Royal Family: The deadly sickness that killed Henry VIII's brother and thousands of others before vanishing without a trace

In June 1528, a French ambassador to London wrote hurriedly of recent developments within the English capital.

“This disease… is the easiest in the world to die of”, Cardinal du Bellay reported to his counterparts in Paris.

“You have a slight pain in the head and at the heart; all at once you begin to sweat. There is no need for a physician… you are taken off without languishing.”

He was referencing what was later to be called the sweating sickness, or even the English sickness, so-called after its perceived origins in Shrewsbury, England; and it hitting the English considerably worse than other European countries.

And this is, more or less, all that is recorded known about the illness; the symptoms, and its reported place of outbreak.

To this day, the sweating sickness remains a colossal mystery to both scientists and historians, both cohorts just as unsure as their 14th to 16th century counterparts as to where and how the illness originated from, just exactly how it spread throughout the continent, and why, exactly, it managed to disappear entirely in 1644.

The sweating sickness was a source of much fear and hysteria for early modern Europeans, due to their inability to understand how it spread, and the swiftness in which potentially hundreds and thousands came to contact it.

And, naturally, it didn’t help that the fatality rate seemed to be 50 per cent.

For comparison, the Great Plague, which also haunted 16th century Europe, had a similar fatality rate of 30 per cent to 60 per cent.

The symptoms were also pretty bleak, too: cold shivers, severe pains in the head and neck, which would ultimately be followed by hot sweats- and, finally, an overwhelming desire to sleep.

Not only did the sickness manage to elude science both then and now, but the social, political and economic impact it had upon England especially cannot be understated.

Historian John Ashdown-Hill, who specialises in Richard III, has long argued that the dispatched King’s contacting of the disease the night before the Battle of Bosworth- in which the former fought for the Crown against Tudor rebel Henry VII- caused him sleepless nights throughout.

And when the new King Henry was crowned as a result of Richard III’s death in battle, the sickness- which was running rampant across both camps of soldiers- spread even further, accompanying Henry and his men down to London.

Due to the overlap between the new King and the new sickness, many across England believed that the sweating sickness was sent by God to punish those who supported the reign of Henry VII.

Beliefs that would have assumedly only been strengthened once the sudden death of King Henry VII’s teenage son and heir to the throne, Arthur, was supposedly at the hands of the sweating sickness.

It haunted other high-profile Tudors, too. Anne Boleyn contacted it; Cardinal Wolsey barely survived. Unsurprisingly, the King himself was absolutely petrified of it.

Today, the sweating sickness cannot be understood, due to a lack of DNA available in the victims’ graves.

Unlike its bigger sisters, the Great and Bubonic Plagues- in which radical scientific breakthroughs have erupted over the years- the sweating sickness is, assumedly, forever limited to the mysteries of history.

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