I want to bet 1 million dollars that he had syphilis or some other sexually transmitted disease….

and my belief is mutually exclusive of the fertility of his wives and his ability to produce a legitimate child with a 'y' chromosome.

#1. He slept with a lot of women

#2. Women weren't as virtuous at court as I once thought they were, so THEY slept around

#3. He and other peerage travelled a lot, inside and outside of the country, so he(or they) could have picked up something anywhere

#4. If I knew a man who had relations with as many women as he did as indiscriminately as he did, I would swear that he had a disease now, here in the yr 2011, and we have easy access to condoms….why won't people believe that Henry would have a disease too?

All of that power, wealth and merrymaking that they did back then…? You gotta be kidding me if someone would think that he didn't have one…..

I don't think it has anything to do with his ability to have male kids, because he had 2 that we know of, and many more kids that we don't know of…

I don't think Henry had syphilis either; apparently his doctors notes show that he was never treated with the favoured remedies for syphilis of the time such as mercury for skin lesions.  Which makes me think his leg ulcer was something different entirely.  I do know Kim, that there were a few times when he was older that the ulcer closed up causing Henry horrendous pain and that one time it was so bad he turned purple in the face.  When it flared up the wound had to be drained regularly.  The invention of antibiotics is an incredible thing!

Of course that doesn't mean he didn't have some other STD; gonorrhea, for example, has been known about since ancient times.  Of course without an exhumation we'll never know definitively, though how much information you get could from 500 year old bones I don't know.  Even if they carried out such testing it wouldn't surprise me if they weren't able to prove conclusively one way or the other that Henry indeed suffered from syphilis or some other STD.

What I keep coming back to is Henry's fall from his horse in 1536.  He was knocked unconscious for two hours and it was feared for his life.  It's completely possible he suffered concussion and perhaps even a slight shift in personality.  It's also possible it re-opened an old wound that he may have got in a previous fall in around 1524 which then never healed properly and became ulcerous.

I've also read that he may have had something called osteomylitis which I think (I can't be sure, I don't know enough about it!) may interfere in the healing of wounds. 

Apparently there's a book held by the British Library containing prescriptions for Henrys own use; some of them are even said to have been thought of by Henry himself.  There's a very good book 'The Last Days of Henry VIII' by Robert Hutchinson which goes into detail about Henrys health and decline as well as the power struggle at court in the last few years of his reign.  The author comes to the conclusion that Henry probably didn't have syphilis and that his leg ulcers were due to wounds originally got in the 1520s from jousting accidents and exacerbated by the 1536 fall where they probably developed into varicose ulcers.  He also makes the suggestion that in one of Henrys first jousting accidents his tibia bone was damaged and subsequently got infected.  Henrys ulcers were mainly on the thigh, not usually a site of skin lesions caused by syphilis.

You're right though Nikki, I would imagine Henry's doctors and physicians would have to be VERY careful about how they worded things – Lord Montague was executed two months after Henrys 1536 fall for predicting the king's death! 

Syphilis was known and treated at the time with mercury (BTW, Francis I was riddled with it and had three sons survive at least until their teens), but there is no record of mercury being used on Henry, as there are records of mercury being used on Francis. Also, Mary Boleyn was alleged to be Francis I's lover also, but she apparently showed no signs of syphilis herself, nor did her children.

Osteomyelitis is a bone infection that can be caused by an injury to the bone not healing correctly (say, a splinter of a poorly set bone sticking out and causing constant irritation to the soft tissues around it). This is definitely a possibility with Henry and his leg ulcer.

It's also quite possible that he had adult-onset diabetes, which also inhibits healing, and would have made his leg ulcer(s) worse.

He also had recurrent bouts of malarial fever.

He may have had a head injury from his 1536 jousting accident that may have caused brain injury and personality changes. Add no antibiotics and inadequate pain management and you get a tyrant.

I had a coworker who had been in a car accident with his wife and they both suffered head injuries. Although both fully recovered, he said they had both undergone personality changes as a result. And their personalities were now totally incompatible and the marriage didn't survive. He said it wasn't the fault of either of them, just one more bit of damage inflicted on them by the accident. He also said it had taken several years of reflection and therapy to let go of the guilt and anger over his marriage failing, though.