December 10, 2008 • 12 mins
From 1509 to 1547, thousands of people were beheaded under the bloody, violent reign of Henry VIII. Check out this HowStuffWorks podcast to learn more about Henry VIII and his effect on history.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Kandis gives in join by staff writer Jane McGrath. Okay, Jane,
who do you think is one of the most reviled
figures in all of history? Oh? That's a good question.
(00:24):
I think Henry the Eighth is up there. Yeah, maybe
alongside Rescipute and who we talked about in an earlier podcast,
The Crazy Man Hitler. Ah, good answer, Good answer. Definitely
not Thomas Jefferson, whom everyone loves, or at least I do,
because we all know that Henry the Eighth. So he
reigned for thirty six years fifteen o nine fifty seven,
(00:44):
and during this time, I think somewhere between like fifty
seven thousand and seventy two thousand people were beheaded. That's
an amazing number. What do you think about it? Especially
um the fact that the Queen Queen Mary, known as
Bloody Mary, actually only killed about three hundred I think
in her six years, and yet she's known for being
the bloody I know that was his daughter, so we
(01:06):
don't know if you know she learned a thing or
two from her daughter or why. But as we'll see
in a few minutes her her killings were for a
very different reason. But Henry, Henry, Henry, Henry, Where do
we start with? Henry such a complicated man. He wanted
to be more popular than his father, and his father
set out to amass tons of money so that the
monarchy would be virtually unstoppable and unbreakable, and the people
(01:29):
kind of hated him. So when Henry the eighth came
into power, he wanted a couple of things. He wanted
to marry his brother's widow, and he wanted to be
more popular than his dad. And eventually he did both things,
but then screw them both up. Yeah, you could say that. Um.
He ended up killing two of his father's advisors, close
advisors who were well known in England at the time
(01:50):
for being responsible for a love of the high taxes
that were going on, the oppressiveness that they hated Henry
the seventh for Yeah, that was Edmund Dudley and Richard Empson,
and like Jane said, they were umbols of the corruption
at court. So when Henry killed them, instantly his stock
went up. But he didn't stop there. He started doing
some things that the people did not like so much.
And so one of the first wrong moves that he
(02:14):
made when he was at court was that he made
an attempt to marry his older brother's widow, Catherine of Aragon.
She was from Spanish royalty, and essentially he was arguing
that the marriage didn't really exist in the eyes of
God because they never consummated it. At least that was
the excuse he used by the Pope's hand to get
(02:34):
the marriage approved, right, and he exactly like you said,
he needed special permission from the Pope to marry her
in the first place. So that caused a lot of
trouble later on, it did. And so after all of
that hoop la getting to married Catherine of Aragon, he
decided that he wanted to divorce her. Yeah, he she
The big reason was, you could say that she had
not produced him a male heir, and he wanted someone
(02:55):
to uh in his family, his lineage to pass the
crown down to. And this marriage, which was all well
and fine, um, but the the queen did not produce
any males. So Henry turned around and he said, all right,
you're doing nothing for the Tutor family. And I guess
technically it was a sin to marry you in the
(03:15):
first place, so, um, we're getting divorced. And that was
when the Pope said, now, because he said, in the
first place, you know, you pointed out this law that
said it's not a sin to marry someone if the
married hasn't been consummated. So that's what we're gonna stick by, Henry.
That's that. So Henry went up the Pope by saying, well,
you know what, the Catholic Church doesn't matter anymore. I'm
the church. Yeah. And this was a very interesting move
(03:39):
on his part because, uh, he's an interesting figure in
that he supported the church during the Protestant Revolution basically
that happened um earlier on, and he wrote a lot
of things against Martin Luther, who was credited with instigating
the revolution and um. And so he made a lot
of friends, Catholic friends in England to like us or
(03:59):
Thomas Moores is one who helped him talk about, like
write things that were against Martin Luther and aligned himself
with the Pope and the church. So when he broke
with the Catholic Church, he oversaw the start of the
English Reformation. And essentially what he did was he created
a modern sovereignty, which is, you know, throne independent of
the Church. But he didn't really see it at that time.
