The Last Days of Henry VIII: Conspiracy, Treason and Heresy at the Court of the Dying Tyrant (19 page)

William Butts (?1485–1545) was Henry’s favourite and most trusted physician, with a handsome salary to match and, later, a knighthood. He attended two of Henry’s queens – Anne Boleyn and Jane Seymour, the king’s bastard son Henry Fitzroy and Princess Mary, as well as Prince Edward. A strong intellectual, he was a supporter of religious reform and a friend and ally of both Queen Katherine Parr and Archbishop Cranmer. He died of malaria and was buried beneath a monumental brass depicting him in armour, now sadly lost, in Fulham Church
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in West London, then a fashionable country parish in Middlesex. His personal loss as friend and confidant to the king is difficult to overestimate.

Thomas Wendy, born about 1500, succeeded Butts as chief physician and was one of the witnesses to Henry’s will, together with fellow royal doctors George Owen and Robert Huicke, who each received a legacy of £100 from Henry. Wendy, who took his MD at Ferrara in north-east Italy, was reappointed physician to Edward VI and Mary, the latter granting him the lordship and manor of Chatteras, Cambridge, in 1558, just before she died.
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He witnessed her will and died at Hasingfield, Cambridgeshire, in 1560.
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Other physicians in the royal medical team included George Owen, who died in 1558 from ‘an epidemic of intermittent fever’ and was buried in St Stephen Walbrook, London;
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Walter Cromer, ‘the Scot’, who was dead by 1547; and Robert Huicke, whose relative William fell foul of Bishop Gardiner over his unorthodox religious beliefs, particularly his denial of the transubstantiation of bread and wine during holy communion, but escaped unscathed after a personal appeal to the king. The doctor was not an attractive character, however, and was involved in a very messy divorce from his wife, Elizabeth, in 1546. After hearing his appeal at Greenwich against a legal finding in favour of his wife, the Privy Council wrote that

we never in all our lives heard matter that more pitied us: so
much cruelty and circumvention appeared; the man, so little cause ministered by the woman.
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Huicke again survived the scandal and was appointed physician extraordinary to Edward VI at £50 a year and witnessed Katherine Parr’s will. He became physician to Elizabeth when she ascended the throne in 1558. He is believed to have died in 1581 and was buried in the chancel of Harlington Church, Middlesex.

If these levels of medical knowledge were not sufficient, special medical advice was also called in from time to time from a variety of sources, notably Andrew Boorde – ‘merry Andrew’ – who had been recommended by Norfolk. This former Carthusian monk examined Henry in 1542 and reported, in the terse manner of most doctors, that the king was ‘fleshy’ with large arteries, ruddy cheeks and pale skin, with his ‘hair plenty and red, pulse great and full digestion perfect, anger short [and] sweat abundant’.
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But Boorde was alarmed by Henry’s overeating and obesity, a concern shared by his household doctors who feared that the royal constitution did not augur well for long life. Following a colourful career, Boorde died in the Fleet Prison in 1549 after being accused, almost inevitably given his lusty, spirited character, of maintaining prostitutes in his home in Winchester.

The king also employed surgeons, notably Sir John Ayliffe, Master of the Barbers’ Company, in 1538,
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who successfully treated Henry for a fistula – a narrow-mouthed ulcer – at Brinkworth, Wiltshire, ‘for which the king bestowed on him great estate in gratitude’ and later bequeathed him £100 in his will.
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Others included John Monforde, or Mumford, and Richard Ferris, who is believed to have attended the king during his last illness in 1546–7. A ‘nurse-surgeon’, William Bullein, author of a book on pleurisy and the sweating sickness, was also a member of the royal household’s medical team.

