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KS2 History learning resources for adults, children, parents and teachers.

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Read the fascinating story of King Henry VIII, founder of the Anglican Church (Church of England), and first king to authorize an English language Bible.

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Henry VIII: Henry VIII, king of England (1509-47) who presided over the beginnings of the English Renaissance and the English Reformation.

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The Life of King Henry VIII (1491-1547). Biography of Henry Tudor, King of England.

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Biography of King Henry VIII of England, the Tudor monarch whose six wives had to fear execution, divorce, and death; father of Queen Elizabeth I and 'Bloody Mary'

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Contents

1. Henry VIII: Early Life

2. Henry VIII: First Years as King

3. Henry VIII: Dissolving a Marriage, Splitting the Church

4. Henry VIII: More Marriages and Deaths

5. Henry VIII: Death and Legacy

King Henry VIII (1491-1547) ruled England for 36 years, presiding over sweeping changes that brought his nation into the Protestant Reformation. He famously married a series of six wives in his search for political alliance, marital bliss and a healthy male heir. His desire to annul his first marriage without papal approval led to the creation of a separate Church of England. Of his marriages, two ended in annulment, two in natural deaths and two with his wives' beheadings for adultery and treason. His children Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I would each take their turn as England's monarch.

Henry VIII: Early Life

Henry was born January 28, 1491, the second son of Henry VII, the first English ruler from the House of Tudor. While his older brother Arthur was being prepared for the throne, Henry was steered toward a church career, with a broad education in theology, music, languages, poetry and sports.

Did you know? An accomplished musician, Henry VIII of England wrote a song entitled "Pastime With Good Company" that was popular throughout Renaissance Europe.

Arthur had been betrothed since age 2 to Catherine of Aragon, the daughter of the Spanish rulers Ferdinand and Isabella, and in November of 1501 the teenage couple were married. Months later, Arthur died of a sudden illness. Henry became next in line for the throne and in 1503 was betrothed to his brother's widow.

Henry VIII: First Years as King

Henry VIII took the throne at age 17 and married Catherine of Aragon six weeks later. Over the next 15 years, while Henry fought three wars with France, Catherine bore him three sons and three daughters, all but one of whom died in infancy. The sole survivor was Mary (later Mary I), born in 1516.

Henry was an active king in those years, keeping a festive court, hunting, jousting, writing and playing music. He issued a book-length attack on Martin Luther's church reforms that earned him the title "Defender of the Faith" from Pope Leo X. But the lack of a male heir-especially after he fathered a healthy illegitimate son, Henry FitzRoy, in 1519-gnawed at the king.

Henry VIII: Dissolving a Marriage, Splitting the Church

By the 1520s, Henry had become infatuated with Anne Boleyn, a young woman in his wife's entourage. He also worried that his marriage to Catherine had been cursed by God because of the Old Testament ban on marrying the widow of one's brother. The king decided to seek a papal annulment that would free him to remarry.

With the assistance of his powerful adviser Cardinal Wolsey, Henry petitioned Pope Clement VII but was rebuffed due to pressure from Catherine's nephew, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Wolsey was forced from power for his failure and died in 1630 awaiting trial for treason.

With the backing of the English parliament and clergy, Henry ultimately decided that he didn't need the pope's permission to rule on issues affecting the Church of England. In 1533 Henry and Anne Boleyn were married, and their daughter Elizabeth was born. Mary was declared illegitimate and Elizabeth named his heir. England's monasteries were closed and in most cases sold off to add to Henry's wealth.

Henry VIII: More Marriages and Deaths

In January of 1536 Henry was unhorsed and injured during a jousting tournament. When news of his accident reached the pregnant Anne, she miscarried, delivering a stillborn son. Henry then spurned her, turning his affections to another woman of his court, Jane Seymour. Within six months he had executed Anne for treason and incest and married Jane, who quickly gave him a son (the future Edward IV) but died two weeks later.

Henry's fourth marriage bore similarities to his first. Anne of Cleves was a political bride, chosen to cement an alliance with her brother, the ruler of a Protestant duchy in Germany. The marriage only lasted a few days before Henry had it annulled. He then married Catherine Howard, but two years later she too was beheaded for treason and adultery.

In the last years of his reign Henry grew moody, obese and suspicious, hobbled by personal intrigues and by the persistent leg wound from his jousting injury. His final marriage, to the widow Catherine Parr in 1543, saw his reconciliation with Mary and Elizabeth, who were restored to the line of succession.

Henry VIII: Death and Legacy

Henry VIII died on his 56th birthday, January 28, 1547. His 9-year-old son Edward VI succeeded him as king but died six years later. Mary I spent her five-year reign steering England back into the Catholic fold, but Elizabeth I, the longest-reigning of the Tudor monarchs, re-entrenched her father's religious reforms.

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Henry VIII: Early Life Henry VIII: First Years as King Henry VIII: Dissolving a Marriage, Splitting the Church Henry VIII: More Marriages and Deaths Henry VIII: Death and Legacy King Henry VIII (1491-1547) ruled England for 36 years, presiding over sweeping changes that brought his nation into the Protestant Reformation.

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'My, you ought to seen old Henry the Eight when he was in bloom. He was a blossom. He used to marry a new wife every day, and chop off her head next morning. And he would do it just as indifferent as if he was ordering up eggs. 'Fetch up Nell Gwynn,' he says. They fetch her up. Next morning, 'Chop off her head!' And they chop it off. 'Fetch up Jane Shore,' he says; and up she comes. Next morning, 'Chop off her head' - and they chop it off. 'Ring up Fair Rosamun.' Fair Rosamun answers the bell. Next morning, 'Chop off her head.' And he made every one of them tell him a tale every night; and he kept that up till he had hogged a thousand and one tales that way, and then he put them all in a book, and called it Domesday Book - which was a good name and stated the case. You don't know kings, Jim, but I know them; and this old rip of ourn is one of the cleanest I've struck in history. Well, Henry he takes a notion he wants to get up some trouble with this country. How does he go at it - give notice? - give the country a show? No. All of a sudden he heaves all the tea in Boston Harbor overboard, and whacks out a declaration of independence, and dares them to come on. That was his style - he never give anybody a chance. He had suspicions of his father, the Duke of Wellington. Well, what did he do? - ask him to show up? No - drownded him in a butt of mamsey, like a cat. Spose people left money laying around where he was - what did he do? He collared it. Spose he contracted to do a thing; and you paid him, and didn't set down there and see that he done it - what did he do? He always done the other thing. Spose he opened his mouth - what then? If he didn't shut it up powerful quick, he'd lose a lie, every time. That's the kind of a bug Henry was....
All I say is, kings is kings, and you got to make allowances. Take them all around, they're a mighty ornery lot. It's the way they're raised.'

I have no fear but when you heard that our Prince, now Henry the Eighth, whom we may call our Octavius, had succeeded to his father's throne, all your melancholy left you at once. What may you not promise yourself from a Prince with whose extraordinary and almost Divine character you are acquainted? When you know what a hero he now shows himself, how wisely he behaves, what a lover he is of justice and goodness, what affection he bears to the learned I will venture to swear that you will need no wings to make you fly to behold this new and auspicious star. If you could see how all the world here is rejoicing in the possession of so great a Prince, how his life is all their desire, you could not contain your tears for joy. The heavens laugh, the earth exults, all things are full of milk, of honey, of nectar! Avarice is expelled the country. Liberality scatters wealth with bounteous hand. Our King does not desire gold or gems or precious metals, but virtue, glory, immortality. Lord Mountjoy to Erasmus, 1509

A brief discussion of his personality and historical importance
How can one adequately describe Henry's personality? Imagine yourself as Henry VIII, the second son suddenly yanked into the spotlight by your older brother's death. Sheltered and smothered by a father suddenly aware that he has just one heir left; handsome and intelligent and, by turns, both recklessly indulged and then denied. Any of us would have emerged as a mass of contradictions and frustrations. So Henry VIII, crowned king at the prime of his life, just eighteen years old and physically magnificent with more enthusiasm and energy than most of his contemporaries, became a conflicted and confused man. But it is a shame to let the last twenty years of his life color the interpretation of his entire life. One should not see him as simply an ogre king who beheaded two wives, divorced two others, and rejected another in one of the most humiliating ways possible.

His personality was quite amazing; his intelligence, learning, and curiosity impressed even the world-weary ambassadors who littered his court. His thirst for knowledge was insatiable, though it never became the near-mania that haunted Philip II. Henry VIII didn't spend his declining years surrounded by slips of paper detailing the most minute occurrences in his realm. But he did spend his entire reign reading dispatches, scribbling notations, meeting with diplomats and politicians. Very little occurred in England that escaped his attention; indeed, very little occurred in Europe that escaped Henry VIII. He prided himself on this and well he should; the Spanish ambassador reported that Henry knew of the fall of Cadiz before the Holy Roman Emperor.

He was usually genial company. He loved music and wrote his own. He enjoyed dancing and entertainment. He held countless banquets and tournaments. He enjoyed all physical activities and excelled at most of them. Hunting, archery, tennis, jousting - the king made his court into an endless round of competition and celebration. When he grew older, these former pleasures became torments; like most former athletes, Henry became fat as he aged and the once-loved pastimes became bitter reminders of the ravages of time. And he ruled over a country where almost half the population was 18 years old or younger! Youth was everywhere, staring the old king in his face. We can imagine the effects. Quite naturally, he sought reassurances - from women, his courtiers, his council. Affairs could distract him, but love affairs were never his grand passion. Despite his licentious reputation, Henry VIII was really a 16th century sexual prude; among his European contemporaries, he philandered the least. State affairs indulged his taste for war and glory; family affairs gnawed at his conscience and pride. But Henry VIII did not want distractions. He wanted a grand mission, a defining statement. In the end, he got his wish, though in the most improbable way possible.

He began life as a second son, destined for the church. It was the dream of Henry VII for his eldest son, Arthur, to be king and for his second son, Henry, to be the highest churchman in England. And so, for the first ten years of his life, Henry was a student of theology. And for the next thirty years of his life, he remained a dutiful son of the church. It is ironic, then, that his most significant historical achievement was the destruction of the Roman Catholic faith in England. The impact of the Henrician reformation forever altered the course of English history. Henry VIII, who had indulged in endless diplomatic squabbles and foreign wars, left no grand achievement beyond his own borders. Vast amounts of money were spent on these foreign entanglements - and many lives lost - but, in the end, nothing changed in the European balance of power. England, constantly pulled between the two great continental powers of France and the Holy Roman Empire, nearly bankrupted itself in an attempt to become respected and feared.

Why did Henry ultimately fail in those tasks normally reserved for monarchs? Ultimately, he was a victim of his times. The 16th century was a confusing mess of changing loyalties, betrayals, near-constant fighting, and most importantly, a rising skepticism of that great institution of the fading medieval world, the Roman Catholic church. With the advent of the printing press a century before, literacy and intellectual debate grew rapidly. The High Renaissance in Italy occurred during the first 20 years of Henry VIII's reign. It was a time of unparalleled scientific experiment, intellectual fervor, and spirited debate. In such a time, traditional views of kingship were bound to change for both the ruler and those he ruled.
(As evidence of this confusion, one need only remember that Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor crowned by the Pope, led the brutal sack of Rome in 1527. Charles, supposedly the anointed defender of the papacy, actually ordered his imperial army to loot, pillage, and kill their way through Rome and the Vatican. The pope ended up fleeing to relative safety in his nightshirt.)
While reading any biography of Henry VIII, one must remember the flavor of his times and judge him, if at all, by sixteenth-century standards. It's always amusing to read descriptions of Henry as the lustful tyrant torn between bedding and beheading innocent women; in truth, he blushed at dirty jokes and was more faithful than many 20th century husbands. He was married to Katharine of Aragon for over twenty years and had just a handful of mistresses. He waited years to physically consummate his relationship with Anne Boleyn, and despite being in the prime of his life, remained faithful to her until marriage. Was this sexual prudery a result of his early church training? Perhaps. Whatever the case, it was a hallmark of his life. Henry VIII was always an incurable romantic.
His personal and political decisions were always grandiose, melodramatic, and played for great effect. He loved pomp and pageantry, even as he loathed to deal with the consequences of his actions. Like his father, he was caught in the transition from medieval England to renaissance England. And like his father, he was well-versed in English history and desperate to continue the Tudor dynasty, to secure his claims to Ireland, Scotland, and France, to raise England to the status of its continental neighbors, and to expand his God-given right to rule all Englishmen. When reading about Henry's political and dynastic ambitions, one is always struck by the wide scope of his desires. Though most came to naught in the end, he actually planned invasions of France, plotted to join Charles V's invasion of Italy, and intended to seize the Scottish throne. The word 'ambitious' hardly does Great Harry justice.

His political ambitions failed and he bequeathed a woeful mess to his nine-year-old heir, Edward VI. His greatest achievement was a dubious one, and one for which he was often eager to distance himself - the Henrician reformation, the end of Roman Catholicism in England and the birth of the Anglican church. The king, for all his contradictions and failures, helped destroy the greatest institution in medieval Europe. Once Germany and England fell to the new heresy, its spread across Europe was inevitable and invincible.
In the biography of Henry at this site, I hope to capture both the king's personality and assess his importance to history. Henry VIII's reign was as tumultuous as the king himself. If nothing else, it makes for entertaining reading.

