In Bed with the Tudors: The Sex Lives of a Dynasty from Elizabeth of York to Elizabeth I (28 page)

If herbal cures did not work, a variety of other methods were available to the childless couple. Superstition would encourage them both to urinate on a mixture of wheat and bran; if this became ‘foul’, the infertile partner was identified. A barren woman was invited to echo the reproductive capabilities of a rabbit by drinking a mixture made from that animal’s powdered womb; frigid or unresponsive women were to have the ‘grease of a goat’ rubbed on their private parts. Religion would encourage them to attend their local church, pray, undertake pilgrimage and be sprinkled with holy water. The
Compendium Medicanae
, a thirteenth-century tract by Gilbertus Anglicus, told them to uproot a large comfrey plant, followed by a smaller one within three hours; they must recite the Lord’s Prayer three times whilst pacing, juice the plant and use this to write the prayer on a card, which they then wore about their necks during intercourse. For a girl, the woman should wear the card; for a boy, the man. Other incantations included the repetition of phrases like ‘Lord, wherefore are they increased’ and ‘rejoice, loose their chains O Lord’.
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Sympathetic magic was also used; one Oxfordshire couple named Phipps were denounced by the church in 1520 for keeping an empty cradle by their bed in the hopes that it would prompt conception.
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Infertile couples might also seek to use alchemy or astrology to help conceive a child. The position of the stars was held to be auspicious at conception and birth: if they could afford an alchemist’s fees, a couple may be given certain dates to avoid or rituals to follow. In Bury St Edmunds, a white bull festooned with garlands was led through the streets from its paddock home to the gates of the abbey: women who wished to conceive would accompany it, stroking its sides until reaching the shrine and offering prayers, again making the woman responsible for ensuring conception. The eleventh-century female doctor Trotula of Salerno was among the few to state that infertility might be equally attributed to men and women. She suggested a man drink a liquid whilst reciting the paternoster nine times. This would have hardly been an acceptable explanation for Henry.

Obviously, Henry had to be regularly sharing Catherine’s bed in order for her to conceive. As the months passed and the summer of 1541 arrived, bringing the king’s fiftieth birthday, even she began to despair that she may never fall pregnant and thus ensure her position. Perhaps it was partly this fear that contributed to the commencement of an adulterous relationship almost under the king’s nose. In the full awareness of her predecessor’s fates, to smuggle her cousin Thomas Culpeper into her bedchamber at various locations on the royal progress was an act of extreme folly at the very least. Perhaps it was indeed the romantic, innocent liaison they portrayed, fuelled by intention rather than activity. There is a chance that the affair was not consummated in the physical sense at all and that a second of Henry’s wives met her death innocent of the charges of adultery. When a servant named John Lascelles came forward with information about the nightly activities of the Duchess of Norfolk’s charge, the king was horrified. Just as he had been mistaken over Anne of Cleves’ sexual experience, he had naively believed in his young wife’s virginity and she had not taken any steps to open his eyes. He had not insisted on any of the contemporary virginity trials, like the examination by a panel of matrons or the waving of a chicken wing over the abdomen. Once again, Henry found his initial impression of a woman did not match up to the reality. Whether or not she had cheated on him after their marriage, his disillusionment over Catherine’s past was enough; her days were numbered.

It was incumbent upon a married man to acknowledge, as his own, any children born to his wife, so long as they were living together. However, Tudor men did not always take kindly to being ‘cuckolded’, especially when it came to the inheritance of money and property. One scandal diligently recorded by the parish clerk of Little Clacton was that of Thomasin Robwood. She had married a Walter Clarke on 15 November 1574, although later events proved that by this time she was already three months pregnant. The question of whether she had known and if she had communicated this to Clarke appears to be answered by the later naming of the ‘bastard’s’ father, Peter Tredgold, who is listed the previous year as a tailor in the village. Their daughter Prudence was born in May 1575, having been conceived in August 1574. Perhaps Clarke had finally realised the truth of his wife’s condition and worked out the maths or had gallantly offered her security and later changed his mind. No answers can be found to explain under what circumstances the conception take place but Thomasin and Walter did not go on to have any more children together.
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For Henry VIII, the all-important succession was dependent upon his wife’s fidelity; the possibility of an illegitimate child inheriting the throne was unthinkable. It was this suspicion that had fuelled the vehemence of his rejection of Anne Boleyn: now her cousin was trying to provide him with the ‘heir’ he needed, possibly with the assistance of another man! There may be the possibility that for the young teenager, romantically in love with Culpeper whilst married to an ageing, obese man, the question of the succession was not sufficient deterrent. At his examination, Culpeper insisted that they had merely talked, with the intention of infidelity but had never consummated their attraction: it was not enough to save his neck.

