British Monarchs Who Ended Badly, Part 6: Edward VI, Bloody Mary, and the Virgin Queen

As we learned in Part 5, Henry VIII broke with the Church of Rome and disposed of his first two wives (divorced, beheaded) in his quest to father a male heir to the English throne. His third wife, Jane Seymour, delivered the goods, and promptly died, leaving a vacancy for wife number four. 

The "goods" was the future Edward VI, who became king in 1547, on Henry's death. He did not prove to be the strong monarch Henry had hoped for. He was only nine years old, and sickly. This left him under the influence of the powerful men around him. 

[Image: Edward VI, aged 13]

They favored moving the new Church of England in a more Protestant direction and penalising Catholics. Under their influence, Edward became a little bigot. His brief reign was marked by riot, rebellion, and war with Scotland. 

Edward VI died at age 15, probably of tuberculosis. According to Henry's will, his eldest daughter Mary was next in line. Unlike Edward, Mary was raised a devout Catholic. 

The Protestant nobles who had dominated the country under Edward knew that Mary would remove them, or worse. They ignored Henry VIII's final will and proclaimed Lady Jane Grey as Queen. She was a teenager they believed they could manipulate. [Image: Lady Jane Grey, Streatham Portrait]

Lady Jane was descended from Henry VII, and thus of royal lineage, but many influential people believed Mary was the rightful heir. Within little over a week, Lady Jane's support evaporated, and Mary's forces prevailed. 

Lady Jane was never crowned, so one can debate whether she was ever monarch. But neither was Edward V, who is counted as a king. A tough call. It was a tough end for Jane as well. The "Nine Days Queen" was beheaded at the Tower of London, along with her husband and father-in-law.

Mary Tudor has gone down in history as "Bloody Mary." That's awful, but how many monarchs have a popular cocktail named after them? Even "Ivan the Terrible" has only got a vodka. 

[Image: Mary I]

Mary earned her nasty epithet because of her violent campaign to restore Catholicism in England. During her brief reign (1553-1558) her government executed hundreds of Protestants, mostly by burning at the stake. [Image: Protestants being burned at Smithfield Market in London, from an 18th century edition of Foxe's Book of Martyrs]

The persecutions did not achieve their result, perhaps because Mary died too soon. Their main result was to make her and her Church infamous in England for centuries. 

Something else hurt her popularity. She married a foreign monarch, the most powerful in Europe at the time, Philip II of Spain. We all know the English love to hate foreigners. He came to England, married Mary, gamely tried to impregnate her, and left for home soon after. I think he knew the game was up. He later sent the Spanish Armada in revenge.

Mary believed she had gotten pregnant. It turned out to be a false pregnancy. She died in 1558 with her two great tasks unfinished. Catholicism was not firmly restored, and there was no Catholic heir. 

With Mary gone, one child of Henry VIII remained: Elizabeth, daughter of Anne Boleyn. Elizabeth I lasted 45 years and brought some needed stability. [Image: Elizabeth I, the Armada Portrait]

The "Virgin Queen" was the last of her line. Whether she really died a virgin or not, the fact that Elizabeth never married meant the end of the Tudor dynasty. 

Her options for marriage were certainly unappealing: an English nobleman or a foreign prince, most likely a Catholic. Neither was likely to be a popular choice, and any man she chose, she knew, would try to rule her and the country. 

Elizabeth was an effective monarch for her time but it wasn't an especially pleasant time. Many historians have proclaimed the "Elizabethan Age" as a Golden Age for England. That may have been true for some people, but it was a tough world for most of them. Savage laws against beggars and vagrants were the main means of dealing with the rising numbers of poor.  

England famously defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588. It was a critical victory, but the Spanish plan had serious flaws from the start. It is hard to see how it could have succeeded. 

Under Elizabeth, England became safe for Protestantism of a sort. Her religious settlement, her Church of England, compromised between Catholic and Protestant doctrine. But crucially, it remained independent of Rome with the monarch as its titular head. 

Radical Protestants disliked the Elizabeth's Anglican Church as too "Romish" and pushed to "purify" it. Devout Catholics tried to destroy it. Yet enough people supported it to ensure its survival to this day. 

Elizabeth is usually compared favorably to her sister Mary and portrayed as more tolerant and moderate. Up to a point, the distinction is valid, but only up to a point. Elizabeth did not send hundreds to the stake, but she did have many a Catholic priest hanged.

Historians have praised Elizabeth for creating a church that sought compromise between Catholic and Protestant doctrines and her distaste for religious persecution. "I would not make windows into men's souls," she is alleged to have said when becoming Queen. 

