June 1, 2023 • 24 mins
The Broadway musical “Six” sparked interest in the wives of King Henry VIII, but many of us can’t name all six women, let alone know their backstory. In our last episode of the season, Georgetown University History professor Amy Leonard explains why these wives were so historically significant beyond their marriages to Henry VIII.
One Day University is a co-production of iHeart Podcasts and School of Humans. It is a Curiosity Podcast. You can sign up at the website OneDayU.com to become a member and access over 700 full length video lectures. You can also download their app. Once you’re a member, you can watch Professor Amy Leonard’s lecture, “The Six Wives of Henry VIII (Their Real Stories)”
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
This is the only wife of the six that he
didn't know beforehand, and he didn't have some say in marrying.
They had this very awkward first meeting where she didn't
recognize him. She seemed to be a little unsophisticated, not
as educated as some of the other wives, and he
decided within a couple of days he needed to get
rid of her as quickly as possible.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Welcome to One day University Talks with the world's most
engaging and inspiring professors discussing their most popular courses. This
podcast is your chance to discover some of our top
rated lectures on your own schedule. I'm Stephen Shregis. We're
wrapping up this season by telling you the real stories
behind the six wives of King Henry the Eighth. Everyone
(00:54):
knows the awful face of these women. There's even a
rhyme to help remember devor beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.
But Georgetown history professor Amy Leonard says there's a lot
of misinformation out there about them, including in that rhyme.
There was no divorce for King Henry, only in nulments.
(01:16):
Amy also says, while the popular Broadway musical six is
a great show and gets a lot right about the women.
It also gets some things wrong, like Henry being duped
by an inaccurate portrait of Anne of cleves Amy. Leonard
separates fact from fiction in her one day university lecture
The Six Wives of Henry the Eighth. In addition to
(01:37):
learning the real story about the wives, she says that
we should also remember King Henry for more than his
multiple marriages.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
Henry is hugely important for English history, and it's kind
of sad in some ways that it gets completely overshadowed
by his personal life and relationship with his wives. One
of the most important things he does is because of
wanting a successor. Is he breaks from Rome and he
brings about the English Reformation. There'll be lots of changes
that happen after his time, but by breaking from Rome
(02:14):
and setting up the king as the supreme head of
church and state, he really changed the course of English history.
I mean, he gives Parliament much more power. They're the
ones who actually annull the marriage and allow him to
take over. That religious movement transforms England into a Protestant nation,
and so that was due to Henry. He himself was
(02:34):
not that Protestant. He ends up pretty much Catholic for
his whole life. He cared more about his own power
than about religion. I mean, if it's England on to
sort of the European stage instead of what had been
kind of a remote backwater, he's in connection with France,
with the Habsburgs, with Spain. He really makes England something
that has to be kind of reckoned with. And also,
I mean on a sort of cultural side, he's quite
(02:56):
a renaissance man. He thinks of himself as being very
well educated. He cares deeply about culture and the arts
and wants to bring that into England as well. So
there are lots of other things he does other than
get married six times.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
What's the biggest misconception about these six women who were
all wives.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
I think that they can be easily summed up or
described in one word. You know, one's the temptress, or
one's the loyal wife, one's the saint. And I think
they're too often seen as pawns in history, that they're
the victims so often of what happens, rather than having
any kind of agency of their own or any kind
of influence of their own. They're very important in their
(03:35):
own right for what they do as queens, what they do,
you know, within their courts, how much influence they might
have on Henry and others around him, And so I
think that they're too often talked about just sort of
as these wives who are only understood in relationship to
Henry and their mostly terrible ends, when in fact they
have these rich lives that go beyond that.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
Wife Number one fifteen oh nine Catherine of Aragon. She
was actually the widow of Henry's older brother, Arthur. How
did she end up getting married to Henry.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
Well, Arthur dies young, and there's some debate over whether
or not the marriage was ever even consummated. Catherine says
it wasn't, and Henry the Eighth's father, Henry the seventh,
who had arranged the marriage between Catherine and Arthur, didn't
want to lose that connection. I mean, it was connecting
to powerful Spanish monarchs. She had a huge dowry that
she came in with and Henry didn't want to lose that.
(04:29):
So Henry was trying to figure out a way of
keeping all of those positive things that came from the
first marriage.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
So amy, they were married for nearly twenty four years,
and then the marriage ends not in a divorce, but
in an annulment. I know why, but I don't know
the details. Can you explain them to me and to
our listeners. Yes.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
So the marriage starts off fairly happily. Henry is happy.
He's grown up with Catherine, he knows her well, and
so he agrees to marry her, and so by all accounts,
they have a very good and close relationship. But then
the problem is is that Henry wants a successor, and
he wants a male successor. And so Catherine has many,
many pregnancies, but all of them end in miscarriage or
(05:12):
stillbirths except for one, and so she's only able to
have one viable pregnancy with Mary, a girl being born.
