CHAPTER FIVE

‘Anger Short and Sweat Abundant’

‘“I dreamed now that the king is dead …” Two days after, he said in his great chamber at Bockmar: “The king is not dead but he will die one day suddenly, his leg will kill him and we shall have jolly stirring.”’

INTERROGATION OF HENRY POLE, LORD MONTAGUE, 7 NOVEMBER 1538.¹

For much of his life, the king had always enjoyed rude health, except for an attack of smallpox (or possibly measles) when he was twenty-two and the first of a number of recurrent bouts of malaria seven years later.² As a slim, handsome youth, his athleticism in the joust, the hunting field and other manly sports such as wrestling was famous throughout the realm and in foreign courts and was admired by his subjects much more widely than any latter-day international soccer superstar’s skill and prowess.³ He was the very personification of a new, confident England, no longer an isolated island off the coast of Europe, as he attempted to dominate the stage of Continental politics.

But in 1527, when Henry was a dashing and robust thirty-six, this love of sport and physical activity caused the first of several injuries that were continually to try the king’s patience and unsubtly remind him that his imperial crown did not protect him from very human pain and suffering. In April that year, Henry apparently hurt his foot during an energetic game of tennis,⁴ probably at the Palace of Westminster, and the next month he was forced to wear a black velvet slipper to ease the pain still troubling him. The weakness, in a tendon, may have persisted, as he wrenched a foot again two years later.

Worse was to come. During one of the royal progresses in 1527–8, the king was confined to bed at Canterbury with a ‘sore leg’ believed to be a varicose ulcer on the left thigh, probably caused by the constrictive garters he fashionably wore below the knee,⁵ or alternatively by a traumatic injury sustained while jousting.⁶ Thomas Vicary,⁷ a local surgeon, was called in and managed to heal the ulcer quickly and relatively painlessly – much to the king’s relief. Vicary was rewarded with a medical appointment to the household at a salary of 20s a year and was promoted to serjeant surgeon in 1536, a post worth £26 13s 4d annually (or more than £10,000 a year at 2004 prices), which he retained during the reigns of Edward, Mary and Elizabeth. A still-grateful Henry later granted him a twenty-one-year lease on the dissolved Abbey of Bexley in Kent.

Out of this sore leg was born the much-quoted tradition that Henry suffered from syphilis, contracted during the wild salad days of his youth in England, or while he was campaigning in France in 1513, or even that he was infected by his first wife, Catherine of Aragon.⁸ Many still believe that he died in 1547 from the terminal effects of this venereal disease. However, the king was not, by contemporary European standards, the great royal libertine of folklore. Aside from mere court dalliances and flirtations, surviving accounts document his extramarital relations with just three women: Elizabeth Blount, mother of his bastard son Henry Fitzroy,⁹ later Duke of Richmond; Mary Boleyn; and Margaret Shelton. No doubt he had other flings, particularly in the hale and hearty days before he ascended the throne in 1509, at which point his life fell under the scrutiny of the prying eyes of foreign ambassadors. His varicose ulcer of 1527–8, say proponents of this theory,¹⁰ was in reality a broken-down gumma or swelling – an obvious symptom of tertiary syphilis, although the thigh is an unusual location for this.¹¹ Moreover, gummata are not normally painful and the king certainly suffered intolerable agony with his legs. As syphilis can also damage foetuses, the frequent miscarriages and stillbirths by both Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn are also offered up as further evidence of Henry’s venereal infection. Several portraits and sketches of Henry completed during or immediately after 1536 show a very slight ‘lesion’ or depression on the right side of the king’s nose – again, a supposed symptom of syphilis. Other paintings, however, omit this slight deformity, perhaps for reasons of royal vanity. Finally, Wolsey, in his downfall in 1529, was accused by the trumped-up Act of Attainder of attempting to infect the king with syphilis:

the same lord cardinal, knowing himself to have the foul and contagious disease of the great pox, broken out upon him in diverse places of his body, came daily to your grace, rowning [whispering] in your ear and blowing upon your most noble grace with his most perilous and infective breath to the marvellous danger of your highness if God, of his infinite goodness, had not better provided for your highness.¹²

The allegations about Wolsey’s syphilis, however, were treacherously provided to the Boleyn party at court by the cardinal’s own doctor, the enigmatic Venetian Augustine de Augustinis, who became a physician to the king in late 1537 and was also employed on various diplomatic missions by both Henry and his Lord Privy Seal, Thomas Cromwell.¹³ The wording of the accusation, asserting that Henry was protected against infection by divine providence, is perhaps indicative of the king’s perceived special relationship with God.

