Archæological Essays, Vol. 2

by James Young Simpson

4th Corollary.—The early notices that I have adduced of the appearance of syphilis in Scotland are curious as proofs of the rapidity with which the disease travelled, at its first outbreak, over the kingdoms of Europe. The new malady was, as I have already stated, first distinctly recognised during the period that Charles VIII. of France occupied the city of Naples, or rather immediately after he left that place. The cases of the disease that had appeared previously were not, at least, anywhere in such numbers, or in such severity, as to excite any marked and decided degree of attention from physicians or from the public. That Naples was the locality in which the contagion first burst forth so extensively and overtly as to be considered almost the source and cradle of the new epidemic; and further, that this happened at the precise date of the visit of the French army, seems, as has been suggested by various authors, to be shown by the very designations respectively conferred at the time upon the new affection by the Neapolitans and French. For whilst, as already alluded to, the French, as is well known, designated it at its first commencement among them the Neapolitan disease, alleging it to have been communicated to them by the inhabitants of Naples, the Neapolitans, on the other hand, termed it the French disease, believing that it had been brought to them by the victorious army of France. Now the date of Charles’s sojourn in Naples is well known. His army, in their march through Italy, arrived at Rome on the 4th December 1494, and entered Naples on the 21st or 22d February 1495; and after remaining three months, they vacated the city on the 20th May. On the 24th of the same month the renowned Spanish general Cordova landed in Sicily; on the 6th July the battle of Fuornovo was fought, and next day King Ferdinand returned to Naples; but the last remains of the French army did not reach France till the end of the following year. The Aberdeen edict, however, was issued within less than two years after Charles commenced his march homeward. Or, we may state the matter otherwise. Columbus arrived at Palos, in Andalusia, after his first voyage to the New World, on the 15th March 1493, having previously landed at Lisbon on the 6th, and visited the Portuguese King at Valparaiso: while Pinzen, the commander of the other remaining caravel of Columbus’ tiny fleet, was, about the same date, driven northward into the French port of Bayonne. Possibly one focus or centre for the future spread and dissemination of syphilis was left in this French port by Pinzen’s crew, if they brought the infection with them; but I have nowhere found any allusion to this question. Columbus reached Spain, from his second voyage, in April 1496. The edict of the Aberdeen aldermen and council was passed on the 23d April 1497, or exactly four years and thirty-eight days from the date of Columbus’ first return to Spain; while the famous ordinance of the Parisian authorities regarding syphilis was issued on the 6th March 1497, only forty-eight days before that of Aberdeen.[621]

In reference to the rapidity with which syphilis spread from the south and middle of Europe to this small and isolated kingdom of Scotland, it is necessary to remember that in the last years of the fifteenth century, and during the reign of James IV., the intercourse of this country with “France, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, and Flanders was (to quote the words of the Scottish historian, Mr. Tytler) as regular and uninterrupted, not only in the more solemn way of embassies, but by heralds, envoys, and merchants, as that carried on with England.”[622] There was in actual operation, also, at that very date, another medium by which such a disease was very likely to be carried from the Continent to our shores, and diffused among the population of the larger towns. In November 1495, Perkin Warbeck, under the title of Prince Richard, Duke of York, arrived in Scotland, and was received with regal honours by King James, who bestowed upon him in marriage his cousin, the Lady Catherine Gordon. This pretended claimant to the English throne remained in Scotland till July 1497. He was preceded, accompanied, and followed to this country by gay and reckless “soldiers of fortune”from the Continent, Ireland, England, etc.—the men of all others most likely to transmit and diffuse such a disease as syphilis. These adventurers appear to have been quartered by the Scottish King upon various towns. Thus, the town-records of Aberdeen show that, as early as the 5th July 1495,—some months before Warbeck himself arrived in Scotland,—a burgh tax was imposed “to the sustentacioun of aught Inglismen of the Duk of Yorkis, direkit to the toune by our souerane lordis hiennes, and his letteris therapone.”—(Spalding Club Extracts, vol. i. p. 57.)

