Smallpox, poisonings and plague
Elizabeth I suffered but recovered from a near-fatal bout of smallpox at Hampton Court Palace; her brother Edward IV’s former nurse, Sybil Penn, was not so lucky. After her death from smallpox, Penn is said to have become one of the palace’s most persistent ghosts.
Poisonings were a feature of the internecine political and religious turmoil of the Tudor court. In 1594, Elizabeth’s Jewish physician, Dr Lopez, found himself in the Tower of London on the charge of conspiring with the Spanish to poison his mistress, and a burst of anti-Semitism followed. In September 1613, Sir Thomas Overbury died in the Tower, after eating poisoned tarts and jellies provided by the Countess of Essex, wife of the King’s former favourite.
Plague caused the deferral of James I’s coronation from 1603 to 1604, and the coronations of both James I and his son Charles I were denuded of the traditional procession from the Tower to Westminster because disease was rife in the city.
William III, a sufferer from asthma, disliked Whitehall Palace both for the formal ceremonies he had to endure there and for its polluted air. The cleaner air at Kensington and Hampton Court were great attractions (‘the air of Hampton Court agreed so well with him that he resolved to live the greatest part of the year there’), and Kew in later centuries was thought a fresh and healthy place for royal children to grow up.