(04:20):
He wasn't trying to make huge strides for England, and
he just wanted to get what he wanted in the bedroom,
quite frankly so. And he wasn't just blindly annulling his
marriage from Catherine. He had his eye on someone else,
that's right. And her name was Anne Boleyn. Yes, and
I'm sure many of you have heard that name, and
even if you know, you don't know the full story.
She was his mistress for a time being she was
(04:43):
a very young member of the court, and her family
noticed that she had caught the King's eye, and her
family being a rather enterprising group of individuals, but well,
why don't you exploit that, Anne, And so she did. Yeah,
and it worked, and it caused England to turn away
from the Catholic Church in the end, it really really did.
It was a huge math. Yeah, and it ended up
(05:04):
not working out all that well for anyone really, because
Anne didn't produce a male either. She produced a daughter
with no male air. The thing is, Henry really loved
her at first. We know for a fact that he
really really loved her, but she was incredibly unpopular at
court and she wasn't getting any sympathy, and after she
failed to produce a male heir, she was she was
(05:25):
kind of out. But Henry needed a reason to kick
her out of the bed, so he made up a
lie that she was an adulteress. Yeah, and one of
the laws that eventually evolved around her was that she
had actually um was an adulteress with her brother, so
had an affair with her brother, and so this idea
of sent incests is obviously people lashed onto this idea
since they already hated her, and it was one of
(05:46):
the reasons why she was executed and that was the
end of Anne. But Henry really couldn't be satiated. Throughout
his life, We constantly in history see him espousing women
and then and then killing them off and inventing these
reason end And it's not as though the people of
England were sitting back at this time and condoning it.
By the contrary, I'm sure that they were very upset
(06:07):
that they were probably also very afraid of him, because
this was a man who killed a nun, he killed cardinals,
he killed advisers, he killed members of the courts, and
most of the stemmed from from his separation with the
Church because once he wanted to marry Anne boleyn Uh.
People such as Thomas Moore and Colonel John Fisher, who
used to be as adversaries, were arguing that they basically
(06:30):
did not want to sign themselves onto this oath of
supremacy that Henry had had come up with, and they
weren't going to repudiate the church and and turned to
Henry as their new pope basically, but because Henry had
declared himself the heat of the Church and God's living
I guess dignitary or ambassador on earth, he had carte
launched to pretty much do what he placed. And this
(06:50):
was he really dangerous for, you know, the monarch to have.
And there were people who did voice opposition to Henry,
and one of the more notable ones. Actually, it's so
funny because she was such a humble and unexpected figure
to do so, Elizabeth Barton, that's right. And she was
a young girl and she was so basically a servant,
and uh, she got sick when she was about nineteen
(07:14):
and she started getting visions um that when she claimed
divine visions and messages from God saying, you know, Henry
cannot marry Anne Boleyn. You cannot let this happen. If
he does, he's not going to survive long afterwards. And
so she started saying these visions and Henry was a
little upset about that. And so there were people divided
into distinct camps. There's who thought she was crazy, there
(07:34):
was who thought she was having legitimate visions, and those
who thought, I guess she was just speaking out, you know,
against the king. It was an active truth then, and
the Archbishop of Canterbury had some good insight. He thought, well,
if I get this girl and stayed in in a
convent and she studies to become a nun, she's going
to gain some cloud. And she did, and she had
these visions for more than ten years, and eventually she
(07:55):
was accused of treason and arrested. And when she was
put on trial, I don't now if she was frightened
to the point of confessing that she was faking yet,
or if she really was genuinely faking it all along. Whatever,
she attracted her statements and that was the end of her.
So she didn't really went out by retracting your statements anyway.
