CHAPTER V

.

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.

##