And so Henry just feels that this is a sign
from God that somehow he never should have married her
to begin with, and that God is punishing him by
not giving him a male heir. And this is very
much the sexism of the time, the idea that only
(05:34):
a man can rule, although there were other female queens
throughout Europe in the sixteenth century in particular, but Henry
is fixated on the idea that it's because he married
his brother's widow that he needs to get this marriage
annulled and marry somebody else that can give him a
male heir.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
Then let's turn to the Bible for a bitute. There's
a reference in Leviticus that's sort of wrapped up in
all of this. Can you explain that Bible passage to
us and how Pope Julius the second got involved.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
Yes, So it's from Leviticus twenty twenty one of chapter
and verse that says if a man shall take his
brother's wife, it is an unclean thing, they shall be childless.
Henry the seventh wanted to make sure that everything was
as tied up neatly as possible, so he goes to
the pope, who is Pope Julius the Second, and asks
for a special dispensation to sort of counteract Leviticus and
(06:27):
say that it's okay for Henry to marry his brother's wife.
And so Julius then gives the dispensation, and they think
that this is something that will sort of strengthen the case.
But in the end it's going to become more of
a problem later because the later pope is not going
to want to countermand what the previous pope had decided
with this dispensation.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
Okay, I'm going to remember that the Bible is complicated.
Wife number two was Anne Berlin, and there are a
few conflicting stories about Anne's physical appearance. Do you know
what she looked like?
Speaker 1 (07:01):
This is a fascinating question, and this gets to the
whole kind of power of tudor propaganda, and so that
you know, Henry and the other tutors wanted to create
their own story, and so once and later on gets
written out, they do a great job of kind of
airbrushing or out of history, and so we don't really
know what she looked like. We have a bunch of
different portraits, some of them saying that they're her, some
(07:22):
of them that we aren't really sure, and there's a
lot of difference in it. And so just in terms
of having actual images of her, a lot of them
were destroyed and a lot of them are unclear whether
it's actually her. We have a lot of descriptions of
her from the time, and most of those are from
hostile sources. So they will say things like she had
a sixth finger, she had a goiter on her neck,
(07:43):
she had like wartz. They'd make her seem fairly unattractive,
which seems somewhat surprising that Henry would marry someone like that.
What we do know, what seems to be pretty consistent,
is that she had dark hair, and she had really
dark but lively and very attractive of eyes. Like almost
everybody comments on these eyes that showed intelligence, showed a vivacity,
(08:06):
and that really drew people in. But I do find
it interesting that we can't for sure saying we have
this for a couple of his wives, that we don't
know for sure what they look like.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
The marriage to Anne led to the Reformation, the establishment
of the Church of England. Can you explain that rather
a momentous event to us?
Speaker 1 (08:23):
Yes, And this is one of the things that Reformation
historians debate endlessly of you know, was this just the
flip of a pen and Parliament's decision, and that there
was actually no kind of popular support, that this is
a complete top down effort by Henry, And in some
ways it was. And so that Henry desperately wants to
marry Anne and at some point is pregnant. I mean,
she'd held him off for a long time, but when
(08:45):
she's pregnant, Henry is fixated on the fact that this
must be his male heir, God is now rewarding him,
and so that he needs to have the marriage annulled.
The Pope is not doing it. The Pope is not
on his side now, and so you know that all
he can do is to after you, break from the pope,
and that this is the only way that he's going
to be able to get the marriage annulled and to
(09:05):
get what he wants, which is a baby born legitimately,
the assumption being that it's going to be a boy.
So he gets Parliament to annul the marriage rather than
the papacy, and in that moment breaks from the authority
of the church. And so he then has the Act
of Supremacy, which puts him as the head of both
the church and the state, and has everybody, all the
(09:28):
important people in England have to sign it, basically saying
that the Pope is no longer the head of the
Catholic Church and so now we have the king as
the head of it, and that this sort of tangentially
brings in the Reformation that will start the process of
the Reformation, but that really won't get completed until under
Henry's son, Edward the sixth and then later on even
(09:50):
more so under.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Elizabeth speaking of momentous events and ends up beheaded. How
did that happen?
Speaker 1 (09:57):
This is one of the things that is certainly the
history of this period tends to blame the wives a lot,
or some of the wives for what happens. I mean,
Anne's number one failure is that she's not able to
give Henry what he wants, which is a male child.
So he gets this annulment, he gets to Mary Ann,
he's so excited, and then instead of the son that
he's been assuming will come, it's Elizabeth. So now he
(10:18):
has Mary and Elizabeth, and the whole Reformation was for
naught in his mind. Anne is also pushing her own
agenda in some ways, and she's going to alienate people.
She's not as politically savvy as she could be. There's
a lot of debate over how much of this is
Thomas Cromwell's fault or not that Thomas Cromwell really was
instrumental in her downfall, and so in the end that's
(10:40):
going to kind of undermine and through her own behavior
and other people's kind of machinations, and so that'll end
up where she's going to be accused of adult tree.
She's going to be accused of incest with her own brother,
and so she'll be then tried for treason, because cheating
on the king is treason, and she will be convicted
(11:00):
of that and then decapitated.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
So let's move on to wife number three, Jane Seymour,
who finally produced the male heir that Henry wanted so badly.
How did these two meet? I heard that he married
her right after Anne's beheading? How did that happen so quickly?
