Explore the TUDOR collection of classic, sport, diving and heritage-inspired watches, all Swiss-made, on the Official TUDOR Website! British attitudes to witchcraft during the Tudor era tended to be less extreme than those of contemporary Europeans. Indeed, under the right circumstances, the British witch could occasionally become an acceptable – if not quite respectable – member of society.

In the first episode of BBC historical drama Wolf Hall, based on Hilary Mantel’s novel of the same name, Thomas Cromwell returns home to find his wife and two daughters have all died during the night, victims of a pestilence – the “sweating sickness” – that is scything through the Tudor world.

The speed of onset of this disease, which saw victims literally being well today and dead tomorrow, and its relentlessly high mortality rate gave the sweating sickness the same aura of terror that we attach to Ebola today.

Tudor Curses

Sudor Anglicus

Contemporary accounts describe an illness that began with a general feeling that something was not right, a strange premonition of oncoming horror, followed by the onset of violent headache, flu-like shivers and aching limbs.

This was succeeded by a raging fever complicated by pulse irregularities and cardiac palpitations. Death often simply seemed to occur due to dehydration and exhaustion. As one commentator said:

A newe Kynde of sickness came through the whole region, which was so sore, so peynfull, and sharp, that the lyke was never harde of to any mannes rememberance before that tyme.

The sweating sickness first appeared around the time Thomas Cromwell, later chief minister to Henry VIII, was born, at the end of the dynastic Wars of the Roses, and there has been some debate concerning the possibility that it arrived with the invading army of the first Tudor king, Henry VII, in 1485.

By the time it disappeared in 1551 it had caused five devastating outbreaks. To observers on the other side of the Channel, whose countries had apparently remained miraculously untouched (though a later outbreak did spread to Calais), this disease was Sudor Anglicus, or the “English Sweat”.

Doctor without borders

During the Tudor and early Elizabethan eras, the merest rumour of sweating sickness in a certain locality was enough to cause an exodus of those who could afford to leave.

Thomas Le Forestier, a French doctor originally based in England, wrote about the 1485 sickness after his return to France, providing information about its appearance and impact during this first outbreak.

But one man’s name became synonymous with the sickness. Norwich-born and Cambridge-educated John Kays had spent his early medical career travelling extensively on the continent, returning around the end of the reign of Henry VIII with a fashionably Latinised moniker, Dr Johannus Caius. The sweating sickness panic during the outbreak of 1551 gave him the ideal opportunity to make this new name known to everybody.

The fact that the wealthy seemed to be more frequently affected also gave him the opportunity to make money. Despite most of Caius’s patients still ending up dead, he was eventually rich enough to make a splendid endowment to his old Cambridge college, which changed its name to Caius College in his honour. To the rest of us, Caius left his classic description of the disease: Account of the Sweating Sickness in England, first published in 1556.

Medical speculation

A minor academic industry has developed speculating on what sweating sickness could have been.

Given that it had few symptoms other than a violent fatal fever, medical historians have had little to go on. But suggestions that have been made over the years include influenza, scarlet fever, anthrax, typhus or some SARS-like pulmonary enterovirus. All, however, have had some clinical or epidemiological aspect that meant they didn’t quite fit the description on the “most wanted” poster for sweating sickness.

Then in 1993, an outbreak of a remarkably similar syndrome occurred among the Navajo people in the region of Gallup, New Mexico. This episode, known as the Four Corners outbreak after the region of south-western USA in which it was located, turned the attention of sweating sickness investigators towards its causative agent: Sin Nombre virus. Sin Nombre is a hantavirus, a member of a group of viruses that were mostly previously known in Europe for causing a kidney failure syndrome, and a cousin of several tropical fever viruses transmitted by biting insects. The new disease was given the name hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (HPS).

Made in Chelsea

Aside from the similar clinical descriptions of sweating sickness and HPS, one other factor stands out in favour of their equivalence: rich people in Tudor times were more likely to be victims.

The end of the Wars of the Roses meant that people at last felt safe to invest in property without the risk of it being immediately ransacked, and the dissolution of the monasteries created a new upwardly mobile class that suddenly had the means to build. And build they did – Tudor London and the regional cities of England experienced a massive housing boom. Large households needed large staff, and large numbers of people need large kitchens full of large deposits of grain and other foodstuffs. Shortly after the people moved in, the rats and mice followed.

The Four Corners outbreak was due to the presence of Sin Nombre virus within the droppings of deer mice living in the vicinity of the Navajo dwellings. Aerosolisation of the virus when the droppings were disturbed, for instance when a broom passed over them to sweep them away, created an environmental airborne infection.

Whereas nowadays rodents plague the poor, in post-medieval London they were a feature of all levels of society. Rather than try to remove the rats, an almost impossible task, Tudor housekeepers, fastidiously brushing their droppings away, may have released a cloud of hantavirus-loaded dust, triggering the sweating sickness across England. All this assumes, of course, that the sweating sickness was an early variant of HPS. Other candidate pathogens have generated other explanations and scenarios.

So where did it go?

Sweating sickness had disappeared by late Elizabethan times. Its reign of terror barely lasted a century. If indeed it was an ancient variant of HPS, we can perhaps speculate about what led to its demise. The virus may have mutated to a less virulent form, perhaps in the process acquiring the capacity to be passed between humans as a more benign feverish illness, rather than being just a sporadic environmental hazard. Or perhaps its evolutionary trajectory took it in the other direction, becoming more fatal to its rodent hosts, thereby reducing the quantity of infected droppings around human habitations.