By this, she meant that as long as people conformed to her version of the church outwardly, she did not care what they thought. The truth is, she had to care. Thought, when sincere, can lead to action. 

Violence and rebellion connected to religious causes was never far below the surface in Elizabethan England. The pope declared Elizabeth a heretic who could be deposed or killed and Catholic plots against her were common. 

One of those famously involved was her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots. In 1567, Protestant nobles deposed Catholic Mary from the Scottish throne. She fled to England and put herself under Elizabeth's protection. [Image: Mary, Queen of Scots]

Mary was the granddaughter of a sister of Henry VIII. As such, she was Elizabeth's closest heir. She became a focus of Catholic plots to replace Elizabeth with her after the pope declared Elizabeth a heretic. 

Elizabeth kept Mary in comfortable captivity for 19 years before bowing to the demands of her male advisors and ordering her cousin's execution. (Contrary to certain "historical" films, the pair never met face to face). 

Catholic priests in England, especially Jesuits, sometimes met a similar fate. They were declared agents of foreign powers aiming at Elizabeth's assassination, and therefore guilty of treason. Catholics in Ireland also suffered for their faith and opposition to English rule. The subjugation of the Emerald Isle was completed toward the end of her reign. 

Elizabeth died soon after, in 1603. She never publicly named her successor. Her chief minister, Robert Cecil, arranged the business. The son of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, James VI of Scotland, became King James I of England, Wales, and Ireland, the first monarch to rule all of the British Isles. 

England was wealthier and more populous than Scotland and the weather was a little better. James viewed England as the Land of Milk and Honey. He and his dynasty, the Stuart monarchs, would discover another reality.

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British Monarchs who Ended Badly: Part 5, Henry VIII and His Six Queens

The Tudor Dynasty, which ruled England and Wales from 1485 to 1603, is the most written about of any royal house in British history.  The Tudors might well be one of the most important job creators of the past few centuries. Tudor and Co. have inspired innumerable biographies, novels, plays, and films, not all of them bad. 

I cannot possibly provide enough detail here to satisfy all the curious. Therefore, I will keep it fairly brief and barebones. I regret that means leaving out many of the salacious bits.

The Tudor Period was ushered in by Henry Tudor, who defeated Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. The half-Welsh Henry VII ruled until his death in 1509, probably of tuberculosis. 

He was a rather boring king, but that was probably not a bad thing after decades of disorder. He was a shrewd and apparently an amiable fellow. His great achievement was to bring relative stability and increase the power of the monarchy after the chaos of the Wars of the Roses. [Image: Henry VII, 1505]

Henry VII was a notorious tightwad. After the Italian navigator John Cabot returned from a voyage of discovery to North America in 1497, the king presented him a reward of £10. 

To be sure, £10 was worth a lot more than now, especially since Liz Truss became Prime Minister. Henry could be generous with his family, but no one would accuse him of being extravagant. He was, however, adept at extracting money from his subjects. In his portrait above, you can see he has his eyes on your moneybags. 

Perhaps Henry VII can be forgiven for his miserliness. The government had become cash poor during the previous period of anarchy. Henry VII managed to restore its finances. Just in time. His son Henry VIII was a lavish spender. One of his first acts was to execute his father's hated chief tax collectors, Empson and Dudley.

 [Image: Henry VIII in the 1530s]

Henry VIII became king by accident. His older brother Arthur was heir. As part of a treaty with Spain, his father had married Arthur at 14 off to a Spanish princess, Catharine of Aragon, in 1501. But Arthur died the next year, probably of the mysterious "sweating sickness" that was epidemic at the time. [Image: Catherine of Aragon]

Hoping to keep the marriage alliance going, Henry VII proposed marrying Catherine to his second son, the future Henry VIII. Because the Bible contained conflicting passages on whether a man could marry his brother's widow, Henry VII applied for and got a papal dispensation allowing the match. 

Other complications delayed the match, one of which was young Henry's opposition. But after he became king in 1509, he married Catherine. He seems to have been happy enough with her at first. But he grew less happy as the years passed, and she did not produce a male heir. They had only one child, Mary. 

Henry believed that only a male would be able to preserve his new dynasty. In the late 1520s, he decided God was punishing him for marrying Catherine -- that the marriage was not valid according to the Bible. Implied in this was the idea that the pope had made a mistake in granting a dispensation and the marriage should be annulled. 

