June 11, 1509—England’s monarch-in-waiting, Henry VIII, married Katherine of Aragon, widow of his older brother Prince Arthur, at Gray Friars Church. Like many disasters, it seemed like a great idea at the time.
I believe that this is my fourth post (counting my review of A Man for All Seasons), in a year and a half, on Henry. Overkill? I don’t think so. “Great Harry’s” character was so outsized and his 38-year-reign so hugely consequential for world history, that he deserves as much attention as we can give him.
I decided to write this latest post as soon as I read historian David Starkey’s enlightening comments to David Musgrove on Henry in the April 2009 issue of BBC History Magazine. Unfortunately, most of the content from the magazine—including the piece—is not posted, so I’ll summarize it.
I had heard how young Henry was nothing like the wench-hungry, splenetic tyrant he became in middle age, but Starkey shed considerable light on why the 18-year-old prince’s ascension to the throne promised that he would be a uniter, not a divider. (That last phrase—it sounds familiar….Seems like I’ve heard it before….Give me a minute, it’ll come to me!)
There was no reason to suppose at all that the union would unravel. Indeed, it seemed to promise an end to all kinds of problems.
True, Katherine was six years older than her spouse, but that was not a real problem—she was still within childbearing age. Her marriage to Prince Arthur, which occurred when the two were only 15, barely registered on the radar screen, since the prince died within a year of the ceremony.
Henry had to be granted a papal dispensation to marry his brother’s widow. Years later, when he pressed for an annulment, he claimed that the grounds on which that dispensation was granted—that Katherine’s marriage to Arthur had never been consummated—were false; that Katherine had deceived him in this; and that, therefore, God blighted their sinful marriage with the lack of a male heir. Katherine insisted that all of this was false.
Who was telling the truth? It would have been natural if Katherine had lied—after all, the end of the marriage would have meant not only that she was no longer Henry’s wife but that their daughter Mary could never succeed to the English throne.
On the other hand, this is, after all, Henry VIII we are dealing with—a man who, at his best, even in youth, demanded to have his own way, and who, in middle age, had become besotted with Anne Boleyn, a court lady (and sister of one of his mistresses) who refused to sleep with him unless she were his wife—i.e., queen herself. The lust-driven king then began hunting for excuses to end the marriage.
Whose fault was it that Henry married Katherine? First his father, then himself. After Arthur died of the “sweating sickness,” Henry VII wanted to keep the dowry that came with his son’s marriage and preserve the alliance with Spain. As time went on, he didn’t think he needed Spain as much, so he began looking for ways to end the relationship. He died before anything could come of it.
Henry VIII could have decided not to go through with it, but didn’t. All things considered, Katherine was not a bad match. She was intelligent, fully capable of acting as regent in his place, and much loved by the English people for her piety. As for looks, the Venetian ambassador to England, Sebastian Giustinian, wrote that she was “not handsome, though she had a very beautiful complexion.”
I don’t accept all of Starkey’s conclusions about the marriage, most notably that Henry was “a tender husband” who even neglected his hunting during Katharine’s pregnancies. The historian thinks that’s because Henry loved his wife.
I think he’s overlooking a more plausible explanation: Henry didn’t care about a healthy wife so much as a healthy baby—and, more specifically, a healthy male baby, because no female monarch had ascended to rule the British throne alone until this time. Only a male monarch, the thinking of the time went, could prevent the country from falling into civil war again.
In his coffee-table companion to Masterpiece Theatre—titled, of course, Masterpieces—Alistair Cooke mentions a longtime curious Cockney custom: while passing the display of Henry’s armor in the Tower of London, women would rub his codpiece on the way past—as a kind of good-luck sign and fertility symbol.
How ironic, given that only one of Henry’s six children by Katherine survived to adulthood—and that was a woman, Mary. Within a few short years, if Henry ever did feel the love that Starkey and Cooke suggest, it was about to cool off because of this failure to produce a male heir.
