1528. If there were any better regimen in the later epidemics than in the

earlier, as Polydore Virgil says there was, it was merely the wisdom of avoiding extremes. Hence the misleading character of his remark that, after an immense loss of life, “a remedy was found, ready to hand for everyone.” Bacon in his ‘Reign of Henry VII.’ took from Polydore almost word for word all that he says of the “remedy” of the sweat; and the unreal word-spinning thus begun was carried to its full development by bishop Sprat, the historian of the Royal Society (1667), who mistakes the “remedy” for some _arcanum_ or potent drug, gives my lord Verulam the credit of preserving the prescription for the use of posterity, and adduces it as an encouragement to the Royal Society to seek among the secrets of nature for an equally efficacious “antidote” to the plague. The language of historians is that the sweat of 1485 spread over the whole kingdom. We hear of it definitely at Oxford[487] where it “lasted but a month or six weeks” and is said to have cut off many of the scholars before they could disperse. It is heard of also with equal definiteness at Croyland abbey. There is also mention of it in a contemporary calendar of the mayor of Bristol, but without any special reference to that city[488]. Beyond these notices, there appears to be nothing to show that the sweat went all through England in the late autumn or early winter of 1485. But we may take the following passage by Forrestier, in the dedication of his tract to the king, as expressing the state of matters, with perhaps some exaggeration: “When that thy highness and thy great power is vexed and troubled with divers sickness, and thy lordships and almost the middle part of thy realm with the venomous fever of pestilence, and, by the reason of that, young and old and of all manner of ages, with divers wailings and sadness they are stricken: therefore, excellent and noble prince, we are moved with every love and duty, and not for no lucre neither covetyse, to ordain a short governing against this foresaid fever[489].” The Second Sweat in 1508. After the first outburst of the sweat in 1485 had subsided, probably before winter was well begun, nothing more is heard of it for twenty-three years. It reappeared in 1508, a third time in 1517, a fourth time in 1528, and for the last time in 1551. With each successive outbreak, our information becomes less meagre, while the epidemic of 1551 actually called forth an English printed book by Dr Caius, the epidemic of 1528 having called forth a whole crop of foreign writings on its spreading to the continent (for the first and only time) in the year following (1529). As the nature, causes, and favouring circumstances of the sweat cannot profitably be dealt with except on a review of its whole history, it will be necessary to take up at once and together the four subsequent epidemics of it in this country, leaving the intercurrent and probably much more disastrous epidemics of bubo-plague, during the same period, as well as the great invasion of syphilis in 1494-6, to be chronicled apart. Our knowledge of the second outbreak of the sweat, in 1508[490], comes almost exclusively from Bernard André, whose _Annals of Henry VII._[491] are fortunately preserved for that year (as they are also for 1504-5). Under the date of July, 1508, he says that some of the household of the Lord Treasurer were seized with the sweat, and died of it, “and everywhere in this city there die not a few.” In August public prayers were made at St Paul’s on account of the plague of sweat. In the same month the king’s movements from place to place in the country round London are described as determined by the prevalence of the sweat. From Hatfield, whither he had gone to visit his mother on the 9th August, he went to Wanstead, where certain of his household “sweated;” on that account the king moved to Barking, and thence to other places about the 14th. He avoided Greenwich and Eltham, in both which places the chief personages of the royal palaces “had sweated,” so much did the sickness then rage in all places (_per omnia loca_). Some of the king’s personal attendants appear to have caught the infection; nor did it avail, says André, to run away or to follow the chase, _quoniam mors omnia vincit_. Other visits were paid down to the 17th August, and a strict edict was issued that no one from London was to come near the court, nor anyone to repair to the city, under penalties specified. The only one near the king’s person who died of it was lord Graystock, a young Cumberland noble. The Lord Privy Seal and the Lord Chamberlain were both attacked but recovered; doctor Symeon, the dean of the Chapel Royal, died of it. There appears to have been a good deal of the sickness in various places, but many recovered, says André, with good tending. The king occupied himself with hunting the stag in the forests at Stratford, Eltham and other places round London. From the provinces there is one item of information relating to Chester[492]: in the summer of 1507, it is said, the sweating sickness destroyed 91 in three days, of whom only four were women. At Oxford in 1508, or the year before Henry VII.’s death, there was a sore pestilence which caused the dispersion of divers students; but it is not called the sweat[493]. The Third Sweat in 1517. Except for a single reference to the sweat in 1511, nothing is heard of it