THE SWEATING SICKNESS.
The strange disease which came to be known all over Europe as _sudor
Anglicus_, or the English Sweat, was a new type or species of infection
first seen in the autumn of 1485. Polydore Virgil, an Italian scholar and
man of affairs, who arrived in England in 1501, became, in effect, the
court historian of Henry VII.’s reign, and of the events which led up to
the overthrow of Richard III. at Bosworth Field on the 22nd of August
1485; his account of the movements of Henry Tudor, from his landing at
Milford Haven on Saturday the 6th of August until his triumphal entry into
London on Saturday the 27th of the same month, is so minute that he must
be assumed to have had access to journals written at the time. Polydore’s
account of the sweat begins with the statement that it showed itself on
the first descent of Henry upon the island--_sub primum descensum in
insulam_[480]. The last continuator of the ancient chronicle of Croyland
abbey, who was still making his entries when Bosworth Field was fought,
not far from Croyland, and who closed his annals the year after, records
an incident which seems to show that the sweat had been prevalent before
the battle. Thomas, lord Stanley, lay at Atherstone, not far from
Bosworth, with five thousand men nominally in the service of Richard, and
was summoned by the king to bring up his force before the battle. He
excused himself, says the Croyland annalist, on the ground that he was
suffering from the sweating sickness[481]. I shall examine that evidence,
and the general statement of Polydore Virgil, in a later part of this
chapter. Meanwhile we may take it that the outbreak of the sweat was
somehow associated in popular rumour with the victorious expedition of
Henry Tudor. Writers on the English sweat hitherto have had to depend on
the somewhat meagre and not always consistent statements of annalists for
their knowledge of its first authentic occurrence. I am now able to adduce
the testimony of a manuscript treatise on the new epidemic, written by a
physician while it was still prevalent in London, and elaborately
dedicated to Henry VII., if not composed by his order[482]. The author is
Thomas Forrestier, styled in the title a Doctor of Medicine and a native
of Normandy, tarrying in London. Whatever his relation with the Tudor
court may have been, his name does not occur in the patents as one of the
king’s physicians. It appears, indeed, that he had got into trouble in
London some two years after this date; for, on the 28th of January, 1488,
the king granted to him a general pardon, “with pardon for all escapes and
evasions out of the Tower of London or elsewhere, and remissions of
forfeiture of all lands and goods[483].” Probably he went back after this
to his native Normandy: at all events, he is next heard of in practice at
Rouen, where he published, in 1490, a Latin treatise on the plague, one of
the first productions of the printing-press of that city.
It is in the opening sentences of his printed book on the plague[484], and
not in his manuscript on the sweat, that he fixes the date when the latter
began. The sweating sickness, he says, first unfurled its banners in
England in the city of London, on the 19th of September, 1485; and then
follow in the text certain astrological signs, representing the positions
or conjunctions of heavenly bodies on that date. The London chronicles of
the time assign dates for the beginning of the epidemic which differ
somewhat from Dr Forrestier’s. One of them, a manuscript of the Cotton
collection, by an anonymous citizen of London, records the entry of Henry
VII. into the capital on the 27th of August, and proceeds: “And the XXVII
day of September began the sweating syknes in London, whereof died Thomas
Hyll that yer mayor, for whom was chosen sir William Stokker, knyght,
which died within V days after of the same disease. Then for him was
chosen John Warde.... And this yere died of that sickness, besides ii
mayors above rehersed, John Stokker, Thomas Breten, Richard Pawson, Thomas
Norland, aldermen, and many worshipful commoners[485].” In the better
known but not always equally full chronicle of Fabyan, who was then a
citizen, and afterwards sheriff and alderman, the date of Henry’s
reception by the mayor and citizens at Hornsey Park is given as the 28th
of August, the reference to the sweat being as follows: “And upon the XI
day of Octobre next following, than beynge the swetynge sykeness of newe
begun, dyed the same Thomas Hylle, mayor, and for him was chosen sir
William Stokker, knyght and draper, which dyed also of the sayd sickness
shortly after.” The only other particular date extant for the sweat of
1485 comes from the country: Lambert Fossedike, abbot of Croyland, died
there of the sweating sickness, after an illness of eighteen hours, on the
14th of October[486].
Apart from the hitherto unknown manuscript of Forrestier, these are the
only contemporary references. Stow, who must have had access to some
journal of the time, says that the king entered London on the 27th August
and that “the sweating began the 21st September, and continued till the
end of October, of the which a wonderful number died,” including the two
mayors and four other aldermen, as above. Hall’s chronicle, which has been
the principal source used by Hecker and others, reproduces the account of
the sweat by Polydore Virgil almost word for word; and Polydore’s account
was certainly not begun until after 1504 and was not published until 1531.
Bernard André, historiographer and poet laureate of Henry VII., was
present at the entry into London on the 27th August; but he gives no
particulars of the sweat of that autumn, in his ‘Life of Henry VII.,’
although it is probable that his ‘Annals of Henry VII.’ would have
furnished some information had they not been lost for the year 1485, as it
is to his extant annals for the year 1508 that we owe almost all that is
known of the second epidemic of the sweat in that year. The state papers
of the time do not contain a single reference to the epidemic, although it
was so active in the city of London as to carry off two mayors and four
aldermen within a few days, and was besides, as Polydore Virgil says, “a
new kind of disease, from which no former age had suffered, as all agree.”
London was full of people, including some who had stood by Henry Tudor in
France, others who had joined his standard in Wales, and still others who
came to do homage to the new dynasty; and there is evidence remaining of
hundreds of suitors, great and small, attending the court to receive the
reward of their services in patents and grants, as well as evidence in the
wardrobe accounts of the bustle of preparing for the Coronation on the
30th of October. But in all the extant state records of those busy weeks,
there is not a scrap of writing to show that such a thing as a pestilence
was raging within the narrow bounds of the city and under the walls of the
royal palace in the Tower. It remains, therefore, to make what we can out
of the medical essay which Dr Forrestier wrote for the occasion.
In his later reference of 1490, he says that more than fifteen thousand
were cut off in sudden death, as if by the visitation of God, many dying
while walking in the streets, without warning and without being confessed.
That number of the dead need not be taken as at all exact: nor does it
appear whether it is meant for London or for the whole country. But the
dramatic suddenness of the attack is illustrated by particular cases in
his original treatise of 1485, although deaths so sudden are unheard of in
any infection:--
“We saw two prestys standing togeder and speaking togeder, and we saw
both of them dye sodenly. Also in die--proximi we se the wyf of a
taylour taken and sodenly dyed. Another yonge man walking by the
street fell down sodenly. Also another gentylman ryding out of the
cyte [date given] dyed. Also many others the which were long to
rehearse we have known that have dyed sodenly.” Gentlemen and
gentlewomen, priests, righteous men, merchants, rich and poor, were
among the victims of this sudden death. Of the symptoms he says: “And
this sickness cometh with a grete swetyng and stynkyng, with rednesse
of the face and of all the body, and a contynual thurst, with a grete
hete and hedache because of the fumes and venoms.” He mentions also
“pricking the brains,” and that “some appear red and yellow, as we
have seen many, and in two grete ladies that we saw, the which were
sick in all their bodies and they felt grete pricking in their bodies.
And some had black spots, as it appeared in our frere (?) Alban, a
noble leech on whose soul God have mercy!”
Both in his pathology and in his copious appendix of formulae he directs
attention to the heart, as the organ that was suddenly overpowered by the
pestilential venoms. Many died, he would have us believe, because they
listened to the false leeches, who professed to know the disease and to
have treated it before. A considerable part of his space is occupied with
the denunciation of these irregular practitioners, their greed and their
ignorance,--a theme which is a common one in the prefaces of Elizabethan
medical works also. It appears that the false leeches wrote and put
letters upon gates and church doors, or upon poles, promising to help the
people in their sickness. They were also injudicious in the choice of
their remedies--some ordaining powders and medicines that are hot until
the thirtieth degree and over, others ale or wine, or hot spices, “and
many other medicines they have, the which, the best of them, is nothing
worth.” These false leeches knew not the causes,--their complexions, their
ages, the regions, the times of the year, the climate,--evidently the
astrological lore which gave Chaucer’s physician, a century earlier, his
academical standing or his superiority to the vulgar quacks of his day.
Those who fell into the hands of quacks, Forrestier implies, had an
indifferent chance. Many died for want of help and good guiding; whereas
many a one was healed that had received a medicine in due order, “and if
he purge himself before.” The clearly written and fully detailed formulae
at the end of his essay are so far evidence that Forrestier did not
traffic in secret remedies. The first part of the essay is occupied with
the doctrine of causes--the nigh causes and the far. The far causes were
astrological; but the nigh causes, although they are altogether inadequate
to account for sweating sickness as a special type, and are indeed little
else than the stock list of nuisances quoted in earlier treatises upon the
plague, are suggestive enough of the condition of London streets and
houses at the time, and will be referred to in a later part of the
chapter.
