They buried some at midnight in unmarked graves. Others simply vanished from all records. Katherine of Aragon’s pregnancies produced children so disturbing that witnesses were paid fortunes to never speak again. By the end of this video, you’ll discover what was medically wrong with these infants and the shocking truth about where the missing bodies actually are.
The forbidden records that survived tell us something chilling. Within hours of certain royal births at Richmond Palace in Greenwich, servants were ordered to burn specific documents in the fireplaces of the Queen’s Chambers. But fire doesn’t always destroy everything completely. A fragment recovered centuries later from the architectural remains of Richmond Palace contained three words written in Latin by a court physician.
“Contraumnatus, born against nature.”
What could have been so horrifying that trained medical professionals, men who had seen death and disease in every form, would use language typically reserved for describing demonic possession? The answer lies in understanding that Tudor physicians had witnessed still births and infant deaths countless times.
They had detailed medical vocabularies for describing birth defects, premature deaths, and maternal complications. Yet, when it came to some of Catherine of Aragon’s children, they abandoned medical terminology entirely and reached for the language of the supernatural. This wasn’t ignorance or superstition. This was educated men struggling to describe something their training had never prepared them for.
Court records show that after certain births, multiple physicians would request immediate transfers to other noble households, abandoning prestigious positions at the royal court without explanation. One doctor, Thomas Linacre, who had founded the College of Physicians and served as Henry VIII’s personal doctor, abruptly retired from court life after attending one of Catherine’s deliveries in 1513. He never practiced medicine again.
The pattern of secrecy surrounding these births was methodical and expensive. Midwives were paid between £50 and £200, fortunes at the time when a skilled craftsman might earn £10 in a year. These payments appear in fragmentary financial records with vague descriptions like “for services rendered to her majesty” or “for discretion regarding royal matters.”
But the timing of these payments corresponds exactly with Catherine’s known pregnancies that ended in tragedy. Even more disturbing, several of these midwives disappeared from historical records entirely after receiving their payments. They didn’t return to their practices, didn’t attend other noble births, simply vanished as though they had never existed. One midwife, Margaret Pole, left London immediately after attending Catherine in 1515 and was found dead 6 months later in a remote village, officially from plague, though no plague outbreak was recorded in that region that year.
The speed with which evidence was destroyed suggests something beyond normal royal privacy. When Catherine’s pregnancies ended badly, entire rooms would be stripped and redecorated. Birthing chairs were burned rather than stored for future use. Linens and blankets were destroyed instead of being washed and reused, as was standard practice, even for royalty. The royal household accounts show unusual expenses for quicklime. Large quantities of it ordered immediately following certain births. Quicklime was used primarily for one purpose in Tudor England: rapid decomposition of organic matter.
What makes this conspiracy of silence even more disturbing is who else was involved. Foreign ambassadors stationed in England, whose job was literally to report everything happening at court back to their governments, wrote letters that have survived in various European archives. The Venetian ambassador in a coded dispatch from 1514 referred to “an event of such nature that I dare not commit full details to paper even in cipher.”
The Spanish ambassador, who had direct access to Catherine and served her homeland’s interests, wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella’s successors describing “a tragedy that transcends normal understanding of birth complications.”
These were sophisticated diplomatic observers who had seen courts across Europe, who understood political intrigue, and weren’t easily shocked. Yet something about Catherine’s situation left them unable or unwilling to provide specifics even in private encrypted correspondence. The silence was international, coordinated, and absolute.
But silence creates gaps, and gaps create questions. By 1516, when Catherine finally delivered a living child, Princess Mary, the relief at court wasn’t just about securing succession. It was about proving that Catherine could produce something normal, something that could be acknowledged and celebrated publicly. But that relief would be short-lived because what was causing these tragedies wasn’t going away. It was getting worse, and what happened in Catherine’s next pregnancy would make all the previous horrors seem almost bearable by comparison.
The pattern emerged slowly at first, then with terrifying consistency. Catherine of Aragon’s first pregnancy began in early 1510, shortly after her marriage to Henry VIII. The young queen was 24 years old, healthy by all accounts, and optimistic about producing the male heir that Henry desperately wanted. But in January 1510, just months into the pregnancy, Catherine miscarried.
