Family Life, 1587–1591

Abstract

Hitherto Arthur Throckmorton had had exemplary health: no sign of the febrile, consumptive condition that carried off his father in middle age. And indeed he must have had a good constitution, when we consider his medical treatment of himself, in spite of which he lived out his full span of life. His sister Bess was the toughest of the lot, for, in spite of the troubles and sorrows of her life with Ralegh, she lived to an extreme old age, dying in 1647 after the first Civil War. But from the time of his marriage Arthur displays a new interest in his health, perhaps regrettable though informative for us. It was not so much valetudinarianism, as offering something else to be interested in, for the Elizabethans had a narrow, circumscribed range of interests. They had to make their own amusements; amusements were home-made, rough and ready; life was lived very much within the family; they must have been easy preys to boredom. The pleasures of exoneration and copulation bulked more largely. Interest in their physical condition and its symptoms was therefore a regular thing, as with old-fashioned country folk up to a generation ago. Later on with increasing age, in the last volume of the Diary, we shall find it becoming an obsession with Throckmorton.