present at the time two
of the king’s physicians who, so as promptly to forestall so serious a
danger to “this best of kings,” as Scarburgh has it, opened a vein in his
right arm and drew 16 ounces of blood. As a matter of fact, this assault,
though seemingly homicidal, was probably as good a thing as could have
been done for him, though few doctors would have the moral courage
to do it to-day. His head was closely shaved; his neck and shoulders
were blistered and scarified; emetics, purgatives and clysters were
administered, and every reputable doctor, regardless of his religion,
was summoned to the defence. Whitehall must have presented a lively
spectacle that winter morning with all the periwigs and silver buckles
and gold-headed canes and wise faces. In fact, they did what they could:
if they had known that the cause of the convulsions was probably that the
king’s kidneys had “gone on strike,” they could have done little more
than endeavour to get rid of the poisons that must have been circulating
in his body by some other effluent than by the urine. After about two
hours their efforts were crowned with success. The king, whose face had
been hideously black,—i.e., cyanosed—and whose eyes had been rolling this
way and that, woke up, and proceeded to give an account of himself. The
poisons had for a time been got out of his body; but only for a time. He
said that, not feeling very well when he awakened, he had gone to his
private closet to get some “king’s drops,” which Dr. Crawfurd explains
to have been “a volatile extract of bone made in the king’s laboratory
according to the formula of the late Dr. Goddard, and in high repute on
the Continent.”
Charles was then out of immediate danger, and during the Tuesday he
remained fairly well except for some soreness about the neck and mouth,
which was probably due to the efforts that had had to be made to get him
to swallow his medicines. Just so to-day, a patient occasionally wakes
up from an anæsthetic with a stiff jaw after the efforts which have
had to be made to pull his tongue forward if his breathing has given
trouble while he was unconscious. Charles complained of great pain in
his interior, which was probably less a symptom of his illness than of
the violent purgatives that had been forced down his throat; but to the
horrified Bishop Burnet it was “agonies.”
The doctors, pestered by the ministers of the Crown to give the king’s
illness a name, were greatly perturbed, and all fourteen[12] of them
entered into many grave consultations one with another. On the afternoon
of Wednesday, February 4th, the convulsions returned, and as intermittent
fever was then especially prevalent in and about London they said that
probably His Majesty was suffering from that complaint, though to be
sure the violent convulsions, cyanosed skin, loss of speech, and turning
of the eyeballs did not look quite like intermittent fever. But the
council was satisfied, which, to the doctors wrestling with a mysterious
and complex disease, was probably all that they could expect, for it
enabled them to say that they now knew what to do, and that, apparently,
the king was in no great immediate danger. As the _British Medical
Journal_ rather unkindly points out: “On June 21st, 1902, the late King
Edward’s Private Secretary wrote that there was not a word of truth
in the rumours that had been floating about concerning His Majesty’s
health, though on June 24th the coronation was postponed and he had to be
operated on for appendicitis”; though, considering what a sudden thing
acute appendicitis is, there is little wonder that three days before
anyone might not have known of his coming ill health.
On the Thursday occurred those dramatic events of which conventional
historians have made so much. When he was first taken ill on the Monday
his poor wife had hurried to his side, and had taken the place of at
least one of his mistresses in nursing him. Catherine of Braganza may not
have had sufficient physical charm to keep his wayward fancy, and may not
have been able to bear him an heir,[13] but at least she was faithful
to him unto his death. In her presence the other women retired, and she
nursed her husband until the horrors of the sick room overcame her; she
felt faint and withdrew; as Macaulay says, “was carried senseless to her
chamber.” Little wonder; the sick room must indeed have been horrible to
every sense, with all the purgatives and clysters and cauterization of
bare skin, and a husband writhing in convulsions and rolling his eyes,
apparently in the utmost agony, though I doubt if he felt anything at all
in his fits. Early in her married life she had fainted when Charles had
introduced her to his mistress _en titre_. There had been many occasions
for fainting since then, and she had been accused of trying to poison
Charles, who had humiliated her. Later on she sent word to him that she
asked his pardon for being too ill to come to his aid; and Charles said,
“She ask my pardon, poor woman! I ask hers, with all my heart.” Yet the
time was to come when she was accused of inducing him to turn Roman
Catholic. Macaulay seems rather to blame the Duchess of Portsmouth for
seeing that he was “reconciled” to the Church, as she would doubtless
put it, but there is another suggestion that occurs to myself. With all
his laziness and clever frivolity, Charles was, after all, very much
like other men; he had had a mother, and Queen Henrietta Maria, though
a daughter of Henri Quatre, was an ardent Roman Catholic; during the