The account of the treatment given by Polydore Virgil, and from him copied
into Hall’s chronicle, is probably the experience of later epidemics of
the sweat, although it comes into the history under the year 1485. The
evil effects of throwing off the bed-clothes, and of drinking great
draughts of cold water, and, on the other hand, the benefits of lying
still with the hands and feet well covered, are among the topics discussed
in letters during the epidemic of 1517, one of those which came within the
historian’s own experience in England. But it is clear from Forrestier’s
essay of 1485 that there were great differences in the regimen of patients
in the sweat during its very first season, some adopting the hot and
cordial treatment, others, perhaps, the cooling, just as in the smallpox
long after. Bernard André implies that there was a correct and an
incorrect regimen also in the second epidemic of 1508, and there is
evidence of conflicting advice in the letters on the sweats of 1517 and
1528. If there were any better regimen in the later epidemics than in the
earlier, as Polydore Virgil says there was, it was merely the wisdom of
avoiding extremes. Hence the misleading character of his remark that,
after an immense loss of life, “a remedy was found, ready to hand for
everyone.” Bacon in his ‘Reign of Henry VII.’ took from Polydore almost
word for word all that he says of the “remedy” of the sweat; and the
unreal word-spinning thus begun was carried to its full development by
bishop Sprat, the historian of the Royal Society (1667), who mistakes the
“remedy” for some _arcanum_ or potent drug, gives my lord Verulam the
credit of preserving the prescription for the use of posterity, and
adduces it as an encouragement to the Royal Society to seek among the
secrets of nature for an equally efficacious “antidote” to the plague.
The language of historians is that the sweat of 1485 spread over the whole
kingdom. We hear of it definitely at Oxford[487] where it “lasted but a
month or six weeks” and is said to have cut off many of the scholars
before they could disperse. It is heard of also with equal definiteness at
Croyland abbey. There is also mention of it in a contemporary calendar of
the mayor of Bristol, but without any special reference to that city[488].
Beyond these notices, there appears to be nothing to show that the sweat
went all through England in the late autumn or early winter of 1485. But
we may take the following passage by Forrestier, in the dedication of his
tract to the king, as expressing the state of matters, with perhaps some
exaggeration:
“When that thy highness and thy great power is vexed and troubled with
divers sickness, and thy lordships and almost the middle part of thy
realm with the venomous fever of pestilence, and, by the reason of
that, young and old and of all manner of ages, with divers wailings
and sadness they are stricken: therefore, excellent and noble prince,
we are moved with every love and duty, and not for no lucre neither
covetyse, to ordain a short governing against this foresaid
fever[489].”
The Second Sweat in 1508.
After the first outburst of the sweat in 1485 had subsided, probably
before winter was well begun, nothing more is heard of it for twenty-three
years. It reappeared in 1508, a third time in 1517, a fourth time in 1528,
and for the last time in 1551. With each successive outbreak, our
information becomes less meagre, while the epidemic of 1551 actually
called forth an English printed book by Dr Caius, the epidemic of 1528
having called forth a whole crop of foreign writings on its spreading to
the continent (for the first and only time) in the year following (1529).
As the nature, causes, and favouring circumstances of the sweat cannot
profitably be dealt with except on a review of its whole history, it will
be necessary to take up at once and together the four subsequent epidemics
of it in this country, leaving the intercurrent and probably much more
disastrous epidemics of bubo-plague, during the same period, as well as
the great invasion of syphilis in 1494-6, to be chronicled apart.
Our knowledge of the second outbreak of the sweat, in 1508[490], comes
almost exclusively from Bernard André, whose _Annals of Henry VII._[491]
are fortunately preserved for that year (as they are also for 1504-5).
Under the date of July, 1508, he says that some of the household of the
Lord Treasurer were seized with the sweat, and died of it, “and everywhere
in this city there die not a few.” In August public prayers were made at
St Paul’s on account of the plague of sweat. In the same month the king’s
movements from place to place in the country round London are described as
determined by the prevalence of the sweat. From Hatfield, whither he had
gone to visit his mother on the 9th August, he went to Wanstead, where
certain of his household “sweated;” on that account the king moved to
Barking, and thence to other places about the 14th. He avoided Greenwich
and Eltham, in both which places the chief personages of the royal palaces
“had sweated,” so much did the sickness then rage in all places (_per
omnia loca_). Some of the king’s personal attendants appear to have caught
the infection; nor did it avail, says André, to run away or to follow the
chase, _quoniam mors omnia vincit_. Other visits were paid down to the
17th August, and a strict edict was issued that no one from London was to
come near the court, nor anyone to repair to the city, under penalties
specified. The only one near the king’s person who died of it was lord
Graystock, a young Cumberland noble. The Lord Privy Seal and the Lord
Chamberlain were both attacked but recovered; doctor Symeon, the dean of
the Chapel Royal, died of it. There appears to have been a good deal of
the sickness in various places, but many recovered, says André, with good
tending. The king occupied himself with hunting the stag in the forests at
Stratford, Eltham and other places round London.
From the provinces there is one item of information relating to
Chester[492]: in the summer of 1507, it is said, the sweating sickness
destroyed 91 in three days, of whom only four were women. At Oxford in
1508, or the year before Henry VII.’s death, there was a sore pestilence
which caused the dispersion of divers students; but it is not called the
sweat[493].
The Third Sweat in 1517.
Except for a single reference to the sweat in 1511, nothing is heard of it
between the autumn of 1508 and the summer of 1517. The reference in 1511
occurs in a letter of Erasmus, from Queens’ College, Cambridge, dated 25th
August, in which he says that his health is still indifferent _a sudore
illo_. This may possibly refer to the lingering effects of an attack in
1508, or to the influenza of 1510; and as all the other references in 1511
are to plague, and to alarms of plague, it may be doubted if the sweating
sickness had really been prevalent in England in that year, or at any time
between 1508 and 1517. We begin to hear of it definitely in the summer of
the latter year. We have now reached a period from which numerous letters,
despatches and other state papers have come down[494]. Among the most
useful of these for our purpose are the despatches of the Venetian
ambassador and the apostolic nuncio from London, the letters of Pace to
Wolsey when Henry VIII. was in the country and the cardinal not with him,
the letters of Erasmus, sir Thomas More and others.
The first that we hear of sickness in London in 1517 is from a letter of
the 24th June, written by a cardinal of Arragon to Wolsey, from Calais;
the cardinal, who was travelling like a noble, with a train of forty
horses, had intended to visit London, but was waiting on the other side
owing to a rumour that the sickness was prevalent in London. It is
probable that this rumour had referred to the standing infection of
English towns in summer and autumn, the bubo-plague; for it is not until
five weeks later that we hear of the sweating sickness under its proper
name.
On the 1st of August the nuncio writes from London to the marquis of
Mantua that a disease is broken out here causing sudden death within six
hours; it is called the sweating sickness; an immense number die of it. On
the 6th of August he occupies the greater part of a letter of three pages
with an account of it. To some it proved fatal in twelve hours, to others
in six, and to others in four; it is an easy death. Most patients are
seized when lying down, but some when on foot, and even a very few when
riding out. The attack lasts about twenty-four hours, more or less. It is
fatal to take, during the fit, any cold drink, or to allow a draught of
air to reach the drenching skin; the covering should be rather more ample
than usual, but there was danger in heaping too many bed-clothes on the
patient. A moderate fire should be kept up in the sick chamber; the arms
should be crossed on the patient’s breast, and great care should be taken
that no cold air reached the armpits[495]. The disease was on the
increase, and was already spreading over England; it was reported that
more than four hundred students had died of it at Oxford, which was a
small place but for the university there. Burials were occurring on every
side; there had been many deaths in the king’s household and in that of
cardinal Wolsey, who was in the country “sweating.” Such is the universal
dread of the disease that there are very few who do not fear for their
lives, while some are so terrified that they suffer more from fear than
others do from the sweat itself.
On the same day (6th August), the Venetian ambassador, Sebastian
Giustinian, who was on friendly terms with the nuncio and often indebted
to him for information, writes to the Doge giving much the same account of
“the new malady.” He remarks upon the sudden onset, the rapidity of the
issue when it was to be fatal, and the cessation of the sweat within
twenty-four hours. His secretary had taken it, as well as many of his
domestics. Few strangers are dead, but an immense number of Englishmen. On
going to visit Wolsey, he found that he had the sweat; many of the
cardinal’s household had died of it, including some of his chief
attendants; the bishop of Winchester also had taken it. On the 12th of
August, the Venetian envoy writes that he himself and his son have had the
sweat; Wolsey has had it three times in a few days, many of his people
being dead of it, especially his gentlemen[496]. In London “omnes silent.”
Wolsey’s attack and relapses are confirmed by his own letter to the king;
about the end of August he went on a pilgrimage to Walsingham, and
remained there most of September, but even after his return he was “vexed
with fever.” The relapses of the sweat, which are mentioned by Forrestier
in 1485, by André in 1508, and now again in 1517, may have been the origin
of the saying in the form of a proverb, which occurs in an essay of the
time by sir Thomas More,--that the relapse is worse than the original
disease[497].
