ROYAL SURFEITS

Press, Volume XI, Issue 130, 9 January 1867, Page 3

ROYAL SURFEITS

The following amusing, letter, addressed to the editor of the " Pall Mall Gazette," appeared in that journal on the 2nd October:— At the present season, when sanitary alarms are directing attention rather more than commonly to the limits of the prudent and the prejudicial in diet, the mind whose habitual bias is towards historical retrospection naturally revolves the names of monarchs who have perished by—to spare a more vulgar word—by over-indulgence in some coveted food. The sovereign most intimately connected in all English minds with the fact of fatal indigestion—the royal surfeiter par eminence —was Henry 1.1 That literary monarch, it is well known, after his eon's untimely death, was "never seen to smile again." The food of the mind even seems to have ceased to afford him effectual solace. But he continued his habit of hunting, and he retained his perilous fondness for the eel-like fish called lamprey. It was after a hunting day in the forest of Lion, in Normandy, that he rested at the abbey of St. Denis, near Eouen, one November night, ate, in spite of physicians' warnings, his fatal supper of lampreys, provided by the assiduous monks, and had the attack of dyspepsia to which he succumbed in six days' time. A less respectable monarch than he, his great grandson John, died of surfeit also. October peaches and new cider gave him his quietus when he was but forty-eight years old. He had just escaped by the skin of his teeth from the disastrous flood which overwhelmed his army and baggage, like another Pharaoh's host, in the Wash, and seeking rest and shelter in the Abbey of Swineshead, gave loose to his appetite among the products of the monastic vats and kitchen gardens. He struggled on to Newark, horribly ill, and there died three daye after the Swineshead supper. Another English sovereign, at a long interval, is attainted of fatal surfeit direct. George I. supped on melons or on oranges, for the interesting doubt is a crux in history, and probably on his favorite liquor punch, at Count de Twittel's castle, near Delden, the evening before he received the apoplectic stroke which befell him on his road to Osnaburg. Melons caused the death of the German Emperor Erederic 111., a hale old monarch who might well have discharged nature's score on other grounds, for he was seventy-eight years old, and had just had his leg amputated a deux reprises, the operation having been clumsily performed in the first instance; but he was doing well, and seemed likely to recover, when a debauch in melons carried him off. Unwarned by his example, his son Maximilian 1., the most romantic of all the Hapsburgs, died of melons also, indulging in them to an enormous extent after a rigorous fast according to the Church's rules. A voracious meal of mushrooms stewed in oil hastened the end of the Emperor Charles VI. in 1740. In France we know of but one sovereign who may positively be said to have died of excess, Louis X., who drank himself to death with wine in a cold cellar after overheating himself at a game of tennis. But the case of John, the Black Prince's captive, is suspicious also. He succumbed after a winter of feasting—among the flesh-pots of Egypt—at the Savoy Palace, Strand. - Of surfeits indirect, or constitutions undermined by habitual over-feeding, the royal examples, if carefully looked into, would no doubt be numerous. James 1., for instance, loved good eating and sweet wines inordinately, and thereby brought on the gout and general break-up, of which he died ; and the same may be said of Henry VIII. But here a thought suggests }tsel£ Poison was, we know, a very frequently credited mode of exit for troublesome great personages at some periods of European history. The historical verdict, "not without suspicion of poison," is in fact so common as to have excited reasonable distrust in later days, and to have been explained by reference to the : prevalent scientific ignorance regarding the symptoms of disease when it was first pronounced. .But there may have been something in it notwithstanding, more than meets the ear. I There are two ways of poisoning— —poisoning by drugs and poisoning by ill-cooked viands, for Erancatelli and Lady Harriet Sinclair were then unborn. Shakspeare, in enumerating the causes of the deaths of kings ("Eichard II." Act 3), omits to specify bad cookery as one; but he says —and his subtle knowledge of human nature none will dispute—" Some poisoned by their wives." Now. Catherine Parr had opportunities this way which for her own life's sake she might be excused for not disregarding; and if ever monarch did deserve unwholesome dinners at the hand of his wives, Henry VIII. was that monarch. At the same time I have little doubt that, if set on this track, Mr Eroude, with his accustomed ingenuity, would find reason to reverse the sequence of cause and effect, and would make out that Henry's reign, with all its deeds of domestic murder, was but, in fact, one long unavailing struggle against the refined cruelty of the conjugal cuisine. In connection with this view I must not omit that Charles 11. was seized with his fit of apoplexy after partaking of a porringer of spoon-meat administered to him at his request by the Duchess of Portsmouth, but made " too strong for his atamaeh," says Burnet; assuredly not with any evil intention on the part of the Duchess, who thereby lost ber lover and her lucre.