Bloody Mary by Carolly Erickson Page A

negotiations with the pope.
    As if to complement the murky frustrations of these proceedings the sweating sickness broke out again in London. Once again without warning the cycle of chills, “fervent heat,” delirium and death broke in upon ordinary lives. Forty thousand were affected in the first outbreak alone, and Londoners fleeing the infection carried it into the countryside where it struck thousands more. Commerce and government slowed, and then stopped altogether; courts were adjourned and countinghouses locked up. Wolsey, who had come safely through the sweat once, made certain to avoid infection by locking himself away until the visitation was over. Anyone who wished to speak with the cardinal, the French ambassador wrote, had to shout through a trumpet. Householders of all degrees, from the king on down, brought out the vials and boxes of medicines they had kept from the last assault of the sweat ten years earlier, but the disease was as fatal as ever. In the words of one who lived through it, the sweat “brought more business to the priests than the doctors,” and was so “pestiferous and ragious” that the only safety lay in moving from place to place, staying one step ahead of infection.
    When Henry’s gentleman William Compton caught it and died, and Anne Boleyn and others of the court were very ill, the king moved suddenly to a manor in Hertfordshire, leaving his courtiers and his sweetheart to struggle along as best they might. He wrote Anne an encouraging note reminding her that the disease spared women more often than men, but by the time she was able to read it she was probably out of danger, and was certainly angry at his desertion. The king took particular care for Henry Fitzroy, ordering him moved from Pontefract Castle when six people in the neighboring parish died of the sweat. He worried that there was no doctor within reach, and personally compounded preventives for the boy and his household. “Thanks be to God and to your said highness,” Fitzroy wrote to his father when the epidemic had died down, “I have passed this last summer without any peril or danger of the ragious sweat that hath reigned in these parts and other, with the help of such preservatives as your highness did send to me, whereof most humble and lowly I thank the same.” 5
    Whether Henry dosed his wife and daughter with his medicines is unknown, but they were with him in his Hertfordshire retreat, and for a time the bitter issue of the divorce took second place to the more pressing question of survival. Mary had been ill with smallpox slightly before the sweat appeared and was in fragile health, while Katherine’s constitution was beginning to weaken under the strain of the drawn-out delays and difficulties in the king’s proceedings. In her dealings with Henry she chose to behave as if nothing had changed, but her cheerful and loving manner toward him was kept up at great cost, and her confessor and Spanish gentlewomen knew well what anguish she kept hidden.
    Katherine’s anguish was made worse by the constant efforts of Wol-sey, Campeggio and others to separate her from Henry, if possible, by some means short of divorce. One obvious alternative was to persuade her to enter a convent—an action which, under church law, would have released Henry from the marriage as irrevocably as her death. At first this solution was proposed to her under the mildest of conditions; she would lose nothing but “the use of the king’s person,” and would be allowed to keep her dowry, her income from rents, and her jewels. Most important, her entry into religion would in no way diminish Mary’s succession rights. But Katherine was not tempted, even for a moment, to agree to any proposal under which she would cease to be Henry’s wife, and she did not even take time to think it over before refusing. Other proposals angered her. Campeggio and Wolsey both favored a scheme which would satisfy Henry’s desire to be rid of Katherine