Sweating sickness strikes England in The Tudors Season 1, Episode 7, bringing death, dread, and religious tension to Henry VIII’s court. From Anne Boleyn’s brush with death to Catherine of Aragon’s exile and Thomas More’s fiery views on heresy, this episode blends eerie historical truth with heavy-handed drama. But how much of it is accurate? Let’s break down the fact versus fiction behind the 1528 plague, Henry’s medical paranoia, and the growing threat of Reformation ideas in the Tudor world.

Inside This Post:

• Compton’s Death and Anne Hastings’ Fate
• Henry VIII the Herbalist
• Catherine of Aragon’s Emotional Blackmail
• What Was the Sweating Sickness?
• Anne Boleyn falls ill at Hever Castle
• The Purging Flames
• Historical Woopsies

Episode 7: Plague

The dreaded sweating sickness terrorizes England, sending Catherine of Aragon to Wales, Anne Boleyn to Hever, and Henry VIII into isolation. Meanwhile, his men reach Pope Clement with a plea for the holy seat to recognize his annulment from his wife. But when the sweat strikes down the one Henry loves most, an uncertain future looms ahead.

Compton and the Lady: A Fatal Romance?

William Compton falls ill and dies of the sweat at his country estate, despite the physician bleeding him to save his life. The series treats Anne Hastings as his common-law wife, and she perishes within a few days.

Anne Hastings was Henry VIII’s first attempt at having a mistress, in 1513-1514. Her brother, the Duke of Buckingham, caught her alone in a room with Compton, who had delivered the king’s letter to her, and accused her of cheating on her husband with the king. There’s no indication of whether she ever became intimate with Compton, nor did she live with him. He left her some property in his will, along with his wife and children. The sweat also killed Mary Boleyn’s husband a day or two later than Compton, but Anne Hastings lived until the 1520s.

Henry the Herbalist: Tudor Medicine & Superstition

Henry has a medicine cabinet full of tonics, and prides himself on being a herbalist. This is true! In those days, the doctors believed four fluids ruled the body. Blood (Sanguine), phlegm (Phlegmatic), yellow bile (Choleric) and black bile (Melancholic). Too much of one humor would cause one to fall ill, so they attempted to keep them stable. Henry was a closet pharmacist and enjoyed mixing up his own tonics. He sent remedies to Anne when she fell ill with the sweat, along with his personal physician, Dr. Butts. And he had a handwritten book of medical treatments compiled for him of 200 recipes, many of them his own.

Because he had no male heir, Henry feared the sweat above all other illnesses and obeyed the superstitions about the illness. Possible ways to keep it from throwing your humors out of balance involved staying active, exercising, sweating naturally to expel the poison from their bodies, and avoiding “evil mists” (foul air) and rotten food. Also, herbal concoctions and avoiding going outside. The rich changed their undergarments frequently in favor of clean linen, fled to different locations, and practiced self-isolation.

It’s unclear whether Henry catches the sweat and hallucinates, or if his fear causes him intense paranoia and hallucinations.

Catherine of Aragon: Exile, Loyalty, & Betrayal

In the series, he sends Catherine away to be with Princess Mary at Ludlow Castle, but in reality, she traveled with him as he moved from place to place. She never returned to Ludlow Castle in Wales and was stubborn in her refusal to leave his side. Catherine knew the minute she left, he could keep her away and refuse to let her return, and she would have lost the battle for remaining his wife and queen.

I like how she confronts him about Anne and calls her his mistress, then Henry piously denies it and insists they are not sleeping together. Catherine then turns it around and asks him if he does not share secrets with her, and make promises to her, intimating that in her mind, emotional adultery is just as serious as the real deal. This would be in line with Catholic teachings of the time, which equated mental sin with physical sin. Like the scripture says, if you have already committed adultery with a woman in your mind, you are not absolved of sin.

Sweat, Sorrow, & Sudden Death

The early symptoms were a sense of apprehension, violent cold shivers, dizziness, headaches, severe pains in the neck, shoulders, and limbs, and exhaustion. An initial cold sweat lasted for a half an hour to three hours, then the hot sweat began with an internal fire, headache, delirium, a rapid pulse, and intense thirst, followed by chest pains and palpitations. In the final stages came exhaustion and the intense urge to sleep, which could be fatal. There was no immunity, so one could suffer multiple bouts in their lifetime (as Wolsey did).

The sweat came in the summer and early autumn. No one knows what caused it, whether it came from anthrax or a rodent-borne virus, or why it ceased after about forty years. The sickness spread overseas but could not take root, and it had its final outbreak in England in 1551.

Anne Boleyn’s Illness

Anne’s maid catches the sweat and dies, infecting her household at Hever. There’s a contrast between how Anne sympathizes with and reassures her, even after she collapses, compared to Henry bolting as soon as his servant keels over in front of him. It shows us Anne is a sweet and tender person, while Henry is only concerned for himself.

The show only has Anne fall ill, when her brother George and her father Thomas were also infected. The king sent his second-best doctor to tend her, and she recovered. And it doesn’t make us much care for her father, when he gleefully celebrates that because she survived, his plans can get back on track (foreshadowing his callousness at the end of her life).

Sir Thomas More: Humanist Scholar or Heretic Hunter?

Thomas More does not fear death, but he fears the heresy (Lutheranism) spreading across Europe, and tells his daughter that though he does not advocate for violence as a humanist, he believes Luther and his followers should be dragged out of their homes and burned.

Unfortunately, this is all true. More even remarked once that a heretic was “well and truly burned” at the stake. He approved of burning as punishment for heretics, but that begs the question of why.

Putting aside the violent Tudor times, which seems unfathomable to us in a modern context, humanist ideas were only beginning to take root, and they had a fundamental influence on how people learned to see humanity. Christianity should have been doing its job, and establishing basic humanitarian beliefs, but it had devolved into the Church being the absolute moral authority and anyone outside the Church as deserving its most extreme punishment.

Catholics viewed heresy as a serious offense, threatening the well-being of the individual and the wider community. Like the sweat, it was an infection that they wanted to root out and destroy. They used burning at the stake as a public punishment for unrepentant heretics to deter others from similar heresy. The imagery of fire invoked the flames of hell, a warning about the potential eternal consequences of unrepentant sin. It also gave a person one last chance to repent. Motivated by the threat of eternal suffering, they might save their souls from damnation by recanting.

It is horrible and inhumane, but that’s what they thought and did.

Weird Words & Historical Woopsies

• With his gay lover now dead, Thomas Tallis takes an interest in Joan over her twin sister June, who later perishes from the sweat. It’s not cool that Hirst portrays Joan as an incestuous slut (both of them tried to lure Tallis into bed in a previous episode, and had a threesome with George Boleyn). Joan says Tallis is “weird,” which is a modern anachronism. In Tudor times, “weird” meant “fate or destiny” rather than “strange.”
• Anne gives the new French ambassador a dog named Wolsey, but there’s no evidence to support this.
• Her uncle, Thomas Howard, falls sick, but he never did, probably in place of her father.
• Cardinal Wolsey catches the sweat and recovers; in history, he caught the sweat multiple times and lived through every bout, but he may not have caught it in 1528 as depicted.
• In a nice touch, a memorial is held for the dead knights of the court, represented by their spurs resting on satin pillows.

Curious what personality types feature in The Tudors? Check out my analysis here!

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About the Author: Charity Bishop writes historical fiction, historical fantasy, and suspense novels that explores the darkness in human hearts, and the light that refuses to be extinguished. Discover her books.