King Henry Viii

King Henry Viii

King Henry VIII initiated the reformation in England due mostly to his quest for a male heir to the throne. If Henry's first wife had given birth to a male child, the entire restructuring of the church and dissolution of the monasteries would have been avoided.

Henry VIII King of England was never supposed to be king but as chance would have it he became king when his elder brother Arthur had died at the very young age of sixteen. Before his brother Arthur died and opened the way to his enthronement, their father had envisaged Henry as a future Archbishop of Canterbury. Luck would be on Henry's side as his father Henry VII was still alive and able to set up his enthronement. Henry VII had secured the Tudor succession when he brought the War of the Roses to an end with his triumph at Bosworth Field. With Henry VIII king the future of England, the church, and the people had been sealed.

At the age of fourteen Henry married seventeen year old Catherine of Aragon who had been married to Henry's brother Arthur before his death. Because the marriage of a woman to her dead husband's brother transgressed canon law, a special dispensation had to be sought from the Vatican and this took several months to arrange. Things started out good for the young new couple but rumors soon started circulating about separation. The two stayed together long enough for Catherine to give birth to the couple's first child Princess Mary, who was born in 1516 and would later become Queen.

Subsequent attempts at Catherine producing a male heir ended in failure as she had three miscarriages and two deaths a few weeks into infancy. Catherine had utterly failed to fulfill her first obligation as the king's wife: to provide him with a son who would ensure the Tudor succession. In the early 1520s Henry began to get very worried about the succession to the throne and with his only heir a little girl he had cause to be. Dissatisfied as Henry may have been with his marriage, it is most improbable that he would have embarked on the problems of a divorce at all if he had not had a successor to Catherine in mind.

From 1525 onwards he became ever more infatuated with Anne Boleyn, the sister of an earlier mistress and daughter of the courtier Sir Thomas Boleyn who had already earned promotion by his elder daughter Mary's involvement with the king. The main problem with Henry wanting to divorce Catherine was that Henry VIII was a Roman Catholic and the Roman Catholic faith believed in marriage for life. It did not recognise, let alone support, divorce. Henry was a man with great knowledge of the bible and knew every verse and passage by memory and he used this knowledge of the bible to escape his marriage to Catherine. When Henry had married Catherine, the wife of his deceased brother, special dispensation had to be granted so that the marriage would be considered valid. When Catherine of Aragon failed to secure the succession with a male heir, Henry searched his conscience for the source