Henry VIII’s six marriages are some of the most famous and tumultuous unions in history.
Between his accession to the throne in 1509 and his death in 1547, Henry’s quest for a male heir led him through a series of marriages.
From Catherine of Aragon’s 24-year marriage to Anne of Cleves’ 6-month alliance, each queen’s story is filled with drama, intrigue, and unexpected twists! Discover the who, why, when, and how of these iconic unions…
Transcript:
I’m continuing our series on Henry VIII today with a look at his marriages.
We all know that he was married six times between his accession to the throne in April1509 and his death in January 1547, and many of us know the rhyme reminding us of the fates of those wives:
Divorced, beheaded, died,
Divorced, beheaded, survived.
But I’m just going to share with you today a few facts about these marriages, answering the questions who? Why? When? Where? How? How long?
So, let’s look at marriage number 1 – Catherine of Aragon…
Catherine of Aragon was the daughter of Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon, and the widow of Henry’s older brother, Arthur Tudor, Prince of Wales. Catherine had married Arthur in 1501 when Henry VII had made an alliance with the powerful Catholic monarchs of Spain. After Arthur’s death in 1502, Catherine became betrothed to 12-year-old Prince Henry, the future Henry VIII, in 1503, and it was agreed that they would marry when Henry “shall have completed the fourteenth year of his age.” However, on 27th June 1505, on the eve of his fourteenth birthday, the prince renounced the betrothal, claiming that it had been contracted without his consent. It was actually down to his father, Henry VII, who thought he could get a better match for his heir. Isabella I had died in November 1504 and neither Isabella’s husband, Ferdinand, or Catherine, were heirs to Castile, instead, the kingdom had gone to Catherine’s older sister, Juana, wife of Archduke Philip of Burgundy. So, in 1505, Catherine of Aragon as the younger daughter of the king of Aragon and only the sister of the Queen of Castile, was not quite the catch she had been in 1501.
However, after Henry VII’s death in April 1509, Henry, who was now Henry VIII, decided to be Catherine’s knight in shining armour and rescue her from a very uncertain future by marrying her, claiming that it was his father’s dying wish. Henry had known Catherine for years. He’d escorted her from the Bishop’s Palace to St Paul’s Cathedral door on the day of her wedding to Arthur, he’d been betrothed to her, they’d corresponded, and I think he was probably attracted to her and saw her as a fitting wife. He didn’t have to marry her, he chose to.
The couple married on 11th June 1509 in the Queen’s Closet at Greenwich Palace. It was a low-key ceremony for the nearly 18-year-old king and his 23-year-old bride as they were to enjoy a lavish joint coronation on 24th June.
So, that just leaves us with the question “how long?”. Well, according to Henry VIII, they were never married as he claimed that the pope acted contrary to God’s law in issuing a dispensation for the king to marry his brother’s widow. And, according to Catherine, who never recognised the annulment of her marriage or her demotion to Dowager Princess of Wales, they were married over 26 years, until her death in January 1536. In reality, their marriage was officially annulled on 23rd May 1533 by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, so we’d say just under 24 years.
The marriage produced a healthy daughter, the future Mary I; a son, Henry, Duke of Cornwall, who lived for just 52 days; two stillborn daughters and two stillborn sons.
Let’s move on to marriage number 2 – Anne Boleyn…
Anne was the daughter of courtier and diplomat Thomas Boleyn, grandson and co-heir of Thomas Butler, 7th Earl of Ormonde, and Elizabeth Howard, daughter of Thomas Howard, 2nd Duke of Norfolk. She’d made her debut at the English court in 1522 after serving firstly Margaret of Austria in Mechelen and then Queen Claude of France. She then became a maid of honour to Queen Catherine of Aragon.
At some point, and we don’t know when, Henry VIII noticed her, became attracted to her and began wooing her, including sending her love letters and gifts. Anne refused to be his mistress, even his official mistress and an obsessed Henry VIII proposed marriage. Anne accepted the proposal, probably at New Year 1527, and so began the Great Matter, Henry’s quest for an annulment of his first marriage. It led to Henry VIII breaking with the authority of Rome and making himself supreme head of the Church in England. Not only was Henry obsessed with Anne, he was desperate for a son and Catherine’s last pregnancy had been in 1518. He needed a fertile wife.
As I’ve said, Archbishop Cranmer annulled Henry’s marriage to Catherine in May 1533, but Henry had already taken things into his own hands by marrying Anne secretly on 25th January 1533 at Whitehall Palace. However, chronicler Edward Hall writes of them undergoing a wedding ceremony on 14th November 1532 after they landed at Dover on their return from a meeting with Francis I in Calais. This would make sense as they then started sleeping together and Anne was pregnant by the time of the January ceremony. Anne was about 31 at the time of her marriage, and Henry was 41.