This was not a popular idea in Rome, nor with Catherine's powerful nephew, the Hapsburg Emperor Charles V, who pushed the pope to deny Henry's appeal. The presence of his armies in Italy gave his views considerable force.

Henry was not a Protestant nor was he anti-Catholic in doctrine. A few years before, he had written a pamphlet denouncing Martin Luther's attacks on the Roman Church. For this work, the pope of the time awarded Henry the title of "Defender of the Faith," which British monarchs still flaunt. 

But Henry was desperate to rid himself of Catherine. She was now in her 40s and he believed she could never give him the male heir he so desired. He had also begun a relationship with the woman he thought could do the job: Anne Boleyn. Her ambitious family threw her at him. Lust and political need did the rest. The pair met and wooed at Carew Manor in Beddington, Surrey, just a short walk from my current residence. 

[Image: Anne Boleyn]

Things got messy. Anne got pregnant. The pope refused to grant the annulment. Henry responded by declaring that the pope had no authority in England. 

In effect, the Church in England became the Church of England, the Anglican Church. The King replaced the pope as its Supreme Head. All of this was done through legal means, by Acts of Parliament. 

Desperate for cash by now, Henry followed the break from Rome by seizing a money pit. He dissolved the monasteries and confiscated their land and wealth, much of which he sold to eager buyers. The idea probably came from Thomas Cromwell, who had become Henry's right-hand man. Cromwell superintended the dissolution. [Image: Thomas Cromwell]

Some of the clergy, and some among the laity opposed Henry VIII's break with Rome. Many of them paid with their lives, notably Sir Thomas More, who had been Lord Chancellor for a season. 

As everybody knows, Henry had his new church grant his annulment. He married Anne. She gave him a child, but alas it was a girl, Elizabeth. She had several miscarriages. The royal couple's relationship soured. 

Henry, looking ahead to wife number three, accused Anne of treason, incest, and adultery. The court meekly complied and she was beheaded a few days later. The ever magnanimous king paid for an expert French executioner to perform the job with a sword. No ordinary axeman for an English queen. 

Henry had already selected wife number three, Jane Seymour. Jane gave Henry his desired male heir, Prince Edward. He took precedence over Mary and Elizabeth. Jane's tenure as Mrs. Henry Tudor was tragically short. She died shortly after the birth of an infection. But at least she wasn't beheaded. [Image: Jane Seymour]

To celebrate the birth of his long-desired son, Henry began to build a new magnificent palace, Nonsuch, near Cheam in Surrey. It was completed in 1538. [Image: A model of Nonsuch. The palace was demolished in the 1680s]

Henry was now in the market for wife number four. Thomas Cromwell, who had become the king's chief minister had an idea. He arranged a marriage alliance with the daughter of a German prince, Anne of Cleves. 

Henry liked her portrait, but not the real Anne. The pair did not hit it off, and he quickly arranged to have the marriage annulled. Probably because she (wisely) did not oppose him, Henry treated Anne generously and she lived in England until her death in 1557, arguably the happiest of Henry's six wives. [Image: Anne of Cleves]

Thomas Cromwell did not fare so well. Henry had him beheaded for treason and corruption. The real reasons for his fall are unclear, but may have been related to the Cleves match and alliance. Being close to an increasingly paranoid Henry was a lot like being close to Joseph Stalin. A whiff of suspicion could be enough to prove one's undoing. 

With his exquisite sense of timing, Henry married his next wife, Catherine Howard the day Cromwell was beheaded. Wife number five did not last long either. She ended up like Anne Boleyn, with her head on the block, after Henry accused her of adultery. Two of her accused lovers enjoyed the same fate. [Image: Portrait of a Young Lady believed to be Catherine Howard]

Wife number six, Catherine Parr, was more fortunate, if you believe that being married to a volatile, fat old man with ulcerous, boil covered legs is a pleasant fate. She was somehow able to keep the aging Henry content. She avoided an annulment and kept her head, which is quite a feat considering the fate of his other wives. 

Henry VIII died in 1547, aged 55. In his final years his waistline ballooned to 54 inches (140 cm). He had "mobility issues" and had to be moved about with the use of mechanical contraptions. Most historians reject the old theory that he died of syphilis. The cause of his demise is still debated. 

Paradoxically, the reign of Henry VIII was probably a fairly good one for many of his ordinary subjects. He generally kept the country out of war and maintained internal peace. He was intelligent, talented, handsome, and well educated. From the 1530s on, however, he was sometimes mad, bad, and dangerous to know.

On his death, the throne passed to his ten-year-old son, Edward VI, beginning another period of turmoil.  