Speaker 1 (11:20):
So Henry met Jane the way that he had met
Anne and the way that he's going to meet some
of his other wives is that she was a lady
in waiting for the queen. So Jane had been a
lady in waiting for Catherine of Aragon and then was
also one for Anne Bolin, and so she was just
always around in the court, and that he also knew
her father. He claims that she's his favorite wife. And
(11:41):
when he does a portrait of himself later on, when
he's actually married to Catherine Parr, he does this portrait
of him with Jane Seymour, who has been dead for
over a decade, and his son Edward, and then his
two daughters off to the side. So it's clear that
she's the one that he has the most fondness for.
I think first, because she gives him so and so
that is what he wants. She is the only one
(12:02):
of his six wives who gives birth to a boy
who survives to inherit the throne. And two, I think that,
and this is a little bit perhaps cynical of me,
she dies right after Edward is born, and so she
doesn't cause him any more problems. She isn't around to
kind of ask for anything more. Her motto was bound
to obey and serve, And so I think that she
(12:23):
was definitely a much more controllable wife than the two
previous ones for Henry. So I think all of that
really appealed to Henry after going through two very strong
willed marriages with strong willed women.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
After the break the last three wives of Henry the eighth,
including one who gets a rare happy ending, we're up
(12:58):
to wife number four, Anne of Cleaves. She's been referred
to as the strategic wife, So what's her story.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
So after Jane dies, Cromwell and some others really see
this as an opportunity for creating more political alliances. Neither
Anne nor Jane had really given anything in a kind
of political international way that often royal marriages were supposed
to bring. And so Cromwell sees this as an opportunity
to shore up their kind of Protestant connections, and so
(13:28):
he's looking to the Protestant states, particularly anyone who can
sort of help them against Charles the fifth. And so
Charles the fifth is the great, big, holy Roman emperor
king of Spain. He controls a tremendous amount of territory,
and Cromwell is looking to sort of help support England
against that, both politically and in a Protestant way. So
(13:48):
he looks at Anne as being the daughter of a
Protestant prince or pseudo Protestant prince, but somebody who is
a member of the Schmalkaldic League, which is a German
league basically affiliated with Prosentism against Charles the fifth, and
so sees that Henry marrying Anne can tie him closer
to these princes, closer to Prosentism, and help against what
(14:13):
is seen as this big threat of the Habsburg Charles
the fifth. So it's the most pragmatic and political arranged
marriage that Henry has.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
This one ends up in surprise and annulment, this time
an agreeable one according to your lecture. Explain that, and
explain how this one was annulled as well.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
This is the only wife of the six that he
didn't know beforehand and he didn't have some say in marrying,
and that they had this very awkward first meeting where
she didn't recognize him, and she didn't really seem to
understand the courtly ways of the tutor court. She seemed
to be a little unsophisticated, not as educated as some
of the other wives. This was something very kind of
(14:54):
embarrassing to Henry, and that caused him to turn against
the marriage right from the beginning. And then was really,
you know, it was sort of doomed from the start
where they could never consummate it, and he decided within
a couple of days he needed to get rid of
her as quickly as possible. She had been betrothed to
somebody else, and so that caused complications, and so they
were easily able to come up with reasons for annulling it,
(15:15):
and Anne went along with it. And that is sort
of the big difference between Anne and Catharine of Aragon.
If she had gone along with the annulment, she probably
would have been set up very well, but she refused.
And she refused because they had been married for over
twenty years and they had a child together and the
child was made of Bastard by the annulment. Anne had
had no connection like that. And for Anne, you know,
she saw her options, she knew what had happened to
(15:37):
other wives, and she realized that, you know, it would
make no sense at all to hold out, and so
she said, fine, I am happy with the annulment. And
Henry is very grateful for this, and he settles a
very large payment on her actually gives her one of
the castles that have been in Anne Boleyn's family, and
you know, it's this huge settlement that she is able
(15:59):
to live very comfortably on for the rest of her life.
It seems like she ends up the best of the
six wives. We also have to remember that this was
pretty humiliating for her as well. I mean, she gets
rejected by the king. She can't go back home because
she can't marry somebody else because then that's complicated as
well for Henry. So she's sort of stuck in a
country she doesn't know, she doesn't know the language very well.
(16:21):
She's quite welcome at court. She gets along very well
with both Elizabeth and Mary, and Henry calls her his
dear sister and actually treats her better than he does
any of his wives after that. So she does really
make the best of it and make for quite a
good Eddica, and she outlives all of the other wives.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
Wife number five, Catherine Howard. I heard she started out
pretty well and then things took a serious turn for
the worst and she ends up aheaded two years later.
What happened?
Speaker 1 (16:50):
So Henry is absolutely smitten with her. She's very young,
she has this vitality. She's beautiful, she's flirtatious, she's fun.
But there's a serious age gap. He's forty nine when
they get married, and she's anywhere between fifteen and twenty one.
