Henry VIII

Henry VIII was king of England from 1509 to 1547, the second monarch of the Tudor dynasty. He is remembered above all for his six marriages and for breaking with the Pope in Rome to end the first of them, a decision that created the Church of England, led to the dissolution of the monasteries and changed English religion, politics and landholding for centuries.

Henry was born on 28 June 1491 at Greenwich Palace, the second son of Henry VII, who had won the crown at Bosworth in 1485, and Elizabeth of York. As a younger son he was not expected to rule, and he received a broad humanist education in languages, theology and music. In 1502 his elder brother Arthur died, a few months after marrying the Spanish princess Catherine of Aragon. Henry became heir, and to preserve the alliance with Spain he was betrothed to his brother's widow, which required a papal dispensation because canon law forbade a man to marry his brother's wife.

Henry succeeded his father on 21 April 1509, aged seventeen, and married Catherine weeks later. Tall, athletic and fond of hunting, jousting and display, he was a striking contrast to his careful, unpopular father. One of his first acts was to have two of Henry VII's hated tax collectors, Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley, executed. He wanted glory in war against the Kingdom of France, and in 1513 he invaded northern France, winning the Battle of the Spurs and taking Tournai. While he was away, an English army defeated the Scots at Flodden, where James IV of Scotland was killed.

Day-to-day government was run increasingly by Thomas Wolsey, who became Archbishop of York, a cardinal and Lord Chancellor. Wolsey managed Henry's diplomacy, including the lavish meeting with Francis I of France at the Field of Cloth of Gold in 1520, and steered between France and the emperor Charles V, Catherine's nephew. In 1521 Henry published a defence of the seven sacraments against Martin Luther, for which Pope Leo X gave him the title Defender of the Faith, which British monarchs still use.

By the mid-1520s Catherine had given birth several times, but only one child survived, a daughter, Mary, born in 1516. Henry was convinced that he needed a son to secure the dynasty, which had come to the throne after decades of civil war. He also fell in love with Anne Boleyn, a lady of the court, who refused to become merely his mistress. Henry came to argue that his marriage was invalid in the eyes of God, citing a verse in Leviticus, and from 1527 he sought an annulment from Pope Clement VII. The Pope was under the control of Charles V, whose troops had sacked Rome that year, and would not grant it. Wolsey's failure to obtain it ended his career; he was arrested in 1529 and died in 1530 on his way to face charges of treason.

Henry then turned to Parliament and to new advisers, above all Thomas Cromwell and Thomas Cranmer. A series of statutes cut the links between the English church and the papacy. Henry married Anne Boleyn secretly in January 1533; in May, Cranmer, now Archbishop of Canterbury, declared the marriage to Catherine void, and in September Anne gave birth to a daughter, the future Elizabeth I. The Act of Supremacy of 1534 declared the king Supreme Head of the Church of England, and refusing to accept this became treason. Among those executed were the former Lord Chancellor Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher, in 1535.

Henry's church remained close to Catholicism in its doctrine and worship, and he never accepted Lutheran ideas such as justification by faith alone. Yet the break opened the way for the Protestant Reformation in England, as an English Bible was placed in every parish church from 1538. Between 1536 and 1541, Cromwell's agents dissolved the monasteries, nunneries and friaries of England and Wales, and their lands and wealth passed to the crown, much of it soon sold to the nobility and gentry. In 1536 a large rising in the north, the Pilgrimage of Grace, protested against the religious changes; Henry promised concessions, then had around 200 people executed after further unrest.

Anne Boleyn failed to give Henry a son, and in May 1536 she was tried and beheaded on charges of adultery, incest and treason, which most historians consider fabricated. Eleven days later Henry married Jane Seymour, who gave birth to the future Edward VI in October 1537 and died less than two weeks later. His fourth marriage, to the German princess Anne of Cleves in January 1540, was arranged by Cromwell to win Protestant allies. Henry disliked her, and the marriage was annulled after six months; Cromwell was executed in July 1540. Henry's fifth wife, the young Catherine Howard, was beheaded in February 1542 for adultery. His sixth, Catherine Parr, whom he married in 1543, outlived him. The traditional rhyme summarises the fates of the six as divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived, although strictly speaking two of the marriages were annulled rather than ended by divorce.

Henry's reign saw a major extension of royal authority. The Laws in Wales Acts of 1535 and 1542 united Wales with the Kingdom of England under English law and gave it seats in Parliament. In 1542 Henry took the title King of Ireland, replacing the older Lordship of Ireland. He spent heavily on the navy, building warships and dockyards, though his flagship, the Mary Rose, sank off Portsmouth in 1545.

His later wars were costly. He captured Boulogne in 1544 and fought the Scots, trying to force a marriage between his son Edward and the infant Mary, Queen of Scots, a campaign later known as the Rough Wooing. To pay for these wars he sold monastic lands and debased the coinage, causing inflation. After a jousting accident in 1536 and with a leg ulcer that would not heal, Henry grew obese and increasingly suspicious, and the last years of his reign were marked by executions of nobles he distrusted. He died on 28 January 1547 at the Palace of Whitehall in London, aged 55, and was buried at St George's Chapel, Windsor, next to Jane Seymour.

All three of Henry's surviving children reigned in turn: the Protestant Edward VI, the Catholic Mary I, who tried to restore papal authority, and Elizabeth I, under whom the Church of England took lasting shape. The Tudor dynasty ended with Elizabeth in 1603, and the crown passed to the Stuarts of Scotland, descendants of Henry's sister Margaret.

Historians judge Henry very differently. Some see him as a strong king who asserted English independence from foreign authority, strengthened the state and gave Parliament a central role. Others stress his vanity, cruelty and wastefulness, the dozens of people he had executed, and the destruction of monastic culture. Many argue that his ministers, especially Wolsey and Cromwell, did much of the real work of government. His image, fixed by Hans Holbein's portraits of a broad, imposing figure, remains one of the best known of any English monarch. For the wider story of his kingdom, see the History of the United Kingdom.