Edward VI
This poor little boy, in whom all the tragedy of the Tudors seems to have concentrated itself, was born to Henry VIII and Queen Jane Seymour in 1537. Henry had already forgiven himself for his conduct to Anne Boleyn, and was deeply attached to his new queen; during the progress of the christening he sat by the side of his wife and held her hand in order that she might not be too exhausted by the strain. She, poor thing, had to wear a great gown of ermine, and to sit upright on a state pallet to welcome and bless her little son as the service terminated. But her loving arms could not save him; already within him were implanted the seeds of death, a tuberculous tendency from his grandfather, Henry VII, and actual spirochetes from his father, Henry VIII. And, as Queen Jane clutched him to her bosom, she herself began to shiver; no doubt she thought her shivering was from fear lest she lose her son; but within a week of his birth she lay dead, probably from puerperal septicæmia. Henry was heart-broken; but at least the curse ofthe Church had been lifted; he could now honestly say that he had begotten a legitimate and living son, and that the succession of the English throne was safe. Where the brilliant little Anne Boleyn had failed, this commonplace and featureless Queen Jane, so colourless that everybody liked her, or at least did not hate her, had succeeded. So she being dead, Henry at once communicated with the Court of France in order to get him another wife, if possible; that the Pope might see how impotent he was to affect human destiny. This was not because he was incurably lustful, but because it was still important to have another heir, should little Edward turn sick and die. Already, one thinks, the English Prometheus was scaling Olympus with determined, though engrossed, footsteps; already Zeus might well tremble at the ponderous footfalls of this fat and syphilitic man.
But little Edward did not seem likely to die; for, to all appearances he was a strong and healthy little boy. If the Court of England had purposely meant to deny that Edward was syphilitic it could not have chosen better words to do it in, for, as the message announcing the glad news of his progress said, “he sucketh like a child of puissance.” In the typical infantile hereditarysyphilis the baby suffers from “snuffles,” and its sucking powers are, to say the least, inadequate. But the spirochæte has other ways of taking its revenge upon its host. It may lie latent for years, and so poison the child’s resisting powers that he falls an easy victim to some deadly bacterium. In the case of little Edward it seems to have been the tubercle bacillus that first seized upon its chance; and when, fifteen years later, just after puberty, it was working its deadly will upon him the spirochæte of syphilis joined the assault.
Edward was an affectionate little boy, of good impulses. Of course it was unthinkable that a prince should ever be flogged; so the fond father appointed a whipping-boy to act vicariously in his stead. It was Barnaby Fitzpatrick who was honoured by receiving the royal thrashings, though Edward was such a good little boy that Barnaby was seldom called upon for duty, and grew up a firm friend of the little king who might have suffered in his person but for him. Edward’s wet-nurse was a motherly woman whom he later called his “mother-jak.” I do not know what childish utterance that may have represented, but it is silly enough a term to have come from the mouths of babes and sucklings. At eleven months old no less a personage than Thomas Cromwell visited himofficially and, no doubt, dandled him upon his knee. Says Cromwell’s secretary, speaking of this time, “And I do assure your lordship that I never saw so goodly a child of his age; so merry, so good and loving a countenance, and so earnest an eye, as it were exercising a judgment towards every person who repaireth to his grace; and, as it seemeth to me, his grace encreaseth well in the air where he is.” (Already he had been sent to the country for his health.) “And, albeit a little of his grace’s flesh decayeth, yet he shooteth out in length and waxeth firm and stiff and he can steadfastly stand.” So clearly he was a nice little boy of eleven months, if anything rather forward for his age.
When he was about two, his father, the king, used to take his little son in his arms and stand at the window to show the multitude how bravely his boy was fighting life; and the crowd would clap and cheer for joy, for King Henry VIII was still beloved, and the Tudor succession was at every Englishman’s heart; the awful mental and physical degeneration in the king was still to come, and there is no more delightful scene in Henry VIII’s life than that of him standing at the window holding up his son to be cheered by the crowd. How little we really know of our public men!Who could have foretold that this smiling king was to become the most murderous tyrant who ever sat upon the throne of England? For the present let him be glad, and his little son with him, smiling and chuckling with true Tudor tact. The tragedy to both comes soon enough.
Some time before this, the proud wet-nurse announced that her foster-child “has three teeth and a fourth appeareth.” I cannot discover the exact age at which this announcement was made. It would be interesting to know whether his dentition was entirely normal; but probably little Edward seemed normal enough. When he came to be educated the amount of learning that was stuffed into that poor child’s head was simply amazing—worthy of Elizabeth; worthy of bluff King Hal himself. He could speak both Latin and Greek; he habitually wrote in Latin, and could translate a Latin author into Attic Greek. For his friend he selected little Jane Dormer, a girl of his own age; the two ran about and played together. The two made a pretty picture, if you can forget the fate that was hanging over the little boy. He kept a journal, and a day came, April 2nd, 1552, when he noted “this day I fell sick of the measles and the smallpox.” The young diagnostician must have been very sure of his insight. The factthat two dissimilar eruptions came out on the little boy at the same time rather seems to indicate that there was some other toxin at work, probably syphilitic.