The official announcement was brief and vague, stating simply that the queen had lost the child and was recovering. No details were provided about how far along she was, what caused the miscarriage, or whether the fetus showed any abnormalities. This might seem like normal royal discretion, but it established a pattern that would repeat with increasingly disturbing variations.
Just 11 months later, in January 1511, Catherine gave birth to a living son. He was named Henry, Duke of Cornwall. And for 52 days, England had its male heir. The celebrations were massive. Tournaments were held, bells rang throughout London, and Henry VIII was ecstatic. But then the infant died suddenly.
The cause was listed simply as infant mortality, which in Tudor times could mean almost anything. What’s strange is what happened next. The baby’s body was supposed to lie in state, as was traditional for a prince of England. Instead, the funeral was rushed, held within 24 hours with limited attendance and no public viewing of the body. Why the hurry? Why the secrecy? Infant death was tragically common in the 16th century. Nothing to hide. Unless there was something about this particular infant’s death that needed to be hidden.
Between 1511 and 1514, Catherine had two more known pregnancies. The first in late 1513 ended in a stillborn son delivered in December. Court records indicate the queen was devastated, but again details are suspiciously absent. There’s no physician’s report in the archives, no description of the birth complications, nothing about whether the child was full-term or premature.
The second pregnancy in 1514 ended similarly. Another stillborn child in late December. Two consecutive December stillbirths. Both sons, both buried quickly with minimal ceremony. The timing alone was suspicious. December births suggested conception in March or April, meaning these pregnancies went nearly full term before ending in death. Full-term stillbirths can happen, but they’re relatively rare, and having two in consecutive years suggested something systemically wrong.
But here’s what makes historians suspicious that something more disturbing was happening. In both cases, foreign ambassadors reported hearing rumors from court servants about unfortunate circumstances surrounding the births. The Venetian ambassador wrote that staff members seemed frightened and unwilling to discuss what had happened. The French envoy mentioned that the queen’s ladies-in-waiting were given unusually generous gifts and bonuses after the 1514 stillbirth. The kind of payments that looked like hush money.
Most tellingly, the Spanish ambassador, who had regular access to Catherine, stopped mentioning her pregnancies in his letters after 1514, as though he’d been instructed to keep them completely confidential, even from Catherine’s own family back in Spain.
Then came 1516 and finally success. Catherine gave birth to a living daughter, Mary, on February 18th. The relief at court was palpable. Even though the child was female and Henry wanted a son, at least Catherine had proven she could carry a pregnancy to term and deliver a living child. Princess Mary was healthy, normal in every way, and would survive to adulthood and eventually become Queen Mary I. But this single success was surrounded by a pattern of failures that was becoming impossible to ignore.
In 1518, Catherine became pregnant again. She was 33 years old now, and this would be her final pregnancy. In November 1518, she delivered a stillborn daughter. This time, there was no public announcement at all. The birth went entirely unrecorded in official chronicles. We only know about it because of private letters between Henry’s counselors and fragmentary evidence in household accounts. The baby’s body was never placed in any royal tomb. There’s no record of where or how it was buried. It simply disappeared from history as though it had never existed.
Six pregnancies in 8 years, one living child, five dead. But the numbers don’t tell the full story. What makes Catherine’s reproductive history truly disturbing isn’t just the failure rate. It’s what happened to the bodies of those dead children and what people who saw them were forbidden to discuss. Because by 1518, the rumors circulating in Europe’s courts had taken on a specific horrifying character. People weren’t just whispering about stillbirths anymore. They were whispering about monsters.
The birth that changed everything happened in the winter of 1513. Catherine was 8 months pregnant, and court physicians were optimistic. She’d carried previous pregnancies to term before, and despite the tragic outcomes, there was hope this time would be different. But when labor began in early December, something went wrong immediately. The birth was difficult, lasting over 18 hours, and Catherine’s screams could be heard throughout the palace.
When the child was finally delivered, witnesses in the outer chambers reported an unusual reaction from inside the birthing room. Not the typical sounds of grief over a stillborn, but something else. Shocked silence, then frantic whispered conversations, then the sound of someone being sick.
