The spy who loved
Recording from Claire Mulley’s talk “The spy who loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville, Britain’s First Female Special Agent of the Second World War’, for CVHF 2013, Saturday 29th June 2013.
24th–30th June 2024 - Broadchalke, Salisbury
Recording from Claire Mulley’s talk “The spy who loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville, Britain’s First Female Special Agent of the Second World War’, for CVHF 2013, Saturday 29th June 2013.
HENRY VIII is arguably our most famous king whose reign of almost four decades in the sixteenth-century laid the foundations of the nation we know today.
Everyone remembers him as the monarch who had six wives but Henry changed his realm from being a group of remote islands on the edge of the known world into a major player in European politics and diplomacy, as well as establishing the Anglican Church in the break from Rome.
He came to the throne in 1509, a few weeks short of his eighteenth-birthday, as a fit, athletic sportsman – regarded by his besotted subjects as very much the David Beckham of his day. But Henry was much more than a champion jouster – he was a Renaissance Prince, fervently interested in science and the arts, particularly music.
One of his great interests was in medicine, in the sixteenth-century based more on superstition or religious doctrine, as it was firmly in the hands of doctors licensed by the church or practiced by quacks – blacksmiths, ‘wise women’ or white witches.
Their outlandish cures should not be replicated today. Don’t try them at home as there are some very dangerous ingredients!
It was also believed that the position and movement of celestial bodies like planets could determine a patient’s health – or the appropriate cure for their maladies.
Doctors maintained that the new king, born under the astrological sign of Cancer, was governed by the maternal cycles of the moon and Henry’s horoscope suggested he was vulnerable to coughs, fevers, quinsy, rheumatism, smallpox and kidney stones.
His birth chart had cast him as a cheerful, frivolous and flirty child who would grow up to become a man of action. He would be short-tempered, eat and drink to excess, prickly if criticized, and have a healthy libido and he would suffer from acute constipation and poor sleeping. Ironically, many of these predictions became true as the king grew older. (Maybe there is more truth in astrology than we thought!)
During his son-less marriages to Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, Henry was painfully aware that the future of the insecure Tudor dynasty was fragile. It could collapse abruptly with his illness or death – or by being overthrown in a coup d’etat, launched by another, stronger, claimant to the throne of England.
Even after the birth of Prince Edward, on 12 October 1537, there was no ‘spare heir’ to allow the king to sleep easier at night.
Therefore the king’s health dictated the stability of the realm and symbolized the power of the monarch.
No wonder Henry VIII became obsessed with his own health and medical care – displaying all the signs and symptoms of a hypochondriac.
Tudor diseases
With epidemics in 1509-10, 1516, 1527-30, 1532 and 1544-46, Henry was particularly paranoiac about bubonic plague. When his court went on progress, messengers were sent ahead to check whether towns en route were infected. At Windsor and Calais, the sick were dragged out of their houses and left to die in the fields.
Another dangerous disease was the English ‘sweating sickness’ – probably introduced into England by the French mercenaries of Henry VII before the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. There were major epidemics in 1485, 1508, 1517, 1528 and 1551 of this disease which we now know was a type of viral pneumonia.
Symptoms included headaches, muscular pain, fever, copious sweating and laboured breathing. The victim became leaden-limbed and drowsy. Delirium and vomiting followed with palpitations of the heart. And they were often dead within 12-24 hours of showing the first symptoms.
The disease claimed a very high proportion of victims among young wealthy males living in towns: 50 people a day died in London in the 1528 outbreak, probably including Thomas Cromwell’s wife and daughter. Anne Boleyn and Thomas Wolsey also went down with this disease – but both recovered.
Other Tudor killer diseases included:
Overall, life expectancy was much worse than today – only around 10% of Tudors lived beyond their 40th birthday.
The birth of modern medicine
Henry tried to rationalize medical science and structure the profession in a number of measures during his reign. He established the Royal College of Physicians on 23 September 1518 to ‘withstand the attempts … of those wicked men who shall profess medicine more for the sake of their avarice than from the assurance of any good conscience’.
These wicked persons included ‘common artificers [such] as smiths, weavers and women who boldly and customarily take upon themselves great cures… They use sorcery and apply medicines very noxious to the displeasure of God… and grievous hurt to the king’s liege people… who cannot discern the cunning from the uncunning’.
