A Book About Doctors

by John Cordy Jeaffreson

It would not be hard to say which of the two gifts has done the greater good. Poor Will Nutley took his 500 guineas, and had "more bottles," went a few more times to the theatres in lace and velvet and brocade, roared out at a few more drinking bouts, and was carried off by [his biographer calls it "a violent fever">[ in the twenty-ninth year of his age. And possibly since Willy Nutley was Willy Nutley, and no one else, this was the best possible termination for him. That Radcliffe, the head of a grave profession, and a man of fifty-seven years of age, should have conceived an enthusiastic friendship for a youngster of half his age, is a fact that shows us one of the consequences of the tavern life of our great-grandfathers. It puts us in mind of how Fielding, ere he had a beard, burst into popularity with the haunters of coffee-houses. When roistering was in fashion, a young man had many chances which he no longer possesses. After the theatres were closed, he reeled into the hostels of the town, singing snatches with the blithe, clear voice of youth, laughing and jesting with all around, and frequently amongst that "all" he came in contact with the highest and most powerful men of the time. A boy-adventurer could display his wit and quality to statesmen and leaders of all sorts; whereas now he must wait years before he is even introduced to them, and years more ere he gets an invitation to their formal dinners, at which Barnes Newcome cuts as brilliant a figure as the best and the strongest.

Throughout his life Radcliffe was a staunch and manly Jacobite. He was for "the king"; but neither loyalty nor interest could bind him to higher considerations than those of attachment to the individual he regarded as the rightful head of the realm. In 1688, when Obadiah Walker tried to wheedle him into the folly of becoming a Romanist, the attempt at perversion proved a signal failure. Nothing can be more truly manly than his manner of rejecting the wily advances of the proselytizing pervert. "The advantages you propose to me," he writes, "may be very great, for all that I know; God Almighty can do very much and so can the king; but you'll pardon me if I cease to speak like a physician for once, and, with an air of gravity, am very apprehensive that I may anger the one in being too complaisant to the other. You cannot call this pinning my faith to any man's sleeve; those that know me are too well apprized of my quite contrary tendency. As I never flattered a man myself, so 'tis my firm resolution never to be wheedled out of my real sentiments—which are, that since it has been my good fortune to be educated according to the usage of the Church of England, established by law, I shall never make myself so unhappy as to shame my teachers and instructors by departing from what I have imbibed from them."

Thus was Walker treated when he abused his position as head of University College. But when the foolish man was deprived of his office, he found a good friend in him whom he had tried to seduce from the Church in which he had been reared. From the time of his first coming to London from Oxford, on the abdication of James the Second, up to the time of his death, Walker subsisted on a handsome allowance made to him out of Radcliffe's purse. When, also, the discarded principal died, it was the doctor who gave him an honourable interment in Pancras churchyard, and years afterwards erected a monument to his memory.

As years passed on, without the restitution of the proscribed males of the Stuart House, Radcliffe's political feelings became more bitter. He was too cautious a man to commit himself in any plot having for its object a change of dynasty; but his ill-humour at the existing state of things vented itself in continual sarcasms against the chiefs of the Whig party with whom he came in contact. He professed that he did not wish for practice amongst the faction to which he was opposed. He had rather only preserve the lives of those citizens who were loyal to their king. One of the immediate results of this affectation was increased popularity with his political antagonists. Whenever a Whig leader was dangerously ill, his friends were sure to feel that his only chance of safety rested on the ministrations of the Jacobite doctor. Radcliffe would be sent for, and after swearing a score of times that nothing should induce him to comply with the summons, would make his appearance at the sick-bed, where he would sometimes tell the sufferer that the devil would have no mercy on those who put constitutional governments above the divine right of kings. If the patient recovered, of course his cure was attributed to the Tory physician; and if death was the result, the same cause was pointed to.

It might be fancied that, rather than incur a charge of positively killing his political antagonists, Radcliffe would have left them to their fates. But this plan would have served him the reverse of well. If he failed to attend a Whig's death-bed to which he had been summoned, the death was all the same attributed to him. "He might," exclaimed the indignant survivors, "have saved poor Tom if he had liked; only poor Tom was a Whig, and so he left him to die." He was charged alike with killing Queen Mary, whom he did attend in her dying illness—and Queen Anne, whom he didn't.

The reader of the Harleian MS. of Burnet's "History" is amused with the following passage, which does not appear in the printed editions:—"I will not enter into another province, nor go out of my own profession, and so will say no more of the physician's part, but that it was universally condemned; so that the Queen's death was imputed to the unskilfulness and wilfulness of Dr. Radcliffe, an impious and vicious man, who hated the Queen much, but virtue and religion more. He was a professed Jacobite, and was, by many, thought a very bad physician; but others cried him up to the highest degree imaginable. He was called for, and it appeared but too evident that his opinion was depended on. Other physicians were called when it was too late; all symptoms were bad, yet still the Queen felt herself well."

