In Bed with the Tudors: The Sex Lives of a Dynasty from Elizabeth of York to Elizabeth I (9 page)

As early as April 1503, news had reached Spain of a projected match between the king and his widowed daughter-in-law Catherine of Aragon. Arthur’s early death had left her in a difficult situation politically and financially, but more awkward still were the wranglings between the two countries over the long-overdue payment of her dowry. There had already been talk of a match between Catherine and Prince Henry, the new heir, when he came of age. The thought of the seventeen-year-old girl being wedded to her forty-six-year-old father-in-law appalled Catherine’s mother, Isabella of Castile, who described it as ‘a very evil thing; one never before seen … which offends the ears’ and urged Henry to send her daughter home. But did Henry really intend to marry his son’s teenage widow? The lines of diplomatic communication were notoriously unreliable and subject to rumour and misinterpretation; the supposed match may have had more to do with Henry’s hopes to extract the protracted Spanish dowry or answer the difficult questions of provision for Catherine than actual desire or intention. Being obliged to maintain Catherine’s household and wait until the twelve-year-old future Henry VIII came of an age to allow them to wed may have seemed too protracted and restrictive for the king. Marriage to Catherine would have solved his immediate problem whilst opening up further potential foreign alliances for his son.

Her mother did not see it that way. Resolute and war-like, Isabella could not easily be put off. Instead, she offered her niece, Queen Joan of Naples, as a more suitable candidate. Born in 1479, Joan had been married to her own nephew and widowed young, at seventeen in 1496: her comparative youth and family connections made her a suitable match for Henry and she was still young enough to have born him more children. With only one son remaining out of four, he had learned the imperative of having the proverbial ‘spare heir’. By October 1504, Spanish ambassador De Puebla wrote to report that he had spoken at length to the king about the match, who had expressed great ‘pleasure’ at the thought of it and was questioning him as to the lady’s beauty and personal attributes. The following June, he sent ambassadors to Naples, whose detailed report back gives a good indication of the physical attributes Henry required in a new bride. In response to a series of his questions, the king learned that she was aged around twenty-seven, her ‘unpainted’ face was ‘amiable, round and fat’, cheerful and demure, her skin clear and complexion fair and clean. Her teeth were fair and clean, with lips ‘somewhat rounded’ and hair that appeared brown under her headdress. It was difficult to discern her exact height as she wore slippers and her figure was hidden under a great mantle. Her arms were round and ‘not very small’, hands ‘somewhat full and soft’, fingers fair and small, of a ‘meetly’ length and breadth, her neck ‘comely and not-misshapen’; there was no discernible hair on her lips and her breasts were ‘great and full and trussed somewhat high’. She was recorded to be a good ‘feeder’, eating meat twice a day and drinking cinnamon water and hippocras wine. These descriptions were apparently pleasing to Henry on a personal level, as by that July, rumours had reached Spain of a potential marriage treaty.
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However, by March 1506, Henry was entering into negotiations for the hand of another woman. The Archduchess Margaret of Savoy was recently widowed and very rich. It would have been a powerful union for England, although the use of a rival may have been intended to hurry the Spaniards into an alliance. Political and financial obstacles may also have been to blame. Born in 1480, Margaret was named after her step-grandmother Margaret of York, sister to Edward IV and Richard III; she was also the sister of Philip ‘the Handsome’ of Austria, the brother-in-law of Catherine of Aragon through his marriage to her sister Juana, and had been briefly married to Catherine’s brother Juan. After his death she delivered a stillborn child and a second, short-lived marriage had been childless, after which she had vowed to remain single and was known at the Savoyard court as ‘lady of mourning’. Luckily or unluckily for Henry, Margaret refused him and he returned to consider another Hapsburg alliance.

By 1506, Catherine of Aragon’s sister Juana had attracted the nickname ‘the mad’. She was beautiful but considered deeply unstable. Her almost obsessive love for her husband Philip the Handsome was complicated by his infidelity and coldness: her maladies were more likely attributable to depression and neuroses. She was imprisoned and manipulated by him, suffered continual attempts to undermine her and eventually lived apart from him. Juana and Philip had been forced by bad weather to land on the English coast in 1505, where they had been royally entertained by Henry VII and reunited with Catherine. Philip’s sudden death in September 1506, of typhoid fever, put Juana back on the marriage market, although potential suitors may have been put off by her refusal to let him be buried and have his body removed from her presence. At this time though, she was five months pregnant with her sixth child. Unsurprisingly, these negotiations also came to nothing.