In 1540, Henry granted a royal charter to the ‘United Company of Barber Surgeons’ which placed physicians firmly at the top of the profession. Surgeons were now prohibited from prescribing ‘inward remedies’ especially for sciatica, syphilis, ulcers or any kind of wound’ but could undertake blood-letting and cutting into a patient’s body. At the bottom, barbers were limited to shaving and pulling teeth.
Medical theory and practice
In Tudor times, medical theory was rooted in the beliefs of a Greek doctor called Aelius Galenus who lived in the Roman period. As well as the seasons of the year and the twelve astrological signs, one’s health and choice of medical treatment were influenced by the four bodily ‘humours’ – blood, phlegm, black bile (melancholy) and yellow bile.
It was thought that red-haired people – like Henry VIII and his children – showed the predominance of yellow bile, providing them with fiery emotions. Certainly, an unpredictable temper seems to have been part of the Tudor genes.
A healthy bodily balance could be restored by manipulating the body’s liquids: through sweating, urinating and blood-letting.
Some doctors however recommended ‘lusty singing’ by patients to aid recovery. The sick room could become a noisy place.
Other treatments included:
Henry himself experimented with his own cures for a variety of diseases. The British Library still has a book which contains 100 of his recipes for a range of nostrums, balms and poultices, including ‘The King’s Own Grey Plaster’ ‘to take away inflammation, cease pain and heal ulcers’. Its ingredients include roots, buds, stone-less raisins, linseed, vinegar, rosewater, long garden worms, ivory scrapings, powdered pearls [highly poisonous] red lead, suet of hens and fat from the thighbone of calves.
Henry’s medical history
In trying to discover what medical conditions afflicted Henry VIII we have two major problems to overcome. Firstly, medical science was less advanced than it is today and the king’s doctors had very limited means of discovering exactly what maladies were afflicting him – except for diseases such as the plague, smallpox or sweating sickness with which they were all too familiar. Secondly, we have to rely on descriptions of the king’s symptoms in accounts by witnesses completely ignorant of any medical knowledge, such as his courtiers or gossipy foreign ambassadors attached to his court.
Even given these problems, we can build a reasonably accurate picture of Henry’s medical history:
‘The king’s life was really thought in danger, not from the fever but from the leg which often troubles him because he is very stout and marvellously excessive in eating and drinking so that people worth credit say he is often of a different opinion in the morning than after dinner’.
His first wife, Katherine of Aragon’s tragic natal record of a succession of miscarriages and still-borns has led to much speculation about the king’s ability to father children. This is something of a red herring as it ignores, of course, his success in fathering his illegitimate son Henry Fitzroy, Princesses Mary and Elizabeth and Prince Edward.
Some have suggested that Henry had a translocation of his chromosomes which meant that his sperm cells had extra or missing genetic material which could cause miscarriages. Another theory is that he had a rare blood group which had a similar effect.
More likely, given the poor nature of Tudor hygiene and diet, is that Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn suffered nutritional imbalances, or simply viral or bacteriological infections like listeriosis, which also manifests itself as meningitis or pneumonia in new-borns. Significantly, perhaps, the two boys that Katherine safey delivered in 1511 and 1513 died shortly after their births.
The Royal diet
Henry consumed three meals a day. He was particularly fond of galantines, game pies and haggis and drank wine, beer and gin. The slaughter of birds for the Tudor table was prodigious: larks, stork, gannet, heron, snipe, bustard, quail, partridge, capons, teal, crane and pheasants were all eaten. Sparrow pie was an especial favourite on menus for the court.
Salted and fresh fish followed the meat course: cod, herrings, eels, salmon, porpoises, dolphin and ling. Fresh fruit was shunned as it was believed to cause diarrhoea and fever – but Henry liked cherries. Green vegetables also avoided as ‘they engender wind and melancholy’ but cucumbers, lettuces and the herb parslane eaten as a first course.
Did Henry suffer from syphilis?
Supporters of this theory suggest his ulcer of 1527-8 was a broken-down gumma, a symptom of tertiary syphilis. The disease can cause miscarriages and still-births. But the leg is unusual location for a gumma, and this ulcer was painful, whilst gummata are not. What’s more, there is no sign of syphilis in his children.