Henry may have been in a romantic relationship with Anne for 7 years or more before their marriage, but the marriage lasted just three years. On 15th May 1536, Anne was tried for high treason and found guilty of sleeping with five courtiers, including her own brother, and plotting with them to kill the king. On 17th May 1536, her marriage to the king was annulled. It is not clear whether this was down to the king’s previous relationship with her sister, Mary, or an alleged precontract between Anne and Henry Percy, 6th Earl of Northumberland. Anne was executed on 19th May 1536, and, the next day, the king became betrothed to wife number 3, Jane Seymour.
Henry’s marriage to Anne resulted in the birth of a healthy daughter, the future Elizabeth I, one probable stillbirth in 1534, and a miscarriage in January 1536.
Wife number 3, Jane Seymour, was the daughter of Sir John Seymour of Wulfhall in Wiltshire and his wife, Margery Wentworth. She’d begun serving Catherine of Aragon as a maid of honour between 1527 and 1529, but this was cut short by Henry’s banishment of Catherine in 1531, when he reduced her household. In 1535, Jane was called back to court to serve Queen Anne Boleyn and by early 1536, the king was wooing her, sending her gifts. In March 1536, Jane’s brother, Edward and his wife, were given apartments at Greenwich Palace which the king could access through a private passage, thus allowing the king to court Jane secretly while she was also chaperoned.
Jane was coached on how to behave with the king by those who hated Anne Boleyn, being told to tell him how unpopular his second marriage was. The king was already doubting his marriage, as Anne had recently miscarried a son, and it wasn’t long before Jane went from courtly love flirtation to potential wife. The couple became betrothed on 20th May 1536 and despite their relationship being reported as sounding “ill in the ears” of the English people, they were married just ten days later, on 30th May at Whitehall Palace. Jane was about 28 and the king was 44.
Jane seems to have been the polar opposite of Anne Boleyn, in both looks and character, and perhaps her seemingly meek and mild manner appealed to the king after his quite volatile relationship with Anne. But again, his priority was to have a son, and he believed that there was more chance of him having one with Jane, who came from a large family, than with Anne, who’d not long had a miscarriage.
Nearly a year after the king’s marriage to Jane, on 27th May 1537, there were celebrations for the quickening of Jane’s unborn baby, i.e. its first detectable movements in the womb, and Jane gave birth to a healthy son, the future Edward VI, on 12th October 1537 after a long labour. Sadly, she died just twelve days later, probably due to an infection caused by some of the placenta being retained.
The marriage had lasted less than 18 months, but Jane had given the king the greatest gift in his eyes, a healthy son and heir. It was Jane he chose to be depicted with him in later portraits showing the Tudor dynasty or the Tudor family, and he gave orders for his remains to be buried with hers. They share a vault in St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle.
The king appears to have been truly devastated by Jane’s death and he didn’t marry again until January 1540.
Henry VIII’s fourth marriage was negotiated by Thomas Cromwell who was looking for a suitable diplomatic alliance for England. Cromwell put forward Anne of Cleves as a potential bride. Anne was daughter of the recently deceased John III, Duke of Cleves, and Maria of Jülich-Berg, and the sister of Duke Wilhelm of Cleves. As historian Howard Leithead notes, “While the duke was no protestant, neither was he close to either pope or emperor, and the treaty considerably increased the prospects for an alliance with the Schmalkaldic League of Lutheran princes”. Henry VIII agreed to the marriage after seeing a miniature of Anne painted by Hans Holbein the Younger and a treaty was agreed in the autumn of 1539.
Unfortunately, in the lead-up to the wedding, Henry VIII decided that he didn’t want to marry Anne. Whether it was because she’d humiliated by not recognising him at their first meeting or because the king did not view an alliance with Cleves as valuable any longer, Henry turned against the idea. However, he ended up having to go through with it for fear of upsetting the Duke of Cleves, and the couple married on 6th January 1540, the Feast of Epiphany, in the queen’s closet at Greenwich Palace. Anne was about 24 years old and Henry was 48.
The morning after the all-important wedding night, when Cromwell asked the king what he thought of his bride, the king said:
“Surely, as ye know, I liked her before not well, but now I like her much worse. For I have felt her belly and her breast, and thereby, as I can judge, she should be no maid… [The] which struck me so to the heart when I felt them that I had neither will nor courage to proceed any further in other matters… I have left her as good a maid as I found her.”