first few years of her married life with King Charles I she had undergone
a great deal of hardship for her religion. She must have frequently,
like other mothers, talked over religious matters with her children;
and when Charles II came to die, when his courage and self-esteem were
weakened by the crowning humiliation of death, it is quite possible that
in that awful moment he may have sincerely turned to Mother Church, that
Church which had consoled his mother, as a refuge. And hence doubtless
arose that dramatic interlude in the act of dying that Macaulay paints
so vividly. The Duchess of Portsmouth may have wept and poured out her
heart to the French Ambassador as he says; no doubt the Benedictine monk,
John Huddlestone, was summoned just as he says; but after all, it is the
penitent himself who had to do penance, and quite possibly Charles, in
trying to swallow the holy bread, was really unconsciously remembering
the teachings of his Roman Catholic mother. We have seen how Elizabeth,
when dying, recalled to her memory events of her youth; why should we
not think just the same of Charles II? He was not mad as Protestants
said; he was just dying. It is quite a common incident with the dying,
and is supposed to account for the known phenomenon that rationalists,
when they feel their brain is beginning to betray them, have embraced
Christianity. Then he commended the Duchess to the care of his brother,
the Duke of York, afterwards James II, “and,” he said, “let not poor
Nelly starve.” Again he was thinking of the past, this time the recent
past, for “pretty witty Nell” (as Pepys calls her), “the most indiscreet
and the wildest creature that ever was in a court” (as Burnet calls her),
had been his mistress for many years—since about 1670—and was the most
popular of all, “a true child of the London streets.” She, it is said,
was the only woman who was really faithful to him at heart except his
wife. At half-past ten on the Friday, Charles again became speechless;
before twelve he was dead, probably of a uræmic coma due to chronic
Bright’s disease.
Then came the inevitable accusations of poisoning which attended every
sudden death in that suspicious age. We can, I believe, even explain some
of the symptoms that were considered so suspicious. It was quite natural
that Louise de Querouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth, should be accused of
poisoning him, for it was well known at that time that Frenchwomen and
Roman Catholics invariably worked by poison, and unhappily for Louise
she was both. But what kind of poison could cause blue spots to form
upon a man’s chest? And what kind of poison could make his tongue swell
up? I must try to explain in popular language what chronic Bright’s
disease really is. It is not merely a disease of the kidneys. The kidneys
indeed become sclerosed, or hardened, and in time become shrivelled;
but with this the arteries and heart also become diseased; the heart
becomes enlarged, and the blood-vessels thickened and hardened; rather
than a disease of the kidneys alone it is almost a thickening of the
arteries all over the body, including those in the kidneys. And with this
thickening goes a loss of elasticity, so that blood-vessels are apt to
rupture at the slightest provocation. So that in the struggles of his
uræmic convulsions it is quite possible that tiny capillaries of the
king’s chest may have ruptured and caused blue spots on the neighbouring
skin. If he had not died it is quite probable that the whites of his eyes
might have become bloodshot, from the rupture of some tiny arteriole. It
often happens to-day in Bright’s disease.
And the tongue? Quite frequently the tongue and larynx suddenly swell up
in chronic Bright’s disease, and the patient suffocates before he can
obtain relief. King Charles was indeed poisoned, though not by human
agency. He was poisoned by the toxins which should have been excreted by
his own kidneys, but could not be got rid of by any human aid; that is to
say, he probably died of uræmia from chronic Bright’s disease.
A post-mortem examination was held, so we can get even further evidence.
One could not expect a doctor in the seventeenth century to observe
that his kidneys were obviously diseased, or that part of his brain was
œdematous or softened, as often happens in Bright’s disease, and would no
doubt cause the loss of speech. But they did observe that his heart was
enlarged, a most significant point.
I remember one of the very first private patients that I ever had, nearly
thirty years ago. A middle-aged Englishman had come to Sydney from China
for his health, apparently feeling fairly well, though debilitated by
the tropical climate. Suddenly, as he was shaving, he was taken ill with
a violent fit of convulsions, and, in spite of all that we could do for
him, died in the course of two or three days with symptoms that exactly
resembled those so graphically portrayed by Lord Macaulay and Dr.
Crawfurd.
There is much of extraordinary interest to be found in Dr. Crawfurd’s
book which gives the fantastic truth about medicine in 1685,[14] I can
only advise you to read the book. In spite of the queer medicines that
they used to prescribe I fancy that doctors at that time had more common
sense than we moderns seem to think, and I very much doubt if anything
could have saved King Charles’s life, except perhaps for a short time.
He had come to his end. Our treatment would have been less drastic, but
little more successful.