Three midwives had been present, along with two physicians. Within an hour, one of the midwives was removed from the palace, not escorted politely, but physically carried out by guards while she sobbed uncontrollably. A physician who had been in the room requested immediate leave and departed London that same night, abandoning his lucrative court position. The senior midwife, a woman named Agnes, who had delivered dozens of noble children, stayed, but refused to discuss what she’d seen.
Years later, on her deathbed in 1563, she finally spoke to a priest during her final confession. That priest’s personal writings survived, though they were kept hidden in church archives for centuries. According to the priest’s account, Agnes described the 1513 stillbirth as “an infant whose form was not as God intended.”
She said the child had been full-sized and fully formed in most ways, but with abnormalities severe enough that everyone in the room immediately understood why it hadn’t survived. She mentioned a skull not properly closed and limbs that were not right.
Modern medical historians reading this centuries-old account believe she was describing what we now call severe neural tube defects, possibly anencephaly or a similar condition where the brain and skull don’t develop properly. Infants born with these conditions rarely survive more than hours. And in Catherine’s case, the child was already dead at birth.
But here’s what makes the priest’s account especially credible. He recorded Agnes saying that this wasn’t the first time she’d seen such problems in royal births and it wouldn’t be the last. She specifically mentioned attending Catherine again in 1514 and seeing similar malformations, though different in nature. This suggests a pattern of severe birth defects across multiple pregnancies. Not just random tragic chance, but something systematic.
Neural tube defects can be caused by various factors: folic acid deficiency, genetic predisposition, or exposure to certain toxins. In Tudor England, none of these causes would have been understood. All they would have seen was a pattern of children born with devastating physical abnormalities. Children whose appearance was disturbing enough that experienced medical professionals wanted them hidden immediately. And this raised a terrifying question for everyone at court. Was Catherine cursed? Or was something medically wrong with the royal bloodline itself?
The religious interpretation of Catherine’s reproductive failures became impossible to ignore by 1527 when Henry VIII began seriously pursuing an annulment. His argument presented to the Pope centered on a passage from the book of Leviticus stating that a man who marries his brother’s widow will be childless. Catherine had previously been married to Henry’s older brother, Arthur, who died in 1502. Henry claimed their marriage had been cursed from the beginning and Catherine’s dead children were proof of God’s displeasure.
It was a convenient theological argument for a king who wanted to marry Anne Boleyn, but it reveals something important about how people at the time understood Catherine’s tragedies. They didn’t have modern genetics or obstetrics. They couldn’t test for blood incompatibilities or chromosomal abnormalities. What they had was pattern recognition, and the pattern was undeniable.
Catherine could get pregnant easily. She’d conceived at least six times, possibly more that went unrecorded, but she couldn’t carry healthy children to term except once. To Tudor minds, this didn’t look like bad luck or medical complications. It looked like divine judgment. And if God was punishing this marriage, then the physical form of that punishment, the dead and deformed infants, were seen as signs and warnings.
This interpretation affected how the bodies were handled. Children who were seen as evidence of God’s curse couldn’t be given normal royal funerals or buried in consecrated ground in prominent locations. They had to be hidden, buried quietly, their existence minimized or erased from official history.
But there’s physical evidence that survived the centuries and tells a different story. Westminster Abbey contains the tomb of Catherine of Aragon. And nearby are several small markers for infants from the Tudor period. One of these, installed long after the original burials, is marked simply “child of Henry and Catherine 1511.” It’s presumed to be Prince Henry, the son who lived 52 days.
But architectural surveys of Westminster Abbey done in the 19th century revealed something strange. Ground-penetrating surveys showed at least three other small burial sites in the vicinity of Catherine’s tomb that have no markers, no records, no official acknowledgement. These anonymous infant graves were buried deeper than normal in simple wooden coffins rather than the lead-lined coffins used for royalty and positioned away from main family groupings. Their orphaned burials present but unacknowledged.
Modern Westminster Abbey officials have refused all requests to investigate these sites, citing preservation concerns and respect for the dead. But historians suspect these are some of Catherine’s lost children, the ones whose births and deaths were never officially recorded, buried in secret and left unmarked. Because acknowledging them would mean acknowledging what they were.
