Some of the leper hospitals were specially endowed for persons above the lower ranks, who happened to become affected with the disease. In 1491, Robert Pigot gave by will to the leper hospital of Walsingham, in the archdeaconry of Norwich, a house in or near that town for the use of two leprous persons “of good families.”[224]
The malady was found among the clergy as well as among the laity, and some of the English leper hospitals were specially founded for the reception of leprous monks alone—as the hospital of St. Lawrence, near Canterbury, and, according to Tanner,[225] that of St. Bartholomew, at Chatham. From one of the edicts issued by Henry II. during the height of his quarrel with Archbishop Becket, it would appear that the dignitaries of the church occasionally did, or at least might, employ lepers in the high character of nuncios, for, in order to prevent Becket from putting the kingdom of England under an ecclesiastical interdict, Henry took all precautions that no official letters to that effect should be conveyed into Britain; and to secure this object the more surely, he enacted, that, if any individual did carry thither letters of interdict from the Pope or Archbishop, he should be punished “by the amputation of his feet if a regular; by the loss of his eyes and by castration, if a secular clergyman; he should be hanged if he were a layman; and burned if he were a leper” (si Leprosus, comburatur).[226]
In the extant account of the British leper hospitals, there are still preserved some instances in which these institutions were founded by the wealthy and noble after they had themselves become the victims of the malady. The leper hospital of Mayden Bradley, in Wiltshire, was founded by a female member of the rich family of the Bysets[227]—Camden alleges by a daughter of Manasser Byset, sewer to King Henry II., after she had herself become a leper. “This hospital,” says Leland, “was builded by one of the three heirs general of the Bisets, who, being a lazar, gave her part of the town of Kidderminster in pios usus.”[228]
If the earlier biographical notices that we possess regarding the nobility of Great Britain were as minute on their private as on their martial and political lives, we might probably have to record many more notices in regard to their bodily maladies of an import similar to the following:—The youngest son of Robert Blanchmains, Earl of Leicester, was himself a leper, and in the reign of Richard II. founded a leper hospital, dedicated to St. Leonard, on the north part of the town of Leicester.[229]
The royal families of England and Scotland did not always remain exempt from the suspicion, at least, and accusation of leprosy, if not from the actual attack of the disease.
Henry III. courted Margaret, Princess of Scotland, and the sister of Malcolm IV. The royal lady preferred the brave Hubert de Burgh, the minister of the English king. Hubert’s enemies afterwards alleged to King Henry, that he (Hubert) had dissuaded the Scottish princess from accepting the hand of the English monarch, by telling her “that Henry was a squint-eyed fool, a lewd man, a leper, deceitful, perjured, more faint-hearted than a woman, and utterly unfit for the company of any fair and noble lady.”—(Articles of Impeachment, as given by Speed.)[230]
In reference to this unfounded accusation, I may state that Ryland mentions it as a local tradition that the leper-house of Waterford in Ireland was founded by King John (the father of Henry III.) in consequence of his son’s being affected at Lismore with an eruption that was supposed to be leprosy.[231] But even supposing the tradition correct, it could scarcely have been Henry the eldest legitimate son of John, since, at the date of his father’s expedition into Ireland, 1209 and 1210, Henry was a child of only five or six years of age, and in all probability did not accompany his royal sire.
Different historians have alleged that Henry IV. was affected with leprosy in the latter part of his life. The immediate cause of his death seems to have been epilepsy, terminating, after a time, in an apoplectic attack; and some authors aver strongly that this was his only disease. Thus, in his Chronicles of England,[232] the celebrated old printer, Grafton, upholds that Henry was carried off by “a sore and sudaine disease called an apoplexie.” Hall, an author somewhat anterior in date, stoutly maintains this same view, for the king’s disease, as he observes, “was no lepry striken by the hand of God, as folish friers before declared, for then he neither would for shame nor for debility enterprize (as he did), so greate a journey as into Jewrie (Jerusalem), in his own persone, but he was taken with a sore apoplexye.”[233]
Hollinshed,[234] quoting implicitly this account from “Maister Hall,” gravely adds, and he “had none other greefe nor maladie.” The dogmatic authority of Hall on this, as on other points, is not to be over much relied upon.