Making Haste from Babylon

by Nick Bunker

  Before that, we have to return to King James, and look more deeply for the secret of his animosity toward the Puritans. His beliefs about religion and the Church carried an intense emotional charge. To appreciate why this was so, we begin with the suffering man, and not with his disemboweled carcass under a surgeon’s knife.

  OUR MASTER LEAR

  Ill health obsessed the king and his leading subjects. In the opening months of 1605, at the height of the great purge of Puritans, and as Shakespeare began to plan the writing of King Lear, we find one eminent man after another beset by bodily afflictions. In January, the bishop of Winchester complained about his sciatica and his flatulence, while Lord Cobham had the gout. The insomniac Lord Zouche tossed and turned with measles and a heavy cold, while Sir Bevis Bulmer caught a burning fever. William Brewster’s boss was Sir John Stanhope, head of the Royal Mail, and in March he suffered from colic and cramps. The Earl of Dorset consulted his doctors about some unspecified illness. They gave him “physic and fomentations” intended to open his pores and make him sweat.11

  During these months disease was rife, though as so often its exact type cannot be established. Although London was free from plague, an epidemic struck the western port of Bristol, and in the Pilgrim country the town of Worksop suffered ten months of contagion. Only six miles from Scrooby, in Worksop that year fifty-three people died, forty-nine from something tersely called “infec” in the parish register, compared with sixteen deaths in a normal year. As was the custom, the JPs placed a levy on the other parishes nearby to raise money for the town. We can be sure that the Pilgrims were well aware of the calamity.12

  Men and women lived with death leaning over their shoulders, but the king’s health always gave most cause for alarm: very much so, in 1605. Of course, he had two sons, Prince Henry and Prince Charles. But they were only eleven and four years old, while his daughter Elizabeth was not yet nine. If a minor succeeded to the throne, the king’s death would plunge the realm back into the uncertainties that dogged the closing years of the old queen’s reign. Later that same year, the Gunpowder Plot came close to ending his life, by blowing him up as he opened a new session of Parliament. But even without that notorious conspiracy by Roman Catholics his survival was never certain. With his passion for the chase, James always ran the risk of a fatal accident—while on his way south, two years before, he broke his leg in a fall—and in 1605 he suffered from a series of heavy colds. His courtiers nervously watched his habit of heavy drinking in the open, while he was perspiring after many hours in the saddle.

  At this point King James was only thirty-nine. As the years went by, allusions to his worsening health came to feature ever more often in the eyewitness accounts that survive. If we exclude mocking comments made by opponents, we come up with a comprehensive portrait of James in middle age. He was a man of medium height, broad shouldered, but with a slender body and spindly legs. He had a sparse light brown beard the same color as his hair. He was apt to walk about in circles, something first noticed when he was in his teens. Later in life he did so while leaning for support on a good-looking young man. James was inclined to cough and splutter because of mucus and catarrh, and to gobble his food because he lacked teeth. Prone to stomach upsets, he broke wind frequently, from both orifices. He also suffered woefully from diarrhea, blamed by his doctor on excessive drinking.

  Like the king’s physical health, his turbulent feelings were also on display. They were documented in 1623 in notes made by his principal physician, the French doctor Theodore Turquet de Mayerne. He recorded the king’s chronic stomach upsets and the pain he suffered when he threw up his food, pain so severe that apparently it covered his face with red spots. Mayerne also commented on his attacks of anxiety and depression, after a death in the family or a political setback.

  In 1610, the king endured a disappointing session of Parliament, when the Commons blocked plans for reform of the royal finances. After dissolving the assembly, James collapsed in early 1611, vomiting twice a day and suffering more than a week of diarrhea, with unusually watery, bilious feces. Most alarming of all were symptoms of mental distress: chest pains, palpitations, and “moestitia,” meaning “grief” or “sadness.” He suffered even worse agonies after the death of the queen in 1619. A multitude of ailments struck him simultaneously. As always, he suffered from runny bowels, and severe melancholy, but also from inflamed kidneys, an acute bout of arthritis, a rash of small white ulcers on the back of his throat, and, ominously, an intermittent pulse.