But yeah, you're right, as you mentioned, they made her
(08:15):
a nun and some and it kind of worked to
the fact that she was known from then on as
the nun of Kent. So if you look back at
these members of the church that Henry opposed and and
all the harm that came to them. Um, John Fisher,
like you mentioned earlier, he was very very opposed to
henryson Norman from Catherine and he was beheaded, but later
four hundred years later, actually he was sainted. Yeah, and
(08:37):
I imagine not getting into this oath of supremacy put
in a good light with the church. For the candonization,
it was really scary. With the act declared. It would
be like are us president today saying, yeah, we already
have a separation of church and stay. But there you know,
there's sort of a new religious power and and that's me,
and so I can do what I want. So think
of everything he has at his disposal. Not only does
(08:59):
he have the national treasury, but he's got he's got
the military, and he's got all of these counsels that
he ever sees, he's got the infrastructure, everything under his thumb.
And because he is the new supreme ruler. He gets
to do whatever he wants. And meanwhile he throws coush
into the wind when it comes to morality, and gets
to go out and be with as many women as
he wants. And when he's tired of one, he gets
(09:21):
to cut off her head and go on to the
next one. And imagine he instilled fear and everyone at
the time since he was cutting off whoever he thought,
you know, whatever his whims told him, right. And so
when we look back at Henry, we have to wonder, well,
all these people were in opposition dying, was there anyone
who actually supported him? And scarily enough, yeah, yeah, there was. Yeah.
It's interesting. There's this one character named Thomas Cromwell who
(09:43):
supported him throughout his his seek for divorce from his
first wife so that he could marry An Bowyan. And
he once the Catholic Church was done away with in
in England, he basically swept through. He disbanded the monasteries,
he did away with taxes that were paid to Rome
at that time. And um uh after uh, the marriage
(10:04):
to Anne didn't work out as we said, Um, Henry
married Jane Seymour and uh not. Dr Quinn medicine, that's right,
a different one in case you're confused. And she actually
did on the side. Note, she did produce a male
heir for him, but she died a little bit later
and it turned out later down the line that the
Sun was kind of a weekly child and ended up
dying kind of young too. But that's uh, that's not
(10:25):
to the point that Um, after Jane Seymour died, Cromwell,
who was still his his his friend at this time,
convinced Harry or sorry Henry, to Mary Anne of Cleaves,
and uh, this was a disaster. Basically it was part
a political alliance with Germany, that's right. Yeah, And um,
it didn't work out from the beginning because Henry hated her.
(10:46):
She he didn't think she was pretty, she didn't like
her care her personality. Just hated each other and so
he would not have it anymore, and so he wanted
a divorce. And he sort of blamed Cromwell for this
marriage because like obviously he orchestrated it as a political move.
As Candice said it, so a note to all of
you legislators that they're listening, don't be matchmakers. Just okay
it because you never now that's true. It's sort of
(11:08):
big Cromwell in the behind right there. And actually after
that you can see how the tables turned so much because, um,
remember when we said that he had dismanded monasteries and
stuff like that against the Catholic Church. But at that
time he got connections with Lutherans, and so his enemies,
Cromwell's enemies at this time, made these connections, tried to
convince the king that he was a heretic because obviously, um,
(11:30):
Henry was not for Lutherans. He fought against the Lutherans
as well, and so this convinced Henry and head chopped off.
And you know, you look at what happened after Henry
passed on and his daughter came to the throne and
says Mary, Queen Mary, and bloody Mary. And here's what's
so ironic. She was devoutly religious, and so she tried
(11:50):
to reinstate the church. And the reason that we call
her Bloody Mary's because a lot of people died under
her hand when they were burned at the stake for Harrison.
So all that, I guess you could call it work,
or all the groundwork that her father lay tried to
separate the church and state she tried to fix and
it didn't work in the end. But from that on
(12:10):
out man, what a mass and right? And after Mary
and uh, then that's when Elizabeth came to thrown, and
that's when we get Shakespeare and everything Elizabethan era and
the rest of history. So if you want even more
about Elizabeth and Shakespeare and marriage or blood, be sure
to check out how stuff works dot com for more
on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how
(12:33):
stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think.
Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Kandis gives in join by staff writer Jane McGrath. Okay, Jane,
who do you think is one of the most reviled
figures in all of history? Oh? That's a good question.
(00:24):
I think Henry the Eighth is up there. Yeah, maybe
alongside Rescipute and who we talked about in an earlier podcast,
The Crazy Man Hitler. Ah, good answer, Good answer. Definitely
not Thomas Jefferson, whom everyone loves, or at least I do,
because we all know that Henry the Eighth. So he
reigned for thirty six years fifteen o nine fifty seven,
(00:44):
and during this time, I think somewhere between like fifty
seven thousand and seventy two thousand people were beheaded. That's
an amazing number. What do you think about it? Especially
um the fact that the Queen Queen Mary, known as
Bloody Mary, actually only killed about three hundred I think
in her six years, and yet she's known for being
the bloody I know that was his daughter, so we
(01:06):
don't know if you know she learned a thing or
two from her daughter or why. But as we'll see
in a few minutes her her killings were for a
very different reason. But Henry, Henry, Henry, Henry, Where do
we start with? Henry such a complicated man. He wanted
to be more popular than his father, and his father
set out to amass tons of money so that the
monarchy would be virtually unstoppable and unbreakable, and the people
(01:29):
kind of hated him. So when Henry the eighth came
into power, he wanted a couple of things. He wanted
to marry his brother's widow, and he wanted to be
more popular than his dad. And eventually he did both things,
but then screw them both up. Yeah, you could say that. Um.
He ended up killing two of his father's advisors, close
advisors who were well known in England at the time
(01:50):
for being responsible for a love of the high taxes
that were going on, the oppressiveness that they hated Henry
the seventh for Yeah, that was Edmund Dudley and Richard Empson,
and like Jane said, they were umbols of the corruption
at court. So when Henry killed them, instantly his stock
went up. But he didn't stop there. He started doing
some things that the people did not like so much.
And so one of the first wrong moves that he
(02:14):
made when he was at court was that he made
an attempt to marry his older brother's widow, Catherine of Aragon.
She was from Spanish royalty, and essentially he was arguing
that the marriage didn't really exist in the eyes of
God because they never consummated it. At least that was
the excuse he used by the Pope's hand to get
(02:34):
the marriage approved, right, and he exactly like you said,
he needed special permission from the Pope to marry her
in the first place. So that caused a lot of
trouble later on, it did. And so after all of
that hoop la getting to married Catherine of Aragon, he
decided that he wanted to divorce her. Yeah, he she
The big reason was, you could say that she had
not produced him a male heir, and he wanted someone
(02:55):
to uh in his family, his lineage to pass the
crown down to. And this marriage, which was all well
and fine, um, but the the queen did not produce
any males. So Henry turned around and he said, all right,
you're doing nothing for the Tutor family. And I guess
technically it was a sin to marry you in the
(03:15):
first place, so, um, we're getting divorced. And that was
when the Pope said, now, because he said, in the
first place, you know, you pointed out this law that
said it's not a sin to marry someone if the
married hasn't been consummated. So that's what we're gonna stick by, Henry.
That's that. So Henry went up the Pope by saying, well,
you know what, the Catholic Church doesn't matter anymore. I'm
the church. Yeah. And this was a very interesting move
(03:39):
on his part because, uh, he's an interesting figure in
that he supported the church during the Protestant Revolution basically
that happened um earlier on, and he wrote a lot
of things against Martin Luther, who was credited with instigating
the revolution and um. And so he made a lot
of friends, Catholic friends in England to like us or
(03:59):
Thomas Moores is one who helped him talk about, like
write things that were against Martin Luther and aligned himself
with the Pope and the church. So when he broke
with the Catholic Church, he oversaw the start of the
English Reformation. And essentially what he did was he created
a modern sovereignty, which is, you know, throne independent of
the Church. But he didn't really see it at that time.
