Henry VIII--1509-1547
Henry VIII was not quite eighteen when he came to the throne. The country was at peace, was fairly prosperous, and the young King had everything in his favor. He was handsome, well educated, and fond of athletic sports. His frank disposition won friends everywhere, and he had inherited from his father the largest private fortune that had ever descended to an English sovereign. Intellectually, he was in hearty sympathy with the revival of learning, then in progress both on the Continent and in England.
Henry's Marriage with his Brother's Widow.
Such was the King at the outset. In less than twenty years he had become another man. At the age of twelve he had married at his father's command, and solely for political and mercenary reasons, Catharine of Aragon, his brother Arthur's widow, who was six years his senior. Such a marriage was forbidden, except in certain cases, by the Old Testament and by the ordinances of the Roman Catholic Church. The Pope, however, had granted his permission, and when Henry ascended the throne, the ceremony was performed a second time. Several children were the fruit of this union, all of whom died in infancy, except one daughter, Mary, unhappily fated to figure as the "Bloody Mary" of later history.
The King's Anxiety for a Successor; Anne Boleyn.
No woman had yet ruled in her own right, either in England or in any prominent kingdom of Europe, and Henry was anxious to have a son to succeed him. He could not bear the thought of being disappointed; in fact he sent the Duke of Buckingham to the block for casually saying, that if the King died without issue, he should consider himself entitled to receive the crown.
It was while meditating this question of the succession, that Henry became attached to Anne Boleyn, one of the Queen's maids of honor; she was a sprightly brunette of nineteen, with long black hair and strikingly beautiful eyes.
The light that shone in those eyes, though hardly that "Gospel light" which the poet calls it, was yet bright enough to effectually clear up all difficulties in the royal mind. The King now declared that he felt conscientiously moved to obtain a divorce from his old wife, and to marry a new one. In that determination lay most momentous consequences, since it finally separated England from the jurisdiction of the Church of Rome.
"When love could teach a monarch to be wise,
And Gospel light first dawned from Bullen's [Boleyn's] eyes."
--Gray.
Wolsey favors the Divorce from Catharine.
Cardinal Wolsey, Henry's chief counselor,--the man who thought that he ruled both King and kingdom,--lent his powerful aid to bring about the divorce, but with the expectation that the King would marry a princess from France, and thus form an alliance with that country. If so, his own ambitious schemes would be forwarded, since the united influence of the two kingdoms might elevate him to the Papacy.
The Venetian ambassador in a dispatch to his government, wrote of Cardinal Wolsey: "It is he who rules both the King and the entire Kingdom. At first the Cardinal used to say, `His Majesty will do so and so'; subsequently he went on, forgetting himself, and commenced saying, `We shall do so and so'; at present (1519) he has reached such a pitch that he says, `I shall do so and so.'"
When Wolsey learned that the King's choice was Anne Boleyn, he fell on his knees, and begged him not to persist in his purpose; but his entreaties had no effect, and the Cardinal was obliged to continue what he had begun.
The Court at Blackfriars (1529).
The King had applied to the Pope to annul the marriage with Catharine on the ground of illegality. Delays now became the order of the day. At last, a court composed of Cardinal Wolsey and Cardinal Campeggio, was convened at Blackfriars, London, to test the validity of the marriage.
Henry and Catharine were summoned. The first appeared and answered to his name. When the Queen was called she declined to answer, but throwing herself at Henry's feet, begged him with tears and sobs not to put her away without cause. Finding him inflexible, she left the court, and refused to attend again, appealing to Rome for justice.
This was in the spring (1529). Nothing was done that summer, and in the autumn, the court, instead of reaching a decision, dissolved. Campeggio, the Italian legate, returned to Italy, and Henry, to his disappointment and rage, received an order from Rome to carry the question to the Pope for settlement.
Fall of Wolsey (1529).
Both the King and Anne Boleyn believed that Wolsey had played false with them. They now resolved upon his destruction. The Cardinal had a presentiment of his impending doom. The French ambassador, who saw him at this juncture, said that his face had shrunk to half its size. But his fortunes were destined to shrink even more than his face.
