Chapter III: Part 3

Innumerable attempts have been made to explain the slanders upon Queen Elizabeth, from Miss Gwen John’s explanation given in her little play, “The Prince,”(12) that probably they arose from accidental episodes that occurred when she was about her normal duties at Court, to Major Hume’s idea—which is generally held—that they were the result of purposeful “hoaxing” by the Great Queen, all done for the sake of her country. True, like her father Henry VIII, Elizabeth was very patriotic; but, as one of Professor Chamberlin’s doctors suggests, it is difficult to distinguish between her patriotism and her desire to keep her own head on her shoulders. So far as I know the present suggestion—that the contemporary rumours about her physical malformation were impossible—has never been put forward before. It again leaves the field open for those who are able to estimate the effects of sectarian enthusiasm upon the human mind to find some other explanation than a physical malformation.

Her character has been so much besmirched by slander that we are sometimes apt to forget that in reality she was as clever and intellectual as her great father in his youth. She knew several languages, and to seek consolation in the worries that necessarily befell her it is said that she translated Boëthius’ “Consolatio Philosophiæ.”(9)

If we are to remember her as the man-struck old maid who philandered with and petted her favourites, it is equally well for us to remember her as the intellectual woman who was able to translate a deep philosophical work. The extremely intellectual qualities that one finds in Elizabeth are sometimes forgotten in the whirlwind of sectarian slander and patriotism that had centred itself on her head. Possibly the reason why she fixed upon Boëthius for translation—he had already been done by Chaucer—is because he wrote his great “consolation” in prison while he was awaiting the Roman executioner. Perhaps she thought that his case somewhat resembled her own.

Her dual personality came out strongly in her last words. According to Sir Sidney Lee they were “Ad inferos eat melancholia”—“To hell with melancholy.” Not long afterwards she fell into a deep coma(10)—probably caused by septic intoxication from an abscess in her tonsils, acting upon a woman whose arteries were much older than her years—and died in her sleep. In these words one sees the reckless courage that we suppose to be male, swearing and laughing in the face of death however unwelcome he may be, and the feminine desire to charm which led her to paint her face as she said them.

But after all, the best epitaph upon Elizabeth is the little verse that she scratched upon a windowpane at Woodstock Manor, where her loving sister Mary was “entertaining” her much as we entertained Napoleon at St. Helena:

“Much is suspected of me;
Nothing proved can be;
Elizabeth prisoner.”

And perhaps it is as well that nothing can be proved against the personal morality of one of the greatest women in history. One imagines that her wraith would laugh ironically at all our vain efforts, as her young girlhood evidently laughed at poor Mary as she scratched the words _Elizabeth prisoner_.(5)

I take from the _British Medical Journal_ of 1910 the description of her actual death, because it is in accordance with my own experience of the deaths of fierce and obstinate old ladies.

Lady Southwell, one of her maids of honour, said: “She kept her bed for fifteen dayes besides the three dayes that she sat upon her stool without speaking; until one day, being pulled upon her feet by force, she stood upon her feet for fifteen hours. Her Majestie understood that Mr. Secretarie Cecil had given forth that she was mad; and therefore in her sickness she said ‘Cecill, know thou that I am not mad; you must not try to make Queen Jane of me.’” Queen Jane was “Crazy Jane,” mother of Charles V, and this recollection of the days of her youth, when Charles V was the greatest man in the world, is very characteristic of an old person. “And,” continues Lady Southwell, “though by Cecil’s means many stories were spread about that she was mad, myself, nor anie that were about me, could never see that her speeches, so well adapted, proved her distracted mind.”

Then they lifted her into bed; she fell asleep; and the last of the great personal monarchs of England died in coma. There was no sectarian nonsense about her waking from a stupor to press anybody’s hand, when all she wanted was to get on with her dying.

But though Elizabeth was so great and had such an astonishing effect on English history(8) it would be a mistake to turn her into the heroine of a sentimental novel.

(1) A. F. Pollard, _Political History of England_.

(2) F. Chamberlin, _Private Character of Queen Elizabeth_.