between the autumn of 1508 and the summer of 1517. The reference in 1511 occurs in a letter of Erasmus, from Queens’ College, Cambridge, dated 25th August, in which he says that his health is still indifferent _a sudore illo_. This may possibly refer to the lingering effects of an attack in 1508, or to the influenza of 1510; and as all the other references in 1511 are to plague, and to alarms of plague, it may be doubted if the sweating sickness had really been prevalent in England in that year, or at any time between 1508 and 1517. We begin to hear of it definitely in the summer of the latter year. We have now reached a period from which numerous letters, despatches and other state papers have come down[494]. Among the most useful of these for our purpose are the despatches of the Venetian ambassador and the apostolic nuncio from London, the letters of Pace to Wolsey when Henry VIII. was in the country and the cardinal not with him, the letters of Erasmus, sir Thomas More and others. The first that we hear of sickness in London in 1517 is from a letter of the 24th June, written by a cardinal of Arragon to Wolsey, from Calais; the cardinal, who was travelling like a noble, with a train of forty horses, had intended to visit London, but was waiting on the other side owing to a rumour that the sickness was prevalent in London. It is probable that this rumour had referred to the standing infection of English towns in summer and autumn, the bubo-plague; for it is not until five weeks later that we hear of the sweating sickness under its proper name. On the 1st of August the nuncio writes from London to the marquis of Mantua that a disease is broken out here causing sudden death within six hours; it is called the sweating sickness; an immense number die of it. On the 6th of August he occupies the greater part of a letter of three pages with an account of it. To some it proved fatal in twelve hours, to others in six, and to others in four; it is an easy death. Most patients are seized when lying down, but some when on foot, and even a very few when riding out. The attack lasts about twenty-four hours, more or less. It is fatal to take, during the fit, any cold drink, or to allow a draught of air to reach the drenching skin; the covering should be rather more ample than usual, but there was danger in heaping too many bed-clothes on the patient. A moderate fire should be kept up in the sick chamber; the arms should be crossed on the patient’s breast, and great care should be taken that no cold air reached the armpits[495]. The disease was on the increase, and was already spreading over England; it was reported that more than four hundred students had died of it at Oxford, which was a small place but for the university there. Burials were occurring on every side; there had been many deaths in the king’s household and in that of cardinal Wolsey, who was in the country “sweating.” Such is the universal dread of the disease that there are very few who do not fear for their lives, while some are so terrified that they suffer more from fear than others do from the sweat itself. On the same day (6th August), the Venetian ambassador, Sebastian Giustinian, who was on friendly terms with the nuncio and often indebted to him for information, writes to the Doge giving much the same account of “the new malady.” He remarks upon the sudden onset, the rapidity of the issue when it was to be fatal, and the cessation of the sweat within twenty-four hours. His secretary had taken it, as well as many of his domestics. Few strangers are dead, but an immense number of Englishmen. On going to visit Wolsey, he found that he had the sweat; many of the cardinal’s household had died of it, including some of his chief attendants; the bishop of Winchester also had taken it. On the 12th of August, the Venetian envoy writes that he himself and his son have had the sweat; Wolsey has had it three times in a few days, many of his people being dead of it, especially his gentlemen[496]. In London “omnes silent.” Wolsey’s attack and relapses are confirmed by his own letter to the king; about the end of August he went on a pilgrimage to Walsingham, and remained there most of September, but even after his return he was “vexed with fever.” The relapses of the sweat, which are mentioned by Forrestier in 1485, by André in 1508, and now again in 1517, may have been the origin of the saying in the form of a proverb, which occurs in an essay of the time by sir Thomas More,--that the relapse is worse than the original disease[497]. The death of a well-known personage, Ammonio, the Latin secretary of the king, is the subject of several letters, including one of the 19th August from More to Erasmus; he died at nine on the morning of the 17th August, after an illness of twenty hours: he had been congratulating himself on being safe by reason of his temperate life. More confirms the statement as to deaths in the university of Oxford, and he adds also at Cambridge. In London the sweat attacks whole families: “I assure you there is less danger in the ranks of war than in this city.” His own family (? in Bucklersbury) are safe so far, and he has composed his mind for any eventuality. He hears that the sweat is now at Calais. On the 27th August, the Venetian envoy writes again that the disease is now making great progress; the king keeps out of the way at Windsor, with only three favourite gentlemen and