The longest-lived of Henry VIII’s sons, Henry Fitzroy, was born on 15 June 1519. Unfortunately for the king, this son was born on the wrong side of the blanket.

Bessie Blount, a minor nobleman’d daughter, had given Henry what his queen, Katherina of Aragon, had tried to give him so many times in the past — a healthy baby boy. With a disturbing lack of sensitivity for the feelings of his queen, Henry VIII named the boy after himself — the same first name as the infant prince that he and Katherina had lost in 1511 — and publicly acknowledged Fitzroy as his royal offspring. This seems, to the modern mind, to be a an unbelievably cruel thing to do to Queen Katherina. The king, however, saw no problems with it. Royal bastards were a fact of life and his wife was expected to pretend they didn’t exist.

Katherina, as expected of her, stoically bore up under the birth of her husband’s son with Bessie Blount and ignored his callous disregard for her emotions. She probably even understood that his name for the baby was motivated by the need to defend his pride. Doubtlessly, the king wanted, even needed, to show the world that the lack of a legitimate prince wasn’t ‘his’ fault. Fitzroy’s birth demonstrated that Henry VIII was clearly capable of fathering healthy sons. It appears to have worked, since everyone seems to have agreed with Henry VIII’s assessment of his reproductive capabilities. Certainly many historians have blithely assumed that the birth of Henry Fitzroy proved that any obstetrical problems were on Katherina’s side of the equation. Lacey Baldwin Smith, who is an otherwise peerless historian, wrote that the king “proved where the fault of sterility lay by siring a son”.

There are two major problems with this assertion, though. First, it is a misstatement to identify Katherina as infertile. According to Merriam-Webster’s Medical Desk Dictionary infertility occurs when a couple is “incapable of or unsuccessful in achieving pregnancy over a considerable period of time (as a year) in spite of determined attempts by heterosexual intercourse without contraception”. Katherina was pregnant on least six, and maybe even as much as eight, occasions from 1509 to 1518. Half a dozen or more pregnancies in as many years make the idea of her infertility ludicrous. It is clear that the queen was fecund. Additionally, it is plain that Henry had no physiological or psychological problems preventing him from having intercourse with his wife.

Secondly, Henry Fitzroy’s birth does not in any way contradict the theory that Henry VIII was Kell positive. Fitzroy was Bessie Blount’s first known pregnancy and her only child by the king, so her body would not have been sensitised to the Kell antigen yet, and the fetus would have been safe from her antibodies. Some historians have speculated that Henry only had one child with Bessie because he was sexually unaroused by a woman who had borne his child. That seems unlikely, since he had gotten Katherina pregnant annually and she had definitely given birth to his children. Then again, Katherina was also his queen and thus it was his duty as much as his pleasure to try to impregnate her in order to secure heirs, so perhaps he really did reject his mistress because she had become the mother of his son. Nevertheless, it is at least possible that he didn’t have multiple children with his mistress because he couldn’t. Any of Bessie’s subsequent pregnancies in which she carried a Kell positive fetus would not have produced a viable baby, just like many of the losses experienced by Henry’s wife. This must remain speculation, since there is no record of Bessie having ever been pregnant with any more of the king’s children. She did, however, have subsequent children with her husband, Gilbert Talboys.

Fitzroy is consistent with the Kell theory, and he is probably the best hope of ever proving any medical hypothesis regarding Henry VIII. Fitzroy was never officially crowned or in line for the throne, and thus a team of archaeologists wouldn’t necessarily need royal permission to excavate his body and test the DNA of his remains. If Fitzroy had a Kell positive gene, that would make it infinitely more probable that his dad was Kell positive.

Then there is my theory that Henry Fitzroy and Edward VI and Arthur Tudor all died from complications of atypical (non-classic) cystic fibrosis. As I explain in Edward VI in a Nutshell, if Arthur, Fitzroy, and Edward had all inherited a similar genetic mutation causing non-classic CF, then they could have been relatively healthy as children but have had undetected pulmonary deterioration that eventually needed just one more infection (viral or bacterial) to tip the scales toward their demise.

The chronic cough, struggle to breath, and the ‘wasting’ effect of mal-absorption of food due to the thick mucus obstructing the digestive system were all symptoms exhibited by the dying Tudor adolescents. The bronchiectasis attendant to atypical CF would have looked a lot like tuberculosis to Medieval and Tudor physicians, albeit a strangely fast-acting one. Fitzroy’s illness, in particular, progressed too rapidly to feasibly be tuberculosis. TB usually takes two to ten years to kill the patient; it would be farfetched to think it caused Fitzroy’s death in just a few weeks. If Fitzroy had Atypical CF, his weakened body would have also been vulnerable to deadly optimistic infections, as well as septicemia and renal failure.

If Fitzroy can be exhumed, his DNA could potentially reveal the Kell positive gene and could certainly prove or disprove the theory that he had atypical CF. So much to be learned from one set of bones! Now, does anyone know any documentary producers, curious billionaires, or suddenly well-funded universities willing to pay for a team of curious archaeologists to dig up and test Fitzroy’s mortal coil?