In September 2014, Scots held a referendum on whether to dissolve a partnership that had lasted since Queen Anne presided over the Acts of Union (1707), which established the “united Kingdom of Great-Britain.” As Simon Schama wrote in A History of Britain, Anne saw to it that the United Kingdom, which “began as a hostile merger would end in a full partnership . . . ” Anxious voters were reassured that, after independence, Scots would retain their popular National Health Service. Secession lost out, but Scotland’s first minister had already set Scottish Independence Day as March 24, 2016, to commemorate the anniversary of the Acts of Union and the United Kingdom’s founding mother, Queen Anne. The queen, a childless widow, died in 1714, sickened by what was then diagnosed as gout, dropsy, hemorrhage, and stroke. If poor Anne had produced a Stuart heir, that blundering George from Germany would not have ascended to the throne, and the United States today might have a National Health Service like those in Scotland, Canada, or Australia.
QUEEN ANNE’S LIFE AND THE STUART DYNASTY were undone by systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) and its harsh companion, the antiphospholipid antibody syndrome, which produces bleeding, clotting, stroke, and obstetrical calamity (Hughes, 1985). Anne and her husband, Prince George Oldenburg of Denmark, sweated out at least seventeen pregnancies from 1684 to 1700 (Table 1): all but one resulted in miscarriages, stillbirths, or infant death. Anne’s longest-surviving child, William, the last Stuart to live at Kensington Palace, died at age 11 after suffering infantile seizures, childhood dyskinesias, and gross hydrocephalus, symptoms now recognized as those of neonatal lupus.
Table 1. Children of Anne Stuart, Queen of Great Britain, and George Oldenburg, Prince of Denmark
Stillborn daughter 1 Oldenburg b. 12 May 1684, d. 12 May 1684
Mary Oldenburg b. 2 Jun 1685, d. 8 Feb 1687
Anne Sophia Oldenburg b. 12 May 1686, d. 2 Feb 1687
Stillborn child 1 Oldenburg b. 21 Jan 1687, d. 21 Jan 1687
Stillborn son 1 Oldenburg b. 22 Oct 1687, d. 22 Oct 1687
Stillborn child 2 Oldenburg b. ca. Oct 1688, d. ca. Oct 1688
William Henry Oldenburg, Duke of Gloucester, b. 24 Jul 1689, d. 30 Jul 1700
Mary Oldenburg b. 14 Oct 1690, d. 14 Oct 1690
George Oldenburg b. 17 Apr 1692, d. 17 Apr 1692
Stillborn daughter 2 Oldenburg b. 23 Mar 1693, d. 23 Mar 1693
Stillborn daughter 3 Oldenburg b. 21 Jan 1694, d. 21 Jan 1694
Stillborn daughter 4 Oldenburg b. 17 Feb 1695, d. 17 Feb 1695
Stillborn son 2 Oldenburg b. 25 Mar 1696, d. 25 Mar 1696
Stillborn son 3 Oldenburg b. 25 Mar 1697, d. 25 Mar 1697
Stillborn son 4 Oldenburg b. 10 Dec 1697, d. 10 Dec 1697
Stillborn son 5 Oldenburg b. 15 Sep 1698, d. 15 Sep 1698
Stillborn son 6 Oldenburg b. 25 Jan 1700, d. 25 Jan 1700
It’s clear that Anne suffered from SLE, a disease that chiefly afflicts women of child-bearing age and their newborns. The queen’s contemporaries describe four clinical features that add up to current criteria for the diagnosis, described in Petri et al.: a blotchy, pitted face with a wolf-like rash on the cheeks; recurrent polyarthritis; facial and leg edema; and repeated seizures, nosebleeds, and lethal stroke. Official portraits of Queen Anne show variable joint swellings, obvious facial swelling, and the classic facial rash. Add her obstetrical history, and we arrive at the diagnosis of the antiphospholipid antibody syndrome. The syndrome is often tagged “Hughes syndrome,” after my colleague Graham R. V. Hughes, who described a patient in London with ailments similar to those of Queen Anne. His seminal 1983 article in the British Medical Journal sums up the problem: “Thrombosis, abortion, cerebral disease and the lupus anticoagulant.” Graham Hughes has earned his eponym: it’s fitting that he directs a unit at St. Thomas’ Hospital, down Royal Street and a bridge away from Westminster Abbey, where Queen Anne lies forever.