  After editing James’s letters, a modern scholar described him as “one of the most complicated neurotics ever to sit on either the English or the Scottish throne.”13 By middle age he would have presented an insoluble riddle for a psychoanalyst. By then, James had endured painful illness in his childhood—he could not walk until he was six—and a host of attempted coups, bereavements, and conspiracies. His mother Mary was beheaded. His father was murdered, strangled while his house was destroyed by an explosion, and of course James I came close to dying in a similar way in 1605. His opposite numbers in France, Henry III and Henry IV, both fell to the assassin’s dagger. And as it happens, the second of these murders occurred in 1610, not long before James’s collapse the following year.

  Was he a coward? That was his reputation. Referring to the autopsy, a diarist mentioned the inflated size of James’s heart to explain why the king was “soe extraordinarie fearefull.” Famously, James wore a quilted doublet to hinder an attacker’s knife. People took these traits as signs of a yellow streak, but that was unfair. Hunting on horseback is not a pastime for the timid. Few men had better reasons than James I for succumbing to occasional attacks of panic. But who could say precisely which of his fears were neurotic phobias and which had some objective basis? Nobody could define the boundary where rationality ended and chronic anxiety or depression began.

  Almost inevitably, a man so insecure might waste his energy in a futile quest for emotional support—and this James did, time and again. He might turn to alcohol or ceaseless physical activity, such as hunting. This was habitual for James. He might look for comfort from younger men, as favorites or lovers: he leaned on them in more ways than one. Or perhaps he might take refuge in fantasy and cast himself in the role of a philosopher king, dreaming of an imaginary empire of perfection where everyone obeyed his wise instructions. This James did too, as we shall see.

  For James I, Separatists and people like them came to symbolize the poison of disorder and discontent that threatened to contaminate his ideal monarchy. In this there lay an element of paranoia, and if we reach that conclusion, we have the authority of Shakespeare. From Lear and Othello to The Winter’s Tale, he provided a commentary on the character of powerful but frightened men, and the devastating effect of their anxieties. His audience cannot have failed to see that Shakespeare was exploring in heightened form the daily plight of their sovereign.

  In an age when monarchy was personal, the inner life of the king had implications of the most far-reaching kind. And when King James wrote about Puritans and Brownists, we find him using language that mingles theology, political calculation, and obsessional neurosis. We see it most clearly when he uses the terminology of medicine.

  PATHOLOGY AND THE PILGRIMS

  In his case notes, Mayerne said that King James laughed at doctors. Even so, this unhealthy man took care to choose as his physicians the medical luminaries of the era. King James favored not only Mayerne himself, a star who treated Cardinal Richelieu for gonorrhea, but also William Harvey, the man who first described the circulation of the blood. Most frequently of all, James selected men who had new things to say about the nature of disease, linking it to poor hygiene, to contamination, or to defective chemistry inside the body.

  The king’s interest in public health was entirely genuine. When the City of London chose a lord mayor, the new incumbent came before the king to be praised or chastised; and in the early 1620s, the mayors found themselves being berated by His Majesty for the
City’s failure to clean up the open sewer known as the Thames. As king of Scotland, the young James employed as his court physician a man who blamed the plague on polluted drinking water. And in 1618, James sponsored Britain’s first official compendium of drugs and elixirs, a project that embodied his concern for the well-being of his subjects. Like Bancroft’s canons, it was intended to promote uniformity and to serve as the guarantor of health and good order.