We don't actually know her real birth date. I would
say she's closer to seventeen or eighteen. When she gets
(17:12):
married to him. He lavishes her with gifts and praise
and really kind of uses her to sort of feel
young again. So I think in those first days she's
really happy to be taken care of. She had grown
up kind of poor in a lot of ways. And
so that she's getting all of these gifts, and she's
a queen, and so I think that she loves having
that kind of influence and power. But Henry is not
(17:35):
doing well. You know, he's only forty nine, but he
had a hard life at that point, a lot of
illnesses and injuries from his jousting, and so he was
pretty cantankerous. He was starting to get more and more
ill starting to rage more and more. There's a lot
of debate over you know, maybe some brain damage that
he had that's hard for her to deal with as
a young woman, and so she starts sort of turning
(17:56):
away from him and looking for other people to kind
of get comfort from. I think she gets a bad
rap in the historiography in a lot of ways, but
she also doesn't make very sensible choices. So she is
sort of falling in love with other people and putting
that into writing, and so very quickly it's going to
be clear that she's committing treason, because that's what happens
when you cheat on the king. And so Henry is
(18:17):
going to be extremely disappointed that yet again he's chosen
wrong and his wife has betrayed him.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
You described her entrance to the Tower of London for
I guess what you'd call her trial. That's pretty gruesome.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
Yeah, So it's pretty sad for Catherine. And I think
there's clear evidence that she was sexually assaulted as a
young girl, probably when she was like twelve or thirteen,
then had another affair with another older man when she
was still very young. When she's put on trial for
adultery for treason, some of these old lovers are going
to come back and testify against her and sort of
talk about the sexual relationships they had. Her supposed lover
(18:54):
within the court and then someone from earlier before she
got married. Both of them testify against her, and because
they've committed adultery with the King's wife or soon to
be wife, they are both executed, and after their execution,
their heads are put on spikes outside the Tower of London.
And so when Catherine comes in for her own trial,
(19:17):
she comes in through what's known as the Trader's Gate,
and the boat takes her past these pikes with her
former lover's heads on top of them, and I just
can't imagine what that must have been like for her.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
On to wife number six, the very last one who
was Katherine Parr. She actually outlived Henry for a little while.
I've heard she had the most influence upon him in
terms of culture, religion, the role of women, education of
his children. What's that all about.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
So Catherine is fascinating. I think all the wise influence
in some ways, but Catherine Parr and Catherine Aragon we
really sort of see it in terms of culture and education.
And so for Catherine Parr, she is one of the
great educated women of her day. She is a published author.
She's the first published female author whose name is actually
on the work that is printed. I mean, she was
(20:08):
more classically Protestant than Henry was at this point, so
she had to hide that a little bit. But that's
going to be something that influences particularly Elizabeth, and so
she has a good deal of say in how Elizabeth
gets educated. Who are the tutors for her? And Elizabeth
gets this very very good humanist education. Many see Catherine
as being fundamental to that, although there's a little bit
(20:29):
of debate over how much she was involved, but I
think she was involved enough that it does make a
difference certainly for Elizabeth's later life in terms of really
lasting influence for both Mary and Elizabeth Jane Seymour had
started this, but Katherine Parr is able to kind of
ended of getting both Mary and Elizabeth added back into
the succession, so that she gets Henry too, even though
(20:52):
there's still technically illegitimate. She gets Henry to add them
both in after his son Edward the sixth and so
that would be next, and then Elizabeth, and that Most
historians think that Catherine was really instrumental in doing that,
and she had a very good relationship with both Elizabeth
and Mary until after Henry died, and then she and
Mary will have a falling out because of her next actions.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
Well, then phillis in what happened to Catherine after Henry died.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
So they're married a couple of years Henry dies. Before
Catherine had married Henry, she had actually already been planning
to marry somebody else, Thomas Seymour. They had known each
other for a while and everything had been going sort
of a pace. But then when Henry offered for her,
you know, you always take the king over anyone else.
But after Henry died, she actually goes back to Thomas.
So they end up getting married, and it's something of
(21:42):
a scandal because they get married very quickly after Henry
had died. You're supposed to have a morning period of
at least a year, particularly because you want to make
sure that the wife, the widow, isn't pregnant with the
dead monarch's child. And so the fact that she gets
married within a couple of months is really look down upon.
People are very critical about it, and particularly Mary. And
(22:03):
this is what's going to break the relationship between Mary
and Catherine Parr is that this is seen as kind
of a betrayal of the father, and that she's married
Thomas Seymour and sort of moved on in this way
seems very unseemly to Mary and others. So she's only
married to Thomas for about a year before having a
child and dying before she could see him grow up.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
One last question, how unusual is this story of Henry
the eighth and then six wives? Is there anything else
like it? Can you compare him to any other monarchs
in this regard?
Speaker 1 (22:35):
There really is nothing else like this. Plenty of monarchs
get married multiple times. Plenty of monarchs will have an
annulment to either have a better marriage that gives them
better alliances or to get a male heir. All of
that is true. We have a big a mist in Germany,
Philip Professa, who has two wives. So you know, there
are little nuggets of this everywhere. Six wives, two of
(22:57):
whom are executed and two of whom have annulments. That's
really unusual. There is nothing quite like that, and I
think that that is one of the reasons why people
at the time were sort of shocked by it. The
French king is writing things like you really need to
do better with who you're choosing to be your wife.
This was gossip for the continent just as much as
(23:17):
it is for us now, and I think that that's
one of the reasons that it has this hold on
our imagination, and you have all of these movies and
TV shows and musicals that go over it, and it's
why it's the main thing that he's remembered for, which
is unfortunate because there's a lot else that was going
on in his reign. But when you do something this
kind of out of the box and just so different
(23:40):
and crazy from what everybody else is doing, you know
it's going to be something that's going to be part
of your living legacy.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
Amy, thanks so much for this. We just appreciate you
taking the time to tell us six great stories.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
Thanks well, thank you so much for having me on.