The death of a well-known personage, Ammonio, the Latin secretary of the
king, is the subject of several letters, including one of the 19th August
from More to Erasmus; he died at nine on the morning of the 17th August,
after an illness of twenty hours: he had been congratulating himself on
being safe by reason of his temperate life. More confirms the statement as
to deaths in the university of Oxford, and he adds also at Cambridge. In
London the sweat attacks whole families: “I assure you there is less
danger in the ranks of war than in this city.” His own family (? in
Bucklersbury) are safe so far, and he has composed his mind for any
eventuality. He hears that the sweat is now at Calais. On the 27th August,
the Venetian envoy writes again that the disease is now making great
progress; the king keeps out of the way at Windsor, with only three
favourite gentlemen and Dionysius Memo, who is described as his physician,
but in other letters as “the Reverend,” and as a musician from Venice. On
the 21st September the envoy has gone to the country to avoid “the plague
_and_ the sweating sickness.” A few days later (26th Sept.) he writes that
“the plague” is making some progress, and that the prolonged absence of
the king, the cardinal and other lords from London owing to the sweat, had
encouraged the citizens to a turbulent mood against the foreign traders
and residents; the state of matters was so threatening that three thousand
citizens were under arms to preserve the peace. The references after
September, 1517, are mostly to the “common infection” or plague, which was
an almost annual autumnal event in London. There was probably some
confusion, at the time, between that infection and the sweat, not, of
course as regards symptoms, but in common report; thus it is not clear
whether the fresh alarm in the king’s court at or near Windsor on the 15th
October, owing to the deaths of young lord Grey de Wilton and a German
attendant of the king, refers to the sweat or to the plague. As late as
the 2nd November, a letter from the University of Oxford to Wolsey
excuses delay in answering his two letters on the ground of the sweating
sickness.
The prevalence of “sudor tabificus” at Oxford in 1517 is known from other
sources as well: it is said to have caused “the dispersion and sweeping
away of most, if not all, of the students[498];” and the nuncio, writing
from London on the 6th of August, mentions the current but improbable
statement that more than four hundred students had died in less than a
week.
Besides these from Oxford, there are hardly any notices of the 1517 sweat
in the country remote from London. A record at Chester mentions an
outbreak of “plague,” which is taken to mean sweating sickness; it is said
also to have been “probably more serious than in 1507;” many died, others
fled; and the grass grew a foot high at the Cross[499]. But these are the
marks of true plague, which we know to have broken out in London, and in
country districts as well, in the autumn and winter of 1517, or almost as
soon as the short and sharp outburst of the sweat was past.
Among the references to prevailing diseases on the continent in 1517,
besides sir Thomas More’s rumour of the sweat in Calais, there is none
which would lead us to suppose that the distinctive English malady had
invaded Europe in that year. But there is a significant statement by
Erasmus, hitherto overlooked, which almost certainly points to an epidemic
of influenza on the other side of the North Sea the year after the sweat
was prevalent in England. It is known that there was a suddenly fatal form
of throat disease prevalent in the Netherlands that spring, which has been
taken to be diphtheria; but the malady to which Erasmus refers can hardly
have been the same as that. Writing from Louvain to Barbieri on the 1st
June, 1518, he says that a new plague is raging in Germany, affecting
people with a cough, and pain in the head and stomach, he himself having
suffered from it. The significance of that epidemic, assuming it to have
been influenza, will be dealt with in the sequel.
By means of the foregoing contemporary notices of the sweat in 1517 we
are able to judge of the general accuracy of the summary of it in Hall’s
chronicle, which has been hitherto almost the only source of information.
The sweat killed, he says, in three hours or two hours, which is something
of an exaggeration of the shortest duration mentioned by the nuncio and
the Venetian envoy in their letters of the 1st and 6th August. Another
general statement may be suspected of even greater exaggeration: “For in
some one town half the people died, and in some other town the third part,
the sweat was so fervent and the infection so great.” The sweat lasted, he
says, to the middle of December. Stow, in his _Annals_, more correctly
states that the plague came in the end of the year, after the sweat. The
plague was much the more deadly infection of the two; but even plague and
sweat together, and at their worst, would hardly have destroyed one-half
or one-third of the inhabitants of a town.
The Fourth Sweat in 1528.
As the despatches of the nuncio and the Venetian envoy in London give the
best accounts of the sweat of 1517, it is in the despatches of the French
ambassador, Du Bellay, that we find the most serviceable particulars of
the sweat in 1528. Du Bellay, bishop of Bayonne, and a witty diplomatist,
was in London through the whole of it, and during that time sent letters
to Paris, in three of which the sweat is a principal topic. From many
other state letters of the time various particulars may be gathered, and
in one letter by Brian Tuke, one of the king’s ministers, we find some
theorizings about the disease. The outbreak befell at the time when Henry
VIII.’s passion for Mistress Anne Boleyn, sister to one of the ladies of
the Court, was waxing strong; it had the effect of parting the lovers for
several weeks, the distance between them having been bridged over by an
interchange of tender notes, of which those of the king remain open to the
prying eyes of posterity.
The sweat is heard of as early as the 5th of June, 1528, when Brian Tuke
writes to Tunstall, bishop of London, that he had fled to Stepney “for
fear of the infection,” a servant being ill at his house. The sickness
must have made little talk for some ten days longer. On the 18th June, Du
Bellay writes that it had made its appearance “within these four
days[500].” On the 16th, the king at Greenwich was alarmed by the
intelligence that a maid of Anne Boleyn’s had been attacked by it[501]. He
left in great haste for Waltham, and sent the young lady to her father’s
in Kent. “As yet,” writes Du Bellay, “the love has not abated. I know not,
if absence and the difficulties of Rome may effect anything.” The king
wrote to her at once: “There came to me in the night the most afflicting
news possible.... I fear to suffer yet longer that absence which has
already given me so much pain.” He sends his second physician (Dr Butts)
to her. The alarm about her health seems to have been uncalled for just
then, although both she and her father caught the disease within a few
days. By the 18th June, according to the French envoy, some 2000 had
caught the sickness in London. It is, he says, a most perilous disease:
“one has a little pain in the head and heart; suddenly a sweat begins; and
a physician is useless, for whether you wrap yourself up much or little,
in four hours, sometimes in two or three, you are despatched without
languishing as in those troublesome fevers.” The day before, on going to
swear the truce, he saw the people “as thick as flies rushing from the
streets or shops into their houses to take the sweat whenever they felt
ill.... In London, I assure you, the priests have a better time than the
doctors, except that the latter do not help to bury. If this thing goes
on, corn will soon be cheap. [The season was one of scarcity.] It is
twelve [eleven] years since there was such a visitation, when there died
10,000 persons in ten or twelve days; but it was not so bad as this has
been.” Writing again, twelve days after, on the 30th June, he says that
some 40,000 had been attacked in London, only 2000 of whom had died; “but
if a man only put his hand out of bed during the twenty-four hours, it
becomes as stiff as a pane of glass”--that is to say, by keeping
themselves carefully covered, as we learn also from Polydore Virgil’s
history and letters on the sweat of 1517, they greatly increased the
chance of recovery. In his third despatch, 21st July, he says the danger
begins to diminish hereabout and to increase elsewhere; in Kent it is very
great. Anne Boleyn and her father have sweated, but have got over it. The
notaries have had a fine time of it, nearly everyone having made his will,
as those who took the disease in its fatal form “became quite foolish the
moment they fell ill.” His estimate of 100,000 wills is, of course, a
humorous exaggeration. The sweat had been at its height in London,
according to its wont, for only a few weeks, mostly in July. On the 21st
of August one writes from London that “the plague at this day is well
assuaged, and little or nothing heard thereof.” From other parts of
England there are few particulars of the sweat of 1528. We hear of it at
Woburn on the 26th June, in a nunnery at Wilton on the 18th July, at
Beverley on the 22nd July--it is reported as very serious in Yorkshire
generally,--at Cambridge on the 27th July, and at several places in Kent
about the same date. The “infection” at Dover as late as the 27th
September may not have been the sweat, but the ordinary bubo-plague. But
it is probably to the sweat that the deaths of four priests and two
lay-brothers at Axholme, in Lincolnshire, are to be referred, as well as
the heavy mortality in the Charterhouse, London[502].
As in the previous sweat of 1517, the letters of the time give us many
glimpses of the invasion of great households in and around London,
including the king’s.
When the French ambassador was walking with Wolsey in his garden at York
Place (Whitehall) on a day in June, word was brought to the cardinal that
five or six of his household had taken the sweat, and the diplomatic
interview was brought to an abrupt end. Du Bellay writes again in July
that only four men in Wolsey’s great house remained well. Among those in
his household who died of it were a brother of lord Derby and a nephew of
the duke of Norfolk. The cardinal, who had suffered from the sweat and its
relapses in 1517, fled from it to Hampton Court on the 30th June, and shut
himself up there with only a few attendants, having previously adjourned
the law courts and stopped the assizes. On the 21st of July, Du Bellay
writes that it was almost impossible to get access to Wolsey, and suggests
that he might have to speak with him at Hampton Court through a trumpet.
In the same letter the French ambassador refers to the circumstances of
his own attack when he was visiting the archbishop of Canterbury (Warham),
probably at Lambeth: “The day I sweated at my lord of Canterbury’s, there
died eighteen persons in four hours, and hardly anyone escaped but myself,
who am not yet quite strong again.” The bishop of London, Tunstall, writes
to Wolsey from Fulham on the 10th July, that thirteen of his servants were
sick of the sweat at once on St Thomas’s day; he had caused the public
processions and prayers to be made, which the king had wished for on the
5th July. The governor of Calais writes on the 10th July: “The sweat has
arrived and has attacked many.” Only two were dead, a Lancashire gentleman
and a fisherman; but in a second letter of the same night, four more are
dead, of whom two “were in good health yestereven when they went to their
beds.” Various other letters about the same date make mention of personal
experiences of the sweat, or of domestics attacked, at country houses in
the home counties. The most minute accounts are those for the king’s
household.