  Mayerne, Harvey, and the London College of Physicians prepared the book, which came to be known as the London Pharmacopoeia. Appropriately, it included a formula for distilling Scotch whiskey, but it was a serious work that went through many editions, often revised and updated. “Desirous in all things, to provide for the common good of our subjects,” the king decreed that he would do away with “all falshood, differences, varieties and incertainties in the making or composing of Medicines.” For that reason, he gave the book the force of law, with a proclamation that made it a crime to concoct potions that deviated from a list of standard recipes.14

  When he spoke in this way about the common good, King James drew on new theories, ideas that were absurd and even bizarre, but capable of developing along a scientific path. Chemical medicine, as they were known, originated with the Swiss metallurgist known as Paracelsus. He died in 1541, but by the end of the century his system of thought had deeply influenced the medical establishment in England. During the reign of James I, it came close to being accepted as official orthodoxy. Most of the king’s favored doctors were Paracelsians. Among them was Mayerne, trained in Paris by a French Paracelsian by the name of Joseph Du Chesne. In 1605, Du Chesne’s principal book appeared in London in translation. Of course it was nonsense, an esoteric farrago of garbled theology, alchemy, and magic, but it contained the seeds of progress. It also had affinities with the king’s own attitudes and emotional commitments.

  Du Chesne said that sickness arose from chemical dysfunction, a toxic chain of cause and effect open to investigation in the laboratory. Following Paracelsus, he believed that the material world arose as the product of three essences—salt, sulfur, and mercury—mixed and compounded by heat and by alchemy. Du Chesne explained that salt was dry and solid, mercury was moist and fluid, and between the two was sulfur, sweet and clammy. Combined together, in food, wine, and sperm, they created a human being.

  The liver absorbed food and drink, and from the salt within them it synthesized a hot white juice. This became blood and flowed up through the veins to the heart, as if the body were a system of tubes, glass vessels, and retorts, heated by a flame. The heart cooled and purified the blood, added sulfur, and then transmitted it to the brain. Like a distiller making cognac, the brain slowly heated and refined the blood and added mercury. With the process complete, the liquid became rich arterial blood, ready to flow outward to refresh each limb.

  Odd though they were, Du Chesne’s theories possessed a degree of logic. Since the body was a chemical machine, of course it gave rise to waste products, just as men found ashes or sediment when they smelted copper or brewed beer. Among the dregs of human biology, said Du Chesne, were saliva, urine, and sweat. Left within the system to decay, these congealed to form what Du Chesne called “superfluous humours,” noxious excrements liable to violate the balance of body and mind: in the kidney, they produced the stones that inflicted so much pain on King James. Trapped in the liver, the humors would accumulate and rise up to infect the brain, causing “long madness, burning frenzies, setled melanchollies … and many such like.” As for the second cause of disease, that was obvious: poison, or lethal waste matter implanted from outside.15

  What did all this have to do with politics? Not much, we might think, but Du Chesne and Mayerne would have disagreed. So would King James. Both Mayerne and Du Chesne were intensely political, and served as physicians to Henry of Navarre, the Huguenot leader and later the king of France. French royal doctors saw commentary on public affairs as part of their profession, and they applied the doctrines of medicine to the exercise of power. Observation first, to identify the symptoms; next, the application of theory to decide the cause; and then the choice of therapy: that was how a doctor went about his job. The king should follow the same procedure to eradicate the maladies that afflicted his people.16

  For Du Chesne, the body functioned best when its internal functions bubbled freely away, without interference, following their natural course. So too in the language of King James the realm prospered when the balm of his wisdom flowed outward like pure spring water, circulating from one end of his kingdom to the other, without interruption by the disobedient. When James condemned tobacco smoking, he did so using ideas of the same kind. Tobacco, said the king, contaminated the natural fluids of the human body, and smokers harmed not only themselves but the nation. “Sucked up by the nose, and imprisoned in … braines,” smoke left an oily deposit in the lungs, which poisoned the mind and made men lethargic. By purchasing the weed from foreigners, they undermined the economy of the realm. By inflicting a smelly torment upon their wives, they endangered the holy institution of the family.

  For King James, Puritanism resembled the addiction to nicotine. Like the superfluous humors described by Joseph Du Chesne, the Puritans were sediments, dregs, or dross, by-products of an alembic malfunction in the organs of the body politic. Willful Puritans upset the king because they followed their private, individual inclination, rather than accepting the established wisdom of the community, sanctioned by statesmen and embodied in the Church. Puritans behaved, in other words, like tobacco smokers, devoted to their own obsession regardless of the cost that fell upon themselves and others.

