Part 7
It must have been a miserable voyage for Fielding; he was confined to the cabin because he could not mount the companion ladder owing to his weakness and pain. Twice he had to be tapped for his dropsy; the food was bad, his wife confined to her bed with a terrible toothache that could not be relieved because the tooth seems to have had a peculiar root that defied all attempts at removal; but he himself, sitting propped up in the stuffy cabin, wrote the most delightful and uncomplaining journal imaginable, which is quite as brilliant as, and even more moving than, any of his novels. It is written in Fielding’s own half-jocular, half-satirical and wholly sympathetic style, but is entirely free from that occasional coarseness that has shocked even a generation that seems to revel in the sex-neurotic and introspective psychoanalytical novel. Better to use an occasional naughty word than to give the impression of being constantly possessed by unclean thoughts of sex, which seems to be the unhappy fate of some modern novelists.
Although he has given us an excellent description of his symptoms it is difficult to reduce it to terms of modern pathology and to name his actual sickness. I thought at first that he must have had cirrhosis of the liver, because it is well known to cause severe dropsy, wasting, haggard face, and despair. But after carefully reconsidering the symptoms I came to the conclusion that such an idea was untenable, for cirrhosis is not noted for its jaundice, and moreover it is caused by long and continuous drinking, whereas Fielding is known to have been a reasonably abstemious drinker. But there is an even more terrible disease which would even better than cirrhosis exactly suit the conditions of our problem, cancer. If we imagine Fielding to have suffered from a certain form of internal malignant tumour spreading to the peritoneum, all his symptoms would be at once explained, deep jaundice, dropsy, wasting and frightful appearance. I am assuming that Fielding’s form of “dropsy” was what we now call “ascites,” that is to say, an outpouring of serous fluid into the peritoneum. His so-called asthma may possibly have been due to heart trouble owing to the strain on his heart caused by oppression from the dropsy, and his “gout” to septic disease of his teeth, which would account for the toothless condition which so disfigured him towards the end of his life and prevented him from eating the ship’s food.
Unlike some writers who, being possessed by their own unconscious minds, are led into filth, Fielding, though occasionally coarse, is never dirty. I remember during some months, when all the cats, dogs and roosters in the neighbourhood combined in an assault upon sleep, and an occasional kookooburra joined in the noise, I read through the whole of _Amelia_ and thought it one of the most delightful books in the world; and a rereading of it tends to confirm me in that belief. Amelia, for all her scarred nose, is one of the most charming women in fiction, though she had a great deal to put up with in her husband, Captain Booth, and though she _would_ call him “Billy.”
Fielding himself was what the Americans would call a “he-man.” He was not one of the miserable, whining, introspective heroes of post-war fiction; and in Tom Jones and Captain Booth he has drawn a man as he thought a man should be, and as good men probably are if we would stop our ears to the howls of the old women. And these heroes of his were probably drawn from himself. That terrible ironic creature, Jonathan Wild, of course represents his knowledge of the Old Bailey; it is a grim book, and far too ironical for most people, though it has not the sardonic and shuddering laughter of Dean Swift and his Struldbrugs.
But if he had cancer when he started on his last voyage he must have had it coming on when he believed Virtue’s tarradiddle, and possibly it was because of his poor health that he believed her. No man with a cancer beginning to gnaw at his vitals could possibly take the trouble to cross-examine a brazen hussy who was determined to deceive him, and we can even understand that chapter in _Amelia_ when he stops the narrative to deliver a violent attack upon the medical profession, possibly because when he was writing _Amelia_ he must occasionally have felt the slight twinge and noticed the slight jaundice that would be the first symptom that all was not well.
But he was a very kind man, even as a magistrate. He knew too much about human nature to be harsh with anybody, and possibly Virtue, in telling untruths, had touched a soft spot in his generous heart; in other words, Virtue and Betty must have “vamped” him.
King James I
It would be easier to say what was not the matter with this walking pathological museum than to name his actual disease. From early youth till death his life was one long pain. He could hardly walk until he was nearly six years old, and this defect was attributed by his physician, Sir Theodore Mayerne, to the bad milk of a drunken wet-nurse. Mayerne,[11] who left a full account of James’s health, seems to have been an acute man, but nowadays we should rather attribute the somewhat neurotic troubles from which James suffered to his unconscious infantile disgust at the drunken woman than to the influence of her bad milk.
He himself certainly did not use milk as his drink when he came to years of “discretion.” He was afflicted with the normal gigantic appetite of kings in those days. He ate anything and everything so long as it could be eaten: not even Charles V could have excelled his prowess. He drank, indiscriminately, beer, spirits, Spanish wines, cider, sweet French wines, and muscatel, probably mixing them all right royally. His interior organs were always too full, and he got rid of the vast surplus in whatever disgusting way, up or down, happened to be convenient, so, in every way, he must have been a most unpleasant companion.
