Coronavirus has put sanitation into our collective mind. Keep your distance from others; wash your hands; don’t touch your face. Back in the sixteenth century, King Henry VIII (voted “worst monarch” by the Historical Writers Association, had the same worry. His fear of the dreaded sweating sickness caused him to sleep in a different bed every night.
Without warning, a person would be overcome with headache, neck ache, general weakness and a cold sweat covering the entire body. Then came fever, dehydration and heart palpitations. In less than twenty-four hours, half of those afflicted were dead. The infection was blamed on foreigners — sound familiar? — specifically mercenaries Henry’s father had brought to England to help him seize the throne.
The sweating sickness first arose in 1485 and reappeared four more times in the next century. Henry had become official heir to the throne at age ten when the disease claimed his older brother in 1502. A century-and-a-half earlier, the Black Death, a form of bubonic plague, had wiped out sixty percent of the world’s population. Henry, a germaphobe before anybody knew about germs, moved from one royal residence to another trying to outrun disease. Medical experts of the era advised people to avoid evil mists and rotten fruit.
There was also a practical reason for frequent moves. The royal palace would literally be full of shit, deposited by the king’s court. Henry and his entourage of hundreds would move on to another location so the human waste could be removed. The smell was at least as bad as one imagines. Aristocratic followers and their attendants tended to do their business wherever, urinating and defecating in stairways and hallways and corners. Henry had walls marked with “X”s to discourage pissing, but courtiers used them as targets. The king’s “gong scourers” had the task of moving the waste into underground chambers and then cleaning those when the court moved on.
Even Louis XIV’s palace at Versailles, the height of seventeenth-century elegance. was a cesspit, thanks to his court numbering thousands. Elegant gowns, never laundered, reeked from accumulated filth. Ladies simply raised their skirt and peed where they stood. The French had their own pandemic variation, called Picardy Sweat that periodically appeared during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was not as widespread and its cause was never determined.