(3) F. Chamberlin, _The Sayings of Queen Elizabeth_.

(4) Ben Jonson, _Conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden_.

(5) F. A. Mumby, _Girlhood of Queen Elizabeth_.

(6) M. S. Hume, _Courtships of Queen Elizabeth_.

(7) Mabel Christie, _Henry VI_.

(8) Rachel Taylor, _Aspects of the Italian Renaissance_.

(9) _The Australasian Journal of Philosophy_, June, 1924.

(10) Facts from the _British Medical Journal_, 1910; guess my own.

(11) Julian Huxley, _Essays of a Biologist_.

(12) Gwen John, _The Prince_.

Ivan the Terrible

The life of this criminal lunatic has been described so often, with so much journalistic horror, that I hesitate to offer the plain matter-of-fact comments of a doctor upon it.

In order to understand the Russia of the last few centuries, we must first of all glance at Russian history. Under the brutal yoke of the Mongols the Russians learned the worst extremes of cruelty to which the vanquished in an Oriental country must submit; for, their country laid waste by civil war and devastated by the Tartars, the whole people were familiar with bloodshed, misery and cruelty. A man’s children were his slaves, whom he could sell four times, and his wife and family lay under a sterner rule of fatherhood than ever obtained even in Rome or in Asia. Prisoners of war had to sell themselves as slaves lest they starve.

Ivan was born in 1530, son of Vassili Ivanovitch and Helena Glinska. One of his brothers was an imbecile, and his father was sullen, changeable, and savagely ferocious.

When Ivan was three years of age his father died, and, under the regency of his mother his education in vice began; indeed, it seems to have been prodigious. Although Helena seems to have done her best to protect him, he was encouraged by courtiers to yield to every form of self-indulgent vice that is possible to a young man. He used to watch with delight his dogs as they fell upon prisoners whom he had had thrown to them; and was constantly suspicious of the Boyars, or aristocrats, whom he suspected to have organised conspiracies against him. It is said that they used to organise their conspiracies either in the name of Ivan or of his mother; and they were opposed by their natural enemies, the trading classes. Hence it was that Ivan conceived a violent hatred and terror of the Boyars, and an equally foolish trust in the merchants. He had to suffer many indignities, and saw his favourites murdered before his eyes. Ivan struck back, until at last he captured one Shousky, last of the Boyars, and gleefully threw him to the dogs from the balcony whence he had often seen his prisoners eaten. A great fire broke out in Moscow in 1547, when Ivan was seventeen years old; seventeen hundred people perished in the flames. The populace rose in fury, accusing his grandmother and her sons of setting Moscow ablaze. Being a good grandson Ivan acted with vigour; he did not try to ascertain how far the old lady and his uncles were guilty, but incontinently seized upon the ringleaders of the people and put them to death as they deserved. In the midst of the pother a monk—one Sylvester—appeared. He seems to have been like one of those Oriental prophets who are said to have dared to tell the truth to kings. Bravely facing Ivan, he foretold the future in many visions and dreams; and warned Ivan that it was owing to his own misdeeds that Russia was suffering such tragic torments.

For some reason Ivan spared him, called together a synod of priests and other intelligentsia of Russia and asked for its aid in the government. Flattered, the synod drew up rules for its ruler; and the next ten years are pictured to us—possibly by friends of the synod—as a veritable _quinquennium Neronis_; though the period was longer than Nero’s. There was good government and outward prosperity; the army was reformed; a new code of laws was devised; a printing press was established; Archangel was founded; trade with England was set afoot through the White Sea; by victories in Livonia the frontier was pushed towards the Baltic; fortresses against the Tartars were established in the Crimea; and the Turks were driven back. In these wars Ivan IV showed himself to be a great and able general; a worthy predecessor of that Peter the Great who was soon to come after him.

But this was too good to last. In 1552 his wife died: Anastasia, first of the Romanoffs, the woman, as it would now seem, who saved Russia by protecting the Tsar from harpies. Ivan was heart-broken. He suspected her to have been poisoned, as every sudden death in the sixteenth century was attributed to poison; and from a little village near Moscow he wrote a violent letter, accusing the Boyars both of poisoning his Anastasia and of misgoverning Russia during his minority. He concluded by threatening that God called him to abandon the ungrateful people, who were unworthy of such love as his.

