The Plays of Shakespeare

The death of King Richard III was as close as William Shakespeare’s plays about English history came to his own present day for the vast majority of his career. It wasn’t until the very end of his time in London, when he presented Henry VIII as the misbegotten, unsatisfying coda to his tenure as a working playwright, that he continued the story of England’s monarchs.

Yet it seems to me better for us to take up the subject of what came after Richard already today. For the Tudor dynasty that had Richard’s triumphant nemesis Henry VII as its patriarch was still on the throne as Shakespeare was making his name in London, affecting his life and his art in manifold ways; it was no accident that the tetralogy of plays we’ve just been exploring was, whatever else it might have been, partially rank Tudor propaganda. It can only aid our understanding of the man and his many plays that are still to come if we look now at the most recent history that Shakespeare knew, even if we can’t connect it directly to his works in the same way that we can the history that came before. A strong argument can be made that the Tudors were the most consequential dynasty in all of England’s history, including in their ranks the king who transformed England from a Catholic to a Protestant country and the queen who set it on course to building the biggest empire the world has ever known, that fabled one over which the sun never set.

So, then…

The former Henry Tudor’s first challenge as King Henry VII was to ensure that his own reign lasted longer than that of Richard, in the face of a somewhat dubious claim to the throne and a substantial Yorkist faction who weren’t uniformly mollified by the symbolism of his marriage to Elizabeth of York. To secure his position once and for all, he had to fight one more pitched battle, this time against insurgents rather than as the leader of them. He won the Battle of Stoke Field, which may have been even larger and bloodier than the Battle of Bosworth Field, on June 16, 1487, killing in the process the rebel leader John de la Pole, the Earl of Lincoln and Richard III’s nephew, a man who probably had ambitions of his own to seize the throne. This victory on Henry’s part is often forgotten today — not least because it was never written about by Shakespeare — but it is considered by most historians to mark the true, definitive ending of the Wars of the Roses.

After his period of youthful martial glory was over, Henry VII settled down to become the most detail-oriented king England had known in many a generation. An austere, serious-minded man by disposition, he was for once exactly the monarch that England needed. He stabilized the kingdom’s precarious finances, both by avoiding expensive military adventures and through a taxation regime that many people at all levels of society thought onerous, but that was for the most part fairly administered. His worst failing — an understandable one, in light of what had come before him — was an abiding sense of paranoia. He came down harshly on any hint of sedition; the royal jailers and executioners were kept plenty busy. He had two overriding goals for his reign: to leave England a solvent, governable state, and to leave it in the hands of another Tudor.

Naturally, it was assumed that said Tudor would be his eldest son, whom Henry had invested with the storied name of Arthur upon his birth in September of 1486. Arthur was groomed almost from that very instant for the role of his father’s successor, being surrounded by the best teachers and trainers whom Henry could find. Much to his gratification, Arthur proved a chip off the old block. Earnest and serious, he sponged up languages, religion, philosophy, and statecraft, evincing from an early age an understanding of what his role was to be in this life and how important it was for him to play it well. If the father and the son were perhaps a little on the boring side in their dour earnestness, most could agree that boring might not be such a bad way to kick the next century off, after all that England had been through in the last one. A more worrisome concern was Arthur’s health: he was a frail, sickly boy who seemed unlikely ever to lead any armies into battle in the way that his father once had. The obvious solution to that problem, of course, was for him to avoid having to do so by continuing Henry VII’s policy of neutrality and moderation on the international stage, whilst nipping any internal uprisings in the bud by clamping down on the merest hint of disloyalty.

Having gone a long way toward locking down his authority over his own kingdom with his marriage to Elizabeth of York, Henry looked for a queen for Arthur who could improve its standing abroad. He negotiated a rather dazzling match with Catherine of Aragon, a daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, the joint monarchs of the newly united and ascendant kingdom of Spain. The bright and beautiful sixteen-year-old girl arrived in England with great pomp and circumstance in the spring of 1502. There she met the virginal and ascetic fifteen-year-old Arthur, married him, and lay down with him for the first time in a bed strewn with roses and holy water. The poor boy keeled over dead not long afterward. The jokes practically wrote themselves in 1502, as they still do today.

Henry had doted on Arthur, yet he had little time to grieve. He could take solace in the fact that he had a second son, eleven years old at the time, who was also named Henry. Less fortuitously, this spare heir had not received the same education and training as his brother. Prince Henry had grown up in the countryside, well away from the halls of power. He was a lusty, robust boy, a natural athlete who preferred the jousting field and the boxing ring to the classroom or the library. He hardly knew his father, who had regarded him as an irrelevancy while Arthur was being groomed for the throne. Now, that would have to change. Prince Henry was brought to London for a crash course in all the things a future king of England needed to know.

