The sweating sickness has featured in this blog before* but now I have come upon another article about it which is worth bringing to attention. If you go here (https://allthatsinteresting.com/sweating-sickness) you’ll discover a lot about the disease that ripped through England in the late 15th century.
The article places the sickness’s arrival to shortly after Bosworth. Well, that’s fine by me. The House of Tudor was responsible for legion other bad things that afflicted England over the following century, so it richly deserves the blame for bringing the sweating sickness as well.
Yet it seems that sit-on-the-fence Lord Stanley excused himself to Richard III before Bosworth by whining that he and his men had “the sweat”. Well, they were probably in a sweat, that’s for sure. But how can I fit the timing into the equation of Tudor’s guilt for bringing the disease to England? Easily. No doubt Stanley had kept secret meetings with Tudor’s messengers and caught it from them. And his own messengers had gone to Tudor and brought it back with them. Further, the fact that the Stanley serpent survived his particular sweat hints that it was a ruse in the first place, or at least something other than the sweating sickness. I’d hazard it was a timely bout of traitor’s toes. Whatever, he was certainly well enough to betray his king!
Stanley’s brother, Sir William, was equally as treacherous, going to the battle with a plan to switch sides with all his men at an opportune moment. Thus he brought about the assassination of Richard III. The king didn’t die as the result of straightforward conflict, he was picked off by a plot engineered by someone he believed was on his own side! Battlefield or not, to me that was assassination. So it served Sir William right that eventually he forfeited his own life to the unworthy Tudor maggot he’d committed treason to serve at Bosworth. Retribution, eh?
Elder brother Lord Stanley, however, was clearly coated with Teflon, because he was to live his allotted span and die in his bed. I hope a particularly mean-minded demon, or perhaps Death himself with a nasty long spike, was waiting gleefully at the foot of the bed, as in the illustration at the beginning of this article.
Unfortunately, as we all know, Tudor himself didn’t succumb to the disease. However fate and the sweating sickness did take his prized son and heir, Prince Arthur. On the downside, that left us with Henry VIII. Say no more. I ask you, ladies and gentlemen, did England really deserve the Tudors? The only one worth any salt was Elizabeth I.
Anyway, I’ve digressed a little in order to take pops at Tudor and the Stanleys, so will finish by urging you to give the allthatsinteresting.com article a read. It’s informative, and gives a history of how the sickness came…and then went away again.
A 16th-century depiction of the sweating sickness in Strasbourg. from the allthatsinteresting.com link above.
*Previous posts about the sweating sickness:
- What was the sweating sickness and where did it come from….? – murreyandblue
- Richard III had the sweating sickness before facing Tudor….? – murreyandblue
- Sweating Sickness in 1485 – a missed publicity opportunity….? – murreyandblue
- The truth about Prince Arthur, Prince Henry, and Katherine of Aragon….? – murreyandblue
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