Arthur Tudor & Katherine of Aragon – Was their Marriage Consummated?

I am delighted to welcome Leanda de Lisle to On the Tudor Trail! Leanda’s latest book, Tudor: The Family Story, was published in the UK in late August and sounds like a fascinating read. It’s certainly on my TBR list.

Leanda has written a guest post for us about Katherine of Aragon and Arthur Tudor, in it she explores the question of whether or not the young couple’s marriage was ever consummated and if not, why not. Happy reading!

Arthur Tudor & Katherine of Aragon – Was their Marriage Consummated?

By Leanda de Lisle

Henry VIII’s six wives have given him a reputation for being a bit of a womaniser. But his sexual exploits were extremely restrained by the standards of kings, not least those of his own grandfather, Edward IV.  This owed much to an upbringing that emphasised the value of chastity and may also help explain the insistence of Henry’s wife, Katherine of Aragon, that her first marriage, to his elder brother   Arthur, was never consummated.

Katherine of Aragon by Wenceslaus Hollar

Katherine maintained after Arthur’s death that they had never had sexual intercourse. As she described it, the long days of entertainments following their wedding at St Paul’s in 1501, and Arthur’s subsequent sickness, meant the couple had spent no more than seven nights in the same bed during the following months, and each morning Katherine had awoken still a virgin.

When, after twenty years of marriage, Henry began seeking an annulment from Katherine, and hoped to marry Anne Boleyn, he produced witnesses who claimed that Arthur had boasted after his wedding night about having spent the night ‘in the midst of Spain’, and even that they had seen his ‘enflamed member’.  It may be that, since men valued virginity, Katherine was pretending that she had kept hers. It is also quite possible, however, that, despite these claims, Katherine was telling the truth.

Louis XII of France made several extravagant boasts about his wedding night, after having married in his old age, Henry VIII’s lovely teenage sister, Mary Tudor. But his twenty year old cousin and heir, Francis, had information that the sickly old man was incapable of having children. Louis’ boasts were wide of the mark – and if Arthur ever said the words attributed to him, the same may have been true of him.

Any number of diseases can cause impotence or lower the libido, including tuberculosis, which is often cited as the illness to which Arthur had succumbed. TB is a slow killer that induces fatigue, and the genitourinary tract is the most common site, after the lungs, for   infection. This is turn can spread to the testis, as it may have done in Arthur’s case.

Arthur Tudor

And there is another possible explanation that has yet to be considered, but which may add a psychological dimension to Arthur’s failure to have sexual intercourse with his wife: The fifteen year old groom may have been uncertain what constituted the consummation of a marriage, or been so anxious to do so in a manner that was not considered sinful, that it further impacted on his ability to maintain an erection.

These were earthy times, but it was also an era of powerful religious belief. Arthur’s father, Henry VII, had always been concerned to demonstrate his personal chastity and to maintain high standards of sexual propriety at Court. This was to distance his reign from the immorality associated with Edward IV’s later years, which Richard III had used as a tool in his usurpation of Edward V (claiming Edward IV’s children were bastards). Equally, Henry VII had been keen to promote national admiration for his saintly, but less than virile, Lancastrian half-uncle, Henry VI.

A biography of the ‘saint’ published in 1500 claimed that when in bed with his Queen, Henry VI had never ‘used her unseemly’ ‘but with all conjugal honesty and gravity’, and that he was distressed at the sight of nudity. It had taken Henry VI eight years to conceive a child.  Was Arthur overcome by anxiety to have sex with his wife also with ‘honesty and gravity’?

Conceiving children was of vital importance to the succession, but it would not be surprising if there had been a prim atmosphere around Arthur. His father saw him as the future King of a new Camelot – but in Thomas Malory’s ‘The Death of Arthur’, sexual immorality lead to the destruction of Camelot and, ultimately, to Arthur’s death. The desire of Arthur’s servants to please Henry VII with their own chaste behaviour may have left Arthur’s sexual education incomplete, and left him confused. Unsurprisingly, Henry VII was angered by Katherine’s claims, which not only cast aspersions on his son’s manhood, but also may have been taken as a criticism of the way Arthur was raised. When he sought the papal dispensation permitting Katherine’s marriage to young Henry (who as her brother-in-law was within the forbidden degrees of kinship) it tactfully observed that the marriage to Arthur at least ‘may’ have been consummated.

18 year old Henry VIII in 1509

But for Henry VIII his wedding night proved to him Katherine was indeed a virgin – or so he believed at the time. He would later claim that his own sexual inexperience and ignorance – despite being almost three years older than Arthur – had not made him the most competent of judges.