Hughes syndrome, which can also occur in the absence of lupus, results from antibodies directed against one’s own cell membranes (phospholipids and/or proteins). Closely related antibodies, the “lupus anticoagulant,” inhibit the coagulation of normal blood; in pregnant women, these autoantibodies induce cascades of injury directed against the mother or products of her womb. A clue to the diagnosis, as in the queen’s case, is a history of fetal loss.
BEFORE THE REIGN OF QUEEN ANNE (1702–1714), England was torn by religious and family spats that ranged in intensity somewhere between today’s Sunni–Shiite conflicts and intramural White House squabbles. The House of Stuart regained power in 1660 after Cromwell’s Puritan misadventures. Anne’s uncle, Charles II, restored the monarchy, presided over Restoration comedy, and chartered the Royal Society. The second Charles was a middling Protestant, as Anne had been brought up. But next in line to Charles came a very partisan Catholic, his brother, to be James II, who was Anne’s father. After a short three years in power, James was overthrown in 1683 by Anne’s Protestant brother-in-law (and cousin), who became William III. This coup, called the Glorious Revolution of 1688, resulted in permanent exclusion of any Catholic successor. William III became joint monarch with Anne’s elder sister, Mary II, whom he had married—we know the pair from the college in Williamsburg, Virginia, whose name honors them. As a website devoted to British royals puts it, “the marriage survived although all three of her pregnancies were stillborn.” Two sisters, sixteen stillbirths, no heirs? Time for some genomics here.
Then came the younger sister’s turn: Queen Anne with her own stillbirths, her gout, dropsy, and seizures. But these days her reign is remembered less for disease than for peace and prosperity. The War of the Spanish Succession had broken out on both sides of the Atlantic the year before her coronation. The great powers—England, Austria, and Holland versus France and Spain—fought battles from the Alps to the Canaries, from Jamaica to the Arctic. Handel’s musical tribute to the “great Anna” celebrated her major achievement, the Treaty of Utrecht (1713). The treaty not only established a peace that would last to midcentury but also left Britain in possession of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, the Hudson Bay Territory, and Gibraltar. Schama had it right—that full partnership of the United Kingdom had become “the most powerful going concern in the world.”
Anne followed a path set by uncle Charles II as custodian of arts, science, and the commonweal. She was a patron of Christopher Wren, knighted Isaac Newton in Cambridge, and appointed Jonathan Swift the dean of St. Patrick’s in Dublin. By proclaiming the “Statute of Anne” (1710) for the “Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write useful Books,” she established the basis of copyright law in anglophone countries. In the American colonies, her contented subjects commemorated her name and the benefits of her deeds. Annapolis, Maryland, is named for her, as are Cape Ann in Massachusetts and Fort Ann in Washington County, New York. She is remembered for granting an Act of Denization (by which a foreigner obtained legal status) to Luis Gomez, a Jewish refugee from the Spanish Inquisition in 1705. This document allowed Gomez to conduct business, own property, and live freely within the colonies. His mill in Marlboro, New York, is a tourist site today. Among her other acts, deeds, and grants that remain in the news are those 215 acres the queen bestowed on Trinity Church in Manhattan in 1705. The church elders are debating what to do with the $2 billion it’s worth today.
Not bad for a dozen years of Stuart-ship, and again one wonders what a living heir would have meant.
TROUBLE CAME WHEN THE HESSIANS FOLLOWED THE STUARTS. Worried over Anne’s afflicted womb, Parliament passed the Act of Settlement (1701), which assured a Protestant line of succession. The nearest skein of that line led to Hanau (Hanover) and the four Georges who ruled from 1714 to 1830. George I, a Hessian who barely spoke English, kept several mistresses; in return, his wife eloped with a Swedish count, who was killed and dumped in a river on George’s order. He then had his young son, George II, arrested for siding with his mother and excluded him from public ceremonies. When his father died of a stroke on one of his frequent trip
s home to Hanover, George II assumed the British throne and—one generation after Anne’s “lasting peace”—took the country to war again. The issue was settled in 1745, when Bonnie Prince Charlie and his Highlanders were defeated by the redcoats at Culloden. In 1751, George II’s eldest son, Frederick, died suddenly of mysterious injuries (having been struck by a tennis, or possibly a cricket, ball), and the crown passed to George III.
