Shattering myths (1): Henry VIII never divorced
The Tudor king never countenanced divorce and believed in the sacrament of Holy Matrimony, but three of his marriages were annulled
As an historian, at least an amateur and intermittent one (I have degrees in it, so that’s something), I occasionally come across notions used in argument which are presented as fact as it strikes me that they are simply not true. These can be contentious ideas which people know are contested, or they can be, if you like, more foundational concepts which have entered the historical mainstream. It bothers me. I don’t claim any originality in this respect, but I thought I would, from time to time, tilt at some of these nonsense windmills. So here we begin.
“Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.”
You know it. It’s the mnemonic for the wives of Henry VIII, famously six in number, and what became of them. Except it’s not. My apologies if this comes as a shock, but Henry VIII, author of the English Reformation, the man who brought about the break with Rome, didn’t believe in divorce, and never divorced anyone.
Let’s start at the beginning. In the Roman Catholic Church, there are seven sacraments. Indeed, Henry had earned the title Fidei Defensor, Defender of the Faith, from Pope Leo X in 1521 for his publication of a defence of the sacraments, Assertio Septem Sacramentorum. Holy matrimony was, and is, one of those sacraments, and, while it had been a relatively latecomer, it was included in the list of seven agreed at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. It was regarded as an instrument of sanctification, a way in which the grace of God could be bestowed on a couple, and it both allowed the couple to comply with God’s law of marriage and presented them with a model which they could follow in the form of Christ the bridegroom, who took the church as his bride and gave it the greatest degree of love, devotion, and sacrifice, up to and beyond death.
Because matrimony was divinely blessed, it was in general indissoluble. Provided there had been no impediments, both parties had entered into the marriage freely and it had been consummated, it was a bond which ended only with the death of a spouse. Very little changed in the early days of the Reformation: the Church of England’s canon law states that marriage is:
in its nature a union permanent and lifelong, for better for worse, till death them do part, of one man with one woman, to the exclusion of all others on either side, for the procreation and nurture of children, for the hallowing and right direction of the natural instincts and affections, and for the mutual society, help and comfort which the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity.
There was no provision for divorce, and remarriage while both spouses were alive was impossible, given that it was bigamy. Until the passage of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857, a valid marriage contracted under the auspices of the Church of England could only be dissolved by a private act of Parliament, and there were only ever 324 successful petitions. Certainly Henry had no notion of divorce nor of marriage as anything but a sacramental and lifelong commitment, sanctified by God.
So what happened? The short answer is that the king had wanted the pope to annul his marriage to Katharine of Aragon, that is, to declare that it was legally void and had never happened. The ongoing failure of his marriage to produce a healthy male heir caused him to think that it was in some way defective; Katharine had been the wife of his elder brother, Arthur, Prince of Wales, who died of the mysterious sweating sickness in 1502. Indeed, it had required a dispensation from Pope Julius II for Henry and Katharine to marry in 1509, since a man and his brother’s widow were within the forbidden degree of affinity (based on Leviticus 18). Katharine, it should be said, insisted that she and Arthur had never consummated their union, though there was some doubt over that issue.
An annulment of a marriage which had been enabled by papal dispensation could, of course, only come from the pope, and from 1523 to 1534 that was Clement VII, born Giulio de’ Medici. In this respect, Henry’s timing was unlucky: after the Battle of Pavia in 1525, the pope was closely allied to the holy Roman emperor, Charles V, and was his prisoner after the sack of Rome in 1527. The emperor was Queen Katharine’s nephew, which made it impossible for the pope to declare her marriage null and void. Henry was also, by this stage, enamoured of Anne Boleyn, a lady in waiting to the queen, and determined to take her as his wife.