On the 16th June the king had left Greenwich hurriedly for Waltham. In a
letter to Anne Boleyn, he writes that, when he was at Waltham, two ushers,
two valets-de-chambre, George Boleyn and Mr Treasurer (Fitzwilliam) fell
ill of the sweat, and are now quite well. “The doubt I had of your health
troubled me extremely, and I should scarcely have had any quiet without
knowing the certainty; but since you have felt nothing, I hope it is with
you as with us.” He had removed to Hunsdon (on 20th or 21st June) “where
we are very well, without one sick person. I think if you would retire
from Surrey, as we did, you would avoid all danger. Another thing may
comfort you: few women have this illness, and moreover none of our court,
and few elsewhere, have died of it.” When Brian Tuke went to Hunsdon on
the 21st June, the king spoke to him “of the advantages of this house, and
its wholesomeness at this time of sickness.” Two days after, Tuke having
business with the king, found him “in secret communication with his
physician, Mr Chambre, in a tower where he sometimes sups apart.” The king
conversed with his minister about the latter’s ill-health (seemingly
stone), and showed him remedies, “as any most cunning physician in England
could do.” As to the infection, the king spoke of how folk were taken, how
little danger there was if good order be observed, how few were dead, how
Mistress Anne and my lord Rochford (her father) both have had it, what
jeopardy they have been in by the turning in of the sweat before the time,
of the endeavours of Mr Butts who had been with them, and finally of their
perfect recovery. The king sends advice to Wolsey to use “the pills of
Rhazes” once a week, and, if it come to it, to sweat moderately and to the
full time, without suffering it to run in. But the king’s optimist views
of the malady were quickly disturbed. William Cary, married to Anne
Boleyn’s sister, died of the sweat suddenly at Hunsdon, having just
arrived from Plashey, and two others of the Chamber, Poyntz and Compton,
died about the same time either there or at Hertford, whither the king
removed. On the evening of the 26th June there fell sick at Hertford, the
marquis and marchioness of Dorset, sir Thomas Cheyney, Croke, Norris and
Wallop. The king hastily left for Hatfield, on the 28th June, where still
others appear to have taken the sickness. Du Bellay, writing on the 30th,
says all but one of the Chamber have been attacked. From Hatfield the king
went at once to Tittenhanger, a country house which belonged to Wolsey as
abbot of St Albans, and there he elected to take his chance of the sweat,
keeping up immense fires to destroy the infection. On the 7th July, Dr
Bell writes from Tittenhanger to Wolsey that “none have had the sweat here
these three days except Mr Butts.” Two days later, however, the
marchioness of Exeter “sweated,” and the king ordered all who were of the
marquis’s company to depart, he himself removing as far as Ampthill,
whence he thought of removing on the 22nd July to Grafton, but was
prevented by the prevalence of the infection there. Shortly after Anne
Boleyn returned to the court. It is clearly to the period of her return
that an undated letter of hers to Wolsey belongs; after writing a few
formal lines to make interest with the cardinal, she took her letter to
the king for him to add a postscript, which was as follows: “Both of us
desire to see you, and are glad to hear you have escaped the plague so
well, trusting the fury of it is abated, especially with those that keep
good diet as I trust you do.”
Although the attacks mentioned in the correspondence of the time are many,
the deaths are few. A letter of Brian Tuke’s to Wolsey’s secretary, on the
14th July, takes a somewhat sceptical line about the whole matter. His
wife has “passed the sweat,” but is very weak, and is broken out at the
mouth and other places. He himself “puts away the sweat” from himself
nightly (directly against the king’s advice to him), though other people
think they would kill themselves thereby. He had done that during the last
sweat and this, feeling sure that, as long as he is not first sick, the
sweat is rather provoked by disposition of the time, and by keeping men
close, than by any infection, although the infection was a reality.
Thousands have it from fear, who need not else sweat, especially if they
observe good diet. He believes that it proceeds much of men’s opinion. It
has been brought from London to other parts by report; for when a whole
man comes from London and talks of the sweat, the same night all the town
is full of it, and thus it spreads as the fame runs. Children, again,
lacking this opinion, have it not, unless their mothers kill them by
keeping them too hot if they sweat a little. It does not go to Gravelines
when it is at Calais, although people go from the one place to the other.
The English Sweat on the Continent in 1529[503].
Whether the sweat went at length to Gravelines or other places in that
direction does not appear; but there is abundant evidence that it showed
itself in the course of the following year (1529) in many parts of the
Continent, excepting France, and that its outbreak was often attended with
a heavy mortality. It was observed in Calais, as we have seen, on the 10th
of July, 1528. But it is not until the year after, on the 25th of July,
1529, that we hear of it again,--at Hamburg, where a thousand persons are
said to have died of it within four or five weeks, most of them within
nine days. On the 31st July it was at Lübeck, and about the same time at
Bremen and the neighbouring ancient town of Verden; on 14th August in
Mecklenburg; at Stettin on the 27th August, and at Wismar, Demmin,
Rostock, Stralsund, and Greifswald about the same date; in Danzig on the
1st September; Königsberg, on the 8th; and so eastwards to Livonia in
1530, and to Lithuania, Poland and Russia, the information for which
countries is vague. Copenhagen also suffered from it, and towns in the
interior of East Prussia, such as Thorn and Kulm. Meanwhile the sweat had
proceeded by way of Hanover and Göttingen, about the middle of August
afflicting also Brunswick, Lüneburg, Waldeck, Hadeln, Einbeck, Westphalia,
the valley of the Weser, and East Friesland. It reached Frankfurt on the
11th September, Worms shortly after, and Marburg at the end of the month,
breaking up the conference there between Luther and Zwingli, and their
respective adherents, on the doctrine of the Eucharist. Jülich, Liege and
Cologne were reached about the middle of September, and Speyer about the
24th, Augsburg (where there was a most severe and protracted epidemic) on
the 6th, Strasburg on the 24th. Freiburg in Breisgau, Mühlhausen and
Gebweiler in Alsace, in October. In November, the sickness overran
Wurtemberg, Baden, the Upper Rhine, the Palatinate, and the shores of the
Lake of Constance. Among the other German provinces visited in due order
were Franconia, Thuringia, Saxony, the Saxon Metal Mountains, Meissen,
Mannsfeld, Halberstadt, Magdeburg, Wittenberg, Lusatia, the Mark of
Brandenburg, and Silesia. In Vienna the sweat prevailed during the siege
by Sultan Soliman from the 22nd September to the 14th October. At Berne it
is heard of in December, and at Basle in January 1530. The Low Countries
had not been affected so soon as their nearness to England might have led
one to expect: the sickness is said to have approached them from the Rhine
in the latter half of September. They suffered severely, one of the
heaviest mortalities being reported for the town of Zierikzee, where three
thousand are said to have died subsequent to the 3rd of October, 1529.
In this remarkable progress over the mainland of Europe, France was
conspicuously avoided. The sweat does not appear to have entered Spain,
nor to have crossed the Alps. But all the rest of the Continent, from the
Rhine to the Oder (if not farther east) and from the Baltic to the Alps,
was reached by the English sweat in much the same way as if it had been an
influenza reversing the order of its usual direction. There need be no
hesitation as to the correctness of the diagnosis; the disease was
described by several foreign writers from their own observation, and their
descriptions agree entirely with those of Forrestier, in 1485, of Polydore
Virgil, perhaps for the epidemics of 1508 and 1517, and of the
letter-writers who were describing the epidemic of the year before (1528),
as they saw it in and around London. The striking thing in the accounts
from the continent is the enormous range of its fatality; in some towns
the proportion of deaths to cases was hardly more than in influenza, while
in others it was the death-rate of a peculiarly pestilential or malignant
typhus; and those differences cannot have depended wholly upon the method
of treatment.
These full accounts of the English sweat on the continent of Europe in
1529 are in striking contrast to the meagre records of it at home. They
were compiled first in 1805 from the numerous contemporary chronicles, and
printed pamphlets or fly-sheets on the sweat, by Gruner, professor at
Jena, in his _Itinerary of the English Sweat_, and his _Extant writers on
the English Sweat_, published in Latin[504]. In 1834 Hecker went over the
ground again in his well-known essay, improving somewhat upon the positive
erudition of Gruner, but at the same time hazarding a number of doubtful
interpretative statements, especially as to the sweat in England, for
which the meagreness of the English records then available may be his
excuse. The erudition of Gruner, Hecker and Häser deserves every
acknowledgement; but it is of value more especially for the extension of
the sweat to the continent of Europe in 1529, where it had abundant
materials at its service, in chronicles, printed essays, and “regiments.”
There are extant no fewer than twenty-one printed essays or sheets of
directions on the English sweat, which were issued from the German,
Netherlands, or Swiss presses between the month of October 1529 and the
month of June 1531, two or three of them being in Latin and most of them
brief summaries in the native tongue for popular use. The corresponding
epidemic in England did not call forth a single piece by any medical man,
so far as is known. Nor does the English treatment appear to have lost
anything thereby; for it was based upon the profitable experience of
previous epidemics as embodied in oral tradition. Down to the fifth
epidemic in 1551, the only English writing on the sweat so far as is known
was the manuscript of 1485, by Forrestier. Almost all that we know of the
epidemics in England in 1508, 1517 and 1528 comes from Bernard André’s
annals and Polydore Virgil’s history, and from the despatches of the
apostolic nuncio, the Venetian ambassador and the French ambassador. The
fifth and last outbreak, in 1551, called forth two native writings, one
for popular use in English in 1552, and another in Latin in 1555, both by
Dr Caius, physician to Henry VIII. and Edward VI.; these are indeed better
than nothing at all, but they are too much occupied with pedantry and
lugubrious rhetoric to be of much service for historical purposes[505].
