Anyone else a little surprised she never was pregnant? At 17-18 she would probably have been at the height of fertility.
shareDoesn't mean Henry was still very fertile. Catherine Parr wasn't pregnant either while she was with Henry, yet once she married Seymour she became pregnant in less than a year.
shareTrue!! But if she were sexually active with Mannox, Dereham and Culpepper, I would have thought at least once she might have become pregnant. In the Tudors, there is the scene where she thinks she's pregnant, only to begin her monthly cycle later. Perhaps due to irregular menstration, she was unable to conceive.
shareWomen in medieval times often had fewer periods, so that could have been a factor.
Didn't she at some point say something like "I know how to meddle with a man without getting pregnant"? I honestly can't remember right now if that was on The Tudors or Henry VIII. So she might have had some form of contraception or 'Plan B'.
How is that possible? The German duchesses were having lots of children!
shareAs for fewer periods, malnutrition, wrong nutrition, (earlier menopause, obv. not in Kathryn's case), (breastfeeding, ditto not the case here), high stress levels, hormonal imbalance..
As for contraception...herbs and plants, lemon rind (citric acid), sponges, cotton pessaries, coitus interruptus (with anyone but Henry because he would've had questions about that ;))..
Now, using methods of contraception was illegal, but compared with high treason it wouldn't have been Kathryn's biggest worry, I'd wager.
I'm not saying that's what happened, I'm not saying that's what she did, only that these things existed. TBH, I think the most likely scenario apart from them just not having sex that often during fertile days is that HVIII had a low sperm count for whatever reason (not gonna list all of those).
I kinda feel like her meaning when she said she could 'meddle with a man' without getting pregnant was that she was not having P in V intercourse with them.
Probably she was engaging in fellatio.
No, I think she only had sex when it was that time of the month, otherwise she would have gotten pregnant.
sharewomen can get pregnant anytime , not just when they on their cycle.
shareNo they can't. That's not how it works.
share
No they can't. That's not how it works.
It is possible to get pregnant from having sex while on your period, it's just highly unlikely. Usually it would be from a case of mistaking mid-cycle bleeding for an actual period.
shareI don't think she would have had sex when she was on her period. In that era it was considered unclean,and very taboo.
Personally I don't think she actually had sex. I think she might have did everything else ,but didn't go all the way.
I noticed that Elizabeth Blount, and
Mary Boleyn both has a affair with Henry VIII when they were as young as 15, yet they didn't become pregnant until they were 17, or 18. I think that it's possible that they weren't having intercourse , they were just doing everything else . However given the era in which they live in was considered fast,forbidden, taboo.
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Kades! [/love]
I have read that the onset of menstruation was later for women historically, 16 or 17 as opposed to what we're told is average now.
I think too, that intercourse during a woman's period may not have been taboo, at least for individuals who considered it a way to avoid pregnancy and were not squeamish about it. People in Tudor England lived a lot closer to nature than we do now. There was no indoor plumbing, after all, and privies were not as privy as we're accustomed to.
i don't think henry was very able by that time. there's no record of any child born to him after edward VI.
shareTrue and he was morbidly obese and smelled awful by time he married Katherine.
shareI can't remenber where I read it, but Henry might have been impotent in his later years, maybe becuase he was so obese... So maybe that's why he didn't have more children...
shareI think that the original point pf this discussion was that sh was having sex with other - younger and presumably more virile - men, and not Henry's ability to impregnate her.
sharecatherine is supposed to have told Francis Dereham that she knew how to 'meddle with a man' without getting pregnant. Whether this can be considered reliable information I don't know.
shareI don't think anyone would have wanted to have sex with Henry. His leg oozed nonstop and gave a smell so repulsive it would make a mortician vomit.
shareAt that point Henry was thought to have not only the infected leg, but gout, diabetes, and possibly syphilis, not a great combination for romance and pregnancies.
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