17/03/13
Although I am extremely reluctant to write
this, Henry VIII had a real dilemma on his hands with the want, through
Catherine of
The Catholic Church, however, to which the king
was attached, forbade divorce, no matter what the pretext, leaving Henry with
little option but to divorce Catherine and marry again anyway, thereby
incurring the penalty of excommunication. Ironically, although he did
eventually secure a male heir in the person of Edward VI, who was too young to
actually rule independently of a regency, it was his first daughter, Mary who,
following the brief reign of Lady Jane Grey (appointed via her mother, Lady
Brandon, by Edward in order to preclude Mary, a Catholic, from inheriting the
throne), went on to rule from 1553-58, and largely because the Church that
Henry founded, the Church of England, made it possible for England to be ruled
by a female, albeit one in her case who, being Catholic, sought to undo, within
the Anglican state, what her father had tried to establish. For Henry had had a
problem with the Catholic Church and Catholicism in general, bearing in mind
that loyalty to the throne could not be guaranteed from subjects who were
mainly Catholic. Therefore he had set about disestablishing monasteries and
other traditional religious sites not merely to avenge himself upon Rome for
having excommunicated him but, more significantly, to ensure the continuance of
his reign and of the Tudor line.
Art, not least religious art, was also a victim
of Henry's reign, which is not altogether surprising since, quite apart from
any moral objections one might conceive of (dubious at best), it would have
been the product, by and large, of Catholic artists, not least from Italy and
France, and therefore one could not establish, much less build, the new church,
the Church of England, by continuing to employ the kinds of artists, sculptors,
carvers, etc., largely, if not exclusively, responsible for what had gone
before and who would not, in all probability, want to work for a heretic and
apostate even if he had been stupid or naïve enough to invite them. They, too,
were naturally banned from Henry's church, as he sought to distance himself
from
As for his subsequent marital fate, it didn't
really improve all that much, what with another daughter (Elizabeth, destined
to succeed Queen Mary as Elizabeth I in 1558) from his third marriage (the
second having given him Edward), while Katherine Parr, the last of the six
(Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, and Catherine
Howard having preceded her), was someone he apparently didn't have intimate
relations with at all, although she outlived him (he died in 1547) and went on
to marry again, this time a relative, if I'm not mistaken, of Catherine Howard.
So, all in all, King Henry VIII had, even
without personal problems deriving from his corpulence, a hard time of it, and
one should not look upon his excommunication from the Roman Catholic Church as
retribution for an especially sinful or wayward disposition but, rather, as the
inevitable course of unfortunate events in which the king felt he had no
alternative, in the circumstances, but to divorce Catherine of Aragon and
remarry in the, by then, desperate hope of securing a male heir to the English
throne. His subsequent tendency towards serial monogamy, as I earlier described
it, was not unconnected with this fundamental problem and in no way connected
to his excommunication which, of course, resulted from his marriage to Anne
Boleyn, who, happily, gave him a male child, namely Edward, before proving less
than satisfactory in other respects. But, in all, he only had three children,
two of whom were girls, one child from each of his first three marriages,
Elizabeth, like Edward before her, being raised as a Protestant within the
Anglican fold, but not destined to inherit the throne until after her
half-sister Mary, who had of course been raised as a Catholic during his first
marriage, had died in 1558 and, with Habsburg connections (Mary having married
Philip I of Spain in 1554), paved the way for Spanish interest in the English
throne and opposition to the Protestant Elizabeth, which culminated with the
loss at sea and effective defeat of the Spanish Armada sent to invade England
and resulted, ironically, in the continuing rule, until 1603, of Queen
Elizabeth I, the real beneficiary of her father's reforms.
Although I have no compunction in pursuing
metaphysical truth, indeed tend to write about it with an alacrity that
sometimes astonishes me, given my general reluctance to put pen to paper, I am,
as though by compensation, much more reluctant to get my facts straight,
largely, I suspect, because I tend to distrust the extent to which certain
things or claims are actually
factual and not rather fiction in disguise, or fictions dressed up as facts. In
fact, if truth be told, I often encounter a difficulty, coming from a literary
background, in distinguishing fact from fiction anyway, quite apart from the
amount of fact which is dressed up as truth when, in point of fact, it is
further from truth than would be illusion or, rather, falsity.
As a matter of fact, I am equally reluctant to
read fiction these days, much less write it, and usually steer well clear of
novels and other fictitious writings that, no matter how preferable to
unsublimated drama, also make claims upon truth when, in actuality, they would
be further from truth than illusion and correspondingly closer – dare I say it?
- to fact.