The information about the epidemic of 1551 is so scanty as to suggest that
the sickness in that year can hardly have been so severe as in 1528; the
state papers contain hardly anything relating to it, and we owe nearly all
our knowledge of it to the diary of Machyn, a citizen of London, to Edward
VI.’s diary, and to Dr Caius. Bills of mortality had been kept in London
for two or three weeks when the epidemic was at its height, from which
some totals of deaths are extant.
The Fifth Sweat in 1551.
It was not in London that the sweat of 1551 began, but at Shrewsbury--on
the 22nd of March, according to the manuscript chronicle of that
town[506], or on the 15th of April, according to Caius[507]. No record
remains of its prevalence at Shrewsbury; the statement of Caius, that some
900 deaths had occurred in a single city corresponds to the facts for
London, and has no more reference to Shrewsbury (where Caius never
resided) than it has to Norwich (as in Blomefield’s county history). The
strange influence in the air or soil advanced from Salop, as we learn from
Caius, by way of Ludlow, Presteign, Westchester, Coventry and Oxford, in
only one of which places is anything known of it except Caius’s remark
that it proceeded “with great mortality.” The best record of its
prevalence on the way from Shrewsbury to London occurs in the parish
register of Loughborough, in Leicestershire. Under the date of June, 1551,
the register has an entry that “the swat called New Acquaintance, alias
Stoupe! Knave and know thy Master, began on the 24th of this month.” Then
follow the names of 12 persons who were buried in four days, and, on the
next page, under the heading of “The Sweat or New Acquaintance,” the names
of 7 more, all buried in three days--making a total of 19 in six days,
presumably all dead of the sweat and presumably also the whole mortality
from it in Loughborough, which had far heavier mortalities from the common
plague in after years[508].
The date of its arrival at Oxford, on the way to London, is not known; but
a physician then resident there, Dr Ethredge, has left it on record that
it attacked sixty in Oxford in one night, and next day more than a hundred
in the villages around; very few died of it at Oxford, which showed that
the air of that university was more salubrious than at Cambridge, where
the two sons of the duchess of Suffolk died[509].
The sweat appeared suddenly in London about the beginning of July, and had
a short but active career of some three weeks. Deaths from it began to be
mentioned on the 7th, and are entered in the king’s (Edward VI.’s) diary
as having amounted on the 10th to the number of 120, in the London
district, including “one of my nobles and one of my chamberlains,” so that
“I repaired to Hampton Court with only a small company.” The royal diarist
says that the victims fell into a delirium and died in that state[510]. On
the 18th July, the king, in Council at Hampton Court, issued an order to
the bishops, that they should “exhort the people to a diligent attendance
at common prayer, and so avert the displeasure of Almighty God, having
visited the realm with the extreme plague of sudden death[511].”
The diary of a London citizen says that “there died in London many
merchants and great rich men and women, and young men and old, of the new
sweat[512].” On the 12th died Sir Thomas Speke, one of the king’s
council, at his house in Chancery Lane; next day died Sir John Wallop “an
old knight and gentle[513],” the same who had survived an attack of the
sweat in 1528 when at Hertford with Henry VIII. It is not clear whether
some other deaths of notables in the same few days were due to the sweat.
Three independent statements are extant of the mortality in London which
had all been taken, doubtless, from the bills regularly compiled. One
gives the deaths “from all diseases” in London from the 8th to the 19th
July as 872, “no more in all, and so the Chancellor is certified[514];”
another gives the deaths “by the sweating sickness” from the 7th to the
20th July as 938[515]; and Caius gives the deaths from the 9th to the 16th
July as 761, “besides those that died on the 7th and 8th days, of whom no
register was kept[516];” by the 30th of July, 142, more had died, by which
time it had practically ceased in London[517]. Caius adds that it next
prevailed in the eastern and northern parts of England until the end of
August, and ceased everywhere before the end of September. The king, in a
letter of the 22nd August, written during his progress, says that the most
part of England at that time was clear of any dangerous or infectious
sickness[518]. Records at York make mention of a great plague in 1551, but
without describing it as the sweat[519]. The event which excited most
attention was the death by the sweat of the two sons of the widowed
duchess of Suffolk, the young duke Henry and his brother lord Charles
Brandon on the 16th of July. They had been taken from Cambridge, for fear
of the sweat, to the bishop of Lincoln’s palace at Bugden, in
Huntingdonshire, their mother accompanying them; they fell ill
immediately upon their arrival, the elder dying after an illness of five
hours and his brother half an hour after him[520].
Besides the cases of the two noble youths and others at Cambridge[521],
there are no particulars of its prevalence in “the eastern and northern
parts of England” (Caius). But we hear of it in the register of a country
parish in Devonshire, under the same name of “Stup-gallant” as in the
Loughborough register; and it is probable that those two casual notices
indicate its diffusion all over England in the manner of influenza. That
conclusion may find some support in the statement of one Hancocke,
minister of Poole, Dorset, that “God had plagued this realm most justly
with three notable plagues: (1) The Posting Sweat, that posted from town
to town thorow England and was named ‘Stop-gallant,’ for it spared none.
For there were some dancing in the Court at nine o’clock that were dead at
eleven[522].” Its occurrence in Devonshire is proved by entries in the
parish register of Uffculme: the whole burials in the year 1551 are 38;
and of these no fewer than 27 occur in the first eleven days of August,
and 16 of them in three days, the disease of which those persons died
being named, in the register, “the hote sickness or stup-gallant[523].”
Comparing these records of the sweat of 1551 with those of the years 1517
and 1528, we may conclude that the latest of those three outbreaks was not
more severe than the earlier, and that, in the Court circle, it was
probably milder. The gloomy rhetoric of Caius had led Hecker to construct
a picture of its disastrous progress along the valley of the Severn, in
which there is not a single authentic detail. Caius says that he was a
witness of it, but that must have been in London; and the figures for
London, although they indicate a very sharp epidemic while it lasted, do
not suggest a mortality greater at least than that of 1528. The Venetian
ambassador in writing a general memoir on England four years after, says
that all business was suspended in London, the shops closed and nothing
attended to but the preservation of life; but as he makes a gross
exaggeration in stating the deaths in London at 5000 “during the three
first days of its appearance,” we may take it that his impressions were
vague or his recollections grown dim[524].
Were it not for the isolated notices of the sweat in Leicestershire and
Devonshire, we should hardly have been able to realize that country towns
and villages had been visited by an epidemic which was appalling both by
its suddenness and by its fatality while it lasted. The name of
“Stop-gallant,” by which it is called in these parish registers, shows the
sort of impression which it made; but so far as the mortality is
concerned, that was often equalled, if not exceeded, in after years by
forms of epidemic fever which had nothing of the sweating type, although
they might also have been called “stop-gallant,” and indeed were so-called
in France (_trousse-galante_).
Apart from the notices in parish registers, we have the generalities of Dr
Caius, which amount to no more than a funereal essay, in the scholastic
manner, upon the theme of sudden death. It may be doubted whether Caius
really knew the facts about the disease in the country. The 27 deaths
within a few days in a small Devonshire village and the 19 in six days in
a small Leicestershire town, are hardly to be reconciled with the
statement in his Latin treatise of 1555, that “women and serving folk, the
plebeian and humble classes, even the middle class,” did not feel it, but
the “proceres” or upper classes did: they fled from it, he says, to
Belgium, France, Ireland and Scotland. It was for these that he was
chiefly concerned; and when he approaches his rhetorical task with the
remark that “nothing is more difficult than to find suitable words for a
great grief,” we may take it that he was thinking rather of such moving
cases as that of the widowed duchess of Suffolk, who had lost her two sons
in one day, than of wide-spread sickness and death throughout the homes of
the people.
Nothing more is heard of the sweat in England after the autumn of 1551, at
least not under that name. Francis Keene, an “astronomer,” prophesied in
his almanack for 1575, that the sweat would return, “wherein he erred not
much,” says Cogan[525], “as there were many strange fevers and nervous
sickness.” Some years before that, in 1558 (a year after influenza
abroad), there prevailed in summer “divers strange and new sicknesses,”
among which was a “sweating sickness,” so described by Dr John Jones, who
had it at Southampton. We are, indeed, approaching the period of frequent
and widespread epidemics of fever and of influenza, in both which types of
disease sweating was occasionally a notable symptom, as in the influenza
of 1580 abroad, in the fatal typhus of 1644 at Tiverton, in the widespread
English fevers of 1658, and in the London typhus as late as 1750. How
those other types of fever, due as if to a “corruption of the air,” are
related generically to the English sweat is a question upon which
something remains to be said before this chapter is concluded. But the
history of the English sweat comes to a definite end with the epidemic of
1551. Sweating sickness of the original sort was never again the _signum
pathognomicum_ of a whole epidemic of fever. The English Sweat became an
extinct species, after a comparatively brief existence on the earth of
sixty-six years. Its successors among the forms of pestilential disease
may have occasionally put forth the sweating character, as if in a sport
of nature; but the most of the travelling, or posting, or universal
fevers, and universal colds, are easily distinguished from the
sweat--_nova febrium terris incubuit cohors_[526].
Antecedents of the English Sweat.