Dionysius Memo, who is described as his physician, but in other letters as “the Reverend,” and as a musician from Venice. On the 21st September the envoy has gone to the country to avoid “the plague _and_ the sweating sickness.” A few days later (26th Sept.) he writes that “the plague” is making some progress, and that the prolonged absence of the king, the cardinal and other lords from London owing to the sweat, had encouraged the citizens to a turbulent mood against the foreign traders and residents; the state of matters was so threatening that three thousand citizens were under arms to preserve the peace. The references after September, 1517, are mostly to the “common infection” or plague, which was an almost annual autumnal event in London. There was probably some confusion, at the time, between that infection and the sweat, not, of course as regards symptoms, but in common report; thus it is not clear whether the fresh alarm in the king’s court at or near Windsor on the 15th October, owing to the deaths of young lord Grey de Wilton and a German attendant of the king, refers to the sweat or to the plague. As late as the 2nd November, a letter from the University of Oxford to Wolsey excuses delay in answering his two letters on the ground of the sweating sickness. The prevalence of “sudor tabificus” at Oxford in 1517 is known from other sources as well: it is said to have caused “the dispersion and sweeping away of most, if not all, of the students[498];” and the nuncio, writing from London on the 6th of August, mentions the current but improbable statement that more than four hundred students had died in less than a week. Besides these from Oxford, there are hardly any notices of the 1517 sweat in the country remote from London. A record at Chester mentions an outbreak of “plague,” which is taken to mean sweating sickness; it is said also to have been “probably more serious than in 1507;” many died, others fled; and the grass grew a foot high at the Cross[499]. But these are the marks of true plague, which we know to have broken out in London, and in country districts as well, in the autumn and winter of 1517, or almost as soon as the short and sharp outburst of the sweat was past. Among the references to prevailing diseases on the continent in 1517, besides sir Thomas More’s rumour of the sweat in Calais, there is none which would lead us to suppose that the distinctive English malady had invaded Europe in that year. But there is a significant statement by Erasmus, hitherto overlooked, which almost certainly points to an epidemic of influenza on the other side of the North Sea the year after the sweat was prevalent in England. It is known that there was a suddenly fatal form of throat disease prevalent in the Netherlands that spring, which has been taken to be diphtheria; but the malady to which Erasmus refers can hardly have been the same as that. Writing from Louvain to Barbieri on the 1st June, 1518, he says that a new plague is raging in Germany, affecting people with a cough, and pain in the head and stomach, he himself having suffered from it. The significance of that epidemic, assuming it to have been influenza, will be dealt with in the sequel. By means of the foregoing contemporary notices of the sweat in 1517 we are able to judge of the general accuracy of the summary of it in Hall’s chronicle, which has been hitherto almost the only source of information. The sweat killed, he says, in three hours or two hours, which is something of an exaggeration of the shortest duration mentioned by the nuncio and the Venetian envoy in their letters of the 1st and 6th August. Another general statement may be suspected of even greater exaggeration: “For in some one town half the people died, and in some other town the third part, the sweat was so fervent and the infection so great.” The sweat lasted, he says, to the middle of December. Stow, in his _Annals_, more correctly states that the plague came in the end of the year, after the sweat. The plague was much the more deadly infection of the two; but even plague and sweat together, and at their worst, would hardly have destroyed one-half or one-third of the inhabitants of a town. The Fourth Sweat in 1528. As the despatches of the nuncio and the Venetian envoy in London give the best accounts of the sweat of 1517, it is in the despatches of the French ambassador, Du Bellay, that we find the most serviceable particulars of the sweat in 1528. Du Bellay, bishop of Bayonne, and a witty diplomatist, was in London through the whole of it, and during that time sent letters to Paris, in three of which the sweat is a principal topic. From many other state letters of the time various particulars may be gathered, and in one letter by Brian Tuke, one of the king’s ministers, we find some theorizings about the disease. The outbreak befell at the time when Henry VIII.’s passion for Mistress Anne Boleyn, sister to one of the ladies of the Court, was waxing strong; it had the effect of parting the lovers for several weeks, the distance between them having been bridged over by an interchange of tender notes, of which those of the king remain open to the prying eyes of posterity. The sweat is heard of as early as the 5th of June, 1528, when Brian Tuke writes to Tunstall, bishop of London, that he had fled to Stepney “for fear of the infection,” a servant being ill at his house. The sickness must have made little