"Three of the biggest men that could be found could get inside his doublet." — A contemporary account of Henry VIII in his final years. By his death he weighed nearly 400 pounds and was carried between rooms in a mechanical chair.
The Tudor ruff was not merely a fashion statement. In the courts of the late sixteenth century, the high collar concealed the characteristic neck lesions of secondary syphilis — open ulcerations that no amount of perfumed water could disguise.
The standard cure for head lice at the Tudor court was quicksilver — mercury — worked into the scalp with butter. It killed the lice. It also caused tremors, kidney failure, and tooth loss. The Mary Rose alone was raised with 82 lice combs aboard.
Venetian ceruse — the white cosmetic worn by every woman of status at the Tudor court — was made by burying lead plates over vinegar in horse dung for weeks. The resulting white powder was then applied directly to the face, daily, for decades. It destroyed the skin it was meant to beautify.
"Her face oblong, fair, but wrinkled; her eyes small, yet black and pleasant; her teeth black — a defect the English seem subject to, from their too great use of sugar; she wore false hair, and that red." — Paul Hentzner, German jurist, describing Elizabeth I in person, 1598.