This threw Russia into a panic. “How shall we get on without our ruler?” they asked. “Who will defend us against our enemies? What will the sheep do without their shepherd?”

Evidently Ivan was a politician of no mean order; he knew his Russia. Touched by the weeping of the herd, he returned to his subjects. But how changed an Ivan! Formerly he had been a splendid man physically, tall, broad-shouldered, with hawk nose and eagle eyes; a true tsar of the dynasty of Rurik; fit leader of the great Russian people. On his return to his loving people he was suddenly become thin and wasted; his hair was falling; his skin was dull; his eyes had lost their brilliance; physical degeneration had already set in.

Considering his subsequent history, it is probable that in the fit of petulance after the death of his beloved wife he had become infected with syphilis, which was then at the height of its conquering career throughout Europe. Eight days after her death he married a Circassian woman, who was of a rough mind, and of coarse breed; possibly it may have been from her that he caught his disease, for to her influence is generally attributed his mental degeneration.

Such a fate often happens to a physically strong young man who suddenly finds himself deprived of his helpmate; and it was a wise law of the Romans, that every Governor of a province must be married; if for no other reason than that a wife would protect him from the attacks of other women who might mean him less well than she.

When he was seventeen, he had proclaimed himself “Tsar,” thus showing himself bolder than his predecessors, who had perforce to content themselves with the title of “Grand-Duke.”

Now, in his new-found glory, with his new wife by his side, he raised for himself a bodyguard of 6,000 men, whom he called the Opritschnitza. These men rode through the countryside with besoms and dogs’ skulls at their saddle-bows. The emblems were supposed to signify that they would sweep away and hunt down all enemies of the Tsar.

But the Boyars were still to be properly punished for their wickedness; there were a few left, and at least the children of the infamous brood survived and had to be brought to justice; so Ivan rode through the land from country-house to country-house at the head of his men, besoms, dogs’ skulls, and all, slaying and burning; a right merry journey. Those whom he could not kill perished in the snow, and all Russia lay in terror of Æsop’s “King Stork.” Better had it been for Russia if the people had left him in his self-imposed quarantine, to recover in peace from his skin-syphilis before it had attacked his brain. For a man suddenly driven mad by securing absolute power, and worried by fighting, revenge, and murder, to rage desperately about the country instead of treating his syphilis even by the crude methods that were in vogue in the middle of the sixteenth century, was sheer madness. To this day we find that physical and mental rest, fresh air, and mercury, are the standbys in the treatment of syphilis, and quite probably it is less deadly to-day than it was in 1550.

It was the custom in Russia for the Tsar, when he wanted a wife, to collect all the most beautiful women from whom he should make his choice; and in 1570 he, in need of another wife, collected no less than 2,000 girls; them he kept in captivity for more than a year, treating them as he would, ruthlessly and relentlessly, a symptom truly characteristic of cerebral syphilis in a man untroubled by restraints, moral or legal. From these he chose another wife for himself and one for his son, that the great name of Ivan should not perish from the earth.

The shuddering remainder he bestowed on his courtiers, or sent home.

Cerebral syphilis is an extraordinary thing. Besides causing general paralysis, which is known positively to be syphilitic, the disease acts upon the arteries of the brain, and the symptoms that it causes seem to depend upon the areas of the brain that the diseased arteries supply. If the affected area is the front of the brain in which the intellectual faculties are supposed to be, all the symptoms of violent mental irritation are caused. They may begin quite early in the disease, and may last for many years till the patient’s death; much appears to depend upon whether the patient has been able to live a decent and quiet life. That in the case of Henry VIII his disease apparently led to nothing more monstrous than cutting off two of his wives’ heads—possibly they deserved it—and to violent and murderous political activity, would rather seem to show that if he had had a chance of rest and treatment he might have been no worse a king than many others who have won fame and gratitude. At least he was a highly educated man who certainly meant well at first. Ivan from the beginning was little better than a brute, of shocking family history and evil impulses. In him it probably went far beyond the stage of mere syphilitic psychasthenia.[10]

