For Henry VIII’s birthday, I’m happy to welcome Kyra back for another guest post, this time doing a little Tudor mythbusting! – Lara
Happy Birthday to Henry VIII, who was born on this day 523 years ago!
As a gift to him, I have devoted this day to debunking a lot of bunk about his life that I had *assumed* was true until I delved deeper during researches for my own book about this infamous King. There is nothing like research to leave you both enlightened and appalled by your former state of unsuspecting belief. Of course, there are myriad myths about Henry and I cannot cover them all, so I’ll just pick one topic for this post.
To wit: Henry VIII split from Roman Catholicism and formed the English Church just to get a divorce from his first wife.
That is an oversimplification to the point of falsehood, that is.
Henry wed his brother’s widow, Katherina (that’s how she spelled it) of Aragon in 1509. To marry Katherina, who was both his distant cousin AND his sister-in-law, Henry had to get a dispensation from Rome which allowed the marriage despite the fact it was incest according to Church Law. Royal families had to spend a lot of time getting the Vatican to allow their marriages, in general, because the inbreeding between the European monarchies was extreme. Only when the Pope had granted the dispensation, could the union of Katherina and Henry be legally binding one in the eyes of the Church.
Over the next 15 years they had multiple children who were stillborn or died shortly after their birth, and one daughter who lived. By 1524 the King knew there was zero chance of a male heir with his wife because Katherina had gone into early menopause, so he physically separated from her and started making arrangements to get a Papal annulment. The fact he had fallen in love with Anne Boleyn was not the main cause of the proceedings. At the time he was just planning on making Anne his “official” mistress. With or without Anne, he was going to end his marriage to Katherina no matter what. He was afraid that his lack of a male heir would make the Kingdom fall back into civil war and anarchy after his death, which certainly wasn’t a far-fetched scenario at the time.
At face value it seems ridiculous that Henry thought he could just snap his fingers and get his marriage declared null and void. He was a devout Catholic and Catholicism has never been reknown for its lax attitude toward the “til death do us part” clause in the wedding vows. Furthermore, Henry’s wife was more authentically connected to the English throne than he was. Her mother, Queen Isabella, was descended through the legitimate children of Edward III’s son John of Gaunt, whereas Henry VIII was descended from the children of John of Gaunt and his mistress Kathryn Swynford, who were only legitimized after John of Gaunt was able to marry their mother. Even then they were expressly forbidden as heirs to the throne, which means that Henry VIII didn’t have a leg to stand on vis-a-vis his claim to the throne, but his wife did. Katherina provided a much needed legitimacy to Henry’s crown. She was also the one with arguably the most political clout, since her nephew, Charles, was such a big deal that he was both the Holy Roman Emperor and the King of Spain.
Nevertheless, Henry had good reason to think that his nullity suit would be resolved fairly quickly. Papal annulments, at least for the wealthy or royal, while not exactly a walk in the park were also not that hard to get.
For example, prior to Henry’s nullity suit in the 1520’s, Louis XII of France had pulled all kind of marital shenanigans. Louis wanted to marry Anne of Brittany, who was the widow of his cousin Charles VIII, for political and economic reasons. Thus Louis petitioned the Papacy to annul his marriage with Joan, who was the daughter of his cousin and predecessor, Louis XI. Louis XII, being something of an asshat, tried to annul the marriage based on Joan’s supposed physical deformities and the witchcraft that had been used to keep him from consummating the marriage. Although she didn’t like Louis in the slightest, Joan was understandably pissed off by his insults and fought the annulment. It was clear to everyone that Joan was in the right, but for political reasons the Pope granted Louis the annulment anyway, and allowed him to marry Anne, who was no fonder of him than Joan had been.
Also in the realm of “things you weren’t supposed to do but royalty got away with”, Henry’s long-standing rival Francis I was married to Louis’s eldest daughter, Claude, even though she was precontracted to Emperor Charles and therefore her marriage to Francis should have been disallowed on those grounds.
Even closer to home, Henry’s sister Margaret, the former Queen of Scotland, got an annulment from her second husband, the Earl of Angus, in 1527.
