Parliament and King – Part One

By 1640, Charles I was finding that his non-parliamentary attempts to raise money were failing to fund his plans, especially his military struggle with Scotland.  After twelve years of personal rule, he called a parliament in April 1640. It was not a success. Parliament only wanted to continue where it had left off and talk about their own privileges and the king’s abuses of power. Exasperated, Charles dissolved it after only three weeks, and it became known, appropriately, as the Short Parliament.

Inevitably, he had to call another parliament in November. This one lasted rather longer and became known as the Long Parliament, because technically it sat until it dissolved itself in 1660. Charles still wanted it to vote him money, but it had other priorities, and one of its first acts was to impeach William Laud, the reforming Archbishop of Canterbury and protégé of the king, for high treason.  This was really a way of getting at Charles by the mostly Puritan parliament, who disliked Laud’s reforms and his sometimes draconian methods of enforcing them – by having his opponents branded, for example. Given his age (he was sixty-seven), Laud was imprisoned in the Tower of London rather than being put on trial.  Parliament next impeached Charles’s close advisor, the Earl of Strafford, alleging that he had attempted to raise an army in Catholic Ireland to subdue England.  Charles was obliged to sign his friend’s death warrant and he was dead within six months of the Long Parliament’s first meeting.

When rumours reached Charles that parliament was also planning to impeach his queen, Henrietta Maria, for alleged involvement in Catholic plots, Charles decided to go on the offensive and arrest five of its leaders for treason. It was not a wise move. No king had ever entered the House of Commons, but on Tuesday, 4 January 1642, in gross violation of Parliamentary privilege, the King entered the House with armed men to arrest the Five Members. They had been warned and fled, but Charles had openly shown his contempt for parliament.  He left London on 10 January 1642 and set up his court in Oxford, where he began raising an army, having declared that parliament was in rebellion. The Civil War had started.

In 1640, Hythe had elected John Wandesford and Henry Heyman  as M.P.s for the Short Parliament .   The two men could not have been more different. Wandesford was a Royalist, who later went with the king to Oxford and managed the king’s artillery train there during the Civil War.  His attraction for Hythe corporation seems to have been that he tried to get the Crown to take an interest in building a proper harbour for the town. He was as good as his word, and sent papers to the Secretary of State, who undertook to pass them to His Majesty, but by then Charles’s mind was on other things and the project never got any serious attention.  Henry Heyman , on the other hand, was the parliamentarian son of Peter Heyman, the towns’  former M.P. The Heyman’s family seat was Somerfield at Sellinge about four miles from Hythe, and they were well-known to the corporation.

In the election for the Long Parliament the same year, Hythe plumped for two parliamentarians. Henry Heyman was chosen again, and wrote frequently to the corporation, his ‘brethren and loving friends’, keeping them up to date with national developments, especially of the Five Members charged with treason. The town ditched Wandesford, who had failed to deliver the promised harbour, and chose instead John Harvey, brother of the physician William Harvey.  He also had local connections, having inherited from his father land at Arpinge and Folkestone. He had broken with the family’s Royalist loyalties (his brother was physician to James I), and sided with parliament until his death in 1645.

The choice of two staunch parliamentarians attracted the attention of the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, the Duke of Lennox, who was a Stuart cousin of the king. He was incensed by Hythe’s decision and wrote a threatening letter to the corporation demanding to know the name and standing of every man who had voted for Harvey and Heyman.  Votes were not then secret and were given verbally. The list had to be provided to Dover Castle.  Refusal would be ‘at your peril’.Unintimidated, the corporation referred the letter to their M.P.s., who passed it on to other interested parties.  It formed part of the evidence against Lennox when, in 1643, the House of Commons decided that he was ‘one of the malignant Party, and an evil Counsellor to His Majesty’ and that he should be removed from all his offices. He fled into exile before joining the king at Oxford.

