Catholic Medical Quarterly Volume 75(3) August 2025
Was the Break-Up of the Catholic Church in England in the 16th Century caused by Syphilis?
Dr Michael Straiton
This essay focuses on the medical background of the Tudors, presenting a strong argument that the English Reformation and the break-up of the Catholic Church in England from Rome was a direct consequence of King Henry VIII suffering from syphilis.
In
1492 Christopher Columbus set out Westwards from Spain in the hope of
finding a new trade route with Asia. The exploration included three ships
and a good company of sailors, landing in the islands that we now call the
Bahamas. The generally accepted hypothesis is that many of these sailors
cohabited with local, indigenous women and picked up a new disease -
syphilis which was endemic in the Americas and brought it back to
Europe. The first documented outbreak in Europe took place in 1495 when
troops serving Charles VIII of France invaded Italy. The story is that the
Spanish mercenaries fighting for Charles had a retinue of prostitutes and
it could be that from this epicentre, the disease swept across the
continent.
Henry VII, King England and Lord of Ireland died in April 1509. His heir, Henry VIII was only 17 but his youthful vigour and his dual Yorkist and Lancastrian blood made him the perfect emblem for the Tudor dynasty. He was dashing, a keen sportsman, well educated, and a supporter of the arts. He was also a loyal Catholic. Henry, with his secretary Thomas More, wrote a traditional defense of the Seven Sacraments of the Catholic Church, dedicating it to Pope Leo Xl in 1521. The King’s reward from the Pope was the title ‘Fidei Defensor’ - Defender of the Faith.
By the late 1530s however, Henry VIII was no longer an athletic ‘Renaissance Prince’ but an obese, tyrannical monarch. The most common argument for this change of personality focuses on an infamous jousting accident in 1536 when he fell from his horse and injured his leg. The resulting painful and ongoing ulcer was blamed for his irritability, which was set against the context of his developing conflict with the Pope as a result of his decision to marry Anne Boleyn without the Pope’s consent.
I believe that there is significant evidence to suggest that Henry VIII had contracted syphilis and that this disease was a strong influence on his change in personality and on his actions, which. determined the break up of the Catholic Church in England. and Wales, with a significant effect in Ireland as well.
Syphilis is a highly infectious bacterium, Treponema pallidum, and it spread like wildfire, far and wide. By the mid-16th Century syphilis lurked everywhere in Europe. In 1497 Aberdeen Council had been the first civic body in the British Isles to implement regulations to tackle the ‘Great Pox’ (commonly understood to be syphilis), which indicates that there was a high level of infection in the city at this time.
By 1547 a quarter of the patients in St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London were syphilitic. In his book ‘Syphilis in Shakespeare’s England’, Johnannes Fabricius states that an estimated 20% of the population of London were infected with syphilis in the 16th Century and that literary and dramatic fraternities were particularly high risk groups, possibly connected to the proximity of theatres and bordellos. As a young man Henry VIII is believed to have encouraged an artistic environment at his court, becoming a patron to visual artists and writers alike. Given that this was a time in which the promiscuity of Kings was condoned, it is not inconceivable that his court was vulnerable to the disease.
What are the indications that Henry VIII had syphilis? In his book ‘Four Princes’ John Julius Norwich states that by the end of 1545 the King’s health had deteriorated significantly, that his weight was obese and that he had a festering abscess on the front of his thigh, which had plagued him since 1528. This presents as a syphilitic gumma, pathognomonic of tertiary syphilis, which would explain his difficulty around fertility and his children’s pathology. We don’t know how many times his first wife Catherine of Aragon became pregnant but she suffered multiple stillbirths between 1510 and 1518. A son, Prince Henry, Duke of Cornwall was born in 1511 but died only 52 days later. Catherine bore a daughter Mary in 1516, who herself developed characteristics of congenital syphilis, including a saddle nose, scanty hair and a history of multiple stillbirths.
Henry’s
anxiety to produce a healthy, male heir with Catherine lead him to a
liaison with Anne Boleyn which precipitated the devastating conflict with
the Pope, who refused to grant an annulment for his marriage to Catherine.
Anne Boleyn, in turn, produced another daughter, Elizabeth. Anne’s seeming
inability to secure a male child led Henry to have her executed, enabling
him to move to a third wife, Jane Seymour. Jane did give Henry the boy he
had been longing for and Edward succeeded to the throne, after the death
of his father, aged 9 but died aged 15. The general conjecture is that his
death was either due to tuberculosis, arsenic poisoning or syphilis.
In his midlife, Henry VIII showed significant changes to his personality, becoming voracious in his appetite for wealth and in his murderous zeal, which could be indicative again of the tertiary stage of syphilis. In 1534, the act of Supremacy broke the 900 year attachment to the Pope in Rome and made Henry VIII the head of the Church in England. Despite him remaining a Catholic and continuing to attend Mass in his private life, this public declaration made the Catholic church illegal in his realm.
From 1536-40 he ordered the Dissolution of the Monasteries in England and Wales, with some 800 abbeys, priories and monasteries closed and land surrendered to the Crown. The shattered remains of monasteries such as Binham Priory, Buildwas Abbey, Gloucester Greyfriars, White Ladies nunnery and Shap Abbey are testament to a process where the lead on the roofs, the silver and gold plate and other fine goods were removed. The residents were expelled and the lands sold, with some buildings adapted for private use and others left to the elements. For centuries the Pope had received annates - funds for the upkeep of the HoIy See :and these funds were now acquired directly by the King.
There is little evidence to suggest that Henry’s Dissolution of the Monasteries was fuelled by a zeal for the ideas of the Reformation coming from Luther in Germany. They were decisions fuelled by his personality and political insecurity. Furthermore, his actions went beyond the pragmatic, to become cruel. People who frustrated his authority met vicious retribution and death. These included two of his wives -Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard - his political advisers including Sir Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher who both opposed Henry’s attack on the Catholic Church and paid the consequences and Carthusian Monks who refused the Oath of Supremacy and were tortured, burned at the stake and left to starve to death in cells.
To my mind, Henry VIll’s vicious and determined actions against the Catholic Church indicate the tertiary stage of syphilis, while the evidence of his physical condition and long term problems around fertility both strengthen the case. If the King was syphilitic, it is hard to avoid the direct connection between the disease and the fate of the Catholic Church in the British Isles.
The difficult fact in my hypothesis is that Elizabeth I, Henry’s second daughter, did not suffer from syphilis and reigned for a full term of 40 years, proving that she was free of ‘The Great Pox’. Full of spite against Anne Boleyn, Henry fostered rumours that Elizabeth was the child of one of Anne’s lovers, Mark Smeaton, a musician and groom in the chamber of the Royal Household, who was executed with Anne Boleyn. Mary Tudor stated that her half-sister resembled Mark Smeaton. Could it be that Elizabeth was not a legitimate daughter of the King? Henry certainly ignored Elizabeth. He gave her a comfortable household, but denied her his company. When Elizabeth I died on 24th March 1603, there were no male Tudor heirs and the Tudor Dynasty came to an end, to be replaced by that of the Stuarts.
Alas, The Great Pox is still with us —8,692 cases of syphilis were reported in the U.K. in 2022 according to the UK Health Security Agency.
Dr Michael Straiton. June 2024