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By Root 1386 0

following the revelation of the Irish rising and the suspicion that it was promoted from within Charles’s circle of advisers: ‘diseases which proceed from the inward parts, as the liver, the heart or the brains, the more noble parts, it is a hard thing to apply cure to such diseases’.2 His own death naturally invited comment from his enemies. It was also common to make a connection between the physical sufferings of particular individuals and the judgements of God upon them. Judgements on individuals often took the form of a loss of mental faculties, and hideous outward afflictions – flesh falling away from the fingers, disfigurements of the skin, or the efflux of excrements from the wrong parts of the body.3

Parliamentarian newsbooks, at a disadvantage because of the timing of their editions, were on the defensive. The Parliament Scout noted that Pym’s enemies had been quick to ‘tell bad lies of him’ and Remarkeable Passages reported that those who could not blemish Pym ‘all his life, would have spotted his corpse now he is dead; but that 1000 are eye witnesses how clear a Coarse [sic] he is, to the shame of those that raise such wicked inventions’. The Weekly Account was more sober: ‘It is reported that he died of that loathsome disease which the Greeks call Ptheriasis… but the dead body exposed to the view of above a thousand witnesses did sufficiently convince the truth and malice of the report’. An Answer to Mercurius Aulicus put the figure at ‘many hundreds’.4

But the most remarkable riposte took the form of a short pamphlet collected by Thomason about three weeks after Pym’s death. It reported the verdict of experts, rather than an unidentifiable mass of eyewitnesses: Theodor Mayerne, the most famous physician of the day, and the President of the College of Physicians; four others who were present at the dissection of his body (including the next President); two of those who had been attending Pym during his illness; a chyrurgion (surgeon) and an apothecary, with their servants. Together they testified that his skin was free of any roughness, scabs or scarring, ‘much less Phthiriasis or lousy disease, as was reported’. There was no sign of poisoning and ‘he had his intellectuals and senses very entire to the last’, enjoying sufficient and quiet sleep for the most part. No raving death, then. His heart and lungs were fine and his lower organs also sound except for some discolouration, and his spleen seemed small. There was, however, such a large ‘abscess or impostume’ in his lower belly that it could be felt from the outside, and once opened could accommodate a fist. This affected the surrounding parts, and made it difficult for him to eat, so that he suffered loss of appetite and nausea. After a long languishment the abscess broke and he died.5

Pym’s supporters also marked his death with eulogy. The parliamentarian champion against Aulicus was Mercurius Britanicus, which devoted much of its weekly content to a detailed refutation of Aulicus’s reports, as did An Answer to Mercurius Aulicus, which contained a line-by-line refutation. The week of Pym’s funeral, however, Britanicus broke off from this feud, and limited its reporting of other events in order to make space for an elegy to Pym, which was commended by Remarkeable Passages. All the parliamentarian papers did the same, emphasizing Pym’s selfless service in the cause (even to the neglect of his own household, which Parliament was now taking measures to support). His ceremonial burial in Westminister Abbey on 15 December was crucial to this effort:

The Parliament so highly honours the memory of Master Pym, that they have ordered a monument to be erected in the Abbey at Westminster, where he is to be interred; and the House of Commons have appointed themselves to accompany the corpse to the grave, so highly do they value and esteem the merits and deservings of so good, so excellent a patriot, and commonwealths-man.6

Such ceremonies were also controversial of course and Bruno Ryves included this in his list of desecrations of the Abbey ‘not to be passed over