A Brief History of the Tudor Age Read online

  Before the end of the fifteenth century, a handful of intellectuals at Oxford were eager to learn Greek, though they had to go to Italy to do so, as there was no one in England who could teach it to them. William Tully of Selling, the Prior of Christchurch, Canterbury, had learned Greek before he died in 1494. By 1500 William Grocyn, Thomas Linacre, William Lilly and William Latimer were leading Greek scholars, and within a few years Thomas More had joined them, and had become a close friend of Erasmus, who was the most eminent Greek scholar in the Netherlands. Cardinal Morton, Archbishop Warham, Wolsey and Henry VIII gave official encouragement to the humanists, and Fisher, despite all his duties as Bishop of Rochester, Chancellor of Cambridge University, and a member of the Privy Council, started to learn Greek himself when he was more than fifty years old.

  In 1511, Erasmus came to Cambridge to give unofficial lectures in Greek. Richard Croke was appointed as the first official lecturer in Greek at Cambridge University in 1519, and he was followed there by Sir Thomas Smith, who later became one of the leading diplomats of Edward VI and Elizabeth I. In 1540, when Henry VIII created the five Regius Professorships at Cambridge in Divinity, Civil Law, Physic, Hebrew and Greek, Sir John Cheke became the Professor of Greek; and Roger Ascham, who was tutor to Henry VIII’s children, was another leading Greek scholar. Unlike Croke, who was conservative and Catholic in religion, Smith, Cheke and Ascham were Protestants, though Cheke distressed his Protestant friends by recanting and becoming a Catholic in order to avoid being burned after he had been extradited from the Netherlands to England in Mary’s reign.

  Smith and Cheke were strong supporters of Erasmus’s views on Greek pronunciation, for Erasmus had pointed out that the Greeks in the sixteenth century ignored the diphthongs in the pronunciation of the vowels which the ancient Greeks had used, and also pronounced some consonants differently. Erasmus’s views were opposed by the German scholar, Reuchlin, and the correct pronunciation of Greek became a very controversial issue. When Cheke used Erasmus’s pronunciation in his lectures at Cambridge after 1540, he gained a great deal of support from the undergraduates; but that arch-conservative, Stephen Gardiner, had been elected Chancellor of the University after Cromwell’s fall. He supported the traditional pronunciation, and in 1542 issued an order as Chancellor of the University, forbidding anyone from using Erasmus’s pronunciation, and announcing that any undergraduate who did so was to be whipped. This made the pronunciation of Greek a religious and political issue; and after the triumph of Protestantism under Elizabeth I, Erasmus’s pronunciation was restored at Cambridge.

  The study of law at the universities was confined to the canon law and Roman civil law, for the common law of England was taught and learned in the four Inns of Court in London. Neither the canon, the civil nor the common law were affected by the Renaissance and the study of Greek, because the textbooks of ancient Rome, and the Codes of the Emperor Justinian of Constantinople in the sixth century after Christ, were written in Latin and were already known to English lawyers in the twelfth century; and in law, unlike literature and the arts, the ancient Romans had made a much more important contribution than the ancient Greeks. The English common lawyers were in conflict with the Court of Chancery, where the Lord Chancellor, with his system of equity, interfered with the common law of the Court of King’s Bench, the Court of Common Pleas, and the Court of Exchequer; while the international ‘law merchant’, with its bills of exchange and negotiable instruments, was applied in the courts merchant which the merchants had established in London, Bristol and the chief commercial cities and ports.

  After the disappearance of feudalism, sales of land increased, and this strengthened the influence of the common lawyers. By 1500, the more successful barristers of the Inns of Court were earning very large fees; when Thomas More was still a young man, he was earning £400 a year from his legal practice, at a time when the husbandman’s wage was fixed at 16s.8d. a year. But barristers and solicitors were required to provide their services free of charge to the poorer litigants under a system of free legal aid which had been instituted by Henry VII. An Act of 1495 provided that any poor person who could not afford the cost of litigation could apply to the Lord Chancellor who, at his discretion, could allow the applicant to dispense with the payment of court fees and could order an attorney to act for him, and counsel to appear for him in court, without charging any fees.

  The common lawyers increased their influence as well as their wealth during the Tudor Age. By the second half of the sixteenth century, barristers were playing a leading part in the House of Commons, and some of them were filling important positions in the Queen’s service.

  The study of medicine, unlike the study of law, was greatly affected by the humanist studies in Greek. Medicine had always been admitted as a proper subject of study and practice by the Church, for though disease was a punishment sent by God for our sins, for which the only real cure was prayer and repentance, there was no objection to a Christian trying to alleviate the consequences of disease by applying medical remedies; there was Scriptural authority for this, because Isaiah cured Hezekiah’s boil by placing a lump of figs on it. From the earliest times the Christians had impressed even their pagan enemies by the care with which they tended their sick; but this consisted largely of loving tenderness and faith-healing based on a trust in Christ. Christians were often ignorant and suspicious of the physical remedies which had been prescribed by the pagan physicians of ancient Greece and Rome. This medieval Christian attitude contributed very little to medical knowledge, though it agrees with one trend in twentieth-century thinking in rejecting pills in favour of spiritual, or psychological, contentment and in placing great emphasis on the importance of a healthy and moderate diet.

