The illness and death of Henry Prince of Wales in 1612 : a historical case of typhoid fever / by Norman Moore.

  • Moore, Norman, 1847-1922.
Date:
1882
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The illness and death of Henry Prince of Wales in 1612 : a historical case of typhoid fever / by Norman Moore. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    further than that it was a fever. Poison was suggested at the time as the cause of death, and the popular groundless rumour has been occasionally repeated by historians/ but neither then nor since has this rumour had any support even in opinion, and the disease which cut short the career of a prince from whom much was hoped has been generally regarded by historians as natural in its origin but unexplained. I hope in this paper to demonstrate that Prince Henry Stuart died of typhoid fever. I was led to the inquiry by a paragraph in Roger Coke's amusing history of the reigns of the Stuart kings,2 which excited my curiosity as to the Prince's malady. As Coke's book is not in every library, I will quote the passage,3 and shall venture to give also some preceding paragraphs, so as to recall Prince Henry himself to recollection, before proceeding to the history of his fatal illness. This year was wounded up in a mournful catastrophe, for upon the 6th of November Prince Henry died in the beginning of the blossom of his youth, being 18 years, 8 months, and 17 days old; a Prince adorned with wisdom and piety above his years, strength and ability of body, equal to any man, of a noble and heroick disposition, and an hater of flatteries and flatterers, and therefore fell flat at odds with Rochester, not once giving him any countenance or vouchsafing him his company. I have heard my father (who was about the Prince's age) tell several stories of him. Once when the Prince was hunting the stag, it chanced the stag being spent crossed the road, where a butcher and his dog were travelling. The dog killed the stag, which was so great that the butcher could not carry him off. When the huntsman and company came up they fell at odds with the butcher, and endeavoured to incense the Prince against him ; to whom the Prince soberly answered, ' What if the butcher's dog killed the stag, what could the butcher help it ? ' They replied, c If his father had been served so, he would have sworn so as no man could have endured it.' ' Away/ replied 1 Sir Thomas Lake: Letter to Sir D. Carleton, Nov. 10, 1612. 'Calendar of State Papers ' (1611-1618), p. 155. Violent reports were propagated, as if Henry bad been carried off by poison j but the physicians on opening his body found no symptoms to confirm such an opinion.—Hume,' Hist, of England ' (ed. Lond., 1848), iv, 269. Rumours of his having died of poison were immediately abroad, and in spite of the most decisive proof of his natural death in the report of his attending phy- sicians, continued to be repeated for more than a century.—Sir J. Mackintosh, 4 Hist, of England ' (ed. Lend., 1835), iv, 236. a ' A Detection of the Court and State of England during the Four Last Reigns and the Interregnum,'by Roger Coke, Esquire. Two vols. London, 1696. 2nd edition. 3 Coke, * Detection,' p. 56.