Three barbers also worked for Henry during his time on the throne – these were privileged players in the closed, regimented world of the court. The king’s barber was one of just fifteen courtiers allowed access
to the monarch’s secret apartments for the early-morning ritual of the trimming of the regal beard.
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Henry’s ordinances for the organisation of the Privy Chamber prohibited them from consorting with ‘vile persons or misguided women’, warned them not to disclose anything they heard while in the king’s company and ordered them to keep themselves and their clothing clean.
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This was a formidable array of medical talent, probably unrivalled in its corpus of expertise anywhere in the courts of Europe of the day. Their regular duties included frequent and profound examination of the royal stools, sputum and urine, as well as bleeding and cupping, in line with the changing lunar phases, to maintain the balance of Henry’s bodily humours, as suggested by the classical philosophers.
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Such procedures must have been purely routine in the halcyon healthy days of the king’s youth. Then came the first of many emergencies.

Henry’s real medical problems began on 24 January 1536, when he was forty-four. He had taken a carefully orchestrated starring role in a dazzling display of jousting at Greenwich, on the eve of the conversion of St Paul.

The king, mounted on a great horse to run at the lists, both fell so heavily that everyone thought it a miracle that he was not killed, but he sustained no injury.
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Due to his showy enthusiasm and braggart recklessness, Henry had suffered accidents in the lists before. In 1524, whilst tilting with lances with his old friend the Duke of Suffolk, the king had been injured above the right brow after he unwisely rode out with his helmet visor raised. Although he was lucky not to lose an eye and, daredevil-like, ran six more courses at the lists that day, he suffered frequent migraine headaches afterwards.
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This latest jousting incident was far more serious even than it seemed at the time. His armoured horse reportedly fell on top of him as he was unseated by his opponent’s blunted lance. Five days later, Anne Boleyn miscarried of a male foetus aged about three and a half months after her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, told her of the accident. More
indicatively, two months later, a report from Rome quoting the French king said that Henry, having fallen from his horse, ‘had been for two hours without speech’, possibly through severe concussion or, worse, bruising of the cerebral cortex.
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Although Cromwell wrote to Bishop Gardiner in February that the ‘king is merry and in perfect health’, one can smell deceit in that devious minister’s reassuring weasel words, which were probably only intended for outside consumption. Then, in March, Lord Montague unwisely and famously blurted out his premonition of the king’s death and paid with his life for his hasty words, for it was high treason to presage the king’s death. But they were patently true: the next month, Henry was said to ‘go seldom abroad because his leg is something sore’.
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The fall almost certainly broke open the varicose ulcer he was treated for in 1527–8 and thus it became chronic, discharging freely. No doubt the royal doctors tightly bandaged up the wound.

This was the beginning of all the king’s debilitating medical problems that constantly and painfully afflicted him until his death. On 14 May 1538, one of the fistulas on his leg closed up and

for ten or twelve days, the humours which had no outlet were like to have stifled him so that he was some time without speaking, black in the face and in great danger.
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In today’s modern medical terms, the king was suffering from a thrombosed vein in his leg and, dangerously, a clot may have detached from this vein. He was lucky to escape with his life: even with the benefits of twenty-first-century medicine, the condition still remains hazardous. In November that year, Sir Geoffrey Pole reported that Henry had

a sore leg that no poor man would be glad of and that he should not live long for all his authority next to God.
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By Good Friday 1539, the king’s legs must have improved, as he was able to take part in that strange pre-Reformation liturgical rite of ‘crawling to the cross’. This ritual involved veneration of the crucifixion scene, temporarily positioned in the Easter Sepulchre on the north side of the
chancel of a church, by reverently shuffling forward on the knees from the chapel door during Mass.
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But in September, he was clearly suffering from acute constipation. This recurrent and very intimate problem would not come as a surprise to today’s dietitians, given the menus of the huge, unhealthy meals daily consumed by the court and other wealthy households in the Tudor period. The English were famous for being big meat eaters (remember the ‘roast beef of old England’) with plenty of game, hoofed and feathered, heaved on to the groaning banqueting tables. The slaughter of birds for food was both prodigious and catholic in choice: larks, stork, gannets (and other gulls), heron, snipe, bustard, quail, partridge, capons, teal, cranes and pheasants all regularly appear on menus that would send horrified shivers down the corporate spine of today’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. One of the court’s favourites was stewed sparrows. The king was said to be fond of galantines,
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game pies and haggis – a sheep’s stomach stuffed with minced offal and oats. Today, it is a traditional Scottish dish.
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Impressive quantities of salted and smoked cod, plus herrings, fresh salmon and eels were also consumed after the hot meat course. Most meats and fish, if not downright unpalatable, were heavily flavoured with spices to disguise their lack of freshness. Little roughage appeared on the dinner table: fresh fruit was widely shunned as it was believed to cause diarrhoea and fever. Green vegetables, as well as turnips, carrots and parsnips, were also avoided because ‘they engender wind and melancholy’
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but cucumbers, lettuces and the succulent herb purslane
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were eaten in more healthy salads as a first course. Butter was usually rancid and used mainly in cooking. One writer has ingeniously suggested that most of Henry’s ailments were attributable to scorbutic disease, or scurvy, caused by a chronic lack of vitamins supplied in our modern diet by fresh vegetables and fruit.
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Whatever, his food bingeing aggravated his medical condition and regularly blocked the healthy movement of his bowels.

