Charming youth to tyrant
Chronic medical conditions linked to transformation
I have just bought The Mirror and the Light, the third and final book in Hilary Mantel’s wonderful historical trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, a powerful figure in the English court of King Henry VIII.
So, lockdown or no lockdown, I shall spend the summer reading this tome of around 900 pages.
Over the timescale of the three books, 1500-1540, Henry VIII (1491-1547) evolved from an intelligent, fun-loving, charming, happily-married youth to an obese, egotistic, chronically-sick, six-timesmarried tyrant and murderer. So how did this transformation come about?
Several chronic medical conditions have been suggested to answer this question, including diabetes, glandular problems like Cushing’s syndrome (overactive adrenal gland) and myxodema (deficient thyroid gland) and dementia. But none of these explain the obstetric problems suffered by his first two wives.
Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn each bore one healthy child (later Queens Mary and Elizabeth I respectively) followed by a series of miscarriages, mostly in late pregnancy. This is typical of syphilis caused by the bacterium Treponema pallidum. So could Henry have been a sufferer and passed the microbe on to his wives?
Syphilis first appeared among French troops fighting in Italy in 1494 and as this date neatly coincides with the return of Christopher Columbus’s men from America in 1493, most people, including the doctor who treated crew members on their return, assumed they brought this new and dreadful disease with them.
Whatever its origin, like COVID today, syphilis spread rapidly throughout the continen, then on to Africa and Asia, mainly carried by travellers, in this case mercenaries in the French army returning home. The disease was much more severe than today’s syphilis, hence the name 'the great pox', coined to distinguish it from smallpox.
As well as the serial miscarriages suffered by his wives after an initial healthy child, presumable conceived before the bacterium took hold, Henry had certain symptoms typical of chronic syphilis including open sores on his leg and mental derangement. It’s fun to speculate, but there is no evidence to support any of the theories and probably never will be.