When Anne Boleyn fell sick with the sweating sickness Henry sent her a love letter and his second best physician. Then he fled.
The sweating sickness had arrived at the English court in May 1528 and was spreading with terrifying speed. Thomas Forrestier, a French physician living in London, recorded people dropping dead while walking down the street or playing with their children. Edward Hall wrote of it carrying people off within two to three hours, with people appearing merry at dinner and dead at supper.
By the eighteenth of June the French ambassador Jean du Bellay reported two thousand people afflicted in London alone. By the thirtieth of June he counted forty thousand, and noted that while he himself had sweated at the Archbishop of Canterbury's house, eighteen members of the Archbishop's household died in four hours.
When one of Anne's ladies fell sick at court she was immediately sent to her family home at Hever Castle in Kent. Henry and Catherine of Aragon fled in the opposite direction, moving between safe houses to stay ahead of the illness. Anne's father Thomas and her brother George both fell ill in the same outbreak. George came down with the sweat at Waltham, close to the royal party, and Henry and Catherine moved again immediately.
At Hever, Anne contracted the sickness herself. The disease could kill within twenty-four hours of symptoms appearing. Those treating it were advised to keep the patient awake throughout, lying still under a light covering, drinking only lukewarm liquids. Falling asleep was believed to mean death.
Henry received the news of Anne's illness in the night. The letter he wrote survives, now held in the Vatican Library, its pages spattered with ink drops and smeared where his large hand moved across the paper. "There came to me suddenly in the night the most afflicting news that could have arrived," he wrote. "I esteem you more than all the world, and whose health I desire as I do my own, so that I would gladly bear half your illness to make you well."
His chief physician was unavailable.
Henry wrote that he was sending his second in command instead: "I send you my second, and hope that he will soon make you well. I shall then love him more than ever." He closed with the hope of seeing her again soon, which would be "a greater comfort than all the precious jewels in the world." The letter was dispatched to Hever with William Butts, royal physician. Henry stayed where he was.
William Carey, husband of Anne's sister Mary, died of the sweating sickness on the twenty-second of June. Anne survived. Butts treated her and she recovered fully, one of the fortunate ones in a summer that killed members of the king's privy chamber and dismembered households across London in a matter of hours.
Henry's letter to Anne is in the Vatican Library. It has been there since before either of them knew how the story would end. He wrote that he would gladly have borne half her illness.
He sent his second best doctor and moved to the next safe house. She recovered without him.