Henry VII was at pains to salvage the guarantee of friendship with Spain which Arthur’s marriage to Catherine had represented, as he was the dowry of 200,000 ducats she had brought with her to England. He decided the only way to do so was to marry Arthur’s widow to Henry. This eyebrow-raising proposition was, as you can doubtless well imagine, not greeted with equal enthusiasm from all quarters. Inevitably, both sides of the debate plumbed their Bibles for relevant scripture — and, equally inevitably, both came up with something that seemed to apply in its frequently self-contradictory pages. Opponents of the new marriage pointed to the Book of Leviticus: “And if a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing: he hath uncovered his brother’s nakedness; they shall be childless.” Proponents riposted with the Book of Deuteronomy: “If brethren dwell together, and one of them die, and have no child, the wife of the dead shall not marry without unto a stranger: the husband’s brother shall go in unto her, and take her to him to wife, and perform the duty of an husband’s brother unto her.”

For her part, Catherine still quite liked the idea of becoming the next queen of England, as she did that of becoming the wife of Prince Henry, who even at age eleven manifested more of the qualities that a buxom teenage girl might find attractive than had Arthur. She put a thumb on the scale by insisting that her first marriage had never been consummated; Arthur, she said, had been too awed and overwhelmed to do the nasty, roses and holy water notwithstanding. If she was telling the truth — admittedly, a monumental if — there was a case for having the marriage annulled, because some theologians considered the marriage pact to be irrevocably sealed only at the moment of consummation. King Henry formally requested an annulment from Pope Julius II on this basis. It was granted in 1503 — but, as we’ll see, the question of just what Arthur and Catherine had gotten up to in the marital bed was destined to come up again much later. For now, though, Prince Henry was betrothed to Catherine, who remained in England with her dowry, waiting for her next husband to come of age. Perhaps mindful of the fate Arthur had suffered after going to bed with her, King Henry decided that the marriage could wait until his second son reached eighteen years of age.

That watershed was close at hand on April 21, 1509, when Henry VII died of tuberculosis at age 52, whereupon Prince Henry became Henry VIII. The new king married Catherine on June 11, two and a half weeks before his eighteenth birthday. His father’s projects for England and for his family had been successful: a peaceful transfer of power had taken place in an orderly kingdom, and the new king was another Tudor. Alas, what happened over the reigns and decades to come would be anything but orderly. In the broader chronology of English history, Henry VII’s tenure stands out as a rare island of stability with tempestuous seas to either side.

For the nonce, however, Catherine must have thought she had herself a prize catch; certainly everyone around her did. The upper crust of Europe gushed about the young king like teenage girls at a boy-band concert. “It is the prettiest thing in the world to see him play [tennis], his fair skin glowing through a shirt of finest texture,” reported an ambassador from Venice. Henry also “sang and played all kinds of instruments with rare talent.” An up-and-coming English theologian and philosopher named Thomas More asked his Dutch friend Erasmus, the greatest all-around man of learning of the age,

What may you not promise yourself from a prince with whose extraordinary talent and almost divine character you are well acquainted? But when you know what a hero he now shows himself, how wisely he behaved, what a lover he is of justice and goodness, what affection he bears to the learned, I venture to swear that you will need no wings to make you fly to behold this new and auspicious star. Oh, my Erasmus, if you could see how all the world here is rejoicing in the possession of so great a prince, how his life is all their desire, you would not contain your tears for joy. The heavens laugh, the earth exalts.

Some of the same men who praised Henry so fulsomely at the start of his reign would be left scratching their heads in dismay in the future, looking at the latter-day version of the king — grotesquely obese, lecherous, tyrannical, looming over his court and his kingdom like a bloated hippo — and wondering where it had all gone so wrong. Many of them would conclude that the rot first began to set in when Cardinal Wolsey entered Henry’s orbit.

