Even the number of premature births endured by his wives is in dispute; and all sorts of cock-and-bull stories are made up to show that his children, if born alive, or his wives if they took ill were singularly subject to the effects of cold and overlong christenings. Once would be all very well; but when it happens more than once it becomes suspicious. It is wonderful what people can invent when they wish to explain a thing by religious and political conspiracies—of which they can really know nothing in an age so utterly different from ours, in which the actors have long gone beyond our intimate knowledge—when the obvious medical truth is staring them in the face. Human beliefs have changed, but syphilis is still the same.
I follow Pollard because he impresses me as a man of common sense. I have not met him; but the sheer virulent abuse of the ordinary man is no argument and is a better description of the critic’s own mind than of his subject.
The facts which can only reasonably be explained by the idea that he was suffering from constitutional syphilis are as follows—I put them in the order in which they impress myself:
(a) The extraordinary number of premature births and dead children from two of his wives, one of whom was young and healthy. The early death of Catherine’s first-born son is attributed to the strain of a long christening on a bitter midwinter day.
(b) The poor health of at least three of his children, Mary Tudor, Edward VI, and the illegitimate Duke of Richmond; whether Elizabeth escaped the infection is at least doubtful since Professor Chamberlain has carefully investigated the details of her health.
(c) The terrible degeneration, mental, moral, and physical, which set in in his early middle age.
(d) The facts contained in the extract from the British Medical Journal of 1910: “From being an able and athletic man he had become a mass of loathsome infirmities. He was bloated in face and so unwieldy that he could hardly pass through an ordinary door. His legs were swollen and covered with festering sores, causing an unbearable stench. Towards the end those about him saw that death was at hand, though, according to Foxe, he would never allow it to be mentioned in his hearing. Kings never seem to have liked it to be recognised that they are mortal, in which reluctance to face facts they are much like other people.”
(e) The sinus in his leg which caused him unbearable agony whenever it was closed. This seems to have been syphilitic periostitis occurring in an essentially neurotic man.
(f) Death in stupor at the comparatively early age of fifty-five.
Not any single one of these symptoms is indubitable evidence of syphilis, but taken altogether there is no other reasonable explanation. In syphilis and self-indulgence we have the secret of the whole tragic development of this king’s character. Syphilis alone would doubtfully have accounted for it, even less perhaps gluttonous and bibulous self-indulgence. It is quite true that after his first marriage he seems to have abandoned all moral restraint, or at least guidance by ecclesiastics and the Church; but his dreadful degeneration was not a result of doing so; he did so because he was influenced by the spirochæte and gluttony combined. To-day, when a man gets into gaol for any particularly shameless offence—especially sexual—the very first thing that the police surgeon does is to perform a Wassermann test upon his cerebro-spinal fluid; and I am perfectly certain that if it were possible to do so upon Henry Tudor, the report would come back marked “Wassermann plus,” and probably towards the end of his life “plus plus plus!”