And there is no evidence of syphilis in his children, Mary, Elizabeth and Edward – none of them bore its visible stigmata – and Tudor doctors, well versed in the symptoms of what was euphemistically called ‘the French disease’, would have swiftly recognised a gumma as an indication of syphilis and treated the king accordingly. The rudimentary medical treatment of this venereal disease in the sixteenth century consisted of six weeks of sweating the patient and the administration of successive doses of mercury (although poisonous) which made the patient’s gums red and sore and created ‘copious flows of saliva’.¹⁴ The ever-present ambassadors, constantly seeking scurrilous gossip to report to their royal masters abroad, would surely have spotted either a prolonged absence of the king from public life or the visible symptoms of the treatment. Neither was reported.

So, as we have seen, it is more probable that Henry suffered from varicose ulcers, which are sometimes linked to deep-vein thrombosis. More seriously, it is likely that injuries to the royal legs, perhaps sustained while hunting or, more likely, jousting, damaged the tibia and also caused chronic osteitis, a very painful bone infection. If the wound healed over with the bone still infected, then fevers would occur and the legs would become further ulcerated,¹⁵ requiring changes of dressings several times a day as the stench of the ulcers filled his Privy Chamber. This condition closely matches his known symptoms and had grave implications for his future life and health.

No wonder that Henry would today be recognised as a hypochondriac, always obsessed with his health and anxious to hide his infirmities from his subjects, as revealed in a letter to the Duke of Norfolk written on 12 June 1537 (which provides evidence of both legs being afflicted by ulcers):

To be frank with you, which you must keep to yourself, a humour has fallen into our legs and our physicians advise us not to go so far in the heat of the year …¹⁶

A public image of the strength and omnipotence of a ruler means everything for a government, then as now. The king was also fascinated with medicine for its own sake – part and parcel of a Renaissance prince’s interests and continued education in the fashionable subjects of theology, astronomy and music. A law passed early on in Henry’s reign intended to regulate medical practice discloses that quackery was

daily within this realm exercised by a great multitude of ignorant persons of whom the great part have no manner of insight into [medicine] nor any kind of learning … so far that common artificers such as smiths, weavers and women boldly … take upon them great cures and things of great difficulty in which they partly use sorcery and witchcraft, partly apply such medicine unto the disease as be very noyous [noxious] … to the high displeasure of God … and the grievous hurt, damage and destruction of many of the king’s liege people, most especially of them who cannot discern the uncunning from the cunning.¹⁷

Henry was also curious about new pharmaceutical cures and had clearly acquired some practical knowledge of the medicinal properties of a large number of plants and herbs even before he became the unwilling and testy recipient of some of the less pleasant potions and nostrums. His interest is demonstrated by around 100 recipes for ointments, balms and poultices, apparently developed personally by him,¹⁸ contained in a water-damaged but still-legible book of prescriptions for Henry’s own use preserved in the British Library. The constituents of the ‘king’s own plaster’ included

roots, buds, different plants, raisins without stones, linseed, vinegar, rosewater, long garden worms, scrapings of ivory, pearls powdered fine, red lead, red coral, honeysuckle water, suet of hens, fat from the thighbone of calves.

The concoction would be poisonous and is certainly not one to be tried at home. Henry sent his own recipe for curing ‘the sweat’ to the courtier Sir Bryan Tuke, Treasurer of the Privy Chamber and Henry’s secretary, during the great epidemic of 1517–18, which involved drinking a little wine ‘with the pills of Rasis’ – probably Rhases, an Arabian physician. But following his normal cautious, if not neurotic, practice, Henry himself fled diseased London to the safety of the countryside, moving from palace to palace ahead of the spread of the scourge. Henry also had his own patent recipe for curing bubonic plague. His ingredients were exotic in the extreme:

Take one handful of marigolds, a handful of sorrel and a handful of burnet,¹⁹ a handful of feverfew,²⁰ half a handful of rue²¹ and a quantity of dragons²² of the top or else the root and wash them clean in running water and put them in a pot with a potel²³ of running water and let them seethe easily. From a potel on to a quart of liquor and then set it back till it be almost cold and strain it with a fine clothe and drink it. If it be bitter, put thereto sugar. And if it be taken before the purpulls [buboes, swelling in the glands of the armpit or groin] do appear, it will heal the sick person with God’s grace.²⁴

Divine intervention therefore remained essential.