The queen refused to agree that her marriage had been invalid, and, when it was suggested she might retire quietly to a convent, she responded angrily, “God never called me to a nunnery. I am the King’s true and legitimate wife.” Katharine was, in many ways, a rather magnificent woman, clever and self-possessed (and, as is often forgotten, almost six years older than Henry). She was the youngest daughter of Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon, los Reyes Católicos, who united Spain and sponsored Columbus’s first voyage to the New World.
Katharine acted as regent for Henry when he travelled to France in 1513, and oversaw the response to the Scottish invasion which culminated in the crushing victory of the English army at the Battle of Flodden on 9 September; the king of Scots, James IV, died in the encounter, as did 10 Scottish earls, 11 lords of parliament and five senior clerics including the archbishop of St Andrews, the head of the Scottish church. Between 5,000 and 10,000 Scottish soldiers died. The herald who brought Katharine news of the battle at Woburn Abbey also delivered James IV’s torn and bloodstained surcoat. In her account of the campaign written to Henry, the queen suggested he use the coat as his banner, and mused that she would have sent him the Scottish monarch’s body, but “Englishmen’s hearts would not suffer it”.
If Katharine would not give way, and the pope could not grant an annulment, another solution was needed. The unlikely pairing of Clement VII and Martin Luther both suggested that Henry take Anne as a second wife, not as part of a general acceptance of polygamy but in order to secure an heir; after all, some of the figures in the Old Testament had taken more than one wife, and Luther, rather than countenance divorce, said “I would allow the king to take another queen, according to the examples of the ancient patriarchs and kings who had two wives at the same”. His colleague Philip Melanchthon was inclined to a similar view, as polygamy was not absolutely forbidden. Their ally Philip I, landgrave of Hesse, was also seeking a way to free himself of his first wife and was intrigued by the idea.
It is unlikely Henry gave the polygamy plan much serious consideration. Certainly he wanted to have sex with Anne, but he also wanted to produce a male heir and secure the Tudor succession, and the child of a bigamous union would surely have been of dubious legitimacy for that purpose. His illegitimate son Henry FitzRoy was created duke of Richmond and Somerset in 1525, and was referred to as the “right high and noble Prince Henry”, and if the king had been willing to take chances the boy could have been fully legitimised. The risk of a challenge was surely too great.
The issue of Henry’s marriage to Katharine—”the King’s Great Matter”, as it was euphemistically known—would therefore have to be dealt with domestically. Parliament was summoned in November 1529 and a series of statutes were passed which began to cut away at the papacy’s jurisdiction over England. In October 1530, Henry charged the English clergy with violating the Statute of Praemunire 1392 by adhering to their obedience to the pope, and demanded £100,000 from the clergy of the Province of Canterbury, a sum equal to the crown’s annual income. After some negotiation, in March 1531 the Convocation of Canterbury agreed to pay the money over five years in return for a pardon on the praemunire charge and their recognition of the king as “singular protector, supreme lord and even, so far as the law of Christ allows, supreme head of the English Church and clergy”.
That was the essence of the Reformation in legal terms. The phrase “so far as the law of Christ allows” had been inserted at the last stage by John Fisher, bishop of Rochester and ally of Katharine, and could in fact be taken to nullify the whole provision: the Catholic Church would argue that “the law of Christ” did not allow the repudiation of papal authority to any degree. It was little more than face-saving (or conscience-salving) in the end. In July, Katharine was banished from court and separated from her daughter Mary, then 15, whom she never saw again. Her rooms at court were given to Anne Boleyn. She wrote to the emperor, her nephew, shortly afterwards:
My tribulations are so great, my life so disturbed by the plans daily invented to further the King’s wicked intention, the surprises which the King gives me, with certain persons of his council, are so mortal, and my treatment is what God knows, that it is enough to shorten ten lives, much more mine. As far as concerns this business, I have offended neither God nor the King, to whom I have always shown obedience as a true wife, and sometimes more so in this affair than my conscience approved of.