talk for some ten days longer. On the 18th June, Du Bellay writes that it had made its appearance “within these four days[500].” On the 16th, the king at Greenwich was alarmed by the intelligence that a maid of Anne Boleyn’s had been attacked by it[501]. He left in great haste for Waltham, and sent the young lady to her father’s in Kent. “As yet,” writes Du Bellay, “the love has not abated. I know not, if absence and the difficulties of Rome may effect anything.” The king wrote to her at once: “There came to me in the night the most afflicting news possible.... I fear to suffer yet longer that absence which has already given me so much pain.” He sends his second physician (Dr Butts) to her. The alarm about her health seems to have been uncalled for just then, although both she and her father caught the disease within a few days. By the 18th June, according to the French envoy, some 2000 had caught the sickness in London. It is, he says, a most perilous disease: “one has a little pain in the head and heart; suddenly a sweat begins; and a physician is useless, for whether you wrap yourself up much or little, in four hours, sometimes in two or three, you are despatched without languishing as in those troublesome fevers.” The day before, on going to swear the truce, he saw the people “as thick as flies rushing from the streets or shops into their houses to take the sweat whenever they felt ill.... In London, I assure you, the priests have a better time than the doctors, except that the latter do not help to bury. If this thing goes on, corn will soon be cheap. [The season was one of scarcity.] It is twelve [eleven] years since there was such a visitation, when there died 10,000 persons in ten or twelve days; but it was not so bad as this has been.” Writing again, twelve days after, on the 30th June, he says that some 40,000 had been attacked in London, only 2000 of whom had died; “but if a man only put his hand out of bed during the twenty-four hours, it becomes as stiff as a pane of glass”--that is to say, by keeping themselves carefully covered, as we learn also from Polydore Virgil’s history and letters on the sweat of 1517, they greatly increased the chance of recovery. In his third despatch, 21st July, he says the danger begins to diminish hereabout and to increase elsewhere; in Kent it is very great. Anne Boleyn and her father have sweated, but have got over it. The notaries have had a fine time of it, nearly everyone having made his will, as those who took the disease in its fatal form “became quite foolish the moment they fell ill.” His estimate of 100,000 wills is, of course, a humorous exaggeration. The sweat had been at its height in London, according to its wont, for only a few weeks, mostly in July. On the 21st of August one writes from London that “the plague at this day is well assuaged, and little or nothing heard thereof.” From other parts of England there are few particulars of the sweat of 1528. We hear of it at Woburn on the 26th June, in a nunnery at Wilton on the 18th July, at Beverley on the 22nd July--it is reported as very serious in Yorkshire generally,--at Cambridge on the 27th July, and at several places in Kent about the same date. The “infection” at Dover as late as the 27th September may not have been the sweat, but the ordinary bubo-plague. But it is probably to the sweat that the deaths of four priests and two lay-brothers at Axholme, in Lincolnshire, are to be referred, as well as the heavy mortality in the Charterhouse, London[502]. As in the previous sweat of 1517, the letters of the time give us many glimpses of the invasion of great households in and around London, including the king’s. When the French ambassador was walking with Wolsey in his garden at York Place (Whitehall) on a day in June, word was brought to the cardinal that five or six of his household had taken the sweat, and the diplomatic interview was brought to an abrupt end. Du Bellay writes again in July that only four men in Wolsey’s great house remained well. Among those in his household who died of it were a brother of lord Derby and a nephew of the duke of Norfolk. The cardinal, who had suffered from the sweat and its relapses in 1517, fled from it to Hampton Court on the 30th June, and shut himself up there with only a few attendants, having previously adjourned the law courts and stopped the assizes. On the 21st of July, Du Bellay writes that it was almost impossible to get access to Wolsey, and suggests that he might have to speak with him at Hampton Court through a trumpet. In the same letter the French ambassador refers to the circumstances of his own attack when he was visiting the archbishop of Canterbury (Warham), probably at Lambeth: “The day I sweated at my lord of Canterbury’s, there died eighteen persons in four hours, and hardly anyone escaped but myself, who am not yet quite strong again.” The bishop of London, Tunstall, writes to Wolsey from Fulham on the 10th July, that thirteen of his servants were sick of the sweat at once on St Thomas’s day; he had caused the public processions and prayers to be made, which the king had wished for on the 5th July. The governor of Calais writes on the 10th July: “The sweat has arrived and has attacked many.” Only two were dead, a Lancashire gentleman and a fisherman; but in a second letter of the same night, four more are dead, of whom two “were in good health yestereven when they went to