The cause of chronic Bright’s disease is not definitely known. It has
been attributed to innumerable things; indeed, to everything which any
given physician does not like himself; and comparatively recently it
has even been attributed to improper feeding in infancy, so far back in
life are its roots supposed to go. Indeed, it is generally thought to be
hereditary; but probably it is still a mystery, though overeating and
overdrinking may have something to do with it, not to mention, of course,
syphilis, but so many men who have not had syphilis die of chronic
Bright’s disease that it would not be fair to state it as the cause.
But why is it that Henri Quatre, whose morals were little if at all
better than those of Charles, has become a national hero, while Charles
is always held up as a byword for infamy? I do not know; but the usual
explanation is that the English are at heart Puritans, and M. Chevrillon,
in his recent essays on English literature, has accepted that as the
reason for the popularity of Kipling and Galsworthy. But I sometimes
wonder whether, had England been more successful under Charles II, so
much would have been heard of his immorality. After all, Lord Nelson was
not a Joseph, but he saved England from Napoleon; whereas Charles II saw
the Dutch fleet in the Thames, and ran about chasing butterflies while
the guns thundered.
All medical students, and most doctors, pass through a period when they
are convinced that they have chronic Bright’s disease, and it is not
till after visiting their physicians in an agony of mind that they are
relieved of their mental distress. Let not a lay reader be silly enough
to copy these apprehensive doctors. No man can be his own physician.
But perhaps the most interesting things about Charles II are the
sterility of his wife, Catherine of Braganza, and his affection for “poor
Nelly,” which she undoubtedly returned. Catherine appears to have been a
convent-bred maiden with beautiful eyes. She was by no means the king’s
first or last love; and several months after the marriage she fell ill
of some sickness that brought her to death’s door, so that they had to
administer extreme unction. It was probably owing to this illness that
she never had a child, and was afterwards often ill. Such a trouble as
pelvic peritonitis, with inflammation of the Fallopian tubes, often
causes sterility. It is Nature’s stupid way of saving the patient’s life
that she isolates the inflammation and seals the tubes, so that the woman
indeed lives, but miserable, sterile, neurasthenic, and in constant
pain. What was the actual cause of the illness in Catherine’s case it is
impossible to say. One ventures to hazard a guess that the real cause of
Catherine’s sterility was simply adhesions and blocked Fallopian tubes;
it is certain that it had nothing to do with King Charles’s potency,
because he had many natural children by other women. It is in that severe
illness several months after she was married that the explanation of her
sterility probably lies. We see innumerable cases of this sort to-day.
About Nell Gwynn. She was herself the daughter of a prostitute who, in
a fit of drink, one night fell into a ditch and was drowned. Her charm
over the king probably lay in her wit and recklessness; she dared to say
to him things that no one else on earth ventured. She was faithful to
him after he had won her—if indeed she took much winning. Other women,
such as La Belle Stuart, and Louise de Querouaille, pretended to resist
him for a time, but Nell seems to have been really fond of him and did
not resist at all. Remember she was, before she became an actress, an
orange-girl—that is to say, a prostitute. Everything we hear of her tells
of her uniform kindness and generosity; she was of course extremely loose
in her conduct and morals, but she seems to have cared little for money.
She died about two years after the king, apparently of a stroke that had
brought on one-sided paralysis or hemiplegia; and considering the assured
facts of her youth, and the early age at which she died, that stroke was
probably caused by syphilis, which had lain latent in her ever since the
time when she sold herself with her oranges in the pit of Drury Lane.
But no person should attempt to describe the life either of Charles II or
Nell Gwynn who has the slightest tendency to moralise; for neither the
wittiest of the Stuarts nor the clever little actress can be explained on
conventional codes of morality. It is the attempt to consider Charles II
as if he had been a child of Queen Victoria, and to moralise over him,
that makes most books about him so repulsive.
But Nell did not try to enter politics; she resisted the temptation to be
queen, even if the opportunity had ever offered. She knew that her only
function in life was to charm; and with the coldly realistic outlook on
life that is common to all prostitutes, she knew that in the position of
a queen she must come up against the harsh facts of reality, and that,
like Anne Boleyn, she would probably lose her head in every sense of the
word. Mere power to charm is not for a queen. Nell’s memory, owing to
her wisdom and self-restraint, has been tenderly treated by the English
people, in spite of that prudery which has scoffed at the real cleverness
of her royal lover. Nell Gwynn, to use her own coarse words, was content
to remain “the Protestant whore,” the cleverness of her tongue enabled
her to keep her place at Court against all rivals, and her charm even
impresses us to-day, who have never seen her dance nor heard her cockney
witticisms. “Let not poor Nelly” fade from our memories.