The Herbalist: Nicholas Culpeper and the Fight for Medical Freedom. Benjamin Woolley

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СКАЧАТЬ than any other was seen as the embodiment of such concerns: George Villiers, James’s favourite, whispered to be his lover, ‘raised from the bottom of Fortune’s wheel to the top’.⁵ Villiers had benefited more than anyone else from royal favours. The son of a sheriff and a ‘servant woman’, Villiers had been elevated by James to Duke of Buckingham in 1623. The last duke in England had been Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, executed in 1572 for his plan to marry Mary Queen of Scots and found a Catholic dynasty to replace Elizabeth’s. Elizabeth, as parsimonious with titles as James was extravagant, and disturbed by having to order the execution of a close kinsman, had thenceforth refused to raise even her closest favourites to a rank traditionally reserved for those with royal blood, and now tainted with treasonous associations.

      Such a high position provided the perfect stage for Villiers to play out his political ambitions, which now included arranging the future of James’s son and heir, Prince Charles. The sickly, shy, stammering prince was initially jealous of Villiers’ closeness to the King. When he was sixteen, he had lost one of Villiers’ rings, prompting James to summon his son and use ‘such bitter language to him as forced His Highness to shed tears’. A few months later, during a walk in Greenwich Park, James boxed the boy’s ears for squirting water from a fountain into Villiers’ face.⁶ But by the later years of James’s reign, loyalties began to shift. Villiers began to lavish his attentions on Charles, who responded by declaring himself Villiers’ ‘true, constant, loving friend’, trusted enough to take charge of his marriage negotiations. Villiers promoted matches first with the Infanta Maria, the daughter of the King of Spain, then Henrietta Maria of France, both Catholic royals. The Puritans, a body with growing influence in the House of Commons, sensed danger, which intensified in May 1625, just two months after Charles had succeeded to the throne, when he married Henrietta Maria by proxy (she was still in France at that stage, Villiers having been dispatched immediately after James’s funeral to fetch her). Fears spread that with her arrival would come a Catholic dispensation and, as the MP John Pym put it melodramatically: ‘If the papists once obtain a connivance, they will press for a toleration; from thence to an equality; from an equality to a superiority; from a superiority to an extirpation of all contrary religions.’⁷ Thus, when the charges that James had been poisoned first emerged, there were many ready to identify Villiers as the chief suspect, working to hasten the succession of his new best friend.

      Suspicions were first voiced by John Craig. Being a Scottish doctor, he had initially practised in London without a licence but had agreed to submit himself to examination by the College of Physicians, appearing before the Censors on 2 April 1604 alongside Harvey, who was receiving his second examination that day. Unlike Harvey, Craig was admitted immediately, despite being a Scot and therefore according to the College’s own statutes ineligible for membership. Craig had very little to do with the College thereafter, devoting himself almost exclusively to the King.

      It was in the early days of James’s final illness that Craig’s suspicions were aroused. Villiers’ mother, the Countess of Buckingham, had taken it upon herself to nurse the King, and, Craig claimed, it was she who first applied a plaster to the King’s stomach without the permission of James’s attending physicians. Her intervention ‘occasioned so much discontent in Dr Craig, that he uttered some plain speeches, for which he was commanded out of court’. He was escorted from Theobalds and banned from returning to James’s side, and from further contact with Charles.⁸ Soon after, he accused the Countess and her son the Duke of poisoning the King.

      Aspects of Craig’s story were confirmed by others who were present in the ‘Chamber of Sorrows’. Thomas Erskine, Earl of Kellie, a Villiers supporter who was at Theobalds throughout, wrote in a letter dated 22 March 1625 to his kinsman John Erskine, Earl of Mar: ‘There is something fallen out here much disliked, and I for myself think much mistaken, and that is this. My Lord of Buckingham, wishing much the King’s health caused a plaster to be applied to the King’s breast, after which his Majesty was extremely sick, and with all did give him a drink or syrup to drink; and this was done without the consent or knowledge of any of the doctors; which has spread such a business here and discontent as you would wonder.’⁹

      The accusation became public some months later in a pamphlet by George Eglisham (or Eglington), doctor to James Hamilton, the Earl of Abercorn. Eglisham also claimed to have treated the King on various occasions over the previous ten years. He was not apparently in attendance during the King’s final days, though he may have been at Theobalds in mid-March. He alleged that Villiers, having seen that ‘the King’s mind was beginning to alter towards him’, decided it was time for James to ‘be at rest’ so his son could inherit. When the King fell sick ‘of a certain ague, and in that spring [infection], was of itself never found deadly, the Duke took his opportunity when all the king’s Doctors of Physic were at dinner, upon the Monday before the King died, without their knowledge and consent, offered him a white powder to take: the which he a long time refused; but overcome with his flattering importunity at length took it in wine, and immediately became worse and worse, falling into many swoonings and pains, and violent fluxes of the belly so tormented, that his Majesty cried out aloud of this white powder, would to God I had never taken it, it will cost me my life’. The following Friday, Villiers’ mother was involved in ‘applying a plaster to the King’s heart and breast, whereupon he grew faint, short breathed, and in a great agony’. The smell of the plaster attracted the attention of the physicians, who, returning to the King’s chamber, found ‘something to be about him hurtful unto him and searched what it should be, found it out, and exclaimed that the King was poisoned’. Buckingham himself then intervened, threatening all the physicians with exile from the court ‘if they kept not good tongues in their heads’. ‘But in the mean time,’ Eglisham added, ‘the King’s body and head swelled above measure, his hair with the skin of his head stuck to the pillow, his nails became loose upon his fingers and toes’ – signs, perhaps, of poisoning by white arsenic or sublimate of mercury, substances implicated in another courtly scandal fresh in the public mind, the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury in 1613. As to the source of the poison, Eglisham’s finger pointed straight at Buckingham’s astrologer, ‘Dr’ John Lambe. Lambe had become a figure almost as hated as his master, accused of performing ‘diabolical and execrable arts called Witchcrafts, Enchantments, Charmers and Sorcerers’, and in 1623 of raping an eleven-year-old girl. He also practised medicine, which in 1627 led to him being referred to the College of Physicians by the Bishop of Durham.¹⁰

      The poisoning allegations were ignored by the new king and his ministers, but taken up by a number of the Duke’s enemies in Parliament. Relations between Charles and Parliament soured within weeks of his accession, as the matter of his subsidy, the amount of tax revenue to be paid into the royal exchequer, was debated. Villiers’ influence over the new king became one of the main points of contention, and it soon emerged that a number of MPs were planning to bring charges against the Duke for his role in instigating a number of extravagant and disastrous policies. The primary role of Parliament was supposed to be debating laws and raising taxes, not sitting in judgement over the court, and the King was outraged by its presumption.

      Meanwhile, a terrible epidemic of the plague had broken out in London, forcing the King to take refuge at Hampton Court. Charles wanted Parliament to continue sitting, to ensure it voted the subsidy he desperately needed, so he forced both houses to reconvene in Oxford – a precursor of the government in exile that Charles set up during the Civil War. The reassembled MPs were in no mood to be compliant, and after an angry debate one of them, Sir George Goring, demanded that Villiers be summoned ‘to clear himself’ – in other words, account for the policies he had advised the King to adopt. This produced a furious response from Charles. He summoned his Council and, according to the snippets picked up by the Venetian ambassador, told his ministers he could not tolerate his ‘servants to be molested’ in this manner. СКАЧАТЬ