Table Of ContentThe Six Wives of Henry VIII
Alison Weir
viiiChronology
148522 AugustBattle of Bosworth. Henry Tudor usurps the English throne as
Henry VII and founds the Tudor dynasty.
16 December Birth of Katherine of Aragon.
148619/20 September Birth of Prince Arthur, eldest son of Henry VII.
148927 March Treaty of Medina del Campo: Katherine and Arthur betrothed.
149128 June Birth of Prince Henry, second son of Henry VII.
149919 May Katherine and Arthur married by proxy.
c. 1500/1Birth of Anne Boleyn.
150119 May Katherine and Arthur married for a second time by proxy.
27 September Katherine arrives in England.
12 November Katherine enters London in state.
14 November Marriage of Katherine of Aragon and Arthur, Prince of Wales.
15022 April Death of Prince Arthur.
150325 June Katherine betrothed to Prince Henry.
150418 February Prince Henry created Prince of Wales.
26 November Death of Isabella of Castile.
150527 June Prince Henry secretly repudiates his betrothal.
c.1507/8Birth of Jane Seymour.
150922 April Death of Henry VII and accession of Henry VIII.
11 June Marriage of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon.
23 June Henry and Katherine enter London in state.
24 June Coronation of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon.
151031 January Birth of a stillborn daughter to Katherine of Aragon.
15111 January Birth of Prince Henry, son of Henry VIII and Katherine of
Aragon.
22 February Death of Prince Henry.
c.1512Birth of Katherine Parr.
151330 June to 22 October Katherine rules as regent while Henry VIII
campaigns in France.
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ix
9 September Battle of Flodden.
October Birth of a son, who died soon after birth, to Katherine of Aragon.
1514November Birth of a son, who died soon after birth, to Katherine of
Aragon.
151522 September Birth of Anne of Cleves.
1516January Death of Ferdinand of Aragon.
18 February Birth of the Princess Mary, daughter of Henry VIII and Katherine
of Aragon.
151810 November Birth of a daughter, who died soon after birth, to Katherine
of Aragon.
1519February Death of the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian, followed by
the election of Charles of Castile, Katherine of Aragon's nephew, in his stead.
June Birth of Henry FitzRoy, bastard son of Henry VIII by Elizabeth Blount.
15203-23 June The Field of Cloth of Gold, summit meeting between Henry
VIII and Francis I of France.
1524Katherine of Aragon known to be past the age for bearing children.
Cessation of sexual relations between her and Henry VIII.
c.1525Birth of Katherine Howard.
1525August Princess Mary's household established at Ludlow.
1526February First indication that Henry VIII courting Anne Boleyn.
15276 May Sack of Rome by the Emperor's troops.
17 May Proceedings to annul Henry VIII's marriage to Katherine of Aragon
instituted in an ecclesiastical court at Westminster.
22 June Katherine informed by Henry of his doubts concerning the validity of
their marriage.
September Henry VIII asks the Pope to help him gain an annulment of his
marriage.
152829 September Cardinal Campeggio, sent by the Pope to try the King's
case, arrives in England.
152931 May The legatine court opens at Black Friars, London.
23 July Campeggio adjourns the case indefinitely to Rome.
1530November Death of Cardinal Wolsey.
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1532 1533
1534
1535
1536
11 FebruaryThe Reformation Parliament acknowledges
Henry VIII as Supreme Head of the Church of England under Christ.
14 July Henry separates from Katherine and she is banished from court.
1 September Anne Boleyn created Lady Marquess of Pembroke.
25 January Secret marriage of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn.
12 April Anne Boleyn first appears in public as Queen of England.
23 May Archbishop Cranmer declares the marriage of Henry VIII and
Katherine of Aragon to be invalid and unlawful.
28 May Archbishop Cranmer declares the marriage of Henry VIII and Anne
Boleyn to be good and valid.
31 May Anne Boleyn enters London in state.
1 June Coronation of Anne Boleyn.
7 September Birth of the Princess Elizabeth, daughter of Henry VIII and Anne
Boleyn.
23 March Parliament passes the Act of Succession vesting the succession in
Anne Boleyn's children by the King.
23 March Pope Clement VII pronounces the marriage of Henry VIII and
Katherine of Aragon to be lawful and canonical.
c. July Birth of a child, sex not known, either stillborn or dead soon after birth,
to Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn.
22 June Execution of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester.
late June Birth of a stillborn child to Anne Boleyn.
6 July Execution of Sir Thomas More.
November First mention of Henry VIII's courtship of Jane Seymour.