There is a third possibility – we know that the climate of Europe was becoming progressively colder from the late middle ages onwards. Perhaps some subtle change in rodent ecology made life harder for the virus. For instance the Four Corners HPS outbreak was linked to the El Niño climatic oscillation. We’ll never know for sure. Much of the mystery of sweating sickness remains. However, we do know that hantaviruses are still with us, and their day could come again.

The King's Curse is a 2014 historical novel by Philippa Gregory, part of her series The Cousins' War. A direct sequel to The White Princess, it follows the adult life of Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, the daughter of George Plantagenet, 1st Duke of Clarence and Isabel Neville.^[1]

Rivers Curse Tudor

Plot[edit]

Since Henry Tudor's accession to the English throne as Henry VII, Margaret Plantagenet has had to distance herself from her connection to the former royal family to survive. Married to a minor Tudor knight, she now mourns her younger brother, Edward, a potential claimant to the throne who has been executed by Henry on false charges of treason after 14 years imprisoned in the Tower of London. Margaret and her husband, Sir Richard Pole, manage the household of teenage Arthur, Prince of Wales, Henry's son and heir by his queen Elizabeth of York, Margaret's Plantagenet first cousin. Margaret makes fast friends with Arthur's new young bride, the Spanish princess Katherine of Aragon, but Arthur's sudden death leaves both women on uncertain ground.

Commanded by Arthur on his deathbed to marry his young brother Henry and someday become queen, Katherine asserts publicly that their marriage was never consummated. With Elizabeth now dead, King Henry considers preserving the alliance with Spain by marrying Katherine himself; his imperious mother Margaret Beaufort believes Katherine is lying, and fiercely opposes this therefore sinful marriage to her son or grandson. Richard's death leaves Margaret with five young children and a dwindling income. The King's Mother offers to relieve her burdens in exchange for a statement contradicting Katherine, but Margaret remains loyal. She is forced to foster her two oldest sons with a cousin, place her third son in Sheen Priory, and take her daughter and infant son with her to live in Syon Abbey.

Prince Henry succeeds his father as Henry VIII, and immediately marries Katherine. Margaret's maternal family fortunes and titles are restored to her, making her Countess of Salisbury in her own right. Her eldest son Henry Pole, 1st Baron Montagu, becomes a friend and confidante of the young king, and her son Reginald is sent to Oxford to become a scholar for the king. Margaret sets to make advantageous marriages for all of her children. Katherine loses several children before giving birth to Princess Mary, to whom Margaret is named governess. The execution for treason of their cousin Edward Stafford, 3rd Duke of Buckingham puts Margaret and her family in danger, but the scandal blows over. Margaret's son Arthur dies. Not having a legitimate male heir, Henry seeks to somehow put Katherine aside and marry the courtier Anne Boleyn; refused any such dispensation by the pope, Henry ultimately declares himself head of the Church of England, proclaims his marriage to Katherine invalid, and Mary illegitimate. Though scandalized, Margaret, her family, and everyone in England is compelled to swear an oath asserting Henry's right to do so; anyone who does not swear is executed.

Thomas Cromwell has begun a systematic dissolution of the monasteries in Henry's name, which causes increasing unrest among the common people. It has become a treasonous crime to disagree with the king, and even after Katherine's death, Margaret and her relations must hide their support for Mary and the Catholic Church. Henry has fathered only a daughter, Elizabeth, with Anne, and the vindictive greed of the Boleyns has left them with few allies. When Henry decides on a new consort, Jane Seymour, Anne is executed for adultery, and Elizabeth is also declared illegitimate. Henry is devastated when his illegitimate son Henry FitzRoy dies, but Jane finally gives him a legitimate son. Meanwhile, in self-imposed exile, Reginald has made an enemy of the king by writing and acting against Henry's split from papal authority. Margaret and her sons distance themselves from Reginald's disloyalty, but Cromwell focuses his attentions on them. Soon Margaret's youngest son Geoffrey has been arrested, and implicates Montagu, their cousins Henry Courtenay, Edward Neville, and others in seditious conversations going back years. Despite a lack of concrete evidence, all but Geoffrey are beheaded. Though protesting her innocence of any wrongdoing, Margaret is stripped of her fortune, imprisoned in the Tower of London, and attainted. Though Cromwell himself is executed for treason in the meantime, after two years in the Tower, Margaret is beheaded.

Arthur Tudor Curse

Critical reception[edit]

Publishers Weekly called The King's Curse 'carefully researched' and 'an illuminating portrait' of Margaret Pole, adding that 'Gregory moves confidently through a tangle of intrigue, revenge, and tyranny toward a shocking betrayal that brings Margaret face-to-face with the king’s ire.'^[2]

AudioFile magazine gave its Earphones Award to the audiobook recording of The King's Curse, noting Gregory's 'steady grasp of history' and praising narrator Bianca Amato's performance.^[3]

Adaptations[edit]

• The Spanish Princess (2019-2020), series directed by Birgitte Stærmose, Daina Reid, Lisa Clarke, Stephen Woolfenden, Chanya Button and Rebecca Gatward, based on novels The Constant Princess and The King's Curse

References[edit]

1. ^'The King's Curse (Official site)'. PhilippaGregory.com. Retrieved 7 October 2014.
2. ^'The King's Curse'. Publishers Weekly. 21 July 2014. Retrieved 8 October 2014.
3. ^'Audiobook Review: The King's Curse (2014)'. AudioFile. Retrieved 8 December 2014.

External links[edit]

Tudor Curse Tilbury Fort

• Philippa Gregory on IMDb

Tudor Dynasty Curse