Henry Tudor, duke of York: 1491-1502

The second Henry Tudor was born on 28 June 1491 at Greenwich Palace in London. He was the third child of the first Tudor monarch, Henry VII, and his wife, Elizabeth Plantagenet, daughter of the Yorkist king, Edward IV. At the time of her second son's birth, Queen Elizabeth was just 25 years old; her husband was 34, and had been king for almost six years. Those six years had been difficult ones. Henry's marriage to Elizabeth had helped amass Yorkist support for his rule, but the English people were hardly enthusiastic about Henry, even as they had been noticeably ambivalent about his predecessor, Elizabeth's uncle, Richard III. Elizabeth was popular with the common people; her young life had all the romance and tragedy necessary for sympathetic gossip and she was a classical fair beauty, possessing all the female virtues necessary for a queen. She was quiet, demure, and charming; she was also content to allow her formidable mother-in-law, Margaret Beaufort, assume a position of unprecedented influence over the king.
Elizabeth's emotional attachment to her husband has been much-debated. In truth, she had known all her life that she would never marry a man of her own choice.

In the end, her mother, Elizabeth Woodville, conspired with Margaret Beaufort for Elizabeth to marry Henry Tudor, exiled son of Henry VI's half-brother. Henry was, by all accounts, grateful for the match. He appreciated its political implications. He also respected his new queen and was faithful to his marriage vows, an unusual trait in a king. Upon her marriage, Elizabeth entered a semi-retirement - she was queen and her duty was to produce as many heirs as possible. Nine months after her marriage, she gave birth to her first child at St Swithin's Priory in Winchester, a prince named Arthur. Henry and Elizabeth had wed on 18 January 1486 at Westminster Abbey in London; Prince Arthur was born 20 September 1486. Three years later, Elizabeth gave birth to their second child, a princess called Margaret after Henry VII's mother. She was born on 28 November 1489 at Westminster Palace in London. For the new king, the birth of a healthy second child, and his wife's rapid recovery, were good omens. Even as he attempted to enforce his rule in the always troublesome northern England which had been Richard III's base of support, Henry VII could rest assured that his dynasty was becoming secure. But it was only on 28 June 1491, when another healthy prince was born, this time at Greenwich Palace, that Henry VII could breathe a sigh of relief. This second son was a necessary insurance policy for the new Tudor dynasty. Childhood mortality was high and diseases such as small pox, the sweating sickness, and the plague were rife throughout England. A king needed as many healthy heirs as possible, and the birth of a second son was an occasion for celebration.
On 27 February 1490, Prince Arthur was titled prince of Wales at Westminster Palace in London; this was the real beginning of a tradition that continues to this day. And in 1494, Arthur's baby brother was titled duke of York, the traditional title of the king's brother. At this early age, all we know of Prince Henry was that he was considered a handsome and precocious toddler, but one would expect such descriptions of the king's son. He did not share his brother's fair coloring or slight build. Prince Henry was a sturdy, strawberry-blond boy noted for his energy and temper. Just a year after his birth, his mother bore another daughter; this child was called Elizabeth and she died three years later. It was the first in a series of tragedies for the young queen. She and Henry VII were considered good and affectionate parents, but they never lost sight of the political importance of their children. Together they decided that Prince Henry, like most second sons, was destined for the church, and his early schooling was planned accordingly. This strong emphasis upon theology and its esoteric debates remained with Henry for the rest of his life and made him feel uniquely qualified to interpret religious law during the 1520s.

Heir apparent: 1502-1509

Henry's position as the second son lasted only until 2 April 1502, just a few months before his eleventh birthday. It was on that day that his brother Arthur died at Ludlow Castle, the government seat of the prince of Wales. The insecurity of the Tudor succession was suddenly unavoidable. Elizabeth of York, despite repeated pregnancies, had not borne another healthy son; after Henry's birth, there was just one more male child - a son called Edmund, born in 1499 and dead just a year later. The queen did become pregnant shortly after Arthur's death but this eighth pregnancy proved to be her last. The child, called Katherine, was born and died on 2 February 1503. Elizabeth contracted an infection and died a few days later, on 11 February, her thirty-seventh birthday. So in the short space of a year, Henry lost both his older brother and mother. But the effects of these losses was felt even more keenly by Henry VII. His reign had proved to be neither peaceful or happy. He was beset by worries - constant diplomatic maneuvering, subjects who mocked him as a cold-hearted, tax-hungry miser, and now he had lost his son and wife.
Arthur's death was more than a personal tragedy; it was a political tragedy as well. The young prince had been married to Princess Katharine of Aragon on 14 November 1501 at St.Paul's Cathedral, London. The daughter of the 'Catholic Kings' of Spain, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, Katharine's marriage to the Tudor heir had marked the high point of Henry VII's foreign diplomacy. His grip on the English throne had long been considered both illegitimate and untenable by most European powers, except in cases where it suited their interests to pretend otherwise. But a bond of marriage between the house of Tudor and the ruling dynasty of Spain gave Henry's rule a stamp of approval. He was now allied with one of the most powerful ruling families in Europe. Prince Henry met his sister-in-law and future wife on this momentous occasion, heading the procession that led her to the cathedral. Later, he officially introduced her to the citizens of London.
With Arthur's death, his teenage wife was trapped in England while Henry VII squabbled with her father over the remaining payments on her dowry. Henry VII was perhaps even then mulling over the idea of not letting the all-important Spanish alliance go to waste. Soon enough he was openly proposing that Katharine marry young Prince Henry, now the heir apparent and five years her junior. What did young Prince Henry know of these plans? Probably very little. After Arthur's death, Henry VII became somewhat paranoid and tried desperately to protect his only son from any injury or illness. People who wished to visit the young prince had to receive permission from Henry VII, and this remained the case well into the boy's adolescence. Such strict rules may have irked the heir but they did not interfere with his continuing education. While his older brother was in Wales learning the intricacies of government, Henry received a primarily classical education, mastering Latin and French and becoming an excellent and exuberant athlete. Contemporary sources make it clear that he was a happy child, fond of sports and spectacle, and equally proud of his intellectual accomplishments. In short, he possessed all the personality and charm his father noticeably lacked. Both his physical appearance and character were similar to those of his Plantagenet grandfather Edward IV. This fact was much remarked upon by those Englishmen who had lived through the last years of the Wars of the Roses.
Luckily for Prince Henry, his father spent the last years of his reign establishing good relationships with other monarchs and avoiding expensive war; also, his fondness for extorting money from an unwilling populace never wavered. He left his son a king's greatest gift - a healthy treasury. Ironically, one of Henry VIII's first acts as king was to execute his father's most productive, and hence most notorious, tax collectors. But Henry VII never really decided whether he wanted to marry Prince Henry to Katharine of Aragon. He kept the young princess in England for seven years while he toyed with the idea. Her living conditions steadily deteriorated; she was miserably unhappy, many of her Spanish attendants were sent home, she lacked money for even basic necessities. Food and adequate clothing were constant concerns. She struggled to bear her hardships with the serene and regal dignity that was ingrained in her character as a princess of Spain, and such calm in the face of deprivation impressed young Prince Henry. It is certainly true that even years later, in the midst of an acrimonious separation, he never lost his respect for Katharine. This respect was always tinged with a bit of fear. He was keenly aware of her great ancestry and extensive education, her self-deprecating wit and complete mastery of all feminine tasks. Even as queen of England, she took particular pride in sewing and mending Henry's shirts.

They had little contact during the later years of Henry VII's reign, only meeting occasionally at events. Henry was formally promised in marriage to Katharine on 23 June 1503; the treaty stated that he would marry Katharine on his fifteenth birthday, 28 June 1505, and that her parents send over 100,000 crowns worth of plate and jewels in addition to the dowry she had given when married to Prince Arthur. Henry VII was a stickler on the dowry issue, refusing to allow the marriage to be solemnized, much less celebrated and consummated, until the money arrived. But the Spaniards were as loathe to part with money as Henry. So 1505 came and went with no marriage though Prince Henry referred in letters to Katharine as his 'most dear and well-beloved consort, the princess my wife'. But his father was still king, and his father refused to allow the marriage. To strengthen his bargaining power with the Spaniards, he had Prince Henry make a formal protest to Richard Fox, the bishop of Winchester, disowning the marriage contract. Both parties prevaricated - until 1509, when Henry VII suddenly died at the age of 52, and his headstrong son, chafing at his father's authority, was free to make his own decisions. To the surprise of all, including the Spaniards, he promptly announced he would marry Katharine and crown her queen of England.

After years of being shut away from the world, he was now king. All of the boundless energy and enthusiasm of his character was unleashed. Perhaps out of chivalry, or adolescent affection, or, as he later claimed, out of respect for his father's wishes, he wed his late brother's wife. In light of future events, it is worth noting that the dowry had not been the only sticking-point in the marriage plans - there was the not insignificant fact that Katharine had been married to Henry's brother, and her marriage to Henry would be regarded as incestuous and unacceptable to the church. As Henry VIII would later argue, Leviticus clearly stated that a man was forbidden to marry his brother's widow. For her part, Katharine claimed, and her duenna, Dona Elvira, agreed, that her marriage to Arthur had never been consummated. The young prince of Wales had been suffering from consumption for months, even before the wedding, and their wedding night had passed uneventfully. If this was true, and it seems to have been (until it was in Henry VIII's interests for it not to be), there was no barrier to her union with Henry. Both the English and Spanish courts sought the requisite papal dispensation. It was granted and the path to marriage was clear.

His Majesty is the handsomest potentate I ever set eyes on; above the usual height, with an extremely fine calf to his leg, his complexion very fair and bright, auburn hair combed straight and short, in the French fashion, and a round face so very beautiful that it would become a pretty woman, his throat being rather long and thick.... He will enter his twenty-fifth year the month after next. He speaks French, English and Latin, and a little Italian, plays well on the lute and harpsichord, sings from book at sight, draws the bow with greater strength than any man in England and jousts marvelously.... a most accomplished Prince. the Venetian diplomat Pasqualigo in a dispatch, 1515

1509-1526: Katharine of Aragon, Cardinal Wolsey and Princess Mary

Henry was crowned king of England at Westminster Abbey on 23 June 1509. He had married Katharine on 11 June at Grey Friars Church in Greenwich and she shared his coronation. It was a splendid event and continued throughout midsummer with much celebration and spectacle. There is an account of the coronation at the Primary Sources section. It was soon clear that the young king, who turned 18 just a few days after his coronation, had little interest in the day-to-day business of government. While it is true that Henry was a vocal participant at council meetings, the early years of his reign were devoted more to enjoyment than the drudgery of administration. He was content to allow trusted nobles and ecclesiastics to rule in his name - William Warham, archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Howard, earl of Surrey and later 2d duke of Norfolk, Bishop Richard Foxe, and, beginning around 1514, Thomas Wolsey.

As mentioned earlier, one of the first acts of Henry's reign was a particularly brutal one, especially designed to benefit his popularity. He ordered the executions of his father's most productive and hated tax collectors, Edmund Dudley and Sir Richard Empson. It was a bloody beginning for his reign and a taste of things to come. Certainly it pleased the English people for most tax collectors were hated, and Dudley and Empson had been particularly ruthless. But their efficiency had the complete support of King Henry VII, whose orders they followed. A problem had emerged for the new king - how could he execute the tax collectors when their only crime was to obey their king? He resorted, for the first but not the last time, to judicial murder, charging the men with 'constructive treason'. It was a wholly fictitious charge which no one fully understood, even those at the trial. This cold-blooded act pleased the people and demonstrated Henry's desire for popular approval. But it also revealed a ruthlessness to his character that grew more pronounced as the years passed. Many historians argue that Henry grew tyrannical only after Katharine of Aragon failed to provide an heir but the evidence proves otherwise. If someone could not be legally executed, the king simply invented a new charge. For example, in 1513, before leaving for war in France, he executed Edmund de la Pole, his Plantagenet cousin held prisoner in the Tower since Henry VII's reign. A benign spirit, locked away for most of his life, Edmund was no threat to anyone. But Henry executed him to remind his subjects that, though he would be in France, any challenge to his authority would be met with grave displeasure.

His marriage to Katharine was very happy, at least during these early years. She had a more reserved character than her husband and blushed at his ribald jests, but she entered into the spirit of frivolity which pervaded their court. There was dancing and music, for Henry was a splendid dancer and musician; he composed songs and wrote poetry, most of which has survived and is quite lovely. He also enjoyed hunting, sometimes tiring ten horses during a single hunt, and jousting; by all accounts, he was the greatest athlete at the court. And he was a dedicated and affectionate husband. Everything he built was decorated with an intertwined H and K, and Katharine's pomegranates were carved next to Tudor roses. He called himself the 'Knight of the Loyal Heart' and bowed before his queen after each grueling tournament. He also involved Katharine in the seemingly endless visits of foreign dignitaries, inviting the ambassadors to her apartments and openly seeking her advice and opinion. It was clear that they loved and respected one another, and those early years made his eventual disinterest all the more painful for the queen to bear.
Katharine bore their first child on 31 January 1510, just six months after their coronation. It was a girl, born too early to survive.

