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

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СКАЧАТЬ Charles would not sacrifice Villiers. Days after his submission to the select committee, the King sent the Earl of Arundel to the Tower of London. His pretext was that the Earl had allowed his son to marry a royal ward, but everyone knew it was for supporting the anti-Buckingham faction in the House of Lords. After repeated commands to the Commons to drop the charges, Charles eventually dissolved Parliament, thus bringing the impeachment proceedings to a peremptory close. He still did not have the subsidy he needed, at a time when he was having to pay for a disastrous military adventure launched by Villiers against Spain. Facing bankruptcy, he turned over royal lands to the value of around £350,000 to the City in return for the liquidation of his debts, which amounted to £230,000. He also decided to impose a ‘forced loan’, the menacing term for an interest-free, non-refundable levy extracted from taxpayers, claimed as a royal prerogative at times of national emergency. Charles’s predecessors had used this technique, but the levies had generally been small, few had to pay, and many were let off – William Harvey, for example, had managed to avoid a loan of £6. 13s. 4d. imposed by James I in 1604 when a group of influential friends petitioned on his behalf.¹⁷ This time, all rateable taxpayers were expected to contribute, and five separate payments were demanded. A series of high-profile protests resulted. Seventy-six members of the gentry were imprisoned and several peers were dismissed from their offices for refusing to pay. Pondering on the ancient common-law principle of habeas corpus, judges considered whether the royal prerogative extended to imprisoning without charge individuals who represented no threat to national safety; but they could not bring themselves to rule definitively on such a sensitive matter.

      The poisoning charges against Villiers were lost in the midst of these epic struggles, and became irrelevant when John Felton, a naval lieutenant, stabbed the Duke to death at Portsmouth in 1628. As to the truth of the charges, they were widely believed at the time, and historians have debated the matter ever since, on the basis of evidence that can never be decisive. Villiers was probably capable of hatching such a plot, and Charles, who had suffered many humiliations at the hands of his father and who was impatient to take the reins of government, may even have connived. But James was already ill before the Duke’s interventions. In addition to malaria, he was suffering from a variety of chronic ailments, including gout and possibly the royal malady porphyria (the ‘madness’ of King George III, a non-fatal but debilitating intermittent disease that got its name from the Greek for purple, the colour of the sufferer’s urine). Poisoning is one possible reason why a condition originally considered to be non-threatening turned lethal, but there are plenty of others.

      No censures were brought against the physicians. They could have been accused of negligence, but the committee was only interested in attacking Villiers and seemed to accept the difficulties of managing a royal patient. However, the episode left a mark on their profession, barely noticeable in the mid-1620s but soon to become as obvious to its enemies as the most unsightly wart. In 1624, an Oxford scholar called John Gee had published The Foot out of the Snare, a list of all Catholics known or suspected of living in London. In addition to naming priests and ‘Jesuits’, it had a section devoted entirely to ‘Popish Physicians now practising about London’. Dr Moore was the first to be listed, but there were many others, including Thomas Cadyman, Robert Fludd, John Giffard, and Francis Prujean, all of them prominent members of the College. Many had, Gee pointed out, been to ‘Popish Universities beyond the seas’ such as Padua, ‘and it is vehemently suspected that some of these have a private faculty and power from the See of Rome’ to administer the last rites to their patients. Harvey was not among those listed, and never would be. Though disliking Puritans, he steered clear of religious controversy. Protestants in Parliament, however, demanded, in 1626 and again in 1628, that the College identify any practising physicians who were ‘recusant’ (Catholics who refused to attend Anglican services). Lists were duly drawn up that identified Moore and Cadyman among others. No action was taken against them, either by Parliament or by the College. Many, in particular Prujean, went on to prosper; but the poisoning episode served to reinforce further the feeling among some Protestant radicals that the College had the same papist leanings and corrupt attitudes as the court it served.¹⁸

      William Harvey came out best from the whole controversy. Within a few weeks of the select committee inquiry drawing to a close he received a ‘free gift’ of £100 from Charles I ‘for his pains and attendance about the person of his Majesty’s late dear father, of happy memory, in time of his sickness’. There is also a reference among the College’s papers to Harvey receiving a ‘general pardon’ from Charles in early 1627, at the time when the parliamentary impeachment of Villiers was launched. The pardon appears to have been designed to provide retrospective immunity from any charges relating to Harvey’s time as one of James’s physicians. Such immunity was not routinely provided to royal physicians, so the fact that it was granted suggests a specific charge was anticipated – for example that Harvey was somehow complicit in James’s death.¹⁹ Whatever the significance of the new king’s generosity, it confirmed Harvey’s special position at Charles’s side, where he would remain the most loyal and devoted of royal servants, unshakeable in his attachment to the King during one of the roughest reigns in English history.

      A visitation of plague to London as depicted in Thomas Dekker’s A Rod for Run-Aways, 1625.

      In the summer months of 1625, while Parliament and the court were at Oxford debating Buckingham’s impeachment, the scholar and poet John Taylor chaperoned Queen Henrietta Maria, just arrived from France, on a trip up the Thames from Hampton Court to Oxford. Gliding on the royal barge through the lush countryside, past Runnymede, where the Magna Carta was signed, and the towers of Windsor Castle, the royal party found the gentle pleasures of a summer cruise transformed into a ‘miserable & cold entertainment’. Crowds of starving, homeless people lined the banks. They were Londoners, desperately trying to escape one of the deadliest outbreaks of the plague in the city’s history – at least as severe as the more famous Great Plague of 1665. Having reached the country, these refugees had faced what Taylor described as a ‘bitter wormwood welcome’ from the country folk. Greeted as wealthy tourists in better times, they were shunned for fear that they carried the contagion. ‘For a man to say that he came from Hell would yield him better welcome without money, than one would give to his own father and mother that come from London,’ Taylor observed.²⁰

      Back in London, a stray visitor would not at first have beheld the apocalypse, just empty streets deodorized with oak and juniper smoke, musket fumes, rosemary garlands and frankincense, and peals of bells. They would pass dormant houses, the staring eyes of their inhabitants glimpsed through windows thrown open to let in the fragranced air and the clarions. They would spot stray dogs who had lost their masters, ditches left undredged for fear of stirring up pestilential airs, lone pedestrians chewing angelica or gentian or wearing arsenic amulets to ward off infection, some coming to a sudden halt and holding out their arms in curious positions, as though carrying invisible pails of water – signs of the first twinges of the characteristic plague sores or ‘buboes’ that appear under the arms.²¹

      ‘The walks in [St] Paul’s are empty,’ observed Thomas Dekker, who having written about the last plague outbreak in 1603 found his fascination revived along with the contagion. Not a ‘rapier or feather [was] worn in London’. The rich were gone, the rest unable to bear the inflating cost of a ticket out. ‘Coachmen ride a cock-horse,’ Dekker wrote, ‘and are so full of jadish tricks, that you cannot be jolted six miles from London [for] under thirty or forty shillings.’ Shops were shut, businesses closed, ‘few woollen drapers sell any cloth, but every churchyard is every day full of linen-drapers’. Cheapside, London’s main market, was empty, ‘a comfortable Garden, where all Physic Herbs grow’.²²

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