There were more sicknesses of that kind, perhaps not without a sweating character, in the last ten years of the 16th century[552]. But they are indefinitely given as compared with earlier and later epidemics, and I shall pass to the next authentic instance.
The autumn of 1612 was undoubtedly a season of epidemic ague or “new disease” in England[553]. When Prince Henry, eldest son of James I., fell ill in November, in London, during the gaieties attending the betrothal of his sister the Princess Elizabeth to the Count Palatine of the Rhine, a letter-writer of the time said of his illness: “It is verily thought that the disease was no other than the ordinary ague that hath reigned and raged almost all over England since the latter end of summer[554].” The attack began in the end of October. The spirited and popular prince had been leading the gaieties in place of his father, who could not stand the fatigue, and was “seized by a fever that came upon him at first with a looseness, but hath continued a quotidian ever since Wednesday last [before the 4th of November], and with more violence than it began, so that on Saturday he was let blood by advice of most physicians, though Butler, of Cambridge, was loth to consent. The blood proved foul: and that afternoon he grew very sick.... I cannot learn that he had either speech or perfect memory after Wednesday night, but lay, as it were, drawing on till Friday between eight and nine of the evening that he departed. The greatest fault is laid on Turquet, who was so forward to give him a purge the day after he sickened, and so dispersed the disease, as Butler says, into all parts; whereas if he had tarried till three or four fits had been passed, they might the better have judged of the nature of it; or if, instead of purging, he had let him blood before it was so much corrupted, there had been more probability.” At the dissection, the spleen was found “very black, the head full of clear water and all the veins of the head full of clotted blood. Butler had the advantage, who maintained that his head would be found full of water, and Turquet that his brains would be found overflown and as it were drowned in blood[555].” Butler, it appears, was “a drunken sot.” When King James asked him what he thought of the prince’s case, he replied “in his dudgeon manner” with a tag of verse from Virgil ending with “et plurima mortis imago.” The Princess Elizabeth could not be admitted to see her brother “because his disease was doubted to be contagious[556].” It was at least epidemic, for in the same week alderman Sir Harry Row and Sir George Carey, master of the wards, died “of this new disease[557].” The earliest reference to it that I find is the death, previous to 11 September, of Sir Michael Hicks at his house Rackholt in Essex, “of a burning ague,” which came, as was thought, by his often going into the water this last summer, he being a man of years[558]; but much more probably was a case of “the ordinary ague that hath reigned and raged almost all over England since the latter end of summer.” The next year was still more unhealthy, to judge by samples of parish registers; agues are mentioned also in letters; thus, one going on 25 March, 1613, to visit Sir Henry Savile, found him “in a fit, an ague having caught hold of him[559].”
The winter of 1613-14 was marked by most disastrous floods in Romney Marsh, in Lincolnshire, in the Isle of Ely, and about Wisbech, and most of all in Norfolk[560]; but the malarious conditions so brought about, being subsequent to, were not conceivably the cause of, the epidemics of ague in the autumn of 1612 and 1613, which made so great an excess of burials over christenings in the parish registers.
A curious record remains of an aguish sickness in a child, which had begun about January, 1614. On 18 March, of that year, the dowager Countess of Arundel wrote from Sutton, near Guildford, to her son Earl Thomas, who was making the grand tour to Rome and elsewhere with his wife, and had left the children to the care of their grandmother: “Your two elder boys be very well and merry, but my swett Willm. continueth his tersion agu still. This day we expect his twelfth fitt. I assur myselfe teeth be the chefe cause. I look for so spedy ending of it, he is so well and merry on his good days, and so strong as I never saw old nor yonge bear it so well. I thank Jesu he hath not any touch of the infirmity of the head, but onely his choler and flushe apareth, but he is as lively as can be but in the time of his fits onely, which continueth some eight hours[561].”
The epidemic of ague or “new disease,” which began to rage all over England in the end of the summer, 1612, had probably recurred in the years following, down to 1616. There is not a trace of plague during those years in any known record; and yet they are among the most unhealthy years in Short’s abstracts of town and country parish registers[562].