Radcliffe's negative murder of Queen Anne was yet more amusing than his positive destruction of Mary. When Queen Anne was almost in extremis, Radcliffe was sent for. The Queen, though she never forgave him for his drunken ridicule of her vapours, had an exalted opinion of his professional talents, and had, more than once, winked at her ladies, consulting him about the health of their royal mistress. Now that death was at hand, Lady Masham sent a summons for the doctor; but he was at Carshalton, sick of his dying illness, and returned answer that it would be impossible for him to leave his country-seat and wait on her Majesty. Such was the absurd and superstitious belief in his mere presence, that the Queen was popularly pictured as having died because he was not present to see her draw her last breath. Whom he liked he could kill, and whom he liked could keep alive and well. Even Arbuthnot, a brother physician, was so tinctured with the popular prejudice, that he could gravely tell Swift of the pleasure Radcliffe had "in preserving my Lord Chief Justice Holt's wife, whom he attended out of spite to her husband, who wished her dead."

It makes one smile to read Charles Ford's letter to the sarcastic Dean on the subject of the Queen's last illness. "She continued ill the whole day. In the evening I spoke to Dr Arbuthnot, and he told me that he did not think her distemper was desperate. Radcliffe was sent for to Carshalton about noon, by order of council; but said he had taken physic and could not come. In all probability he had saved her life; for I am told the late Lord Gower had been often in the condition with the gout in the head, and Radcliffe kept him alive many years after." The author of Gulliver must have grinned as he read this sentence. It was strange stuff to write about "that puppy Radcliffe" (as the Dean calls the physician in his journal to Stella) to the man who coolly sent out word to a Dublin mob that he had put off an eclipse to a more suitable time. The absurdity of Ford's letter is heightened by the fact that it was written before the Queen's death. It is dated July 31, 1714, and concludes with the following postscript:—"The Queen is something better, and the council again adjourned till eight in the morning." Surely the accusation, then, of negative womanslaughter was preferred somewhat prematurely. The next day, however, the Queen died; and then arose a magnificent hubbub of indignation against the impious doctor. The poor man himself sinking into the grave, was at that country-seat where he had entertained his medical friends with so many noisy orgies. But the cries for vengeance reached him in his retreat. "Give us back our ten days!" screamed the rabble of London round Lord Chesterfield's carriage. "Give us back our Queen!" was the howl directed against Radcliffe. The accused was a member of the House of Commons, having been elected M.P. for the town of Buckingham in the previous year; and positively a member (one of Radcliffe's intimate personal acquaintances) moved that the physician should be summoned to attend in his place and be censured for not attending her late Majesty. To a friend the doctor wrote from Carshalton on August 7, 1714:—"Dear Sir,—I could not have thought so old an acquaintance, and so good a friend as Sir John always professed himself, would have made such a motion against me. God knows my will to do her Majesty any service has ever got the start of my ability, and I have nothing that gives me greater anxiety and trouble than the death of that great and glorious Princess. I must do that justice to the physicians that attended her in her illness, from a sight of the method that was taken for her preservation, transmitted to me by Dr Mead, as to declare nothing was omitted for her preservation; but the people about her (the plagues of Egypt fall upon them!) put it out of the power of physick to be of any benefit to her. I know the nature of attending crowned heads to their last moments too well to be fond of waiting upon them, without being sent for by a proper authority. You have heard of pardons signed for physicians before a sovereign's demise. However, as ill as I was, I would have went to the Queen in a horse-litter, had either her Majesty, or those in commission next to her, commanded me so to do. You may tell Sir John as much, and assure him, from me, that his zeal for her Majesty will not excuse his ill usage of a friend who has drunk many a hundred bottles with him, and cannot, even after this breach of good understanding, that was ever preserved between us, but have a very good esteem for him."

So strong was the feeling against the doctor, that a set of maniacs at large formed a plan for his assassination. Fortunately, however, the plot was made known to him in the following letter:—

"Doctor,—Tho' I am no friend of yours, but, on the contrary, one that could wish your destruction in a legal way, for not preventing the death of our most excellent Queen, whom you had it in your power to save, yet I have such an aversion to the taking away men's lives unfairly, as to acquaint you that if you go to meet the gentlemen you have appointed to dine with at the 'Greyhound,' in Croydon, on Thursday next, you will be most certainly murthered. I am one of the persons engaged in the conspiracy, with twelve more, who are resolved to sacrifice you to the Ghost of her late Majesty, that cries aloud for blood; therefore, neither stir out of doors that day, nor any other, nor think of exchanging your present abode for your house at Hammersmith, since there and everywhere else we shall be in quest of you. I am touched with remorse, and give you this notice; but take care of yourself, lest I repent of it, and give proofs of so doing, by having it in my power to destroy you, who am your sworn enemy.—N. G."