The sixteenth-century treatment for ‘French Pox’ was six weeks of sweating and administration of doses of poisonous mercury (mixed with the spittle of a fasting man) which made the patients’ gums red and sore and created copious flows of saliva. But Henry had no lengthy absence from public view reported by the gaggle of ambassadors at his court – nor did he display any symptoms of this horrible treatment. Furthermore, there were no purchases of mercury in surviving apothecary’s or doctors’ accounts.
I believe the symptoms reported by his courtiers and evidence of his dramatic change in appearance in the early 1540s indicate that he was suffering from a disease just as invidious as syphilis.
Cushing’s Syndrome
This is an endocrine abnormality, which today affects 10-15 people in a million and can be treated very successfully with modern medicine. Henry’s doctors of course did not possess the ability to diagnose or control the disease.
Its symptoms includes gross obesity in the body trunk, increased fat around the necks, a ‘moon face’, buffalo hump to back. They suffer slow and poor healing of wounds and their bones are weakened and the muscles around the hips become wasted. They have high blood pressure and diabetes.
The victims display irritability, depression, anxiety, insomnia and sudden mood swings. In around 20% of cases, they become psychotic, exhibiting paranoia that drives a deep suspicion of everyone around them. They are quarrelsome, unnaturally aggressive and become emotionally detached from loved ones or those close to them.
Henry displays many of these symptoms. He has a sudden increase of fat in his trunk, his face becomes round, and his wounds are slow to heal. His mobility is sharply decreased – he walks with a staff after 1541 – and later, he readily agrees to destroy his wife and closest friend, but then abruptly changes his mind.
In November 1545, the king agreed to Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s arrest for heresy but summoned him to Whitehall palace at 11 o’clock at night to warn him of the planned arrest the following day at a Privy Council meeting. When the conspirators made their move against the archbishop, Henry slapped them down, saying: ‘I believe Canterbury as faithful man towards me as ever was prelate in this realm… who so loves me will regard him so’.
His sixth queen Katherine Parr, with her reformist religious beliefs, also became a target for conservative plotters. The odious Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester told Henry in 1546 that the Queen’s views were heresy under law and he could ‘disclose such treasons cloaked with this heresy’. Henry was happy to sign her arrest warrant but when the Lord Chancellor came to arrest her in the Privy Gardens at Whitehall, he boxed his ears shouting ‘Arrant knave, beast and fool’ and sent him packing.
Henry’s Last Days
Henry retired to his palace at Whitehall in December 1546 and began his final journey to meet his maker. His last days were painful: his legs were sometimes cauterized – seared with hot irons – by his doctors – Messrs. Wendy, Owen and Huicke.
On 17 January, the king briefly saw the Spanish and French ambassadors and talked of diplomatic and military matters. He seemed ‘fairly well’. Two days later he was said to be planning the investiture of his nine-year-old Edward as Prince of Wales.
Then Henry began to drift in and out of consciousness. In mid-morning on 27 January, he received communion from his confessor John Boole and discussed matters of state with some councillors.
His doctors were afraid to tell Henry that he was dying. Under Cromwell’s laws, it was treason to predict the king’s death.
That evening, Sir Anthony Denny, chief gentleman of the Privy Chamber, came into the king’s bedroom and knelt by the great walnut bed of estate. He warned the king ‘that in man’s judgment you are not like to live’ and exhorted him to prepare himself for death. Denny urged the king to remember his sins ‘as becomes every good Christian man to do’.
Henry said he believed ‘the mercy of Christ is able to pardon me all my sins, yea, though they were greater than they be’. Denny asked if the king wanted to see ‘any learned man to confer withal and open his mind unto’. Henry nodded and said: ‘If I had any, it should be Dr. Cranmer but I will first take a little sleep. And then, as I feel myself, I will advise upon the matter’. These were his last known words.
Shortly afterwards Henry lost the power of speech and probably passed into an uraemic coma.
Cranmer, at his palace in Croydon, Surrey, was summoned to give Henry the last rites. But it was a terribly cold night and the icy roads held up his progress to London. The archbishop arrived at Whitehall in the early hours and clambered up on the king’s great bed. He grasped Henry’s hand and whispered in the ear of the unconscious king: ‘Do you die in the faith of Christ?’ Cranmer claimed he felt Henry’s hand squeeze his own as a sign, a token of his acknowledgement.
