Towards the end of 1684 the king did not feel quite well: he was irritable and depressed, and thought it wise to remain indoors during the mornings, instead of taking his usual active walks. He attributed his illness to gout. It would be interesting to speculate on what the disease actually was that so often was called “gout” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There are many conditions which cause symptoms such as might be mistaken for gout; let us leave it at that, for even to-day a doctor, forced to give to a vague complaint a name, sometimes takes refuge in the euphemism “rheumatic gout.” During these few days indoors he amused himself by playing with mercury in his laboratory, for, as is well known, he was of scientific bent. At last came the fateful morning, Monday, February 2nd, 1685. At eight o’clock the king, while being shaved, fell back with a cry into the arms of an attendant, Lord Aylesbury. According to Dr. Scarburgh, “Charles, having just left his bed, was walking about quietly in his bedchamber when he felt some unusual disturbance in his brain, which was followed by loss of speech and violent convulsions.” There happened to be present at the time two of the king’s physicians who, so as promptly to forestall so serious a danger to “this best of kings,” as Scarburgh has it, opened a vein in his right arm and drew 16 ounces of blood. As a matter of fact, this assault, though seemingly homicidal, was probably as good a thing as could have been done for him, though few doctors would have the moral courage to do it to-day. His head was closely shaved; his neck and shoulders were blistered and scarified; emetics, purgatives and clysters were administered, and every reputable doctor, regardless of his religion, was summoned to the defence. Whitehall must have presented a lively spectacle that winter morning with all the periwigs and silver buckles and gold-headed canes and wise faces. In fact, they did what they could: if they had known that the cause of the convulsions was probably that the king’s kidneys had “gone on strike,” they could have done little more than endeavour to get rid of the poisons that must have been circulating in his body by some other effluent than by the urine. After about two hours their efforts were crowned with success. The king, whose face had been hideously black,—i.e., cyanosed—and whose eyes had been rolling this way and that, woke up, and proceeded to give an account of himself. The poisons had for a time been got out of his body; but only for a time. He said that, not feeling very well when he awakened, he had gone to his private closet to get some “king’s drops,” which Dr. Crawfurd explains to have been “a volatile extract of bone made in the king’s laboratory according to the formula of the late Dr. Goddard, and in high repute on the Continent.”