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.
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 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. 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 learning the real story about the wives, she says that we should also remember King Henry for more than his multiple marriages.
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 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
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 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.
What's the biggest misconception about these six women who were all wives.
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 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.
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.
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.
So Henry was trying to figure out a way of keeping all of those positive things that came from the first marriage.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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 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, 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, 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.
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?
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 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 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 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 more so under.
Elizabeth speaking of momentous events and ends up beheaded. How did that happen?
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 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 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 of that and then decapitated.
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?
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 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 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 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.
After the break the last three wives of Henry the eighth, including one who gets a rare happy ending, we're up to wife number four, Anne of Cleaves. She's been referred to as the strategic wife, So what's her story.
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 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 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 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.
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.
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 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, 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 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 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. 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.
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?
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 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 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 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 going to be extremely disappointed that yet again he's chosen wrong and his wife has betrayed him.
You described her entrance to the Tower of London for I guess what you'd call her trial. That's pretty gruesome.
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 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, 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.
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.
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 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 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 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.
Well, then phillis in what happened to Catherine after Henry died.
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 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 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.
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?
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 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 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 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.
Amy, thanks so much for this. We just appreciate you taking the time to tell us six great stories.
Thanks well, thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate it.
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, as well as all the talks you learned about in this podcast. One Day University is a production of iHeart
Podcasts and School of Humans. If you enjoyed the show, leave a review in your favorite podcast app. You can also check out other Curiosity podcasts to learn about history, pop culture, true crime, and more. School of Humans