From Chapter 2: Tobacco engages
Both sexes, all ages,
The poor as well as the wealthy;
From the court to the cottage,
From childhood to dotage,
Both those that are sick and the healthy.
This chapter and the next deal with the history of
smoking during the first fifty years after its introduction as a social habit—roughly to 1630.
The use
of tobacco spread with extraordinary rapidity among all classes of society. During the latter part of Queen Elizabeth's reign and through the early decades of the seventeenth century tobacco-pipes were in full blast. Tobacco was triumphant.
From Chapter 13: There is a tradition that Queen Elizabeth herself once smoked—with unpleasant results. Campbell, in his "History of Virginia," says that Raleigh having offered her Majesty "some tobacco to smoke, after two or three whiffs she was seized with a nausea, upon observing which some of the Earl of Leicester's faction whispered that Sir Walter had certainly poisoned her. But her Majesty in a short while recovering made the countess of Nottingham and all her maids smoke a whole pipe out among them." The Queen had no selfish desire to monopolize the novel sensations caused by
smoking. An eighteenth-century writer, Oldys, in his "Life of Sir Walter Raleigh," declares that tobacco "soon became of such vogue in Queen Elizabeth's court, that some of the great ladies, as well as noblemen therein, would not scruple to take a pipe sometimes very sociably." But these stories rest on vague tradition, and probably have no foundation in fact.