The first half of the 17th century is a period which is almost a blank in the conventional annals of “influenza” in Europe. But that period, which was the period of the Thirty Years’ War, had many widespread sicknesses. I do not wish to claim these as influenzas, or to contend that they were infections equivalent thereto in diffusiveness. We may, however, find a place for them in this context; for they were certainly as mysterious as any epidemics admitted into the canon of influenzas. So far as concerns Britain, the first was the epidemic ague, or “new disease,” of 1612 and 1613, probably recurring until 1616. The second was the universal spotted fever of 1623 and 1624, of which I have given an account in the chapter on typhus. That was followed by the plague of 1625, and that again by a harvest ague in the country in the end of the same year. The next epidemic ague or “general sickness, called the new disease,” fell mostly in England upon the two years 1638 and 1639. It was in part a harvest ague, “a malignant fever raging so fiercely about harvest that there appeared scarce hands enough to take in the corn[563]”; but it was also a winter disease. I pass over the war-typhus of 1643, to which the name of “new disease” was also given, and the widespread fever of the year following. In 1651 we hear again of a strange ague, which “first broke out by the seaside in Cheshire, Lancashire and North Wales,” eighty or a hundred being sick of it at once in small villages. Whitmore, who saw this epidemic in Cheshire, identified it with the Protean disease which he described in 1657-58, and hazarded the theory that the former was a diluted or “more remiss” infection carried by the wind from Ireland, where the plague was then raging, in Dublin, Galway, Limerick and other places, after their sieges or occupations by the army of the Commonwealth.
Thus in the first half of the 17th century we have more or less full evidence of epidemics of “new disease” in 1612-13, 1623-24, 1625, 1638-9, 1643-4 and 1651, not one of which was an influenza as we understand the term[564].
We come at length to the years 1657-59, in the course of which one catarrhal epidemic, or perhaps two, did prevail for a few weeks. The hot agues or “new disease” had been raging all over the country from the summer of 1657; then in April, 1658, there came suddenly universal coughs and catarrhs, “as if a blast from the stars”; they ceased, and the hot agues dragged on through the summer and autumn. A letter from London, 26 October, 1658, says: “A world of sickness in all countries round about London: London is now held to be the wholesomest place,” and adds that “there is a great death of coach-horses almost in every place, and it is come into our fields[565].” It was after this, in the spring of 1659, if Whitmore has made no mistake in his dates, that coughs and catarrhs “universally infested London, scarce leaving a family where any store were, without some being ill of this distemper.” The details have been given fully in the former volume[566]. I wish merely to remark here that the two catarrhal epidemics, or influenzas proper, in two successive springs, were sharply defined episodes in the midst of a period of epidemic agues, and that the “new disease” as a whole, during the two or three years that it lasted, had such an effect in the way of ill health and mortality that it was afterwards viewed as a “little plague” worthy of being set in comparison with the Great Plague of 1665.
Willis does not say that the epidemic agues lasted after 1658, perhaps because his essay was printed early in 1659; but Whitmore, whose preface is dated November, 1659, says, without distinguishing the hot ague from the catarrhal fever but speaking of them both as one Protean malady: “it now begins again, seizing on all sorts of people of different nature, which shows that it is epidemic.” Sydenham does not appear upon the scene until 1661; but when his epidemic constitutions do begin, it is with intermittents or agues, which lasted, according to him, until 1664. Perhaps if Sydenham’s experience had extended back to 1657 he would have made his aguish constitution to begin with that year, and to go on continuously until 1664. At all events it does not appear that the year 1660 was a clear interval between Willis’s and Whitmore’s period of 1657-59, Sydenham’s period of 1661-64; for it so happens that John Evelyn has left the following note of his own illness:
“From 17 February to 5 April [1660] I was detained in bed with a kind of double tertian, the cruell effects of the spleene and other distempers, in that extremity that my physicians, Drs Wetherburn, Needham and Claude were in great doubts of my recovery.” Towards the decline of his sickness he had a relapse, but on the 14th April “I was able to go into the country, which I did to my sweete and native aire at Wooton.” On the 9th of May he was still so weak as to be unable to accompany Lord Berkeley to Breda with the address inviting Charles II. to assume the crown.