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The reign of Henry VIII is one of the most fascinating in English history. Not only was it a time of revolutionary political and social change, but it was also dominated by one of the most extraordinary and charismatic men to emerge in the history of the British Isles – the King’s contemporaries thought him ‘the greatest man in the world’ and ‘such a king as never before’. He ruled England in unprecedented splendour, surrounded by some of the most intriguing personalities of the age, men and women who have left behind such vivid memorials of themselves that we can almost reach out across the
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Six of these people were the King’s wives. It is — and was then — a remarkable fact in itself that a man should have six wives, yet what makes it especially fascinating to us is that these wives were interesting people in their own right. We are fortunate that we know so much about them – not only the major events and minutiae of their public lives, but also something of their thoughts and feelings, even the intimate details of their private lives. Henry VIII’s marital affairs brought the royal marriage into public focus for the first time in our history; prior to his reign, the conjugal
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Greater care was taken, both in England and abroad, to maintain public records, and with the evolution of intelligence systems, such as that established by Thomas Cromwell, more detailed information than ever before was accumulated. Much of the source material for the reign of
Henry VIII was collated by historians and published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, giving rise to a succession of biographies, learned and otherwise, of the King, his courtiers and his wives.
What follows are the conclusions I have reached after many years of research into the subject, conclusions that, on the weight of the evidence, must be as realistic as anything can be after a lapse of 450 years.
Katherine of Aragon was a staunch but misguided woman of principle; Anne Boleyn an ambitious adventuress with a penchant for vengeance; Jane Seymour a strong-minded matriarch in the making; Anne of Cleves a good-humoured woman who jumped at the chance of independence; Katherine Howard an empty-headed wanton; and Katherine Parr a godly matron who was nevertheless all too human when it came to a handsome rogue.
Only four of the six received any formal education; Jane Seymour and Katherine Howard appear to have been barely literate.
the Renaissance concept of female education gradually became accepted and even applauded.
in Henry VIII’s time, the education of girls was the privilege of the royal and the rich, and its chief aim was to produce future wives schooled in godly and moral precepts. It was not intended to promote independent thinking; indeed, it tended to the opposite.
There was no legal age for marriage in the sixteenth century. Marriage between children was not unknown, but the usual age of both partners was around fourteen or fifteen, old enough for cohabitation. No one questioned whether young people were mature enough to marry and procreate at such an early age: life expectancy was short, and the average woman could not expect to live much beyond thirty.
all of Henry’s wives except Katherine Howard married him at quite a late age. Katherine of Aragon was twenty-four (it was her second marriage), Anne Boleyn around thirty-two, Jane Seymour twenty-eight, Anne of Cleves twenty-four, and Katherine Parr thirty-one (her third marriage).
What was really required of a queen was that she produce heirs for the succession and set a high moral standard for court and kingdom by being a model of wifely dignity and virtue.
A woman who bore ten children could expect to see less than half grow to full maturity if she were lucky. Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn had ten pregnancies between them: two children survived. Caesarian section and forceps were unknown, and many babies died at birth.
Ferdinand and Isabella represented everything that seemed desirable to Henry VII: they were the descendants of ancient monarchies, their position was strong, and their reputation glorious. If they could be persuaded to agree to a marriage alliance between Prince Arthur and one of their four daughters, then the Tudor dynasty would be far more secure than hitherto. Moreover, Spain and France were hereditary enemies, and therefore a joint pact between England and Spain would benefit both sides.
he needed the alliance with Spain, he wanted Katherine’s dowry to add to his already rich inheritance, and, above all, he wanted Katherine herself. And what Henry VIII wanted, he usually got.
Henry VIII professed all his life a deep and sincere faith in God, and for many years regarded himself as a true son of the Church of Rome. He was known to attend as many as
six masses in a single day, and at least three on days when he hunted. Every evening, at 6.0 p.m. and 9.0 p.m., he went to the Queen’s chamber to hear the offices of vespers and compline. At Easter, he ‘crept to the Cross’ on his knees, with all due humility. He also held himself up as an authority on doctrine, and was acknowledged as such by his contemporaries because ‘he is very religious’.
And, after a successful day, it was not unknown for him to boast about his success for three or four hours at a time. Queen Katherine enjoyed hunting too, and sometimes accompanied her husband.
Being an excellent horseman and an expert in the martial arts, Henry was also passionately fond of that other great medieval sport, the jousting tournament, which was almost a weekly event during the early years of his reign. He was a fine jouster who was conspicuous in the combats, both on horseback and on foot, excelling everyone else ‘as much in agility at breaking spears as in nobleness of stature’. At one tournament in 1518, Henry performed ‘supernatural feats’, causing his magnificent charger to ‘jump and execute other acts of horsemanship’. Then, changing mounts, he made his fresh steed
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Henry had a lifelong love of the sea and all things maritime. He ordered the building of several great ships – including the Henry-Grace-a-Dieu and the Mary Rose - and has been rightly acclaimed as the founder of Britain’s modern navy.