The precipitating action of Henry’s break with the Roman Catholic Church was the refusal of his request for an annulment from Pope Clement. That occurred in 1529, but more than a decade earlier—as early as 1514, to be precise—Henry’s representative, Thomas Cardinal Wolsey, was already petitioning Pope Leo X to annul the marriage.
Henry shelved that petition because, he figured, the birth of Mary in 1516 might augur better things ahead. But no male ever resulted, so a decade later, with Katherine well past childbearing, he pressed his case far more vigorously.
In a prior post on Lord Mountjoy’s letter to Erasmus on the ascension of Henry to the throne, I pointed out how hopeful so many in Europe were over the event. Here, Starkey offers a plausible reason for this—not just the vigor and good looks enjoyed by Henry in his youth, but also the royal’s affinity for the House of York, the losers in the War of the Roses.
How many of you have heard someone say, “He (she) takes after his mother (or father)”? Well, Henry was closer to his mother, Elizabeth, the eldest daughter of Yorkist King Edward IV—eldest brother of the reviled Richard III.
When Henry became king, then, the followers of the House of York breathed a sigh of relief. They no longer worried about dealing with his conniving father, whose marriage to a Yorkist could be interpreted as mere window dressing. No, Henry seemed one of them.
At the same time, the marriage seemed to further align the interests of England and Spain. Katherine’s nephew, Charles V of Spain, would become Holy Roman Emperor.
In fact, peace seemed to be breaking out all over the continent. Lord Mountjoy was not the only one feeling hopeful in those days. Eight years after Henry began his reign, the recipient of Mountjoy’s observations, Erasmus of Rotterdam, set down impressions that, five centuries later, can’t but appear to be hopelessly naïve:
“When I see that the highest sovereigns of Europe, Francis of France, Charles the King Catholic, Henry of England and the Emperor Maximilian, have set all their warlike preparations aside, and established peace upon solid, and, as I trust, adamantine foundations, I am led to a confident hope, that not only morality and Christian piety, but also a genuine and purer literature may come to renewed life or greater splendor.”
I believe that this is my fourth post (counting my review of A Man for All Seasons), in a year and a half, on Henry. Overkill? I don’t think so. “Great Harry’s” character was so outsized and his 38-year-reign so hugely consequential for world history, that he deserves as much attention as we can give him.
I decided to write this latest post as soon as I read historian David Starkey’s enlightening comments to David Musgrove on Henry in the April 2009 issue of BBC History Magazine. Unfortunately, most of the content from the magazine—including the piece—is not posted, so I’ll summarize it.
I had heard how young Henry was nothing like the wench-hungry, splenetic tyrant he became in middle age, but Starkey shed considerable light on why the 18-year-old prince’s ascension to the throne promised that he would be a uniter, not a divider. (That last phrase—it sounds familiar….Seems like I’ve heard it before….Give me a minute, it’ll come to me!)
There was no reason to suppose at all that the union would unravel. Indeed, it seemed to promise an end to all kinds of problems.
True, Katherine was six years older than her spouse, but that was not a real problem—she was still within childbearing age. Her marriage to Prince Arthur, which occurred when the two were only 15, barely registered on the radar screen, since the prince died within a year of the ceremony.
Henry had to be granted a papal dispensation to marry his brother’s widow. Years later, when he pressed for an annulment, he claimed that the grounds on which that dispensation was granted—that Katherine’s marriage to Arthur had never been consummated—were false; that Katherine had deceived him in this; and that, therefore, God blighted their sinful marriage with the lack of a male heir. Katherine insisted that all of this was false.
Who was telling the truth? It would have been natural if Katherine had lied—after all, the end of the marriage would have meant not only that she was no longer Henry’s wife but that their daughter Mary could never succeed to the English throne.
On the other hand, this is, after all, Henry VIII we are dealing with—a man who, at his best, even in youth, demanded to have his own way, and who, in middle age, had become besotted with Anne Boleyn, a court lady (and sister of one of his mistresses) who refused to sleep with him unless she were his wife—i.e., queen herself. The lust-driven king then began hunting for excuses to end the marriage.
