The sweating sickness, or the sweat for short, seems to have been a kind of acute influenza, perhaps combined with pneumonia. The principal symptom was profuse sweating (hence the name). The disease moved with extraordinary speed: within twenty-four hours the patient was generally past the worst–or dead. The epidemic made its first recorded appearance in England at the end of the fifteenth century. Thereafter, it struck again, invariably in the summer and with undiminished ferocity, every few years. The outbreak of 1528 was one of the worst.
Certainly, it had the most momentous consequences.
On Tuesday, 16 June, one of Anne’s ladies-in-waiting fell sick of the disease.
It was in any case a day of upheaval at Court as it was the beginning of the Progress. The whole Courtly apparatus of ‘portable magnificence’–the tapestries and cushions, jewels and plate, household utensils and the King’s own clothes, bedding, travelling library, medicine chest and personal petty-cash–had been packed into their special bags, boxes and chests and loaded on to carts. The carts had been covered with bear-hides to protect them against the elements and the great caravanserai of the Court stood ready to depart from Greenwich to the first port of call of the Progress: Waltham Abbey in Essex.
But, with the news of the disease, these orderly arrangements were abandoned. Henry immediately rode off to Waltham while Anne was sent to stay with her father at Hever.1
Such a flight to safety was Henry’s invariable reaction to plague and other epidemic diseases. No one would have expected him to behave differently–with the exception, it appears, of Anne herself. She seems to have protested at the abrupt separation from her royal admirer. At any rate, Henry was soon writing to her, to comfort her and remove her ‘unreasonable thoughts’. He trusted that the disease had spared her as it seemed to have done him. He heard that she had had, as yet, no symptoms. And, in any case, he asserted, ‘few if any women’ had been affected.
But the real purpose of the letter was to assure Anne that, despite his flight and their separation, his love for her remained the same. ‘Wherever I may be I am yours,’ he protested, reverting both to the Courtly French and the extravagant phraseology of his earliest letters to her. And, once more, there was a fanciful signature: his royal cipher between the syllables of the French word immuable–the whole meaning ‘King Henry the Constant’ or ‘King Henry the Immovable.’ The fact that the ‘Constant’ and ‘Immovable’ Henry was actually in a state of perpetual motion, fleeing from house to house to escape the sweat, may have escaped Henry. But Anne is unlikely to have missed the irony.2
A day or so later Henry’s hardy optimism was dashed: Anne had fallen ill, along with her father. The news was brought to Henry at night. Immediately, he wrote to her again. It was the worst possible thing that could have happened. He loved her more than the whole world. He desired her health as much as his own. He would gladly suffer half her illness to have her cured.
With the letter Henry sent Anne a physician. His favourite doctor (probably Dr Chamber) was unfortunately absent, just at the moment when he was most needed. But, in his place, Henry was despatching his second medical adviser. He prayed to God that this physician would be able to make her well. Anne, for her part, ‘was to be governed by his advice regarding your sickness’. That way, Henry wrote, ‘I hope soon to see you again, which will be a better restorative to me than all the precious stones of the world’–and here the King, who was himself a keen amateur of medicine, referred to the supposed curative properties of certain jewels.3
The physician’s name was Dr William Butts. He had gone up to Cambridge about ten years before Foxe and Gardiner. But, since he was a slower developer than that brilliant pair of friends, he was an elder contemporary of theirs. He commenced his MD in 1518 and in 1524 he became the Principal of St Mary’s Hostel, which lay a few yards from both Gardiner’s Trinity Hall and Foxe’s King’s College. His practice began in the mid-1520s and he quickly made his name with his treatment, first of the always sickly Princess Mary and then, as recently as May 1528, of the usually robust Duke of Norfolk. Norfolk sang his praises, as one ‘without whose aid he thinks he should not have recovered’. But Anne was his test-case.4
At first, it was touch and go. ‘By returning in of the sweat before the time’, Anne was in grave ‘jeopardy’. Though no one knew it at the time, the whole future of England, England’s Church and England’s State, hung in the balance. But ‘the endeavour of Mr Butts’ (or, more likely, the vigorous Boleyn constitution) carried her through. She survived.5
Butts’s career was now made. ‘If he can put you in health again,’ Henry had vowed in his letter to Anne, ‘I shall love him better than ever.’ He kept his promise. By Christmas, Butts had been appointed Royal Physician with the then enormous salary of £100 a year. With Anne herself, Butts’s relationship became, if anything, even more intimate. For he helped take charge not only of Anne’s physical health but of her spiritual welfare and religious patronage as well.6
Anne recovered rapidly. However, Henry’s invariable practice was to impose a lengthy period of quarantine on members of his entourage who had been sick or otherwise exposed to infection. He made no exception–not even for Anne–and she remained in Kent for several weeks. But they communicated frequently by letter. And her absence not only made Henry grow fonder (as the French ambassador noted with apparent surprise) but also more generous to her ‘suits’ or petitions on behalf of her relatives and clients.
