Random Historians Answer Questions About Historical Royals We Should Have Asked Ages Ago (17 items)

• (#9) Why Wasn't England Invaded After Henry VIII's Excommunication?

  Redditor u/SenatorArmstrong2020 asked:

  Why didn't anyone invade... England after [Henry VIII] was excommunicated in 1538?

  Redditor u/porphyrogenitaAC answered:

  The only powers capable of an invasion of England, France, and Charles V's empire, were bitter rivals, almost constantly at war. While there was a short window around 1538-40 when England went through a real invasion scare as France's King Francois I and Charles V signed a treaty of friendship and agreed to sever ties with England, the peace didn't hold long enough for any invasion to come about. By 1540 relations had cooled between them and in 1542 they were at war again. Basically Francois and Charles were at war so frequently that neither trusted each other enough to risk a daring attack on England which would leave them badly exposed on the continent.
• (#7) Why Don't English Royals Use Surnames?

  Redditor u/Ainatuoretta asked:

  What is the surname of Queen Elizabeth II ?

  Redditor u/jschooltiger answered:

  Inasmuch as she has a surname, it's Windsor. The current British royal house is the house of Windsor; that line succeeded the house of Hanover when Queen Victoria died and her son Edward VII succeeded her. Edward took his father's surname, being a member of the royal house of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha; the name of the house was changed to Windsor in 1917, under George V, as a result of anti-German sentiment in WWI. However, in normal usage, the royal family doesn't use surnames -- there's no ambiguity over which Elizabeth is queen of Britain, versus who's Elizabeth Smith or Elizabeth Stone.
• (#17) Why Was Charles II's Autopsy Filled With So Many Opinionated, Non-Scientific Terms?

  Redditor u/Blaskowicz asked:

  The physician in the autopsy of Charles II gave some very... colorful (if not medically impossible) descriptions like "heart the size of a peppercorn" and "did not contain a single drop of blood." What was going on in these autopsies?

  Redditor u/BedsideRounds answered:

  [A caveat that this answer rests on the argument of unconscious assumptions called episteme]

  Carlos II died in 1700. I don't have ANY primary information about how or why the autopsy was performed, and none of the review articles (some of which are in Spanish) seem to have any information on that either. So I'll defer to someone else on why it might have been performed in early 18th century Spain. Cerda, in (Rev Méd Chile 2008; 136: 267-270) suggests that it was done because he was known as "El hechizado," which he translated as "The Bewitched" (and I think should be able to be translated at "The Cursed" as well). Because I don't have the autopsy in front of me, this is largely speculation -- but with the caveat that I've read a lot of literature from this period. The "clinical gaze" of the physician who cared for Carlos -- which would likely NOT have been who performed the autopsy, I should mention -- was not looking for disease localized in specific organs. That idea would have been completely foreign to physicians of this period. And going along with that -- in later periods, the body was opened AS SOON AS POSSIBLE to catch the transition between life and death. Even in Morgagni's time, there could be a lag to dissection, though he was aware of the effects of putrefaction.

  Instead, he would have been looking for evidence of fundamental imbalances -- and this is speculation, of course, since my caveat above -- but even evidence that he was "Bewitched." We have to interpret these colorful descriptions knowing full the context in which these physicians operated...

  And what did he die of? Most explanations have focused on his unusual genitalia and suggested some combination of renal colic, stones, and infections leading to his eventual death. However, before he died he apparently had a wasting disease and severe diarrhea. This has led some to suggest a more mundane (for the 17th century) cause of death -- TB enteritis.

  And now onto Part III -- generally making sense of medical history. My caveat here will be that some of this is my opinion, and on these topics I have a tendency to be quite opinionated.

  So I am a practicing physician (both in the US and in Botswana), so it is with great affection when I say that one of the greatest impediments to understanding medical history has been doctors themselves. For the longest time (roughly until WW2), medical history has been in the hands of its practitioners, and they largely painted a picture of gradual progress by (largely) upper class, white men. Since then, medical history (and the history of science in general -- I don't want to suggest that this is unique to medicine) has expanded dramatically. But doctors -- including the doctors who write review articles on historical topics in medical journals -- have largely not kept up with this expanded historiography. Comically, some articles on medical history read chapters from an 1890s textbook I own, with just extra content added on once the 20th century rolled through...

  When I was younger and starting my flirtation with medical history, I actually said something like, "I just don't GET doctors from the 18th century," in contrast to, say, Rene Laennec, who wrote his On Mediate Auscultation not even a fifty years later, but for some reason seems like it comes from fundamentally the same era as myself. The reason is, I would argue now, that Laennec and I share many fundamental assumptions about the relationship between, man, physician, disease, and nature, which are not shared with Lind.