At age 22, George III became head of the British Empire in 1760. The official website of the British monarchy notes that he is best remembered for provoking American independence and for going mad—adding, “This is far from the whole truth.” Alan Bennett’s popular play and the film made from it, The Madness of King George (1994), revived the story of a nutty monarch crazed by “variegate porphyria.” Modern analyses reject that diagnosis but not its symptoms: blindness, deafness, and madness—episodic bouts of which followed the loss of the American colonies. When his redcoats and Hessian mercenaries were defeated by the Americans, he declared a General Day of Fast in 1778—a gesture understood as pitiful at the time. Horace Walpole (1717–1797) wrote:
First General Gage commenc’d the war in vain;
Next General Howe continued the campaign;
Then General Burgoyne took the field and; and last
Our forlorn hope depends on General Fast.
Whether his madness was caused by, or was coincident with, loss of his American colonies remains in doubt. What is certain is that George III blundered into his American quagmire through economic miscalculation. The empire was going broke, thanks to the costs of the successional wars with France and Spain and the expenses of the East India Company, which ran India for the crown. By the 1770s, at a time when there were no income taxes, the United Kingdom required £4 million (£500 million today) simply to service its debt. The answer was to tax items in demand among the more prosperous of the American colonies. George had figured out a solution. In a letter of the early 1780s, he wrote, “While the Sugar Colonies [the Caribbean] added above three millions a year to the wealth of Britain, the Rice Colonies [South Carolina, etc.] near a million, and the Tobacco ones [Maryland, etc.] almost as much; those more to the north [Pennsylvania on up], so far from adding anything to our wealth as Colonies . . . rivalled us in many branches of our industry, and had actually deprived us of no inconsiderable share of the wealth we reaped by means of the others.”
The answer was clear: impose taxes on sugar, tea, and commercial transaction. The British were sure that those moneymaking rivals would return some of the “not inconsiderable wealth” in the form of taxes. The result of that miscalculation was the American Declaration in Philadelphia of July 4, 1776, which lists in detail a litany of “ . . . the patient sufferance of these Colonies” and explains the “necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.”
We do not know whether a legitimate heir of Queen Anne would have forestalled rebellion in Scotland or revolution in America, but I can imagine a placid Anne or regal Charles on the throne, making sure of “a lasting peace” on both sides of the Atlantic. Without those antiphospholipid antibodies tugging at Anne’s womb, the Georges might have remained in Hesse, and the United States would have a National Health Service, just like Scotland.
7.
Groucho on the Gridiron
After taking a sociology exam, Cardale Jones, a quarterback at Ohio State, posted a message on Twitter . . . : “Why should we have to go to class if we came here to play FOOTBALL, we ain’t come to play SCHOOL, classes are POINTLESS.”
—New York Times, December 30, 2014
Robert Morris University becomes first to recognize video games as varsity sport . . . scholarships will [be] worth up to $19,000 per student.
—Associated Press, October 6, 2014
ZEPPO: . . . it isn’t right for a college to buy football players! GROUCHO: (president of Huxley College): This college is a failure. The trouble is, we’re neglecting football for education.
—Horse Feathers (film), 1932
THE STORY OF “ATHLETICS” IN AMERICAN COLLEGES has never been more amusing. Shortly after football players (undergraduates!) at Northwestern University demanded a union contract, Robert Morris University advertised that it would award “athletic scholarships” [sic] for varsity video-game players. Antics like these would have been enough to startle folks at universities in Stockholm, Edinburgh, Cambridge, or at the Sorbonne—schools that fulfill their academic functions without athletic scholarships or stipends for electronic gaming. But, not to be outdone, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) raised the ante by offering a few thousand unaudited expense dollars to each American college athlete’s already generous football scholarship. The NCAA proceeded to slip in a payment to ESPN for $7.3 billion over twelve years. It guaranteed telecast of seven “collegiate” games per year: four major bowl games, two semifinal bowl games, and the “College Football Playoff National Championship Game.”