their beds.” Various other letters about the same date make mention of personal experiences of the sweat, or of domestics attacked, at country houses in the home counties. The most minute accounts are those for the king’s household. On the 16th June the king had left Greenwich hurriedly for Waltham. In a letter to Anne Boleyn, he writes that, when he was at Waltham, two ushers, two valets-de-chambre, George Boleyn and Mr Treasurer (Fitzwilliam) fell ill of the sweat, and are now quite well. “The doubt I had of your health troubled me extremely, and I should scarcely have had any quiet without knowing the certainty; but since you have felt nothing, I hope it is with you as with us.” He had removed to Hunsdon (on 20th or 21st June) “where we are very well, without one sick person. I think if you would retire from Surrey, as we did, you would avoid all danger. Another thing may comfort you: few women have this illness, and moreover none of our court, and few elsewhere, have died of it.” When Brian Tuke went to Hunsdon on the 21st June, the king spoke to him “of the advantages of this house, and its wholesomeness at this time of sickness.” Two days after, Tuke having business with the king, found him “in secret communication with his physician, Mr Chambre, in a tower where he sometimes sups apart.” The king conversed with his minister about the latter’s ill-health (seemingly stone), and showed him remedies, “as any most cunning physician in England could do.” As to the infection, the king spoke of how folk were taken, how little danger there was if good order be observed, how few were dead, how Mistress Anne and my lord Rochford (her father) both have had it, what jeopardy they have been in by the turning in of the sweat before the time, of the endeavours of Mr Butts who had been with them, and finally of their perfect recovery. The king sends advice to Wolsey to use “the pills of Rhazes” once a week, and, if it come to it, to sweat moderately and to the full time, without suffering it to run in. But the king’s optimist views of the malady were quickly disturbed. William Cary, married to Anne Boleyn’s sister, died of the sweat suddenly at Hunsdon, having just arrived from Plashey, and two others of the Chamber, Poyntz and Compton, died about the same time either there or at Hertford, whither the king removed. On the evening of the 26th June there fell sick at Hertford, the marquis and marchioness of Dorset, sir Thomas Cheyney, Croke, Norris and Wallop. The king hastily left for Hatfield, on the 28th June, where still others appear to have taken the sickness. Du Bellay, writing on the 30th, says all but one of the Chamber have been attacked. From Hatfield the king went at once to Tittenhanger, a country house which belonged to Wolsey as abbot of St Albans, and there he elected to take his chance of the sweat, keeping up immense fires to destroy the infection. On the 7th July, Dr Bell writes from Tittenhanger to Wolsey that “none have had the sweat here these three days except Mr Butts.” Two days later, however, the marchioness of Exeter “sweated,” and the king ordered all who were of the marquis’s company to depart, he himself removing as far as Ampthill, whence he thought of removing on the 22nd July to Grafton, but was prevented by the prevalence of the infection there. Shortly after Anne Boleyn returned to the court. It is clearly to the period of her return that an undated letter of hers to Wolsey belongs; after writing a few formal lines to make interest with the cardinal, she took her letter to the king for him to add a postscript, which was as follows: “Both of us desire to see you, and are glad to hear you have escaped the plague so well, trusting the fury of it is abated, especially with those that keep good diet as I trust you do.” Although the attacks mentioned in the correspondence of the time are many, the deaths are few. A letter of Brian Tuke’s to Wolsey’s secretary, on the 14th July, takes a somewhat sceptical line about the whole matter. His wife has “passed the sweat,” but is very weak, and is broken out at the mouth and other places. He himself “puts away the sweat” from himself nightly (directly against the king’s advice to him), though other people think they would kill themselves thereby. He had done that during the last sweat and this, feeling sure that, as long as he is not first sick, the sweat is rather provoked by disposition of the time, and by keeping men close, than by any infection, although the infection was a reality. Thousands have it from fear, who need not else sweat, especially if they observe good diet. He believes that it proceeds much of men’s opinion. It has been brought from London to other parts by report; for when a whole man comes from London and talks of the sweat, the same night all the town is full of it, and thus it spreads as the fame runs. Children, again, lacking this opinion, have it not, unless their mothers kill them by keeping them too hot if they sweat a little. It does not go to Gravelines when it is at Calais, although people go from the one place to the other. The English Sweat on the Continent in 1529[503]. Whether the sweat went at length to Gravelines or other places in that direction does not appear; but there is abundant evidence that it showed itself in the course of the following year (1529) in many parts of the Continent, excepting France, and that its outbreak was often attended