Part 8

On the Thursday occurred those dramatic events of which conventional historians have made so much. When he was first taken ill on the Monday his poor wife had hurried to his side, and had taken the place of at least one of his mistresses in nursing him. Catherine of Braganza may not have had sufficient physical charm to keep his wayward fancy, and may not have been able to bear him an heir,[13] but at least she was faithful to him unto his death. In her presence the other women retired, and she nursed her husband until the horrors of the sick room overcame her; she felt faint and withdrew; as Macaulay says, “was carried senseless to her chamber.” Little wonder; the sick room must indeed have been horrible to every sense, with all the purgatives and clysters and cauterization of bare skin, and a husband writhing in convulsions and rolling his eyes, apparently in the utmost agony, though I doubt if he felt anything at all in his fits. Early in her married life she had fainted when Charles had introduced her to his mistress _en titre_. There had been many occasions for fainting since then, and she had been accused of trying to poison Charles, who had humiliated her. Later on she sent word to him that she asked his pardon for being too ill to come to his aid; and Charles said, “She ask my pardon, poor woman! I ask hers, with all my heart.” Yet the time was to come when she was accused of inducing him to turn Roman Catholic. Macaulay seems rather to blame the Duchess of Portsmouth for seeing that he was “reconciled” to the Church, as she would doubtless put it, but there is another suggestion that occurs to myself. With all his laziness and clever frivolity, Charles was, after all, very much like other men; he had had a mother, and Queen Henrietta Maria, though a daughter of Henri Quatre, was an ardent Roman Catholic; during the first few years of her married life with King Charles I she had undergone a great deal of hardship for her religion. She must have frequently, like other mothers, talked over religious matters with her children; and when Charles II came to die, when his courage and self-esteem were weakened by the crowning humiliation of death, it is quite possible that in that awful moment he may have sincerely turned to Mother Church, that Church which had consoled his mother, as a refuge. And hence doubtless arose that dramatic interlude in the act of dying that Macaulay paints so vividly. The Duchess of Portsmouth may have wept and poured out her heart to the French Ambassador as he says; no doubt the Benedictine monk, John Huddlestone, was summoned just as he says; but after all, it is the penitent himself who had to do penance, and quite possibly Charles, in trying to swallow the holy bread, was really unconsciously remembering the teachings of his Roman Catholic mother. We have seen how Elizabeth, when dying, recalled to her memory events of her youth; why should we not think just the same of Charles II? He was not mad as Protestants said; he was just dying. It is quite a common incident with the dying, and is supposed to account for the known phenomenon that rationalists, when they feel their brain is beginning to betray them, have embraced Christianity. Then he commended the Duchess to the care of his brother, the Duke of York, afterwards James II, “and,” he said, “let not poor Nelly starve.” Again he was thinking of the past, this time the recent past, for “pretty witty Nell” (as Pepys calls her), “the most indiscreet and the wildest creature that ever was in a court” (as Burnet calls her), had been his mistress for many years—since about 1670—and was the most popular of all, “a true child of the London streets.” She, it is said, was the only woman who was really faithful to him at heart except his wife. At half-past ten on the Friday, Charles again became speechless; before twelve he was dead, probably of a uræmic coma due to chronic Bright’s disease.

Then came the inevitable accusations of poisoning which attended every sudden death in that suspicious age. We can, I believe, even explain some of the symptoms that were considered so suspicious. It was quite natural that Louise de Querouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth, should be accused of poisoning him, for it was well known at that time that Frenchwomen and Roman Catholics invariably worked by poison, and unhappily for Louise she was both. But what kind of poison could cause blue spots to form upon a man’s chest? And what kind of poison could make his tongue swell up? I must try to explain in popular language what chronic Bright’s disease really is. It is not merely a disease of the kidneys. The kidneys indeed become sclerosed, or hardened, and in time become shrivelled; but with this the arteries and heart also become diseased; the heart becomes enlarged, and the blood-vessels thickened and hardened; rather than a disease of the kidneys alone it is almost a thickening of the arteries all over the body, including those in the kidneys. And with this thickening goes a loss of elasticity, so that blood-vessels are apt to rupture at the slightest provocation. So that in the struggles of his uræmic convulsions it is quite possible that tiny capillaries of the king’s chest may have ruptured and caused blue spots on the neighbouring skin. If he had not died it is quite probable that the whites of his eyes might have become bloodshot, from the rupture of some tiny arteriole. It often happens to-day in Bright’s disease.

