King Charles II (87 page)

The winter of 1683 was one of the most severe ever recorded; the King, who had himself known vividly what it was like to be cold and hungry, gave particular orders for the relief of the poor. His subjects’ welfare in distress was indeed an interest he maintained throughout his reign. His efforts after the Fire of London have been remarked; in 1675 he gave the town of Northampton, badly damaged by its own Great Fire, one thousand tons of wood from his estates – thirty-six years later the Mayor and Corporation showed their appreciation by erecting a statue to him, still to be seen today, above the portico of All Saints’ Church.

In 1683 there was at least one benefit to be derived from the ice and snow. The new sport of skating flourished. Nahum Tate wrote of the popular enthusiasm in his elaborate way:

Ourselves without the aid of Tide or Gale

On Keels of polish’t steel securely sail….

Yes, the King too was securely sailing. And the ice beneath his feet was no longer thin and cracking. The vast statue erected to him at the Royal Exchange was one symbol of the powerful stability of the monarchy. Less tangible but equally real was the affection felt for the sovereign by his subjects. Halifax, weighing up his last period from a critical standpoint, had to admit that ‘in his autumnal fortune’ there still remained ‘a stock of warmth in men’s hearts for him’.
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This warmth was reciprocated.

King Charles
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, wrote Bishop Burnet, was the greatest instance in history of the various revolutions of which any one man was capable. His deathbed, fittingly, was to be the scene of yet one more. Played out over nearly a week, a fugue for alternating voices of hope and despair, it also involved his secret conversion to a proscribed Faith.
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The drama began quite suddenly on a Sunday night. It was 1 February 1685. The day itself had passed placidly enough. The King’s leg still bothered him. He told Sir Richard Mason that he did not feel well, but believed that it would pass. He could not take his favourite constitutional; instead, he went for a drive with his attendant Thomas Lord Bruce, whose period of waiting had begun the previous Monday and was due to end on the morrow. It is thus to Bruce that we owe many of the most affecting details of his master’s last days, still vivid in his memory when he wrote his memoirs many years later.
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At supper the
King ate his customary hearty meal, but it included something out of the ordinary, a couple of goose eggs. Afterwards Bruce sought both natural and supernatural explanations of the King’s collapse. On the one hand, he blamed the eggs, on the other hand, he divined in the sudden extinction of a vast wax candle held by a page, ‘where no wind was to be found’, a fearful omen of what followed.

At the time the King merely carried out his usual practice after supper and loped off to the apartments of Louise to see who might have been supping there. These were the rooms whose indiscreet opulence both enchanted and shocked John Evelyn. Here Louise held her own not-so-mimic court. More rounded than ever, the King’s ‘Fubbs’ was also more cherished since an illness in November which had held the Court in a state of well publicized public distress. On this occasion a high game of basset was being played, which also shocked Evelyn. His eyes widened at the sight of £2,000 in gold on the table, with about twenty courtiers and ‘other dissolute persons’ surrounding it – all this on a Sunday to boot! For Evelyn the tale lost no moral in the telling: ‘Six days after was all in the dust,’ he wrote with doleful glee.
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It seems more relevant to the life of King Charles
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that he spent the last active night of his life in his own version of peaceful domesticity. Evelyn also professed himself appalled to see the King ‘toying’ with ‘Cleveland’ and ‘Mazarin’ (Barbara and Hortense respectively, both returned to England and restored to friendly favour), as well as his hostess ‘Portsmouth’. A French boy was singing love songs in the background. These songs may have been recent imports from the Court of France, but as for the great ladies they, if anything, represented love’s old sweet song. Not one of them could be remotely considered young and between them one way and another they could number nearly fifty years in the King’s service. The evening was therefore marked as much by the King’s fidelity to old friends as by profligacy.

Afterwards there were plenty of people to bear witness that they had never seen the King in a better mood. Bruce duly conducted his master to bed: it was at this point that the wax
candle was so ominously extinguished (although it is surely straining credulity to suggest that
no
draught could be responsible in a corridor in February – in the seventeenth century). The King put on his nightgown. Bruce, as Gentleman-in-waiting, and Harry Killigrew, as Groom of the Bedchamber, were to share his room according to custom. The King lay down to sleep.

