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

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СКАЧАТЬ sovereignty; his condition would be too miserable if he could not command and be obeyed.’ These complaints, made within six months of his succession, would set the tone of his entire reign.¹¹

      Parliament, however, continued to touch the King’s sovereignty, which became increasingly tender. In the spring of 1626, as Charles still impatiently awaited a settlement on his subsidy, the Commons passed a motion that it would ‘proceed in the business in hand concerning the Duke of Buckingham, forenoon and afternoon, setting all other businesses aside till that be done’. As part of this business, a select committee was appointed to hear the evidence that the Duke had poisoned James.

      Only a garbled account of the proceedings survives.¹² Several, but not all, of the King’s physicians were called to give evidence. Craig was notably absent, as was Sir William Paddy, the most senior member of the College to have attended the King, and Sir Theodore de Mayerne, James’s principal physician, who had been abroad since 1624. Those who did attend include Dr Alexander Ramsay, one of James’s Scottish doctors; Dr John Moore, a licentiate of the College (i.e. granted a licence to practise) but never admitted as a Fellow because he was publicly identified as a Catholic; Dr Henry Atkins, the current President of the College; Dr David Beton, another Scottish physician; a Dr Chambers, a ‘sworn’ royal physician but not a Fellow of the College; Dr Edward Lister, a veteran of the College and a Censor at the time of Harvey’s admission; and William Harvey. The King’s surgeon Hayes was also called, together with Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, a courtier who was in attendance throughout most of the King’s illness.

      All agreed that the Duke had persuaded the King to take a medicine in the form of a posset and a plaster. They also admitted that, soon after the King’s death, they had been asked to endorse a ‘bill’ that was purported to contain the recipe for that medicine. Thereafter, confusion and obfuscation abounded. No one could recall what was in the bill presented to them after the King’s death, or confirm that the recipe was for the medicine given to the King, which implied that they did not know what was in the medicine. Various justifications were offered as to why they allowed an unknown substance to be given to a patient under their care: that they were absent when it was administered, that the King had ordered it to be administered, that they believed it to be safe because it smelt of a theriac or ‘treacle’, specifically Mithridate, an elaborate but familiar medicinal compound which, the doctors reassured the committee, would not have caused any harm in this case.

      As to who prepared the medicine, there was little agreement. Some said it was the Duke himself, some that it was the King’s apothecary, one Woolfe. When asked who had been present when the medicine was given, fingers started pointing in many directions, but mostly towards the royal surgeon, Hayes, and the physician in closest attendance at the crucial stages of the King’s illness, William Harvey.

      Dr Moore claimed that Harvey had been in attendance when the plaster was first brought in and should have prevented it from being applied. Moore had been identified from the beginning of the inquiry as a Catholic and, as Dr Atkins put it, ‘not sworn’, in other words not officially recognized as a royal physician. He was also forced to admit that it was he who presented the physicians with the supposed recipe for the medicine for their endorsement after the King’s death. This made him more vulnerable than any of the other doctors, and probably explains why he tried to deflect blame in the direction of Harvey.¹³

      Harvey, however, was serene. He admitted to being present when the plaster was applied, the surgeon Hayes performing the operation. He ‘gave way’ to the procedure because it was ‘commended by [the] Duke as good for [the King]’. Furthermore, since it was an external treatment, he could safely monitor its effects from the King’s bedside. Trying to spread the responsibility a little, he pointed out that Dr Lister had been there at the time the plaster was first applied, a claim Dr Lister later denied. As for the posset, Harvey had allowed it to be administered as ‘the King desired it, because the Duke and [Earl of] Warwick had used it’. The select committee notes also add the words ‘He commended the posset’, though whether the commendation was Harvey’s or the King’s is unclear. Harvey confirmed that a recipe had been presented to the physicians soon after James’s death, brought in by Sir William Paddy. However, alone of all the physicians questioned, he suggested that the physicians had ‘approved’ it. Unlike some of his colleagues, Harvey appears not to have questioned whether the recipe was the same as that used to make the medicine. As to its origin, all he would say was that it was a ‘secret of a man of Essex’, referring to a John Remington of Dunmow.¹⁴

      The question that remained unanswered throughout the proceedings was why a plaster should have been applied at all. Harvey gave a hint – not to the parliamentary select committee, but to Bishop Williams, the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, when the two met on the road from London to Theobalds on the Tuesday before the King’s death. Williams later recalled Harvey describing the illness suffered by the King in these terms: ‘That the King used to have a Beneficial Evacuation of Nature, a sweating in his left Arm, as helpful to him as any Fontanel could be; which of late had failed.’ In other words, there was an area probably around the upper left ribs, where he would sweat copiously, allowing the release of surplus humours that would otherwise accumulate and putrefy in that part of the body. This outlet, Harvey claimed, had become blocked, causing a dangerous build-up of those humours. It was a puzzling diagnosis, as James’s underarm fontanel is mentioned nowhere else. Theodore de Mayerne left detailed medical notes on his patient which record, for example, that the King ‘often swells out with wind’ and suffered from legs ‘not strong enough to sustain the weight of the body’; but the only ‘Beneficial Evacuation’ Mayerne mentions was the King’s almost daily ‘haemorrhoidal flow’, which, if blocked, made him ‘very irascible, melancholy, jaundiced’.¹⁵

      Williams, too, was puzzled by Harvey’s diagnosis. ‘This symptom of the King’s weakness I never heard from any else,’ he commented, ‘yet I believed it upon so learned a Doctor’s observation.’ He even attempted to deduce his own theory on how the disease developed, suggesting that the ‘ague’ had become ‘Mortal’ because the infection or ‘Spring’ had entered so far that it had been able ‘to make a commotion in the Humours of the Body’ that could no longer be expelled with ‘accustomed vapouration’.¹⁶ It would also explain why a hot plaster applied to the King’s stomach might help, for, by provoking sweat, or even blisters, it might encourage ‘vapouration’ of the offending humours and so restore the body to a state of healthy balance.

      The effect of Harvey’s testimony to the select committee and to Bishop Williams was to deflate the poisoning case. It did not exonerate the Duke, nor did it reveal the all-important recipe for the medicine; but it strongly suggested that Villiers’ intervention was no more than inconvenient, and that it had been insisted upon by James himself, who was an exasperating patient (one fact upon which nearly everyone seemed to agree). The King, Harvey told the select committee, ‘took divers things’ regardless of his medical team’s advice, on account of his ‘undervaluing physicians’.

      In its report to the House of Commons, the select committee concluded that ‘when the King [was] in declination’, the Duke had ‘made [the posset and plaster] be applied and given, whereupon great distempers and evil symptoms appeared, and physicians did after advise Duke to do so no more, which is by us resolved a transcendent presumption of dangerous consequence’. On the basis of this, it resolved that the charges should be annexed to the others levelled against the Duke.

      When the report was presented to the House, Sir Richard Weston, Charles’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, led a rearguard action on the King’s behalf to defend the Duke, claiming that there was no evidence of a crime being committed. Despite this intervention, the MPs СКАЧАТЬ