The next birth, on 1 January 1511, was a far happier occasion. It was a boy, called Henry after his father and titled duke of Cornwall. The delighted father planned celebrations to rival his coronation. The boy was apparently healthy yet died about two months later. The cause was unknown, but it was an age of high infant mortality. The young parents were devastated. Henry consoled himself by waging war against France, courtesy of his father-in-law Ferdinand of Aragon, and Katharine's fierce piety led her to kneel for hours on cold stone floors in prayer. But Henry's attempts to gain glory on the battlefield were misplaced. In June 1512, the marquess of Dorset sailed out of Southampton, bound for Gascony with 12,000 troops. They reached the port of Fuentarrabia, where they were to join the Spanish and attack Bayonne. But the Spanish troops never arrived. Ferdinand, without consulting his son-in-law, attacked and seized Navarre instead and then declared the 'Holy War' over. He had essentially used Henry's troops as bait; when the French went off to fight the English, Ferdinand seized his chance and attacked Navarre. To top off his treachery, he also openly criticized the English soldiers who, without receiving his permission, had sailed home after waiting four months at Fuentarrabia. Henry was too embarrassed by his soldiers' mutiny to call his father-in-law's bluff.

Desperate to erase the memory of that military blunder, he planned a grand campaign for the spring of 1513. His ambassadors even secured the support of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian. He joined the 'Holy Alliance' of England and Spain to attack France. But once again Ferdinand's self-interest ruled the day. He went behind his allies' backs to make a secret truce with Louis XII of France, and so he kept Navarre peacefully. This happened in March 1513 and suitably angered Henry. But the English king had learned a lesson from his previous blunder. His forces were launched from England's only possession on the continent, Calais in northern France. The Spanish would not be involved. On 1 August 1513, about a month after he left England, Henry besieged the town of Therouanne. Two centuries before, Edward III had seized that city after the great battle of Crecy. With Maximilian by his side (actually as his subordinate; he allowed Henry command of his troops in exchange for paying their salaries), Henry won a victory within a fortnight. The capture of a duke, marquis, and vice-admiral fleeing the scene helped raise substantial ransoms. He gave the town to Maximilian as a gift and the emperor ordered it razed to the ground. Their next battle was one month later at Tournai. It surrendered after eight days and Henry decided it would become another English stronghold within France.

He had left Katharine in charge at home, officially titled Governor of the Realm and Captain-General of the Armed Forces, an honor never allowed his other wives. She had been resoundingly successful. France and Scotland had an 'Auld Alliance' against England, and James IV of Scotland, married to Henry's sister Margaret Tudor, had responded to English aggression against his ally. He led his armies into northern England. Thomas Howard, the earl of Surrey, took the few English troops left in the nation to meet him. The armies clashed at Flodden Edge, between Berwick and the Cheviots. Three hours of fighting ended the Scottish threat. The evening of 9 September 1513 saw over 10,000 Scots dead, including most of their aristocracy. James IV himself was killed. Had Henry's attention been focused on his own country, he could have seized a golden opportunity - with James dead and the high nobility of Scotland destroyed, he could have marched into Edinburgh and seized his sister Margaret and her infant son, now King James V. But instead he remained enthralled with dreams of European conquest, perhaps comparing himself to his hero, Henry V. And these dreams were encouraged by news that the Pope had, in secret, promised to recognize Henry as king of France if he could physically seize possession of the country. This generous offer had been inspired by French meddling in papal affairs.

During this triumphant time, Katharine lost another child. In November 1513, another prince, also called Henry, duke of Cornwall, was born and soon died. It was the third miscarriage in as many years. Was Henry worried? He was still young, as was Katharine, and had been king for just five years. He was naturally optimistic, though undoubtedly disappointed. Once again, the queen was on her knees in prayer. Perhaps she felt the losses more keenly. In letters to her father, she blamed herself. She clearly saw the dead children as a reproof of some sort, a failure to fulfill the most basic feminine role. But she was able to send Henry the bloody coat of the Scottish king; it may have been some consolation.

Still, in 1514, as Cardinal Thomas Wolsey extended his control of government, Katharine had reason to become wary. The golden happiness of the first years with Henry was wearing thin. Her father had betrayed her husband openly and scornfully, treating them both as little more than foolish children. She had been her father's best ambassador, heedlessly pressing his claims upon Henry, using the natural affection between husband and wife to urge alliances with Spain. She felt the sting of her father's betrayals. He had lied to her, misled her, and tricked her into betraying her husband. It was clear that her primary loyalty must be to Henry and the English people; she would never trust Ferdinand again. In 1514, the king returned home and his councilors told him that Henry VII's great treasury was fast running low. War with France was too costly to continue. Henry had seized Tournai and made the competent Thomas Wolsey its bishop, but more extensive campaigning was out of the question. In this, the king surprisingly agreed. He had won his share of glory - at least for now - and it would be enough. And Ferdinand's betrayal had been met with a suitable reply. Henry's younger sister Mary, the most beautiful of the Tudor children, had been betrothed to Ferdinand's nephew, the duke of Burgundy, but now Henry made peace with France and promised Mary to Louis XII, three times her age and suffering from gout.

Henry's new desire for peace with France, England's traditional enemy, was encouraged by Spanish duplicity. But itwas also due to the growing influence of Wolsey. Derisively called 'Master Almoner' by those jealous of his influence, Wolsey came from a humble background and, like most talented and ambitious men from poor families, he used the church to advance in society. He attended Oxford and showed such promise that he was made bursar of Magdalen College and then chaplain to Archbishop Deane. In 1507, in his thirties and now well-connected, he became chaplain to Henry VII. Upon Henry VIII's accession, Wolsey received a seat on the council and was made king's almoner. This position allowed him personal contact with the young, impressionable monarch. He accompanied Henry to France during the successful campaigns of 1513, where he was made bishop of Tournai, and their close relationship grew stronger. Henry appreciated Wolsey's dedication to administrative detail and hard work. And both Warham and Fox, the two senior councilors Henry inherited from his father, regarded Wolsey as their protégé. They were quite happy to retire to their dioceses, leaving the younger man to deal with the headstrong and rash young king. One can easily sympathize with Warham and Fox since Henry VIII's personality was quite different from his father's. The most obvious difference was that he spent money with the same passion his father had collected it.
But it is important to remember that Henry VIII never completely abandoned his power to Wolsey, though court gossip believed otherwise. He carefully read the Cardinal's dispatches and proved himself well-informed about domestic and foreign affairs when dealing with ambassadors. Also, Henry possessed a lifelong love of keeping his subjects, noble or common, on their toes; he enjoyed indulging his taste for surprises. In banquets, this showed itself in his passion for elaborate costumes in which his identity was hidden. His subjects would guess which costume hid their king, to the delight of all. Once, he and several courtiers dressed as Robin Hood and his band of outlaws and then broke into Katharine of Aragon's apartments. The queen, used to such antics, wisely played along but several of her ladies were terrified. At the Primary Sources section, you can read about Henry's first meeting with his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves; he disguised himself at their first meeting, to the amusement of his nobles and the confusion of the lady. At times, this love of surprise - of keeping those close to him on an uneven keel - was downright cruel. He would later allow his councilors to plan Thomas Cranmer's arrest, only to tell the archbishop their plan in secret. When the soldiers arrived, they were openly embarrassed and thwarted when Cranmer revealed his knowledge of the plan and the king's pardon. And his sixth and final wife, Katharine Parr, was likewise surprised. Walking in her garden with Henry, she was accosted by soldiers intending to arrest her. Their warrant had been signed by Henry himself. But when they attempted to seize the queen, Henry cursed them, beat several of them about the head and shoulders, and demanded they beg Katharine's forgiveness. One can imagine the guards' confusion.
All of these instances serve to illustrate Henry's desire to remain in control, to hold absolute power in his hands always. As king, he could give orders but it was also his privilege to immediately change his mind without bothering to consult anyone. His will was law. And so he demonstrated his power by doing exactly as he liked, oftimes choosing the perfect moment to throw everyone off guard and demonstrate his complete authority. It may have seemed irrational to his contemporaries, and also to us, but it was quite an effective policy. It meant that no one ever really knew where they stood with the king. And so, not knowing his true feelings, they were all the more eager to sycophantically fawn over him and seek his approval.
This strain of the king's character was perhaps a bit more light-hearted in the early years of his reign but, like most of Henry's good qualities, it soon developed an ugly cast. His mutability was certainly recognized by Wolsey, and famously by Sir Thomas More, and later led to the Cardinal's downfall. But in the early years of their relationship, as Wolsey's genius for administration and diplomacy led him to amass great titles and wealth, the men got along amazingly well. This continued for over a dozen years. In 1514, Wolsey was titled archbishop of York, and in 1515 he became a cardinal and lord chancellor, and in 1518 he was made papal legate. As archbishop of York, he lived at York Palace and to most outside observers this was the real seat of government power. Messengers rode constantly between York and Henry's palaces.
For a long while, both Wolsey and Henry were focused on foreign affairs. Wolsey was a Francophile and desired peace between the traditional enemies. He used Ferdinand's treacherous behavior to encourage a marriage between Henry's sister and Louis XII. This pro-France policy naturally placed him at odds with Katharine of Aragon. Though she recognized her father's treachery and protected her marriage by no longer pressing Spanish claims, she was still the daughter of the Spanish king. Wolsey didn't trust her, which certainly wasn't surprising. Katharine developed a natural antipathy to the Cardinal as well. She was a deeply pious woman, growing more so as she aged. She thought Wolsey far too worldly to be a man of the church. She favored councilors like Thomas More and John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, men whose dedication to the church was as passionate as her own. She was also peeved that her role as Henry's confidante and advisor was slowly stolen away by Wolsey. Katharine was jealous of the Cardinal's influence with her husband, particularly since it meant a subsequent decline in her own influence. The king no longer brought foreign ambassadors to her rooms and he no longer sought her opinions. It was as if her father's betrayals implicated her. Wolsey was the consummate diplomat, skilled at flattering the queen when they met, but their mutual dislike was open knowledge at court.
In December 1514, Katharine suffered another miscarriage; it was her fourth, and the third son. It was particularly galling for her since earlier that year Henry had taken his first public mistress. He was not a lecher, and certainly less victimized by lust than his fellow monarchs, particularly Francis I of France. But kings take mistresses and around New Years' 1514, Henry's eye was caught by Elizabeth Blount. She was the cousin of Lord Mountjoy and one of Katharine's ladies-in-waiting. Bessie was pretty and vivacious, and quite happy to bask in the king's attention. And she had his attention for several years, which once more proves Henry's monogamous streak. And he did not neglect his wife. On 18 February 1516, Katharine and Henry's luck changed. Their only surviving child, a princess called Mary, was born. She was healthy and survived the difficult early months of infancy. Henry was proud, if disappointed, and told an ambassador: 'We are both young. If it was a daughter this time, by the grace of God the sons will follow.'
One can easily understand Henry's disappointment. He was a good father to Mary in those early years, proudly carrying her about and showing her off to visitors. But he was perhaps aware that time was running out for a male heir to be born. There are indications that he explored the idea of divorcing Katharine as early as 1518. An English courtier had supposedly visited the Vatican on an exploratory mission earlier that year. And gossip about Katharine's miscarriages had spread through the English court as early as 1514.

Henry was still affectionate towards Katharine, and they remained intimate for several years after Mary's birth, as evidenced by other pregnancies. But perhaps the bloom of the relationship had gone. His wife looked older than her years, her body worn out by ceaseless pregnancies and births. She was by nature a reserved and serious person; her mind dwelt constantly upon the failure of her most important duty as queen. On 10 November 1518, her last child - another daughter - was born, and died. Special doctors summoned from Spain arrived to help the queen conceive again. They were unsuccessful. Henry publicly vowed to lead a crusade against the Turks if God granted him a son.
But it was not to be, at least not with Katharine of Aragon. In 1519, Elizabeth Blount, his young mistress, bore him a healthy son. Henry was ecstatic. Here at last was proof that the king could father sons. Henry named the boy after himself, giving him the last name 'Fitzroy', the traditional surname of royal bastards. He would soon lavish so many titles upon the boy that Katharine felt it necessary to remind him that Princess Mary was his heir. Henry publicly chastised her and, in a fit of spite, sent several of her favorite attendants back to Spain.

Now we come to an important moment in what came to be called 'the king's great matter' (Henry's attempt to annul his marriage to Katharine.) Fitzroy's birth proved Henry could have a son, and no one could deny Katharine's fertility. It is doubtful Henry ever blamed her for the failure to produce a male heir after witnessing the endless cycle of pregnancies and prayer. Yet why had he and Katharine been unable to produce a living son between them? Naturally enough, the king's mind turned to God. It must be God's will that they had no male heir. But what had he done to offend God? Henry searched for an answer and soon found it quite easily. In the Bible, Leviticus XVIII, 16 clearly stated 'Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy brother's wife: it is thy brother's nakedness'. And, later, in chapter XX, 'If a man shall take his brother's wife, it is an unclean thing: he hath uncovered his brother's nakedness; they shall be childless'. What could be more clear? The Bible itself condemned his marriage to Katharine. The pope's dispensation was meaningless.
And so began one of the most fascinating decades in English history.

