The Pathetic Story Of Henry VIII’s Love Life D
Henry VIII saw an of Cle’s portrait and rushed to marry her. But when they actually met, he was disgusted. Henry claimed she was ugly. But modern historians have revealed the real reason why he turned on her. And it’s beyond twisted. We know of Catherine of Aragon, Anne Bolin, Jane Seymour, an of Cleves, Katherine Howard, and Catherine Parr for all the wrong reasons.
Or rather, one wrong reason. their husband, King Henry VIII. But what were these women really like? And how did they handle their very different, if very tragic fates? Married from 1509 to 1533, Catherine of Aragon wasn’t just Henry’s first wife, she was also his longest marital relationship.
But she came into the union with baggage of her own. She’d actually been married to Henry’s older brother, Arthur, before he died just after their honeymoon. Catherine was the daughter of the powerhouse couple, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. So, even after Arthur’s passing, she was still a powerful tutor chesspiece.
So much so that Henry’s middle-aged father considered marrying her after his son’s death. Catherine’s own family objected to the idea, and her second betroal was to Henry. Because she’d been married to Arthur, Catherine had to get special dispensation from the Pope in order to walk down the aisle to his brother Henry.
In doing so, she also had to swear that her first marriage had never been consummated. One of Catherine’s only jobs was to give Henry a male heir. But over the next months and years, she suffered through numerous miscarriages and still births. Worst of all, perhaps was the seemingly healthy baby boy who she gave birth to in January 1511, but who died after less than 2 months.
When Catherine served as regent in 1513, while Henry fought in France, Scotland saw this as an opportunity to attack while a weak woman ruled. Catherine marshaled allies and then famously rode towards Scotland in complete armor to give an inspirational speech to her men, all while being 7 months pregnant.
Perhaps because of these stresses, Catherine went into premature labor shortly after, resulting in a still birth. And though she finally carried a healthy baby to term in 1516, that baby was a girl, the future Queen Mary I of England, not what Henry wanted. By the 1520s, after yet another stillbirth in 1518, Henry and Catherine were all but estranged.
To make it worse, Henry had fallen head over heels for Anne Berlin and began obsessing over how to split from Catherine. In particular, Henry became conveniently convinced that God had cursed him for lying with his brother’s wife and that the only way he would ever have a son was to do it with someone else.
Catherine was adamant she and Arthur had never slept together, that there was no religious grounds for a split, and that she would never back down willingly from her position as queen. In a desperate moment, Henry even suggested that Catherine join a convent. To which she snapped, “God never called me to a nunnery.
I am the king’s true and legitimate wife.” With Catherine not making it easy, Henry began the king’s great matter. For years, he tried to persuade the Catholic Church into enulling his marriage, eventually simply taking over as the head of the church, annulling his own union and kickstarting the English Reformation. Catherine died in 1536 at the age of 50, and her cause of death was as fitting as it was eerie.
When attendants prepared her body for burial, they found that her heart was jet black. She’d likely died from cancer of the heart. Even then, her rival met an undeniably worse fate. And entered Henry VII’s court as Catherine of Aragon’s Lady in waiting. A dark, captivating, and whipsmart beauty. She almost immediately caught Henry’s eye.
She entertained his advances, but staunchly refused to sleep with him unless he extricated himself from Catherine of Aragon and married her. It worked like a charm. Soon enough, she’d earned a proposal from the king and the pair began collaborating with Henry’s religious officials to get the anulment. On January 25th, 1533, King Henry VIII and Anne Berlin married, but even then they were still holding on to a secret.
They’d already married the previous November, and Anne, having finally conceded to Henry’s desires, was currently pregnant. Unfortunately, this triumphant beginning would also be the high point of Anne’s reign. She was supposed to save the House of Tudtor and give Henry a male heir, but the child she gave birth to in September 1533 was a girl, the future Queen Elizabeth I.
Henry had been so sure it was a boy that he not only cancelled celebratory events intended for the new prince, he also began to resent Anne. Anne always had a sharp tongue and mind, but Henry began to take more and more umbrage at these qualities. In the end, pregnancy came no easier for Anne Bolin than it did for Catherine of Aragon, and she suffered multiple miscarriages after having Elizabeth.
Henry began distancing himself from her, just as he had with Catherine. Instead, he spent more and more time with the pretty Jane Seymour. Anne watched as Henry pied Jane with gifts, including a necklace containing a locket with his portrait inside. She didn’t take it well.