Seven wives in all were his, so that he beat Henry’s record by one. I suppose he showed the same miserable story of domestic unhappiness, but I have not been sufficiently interested to find out. Some of his letters are still extant, and they show all the signs of insanity, in their unwieldy length, their foolish cunning, their voluble avoidance of the main point, and their inconsequence. On the evidence of these letters alone any two doctors to-day would “sign up” Ivan IV. To say that he became wildly sexual would be to understate the matter: he developed the morals of a satyr. This is all very characteristic of syphilitic insanity, whose victims often find its worst effects in an utter abandonment of sexual restraint. It is almost as if the disease, being often the result of impurity, revenges itself on the victim by accentuating the very incontinence which has caused it.

The rest of the story of Ivan the Terrible—it is strange that history has not yet called him Ivan the Great—is not very interesting, except for two shocking incidents that we shall relate in their turn. It is simply the record of a man with an Oriental mind, maddened by syphilis, abandoning himself to the most ruthless cruelty, experimenting as if to plumb the depths of human wickedness. It would be wearisome both to tell it and to read it, with all the senseless stabbings, the stamping on the feet of helpless menials, the red-hot pokers, the experiments in torture, the burnings, the infamy. Let us hold our noses and turn to historical facts of a broader interest.

A man, in order to curry favour with the Tsar, wrote a private letter to the King of Poland accusing the great city of Novgorod of conspiring against its ruler. Ivan found it by a trick, possibly with the connivance of the writer. He held his peace, just as Henry VIII had remained silent when he first heard of the sin of Anne Boleyn. But, without a word to anybody, he collected an army of 15,000 men, whom he marched towards the doomed city, around which he erected a barricade of stakes that no one might enter or leave so as to escape the just punishment of an outraged Tsar. Then, for every day throughout a period of five weeks 500 to 1,000 of the citizens were led into his presence and put to death in all sorts of amusing ways; Ivan’s cleverness in devising new ways of killing seems to have been really wonderful. So wicked was the city that neither man, woman, nor child was spared, until but a scanty few remained alive. This niggardly remainder he collected before him, and forced to pray for the beloved Tsar. Like many syphilitic lunatics he had long considered himself to be God.

Then his eldest son, Ivan, who had grown up very like himself in character, so that people were already looking into the future with forebodings, took offence at what the half-witted fellow thought to be his father’s insult to his wife, Helena. With a roar Ivan rushed upon his son, striking him on the head with a heavy staff shod with iron. Ivan the prince dropped insensible, and died in a few days. Tsar Ivan was shocked unutterably, did penance and for a time seemed to regain sanity in his grief for the loss of his bright boy. But only for a time; soon the old monotonous régime of insensate cruelty returned.

1584 was a great year for Ivan. Feeling rather unwell the brilliant idea struck him that a well-born English girl would just suit his whim; so he sent a special messenger to Queen Elizabeth to select him one, also to inform her that, should his mutinous subjects prove unruly he would honour England by seeking therein a sanctuary. Thrice happy England; sanctuary for so many politicians! Well might refugees from the Austrian troubles in 1848 seek her green fields for peace.

The Virgin Queen selected one of her maids of honour, Lady Mary Hastings, for this dishonour. The Earl of Huntingdon, Lady Mary’s father, and Lady Mary herself, shuddered and protested at the thought of her marriage with this dreadful man, especially as Ivan’s seventh wife was still alive, and he had blithely proposed to set her aside in favour of the fair English maid, as the wretched creature would not die, nor leave him single, nor allow him to poison her. But for once, at least, Elizabeth’s heart conquered her head, and she did not press the match; it was too tragic even for the sixteenth century, so that no English girl graced Moscow any more than did Caliban marry Miranda.

But Death was still waiting, inexorably. No doubt Ivan had long forgotten the apparently trifling illness from which he had suffered after the death of his first wife, or rather soon after his second marriage, but it had not forgotten him. Nature never forgets and seldom forgives, as so many doctors have said about Life.