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King Henry VIII - Facts, Information, Biography & Portraits

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'My, you ought to seen old Henry the Eight when he was in bloom. He was a blossom. He used to marry a new wife every day, and chop off her head next morning. And he would do it just as indifferent as if he was ordering up eggs.

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Henry VIII, king of England, was famously married six times and played a critical role in the English Reformation, turning his country into a Protestant nation. Learn more at Biography.com.

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Besides his six marriages and many extramarital affairs

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Henry VIII (28 June 1491 - 28 January 1547) was King of England from 22 April 1509 until his death in 1547. Henry is best known for his six marriages, and for his efforts to have his first marriage (to Catherine of Aragon) annulled. His disagreement with Pope Clement VII about such an annulment led Henry to initiate the English Reformation, separating the Church of England from papal authority. He appointed himself Supreme Head of the Church of England and dissolved convents and monasteries, for which he was excommunicated. Henry is also known as "the father of the Royal Navy", as he invested heavily in the navy, increasing its size from a few to more than 50 ships, and established the Navy Board.

Domestically, Henry is known for his radical changes to the English Constitution, ushering in the theory of the divine right of kings in opposition to Papal supremacy. He also greatly expanded royal power during his reign. He frequently used charges of treason and heresy to quell dissent, and those accused were often executed without a formal trial by means of bills of attainder. He achieved many of his political aims through the work of his chief ministers, some of whom were banished or executed when they fell out of his favour. Thomas Wolsey, Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, Richard Rich, and Thomas Cranmer all figured prominently in his administration.

Henry was an extravagant spender, using the proceeds from the dissolution of the monasteries and acts of the Reformation Parliament. He also converted the money that was formerly paid to Rome into royal revenue. Despite the money from these sources, he was continually on the verge of financial ruin due to his personal extravagance, as well as his numerous costly and largely unsuccessful wars, particularly with King Francis I of France, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, King James V of Scotland and the Scottish regency under the Earl of Arran and Mary of Guise. At home, he oversaw the legal union of England and Wales with the Laws in Wales Acts 1535 and 1542, and he was the first English monarch to rule as King of Ireland following the Crown of Ireland Act 1542.

Henry's contemporaries considered him to be an attractive, educated, and accomplished king. He has been described as "one of the most charismatic rulers to sit on the English throne" and his reign has been described as the "most important" in English history. He was an author and composer. As he aged, he became severely overweight and his health suffered. He is frequently characterised in his later life as a lustful, egotistical, paranoid and tyrannical monarch. He was succeeded by his son Edward VI.

Early years

Born on 28 June 1491 at the Palace of Placentia in Greenwich, Kent, Henry Tudor was the third child and second son of King Henry VII and Elizabeth of York. Of the young Henry's six (or seven) siblings, only three - his brother Arthur, Prince of Wales, and sisters Margaret and Mary - survived infancy. He was baptised by Richard Foxe, the Bishop of Exeter, at a church of the Observant Franciscans close to the palace. In 1493, at the age of two, Henry was appointed Constable of Dover Castle and Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports. He was subsequently appointed Earl Marshal of England and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland at age three and was made a Knight of the Bath soon after. The day after the ceremony, he was created Duke of York and a month or so later made Warden of the Scottish Marches. In May 1495, he was appointed to the Order of the Garter. The reason for giving such appointments to a small child was to enable his father to retain personal control of lucrative positions and not share them with established families. Not much is known about Henry's early life - save for his appointments - because he was not expected to become king, but it is known that he received a first-rate education from leading tutors. He became fluent in Latin and French and learned at least some Italian.

In November 1501, Henry played a considerable part in the ceremonies surrounding his brother Arthur's marriage to Catherine, the youngest child of King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile. As Duke of York, Henry used the arms of his father as king, differenced by a label of three points ermine. He was further honoured on 9 February 1506 by Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, who made him a Knight of the Golden Fleece.

In 1502, Arthur died at the age of 15, possibly of sweating sickness, just 20 weeks after his marriage to Catherine. Arthur's death thrust all his duties upon his younger brother. The 10-year-old Henry became the new Duke of Cornwall, and the new Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester in February 1504. Henry VII gave his second son few responsibilities even after the death of Arthur. Young Henry was strictly supervised and did not appear in public. As a result, he ascended the throne "untrained in the exacting art of kingship".

Henry VII renewed his efforts to seal a marital alliance between England and Spain, by offering his son Henry in marriage to the widowed Catherine. Both Henry VII and Catherine's mother Queen Isabella were keen on the idea, which had arisen very shortly after Arthur's death. On 23 June 1503, a treaty was signed for their marriage, and they were betrothed two days later. A papal dispensation was only needed for the "impediment of public honesty" if the marriage had not been consummated as Catherine and her duenna claimed, but Henry VII and the Spanish ambassador set out instead to obtain a dispensation for " affinity", which took account of the possibility of consummation. Cohabitation was not possible because Henry was too young. Isabella's death in 1504, and the ensuing problems of succession in Castile, complicated matters. Catherine's father Ferdinand preferred her to stay in England, but Henry VII's relations with Ferdinand had deteriorated. Catherine was therefore left in limbo for some time, culminating in Prince Henry's rejection of the marriage as soon he was able, at the age of 14. Ferdinand's solution was to make his daughter ambassador, allowing her to stay in England indefinitely. Devout, she began to believe that it was God's will that she marry the prince despite his opposition.

Early reign

Henry VII died on 21 April 1509, and the 17-year-old Henry succeeded him as king. Soon after his father's burial on 10 May, Henry suddenly declared that he would indeed marry Catherine, leaving unresolved several issues concerning the papal dispensation and a missing part of the marriage portion. The new king maintained that it had been his father's dying wish that he marry Catherine. Whether or not this was true, it was certainly convenient. Emperor Maximilian I had been attempting to marry his granddaughter Eleanor, Catherine's niece, to Henry; she had now been jilted. Henry's wedding to Catherine was kept low-key and was held at the friar's church in Greenwich on 11 June 1509.

On 23 June 1509, Henry led the now 23-year-old Catherine from the Tower of London to Westminster Abbey for their coronation, which took place the following day. It was a grand affair: the king's passage was lined with tapestries and laid with fine cloth. Following the ceremony, there was a grand banquet in Westminster Hall. As Catherine wrote to her father, "our time is spent in continuous festival".

Two days after his coronation, Henry arrested his father's two most unpopular ministers, Sir Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley. They were charged with high treason and were executed in 1510. Politically motivated executions would remain one of Henry's primary tactics for dealing with those who stood in his way. Henry also returned some of the money supposedly extorted by the two ministers. By contrast, Henry's view of the House of York - potential rival claimants for the throne - was more moderate than his father's had been. Several who had been imprisoned by his father, including Thomas Grey, 2nd Marquess of Dorset, were pardoned. Others went unreconciled; Edmund de la Pole was eventually beheaded in 1513, an execution prompted by his brother Richard siding against the king.

Soon after marrying Henry, Catherine conceived. She gave birth to a stillborn girl on 31 January 1510. About four months later, Catherine again became pregnant. On 1 January 1511, New Year's Day, a son Henry was born. After the grief of losing their first child, the couple were pleased to have a boy and festivities were held, including a two-day joust known as the Westminster Tournament. However, the child died seven weeks later. Catherine had two stillborn sons in 1513 and 1515, but gave birth in February 1516 to a girl, Mary. Relations between Henry and Catherine had been strained, but they eased slightly after Mary's birth.

Although Henry's marriage to Catherine has since been described as "unusually good", it is known that Henry took mistresses. It was revealed in 1510 that Henry had been conducting an affair with one of the sisters of Edward Stafford, 3rd Duke of Buckingham, either Elizabeth or Anne Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon. The most significant mistress for about three years, starting in 1516, was Elizabeth Blount. Blount is one of only two completely undisputed mistresses, considered by some to be few for a virile young king. Exactly how many Henry had is disputed: David Loades believes Henry had mistresses "only to a very limited extent", whilst Alison Weir believes there were numerous other affairs. Catherine is not known to have protested. In 1518 she fell pregnant again with another girl, who was also stillborn.

Blount gave birth in June 1519 to Henry's illegitimate son, Henry FitzRoy. The young boy was made Duke of Richmond in June 1525 in what some thought was one step on the path to his eventual legitimisation. In 1533, FitzRoy married Mary Howard, but died childless three years later. At the time of his death in June 1536, Parliament was considering the Second Succession Act, which could have allowed him to become king.

France and the Habsburgs

In 1510, France, with a fragile alliance with the Holy Roman Empire in the League of Cambrai, was winning a war against Venice. Henry renewed his father's friendship with Louis XII of France, an issue that divided his council. Certainly, war with the combined might of the two powers would have been exceedingly difficult. Shortly thereafter, however, Henry also signed a pact with Ferdinand II of Aragon. After Pope Julius II created the anti-French Holy League in October 1511, Henry followed Ferdinand's lead and brought England into the new League. An initial joint Anglo-Spanish attack was planned for the spring to recover Aquitaine for England, the start of making Henry's dreams of ruling France a reality. The attack, however, following a formal declaration of war in April 1512, was not led by Henry personally and was a considerable failure; Ferdinand used it simply to further his own ends, and it strained the Anglo-Spanish alliance. Nevertheless, the French were pushed out of Italy soon after, and the alliance survived, with both parties keen to win further victories over the French. Henry then pulled off a diplomatic coup by convincing Emperor Maximilian to join the Holy League. Remarkably, Henry had also secured the promised title of " Most Christian King of France" from Julius and possibly coronation by the Pope himself in Paris, if only Louis could be defeated.

On 30 June 1513, Henry invaded France, and his troops defeated a French army at the Battle of the Spurs - a relatively minor result, but one which was seized on by the English for propaganda purposes. Soon after, the English took Thérouanne and handed it over to Maximillian; Tournai, a more significant settlement, followed. Henry had led the army personally, complete with a large entourage. His absence from the country, however, had prompted his brother-in-law James IV of Scotland to invade England at the behest of Louis. Nevertheless, the English army, overseen by Queen Catherine, decisively defeated the Scots at the Battle of Flodden on 9 September 1513. Among the dead was the Scottish king, thus ending Scotland's brief involvement in the war. These campaigns had given Henry a taste of the military success he so desired. However, despite initial indications, he decided not to pursue a 1514 campaign. He had been supporting Ferdinand and Maximilian financially during the campaign but had received little in return; England's coffers were now empty. With the replacement of Julius by Pope Leo X, who was inclined to negotiate for peace with France, Henry signed his own treaty with Louis: his sister Mary would become Louis' wife, having previously been pledged to the younger Charles, and peace was secured for eight years, a remarkably long time.

Charles V, the nephew of Henry's wife Catherine, inherited a large empire in Europe, becoming king of Spain in 1516 and Holy Roman Emperor in 1519. When Louis XII of France died in 1515, he was succeeded by his cousin Francis I. These accessions left three relatively young rulers and an opportunity for a clean slate. The careful diplomacy of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey had resulted in the Treaty of London in 1518, aimed at uniting the kingdoms of western Europe in the wake of a new Ottoman threat, and it seemed that peace might be secured. Henry met the new French king, Francis, on 7 June 1520 at the Field of the Cloth of Gold near Calais for a fortnight of lavish entertainment. Both hoped for friendly relations in place of the wars of the previous decade. The strong air of competition laid to rest any hopes of a renewal of the Treaty of London, however, and conflict was inevitable. Henry had more in common with Charles, whom he met once before and once after Francis. Charles brought his realm into war with France in 1521; Henry offered to mediate, but little was achieved and by the end of the year Henry had aligned England with Charles. He still clung to his previous aim of restoring English lands in France but also sought to secure an alliance with Burgundy, then a territorial possession of Charles, and the continued support of the Emperor. A small English attack in the north of France made up little ground. Charles defeated and captured Francis at Pavia and could dictate peace, but he believed he owed Henry nothing. Sensing this, Henry decided to take England out of the war before his ally, signing the Treaty of the More on 30 August 1525.

Annulment from Catherine

During his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, Henry conducted an affair with Mary Boleyn, Catherine's lady-in-waiting. There has been speculation that Mary's two children, Henry Carey and Catherine Carey, were fathered by Henry, but this has never been proved, and the king never acknowledged them as he did in the case of Henry FitzRoy. In 1525, as Henry grew more impatient with Catherine's inability to produce the male heir he desired, he became enamoured of Mary Boleyn's sister, Anne Boleyn, then a charismatic young woman of 25 in the queen's entourage. Anne, however, resisted his attempts to seduce her, and refused to become his mistress as her sister had. It was in this context that Henry considered his three options for finding a dynastic successor and hence resolving what came to be described at court as the king's "great matter". These options were legitimising Henry FitzRoy, which would need the involvement of the Pope and would be open to challenge; marrying off Mary, his daughter with Catherine, as soon as possible and hoping for a grandson to inherit directly, but Mary was considered unlikely to conceive before Henry's death, or somehow rejecting Catherine and marrying someone else of child-bearing age. Probably seeing the possibility of marrying Anne, the third was ultimately the most attractive possibility to the 34-year-old Henry, and it soon became the king's absorbing desire to annul his marriage to the now 40-year-old Catherine.