The swiftness and severity of Henry’s reaction shows the depth of his sudden disillusionment with his beloved young ‘rose without a thorn’ as well as the blow to his ego. Catherine’s promiscuity, like her cousin Anne’s supposed behaviour, did not just pose a threat to the succession. Apart from making a fool of the king, it exposed him to the risk of venereal disease. That term was coined in 1527, although syphilis, known in England as the ‘French pox’ had been common in Europe since the fifteenth century, and other sexually transmitted diseases present in England for centuries. Syringes for injecting the mercury treatment directly into the urethra were discovered aboard the wreck of the Mary Rose, Henry’s flagship that sank in 1545. The spread and effects of such conditions was poorly understood, demonised and sometimes deliberately exploited. It sounds ridiculous to a modern audience that in 1529, Thomas Wolsey was accused of blowing in the king’s ear in an attempt to give him syphilis yet the overlap between infection, superstition and magic was strong. As far back as 1346, a royal proclamation stated that leprosy would ‘taint persons who are sound, both male and female’
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and a wide-spread fear that it could be spread through sexual contact contributed to the regulation of London prostitutes or ‘Winchester Geese’, after that Bishop’s role in licensing them. Women might attempt to cover the effects of the disease by applying asses’ milk or bean-flower water to the skin; some remedies called for the use of brimstone or dog turds. The city’s brothels were located almost out of sight and mind across the Thames in Southwark and Bankside, often closing during the plague and outbreaks of illness, such as the syphilis epidemic of 1504. Henry VIII had attempted to close them entirely in 1535, on the basis that they spread disease, a battle he wouldn’t achieve until 1546. Some commentators felt this had little impact, with the spread of prostitutes now less easy to regulate:

The Stewes in England bore a beastly sway
Till the eight Henry banish’d them away
And since these common whore were quite put down
A damned crue of private whores are grown
So that the divill will be doing still
Either with publique or with private ill.
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Medieval recipe books carried a range of contemporary and ancient remedies against the effects of sexually transmitted diseases, some superstitious, some herbal. Gonorrhoea was a well-known condition, being treated with soothing remedies for ‘burning members’ (genitals), while women with the resulting discharge should soak a yarrow and lay it beneath their seat to take away the odour. ‘Loin ache’ could be soothed with mixtures of nettle, bettany, pennyroyal, groundsel and hound’s tooth diluted in wine. Pennyroyal, dill and sage were suggested for genital itching, while infused dock could treat swellings or else a patient could attach henbane roots to the thigh. For leprosy, still considered to be passed through sexual contact, drinking or bathing in the blood of virgins or children was recommended by the Ancient Greeks but even into the eighteenth century, dog blood was listed as an effective remedy. Some of these illnesses could result in infertility or interfere with the birth process. In 1513, Rosslin wrote that if the woman’s parts were affected with boils, ulcers or warts, a midwife should take advice from a doctor before the delivery; if unable, she should pour oil and fat into the vagina to make the delivery less painful and try to prevent miscarriage. The possibility of Catherine’s infidelity, which Henry was at first reluctant to believe, introduced the possibility of his own infection, fertility and mortality; all issues that were particularly close to his heart.

The details of Catherine’s past were written in a letter left by Cranmer for Henry to find in the chapel at Hampton Court. She was accused of living ‘dissolutely’ and ‘using the unlawful company of Dereham’; in the words of Holinshed, they had been pre-contracted. His reaction was swift; the extent of his shock and grief surprising. After the incrimination of Manox and Dereham – who had done little wrong in fraternising with a willing teenager before she rose to become the king’s wife – the association of Catherine and Culpeper was uncovered. All were sent to their deaths; the men in December, Catherine in February 1542. The heads of Manox and Dereham remained on London Bridge until as late as 1546. The event afforded a small glimmer of hope for Anne of Cleves, whose brother petitioned Henry to accept her again as his wife, yet Henry was not prepared to re-enter that particular yoke.