He was subject to catarrh, and was much affected by cold and damp; he was constantly spitting, hawking, and blowing his nose. As handkerchiefs were not then in general use, I have heard that he used his sleeve or his finger and thumb, which would not add to his “clubability.” He had some difficulty in swallowing, owing, as Sir Theodore puts it, to some narrowing of his fauces, inherited from his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, and from his grandfather, James V of Scotland. Putting two and two together, the constant blowing of his nose and the “narrowing” of his throat, one imagines that probably the poor man suffered from adenoids and enlarged tonsils. He occasionally suffered from gravel, often accompanied by blood. He constantly suffered from another ignoble trouble, which in the course of years bled copiously. If he was specially worried in mind or body—and a king is always worried—he would become jaundiced. Whenever anything more than usually alarming occurred, the unhappy man would get diarrhœa, just like an anxious student awaiting his interview with the examiners. He used faithfully to insist on his being bled every day, until his least dignified ailment saved the doctors the trouble. When he dismissed his Parliament of 1610 apparently his diarrhœa became profuse. In fact, if you can think of any ailment that I have not mentioned from which he suffered—so be it that it was excessively undignified—I wish you would tell me what it was.
He had a truly psychasthenic dread of pain, yet hated all doctors, possibly because he had suffered too much at our hands. His teeth were all decayed, so that he could chew nothing, but had perforce to bolt his food. A man with the decayed teeth that so distinguished the “most learned fool in Christendom” would naturally in time suffer from arthritis; and in middle age this complaint so crippled him that he could hardly mount his horse. He detested purgatives, and considered that any medicine, to do good, must act upon the bowels without griping the patient; till late in his life he would not even allow an enema, probably because it hurt him.
With death came, as usual, a little of that dignity that was so sadly lacking in his life. S. R. Gardiner says that he died of a fever, but it is impossible even to guess at its nature. Early in the morning of March 27th, 1625, he was so ill that he had to send for his son Prince Charles, who came running into the king’s room in a nightshirt. Seeing his son, King James tried to raise himself on his pillows and to say something; but his voice had become so weak as to be inaudible, so that even then he failed. He was understood to say “Veni, Domine Jesu,” and soon his breathing ceased; in fact, like most people, he passed painlessly into the sleep that knows no waking. He had done with all his pain and constant discomfort, and, so far as he knew, with the misunderstanding that afflicted him in his life in England and has certainly afflicted his memory ever since. Poor James did not have a chance from his infancy. It has been said that he failed because he did not understand the English people; but how could you expect him to do that when he was constantly worried by the most distressing and undignified of all ailments? And was it not also equally their duty to try to understand him?
They held a post-mortem examination upon him, because there were the usual accusations of poisoning, apparently founded largely upon the swelling of his tongue. They found that his heart was enormously enlarged, and that in his left kidney, which was greatly shrunken, there reposed two stones, from which doubtless had come that gravel which had so afflicted him during his life. Possibly his enlarged heart and swollen tongue, together with his vast overeating and drinking, may have meant that King James I had chronic Bright’s disease.
How far the drunken wet-nurse may have influenced his later life no one can say; but it is quite possible that the unconscious infant may have felt a disgust that went far to cause that nervousness and lack of dignity of which his subjects complained. But how could any man be dignified when he was suffering constantly from gravel and the other tormenting, itching, weakening, and ignoble trouble?
But surely we have omitted the most important point in James’s supposed character: the unnatural offences of which he was suspected. Well, Sir Theodore Mayerne, who has told us so frankly all about his hawking and spitting, his diarrhœa, his gravel, his stones, and his bleeding hæmorrhoids, does not seem to know anything about the unnatural offences. The pure mind always seems to turn towards this sort of offence when it thinks of its neighbour. In 1642, according to the _American Mercury_ of April, 1924, the Puritans, hardly settled down in the American colonies, were already accusing each other of the most awful sexual offences. And before convicting James of such offences one would prefer the evidence of a level-headed doctor to that of all the seventeenth-century Puritans in the world.
It is strange how minds, under the influence of fierce religious fervour, always turn, and always have turned, to unnatural sexual offences. It is not a product of patristic Christianity, as so many have thought. On reading _The Golden Ass_, of Apuleius, one must be struck with the amazing moral filth of the Roman Empire. After wading through hundreds of pages of gay and libidinous dirt, one suddenly finds that one is assisting in religious propaganda. Apuleius paints his fellow-countrymen and women in such black colours simply because he wants them to join in the worship of the Great Mother, which was then so formidable a rival to Christianity in the Roman Empire.