Henry died around 2am on 28 January 1547, aged 55 and 7 months, from renal and liver failure, coupled with effects of obesity.
Further reading: Robert Hutchinson, Last Days of Henry VIII, Phoenix, London 2006
Robert Hutchinson, Young Henry, Phoenix, London 2012
Clifford Brewer, The Death of Kings, London 2000
Robert Hutchinson will be speaking on “The Spanish Armada” at the Chalke Valley History Festival on Tuesday, 24th June 2014.
Useful links:
http://www.andrewlownie.co.uk/authors/robert-hutchinson
http://www.sal.org.uk/newsandevents/Lecture%20Archive/lecturerecordings/lecture28january2014
Recording from Guy Walters’s talk “The Great Escape’, for CVHF 2013, Saturday 29th June 2013.
In March 1944, some 80 Allied prisoners of war tunnelled out of a maximum security POW camp in Lower Silesia. Immortalised fifty years ago in the film The Great Escape, the breakout from Stalag Luft III has become a vital – and almost mythological – component of our Second World War story. In his talk, Guy will take a fresh look at the escape, and ask a number of penetrating questions. What was the point of the Great Escape? Did it really open, as is often claimed, a new front within the German Reich? How many POWs actually wanted to escape? How well was it organised? Did RAF officers really have a duty to escape? How much help did the Germans supply? What was the character and motivation of Roger Bushell, the squadron leader who led the escape? And finally, was the Great Escape really all that great? Guy’s talk promises to be both thrilling and controversial as he strips away the myth to uncover the reality.
Working in the archives in Delhi, I recently came across a file of newspaper clippings collected shortly after Gandhi’s death. These dealt with various schemes suggested by diverse citizens of India to honour the Mahatma’s memory. Thus, for example, in its issue of 3rd March 1948, a paper named New Orissa, published from Cuttack, reported that a certain Dr Prunachandra Mitra had introduced a resolution in the Bihar Legislative Assembly demanding that India be renamed ‘Gandhistan’.
Other proposals were somewhat less ambitious, seeking merely to have the dead leader commemorated in their own place of residence. Thus, as reported in the East Bengal Times of 22nd March 1948, a meeting of the Hindu and Muslim ladies of Sylhet resolved to establish a Gandhi Memorial Hall in the town, where ‘they would conduct a women’s library, club, introduce cottage industries and would propogate the teachings of Gandhiji’. The scheme was modest, as well as noble—for Sylhet was now in East Pakistan.
A far more ambitious scheme was reported in The Hindu of 1st March 1948. On the 29th of February, the Jam Saheb of Nawanagar had laid the foundation for a statue of Gandhi on top of a hill fifteen miles north of Bombay, adjacent to a village named Chandivilli. The report on the ceremony noted the actual height of the hill—six hundred and ninety four feet—as well as the height of the statue itself. This was to be seventy-nine feet high, presumably one foot for every year of Gandhi’s life.
Nawanagar was a princely state in Kathiawar, the ear-shaped peninsula in Western India to which the Mahatma himself belonged. His father had been Dewan both of Porbandar—where Gandhi was born—and of Rajkot, where Gandhi went to school. After Independence, the princely states of Kathiawar were brought together in a united state known as Saurashtra (later to be merged with Gujarat).
At this time, March 1948, the Jam Saheb of Nawanagar was the Rajpramukh (or Governor) of this Union of Kathiawari States. Now, watching him lay the foundation for a statue of the greatest son of Kathiawar was his Chief Minister, the veteran Congressman U.N. Dhebar. And there were a clutch of other dignitaries too. For some reasons the former rulers of Rajkot and Porbandar were absent. Yet The Hindu report (which came courtesy the wire service AP) noted the attendance of the Maharajas of Bhavnagar and Morvi, both states of Kathiawar to which Gandhi had close connections. (He had studied in Bhavnagar, while his best friend came from Morvi). Also present were the lawyer-politician K. M. Munshi, S. K. Patil (the influential President of the Bombay Pradesh Congress Committee), Dahyabhai Patel (son of Vallabhbhai), and the Sheriff and Mayor of Bombay.
The summit of the hill was to be named Gandhi Shikhar. If/when it reached its full height of seventy-nine feet, the statue would be seen from miles around. The scheme also envisaged the construction of seventy nine pillars or stupas. These would be placed, at suitable intervals, around the foot of the hill, punctuating a one and a quarter miles long perambulation (pradakshina). Each pillar would contain details (presumably in Gujarati and English, and possibly Hindi as well) of an important event in Gandhi’s life.