Henry VII did not remarry. It is difficult to know, at this distance, just how sincere his marital attempts were; whether they were driven by personal factors or simply another facet of the complicated game of European politics, or both. It would be misleadingly anachronistic to separate these motives and see his attempts at wooing as anything less than his royal duty. If he was looking for comfort, he might have found a willing wife closer to home, among his own nobility; dynastically, the pool of available women failed to provide him with a successful candidate. Perhaps it was the very geographical and political distance between him and these potential brides that made them attractive; the king was the ultimate prize in the delicate game of foreign alliances and to commit himself may have risked alienating other potential unions. He was spoilt for choice, so long as his marriage remained theoretical. There is no doubt about the genuine grief he exhibited at the loss of his wife, retreating ‘to a solitary place to pass his sorrow’ and seeing no one except ‘those appointed’. Ill health increasingly plagued him during the last years of his life, as he resigned himself to his losses. His heir was the now teenage future Henry VIII, already a charismatic and confident boy, who would soon need a wife of his own.

1501–1510

Widowhood & Fertility

O men, how ill do you bestow your time, and paines! Alas, wee women die not, but are tormented even to death: for those that are accounted the most expert and skilful among you, take not that care of us which they should; you fill whole Libraries with your writings … making little or no mention … of our cruel and insupportable torments.
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The death of Elizabeth of York deprived the young widowed Catherine of an important ally and benefactor. It was primarily the queen who had liaised by letter with Isabella of Castile to orchestrate the marriage with Arthur and oversee many of the arrangements. More importantly, she was a sympathetic maternal figure whose experience would have been invaluable to Catherine in her future role as wife and mother. Shortly before her death, she had sent her daughter-in-law books and arranged her transport to court, where she could recover from illness in comparative luxury, rather than remaining in Ludlow, with its bad weather, ill vapours and bad memories. From 1503 onwards, her status uncertain, Catherine existed in a sort of social and marital limbo, dependent on the king’s scant support and effectively reduced to penury. Between the ages of sixteen and twenty-three, she struggled to feed herself and her own household: the magnificent feasts of her wedding celebrations in the autumn of 1501 were consigned to memory. Yet throughout this time, she continued to hope that Henry would announce her betrothal to his younger son, and that once he came of age, she would again be a bride and, ultimately, a queen. Marriages among royalty and the aristocracy were commonly made in the mid- to late teens, to maximise the child-bearing years. For Catherine, the peak of her fertility coincided with uncertainty and dearth.

Then as now, a woman’s ability to conceive was influenced by her access to good quality food, her activity levels and her sexual availability. A teenage girl needed to attain a certain body weight for the onset of the menarche, or ‘flowers’ and subsequent regularity of her cycle. Having already reached the age of puberty before her marriage to Arthur, Catherine had clearly been menstruating but the effects of her poverty could have caused the complete or temporary cessation of her periods. Hypothalamic amenorrhoea can be triggered by stress, anorexia or bulimia: in terms of diet, the availability of protein and fat in Catherine’s diet and the regularity of meals would have been a significant factor. A lack of vegetables may have led to the condition Chlorosis, an iron deficiency that is often cause for concern during pregnancy. As a devout Catholic, she fasted regularly, further affecting her body’s menstrual cycle, yet understandably, her strict devotions may have represented the only facet of her life over which she could exercise any control. Modern responses to her condition might encompass psychosomatic illness and hypochondria, exacerbated by malnourishment, although the devotional aspect of her life makes diagnosis more complex. The pattern of the ensuing six years of poverty and ill-health, coinciding with her most fertile period, may have had a lasting impact on her reproductive abilities. Contemporary medicine was of little assistance.

