Tudor King of England, of Six Marriages and the Founder of the Church of England
Henry VIII (1491–1547) was the second Tudor king of England, who, when the Roman Curia refused to annul his marriage to his first queen, Catherine, broke with the Roman Church in anger and in 1534 passed the Act of Supremacy making himself supreme head of the Church of England, launching the English Reformation. He married six times, with two queens executed and two divorced; this marital history is inseparable from his shaping of the national church, and remains one of the most discussed reigns in English history.
The fates of Henry VIII’s six queens are popularly summed as "divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived": Catherine divorced, Anne Boleyn beheaded, Jane Seymour dead after childbirth, Anne of Cleves divorced, Catherine Howard beheaded, and the last, Catherine Parr, outlived him. This marital history directly drove England’s break with the Roman Curia.
When Pope Clement VII refused to grant an annulment of Henry’s marriage to Catherine, Henry had Parliament legislate to declare himself "the only supreme head on earth of the Church of England," seizing vast monastic property for the crown — a break not purely from theological conviction but from a tangle of power, finance, and marriage, setting the Church of England on an independent path neither Catholic nor Continental Protestant.
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.
That email didn’t look right? Free · unsubscribe anytime · Privacy