  This isn't made any easier by the medical tendency to remain "ahistorical" and continue to reuse old words with new, unconsciously loaded definitions (my favorite example is "sepsis" which I've written about before on AskHistorians). I mean, some of my residents still use these and have no idea -- the best example is "bleeding diathesis"; diathesis meaning a hereditary tendency towards something, which was largely used in the debate about whether or not TB was hereditary ("a consumptive diathesis").
• (#10) Did Queen Victoria Actually Care About The Irish During The Great Famine?

  Redditor u/Jewelofadog asked:

  Was Queen Victoria actually upset about the plight of the Irish during the Great Famine?

  Redditor u/chocolatepot answered:

  Yes, Queen Victoria was upset, although her concern was tempered. As a young princess, she was highly sympathetic to the native Irish as a whole when she learned about the historical and present oppression visited on them by her ancestors; it's been argued that her feelings were turned early in her rule by her highly influential first Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne. Ireland had been undergoing civil unrest through the 1830s due to poor crop yields and high rents charged by absentee English landowners, and when Victoria came to the throne in 1837, she came to believe that the issue was the "low Irish" (a term frequently used during this time for Irish people, particularly those that had emigrated to England, who were destitute and seen as having caused or deserving their problems through fecklessness and irresponsibility) revolting against good or at least well-intentioned local leaders. This obviously had implications for leaders farther up the chain of command! Stricter measures were taken by the government against the "low Irish, and Victoria was disinclined to visit for fear of her own safety.

  When the potato blight hit and destroyed two years' worth of crops, the queen urged her new PM Robert Peel to repeal the Corn Laws, which had put high import duties on foreign food and thus caused even more economic devastation when crops in the UK failed (such as with the Great Famine). She also limited the palace bread rations to a pound per person per day in order to cut down on the use of grain/flour, freeing up more to be sent to Ireland; she gave £2000 from her personal income and encouraged others to donate to the cause. However, she still retained her old prejudices, and while she was horrified at the suffering of the poor Irish, she was disdainful of those that revolted violently against their landlords for hoarding/diverting food.

  Eventually, the royal family did visit. The lord mayor of Dublin invited the queen to come in 1844, but the unrest (and then famine) made her and the government decide not to actually go through with it. Finally, in 1849, Victoria, Albert, and the oldest four children went on a low-budget state visit to improve relations between the Irish and stimulate trade and manufacture, which ended up costing roughly £2000 itself, canceling out her donation. Victoria and Albert were charmed by what they saw and considered it a great success - despite the desperate circumstances, there were still plenty of cheering crowds - but her itinerary was designed to keep her out of the hard-hit areas and in the long run, it did little to calm tensions. One has to wonder what might have happened if she had given Ireland the kind of patronage she gave to Scotland: would it have created a similar tourist industry and brought in more money for the region? Would there have been more sympathy on the part of the English toward the rural Irish? Would the government of Dublin have kept the statue of Albert she sent following his death, the return of which helped to make Victoria okay with neglecting Ireland for the rest of her reign? We don't know that it would have made a difference to the history of Irish separatism, but it's an interesting counterfactual to ponder.
• (#14) When Did Queen Elizabeth Start Going By The First?

  Redditor u/Skoodledoo asked:

  Was Queen Elizabeth I always titled as the first?

  Redditor u/RTarcher answered:

  Queen Elizabeth was known simply as that until the succession of Elizabeth II. An example of this is the biography of Elizabeth I by J. E. Neale. The original title of the biography was simply "Queen Elizabeth" when it was initially published in 1934. When the book was reprinted in 1952, Neale states in his introduction that "for obvious reasons I have changed the title of this book to Queen Elizbeth I." Other publications predating Queen Elizabeth II also refer to Elizabeth I as simply "Elizabeth."
• (#8) Why Is Anne Boleyn's Age Disputed?

  Redditor u/greensweet asked:

  Why is Anne Boleyn's age disputed?

  Redditor u/milkybev answered:

  This was actually not an uncommon uncertainty during the Tudor era (and in predating eras) — it was only when Thomas Cromwell issued a mandate for strict parish registers in 1538 that there was a regulated and widespread record of christenings, burials, and marriages. Considering that the mandate was implemented decades after Anne Boleyn (as well as many of Henry’s other wives, in fact) was born, the uncertainty of Anne’s date of birth is likely due to poor record-keeping in general.

  There are, however, more specifically recorded dates relevant to the estimation of Anne’s exact age, such as when she attended boarding school, that can be placed in the social context of Tudor England to establish a likely timeline of her life — but even here the dates recorded are inconsistent. Frustrating, right?

  There are a few excellent arguments that people have written about Anne’s age that will be more in-depth and well-researched than what I can give, so I recommend looking here at Gareth Russel’s proposal of Anne being born in 1507, and Eric Ives’ book “The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn.”

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