Henry's precise motivations and intentions over the coming years are not widely agreed on. Henry himself, at least in the early part of his reign, was a devout and well-informed Catholic to the extent that his 1521 publication Assertio Septem Sacramentorum ("Defence of the Seven Sacraments") earned him the title of Fidei Defensor (Defender of the Faith) from Pope Leo X. The work represented a staunch defence of papal supremacy, albeit one couched in somewhat contingent terms. It is not clear exactly when Henry changed his mind on the issue as he grew more intent on a second marriage. Certainly, by 1527, he had convinced himself that Catherine had produced no male heir because their union was "blighted in the eyes of God". Indeed, in marrying Catherine, his brother's wife, he had acted contrary to Leviticus 20:21, a justification Thomas Cranmer used to declare the marriage null. Martin Luther, on the other hand, had initially argued against the annulment, stating that Henry VIII could take a second wife in accordance with his teaching that the Bible allowed for polygamy but not divorce. Henry now believed the Pope had lacked the authority to grant a dispensation from this impediment. It was this argument Henry took to Pope Clement VII in 1527 in the hope of having his marriage to Catherine annulled, forgoing at least one less openly defiant line of attack. In going public, all hope of tempting Catherine to retire to a nunnery or otherwise stay quiet was lost. Henry sent his secretary, William Knight, to appeal directly to the Holy See by way of a deceptively worded draft papal bull. Knight was unsuccessful; the Pope could not be misled so easily.

Other missions concentrated on arranging an ecclesiastical court to meet in England, with a representative from Clement VII. Although Clement agreed to the creation of such a court, he never had any intention of empowering his legate, Lorenzo Campeggio, to decide in Henry's favour. This bias was perhaps the result of pressure from Emperor Charles V, Catherine's nephew, but it is not clear how far this influenced either Campeggio or the Pope. After less than two months of hearing evidence, Clement called the case back to Rome in July 1529, from which it was clear that it would never re-emerge. With the chance for an annulment lost, Cardinal Wolsey bore the blame. He was charged with praemunire in October 1529, and his fall from grace was "sudden and total". Briefly reconciled with Henry (and officially pardoned) in the first half of 1530, he was charged once more in November 1530, this time for treason, but died while awaiting trial. After a short period in which Henry took government upon his own shoulders, Sir Thomas More took on the role of Lord Chancellor and chief minister. Intelligent and able, but also a devout Catholic and opponent of the annulment, More initially cooperated with the king's new policy, denouncing Wolsey in Parliament.

A year later, Catherine was banished from court, and her rooms were given to Anne Boleyn. Anne was an unusually educated and intellectual woman for her time and was keenly absorbed and engaged with the ideas of the Protestant Reformers, but the extent to which she herself was a committed Protestant is much debated. When Archbishop of Canterbury William Warham died, Anne's influence and the need to find a trustworthy supporter of the annulment had Thomas Cranmer appointed to the vacant position. This was approved by the Pope, unaware of the king's nascent plans for the Church.

Henry was married to Catherine for 24 years. Their divorce has been described as a "deeply wounding and isolating" experience for Henry.

Marriage to Anne Boleyn

In the winter of 1532, Henry met with Francis I at Calais and enlisted the support of the French king for his new marriage. Immediately upon returning to Dover in England, Henry, now 41, and Anne went through a secret wedding service. She soon became pregnant, and there was a second wedding service in London on 25 January 1533. On 23 May 1533, Cranmer, sitting in judgment at a special court convened at Dunstable Priory to rule on the validity of the king's marriage to Catherine of Aragon, declared the marriage of Henry and Catherine null and void. Five days later, on 28 May 1533, Cranmer declared the marriage of Henry and Anne to be valid. Catherine was formally stripped of her title as queen, becoming instead "princess dowager" as the widow of Arthur. In her place, Anne was crowned queen consort on 1 June 1533. The queen gave birth to a daughter slightly prematurely on 7 September 1533. The child was christened Elizabeth, in honour of Henry's mother, Elizabeth of York.

Following the marriage, there was a period of consolidation, taking the form of a series of statutes of the Reformation Parliament aimed at finding solutions to any remaining issues, whilst protecting the new reforms from challenge, convincing the public of their legitimacy, and exposing and dealing with opponents. Although the canon law was dealt with at length by Cranmer and others, these acts were advanced by Thomas Cromwell, Thomas Audley and the Duke of Norfolk and indeed by Henry himself. With this process complete, in May 1532 More resigned as Lord Chancellor, leaving Cromwell as Henry's chief minister. With the Act of Succession 1533, Catherine's daughter, Mary, was declared illegitimate; Henry's marriage to Anne was declared legitimate; and Anne's issue declared to be next in the line of succession. With the Acts of Supremacy in 1534, Parliament also recognised the king's status as head of the church in England and, together with the Act in Restraint of Appeals in 1532, abolished the right of appeal to Rome. It was only then that Pope Clement VII took the step of excommunicating the king and Cranmer, although the excommunication was not made official until some time later.

The king and queen were not pleased with married life. The royal couple enjoyed periods of calm and affection, but Anne refused to play the submissive role expected of her. The vivacity and opinionated intellect that had made her so attractive as an illicit lover made her too independent for the largely ceremonial role of a royal wife and it made her many enemies. For his part, Henry disliked Anne's constant irritability and violent temper. After a false pregnancy or miscarriage in 1534, he saw her failure to give him a son as a betrayal. As early as Christmas 1534, Henry was discussing with Cranmer and Cromwell the chances of leaving Anne without having to return to Catherine. Henry is traditionally believed to have had an affair with Madge Shelton in 1535, although historian Antonia Fraser argues that Henry in fact had an affair with her sister Mary Shelton.

Opposition to Henry's religious policies was at first quickly suppressed in England. A number of dissenting monks, including the first Carthusian Martyrs, were executed and many more pilloried. The most prominent resisters included John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, and Sir Thomas More, both of whom refused to take the oath to the king. Neither Henry nor Cromwell sought at that stage to have the men executed; rather, they hoped that the two might change their minds and save themselves. Fisher openly rejected Henry as the Supreme Head of the Church, but More was careful to avoid openly breaking the Treasons Act of 1534, which (unlike later acts) did not forbid mere silence. Both men were subsequently convicted of high treason, however - More on the evidence of a single conversation with Richard Rich, the Solicitor General, and both were executed in the summer of 1535.

These suppressions, as well as the Dissolution of the Lesser Monasteries Act of 1536, in turn contributed to more general resistance to Henry's reforms, most notably in the Pilgrimage of Grace, a large uprising in northern England in October 1536. Some 20,000 to 40,000 rebels were led by Robert Aske, together with parts of the northern nobility. Henry VIII promised the rebels he would pardon them and thanked them for raising the issues. Aske told the rebels they had been successful and they could disperse and go home. Henry saw the rebels as traitors and did not feel obliged to keep his promises to them, so when further violence occurred after Henry's offer of a pardon he was quick to break his promise of clemency. The leaders, including Aske, were arrested and executed for treason. In total, about 200 rebels were executed, and the disturbances ended.

Execution of Anne Boleyn

On 8 January 1536, news reached the king and queen that Catherine of Aragon had died. The following day, Henry dressed all in yellow, with a white feather in his bonnet. Queen Anne was pregnant again, and she was aware of the consequences if she failed to give birth to a son. Later that month, the king was unhorsed in a tournament and was badly injured; it seemed for a time that his life was in danger. When news of this accident reached the queen, she was sent into shock and miscarried a male child at about 15 weeks' gestation, on the day of Catherine's funeral, 29 January 1536. For most observers, this personal loss was the beginning of the end of this royal marriage.

Although the Boleyn family still held important positions on the Privy Council, Anne had many enemies, including the Duke of Suffolk. Even her own uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, had come to resent her attitude to her power. The Boleyns preferred France over the Emperor as a potential ally, but the king's favour had swung towards the latter (partly because of Cromwell), damaging the family's influence. Also opposed to Anne were supporters of reconciliation with Princess Mary (among them the former supporters of Catherine), who had reached maturity. A second annulment was now a real possibility, although it is commonly believed that it was Cromwell's anti-Boleyn influence that led opponents to look for a way of having her executed.

Anne's downfall came shortly after she had recovered from her final miscarriage. Whether it was primarily the result of allegations of conspiracy, adultery, or witchcraft remains a matter of debate among historians. Early signs of a fall from grace included the king's new mistress, the 28-year-old Jane Seymour, being moved into new quarters, and Anne's brother, George Boleyn, being refused the Order of the Garter, which was instead given to Nicholas Carew. Between 30 April and 2 May, five men, including George Boleyn, were arrested on charges of treasonable adultery and accused of having sexual relationships with the queen. Anne was also arrested, accused of treasonous adultery and incest. Although the evidence against them was unconvincing, the accused were found guilty and condemned to death. The accused men were executed on 17 May 1536. Henry and Anne's marriage was annulled by Archbishop Cranmer at Lambeth on the same day. Cranmer appears to have had difficulty finding grounds for an annulment and probably based it on the prior liaison between Henry and Anne's sister Mary, which in canon law meant that Henry's marriage to Anne was, like his first marriage, within a forbidden degree of affinity and therefore void. At 8 am on 19 May 1536, Anne was executed on Tower Green.

Marriage to Jane Seymour; domestic and foreign affairs

The day after Anne's execution the 45-year-old Henry became engaged to Seymour, who had been one of the queen's ladies-in-waiting. They were married ten days later at the Palace of Whitehall, Whitehall, London, in the queen's closet, by Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester. On 12 October 1537, Jane gave birth to a son, Prince Edward, the future Edward VI. The birth was difficult, and Queen Jane died on 24 October 1537 from an infection and was buried in Windsor. The euphoria that had accompanied Edward's birth became sorrow, but it was only over time that Henry came to long for his wife. At the time, Henry recovered quickly from the shock. Measures were immediately put in place to find another wife for Henry, which, at the insistence of Cromwell and the Privy Council, were focused on the European continent.

With Charles V distracted by the internal politics of his many kingdoms and also external threats, and Henry and Francis on relatively good terms, domestic and not foreign policy issues had been Henry's priority in the first half of the 1530s. In 1536, for example, Henry granted his assent to the Laws in Wales Act 1535, which legally annexed Wales, uniting England and Wales into a single nation. This was followed by the Second Succession Act (the Act of Succession 1536), which declared Henry's children by Jane to be next in the line of succession and declared both Mary and Elizabeth illegitimate, thus excluding them from the throne. The king was also granted the power to further determine the line of succession in his will, should he have no further issue. However, when Charles and Francis made peace in January 1539, Henry became increasingly paranoid, perhaps as a result of receiving a constant list of threats to the kingdom (real or imaginary, minor or serious) supplied by Cromwell in his role as spymaster. Enriched by the dissolution of the monasteries, Henry used some of his financial reserves to build a series of coastal defences and set some aside for use in the event of a Franco-German invasion.

Marriage to Anne of Cleves

Having considered the matter, Cromwell suggested Anne, the 25-year-old sister of the Duke of Cleves, who was seen as an important ally in case of a Roman Catholic attack on England, for the duke fell between Lutheranism and Catholicism. Hans Holbein the Younger was dispatched to Cleves to paint a portrait of Anne for the king. Despite speculation that Holbein painted her in an overly flattering light, it is more likely that the portrait was accurate; Holbein remained in favour at court. After seeing Holbein's portrait, and urged on by the complimentary description of Anne given by his courtiers, the 49-year-old king agreed to wed Anne. However, it was not long before Henry wished to annul the marriage so he could marry another. Anne did not argue, and confirmed that the marriage had never been consummated. Anne's previous betrothal to the Duke of Lorraine's son Francis provided further grounds for the annulment. The marriage was subsequently dissolved, and Anne received the title of "The King's Sister", two houses, and a generous allowance. It was soon clear that Henry had fallen for the 17-year-old Catherine Howard, the Duke of Norfolk's niece. This worried Cromwell, for Norfolk was his political opponent.

Shortly after, the religious reformers (and protégés of Cromwell) Robert Barnes, William Jerome and Thomas Garret were burned as heretics. Cromwell, meanwhile, fell out of favour although it is unclear exactly why, for there is little evidence of differences in domestic or foreign policy. Despite his role, he was never formally accused of being responsible for Henry's failed marriage. Cromwell was now surrounded by enemies at court, with Norfolk also able to draw on his niece Catherine's position. Cromwell was charged with treason, selling export licences, granting passports, and drawing up commissions without permission, and may also have been blamed for the failure of the foreign policy that accompanied the attempted marriage to Anne. He was subsequently attainted and beheaded.

