Saturday 17 October 1663 Up and to my office, and there we sat a very full board all the morning upon some accounts of Mr. Gauden’s…. Thence to the Dolphin Tavern, and there Mr. Gauden did give us a great dinner. Here we had some discourse of the Queen’s being very sick, if not dead, the Duke and Duchess of York being sent for betimes this morning to come to White Hall to her.* So to my office and there late doing business, and so home to supper, my house being got mighty clean to my great content from top to toe, and so to bed, myself beginning to be in good condition of health also, but only my laying out so much money upon clothes for myself and wife and her closet troubles me. *This was serious. Catherine, married to Charles II in 1662, was in the midst of a severe illness (fever, possibly linked to miscarriage or a spotted fever). Contemporary accounts describe her as critically ill: she was shaved, given extreme unction by her Portuguese attendants, had pigeons applied to her feet, and at times was delirious (imagining she had given birth). Charles was genuinely distressed; the crisis fueled court speculation about remarriage and succession. “pigeons applied to her feet” Richard Napier,the Buckinghamshire astrologer-physician, prescribed “a pigon slitt & applyed to the sole of each foote” in dozens of cases for fevers, delirium and head ailments. His manuscript casebooks preserve these “pigeon slipper” remedies alongside the charts that guided them. Napier is profiled in a very good book I happen to be reading: Madness in Civilization by Scull. He writes, “Napier was the Rector of Great Linwood in Buckinghamshire, England, and an astrologer, alchemist, magician and mad-doctor. Nervous and distracted patients came from great distances to be treated by him with priest craft and physick administered at astrologically propitious moments.” Richard Napier (1630 portrait, Ashmolean Museum)