Katherine of Aragon first appeared at court as Queen of England on the day her marriage to the King was proclaimed, 15 June 1509. Henceforth, she would be at Henry’s side at all state and court functions.
Sir Thomas More applauded Henry VIII for cultivating all the ‘liberal arts’, and Erasmus thought that ‘under such a King, it may not seem a court, but a temple of the Muses’. When Henry dined, he was attended by writers,
One of the scholars who ranked highest in the King’s estimation was Thomas More, a friend of Erasmus and a fellow humanist.
A man of upright character with a gentle, dry wit, More was also a brilliant lawyer and well read in theology. In 1516, he published a book entitled Utopia, which described the ideal political state and earned him a generous measure of fame. He was also renowned for his exemplary family life and for his learned daughters, the products of his advanced views on female education. His eldest daughter, Margaret, the future wife of the Protestant writer William Roper, could speak both Latin and Greek. Henry and Katherine admired More, and the King invited him to court, though he only accepted with
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As he had feared, he hated it. ‘I am as uncomfortable there as a bad rider is in the saddle,’ he wrote. However, the King was ‘so courteous and kindly’ and did all in his power to make More welcome, singling him out for special friendship and showing he realised what a sacrifice More had made to humour him. ‘I should not like to think that my presence had in any way interfered with your domestic pleasures,’ he told him, intrigued by this rare, unworldly man who seemed content with his family, his books and his animals. More’s integrity, and his conservatism in matters of religion – he
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When the King and Queen dined privately, they would often send for Thomas More to be ‘merry with them’, and so much did they enjoy his company that, according to his son-in-law, William Roper, ‘he could not once in a month get leave to go home to his wife and children’. The King would frequently summon More to his private study, where the two men would s...
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Masques differed from pageants in that there was more plot to them; whereas a pageant was merely a tableau with music and dancing, a masque incorporated a story, and was the forerunner of the modern musical.
The annual routine of the court culminated in the twelve days of merrymaking that constituted a Tudor Christmas. Henry VIII usually kept the festival at Greenwich Palace. Christmas Day itself was then a holy day, devoted to acts of worship, but the days after it were given over to feasting and ‘disports’, the King celebrating Christ’s birth with ‘much nobleness and open court’. The festivities reached their climax on Twelfth Night, the Feast of the Epiphany, when they were usually brought to an end with a sumptuous banquet.
Gifts were exchanged on New Year’s Day, not on Christmas Day.
Unusually at Christmas 1517, the court was closed, but there was a very good reason for it. Plague was a notorious killer, and during an epidemic drastic measures had to be taken to avoid the spread of infection, for it was no respecter of persons. And plague struck often, particularly in sixteenth-century summers. The plague that had hit London in the July of 1517 was of a type known to be extremely deadly – the sweating sickness, a scourge prevalent only in Tudor times, having first appeared in England in 1485; some saw it as a judgement of God upon the usurping dynasty. Illness in any form
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Katherine’s labour began on 31 December 1510, and on New Year’s Day 1511, she was at last ‘delivered of a Prince, to the great gladness of the realm’. In honour of the occasion, a jubilant Henry ordered beacons to be lit in London and the distribution of free wine to the citizens. Churchmen went in procession through the streets, and in the churches the Te Deum was sung. The child was given his father’s name, Henry.
Then tragedy struck, and the festivities were brought to an abrupt halt when the King and Queen were informed that the little prince had died on 22 February at Richmond. The chronicler Edward Hall says that Henry, ‘like a wise Prince’, was deeply grieved yet still philosophical; his concern was mainly for Katherine, who, ‘like a natural woman’, was devastated by the news and ‘made much lamentation
From the first, Katherine of Aragon was mindful of the fact that she was in England to represent her father’s interests, and in the early days of their marriage her influence over the young Henry VIII was very strong indeed. Henry would do nothing without her approval; even when it came to matters of state, he would say to his councillors, or to visiting ambassadors, ‘The Queen must hear this,’ or ‘This will please the Queen.’
It was essential that she regain the King’s confidence, yet Henry never came to her now for advice on political matters, and she was obliged to retire into the background and settle for a purely domestic and decorative role. For someone who had, for several years, been at the centre of events, this was hard to take, yet take it she did, with patience and humility, never betraying her sense of isolation or her distaste for her husband’s new allies. If she could bring him an heir, she might yet win him back, but in November 1514 her latest pregnancy ended with the birth of yet another prince who
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She was destined, however, to bear a living child. A fifth pregnancy was confirmed in the summer of 1515, and at four o’clock in the morning of 18 February 1516, Katherine gave birth to a healthy daughter. Although the baby was the wrong sex, the King was delighted with her, for she was ‘a right lusty princess’, and he named her Mary. Katherine’s emotions when she beheld her ‘beauteous babe’ may well be imagined – even the news of the death of her father, King Ferdinand, which had been kept from her until after her confinement, could not dampen her joy.