That night the vast, sprawling Palace of Whitehall was restless. There were the endless striking clocks, none of which kept time with each other, chiming through the small hours. There was the flickering, shooting light of the Scotch coal in the enormous grate, lighting up rich tapestries and dusty corners. There were the King’s indulged dogs, a whole pack of them in the very bedroom and even in the bed, the bitches and their whelps whimpering and shifting. Bruce, the Lord-in-waiting, could not sleep. None of these sounds, however disturbing, was unusual. Besides, Bruce was going off duty the next day – he could sleep then.

What was both unusual and disquieting was the fact that the King himself tossed and turned. Normally he was a very heavy sleeper when he finally got to bed (worn out no doubt by his various versions of physical exercise). He even muttered occasionally in his sleep, as Calpurnia cried out before the death of Caesar, something Lord Bruce had never known him do before. Robert Howard, another Groom, hearing of this, commented, ‘Lord! that is an ill mark, and contrary to his custom.’

When the King did awake, he looked quite different. His normally olive complexion was ‘pale as ashes’. He went immediately, still earing only his nightgown, into his Privy Closet just off the bedroom. When Howard went to join him, he found the King completely silent. Buckling on his garters, Howard took a worried look at his face and exclaimed, ‘Sir, how do you do?’ The King merely blew out his cheeks and ‘puffed’ as he did when he was vexed.

In the meantime, the royal doctors were actually waiting in the antechamber to the bedroom to dress the tiresome sore on his leg. As time passed and still the King did not emerge from his closet, the worried Bruce searched for William Chiffinch,
the King’s Keeper of the Closet (and confidant), to take his master something thicker to wear than a mere nightgown. Etiquette forbade anyone other than Chiffinch to enter the closet unbidden. In the end it was Chiffinch, who had carried out so many more cheerful errands in the past, who conducted the King out of the closet back into the bedroom.

The King’s speech was obviously by this time seriously impaired, if not worse. The Earl of Craven, proffering him a paper on which were written the passwords (for the guards) for the new month, could get no response. The King could only occasionally manage a few disjointed words, such as ‘All-All’ when trying to discuss the death of Lord Allington.
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At one point he began to mutter in French: in what shadows of the past was his mind lurking?

But the King did manage a little sherry and China Orange. And because no one dared to take it upon themselves to interrupt his routine – although it must have been obvious that he was dangerously sick – his barber Follier now proceeded to shave his master as usual.

The King was sitting as was his wont, with his knees against the window, and Follier was just fixing the linen round his neck, when the King gave vent to the most extraordinary and piercing noise. Afterwards described by one as ‘the dreadfullest shriek’ and by another as an ‘exclamation as one that dies suddenly’, it was clearly audible outside the chamber.
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Then the King sank back into Bruce’s arms, unconscious. It was exactly eight o’clock in the morning. It could no longer be denied that something was horribly, even catastrophically, wrong.

The responsibility for making the first decision about treatment fell upon Bruce, the senior gentleman present. By this time one of the doctors, Sir Edmund King, had arrived in the bed-chamber and had witnessed the incident. Bleeding was the obvious remedy of the time. And bleed the King this doctor now proceeded to do in style, while a panic-stricken message was sent off to the Duke of York and the rest of the Privy Council were summoned as hastily as possible. By the time a Privy Council of sorts had gathered together in the outer room at midday, Charles had had sixteen ounces of blood removed
via a vein in his arm, a task for which the doctor was afterwards paid £1,000.
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Soon other doctors came flocking in as the news of the King’s collapse reached them. A series of remedies were frantically applied. The King’s head was shorn. Cantharides was used as a blistering agent. A further eight ounces of blood was removed. And as a result of these steps – or despite them – the King did actually recover. Two hours later his speech had come back.

He found the Duke of York beside him. The Duke was once more in command of the situation, as he had been in 1679, but it was a token of the general disarray that he had forgotten to put on both his shoes and was still wearing one slipper. One of the first things the King did, with his speech returned, was to ask for the Queen. He also explained what had happened to him earlier: how he had felt ghastly on rising and had immediately gone to his closet to take some of the so-called King’s Drops, made up in his own laboratory out of extract of bone after a formula of Dr Jonathan Goddard. Leaving his closet, the last thing he could remember was feeling intensely giddy. The King was now laid on his bed.

