Remember the 1971 film The French Connection? It dealt with the international drug scene so prevalent in our culture today. Another movie that could be made about drugs took place not in France or the United States but in England. The time was not modern but the seventeenth century. The drug involved had its origins in the Andes mountains of Peru and Colombia, but it was not cocaine. It was cinchona, more commonly known at the time as Jesuits' Powder.

For centuries, thousands of people died each year from malaria, its cause and cure unknown. Around 1630, Jesuit missionaries working in Peru learned from Native peoples that the bark of a certain tree cured malaria. The natives called it quinquina ("the bark of barks"), from which came the word quinine.

Jesuit Cardinal John de Lugo was a staunch promoter of the quinine that Jesuit missionaries in Peru sent to Rome. De Lugo was convinced that it was a priceless gift of God for the cure of malaria, so prevalent in Italy that cardinals dreaded going to Rome for papal elections for fear of contracting it.

In England things got off to a bad start when the first recorded use of the new drug proved disastrous. During a malaria epidemic in 1658, it was given to a respected London alderman, who died. His death was immediately attributed to Jesuits' powder. Because he was a well-known figure in society, the incident aroused great animosity and the suspicion of Jesuit intrigue. As one author put it:

The Protestants scented a Jesuit plot; the bark was an insidious poison which the Jesuits had brought to Europe for the purpose of exterminating all those who had thrown off their allegiance to Rome.

The very name Jesuits' powder often caused the drug to be regarded as not only suspect but despicable. In the words of The Catholic Encyclopedia (1910):

Among Protestant physicians hatred of the Jesuits and religious intolerance lie at the bottom of the long conflict over the good or harm effected by Peruvian Bark.

But one quack and a quirk of fate were destined to overcome this overwhelming wall of prejudice.

Sir Robert Talbor

Along the southeastern coast of England in Essex County, Robert Talbor had begun to acquire a reputation for successfully treating malaria. No one knew his secret, but one thing seemed certain: his success was not due to Jesuits' Powder.

In 1672 Talbor, who described himself as a feverologist, published a book that carefully avoided any mention of the ingredients of his own remedy but warned others:

Beware of all palliative cures, and especially of that known as Jesuits' Powder, for I have seen most dangerous effects follow the taking of that medicine.

That warning was duplicitous: Talbor was mixing Jesuits' Powder with opium and various wines, thus disguising it from detection.

In 1678 a great malaria epidemic broke out around London, and it was not long before King Charles II contracted the disease. News of Talbor's success in curing people reached the king. Despite the fact that Talbor was considered a quack by the College of Physicians, the king demanded his services. Talbor cured the king. In gratitude, the king not only made him a knight but also appointed Sir Robert to the College of Physicians. Much to the dismay of the college's members, Talbor discarded the idea that it was necessary to bleed and purge a patient from "corrupt humors," the basic premise of Galenic medicine. Moreover, Talbor's refusal to reveal his secret cure for malaria infuriated them.

Given the political climate and the religious bigotry of the times, Talbor's secretiveness was understandable. He was giving Jesuits' Powder to the king at the very time Jesuits were being accused of wanting to murder the king. As M. L. Duran-Reynals (The Fever-Bark Tree, 1946) put it:

There are good reasons to believe that in the course of time Talbor found himself in desperate need of hiding the identity of the remedy. He, who was not a physician, was working with a drug labeled by the medical profession as dangerous, one which exposed those who used it to the perilous accusation of popery.

Titus Oates's Popish Plot

In September 1678, Titus Oates touched off a reign of terror that swept through London when he testified that there was a vast Jesuit conspiracy to assassinate Charles II and to place his Roman Catholic brother James, Duke of York, on the throne. Oates's testimony was eventually discredited for its many inconsistencies but not before some 35 people had been innocently executed. Among these were eight Jesuits who have since been named Saint or Blessed. Their death sentence for treason called for them to be "hanged, drawn, and quartered."

In his The English Jesuits (1967), Bernard Basset, SJ, describes the whirlwind that followed Oates's false accusations:

Hundreds of innocent people died through the Oates Plot; one Jesuit, William Culcheth, reckoned that four hundred perished in prison, some of them victims of the plague.

London was hysterical with yarns about thousands of Irishmen and Frenchmen crouching in the cellars, ready, at the signal, to leap out and slit all honest Protestant throats. A vast anti-Catholic parade wound its way through the city with six [people dressed as] Jesuits, bearing bloody daggers, escorting an effigy of the Pope, draped in rosary beads.