Thomas Wolsey was a rare self-made man in an era when almost everyone in England died in the same station of life they had inhabited as children. Born in 1473, the son of a publican, he had made it into Oxford University as a boy through persistence and native intelligence, graduated at age fifteen, then joined the Church, where he advanced rapidly by dint of his chutzpah, his gift for gab, and a not-insubstantial measure of real capability. As he did so, he became a walking, talking argument for why a Protestant Reformation was necessary, what with his taste for wine and opulence that exceeded that of many a temporal monarch of Europe, and what with the requisite brood of “nephews” and “nieces” running in the train of himself and his various mistresses. But this worldly man of the Church knew how to get things done, which made him enormously appealing to young King Henry, who ceded more and more authority to him in order to make time for his own indulgence in wine, women, and song. Wolsey cemented himself in Henry’s good graces in 1514, when he succeeded in marrying the king’s younger sister off to Louis XII of France. The good cardinal was given the title of Lord Chancellor — the official right-hand man to the king — shortly thereafter.

His power and his opulence grew in tandem. He traveled England and the continent with a retinue that rivaled that of his king, his ever-increasing girth swathed in the crimson robes of royalty. On the subject of his costume balls, where the fountains gushed wine instead of water and the napkins were woven from threads of real gold, one courtier wrote that the like were “never given by Cleopatra or Caligula, the whole banqueting hall being decorated with huge vases of gold and silver.” He was the archetype of the power behind the throne; the other monarchs of Europe treated him for all practical purposes as if he rather than Henry was the ruler of England. And indeed, Wolsey himself sometimes seemed to forget his station; diplomats noticed how he spoke more and more using the royal “we,” on subjects upon which he had never consulted his king. One didn’t have to know too much history to suspect that he was playing with fire by getting so big in his britches, but for years Henry didn’t seem to mind. Wolsey’s downfall, when it came, would have an entirely unexpected proximate cause.

Henry may not have had much patience for most of the details of governance, but he did understand all too well that the stability of the realm and of the Tudor dynasty depended on the production of a healthy male heir. But as the years went by, this was the one thing that eluded him. Catherine miscarried a daughter in 1510; had a son in 1511 who died within weeks; miscarried two more sons in 1513 and 1514; finally had a healthy daughter who was named Mary in 1516, then miscarried another in 1518. After that, there were no more children. Whether this was because Henry had lost his taste for his queen and was no longer having sex with her or was because Catherine, six years older than her husband, was no longer capable of becoming pregnant was an open question at court. But there was no question whom Henry blamed for his situation: Catherine.

Henry returned to those words from the Book of Leviticus, about childlessness being God’s judgment upon a man who dared to marry his brother’s widow; childlessness wasn’t quite his plight, granted, what with the presence of Princess Mary, but he was bereft of the kind of child that really mattered to him. By about 1525, lust had been added to politics as a reason for getting rid of Catherine and taking a new wife. For Henry had fallen hard for a local lass of only moderately good family named Anne Boleyn, who played the only card she had masterfully by not quite rejecting his romantic overtures but refusing to “go all the way” with him, as my friends and I used to call it back in the day. (She had evidently learned from the experience of her older sister Mary Boleyn, who had joined Henry in his bed only to be discarded in a matter of months.) It was an all too typical story: with a veritable kingdom full of willing women at his disposal, Henry wanted the only one he couldn’t have. By most reports, Anne wasn’t even all that beautiful, and yet he mooned over her like a love- and lust-addled adolescent.  A papal respresentative at Henry’s court reported that “this passion is a most extraordinary thing. He sees nothing, he thinks of nothing, but his Anne; he cannot be without her for an hour. It moves me to pity to see how the king’s life, the stability and downfall of the whole country, hang upon this one question.”

Henry, who had previously been more wont to abide by the advice of Cardinal Wolsey than to make demands of him, now tasked his Lord Chancellor with petitioning Pope Clement VII for an annulment of his current marriage, principally on the grounds of that passage in the Book of Leviticus. In his opinion, his lack of a male heir alone ought to serve as sufficient proof that Queen Catherine had been lying when she said that her first marriage with his brother Arthur had never been consummated. It was of course at least as likely as not that she really had been lying, but the demand for an annulment nevertheless placed Clement in a difficult position. For a rabble-rousing former monk named Martin Luther was spearheading a full-blown revolt against the Church’s authority in central Europe, arguing that the entire organization, from the pope on down, had lost its way and become an irredeemably corrupt instrument of Satan. To grant Henry’s request now, when it was so obviously personally and politically convenient to that monarch, and to do so by reversing the once similarly convenient decree of an earlier pope, would be to play directly into Luther’s self-righteous hands. If Catherine could have been convinced or coerced to recant her assertion that she had never had sex with Arthur, it would have greatly strengthened Henry’s claim with the pope, but this she adamantly refused to do. And here too Wolsey’s hands were more or less tied. Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who was also King Charles I of Spain and thus by far the most powerful monarch in Europe, was already annoyed at Henry for his treatment of his Aunt Catherine. If Henry and Wolsey outright did away with her, or forced a confession out of her on the rack, all bets would be off.

