Scientists at Southern Methodist University in the United States link the difficulties Henry VIII's wives had in carrying children to the presence in the king's blood of a particular antigen, belonging to that group of peptides on red blood cells which, w

Scientists at Southern Methodist University in the United States link the difficulties Henry VIII's wives had in carrying children to the presence in the king's blood of a particular antigen, belonging to that group of peptides on red blood cells which, when present in a man's blood, block the possibility of a woman with the same antigen bearing his child. The birth of a child in such a situation is possible if the mother's blood is negative for this antigen. The difficulty is that during pregnancy the woman's body begins to produce its own antibodies, which in subsequent pregnancies pass into the placenta and destroy the foetus.

Such a hypothesis explains why only three wives managed to carry a healthy child for Henry VIII, while every subsequent attempt to bear one proved unsuccessful for the couple. The question is: where should one look for the origins of this hereditary phenomenon of Fat Harry?

The donor of so unfavourable an anomaly may have been Henry's maternal great-grandmother Jacquetta of Luxembourg, who gave the world 14 children, all of whom survived. One of Jacquetta's six sons died in childhood, and the other five were childless – one, it is true, was a priest, and another unmarried. An interesting hypothesis, though an ambiguous one. Its authors do not regard the fertility of Jacquetta's daughters as a refutation: many of her male descendants had trouble continuing the line.

Such a tragic fate is not typical even of the sixteenth century, when child mortality was undoubtedly high, yet the rate at which pregnancies were carried to term, even among the poorer strata of the population, substantially exceeded the ratio of successful births to pregnancies among Henry's wives. On the whole, given the child mortality of the day, the life expectancy of infants allowed most of them to live to baptism, unlike the offspring of Henry VIII who died in infancy.

If Henry inherited the antigen along this line, he received it through his mother from her mother, the queen consort Elizabeth Woodville. Lady Woodville had many children in two marriages; in the second, to Edward IV, ten were born. Of the three sons of Elizabeth and Edward, two died at 13 and 10 years old, and one at the age of one. Of the six sisters of Henry's mother, several were childless for various reasons; one, Anne of York, after her first successful births lost two sons in infancy and had one stillborn child.

Pursuing the medical line of the antigen, the researchers note that its carriers often suffer from problems with the heart, the blood and the nervous system, and that after the age of 40 their health deteriorates rapidly.

One of the probable causes of Henry VIII's death is precisely cardiovascular in nature. It is known that he fell suddenly ill after injuring his leg in a fall from his horse in 1536, when the horse also fell on him and he lay unconscious for several hours. A number of historians call this event the starting point of the king's madness, as the result of a blow to the head. The wound on his leg, which would not heal, also played its fatal part in the rapid decline of the Tudor's general condition, as he became more immobile with every year. The McLeod syndrome described here causes both muscle weakness and the resulting atrophy of the limbs.

None of Henry VIII's sons lived to reach majority, and both daughters remained childless, so the hereditary character of the ailment cannot be proved from his progeny, although it is hard not to notice that Bloody Mary was quite a piece of work.