A Fifteenth-Century Medicus Politicus: John Somerset, Physician to Henry VI

Summary

Medical doctors play a large part in personal history; it is therefore surprising that they make so slight an impact on public affairs, on politics. We can easily read a whole library of history without encountering the name of a single medical doctor, so modest and inconspicuous are the physicians of the body.

At first glance, the return of John Somerset as a shire knight for Middlesex to the parliament of 1442 seems unsurprising, if not predictable. Although, unlike his fellow representative, Thomas Charlton, he did not come from an established county family, he had occupied the manor of Ruislip as a life tenant of the crown since 1437, had served on the local bench for just over two years, and had already acquired the extensive estate in and around Osterley where he was to build a ‘great messuage’. And if these unimpeachable local connexions failed to convince the electors of Middlesex, his position at court and influence over a young, impressionable monarch would surely have silenced any residual opposition. He had assumed his first major administrative offices, as chancellor of the exchequer and warden of the exchange and mint in the Tower of London, in December 1439. Just over a year later he became almoner of the royal household and was also by then busily engaged in the acquisition of estates earmarked for the king's new colleges at Eton and Cambridge, in whose management he remained closely involved.