The Speckled Monster

by Jennifer Lee Carrell

  Jerusha lived through most of these quiet years with Zabdiel, dying of cancer two years before him, on April 15, 1764.

  Thomas Boylston (Zabdiel and Jerusha’s son) became a doctor, training under his father and acquiring enough skill and trust to be sent alone the seventy-two miles down to Newport, Rhode Island, in 1737—at the age of twenty-two—to perform a mastectomy. At the end of that year, he traveled to London for more training at St. Thomas’s Hospital, bearing a letter of introduction from his father to Sir Hans Sloane, identifying him as “the first fruit of Inoculation in the American World.” Back in Boston, he married in 1744, but died soon afterward in late 1749 or early 1750, only thirty-four years old; he had no children. John made himself a wealthy businessman; he remained a bachelor. He moved to London in 1768, and then to Bath. He was a loyalist, but remained concerned for the welfare of his countrymen; during the Revolution, he contributed liberally to the relief of American prisoners-of-war. He died in 1795, age eighty-six, leaving bequests for the orphans and elderly poor of Boston. Zabdiel junior went to study in London in 1729 or soon thereafter; by 1733, he had died there of tuberculosis—which had no cure until antibiotics were discovered in the twentieth century. The girls all remained in Boston. Young Jerusha married one of Zabdiel’s inoculees, Benjamin Fitch, with whom she had eight children. She died a wealthy widow as the eighteenth turned into the nineteenth century. Mary died a spinster in 1802, age eighty-nine. Elizabeth married Dr. Gillam Taylor, with whom she had three children.

  Thomas Boylston (Zabdiel’s brother) died in 1739; his widow, Sarah, survived to the very eve of the Revolution, in 1774. Painted in later years by John Singleton Copley, she is the only one of the Boylstons who took part in this story to have her image preserved; it is owned by Harvard University.

  Jack, Moll, and Jackey disappear from view at the close of the 1721 epidemic. A free black man named John Boylstone and called Jack, however, married one Jane Kennedy at Trinity Church in 1779. As he was born in 1742, he cannot have been this Jack or Jackey: but he could have been Jackey’s son—which would mean the family bought or was given its freedom within a generation.

  Cotton Mather died one day after his sixty-fifth birthday, on February 13, 1728, believing the Second Coming was imminent: the largest earthquake in New England’s history had struck a few months earlier on October 29, 1727, tolling church bells and cracking houses in half. Tremors rolled underfoot through January 1728. As death approached, he called out: “And this is dying! This all? Is this what I feared when I prayed against a hard death? Is it no more than this? O I can bear this! I can bear it, I can bear it!” His last word was a quiet “Grace!”

  Samuel Mather joined his father as minister of the Old North Church upon the death of his grandfather Increase in 1723; like his father, he possessed strong streaks of both generosity and paranoia. He did not, however, possess his father’s breadth of intellect. He came to Boylston’s defense in 1730, writing a nitpicking dissection of Douglass’s Dissertation—anonymously. In 1742, Mather and some of his parishioners seceded to form an independent church that survived until his death in 1785.

  Onesimus Mather is last heard of in 1738, assigned to clean streets “pursuant to the Act for the Regulating of Free Negroes.”

  William Douglass began buying houses and land in January 1723, and never stopped. Between 1736 and 1741, he bought immense acreage in Worcester County, where the town of Douglas was named for him. In 1743, he bought the Green Dragon, complete with cartway, stables, and yard, to serve as his “mansion house” (though it either in part remained or later returned to being an inn). In 1736, he became president of the Scots Charitable Society, an office he held until the year of his death.