Tudor understanding – or misunderstanding – of the body united a strange blend of Christian theology, Greek and Roman ideas, astrology, astronomy and superstition. Physical health was still connected with personal morality, so an ill body was considered the product of an ill mind or behaviour, which, coupled with the belief that misfortune and disease were visitations of God, frequently made diagnosis more a matter of character and reputation than science. Illness was considered to be divine judgement, for which error a sufferer would search their past behaviour and make amends. The body was considered to be comprised of four humours: blood (air), phlegm (water), black bile (earth) and yellow bile (fire), each with their own degrees of heat and moisture. These would determine an individual’s temperament and prescribe a certain diet and set of medicines. Illness could be caused by an imbalance of one or more elements, diagnosed through urinology and treated by bleeding, purges and balanced with the opposing element. Therefore, a hot and dry complaint would be prescribed foods that were considered cold and wet and vice versa. This also lent itself to bodily types, determining certain characteristics and needs; the hot and moist sanguine characters were red-cheeked and corpulent and supposed to be amorous, happy and irresponsible; their opposite cold and dry melancholics were thin and sallow, introspective and sentimental. Overall, four basic character types dominated, reducing all patients to a simple, formulaic diagnosis. The connection between mind and body would not be understood for centuries.

In August 1504, Catherine was recorded as suffering from an ‘ague and derangement of the stomach’, which lasted three days and left her with a bad cold and cough. ‘Ague’ was an unspecific, catch-all term for fever, which could encompass a number of illnesses from flu to malaria onwards; the symptoms included alternating temperature, sweating and shivering. Born in mid-December, making her a Sagittarius, Catherine would have been considered warm, dry and choleric in temperament and would have been treated by herbs and foods that were considered cold and wet. Recovering enough to travel from Westminster to Greenwich in late summer, Catherine fell ill again, this time more seriously than before, experiencing daily swings between ‘cold and heat’, lacking appetite, her complexion changing ‘entirely’, plunging her women into despair. Her physicians had confidence in her recovery, though, purging her twice and attempting twice to bleed her, ‘but no blood came’. The subtext of this was sexual. Bloodletting was one contemporary means of treating menstrual problems: undischarged blood was supposed to pool in the body and required release through some other outlet. It was not considered different to other forms of bodily bleeding, like a man suffering a nose bleed, all to rid the body of excess fluid. To the early Tudor surgeons, bleeding from a vein was the same as menstrual bleeding. Physicians had little faith in, or understanding of, nature’s ability to efficiently design the female body: it was considered an imperfect representation of the male form and the monthly cycle was understood to be its method of shedding unnecessary, accumulated blood, without which, the womb would become overrun with fluid and could ‘choke’ or ‘suffocate’. Trotula of Salerno wrote that a woman who failed to menstruate as the result of fasting should eat good food and drink to ‘give her good blood’. Bleeding a patient was the most common way to treat this condition, to prevent consumption by body heat and the development of ‘mannish’ characteristics. Among many beliefs regarding the female cycle was that the failure to menstruate made a woman dangerously ‘masculine’ and prone to many forms of madness and fits. Other remedies included hot baths, pessaries placed in the vagina or, for married women, intercourse.

Menstrual blood was also feared by men and formed part of a wider misogynistic suspicion of women’s bodies and minds. One belief claimed that it could damage the penis on contact, or that men might unsuspectingly consume it in love potions! It had the power to turn new wine sour, make fruit fall from trees, kill bee hives, give dogs rabies and make crops turn barren. A child in a cradle could be poisoned by the gaze of an old, pre-menopausal woman, whose accumulation of blood would lead to poisonous vapours being given off by her eyes! It was considered an essential but corrupting force; children conceived during periods were supposed to be red haired and ‘puny’. Menstruating women carried round nutmegs and nosegays to conceal any arising odours, as the corrosive power of the female reproductive fluids, transmittable through smell, constituted a real fear at the time. To stem a heavy flow, women were advised to take the hair from a particular animal’s head and bind it to a ‘green’ or young tree; another ‘proven’ remedy advocated burning a toad in a pot and wearing the powder in a pouch around the waist. If this failed, recipes using comfrey, nettle and blackberry, alongside the repetition of ‘magical’ numerical formulae were suggested. Female sexuality and bodily functions of all sorts formed a dangerous taboo, loaded with superstitious significance. As one of a number of mysterious maternal excretions, including placentas, umbilical cords and birth cauls, the supposed ‘magical’ properties of female blood were treated with suspicion by those excluded from the birth chamber. Catherine’s inability to produce sufficient blood for her physicians may have given cause for concern over her future reproductive abilities, while not necessarily being understood to be a function of her poor diet and religious habits. She insisted that further attempts be made at bleeding, yet the doctors preferred to purge her instead, giving her herbal remedies designed to cleanse her internally that could bring on vomiting, diarrhoea and other violent reactions.