The Duke of Lennox, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports

In Sickness and in Health – Part Two

 

The seventeenth century had medical men and women of all sorts, to suit all conditions and most purses. There were some who were licensed, some not, and some who probably should not have been. There were physicians, all university men; surgeons (or as it was spelt then ‘chirugeons’) who had been trained through an apprenticeship to perform basic surgery, treat injuries and set bones; apothecaries who dispensed drugs to physicians and also attended patients independently; and barber-surgeons, with practical skills in bone-setting, blood-letting and treating minor injuries, but who were men of little learning and generally held in low regard.  Finally there were midwives, who learned ‘on the job’ and were licensed by the Diocese on the recommendation of ‘six honest matrons’, their minister and a churchwarden.  Rich people could shop around and choose a practitioner of their liking, inside or outside the town, as most covered a wide area. The poor, as always, made do.

In fact, the practitioners who called themselves ‘physicians’ in Hythe were not university men at all, but only licensed surgeons or barber-surgeons. The terminology was loosely applied, and by the end of the century the word ‘doctor’ was generally applied to all medical men.

They offered different services and treatments. Arnold Hall seems to have specialised in providing remedial diets to patients, and also employed nurses to attend the sick. Between 1626 and 1642 he built up an extensive practice covering the Romney Marsh, Cheriton, Alkham and as far afield as Sittingbourne. William Stace, a barber-surgeon at about the same time, let blood and prescribed poultices and potions. When the blacksmith John Gately was taken ill at Rye in 1625, it was Stace he summoned from Hythe to treat him (unsuccessfully as it turned out).  James Arthur was licensed as a surgeon in 1635, over the objections of Arnold Hall. Whether the objections were on professional grounds or whether he thought one surgeon in Hythe was enough is not recorded. Arthur practised in the town for nearly fifty years, finding time also to serve as jurat, mayor and churchwarden. Sick people then, as now, sought second opinions. Elias Bassett, during his last illness in 1684, was treated by both James Arthur and Richard Jacob.

Medical men prescribed a range of treatments, nearly all thankfully unfamiliar today. Blood-letting and purges were very popular. So were poultices. In the 1630s, John Hall, Shakespeare’s son-in-law, described how he treated a man with gout: he applied a poultice of mallows, a fomentation of frogspawn and a plaster and purged him with senna powder. One must assume that the placebo effect was at work if any of these treatments relieved the condition.

Medicines were often herbal in origin, perhaps with the addition of opium, and often infused in an alcoholic beverage.  Brandy, port wine, beer, cider and ale were all popular, and spices and sweeteners were added for taste and smell. Fumigants were prescribed to banish noxious miasmas. One such, said to drive out plague, was a concoction of brimstone, saltpetre and amber which was ground and burned. The stench may well have been successful in driving rats out of the house, to say nothing of the inmates.

One Hythe surgeon, John Grove, had a most unfortunate record of prescribing.  In 1595, two years after he was licensed, he admitted to a court purging Anne Pierce, a widow, with two ounces of diacatholicon, two ounces of diafinicon, and one ounce each of electuarum rosarum and confectio hamech. Each of these mysterious-sounding compounds was a powerful purgative in its own right, and between them they contained antimony, wormwood, prunes, rhubarb root and senna.  One medical book of the time suggests six drams, or about a third of an ounce of confectio hamech alone as a purgative to cure any one or all of leprosy, madness, ringworm or scabies.   The dose prescribed by Grove was probably enough to purge an elephant, and if the unfortunate patient did not die, she would certainly have been very ill indeed.

Grove’s defence, used by schoolboys across the ages, was that he only did it once. The court took a dim view, said he was ignorant and audacious, fined him five pounds and imprisoned him – but did not remove his licence. He practised thereafter in Hythe, where as surgeon, gentleman, jurat and mayor, he achieved respectability.

Happily, physicians were starting to take a more scientific and empirical approach to investigating the workings of the human body. In 1628, William Harvey, who had been born in Folkestone, just down the road from Hythe, described for the first time the circulation of the blood. Not everyone believed him, though. He said that his medical practice dropped off after his publication because people thought he was mad.