If modern forensic technology could examine these remains, we could finally answer questions that have haunted historians for 500 years. Were these children showing signs of genetic disorders? Were there patterns of skeletal abnormalities that would point to specific medical conditions? The answers are there, buried under stone and sealed by five centuries of deliberate silence.
The secret burials weren’t limited to Westminster. Research into parish records around London and other royal residences has revealed suspicious gaps and irregularities. At Greenwich Palace, where Catherine spent much of her time, church records show payments for burial of a royal infant in 1514, but no corresponding entry in the burial register itself. The entry was removed, carefully cut from the page, leaving only the financial record of payment.
At Richmond Palace, similar evidence exists. A churchwarden’s personal account book from 1515 mentions providing materials for the quiet burial of a child of royal blood in December of that year. Yet no royal birth is recorded in that month in any official chronicle. Catherine was known to be pregnant in 1515, but the outcome doesn’t appear in any court record. The churchwarden’s note suggests the child was born, died, and was buried secretly away from official documentation.
Even more disturbing are the records from Hampton Court, which wouldn’t become a royal palace until later, but was used occasionally by the court in the early 1510s. Local church records there mention an infant of noble birth buried beneath the chapel floor at night in 1513. The entry notes that the burial was conducted with all Christian rites, but without public observation, and that “the child’s appearance necessitated closed casket service.”
This is the closest any surviving document comes to explicitly stating that one of Catherine’s children had physical abnormalities severe enough to require hiding the body even during funeral rights.
Foreign diplomatic correspondence provides some of the most revealing evidence because ambassadors had less reason to participate in English cover-ups. They were reporting to their own governments and trying to assess England’s political stability and succession prospects. A dispatch from the Spanish ambassador to King Ferdinand in 1514 states plainly:
“Her Majesty, the Queen has been delivered of another child that did not live. The circumstances of this birth are such that I cannot detail them in writing, even to your majesty, but I will report verbally when next I have audience.”
This is extraordinary. An ambassador writing to his own king in a theoretically private diplomatic pouch, refusing to describe what happened because it was too sensitive for written communication. What could be so disturbing that it couldn’t be written even in a confidential dispatch?
The Venetian ambassador’s reports are equally suggestive. In early 1515, he wrote:
“The Queen’s ladies whisper of troubling matters regarding her majesty’s recent confinement, but they are sworn to silence, and I can obtain no specific intelligence. The court physicians refuse all discussion of the matter, and several have since left the king’s service.”
Again, the pattern of witnesses leaving their positions and refusing to talk. The French ambassador in a letter to Francis I mentioned that rumors of unfortunate peculiarities surrounded Catherine’s failed pregnancies, but noted that English officials maintain absolute discretion, suggesting matters of state security are involved. Why would Catherine’s stillbirths be matters of state security unless they revealed something politically dangerous, something that could be used against Henry and England by foreign powers?
Now, we need to talk about what modern medicine tells us was actually happening inside Katherine of Aragon’s body, because the truth is less supernatural, but perhaps more tragic than Tudor courtiers imagined. The leading medical theory among historians who have studied Catherine’s case is Rh blood incompatibility, a condition that wasn’t discovered until 1940, but explains her pattern of pregnancies with devastating accuracy.
Here’s how it works. Blood types include not just A, B, AB, and O, but also a factor called Rh, which can be positive or negative. If a mother is Rh-negative and the father is Rh-positive, their children have a 50/50 chance of being Rh-positive. During pregnancy, and especially during delivery, some of the baby’s blood can cross into the mother’s bloodstream.
If the baby is Rh-positive and the mother is Rh-negative, the mother’s immune system recognizes the baby’s blood cells as foreign and creates antibodies against them. This usually doesn’t affect the first pregnancy significantly because the antibody buildup takes time. But in subsequent pregnancies, if the baby is Rh-positive, the mother’s immune system is now primed and attacks the baby’s blood cells aggressively.
This is called hemolytic disease of the newborn, and it gets progressively worse with each pregnancy. The first baby might be healthy. The second might be born with mild anemia. The third could have severe complications. By the fourth, fifth, and sixth pregnancies, the babies often die in utero or are born with such severe hemolytic disease that they cannot survive.