Unlike Henry, Margaret had grounds for her divorce that were commonly accepted as reasons to void a marriage; the Earl had been precontracted to marry another woman. Nevertheless, in an attempt to make sure her nullity suit was granted, Margaret dredged up rumors that her first husband might be alive, even though he was as really-most-sincerely-dead as the Wicked Witch of the East. The nullity suit was too important to not cover all the bases, no matter how ridiculous some of those bases were. Of course, the real reason she wanted shut of Angus (besides the fact he was on her last nerve) wasn’t that he had been precontracted or that her first husband was back from the dead; it was that Angus had kidnapped her son, who was now king James V, in order to usurp her regency and rule Scotland in her place.
It is clear that royal annulments were not exactly rare, and Henry had no idea just how hard it would be for him to obtain his own. What Henry hadn’t counted on was the fact that formerly compliant and mild-mannered Katherina would fight him, or that her nephew would soon have the Vatican by the short hairs.
In spite of Henry’s attempts to squash her rebellion against him, Katherina used friends to get messages out to her nephew, Charles V. She also got public opinion on her side, which kept Henry on the ropes. Additionally, she used every legal and theological argument she could to eviscerate Henry’s flimsy case against her and wiped the floor with him every time he challenged her in person. In the larger social and political arena, Katherina was often ahead of Henry because she had many, many loyal friends at court who reported Henry’s every plan to her so she could raise a counterattack. Plus, she had a bone-deep royal dignity that was hard to shake, and she was holding herself together so well that Henry actually sent her a petulant message that she must not love him because she was keeping her court cheerful and showed “no pensiveness in her countenance, nor in her apparel nor behavior”.
To make matters worse for Henry, the Vatican was soon put in a position that they couldn’t help him even if they wanted to. In 1527 the undisciplined troops of Katherina’s nephew, Emperor Charles V, sacked Rome and captured the Pope. Charles, who now de facto owned the Pope, wasn’t about to let the annulment go through for two reasons. 1) There was the honor of his aunt at stake and 2) he wanted to piss Henry off and show him that an European Emperor was a bigger deal than an English King.
Ironically, the biggest problem facing the annulment wasn’t Katherina or Imperial control of the Papacy; it was Henry himself. He was inadvertently hampering his own success by his pig-headed insistence that he was morally in the right. And it wasn’t just that Henry wanted everyone to say he was right, but he also wanted the Vatican to admit it had been wrong to have let him marry Katherine in the first place. He wanted the current Pope to say the last Pope had exceeded the authority granted to him by God. Henry actually thought the Papacy would throw the infallibility of the Pope into question, while the Reformation raged around them, just so Henry could marry again and have more kids.
Worse, all of Henry’s chest-beating wasn’t even necessary, since the King’s problems could have been resolved by other means than the papal dissolution of his first union. Before he was captured by Emperor Charles, the Pope was open to *ahem* alternative solutions, such as permitting royal bigamy or legitimizing the offspring of any royal adultery. But no, His Majesty had to be RIGHT in his insistence of the reason for dissolving his marriage. Henry was so concerned about the “discharge of our conscience” that he needed, fervently, to believe himself to be morally impregnable, especially since a king was considered a representative of God on earth. Henry wanted nothing less than an admission from everyone — including the Pope, Katherina, and all those on Team Katherina — that in nullifying his first marriage he was correctly and legitimately following God’s will based on the text from Leviticus.
All the Papal dawdling and Henry’s grandstanding gave Henry’s ladylove, Anne Boleyn, ample time and ammunition to convince him to consider breaking from Rome. Anne, who was an ardent and devoted religious reformist, was already upset by corruption within the Church hierarchy. She put on a steady campaign to get Henry more and more information assuring him that there was no reason for a King to be the servant of the Pope. Anne was hardly alone. Protestantism and the Reformation had already been spreading like wildfire throughout England.
By the time Henry declared himself Supreme Head of the Church of England a decade had passed since he had first separated from Katherina. He and Anne Boleyn had already gotten married, and their daughter Elizabeth had been born the year before. He had already gotten a bill passed through Parliament declaring his daughter Mary illegitimate and Elizabeth as his heir. Katerina had been banished to a dank manor house in the middle of nowhere. The issue had long since moved away from the annulment of his marriage to Katherina and had become a matter of political autonomy. His attempt to dissolve his first marriage may have lit the fuse toward the creation of the Church of England, but it was certainly not the powder keg of religious and social revolution that blew Rome’s influence over English monarchical government to smithereens.
Happy Birthday, Henry.