(04:20):
He wasn't trying to make huge strides for England, and
he just wanted to get what he wanted in the bedroom,
quite frankly so. And he wasn't just blindly annulling his
marriage from Catherine. He had his eye on someone else,
that's right. And her name was Anne Boleyn. Yes, and
I'm sure many of you have heard that name, and
even if you know, you don't know the full story.
She was his mistress for a time being she was
(04:43):
a very young member of the court, and her family
noticed that she had caught the King's eye, and her
family being a rather enterprising group of individuals, but well,
why don't you exploit that, Anne, And so she did. Yeah,
and it worked, and it caused England to turn away
from the Catholic Church in the end, it really really did.
It was a huge math. Yeah, and it ended up
(05:04):
not working out all that well for anyone really, because
Anne didn't produce a male either. She produced a daughter
with no male air. The thing is, Henry really loved
her at first. We know for a fact that he
really really loved her, but she was incredibly unpopular at
court and she wasn't getting any sympathy, and after she
failed to produce a male heir, she was she was
(05:25):
kind of out. But Henry needed a reason to kick
her out of the bed, so he made up a
lie that she was an adulteress. Yeah, and one of
the laws that eventually evolved around her was that she
had actually um was an adulteress with her brother, so
had an affair with her brother, and so this idea
of sent incests is obviously people lashed onto this idea
since they already hated her, and it was one of
(05:46):
the reasons why she was executed and that was the
end of Anne. But Henry really couldn't be satiated. Throughout
his life, We constantly in history see him espousing women
and then and then killing them off and inventing these
reason end And it's not as though the people of
England were sitting back at this time and condoning it.
By the contrary, I'm sure that they were very upset
(06:07):
that they were probably also very afraid of him, because
this was a man who killed a nun, he killed cardinals,
he killed advisers, he killed members of the courts, and
most of the stemmed from from his separation with the
Church because once he wanted to marry Anne boleyn Uh.
People such as Thomas Moore and Colonel John Fisher, who
used to be as adversaries, were arguing that they basically
(06:30):
did not want to sign themselves onto this oath of
supremacy that Henry had had come up with, and they
weren't going to repudiate the church and and turned to
Henry as their new pope basically, but because Henry had
declared himself the heat of the Church and God's living
I guess dignitary or ambassador on earth, he had carte
launched to pretty much do what he placed. And this
(06:50):
was he really dangerous for, you know, the monarch to have.
And there were people who did voice opposition to Henry,
and one of the more notable ones. Actually, it's so
funny because she was such a humble and unexpected figure
to do so, Elizabeth Barton, that's right. And she was
a young girl and she was so basically a servant,
and uh, she got sick when she was about nineteen
(07:14):
and she started getting visions um that when she claimed
divine visions and messages from God saying, you know, Henry
cannot marry Anne Boleyn. You cannot let this happen. If
he does, he's not going to survive long afterwards. And
so she started saying these visions and Henry was a
little upset about that. And so there were people divided
into distinct camps. There's who thought she was crazy, there
(07:34):
was who thought she was having legitimate visions, and those
who thought, I guess she was just speaking out, you know,
against the king. It was an active truth then, and
the Archbishop of Canterbury had some good insight. He thought, well,
if I get this girl and stayed in in a
convent and she studies to become a nun, she's going
to gain some cloud. And she did, and she had
these visions for more than ten years, and eventually she
(07:55):
was accused of treason and arrested. And when she was
put on trial, I don't now if she was frightened
to the point of confessing that she was faking yet,
or if she really was genuinely faking it all along. Whatever,
she attracted her statements and that was the end of her.
So she didn't really went out by retracting your statements anyway.