with a heavy mortality. It was observed in Calais, as we have seen, on the 10th of July, 1528. But it is not until the year after, on the 25th of July, 1529, that we hear of it again,--at Hamburg, where a thousand persons are said to have died of it within four or five weeks, most of them within nine days. On the 31st July it was at Lübeck, and about the same time at Bremen and the neighbouring ancient town of Verden; on 14th August in Mecklenburg; at Stettin on the 27th August, and at Wismar, Demmin, Rostock, Stralsund, and Greifswald about the same date; in Danzig on the 1st September; Königsberg, on the 8th; and so eastwards to Livonia in 1530, and to Lithuania, Poland and Russia, the information for which countries is vague. Copenhagen also suffered from it, and towns in the interior of East Prussia, such as Thorn and Kulm. Meanwhile the sweat had proceeded by way of Hanover and Göttingen, about the middle of August afflicting also Brunswick, Lüneburg, Waldeck, Hadeln, Einbeck, Westphalia, the valley of the Weser, and East Friesland. It reached Frankfurt on the 11th September, Worms shortly after, and Marburg at the end of the month, breaking up the conference there between Luther and Zwingli, and their respective adherents, on the doctrine of the Eucharist. Jülich, Liege and Cologne were reached about the middle of September, and Speyer about the 24th, Augsburg (where there was a most severe and protracted epidemic) on the 6th, Strasburg on the 24th. Freiburg in Breisgau, Mühlhausen and Gebweiler in Alsace, in October. In November, the sickness overran Wurtemberg, Baden, the Upper Rhine, the Palatinate, and the shores of the Lake of Constance. Among the other German provinces visited in due order were Franconia, Thuringia, Saxony, the Saxon Metal Mountains, Meissen, Mannsfeld, Halberstadt, Magdeburg, Wittenberg, Lusatia, the Mark of Brandenburg, and Silesia. In Vienna the sweat prevailed during the siege by Sultan Soliman from the 22nd September to the 14th October. At Berne it is heard of in December, and at Basle in January 1530. The Low Countries had not been affected so soon as their nearness to England might have led one to expect: the sickness is said to have approached them from the Rhine in the latter half of September. They suffered severely, one of the heaviest mortalities being reported for the town of Zierikzee, where three thousand are said to have died subsequent to the 3rd of October, 1529. In this remarkable progress over the mainland of Europe, France was conspicuously avoided. The sweat does not appear to have entered Spain, nor to have crossed the Alps. But all the rest of the Continent, from the Rhine to the Oder (if not farther east) and from the Baltic to the Alps, was reached by the English sweat in much the same way as if it had been an influenza reversing the order of its usual direction. There need be no hesitation as to the correctness of the diagnosis; the disease was described by several foreign writers from their own observation, and their descriptions agree entirely with those of Forrestier, in 1485, of Polydore Virgil, perhaps for the epidemics of 1508 and 1517, and of the letter-writers who were describing the epidemic of the year before (1528), as they saw it in and around London. The striking thing in the accounts from the continent is the enormous range of its fatality; in some towns the proportion of deaths to cases was hardly more than in influenza, while in others it was the death-rate of a peculiarly pestilential or malignant typhus; and those differences cannot have depended wholly upon the method of treatment. These full accounts of the English sweat on the continent of Europe in 1529 are in striking contrast to the meagre records of it at home. They were compiled first in 1805 from the numerous contemporary chronicles, and printed pamphlets or fly-sheets on the sweat, by Gruner, professor at Jena, in his _Itinerary of the English Sweat_, and his _Extant writers on the English Sweat_, published in Latin[504]. In 1834 Hecker went over the ground again in his well-known essay, improving somewhat upon the positive erudition of Gruner, but at the same time hazarding a number of doubtful interpretative statements, especially as to the sweat in England, for which the meagreness of the English records then available may be his excuse. The erudition of Gruner, Hecker and Häser deserves every acknowledgement; but it is of value more especially for the extension of the sweat to the continent of Europe in 1529, where it had abundant materials at its service, in chronicles, printed essays, and “regiments.” There are extant no fewer than twenty-one printed essays or sheets of directions on the English sweat, which were issued from the German, Netherlands, or Swiss presses between the month of October 1529 and the month of June 1531, two or three of them being in Latin and most of them brief summaries in the native tongue for popular use. The corresponding epidemic in England did not call forth a single piece by any medical man, so far as is known. Nor does the English treatment appear to have lost anything thereby; for it was based upon the profitable experience of previous epidemics as embodied in oral tradition. Down to the fifth epidemic in 1551, the only English writing on the sweat so far as is known was the manuscript of 1485, by Forrestier. Almost all that we know of the epidemics in England in 1508, 1517 