If you have trouble remembering the fate of Henry's wives, this little mnemonic device helps: 

"Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived."

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British Monarchs who Ended Badly, Part 4: The Wars of the Roses

Poor Henry VI. He was not cut out for his job. As you will recall from Part 3, he became King of England in 1422 as an infant, the third Lancastrian king and the youngest person ever to inherit the Crown. [Image: Henry VI]

He was also proclaimed King of France and crowned in 1431, but never ruled that country. One could argue he never really ruled England either. Henry VI had the dubious distinction of being King of England twice, sandwiched around Edward IV, who also held the job twice. It is not even certain he knew he was king.

While Henry was growing up in age, a regency council ruled in his name. In 1437, he assumed control of the government. He had become older. He had not grown up. He may have made a good monk, but not a good monarch for a country overrun by noble thugs. 

During the wars with France, the great lords had become recruiters for the army. They hired "retainers" to fight for pay. The retainers became private armies of the powerful nobles. Historians labeled the system "bastard feudalism."

By 1453, the Hundred Years War ended in English defeat. War abroad soon gave way to war at home, as two families descended from Edward III competed for the throne, the House of Lancaster and the House of York. The struggle would last more than thirty years. 

Historians labeled the conflict The Wars of the Roses. We can thank Shakespeare for that. In Henry VI, Part I, Shakespeare created a fictional scene in which supporters of the rival factions pick either red or white roses as their symbol: the red rose of Lancaster, and the white rose of York. 

[Image: Plucking the Red and White Roses in the Old Temple Gardens, print of fresco in the Palace of Westminster, by Henry Payne, 1910]

Nobody at the time thought they were fighting about roses. The white rose was indeed the symbol of the House of York. The red rose only became associated with the House of Lancaster after the wars.   

"Wars" is also something of a misnomer. Actual fighting was sporadic and punctuated by years of uneasy peace. Most of the battles were small scale affairs, though bloody. They were fought mainly by private armies of retainers in the pay of wealthy nobles, a bit like Mafia gangs.

Teaching the Wars of the Roses was always a struggle for me. To try and explain the complex relationships among the participants and the coming and going of kings is daunting. Everyone seems to be named Henry, Edward, or Richard. They are all descended from Edward III, who had too many children. 

You may recall that in 1399 Henry IV had deposed his cousin Richard II and claimed the throne. His claim was never fully accepted by some nobles. They thought Edmund Mortimer, 5th Earl of March, was the rightful heir. 

Henry IV crushed uprisings in Mortimer's favor. Mortimer, a child at the time, never pursued his claim himself, and Henry treated him well. In fact, Mortimer became a trusted counsellor to the Lancastrian kings before his death in 1425. 

Things changed when the French war ended in defeat and domestic chaos. In the 1450s Richard Duke of York revived the Mortimer claim. Mortimer had no children, but York was his nephew and heir. 

Richard was emboldened by Henry VI's lack of kingly skills. In contrast to his father Henry V, he was not a bold warrior. He was timid, shy, and pious. He disliked war and violence. He was also prone to periodic mental breakdown. 

By the early 1450s, England was descending into anarchy. Bands of armed retainers, returned from plundering France, began to terrorize England. Richard of York presented himself as the man who could restore order. He sought to gain control over the government, which meant Henry VI. Henry's French queen, Margaret of Anjou, who wore the trousers, opposed Richard's plan. In 1455, civil war broke out. 

A victorious Richard captured Henry. He got Parliament to name him Lord Protector and Henry's successor. Margaret refused to accept the deal, which disinherited her son. She raised a Lancastrian army, which defeated and killed Richard in battle. 

The victory did not eliminate the Yorkist threat. Richard's eldest son Edward took up his claim. In 1461 he won a decisive victory over Lancastrian forces at the Battle of Towton. It was a truly big battle. More than 50,000 soldiers were engaged, and it was fought in a blinding snowstorm. Henry VI fled the field and the country. [Image; Edward IV]

Edward seized the vacant throne. As Edward IV, he ruled mostly in peace for nine years. But in 1469 his most powerful ally, Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, turned against Edward. Warwick had provided key support to Edward and before that, to Edward's father. 

"The Kingmaker," as Warwick became known, allied with Margaret of Anjou, wife of Henry VI. They assembled an army in France and invaded England in 1471. Edward, caught by surprise, fled to France. Warwick made the feeble Henry VI king once again. But not for long. 

Edward raised an army in France and returned. Two Yorkist victories left Warwick and Henry VI's only son dead. Edward imprisoned Henry, who died soon after, possibly murdered. 

