Bloody Mary by Carolly Erickson Read Free Book Online Page B

go, for the countryside was as full of infection as the city. By midsummer Londoners had become acclimatized to the fear of death—to the barred windows and doors, the self-professed healers selling cures and preventives in the streets, and the panic that went through a crowd when a passer-by, moaning and holding his head, stumbled past on his way to die. The French ambassador in London wrote home describing how he saw men and women “as thick as flies rushing from the streets or shops” when they felt ill; the sight of an infected person was enough to clear the street. Tens of thousands died in the summer of 1517; for the survivors it was a return to the nightmare mortality of the medieval plague. Many accounted this affliction worse than the plague, which at least gave warning to its victims and allowed them to linger for days or even weeks before they died. They christened the sweat “Know thy Master” and “The Lord’s Visitation,” and they made black jokes about friends who had been “merry at dinner and dead at supper.” They drank the preventive medicines sent by other friends whose households had escaped infection, and murmured prayers at each sounding of the death bell.
    The epidemic of 1517 was not the first of its kind. In the summer of 1485 and again in 1508 the same mysterious disease had swept through southern England, brought on, it was said, by divine displeasure at the severity of Henry VII’s government. Its reappearance in his son’s reign called forth an array of cures, preventives and restoratives; clearly this contagion that had come in with the Tudor line was here to stay. One remedy was compounded of endive, sowthistle, marygold, mercury and nightshade; another called for “three large spoonfuls of water of dragons, and half a nutshellful of unicorn’s horn.” (Swordflsh blades were reverently preserved in English treasuries as unicorns’ horns.) The latter potion was said to have brought Lord Darcy and thirty members of his household safely through one pestilent summer without illness, though they were all exposed to the sweat. A third preventive was called the “philosopher’s egg,” and was made from a crushed egg, its white blown out, mixed shell and all with saffron, mustard seed and herbs, and more unicorn’s horn. This electuary could be kept in glass boxes for twenty or thirty years, and improved with age.
    The most thoroughgoing treatment for the sweat was the series ofmedicinal recipes ascribed to the king himself. Probably because of his phobic dread of illness and in particular of epidemic diseases he became an amateur apothecary, and liked to send remedies for all sorts of ailments to friends and relatives. The first stage in the king’s cure was a preventive made from “sawge of virtue,” herb of grace, elder and briar leaves and ginger; mixed with white wine and drunk in small quantities every day for nine days, this kept one “whole for the whole year, by the grace of God.” If the sweat should strike before the ninth day of the treatment, the second element—water of scabiosa, betony water and a quart of treacle—should be drunk. And if the disease should after all reach the critical stage marked by the appearance of the rash, the ingredients of the first medicine, made into a plaster and applied directly to the skin, would be certain to “draw out all the venom,” and restore health.
    Henry’s medicines did not succeed in keeping his household free of infection. His Latin secretary Ammonius died the day before he was to leave for a sweat-free country house. Wolsey barely escaped death shortly afterward, and a number of his servants died. The bishop of Winchester, the ambassador Giustinian and his son were all stricken, and when the pages who slept in Henry’s bedchamber began to die off one by one the king panicked and sent the entire court away. With Katherine and the infant Mary, three of his trusted gentlemen and his favorite organist Dionysius Memo,