On this day.........528 years ago, the Wars of the Roses
ended at the Battle of Bosworth Field, and the victorious army of Henry VII
carried the ‘sweating sickness’ with it to London.
The illness, perhaps
what we later came to call influenza, would carry off three lord mayors in as
many months. Altogether a ‘wonderful number’ of people died, and there were
five more epidemics over the next 70 years.
During the 1517
outbreak, there was much comment about the suddenness with which the disease
could strike, as people collapsed in the street and were with their maker four hours
later, or, as one contemporary put it: they could be ‘merry at dinner and dead
at supper’. In Oxford, 400 people perished
in a week.
In 1528, Anne
Boleyn caught the disease, and desperately in love with her though he was,
Henry VIII packed her off to her home in Kent, where she survived, but her
brother-in-law died. For the full story,
see A Disastrous History of Britain.
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