  Having been thwarted from making his medical reputation with small-pox, he turned to scarlet fever; his medical masterpiece, published in 1736, was the first modern clinical description of a scarlet fever epidemic (then called eruptive military fever). Throughout his life, he kept detailed records of weather patterns and compass variations, collected rare plants, and wrote an important early history of British North America (equally as important for its gossip and hearsay as for its accurate information), as well as an economic tract on the colonies’ intractable currency problems: paper money aroused almost as much of his wrath as inoculation once had. He also drew one of the most influential pre-Revolutionary maps of New England. Although he was highly respected for his breadth of learning, his meanness nevertheless made and kept many enemies. Passing through in 1744, Dr. Alexander Hamilton described Douglass as “a man of good learning but mischievously given to criticism and the most complete snarler ever I knew. He is loath to allow learning, merit, or a character to anybody.” I have found no record of a marriage, but he had a son, also William Douglass, who was about seven when the doctor died in 1752, about sixty-one years old.

  Joshua Cheever rose quickly in both town and church ranks. In 1730, he was elected selectman of Boston, serving as such for three years; in 1732, he joined the artillery company, eventually becoming a captain. By 1733, he is styled “merchant” or “gentleman” in deeds, and soon thereafter began using the term Esq. In 1736, he became a ruling elder of the New North Church. He died in 1751, a wealthy merchant in possession of wharves, warehouses, shipyards, many houses, and a great deal of land in Boston’s North End, as well as a farm and woodland in Charlestown. Sarah died in 1723; the following year he married a widow, Sarah Sears Jenkins, who outlived him by four years. He never had children, but seems to have treated his second wife’s son, David Jenkins, as his own; if his will is any indication, he was also close to his many nieces and nephews.

  NOTES

  Titles

  Throughout this book, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu appears as Lady Mary. This isn’t undue familiarity; it is correct. Her honorific Lady came from her father’s title, first as an earl, on up to duke, and was therefore attached to her first name and only her first name. She has sometimes appeared in print as Lady Montagu, but that title properly indicates someone else. In the British peerage, a woman uses Lady with a title (sometimes but not always the same as the family surname) only when she holds that title in her own right, or, more commonly, when she is married to the man who does. In Lady Mary’s circle of friends, there was a duchess of Montagu, but no Lady Montagu—which would have indicated the wife of a baronet, baron, viscount, earl, or marquess whose title was Montagu.

  Referring to Lady Mary as plain Montagu or Mrs. Montagu would have been an unthinkable demotion of rank. Neither she nor her husband much used the surname Montagu in any case. He was known as Wortley; when she wanted to use a surname she usually went by Lady Mary Wortley. However, since she has achieved a minor literary fame as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, that is the form used here. It is correct, even if more ultra-correct than she usually bothered to be.

  In contrast, Caroline of Ansbach held her royal title from her husband, not her father. She was therefore Caroline, Princess of Wales, or the Princess of Wales. She was not Princess Caroline. When her husband ascended the throne as King George II, she became Queen Caroline.

  Dates

  In 1582 large sections of Europe began adopting the Gregorian calendar (named for Pope Gregory XIII, who first put it into wide use). With some minor adaptations, this calendar is the one we still use today. Although most of Europe had made the transition by 1701, the British Empire, including its American colonies, clung to the old—and less accurate—Julian calendar (named for Julius Caesar) until 1752. As a consequence, during the period covered by this book, British dates (marked O.S., or Old Style) were eleven days behind those on the continent (marked N.S., or New Style). Months and days appear in the British Old Style throughout this book.

  Until 1752, the British also held to the old custom of beginning the New Year on March 25 (Lady Day, or the Annunciation), rather than January 1—though they called January 1 New Year’s Day. Often, dates from January 1 through March 24 would show up with two years, e.g., March 1, 1715/6. In this b
ook, all years appear in the modern style, changing over at January 1.

  Introduction

  Lady Mary and Boylston both lamented their exhausting popularity and sometimes terrifying demonization while the inoculation controversy was in full scream. Lady Mary’s daughter vividly recalled seeing and hearing servants’ reactions to her mother—including the condemnation that she was “unnatural”—when she was a young girl. Boylston’s children long remembered him daring insults and assaults to perform inoculations at all hours.