This matches Catherine’s pattern exactly. Her first recorded pregnancy ended in miscarriage, possibly because the antibody response was just beginning. Her second pregnancy produced Prince Henry, who was born alive but died at 52 days old. Infants with hemolytic disease often appear healthy at birth but rapidly decline as complications develop. The third and fourth pregnancies ended in stillbirths, increasingly likely as antibody levels build up.
Then came Mary in 1516. Why did Mary survive when the others didn’t? Possibly because Mary was Rh-negative like her mother, meaning there was no blood type conflict. In families with Rh incompatibility, children who inherit the mother’s negative blood type have normal outcomes, while those who inherit the father’s positive blood type suffer increasingly severe consequences. Catherine’s final pregnancy in 1518 ended in stillbirth, likely another Rh-positive child attacked by the now massive antibody load in Catherine’s system.
But here’s where the medical explanation becomes truly disturbing. Severe hemolytic disease doesn’t just kill babies. It causes specific visible physical abnormalities. Babies with this condition often develop hydrops fetalis, where fluid accumulates throughout the body causing severe swelling. They can appear grotesqually enlarged with swollen abdomens, distorted features, and skin that takes on unusual colors, yellow or even greenish from severe jaundice.
Their skulls can appear misshapen from fluid accumulation and brain damage. Their internal organs, especially the liver and spleen, become massively enlarged and can actually be visible through the distended abdomen. If you were a Tudor midwife or physician, and you delivered an infant with severe hydrops fetalis, what would you see? A child, full-sized but monstrously swollen with discolored skin, distorted features, and a grotesqually enlarged belly.
You would have no framework for understanding this was a blood disorder. No vocabulary to explain why this child looked so profoundly wrong. All you would know is that the baby looked unnatural, cursed, against nature.
The Latin phrase “contra naturam natus” that appeared in that fragment of medical records makes perfect sense in this context. Physicians were describing what they saw as accurately as they could with the knowledge they had. They weren’t wrong to say these children appeared abnormal. They were just wrong about the cause. It wasn’t divine curse or demonic influence. It was immunology.
Catherine’s own body, trying to protect itself from what it perceived as foreign invaders, was killing her children one by one. And because the condition is progressive, each pregnancy after the first Rh-positive child would have produced increasingly severe abnormalities. By her final pregnancies, the babies would have been so severely affected that their appearance would have been truly shocking even to experienced medical professionals. This explains the pattern of secrecy, the destroyed records, the traumatized witnesses, and the hidden burials. Court officials weren’t covering up evidence of divine judgment or supernatural horror. They were covering up physical evidence that contradicted the official story of normal stillbirths and infant mortality.
But there’s another medical theory that some historians consider even more disturbing, and it points the finger not at Catherine, but at Henry VIII. Evidence suggests Henry may have been infected with syphilis, possibly as early as his youth. Syphilis was epidemic in Europe during this period, often called the great pox, and it was not uncommon among nobility who had multiple sexual partners. Henry was known to have had mistresses before and during his marriage to Catherine. If he contracted syphilis and transmitted it to Catherine, it would explain her reproductive disasters with brutal clarity.
Congenital syphilis passed from mother to infant during pregnancy causes a horrific range of birth defects and complications. Infected infants might be stillborn or die shortly after birth. Those who survive often show severe abnormalities, skeletal deformities, especially in the skull and long bones, skin lesions and rashes, enlarged livers and spleens, profound neurological damage. The disease attacks developing tissue, causing malformations that would have looked monstrous to Tudor observers.
Infants with congenital syphilis can have what’s called saddle nose, where the bridge of the nose collapses, giving the face a disturbing flattened appearance. They can develop saber shins, where the bones of the lower legs bow outward grotesqually. Their skulls can show abnormal development with prominent foreheads and unusual shapes. The most severely affected infants are born looking profoundly abnormal, and most don’t survive infancy.
The syphilis theory has supporting evidence beyond Catherine’s failed pregnancies. Henry’s later wives also struggled to carry pregnancies to term. Anne Boleyn had at least two miscarriages or stillbirths after giving birth to Elizabeth. Jane Seymour successfully delivered Edward, but died shortly after, possibly from complications related to infection. Katherine Howard and Catherine Parr both failed to produce children despite being young and presumably fertile. If Henry was the source of infection, it would explain why multiple different women all experienced similar reproductive failures when married to him.