The royal staff of doctors, surgeons and apothecaries was extensive and frequently consulted, but their advice not always obeyed due to Henry’s obstinacy and relentless, restless energy. The king was, in all senses, a difficult patient,²⁵ ignoring pleas to rest and the protests of his doctors. But he was also very generous in his gifts and rewards to his medical team, possibly a sign of his growing concern over his declining health.

Henry began his reign with three doctors on the Privy Purse payroll – Thomas Linacre, who had been tutor to his sickly brother, Prince Arthur; John Chambre; and the Spaniard Fernando de Victoria or Vittoria, who had arrived in England with Catherine of Aragon’s entourage in 1501. The king granted letters patent in 1518 to all three to set up

a college in perpetuity of learned and wise men who make any practice of medicine in our City of London and suburbs and within seven miles thereof.²⁶

However, this college was not established until 1523 because Parliament had to override the Bishop of London’s traditional right to grant licences to practise medicine in the city. What became the Royal College of Physicians was granted its own, very appropriate arms in 1546, displaying ‘an ermine cuff with a hand feeling the pulse of an arm’²⁷ as a heraldic pun.

In addition, in 1540, Henry approved a parliamentary Act²⁸ that merged two city companies, the Mystery of Barbers and the Company of Pure Surgeons, into one incorporated body, creating a powerful regulatory authority that, like the physicians’ college, strove to take the magic out of medicine.

Despite these attempts to put medical science on a more rational footing, religion and ancient dogma continued to play important roles in the careers of the leading doctors of the time. Medicine was still rooted in the ideas of the classical anatomists and physicians of centuries before, such as Galen, the Greek who became doctor to the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius in AD 163. New ideas were now emerging, some bizarre, such as the requirement for ‘lusty singing’ recommended in 1537 by the diplomat and scholar Sir Thomas Elyot as an exercise for those confined to the sick bed,²⁹ but others more familiar such as the belated recognition that an irregular pulse could be a sign of ill health. The patient’s room could have been a noisy place. The colour and appearance of urine also figured strongly in diagnosis, samples being taken in straw-covered bottles from midnight to midday, with physicians sternly urged not to shake the specimens.

Sixteenth-century medical treatment, to modern eyes, was crude, if not downright cruel. Enemas, to which Henry was subjected increasingly in his last years for frequent bouts of stubborn constipation, were firmly applied to a patient’s anus by means of a pig’s bladder to which a greased metal tube was fixed. The bladder normally contained more than a pint of a weak solution of salt and infused herbs that had to be retained by the patient for between one and two hours. Another favourite mixture was soothing honey and ‘pap’ – cow’s milk³⁰ – used particularly for the treatment of haemorrhoids, a common affliction particularly prevalent in those who spent long hours in the saddle in all weathers, perhaps wearing armour.

Medical care of ‘humours’ or ulcers – the chief amongst Henry’s painful afflictions – was based on the principle of counter-irritation: draining them by means of a chronic inflammatory reaction, maintained, if necessary, as a running sore. This involved the so-called ‘seton’, a horsehair or silk filament threaded through a loose fold of skin around the ulcer, tightened and left to suppurate. The wound, of course, stank. With what seems a surprising nod to modern ideas of hygiene, the needle used in this process would be first heated red hot and then handled by the doctor with forceps. At other times, an ‘issue’ was deployed: a bulky object such as a small gold or silver ball would be inserted below a flap of skin, previously cut open with a lancet,³¹ to achieve the same efficacious effect.

Who comprised this diagnosis of doctors responsible for the increasingly difficult, if not dangerous, task of maintaining Henry’s health and wellbeing in the face of his numerous temper tantrums and irascibility?

