Monday, October 02, 2023

So then, What Did Cause the Mysterious Death of the 5th Earl of Derby?

 

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So then, we've discounted poison or witchcraft as cause of the mysterious death of Ferdinando Stanley, the 5th Earl of Derby. What then might the cause have been?

According to a document entitled “Touching the Death of the Earl of Derby” Ferdinando and his wife Alice arrived at their estate in Lathom some days before Palm Sunday and he undertook “a course of violent exercise, which his Honour took four days in the Easter week, wherein he vehemently distempered the whole state of his body.” At some point, his wife fell sick and he sent for a trusted physician Dr. Case. The doctor determined that Alice had suffered a miscarriage. She neither knew that she had been pregnant nor miscarried.

While the doctor was available, Ferdinando asked to have his own water (urine) checked.

Case did, pronouncing it after his analysis as perfect and pronouncing Ferdinando himself as presenting a “shewe of the most sounde, perffect, able body that he had seene.” He added that he would be erring in his professional judgment if he prescribed anything to so healthy a man.1

Why he asked no one will ever be in a position to know with certainty, but I suggest that this is the first clue as to what illness was about to kill him within two weeks.

Ferdinando was 35 years old. He had newly become the Earl of Derby. Having trained to be a combatant — the traditional role of an Earl — he may have felt that age was catching up with him. His answer was very rigorous, violent exercise — the only kind of formal exercise he had ever undertaken. He engaged another fighter and fought on foot and horse. He was bound to have taken more than one hard blow, and, as a result, felt some discomfort sufficiently worrisome that he had Case check his water.

Ferdinando probably felt a lingering stomach ache at the point that he asked Case to check his urine. Or perhaps he just felt a little off his game. The doctor found nothing wrong with it. The appendix had yet to actually burst.

Some seven days later, his water showed serious problems and he been constantly regurgitating and urinating for days. Both types of excretion smelled foul with much the same odor. On April 4th, He began to have nightmares and hallucinations.

The 5th of April, 1594, his Honour fell sick at Knowsley; on Saturday he returned to Latham, and, feeling himself worse, he sent to Chester, for one Doctor Case, who the week before had given physic to his Lady. On the Sunday his Honour had cast seven times before the Doctor's coming; the colour of his vomits was like soot or rusty iron, the substance gross and fatty, the quantity about seven pints, the smell not without some offence; his Honour's water, in colour, substance, and smell, not unlike his vomits.2

Neither he nor his doctors could know there would be nothing available until 20th century medicine that could save him from a frightful death.

From Case's first visit until the end of his life, Ferdinando Stanley's stomach was filling with bacteria of a powerful infection. His symptoms are a classical case of peritonitis. The infection was already introduced into his bloodstream. Some was crossing his blood-brain barrier and causing him nightmares and hallucinations.

In the modern world, it is quite rare that a blow to the region of the appendix will cause it to swell and burst. But, then, in the modern world people do not invite repeated, powerful body blows, by one or more opponent, expert in landing deadly blows, as a kind of training. Even with blunted weapons, very serious injury might occur.

The early application of a “glister,” or enema, indicates that he was no longer able to stool — a symptom of a considerable number of maladies one of which is appendicitis. In a matter of days, the Earl could no longer urinate. His kidneys had ceased functioning. Not long after, he developed a continuous case of the hiccups — a sign that his spleen was also failing. One by one his internal organs were succumbing to sepsis.

As for a servant's attestation that he found a “image of wax” depicting the earl, the man was merely taking advantage of an opportunity for attention. The earl himself established the theme:

He himself in all the time of sickness cried he was bewitched.3

The witness statement that the old woman healer asked if the earl had yet lost the ability to urinate, the small number of witnesses were likely collectively revising a memory of her asking after she'd overheard the fact being discussed.

Of course, other similar answers are possible. Especially after the further shock which followed:

Rectal bleeding began. All of the substances coming from his body reeked to such an extent that the smell could hardly be borne by any who came near him.4

These types of mental revision are extremely common among untrained and emotionally involved observers.

The earl had indeed been poisoned... by his own body. If not by his appendix, somehow his intestines otherwise introduced means to peritonitis which spread to become a rampant septic infection throughout his body, ravaging his internal organs.

The purple spots on the earl's corpse, mentioned in the report of Derby's Secretary, John Golborne, also are a sign of hemorrhagic rash caused by sepsis.

after he was dead, all his breast was all spotted and beset with purple pushes, and a circle about his throat of the like color5

“For months after Ferdinando’s interment,” Daugherty informs us, “ no one could get close to his crypt because of a lingering smell from his body which violently nauseated all of those who attempted to approach it to pay their respects.”




1 Daugherty, Leo. Investigating the Death of the Fifth Earl of Derby (2011). 171.

2 Lodge, Edmund. Illustrations of British History, Biography, And Manners,... (1838). II.459.

3Lodge, II.461.

4Daugherty, II.xxi.

5 Daugherty, 205.


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