I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (23:57):
Thanks for joining us here at One Day University. Sign
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(24:19):
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This is the only wife of the six that he
didn't know beforehand, and he didn't have some say in marrying.
They had this very awkward first meeting where she didn't
recognize him. She seemed to be a little unsophisticated, not
as educated as some of the other wives, and he
decided within a couple of days he needed to get
rid of her as quickly as possible.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Welcome to One day University Talks with the world's most
engaging and inspiring professors discussing their most popular courses. This
podcast is your chance to discover some of our top
rated lectures on your own schedule. I'm Stephen Shregis. We're
wrapping up this season by telling you the real stories
behind the six wives of King Henry the Eighth. Everyone
(00:54):
knows the awful face of these women. There's even a
rhyme to help remember devor beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.
But Georgetown history professor Amy Leonard says there's a lot
of misinformation out there about them, including in that rhyme.
There was no divorce for King Henry, only in nulments.
(01:16):
Amy also says, while the popular Broadway musical six is
a great show and gets a lot right about the women.
It also gets some things wrong, like Henry being duped
by an inaccurate portrait of Anne of cleves Amy. Leonard
separates fact from fiction in her one day university lecture
The Six Wives of Henry the Eighth. In addition to
(01:37):
learning the real story about the wives, she says that
we should also remember King Henry for more than his
multiple marriages.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
Henry is hugely important for English history, and it's kind
of sad in some ways that it gets completely overshadowed
by his personal life and relationship with his wives. One
of the most important things he does is because of
wanting a successor. Is he breaks from Rome and he
brings about the English Reformation. There'll be lots of changes
that happen after his time, but by breaking from Rome
(02:14):
and setting up the king as the supreme head of
church and state, he really changed the course of English history.
I mean, he gives Parliament much more power. They're the
ones who actually annull the marriage and allow him to
take over. That religious movement transforms England into a Protestant nation,
and so that was due to Henry. He himself was
(02:34):
not that Protestant. He ends up pretty much Catholic for
his whole life. He cared more about his own power
than about religion. I mean, if it's England on to
sort of the European stage instead of what had been
kind of a remote backwater, he's in connection with France,
with the Habsburgs, with Spain. He really makes England something
that has to be kind of reckoned with. And also,
I mean on a sort of cultural side, he's quite
(02:56):
a renaissance man. He thinks of himself as being very
well educated. He cares deeply about culture and the arts
and wants to bring that into England as well. So
there are lots of other things he does other than
get married six times.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
What's the biggest misconception about these six women who were
all wives.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
I think that they can be easily summed up or
described in one word. You know, one's the temptress, or
one's the loyal wife, one's the saint. And I think
they're too often seen as pawns in history, that they're
the victims so often of what happens, rather than having
any kind of agency of their own or any kind
of influence of their own. They're very important in their
(03:35):
own right for what they do as queens, what they do,
you know, within their courts, how much influence they might
have on Henry and others around him, And so I
think that they're too often talked about just sort of
as these wives who are only understood in relationship to
Henry and their mostly terrible ends, when in fact they
have these rich lives that go beyond that.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
Wife Number one fifteen oh nine Catherine of Aragon. She
was actually the widow of Henry's older brother, Arthur. How
did she end up getting married to Henry.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
Well, Arthur dies young, and there's some debate over whether
or not the marriage was ever even consummated. Catherine says
it wasn't, and Henry the Eighth's father, Henry the seventh,
who had arranged the marriage between Catherine and Arthur, didn't
want to lose that connection. I mean, it was connecting
to powerful Spanish monarchs. She had a huge dowry that
she came in with and Henry didn't want to lose that.
(04:29):
So Henry was trying to figure out a way of
keeping all of those positive things that came from the
first marriage.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
So amy, they were married for nearly twenty four years,
and then the marriage ends not in a divorce, but
in an annulment. I know why, but I don't know
the details. Can you explain them to me and to
our listeners. Yes.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
So the marriage starts off fairly happily. Henry is happy.
He's grown up with Catherine, he knows her well, and
so he agrees to marry her, and so by all accounts,
they have a very good and close relationship. But then
the problem is is that Henry wants a successor, and
he wants a male successor. And so Catherine has many,
many pregnancies, but all of them end in miscarriage or
(05:12):
stillbirths except for one, and so she's only able to
have one viable pregnancy with Mary, a girl being born.
And so Henry just feels that this is a sign
from God that somehow he never should have married her
to begin with, and that God is punishing him by
not giving him a male heir. And this is very
much the sexism of the time, the idea that only
(05:34):
a man can rule, although there were other female queens
throughout Europe in the sixteenth century in particular, but Henry
is fixated on the idea that it's because he married
his brother's widow that he needs to get this marriage
annulled and marry somebody else that can give him a
male heir.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
Then let's turn to the Bible for a bitute. There's
a reference in Leviticus that's sort of wrapped up in
all of this. Can you explain that Bible passage to
us and how Pope Julius the second got involved.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
Yes, So it's from Leviticus twenty twenty one of chapter
and verse that says if a man shall take his
brother's wife, it is an unclean thing, they shall be childless.
