Did Henry Viii Smell as Badly as I Have Read?

In July of 1535, King Henry VIII and his court of over 700 people embarked on an ballsy official tour. Over the next four months the massive entourage would visit around 30 different royal palaces, aloof residences and religious institutions. While these stops were important PR events for the male monarch, designed to spark loyalty in his subjects, royal households had some other reason entirely for their constant movement.

They weren't just exercising their tremendous wealth: they actually needed to escape the disgusting messes large royal parties produced. Palaces—like Henry's Hampton Court—had to exist constantly evacuated so they could be cleaned of the accumulated mounds of human waste. Livestock and farmland also needed time to recover, after supplying food for then many people. Once the tour was over, Henry and a swelling court of over 1,000 would keep moving for the remainder of the yr, traveling ofttimes between the Rex'southward 60 residences in a vain attempt to live in hygienic environment.

Within days of a majestic political party settling in one palace or some other, a stink would set in from poorly discarded food, brute waste, vermin from or attracted to unwashed bodies, and homo waste (which accrued in underground chambers until it could be removed.) The hallways would go and so caked with grime and soot from constant fires that they were fairly blackness. The very crush of court members was so dense that it made a thorough firm cleaning impossible—and futile. Though cleanliness standards were subpar throughout the Medieval, Renaissance and Regency eras, regal courts were typically dirtier than the average small cabin or dwelling house.

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Some of the most storied reigns in history, like that of Catherine the Great, took place against a backdrop of horrifying smells, overcrowded quarters, inundation sleeping room pots and lice-filled furniture. While paintings of Louis Fourteen's opulent court at Versailles show royals clad in gorgeously embroidered garments, viewers today are missing ane of the chief effects of their finery: the odor of hundreds of garments that accept never been washed, all in one unventilated room. And Charles Two of England let his flea-bitten spaniels lie in his bed bedchamber, where they rendered the room "very offensive and indeed made the whole Court nasty and stinking," according to a 17th century author.

Louis Xv's toilette at the Palace of Versailles.

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Simply without a doubtfulness, the most pressing health concern was caused past the famine of waste disposal options in an era before reliable plumbing. "Feces and urine were everywhere," Eleanor Herman, author of The Royal Art of Poison, says of royal palaces. "Some courtiers didn't bother to look for a bedroom pot but simply dropped their britches and did their business—all of their business—in the staircase, the hallway, or the fireplace."

A 1675 report offered this assessment of the Louvre Palace in Paris: "On the chiliad staircases" and "behind the doors and nearly everywhere i sees there a mass of excrement, 1 smells a 1000 unbearable stenches caused by calls of nature which everyone goes to practice there every solar day."

According to historian Alison Weir, writer of Henry Eight: The King and his Court, the captious Henry Viii "waged a constant boxing confronting the dirt, grit, and smells that were unavoidable when so many people lived in one establishment," which was adequately unusual for the time. The king slept on a bed surrounded by furs to keep small creatures and vermin away, and visitors were warned not to "wipe or rub their hands upon none arras [tapestries] of the King's whereby they might be hurted."

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Many of the rules laid downward by the King indicate that his battle confronting the advancing grime was a losing one. To keep servants and courtiers from urinating on the garden walls, Henry had large red X's painted in trouble spots. But instead of deterring men from relieving themselves, it merely gave them something to aim for. Calls for people not to dump dirty dishes in the hallways—or on the King's bed—seemed to fall on deaf ears.

Amazingly, Henry was even forced to decree that cooks in the royal kitchen were forbidden to work "naked, or in garments of such vileness every bit they do at present, nor lie in the nights and days in the kitchen or ground by the fireside." To gainsay the trouble, clerks of the kitchen were instructed to purchase "honest and wholesome garments" for the staff.

Part of the Hampton Court Palace kitchen, pictured in the 1940s, which had been kept exactly every bit it was in the early on 16th century.

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While the King had a relatively sophisticated lavatory system for himself, other waste measures intended equally hygienic seem disgusting today: servants were encouraged to pee in vats and so that their urine could be used for cleaning. As actual cleanliness was often unachievable, the majestic court resorted to masking the offending odors. Sweet-smelling plants covered palace floors, and the fortunate pressed sachets of olfactory property to their noses.

Once Henry and his court moved on to the next royal residence, the scrubbing and airing out of the palace began. The waste matter from the King's non-flushing lavatories was held in cloak-and-dagger chambers when the court was in residence. But after the court left, the King's Gong Scourers, tasked with cleaning the sewers in his palaces nearly London, went to work.

"Afterward the court had been hither for four weeks, the brick chambers would fill head-loftier," Simon Thurley, curator of Celebrated Royal Palaces, told The Independent. " It was the gong scourers who had to make clean them when the court had left."

Of grade, filthiness in over-crowded imperial establishments was not but a problem at the English courtroom. When the futurity Catherine the Great arrived in Russia from her family unit's relatively clean German language court, she was shocked by what she institute. "It's not rare to see coming from an immense courtyard total of mire and filth that belongs to a hovel of rotten wood," she wrote, "a lady covered in jewels and superbly dressed, in a magnificent carriage, pulled by half dozen onetime nags, and with badly combed valets."

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Bathroom Apartment of Marie-Antoinette at Versailles.

Raphael Gaillarde/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images

The Western European belief that baths were unhealthy did not aid matters, either. Although neat freak Henry VIII bathed often and changed his undershirts daily, he was a royal rarity. Louis XIV is rumored to take bathed twice in his life, as did Queen Isabella of Castile, Herman says. Marie-Antoinette bathed once a month. The 17th century British King James I was said to never bathe, causing the rooms he frequented to exist filled with lice.

It was the Sun King himself, Louis XIV, whose pick to no longer travel from courtroom to court would atomic number 82 to a particularly putrid living state of affairs. In 1682, in an effort to seal his authority and subjugate his nobles, Louis Fourteen moved his court permanently to the gilded mega-palace of Versailles. At times over 10,000 royals, aristocrats, government officials, servants and military machine officers lived in Versailles and its surrounding lodgings.

Despite its reputation for magnificence, life at Versailles, for both royals and servants, was no cleaner than the slum-similar atmospheric condition in many European cities at the time. Women pulled up their skirts upward to pee where they stood, while some men urinated off the balustrade in the middle of the imperial chapel. Co-ordinate to historian Tony Spawforth, author of Versailles: A Biography of a Palace, Marie-Antoinette was once striking by human waste being thrown out the window every bit she walked through an interior courtyard.

The heavily trafficked latrines often leaked into the bedrooms below them, while blockages and corrosion in the palace's iron and pb pipes were known to occasionally "toxicant everything" in Marie-Antoinette'south kitchen. "Not even the rooms of the imperial children were safe," writes Spawforth. An occasional court exodus could have reduced the wear and tear on Versailles, perhaps leading to fewer unpleasant structural failures.

This unsanitary style of living no incertitude led to countless deaths throughout imperial European households. It was non until the 19th century that standards of cleanliness and technological developments improved life for many people, including members of imperial courts. Today, many European royals nonetheless move from residence to residence—but for pleasure, not to endeavour and outrun squalor.

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Source: https://www.history.com/news/royal-palace-life-hygiene-henry-viii

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