I shall close these remarks by alluding to one other reputed case of leprosy in a descendant of the royal families of Scotland. The celebrated Constance, Duchess of Britanny, who was allied to the royal families both of England and Scotland (being a granddaughter of Malcolm III. of Scotland, and the English Princess Margaret Atheling, and at the same time a descendant of a natural daughter of Henry I.), is generally alleged by historians to have suffered and died from leprosy.[260] William of Nangris (as Lobineau observes) “has shown that she died of leprosy (de la lepre), a disease with which females were occasionally attacked in these times.” Lobineau places the date of the decease of Constance in the year 1201.
Sex of the Lepers.
The modern history of tubercular leprosy would seem to show that the disease attacks the male in a larger proportion than the female sex. From the table which Dr. Adams collected and published of patients admitted into the leper-house of Funchal, Madeira,[261] from 1702 to 1803, it appears that during that period 526 infected males were admitted into the hospital, while the corresponding list of infected females amounts only to 373. The enumeration of the lepers in the Glasgow leper hospital in 1589,[262] and those entered into the Greenside hospital of Edinburgh in 1591 (the only two old lists of patients of such institutions in Britain that I am acquainted with), show the diseased inmates of these two establishments to have been all males. A large proportion of the English lazar-houses seem, from the language of their charters, to have been endowed entirely for males (fratres leprosi), but, at the same time, we have abundant evidence in the same documents that females often suffered from the disease.[263] Some of the lazar-houses were founded and endowed for admitting infected inmates of both sexes (fratres et sorores leprosæ). Thus Tanner states that the old lazar-house of St. Nicolas, York, contained both male and female lepers.[264] Mackarell and Bridges both mention the same fact with regard to the hospitals of St. Nicolas at Lynne Regis,[265] and of St. Leonard at Northampton;[266] and the inmates of the leper-house of St. Giles, Shrewsbury, bore, according to Owen and Blakeway,[267] the style of the prior, brethren and sisters of St. Giles. A few of the English hospitals were indeed entirely devoted to the reception of leprous females. Thus the hospital of Mayden Bradley was founded in the time of Henry II. for those of the female sex only (pro mulieribus leprosis); and the hospital of St. James, Westminster (which, says Bishop Tanner, stood on or near the place now occupied by the palace of the same name), was destined, as the renewed charter of Henry III. bears, for fourteen leprous girls (quatuordecim Leprosis puellis).[268]
Age of those attacked—Duration of the Disease.
There are no documents (as far as I am aware) which directly throw any light on the age of the inmates of the leper hospitals. The expression, however, of puellæ, which I have just quoted as applied to the inmates of St. James’ Hospital, shows the youth not less than the sex of the inmates of that institution, and so far demonstrates that the disease then, as it does now, sometimes attacked its victims very early in life. Baldwin IV. of Jerusalem, (whose case I have already referred to) was affected with the disease while still a minor, and surrendered his crown at the age of 23, in consequence of the ravages which the disease had by that time made upon his constitution. “He died young,” says Fuller, “at five-and-twenty years of age—a king happie in this, that he died before the death of his kingdome.”[269]
King Robert the Bruce, another, as we have already seen, of the royal victims of the malady, died at the age of 55.[270] But it is difficult to fix the precise date of the first attack of the disease in the case of the Scottish king, and hence difficult to deduce the exact duration of the malady in this particular instance. His faithful biographer, Barbour, describes him as “tuk with sic a sicknes” before the battle of Inverury in 1307, “that he mycht nothyr rid na ga”[271]—(that he might neither ride nor walk). Kerr, in his History of the Life and Reign of the Bruce, seems to hint that this was the commencement of the disease which ultimately carried him off;[272] and indeed Barbour, in a subsequent part of his poem, describes his fatal malady as “beguth”—(begun)
throuch his cald lying
Quhen in his gret myscheiff wes he.—P. 407.
But if the affection commenced in so acute a form at that date, it must have lasted for the long period of twenty-two years, as his death did not take place till 1329. If the disease under which the king suffered so severely in 1307 had been leprosy, it would not in all probability have left his activity and individual prowess for so long a date unimpaired. The battle-axe which, on the evening before the battle of Bannockburn, cleft at a single blow the helmet and skull of Henry de Bohun, could scarcely have been wielded by the arm of one whose body had for some years previously been the seat of a mortal disease. Some facts, however, would seem to show that the malady had assumed a marked and severe form a considerable time before the Bruce’s death. I have already shown, from the Chronicle of Lanercost, that three years before his demise the Bruce was already so incapacitated by the inroads of the leprosy that he was unable to undertake the command of the army in their descent upon the northern counties of England.[273] The same reason rendered him, as we are informed by Barbour, unable to attend the peaceful nuptial feast of his son at Berwick in 1328. It may not be considered uninteresting to add, as a part both of the history of the man and of the disease under which he was labouring, that during these three last years of his life, and whilst “the sicknes” affected his body “so fellely” (to use Barbour’s words), “and him trawaillat sa that he considered death certen,” his naturally energetic mind was still active and vigorous. The accounts of his chamberlain, preserved in the Register House of Edinburgh,[274] show that, during the very last year of his life, he was busied in making experiments on ship-building and navigation in his retirement at Cardross Castle, near the banks of the Clyde, in Dumbartonshire. Within a month before his death, he indited from this place a letter (the original of which still exists among the old archives of Melrose Abbey, preserved in the General Register House, Edinburgh[275]), desiring his heart to be buried within the precincts of that monastery,—a wish which he changed, a short time before he expired, into the well-known commission to his favourite follower and friend, “ye gentle knighte of Douglas,” viz. “I woll yat, as soone as I am trespassed oute of this worlde, ye take my harte oute of my body, and embaume it, and present it to the Holy Sepulchre at Jeruslem, saying my bodie can nat come.”[276]