  This idea, that Puritans were diseased, came to have wide currency. It was expressed in pungent form in one of the most popular books of the period. The Anatomy of Melancholy appeared in 1621, and its author, Robert Burton, devoted a chapter to the victims of spiritual malaise. According to Burton, the Brownists were “a company of blockheads,” men and women who “will take upon themselves to define how many shall be saved, and who damned in a parish.” Incited by the devil, their outlandish ideas were symptoms of mental illness, the fever of religious melancholy. To bring it about, Satan used the infirmities of the body: Burton claimed that brain sickness arose from a distempered liver.17

  Sick and deluded, a Puritan became an agent of infection, giving rise to quarrels and division: or so it seemed to King James as well. Left free to do their worst, they would deface the body politic and shatter the hard-won unity of the realm. Although Tudor kings and queens had valued peace and uniformity, for James they became an obsession that he experienced with an almost physical intensity. Here was a monarch who had come to understand the perils of discord during his period north of the border, when Scotland stumbled from one plot and one civil war to another until the young James engineered a degree of stability.

  In the opening years of his reign in England, James tried to complete a great scheme of unification to make his authority seamless in every corner of the British Isles. Because Puritans endangered the fulfillment of such a project, he wanted them gone, and they were not the only ones. As Jacobean exiles, the Pilgrims had many equivalents: as we shall see, refugees took their leave of Donegal and Edinburgh as well as Scrooby.

  A PERFECT UNION OF PERSONS

  When King James crossed over the frontier on his way south after the death of Elizabeth, he entered political territory of a kind that was almost entirely new. Three hundred years before, Edward I had briefly created an English empire by conquering Wales and Scotland, but it failed to survive for more than a decade. In 1603, James believed that God had given him a duty to re-create a unified Britain, beneath one monarch, and not merely in name alone. Unification had to be thorough, and deep, so that the king could promote common standards of civility, sobriety, and God-fearing obedience, rolled out into each enclave of his domain. This was what James had in mind when he told Parliament that he wished to see England and Scotland become “a perfect Union of Lawes and persons
.”18

  Unification seemed to be a practical necessity. Border thieves and raiders passed back and forth between England and Scotland, evading extradition. Until the two countries were united, it would be impossible to put a stop to their activities. In Ireland, meanwhile, 1603 marked the end of the Nine Years’ War between the English and the Earl of Tyrone, the leader of Catholic resistance, but in English eyes the country remained unpacified and alien. It seemed likely to rebel again as soon as the moment presented itself. At home on the mainland, the king’s peace varied in quality from one place to another, depending on the energy and talent of the JPs in each county.

  James acted with vigor to put a stop to social evils and to make the rule of law uniform across his kingdoms. In the north, he convened a new border commission, and it began to track down and string up the outlaws of the region. In England the king issued a host of proclamations, thirty-two in the first nine months of his reign, and more than eighty in the first five years. Among them were measures for dealing firmly with such enemies to good order as highwaymen, pirates, drunkards, unlicensed alehouse keepers, and speculators who endangered London by building ramshackle, fire-prone dwellings. As Bancroft pursued the Puritans, the king ordered the JPs to redouble their efforts against all forms of offenders, and often they did so with alacrity. In the Quadrilateral, in April 1604, the JPs at Retford prosecuted thirty individuals for brewing without a license, including five from Scrooby.

  Of course the Gunpowder Plot against King James made the process of coercion more urgent. On both sides of the Irish Sea, dissident Catholics seemed to pose the greatest danger to the Crown. And so the king’s lord deputy in Dublin began a policy of intense persecution of the old religion. Legalized theft of territory, executions of priests, the beating to death of Roman Catholics on the doorsteps of their churches: all of these took place. And in Ireland, the quest for uniformity led to a famous incident in Donegal that oddly resembled the case of the fleeing Pilgrims.