What was the Sweating Sickness? And how did Henry VIII ‘self-isolate’?

• How did Spanish Flu get its name?

What were the symptoms of ‘Sweating Sickness’?

Symptoms were shockingly swift and dramatic, with death often occurring within a matter of hours. The first symptoms were cold shivers and severe pains in the head and neck, followed by hot sweats and finally an overwhelming urge to sleep. Nobody knew how to prevent or to treat it, which meant there was widespread panic with the arrival of each onslaught. The cause of the disease remains unknown to this day.

In the summer of 1528, the number of deaths quickly escalated. “About two thousand only have been attacked by it in London”, reported du Bellay. “Twelve years ago, when the same thing happened, ten thousand persons died in ten or twelve days, it is said: but it was not so sharp as it is now beginning to be… Everybody is terribly alarmed.”

• Did you know: Thomas Cromwell lost both his wife and daughters to the sweating sickness within the space of a year, between 1528–9

Henry VIII: how the king ‘self-isolated’

One man was more alarmed than most. Although he is often viewed as stridently self-confident, Henry VIII was one of the greatest hypochondriacs ever to sit on the English throne. He ordered the royal physicians to examine him thoroughly on an almost daily basis and kept a medicine cabinet filled with potions to cure any ailment. Any sign of illness at court would send him into a wild panic.

Little wonder that as soon as the king heard about the latest outbreak of the dreaded Sweat in the summer of 1528 he ordered that the court be immediately broken up and “took off on a flight from safe house to safe house” in different parts of the country. Meanwhile, his mistress Anne Boleyn went into quarantine at Hever Castle, her family home in the Kent countryside. Many of Henry’s courtiers followed suit, but the poorer classes had no such option and were forced to remain in the crowded, disease-ridden city of London.

• 11 curious things you might not know about Anne Boleyn

To the king’s horror, as he was holed up in what we would today call ‘self-isolation’, he learned that his beloved Anne had contracted the disease. For all his declarations of undying love, Henry stayed well away and instead dispatched his second-best physician, William Butts, with a love letter.

Anne Boleyn survived, but the mortality rate was as high as 50 per cent in some areas. Only now, in the midst of a global pandemic, can we begin to appreciate the full terror that the Sweating Sickness must have wreaked.