A conclusion was approaching by this stage, Thomas Cromwell’s steady hand on the tiller (he had been chosen as Member of Parliament for Taunton in 1529 and joined the Council at the end of 1530). In May 1532, Convocation agreed to the Submission of the Clergy, by which they renounced the power to make ecclesiastical law without the king’s permission. In August, the archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham, died after 29 years in office, in his early 80s. Henry decided to appoint Thomas Cranmer, a reformist theologian at that point acting as ambassador to the imperial court, as the new archbishop, to which the pope reluctantly consented in an attempt to avoid a complete breach.
Cranmer arrived back in England in January 1533, and on 24 or 25 Henry secretly married Anne Boleyn, who was perhaps already pregnant; Cranmer did not learn of the marriage until two weeks later. The papal bull authorising his appointment arrived on 26 March and he was consecrated as a bishop on 30 March, but all the while Cranmer was trying to find a way to annul the king’s marriage to Katharine. Henry was at this stage technically contracted in a bigamous union with Anne, but events were moving quickly.
On 7 April, Parliament passed the Act in Restraint of Appeals, which forbade appeals to the papal curia on ecclesiastical matters. Its preamble also contained one of the most significant passages in English political history.
This realm of England is an Empire, and so hath been accepted in the world, governed by one Supreme Head and King having the dignity and royal estate of the Imperial Crown of the same, unto whom a body politic compact of all sorts and degrees of people divided in terms and by names of Spirituality and Temporality, be bounden and owe to bear next to God a natural and humble obedience.
By this provision, England was entirely sovereign, owing no allegiance to a higher authority, and especially neither to the pope nor the emperor.
On 10 May, Archbishop Cranmer, as he now was, opened a special court at Dunstable Priory to rule on the validity of the king’s first marriage, inviting submissions from both parties. Henry was represented by the bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner, while the queen did not send a proxy. On 23 May, Cranmer ruled that the marriage had been against the law of God and was therefore annulled, had never been, and on 28 May he validated the union between Henry and Anne. He then crowned the new queen on 1 June, and on 7 September Anne gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth.
Henry VIII had got his way, in the end. His marriage to Katharine of Aragon had been declared void and he had taken a new wife, though the first child born of their union was a girl. He could hardly have imagined that the queen, probably in her late 20s, would not bear another healthy child before her execution in May 1536, and he was only just 42 himself. To achieve it the king had ended England’s nearly 1,000-year relationship with the papacy—St Augustine of Canterbury, the “Apostle to the English”, had arrived in Kent in AD 597—but in theological and doctrinal terms there had not yet been substantial reform of the English Church. The first years of the English Reformation were largely concerned with political, constitutional and legal aspects of religion.
The king’s own faith remained broadly conservative. The Act of Six Articles 1539 generally affirmed Catholic doctrine, with only significant two departures: auricular confession was no longer framed as a requirement of divine law, but was still “expedient and necessary to be retained”; and although “the natural body and blood of Our Saviour Jesu Christ” was affirmed to be “present really, under the form of bread and wine” in the Eucharist, and “after the consecration there remaineth no substance of bread and wine, nor any other substance but the substance of Christ, God and man”, the actual word “transubstantiation” was omitted from the final text. Married priests were required to put away their wives, and the Six Articles had harsh statutory force. Denial of the real presence in the Eucharist would see you burned at the stake, while the other articles brought hanging or life imprisonment for non-compliance.
If Henry’s marriage to Queen Katharine was annulled rather than ended by divorce, what about his fourth marriage, the second “divorced”? Again, no. Thomas Cromwell arranged the king’s union with Anna, the second daughter of John III, duke of Jülich-Cleves-Berg and count of Mark, as part of a search for Protestant allies on the continent. Henry agreed to the match with Anne of Cleves based on her portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger, but when he met his bride to be on 1 January 1540, it was a disaster. She was 24, though looked older, mild-mannered, uneducated and docile, and serious by English standards. The French ambassador in London, Charles de Marillac, described her as being “of middling beauty and of very assured and resolute countenance”, and she spoke only German.