Confronting headwinds like these, Cardinal Wolsey’s legendary ability to persuade finally failed him. He argued, wheedled, begged, cajoled, and greased palms all over Rome; it availed him nothing. As he continued to report only failure, he learned that Henry, who had been so pleasantly pliant for almost two decades, could be as vengeful as any other tyrant when his will was thwarted. Wolsey was stripped of his titles, powers, and estates one by one. On November 4, 1530, matters came to the final pass: the king’s guards showed up to arrest him. A thoroughly broken man already before his arrest, he died of dysentery at age 57 on November 29, whilst in transit to the Tower of London. “If I had served my god as diligently as I have done my king, he would not have given me over in my gray hairs,” he was reported to have said at the last.

But harrowing Cardinal Wolsey unto death did nothing to solve Henry’s core problem. He was still dashing off letters daily to Anne Boleyn, telling how he wished “my self in my sweetheart’s arms, whose pretty duckys [breasts] I trust shortly to kiss. Written with the hand of him that was, is, and shall be yours by his will.” Looking at the religious unrest that Martin Luther was stirring up well to the east of his kingdom, he saw an opportunity: if he too rejected the authority of the pope, he could make himself the head of his own, exclusively English church, then give himself the divorce he craved. He would turn England from a Catholic to a Protestant country, instituting a massive rupture at all levels of a society of millions of souls, just so he could bring one reluctant woman into his bed. Of such discontinuities is history sometimes made.

Then again, it was more complicated than that too. The dirty little secret of most of the countries of Europe that went Protestant during this chaotic period was that their leaders did so at least as much to attain practical advantages as out of honest religious conviction. There was an obvious attraction for any monarch to the idea of not being under the pope’s thumb, not having to worry about having one’s commandments second-guessed from far-off Rome. Most temptingly of all, the Catholic Church was possessed of enormous wealth and landholdings in virtually all of the countries of Western Europe, in many cases exceeding those of the temporal leaders. And it all lay there defenseless, ripe for confiscation by the crown in the name of religious principle. The king of Denmark, for example, expropriated fully half of the agricultural land in his kingdom when he took it Protestant in 1536.

Henry’s England actually went Protestant before Denmark, but the transition wasn’t accomplished instantaneously, nor without strife and bloodshed. In the summer of 1531, Henry took back the crown jewels he had bestowed upon Catherine and gave them to Anne Boleyn, then packed his erstwhile queen off to live in exile on the borders of his realm; he would never lay eyes on her again. These proofs were enough to convince Anne of the genuineness of Henry’s love for her; she broke down and joined him in his bedchamber. Much to the surprise of many at court, he didn’t tire of her and cast her aside now that he had made the conquest — not right away, at any rate. He declared himself to be as determined as ever to marry Anne and make her the queen of a newly Protestant England. Many pious Englishmen were appalled. Among them was Thomas More, who resigned from all of his positions and titles in protest and retired to his home. But other Englishmen, including plenty of those in the pope’s own clergy, saw religious justice and/or personal advantage in separating London from Rome. Some of these clergymen agreed to grant Henry the annulment of his marriage to Catherine that he had been seeking for so long, in direct defiance of Pope Clement’s edicts. With their judgment in hand, Henry was free to marry Anne Boleyn, who was already pregnant with the child whom he hoped would prove to be his long-sought male heir. The marriage took place on January 15, 1533, by which time it had been seven and a half years in the offing.

The back-and-forth between Rome and London continued for a while, but, with the stances of both Clement and Henry on the legitimacy of the latter’s second marriage set in stone, there could be only one outcome.  On November 11, 1534, the English Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy, arguably the most monumental single law in all its long history. It formally abolished the Catholic Church as a presence in England, establishing in its place an independent Church of England with Henry himself at its head. A reign of terror followed, aimed at rooting out any and all spiritual dissent among the clergy and laypeople alike by means of widespread imprisonment, hanging, beheading, drawing and quartering, and burning at the stake. For years, the public spaces of England were festooned with the heads and limbs of those who rejected the elevation of Henry to the status of their new pope. The most famous of the victims was Thomas More. After refusing repeatedly to recognize Henry’s divorce and remarriage and his newfound spiritual as well as temporal authority over the people of England, More felt the executioner’s axe bite into his neck on July 7, 1535.