Marriage to Catherine Howard

On 28 July 1540 (the same day Cromwell was executed), Henry married the young Catherine Howard, a first cousin and lady-in-waiting of Anne Boleyn. He was absolutely delighted with his new queen and awarded her the lands of Cromwell and a vast array of jewellery. Soon after the marriage, however, Queen Catherine had an affair with the courtier Thomas Culpeper. She also employed Francis Dereham, who had previously been informally engaged to her and had an affair with her prior to her marriage, as her secretary. The Privy Council was informed of her affair with Dereham whilst Henry was away; Thomas Cranmer was dispatched to investigate, and he brought evidence of Queen Catherine's previous affair with Dereham to the king's notice. Though Henry originally refused to believe the allegations, Dereham confessed. It took another meeting of the council, however, before Henry believed the accusations against Dereham and went into a rage, blaming the council before consoling himself in hunting. When questioned, the queen could have admitted a prior contract to marry Dereham, which would have made her subsequent marriage to Henry invalid, but she instead claimed that Dereham had forced her to enter into an adulterous relationship. Dereham, meanwhile, exposed Catherine's relationship with Culpeper. Culpeper and Dereham were both executed, and Catherine too was beheaded on 13 February 1542.

Marriage to Catherine Parr

Henry married his last wife, the wealthy widow Catherine Parr, in July 1543. A reformer at heart, she argued with Henry over religion. Henry remained committed to an idiosyncratic mixture of Catholicism and Protestantism; the reactionary mood that had gained ground after Cromwell's fall had neither eliminated his Protestant streak nor been overcome by it. Parr helped reconcile Henry with his daughters, Mary and Elizabeth. In 1543, the Third Succession Act put them back in the line of succession after Edward. The same act allowed Henry to determine further succession to the throne in his will.

Shrines destroyed and monasteries dissolved

In 1538, the chief minister Thomas Cromwell pursued an extensive campaign against what the government termed "idolatry" practised under the old religion, culminating in September with the dismantling of the shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. As a consequence, the king was excommunicated by Pope Paul III on 17 December of the same year. In 1540, Henry sanctioned the complete destruction of shrines to saints. In 1542, England's remaining monasteries were all dissolved, and their property transferred to the Crown. Abbots and priors lost their seats in the House of Lords; only archbishops and bishops remained. Consequently, the Lords Spiritual-as members of the clergy with seats in the House of Lords were known-were for the first time outnumbered by the Lords Temporal.

Second invasion of France and the "Rough Wooing" of Scotland

The 1539 alliance between Francis and Charles had soured, eventually degenerating into renewed war. With Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn dead, relations between Charles and Henry improved considerably, and Henry concluded a secret alliance with the Emperor and decided to enter the Italian War in favour of his new ally. An invasion of France was planned for 1543. In preparation for it, Henry moved to eliminate the potential threat of Scotland under the youthful James V. The Scots were defeated at Battle of Solway Moss on 24 November 1542, and James died on 15 December. Henry now hoped to unite the crowns of England and Scotland by marrying his son Edward to James' successor, Mary. The Scottish Regent Lord Arran agreed to the marriage in the Treaty of Greenwich on 1 July 1543, but it was rejected by the Parliament of Scotland on 11 December. The result was eight years of war between England and Scotland, a campaign later dubbed "the Rough Wooing". Despite several peace treaties, unrest continued in Scotland until Henry's death.

Despite the early success with Scotland, Henry hesitated to invade France, annoying Charles. Henry finally went to France in June 1544 with a two-pronged attack. One force under Norfolk ineffectively besieged Montreuil. The other, under Suffolk, laid siege to Boulogne. Henry later took personal command, and Boulogne fell on 18 September 1544. However, Henry had refused Charles' request to march against Paris. Charles' own campaign fizzled, and he made peace with France that same day. Henry was left alone against France, unable to make peace. Francis attempted to invade England in the summer of 1545 but reached only the Isle of Wight before being repulsed in the Battle of the Solent. Financially exhausted, France and England signed the Treaty of Camp on 7 June 1546. Henry secured Boulogne for eight years. The city was then to be returned to France for 2 million crowns (£750,000). Henry needed the money; the 1544 campaign had cost £650,000, and England was once again bankrupt.

Physical decline and death

Late in life, Henry became obese, with a waist measurement of 54 inches (140 cm), and had to be moved about with the help of mechanical devices. He was covered with painful, pus-filled boils and possibly suffered from gout. His obesity and other medical problems can be traced to the jousting accident in 1536 in which he suffered a leg wound. The accident reopened and aggravated an injury he had sustained years earlier, to the extent that his doctors found it difficult to treat. The chronic wound festered for the remainder of his life and became ulcerated, preventing him from maintaining the level of physical activity he had previously enjoyed. The jousting accident is also believed to have caused Henry's mood swings, which may have had a dramatic effect on his personality and temperament.

The theory that Henry suffered from syphilis has been dismissed by most historians. Historian Susan Maclean Kybett ascribes his demise to scurvy, which is caused by insufficient vitamin C most often due to a lack of fresh fruits and vegetables in one's diet. Alternatively, his wives' pattern of pregnancies and his mental deterioration have led some to suggest that he may have been Kell positive and suffered from McLeod syndrome. According to another study, Henry's history and body morphology may have been the result of traumatic brain injury after his 1536 jousting accident, which in turn led to a neuroendocrine cause of his obesity. This analysis identifies growth hormone deficiency (GHD) as the reason for his increased adiposity but also significant behavioural changes noted in his later years, including his multiple marriages.

Henry's obesity hastened his death at the age of 55, on 28 January 1547 in the Palace of Whitehall, on what would have been his father's 90th birthday. The tomb he had planned (with components taken from the tomb intended for Cardinal Wolsey) was only partly constructed and was never completed (the sarcophagus and its base were later removed and used for Lord Nelson's tomb in the crypt of St. Paul's Cathedral). Henry was interred in a vault at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, next to Jane Seymour. Over 100 years later, King Charles I (ruled 1625-1649) was buried in the same vault.

Wives, mistresses, and children

English historian and House of Tudor expert David Starkey describes Henry VIII as a husband:

What is extraordinary is that Henry was usually a very good husband. And he liked women-that's why he married so many of them! He was very tender to them, we know that he addressed them as "sweetheart." He was a good lover, he was very generous: the wives were given huge settlements of land and jewels-they were loaded with jewels. He was immensely considerate when they were pregnant. But, once he had fallen out of love... he just cut them off. He just withdrew. He abandoned them. They didn't even know he'd left them.

Succession

Upon Henry's death, he was succeeded by his son Edward VI. Since Edward was then only nine years old, he could not rule directly. Instead, Henry's will designated 16 executors to serve on a council of regency until Edward reached 18. The executors chose Edward Seymour, 1st Earl of Hertford, Jane Seymour's elder brother, to be Lord Protector of the Realm. If Edward died childless, the throne was to pass to Mary, Henry VIII's daughter by Catherine of Aragon, and her heirs. If Mary's issue failed, the crown was to go to Elizabeth, Henry's daughter by Anne Boleyn, and her heirs. Finally, if Elizabeth's line became extinct, the crown was to be inherited by the descendants of Henry VIII's deceased younger sister, Mary, the Greys. The descendants of Henry's sister Margaret-the Stuarts, rulers of Scotland-were thereby excluded from the succession. This provision ultimately failed when James VI of Scotland became King of England in 1603.

Public image

Henry cultivated the image of a Renaissance man, and his court was a centre of scholarly and artistic innovation and glamorous excess, epitomised by the Field of the Cloth of Gold. He scouted the country for choirboys, taking some directly from Wolsey's choir, and introduced Renaissance music into court. Musicians included Benedict de Opitiis, Richard Sampson, Ambrose Lupo, and Venetian organist Dionisio Memo, and Henry himself kept a considerable collection of instruments. He was skilled on the lute and played the organ, and was a talented player of the virginals. He could also sightread music and sing well. He was an accomplished musician, author, and poet; his best-known piece of music is " Pastime with Good Company" ("The Kynges Ballade"), and he is reputed to have written " Greensleeves" but probably did not.

Henry was an avid gambler and dice player, and excelled at sports, especially jousting, hunting, and real tennis. He was also known for his strong defence of conventional Christian piety. He was involved in the construction and improvement of several significant buildings, including Nonsuch Palace, King's College Chapel, Cambridge, and Westminster Abbey in London. Many of the existing buildings which he improved were properties confiscated from Wolsey, such as Christ Church, Oxford, Hampton Court Palace, the Palace of Whitehall, and Trinity College, Cambridge.

Henry was an intellectual, the first English king with a modern humanist education. He read and wrote English, French, and Latin, and owned a large library. He annotated many books and published one of his own, and he had numerous pamphlets and lectures prepared to support the reformation of the church. Richard Sampson's Oratio (1534), for example, was an argument for absolute obedience to the monarchy and claimed that the English church had always been independent of Rome. At the popular level, theatre and minstrel troupes funded by the crown travelled around the land to promote the new religious practices; the pope and Catholic priests and monks were mocked as foreign devils, while Henry was hailed as the glorious king of England and as a brave and heroic defender of the true faith. Henry worked hard to present an image of unchallengeable authority and irresistible power.

Henry was a large, well-built athlete, over 6 feet [1.8 m] tall, strong, and broad in proportion. His athletic activities were more than pastimes; they were political devices that served multiple goals, enhancing his image, impressing foreign emissaries and rulers, and conveying his ability to suppress any rebellion. He arranged a jousting tournament at Greenwich in 1517 where he wore gilded armour and gilded horse trappings, and outfits of velvet, satin, and cloth of gold with pearls and jewels. It suitably impressed foreign ambassadors, one of whom wrote home that "the wealth and civilisation of the world are here, and those who call the English barbarians appear to me to render themselves such". Henry finally retired from jousting in 1536 after a heavy fall from his horse left him unconscious for two hours, but he continued to sponsor two lavish tournaments a year. He then started gaining weight and lost the trim, athletic figure that had made him so handsome, and his courtiers began dressing in heavily padded clothes to emulate and flatter him. His health rapidly declined near the end of his reign.

Government

The power of Tudor monarchs, including Henry, was 'whole' and 'entire', ruling, as they claimed, by the grace of God alone. The crown could also rely on the exclusive use of those functions that constituted the royal prerogative. These included acts of diplomacy (including royal marriages), declarations of war, management of the coinage, the issue of royal pardons and the power to summon and dissolve parliament as and when required. Nevertheless, as evident during Henry's break with Rome, the monarch stayed within established limits, whether legal or financial, that forced him to work closely with both the nobility and parliament (representing the gentry).

In practice, Tudor monarchs used patronage to maintain a royal court that included formal institutions such as the Privy Council as well as more informal advisers and confidants. Both the rise and fall of court nobles could be swift: Henry did undoubtedly execute at will, burning or beheading two of his wives, 20 peers, four leading public servants, six close attendants and friends, one cardinal (John Fisher) and numerous abbots. Among those who were in favour at any given point in Henry's reign, one could usually be identified as a chief minister, though one of the enduring debates in the historiography of the period has been the extent to which those chief ministers controlled Henry rather than vice versa. In particular, historian G. R. Elton has argued that one such minister, Thomas Cromwell, led a "Tudor revolution in government" independently of the king, whom Elton presented as an opportunistic, essentially lazy participant in the nitty-gritty of politics. Where Henry did intervene personally in the running of the country, Elton argued, he mostly did so to its detriment. The prominence and influence of faction in Henry's court is similarly discussed in the context of at least five episodes of Henry's reign, including the downfall of Anne Boleyn.

From 1514 to 1529, Thomas Wolsey (1473-1530), a cardinal of the established Church, oversaw domestic and foreign policy for the king from his position as Lord Chancellor. Wolsey centralised the national government and extended the jurisdiction of the conciliar courts, particularly the Star Chamber. The Star Chamber's overall structure remained unchanged, but Wolsey used it to provide much-needed reform of the criminal law. The power of the court itself did not outlive Wolsey, however, since no serious administrative reform was undertaken and its role eventually devolved to the localities. Wolsey helped fill the gap left by Henry's declining participation in government (particularly in comparison to his father) but did so mostly by imposing himself in the king's place. His use of these courts to pursue personal grievances, and particularly to treat delinquents as mere examples of a whole class worthy of punishment, angered the rich, who were annoyed as well by his enormous wealth and ostentatious living. Following Wolsey's downfall, Henry took full control of his government, although at court numerous complex factions continued to try to ruin and destroy each other.

Thomas Cromwell (c. 1485-1540) also came to define Henry's government. Returning to England from the continent in 1514 or 1515, Cromwell soon entered Wolsey's service. He turned to law, also picking up a good knowledge of the Bible, and was admitted to Gray's Inn in 1524. He became Wolsey's "man of all work". Driven in part by his religious beliefs, Cromwell attempted to reform the body politic of the English government through discussion and consent, and through the vehicle of continuity, not outward change. Many saw him as the man they wanted to bring about their shared aims, including Thomas Audley. By 1531, Cromwell and his associates were already responsible for the drafting of much legislation. Cromwell's first office was that of the master of the king's jewels in 1532, from which he began to invigorate the government finances. By that point, Cromwell's power as an efficient administrator, in a Council full of politicians, exceeded what Wolsey had achieved.