The ability to get jobs and procure favours was, then as now, a mark of political power. As soon as Henry’s passion for Anne was clear, Cavendish notes, ‘it was…judged…throughout all the Court of every man that she being in such favour with the King might work mysteries with the King and obtain any suit of him for her friend’. Anne, for her part, grasped the opportunity eagerly. Unlike Catherine, a foreigner and with no ties binding her to Court parties or factions, Anne had wheeling-and-dealing in her blood. She was the daughter of a man whose ambition was to serve the King ‘in the Court all the days of my life’; her uncle was the politically supple Duke of Norfolk; her brother-in-law, William Carey, was a gentleman of the Privy Chamber; and her cousin, Sir Francis Bryan, known as ‘the Vicar of Hell’, was one of the most colourful characters of the Court. For Anne to press suits on the King, and turn her power over his heart into power over his patronage, was as natural as breathing.7
Anne showed a particular interest in the appointment of the next Abbess of Wilton in Wiltshire. The house was a rich one and many of the nuns were the unmarriageable daughters of important families. They had little by way of religious vocation and lived the life of ladies of leisure–gadding about the countryside, feuding with each other and occasionally conducting not very well concealed love affairs with local clergy. The last Abbess had died in April and two candidates quickly emerged to replace her: Dame Isobel Jordan and Dame Eleanor Carey. Eleanor was sister of William Carey, who pressed hard for her appointment. But William Carey was one of the first victims of the sweating sickness. Anne then took over the suit, as a kindness to her sister Mary’s stricken family, and got Henry to promise faithfully that Eleanor should have the post.
But here other forces came into play. Dame Isobel had powerful backers, too, including, it soon became clear, Wolsey himself. Both sides in the struggle played dirty and the easy-going life of the Abbey provided plenty of scandalous material. Dame Eleanor admitted that she had ‘had two children by two sundry priests and further since hath been kept by a servant of the Lord Broke that was, and not long ago’. There were nasty rumours, too, about Dame Isobel–though, it was conceded, she ‘is so old that of many years she could not be as she was named’.
The upshot was a stalemate that was submitted to Henry himself for resolution. He reported his decision to Anne in a letter written at the beginning of July. Her sister-in-law, Eleanor Carey, was barred out of hand. ‘I would not’, Henry wrote to Anne, ‘for all the gold in the world cloak your conscience or mine to make her ruler of a house which is of so ungodly demeanour.’ That might seem to open the way to Dame Isobel. But Henry arrived at a Judgement of Solomon. ‘Yet notwithstanding’, he assured Anne, ‘to do you pleasure, I have done that neither of them shall have it; but that some [other] good and well disposed woman shall have it.’ This was an ingenious solution, calculated to save face all round.8
But Wolsey rejected it. The minister’s mind at this time is unusually hard to read; probably, indeed, he was unsure of it himself as he was buffeted by contrary experiences. There were long delays in the suit for the decretal commission, on which he had hung his whole future. These filled him with fears and forebodings, which he confided to the French ambassador. And the sweat was carrying off so many in his own household that it seemed impossible that he should escape infection himself. At this moment, suddenly, the clouds parted and Gardiner’s letter arrived with news that Clement had, at last, conceded the decretal commission. Swinging now wildly between depression and a sense of mission, between talk of retirement and a determination to do the right thing at all costs, Wolsey’s mood became dangerously unpredictable. At the beginning of July, he even managed to pick a quarrel with the faithful Russell. This was rather like fighting with himself. Even more dangerously, however, he resolved to take on the King.9
Henry’s decision in the Wilton affair had been communicated to him in a letter written by the Court cleric, Dr Bell. Wolsey decided on his response probably on 5 July. Contrary to his usual practice, he did not inform Henry immediately. Instead, he sent him a strange letter. If these were ‘the last words’ he wrote to him, he assured the King, ‘I dare boldly say and affirm, your grace hath had of me, a most loving, true and faithful servant; and that for favour, meed, gift or promise of gift, at any time, I never did or consented to [any]thing that might, in the least point, redound unto your dishonour or disprofit.’ It was a magnificent valedictory, written in fear of imminent death. Unfortunately, perhaps, Wolsey lived–and had to live with the consequences of his actions.10
Two days later, on the 7th, Bell was still pressing Wolsey for a reply to his letter. What had he done about Wilton? Henry, under pressure no doubt from Anne, was keen to know.11
Wolsey delayed another few days still before writing, and his letter did not reach Bell till the 10th. Bell trembled as he reported Henry’s reaction. The King was ‘somewhat moved’; Bell, for his part, protested that ‘I would rather than part of my small substance’ that Wolsey had acted otherwise. The next day Heneage confirmed Henry’s displeasure: ‘he was not best content’.12
For Wolsey, it transpired, had appointed Dame Isobel Jordan Abbess of Wilton. In so doing, he had defied Henry’s direct command. Still worse, perhaps, he had humiliated the King in front of Anne.