As he grew up he began to show signs of both obstinacy and religiosity, which, with a little encouragement, might have become as fanatic as those of Mary Tudor herself and led to a real good old sixteenth-century religious persecution. It was perhaps fortunate for England that the clever little boy died before he could do any real mischief. We know a great deal about his actual death. For a long time his health had been failing; he was racked with a constant and incurable cough, and apparently showed all the symptoms of a rapid consumption. The regular doctors having failed to cure him, England’s Majesty was entrusted to the care of a woman who professed to have acquired possession of a cure-all. Under her treatment the king became rapidly worse. “His legs swelled, his complexion became sallow, his hair fell out; the terminal joints of his fingers fell off” (syphilitic dactylitis?). “Eruptions came out on his skin, and he lost his fingers.” The luckless laundress who washed his shirts also suffered from terrible things; she lost her nails and the skin off her fingers, which gave rise to the suspicionthat some one had been trying to poison the king her employer. But probably either she had been using some cheap soap or else she had syphilis herself. So, the quack having proved that her cure-all was doing the king more harm than good, was sent about her business, and the regular doctors were recalled. Froude thought that she had been using some mineral poison, and that in truth Edward VI had actually been poisoned by her, though not intentionally. As for me, I am quite prepared to believe that she had somehow got hold of a preparation of mercury which she was using on the light-hearted assumption, which was probably true, that in 1550 everybody was suffering from syphilis, and that when she tried it on Edward’s form, already wasted and powerless by the long struggle with tuberculosis, the spirochætes that had been lying latent within him suddenly became active during the “storms of puberty” with the terrifying results that we have just seen. Possibly the woman may have bragged of her discovery about mercury; and everybody would at once say, “See what you are doing to our beloved young king with your mineral poisons!” There is much virtue in a name. Call mercury a “mineral poison,” and it is at once damned as much as if you had called it a “drug.” Butvegetable poisons are far worse than mineral poisons; yet nobody dreams of saying that we should not take strychnine to “buck us up,” nor morphine to relieve us of intolerable pain. Probably it was that woman’s hard luck that she tried mercury at the very moment when the king’s latent syphilis was about to come to the surface; and no doubt it was just such incidents as this which have given to mercury such a bad name, that the moment one prescribes it the patient always says, “Not mercury, doctor, please.”
But that unfortunate woman was dismissed and the regular practitioners returned to their prey with the good old sixteenth-century remedies for coughs, which, if they could not cure, would certainly not bring the patient all out in a rash. The rumour went about that they were poisoning the king, that he was already dead. As young Edward lay gasping and coughing and sweating on his death-bed his attendants said to him that it would be wise for him to let himself be seen; so, with true Tudor sense of duty, he dragged himself to the window and looked out at the crowd waiting like ghouls to hear that he was dead. When they saw his face, grey, pinched and dying, the crowd cheered as it cheered when it saw him held up in his father’s arms. Though somecheered, yet some held to it that a man who could look so ghastly must be dead, and indeed the rumour that he was dead was but confirmed by the sight of him.
His last prayer was “O Lord God, free me, I beseech you, from this calamitous life.” What was that poor young lad doing that he had already begun to wonder why he had ever been born, as many men have wondered about themselves since him? Tuberculosis of the lungs is often accompanied by a sense of euphoria, that is to say, the patient does not feel so ill as he should feel. But syphilis of the lung is gloomy enough, and sometimes gives rise to symptoms indistinguishable from tuberculosis. On the whole, therefore, I might rather be inclined to hazard a guess that it was syphilis of the lung that killed little Edward VI. I grant that this guess might be based mainly on that sad prayer, coupled with all the other symptoms that I have narrated. Then, after he had been trying to look upon his subjects with eyes that probably saw nothing, he suddenly cried, “I faint—Lord, receive my soul,” and fell back dead.
But is it not rather fantastic to summon either in particular of the two Earthly Twins, tubercle and syphilis, to the final assault, especially a manifestationof syphilis so rare as syphilis of the lung? These two form an alliance when it occurs that is not like the alliance of States; they do not quarrel, but never let go their grip until the patient dies. And it is in an alliance between delayed hereditary syphilis and pulmonary tuberculosis that we must probably seek for the death of Edward VI.
Probably it was lucky for him, and lucky for England that he died; and he did well by wondering why he was ever born. How much more violently would the wonder of life have shocked him when he came to learn how thorny is the path of a man who is too religious!Sed Dis aliter visum.It needed no inscrutable wisdom on the part of the Almighty to realise that Edward Tudor was “better dead.”