Linacre, born in 1460, translated a number of Greek and Latin treatises on medicine and was the first president of the College of Physicians, with their meetings held at his house in Knightrider Street in the City of London. He was appointed tutor to the seven-year-old Princess Mary in 1523 but died the following year ‘from the [gall] stone’³² and was buried, as a mark of his status, in St Paul’s Cathedral, where his fulsome Latin epitaph was recorded more than a century later, just before the Great Fire of London destroyed the medieval cathedral³³ and all the grand tombs within it.

Chambre, or Chamber (1470–1549), fellow and later warden of Merton College, Oxford, became a doctor to the king after studying medicine at the University of Padua and was promoted to chief physician on Linacre’s death in 1524. He also collected a number of lucrative ecclesiastical appointments such as Canon of St George’s, Windsor, and Dean of St Stephen’s, Westminster. He supervised the confinement of Queen Anne Boleyn and safely delivered Princess Elizabeth on 7 September 1533. Chambre also probably attended (with two other royal doctors – William Butts and George Owen) the prolonged labour of Jane Seymour in 1537 and her subsequent infection, from which she died soon afterwards.

Fernando de Victoria, who qualified at a Spanish university, inevitably fell from royal favour when he was dispatched by Catherine of Aragon to inform Charles V of Henry’s attempts to divorce his aunt. He died in 1529³⁴ and was succeeded by Edward Wotton, born around 1492, the son of the beadle of Oxford University and a natural historian of some repute. His studies included the use of insects as a source of medicinal drugs. Wotton died in 1555 and was buried in St Alban’s, Wood Street, in London’s Cheapside.

We have already met Augustine de Augustinis who, when working for Wolsey, famously asked Cromwell for leeches for bloodletting – ‘hungry ones’ – to be procured for his master, then lying ill at Esher, Surrey. They were to be applied by another Italian, Balthasar Guersie, surgeon to Catherine of Aragon. After Wolsey’s disgrace and death, Augustine was employed on diplomatic service overseas for the Duke of Norfolk and Cromwell, as well as suffering a spell of imprisonment in the Tower,³⁵ before being appointed a physician to the royal household around 1537 at £50 a year, receiving a good brooch from the jewel collection of the recently deceased Jane Seymour³⁶ for his pains. In addition to his royal medical duties, he was also engaged in shadowy, if not sinister, diplomatic espionage on behalf of the king. For example, the Spanish ambassador Chapuys wrote to the emperor on 31 October 1540:

Last week, an Italian physician attached to this King’s household and very familiar with the Lord Privy Seal³⁷ came to dine at this embassy on four different days.

He is the king’s spy and has come, as I have reason to think, for no other purpose than to learn what I am about and persuade me to intercede with your majesty for a closer and particular friendship and alliance to be made with him …

The Italian at first dissembled as much as he could, trying to make me believe the suggestions came from him, not from anyone else; yet I had no difficulty in guessing, by various loose remarks he made, who had sent him onto me. For in the course of conversation he alluded to various facts which could not be known to him except through the channel of the Lord Privy Seal.³⁸

Augustine may have also liaised with the French ambassador Charles de Marillac, perhaps in furtherance of the Howard faction’s interests.³⁹ Later, as the king’s health deteriorated, Augustine, long personally and irretrievably linked to the Duke of Norfolk, probably decided that public affairs at court were becoming unhealthy for him, too, and he applied for and was granted a passport to leave England in early July 1546, with £50 as a reward from Henry in his purse. He went to Venice and died in the walled city of Lucca in Tuscany on 14 September 1551.⁴⁰

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 Church⁴¹ 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.⁴² He witnessed her will and died at Hasingfield, Cambridgeshire, in 1560.⁴³

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;⁴⁴ 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.⁴⁵

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’.⁴⁶ 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 1538,⁴⁷ 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.⁴⁸ 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.⁴⁹ 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.⁵⁰

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.⁵¹ 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.⁵²

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.⁵³

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.⁵⁴Although 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’.⁵⁵ 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.⁵⁶

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.⁵⁷

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.⁵⁸

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,⁵⁹ game pies and haggis – a sheep’s stomach stuffed with minced offal and oats. Today, it is a traditional Scottish dish.⁶⁰ 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’⁶¹ but cucumbers, lettuces and the succulent herb purslane⁶² 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.⁶³ 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.⁶⁴

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.⁶⁵ 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.⁶⁶

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.⁶⁷

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.⁶⁸

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:

The king’s life was really thought to be in danger, not from the fever, but from the leg which often troubles him because he is very stout and marvellously excessive in drinking and eating so that people worth credit say that he is often of a different opinion in the morning than after dinner.⁶⁹

Shrovetide came and went quietly at Hampton Court, while Henry, sequestered in his secret apartments, exploded in tantrum after tantrum. Life there passed ‘without recreation, even music which [the king] used to take so much pleasure [in] as any prince in Christendom’. With visitors turned away at the gates, Marillac said there was so little company in the palace ‘that the court resembled more a private family than a king’s train’.