  During the Middle Ages the chief centre for the study of medicine was the University of Salerno in Italy, the oldest university in Europe, which had been founded in the ninth century. At the beginning of the Tudor Age, nearly every physician in England knew the principles of medicine which were laid down in a long Latin poem written by Salerno University to the King of England. There is some dispute about the origin of the poem, but it was probably written towards the end of the eleventh century to William the Conqueror, whose son, Duke Robert of Normandy, had studied for a short time at Salerno University on his way to the Holy Land. After the invention of printing it was often published in the original Latin; and though an English translation was not printed until 1607, it had probably already been translated and learned by heart in English by many doctors during the Tudor Age.

  The Salerne School doth by these lines impart

  All health to England’s King, and doth advise

  From care his head to keep, from wrath his heart;

  Drink not much wine, sup light, and soon arise . . .

  Rise early in the morn, and straight remember

  With water cold to wash your hands and eyes,

  In gentle fashion, reaching every member.

  And to refresh your brain when as you rise,

  In heat, in cold, in July and December,

  Both comb your head, and rub your teeth likewise.

  If bled you have, keep cool; if bath’d, keep warm;

  If dined, to stand or walk will do no harm . . .

  Long sleep at afternoons, by stirring fumes,

  Breeds Sloth and Agues, Aching heads and rheums.

  The poem goes on to describe the beneficial effect of eating eggs and other foods, and the harm that can be done to the eyesight by anything that over-stimulates it, like baths, leeks, onions, garlic, pepper, beans, lentils, bright sunshine, wind, tears, wine and women.

  By the beginning of the sixteenth century, while the ordinary English medical practitioner was reciting the appropriate parts of this poem to his patients, the leaders of the profession were enthusiastically studying the works of Galen, the brilliant Greek physician from Pergamum (Bergama) near Smyrna, who had moved to Rome in A.D. 163 to become the physician of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius and the most fas
hionable doctor in the city. He had been accepted as an authority on medicine throughout the Middle Ages, partly because he believed that there was only one God, and the Church overlooked the fact that his religion was much closer to Judaism than to Christianity; but it was only after the Renaissance that some of his four hundred books which had not been lost became available in Western Europe. They were translated into Latin and published in 1490 in Venice, and the original Greek text was published there in 1525. Galen was regarded as the leading medical authority in England throughout the Tudor Age, though in Basle that audacious and arrogant innovator, Paracelsus, was telling his students in 1527 that his shoelaces knew more about medicine than Galen ever did.

  Thomas Linacre was a striking example of the intellectual all-rounder who did so much to promote the Renaissance in England. He was born at Canterbury in about 1460, studied at Oxford, and became a diplomat in Henry VII’s service. He later became court physician to the young King Henry VIII, and also took holy orders so that he could enjoy the revenues of several ecclesiastical benefices which he had been granted. But his chief interest was always the study of Greek. As a physician and a Hellenist, he was particularly interested in Galen’s works; although he was the most eminent physician in England, he never wrote any book himself, but translated many of Galen’s books into English.

  Another all-rounder, the diplomat Sir Thomas Elyot, decided to follow up his book about education by writing another book on medicine and diet in English for the general reader. In The Castel of Helth, which was published in London in 1541, he constantly quoted Galen as the authority for his advice. In view of the progress that was made in medicine during the next four hundred years, and which is being made in every decade in the twentieth century, it seems extraordinary that the physicians in the Tudor Age should have accepted, as their most authoritative textbooks, the works which Galen had written fourteen hundred years before. It shows not only the state of sixteenth-century medicine, but the excessive veneration which the sixteenth-century intellectuals in all fields paid to anything that was Greek.

  The leading English physician in the reign of Elizabeth I was her court physician, John Kaye, who thought it appropriate to Latinize his name to Caius. He followed his predecessors in worshipping Galen. The authority of Galen was not discarded until the fact that blood circulates, which completely disproved him, was discovered by the English physician, William Harvey, who was born at Folkestone in 1578 but did not make his discoveries until twenty years after the end of the Tudor Age.

  But the Tudor physicians were forced to admit that Galen’s books did not provide any remedy for the new diseases which caused such havoc in the sixteenth century. When Henry VII’s army reached London in September 1485 after their victory at Bosworth, a hitherto unknown illness appeared, which became known as ‘the sweating sickness’, or ‘the sweat’. It forced Henry VII to postpone his coronation till 30 October. This outbreak passed away quite quickly, but the sweating sickness returned from time to time, and with particular virulence in 1517, 1528 and 1555. In July 1517, 400 people died in Oxford in one week; in some towns, one-third or even half of the inhabitants died. In 1528, 2,000 died in London; and in July 1551, 800 died in London in a week.