The history of the English sweat presents to the student of epidemics much
that is paradoxical although not without parallel, and much that his
research can never rescue from uncertainty. Where did this hitherto
unheard of disease come from? Where was it in the intervals from 1485 to
1508, from 1508 to 1517, from 1517 to 1528, and from 1528 to 1551? What
became of it after 1551? Why did it fall mostly on the great houses,--on
the king’s court, on the luxurious establishments of prelates and nobles,
on the richer citizens, on the lusty and well fed, for the most part
sparing the poor? Why did it avoid France when it overran the Continent in
1529? No theory of the sweat can be held sufficient which does not afford
some kind of answer to each of those questions, and some harmonizing of
them all.
The history of Polydore Virgil is so well informed on all that relates to
the arrival in England of Henry VII. that we may accept as the common
belief of the time his two statements about the sweat, the first
associating it in some vague way with the descent of Henry upon Wales, and
the second pronouncing it a disease hitherto unheard of in England. Caius,
who wrote in 1552 and 1555, and can have had no other knowledge of the
events of 1485 than is open to a historical student of to-day, said that
the sweat “arose, so far as can be known, in the army of Henry VII., part
of which he had lately brought together in France, and part of which had
joined him in Wales.” Hecker, the modern reconstructer of the history
(1834), has passed from the tradition of Polydore Virgil and of Caius,
clean into the region of conjecture in assuming that the sweat had arisen
among the French mercenaries on the voyage and on the march to Bosworth.
On the other hand, the one contemporary medical writer in 1485,
Forrestier, is explicit enough in his statement that the sweat “first
unfurled its banners in England in the city of London, on the 19th of
September,” or some three weeks after Henry’s entry into the city. There
is nowhere a hint that it was prevalent among the troops, whether French,
Welsh or English, who won the battle of Bosworth on the 22nd of August,
the only pretext for asserting that it was prevalent in the neighbourhood
before the battle being the gossip of the Croyland chronicle concerning
lord Stanley’s excuse to Richard III. for not bringing up his men, which
gossip probably arose soon after when the sweat became notorious. Croyland
was not very far from the camp of the Stanleys; and yet we know for
certain (with the help of the state papers) that the death of the abbot
Lambert Fossedike from the sweat happened there after an illness of
eighteen hours on the 14th October, some seven or eight weeks from the
date of Bosworth Field, and some three or four weeks after the outbreak of
the disease in London. The probabilities of the case are all in favour of
Forrestier’s view that the first of the sweat in 1485 was its appearance
in London; and we shall accordingly take that as our point of departure.
Henry covered the distance between Leicester and London in four days,
having left the former, after a rest of two nights, on the Wednesday,
slept at St Albans on the Friday, and entered London, very tired by his
journey (says Bernard André), on Saturday evening, 27th August, three
weeks to a day from his landing at Milford Haven. Whether his whole force
travelled from Leicester at the same pace, and entered the city with him,
does not appear; but it can hardly be doubted that Henry’s following,
French, Welsh and English, had found their way to London without loss of
time, to make personal suit for the grants and patents that began to be
issued under the royal seal in immense numbers after the first or second
week in September. London must have been unusually full of people in the
weeks before the Coronation on the 30th October. But the pestilence that
broke out was not the “common infection” or plague, which might
intelligibly have been fanned into a flame by a great concourse of people.
It was the sweat,--a new disease, a stranger not only to England but to
all the world. We shall understand the mysteriousness of the visitation
and the inadequacy of all ordinary explanations, by taking Forrestier’s
account of the causes of it, drawn up in the year of its first occurrence.
Although this earliest writer on the sweat recognized its distinctive type
quite clearly, making no confusion between it and the plague, yet he
referred both diseases to the same set of causes; and in his section on
the causes of the sweat he merely reproduces the conventional list of
nuisances which occurs in nearly all treatises on the plague before and
after his time. There was little variation from that list, as it is given
in the last chapter from a plague-book of the 14th century, down even to
the reign of Elizabeth; thus it is reproduced almost word for word in
Bullein’s _Dialogue on the Fever Pestilence_ written in 1564 (the year
after a great plague), and it is so uniform in Elyot’s _Castle of Health_,
in Phaer’s, and in all the other hygienic manuals of the time, that it
might almost have been stereotyped. This was the causation which
Forrestier transferred bodily to the sweat in his manuscript of 1485;
almost the same causation had been given in the old essay of the bishop of
Aarhus on the plague, actually printed in London in 1480.
“The causes of this sickness,” he says, “be far and nigh. The far
causes--they be the signs or the planets, whose operation is not known
of leeches and of phisitions; but of astronomers they be known.... The
nigh causes be the stynkynge of the erthe as it is in many places....
For these be great causes of putrefaction: and this corrupteth the
air, and so our bodies are infect of that corrupt air.... And it
happeneth also, that specially where the air is changed into great
heat and moistness, they induceth putrefaction of humours, and namely
in the humours of the heart; and so cometh this pestilence, whose
coming is unknown, as to them that die sodenley, &c.”
Among the causes of the corruption he specially mentions the following,
which probably had a real existence in the London of that time, although
he is merely reproducing a stock paragraph of foreign origin:
“And of stinking carrion cast into the water nigh to cities or
towns,--as the bellies of beasts and of fishes, and the corruption of
privies--of this the water is corrupt. And when as meat is boiled, and
drink made of the water, many sickness is gendered in man’s body; and
[so] also of the casting of stinking waters and many other foul things
in the streets, the air is corrupt; and of keeping of stinking matters
in houses or in latrines long time; and then, in the night, of those
things vapour is lift up into the air, the which doth infect the
substance of the air, by the which substance the air corrupts and
infects men to die suddenly, going by the streets or by the way. Of
the which thing let any man that loveth God and his neighbour amend.”
He then mentions a more distant source of corrupt air, apt to be carried
on the wind--the corruption of unburied bodies after a battle, which
enters into all the plague-writings of the time.
These things were, of course, insufficient to account for the special type
of the sweat, or for its sudden outbreak, for the first time in history,
in September, 1485. There may have been such favouring conditions in
London at the time; something of the kind is indeed implied in Henry
VII.’s order against the nuisance of the shambles a few years after; but
we require a special factor, without which the unsavoury state of the
streets, lanes, yards, and ditches, or the crowded state of the houses,
would never have come to an issue in so remarkable an infection as the
sweating sickness. Common nuisances were the less relevant to the sweat,
for the reason that it touched the well-to-do classes most, the classes
who suffered least from the “common infection,” or “the poor’s plague,”
and were presumably best housed, or located amidst cleanest surroundings.
Even within the narrow limits of Old London there were preferences of
locality. If the special incidence of the sweat upon the great households
of prelates and nobles, and on the families of wealthy citizens, had
rested only on the testimony of Dr Caius, who has a theory and a moral to
work out, there might have been some reason for the scepticism of
Heberden, who questions whether Caius was not probably in error in saying
that the sweat spared the poor and the wretched, because he knows of no
parallel instance among infective diseases[527]. But the fact is
abundantly illustrated in the details, already given, for each of the five
English epidemics; and it is confirmed for the continental invasion of
1529, e.g. by Kock, a parish priest of Lübeck, who says that “the poor
people, and those living in cellars or garrets were free from the
sickness,” and by Renner, of Bremen, who says that it “went most among the
rich people[528].” It was, indeed, owing to its being an affliction
chiefly of the upper classes that the sweat has been so much heard of. So
far as mere numbers went, all the five London epidemics together could not
have caused so great a mortality as the plague caused in a single year of
Henry VII., namely the year 1500, or in a single year of Henry VIII., such
as the year 1513. But these great mortalities from plague, amounting to
perhaps a fifth part of the whole London population in a single season,
fell mainly, although not of course exclusively, upon the poorer class.
The bubo-plague, domesticated on English soil from 1348 to 1666, was
emphatically the “poor’s plague,” and, as such, it illustrated the usual
law of infective disease, namely that it specially befell those who were
the worst housed, the worst fed, the hardest pressed in the struggle, and
the least able to find the means of escaping to the country when the
infection in the city gave warning of an outbreak on the approach of warm
weather.
But _morbus pauperum_ is not the only principle of infective disease.
There are pestilent infections which do not come readily under the law of
poor, uncleanly and negligent living, in any ordinary sense of the words;
and there are some communicable diseases which directly contradict the
principle that infection falls upon those who engender it by their mode of
life. Unwholesome conditions of living may be trusted to engender disease,
but it does not follow that the infection so engendered will fall upon
those who lead the unwholesome lives; sometimes it falls upon the class
who are farthest removed from them in social circumstances or domestic
habits, or who are widely separated from them in racial characters. This
principle I believe to be not only a necessary complement to the more
obvious rule, but to be itself one of wide application. It has been an
original theme of my own in former writings, to which I take leave to
refer in a note[529]; and, I have now to try here whether it may not suit
the rather paradoxical and certainly mysterious circumstances of the
sweating sickness on its first outbreak in the autumn of 1485.
If the insanitary state of London were insufficient to explain the
engendering of the disease, the next thing is to look for a foreign
source. Suspicion falls at once upon the foreign mercenaries who landed
with Henry Tudor at Milford Haven on the 6th of August. Who were these
mercenaries? Did they suffer from any contagious disease? Were they likely
to have engendered the sweat? Can the infection be traced, in matter of
fact, to them? In seeking an answer, it will be necessary to enter
somewhat fully into the history of the expedition.