  The best popular history of the eradication of smallpox from nature, along with a chilling assessment of its possible future threat, is Jonathan Tucker’s Scourge: The Once and Future Threat of Smallpox, from which I have drawn the summary presented here. The estimated number of smallpox victims comes from him, as do the comparisons to the bubonic plague and twentieth-century wars, the story of the last sufferer of smallpox “in the wild,” and the metaphor of the maximum-security prison.

  The odds given of vaccination resulting in death are modern; those of variolation resulting in death are from the early eighteenth century. Serious complications from both vaccination and variolation can result in permanent damage, even when patients survive.

  The modern vaccine does not use the cowpox virus, but another virus in the family of “orthopoxviruses.” Some have argued that Jenner never used the true cowpox virus, working with horsepox instead; others maintain that the vaccine strain mutated into something new during intensive reduplication in laboratories. In any case, the virus now used for medical purposes is called vaccinia, incorporating the old story of cows and dairymaids right into its name.

  Two Marys

  When Queen Mary died in Kensington Palace in 1694, doctors had no standard system of classifying the various forms of smallpox. From eyewitness accounts of her symptoms, it is likely that she suffered from what modern doctors would call “late hemorrhagic smallpox, with flat-type lesions.” Though rare, it was a death sentence barely less inevitable than the hundred-percent mortality of the “early hemorrhagic” form: about three percent of its victims might survive. The queen was not one of them. I have drawn the story of her suffering and death from contemporary eyewitness accounts and modern biographies, with details on the course of her disease filled in from both eighteenth- and twentieth-century medical treatises.

  The resemblance of smallpox to chicken pox remains legendary, but for many years the disease it was most closely linked to (at least in imagination) was the measles. British doctors began differentiating smallpox (especially the hemorrhagic forms) from measles around the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth (when they began differentiating diseases more generally), but they had by no means reached unanimous agreement on the subject. Well into the eighteenth-century, many still thought smallpox and measles were different forms or degrees of the same illness. At least one of the queen’s physicians, Dr. Walter Harris, concluded that she had “smallpox and measles mingled.” In their early stages, the two diseases looked enough alike that they were not uncommonly confused until the late twentieth century, when smallpox was removed as a possible diagnosis.

  Many years after the queen’s death, Harris published a description of her case; from his notes come most of the early details (and much of the imagery) given here, up through the sinking of her blisters and her labored breathing that night. Out of respect for royal dignity, witnesses become vague about many details of the queen’s case from this point on, painting the highly unlikely scenario of a comfortable, peaceful, and dignified death. Across the next three centuries, however, their fellow physicians would carefully, even obsessively, catalogue the final horrors endured by more common mortals struck with late hemorrhagic smallpox. I have matched the queen’s condition to the main points of this cataloged nightmare.

  The rotten-garden imagery appears scattered throughout early descriptions of small-pox; I have put the snappish recognition of its weirdness into the king’s mouth, though his general anxiety and near hysteria during his wife’s illness is well documented. The letter quoted is his.

  Young Gloucester is generally supposed to have died from smallpox, though measles was also diagnosed. The combined diagnosis suggesting a flat reddish rash, his doctors’ early declaration that the case was hopeless, and his death on the sixth day of the fever strongly suggests that he suffered specifically from early hemorrhagic smallpox (which invariably kills its victims on or about the sixth day after the onset of fever).

  As Lady Mary liked to tell the tale of her visit to the Kit-Cat Club—and as it was recorded in skeletal form by her granddaughter decades after Lady Mary’s death—she was not quite eight years old. In the context of her life and the history of the Kit-Cat Club, however, the story makes far more sense set several years later: somewhere between early 1699, when she was not quite ten, to late 1701 or early 1702, when she was twelve. (Other than Lady Mary’s dubious timing of this anecdote, the Kit-Cat Club is not known to have existed before 1699 or 1700.) I have set the scene at the beginning of the London social season late in 1701, when she was twelve, expanding her story with contemporary detail.