It appears that the marriage was never consummated and the king’s attentions turned to one of Anne’s young maids of honour, Catherine Howard. By 20th June 1540, Anne had noticed the king’s interest in Catherine, for she complained to the Cleves ambassador, but even though he assured her that there was nothing in it, just four days later Anne was sent away from court, allegedly to keep her safe from plague, but on 7th July convocation ruled that her marriage to the king was invalid due to Anne’s prior betrothal to the Duke of Lorraine, the king’s lack of consent to the marriage, and lack of consummation. Anne went from queen to the king’s “right dear and right entirely beloved sister” after just six months of marriage.
And, on 28th July 1540, the same day that the king’s former advisor, Thomas Cromwell, was executed, 49-year-old Henry VIII married Catherine Howard, who was about 17 or 18 at the time. The couple were married at Oatlands Palace in a low-key and very private ceremony. News of the wedding was kept quiet for over a week and Catherine didn’t appear in public as queen until 8th August, due to the Cleves annulment.
Catherine was the daughter of Edmund Howard, son of Thomas Howard, 2nd Duke of Norfolk, and Jocasta or Joyce Culpeper. Henry VIII was thrilled with his new bride. He doted on her, lavishing her with gifts, and she appears to have given him a new lease of life, with him being recorded as enjoying hunting once more for hours on end. Following their return from a successful northern royal progress, so happy was the king that on All Saints’ Day, he ordered the Bishop of Lincoln at mass “to make prayer and give thanks with him for the good life he led and hoped to [lead with her] […]”. However, the following days, All Souls’ Day, 2nd November 1541, a shocked Henry VIII was informed by Archbishop Cranmer that allegations had been made about Queen Catherine’s past.
The king ordered a full investigation, hoping to clear the queen’s name, but, instead, it was found that the claims were true, Catherine had not been a virgin at their marriage and may even have been precontracted to another man. Things got worse as the investigation continued, with it being found that Catherine had enjoyed secret meetings into the early hours of the morning with Thomas Culpeper, a groom of the king’s privy chamber. They denied a sexual relationship, but Culpeper admitted that they intended to, and with the treason laws as they were, intention was all that was needed for someone to be guilty of high treason.
The king was devastated and went from weeping in front of his council to calling for his sword to kill her himself. Catherine was found guilty of treason by act of attainder and executed on 13th February 1542, just over 18 months after she’d married the king.
And now it’s time for Henry VIII’s sixth and final wife, Catherine Parr. Catherine was the daughter of Sir Thomas Parr of Kendal and Maud Green, a former lady-in-waiting to Queen Catherine of Aragon. Catherine had actually been named after Henry’s first wife. Catherine was twice-married. Her first marriage to Edward Burgh took place in spring 1529, but he died in the early 1530s, and she went on to marry John Neville, 3rd Baron Latimer of Snape Castle in the summer of 1534, becoming stepmother to his two children.
By the winter of 1542, Latimer’s health was declining and he died in early 1543. Catherine went to court, joining her sister and brother-in-law there, and it wasn’t long before she attracted the attention of two suitors. The first was Thomas Seymour, brother of the late Queen Jane, and a man she fell head over heels in love with. However, suitor number 2 was the king and he proposed to Catherine. I’m not sure Catherine had much choice in the matter, but she did accept his proposal and they were married on 12th July 1543 in the queen’s closet at Hampton Court Palace. Catherine was nearly 31 and the king was 52.
The marriage appears to have been one of mutual affection and respect, and Catherine became close to all three of the king’s children, involving herself in the education of Edward and Elizabeth. In 1544, the king trusted his wife enough to leave her as regent while he was campaigning in France, but in 1546 Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, and Lord Chancellor Thomas Wriothesley, who were concerned about the queen’s Protestant leanings, attempted to turn the king against Catherine. It backfired spectacularly when Catherine received advance warning of the plot and was able to get to the king and plead her case, submitting to his authority and explaining that she only discussed religion with him to take his mind off his leg, not because she knew better than him. Catherine won and was safe. Their marriage lasted 3 and a half years and only ended when the king died on 28th January 1547. Catherine went on to marry Thomas Seymour, although their happiness was cut short when she died in September 1548 just days after giving birth to their daughter.
So, those are the six marriages of Henry VIII. Let me order them in length from longest to shortest:
- Catherine of Aragon – 23 years and 11 months from wedding to annulment.
- There’s a tie for second place – Anne Boleyn – 3 and a half years from the November 1532 wedding to the annulment in 1533.
And Catherine Parr – Also three and a half years from the wedding to the king’s death. I think Catherine wins by a few days. - Catherine Howard – Just over 18 months from wedding to her execution.
- Jane Seymour – Less than 18 months from wedding to her death.
- Anne of Cleves – 6 months from wedding to annulment.
I think Henry VIII would only recognise two of his marriages as valid – Jane Seymour and Catherine Parr, but I definitely recognise all six. Rest in peace, dear ladies.
