CHAPTER V.

The Sweat.

1528.

1. As the summer warmed, the sickness broke out everywhere. The royal household was invaded, and the "secret matter" was forgotten in a panic of dismay. Anne suffered from a slight attack, but rallied quickly, and her friends were hoping that the worst was over. George fell down, and sickened to the point of death; and other gentlemen of the chamber took their beds. Waltham being infected, Henry had to seek a change of air. George invited his master to remove to Hunsdon, the great house which had formerly been occupied by Norfolk. Here he found a fresh and wholesome air.

2. From Hunsdon Henry wrote to Anne: "The doubts which haunt me as to your state of health worry and frighten me very much; nor should I have been able to rest at all had I not received a good and sure account of you. Since you have felt no symptoms, I hope you are as free from it as myself. When we were at Waltham, two ushers, two grooms of the chamber, and your brother fell sick. They are now out of danger. Since we came to your house at Hunsdon we have been quite well, thank God, and have not a single person sick amongst us. If you would leave the Surrey

side as we have done, you would escape all risk. One other thing should comfort you; few, if any, women have been taken ill; no one of our Court, and not many beyond it, have died. I entreat you, my beloved, to have no fear, and not to tease yourself about our absence; for, let me be where I may, I shall be always yours. We must sometimes bow to our destiny. He who fights against his fate mostly comes off badly in the end; for this reason bear up bravely. Treat the evil as lightly as you can; ere long I hope to make you sing our happy meeting. I wish I had you in my arms, that I might chase away your credulous fears." Henry was to find ere long that even his manly heart was hardly proof against such fears.

3. This sweating-sickness was no stranger to the soil; in fact, the French and Germans called it "the English Sweat;" but science had neither traced a cause nor found a remedy for the disease. Sir William Butts, the King's physician, had an opportunity of studying it in a personal attack. A flush of fire ran through his veins; then came a sudden faintness, followed by cramp in the stomach, pain in the head, a sleepy stupor in the body, and a fœtid ooze from every pore. Five or six hours the agony lasted. If the patient lived so long, he had a chance of pulling through. A day and night sufficed to either kill or cure. The heat within his veins was hard to bear; he screamed for cooling drinks; yet any cooling drink was death. Not many who were taken ever lived to tell the story of their pain. "Scarce one among a hundred," says the

chronicler Holinshed, "escaped with life." When this disease last appeared, Anne was abroad, but she remembered, with alarm, that it had fallen on the royal household, that the King had fled from London, that the Cardinal was attacked, that thousands of all classes had been swept away. Anne had cause to mourn the ravage of that year; the sweating-sickness having carried off her grandfather, the Great Duke.

4. Ten days after her first attack, the sickness caught her in more serious form, and messengers, speeding after Henry, roused him in the night with their alarming news. Butts was away from court, and could not be recalled in time. Another doctor was despatched to Anne. "News came to me in the night," Henry wrote to his beloved, "the most distressing I have ever heard. Three things alarm and pain me. First, the illness of my love, whom I esteem beyond everything in the world, whose health I cherish as my own, and half of whose suffering I would gladly bear; next, my fear lest the separation I regret so much must last a little time longer, though I pray God to shorten it; and third, because the doctor in whom I trust is absent at the very moment when he could do me the greatest service. I might hope through him, and through his service, to obtain one of my brightest joys in this world, the swift recovery of my beloved. In place of him I send you my other doctor, the only one near me, praying God that he will cure you soon, when I shall like him more than ever. Pray be ruled by his advice about your illness, so that I may see you

shortly in your usual health, a greater cordial to me than all the jewels in the world."

5. The doctor found Lord Rochford and his daughter ill. In each the malady was taking an unhappy turn; a chill coming on and perspiration ceasing long before the usual time. Butts soon came, but Anne seemed lying in a hopeless state. Around her were the dead and dying. Norreys and Carey sickened, and in six hours Carey was a corpse. Compton died. Poyntz died. Courtney took his bed. A little later in the year, his mother, Lady Catharine Plantagenet, passed away. Wallop, Cheney, Bryan, all the grooms and gentlemen of the chamber, with a single exception, suffered from the malady. Kingston, Captain of the Guard, was stricken down. Every one was scared, and Wolsey most of all. The King held up, and by his good example kept the court from panic. "Eat small suppers, drink but little wine, and take a pill once a-week," was his advice to Wolsey. Anne's fine constitution bore her through.

6. On her recovery she was taken down to Hever, where Lady Rochford's nursing set her on her feet once more. All through the summer months this sickness lingered in the narrow streets and by the water-side. Wolsey was overcome by terror; thinking each hour would be his last, confessing every night, and taking the wine and wafer once a day. Though sobered by the frightful scenes about him, Henry never sank into the abject terrors of the Cardinal. Shut up in Hampton Court, Wolsey locked his gates, and lighted fires around his garden

walls. No man was suffered to approach his person, lest the poison should be breathed into his lungs. "Be of good comfort," Henry wrote to him by the hand of Bell, his chaplain, "put away fears and fantasies, and make as merry as in such a season of contagion you may; put apart all cares for a time, and commit all to God."

7. Wolsey's "cares" were numerous: not the least of them a certain election at Wilton Abbey, in which Anne Boleyn had been led to interfere. Sharing in the view of Bellay, that her reign was over, Wolsey had been taking an incautious line. But Anne, in place of falling out of notice, was a stronger power than ever. Since she frightened him so much at Hunsdon, Henry had been drawing her kinsmen more and more about his person, George, his close companion, had a fresh pension granted from the prizes of wine. Bryan was made a gentleman of the Privy Chamber. Even the Irish cousinry were taken into favour. Piers came over from Kilkenny, and having finally resigned the titles in dispute, he was created Earl of Ossory assigned a pension, and restored to his old place of Deputy. But Wolsey only saw the outer side of things, and those in an imperfect light. Henry was ceasing to tell the Cardinal his secret thoughts, and eyes as keen as Wolsey's go astray when they are groping towards an object in the dark.