Laurie Voss#OneThousandYearsOfWomen has been stalled for *checks notes* 3 months because I read bios of all six of Henry 8's wives and they were so fucking depressing that I couldn't bear writing about all of them. So rather than halt the project entirely we're going to get them out of the way by covering all six at once, which is fine because they overlapped substantially and were quite depressingly similar. This is going to be short and sad.
It is a depressing fact of the sexist nature of historians in general that the lives of these six women are recounted primarily as "things Henry did and why", a trap I'm hugely at risk of falling into here by lumping them all together. But the fact is that we know about them primarily for one reason, which is that the same selfish sociopath decided to marry them and then get rid of them once he got tired of them.
First let's get them sorted out, tricky since three of them are named "Catherine":
Catherine of Aragon - the Spanish one, lasted 23 years, had marriage annulled.
Anne Boleyn - mother of Queen Elizabeth, lasted 3 years, beheaded.
Jane Seymour - mother of King Edward VI, lasted 1 year 4 months, died in childbirth.
Anne of Cleves - the German one, lasted 6 months, annulled again.
Catherine Howard - lasted 1 year 6 months, beheaded again.
Catherine Parr - lasted 3 years 6 months, then Henry died.
Catherine of Aragon - the Spanish one, lasted 23 years, had marriage annulled.
Anne Boleyn - mother of Queen Elizabeth, lasted 3 years, beheaded.
Jane Seymour - mother of King Edward VI, lasted 1 year 4 months, died in childbirth.
Anne of Cleves - the German one, lasted 6 months, annulled again.
Catherine Howard - lasted 1 year 6 months, beheaded again.
Catherine Parr - lasted 3 years 6 months, then Henry died.
Catherine of Aragon came first and lasted longest by an order of magnitude so we're going to spend more time on her. Born in Spain in 1485, she was younger sister to the cruelly abused Juana of Castile, who we covered previously (https://alpaca.gold/@seldo/110568677322572284). Her parents were Isabella of Castile (who we covered in #EuropeanBios https://twitter.com/seldo/status/1363701464305000448) and her shitty husband Ferdinand.
Laurie Voss (@[email protected])
Attached: 1 image #OneThousandYearsOfWomen continues today with Juana, Queen of Castile, often called (both rudely and incorrectly) Juana La Loca (the mad). Her life is pretty bereft of fun facts: she was born a political pawn, cruelly used, abused and endlessly gaslit by her husband, her father and her son, branded mentally ill for the convenience of others, and died without having experienced any real agency over her affairs in her entire life.
Unlike some of her successors, Catherine was thoroughly educated by her parents and could speak Spanish, Latin, French and Greek in addition to the subjects more usually taught to noble women such as embroidery, dancing and etiquette. Her mother Isabella was an extreme fan of dynastic marriages and so spent a lot of time and negotiation selecting a suitably advantageous husband for her daughter, finally selecting Arthur, son of Henry 7 and heir to the British throne.
You've likely not heard of Arthur (explicitly named after the mythical king Arthur, hugely fashionable at the time) because he never became king, dying suddenly at the age of 16. His life is most notable because of the tremendous complications it caused for Catherine: she had been shipped over to England in 1501 and married to Arthur less than six months before he died, leaving her sixteen years old and already a widow. But that was just the start of her problems.
Unwilling to let the mere death of her daughter's husband upset her carefully arranged plans, to say nothing of the costly financial negotiations that had gone into the wedding, Isabella immediately began negotiating to marry Catherine to the new heir, Henry, who was 10 years old at that point. Negotiations took an astonishing 8 years; Henry 7 was in no hurry and a better offer might come along. Meanwhile a desperately bored Catherine had nothing to do but hang around in England waiting.
Then in 1509 Henry 7 died, and the newly minted Henry 8, now 18, said it had been 7's dying wish that he marry Catherine, now 23. For this wedding to take place, her previous marriage to Arthur needed to be annulled by the Pope: scripture forbid a man to marry his brother's widow, so she had to be made not a widow at all by retroactively declaring the marriage void. This was done on the basis of Catherine's assertion that she had never consummated her marriage to Arthur, i.e. never fucked him.
This assertion was a problem from the outset, since the 15 year old Arthur had, as a nervous teenager asked about his wedding night understandably would, made quite a lot of noise to several witnesses about quite how thoroughly he had consummated his marriage. Isabella and Ferdinand were adamant that their daughter's assertions to the contrary be accepted, while Henry 8 was willing to let the matter remain ambiguous, which was to cause unending grief later.
The first 15 years of Henry and Catherine's marriage were uneventful and, by the standards of arranged royal marriages in the 1500s, happy. After several miscarriages Catherine gave birth to Mary, giving Henry a much-needed heir to the throne, but there had never been a queen who ruled in her own right in England before, making Henry anxious -- indeed, obsessed -- with obtaining a male child.
As was totally standard for royal marriages at the time, Henry had a number of semi-public mistresses, with one of whom he had a child, Henry Fitzroy. Henry was delighted with this male offspring but the child was illegitimate and therefore could not -- without some legal wrangling -- become king. The evidence that he could sire male children, just not with Catherine, upset Henry a great deal. He began to say that his lack of male children was god's punishment for marrying his brother's widow.