One day, after watching Jane opening and closing the gift locket brazenly in front of her, Anne tore at the chain so hard she hurt her fingers. In another incident, she broke into a rage after walking into a room and seeing Jane on the king’s lap. In a fateful 1536 jousting match, King Henry had an accident and was knocked unconscious for two hours.
The shock of it likely spurred Anne to miscarry the child she’d been carrying, a baby boy. From then on, Henry was through with Anne and planning to marry Jane Seymour. Accordingly, he began spreading around his belief that Anne had literally bewitched him into marrying her. As if that weren’t enough, he then accused male courtiers who’d known Anne, including her brother George, of sleeping with his wife.
By May, Henry had built up enough of a case to have Anne arrested for high treason and thrown in the Tower of London. Her trial ended the way it was always going to end, with a guilty verdict and an execution. In the days before she met the blade, she’s reported to have joked of the executioner, “I hear he’s quite good, and I have a very small neck.
” On May 19th, 1536, Anne Bolin met her end, and Henry was already moving on. [Music] Where Katherine of Aragon was stately and confident and Anne Bolin was dark and witty, Jane was, according to one courtier, the gentlest woman I ever knew. Henry was officially betrothed to Jane Seymour just one day after Anne Berlin went to the chopping block and they were married 10 days later in Whiteall Palace.
Jane’s nice girl reputation today belies a complex shrewd woman. To cement her place beside Henry, she changed many customs of Anne Balin’s more rockous court, including toning down parties and changing fashions. Jane was pregnant soon after her wedding, and just like her predecessors, she was in for tragedy.
Sometime around Christmas 1536, she lost her child through miscarriage. Such was her desperation to please the king. She was pregnant just a month later. Everyone in the kingdom, Jane more than anyone, knew that she needed to provide Henry with a healthy male heir this time and that the pressure was on.
In October of 1537, Jane went into labor and complications arose from the start. Historians believe the baby was in an awkward position, and Jane spent a brutal 2 days and three nights in labor. Still, when at last the child came, the room must have been ecstatic. It was a boy, the future Edward V 6th.
Although Jane seemed healthy in the hours after the birth, within days things took a turn. The possible culprits range from a bacterial infection to an embolism. But whatever the cause, it was fatal. On October 24th, 1537, Jane Seymour died in her bed at the age of 29, having been queen of England for less than 2 years.
Even so, King Henry VIII never forgot her. He mourned her officially for 3 months, held off marrying for 2 years, and no doubt, thanks to her giving him a son, kept her as his favorite queen for the rest of his life. When Henry was ready to marry again in the late 1530s, he had his eye on An of Cleves, a German noble whose Protestant upbringing would be useful to him.
The one thing he didn’t know was if her looks would please him. So he sent court painter Hans Holine to capture her likeness, insisting that he paint Anne accurately so he could properly judge her. When the portrait came back and she was acceptable, Henry got to work on their wedding.
When Anne of Cleves traveled to England to marry Henry, reportedly Henry took one look at her and said, “She’s nothing so fair as she hath been reported.” Though he never called her the apocryphal insult the Flanders mayor, he might as well have. Unfortunately for Henry and Anne, the wheels were already in motion for the nuptules.
Anne of Cleves married Henry on January 6th, 1540. And if the king hoped the wedding knight would change his mind about his bride, he soon lost those hopes. Henry now complained, “I liked her before, not well, but now I like her much worse.” He also talked about the very evil smells about her and in a very intimate scrutiny noted the looseness of her tokens.
At this point, Henry did what he did best. He started looking desperately for a way out. He decided his best option was to go the Catherine of Aragon route and nyx his marriage to Anne of Cleves. Citing Anne’s previous brief and decade old betroal to another man, the king and his counselors argued that the union was invalid.
Apparently though, this wasn’t quite enough. So, Henry soon went for total humiliation. Henry went through a very official and very cruel trial in order to enull his marriage to Anne. These proceedings included assertions that even though he was absolutely completely totally viral, he simply could never consummate a marriage with someone like Anne of Cleves.
The sham of a trial ended with Henry winning and he was officially a single man on July 9th, 1540, just 6 months after he’d married Anne. In some ways, she got a good deal. She kept her head, maintained a comfortable place in Henry’s court, and even outlived all his future queens. Yet, there’s still one crucial part of her story missing.
