Posted
on April 21, 2014
This
guy was a big, blustering man who led a really big life!
Henry
VIII was about 6-foot-two (1.88 m)...at a time when that was VERY
tall.
And
not only was Henry VIII the King of England, starting when his
father (Henry VII) died on this date in 1509, but he oversaw the legal joining of Wales
and England, so he became the king of Wales, too. Oh, and he became king
of Ireland as well! And when Henry VIII separated his nation from
the Roman Catholic Church, thereby starting the state religion known
as “the Church of England” or the “Anglican Church,” he became the Supreme Head of the new church! He even continued the
“nominal” claim to be King of France. (That means that he ruled
France in name only – he didn't really
have any power in France.)
Part
of Henry VIII living a big life was that, in his prime, he was
considered an attractive, educated, and charismatic ruler. He wielded
a lot of power as king, but he also thought of himself as an author and as a
musical composer.
The
biggest thing of the big guy – the thing that most of us most
remember about him – was that Henry VIII was married six times. He
was desperate to have sons, because he thought that only male heirs
to the throne could maintain the Tudor dynasty and keep the peace
after the bloody “Wars of the Roses,” when several nobles fought
for the right to rule England. And when his first wife did not give
him a son, Henry had his marriage ended.
And
he had to fight with the Pope, break away from Roman Catholicism, and
start the Church of England in order to get that divorce!
Henry's
second wife had miscarriages and was executed on charges of
witchcraft and incest (she was almost surely innocent); his third
wife birthed a son but then soon died from complications from that
birth; Henry divorced his fourth wife and executed his fifth wife,
this time for so-called “treason”; and his sixth and last wife
outlived the king.
You
may wonder why Henry still tried to have sons after having one with
his third wife. At the time, a lot of children died before becoming
adults, and people in general died younger. Henry VIII probably
thought he should have multiple sons in case his first died too
early.
A
few years before Henry died, an act by Parliament put his daughters
by various wives – Mary and Elizabeth – back in succession after
his only son, Edward. It was quite lucky for England that that
happened, since Elizabeth I eventually did rule (after her brother
Edward, who became king at age 9, died at age 15, and after her
sister ruled and died as well). Elizabeth I ruled was long and
successful, a “golden age” when England defeated its long-time
enemy, Spain, when music and theatre and literature flourished, when
world exploration and trade occurred, when national pride rose.
Elizabeth I ruled for about 45 years, almost a decade longer than her
father.
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