On 14 March, Henry was still ‘indisposed’, but then surprisingly made a good recovery, enabling his energetic royal progress to the North to show off his new queen, Katherine Howard. But he was to fall into the hands of his doctors again at the end of December, taking their prescribed medicines as he ‘did not feel quite the thing’, possibly because of his shock and dreadful despair at her adultery.

Henry was now huge. As a young man in 1514, his harness of armour, specially made for him, shows that he was 6 ft. 3 in. in height and had a trim waist measurement of 35 in. and a chest diameter of 42 in. – a powerful, muscular picture of chivalry. That manly physique had now gone. At the age of forty-nine, Henry’s waist had swelled to a gargantuan 54 in. and his chest to 58 in. The deterioration in his appearance was awe-inspiring.

Gone were the magnificent propaganda images painted only five years or so before when he was in his mid-forties,⁷⁰ showing the barrel-chested king in familiar three-quarter view. In these portraits, an arrogant monarch stares back defiantly at us out of the canvases, daring us not to be humbled by his bravura. His haughty, regal glance is designed to bring us to our knees. He is clearly fit and healthy, swaggering, overbearing and domineering. This is an imperious Henry, God’s true deputy on earth, shown at the peak of his powers.⁷¹ At the time these portraits were created, the Spanish ambassador Eustace Chapuys wrote tellingly of Henry: ‘He has no respect or fear of anyone in the world.’⁷² The king’s contempt for all around him radiates out malevolently from his eyes. No wonder Henry was the first English king to adopt the word ‘majesty’.

Half a decade or so later, how things had changed! The metamorphosis is dramatic. Now the artist portrays him as a pathetic, hugely overweight old man. The years of misuse and abuse of his body have patently had a dire impact on his frame. His small eyes peer out pig-like from a jowled, fat, lined face. He holds a heavy embossed staff in his left hand for support.⁷³ He is the personification of geriatric decay. One can almost smell the putrid stench of the rank pus oozing from his ulcers, staining the bandages on his swollen legs. Chapuys labelled them ‘the worst legs in the world’.

Henry could no longer fully pursue his much-loved pastime of hunting: although he was still able to ride, long hours in the saddle were now beyond him. Instead, the quarry was driven before him to be shot by crossbow, or he was forced to watch as an impatient onlooker while his keepers drove the game towards a choreographed kill before him.

Yet the coming years of 1544–5 were a critically important period of high mental and physical activity for Henry, during which he personally led his last campaign in France and superintended plans to protect England from invasion,⁷⁴ despite being in continual pain and suffering from the debilitating effects of his massive bulk. His driving determination to lead, to rule effectively, to succeed, must have been terrible to behold.

In March 1544, the ulcers on Henry’s legs flared up yet again, confining him to bed with a fever. The royal doctors urged him not to personally lead the 42,000 English troops then being assembled for the Anglo-Spanish invasion of France and his ministers flapped about in the same cause, ever fearful of provoking another of the king’s rages. But for Henry, the issue was clear cut: he was the king, and the king belonged at the head of his army. To do otherwise on such an important international military undertaking would be a great dishonour both to him and to the prestige of England. The practical and realistic Chapuys urged his imperial master to intervene to persuade Henry against taking to the field of battle, with all the discomforts and inconveniences of campaigning. The emperor sent a special envoy who ‘found Henry so determined upon the voyage that he dared not try to dissuade him’. Once again, with a grim fortitude, Henry recovered and in early June wrote to his ally, promising that he was sufficiently well to embark for Calais ‘where he would resolve whether to go further’. In the event, he crossed the Channel to the field of battle, but it is very doubtful whether Henry went particularly close to the fighting. A mere whiff of gunpowder in the siege of Boulogne was probably enough for the proud old warhorse to prove his point to himself and the watching world.