Henry the seventh wanted to make sure that everything was
as tied up neatly as possible, so he goes to
the pope, who is Pope Julius the Second, and asks
for a special dispensation to sort of counteract Leviticus and
(06:27):
say that it's okay for Henry to marry his brother's wife.
And so Julius then gives the dispensation, and they think
that this is something that will sort of strengthen the case.
But in the end it's going to become more of
a problem later because the later pope is not going
to want to countermand what the previous pope had decided
with this dispensation.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
Okay, I'm going to remember that the Bible is complicated.
Wife number two was Anne Berlin, and there are a
few conflicting stories about Anne's physical appearance. Do you know
what she looked like?
Speaker 1 (07:01):
This is a fascinating question, and this gets to the
whole kind of power of tudor propaganda, and so that
you know, Henry and the other tutors wanted to create
their own story, and so once and later on gets
written out, they do a great job of kind of
airbrushing or out of history, and so we don't really
know what she looked like. We have a bunch of
different portraits, some of them saying that they're her, some
(07:22):
of them that we aren't really sure, and there's a
lot of difference in it. And so just in terms
of having actual images of her, a lot of them
were destroyed and a lot of them are unclear whether
it's actually her. We have a lot of descriptions of
her from the time, and most of those are from
hostile sources. So they will say things like she had
a sixth finger, she had a goiter on her neck,
(07:43):
she had like wartz. They'd make her seem fairly unattractive,
which seems somewhat surprising that Henry would marry someone like that.
What we do know, what seems to be pretty consistent,
is that she had dark hair, and she had really
dark but lively and very attractive of eyes. Like almost
everybody comments on these eyes that showed intelligence, showed a vivacity,
(08:06):
and that really drew people in. But I do find
it interesting that we can't for sure saying we have
this for a couple of his wives, that we don't
know for sure what they look like.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
The marriage to Anne led to the Reformation, the establishment
of the Church of England. Can you explain that rather
a momentous event to us?
Speaker 1 (08:23):
Yes, And this is one of the things that Reformation
historians debate endlessly of you know, was this just the
flip of a pen and Parliament's decision, and that there
was actually no kind of popular support, that this is
a complete top down effort by Henry, And in some
ways it was. And so that Henry desperately wants to
marry Anne and at some point is pregnant. I mean,
she'd held him off for a long time, but when
(08:45):
she's pregnant, Henry is fixated on the fact that this
must be his male heir, God is now rewarding him,
and so that he needs to have the marriage annulled.
The Pope is not doing it. The Pope is not
on his side now, and so you know that all
he can do is to after you, break from the pope,
and that this is the only way that he's going
to be able to get the marriage annulled and to
(09:05):
get what he wants, which is a baby born legitimately,
the assumption being that it's going to be a boy.
So he gets Parliament to annul the marriage rather than
the papacy, and in that moment breaks from the authority
of the church. And so he then has the Act
of Supremacy, which puts him as the head of both
the church and the state, and has everybody, all the
(09:28):
important people in England have to sign it, basically saying
that the Pope is no longer the head of the
Catholic Church and so now we have the king as
the head of it, and that this sort of tangentially
brings in the Reformation that will start the process of
the Reformation, but that really won't get completed until under
Henry's son, Edward the sixth and then later on even
(09:50):
more so under.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Elizabeth speaking of momentous events and ends up beheaded. How
did that happen?
Speaker 1 (09:57):
This is one of the things that is certainly the
history of this period tends to blame the wives a lot,
or some of the wives for what happens. I mean,
Anne's number one failure is that she's not able to
give Henry what he wants, which is a male child.
So he gets this annulment, he gets to Mary Ann,
he's so excited, and then instead of the son that
he's been assuming will come, it's Elizabeth. So now he
(10:18):
has Mary and Elizabeth, and the whole Reformation was for
naught in his mind. Anne is also pushing her own
agenda in some ways, and she's going to alienate people.
She's not as politically savvy as she could be. There's
a lot of debate over how much of this is
Thomas Cromwell's fault or not that Thomas Cromwell really was
instrumental in her downfall, and so in the end that's
(10:40):
going to kind of undermine and through her own behavior
and other people's kind of machinations, and so that'll end
up where she's going to be accused of adult tree.
She's going to be accused of incest with her own brother,
and so she'll be then tried for treason, because cheating
on the king is treason, and she will be convicted
(11:00):
of that and then decapitated.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
So let's move on to wife number three, Jane Seymour,
who finally produced the male heir that Henry wanted so badly.
How did these two meet? I heard that he married
her right after Anne's beheading? How did that happen so quickly?
Speaker 1 (11:20):
So Henry met Jane the way that he had met
Anne and the way that he's going to meet some
of his other wives is that she was a lady
in waiting for the queen. So Jane had been a
lady in waiting for Catherine of Aragon and then was
also one for Anne Bolin, and so she was just
always around in the court, and that he also knew
her father. He claims that she's his favorite wife. And
(11:41):
when he does a portrait of himself later on, when
he's actually married to Catherine Parr, he does this portrait
of him with Jane Seymour, who has been dead for
over a decade, and his son Edward, and then his
two daughters off to the side. So it's clear that
she's the one that he has the most fondness for.