“I like her not!” was Henry’s reaction. He complained that “she is nothing so fair as she hath been reported”, and seemed to despair.
If it were not that she had come so far into my realm, and the great preparations and state that my people have made for her, and for fear of making a ruffle in the world and of driving her brother into the arms of the Emperor and the French King, I would not now marry her. But now it is too far gone, wherefore I am sorry.
They were married at Greenwich Palace on 6 January, but the king could not bring himself to consummate the marriage. He told Cromwell, “I liked her before not well, but now I like her much worse”. The following month, Anne explained to the Countess of Rutland, one of her ladies in waiting, that they were not sexually intimate.
When he comes to bed he kisseth me, and he taketh me by the hand, and biddeth me ‘Good night, sweetheart’; and in the morning kisseth me and biddeth ‘Farewell, darling.’
This was not the way to produce more children, though the king now had a male heir, Edward, Prince of Wales, who was almost three years old. Again, an annulment was the solution; on 9 July 1540, Cranmer declared the marriage void, both on grounds on non-consummation and because from 1527 to 1535 she had been unofficially betrothed to Francis of Lorraine. He had been 10 years old and therefore below the age of consent when the engagement was contracted, meaning it lacked legal force. But it was a useful addition to Cranmer’s judgement.
Anne was less tenacious than Katharine had been, or else less attached to her status, or perhaps simply less devoted to Henry. In fact by co-operating with her husband-that-never-was, she contrived to have a comfortable life: she was given extensive estates and several residences, including Hever Castle which until the previous year had been the seat of Thomas Boleyn, earl of Wiltshire, father of the previous Queen Anne. She was dubbed “the King’s Beloved Sister” and frequently invited to court, becoming close to Henry in her new status. Anne seemingly disliked Henry’s last wife, Katherine Parr, but became good friends with his eldest daughter Mary. When Mary became queen in 1553, Anne apparently converted to Catholicism to conform to the new régime, and participated in the coronation at Westminster Abbey that October.
She withdrew from court in 1554, and her health began to decline, probably due to cancer. Anne was only 41 or 42 when she died at Chelsea on 16 July 1557, but she was Henry’s last surviving wife. Mary gave her a state funeral, which I described in History Today in 2018.
There we are. Henry VIII, who famously broke with Rome to get rid of his wife, never divorced, never countenanced the concept of divorce and made no provision for it in his reformed church. That organisation, the Church of England, still teaches that marriage is a permanent union, Edward VIII had to abdicate as king in 1936 rather than marry a divorcée, and his niece, Princess Margaret, had to abandon any hopes of marrying royal equerry Group Captain Peter Townsend because he was divorced from his wife Rosemary. Yet now King Charles III, who is supreme governor of the Church of England and continues to bear the title “Defender of the Faith” first awarded to Henry VIII in 1521, divorced his first wife and married the current queen, who was herself divorced. His sister, the Princess Royal, is also on her second marriage (though she remarried in the Church of Scotland in 1992 as it then allowed second marriages while the Church of England, strictly, did not).
(Of Henry’s other marriages, his union with Anne Boleyn was annulled two days before she was executed in 1536; Jane Seymour died after giving birth to their son Edward in 1537; Catherine Howard was stripped of her title as queen three months before she was executed in 1542. Poor Catherine: first cousin of Anne Boleyn, second cousin of Jane Seymour, she may have been reckless and foolish, but, surely more sinned against than sinning, she went to the executioner’s block at only 19. For balance, this is a “feminist reinterpretation” of the young queen.)
It is, in a way, fitting for a monarch of Henry VIII’s confidence and sense of grandeur that he did not have his first and fourth marriages ended by divorce but instead, almost defying the very historical record, declared through annulment that they had never actually happened. Ruler of time as well as space: perhaps that’s what they mean when they talk about “temporal power”.