Another key player in the last days of Henry VIII enters now upon the stage: the king’s fool or jester, Will Somers. He strikes a very human note of sanity amid the recurrent bouts of anger, the low cunning and the bloody ruthlessness of his ageing psychopathic master and the plots and conspiracies being waged in dark corners as the various factions in the court began to vie for power when the king finally died. Of all the royal household, this humpbacked little man with his pet monkey was trusted totally by Henry. His ability to make the sad, pained old man laugh enabled him not only to tell the king things that others would not dare to, but to survive happily this most dangerous reign and its immediate successors.

Robert Armin (c.1568–1615), one of the principal actors in Shakespeare’s plays late in Elizabeth’s reign, wrote of Somers’ first meeting with Henry at Greenwich in 1525 in his Nest of Ninnies:⁷⁵

A comely fool indeed, passing more stately:

who was this forsooth? Will Sommers! And not

meanly esteemed by the king for his

merriment; his melody was of a higher strain

and he looked as the noon broad waking.

Will Sommers, born in Shropshire, as some say

was brought to Greenwich on a holy day.

Presented to the king, which fool ordained

to shake him by the hand, or else ashamed.

Lean as he was, hollow-eyed, as all report

and stoop he did too; yet in all the court

few men were more beloved than was this fool

whose merry prate kept with the king much rule.

When he was sad, the King and he would rhyme

Thus Will exiled sadness many a time.

Tradition maintains that Richard Fermer, a Northamptonshire merchant of the Staple of Calais, had employed Somers and introduced him at court.⁷⁶ Somers succeeded the elderly Sexton as the chief royal fool and constantly delighted Henry with his wicked sense of humour and his acrobatics.⁷⁷ No one amongst Henry’s court or administration, no matter how high their status, was safe from his jokes or his dartlike witticisms. Soon the king was promising to fulfil any favour Will desired and the fool undertook to apply when he had the grace to ask, meaning that he would decide when to make the request. ‘One day I shall,’ Somers is said to have commented, ‘for every man sees his latter end, but knows not his beginning.’ With this quip, the jester left the royal presence and ‘laid himself down among the spaniels to sleep’.⁷⁸

One story recounts that soon after his arrival at court, Somers cheekily cheated Henry’s then chief minister, Wolsey, out of £10. It is probably apocryphal, like so many of the tales about the fool, but it provides a flavour of Somers’ wit and the unrestricted access he enjoyed to his royal master. According to the story, the fool had entered the royal apartments while the king and cardinal were privately discussing state business. Somers apologised for his interruption and said that some of Wolsey’s creditors were outside, demanding their money. The cardinal pompously replied that he would forfeit his head if he owed any man a penny, but gave Somers £10 in gold on the promise that it would be paid to whom it was due. Somers then left, but returned later, asking Wolsey: ‘To whom do you owe your soul?’ ‘To God,’ came the reply. Somers then asked: ‘And your wealth?’ ‘To the poor,’ said the cardinal piously. Then, said the fool quickly, Wolsey’s head was forfeit to the king ‘for to the poor at the gate I paid the debt which he agrees is due’.

Henry laughed long at the joke and the cardinal no doubt feigned his merriment, but ‘it grieved him to give £10 away so’ – a large sum of money, equivalent to more than £4,000 in today’s purchasing power. Somers apparently played a number of other practical jokes on the minister, who was always ready to stand on his dignity, and the cardinal ‘could never abide him’.⁷⁹

Thomas Wilson (who thirty years later became a secretary of state in Elizabeth’s government) in his Art of Rhetorique, published in 1551 or 1553, quotes some pointed repartee between Somers and the king, who was then, as ever, in need of hard cash. His fool told him, ‘You have so many frauditors, so many conveyers and so many deceivers’ – clever puns on ‘auditors’, ‘surveyors’ and ‘receivers’, administrators in the Tudor government – ‘that they get all to themselves.’