So, considering the known facts of religious propaganda, I do not believe a single word of the slanders upon James I. There were Puritans about.
It is possible that Petronius, in his _Satyricon_—if he wrote it—drew a truthful picture of the Empire under Nero, because he does not profess to moralise or to convert anybody whatever to any supposed better religion. One is sometimes inclined to agree with Gibbon that “all (_organised_) religions are equally false and equally useful.”
But it would be absurd to suppose that James the Sixth and First was merely the ridiculous creature that I have depicted here. Those who wish to prove that he was a coward have first to account for the known fact that, until his knees stiffened under the influence of his decayed teeth, he was a brave and first-class horseman. It may be true that he could never bear the sight of a drawn sword; neither could Lord Roberts bear the sight of a cat. Before he was dragged to England he did for Scotland what the heavy-handed Tudors did for South Britain. By his skill and diplomacy he welded even fierce little Scotland into an orderly country, and taught the Scots lords and the ministers of the General Assembly that the king was their master.
King Charles I
Doctors seldom take much interest in politics. It is their general experience that for all the tumult and the shoutings of politicians nobody ever seems one penny the better for the uproar, for vast sums are wasted which would be much better expended in a way that we really do know something about, such as the cure of disease and the public health generally. In some ways the most interesting thing about the “Martyred Monarch” is the expression of wistful melancholy which is shown on the famous portrait by Van Dyck. It is undoubtedly due to this portrait that so much sympathy has always been felt for him; and the tragedy of King Charles has always impressed thoughtful men as a tragedy from the Greek.
In his early youth he stammered so badly that until he was ten he could hardly speak at all. Stammering is supposed to be a nervous habit due to a psychasthenic phobia; and the worst case of stammering that I ever knew was said to have been acquired by a nervous child of three, owing to a negligent nurse having locked him up in a dark cupboard while she read novels. Stammerers often express themselves by their pen; and several eminent writers, both in the past and in the present day, have been stammerers. Not less acute than other men—indeed often far more acute than the average—yet as they are invariably shy they are incapable of showing it in conversation; and the brutal outburst of Carlyle concerning poor Charles Lamb reflects an opinion that is too often held by the impatient and intolerant.
King Charles had during his day the finest collection of art-treasures in Europe; and in that fact we see the essentially refined and artistic character of the man, for he not only had the treasures, but understood them. Stammering often tends to improve as the man grows older. Demosthenes is said to have cured himself by shouting at the sea waves, while King Charles succeeded to a large extent by speaking with extraordinary slowness and dignity, though to some extent the habit remained with him to the end. Strangely enough the sad and pathetic expression on Van Dyck’s portrait is not unlike the sad and pathetic expression on the famous portrait statue of Demosthenes by Polyeuctes; although of course Demosthenes was of a much more aggressive character and more ready to make himself felt in public than Charles Stuart.
But in Van Dyck’s portrait we see probably the unconscious infantile fear in the baby Charles that ultimately led him to stammer; and possibly in the utterly wrong-headed obstinacy of the king in holding on to an impossible position, we see the determination that resulted in his curing himself sufficiently to attain the crown.
An incident occurred during his trial that may have led to a false impression. “They will not suffer me to speak,” he cried brokenly as they led him away. Is it possible that during that dreadful moment the old bad habit of his childish days returned, so that King Charles actually _could_ not speak for the time?
He is said to have been one of the few kings of really noble domestic character, a faithful husband and affectionate father. Yet though he could be faithful to his wife he could not help telling lies to his friends.
“Vanquished in life his death By beauty made amends; The passing of his breath Won its defeated ends.”
Charles was temperate, chaste and serious; he treated those about him with punctilious courtesy and expected the same in return.
But it may be that in the twistings and turnings of his political career we see the qualities that are not inconsistent with the artistic temperament.
As for the apparent cause of Charles’s stammering, that is quite impossible even to guess. It is possible that he, a naturally sensitive and refined little boy, may have been unconsciously terrified by his father’s unpleasant personal habits. At any rate, let us keep a soft spot in our hearts for the ill-fated king.
Whence came the somewhat nervous strain that runs, like a brass thread, through the whole dynasty of the Stuarts, I hesitate to speculate: perhaps from Darnley, father of James I. They always make me think of a set of naughty children wedged between the great gloomy Tudors and the unpleasant Hanoverians. There was James I, who is generally held by the English to have been an egregious person; next, Charles I, who, probably, would have done better as a poet; then Charles II, who was by far the cleverest of them, but was too lazy; and lastly the gloomy and exceedingly immoral—if all tales are true—James II, who was a man too much under the influence of religion. It is said that he used to get absolution after every time that he visited his mistress. Then there was that poor, lonely, stupid Anne, who could not, for some reason, rear a single one of her numerous children.