The speed, however, with which the disease thus travelled from the south of Europe to its western confines has been often employed as an argument to show that the contagion of syphilis was propagated at its first introduction by laws different from those which now regulate its communication. In other words, it has been often alleged that the disease was then spread from kingdom to kingdom, and from city to city, by epidemic influences and by general contagion, and not merely by the slower medium of impure sexual connection. We have just seen such a doctrine so far belied by the sagacious regulations of the magistrates of Aberdeen; and when we look to the then existing state of Society, both on the Continent and in our own country, to the loose manners and licentious lives of these times, we shall probably find a sufficient solution of the, at first sight, difficult problem of the rapid dissemination of the new malady. The morals of the general mass of the people are ever found to be principally regulated by the example set before them by the aristocracy and clergy. At the date of the introduction of syphilis into Europe, the notorious habits of the two latter ruling bodies were assuredly such as to expedite greatly the diffusion of the new scourge that had sprung up among them; and hence, at its first outbreak, we find the disease fixing itself upon several of the highest members of the continental courts, and of the church. The Emperor Charles V., and Pope Alexander VI., kings and cardinals, princes and bishops, peers and priests, are openly and publicly recorded among its victims by those who personally watched and described the first ravages of syphilis. In fact the disease was then scarcely, or indeed not at all, looked upon as conferring any degree of infamy.

In his tract on the malady,[623] published at Rome in the year 1500, Peter Pinctor mentions by name, and without any reticence, three of the more illustrious patients whom he had treated for this new disease—namely, the Prebendary Centez, the Cardinal of Segovia, and his Holiness the reigning Pope. Writers thought it no imputation on their own characters to publish an account of the disease as it occurred in their own persons. The physician Joseph Grunbeck of Burkchausen, in his essay “De Pestilentiali Scorra sive Mala de Frantzos” (1496), tells his readers how he himself caught the disease from the atmosphere, when walking in some fields near Augsburg. One of the earliest adherents and fiercest champions of the Reformation in Germany was Ulric Hütten, “the poet and valiant knight of the sixteenth century,” as Merle D’Aubigné designates him. In 1519, Hütten, though bred to arms, and not to physic, published a treatise—De Guiaci Medicina, etc., Morbo Gallico. In this treatise he details his own case and sufferings from the disease, how he had been “utterly vexed with the sycknes,”—had been eleven times salivated for it, and was at last cured by guiacum. This treatise, written, as the preface bears, by “that great clerke of Almayne, Ulrich Hütten, Knycht,” was translated by Thomas Paynell, Chanon of Marten Abbey, and published in England in 1539. The disease was, in Hütten’s opinion, produced “throughe some unholsome blastes of the ayre.” His polemical antagonist, Erasmus, in his Colloquy of Gamos and Agamos, denounced fiercely the character of this reforming and literary knight:—“Qualis eques (he exclaims) cui per Scabiem vix in sella sedere liceat!”

In order to show how swiftly a disease, propagated in the way syphilis is, might overrun the society of continental Europe towards the conclusion of the fifteenth century, it is only necessary to allude to the dire and deplorable state of morals among those that ought to have set an example to the community—namely, the clergy of these days, as painted by the tongue and pens of their own writers. In an official sermon published by Martene (tom. ii. p. 1758), and preached in St. Peter’s at Rome by the Apostolic Auditor prior to the election of the Pope in the year 1484, the corrupt morals and dishonesty of the whole church are denounced; and it is added that many do not merely commit, but triumph even in, such sins as the subversion of chastity and other virtues (de pudicitia, cæterisque virtutibus subversis, triumphantes). The frightful licentiousness and obscene orgies of the reigning pontiff, and of his family and court, which speedily followed, formed a hideous practical commentary upon this text. A high Romanist who had the honour of refusing a cardinal’s hat, Claud D’Espence, Rector of the University of Paris, after exposing the infamy of the taxes of the apostolic chancery, with its list of “filthy and horrid iniquities” (fœdorum tamque horrendorum scelerum)—a license for any and all of which could be purchased—adds, “You shall say we ingenuously confess that God permits this (Lutheran) prosecution to come upon his church on account of the sins of men, chiefly of priests and prelates, from whose sins the Scriptures cry out that the sins of the people are derived.... Is it wonderful if the malady descend from the head to the members, from the supreme Pontiff to others?[624] Where under heaven is there a greater license of all evils (infamia, impudecentia, etc.)?... Truly (adds D’Espence, and he had personally visited Rome), evils such and so great that no one can believe but he who has seen, and no one can deny but he who has not seen....