A frightful portent, a comet, appeared in the sky, and as Ivan saw its horrid tail the thought struck him that it had come to warn him of his death. All Russia was at once in a ferment. Soothsayers were summoned from all the ends of the Tsardom. No less than sixty were collected to save the life of the Tsar, that religious lunatic, who had thought himself to be God; but the best they could do was to promise him that he would not die until twelve days had elapsed. “It will be the worse for you if your promise holds good,” said Ivan in a fury; and with that he made up his mind to slay the soothsayers if he should survive the twelve days. The wife of his surviving son, who was to succeed him as the half-imbecile Tsar Feodor—syphilis again!—came to comfort him in his terrors, that this mighty Tsar should not have to go down into the dark his hand unpressed by any woman’s; but Ivan indecently assaulted her and she fled in terror. To the later Ivan every woman was less feminine than female.

The twelfth day dawned and Ivan prepared the scaffold for the execution of the soothsayers. He himself took what precautions occurred to his simple soul, and spent most of the day on a sofa playing draughts with one of his male favourites—surely the most harmless and safest of joys; surely Ivan could have done nothing better unless he had forestalled fate by a good course of mercury thirty years before! At last, just as Ivan was beginning to congratulate himself that he had beaten fate, beaten the comet and beaten the astrologers, and was glutting himself with the anticipation of his next merry jest, he suddenly choked, uttered a stifled cry and fell back dead. Fate and syphilis had won; the astrologers had predicted so accurately that their heads were even then trembling on their shoulders. What had happened? No doubt his syphilis had affected the aortic valve of his heart, as it frequently does to-day. The blood, instead of coursing on its orderly way throughout his body, had run back into his heart, which, being overfull of blood, had stopped; and in a moment Ivan the Terrible was dead. The people wept for him, as being the Tsar. “Such was the Tsar,” sobbed an admirer. “Such as he was, God made him.”

I do not ask you to suppose that I have diagnosed Ivan from any special knowledge of my own; the facts I have enumerated are all to be found in a book called _The Blot upon the Brain_, by the late Dr. W. W. Ireland, a once-celebrated alienist of Edinburgh, who, so far as I know, was the first to suggest that Ivan IV probably suffered from syphilis. I go further, and suggest that he probably suffered from diffuse cerebral syphilis and syphilis of the aortic valve, just as people do to this day.

Twenty years ago I read that syphilis was unusually widespread in Russia, and I have often wondered since 1917 whether that long ago epidemic can possibly have had anything to do with recent Russian politics.

Luther’s Devil

Those people who find it difficult to suppose that God so loves man that He occasionally suspends the operation of the principle of the conservation of energy in order that He may interfere in purely human affairs on this tiny planet will also find it difficult to believe in a personal devil who roams the world seeking whom he may devour and haunting people. Yet Martin Luther, who started the movement that ultimately led the world back to science and reason, had no difficulty whatever in believing this nonsense, and an infinity of other nonsense that to us nowadays seems little short of stark staring crazydom. Surely the poor gentleman must have been deranged, one thinks. Not at all, for Luther had the evidence of his own senses that he was haunted. He heard the foul fiend whistle and roar in his ears; the devil so gripped his heart that Luther never knew that the next moment might not be his last; sometimes he would cause him to be so giddy that when quietly sitting at work Luther was forced to fall from his stool. What was the matter with Martin Luther?

To begin with, most assuredly he was never mad; at the most one could fairly say that, like most of the great leaders of thought, Luther was probably of the manic-depressive temperament, with that strange mixture of apparently insane egotism and gloomy pessimism that so marks people of that temperament. In his famous prayer he orders his God about in a way that one can only compare to that of the Presbyterian divine who cried in a moment of irritation, “Noo, Lord, that’s fair ridic’lous.” If you read Luther’s _Table-talk_, you will at once be struck with his curious temperament, which could combine a certain amount of shrewd common sense, such as you would expect from a man of Saxon peasant stock, with profound belief in the supernatural, a good deal of disbelief in his fellow-man, virulent hatred of the Pope and all his works, and a good deal of what looks uncommonly like sheer mysticism. _En passant_ I found therein the solution of a problem that has long puzzled me. What was the mysterious “sin against the Holy Ghost” that nobody seems to understand? Let Luther explain it to us himself. Many persons have imagined that it represented one of those sexual perversions against which primitive races have so often launched a fierce tabu, simply because they knew nothing of sexual pathology. But really, according to Luther, it was nothing of the kind.