  The disease came on very suddenly. People who were feeling perfectly well were suddenly affected as they lay in bed, sat at the dinner table, or walked in the street. They sweated profusely, and were dead, sometimes within ten or twelve hours, and sometimes within four hours; ‘some merry at dinner, and dead at supper’, wrote the Tudor historian, Edward Hall. If they survived for twenty-four hours they were saved, and recovered very quickly. It was important that the patient should be neither too hot nor too cold; he should lie quietly in bed, well wrapped in warm blankets but in a room which was only moderately warm, with his arms crossed on his breast, in order to prevent the air from reaching his armpits. Although his fever made him very thirsty, it was important that he should not be given a cold drink, for those who drank anything always died. Women were much less likely to catch the sweat than men, though Henry VIII was being over-confident when he believed, during the epidemic of 1528, that Anne Boleyn would escape the infection which had appeared in her household; she caught the sweat, but quickly recovered.

  Henry, who was always afraid of catching infectious diseases, went to great trouble in 1528 to avoid the sweating sickness; leaving the immediate vicinity of London, he retreated to a tower at Hunsdon in Hertfordshire with only one servant in attendance. One of his secretaries, Brian Tuke, caught the sweat, but, unlike most of the other victims, he did not panic. He was convinced that psychological factors played an important part in catching the disease, for the sweating sickness was known throughout Europe as ‘the King of England’s disease’, and only Englishmen caught it; while it was raging among the English population of Calais,10 not a single case was reported a few miles away at Gravelines, although merchants were continually travelling between the two towns. But when someone with the sweat came from Sussex to London, and this became known, a thousand people in London fell ill that same night, though children never caught it, unless their parents had told them about it. Tuke duly recovered quickly from the sweat; and the French ambassador in London, Jean du Bellay, noticed that, despite all that people said about the sweating sickness, only 2,000 people had died of it in London, although 40,000 people had caught it.

  Although the English in the Tudor Age spoke so much about the sweating sickness, the plague claimed many more victims. There were several outbreaks of plague in Henry VIII’s reign; but the worst visitation was in 1563, when it was brought back to England by the English troops who returned from the disastrous expedition to Le Havre in support of the French Protestants. Between June 1563 and June 1564, 17,046 people died in London, which was about one in six of the inhabitants, as the population was probably about 100,000. The plague returned on several occasions during Elizabeth’s reign, though nothing on the same scale recurred until the summer of 1603, a few months after Elizabeth’s death, when 38,000 people died in London – about the same proportion as in 1563–4, for by 1603 the population of London had increased to about 200,000.

  There was no cure for the plague except to allow the people to die and to take strict measures to segregate those who had caught it or had come into contact with it. During the outbreak of 1563, the houses where cases occurred were required by law to be marked by blue crosses on white paper and the words ‘Lord, have mercy upon us’, and all the doors and windows of the house were to remain closed for forty days. When Henry VIII visited Calais in 1532, orders were given that all sufferers were to be taken out of their houses and carried to a field outside the town and left to die there, so that there should be no risk of them infecting the King. This was sometimes done in other towns, even when the King was not coming.

  There were other new diseases which suddenly appeared in Europe during the Tudor Age. The first cases of syphilis occurred when the French army occupied Naples in 1494, though there were national disagreements about its origin; the French called it ‘the Italian disease’, and the Italians called it ‘the French disease’. It had become very prevalent in every country in Europe by the middle of the sixteenth century, particularly among the upper classes; many people at the French court were infected, including King Francis I. No one suggested until the nineteenth century that Henry VIII’s ulcers were a symptom of syphilis. It is very unlikely that he caught it, because, apart from his wives, he had only two mistresses who could have infected him; if any of them did, it was probably Anne Boleyn’s sister Mary, who, according to Francis I, had been the most immoral woman at his court when she spent some years there before she returned to England to become the mistress of Henry VIII.

  Smallpox and measles were new diseases, and both were very serious. Elizabeth I nearly died of smallpox in 1562. Mary Queen of Scots’ husband, Darnley, fell ill with measles in 1567; but he was well on his way to recovery when he was assassinated as he fled from his sick bed at Kirk-o
’-Field after the house had been blown up by gunpowder.

  The emphasis of the Tudor physicians was on diet. Elyot distinguished between persons with hot stomachs, who have little appetite and like warm food, and those with cold stomachs, who have big appetites and enjoy eating large quantities of cold foods. He prescribed the right sort of vegetables and other dishes which should be eaten during the four seasons of the year – in winter, which lasts from 8 November to 8 February; in spring, from 8 February to 8 May; in summer, from 8 May to 8 August; and in autumn, from 8 August to 8 November.11 He advises his readers to avoid excessive eating and drinking at all times.

  The disease of scrofula – tuberculosis of the lymph nodes at the side of the neck with ulceration of the overlying skin – was known as ‘the King’s evil’, because both physicians and the people believed that it could be cured if the sufferer was touched by the King, who was supposed to have acquired this healing power through the holy oil with which he was anointed at his coronation. All the Tudor sovereigns touched thousands of people to cure them from scrofula, and the practice continued after the Reformation and throughout the seventeenth century until the days of Queen Anne.