Henry’s right-hand man in these measures, his replacement for Cardinal Wolsey, was Thomas Cromwell, another self-made can-do man in an epoch obsessed with titles, bloodlines, and inheritance. Born in 1485 as the son of a humble Putney blacksmith, he had made a small fortune for himself in Italy through textiles and banking, then returned to England to turn it into a bigger one. As his profile as a man of consequence grew, he had begun to aid Wolsey in many of his endeavors. Then he stepped neatly into the cardinal’s shoes after his downfall. Cromwell was commonly regarded for many centuries after his death as little more than a grasping villain, although certainly a clever one. But he was recently given a more nuanced and sympathetic treatment by Hilary Mantel in three of the most widely acclaimed historical novels of the young 21st century. Even she admits, however, that he could be a hard man when he felt the occasion demanded it. Most notoriously, he was responsible for seizing the Catholic Church’s assets on behalf of the crown, a task which entailed turning thousands upon thousands of monks and nuns out of house and home. Bereft and berift, cast adrift with nowhere to go, these sad figures could be seen wandering the byways of England with their beggar’s bowls in hand for years afterward. Their monasteries and nunneries were burnt to the ground; the charred ruins of them can still be glimpsed in parts of rural England to this day.

There were two dark ironies to all of this. The first was that Henry was still far more Catholic than Protestant by theology and temperament. He was definitely not a fan of Protestantism’s more radical ideas about the equality of all people in the eyes of God. Nor was he given to Protestant modesty; England’s cathedrals were not stripped of their ostentation, as would soon be happening in the Netherlands and Scandinavia. For the time being, services there continued to be conducted in Latin, a language that vanishingly few of the parishioners could even understand, while only the clergy, nobility, and property owners were legally allowed to own a Bible to read for themselves. Confession, Communion, and the (prescribed if not always practiced) celibacy of the priesthood too remained unchanged. In short, this new Church of England was Catholicism with the serial numbers filed off, a quality that some would say it has retained to some extent to this day. Meanwhile Henry was as enthusiastic in his persecution of more radical forms of Protestantism as was the Catholic Inquisition.

The second irony was that Henry finally was tiring of Anne Boleyn, just after he had crossed the point of no return with the pope in order to secure her. He and most of those around him found Anne, who was given to violent outbursts of temper and importunate demands now that she had become the supreme woman of England, to be increasingly wearisome. Henry began to show signs that he regretted the divorce which he had upended his kingdom to attain. When Catherine died in her lonely exile on January 7, 1536, aged 50, he wept openly and ordered his court to go into mourning as if they had lost their legitimate queen. Only Anne refused to clothe herself in black.

She would have done well to make herself more agreeable. For a dam of sorts had been broken: having now discarded one queen, Henry would inevitably find it easier to discard a second one. Anne might have saved herself if she had given him the son he still wanted so desperately. But the couple’s first child, delivered on September 7, 1533, had been another girl, who was named Elizabeth in honor of her paternal grandmother. On January 29, 1536, the very day of Catherine’s lavish funeral, Anne miscarried a male child. This effectively sealed her fate.

That spring, Anne was arrested along with five prominent male nobles, all of whom she was accused of having slept with; the most eye-popping prisoner was George Boleyn, the queen’s own brother, with whom she was alleged to have committed incest as well as adultery. Thomas Cromwell’s fingerprints were all over the operation, which was designed to rid Henry not only of a troublesome queen but five men who had been asking too many hard questions about his policies and conduct as of late. All six were executed in May of 1536.

This left Henry free to marry again. And he already had just the woman in mind: Jane Seymour, a modest and artless lady-in-waiting of his former queen who had caught his wandering eye some months ago. He married her on May 30, just eleven days after Anne Boleyn had gone to the gallows. Jane gave him a healthy baby boy at long last on October 12, 1537; he was christened Edward. But she never recovered from the ordeal of childbirth, dying less than two weeks later. Henry would consider her the true love of his life for the rest of his own, because she had given him the son he sought for so long — and probably because she didn’t live long enough afterward to disappoint him.

By this point, there wasn’t much left of the charming young King Henry who had sported and sung with such aplomb, dazzling men and women alike with his grace and beauty. His gradual physical decline had accelerated in 1536, when, at the age of 45, he fell hard from his horse during an ill-advised jousting match, shattering his leg and slamming his head against the ground. He lay unconscious for two hours, and was never the same man afterward. His movements became tentative and slow, his temper even more mercurial, his pronouncements still more erratic. Like many an athlete who suddenly cannot be an athlete anymore, he failed to change his prodigious eating habits to suit his change in lifestyle. As a result, his girth ballooned. He never got out of bed many days, suffering from leg pain and an ulcer that were both exacerbated by his chronic overeating, and possibly from syphilis, the fruit of another form of overindulgence.