1543–1548

The Virtuous Wife

If they be women married … wear such apparel as becometh holiness and comely usage with soberness … love their children …
be discreet, chaste, housewifely, good and obedient unto their husbands.
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Catherine Parr, Henry’s sixth and final wife, is perhaps best known for her history of marriage to elderly husbands and the ageing Henry’s appreciation of her nursing skills. The king’s ill health is well known and various authors have pictured the devoted nurse drawing on her experience to administer to his aches and pains. In fact, neither of these statements are true. Henry had enough doctors. It would have been highly inappropriate for a woman like Catherine to perform this function, especially when what Henry really wanted was a woman to divert his attention and help him regain his youth; he would go to considerable lengths to prevent his wife from witnessing his worst episodes by barring her from his presence. Marriage to Catherine was for pleasure, not duty. However, the reverse was probably true for her. An intelligent and informed woman, she was already in love with another man when she became aware of the king’s preference for her and was forced to sacrifice personal interest and accept a dangerous and unwanted position at Henry’s side. Less well known is her status as a published author, a leading proponent of the Reformed faith and that she too, like Jane Seymour, died following complications arising in childbirth.

Catherine was born 1512, probably at her parents’ Blackfriars house in London. Although they owned property further north, her mother Maud was an attendant on Catherine of Aragon and would have lived in relative proximity to the court during the periods of her employment. Catherine was first married at around the age of seventeen but some historical confusion about the identity of her husband, Edward Borough, has given rise to the idea that she was espoused to a much older man. The misidentification of grandson for grandfather during the Victorian era may explain this, although it does seem likely that her young husband may equally have been ill, as she was widowed in spring 1533 after only four years of marriage and bore him no children. Later the same year she took a step up the social ladder through a union with John Neville, Lord Latimer, a man of forty to her twenty. He already had two children by his first wife but a second short-lived marriage had produced no more offspring; Catherine was not to conceive during the decade she spent as his wife. Latimer’s son would produce only daughters and on his demise, the title would disappear until the twentieth century.

Outside the monarchy, the upper classes were equally keen to secure their succession to gain and retain lands, titles and properties. Sons were essential; primogeniture, or the inheritance of the first born child of the entire estate to the exclusion of other siblings, applied only to men. Although Salic law did not prevent the inheritance of females in England as it did in Europe, Henry VIII’s struggle to produce a son indicates how undesirable the inheritance of females was to the Tudor mind. Large aristocratic families were the norm. Just as a fecund couple could multiply a dynasty, infertility, ill health and infant mortality could grind one branch of an aristocratic family to a halt. Such a turn of events threatened the stock of the Windsors and demonstrates the unpredictability of conception, despite the best of marital intentions. Of the eight children born to Andrew and Elizabeth in the 1490s and 1500s, only three went on to marry. The eldest, George, died at the age of twenty-four without having become a father; his wife Ursula remarried but did not conceive and died childless. The second son William had no issue by his first wife, so remarried on her death; his new spouse, Elizabeth, was twenty years his junior and would have three husbands in all, only bearing a daughter in her final marriage at the age of forty-two; that daughter had two husbands and no issue. The Winsdors’ eldest daughter Eleanor was widowed at the age of fifteen then remarried and bore three children, dying at the age of thirty-one in giving birth to a fourth infant, who shared her fate. Of her offspring, one son reproduced, so the Windsors only had two great-grandchildren, of which one was a boy. He went on to have eight children of his own, perhaps conscious that the lineage was dependent on him. For a Tudor family, such misfortune could only mean that God was punishing them. Some women in these circumstances might have resorted to desperate measures, such as in the life of Hugh of Lincoln, where a gentlewoman, desperate for an heir, feigned a pregnancy with pillows and adopted the child of a peasant.
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It has been estimated
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that in the seventeenth century, almost one in five noble families died out from infertility or infant mortality.