7 january Death of Katherine of Aragon.
2 9 January Birth of a stillborn son to Anne Boleyn.
2 May Anne Boleyn arrested and taken to the
Tower of London.
15 May Trial of Anne Boleyn.
19 May Execution of Anne Boleyn.
20 May Henry VIII betrothed to Jane Seymour.
30 May Marriage of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour.
7 June Jane Seymour enters London in state.
XI
xiJune Parliament passes the Act of Succession
vesting the succession in Jane Seymour's
children by the King. 13 June Henry's daughter Mary offers him her
submission. September 1536
March 1537 Pilgrimage
of Grace.
153712 October Birth of Prince Edward, son of Henry VIII
and Jane Seymour. 24 October Death of Jane Seymour.
15394 September Henry VIII betrothed to Anne of Cleves.
27 December Anne of Cleves arrives in England.
15406 January Marriage of Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves. 4 February Anne
of Cleves enters London in state. April First mention of Henry VIII's courtship
of
Katherine Howard.
9 July Henry VIII's marriage to Anne of Cleves
annulled.
28 July Execution of Thomas Cromwell.
Marriage of Henry VIII and Katherine
15411 November
15427 February
1543 1544
154713 February 12 July July 30 September 28 January
Howard. Henry VIII informed by Archbishop Cranmer
of Katherine Howard's misconduct. Parliament passes the Act of Attainder
condemning Katherine Howard to death. Execution of Katherine Howard.
Marriage of Henry VIII and Katherine Parr. Katherine Parr rules as regent while\
Henry VIII campaigns in France. Death of Henry VIII; accession of
Edward VI.c.April Marriage of Katherine Parr and\
Thomas Seymour. 154830 August Birth of Mary, daughter of Katherine Parr
and Thomas Seymour.
7 September Death of Katherine Parr.
15536 JulyDeath of Edward VI.
10 July Lady Jane Grey proclaimed Queen
of England.
19 July Queen Jane deposed; accession of Mary I,
daughter of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon.
155716 JulyDeath of Anne of Cleves.
155817 November Death of Mary I; accession of Elizabeth I,
daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn.
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1
Introduction
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 centuries and
feel we know them personally.
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 relationships of English sovereigns were
rarely chronicled, and there remain only fragmentary details of the intimate lives
of earlier kings and queens. Yet, thanks to Henry VIII, such details became a
matter of public interest, and no snippet of information was thought too
insignificant to be recorded and analysed, a trend that has continued
2unabated for 450 years, and which has burgeoned in the twentieth century
with the expansion of the media.
Thanks to the wealth of written material that has survived in the form of early
biographies, letters, memoirs, account books and diplomatic reports,
unprecedented in any preceding reign, we know a great deal about, and are able
to make sense of, the lives of these six long-dead women. That such material
was for the first time available to any sizeable extent was thanks to the
humanism of the Renaissance and the widening interest in learning it
engendered. There was a dramatic expansion of educational facilities, with the
founding of many new colleges and schools, and literacy was now seen as being
of prime importance, not only for men, but-to an increasing degree as the Tudor
period progressed - for women also. The development of printing gave rise to a
growth industry in popular works and tracts, which coincided with a renewed
interest in history, leading to a succession of books by a new generation of
chroniclers. 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. Yet while there have been several excellent recent
individual biographies of the wives (seeBibliography),there has been no serious
collective biography since 1905 when M. A. S. Hume's scholarly book,The
Wives of Henry VIIIwas published. This present book aims to fill that gap for the
general reader, with information drawn from only the most reliable of the
original sources.
What were they really like, those six wives? Because of the nature of the
source material for the reign, nearly all of which has a political or religious bias,
a writer could come up with very different assessments of each of them, all of
which might be equally valid. But this would be abdicating some of the
responsibilities of an historian, whose function is to piece together the surviving
evidence and arrive at a workable conclusion. What follows are the conclusions I
have
3reached 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.
Thus, we will see that 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. They
were fascinating women, both because of who they were and what happened to
them; yet we should not lose sight of the fact that, while they were queens and
therefore, nominally at least, in a position of power, they were also bound to a
great degree by the constraints that restricted the lives of all women at that time.
We should therefore, before proceeding with their story, pause to consider those
constraints.
'Woman in her greatest perfection was made to serve and obey man,' wrote the
Scots reformer John Knox in his treatiseFirst Blast of the Trumpet against the
Monstrous Regiment of Women,published in 1558. In Tudor England, as in the
