Creative History

In late August of 1485 the streets of London were packed with thousands of people awaiting the coronation of King Henry VII.  On the 22nd of that month King Henry’s Tudor army had defeated the last remaining forces loyal to the House of York and King Richard III at Bosworth Field thereby bringing an end to the bloody Wars of the Roses and making Henry the new King of England. Soon thousands of victorious soldiers and vanquished prisoners of war would arrive in London and swell this teeming mass of humanity, which already numbered perhaps in the tens of thousands, even further.  And already, even prior to the climactic Battle of Bosworth Field, many soldiers on both sides had been deemed too sick to fight on account of a new and mystifying disease that both armies  simply dubbed, “The Sweat”. “The Sweat” first arrived and struck without warning during the heat of high summer and it painfully killed thousands that it infected within a mere matter of hours.  It mowed down soldiers and