and 1528 comes from Bernard André’s annals and Polydore Virgil’s history, and from the despatches of the apostolic nuncio, the Venetian ambassador and the French ambassador. The fifth and last outbreak, in 1551, called forth two native writings, one for popular use in English in 1552, and another in Latin in 1555, both by Dr Caius, physician to Henry VIII. and Edward VI.; these are indeed better than nothing at all, but they are too much occupied with pedantry and lugubrious rhetoric to be of much service for historical purposes[505]. The information about the epidemic of 1551 is so scanty as to suggest that the sickness in that year can hardly have been so severe as in 1528; the state papers contain hardly anything relating to it, and we owe nearly all our knowledge of it to the diary of Machyn, a citizen of London, to Edward VI.’s diary, and to Dr Caius. Bills of mortality had been kept in London for two or three weeks when the epidemic was at its height, from which some totals of deaths are extant. The Fifth Sweat in 1551. It was not in London that the sweat of 1551 began, but at Shrewsbury--on the 22nd of March, according to the manuscript chronicle of that town[506], or on the 15th of April, according to Caius[507]. No record remains of its prevalence at Shrewsbury; the statement of Caius, that some 900 deaths had occurred in a single city corresponds to the facts for London, and has no more reference to Shrewsbury (where Caius never resided) than it has to Norwich (as in Blomefield’s county history). The strange influence in the air or soil advanced from Salop, as we learn from Caius, by way of Ludlow, Presteign, Westchester, Coventry and Oxford, in only one of which places is anything known of it except Caius’s remark that it proceeded “with great mortality.” The best record of its prevalence on the way from Shrewsbury to London occurs in the parish register of Loughborough, in Leicestershire. Under the date of June, 1551, the register has an entry that “the swat called New Acquaintance, alias Stoupe! Knave and know thy Master, began on the 24th of this month.” Then follow the names of 12 persons who were buried in four days, and, on the next page, under the heading of “The Sweat or New Acquaintance,” the names of 7 more, all buried in three days--making a total of 19 in six days, presumably all dead of the sweat and presumably also the whole mortality from it in Loughborough, which had far heavier mortalities from the common plague in after years[508]. The date of its arrival at Oxford, on the way to London, is not known; but a physician then resident there, Dr Ethredge, has left it on record that it attacked sixty in Oxford in one night, and next day more than a hundred in the villages around; very few died of it at Oxford, which showed that the air of that university was more salubrious than at Cambridge, where the two sons of the duchess of Suffolk died[509]. The sweat appeared suddenly in London about the beginning of July, and had a short but active career of some three weeks. Deaths from it began to be mentioned on the 7th, and are entered in the king’s (Edward VI.’s) diary as having amounted on the 10th to the number of 120, in the London district, including “one of my nobles and one of my chamberlains,” so that “I repaired to Hampton Court with only a small company.” The royal diarist says that the victims fell into a delirium and died in that state[510]. On the 18th July, the king, in Council at Hampton Court, issued an order to the bishops, that they should “exhort the people to a diligent attendance at common prayer, and so avert the displeasure of Almighty God, having visited the realm with the extreme plague of sudden death[511].” The diary of a London citizen says that “there died in London many merchants and great rich men and women, and young men and old, of the new sweat[512].” On the 12th died Sir Thomas Speke, one of the king’s council, at his house in Chancery Lane; next day died Sir John Wallop “an old knight and gentle[513],” the same who had survived an attack of the sweat in 1528 when at Hertford with Henry VIII. It is not clear whether some other deaths of notables in the same few days were due to the sweat. Three independent statements are extant of the mortality in London which had all been taken, doubtless, from the bills regularly compiled. One gives the deaths “from all diseases” in London from the 8th to the 19th July as 872, “no more in all, and so the Chancellor is certified[514];” another gives the deaths “by the sweating sickness” from the 7th to the 20th July as 938[515]; and Caius gives the deaths from the 9th to the 16th July as 761, “besides those that died on the 7th and 8th days, of whom no register was kept[516];” by the 30th of July, 142, more had died, by which time it had practically ceased in London[517]. Caius adds that it next prevailed in the eastern and northern parts of England until the end of August, and ceased everywhere before the end of September. The king, in a letter of the 22nd August, written during his progress, says that the most part of England at that time was clear of any dangerous or infectious sickness[518]. Records at York make mention of a great plague in 1551, but without describing it as the sweat[519]. The event which excited most attention was the death by the sweat of the two sons of the widowed duchess of Suffolk, the young duke Henry and his brother lord