King Henry VIII & Catherine of Aragon

Sir Faithful Heart

The marriage of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon began as a storybook royal romance but ended with the most famous divorce case in history - and the establishment of Anglicanism, one of the world's great religions.

Henry was not quite eighteen when he became King of England in 1509. More than six feet tall, big-framed and athletic with reddish hair, also smart, well educated, and with rock-star charisma, young Henry was regarded as the best royal catch in Europe.

Catherine of Aragon was no starry-eyed young maiden. The daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, rulers of Spain, and already a widow at 24 – Arthur, Henry’s older brother, had died just months after their wedding – she was skilled in the ways of the world and court. Since Arthur’s death, though, Catherine had been left stranded at her ex-father-in-law's court as something between an unwanted guest and a hostage, while the parents and in-laws argued over money.

Young Henry would have none that. Unlike his father he was no miser; his only interest in money was spending it. A new day was dawning in England, and King Henry was the sun. Whether or not he was in love with his brother's widow, he felt gallant toward her, and promptly declared his intention to marry her. With his father dead and Henry on the throne, the road was clear.

Well, almost: Church law, based on a text in the Old Testament, did not allow a man to marry his brother's widow. The Pope had already issued a dispensation setting aside the rule. A few church lawyers were still uneasy, but Henry brushed aside their objections - as did most experts on canon law - and the wedding took place in June of 1509.

The new King and Queen showed every sign of being a happy royal couple. Henry wore Catherine's colors at tournaments and proclaimed himself “Sir Faithful Heart.” At other times he and his attendants dressed up as Robin Hood and his merry men and burst in on Queen Catherine and her ladies, who duly pretended to be surprised before they all took to dancing.

Success for the marriage seemed assured when Catherine gave birth to a son, Prince Henry, in January of 1511. As Catherine recovered from the stresses of sixteenth-century childbirth (a leading cause of death among women), Henry and the court held weeks of feasting and tournaments in celebration of the birth of an heir to the throne.

Their happy world was torn asunder, though, when just two months later the boy died. Altogether Catherine bore half a dozen children, but only one - a daughter, Mary, born in 1516, the future Mary I - lived past infancy. The days of Sir Faithful Heart and Robin Hood antics faded into the past. Henry spent less time with his queen, and began having affairs.

The Bloom is Off

None of this would have made for a particularly bad royal marriage – royal affairs were as common as fleas in the 16th century - but the lack of a son weighed heavily on Henry. The nasty War of the Roses, itself a struggle over royal succession, had ended just thirty years earlier. A daughter was no substitute at a time when the royal job description still included fighting for the crown with sword in hand. (Ironically, Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth I, would alter this view of female monarchs forever - yet by further irony she was the daughter of Anne Boleyn, not Catherine.)

By the mid-1520s, Henry was fed up. Worried about the warning in the Book of Leviticus - he who marries his brother’s widow will be childless – he began to plot. Without a son and heir, Henry considered himself childless and could not understand why God would desert him, or England. He was a devout believer, mostly...a believer in a comfortable God who took special care of him, King Henry.

All Henry needed was a catalyst – a sign of Divine Intervention, perhaps - and around 1525 he found one, in the lovely form of Anne Boleyn, a lady-in-waiting to Queen Catherine. Her sister Mary ("the other Boleyn girl") had already been Henry's mistress, married off to a courtier after their brief affair. Anne refused to be a mere trifle, and Henry decided to solve both his problems at one stroke. If he ended his marriage to Catherine, he would finally win Anne – and also get another chance for a son.

The King's Great Matter

The most famous divorce in English history was not actually a divorce at all. Church law, which governed all marriage, did not recognize divorce. It did, however, provide for annulments - rulings that a proper legal marriage had never occurred in the first place.

Henry began his annulment suit in secret, but there are never any secrets at court, and Catherine soon found out. She was understandably outraged. Not only was she being dumped, but Henry's crude argument - that they had never really been married - meant that she, a princess of Spain, had been living in sin with a man for nearly twenty years.

Whatever Henry's legal argument, his facts were wrong. She had never been truly married to his brother Arthur to begin with - a marriage, in church law, only was complete when the partners “became one flesh” through consummation. Catherine confronted Henry at a church hearing, and asked him to his face: Had she or had she not been a virgin on their wedding night? Having said her piece, Catherine swept out of the courtroom, leaving an embarrassed Henry to call for adjournment. The battle was on.

Henry had no doubt that he would win in the end. He was not the first king to get out of a marriage for another shot at an heir, and Popes had always been realistic in the past. Alternatively, he tried to talk Catherine into entering a convent - the one legal way to dissolve a marriage, even a valid one. It would be an honorable choice, and Catherine was a deeply religious woman. But she refused. God had not called her to be a nun; he had called her to marriage and the throne.

Henry mounted a legal and diplomatic offensive at the Vatican, but it was met with skepticism; all of Europe had heard about his amorous exploits, including his affair with Anne Boleyn. He might have had a legal and political argument, but his unseemly behavior overshadowed his professed moral qualms and dynastic concerns. Anne Boleyn's flashing dark eyes and "pretty dukkies" (as he called her breasts in a love letter) were obviously Henry's prime motivation.

His biggest problem, however, was not raised eyebrows but Catherine's nephew, Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and the most powerful ruler in Europe. In 1527, just as Henry's appeal was on the docket of the Papal Court, Charles's army conquered and sacked Rome, his drunken mercenaries slaughtering thousands of men, women, and children. It was one of the worst war crimes of the 16th century - and it left the Pope effectively the Emperor's prisoner. Henry's arguments, good or bad, mattered little to Charles – and Charles did not want Henry to dump his aunt.

Henry had an equally straightforward response – he rewrote the rule book. He broke the Church of England away from Rome and appointed himself its “Supreme Head and Governor.” In England, at least, Henry was now both King and Pope, with the headsman and hangman to deal with anyone who openly disagreed. Another church court was convened, and his annulment was duly approved. At last he was free to marry Anne Boleyn.

The battle royale between Henry and Catherine didn't end; she continued to call herself Queen of England. Half of Europe agreed, along with many of Henry's subjects - some rose in rebellion, and Sir Thomas More went to the scaffold, while invasion threats kept Henry busy modernizing his fleet and building coastal fortresses.

Just two years after the annulment, Catherine lay on her deathbed. She wrote to Henry, saying that "above all else, mine eyes long for the sight of you." In her heart, it seems, Henry VIII was still the handsome “Sir Faithful Heart” who had rescued her from royal limbo - merely led astray these many years, by wicked advisors and an ambitious, dark-eyed girl.

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  1. Henry VIII, shown here at 18, the year he took the throne. A few years later he married Catherine, his brother's widow.
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  Henry VIII, shown here at 18, the year he took the throne. A few years later he married Catherine, his brother's widow.

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