Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
his “Pastime with Good Company” is still being performed. When 17-year-old
Henry, the second monarch of the House of Tudor, was crowned king in Westmin-
ster Abbey, all of England rejoiced.
Henry left affairs of state in the hands of others, and filled his days with sports,
war, dice, women, and the arts. But in 1529, Henry's personal life became a politic-
al atom bomb, and it changed the course of history. Henry wanted a divorce, partly
because his wife had become too old to bear him a son, and partly because he'd
fallen in love with Anne Boleyn, a younger woman who stubbornly refused to be
just the king's mistress. Henry begged the pope for an annulment, but—for politic-
al reasons, not moral ones—the pope refused. Henry went ahead and divorced his
wife anyway, and he was excommunicated.
The event sparked the English Reformation. With his defiance, Henry rejected
papal authority in England. He forced monasteries to close, sold off some church
land, and confiscated everything else for himself and the Crown. Within a decade,
monastic institutions that had operated for centuries were left empty and gutted
(many ruined sites can be visited today, including the abbeys of Glastonbury, St.
Mary's at York, Rievaulx, and Lindisfarne). Meanwhile, the Catholic Church was
reorganized into the (Anglican) Church of England, with Henry as its head. Though
Henry himself basically adhered to Catholic doctrine, he discouraged the vener-
ation of saints and relics, and commissioned an English translation of the Bible.
Hard-core Catholics had to assume a low profile. Many English welcomed this
break from Italian religious influence, but others rebelled. For the next few genera-
tions, England would suffer through bitter Catholic-Protestant differences.
Henry famously had six wives. The issue was not his love life (which could
have been satisfied by his numerous mistresses), but the politics of royal succes-
sion. To guarantee the Tudor family's dominance, he needed a male heir born by a
recognized queen.
Henry's first marriage, to Catherine of Aragon, had been arranged to cement
an alliance with her parents, Ferdinand and Isabel of Spain. Catherine bore Henry a
daughter, but no sons. Next came Anne Boleyn, who also gave birth to a daughter.
After a turbulent few years with Anne and several miscarriages, a frustrated Henry
had her beheaded at the Tower of London. His next wife, Jane Seymour, finally
had a son (but Jane died soon after giving birth). A blind-marriage with Anne of
Cleves ended quickly when she proved to be both politically useless and ugly—the
“Flanders Mare.” Next, teen bride Catherine Howard ended up cheating on Henry,
so she was executed. Henry finally found comfort—but no children—in his later
years with his final wife, Catherine Parr.