Cromwell did much work through his many offices to remove the tasks of government from the Royal Household (and ideologically from the personal body of the king) and into a public state. But he did so in a haphazard fashion that left several remnants, not least because he needed to retain Henry's support, his own power, and the possibility of actually achieving the plan he set out. Cromwell made the various income streams Henry VII put in place more formal and assigned largely autonomous bodies for their administration. The role of the King's Council was transferred to a reformed Privy Council, much smaller and more efficient than its predecessor. A difference emerged between the king's financial health and the country's, although Cromwell's fall undermined much of his bureaucracy, which required him to keep order among the many new bodies and prevent profligate spending that strained relations as well as finances. Cromwell's reforms ground to a halt in 1539, the initiative lost, and he failed to secure the passage of an enabling act, the Proclamation by the Crown Act 1539. He was executed on 28 July 1540.

Henry inherited a vast fortune and a prosperous economy from his father, who had been frugal. This fortune is estimated at £1,250,000 (the equivalent of £375 million today). By comparison, Henry VIII's reign was a near disaster financially. He augmented the royal treasury by seizing church lands, but his heavy spending and long periods of mismanagement damaged the economy.

Henry spent much of his wealth on maintaining his court and household, including many of the building works he undertook on royal palaces. He hung 2,000 tapestries in his palaces; by comparison, James V of Scotland hung just 200. Henry took pride in showing off his collection of weapons, which included exotic archery equipment, 2,250 pieces of land ordnance and 6,500 handguns. Tudor monarchs had to fund all government expenses out of their own income. This income came from the Crown lands that Henry owned as well as from customs duties like tonnage and poundage, granted by parliament to the king for life. During Henry's reign the revenues of the Crown remained constant (around £100,000), but were eroded by inflation and rising prices brought about by war. Indeed, war and Henry's dynastic ambitions in Europe exhausted the surplus he had inherited from his father by the mid-1520s.

Henry VII had not involved Parliament in his affairs very much, but Henry VIII had to turn to Parliament during his reign for money, in particular for grants of subsidies to fund his wars. The dissolution of the monasteries provided a means to replenish the treasury, and as a result, the Crown took possession of monastic lands worth £120,000 (£36 million) a year. The Crown had profited by a small amount in 1526 when Wolsey put England onto a gold, rather than silver, standard, and had debased the currency slightly. Cromwell debased the currency more significantly, starting in Ireland in 1540. The English pound halved in value against the Flemish pound between 1540 and 1551 as a result. The nominal profit made was significant, helping to bring income and expenditure together, but it had a catastrophic effect on the country's economy. In part, it helped to bring about a period of very high inflation from 1544 onwards.

Reformation

Henry is generally credited with initiating the English Reformation-the process of transforming England from a Catholic country to a Protestant one-though his progress at the elite and mass levels is disputed, and the precise narrative not widely agreed upon. Certainly, in 1527, Henry, until then an observant and well-informed Catholic, appealed to the Pope for an annulment of his marriage to Catherine. No annulment was immediately forthcoming, since the papacy was now under the control of Charles V, Catherine' s nephew. The traditional narrative gives this refusal as the trigger for Henry's rejection of papal supremacy, which he had previously defended. Yet as E. L. Woodward put it, Henry's determination to annul his marriage with Catherine was the occasion rather than the cause of the English Reformation so that "neither too much nor too little" should be made of the annulment. Historian A. F. Pollard has argued that even if Henry had not needed an annulment, he might have come to reject papal control over the governance of England purely for political reasons. Indeed, Henry needed a son to secure the Tudor Dynasty and avert the risk of civil war over disputed succession.

In any case, between 1532 and 1537, Henry instituted a number of statutes that dealt with the relationship between king and pope and hence the structure of the nascent Church of England. These included the Statute in Restraint of Appeals (passed 1533), which extended the charge of praemunire against all who introduced papal bulls into England, potentially exposing them to the death penalty if found guilty. Other acts included the Supplication against the Ordinaries and the Submission of the Clergy, which recognised Royal Supremacy over the church. The Ecclesiastical Appointments Act 1534 required the clergy to elect bishops nominated by the Sovereign. The Act of Supremacy in 1534 declared that the king was "the only Supreme Head on Earth of the Church of England" and the Treasons Act 1534 made it high treason, punishable by death, to refuse the Oath of Supremacy acknowledging the king as such. Similarly, following the passage of the Act of Succession 1533, all adults in the kingdom were required to acknowledge the Act's provisions (declaring Henry's marriage to Anne legitimate and his marriage to Catherine illegitimate) by oath; those who refused were subject to imprisonment for life, and any publisher or printer of any literature alleging that the marriage to Anne was invalid subject to the death penalty. Finally, the Peter's Pence Act was passed, and it reiterated that England had "no superior under God, but only your Grace" and that Henry's "imperial crown" had been diminished by "the unreasonable and uncharitable usurpations and exactions" of the Pope. The king had much support from the Church under Cranmer.

To Cromwell's annoyance, Henry insisted on parliamentary time to discuss questions of faith, which he achieved through the Duke of Norfolk. This led to the passing of the Act of Six Articles, whereby six major questions were all answered by asserting the religious orthodoxy, thus restraining the reform movement in England. It was followed by the beginnings of a reformed liturgy and of the Book of Common Prayer, which would take until 1549 to complete. But this victory for religious conservatives did not convert into much change in personnel, and Cranmer remained in his position. Overall, the rest of Henry's reign saw a subtle movement away from religious orthodoxy, helped in part by the deaths of prominent figures from before the break with Rome, especially the executions of Thomas More and John Fisher in 1535 for refusing to renounce papal authority. Henry established a new political theology of obedience to the crown that continued for the next decade. It reflected Martin Luther's new interpretation of the fourth commandment ("Honour thy father and mother"), brought to England by William Tyndale. The founding of royal authority on the Ten Commandments was another important shift: reformers within the Church used the Commandments' emphasis on faith and the word of God, while conservatives emphasised the need for dedication to God and doing good. The reformers' efforts lay behind the publication of the Great Bible in 1539 in English. Protestant Reformers still faced persecution, particularly over objections to Henry's annulment. Many fled abroad, including the influential Tyndale, who was eventually executed and his body burned at Henry's behest.

When taxes once payable to Rome were transferred to the Crown, Cromwell saw the need to assess the taxable value of the Church's extensive holdings as they stood in 1535. The result was an extensive compendium, the Valor Ecclesiasticus. In September 1535, Cromwell commissioned a more general visitation of religious institutions, to be undertaken by four appointee visitors. The visitation focussed almost exclusively on the country's religious houses, with largely negative conclusions. In addition to reporting back to Cromwell, the visitors made the lives of the monks more difficult by enforcing strict behavioural standards. The result was to encourage self-dissolution. In any case, the evidence Cromwell gathered led swiftly to the beginning of the state-enforced dissolution of the monasteries, with all religious houses worth less than £200 vested by statute in the crown in January 1536. After a short pause, surviving religious houses were transferred one by one to the Crown and new owners, and the dissolution confirmed by a further statute in 1539. By January 1540 no such houses remained; 800 had been dissolved. The process had been efficient, with minimal resistance, and brought the crown some £90,000 a year. The extent to which the dissolution of all houses was planned from the start is debated by historians; there is some evidence that major houses were originally intended only to be reformed. Cromwell's actions transferred a fifth of England's landed wealth to new hands. The programme was designed primarily to create a landed gentry beholden to the crown, which would use the lands much more efficiently. Although little opposition to the supremacy could be found in England's religious houses, they had links to the international church and were an obstacle to further religious reform.

Response to the reforms was mixed. The religious houses had been the only support of the impoverished, and the reforms alienated much of the populace outside London, helping to provoke the great northern rising of 1536-37, known as the Pilgrimage of Grace. Elsewhere the changes were accepted and welcomed, and those who clung to Catholic rites kept quiet or moved in secrecy. They reemerged during the reign of Henry's daughter Mary (1553-58).

Apart from permanent garrisons at Berwick, Calais, and Carlisle, England's standing army numbered only a few hundred men. This was increased only slightly by Henry. Henry's invasion force of 1513, some 30,000 men, was composed of billmen and longbowmen, at a time when the other European nations were moving to hand guns and pikemen. But the difference in capability was at this stage not significant, and Henry's forces had new armour and weaponry. They were also supported by battlefield artillery and the war wagon, relatively new innovations, and several large and expensive siege guns. The invasion force of 1544 was similarly well-equipped and organised, although command on the battlefield was laid with the dukes of Suffolk and Norfolk, which in the latter case produced disastrous results at Montreuil.

Henry's break with Rome incurred the threat of a large-scale French or Spanish invasion. To guard against this, in 1538 he began to build a chain of expensive, state-of-the-art defences along Britain's southern and eastern coasts, from Kent to Cornwall, largely built of material gained from the demolition of the monasteries. These were known as Henry VIII's Device Forts. He also strengthened existing coastal defence fortresses such as Dover Castle and, at Dover, Moat Bulwark and Archcliffe Fort, which he visited for a few months to supervise. Wolsey had many years before conducted the censuses required for an overhaul of the system of militia, but no reform resulted. In 1538-39, Cromwell overhauled the shire musters, but his work mainly served to demonstrate how inadequate they were in organisation. The building works, including that at Berwick, along with the reform of the militias and musters, were eventually finished under Queen Mary.

Henry is traditionally cited as one of the founders of the Royal Navy. Technologically, Henry invested in large cannon for his warships, an idea that had taken hold in other countries, to replace the smaller serpentines in use. He also flirted with designing ships personally. His contribution to larger vessels, if any, is unknown, but it is believed that he influenced the design of rowbarges and similar galleys. Henry was also responsible for the creation of a permanent navy, with the supporting anchorages and dockyards. Tactically, Henry's reign saw the Navy move away from boarding tactics to employ gunnery instead. The Tudor navy was enlarged up to 50 ships (the among them), and Henry was responsible for the establishment of the "council for marine causes" to oversee the maintenance and operation of the Navy, becoming the basis for the later Admiralty.

At the beginning of Henry's reign, Ireland was effectively divided into three zones: the Pale, where English rule was unchallenged; Leinster and Munster, the so-called "obedient land" of Anglo-Irish peers; and the Gaelic Connaught and Ulster, with merely nominal English rule. Until 1513, Henry continued the policy of his father, to allow Irish lords to rule in the king's name and accept steep divisions between the communities. However, upon the death of the 8th Earl of Kildare, governor of Ireland, fractious Irish politics combined with a more ambitious Henry to cause trouble. When Thomas Butler, 7th Earl of Ormond died, Henry recognised one successor for Ormond's English, Welsh and Scottish lands, whilst in Ireland another took control. Kildare's successor, the 9th Earl, was replaced as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland by The Earl of Surrey in 1520. Surrey's ambitious aims were costly but ineffective; English rule became trapped between winning the Irish lords over with diplomacy, as favoured by Henry and Wolsey, and a sweeping military occupation as proposed by Surrey. Surrey was recalled in 1521, with Piers Butler - one of the claimants to the Earldom of Ormond - appointed in his place. Butler proved unable to control opposition, including that of Kildare. Kildare was appointed chief governor in 1524, resuming his dispute with Butler, which had before been in a lull. Meanwhile, the Earl of Desmond, an Anglo-Irish peer, had turned his support to Richard de la Pole as pretender to the English throne; when in 1528 Kildare failed to take suitable actions against him, Kildare was once again removed from his post.

The Desmond situation was resolved on his death in 1529, which was followed by a period of uncertainty. This was effectively ended with the appointment of Henry FitzRoy, Duke of Richmond and the king's son, as lord lieutenant. Richmond had never before visited Ireland, his appointment a break with past policy. For a time it looked as if peace might be restored with the return of Kildare to Ireland to manage the tribes, but the effect was limited and the Irish parliament soon rendered ineffective. Ireland began to receive the attention of Cromwell, who had supporters of Ormond and Desmond promoted. Kildare, on the other hand, was summoned to London; after some hesitation, he departed for London in 1534, where he would face charges of treason. His son, Thomas, Lord Offaly was more forthright, denouncing the king and leading a "Catholic crusade" against the king, who was by this time mired in marital problems. Offaly had the Archbishop of Dublin murdered and besieged Dublin. Offaly led a mixture of Pale gentry and Irish tribes, although he failed to secure the support of Lord Darcy, a sympathiser, or Charles V. What was effectively a civil war was ended with the intervention of 2,000 English troops - a large army by Irish standards - and the execution of Offaly (his father was already dead) and his uncles.

Although the Offaly revolt was followed by a determination to rule Ireland more closely, Henry was wary of drawn-out conflict with the tribes, and a royal commission recommended that the only relationship with the tribes was to be promises of peace, their land protected from English expansion. The man to lead this effort was Sir Antony St Leger, as Lord Deputy of Ireland, who would remain into the post past Henry's death. Until the break with Rome, it was widely believed that Ireland was a Papal possession granted as a mere fiefdom to the English king, so in 1541 Henry asserted England's claim to the Kingdom of Ireland free from the Papal overlordship. This change did, however, also allow a policy of peaceful reconciliation and expansion: the Lords of Ireland would grant their lands to the king, before being returned as fiefdoms. The incentive to comply with Henry's request was an accompanying barony, and thus a right to sit in the Irish House of Lords, which was to run in parallel with England's. The Irish law of the tribes did not suit such an arrangement, because the chieftain did not have the required rights; this made progress tortuous, and the plan was abandoned in 1543, not to be replaced.