Additionally, Henry’s own health problems in later life are consistent with tertiary syphilis: the leg ulcers that never healed, the personality changes and violent mood swings, the progressive mental deterioration. Tudor physicians would have recognized syphilis in adults. They called it the pox and treated it with mercury, which Henry is known to have received. But they might not have made the connection between the king’s disease and the queen’s reproductive failures. Especially since admitting that connection would have been political suicide.
If this theory is correct, the truly horrifying aspect is that the coverup wasn’t just about protecting Catherine’s reputation or avoiding religious interpretations. It was about protecting Henry himself from accusations that he was infecting his wives and killing his own children through disease. The deformed infants weren’t just evidence of medical tragedy. They were evidence of the king’s corruption, literal physical proof that something was rotten at the heart of the Tudor dynasty.
Modern forensic analysis could potentially determine which theory is correct or whether both conditions were present simultaneously. Rh incompatibility and congenital syphilis aren’t mutually exclusive. Catherine could have been Rh-negative and also infected with syphilis from Henry, creating a double assault on her pregnancies.
DNA testing of remains could detect bacterial DNA from syphilis infection. Bone analysis could reveal skeletal abnormalities consistent with either condition. Blood type could potentially be determined from preserved tissue, confirming whether Rh incompatibility was a factor. But all of this requires access to the remains, and that’s where the 500-year-old coverup continues to function.
The Church of England and Westminster Abbey have consistently refused permission for any invasive investigation of Tudor-era graves. The official reasons are preservation concerns and religious respect for the dead. The unofficial reason suspected by many historians is that the truth might be too politically sensitive even now.
Proving that Catherine’s children died from Rh incompatibility would be historically significant but not politically explosive. Proving they died from congenital syphilis passed from Henry VIII would fundamentally alter how we understand the Tudor dynasty. It would confirm that England’s most famous king was killing his own children with disease while blaming and discarding wives for failing to produce heirs. That’s a narrative with uncomfortable implications even 5 centuries later.
By 1527, Catherine of Aragon was 42 years old and had not been pregnant for 9 years. Whatever had been killing her children, whether blood incompatibility or disease or both, no longer mattered because she was past childbearing age. Henry’s patience had run out years earlier. He wanted a son. He wanted Anne Boleyn, and he wanted Catherine gone.
The annulment proceedings began officially in 1527, though Henry had been planning them for at least a year before. His argument to the Pope was based on Leviticus and the claim that his marriage to his brother’s widow had been cursed by God from the start. He pointed to Catherine’s dead children as proof.
The pope, however, was in a difficult political position. Catherine was the aunt of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, who had significant influence over the papacy. Annulling the marriage would be a diplomatic disaster. So, the Pope delayed, investigated, and delayed some more.
For 6 years, Catherine fought to preserve her marriage. Not because she loved Henry. By this point, he was openly hostile to her, but because she understood what was at stake. If the marriage was annulled, her daughter Mary would be declared illegitimate and removed from succession. Everything Catherine had suffered, all those dead children, all those years of pain and humiliation would be for nothing if Mary lost her claim to the throne. So Catherine stood her ground, insisted her marriage was legitimate and refused to accept annulment.
The final humiliation came in 1533 when Henry broke from the Roman Catholic Church entirely, declared himself supreme head of the Church of England and annulled his own marriage without papal approval. Catherine was stripped of her title as queen, reduced to Princess Dowager of Wales based on her first marriage to Arthur. She was separated from her daughter Mary and sent to live in increasingly remote and uncomfortable residences.
Henry married Anne Boleyn who was already pregnant. The hope was that Anne would succeed where Catherine had failed, producing the male heir that had eluded them.
But here’s the tragic irony. Anne’s first child was a healthy daughter, Elizabeth. Her subsequent pregnancies ended in miscarriage or still birth. The pattern was repeating. Henry would go through four more wives after Anne. Jane Seymour managed to produce one son, Edward, but died shortly after childbirth. Anne of Cleves was never consummated and quickly annulled. Catherine Howard was e