“Sins against the Holy Ghost are: first, presumption; second, despair; third, opposition to and condemnation of the known truth; fourth, not to wish well but to grudge one’s brother and neighbour the grace of God; fifth, to be hardened; sixth, to be impenitent.”

The only fault one has to find with this is that Luther does not tell us how to recognise the truth when one sees it. What _is_ the criterion of truth? Otherwise it would seem to be a fairly good description of a certain type of neurasthenia. Many neurasthenics must go in mortal sin every day of their lives, for it is well known that the devil is particularly on the lookout for sins against the Holy Ghost.

Probably Luther’s devil merely represented symptoms due to his wretched health. There is an excellent description of his dystrophy in Hartmann and Grisar’s monumental _Life of Luther_, and Dr. Cabanes went over it again from the point of view of modern medicine; while nearly fifty years ago Dr. W. W. Ireland of Edinburgh reviewed it from the point of view of an alienist of that time. But Ireland did not perceive the immense influence of Luther’s physical ailments on his mental condition. How could you expect him to, fifty years ago? From these three sources, therefore, I draw the material for this essay. A précis of Dr. Cabanes’ essay appeared in the _St. Louis Urologic and Cutaneous Review_ for November, 1924.

Those fanatic Protestants who still believe that Luther was a meek and mild sort of monk who was driven to revolt by the sins of the “Whore of Babylon” should read his _Table-talk_ in order that they may learn what manner of man he really was; and it will be surprising if they rise from it without an insight into Luther’s character that may possibly change their whole conception of the Reformation. Far from being a gentle and Christlike son of the Church, he was, so far as I can gather from his own words, perhaps the most frenzied theologian of that dark century of theologians. In sheer outrageous superstition he could outdistance even the most ignorant peasant; his fear of the devil amounted to possession, because he attributed to the action of the foul fiend every single thing that he could not understand. An hour spent in reading Luther’s _Table-talk_ gives a better insight into the mind of man during that most terrible of all centuries than a year spent in reading an ordinary history. The most reasonable excuse that we can make for him is that he was ill during the greater part of his life, suffering from one of the most distressing of all ailments.

From about the age of thirty he suffered from dreadful noises in the head, banging, whistling, thumping, and crashing. These were accompanied by terrible attacks of giddiness, which sometimes actually caused him to fall from his stool, and rendered work impossible. Towards middle life he became so neurasthenic that his mental condition became almost that of a lunatic—and indeed the Catholics did not miss the opportunity to say that he had actually become mad; but probably this was but a tit for Luther’s own tat of extraordinary theological violence, and was certainly never true. But what is true is that he began to suffer from pains in the region of the heart, accompanied by a sense of dreadful oppression, so that sometimes he thought himself to be dying. As he grew older he became very deaf, and his cardiac distress became still more terrible.

All these things were to Luther certain evidence that his personal devil was attacking him; it is said that once he threw a pot of ink at the fiend, and the marks of it are still shown. All these things can be explained easily—as Dr. Cabanes suggested—if we suppose that Luther was suffering from Ménière’s disease of the labyrinth, a disease of the inner ear that occasionally attacks middle-aged and gouty people, and is supposed to have added its tragedy to Dean Swift’s already tragic life. The labyrinth is composed of the semi-circular canals, structures which are directed longitudinally and laterally to the axis of the body, and assist us in maintaining our equilibrium; if anything goes wrong in these tiny tubes an unconquerable feeling of giddiness overwhelms us, and it is thought that it is the washing this way and that of the fluid in these canals that causes the deathly feeling of giddiness in seasickness. And the fact that Luther’s deafness steadily increased as he grew older seems to show that it was really caused by Ménière’s disease. In 1541 he seems to have suffered from middle-ear disease, accompanied by dreadful earaches and discharge from the ear; while this lasted he became temporarily quite deaf, but all the time the labyrinthine disorder was going on.