Tragically, his hopes were to come to nothing yet again, for on 10 November Katherine had a daughter, ‘to the vexation of as many as knew it. Never had the kingdom desired anything so anxiously as it did a prince.’ The baby was very weak, and died before she could be christened. The Queen found this latest disappointment almost too much to bear, and openly wondered if the loss of her children was a judgement of God ‘for that her former marriage was made in blood’.
The Queen had conceived six, possibly eight, times, yet all she had to show for it was one daughter. She had borne her losses with amiability, resignation and good humour, yet the burden of failure was great.
In August 1525, the King sent Mary with her own household to live at Ludlow Castle.
It seems likely that her affair with Henry VIII began around 1519-20, and that it was still continuing in 1523, when Henry named one of his ships the Mary Boleyn. The relationship seems to have ended in 1525, or thereabouts.
What Henry VIII was really questioning, therefore, was the power of the Pope to dispense at all in such a case as his. This was not immediately apparent as the central issue in the affair, but it would soon become so, and then the shock waves would reverberate around Europe, for to question the Pope’s authority, which all good Catholics believed was invested in him by Christ, was tantamount to heresy. Yet the European climate was ripe for it: for two centuries the papacy had been recognised as corrupt, and was held in disrepute by those who argued the need for reform of a church riddled with
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Given this, it is not perhaps surprising to find a devout Catholic, as Henry undoubtedly then was, calling the Pope’s authority into question over a matter of canon law. The other factor spurring the King into action in the spring of 1527 was that he was, by a fortuitous coincidence, passionately in love for the first time in his life, and wished to remarry.
This was surprising indeed in an age when it was considered almost honourable, and was at least lucrative, to become the mistress – in the sexual sense even – of a king. Yet this lady was keeping him firmly at arm’s length and loudly proclaiming her virtue, which of course only served further to inflame the King’s passion. She would have marriage, and the crown of England, or nothing. Her name was Anne Boleyn.
The story of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn began with passion and ended with a bloody death.
Anne Boleyn, conversely, is an enigma. Her biographers, both before and after her death, were never impartial. On the one hand, we have the Jezebel portrayed by hostile Catholic writers, the ‘Concubine’ who would use any means at her disposal to ensnare a king and be rid of his wife and child, and who would not stop at adultery or incest to provide her husband with a son and so save her own skin. This violent hostility towards Anne Boleyn began in her own lifetime, and when she was beheaded in 1536 there were few who did not believe her to be guilty of at least some of the crimes attributed to
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Anne was no saint, but neither was she an adulteress nor guilty of incest. She was however, ruthless and insensitive, and if she was not as black as the Catholics tried to paint her, it is likely they were nearer the truth. Nevertheless, she was a remarkable woman of considerable courage and audacity, who knew exactly what she wanted, and made sure she got it. Once she had achieved her goal, and was expected to conform to conventional ideals of queenship, disaster overtook her, for she was demonstrably unsuited to her role, and incapable of playing the part of a docile, submissive wife.
Much is known about Anne, but there are also vital gaps. Her date of birth was not recorded, and even the date and place of her marriage to the King were kept secret. The best-documented period of her life is the last seventeen days of it, which were spent in the Tower of London, when her courageous bearing at her trial and execution were in stark contrast to her hysterical fits on her arrest, and a world away from the days when she held sway over the court with such hauteur as the King’s mistress.
If Anne Boleyn was born in 1500-1501, she would have been around thirty-five when she died, middle-aged by Tudor standards. Life had not been kind to her, and stress had aged her prematurely.
Finally, there is conflicting archaeological evidence. In 1876, during restoration work in the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula within the Tower of London, workmen found Anne Boleyn’s bones beneath the altar pavement. Victorian archaeologists described the bones as those of a woman of delicate frame; the neck vertebrae, which had been severed, were very small.
They estimated that Anne had been aged between twenty-five and thirty at her death. It is a fact, however, that the science of pathology was then in its infancy, and this estimate may easily have been inaccurate.
Anne’s charm lay not so much in her physical appearance as in her vivacious personality, her gracefulness, her quick wit and other accomplishments. She was petite in stature, and had an appealing fragility about her. Her eyes were black and her hair dark brown and of great length; often, she would wear it interlaced with jewels, loose down her back. But she was not pretty, nor did her looks conform to the fashionable ideals of her time. She had small breasts when it was fashionable to have a voluptuous figure, and in a period when pale complexions were much admired, she was sallow, even
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