When Anne was first heading to London, Henry secretly snuck into her roadside lodgings in disguise and approached her. The king believed that if they were truly meant to be, she’d somehow sense it was him. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. Quite reasonably, Anne was alarmed at the stranger in her vicinity and either politely ignored his advances or explicitly rebuffed them.
Regardless, Henry came away from his bride to be that day embarrassed. And some historians believe this may have been enough for him to hold a grudge even after she was his wife. Katherine Howard came into Henry’s life the same way many of his queens did. She was a lady in waiting to his wife, this time Anne of Cleves.
Pretty, vivaceious, and 17 years old to Henry’s middle age, Catherine pleased Henry immensely. Minimally educated but notably lively, Catherine was something of a free spirit in the Tudtor court. Meanwhile, thanks to the jousting accident Anne Berlin had witnessed in 1536, Henry carried around a leg injury that would haunt him for the rest of his days and had gained a lot of weight.
Catherine could hardly be as enamored of Henry as he was of her. By now, Henry VIII very much had a pattern, and he and Catherine Howard married just 19 days after he enulled his union with Anne of Cleves. Before Catherine married Henry, she was actively courting one of the king’s favorites, Thomas Culper. The trouble was, this courting didn’t stop once she became queen.
Whether it turned more physical is still a matter of debate, but the pair certainly arranged secret meetings through her lady in waiting. All eyes were on Catherine now that she was Henry’s wife and her old dorm friends from her time at her stepg grandmothers began grumbling about her previous ways particularly when it came to her old relationship with Francis Darham.
Eventually, someone reported these rumors to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, who then began looking into Catherine. Cranmer questioned Catherine’s lady in waiting, hoping to find out more information about her old flame, Darham. The terrified woman began telling him all about Catherine’s current secret meetings with Thomas Culper.
Horrified, Cranmer searched the queen’s rooms. Among Catherine’s papers, AIDS discovered a letter Howard had written to Co Pepper that made her emotional attachment very clear. In it, she wrote, “When I think again that you shall depart from me again, it makes my heart die to think what fortune I have, that I cannot be always in your company.
” To make matters worse, when Cranmer questioned Co Pepper, he admitted that he meant to do ill with the queen and that likewise the queen so minded with him. In late November of 1541, less than 2 years into her marriage, Henry VIII officially stripped Catherine of her crown. Just weeks later, the king executed both Thomas Culper and Catherine’s reported ex-husband, Francis Darham, the latter of which got the particularly gruesome punishment of being drawn and quartered.
On February 13th, 1542, Catherine joined Culper in Darham with a single stroke of the executioner’s blade. When she died, the queen was still only around 19 years old. Clearly, Henry and his ego did not take Katherine Howard’s betrayal well, and his search for his next wife was more for a companion than a lover.
As I landed on the twice widowed, independently wealthy Catherine Parr, a longtime figure at court, Catherine was measured, intelligent, and a stately 5′ 10 in tall. When Henry began considering Katherine Parr, she was already far along in a courtship with Thomas Seymour, none other than Queen Jane Seymour’s brother.
Like Catherine Howard before her, Par knew she couldn’t say no to the king. So when he proposed marriage, she dutifully dropped Seymour. Par was already friendly with the king’s eldest daughter, Mary, became close to his daughter, Elizabeth, and even the young Prince Edward approved of her. In 1547, King Henry VIII’s health issues finally caught up with him, and he died at the age of 55.
He nonetheless made sure to thank Catherine, bequething £7,000 a year to his faithful spouse, a massive sum for the time, but likely still not enough given everything she had to put up with. Just 4 months after Henry died and Edward V 6th became king, Catherine caused a stir at court. She jumped right into marriage with Thomas Seymour, whom she’d apparently never forgotten.
In the summer of 1548, Catherine gave birth to her first and only child, Mary Seymour. Then fate threw in a cruel twist. After nearly four decades of survival, including next to a dangerous king, Catherine fell ill with post-natal complications, and died 8 days after giving birth. Henry VIII’s queens linger in the memory all these centuries later.
Not just because of the tragedies they found themselves embroiled in, but also because of the different and fascinating ways they navigated the obstacles of their royal positions. [Music] Thanks for watching History Expose. If you love uncovering the best stories in history, hit like and subscribe to keep exploring with us.
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