Although he never seems actually to have suffered from gout, there seems to be no doubt that he was of the gouty diathesis, and that uric acid was constantly circulating in his blood, which, added to his manic-depressive temperament, would undoubtedly increase his tendency to gloom. If there can be any worse devil than frightful noises in the head, neurasthenia and uric acid in the blood, it would be interesting to learn what it is. Many a man has been driven to suicide by nothing worse. That Luther seems to have resisted any temptation to suicide that he may have had, speaks volumes for the strength of his purpose.

Probably the pains in his heart and accompanying fear of death represented a gigantic rise in his blood-pressure that would naturally occur in a man of such furious polemic zeal. And it may be that it possibly went so far as to cause angina pectoris. The accompanying fear of death certainly looks like angina, for there is no disease more frightful than angina; the patient feels as though the very grave were yawning for him.

Luther seems to have ultimately become on almost friendly terms with his devil. One night at the castle of Wartburg he heard a dreadful noise on the stair which woke him up—probably it represented noises in his own ears. He got out of bed in a rage with the insolent fiend.

“Is that thou, devil?” he shouted, but Satan said not a word. Then Luther, seeing that Auld Hornie was not to be drawn, got back into bed, piously commended himself to the care of the Lord Jesus Christ, and ultimately got off to sleep again. And this is the sort of thing that went on day and night with the Reformer. What a difference a course of salicylates and bromides might have made to Luther, and possibly through him to the whole Reformation, for there can be little doubt that Luther’s devil played a great part in spurring him to yet more furious religious zeal. Sometimes even he began to despair, and admitted that it was impossible to make peace with the Pope so long as the papacy was the papacy and Luther was Luther. Viewed in this light, that in a sense he was Athanasius _contra mundum_, Luther’s dictatorial and egotistical prayer to his God becomes almost pathetic, for he felt himself alone on the side of God against the mighty power whom he frankly calls anti-Christ, with hardly a soul helping him; it may have been during those passionate appeals to God for guidance before he made the break that his blood-pressure began to rise, for nothing causes the blood-pressure to rise like passionate emotion of any kind. Perhaps forty years later it killed him. Rising blood-pressure kills with exceeding slowness; let excitable politicians beware, for the same rules apply to them to-day as applied to poor Martin Luther, who was really less a man of God than a most furious politician.

Both Hartmann and Grisar and Dr. Cabanes give substantially the same accounts of his sudden death; so probably it is assured in spite of the Catholic story that he committed suicide. For two years a stone in the bladder had added to the tortures of his Ménière’s disease, and on February 17th, 1546, his last seizure attacked him. While at Eisleben he became very restless. “Here at this little village I was baptised,” he said. “It may be that I shall remain here.” In the evening he felt that oppression in the chest of which he had so often complained, so he got his attendants to rub him down with hot flannels, and as soon as he felt better sat down to a light supper. In the middle of the night he awoke, feeling deadly ill. “O my God,” he said, “I do feel so ill; I feel as though I were dying,” and complained of a terrible oppression in his chest. His doctors found him bathed in a cold sweat and without perceptible pulse. He murmured his favourite text from St. John, “God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten son that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish, but shall have life everlasting.” Then he became unconscious and his friends shouted into his deaf ears the question whether he remained steadfast in his faith in Christ and his doctrine, to which they thought they heard him say “Yes,” though probably he did not hear them. At three in the morning his breathing suddenly became audible, and after a deep sigh he died. Probably this is a true account, for we often see the breathing of a dying man assume the up and down character that we call “Cheyne-Stokes.”

For some extraordinary reason Messrs. Hartmann and Grisar attributed this obvious death from heart-failure to apoplexy. One can only suppose that they had never seen a man die of apoplexy; and Dr. Cabanes is undoubtedly right when he attributes it to heart-defeat after a long period of high blood-pressure. Probably a certain amount of angina pectoris also entered into the picture, which is much the same thing put into other language.