Somers enjoyed a very close relationship with Henry, following him from palace to palace, playing with his children. One ferryman’s bill records the passage of his horse across the Thames from Lambeth on Christmas Eve when Henry and his entourage moved to Hampton Court.⁸⁰

The strange rapport between sovereign and fool that endured for more than two decades (when many others fell so easily in and out of royal favour) and the great affection in which Somers was obviously held are reflected in his appearance in several royal portraits and contemporary illustrations. A painting of a chubby Edward, aged six, now in the Kunstmuseum, Basle, shows the prince holding a monkey, probably Somers’ pet.

Most poignant of all is a miniature of Henry, with Somers close by, that appears in the King’s Psalter, preserved in the British Library.⁸¹ The 176-page book, bound in red velvet now worn through usage over time, was written for Henry on vellum in the Italian style of calligraphy by John Mallard around 1540.⁸² Much of it is concerned with the biblical story of David and Goliath, and its content clearly associates the king with David. It contains many marginal notes in the king’s own handwriting as well as several miniature paintings of Henry, one, for example, portraying him sitting in his great bedchamber, reading a book.⁸³ Sometimes the king’s handwritten notes are poignant and telling indicators of his thoughts. Alongside verse 25 of Psalm 17 – ‘I have been young and now am old’ – Henry writes rather pathetically ‘Dolus dictum’ – ‘a painful saying’. The years were running away for the king and he was all too conscious that his mortal span was nearly ended. In his letters, he writes that time ‘is of all losses the most irrecuperable, for it can never be redeemed for no manner, price nor prayer’.⁸⁴

In the Psalter, the Somers picture accompanies Psalm 52 and shows an aged Henry as David, seated, hunched up on a coffer, his legs crossed, playing a small harp. The king has a wistful if not melancholic expression on his wrinkled face, perhaps dreaming of glories past. Although he wears a heavy furred robe, his back looks distinctly humped (of which more anon in Chapter 9). Somers, his fingers intertwined, faces right, out of the illustration, obviously rejected as the content of the psalm dictates. He is wearing a green hooded jacket, a purse and green-blue stockings, probably the ‘coat … of green cloth, with a hood to the same, fringed with white crule [wool embroidery]’ ordered for him on 28 June 1535⁸⁵ by Henry from Lord Windsor, Keeper of the Great Wardrobe, to be made by John Malt, the king’s tailor.

Somers also appears in the huge dynastic family portrait of Henry, Jane Seymour and the royal children Edward, Mary and Elizabeth, painted around 1545 by an unknown artist, which once hung in the Palace of Westminster.⁸⁶ On either side of the main figures are two archways, providing a glimpse of the ornate and lush Privy Gardens outside. In the right-hand archway stands Will Somers, a clothed monkey wearing a cap squatting on his left shoulder, busily scratching the fool’s bowed head. In the left arch stands a female figure who is probably Jane, Princess Mary’s own fool.⁸⁷Beneath the subliminal propaganda signals of the painting, intended to suggest the continuity and legality of the Tudor line of succession and the power and prestige of the dynasty, lies a very human message: all the figures depicted, both royal and humble, must then have been very close to Henry’s heart.⁸⁸

The king’s household accounts for the last twelve months of his reign include a number of references to Somers, relating to his care and upkeep. On the bottom of a bill for 7s 4d for the carriage of two chests from the Palace of Westminster to Windsor is a note in Secretary Wriothesley’s hand: ‘Remember Will Somer shirts.’ And later in 1546 there is a bill from Robert Callyniuod for laundry and clothing for the fool that illustrates how his movements followed the king’s:

For washing William Summer[s’ garments], Michaelmas to Candlemas to the laundry 11s.

For W. Somer, his shaving, 4d.

For a pair of boot hose, 8d.

For William Sommer for two pair of black hose 10s and two pairs of stock[ing]s, 3s 4d at Windsor, October 6.

Two pair of black hose at Windsor against ?Hallowtide, 10s.

Two pair of black stock[ing]s at Oteland, December 1, 3s 4d.

Two pair of black stock[ing]s at Westminster, against Christmas, 10s. and two pairs of black stock[ing]s at Westminster, January 24, 3s 4d.