The scheme itself was the idea of one Amritlal D. Sheth, editor of the Janmabhoomi group of newspapers.
One does not know whether this statue and those pillars were ever built. One suspects not. A well-known historian of Bombay, who lives in the city’s northern suburbs, when asked whether such a statue of the Mahatma exists on a hill in the vicinity, says he has never heard of it. Googling Gandhi/ Chandivilli throws up no results either.
These many and various (and grand and sometimes crazy) schemes to honour Gandhi distressed those with a somewhat deeper understanding of his work and legacy. Thus, in a letter to The Hindu published in the first week of March 1948, the social worker Mrs S. Muthulakshmi Reddi deplored this proliferation of proposals for Mahatma memorials. ‘If he were alive and consulted in this matter’, she remarked, ‘he would certainly decline to have any statues and temples in his name; but, instead, he would strongly advocate that the funds raised in his name should be utilised for carrying out his constructive programme for social and national service.’
The Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, also deplored the mania to name so many things after Gandhi. As one who had worked closely with the Mahatma, he said that ‘the most suitable memorial’ would be to ‘follow his great teaching and to organize work in order to further his constructive ideas in the development of the nation’. Nehru thought some statues and memorials should be constructed, yet the current craze, if not checked, might leadto thousands of roads, parks, squares named after him. This would be both empty symbolism as well as bad aesthetics. For it would ‘not contribute either to conveniences or to the glory of the father of the nation. Only confusion will result as well as a certain drab uniformity. Most of us will then live in Gandhi roads in Gandhinagars or Gandhigrams’.
Those who had known Gandhi closely or worked with him were naturally dismayed by the desire to freeze his memory in street names or grand statues. Yet some ordinary citizens were disenchanted by this frenzy as well. In its issue of 1st March 1948, The Statesman printed a lovely letter to the editor from a certain Indian resident of Rangoon named V. Raman Nair. This began by noting that the desire to memorialize Gandhi would in time be followed by similar proposals to honour, after their own death, other leaders of the freedom movement. And so ‘perhaps some hundred years since the name of Mahatma Gandhi will stand for a town in Madras, of Pandit Nehru for a river in the Punjab, of Sardar Patel for a hair-dressing saloon in Bombay, and so forth.’
Mr Nair of Rangoon observed that ‘our renaming enthusiasts evidently forget that almost every existing name has a cultural and historical background, or may already be perpetuating someone’s memory. To change that name is to attempt to perpetuate one memory at the expense of another. If every age had the same craze for christening and re-christening the Ganges, the Himalayas, and the Taj Mahal would now be known by a hundred cacophonous names. All the romance associated with them will vanish if Sabarmati and Santiniketan, for instance, are renamed after their founders.’
The diasporic Indian was not entirely swayed by the then prevalent mood of anti-colonialism. Thus, as he pointed out, ‘the renaming of Clive Street and Hastings Street’ in Calcutta (then under active consideration) would not wipe out the history of British rule in India. In fact, said Mr Nair, ‘people who really value their independence will want to leave these names alone, as symbols of their one-time servitude. If all such traces and landmarks are destroyed, future historians might be compelled to dig up archives in foreign countries to evaluate the past’.
The grand statue planned for a hill outside Bombay was never built. Yet, some six decades later, another Gujarati centure to memorialize Gandhi bore fruition. This is the so-called ‘Mahatma Mandir’, a large…
I’d like to end this essay with the views of Gandhi’s foremost Southern disciple, C. Rajagoplachari. At the time of the Mahatma’s assassination, Rajaji was Governor of West Bengal. Like Nehru and Muthulakshmi Reddy, he asked for social action, rather than statues or buildings in stone, to honour the memory and example of their dead leader. The Hindu reported that, speaking on All India Radio, Calcutta, on 28th February 1948, Rajaji pointed out that Gandhi had lived and died for the cause of religious harmony. Therefore, the establishment of Hindu-Muslim amity would be the ‘only worthy and satisfying memorial over his ashes’. And so it still remains.
Ramachandra Guha will be speaking on “Arguments with Gandhi” at the Chalke Valley History Festival on Monday, 23rd June 2014.
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