And the tongue? Quite frequently the tongue and larynx suddenly swell up in chronic Bright’s disease, and the patient suffocates before he can obtain relief. King Charles was indeed poisoned, though not by human agency. He was poisoned by the toxins which should have been excreted by his own kidneys, but could not be got rid of by any human aid; that is to say, he probably died of uræmia from chronic Bright’s disease.

A post-mortem examination was held, so we can get even further evidence. One could not expect a doctor in the seventeenth century to observe that his kidneys were obviously diseased, or that part of his brain was œdematous or softened, as often happens in Bright’s disease, and would no doubt cause the loss of speech. But they did observe that his heart was enlarged, a most significant point.

I remember one of the very first private patients that I ever had, nearly thirty years ago. A middle-aged Englishman had come to Sydney from China for his health, apparently feeling fairly well, though debilitated by the tropical climate. Suddenly, as he was shaving, he was taken ill with a violent fit of convulsions, and, in spite of all that we could do for him, died in the course of two or three days with symptoms that exactly resembled those so graphically portrayed by Lord Macaulay and Dr. Crawfurd.

There is much of extraordinary interest to be found in Dr. Crawfurd’s book which gives the fantastic truth about medicine in 1685,[14] I can only advise you to read the book. In spite of the queer medicines that they used to prescribe I fancy that doctors at that time had more common sense than we moderns seem to think, and I very much doubt if anything could have saved King Charles’s life, except perhaps for a short time. He had come to his end. Our treatment would have been less drastic, but little more successful.

The cause of chronic Bright’s disease is not definitely known. It has been attributed to innumerable things; indeed, to everything which any given physician does not like himself; and comparatively recently it has even been attributed to improper feeding in infancy, so far back in life are its roots supposed to go. Indeed, it is generally thought to be hereditary; but probably it is still a mystery, though overeating and overdrinking may have something to do with it, not to mention, of course, syphilis, but so many men who have not had syphilis die of chronic Bright’s disease that it would not be fair to state it as the cause.

But why is it that Henri Quatre, whose morals were little if at all better than those of Charles, has become a national hero, while Charles is always held up as a byword for infamy? I do not know; but the usual explanation is that the English are at heart Puritans, and M. Chevrillon, in his recent essays on English literature, has accepted that as the reason for the popularity of Kipling and Galsworthy. But I sometimes wonder whether, had England been more successful under Charles II, so much would have been heard of his immorality. After all, Lord Nelson was not a Joseph, but he saved England from Napoleon; whereas Charles II saw the Dutch fleet in the Thames, and ran about chasing butterflies while the guns thundered.

All medical students, and most doctors, pass through a period when they are convinced that they have chronic Bright’s disease, and it is not till after visiting their physicians in an agony of mind that they are relieved of their mental distress. Let not a lay reader be silly enough to copy these apprehensive doctors. No man can be his own physician.

But perhaps the most interesting things about Charles II are the sterility of his wife, Catherine of Braganza, and his affection for “poor Nelly,” which she undoubtedly returned. Catherine appears to have been a convent-bred maiden with beautiful eyes. She was by no means the king’s first or last love; and several months after the marriage she fell ill of some sickness that brought her to death’s door, so that they had to administer extreme unction. It was probably owing to this illness that she never had a child, and was afterwards often ill. Such a trouble as pelvic peritonitis, with inflammation of the Fallopian tubes, often causes sterility. It is Nature’s stupid way of saving the patient’s life that she isolates the inflammation and seals the tubes, so that the woman indeed lives, but miserable, sterile, neurasthenic, and in constant pain. What was the actual cause of the illness in Catherine’s case it is impossible to say. One ventures to hazard a guess that the real cause of Catherine’s sterility was simply adhesions and blocked Fallopian tubes; it is certain that it had nothing to do with King Charles’s potency, because he had many natural children by other women. It is in that severe illness several months after she was married that the explanation of her sterility probably lies. We see innumerable cases of this sort to-day.

About Nell Gwynn. She was herself the daughter of a prostitute who, in a fit of drink, one night fell into a ditch and was drowned. Her charm over the king probably lay in her wit and recklessness; she dared to say to him things that no one else on earth ventured. She was faithful to him after he had won her—if indeed she took much winning. Other women, such as La Belle Stuart, and Louise de Querouaille, pretended to resist him for a time, but Nell seems to have been really fond of him and did not resist at all. Remember she was, before she became an actress, an orange-girl—that is to say, a prostitute. Everything we hear of her tells of her uniform kindness and generosity; she was of course extremely loose in her conduct and morals, but she seems to have cared little for money. She died about two years after the king, apparently of a stroke that had brought on one-sided paralysis or hemiplegia; and considering the assured facts of her youth, and the early age at which she died, that stroke was probably caused by syphilis, which had lain latent in her ever since the time when she sold herself with her oranges in the pit of Drury Lane.