I think first, because she gives him so and so
that is what he wants. She is the only one
(12:02):
of his six wives who gives birth to a boy
who survives to inherit the throne. And two, I think that,
and this is a little bit perhaps cynical of me,
she dies right after Edward is born, and so she
doesn't cause him any more problems. She isn't around to
kind of ask for anything more. Her motto was bound
to obey and serve, And so I think that she
(12:23):
was definitely a much more controllable wife than the two
previous ones for Henry. So I think all of that
really appealed to Henry after going through two very strong
willed marriages with strong willed women.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
After the break the last three wives of Henry the eighth,
including one who gets a rare happy ending, we're up
(12:58):
to wife number four, Anne of Cleaves. She's been referred
to as the strategic wife, So what's her story.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
So after Jane dies, Cromwell and some others really see
this as an opportunity for creating more political alliances. Neither
Anne nor Jane had really given anything in a kind
of political international way that often royal marriages were supposed
to bring. And so Cromwell sees this as an opportunity
to shore up their kind of Protestant connections, and so
(13:28):
he's looking to the Protestant states, particularly anyone who can
sort of help them against Charles the fifth. And so
Charles the fifth is the great, big, holy Roman emperor
king of Spain. He controls a tremendous amount of territory,
and Cromwell is looking to sort of help support England
against that, both politically and in a Protestant way. So
(13:48):
he looks at Anne as being the daughter of a
Protestant prince or pseudo Protestant prince, but somebody who is
a member of the Schmalkaldic League, which is a German
league basically affiliated with Prosentism against Charles the fifth, and
so sees that Henry marrying Anne can tie him closer
to these princes, closer to Prosentism, and help against what
(14:13):
is seen as this big threat of the Habsburg Charles
the fifth. So it's the most pragmatic and political arranged
marriage that Henry has.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
This one ends up in surprise and annulment, this time
an agreeable one according to your lecture. Explain that, and
explain how this one was annulled as well.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
This is the only wife of the six that he
didn't know beforehand and he didn't have some say in marrying,
and that they had this very awkward first meeting where
she didn't recognize him, and she didn't really seem to
understand the courtly ways of the tutor court. She seemed
to be a little unsophisticated, not as educated as some
of the other wives. This was something very kind of
(14:54):
embarrassing to Henry, and that caused him to turn against
the marriage right from the beginning. And then was really,
you know, it was sort of doomed from the start
where they could never consummate it, and he decided within
a couple of days he needed to get rid of
her as quickly as possible. She had been betrothed to
somebody else, and so that caused complications, and so they
were easily able to come up with reasons for annulling it,
(15:15):
and Anne went along with it. And that is sort
of the big difference between Anne and Catharine of Aragon.
If she had gone along with the annulment, she probably
would have been set up very well, but she refused.
And she refused because they had been married for over
twenty years and they had a child together and the
child was made of Bastard by the annulment. Anne had
had no connection like that. And for Anne, you know,
she saw her options, she knew what had happened to
(15:37):
other wives, and she realized that, you know, it would
make no sense at all to hold out, and so
she said, fine, I am happy with the annulment. And
Henry is very grateful for this, and he settles a
very large payment on her actually gives her one of
the castles that have been in Anne Boleyn's family, and
you know, it's this huge settlement that she is able
(15:59):
to live very comfortably on for the rest of her life.
It seems like she ends up the best of the
six wives. We also have to remember that this was
pretty humiliating for her as well. I mean, she gets
rejected by the king. She can't go back home because
she can't marry somebody else because then that's complicated as
well for Henry. So she's sort of stuck in a
country she doesn't know, she doesn't know the language very well.
(16:21):
She's quite welcome at court. She gets along very well
with both Elizabeth and Mary, and Henry calls her his
dear sister and actually treats her better than he does
any of his wives after that. So she does really
make the best of it and make for quite a
good Eddica, and she outlives all of the other wives.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
Wife number five, Catherine Howard. I heard she started out
pretty well and then things took a serious turn for
the worst and she ends up aheaded two years later.
What happened?
Speaker 1 (16:50):
So Henry is absolutely smitten with her. She's very young,
she has this vitality. She's beautiful, she's flirtatious, she's fun.
But there's a serious age gap. He's forty nine when
they get married, and she's anywhere between fifteen and twenty one.
We don't actually know her real birth date. I would
say she's closer to seventeen or eighteen. When she gets
(17:12):
married to him. He lavishes her with gifts and praise
and really kind of uses her to sort of feel
young again. So I think in those first days she's
really happy to be taken care of. She had grown
up kind of poor in a lot of ways. And
so that she's getting all of these gifts, and she's
a queen, and so I think that she loves having
that kind of influence and power. But Henry is not
(17:35):
doing well. You know, he's only forty nine, but he
had a hard life at that point, a lot of
illnesses and injuries from his jousting, and so he was
pretty cantankerous. He was starting to get more and more
ill starting to rage more and more. There's a lot
of debate over you know, maybe some brain damage that
he had that's hard for her to deal with as
a young woman, and so she starts sort of turning
(17:56):
away from him and looking for other people to kind
of get comfort from. I think she gets a bad
rap in the historiography in a lot of ways, but
she also doesn't make very sensible choices. So she is
sort of falling in love with other people and putting
that into writing, and so very quickly it's going to
be clear that she's committing treason, because that's what happens
when you cheat on the king. And so Henry is
(18:17):
going to be extremely disappointed that yet again he's chosen
wrong and his wife has betrayed him.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
You described her entrance to the Tower of London for
I guess what you'd call her trial. That's pretty gruesome.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
Yeah, So it's pretty sad for Catherine. And I think
there's clear evidence that she was sexually assaulted as a
young girl, probably when she was like twelve or thirteen,
then had another affair with another older man when she
was still very young. When she's put on trial for
adultery for treason, some of these old lovers are going
to come back and testify against her and sort of
talk about the sexual relationships they had. Her supposed lover
(18:54):
within the court and then someone from earlier before she
got married. Both of them testify against her, and because
they've committed adultery with the King's wife or soon to
be wife, they are both executed, and after their execution,
their heads are put on spikes outside the Tower of London.
