Queen Elizabeth of England
appears to have been an amateur prescriber. Etmuller states that she sent a formula for a “cephalica-cardiac medicine” to the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II, himself a dabbler in various scientific quackeries. It consisted of amber, musk, and civet, dissolved in spirit of roses. It is further on record that the English queen selected doctors and pharmacists for Ivan the Terrible of Russia. In Wadd’s Memorabilia, one of her Majesty’s quarter’s bills from her apothecary, Hugo Morgan, is quoted. It amounted to £83 7s. 8d., and included the following items:—A confection made like manus Christi with bezoar stone and unicorn’s horn, 11s.; a royal sweetmeat with incised rhubarb, 1s. 4d.; rose water for the king of Navarre’s ambassador, 1s.; a conserve of barberries with preserved damascene plums, and other things for Mr. Ralegh, 6s.; sweet scent to be used at the christening of Sir Richard Knightley’s son, 2s.
The Queen of Hungary’s Water.
Rosemary has at times enjoyed a high reputation among medicinal herbs. Arnold of Villa Nova affirms that he had often seen cancers, gangrenes, and fistulas, which would yield to no other medicine, dry up and become perfectly cured by frequently bathing them with a spirituous infusion of rosemary. His disciple, Raymond Lully, extracted the essential oil by distillation.
The name probably assisted the fame of the plant. In the middle ages it was believed to be associated with the Virgin. It was in fact derived from Ros and Maris, meaning Dew of the Sea; probably because it grew near the shores of the Mediterranean.
“Here’s rosemary for you; that’s for remembrance.” So says Ophelia in Hamlet; and many other poets and chroniclers relate how the plant was used at funerals and weddings as a symbol of constancy. It is supposed that this signification arose from the medicinal employment of rosemary to improve the memory. It may easily have happened, however, that the medicinal use followed the emblematical idea.
Old books and some modern ones tell the legend of the Queen of Hungary and her rosemary remedy. It is alleged in pharmaceutical treatises published in the nineteenth century that a document is preserved in the Imperial Library at Vienna, dated 1235, and written by Queen Elisabeth of Hungary, thus expressed:—
“I, Elisabeth, Queen of Hungary, being very infirm and much troubled with gout, in the seventy-second year of my age, used for a year this recipe given to me by an ancient hermit, whom I never saw before nor since; and was not only cured but recovered my strength, and appeared to all so remarkably beautiful that the King of Poland asked me in marriage, he being a widower and I a widow. I, however, refused him for the love of my Lord Jesus Christ, from one of whose angels I believe I received the remedy.”
The royal formula is as follows:—“Take aqua vitae, four times distilled, 3 parts; the tops and flowers of rosemary, 2 parts; put these together in a closed vessel, let them stand in a gentle heat fifty hours, and then distil them. Take one teaspoonful of this in the morning once every week, and let your face and diseased limb be washed with it every morning.”
Beckmann investigated this story and came to the conclusion that the name “Eau de La Reine d’Hongrie” had been adopted by some vendors of a spirit of rosemary “in order to give greater consequence and credit to their commodity”; in other words, he suggests that the interesting narrative was only a clever advertisement.
The only Queen Elisabeth of Hungary was the wife of King Charles Robert, and daughter of Ladislaus, King of Poland. She died in 1380, and for more than ten years before that date either her brother, Casimir II, or her son Louis, was the reigning sovereign in Poland, and neither of these can be supposed to have been her suitor. The alleged date of the document quoted would better suit St. Elisabeth of Hungary, and some old writers attribute the formula and the story to her. But she was never queen of Hungary, and moreover she died in 1231 at the age of 25. Beckmann also denies the statement that the document pretended to be in Queen Elisabeth’s writing is preserved in the Imperial Library at Vienna. The whole narrative is traced to a German named Hoyer, in 1716, and he apparently copied it from a French medical writer named Prevot, who published it in 1659. Prevot attributes the story to “St. Elisabeth, Queen of Hungary,” and says he copied both the history and the formula from an old breviary in the possession of his friend, Francis Podacather, a Cyprus nobleman, who had inherited it from his ancestors. This is the one little possibility of truth in the record, for it appears that Queen Elisabeth of Hungary did mention two breviaries in her will, and it may have been that one of these was the one which the Cyprus nobleman possessed.