The same citizens who had admired him so as a gallant young prince grew to hate him for the disruptions and violence he foisted upon them in service to his personal whims. In a missive that the Richard III Society loves to cite today, Eustace Chapuys, an emissary from the Holy Roman Empire, wrote that “the last King Richard was never so much hated by the people as this king.” But with crafty, ruthless operators like Thomas Cromwell in his employ, there was little hope of ending his reign prematurely. Which is not to say that the people didn’t try from time to time: in early 1537, Cromwell had to use every bit of his guile and plenty of main force to put down the most serious internal revolt that England had known since the Wars of the Roses.

Remarkably, there were three queens still to come in Henry’s fast-dwindling stock of  years, the second half of a progression of women that every British schoolchild still learns in the form of a rhyme: “Divorced, beheaded, died. Divorced, beheaded, survived.”

The next divorcée was Anne of Cleves, a princess from an important Protestant German duchy. Thomas Cromwell promoted and arranged this marriage, hoping to use it to bootstrap a formal system of alliances with the other emerging Protestant kingdoms of Europe. But after the wedding on January 6, 1540, there was found to be a complete lack of physical attraction, apparently mutual, between the bride and groom. Henry had the marriage annulled less than six months later on the basis that it had never been consummated, after noticing another woman who did interest him in the way that his second Queen Anne did not. Yet Anne of Cleves was both lucky and shrewd in comparison to Henry’s earlier queens; by accepting her demotion amicably, she was able to continue to live on at court as “the king’s beloved sister.” It appears that the two did genuinely like one another — just not in that way (as a dismaying number of girls used to tell me back in high school). Rather than the second Queen Anne, it was Thomas Cromwell who took the brunt of the king’s anger for this failed marriage; it seemed that he had finally gotten too big for his britches, in the same way that his mentor Cardinal Wolsey once had. Cromwell was beheaded on July 28, 1540. His mooted league of Protestant kingdoms, which might have prevented much bloodshed in Europe over the century to come, died with him.

The woman — or rather girl — who caught Henry’s eye while he was still married to Anne of Cleves was Catherine Howard, a fetching lass of just seventeen who happened to be a first cousin of Anne Boleyn. Not one to dwell unduly on unpleasant necessities, Henry married her at the very same instant that Cromwell was being executed a few kilometers away. He doted upon her for some months after the marriage, but then began to suspect that, despite her tender years, she had not been a virgin on her wedding night, and might not be restricting her favors to her lawful husband even now. The marriage was annulled on that basis in November of 1541, and Henry’s second Queen Catherine shared the fate of her cousin three months later.

The survivor from the grim schoolhouse rhyme was in some ways the most surprising of all Henry’s queens. Far from being a virgin, Catherine Parr was already a widow twice over and the mother of a daughter when she married Henry on July 12, 1543, at the comparatively advanced age of 31. Although she gave Henry no more children, the king seemed to attain a measure of domestic bliss with this woman who was slightly closer to his own age, who was happy to let him frolic to his heart’s content with younger wenches and then come to her when he needed a partner of substance to talk with. Henry’s third Queen Catherine turned the cards on the old lecher by outliving him and then remarrying herself when his body was scarcely cold. Her luck ran out not long after, however, when she and her second child — her first with her fourth husband — both died in childbirth. Her funeral has gone down in ecclesiastical history for being the first to be conducted by the Church of England in plain English rather than Latin. The times, they were a-changing.

As noted, Henry himself died before his sixth and final queen, on January 28, 1547. He was 55 years old, having spent 37 of those years as king of England. The situation he left behind wasn’t as perilous as it might have been — he had managed to produce a single son in the course of his six marriages — but there was still plenty of reason to be nervous about the stability of the realm. For the next king was a boy of just nine years, ambitious nobles were still as plentiful as they had been during the Wars of the Roses, and now there was the new issue of religion to add to the mix. Even Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell hadn’t been able to snap their fingers and make England their own preferred version of a Protestant kingdom in an instant. The land was still riven by religious discord, not only between adherents to the Church of England and those who wished to return to the Catholic fold, but between the Church of England and the more hardline Protestants who embraced all of the teachings of Martin Luther. England’s most recent tyrant was dead, but his former kingdom was still in the midst of interesting times.

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