In 1478, Edward accused his brother George, Duke of Clarence, of treason, with good reason. He banished Clarence to the Tower of London, where he was privately executed. A rumor spread that he was drowned at his own choice in a butt of malmsey wine, a rich and sweet madeira. True or not, at least it helped me learn what malmsey is.

Edward ruled England for another twelve years in relative peace, which the country sorely needed. When he died in 1483, it seemed that the wars were finally over, and a peaceful succession would follow. 

His thirteen-year-old son was named king as Edward V. At first, the transference of power seemed likely to go smoothly. That changed when Edward's other brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, raised an objection. 

Richard had been staunchly loyal to his older brother, and Edward named him as Lord Protector of his children in the event of his death. Richard swiftly seized control of the young king and his younger brother from their mother's family. He had them both placed in the Tower of London. 

Richard followed with astonishing news. He claimed that the sons of Edward IV were bastards; that his brother's marriage to their mother, Elizabeth Woodville, was invalid. I'll skip the technicalities. Parliament, perhaps overawed by Richard's power, declared the young princes illegitimate and Richard rightful king. [Image: Richard III, earliest surviving portrait, 1520]

In the months following Richard III's seizure of power, the princes were seen less and less, and finally not at all. Did Richard have them murdered? Or did someone else arrange the deed to smear Richard? 

Some defenders of Richard argue that one of Richard's allies, the Duke of Buckingham, turned against him and arranged the murders to blacken his character. Others claim that the man who replaced Richard as king, Henry Tudor, was the true culprit.  

The evidence is inconclusive. In some people's eyes Richard III is the wickedest king in English history. To others, he is an innocent victim framed by Tudor historians, who influenced Shakespeare's portrayal of Richard in Richard III. The contrast in views could hardly be greater. 

Shakespeare's Richard is a monster, a hunchback who thrives on killing those blocking his path to power. The playwright even accuses two-year-old Richard of murder, and of ruthlessly killing someone at a battle at which he wasn't even present. 

Shakespeare can't be entirely faulted. He was relying on chroniclers favorable to the Tudors. They created the monster, as part of a propaganda campaign designed to strengthen the claim of the Tudors to the throne. "Look what we saved you from" was the message.

Richard's defenders have rejected the Tudor portrait, and in doing so, have unduly whitewashed him. He could be as ruthless as his enemies and rivals. Whether or not he had the princes killed, he certainly was responsible for eliminating members of the Woodville family and some of their supporters. Mafioso would understand.     

In 1485, Henry Tudor, half Welsh and a supporter of the Lancastrians, raised an army and challenged Richard. They met on Bosworth Field, near Leicester. One of Richard's allies changed sides in the middle of the battle, throwing victory to Henry. 

According to Shakespeare, Richard was killed after being unhorsed, crying, "A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!" Well, by now you should have learned to take Shakespeare's history with a grain of salt. 

After the battle, Richard was hastily buried in a monastic church in nearby Leicester. For centuries, he remained there, while debate raged over whether or not Shakespeare was correct to describe him as a hunchbacked monster. 

The church and its cloisters were demolished during Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s. In the 20th century, the former monastic site became a car park. ("Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got till it's gone." Not to say it was paradise.

In 2012, archeologists who had pinpointed the location of the demolished monastery, found the remains of a body in the car park. They announced that they believed it was that of Richard III. 

The skeleton displayed numerous wounds. It also showed signs of scoliosis, a spinal deformity which may have given rise to stories that Richard was hunchbacked. Perhaps Shakespeare had been sort of right about that, after all. DNA analysis confirmed that the remains were Richard's.

The victor of Bosworth Field, Henry Tudor, wasted no time after the battle. He went straight to London and claimed the throne. He was descended from John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, through his mother. Others had a better hereditary claim than Henry. But that didn't stop him. He would take care of that problem later. 

[Image; Henry VII, first Tudor monarch] 

To strengthen his position, Henry arranged a hasty marriage to Edward IV's eldest daughter, symbolically uniting the houses of Lancaster and York. He also had a new rose commissioned, the red and white Tudor Rose, a symbolic uniting. In the portrait above, he is holding the rose in his right hand.

Henry VII had to fight one more battle, in 1487, against the army of an imposter claiming to be Edward V. After eliminating that threat, Henry secured his dynasty. His children and grandchildren would rule England until 1603. To judge by the number of books and films about the Tudors, one might be pardoned for thinking they were the only monarchs in English history, before Elizabeth II or this new guy.       

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