Charles Brandon on the 16th of July. They had been taken from Cambridge, for fear of the sweat, to the bishop of Lincoln’s palace at Bugden, in Huntingdonshire, their mother accompanying them; they fell ill immediately upon their arrival, the elder dying after an illness of five hours and his brother half an hour after him[520]. Besides the cases of the two noble youths and others at Cambridge[521], there are no particulars of its prevalence in “the eastern and northern parts of England” (Caius). But we hear of it in the register of a country parish in Devonshire, under the same name of “Stup-gallant” as in the Loughborough register; and it is probable that those two casual notices indicate its diffusion all over England in the manner of influenza. That conclusion may find some support in the statement of one Hancocke, minister of Poole, Dorset, that “God had plagued this realm most justly with three notable plagues: (1) The Posting Sweat, that posted from town to town thorow England and was named ‘Stop-gallant,’ for it spared none. For there were some dancing in the Court at nine o’clock that were dead at eleven[522].” Its occurrence in Devonshire is proved by entries in the parish register of Uffculme: the whole burials in the year 1551 are 38; and of these no fewer than 27 occur in the first eleven days of August, and 16 of them in three days, the disease of which those persons died being named, in the register, “the hote sickness or stup-gallant[523].” Comparing these records of the sweat of 1551 with those of the years 1517 and 1528, we may conclude that the latest of those three outbreaks was not more severe than the earlier, and that, in the Court circle, it was probably milder. The gloomy rhetoric of Caius had led Hecker to construct a picture of its disastrous progress along the valley of the Severn, in which there is not a single authentic detail. Caius says that he was a witness of it, but that must have been in London; and the figures for London, although they indicate a very sharp epidemic while it lasted, do not suggest a mortality greater at least than that of 1528. The Venetian ambassador in writing a general memoir on England four years after, says that all business was suspended in London, the shops closed and nothing attended to but the preservation of life; but as he makes a gross exaggeration in stating the deaths in London at 5000 “during the three first days of its appearance,” we may take it that his impressions were vague or his recollections grown dim[524]. Were it not for the isolated notices of the sweat in Leicestershire and Devonshire, we should hardly have been able to realize that country towns and villages had been visited by an epidemic which was appalling both by its suddenness and by its fatality while it lasted. The name of “Stop-gallant,” by which it is called in these parish registers, shows the sort of impression which it made; but so far as the mortality is concerned, that was often equalled, if not exceeded, in after years by forms of epidemic fever which had nothing of the sweating type, although they might also have been called “stop-gallant,” and indeed were so-called in France (_trousse-galante_). Apart from the notices in parish registers, we have the generalities of Dr Caius, which amount to no more than a funereal essay, in the scholastic manner, upon the theme of sudden death. It may be doubted whether Caius really knew the facts about the disease in the country. The 27 deaths within a few days in a small Devonshire village and the 19 in six days in a small Leicestershire town, are hardly to be reconciled with the statement in his Latin treatise of 1555, that “women and serving folk, the plebeian and humble classes, even the middle class,” did not feel it, but the “proceres” or upper classes did: they fled from it, he says, to Belgium, France, Ireland and Scotland. It was for these that he was chiefly concerned; and when he approaches his rhetorical task with the remark that “nothing is more difficult than to find suitable words for a great grief,” we may take it that he was thinking rather of such moving cases as that of the widowed duchess of Suffolk, who had lost her two sons in one day, than of wide-spread sickness and death throughout the homes of the people. Nothing more is heard of the sweat in England after the autumn of 1551, at least not under that name. Francis Keene, an “astronomer,” prophesied in his almanack for 1575, that the sweat would return, “wherein he erred not much,” says Cogan[525], “as there were many strange fevers and nervous sickness.” Some years before that, in 1558 (a year after influenza abroad), there prevailed in summer “divers strange and new sicknesses,” among which was a “sweating sickness,” so described by Dr John Jones, who had it at Southampton. We are, indeed, approaching the period of frequent and widespread epidemics of fever and of influenza, in both which types of disease sweating was occasionally a notable symptom, as in the influenza of 1580 abroad, in the fatal typhus of 1644 at Tiverton, in the widespread English fevers of 1658, and in the London typhus as late as 1750. How those other types of fever, due as if to a “corruption of the air,” are related generically to the English sweat is a question upon which something remains to be said before this chapter is concluded. But the history of the English sweat comes to a definite end with the epidemic of