  The men’s verses are drawn from a list of Kit-Cat toasts given in 1703. Garth made the verse quoted; I have given Lord Halifax—famous as an extempore versifier—an unattributed toast. Lady Mary must have said something pretty as well, for her father’s friends praised her brilliance as well as her beauty. Within a year or two, she wrote a poem to Lord Halifax, praising him for his praise, in turn, of the countess of Sunderland. (One of the four famously beautiful daughters of the duke of Marlborough, Lady Sunderland was the elder sister of Lady Mary’s friend, Lady Mary Churchill.) I have drawn Lady Mary’s verse exchange with him from this slightly later poem. The first couplet adapts lines from the later poem to the Kit-Cat situation; the second I quote verbatim. Halifax’s verse within hers is adapted from another of the 1703 toasts.

  Jesting stories as to the origin of the Kit-Cat Club’s name became legion soon after its rise to fame. I have accepted the three most common theories. That 1. a tavern owner-cum-pastry chef named Christopher Cat 2. served the mutton pies called Kit-Cats 3. at an establishment under the sign of the Cat and Fiddle makes as much—or more—sense as one combined story than as three separate stories. Sheer—or Shear or Shire—Lane, where the first meeting place stood, has since disappeared beneath the white fairy-tale castle of the Royal Courts of Justice. Soon after Lady Mary’s visit, the club moved to larger digs at another tavern under the sign of the Fountain, in the Strand.

  Three Rebellions

  Lady Mary recorded her girlhood escapades, her clashes with her father, and her courtship with Wortley in detail in letters and in her diary. Her letters often report whole conversations; her diary was lively enough that her granddaughter remembered what she read of it for decades. I have also adapted some dialogue from Lady Mary’s more autobiographical romances and poems.

  Lady Mary later recalled that her brother had always been her best friend; every scrap of evidence suggests that she regarded her father with awe and fear. From the beginning, Wortley both intrigued and irritated her.

  The garden-wall episode with the Brownlows is true, as was her practice of giving her girlhood friends names out of romances—and listing them in her notebook. Lady Mary did indeed slit twenty pages from her earliest album of poems and stories (dating from 1702-04, when she was twelve to fourteen), and then burn them. She squeezed the poem quoted into a blank space on an earlier page; its content strongly suggests that while it was she who carried out this “burning and blotting,” she did not do so voluntarily. The poem’s phrasing sounds as if it answers direct accusations: I have reconstructed the book-burning episode from these clues.

  The critic who made her mutilate her work remains unknown, however, as does the exact nature of the offense. Very young, she developed a dangerous taste for both reading and writing tales that lightly masked real people’s adventures as fiction. Later, this temptation wo
uld get her into much worse trouble; I have surmised that her mistake at fourteen may have been an early foray into this habit. Whatever the problem was, it was particular to the excised pages, or the whole book would have burned.

  Her tormentor may have been her French governess, Madame Dupont, or her brother’s tutor (who possibly also tutored Lady Mary), but the anger-prone authority in her life whose biography was hands down most tale worthy was her father. I have drawn his character from sketches to be found in her diary and romances. He did, in fact, always require from his children the ritual court greeting of bended knee and kissed hand. In 1709 Kneller painted Kingston in a suit of purple velvet; I have drawn his physical description from this painting, and put him in morning dress of the same material.

  Lady Mary gave out many different stories about teaching herself Latin in secret. At times she credited Wortley with sparking her desire to learn. She also credited both Wortley and Congreve for help along the way.

  As an old woman, Lady Mary saw her father in a rakish character from Samuel Richardson’s novel Sir Charles Grandison; had she survived to read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, she would surely have seen Edward Wortley Montagu in Elizabeth Bennett’s first disagreeable impressions of Mr. Darcy: but Wortley never transformed into Prince Charming. Lady Mary described him in arch detail in her letters and romances—especially the tale of Princess Docile (herself) and Prince Sombre, clearly a fictionalized alter ego of Wortley. “He had all the qualities of an upright man, and no single quality of an amiable one,” she wrote: a line I’ve adapted as an exchange between Lady Mary and her sister. Wortley’s letters to Lady Mary uphold her romance characterizations of him, good, bad, and irritating.