It was an easy matter for him to crush the Cardinal. Erasmus said of him, "He was feared by all, he was loved by few--I may say by nobody." His arrogance and extravagant ostentation had excited the jealous hate of the nobility; his constant demands for money in behalf of the King set Parliament against him; and his exactions from the common people had, as the chronicle of the time tells us, made them weep, beg, and "speak cursedly."
Wolsey bowed to the storm, and to save himself gave up everything; his riches, pomp, power, all vanished as suddenly as they had come. It was Henry's hand that stripped him, but it was Anne Boleyn who moved that hand.
Events now moved rapidly toward a crisis. In 1533, after having waited over five years, Henry privately married Anne Boleyn, and she was soon after crowned in Westminster Abbey. When the Pope was informed of this, he ordered the King, under pain of excommunication, to put her away, and to take back Queen Catharine.
Parliament met that demand by passing the Act of Supremacy, 1534, which declared Henry to be without reservation the sole head of the Church, making denial thereof high treason. As he signed the act, the King with one stroke of his pen overturned the traditions of a thousand years, and England stood boldly forth with a National Church independent of the Pope.
Henry's full title was now "Henry VIII, 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, on earth the Supreme Head."
Less than three years after her coronation, the new Queen, Anne Boleyn, for whom Henry had "turned England and Europe upside down," was accused of unfaithfulness. She was sent a prisoner to the Tower. A short time after, her head rolled in the dust, the light of its beauty gone out forever.
The next morning Henry married Jane Seymour, Anne's maid of honor. Parliament passed an act of approval, declaring that it was all done "of the King's most excellent goodness." It also declared Henry's two previous marriages, with Catharine and with Anne Boleyn, void, and affirmed that their children, the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth, were not lawfully the King's daughters. A later act of Parliament gave Henry the extraordinary power of naming his successor to the crown.
A year afterwards Henry's new Queen died, leaving an infant son, Edward. She was no sooner gone than the King began looking about for some one to take her place. By his last will he made Mary and Elizabeth heirs to the crown in case all male and female issue by himself or his son Edward failed.
Henry's eldest sister, Margaret, was passed by entirely. But long after Henry's death, Parliament set his will aside (1603) and made James I (a descendent of Margaret) King of England.
More Marriages (1540).
Thomas Cromwell, the King's trusted adviser, succeeded in persuading his master to agree to marry Anne of Cleves, a German Protestant Princess. Henry had never seen her, but her portrait represented her as a woman of surpassing beauty.
When Anne reached England, Henry hurried to meet her with all a lover's ardor. To his dismay, he found that not only was she ridiculously ugly, but that she could speak--so he said--"nothing but Dutch," of which he did not understand a word. Matters, however, had gone too far to retract, and the marriage was duly solemnized (1540).
The King obtained a divorce within six months, and then took his revenge by cutting off Cromwell's head. What is more, he cut it off
by virtue of that very Act of Attainder which Cromwell had used so unscrupulously in Henry's behalf.
The same year (1540) Henry married Catharine Howard, a fascinating girl still in her teens, whose charms so moved the King that it is said he was tempted to have a special thanksgiving service prepared to commemorate the day he found her.
Unfortunately, Catharine was accused of having been guilty of misconduct before her marriage. She confessed her fault, but for such cases Henry had no mercy. The Queen was tried for high treason, and soon walked that fatal road in which Anne Boleyn had preceded her.
Not to be baffled in his matrimonial experiments, the King took Catherine Parr for his sixth and last wife (1543). She was inclined to be a zealous Protestant, and she too might have gone to the block, on a charge of heresy, but her quick wit came to her rescue. She flattered the King's self-conceit as a profound theologian and the compliment saved her life.
Henry's Death.
But the time was at hand when Henry was to cease his hangings, beheadings, and marriages. Worn out with debauchery, he died at the age of fifty-six. In his will he left a large sum of money to pay for perpetual prayers for the repose of his soul. Sir Walter Raleigh said of him, "If all the pictures and patterns of a merciless prince were lost in the world, they might all again be painted to the life out of the story of this king."
It may be well to remember this, and along with it this other saying of one of the ablest writers on English constitutional history, that "the world owes some of its greatest debts to men from whose memory it recoils." The obligation it is under to Henry VIII is that through his influence--no matter what the motive--England was lifted up out of the old medieval ruts, and placed squarely and securely on the new highway of national progress.
See: History of London