And so when Catherine comes in for her own trial,
(19:17):
she comes in through what's known as the Trader's Gate,
and the boat takes her past these pikes with her
former lover's heads on top of them, and I just
can't imagine what that must have been like for her.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
On to wife number six, the very last one who
was Katherine Parr. She actually outlived Henry for a little while.
I've heard she had the most influence upon him in
terms of culture, religion, the role of women, education of
his children. What's that all about.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
So Catherine is fascinating. I think all the wise influence
in some ways, but Catherine Parr and Catherine Aragon we
really sort of see it in terms of culture and education.
And so for Catherine Parr, she is one of the
great educated women of her day. She is a published author.
She's the first published female author whose name is actually
on the work that is printed. I mean, she was
(20:08):
more classically Protestant than Henry was at this point, so
she had to hide that a little bit. But that's
going to be something that influences particularly Elizabeth, and so
she has a good deal of say in how Elizabeth
gets educated. Who are the tutors for her? And Elizabeth
gets this very very good humanist education. Many see Catherine
as being fundamental to that, although there's a little bit
(20:29):
of debate over how much she was involved, but I
think she was involved enough that it does make a
difference certainly for Elizabeth's later life in terms of really
lasting influence for both Mary and Elizabeth Jane Seymour had
started this, but Katherine Parr is able to kind of
ended of getting both Mary and Elizabeth added back into
the succession, so that she gets Henry too, even though
(20:52):
there's still technically illegitimate. She gets Henry to add them
both in after his son Edward the sixth and so
that would be next, and then Elizabeth, and that Most
historians think that Catherine was really instrumental in doing that,
and she had a very good relationship with both Elizabeth
and Mary until after Henry died, and then she and
Mary will have a falling out because of her next actions.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
Well, then phillis in what happened to Catherine after Henry died.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
So they're married a couple of years Henry dies. Before
Catherine had married Henry, she had actually already been planning
to marry somebody else, Thomas Seymour. They had known each
other for a while and everything had been going sort
of a pace. But then when Henry offered for her,
you know, you always take the king over anyone else.
But after Henry died, she actually goes back to Thomas.
So they end up getting married, and it's something of
(21:42):
a scandal because they get married very quickly after Henry
had died. You're supposed to have a morning period of
at least a year, particularly because you want to make
sure that the wife, the widow, isn't pregnant with the
dead monarch's child. And so the fact that she gets
married within a couple of months is really look down upon.
People are very critical about it, and particularly Mary. And
(22:03):
this is what's going to break the relationship between Mary
and Catherine Parr is that this is seen as kind
of a betrayal of the father, and that she's married
Thomas Seymour and sort of moved on in this way
seems very unseemly to Mary and others. So she's only
married to Thomas for about a year before having a
child and dying before she could see him grow up.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
One last question, how unusual is this story of Henry
the eighth and then six wives? Is there anything else
like it? Can you compare him to any other monarchs
in this regard?
Speaker 1 (22:35):
There really is nothing else like this. Plenty of monarchs
get married multiple times. Plenty of monarchs will have an
annulment to either have a better marriage that gives them
better alliances or to get a male heir. All of
that is true. We have a big a mist in Germany,
Philip Professa, who has two wives. So you know, there
are little nuggets of this everywhere. Six wives, two of
(22:57):
whom are executed and two of whom have annulments. That's
really unusual. There is nothing quite like that, and I
think that that is one of the reasons why people
at the time were sort of shocked by it. The
French king is writing things like you really need to
do better with who you're choosing to be your wife.
This was gossip for the continent just as much as
(23:17):
it is for us now, and I think that that's
one of the reasons that it has this hold on
our imagination, and you have all of these movies and
TV shows and musicals that go over it, and it's
why it's the main thing that he's remembered for, which
is unfortunate because there's a lot else that was going
on in his reign. But when you do something this
kind of out of the box and just so different
(23:40):
and crazy from what everybody else is doing, you know
it's going to be something that's going to be part
of your living legacy.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
Amy, thanks so much for this. We just appreciate you
taking the time to tell us six great stories.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
Thanks well, thank you so much for having me on.
I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (23:57):
Thanks for joining us here at One Day University. Sign
up at our website one dayu dot com to become
a member and access over seven hundred full length video
lectures from the world's finance professors. You can also download
our app. There you can watch Georgetown University Professor Amy
Leonard's lecture on the Six Wives of Henry the Eighth,
(24:19):
as well as all the talks you learned about in
this podcast. One Day University is a production of iHeart
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