Received for William Summer for Michaelmas to Candlemas, three pairs of lined shoes at 10d; seven pairs unlined at 8d, two pairs of summer buskins at 2s, one pair of winter boots, 3s.⁸⁹

Paradoxically, given Henry’s frequent illnesses, it was a firm belief amongst his subjects that the king had the power to cure scrofula, or tuberculosis of the lymph glands in the neck.⁹⁰ This healing process was known as ‘The King’s Evil’ and sufferers merely had to touch his sacred person to be healed by the royal powers. The massive inventory of Henry’s possessions drawn up after his death includes ‘A black velvet bag … containing three rings, whereof one, a ruby, that the king wore at the healing of poor folk’⁹¹ that was used in this regularly staged ceremony.

In the spring of 1546, Henry’s mobility deteriorated considerably as his legs had become very swollen and made walking difficult: the king had become a semi-invalid and had to rely on other means to move around his palaces. In July that year, an entry in the meticulously kept household accounts for the Palace of Westminster records:

Stuff made by the king’s commandment and the same delivered in charge unto … Anthony Denny:

Item: two chairs called ‘trams’ for the king’s majesty to sit in, to be carried to and fro in his galleries and chambers covered with tawny velvet all over quilted with tawny silk with a half place⁹² underneath either of the said chairs and two foot stools standing on either side of the half place, embroidered upon the backs of them and the top of the high pommels on either of them with a rose of Venice gold fringed round about with tawny silk.

Item: one other like chair cover with russet velvet likewise quilted and embroidered with silk and gold and fringed with a like half place and like stools.⁹³

A belief grew up amongst Victorian historians that some mechanical contrivance such as a lift or elevator was constructed to raise the corpulent king from floor to floor of his palaces. This view is based solely on the testimony of the Duke of Norfolk’s mistress, Mrs Elizabeth or ‘Bess’ Holland,⁹⁴ at the trial of Henry, Earl of Surrey, in January 1547. This ‘churl’s daughter’, as the spurned and discarded Duchess of Norfolk bitterly called her,⁹⁵ confessed to the court that the duke had told her

that the king was much grown of his body and that he could not go up and down stairs and was let up and down by a device. And that his majesty was sickly and could not long endure

– the last words alone condemning the duke for treason.

It seems very likely that the king’s ‘trams’ described in Denny’s accounts refer to some form of what later came to be called a sedan chair – fitted with horizontal poles and carried by four attendants, one at each corner. Indeed, the Spanish ambassador van der Delft in his dispatches reports Henry ‘passing in his chair’ on 7 October that year,⁹⁶ probably in the Palace of Westminster. The chairs may have been fitted with wheels because of the king’s great weight, the Old English word ‘tram’ meaning not a vehicle in the modern sense, but a two-shafted cart, wagon or hand-barrow. They were kept in the king’s study, now called ‘the chair house’ in the inventory of the contents of the Palace of Westminster. There is no mention of a lift or any other contrivance in the household accounts and probably there was little need of one: the king’s secret apartments were always on one floor.

Denny’s terse accounts of the time paint a vivid, human picture of Henry as an old man in constant pain, needing comfort for his ulcerated legs and frequent respites from the agony caused by standing for long periods or by prolonged periods of movement. Payments for the same month of July 1546 also include delivery of ‘two foot stools of wood … covered with purple velvet and fringed with silk’ and later there are frequent orders for ‘new made’ chairs and cushions of purple velvet and six more matching foot stools.⁹⁷ The popular image of an elderly king seeking solace by resting his leg on the lap of a compassionate and caring Queen Katherine may not be so far from the truth.

Some of the last items ordered for the king before his death were new close stools, or commodes. William Green’s bill, dated 28 December 1546, totalled £4 10s 6d for making ‘a close stool for the king’s majesty’ covered with black velvet and 31 lb. of down for stuffing the seat, arms and sides, fixed with 2,000 gilt nails. Elizabeth Slanning was also paid 27s 6d for supplying silk fringes and ribbons to Green on 28 November for this commode, delivered to Anthony Denny.⁹⁸ Early the following month, William Hustwayt was paid 5s to make ‘a great pewter cistern’ for one of Henry’s close stools at Westminster and another 5s for a similar very intimate utensil for Windsor. He was also paid 2s for mending an old cistern. On 14 January 1547, two weeks before the king’s death, his Privy Chamber purchased a yard and a half of black velvet ‘to make two pairs of large slippers newly devised’.⁹⁹

By then, Henry’s medical condition had rendered such homely comforts too little, too late to benefit him.