In none of these alleged cases of leprosy in the royal family of England is the proof of the actual existence of the disease at all indubitable and complete. The evidence is more certain and satisfactory in regard to the occurrence of the malady, in its genuine form, in other scions of the House of Anjou than those who ascended the throne of England. I allude especially to the case of Baldwin IV., King of Jerusalem, a direct descendant, like the royal Plantagenets of England, from Fulk, Count of Anjou and Touraine. All historians seem to agree in stating Baldwin IV. to have laboured for some years under elephantiasis, and to have ultimately resigned his sceptre in consequence of disability from that disease. He was, says Fuller, when speaking of him under the year 1174, “enclined to the leprosie called elephantiasis.”[241] By the year 1183, “the leprosie had arrested him prisoner and kept him at home. Long” (adds the same historian) “had the king’s spirit endured this infirmity, swallowing many a bitter pang with a smiling face, and going upright with patient shoulders under the weight of his disease. It made him put all his might to it, because when he yielded to his sicknesse, he must leave off the managing of the State; and he was loth to put off his royal robes before he went to bed, a crown being too good a companion for one to part with willinglie. But at last he was made to stoop, and retired himself to a private life.”[242] The disease, as has been above observed, did not spare the royal family of Scotland. At least two cases of leprosy are alleged to have occurred among the members of it. The first and earliest of these, however, is much more a matter of fable than of fact, and the story, as told us by Hector Boece and Dempster, is, in all probability, due rather to their love of historical romance than their knowledge of historical records. Fiacre, the subject of it, still holds a place as a saint in the Catholic calendars of France and Germany. Among the long list of oaths[243] which Rabelais, in his Pantagruel, long ago put into the mouth of the garrulous Panurge, one is an imprecation “par l’espine de Saint Fiacre.” This Saint Fiacre or St. Fithulk (as he was sometimes termed) was the reputed son of Eugenius IV. King of Scotland. Preferring a cloister to a court, he is said to have retired into France, and to have led the life of a religious solitary in a cell granted to him by Pharo, Bishop of Meaux. After his father was dead and his brother deposed, the Scottish nobles sent a deputation to Fiacre with an offer of the throne of his ancestors. But “quhen (to state the result in Boece’s words) thir ambassatouris was brocht to his presence, he apperit to thair sicht sa ful of _lipper_, that he was repute be thaim the maist horribill creature in erd” (on earth).[244] Spottiswood fixes the era of his death in the year 665.[245]