The earl of Richmond’s successful expedition in 1485 was his second
attempt on the English crown. The first had been made in 1483, when the
duke of Gloucester was hardly seated on the throne and the duke of
Buckingham was in the field against him. Richmond’s army on that occasion
had been furnished by the duke of Brittany, and is roughly estimated at
5000 men in 15 ships[530]; the expedition sailed from St Malo in October,
encountered a storm in the Channel which scattered the fleet, and drove
some of the ships back to the harbours of Brittany and Normandy, so that
Richmond, having reached the Dorset coast with only one or two ships, was
unable to land in force. He returned to a Norman port, and nothing more is
heard of his army of Bretons; during the next two years he appears to have
been left with no other following than two or three English nobles, among
them the earl of Oxford, who afterwards led a division of his army at
Bosworth. After repeated solicitation, he obtained in 1485 a small
body-guard (_leve praesidium_) from the regents of Charles VIII. at Paris,
a few pieces of artillery, and money to help pay for the transport of 3000
or 4000 men. With these resources he betook himself to Rouen in the summer
of 1485 and began to fit out his expedition. It would appear that he found
some difficulty in making up his force to the intended full complement,
and that he was urged by the impatience of his followers and the chance of
a fair wind to leave the Seine with what force he had on the 31st of July.
His force of Frenchmen, under his kinsman de Shandé (afterwards earl of
Bath), consisted of only 2000 men, crowded on board a few ships. It is a
fair inference that the men had been recruited in and around Rouen; we
are told, indeed, by Mezeray that Normandy was at that time infested by
bands of _francs-archers_ who had been licensed by Louis XI., and that the
ministers of Charles VIII. gave them to Henry Tudor, to the number of
3000, regarding the proposed expedition of the latter as a good
opportunity of ridding the province of Normandy of a lawless and
disreputable soldiery[531].
These, then, were the mercenaries who landed at Milford Haven on the 6th
of August, were at once marched through Wales to Shrewsbury and Lichfield,
and took a principal part in the battle of Bosworth on the 22nd of August.
They were Normans, who had become so great a pest to their own province
that Charles VIII.’s ministers were induced to take up Henry Tudor’s cause
partly with the intention of ridding French territory of them. Their
quality is plainly indicated in the speech just before the battle by
Richard III., which had been composed for Hall’s chronicle; only they were
not Bretons, as the speech makes out; they were Normans, recruited for the
expedition in Rouen and the surrounding country.
I have given so much emphasis to the nationality of these mercenaries
because the theory of the English sweat turns upon it[532]. More than two
centuries after Bosworth Field, about the year 1717, when the English
sweat had been long forgotten, an almost identical type of disease began
to show itself among the villages and towns of that very region of France,
the lower basin of the Seine, where the mercenaries of 1485 had been
recruited.
A form of Sweat afterwards endemic in Normandy.
The Picardy sweat, which was first noticed as a disease of the soil about
the year 1717, and has continued off and on down to recent years, was
indigenous to the departments in the basin of the Seine, from the Pas de
Calais to Calvados, with Rouen as a centre. Why that strange form of
sickness should have sprung up there and continued, now in one town or
village now in another, with few blank years for a century and a half, no
one can venture to say. It was not the English sweat in all its
circumstances; on the contrary it was only rarely epidemic over a large
population or a large tract of country at once. It was ordinarily limited
to one or two spots at a time, and in the individuals affected it ran a
longer course than the English sweat had done. But whenever it did become
widely prevalent it also became a short and sharp infection like the
English sweat, causing in some years a very considerable number of deaths.
Distinctively the Picardy sweat was a somewhat mild sickness of a week or
more, seldom fatal, distinctively also of a single town or village, or
small group of villages. It was not unknown in some other parts of France,
such as the Vosges and Languedoc, in Bavaria and in Northern Italy; but in
these other localities it has been much more occasional or even rare. Its
distinctive habitat for a century and a half has been the lower basin of
the Seine; and there it has been so steady at one point or another from
year to year throughout the whole of that period that it may be said to be
a disease of the soil, indigenous or domesticated, and depending for its
periodic manifestations mostly upon vicissitudes of the seasons, as
affecting probably the rise and fall of the ground-water. It has been more
a disease of the well-to-do bourgeois class than of the very poor, and it
has often shown a preference for the cleaner villages. It has been the
subject of a very large number of French writings from the year 1717 down
almost to the present date. Strange as this form of disease is, neither
its circumstances nor its nosological characters are left in any doubt; it
is at once mysterious and perfectly familiar[533].
Theory of the English Sweat.
I have been at some pains to show that Henry Tudor’s mercenaries were
enlisted in and around Rouen, or, in other words, they came from that very
district of France in which the sweat, in a somewhat modified form, began
to make its appearance as an endemic malady two hundred and thirty years
after. If the sweat had not become an endemic or standing disease there,
as if native to the soil, or if it had become equally a disease of all
other parts of Europe, as typhoid fever has, the coincidence would have
been less striking, and might have been made to appear altogether
irrelevant by the long interval of more than two centuries between the one
event and the other. If it were a mere coincidence, we should conclude
that the same causes which established in Normandy in the 18th century a
steady prevalence of a sweating sickness, not unlike the more familiar
prevalence of typhoid, had been at work on English soil more than two
centuries earlier, not indeed to establish a form of sweating sickness
steadily prevalent from year to year in one place or another, like the
plague, but to induce five sharp epidemic outbursts, within a period of
sixty-six years, four of which outbursts began in London and extended
probably over the whole country, while one began in Shrewsbury, travelled
by stages to London, and spread all over England. And, as we are ignorant
of the things which determine the type of the endemic sweat of Normandy or
Picardy down to the present day, we can neither deny nor affirm that there
may have been corresponding factors of disease at work in the England of
Henry VII. By such a line of reasoning we are brought to a view of the
English sweat which precludes all farther inquiry and makes a permanent
blank or maze in our knowledge. Let us try, however, whether the facts of
the case do not better fall in with the view that the English sweat had a
real relation to the seats of the Norman and Picardy sweat, even at a time
when that sweat had not come into existence as a definite form of disease,
and although the French provinces appear to have been spared the invasion
of the epidemic when it overran the rest of Northern Europe in 1529.
The means of communication in 1485 was not wanting, namely the Norman
soldiery of Henry VII. The tradition of their quality is preserved in the
speech composed in Hall’s chronicle for Richard III. before the battle of
Bosworth, and versified somewhat closely by Shakespeare:
“A sort of vagabonds, rascals, and run-aways,
A scum of Bretagnes, and base lackey peasants:
... Let’s whip these stragglers o’er the seas again;
Lash hence these over-weening rags of France,
These famished beggars, weary of their lives.”
There is nothing incredible in the supposition that these men had brought
a disease into London although they had not themselves presented the
symptoms of that disease. Such importations are not unknown; the mystery
hanging over them does not make them the less real. A well-known instance
is the St Kilda boat-cold, “the wonderful story,” as Boswell says, “that
upon the approach of a stranger all the inhabitants catch cold,” a story
which Mr Macaulay, the author of the _History of St Kilda_, had been
advised to leave out of his book. “Sir,” said Dr Johnson, “to leave things
out of a book merely because people tell you they will not be believed, is
meanness: Macaulay acted with more magnanimity.” The St Kilda influenza
has been amply corroborated since then by parallel instances from the more
remote islands of the Pacific, and by striking instances in veterinary
pathology. Among the latter may be quoted the instance which has been
heard of in Shropshire, of “sheep which have been imported from vessels,
although themselves in a healthy condition, if placed in the same fold
with others, frequently producing sickness in the flock[534].” But there
is an instance on a vast scale from the United States, the instance of
Texas cattle-fever, which has recurred so often, and has been so closely
watched on account of the disastrous loss which it causes, that there is
no room left to doubt the reality of that mysterious form of contagion. I
shall have to speak very shortly of the malignant fevers of the assizes,
which spread from prisoners who were not known to be ill of fever; these
incidents are historical from the year 1522, when an epidemic of the kind
arose among the court and grand jury at the gaol delivery in the Castle of
Cambridge. Lastly the history of yellow fever, as expounded in part in
this volume, is an instance of a long-enduring infection arising from the
circumstances of the African slave-trade, the negroes themselves having
been racially exempt from the fever although they had been the source of
the virus.
In all such cases the sickness which ensued among the healthy from contact
with strangers had a more or less definite type; and that type in each
case must have been determined mainly by the antecedents of the strangers,
their racial characters being reckoned among the antecedents as well as
their special hardships and their personal habits. In the case of the
singular visitation of England in 1485, the strangers were a swarm of
disreputable free-booters from Normandy, natives of a soil which developed
the sweat as an indigenous malady in the long course of generations. If
they themselves had shown the symptoms of the sweat in 1485, one might
have said that the circumstances of their passage in crowded ships, of
their exhausting march from Wales to Leicestershire, and thence to London,
had brought to the definite issue of a specific disease that which was
otherwise no more than a habit of body, a constitutional tendency, a
disease in the making. But there is no reason to suppose that they
themselves incurred the symptoms of the disease at all; it was contact
with them in England, particularly in London, that determined the peculiar
type of disease in others. Those others were of a different national
stock, and for the most part of another manner of life; in their very
differences lay their liability, according to well-known analogies. Of
course there must have been something material, something more than
abstract contact, to cause the sweat in certain Englishmen; and although
we cannot image the form of the virulent matter, we are safe to pronounce,
in this hypothesis, that it must have come from the persons of the foreign
soldiery.
