A #WildCard post is an opportunity to have fun by testing theories that there is no actual historical evidence for, but nonetheless are enjoyable to think about.  They should be taken with more than a pinch of salt and even the authors themselves do not necessarily agree with them.

Previously I’ve written about the likelihood of Katherine of Aragon emerging from her first marriage ‘untouched by man’.  Weighing up the evidence available, I concluded that when she wed Henry VIII, she did so with virginity intact.

As I drafted the piece a thought struck me.  A thought backed up by absolutely no evidence, but one I think worthy of a #WildCard’.

When Prince Arthur died, there was a gap of six months before his brother Henry’s creation as Prince of Wales.  Ostensibly, this was in order to be sure that Katherine was not pregnant with Arthur’s child who would have taken precedence in the succession, even if born posthumously.   However, despite this formality, the powers that be seemed relatively content that the marriage had never been consummated.  Indeed, it is said that Henry VII only agreed to the second marriage on that premise.

This got me thinking.  Why was Henry VII so confident that his son had never fully performed his marital duties?  Teenage sex was not always encouraged in Tudor times but there was a general expectation the couple would at least consummate the union.  Katherine’s senior Spanish lady-in-waiting had testified to a lack of activity – but would that really have been enough for the ever paranoid and habitually suspicious Henry?

I think not.

Henry VII was paranoid by nature and his paranoia was not without a foundation in logic.  The Tudor dynasty hung by a thread – or at least, it felt like it did.  If the King married the widowed Katherine to his second son and the marriage was later questioned, it could place his future heirs in great jeopardy.  True, there may have been Papal dispensation for the marriage regardless of the circumstances, but as later events showed, if the political climate was right, this could be done away with.

Instead it seems more likely that Henry VII would not have agreed to the marriage unless he had a cast iron guarantee that the deed was not done.

Could it be that Prince Arthur, despite his lusty brags to his friends, had never intended to consummate his marriage in his early years?  Could it be that he was actually under instruction not to?

History is full of things we don’t know, but for a moment, let’s stand back and look at some of the things that we do.

Sex in this time was seen as potentially dangerous for young people.  We know that Henry was paranoid about losing his heir.  We also know that in domestic matters, the King listened and acted on the advice of his mother.

Lady Margaret Beaufort is famous in history for her status as a child bride.  Married at 12 to a man twice her age, she gave birth to her only child when she was only just a teenager.  A lack of later issue despite two further marriages suggests that this scared her physically; other evidence leads us to believe that it scared her emotionally.

When her granddaughter and namesake was pledged to be married to the Scottish King, her heart went out to her.  Not naïve to the importance of political manoeuvrings and dynastic alliances, Margaret would have supported the match, but she pleaded with her son not to dispatch her north of the boarder too early, reminding him that the Scots King ‘would not wait and harm her.’

Is it possible that she intervened again?  Had this woman of great compassion and maternal instinct taken pity on her future granddaughter-in-law even before she met her?

The circumstances were not the same.  The marriage of both Margarets had been to much older men.  Katherine and Arthur were similar in age, but nonetheless it deserves thinking about.

Margaret, I am confident, would not have broached the subject directly with Arthur.  I don’t know much about their relationship, but it would have hardly been a conversation that would dignify the King’s Mother.  Instead, it is more logical to suspect a conversation took place between the great matriarch, her son and Elizabeth of York.  Perhaps the King himself then broached the subject with his heir-apparent and it was this conversation, and subsequent ones, that gave the King confidence that the marriage was one of legal union alone.

Let me reiterate, there is no evidence for this – but that’s part of the fun of the #WildCard posts.