Vivere qui cupitis sancte, discedite Roma;

Omnia cum liceant, non licet esse bonum.”[625]

Previously another orthodox Roman ecclesiastic, Nicolas de Clemangis, Archdeacon of Bayeaux, had, in indignant, and, let us hope, in too sweeping terms, denounced the continental nunneries of these dark days as little better than brothels, and the taking of the veil as almost synonymous with a profession of public prostitution:—“Nam quod aliud sunt puellarum monasteria nisi quædam non dicam Dei sanctuaria, sed Veneris execranda postibula. Sed lascivorum et impudicorum juvenum ad libidines explendas receptacula ut idem hodie sit puellam velare, quod et publice ad scortandum exponere.”[626] Truly in these pre-Reformation days there was, as Cardinal Bellarmine confesses and laments, “almost no religion left.”[627]

As far as regarded the predisposing habits and influence of the clergy, matters were not better in Britain than on the Continent, when the disease first reached this country. We have already seen Cardinal Wolsey, the primate of England, publicly accused in Parliament of labouring under the disease. We can, however, wonder the less at the disease attacking such a high dignitary, when we recollect that, according to some writers,[628] there was openly inscribed over the doors of a palace belonging to this prelate—“Domus Meretricium Domini Cardinalis.” Polydore Vergil, the sub-collector of the Pope’s revenues in England, speaks, perhaps in exaggerated terms, of the orgies in the residence of Wolsey, by which he allured at first the young King Henry VIII. “Domi suae voluptatum omnium sacrarium fecit quo regem frequenter ducebat. Sermones leporis plenos habebat, etc.”[629] The manners of the inferior dignitaries of the church offered only too close an imitation of those of its primate. The commissioners appointed by Henry VIII. to visit the monasteries of England have recorded a sad, and (even setting aside the influence of prejudice) probably only too true a picture of the moral degeneracy of the great mass of the regular clergy of the time. With some few cheering and honourable exceptions, they found the occupants of most of the monasteries following lives of degraded vice and licentiousness, instead of religious purity and exemplary rectitude. When the visitors received their commissions and instructions, they were despatched into different parts of the kingdom, at the same time, that the monks might have as little warning of their approach as possible. They executed, says the historian Henry,[630] their commissions with zeal and diligence, and made some curious discoveries almost in every house, not much to the honour of its inhabitants. Accounts, he adds, of their proceedings were transmitted by the visitor to the vicar-general, and they contained sufficient materials to render the monasteries completely infamous,—for their gross, absurd superstition, their shameful impositions, their abandoned unnatural incontinency, etc. etc. Some of the old abbots and friars did not attempt to conceal their amours, because they knew it was impossible. The holy father, the prior of Maiden Bradley, assured the visitors that he had only married six of his sons and one of his daughters out of the goods of the priory as yet; but that several more of his children were now growing or grown up, and would soon be marriageable. He produced a dispensation from the Pope, permitting him to keep a mistress; and he asseverated that he took none but young maidens to be his mistresses, the handsomest that he could procure; and when he was disposed to change, he got them individually provided with very good lay husbands.[631] “These be the men” (exclaimed Simon Fish, in one of his celebrated public sermons which he delivered at the period we speak of), “these be the men that corrupt the whole generation in your realm, that catch the pox of one woman, and bear it to another; that be burnt with one woman, and bear it to another.”[632]

Clerical morals and manners were not in a much healthier state on the Scottish side of the Border. Towards the end of the fifteenth century, we have not on record any such obscene scandal as was detailed in a previous century in the Chronicle of Lanercost regarding Priest John, who is alleged to have publicly celebrated phallic orgies among the young inhabitants of his parish of Inverkeithing,[633] a town which was certainly a place of no small note and importance in these early days. But clerical morals were still confessedly in a sad state about the time that syphilis first appeared in this part of the island. The General Satyre of Scotland, written, as I have already stated, at the commencement of the sixteenth century, stigmatises amongst other things—