Henry’s physicians prescribed as a cure for his constipation that the

King’s majesty went betimes [early] to bed, whose highness slept until two of the clock in the morning.

And then his grace was to go to the stool which by waking of the pills and glister [an enema] that his highness had taken before had a very fair siege as the physicians have made report, not doubting but the worst is past by their perseverance to no great danger or any further grief to remain in him.

The hinder part of the night until ten of the clock this morning his grace had very good rest and his grace finds himself well, saving his highness says he has a little soreness in the body.
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So reported Sir Thomas Heneage, Groom of the Stool of Henry’s Privy Chamber, in a salaciously detailed letter to Cromwell written from Ampthill. No doubt the king’s soreness came from the enthusiastic application of the pig’s bladder enema.

Henry normally consumed three meals a day, plus probably frequent snacking in the evenings. His average day began with the page of the Privy Chamber lighting the fires in his secret apartments at seven and he rose half an hour later for breakfast in his bedchamber.
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He went to Mass and consumed ‘dinner’ at around ten o’clock. Most of the day could then be spent hunting, before supper at four. Afterwards, his secretaries and intimates dealt with state papers with him in his study – it was a difficult task, sometimes, to curb his impatience – before he spent the rest of his evening gambling at cards or dice, or playing chess with his cronies.

In late February 1541, the king probably suffered another severe infection caused by the fistulas on his legs closing up. Henry had talked of inspecting his fortifications of the south coast as he was considering rebuilding some of the ramparts, particularly at Dover. However, this trip was prevented by ‘an illness’ he suffered at Hampton Court – a slight fever – followed by a recurrence of the dangerous infection. The French ambassador Marillac reported to Francis I that

One of his legs, formerly open and kept open to maintain his health, suddenly closed to his great alarm, for five or six years ago, in like case, we thought him to have died.

This time, prompt remedy was applied and he is now well and the fever gone. Besides the bodily malady, he had a
mal d’espirit
.
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Marillac was being diplomatic. In fact, Henry was incandescent with rage. Nothing could or would please him as he lay in great pain upon his sick bed. He lashed out ferociously at anything and everything. The ambassador recounted his rantings:

He had unhappy people to govern whom he would shortly make so poor that they would not have the boldness nor the power to oppose him …

Most of his Privy Council, under the pretence of serving him, were only temporising for their own profit but he knew the good servants from the flatterers and if God lent him health, he would take care that their projects would not succeed.
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Even in his agony and labouring under the all-pervasive fear that death was beckoning him, Henry could not resist the temptation to verbally assault his courtiers, ensuring that they knew he was fully aware of their continual profiteering from their royal patronage. He even blamed them for Cromwell’s death:

Upon light pretexts, by false accusations, they made him put to death the most faithful servant he ever had.
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Whilst still more than capable of cunning, the king was really very ill, and his constant gluttony following the death of Jane Seymour was taking its toll. In addition to his anger and violent mood swings, he displayed frequent and capricious changes in his opinions and decisions. On 3 March, Marillac said in a dispatch: