The Royal Touch

Hugh Trevor-Roper’s posthumous biography of Sir Theodore de Mayerne illustrates this synthesis with a style not spinning on its own metaphysical deconstructionist wheels, but a truth-seeking, straightforward, stately style, passionate but decorous. And it seeks the truth about the life and times of one of the most remarkable historical figures of whom you have probably never heard.

Sir Theodore de Mayerne (1573-1655) was court physician for France’s Henry IV, England’s James I and Charles I, as well as the physician, it appears, of at least half (if not more) of the nobility of Europe, hence Trevor-Roper’s title. He was born of French Huguenot exiles in Geneva, where his godfather was Calvin’s successor, Beza. Though his father, Louis de Mayerne (author of The General History of Spain) had literary aspirations for his son, Theodore from an early age wanted only to be a physician: “I sucked the milk of medicine in my cradle . . . nor could any advice from parents or friends ever divert my mind to any other studies.”

Mayerne studied philosophy at Heidelberg, then medicine at the University of Montpellier. Through his friendships and connections made at Montpellier–“the road of patronage,” Trevor-Roper calls it–he set up practice in Paris by 1597 and was soon the third royal doctor for Henry IV.

Mayerne became a very popular physician among the nobility, both Protestant and Catholic. Many of his cases involved the treatment of venereal disease. Trevor-Roper comments: “If a man was afflicted with venereal disease, he did not stand nicely upon sectarian positions.” His most famous patient, in hindsight, was Armand-Jean du Plessis, bishop of Luçon, later to be known as Cardinal Richelieu.

In 1610 Henry IV was assassinated and life at court was transformed. Officially Mayerne and the other Huguenots at court were tolerated, but extreme pressure was put on them to convert to Catholicism. Mayerne had considered going to England; then, in 1611, his brother Henri was killed in Geneva by La Roche-Giffart, and the authorities in Geneva wavered. If they prosecuted the Catholic Frenchman, they feared, the Huguenots would again be persecuted. Yet a man had been slain. The new queen, Marie de Médici, and her court worked from France to secure the murderer’s pardon.

Mayerne learned of this and wrote to Geneva. Trevor-Roper writes eloquently of Mayerne’s righteous anger.

Mayerne had been secretly negotiating with the English and, in April 1611, just after he had learned of his brother’s murder, received a letter from James I asking him to be court physician. Marie de Médici let him go on the understanding that it was a temporary appointment, but both sides knew he would probably not be coming back.

Mayerne traveled to England, weathered attacks from envious doctors, built up a thriving practice, went on diplomatic trips for James, and was spied on and banned from France for carrying secret messages from the English king. He eventually tired of court life and settled in Berne. He “might declare, in his letters, that he did not meddle with affairs of state, but who could believe that? In fact, he loved to be in the centre of things; and now, once again, he was. Expelled from France [because of spying], and chary of returning to that scene of his humiliation, he discovered, in the agonizing autumn and winter of 1621-2, a new centre of activity in Switzerland,” then in the throes of the Thirty Years’ War.

The governments of Berne and Geneva enlisted his assistance in negotiating with King James for help to protect them from the Duke of Savoy, so Mayerne returned to England:

In 1628 the Huguenots rebelled, Richelieu determined to defeat them, which he did in the following year.

“By 1629,” Trevor-Roper writes, “the whole concept of international Protestantism had become a chimera.” Mayerne withdrew “into proud, personal reserve,” an example of “‘interior emigration.'” His first wife died in 1628, and Mayerne sent his eldest son, Henri, on a Grand Tour, preparing the ground (he thought) for retirement to his estate in Switzerland, where he wanted to “give to the world, the works which I have long owed to it.”

But he never returned to his estate–Charles I would not let him–and he never completed the works he aspired to write:

In 1620, at age 47, Mayerne took up the study of art–no one is sure exactly why–eventually producing, based on written sources and consultations with artists, including Rubens who painted his portrait shortly after meeting him in 1629, what art historians call “the Mayerne manuscript.” Trevor-Roper describes it as “an indispensable document in the history of Baroque painting, and indeed in the technique of oil painting from the time of the Flemish primitives to the time of Rubens. But to what end?”

He was not himself an artist or a craftsman: He did not intend to exercise the arts that he studied. It is difficult to detect an economic motive in this case. Rather, it seems that he was animated by a real thirst for knowledge and a desire to leave a record of the chemical discoveries to which he had been inspired by the teaching of Paracelsus, and which he had not realized in both medicine and the arts. He would write a book. It was the doomed ambition of his life.

Doomed also was Mayerne’s desire to leave behind a dynasty living on his estate in Berne. Both of his sons–one of whom he wanted to become a gentleman farmer, the other a physician–rebelled, lived dissolute lives, and died in their mid-twenties. Mayerne blamed his wife’s lenient Dutch family, but, writes Trevor-Roper, “we may see it . . . as Nature’s revenge against a powerful and exacting father, and we may note that he was not the only great Huguenot individualist to suffer this revenge. . . . It is the syndrome of the puritan hero’s rebel son.”

Trevor-Roper’s last paragraph, summing up Mayerne’s final days and the “melancholy tale” of the way his possessions and legacy were fought over, rises to a blend of eloquence and shrewdness:

Hugh Trevor-Roper, the classic scholar, tells the reader when he is speculating, when he knows or does not know something. He is a methodical, meticulous researcher; his judgments are well balanced; his insights into human nature ring true. He emphasizes that, in history, there is never just one cause for any event: He is not a reductionist in the name of politics, science, economics, psychology, or religion, but acknowledges all of them, and shows how they work together to make history.

Franklin Freeman is a writer in Maine.