King Charles II
As the best thing that we hear of the life of King Charles II is the manner of his leaving it, I confine myself to a description of his death. You will get a moderately good account of it in Bishop Burnet’s history, of which Swift was so scornful; and a recognisable account of it in Lord Macaulay, written with all the fixed ideas of the early nineteenth century colouring the ink; but the real truth appeared in an article in the _British Medical Journal_ for 1910, which again was drawn largely from Dr. Raymond Crawfurd’s _Last Days of Charles II_. As Dr. Crawfurd gives the official report of Sir Charles Scarburgh, one of the consultants in attendance at the time, probably we may take it that we have the exact details so far as the medical science of 1685 could give them.
Towards the end of 1684 the king did not feel quite well: he was irritable and depressed, and thought it wise to remain indoors during the mornings, instead of taking his usual active walks. He attributed his illness to gout. It would be interesting to speculate on what the disease actually was that so often was called “gout” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There are many conditions which cause symptoms such as might be mistaken for gout; let us leave it at that, for even to-day a doctor, forced to give to a vague complaint a name, sometimes takes refuge in the euphemism “rheumatic gout.” During these few days indoors he amused himself by playing with mercury in his laboratory, for, as is well known, he was of scientific bent. At last came the fateful morning, Monday, February 2nd, 1685. At eight o’clock the king, while being shaved, fell back with a cry into the arms of an attendant, Lord Aylesbury. According to Dr. Scarburgh, “Charles, having just left his bed, was walking about quietly in his bedchamber when he felt some unusual disturbance in his brain, which was followed by loss of speech and violent convulsions.” There happened to be present at the time two of the king’s physicians who, so as promptly to forestall so serious a danger to “this best of kings,” as Scarburgh has it, opened a vein in his right arm and drew 16 ounces of blood. As a matter of fact, this assault, though seemingly homicidal, was probably as good a thing as could have been done for him, though few doctors would have the moral courage to do it to-day. His head was closely shaved; his neck and shoulders were blistered and scarified; emetics, purgatives and clysters were administered, and every reputable doctor, regardless of his religion, was summoned to the defence. Whitehall must have presented a lively spectacle that winter morning with all the periwigs and silver buckles and gold-headed canes and wise faces. In fact, they did what they could: if they had known that the cause of the convulsions was probably that the king’s kidneys had “gone on strike,” they could have done little more than endeavour to get rid of the poisons that must have been circulating in his body by some other effluent than by the urine. After about two hours their efforts were crowned with success. The king, whose face had been hideously black,—i.e., cyanosed—and whose eyes had been rolling this way and that, woke up, and proceeded to give an account of himself. The poisons had for a time been got out of his body; but only for a time. He said that, not feeling very well when he awakened, he had gone to his private closet to get some “king’s drops,” which Dr. Crawfurd explains to have been “a volatile extract of bone made in the king’s laboratory according to the formula of the late Dr. Goddard, and in high repute on the Continent.”
Charles was then out of immediate danger, and during the Tuesday he remained fairly well except for some soreness about the neck and mouth, which was probably due to the efforts that had had to be made to get him to swallow his medicines. Just so to-day, a patient occasionally wakes up from an anæsthetic with a stiff jaw after the efforts which have had to be made to pull his tongue forward if his breathing has given trouble while he was unconscious. Charles complained of great pain in his interior, which was probably less a symptom of his illness than of the violent purgatives that had been forced down his throat; but to the horrified Bishop Burnet it was “agonies.”
The doctors, pestered by the ministers of the Crown to give the king’s illness a name, were greatly perturbed, and all fourteen[12] of them entered into many grave consultations one with another. On the afternoon of Wednesday, February 4th, the convulsions returned, and as intermittent fever was then especially prevalent in and about London they said that probably His Majesty was suffering from that complaint, though to be sure the violent convulsions, cyanosed skin, loss of speech, and turning of the eyeballs did not look quite like intermittent fever. But the council was satisfied, which, to the doctors wrestling with a mysterious and complex disease, was probably all that they could expect, for it enabled them to say that they now knew what to do, and that, apparently, the king was in no great immediate danger. As the _British Medical Journal_ rather unkindly points out: “On June 21st, 1902, the late King Edward’s Private Secretary wrote that there was not a word of truth in the rumours that had been floating about concerning His Majesty’s health, though on June 24th the coronation was postponed and he had to be operated on for appendicitis”; though, considering what a sudden thing acute appendicitis is, there is little wonder that three days before anyone might not have known of his coming ill health.