That contest—the first of its kind—featured quarterback Cardale Jones of Ohio State University, the fellow who said he “ain’t come to play SCHOOL.” Cardale came “to play FOOTBALL,” and played the game of his life as his team beat Oregon 42–20. Jones showed the world that he’d learned his subject well and will be far better off than if he’d taken a shine to academics. Brawn pays the recent graduate a lot better than Brain: while the average English major expects about $32,000 a year on graduation, Jones is on track to be a millionaire in the NFL the minute he says “Goodbye, Columbus.”
MOST FOLKS I KNOW ARE “ACADEMICS,” a name that harks back to a lush grove of olive trees: the Akademia at the northern edge of Athens. Dedicated to the goddess Athena, the grove was home to the school of philosophy founded by Plato around 380 B.C.E. The Socratic dialogues and symposia held in the Grove of Academe have remained a model for scholarly discourse to the present day. There, too, Plato first defined the liberal arts. Horace looked back in wonder at that Athenian grove where scholars might “inter silvas academi quaerere verum” (“seek for truth among the trees of Academe”). Nowadays we honor the Grove of Academe as the birthplace of reasoned inquiry, the font of Brain.
Brawn, however, was honored there as well. The grounds of the Akademia harbored a gymnasium and bathing area, by the side of which Plato held forth from an exedra, a pillared courtyard, where wine and bathwater flowed for gymnast and philosopher alike. However, even before Plato, the Grove of Academe was renowned as the starting point for festivities that preceded the quadrennial Panathenaic games. Under torches lit from the altar of Eros, lively processions moved into town by the Dipylon Gate to glorify the contests: torch races, sprints, chariot races, wrestling bouts, javelin flings, and more. Competition was fierce, and athletes were well rewarded. Athletes placing first or second in each category received large Panathenaic amphoras, or jugs, that depicted the event; these overflowed with 40 liters of first class olive oil ($185 per liter today). The oil was meant to be sold and could be exported free of duty; the number of amphoras given as a prize depended on the event, the age category, and the final standings. A young (collegiate-level) athlete who placed second would get only six amphoras, but an older pro (NFL-level) who came in first would be given sixty of the jugs. Amphoras that survive today are priceless, the pride of major museums worldwide.
Plato was of one mind with Ohio’s Cardale Jones. The philosopher held that intellectual and athletic efforts were equally arduous; he stated, “An athlete who aims for an Olympian or Pythian victory—he has no free time for anything else.” But Brain and Brawn were not equally rewarded: athletes got the finest oil, Socrates got the deadliest poison.
WE CAN SEE THAT BRAIN AND BRAWN are similarly rewarded today, using Ohio State University and its Buckeyes as examples. Ohio State is the very model of a modern Big Ten university, ranked first in its state and eighteenth among American public universities overall. Its salary scale fits the nationwide model as well: NCAA Class 1 football coaches are paid approximately thre
e to four times as much as university presidents.
Nevertheless, and to its credit, Ohio State’s College of Art and Sciences—in which quarterback Jones is enrolled—in a “Statement of Principles” stresses the importance of a liberal arts education that “should not be compromised for the sake of expediency in pursuit of acquiring vocational skills.” Accordingly, a list of Ohio State University people prominent in the arts includes Milton Caniff, James Thurber, and Roy Lichtenstein, and the sciences have been enriched by three Nobel laureates with Buckeye roots: Paul Flory (Chemistry, 1974), Kenneth Wilson (Physics, 1982), and William Fowler (Physics, 1983).
Ohio State undergraduates can pick from a menu of 80 majors that range from Arts Management to Zoology; the longer list of 100(!) minors includes Coaching Education, Fashion and Retail Studies, Meat Science, and Turfgrass Management. So much for Plato’s academy, which offered students the quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. However, if a Buckeye can get a bachelor of science degree after studying Turfgrass Management (B.S. seems right), why not skip classes altogether and work on the turf itself? That would be a FOOTBALL major, and you ain’t gotta go to class. It’s also a modern version of Plato’s recipe, “no free time for anything else,” for winning an Olympian victory or playing in the College Football Playoff National Championship Game against the Oregon Ducks.
On January 12, 2015, the championship game was viewed by 80,000 fans in a Texas stadium and by over 30 million fans on TV. That’s Darwinian survival of the football fittest over those who come to school to go to class. We note that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology football team played before 900 family and friends in the college stands, despite a record of 9–0 in 2014. The MIT quarterback was majoring in aerospace engineering.
The Fevers of Reason Page 5