The Habitat of the Virus.
We may go even farther in the way of specific probability, and bring the
virus definitely to a habitat in the soil. The English sweat, like the
Picardy sweat itself, had certain characters of a soil poison, like the
poison of cholera, yellow fever and typhoid fever; only it was not endemic
like the two last, but periodic, as well as somewhat volatile in its
manner of travelling, like dengue, influenza, and others of the “posting”
fevers of former times. This brings us to the singular history of the
epidemics of sweat in England,--to the clear intervals of many years and
the sudden bursting forth anew. What became of the specific virus from
1485 to 1508, to 1517 to 1528, to 1551, and after?
A fresh importation in each of the epidemic years after 1485 is
improbable; certainly the circumstances of Henry VII.’s expedition never
occurred again, and the traffic between England and her two French
possessions of Calais and Guines had nothing in it at all analogous.
Equally improbable is the continuance of the sweat in isolated or sporadic
cases from year to year throughout the intervals between the epidemics;
the only facts that give any countenance to such a continuous succession
are the occasionally mentioned “hot agues,” as in 1518, and, on a more
extensive scale, in 1539. The seeds or germs of the infection which arose
first in London in September, 1485, must have lain dormant in the city
until some favouring conditions came round to call them into life. It is
impossible to figure such dormancy of the virus except on the hypothesis
that it was a soil-poison, having its habitat in the pores of the ground.
The periodic activity of all such poisons depends, as we can now say with
a good deal of certainty, upon the movements of the ground-water, which in
turn depend on the wetness or dryness of seasons. The kind of weather
preceding each of the epidemics of the English sweat has been remarked on
by writers, but somewhat loosely or erroneously. The peculiarity of the
year of the second sweat, 1508, (not 1506 as in Hecker, nor 1507 as in
other writers) was a “marvellous” forwardness of vegetation in the month
of January, unusual heat from the end of May to the 13th of June, much
prized rain on that date, on the 16th, and on the 3rd of July[535], the
sweat being heard of first in the Lord Treasurer’s household in July. The
third year of the sweat, 1517, began with a great frost from the 12th
January, so that no boat could go from London to Westminster all the term
time[536], while men crossed with horse and cart from Westminster to
Lambeth[537]. This great frost would appear to have been without snow, the
whole season from September, 1516, to May, 1517, being chronicled as one
of unusual drought, “for there fell no rain to be accounted,” so that “in
some places men were fain to drive their cattle three or four miles to
water.” The kind of weather following the break-up of the drought is not
mentioned, but there is implied of course a certain amount of rain. It was
about the end of July or first of August, 1517, that the sweat began in
London and the suburbs. The fourth, and perhaps the most severe sweat,
that of 1528, followed upon two wet seasons, with one spoiled harvest in
1527 and bad prospects for that of 1528. The winter of 1526-27 had been
unusually wet from November until the end of January; then dry weather set
in until April; after which the rain began again and continued for eight
weeks[538]. The harvest before that seems to have been a partial failure,
for early in 1527 corn began to run short in London, and for a week or
more there was acute general famine, so that the bread carts coming in
from Stratford had to be guarded by the sheriffs and their men all the way
from Mile End to their proper market. The high price of corn continued
into the summer of 1528. The weather of that summer is not specially
recorded for England; but we learn from a diplomatic letter dated, Paris,
the 4th of July, that much rain had fallen and destroyed the corn and
vines, so that there were fears of universal decay and dearth through all
France[539]. On the 5th July, Henry VIII. requests Wolsey to have general
processions made through the realm “for good weather and for the plague,”
the sweat having already been raging for more than a month. The fifth and
last sweat, in 1551, also coincided with an unusually high price of corn,
or, in other words, followed one or more bad harvests. In 1550 wheat was
at 20 shillings the quarter; at Easter in 1551 the price in London was
26_sh._ 8_d._; ten or twelve ship loads of rye and wheat from Holland and
Brittany were sold under the mayor’s direction at a stated but very high
price. Meanwhile the sweat was advancing from Shrewsbury to London, where
it broke out on the 7th July. The statements of Dr Caius about stinking
mists carried from town to town are, like most of his statements, so
obviously the product of his uncritical rhetoric that it becomes almost
impossible to trust his narrative for matters of fact. But we may go so
far as to assume that the first half of 1551 was a season of an unusually
moist atmosphere. At all events the fifth season of the sweat, and also
the fourth (1528), stand out in the annals as years of scarcity following
bad harvests, which had probably failed owing to continuous wet weather.
There is not, on the surface, much uniformity in the weather preceding the
epidemics of the sweat in 1508, 1517, 1528 and 1551. In the first of these
the winter was mild and the early summer excessively hot and dry; in the
second the winter and spring were remarkable for drought, with several
weeks of intense black frost in the middle period; in the remaining two
the antecedent appears to have been an excessive rainfall. But in all the
four we shall find that the law of the sub-soil water, as formulated by
the recent Munich school with reference to epidemic outbursts, was
exemplified. According to that law, the dangerous products of fermentation
arise from the soil when the pores of the ground are either getting filled
with water after having been long filled with air, or are getting filled
with air after having been long filled with water. It is the range of
fluctuation in the ground-water, either downwards or upwards, that
determines the risk to health; and in two of the years of the sweat, 1508
and 1517, we find that there had been a rise from a very low level of the
wells, while in the other two, 1528 and 1551, the wells had begun to fall
after standing for a length of time at an unusually high level. If this
reading of the somewhat imperfect data can be trusted, it is at one and
the same time an explanation of the outbreak of the sweat in the
respective seasons, and a confirmation of the hypothesis that the virus of
the sweat had its habitat in the ground. That hypothesis is, indeed,
supported by so great a convergence of probabilities, both for the English
sweat and for the endemic sweat of France[540], that it may be used to
explain the seasonal incidence without laying the argument open to the
charge of running in a vicious circle.
Whatever had been the kind of weather determining the successive outbreaks
of the sweat, it is clear that the favouring circumstances were in general
not the same as those of the bubo-plague. The greater outbursts of plague,
as we shall see, were in 1500, 1509, 1513, 1531, 1535, 1543, 1547, and
other years not sweat-years. It is only in the autumn of 1517 that the
plague overlaps somewhat on the sweat, and even then it becomes noticeable
mostly in the winter following the decline of the sweat. The two poisons
had existed in English soil side by side, but had not come out at the same
seasons; also the sweat had been mostly a disease of the greater houses,
and the plague mostly of the poorer.
The Extinction of the Sweat in England.
The disappearance of the sweat from England after 1551, or its failure to
come out again with the appropriate weather, is one of those phenomena of
epidemic disease which might be made to appear less of a mystery by
finding several more in the like case. A history of all the extinct types
of infective disease would probably bring to light some reason why they
had each and all died out. But an epidemic disease leaves no bones behind
it in the strata; nor has the astonishing progress of science succeeded as
yet in detecting palæozoic bacteria, although that discovery cannot be
delayed much longer. Meanwhile we have to make what we can of the ordinary
records. In our own time, so to speak, the sweat became extinct in 1551,
and the plague in 1666; perhaps someone before long may be able to say
that typhus died out (for a time) in Britain in such and such a year, and
smallpox (for good) in such and such another. The surprising thing is that
an infection which came forth time after time should have one day been
missed as if it were dead. If the sweat had five seasons in England, why
not fifty? Perhaps its career was short because the circumstances of its
origin were transient and, as it were, accidental. But it may have been
also subject to the only law of extinct disease-species which our scanty
knowledge points to--the law of the succession, or superseding, or
supplanting of one epidemic type by another.
Other forms of epidemic fever, in the same pestilential class as the
sweat, were coming to the front in England as well as in other parts of
Europe. Thus, in 1539, a summer of great heat and drought, “divers and
many honest persons died of the hot agues, and of a great laske through
the realm.” The hot agues were febrile influenzas, and the great laske was
dysentery. Again, in the autumn of 1557, there died “many of the
wealthiest men all England through by a strange fever,” according to one
writer[541], or, according to another[542], there prevailed “divers
strange and new sicknesses, taking men and women in their heads, as
strange agues and fevers, whereof many died.” Jones in his _Dyall of
Agues_, describes his own attack near Southampton, in 1558, and calls it
the sweating sickness.
That epidemic corresponded to a great prevalence of “influenza” on the
continent, which was probably as Protean or composite as the fevers in
England. It would not be correct to say that these new fevers or
influenzas, with more or less of a sweating type, were the sweat somewhat
modified. But they seem to have come in succession to the sweat, if not to
have taken its place, or supplanted it. The prevalent types of disease
somehow reflect the social condition of the population; they change with
the social state of the country or of a group of countries; they depend
upon a great number of associated circumstances which it would be hard to
enumerate exhaustively. As early as 1522 we have the gaol fever at
Cambridge, at a time when Henry VIII.’s attempts to repress crime were
come to the strange pass described in More’s _Utopia_. These things remain
for more systematic handling in another chapter; but in concluding the
career of the sweat in England we may pass from it with the remark that it
did not cease until other forms of pestilential fever were ready to take
its place. The same explanation remains to be given of the total
disappearance of plague from England after 1666: it was superseded by
pestilential contagious fever, a disease which was its congener, and had
been establishing itself more and more steadily from year to year as the
conditions of living in the towns were passing more and more from the
medieval type to the modern. Meanwhile we have to take up the thread of
the plague-history where we left it in the reign of Edward IV.