Historiography

The complexities and sheer scale of Henry's legacy ensured that, in the words of Betteridge and Freeman, "throughout the centuries, Henry has been praised and reviled, but he has never been ignored". Historian J.D. Mackie sums up Henry's personality and its impact on his achievements and popularity:

The respect, nay even the popularity, which he had from his people was not unmerited.... He kept the development of England in line with some of the most vigorous, though not the noblest forces of the day. His high courage - highest when things went ill - his commanding intellect, his appreciation of fact, and his instinct for rule carried his country through a perilous time of change, and his very arrogance saved his people from the wars which afflicted other lands. Dimly remembering the wars of the Roses, vaguely informed as to the slaughters and sufferings in Europe, the people of England knew that in Henry they had a great king.

A particular focus of modern historiography has been the extent to which the events of Henry's life (including his marriages, foreign policy and religious changes) were the result of his own initiative and, if they were, whether they were the result of opportunism or of a principled undertaking by Henry. The traditional interpretation of those events was provided by historian A.F. Pollard, who in 1902 presented his own, largely positive, view of the king, lauding him, "as the king and statesman who, whatever his personal failings, led England down the road to parliamentary democracy and empire". Pollard's interpretation remained the dominant interpretation of Henry's life until the publication of the doctoral thesis of G. R. Elton in 1953.

Elton's book on The Tudor Revolution in Government maintained Pollard's positive interpretation of the Henrician period as a whole, but reinterpreted Henry himself as a follower rather than a leader. For Elton, it was Cromwell and not Henry who undertook the changes in government - Henry was shrewd but lacked the vision to follow a complex plan through. Henry was little more, in other words, than an "ego-centric monstrosity" whose reign "owed its successes and virtues to better and greater men about him; most of its horrors and failures sprang more directly from [the king]".

Although the central tenets of Elton's thesis have since been questioned, it has consistently provided the starting point for much later work, including that of J. J. Scarisbrick, his student. Scarisbrick largely kept Elton's regard for Cromwell's abilities but returned agency to Henry, who Scarisbrick considered to have ultimately directed and shaped policy. For Scarisbrick, Henry was a formidable, captivating man who "wore regality with a splendid conviction". The effect of endowing Henry with this ability, however, was largely negative in Scarisbrick's eyes: to Scarisbrick, the Henrician period was one of upheaval and destruction and those in charge worthy of blame more than praise. Even among more recent biographers, including David Loades, David Starkey and John Guy, there has ultimately been little consensus on the extent to which Henry was responsible for the changes he oversaw or the assessment of those he did bring about.

This lack of clarity about Henry's control over events has contributed to the variation in the qualities ascribed to him: religious conservative or dangerous radical; lover of beauty or brutal destroyer of priceless artefacts; friend and patron or betrayer of those around him; chivalry incarnate or ruthless chauvinist. One traditional approach, favoured by Starkey and others, is to divide Henry's reign into two halves, the first Henry being dominated by positive qualities (politically inclusive, pious, athletic but also intellectual) who presided over a period of stability and calm, and the latter a "hulking tyrant" who presided over a period of dramatic, sometimes whimsical, change. Other writers have tried to merge Henry's disparate personality into a single whole; Lacey Baldwin Smith, for example, considered him an egotistical borderline neurotic given to great fits of temper and deep and dangerous suspicions, with a mechanical and conventional, but deeply held piety, and having at best a mediocre intellect.

Style and arms

Many changes were made to the royal style during his reign. Henry originally used the style "Henry the Eighth, by the Grace of God, King of England, France and Lord of Ireland". In 1521, pursuant to a grant from Pope Leo X rewarding Henry for his Defence of the Seven Sacraments, the royal style became "Henry the Eighth, by the Grace of God, King of England and France, Defender of the Faith and Lord of Ireland". Following Henry's excommunication, Pope Paul III rescinded the grant of the title "Defender of the Faith", but an Act of Parliament ( 35 Hen 8 c 3) declared that it remained valid; and it continues in royal usage to the present day, as evidenced by the letters FID DEF or F.D. on all British coinage. Henry's motto was "Coeur Loyal" ("true heart"), and he had this embroidered on his clothes in the form of a heart symbol and with the word "loyal". His emblem was the Tudor rose and the Beaufort portcullis. As king, Henry's arms were the same as those used by his predecessors since Henry IV: Quarterly, Azure three fleurs-de-lys Or (for France) and Gules three lions passant guardant in pale Or (for England).

In 1535, Henry added the "supremacy phrase" to the royal style, which became "Henry the Eighth, by the Grace of God, King of England and France, Defender of the Faith, Lord of Ireland and of the Church of England in Earth Supreme Head". In 1536, the phrase "of the Church of England" changed to "of the Church of England and also of Ireland". In 1541, Henry had the Irish Parliament change the title "Lord of Ireland" to "King of Ireland" with the Crown of Ireland Act 1542, after being advised that many Irish people regarded the Pope as the true head of their country, with the Lord acting as a mere representative. The reason the Irish regarded the Pope as their overlord was that Ireland had originally been given to King Henry II of England by Pope Adrian IV in the 12th century as a feudal territory under papal overlordship. The meeting of the Irish Parliament that proclaimed Henry VIII as King of Ireland was the first meeting attended by the Gaelic Irish chieftains as well as the Anglo-Irish aristocrats. The style "Henry the Eighth, by the Grace of God, King of England, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith and of the Church of England and also of Ireland in Earth Supreme Head" remained in use until the end of Henry's reign.

References

1. ^ Gibbs, Vicary, ed. (1912). The Complete Peerage, Volume III. St Catherine's Press. p. 443. Under Duke of Cornwall, which was his title when he succeeded his brother as Prince of Wales.

2. ^ Phillips, Roderick (1991). Untying the Knot: A Short History of Divorce. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521423700.

3. Cole, William Graham (6 November 2015). Sex in Christianity and Psychoanalysis. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-317-35977-7.

4. ^ Lockyer, Roger (22 May 2014). Tudor and Stuart Britain: 1485-1714. Routledge. p. 46. ISBN 978-1-317-86882-8. The king had no further use for Wolsey, who had failed to procure the annulment of his marriage, and he summoned Parliament in order that an act of attainder should be passed against the cardinal. The act was not needed, however, for Wolsey had also been commanded to appear before the common-law judges and answer the charge that by publishing his bulls of appointment as papal legate he had infringed the Statute of Praemunire.

5. Losch, Richard R. (1 May 2002). The Many Faces of Faith: A Guide to World Religions and Christian Traditions. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. p. 106. ISBN 978-0-8028-0521-8.

6. ^ James Gairdner, ed. (1882). Henry VIII: Appendix. Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 6: 1533. Institute of Historical Research.

7. ^ James Gairdner, ed. (1886). Henry VIII: August 1535, 26-31. Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 9: August-December 1535. Institute of Historical Research.

8. ^ James Gairdner, ed. (1893). Henry VIII: December 1538 16-20. Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 13 Part 2: August-December 1538. Institute of Historical Research.

9. ^ Wilson, Derek (21 June 2012). A Brief History of the English Reformation. Constable & Robinson. p. 92. ISBN 978-1-84901-825-8. Cromwell, with his usual single-minded (and ruthless) efficiency, organised the interrogation of the accused, their trials and their executions. Cranmer was absolutely shattered by the 'revelation' of the queen's misdeeds. He wrote to the king expressing his difficulty in believing her guilt. But he fell into line and pronounced the annulment of Henry's second marriage on the grounds of Anne's pre-contract to another.

10. ^ Murphy, Neil (2016). "Violence, Colonization and Henry VIII's Conquest of France, 1544-1546". Past and Present. 233 (1): 13-51. doi:10.1093/pastj/gtw018.

11. ^ "The jousting accident that turned Henry VIII into a tyrant". The Independent. UK. 18 April 2009.

12. Sohn, Emily (11 March 2011). "King Henry VIII's Madness Explained". discovery.com. Archived from the original on 30 June 2011.

13. ^ Dean and Canons of Windsor. "Henry VIII's final resting place" (PDF). Windsor Castle: College of St George. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2 May 2013.

14. ^ Wilson, Derek (2003). In the Lion's Court: Power, Ambition, and Sudden Death in the Reign of Henry VIII. Macmillan. pp. 257-60. ISBN 978-0-312-30277-1.

15. ^ "Competing Narratives: Recent Historiography of the English Reformation under Henry VIII". 1997. Archived from the original on 15 June 2013.

16. ^ Woodward, Llewellyn (1965). A History Of England. London: Methuen & Co Ltd. p. 73.

17. ^ Weir, Alison (2008). "The Tudors". Britain's Royal Families: The Complete Genealogy. London: Vintage Books. ISBN 978-0-09-953973-5.

Bibliography

Ashrafian, Hutan (2011). "Henry VIII's Obesity Following Traumatic Brain Injury". Endocrine. 42 (1): 218-9. doi:10.1007/s12020-011-9581-z. PMID 22169966. S2CID 37447368. Archived from the original on 2 January 2012.

Betteridge, Thomas (2005). "The Henrician Reformation and Mid-Tudor Culture". Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. 35 (1): 91-109. doi:10.1215/10829636-35-1-91.

Chibi, Andrew A. (1997). "Richard Sampson, His Oratio, and Henry VIII's Royal Supremacy". Journal of Church and State. 39 (3): 543-560. doi:10.1093/jcs/39.3.543. ISSN 0021-969X.

Davies, Jonathan (2005). "'We Do Fynde in Our Countre Great Lack of Bowes and Arrows': Tudor Military Archery and the Inventory of King Henry VIII". Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research. 83 (333): 11-29. ISSN 0037-9700.

Gunn, Steven (1991). "Tournaments and Early Tudor Chivalry". History Today. 41 (6): 543-560. ISSN 0018-2753.

Hall, Edward (1904) [1548]. Charles Whibley (ed.). The Triumphant Reign of Henry VIII. T.C. & E.C. Jack. OCLC 644934802.

Hibbert, Christopher; Weinreb, Ben; Keay, Julia; Keay, John (2010). The London Encyclopaedia (3 ed.). ISBN 978-1-4050-4925-2.

Ives, Eric (2005). The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn: 'The Most Happy'. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4051-3463-7.

Ives, Eric (2006). "Will the Real Henry VIII Please Stand Up?". History Today. 56 (2): 28-36. ISSN 0018-2753.

Lehmberg, Stanford E. (1970). The Reformation Parliament, 1529-1536. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-07655-5.

Loades, David (2009). Henry VIII: Court, Church and Conflict. The National Archives. ISBN 978-1-905615-42-1.

Rex, Richard (1996). "The Crisis of Obedience: God's Word and Henry's Reformation". The Historical Journal. 39 (4): 863-894. doi:10.1017/S0018246X00024687. JSTOR 2639860.

Whitley, Catrina Banks; Kramer, Kyra (2010). "A New Explanation for the Reproductive Woes and Midlife Decline of Henry VIII". The Historical Journal. 52 (4): 827. doi:10.1017/S0018246X10000452. ISSN 0018-246X. S2CID 159499333.

Williams, James (2005). "Hunting and the Royal Image of Henry VIII". Sport in History. 25 (1): 41-59. doi:10.1080/17460260500073082. ISSN 1746-0263. S2CID 161663183.

Further reading

Biographical

Scholarly studies

Bernard, G. W. (1998). "The Making of Religious Policy, 1533-1546: Henry VIII and the Search for the Middle Way". Historical Journal. 41 (2): 321-349. doi:10.1017/S0018246X98007778. ISSN 0018-246X. JSTOR 2640109.

Bush, M. L. (2007). "The Tudor Polity and the Pilgrimage of Grace". Historical Research. 80 (207): 47-72. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2281.2006.00351.x. ISSN 0950-3471.

Head, David M. (1982). "Henry VIII's Scottish Policy: a Reassessment". Scottish Historical Review. 61 (1): 1-24. ISSN 0036-9241.

Hoak, Dale (2005). "Politics, Religion and the English Reformation, 1533-1547: Some Problems and Issues". History Compass (3). ISSN 1478-0542.

William Stubbs (1886). "The Reign of Henry VIII.: (June 7, 1881.)". Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects: 241-265. Wikidata Q107248000.

William Stubbs (1886). "Parliament under Henry VIII.: (June 9, 1881.)". Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects: 266-291. Wikidata Q107248047.

Thurley, Simon (1991). "Palaces for a Nouveau Riche King". History Today. 41 (6).

Historiography

Primary sources

Douglas, David Charles; Williams, C. H., eds. (1996), English Historical Documents, 1485-1558, OCLC 247046009

Luther, Martin (1918) [1 September 1525]. "1521-1530". In Smith, Preserved; Jacobs, Charles M. (eds.). Luther's Correspondence and Other Contemporary Letters. Vol. 2. Lutheran Publication Society.

Nicolas, Nicholas Harris, ed. (1827), The Privy Purse Expences of Henry VIII, 1529-1532, London: Pickering

External links

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Henry VIII (28 June 1491 - 28 January 1547) was King of England from 22 April 1509 until his death in 1547. Henry is best known for his six marriages, and for his efforts to have his first marriage (to Catherine of Aragon) annulled.