For years he had been physician to Henry VIII. Now he was the patient, with the illness his world called "the stone".
Thomas Linacre died on 20 October 1524. He had served the king and leading figures at court and in the Church, among them Cardinal Wolsey and William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury. These were men accustomed to having things arranged for them. Illness imposed rather different terms, and it imposed them on the physician too.
Linacre belonged to the learned world around the Tudor court, where a knowledge of Greek might lead into medicine, royal education or the company of scholars who wrote to one another across Europe. He had studied in Italy and taken his medical degree at Padua. The languages were part of the medicine. A physician who could read the ancient authorities in their own words could examine what generations of translators had made of them.
There had been royal books long before there was a book for Henry's daughter. In 1499 Linacre dedicated his Latin translation of an ancient Greek work on astronomy to Prince Arthur, Henry's elder brother, and soon afterwards he was called to court as Arthur's tutor. The prince died in 1502. His younger brother Henry became heir, and in 1509 king. A dedication to Arthur remained in print after the royal future it had addressed was gone.
By Linacre's later years, another royal child had a place in his work. Princess Mary was the daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, the girl who would become Mary I. For her he prepared a grammar called Rudimenta Grammatices. The title was Latin. The explanations were in English. Even a king's daughter had to begin somewhere.
The book was dedicated to Mary and set out the elements of the language, its forms and the construction of sentences. Linacre had revised an earlier grammar of his own for her use. This was a different kind of work from translating a medical authority for learned adults. It required the scholar to go back to the beginning and arrange what he knew for someone who was beginning too. The dedication to Arthur had addressed a prince who would never be king. This one addressed a princess who would one day be queen.
For physicians, the work ran in the other direction, from Greek into Latin. Galen's medical writings had passed through centuries of translation and alteration. Linacre sought out authoritative Greek texts and made fresh translations, working to correct the misunderstandings that had built up around them. In this medicine, getting the words right mattered. The authority of an ancient writer was little help if the passage in front of the physician no longer said what its author had written.
One of those translations, published in 1517, concerned the preservation of health and was dedicated to Henry VIII. A copy Linacre gave to Richard Fox, Bishop of Winchester, survives in the Royal College of Physicians' library. The dedication honoured the king. This particular volume was a physician's gift to a bishop.
He gave his fellow physicians something larger as well. In 1518 Henry granted the charter founding the College of Physicians, with Linacre as its first president. Its authority covered medical practice in London and seven miles around it. The king could grant authority. The physicians still needed somewhere to meet.
They met in Linacre's house in Knightrider Street, near St Paul's. He gave part of the house to the College during his lifetime, for its meetings and its library. His rooms became the place where the business of the profession was done. The man who had prepared a grammar for a royal child was also making room, quite literally, for his own profession.
In 1524 there was one more provision to secure. He petitioned for medical lectureships at Oxford and Cambridge and committed property to pay for them: three in all, two at Oxford and one at Cambridge. These were arrangements for teaching that would continue long after his own working life had ended.
In June he had made his will. In October another legal document arrived, and this one concerned the students who would come after him. On 12 October 1524 the king licensed the foundation of Linacre's three medical lectureships. It was permission to begin, with the work of carrying the foundation through still ahead. Linacre died eight days later.