But no person should attempt to describe the life either of Charles II or Nell Gwynn who has the slightest tendency to moralise; for neither the wittiest of the Stuarts nor the clever little actress can be explained on conventional codes of morality. It is the attempt to consider Charles II as if he had been a child of Queen Victoria, and to moralise over him, that makes most books about him so repulsive.

But Nell did not try to enter politics; she resisted the temptation to be queen, even if the opportunity had ever offered. She knew that her only function in life was to charm; and with the coldly realistic outlook on life that is common to all prostitutes, she knew that in the position of a queen she must come up against the harsh facts of reality, and that, like Anne Boleyn, she would probably lose her head in every sense of the word. Mere power to charm is not for a queen. Nell’s memory, owing to her wisdom and self-restraint, has been tenderly treated by the English people, in spite of that prudery which has scoffed at the real cleverness of her royal lover. Nell Gwynn, to use her own coarse words, was content to remain “the Protestant whore,” the cleverness of her tongue enabled her to keep her place at Court against all rivals, and her charm even impresses us to-day, who have never seen her dance nor heard her cockney witticisms. “Let not poor Nelly” fade from our memories.

Henri Quatre

The great thing about Henri Quatre, from the point of view of a medical essayist, is that no person of an anti-syphilitic fury will expect him to be classed as an awful warning of the devastations of that disease. Poor Henri died of good honest assassination, the product of an even worse disease than syphilis—sectarian intolerance. A disease which could cause the awful wars of Henri’s own life, and a few years later the most dreadful of all wars—the Thirty Years’—need not fear to be classed alongside even the most disreputable and destructive of human disorders. And the fact that nobody in these terrible wars ever had the least idea why people were killing each other only makes the marvel of sectarian intolerance even more amazing than it is. Of course, there is no such thing as _religious_ intolerance. Religion should make war impossible, and should inculcate tolerance for other people’s opinions. Did the good-natured and kindly gods of old Greece ever breed a religious war? Did anybody ever go swashbuckling in helmet and armour for Zeus or Aphrodite? Unless perhaps Aphrodite to him meant some individual woman who had been raped from her home, such as Helen of Troy; and Helen probably meant some vague abstraction of a Greek woman as opposed to a barbarian, if she did not symbolise Greek trade through the Hellespont, obstructed by Trojan robber bands. The Marxian materialist view of history grows rather attractive when it is applied to people who have been dead three thousand years.

Quite apart from the murderous sectarian squabbles, which have been dignified by the name of religious wars, the life of Henri Quatre, very properly classed as one of the heroes of France, is extraordinarily interesting to a doctor. But in many ways the most interesting thing about him was his relations with women. Henri may have had some conscience about religion—though I doubt it—but, like our own Charles II, he had absolutely no conscience about women. To him, whether he was married or not, any pretty girl was fair game; and those who care to read pornography can find plenty of it in the record of his life. The seventeenth century was a period of bitter sectarian differences, and it was a time when the divine right of kings to possess pretty girls was elevated almost to an article of faith. Thus we had the marvellous spectacles of King Henri IV and King Charles II, of whom the one became a national hero, the other a byword for flippancy and falsehood. I am not going to be led into any temptation to find the cause of the one phenomenon in the other—to say that if it had not been a period of such bitter sectarianism the virtue of girls might have been more sacred to kings, because there have been good kings and bad kings at all times; girls have been virtuous or wanton, whatever their religion; and the seventeenth century was not the only century in history. The sixteenth and eighteenth could show instances of moral depravity quite as bad as that of either Henri Quatre or Charles Stuart. Let us see what a doctor may be able to say about Henri Quatre.