All round the relief was incredible. The official newsletter of the day, referring to ‘the fit’ which had seized the King, was also able to pronounce him out of danger. It was to be, surely, a repetition of those illnesses of 1679 onwards – sharp but short-lived.

Immediate precautions had been taken following the King’s seizure. Horse guards and foot guards were posted everywhere in Whitehall. Sentries were reinforced. Above all, the ports were stopped. No passengers or ships were allowed in or out. Even in his agony – and he wept unashamedly beside his brother – the Duke of York was quite clear that for the time being no message should reach the Duke of Monmouth, or for that matter the Prince of Orange, lest they try to turn the situation to their advantage. A few days later outgoing traffic was allowed to continue, but incoming was still banned. Only Barrillon, as usual receiving most favoured treatment, was allowed to transmit a solitary letter to Louis
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. Similar precautions had followed
the death of Oliver Cromwell (in order that Charles Stuart should not seize the day).

In the country the Lords Lieutenant were asked to keep themselves in readiness against a crisis. The Lord Mayor and other dignitaries of the now docile City of London were quick to show where
their
sympathies lay by sending a message of loyalty to the Duke of York. As for the common people, those whose affections the King had never lost throughout his autumnal fortune, they too demonstrated their sympathies by grieving openly: ‘They cried as they walked the streets, and great sadness in all faces, and great crowds at all the gates.’
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In the general relief, the doctors at least did not let up on the application of their remedies. It was actually in the presence of his physicians – twelve of them by this time – that next morning, Tuesday, 3 February, the King was seized with another ‘fit’ or convulsion. Immediately and with renewed frenzy the remedies were stepped up and new ones were imported.

Lord Macaulay described Charles
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on his death-bed as being tortured like an Indian at the stake. The comparison is apt, except that one doubts whether any tormentor of Indians ever had quite such a battery of instruments at his command as the seventeenth-century royal doctors. It has been estimated that a total of fifty-eight drugs were administered over five days, many of whose names are as exotic to us as their effects were painful to the King.

There was white hellebore root (a sneezing powder to clear his nose) and plasters of combined spurge and Burgundy pitch (these were applied to his feet), as well as plasters of cantharides on his head. The ingredients of the enemas which were applied frequently were rock salt and syrup of buckthorn. As an emetic, an orange infusion of metals, made in white wine, was employed. White vitriol was dissolved in paeony water; other remedies varied from the homely, such as the distillation of cowslip flowers, to the more striking spirit of sal ammoniac. An anti-spasmodic julep of black cherry water, oriental bezoar stone from the stomach of an East goat and spirits of human skull were amongst other cures named.

The poor King’s body was purged and bled and cauterized
and clystered and blistered. Red-hot irons were put to his shaven skull and his naked feet. His urine became scalding through the lavish use of cantharides. Cupping-glasses and all the many weird resources of medicine at the time were applied. They all had one thing in common: they were extremely painful to the patient.

These prodigious efforts were much admired at the time. Colonel Thomas Fairfax, an Irish officer visiting London, hastened to write to Dublin of the employment of ‘all the means that the art of man thought proper for the King’s distemper’.
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The doctor’s report afterwards spoke of ‘every kind of treatment attempted by Physicians of the greatest loyalty and skill’. The doctors did not exaggerate the universality of their treatments; their loyalty was doubtless incomparable; but they did somewhat gloss over their own incompetence. The King’s mouth and tongue became ‘much inflamed’ with scalding medicines and where his teeth had been forced apart during convulsions. Not all the doctors were as skilled at blooding as Edmund King. James Pearse, Charles’ Surgeon in Ordinary, and Surgeon General to the Navy and Land forces, could not find the jugular vein successfully, a desperate experience for the patient. Another doctor, Thomas Hobbs, who lived in nearby Fleet Street and was Surgeon to the Household and the King’s troops of the Horse Guards, had to finish the job: for the efficiency he was later rewarded by inclusion in Dryden’s poem on the King’s death, ‘Threnodia Augustalis’.
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