But it may be that Dr. Cabanes was too materialistic in supposing that the cause of Luther’s high blood-pressure was drink, in spite of Melanchthon’s explicit statement that Luther was only a moderate drinker. Probably he was no worse than other Germans of the time; and it seems to be undoubtedly true that intense emotion can permanently so put up the blood-pressure that the patient ultimately dies even if only after a great many years; and surely no man ever strained his vascular system more terribly than Martin Luther.

Luther was not a nice man; but nice men do not revolutionise the world.

Henry Fielding

In the gloomy procession of drink, gluttony, and syphilis which makes up so large a part of history—always excepting for a moment Joan of Arc, that “one white angel of war” whom the English and French burned because she did not and could not ever become mature, as I have shown in _Post Mortem_—there is at least one very great man whom one can only pity, if my ideas about him are correct, without the faintest trace of censure—the author of that “foul, coarse and abominable” book, _Tom Jones_, which has been such a nightmare to the prude and yet shows human nature better than most of the books which are welcomed in country parsonages.

On January 1st, 1753, a young servant girl named Betty Canning disappeared from a house in Aldermanbury, London, where she had been employed as a servant; she reappeared on the 29th of the month at her mother’s home, starving, half-clad, and with a fine story of abduction and imprisonment. She identified an old gipsy-woman as her assailant, who, being a gipsy, old and ugly, was promptly seized and sentenced to be hanged after the light-hearted manner of the eighteenth century. Though London was divided into two camps, for and against Betty Canning, there seems to have been no talk of a vigilance committee, probably because the great heart of the people was not stirred by evening newspapers about the woes of a little servant. One of Betty’s witnesses was a little servant girl named Virtue Hall, whose delightful name alone should have induced credence; and Virtue appeared before Fielding, who was then a magistrate looking into the mystery of Betty Canning, to support Betty’s claims for vengeance. If the gipsy had been a man no doubt she would have been hanged promptly; but, as she was a woman, the psychology of those days could not imagine why Betty should have accused her of abduction and a certain amount of trouble was taken to test the truth of Betty’s accusations. As a result the gipsy was by a miracle let off, and Betty got seven years for perjury. Nowadays it seems quite an ordinary sort of case, where a hysterical girl will perjure her immortal soul in order to attract attention to herself, whatever may be the results to others; but the real interest to us lies in the light that it casts on the sick mind of Fielding himself; for he actually believed Virtue and published a pamphlet in support of her evidence.

This done, Fielding’s health began to warn him that he must take care of himself, and he set about curing the chronic gout which had long crippled him. He took an ancient remedy of Galen’s, called “the Duke of Portland’s remedy”—Fielding was always fond of experimenting upon himself with quack medicines—and was advised to try the waters of Bath. Meantime he had busied himself with dogging the footsteps of no less than five gangs of street-robbers; and in the midst of the turmoil there came a peremptory message from the Duke of Newcastle to attend at Newcastle House and discuss the depredations of yet more cutthroats. For months he worked hard at the pursuit, with splendid results for the peace of London, but disastrous results upon his own health, for he had become deeply jaundiced and “fallen away to a shadow.” No more was to be seen that handsome Harry Fielding who had worked so hard for literature and civic peace; whose generosity and goodness to the poor, outcast, and oppressed has become proverbial; but a wasted, dropsical man of pinched face, who could hardly leave his chair, so crippled was he with the gout and so heavy with the dropsy. The time had long gone by for Bath, if indeed it had ever existed. The winter of 1753-4 was terribly severe and his doctors told him that he must seek a warmer climate. Even Bishop Berkeley’s tar-water had failed, so things must have looked black indeed for Fielding as he was carried laboriously on board the ship _Queen of Portugal_ for the long voyage to Lisbon. His wife, the successor of that beloved woman whom he has immortalised in _Sophia Western_ and _Amelia Booth_, accompanied him to nurse him, though I am afraid the poor lady was not much use as a nurse to a sick man whose every movement caused him pain; the very winds fought against him, and it was weeks before the ship could get away from the Isle of Wight into blue water.

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.”