But when did he catch it? He does not seem to have _obviously_ infected any of his wives, so far as we can tell, so the inference is that he must have caught it several years before he married Catherine of Aragon. Well, he married her when he was little more than eighteen, so he must have caught it when he was thirteen or fourteen, at about the very earliest that a gay and showy boy of the Renaissance could manage to catch it. Then probably the primary lesion, so apparently innocent and harmless, healed up under the influence of some simple ointment,[3] just as it does to-day in thousands of men, who bitterly rue later the one little slip that was to cause them all their woes—and Henry went his life through, probably having quite forgotten the trifling incident. To this day we find that those cases of syphilis which are trifling at first, are just the very cases which, under the influence of worry, lack of treatment, or overstrain, go so tragically wrong at the end. The somewhat wicked pun is common among medical men: “Five minutes with Venus may mean a lifetime with Mercury,” a specimen of sardonic jesting with death that so appeals to many doctors, however kindly and serious they may really be. In no way can we better trace his degeneration than in his treatment of his wives; so I propose to describe it alone of all his innumerable misdeeds. Firstly, it is a great mistake to suppose that the only nervous result of syphilis is general paralysis. Among neurotic people it may cause serious mental troubles although it may not affect the actual brain-tissue so far as we can see with a microscope. As this is perhaps not generally known, I quote a sentence from the _Oxford Textbook of the Practice of Medicine_, by various authors, published in 1922. “Such patients are generally psychasthenic, ill-balanced and degenerate.” The writer is speaking of the effects of syphilis upon mental diseases, and its propensity to cause “phobias” and “obsessions.” His first wife was Catherine of Aragon, who was some six years older than himself. After a fierce struggle with the pope the obliging Archbishop Cranmer pronounced a divorce between them. Martin Hume considers that this was entirely for personal reasons, because she had lost her personal charms, and because Henry had fallen in love with Anne Boleyn. Probably there was a great deal of the personal element in it, and it is quite possible that if Catherine had been willing to go into a convent and leave her husband to another woman—he actually proposed that the pope should allow him two wives—there might not have been the divorce that has been fruitful of such stupendous results for England. Catherine seems to have been a woman much under the influence of Spanish religiosity, and undoubtedly put up a strenuous fight to keep her husband; as was only right and proper. Probably the real degeneration in the king was yet to come; the spirochæte was still biding its time.