In the midst of these various harassing affairs, the illness of James began to assume a formidable appearance. The King had frequently, before his last illness, been heard to express his belief that he should not live long. He was a martyr to rheumatism and gout, which he increased by gross feeding, and the continual use of sweet wines. During the whole of the Christmas preceding his death he had kept his chambers, not even going to chapel, or to see the plays, although his known delight in Ben Jonson’s masques would have induced him to attend the representation of the last of those performances played in his reign, the masque of the “Fortunate Isles.” The sole amusement which the dying King permitted himself was to go abroad in his litter, in fair weather, to see some flights at the brook; but all enjoyment of his usual diversion was at an end.
Accounts from the Court became daily worse:--"The King," Chamberlain, on the twelfth of March, wrote to Carleton, “has a tertian ague, but not dangerous, if he would be governed by physicians.”[148] His Majesty’s decline was evidently gradual; nor was he the only person in the realm sinking under fever or ague, the “spotted fever”[149] being fearfully prevalent. Buckingham was now on the eve of going to France as ambassador, to marry by proxy the young Princess, Henrietta Maria; but so late as the twenty-third of March he was detained by the continued illness of James.
Probably typhoid, which is characterized by some spots. State Papers, vol. clxxxv., No. 99.
"The King’s fits," Mr. Chamberlain again writes, “diminish; the Duke will not leave him till he is perfectly recovered, of which there is hope, but no assurance.” On the following day, we find, from the same source, that James performed an act of mercy, almost if not quite his last, in excusing Lord Middlesex part of his fine, and reducing it from 50,000_l._ to 20,000_l._, which sum was to be repaid to the Crown.
His sickness had now assumed a distinctly intermittent form; even so late as the middle of the month there had been an apparent abatement; on the sixteenth of March, he had his seventh fit of this debilitating disease; but it was, as Mr. Secretary Conway informed the Earl of Carlisle, “less intense hereto than the rest, and left more clearness and cheerfulness in his looks than the former.”[150] Yet, in the same letter, Conway speaks of the “double sadness of every face,” and alludes to the "extreme grief suffered for the sharp and smart accesses of His Majesty’s fever."