When he was about nineteen he married Marguerite de Valois, the third of that name, who has achieved fame under the popular name of Reine Margot. She was sister to King Henri III of France; our Henri was at that time only king of Navarre; his little kingdom lay in the south of France, near the borders of Spain. His father had been Anthony of Bourbon; his mother Joan of Albret. Joan had agreed to the marriage with a very heavy heart: she feared the bright eyes of the Catholic enchantress who was to bewitch her own beloved son. She herself was a Huguenot, who looked upon Marguerite as sent directly from the devil. If Marguerite had really been sent by Satan to the inferno of Parisian wickedness she needed no great ensnaring; for, when she married the good Henri of Navarre, simple young country bumpkin that he was, she is said to have already had an affair with the Duke of Guise, and her reputation for virtue would not have passed any great test. She was pretty, and what was more potent, she had a peculiar charm of manner that enabled her to capture all but the most resistant of men. Many of us remember how Marguerite, in the “Huguenots” of Meyerbeer, dances along the stage singing to her lute and plangent orchestral pizzicati “The fair land of Touraine.” Although this, according to Wagner, is very inartistic, still, it is very charming, and has no doubt left Marguerite for us moderns with a character that is more beautiful than it really was. She could no more resist enchanting a man than Henri could resist trying to possess a good-looking girl: the bonds of matrimony sat very lightly upon both. There was no love in the marriage, which was, almost more cynically than most royal marriages, simply an affair of State. Catherine de Medici, Marguerite’s mother, wished to convert Henri to the Catholic faith, and at the same time to make him an enemy of Spain, which, under Don John of Austria, had just won the earth-shaking victory of Lepanto.

But Marguerite could do something else besides make love: she could write. At a time when every one else was striving to be distinguished in style Marguerite wrote as simply and clearly as if she were speaking; and her _Memories_ are therefore still delightful to read. Just after her marriage the massacre of St. Bartholomew broke out. Let the royal lady tell how it affected herself. “An hour later, while I was fast asleep, someone came beating at my door with hands and feet, and shouting Navarre, Navarre! My nurse, thinking it was my husband, ran to open the door. It was a gentleman, wounded by a sword-thrust in the elbow, and his arm cut by a halberd, who rushed into my room pursued by four archers. Seeking safety he threw himself on my bed. Feeling this man clutching me I threw myself into the open space between the bed and the wall, where, he still grasping me, we both rolled over, both screaming and both equally frightened. Fortunately the Captain of my Guards, M. de Nancay, came by, and seeing me in such a plight could not help laughing, but drove the archers out of the room, and gave me the life of the poor gentleman, who was still clinging to me, and whom I caused to be tended in my dressing-room till he was quite cured. While I changed my nightdress,”—Marguerite was lucky to be wearing one in 1572—“for he had covered me with his blood, M. de Nancay told me what had happened, and assured me that my husband was in the king’s room and was quite safe. Making me throw on a dressing-gown, he led me to the room of my sister, Madame de Lorraine, which I reached more dead than alive; just as I was going into the anteroom a gentleman, trying to escape from the archers who were pursuing him, fell dead three paces from me. I too fell half-fainting into the arms of M. de Nancay, and felt as if the same blow had pierced us both.”

Dumas describes this incident in _Marguerite de Valois_; but his description is no more vivid than Marguerite’s. The temptation to make the poor fugitive the hero of his book was too great, and he turned the ill-fated De la Mole into Marguerite’s unwilling bedfellow on that night of weeping. I dare say that Marguerite was not sorry to be able to save the poor man’s life, even though Dumas makes her behave far from generously to his hero later. If I remember rightly she has him tortured by the “boot.”

Queen Joan, her mother-in-law, describes her as being very pretty, but one could not see her face for the paint; she was rather too stout, and was tightly laced. Afterwards, when she had abandoned all sense of decency, she became enormously fat, and could hardly get through an ordinary door. Her intelligence and great fondness for reading probably did not make Henri love her any better, because he could never finish a serious book. She said about her brother Henri III that if all the treachery in the world should perish Henri III had enough to restock it; so it is clear that brother and sister did not really love one another; and probably Marguerite could not resist the temptation to make a scathing epigram.

But Joan need not have been so perturbed over her son falling into the hands of the satanic Marguerite, for, if all tales were true, she was no great saint herself. Once, when Henri III was in a particularly bad temper, he went to Marguerite in church and called her all manner of abominable names, so that she turned and ran weeping out of the church. Later he went up to Henri Quatre and half-apologised for his rudeness, explaining it because of some unfortunate incidents that had been rumoured about Queen Joan’s own virtue. Henri laughed, and afterwards said, “What a nice fellow he must be! He thinks by saying that I am a bastard to make up for calling my wife a prostitute!” That was really much the sort of thing that our own beloved Charles II might have said; and it shows Henri Quatre as a maker of epigrams with just sufficient truth in them to hurt. And all done with a kindly smile, too.