Henry VIII

Henry VIII

King of England from 1509-1547. Under King Henry, England rejected the authority of Rome. King Henry had no son born of his queen, Catherine of Aragon, who had delivered five children (the only survivor beyond infancy was the princess Mary). England was in no mood to accept a girl as heir to the throne because of the nation’s only previous queen who had occasioned bloody wars of succession. As Catherine grew older, Henry grew more troubled. In 1525 the queen was forty and Henry pondered more and more the ways of God: "Am I under some curse of God?" (Catherine had been Henry’s deceased brother Arthur’s wife for several months.) In his mind was Le 10:21, "If a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing, they shall be childless." The Church of Rome recognized the curse, but had granted the marriage for reasons of its own at the time. So in 1527 Henry asked Pope Clement VII to revoke the special dispensation and declare the marriage of eighteen years invalid from the outset. But since Catherine of Aragon was the aunt of the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain, Charles V, Clement did not wish to offend the emperor. So Henry went to the European universities for their scholarly opinion, which was mixed, but gave Henry a pretext to do what he willed. In January 1533, he secretly married Anne of Boleyn. In May an English church court declared Henry’s marriage to Catherine null and void. In September the new queen gave birth to a child, a girl, Elizabeth. The pope then excommunicated Henry. Henry then insisted that the English clergy stop their dealings with the pope due to an old fourteenth-century law prohibiting dealings with foreign powers. Thus, in 1534 the Act of Supremacy declared "The kings’s majesty justly and rightly is and ought to be and shall be reputed the only supreme head on the earth of the Church of England called Anglicana Ecclesia." Henry eventually had Anne Boleyn executed on charges of adultery and subsequently married Jane Seymour and had a son by her, the eventual King Edward VI. Henry appointed Cranmer the Archbishop of Canterbury. Henry then suppressed the monasteries and replenished the royal coffers with their wealth. Then Henry ordered that an English Bible be installed in all the churches.

[tags]Anne-Boleyn, BlogRodent, Catherine-of-Aragon, Charles-V, church-history, Church-of-England, Church-of-Rome, ChurchRodent, Edward-VI, English-Bible, Henry-VIII, history, Jane-Seymour, Pope-Clement-VII[/tags]

 

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