Many people fantasize about what it would be like to have lived in a royal palace from centuries ago. Those fantasies might come crashing down, however, once we realize that the most magnificent chambers were befouled by parasites, bacteria, viruses, and environmental poisons that were responsible for carrying countless young, healthy people to the grave.
For one thing, there were chamber pots in every room. Inside those gorgeous lacquered cabinets were pots brimming with a stinking stew of human waste. They were emptied daily into cesspits that often busted through walls, and then went either into the ground, leaching into ground water and ending up in the nearest well, poisoning the water, or into other rooms.
Many courtiers didn’t bother to search for a chamber pot. When the pious princess Catherine of Braganza arrived in England to marry King Charles II in 1661, she and her ladies were shocked at finding men blithely urinating throughout the palace. They complained “that they cannot stir abroad without seeing in every corner great beastly English pricks battering against every wall.”
Men peed into the fireplaces, in the stairwells, and corners. A 1675 report on the Louvre in Paris claimed that “on the grand staircases…behind the doors and almost everywhere one sees there a mass of excrement, one smells a thousand unbearable stenches caused by calls of nature which everyone goes to do there every day.” Henry VII was so angry that people urinated in his royal gardens, he had crosses painted on the walls, hoping courtiers wouldn’t desecrate such a holy symbol—however, it just gave them something to aim for.
Urine wasn’t just on the walls and corridors, but pretty much on everything people touched. Male servants were encouraged to pee in a vat in the palace kitchen so their urine could be collected for cleaning the house, as well as for scrubbing draperies and textiles, as the ammonia in urine removes even the most stubborn stains. Urine was also used to bind dye to cloth and soften animal hides. Basically, anything you wore would have been soaked in pee.
The rich and poor alike rarely bathed. Filthy people living in a filthy palace often had lice nesting in their hair. King James I of England trailed lice behind him in the palace rooms he frequented. Scientists examining the remains of Ferdinando II, king of Naples (1469-1496), found lice in his head hair and pubic hair. When the archbishop anointed the head of Henry IV of England during his 1399 coronation, lice rushed out of his hair, evidently angry about all the oil.
Nor were all the vermin on the outside of the human body. Royals often had worms roosting inside them. Excavations of latrine sites at the Louvre revealed that worms were rampant in the feces of court residents from the medieval period through that of Louis XIV. English King Richard III suffered intestinal worms that grew up to a foot long, as did Agnes Sorel, mistress of King Charles VII of France. Those with worms would spit them up…alive.
Worm infestations came from drinking bacteria-riddled water. Most rivers and some wells were contaminated with sewage and carcasses that were thrown in the water or buried nearby. Water that was meant to drink was left in a bucket for several days for the solids to settle. Then the solids were skimmed off, and the water was boiled and mixed with alcohol, which killed the germs. Mozart’s mother died from drinking untreated Seine River water in Paris.
While alcohol killed bacteria, it was often poisoned by lead. Lead leached into the liquid from lead crystal decanters and lead pitchers, or was added as a sweetener. Scientists examining the bones of Pope Clement II, who died in 1047, found he had died of lead poisoning, probably from his wine. Many other royal bones have shown off-the-charts levels of lead.
Like the water and wine, food too was unsafe. Without refrigerators, food often spoiled. And cooking over an open fire is challenging; often half the meat is overcooked, the other half somewhat raw. Without an IV drip, food poisoning can lead to rapid dehydration and cause death in just a few hours.
Courtiers didn’t need to ingest bacteria-ridden meat to get sick. The presence of horses, cows, and pigs on palace grounds meant that animal-borne diseases—such as anthrax—could be easily transmitted to humans, in the air or through touch, sometimes resulting in deadly epidemics. In 1313, the court of Holy Roman Emperor Henry VII suffered an epidemic of anthrax which killed horses, people, and eventually the emperor himself. An epidemic caused by sick horses may also have been what killed Mozart in 1791.
Even the beautiful palace rooms we so admire could kill you. Walls painted red—quite a fashionable color in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—were made from mercury or arsenic sulfide. White paint was made from lead, yellow from arsenic sulfide. Starting in the eighteenth century, green walls exuded pure arsenic, sickening and killing countless people.
So while many of us might fantasize about candlelit ballrooms and gorgeous clothing, it’s probably a good idea to remember we wouldn’t enjoy anything if we smelled all that urine, and if we ourselves were filthy, covered with lice, and our insides devastated by worms, bacteria, and poison.
The Health Risks of Bathing
It shouldn’t surprise us that most people living in such filthy palaces were filthy themselves. A thick coating of dirt on the skin, the Church decreed, showed Christian humility and kept illness from entering the body. Over time, physicians came to believe that washing was dangerous, so dangerous, indeed, that many people consulted their astrologers to find the most auspicious time to take a bath. The popular sixteenth-century book, This is the Myrour or Glasse of Helth, advised, “Use not baths or stews, nor sweat too much, for all openeth the pores of a man’s body and maketh the venomous air to enter and for to infect the blood.”
In the late fifteenth century, Queen Isabella of Spain bragged that she had only bathed twice in her whole life. Queen Elizabeth bathed once a month, “whether she needed it or no,” according to one contemporary chronicler. Her successor, James I, bore a great aversion to water and never bathed. One court lady complained that she and her friends got “lousy by sitting in a councillor’s chamber that James frequented.”
King James didn’t even wash his hands before eating. At the table, he “only rubbed his fingers’ ends slightly with the wet end of a napkin.” His lover, the Duke of Buckingham, wrote in one letter to the king, “So, craving your blessing, I kiss your dirty hands.” James itched constantly and rarely changed his clothes.
In 1671, John Burbury, an English diplomat stationed in Istanbul, expressed his astonishment at the excessive “cleanliness of the Turks who, as they had occasion to make urine… afterwards washed their hands.”
Over in France, the Sun King had a similar dislike of personal hygiene. He frequently complained that his mistress, Madame de Montespan, wore too much perfume, which suffocated him. She turned a deaf ear because she doused herself not to hide her own body odor, but his, as he apparently had bathed only twice in his life. In 1680, when the king accused his mistress of overweening pride and many other unworthy qualities, she replied scornfully “That if she had the imperfections of which he accused her, at any rate she did not smell worse than he.”
The ambassador from the wild, barbarous land of Russia—whose inhabitants indulged in the dangerous and bizarre habit of bathing regularly—agreed with the royal mistress, writing to the czar that Louis XIV “stank like a wild animal.”
Read more in the Poison Chronicle series:
- Part 1: A History of Russian Poisonings
- Part 2: The Arsenic Poisoning of Napoleon Bonaparte
- Part 3: Dangerous Medicines of Centuries Past
- Part 4: Poisonous Cosmetics in Medieval Times
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