It is at this point we have to seriously question: did Henry *really* think it was god's punishment, or was he just looking for an excuse? Male historians, being sexist, have tended to give Henry the benefit of the doubt and say he had deep religious doubts. But as is going to become rapidly apparent, Henry was a self-centered sociopath who would cling to any convenient excuse to do what he wanted, so I think we can safely ignore hysterical male historians and say it was just an excuse.
The reason Henry needed an excuse is because by 1525 he had become infatuated with Anne Boleyn. She was then 24 years old to Catherine's 40, another important factor -- Catherine was considered to be past child-bearing age, and Henry was obsessed with getting his legitimate male heir. Indeed, given later events it's really worth considering whether Henry was actually infatuated with Anne herself or just the idea of someone he could get pregnant and have a boy child with.
Catherine put up with Henry parading Anne around proudly, as she had with his previous mistresses, but then Henry began to talk seriously of annulling their marriage because of the brother's widow thing and Catherine, alone out of Henry's wives, was having absolutely none of it and flatly refused to go along with the transparent excuse to get rid of her. "I am the king's true and legitimate wife" was her position and she never budged from it.
For her part, Anne apparently held out from sleeping with Henry unless and until she was made Queen, repeatedly refusing the lesser but still widely recognized position of "official mistress". Historians, who as I have mentioned are very sexist, have repeatedly put this forward as evidence that she was some kind of mastermind schemer, stringing Henry along for her grand designs, namely to depose the Catholic faith in favor of her own Protestant brand of Christianity.
Religion was a big factor in the rise and fall of all six women. England was in the midst of a tremendous power struggle between Catholic and Protestant beliefs, and the Queen was seen as a huge influence in the monarch's religious choices. Thus no matter who the current Queen was, there were always powerful forces trying to get rid of her and replace her with somebody on the opposite side.
This can be seen in the strict alternation of the religions in Henry's wives:
Catherine of Aragon: Catholic
Anne Boleyn: Protestant (mostly)
Jane Seymour: Catholic
Anne of Cleves: Protestant
Catherine Howard: Catholic
Catherine Parr: Protestant
Lots of biographers have spilled ink about how the Queens made power moves in favor of one religion or the other but honestly, these women had so little agency in their lives that it doesn't hold water. They were mere pawns in power struggles at court.
Catherine of Aragon: Catholic
Anne Boleyn: Protestant (mostly)
Jane Seymour: Catholic
Anne of Cleves: Protestant
Catherine Howard: Catholic
Catherine Parr: Protestant
Lots of biographers have spilled ink about how the Queens made power moves in favor of one religion or the other but honestly, these women had so little agency in their lives that it doesn't hold water. They were mere pawns in power struggles at court.
It didn't help the longevity of his marriages (or his wives) that Henry was clearly a sociopath, horny as hell and easily bored. All the scheming courtiers had to do, apparently, was shove an attractive young woman into his general vicinity and he would become infatuated, declare her the love of his life and decide that marrying her would solve all of his problems.
It would be nicer if the desires of the women themselves had been relevant but the evidence is against that. The later wives especially were attractive young women with their whole lives ahead of them who had no rational reason to want to get involved with an older, unattractive and clearly ailing man except that he was also the supreme authority in the country. None of them, from the first to the last, had any meaningful choice over whether they married Henry.
So Henry spent the next 7 years trying to figure out how to legally get rid of Catherine so he could sleep with Anne. The details are extremely dull, involving court cases and the Pope and a lot of extremely dubious religious scholarship in which Henry clung to whatever scripture supported what he wanted to do anyway and ignored the rest. He finally lost his patience, declared himself head of the church, annulled his own marriage and married Anne Boleyn in 1532.
What about Anne as a person? She was of course a whole human being with her own needs and wants and loves and losses but honestly she never did much. She was much less well-educated than Catherine had been, mostly in sewing and other "womanly" duties. Depending on her biographer she was either a staunch champion of religious reform, a wanton harlot who schemed her way into the king's bed in search of riches, or occasionally both. The sad truth is it doesn't really matter.
Catherine refused to accept this status quo, and did not accept being stripped of her titles, and protested mightily at the attendant loss of her jewels, houses etc.. Her daughter Mary was completely loyal to her mother. Catherine insisted her servants continue to refer to her as the Queen and so did Mary, but Catherine was isolated and ignored. She died in 1536, three years later, finally removing the complication of her existence from Henry's life.
There has been a lot of noise made about the fact that either Henry or Anne or both of them wore yellow after hearing about Catherine's death, yellow being a color of rejoicing in England at that time. Quite apart from this being in incredibly poor taste and royalty, regardless of their many faults, being sticklers for being *polite* about things even when being bastards, yellow was in the Spanish court the color of mourning, so whether they did or they didn't is really not that interesting.
Anne Boleyn meanwhile was heading towards her own fall. Like Catherine, she bore one healthy girl -- the later Elizabeth 1 (https://twitter.com/seldo/status/1410418985724563456) -- and had a number of miscarriages. With Catherine dead, Henry could marry again without any further fuss (or argument with Spain) if he could find a way to get rid of Anne. And Henry continued to be obsessed with having a boy: they had pre-written announcements when Elizabeth was born and all the "prince"s had to be changed to "princess".
Laurie Voss moved to @[email protected] on X
Project #EuropeanBios 47 is Queen Elizabeth 1, a tragic figure whose formidable talents were smothered by sexism. Her life was deeply tangled with that of her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, who I'll be covering as #48 very soon after this, so stay tuned!