The question that remained unanswered throughout the proceedings was why a plaster should have been applied at all. Harvey gave a hint – not to the parliamentary select committee, but to Bishop Williams, the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, when the two met on the road from London to Theobalds on the Tuesday before the King’s death. Williams later recalled Harvey describing the illness suffered by the King in these terms: ‘That the King used to have a Beneficial Evacuation of Nature, a sweating in his left Arm, as helpful to him as any Fontanel could be; which of late had failed.’ In other words, there was an area probably around the upper left ribs, where he would sweat copiously, allowing the release of surplus humours that would otherwise accumulate and putrefy in that part of the body. This outlet, Harvey claimed, had become blocked, causing a dangerous build-up of those humours. It was a puzzling diagnosis, as James’s underarm fontanel is mentioned nowhere else. Theodore de Mayerne left detailed medical notes on his patient which record, for example, that the King ‘often swells out with wind’ and suffered from legs ‘not strong enough to sustain the weight of the body’; but the only ‘Beneficial Evacuation’ Mayerne mentions was the King’s almost daily ‘haemorrhoidal flow’, which, if blocked, made him ‘very irascible, melancholy, jaundiced’.15
Williams, too, was puzzled by Harvey’s diagnosis. ‘This symptom of the King’s weakness I never heard from any else,’ he commented, ‘yet I believed it upon so learned a Doctor’s observation.’ He even attempted to deduce his own theory on how the disease developed, suggesting that the ‘ague’ had become ‘Mortal’ because the infection or ‘Spring’ had entered so far that it had been able ‘to make a commotion in the Humours of the Body’ that could no longer be expelled with ‘accustomed vapouration’.16 It would also explain why a hot plaster applied to the King’s stomach might help, for, by provoking sweat, or even blisters, it might encourage ‘vapouration’ of the offending humours and so restore the body to a state of healthy balance.
The effect of Harvey’s testimony to the select committee and to Bishop Williams was to deflate the poisoning case. It did not exonerate the Duke, nor did it reveal the all-important recipe for the medicine; but it strongly suggested that Villiers’ intervention was no more than inconvenient, and that it had been insisted upon by James himself, who was an exasperating patient (one fact upon which nearly everyone seemed to agree). The King, Harvey told the select committee, ‘took divers things’ regardless of his medical team’s advice, on account of his ‘undervaluing physicians’.
In its report to the House of Commons, the select committee concluded that ‘when the King [was] in declination’, the Duke had ‘made [the posset and plaster] be applied and given, whereupon great distempers and evil symptoms appeared, and physicians did after advise Duke to do so no more, which is by us resolved a transcendent presumption of dangerous consequence’. On the basis of this, it resolved that the charges should be annexed to the others levelled against the Duke.
When the report was presented to the House, Sir Richard Weston, Charles’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, led a rearguard action on the King’s behalf to defend the Duke, claiming that there was no evidence of a crime being committed. Despite this intervention, the MPs backed the select committee’s report and added the charge to their list of grievances.
But Charles would not sacrifice Villiers. Days after his submission to the select committee, the King sent the Earl of Arundel to the Tower of London. His pretext was that the Earl had allowed his son to marry a royal ward, but everyone knew it was for supporting the anti-Buckingham faction in the House of Lords. After repeated commands to the Commons to drop the charges, Charles eventually dissolved Parliament, thus bringing the impeachment proceedings to a peremptory close. He still did not have the subsidy he needed, at a time when he was having to pay for a disastrous military adventure launched by Villiers against Spain. Facing bankruptcy, he turned over royal lands to the value of around £350,000 to the City in return for the liquidation of his debts, which amounted to £230,000. He also decided to impose a ‘forced loan’, the menacing term for an interest-free, non-refundable levy extracted from taxpayers, claimed as a royal prerogative at times of national emergency. Charles’s predecessors had used this technique, but the levies had generally been small, few had to pay, and many were let off – William Harvey, for example, had managed to avoid a loan of £6. 13s. 4d. imposed by James I in 1604 when a group of influential friends petitioned on his behalf.17 This time, all rateable taxpayers were expected to contribute, and five separate payments were demanded. A series of high-profile protests resulted. Seventy-six members of the gentry were imprisoned and several peers were dismissed from their offices for refusing to pay. Pondering on the ancient common-law principle of habeas corpus, judges considered whether the royal prerogative extended to imprisoning without charge individuals who represented no threat to national safety; but they could not bring themselves to rule definitively on such a sensitive matter.
The poisoning charges against Villiers were lost in the midst of these epic struggles, and became irrelevant when John Felton, a naval lieutenant, stabbed the Duke to death at Portsmouth in 1628. As to the truth of the charges, they were widely believed at the time, and historians have debated the matter ever since, on the basis of evidence that can never be decisive. Villiers was probably capable of hatching such a plot, and Charles, who had suffered many humiliations at the hands of his father and who was impatient to take the reins of government, may even have connived. But James was already ill before the Duke’s interventions. In addition to malaria, he was suffering from a variety of chronic ailments, including gout and possibly the royal malady porphyria (the ‘madness’ of King George III, a non-fatal but debilitating intermittent disease that got its name from the Greek for purple, the colour of the sufferer’s urine). Poisoning is one possible reason why a condition originally considered to be non-threatening turned lethal, but there are plenty of others.
No censures were brought against the physicians. They could have been accused of negligence, but the committee was only interested in attacking Villiers and seemed to accept the difficulties of managing a royal patient. However, the episode left a mark on their profession, barely noticeable in the mid-1620s but soon to become as obvious to its enemies as the most unsightly wart. In 1624, an Oxford scholar called John Gee had published The Foot out of the Snare, a list of all Catholics known or suspected of living in London. In addition to naming priests and ‘Jesuits’, it had a section devoted entirely to ‘Popish Physicians now practising about London’. Dr Moore was the first to be listed, but there were many others, including Thomas Cadyman, Robert Fludd, John Giffard, and Francis Prujean, all of them prominent members of the College. Many had, Gee pointed out, been to ‘Popish Universities beyond the seas’ such as Padua, ‘and it is vehemently suspected that some of these have a private faculty and power from the See of Rome’ to administer the last rites to their patients. Harvey was not among those listed, and never would be. Though disliking Puritans, he steered clear of religious controversy. Protestants in Parliament, however, demanded, in 1626 and again in 1628, that the College identify any practising physicians who were ‘recusant’ (Catholics who refused to attend Anglican services). Lists were duly drawn up that identified Moore and Cadyman among others. No action was taken against them, either by Parliament or by the College. Many, in particular Prujean, went on to prosper; but the poisoning episode served to reinforce further the feeling among some Protestant radicals that the College had the same papist leanings and corrupt attitudes as the court it served.18
William Harvey came out best from the whole controversy. Within a few weeks of the select committee inquiry drawing to a close he received a ‘free gift’ of £100 from Charles I ‘for his pains and attendance about the person of his Majesty’s late dear father, of happy memory, in time of his sickness’. There is also a reference among the College’s papers to Harvey receiving a ‘general pardon’ from Charles in early 1627, at the time when the parliamentary impeachment of Villiers was launched. The pardon appears to have been designed to provide retrospective immunity from any charges relating