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the country, leaving orders that no one who had been in contact with the disease should approach him. By September he had grown sufficiently alarmed at the spreading plague to decamp from the body of the court, taking only the queen and a few attendants to a remote location. By December the worst of the outbreak was past but, even so, Christmas was kept very quietly that year in order to minimise any risk of infection.
    If Henry needed anyone to console him in his time of peril it seems he looked to Katherine. Hopes that the queen might be with child in August 1517 proved unfounded, but Henry clearly persevered, for by April 1518 she was pregnant again. It is a sad irony that Katherine’s happy condition was probably the impetus for her husband to seek solace in the arms of Elizabeth Blount. Henry had become increasingly solicitous of his wife’s precious pregnancies, advising Wolsey that ‘about this time is partly of her dangerous times, and because of that I would remove her as little as I may now’. Having reached a respectable eighteen years old, Elizabeth was now a far more viable candidate for one of those pleasant interludes Henry seems to have indulged in when Katherine was pregnant. Given that Fitzroy was six years old in June 1525, it is quite feasible that he was conceived at some point between April and November 1518.
    All the evidence suggests this was not an affair of any duration, but a short-term liaison with an unexpectedly pleasant result. That Mary Boleyn was apparently the king’s mistress for some time without such a tell-tale result is not necessarily a reflection on Henry’s abilities. He was perfectly capable of making Katherine pregnant sooner or later, the real danger came in the latter months as she struggled to carry the child to term. If Mary had miscarried the king’s child, Henry may not have been so convinced that her sister would present him with a son. Mary’s two children, Henry (generally thought to have been born in 1524) and Catherine (usually supposed to have been born in 1526) are evidence that she was not barren. The fact that they were not followed by a brood of offspring, the ‘every year a child’ that was the lament of many hard pressed families, tends to suggest another solution. Indeed, if Mary had ever been anywhere near as sexually active as her reputation suggests, she must surely have successfully practised some form of contraception.
    Although this was frowned upon by the Church, single people did seek to avoid unwanted pregnancy and even married couples might take steps to space their families as Mary seems to have done. Remedies to promote fertility, using certain times in a woman’s cycle and certain sexual positions, were common. It took little imagination to realise that the inversion of these ideas might hinder conception. Though moralists argued against the ‘sin of Onan’ (who in Genesis cast his seed on the ground), the practice of coitus interruptus, was well known. Certainly, Catherine Howard was well aware that there were ways and means that ‘a woman might meddle with a man and yet conceive no child unless she would her-self’. Since Mary was actually supposed to be a respectable married woman during her affair with Henry she may have been reluctant to present her new husband with a bastard, even if it was the king’s.
    It is doubtful that Elizabeth had managed to spend the last six years at court without broadening her education a little, but rather than being an indication of promiscuity, the fact that she bore the king a son actually strengthens the argument that she was not accustomed to sleeping around. If she had any other suitors there is no record of them. Such things are, of course, not easy to ascertain. Jane Seymour was twenty-seven and in all likelihood a spotless virgin when she married Henry VIII. Catherine Howard at nineteen had amassed considerably more experience. Yet given the lack