But yeah, you're right, as you mentioned, they made her
(08:15):
a nun and some and it kind of worked to
the fact that she was known from then on as
the nun of Kent. So if you look back at
these members of the church that Henry opposed and and
all the harm that came to them. Um, John Fisher,
like you mentioned earlier, he was very very opposed to
henryson Norman from Catherine and he was beheaded, but later
four hundred years later, actually he was sainted. Yeah, and
(08:37):
I imagine not getting into this oath of supremacy put
in a good light with the church. For the candonization,
it was really scary. With the act declared. It would
be like are us president today saying, yeah, we already
have a separation of church and stay. But there you know,
there's sort of a new religious power and and that's me,
and so I can do what I want. So think
of everything he has at his disposal. Not only does
(08:59):
he have the national treasury, but he's got he's got
the military, and he's got all of these counsels that
he ever sees, he's got the infrastructure, everything under his thumb.
And because he is the new supreme ruler. He gets
to do whatever he wants. And meanwhile he throws coush
into the wind when it comes to morality, and gets
to go out and be with as many women as
he wants. And when he's tired of one, he gets
(09:21):
to cut off her head and go on to the
next one. And imagine he instilled fear and everyone at
the time since he was cutting off whoever he thought,
you know, whatever his whims told him, right. And so
when we look back at Henry, we have to wonder, well,
all these people were in opposition dying, was there anyone
who actually supported him? And scarily enough, yeah, yeah, there was. Yeah.
It's interesting. There's this one character named Thomas Cromwell who
(09:43):
supported him throughout his his seek for divorce from his
first wife so that he could marry An Bowyan. And
he once the Catholic Church was done away with in
in England, he basically swept through. He disbanded the monasteries,
he did away with taxes that were paid to Rome
at that time. And um uh after uh, the marriage
(10:04):
to Anne didn't work out as we said, Um, Henry
married Jane Seymour and uh not. Dr Quinn medicine, that's right,
a different one in case you're confused. And she actually
did on the side. Note, she did produce a male
heir for him, but she died a little bit later
and it turned out later down the line that the
Sun was kind of a weekly child and ended up
dying kind of young too. But that's uh, that's not
(10:25):
to the point that Um, after Jane Seymour died, Cromwell,
who was still his his his friend at this time,
convinced Harry or sorry Henry, to Mary Anne of Cleaves,
and uh, this was a disaster. Basically it was part
a political alliance with Germany, that's right. Yeah, And um,
it didn't work out from the beginning because Henry hated her.
(10:46):
She he didn't think she was pretty, she didn't like
her care her personality. Just hated each other and so
he would not have it anymore, and so he wanted
a divorce. And he sort of blamed Cromwell for this
marriage because like obviously he orchestrated it as a political move.
As Candice said it, so a note to all of
you legislators that they're listening, don't be matchmakers. Just okay
it because you never now that's true. It's sort of
(11:08):
big Cromwell in the behind right there. And actually after
that you can see how the tables turned so much because, um,
remember when we said that he had dismanded monasteries and
stuff like that against the Catholic Church. But at that
time he got connections with Lutherans, and so his enemies,
Cromwell's enemies at this time, made these connections, tried to
convince the king that he was a heretic because obviously, um,
(11:30):
Henry was not for Lutherans. He fought against the Lutherans
as well, and so this convinced Henry and head chopped off.
And you know, you look at what happened after Henry
passed on and his daughter came to the throne and
says Mary, Queen Mary, and bloody Mary. And here's what's
so ironic. She was devoutly religious, and so she tried
(11:50):
to reinstate the church. And the reason that we call
her Bloody Mary's because a lot of people died under
her hand when they were burned at the stake for Harrison.
So all that, I guess you could call it work,
or all the groundwork that her father lay tried to
separate the church and state she tried to fix and
it didn't work in the end. But from that on
(12:10):
out man, what a mass and right? And after Mary
and uh, then that's when Elizabeth came to thrown, and
that's when we get Shakespeare and everything Elizabethan era and
the rest of history. So if you want even more
about Elizabeth and Shakespeare and marriage or blood, be sure
to check out how stuff works dot com for more
on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how
(12:33):
stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think.
Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com.
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