Whose fault was it that Henry married Katherine? First his father, then himself. After Arthur died of the “sweating sickness,” Henry VII wanted to keep the dowry that came with his son’s marriage and preserve the alliance with Spain. As time went on, he didn’t think he needed Spain as much, so he began looking for ways to end the relationship. He died before anything could come of it.
Henry VIII could have decided not to go through with it, but didn’t. All things considered, Katherine was not a bad match. She was intelligent, fully capable of acting as regent in his place, and much loved by the English people for her piety. As for looks, the Venetian ambassador to England, Sebastian Giustinian, wrote that she was “not handsome, though she had a very beautiful complexion.”
I don’t accept all of Starkey’s conclusions about the marriage, most notably that Henry was “a tender husband” who even neglected his hunting during Katharine’s pregnancies. The historian thinks that’s because Henry loved his wife.
I think he’s overlooking a more plausible explanation: Henry didn’t care about a healthy wife so much as a healthy baby—and, more specifically, a healthy male baby, because no female monarch had ascended to rule the British throne alone until this time. Only a male monarch, the thinking of the time went, could prevent the country from falling into civil war again.
In his coffee-table companion to Masterpiece Theatre—titled, of course, Masterpieces—Alistair Cooke mentions a longtime curious Cockney custom: while passing the display of Henry’s armor in the Tower of London, women would rub his codpiece on the way past—as a kind of good-luck sign and fertility symbol.
How ironic, given that only one of Henry’s six children by Katherine survived to adulthood—and that was a woman, Mary. Within a few short years, if Henry ever did feel the love that Starkey and Cooke suggest, it was about to cool off because of this failure to produce a male heir.
The precipitating action of Henry’s break with the Roman Catholic Church was the refusal of his request for an annulment from Pope Clement. That occurred in 1529, but more than a decade earlier—as early as 1514, to be precise—Henry’s representative, Thomas Cardinal Wolsey, was already petitioning Pope Leo X to annul the marriage.
Henry shelved that petition because, he figured, the birth of Mary in 1516 might augur better things ahead. But no male ever resulted, so a decade later, with Katherine well past childbearing, he pressed his case far more vigorously.
In a prior post on Lord Mountjoy’s letter to Erasmus on the ascension of Henry to the throne, I pointed out how hopeful so many in Europe were over the event. Here, Starkey offers a plausible reason for this—not just the vigor and good looks enjoyed by Henry in his youth, but also the royal’s affinity for the House of York, the losers in the War of the Roses.
How many of you have heard someone say, “He (she) takes after his mother (or father)”? Well, Henry was closer to his mother, Elizabeth, the eldest daughter of Yorkist King Edward IV—eldest brother of the reviled Richard III.
When Henry became king, then, the followers of the House of York breathed a sigh of relief. They no longer worried about dealing with his conniving father, whose marriage to a Yorkist could be interpreted as mere window dressing. No, Henry seemed one of them.
At the same time, the marriage seemed to further align the interests of England and Spain. Katherine’s nephew, Charles V of Spain, would become Holy Roman Emperor.
In fact, peace seemed to be breaking out all over the continent. Lord Mountjoy was not the only one feeling hopeful in those days. Eight years after Henry began his reign, the recipient of Mountjoy’s observations, Erasmus of Rotterdam, set down impressions that, five centuries later, can’t but appear to be hopelessly naïve:
“When I see that the highest sovereigns of Europe, Francis of France, Charles the King Catholic, Henry of England and the Emperor Maximilian, have set all their warlike preparations aside, and established peace upon solid, and, as I trust, adamantine foundations, I am led to a confident hope, that not only morality and Christian piety, but also a genuine and purer literature may come to renewed life or greater splendor.”
Arch imperialist Rudyard Kipling might have had the definitive final word about the hopes born by Henry and other world leaders, past and present, in his poem “The Ballad of the King’s Jest”:
Four things greater than all things are,—
Women and Horses and Power and War.
Four things greater than all things are,—
Women and Horses and Power and War.
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