Others depict the same scene as follows:

The general outcry was indescribable . . . The Jesuits wanted to assassinate the king! The Jesuits were planning the slaughter of all the Protestants in England! The Jesuits wanted to poison the whole world . . . by means of an outlandish, so-called medicine, commonly known as the Jesuits' powder! . . . The Peruvian bark, or the facsimile of it, was paraded through the streets of London with great signs telling the gruesome story of how the Jesuits were using it to exterminate the non-Jesuit population.

Basset makes no reference to Sir Robert Talbor nor to the Jesuits' powder. But he does state that for eighteen months Jesuits in England were on the run. At the precise time that five Jesuits were being executed at Tyburn on June 20, 1679, one Jesuit found lodging at the home of a Protestant physician who was also a knight. Could this have been Sir Robert Talbor? Basset cites a contemporary source:

Many were executed in England in the aftermath of Titus Oates's false accusations against Catholics. Among the victims of the hysteria were eight Jesuits, including St. Philip Evans, Bl. John Fenwick, Bl. William Ireland, St. David Lewis, and Bl. John Gavan and Bl. William Harcourt.

Fr. Alexander Keynes, up from Cornwall on business, was advised by Protestant friends to lodge in the house "of a Protestant physician who was also a knight, a most obstinate heretic and a great patron of the infamous perjurer Titus Oates, who very often came to this house. No Catholic was suspected of even wishing to live in such a house, much less a priest and a Jesuit. We were, therefore, sufficiently secure and not the slightest suspicion was entertained regarding us."

Keynes often saw Oates, who came to the house with his cronies, "to hold a sort of secret conclave or council, assembling twice or thrice a week." Peter Hamerton [SJ] also met Oates again and moved round London houses "in the garb of an apothecary's apprentice, with a glass in my hand and an apron before me; in which disguise I entered with much freedom into their chambers and, although the sentry stood at the door, I often heard their confessions and spoke as comfortably to them as occasion would permit."

Duran-Reynals notes:

One point concerning Talbor's life has so far remained wrapped in complete mystery. By what devious ways did he obtain the bark for his experiments in Essex, ways that no one was able to fathom? . . . Throughout all his life the secret acquisition of the bark must have been a considerable problem to Sir Robert but he apparently managed it with unusual ability and a fair amount of ruthlessness.

Could it be that Fr. Peter Hamerton, SJ, in his disguise as an apothecary's apprentice, served Talbor in this capacity? The bark kept in Jesuit pharmacies or colleges was considered particularly efficacious because they were better able to provide a genuine unadulterated supply. The Jesuit college of St. Omers in Belgium was the seminary for the English Jesuits and could have been an easy and reliable source of supply. Titus Oates had been dismissed from St. Omers. The possible connection between Titus Oates, Talbor, and St. Omers as a source of Talbor's cinchona is intriguing. And if they were cronies, it behooved Talbor to appear as a "most obstinate heretic" while at one and the same time befriending Jesuits, who could meet his drug needs, namely, cinchona.

Sir Robert's Secret Exposed

In 1678 Charles II sent Talbor to the French court out of friendship for King Louis XIV, whose son was suffering from malaria, and for the safety of Sir Robert himself. As Duran-Reynals mentions: The king, who had never believed in Jesuits' plots, let alone Jesuits' poisons, must have known the remedy employed by Talbor. Thus he was fully aware of the danger surrounding Sir Robert, for he knew that the inventors of the plot were in desperate need of a plausible scapegoat.

The reception Talbor received in the French court was astounding, and he was pressured by Louis XIV to reveal his secret with an offer he couldn't refuse-3,000 gold crowns and a substantial pension for life for the right to publish the secret upon his death. Little did Talbor realize how soon that would be. Upon his return to England Sir Robert was greeted as a hero and made a fellow commoner of St. John's College at Cambridge. At Trinity Church he had a monument erected for himself with an inscription:

The most honorable Robert Talbor, Knight and Singular Physician, unique in curing Fevers of which he had delivered Charles II of England, Louis XIV, King of France, the Most Serene Dauphin, Princes, many a Duke, and a large number of lesser personages.

Talbor died shortly thereafter in 1681, at age 42. Louis XIV promptly released Talbor's formula, and it was published in London the following year. Norman Taylor (Plant Drugs That Changed The World, 1965), describes the reaction that ensued when it was learned that its effective ingredient was the hated Jesuits' powder:

The consternation in medical circles can only be likened to a revolution. Here was their despised quack, using for years the only real cure for malaria, keeping it a deadly secret, and finally telling the world not only that it was cinchona bark, but how to use it.

The fever of religious bigotry raged as did that of malaria, and the Jesuits continued to be portrayed as in league with the devil. The word jesuitical even made its way into the dictionary. Only when this prejudicial fever subsided did cinchona bark become an acceptable, worldwide remedy for malaria. That it was the Jesuits who had introduced it to Europe was by then forgotten.