Katherine of Aragon(1485 - 1536): Demoted for Bearing No Son
Henry took the throne in 1509, at age 17. Six weeks later, he married Catherine of Aragon, daughter of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain and the widow of his elder brother, Arthur. From the moment young Henry took his nuptials, he obsessed over continuing the Tudor line. Of multiple pregnancies and several births, the only child to survive was Henry and Catherine’s daughter, Mary, born in February 1516.
Catherine remained at Henry’s side for 23 years and is even thought to be the only woman the king ever truly loved. “Henry viewed her as a model wife in every respect bar one… her failure to give him a son,” says Tudor historian Tracy Borman. Frustrated at the lack of a male heir, Henry’s eyes wandered.
He had a brief extra-marital affair with Elizabeth “Bessie” Blount, one of Catherine’s ladies-in-waiting. In 1519, Bessie was taken in secret to the Essex countryside where she gave birth to Henry Fitzroy, Henry’s only acknowledged illegitimate child.
By the 1520s, Henry had developed a fondness for Anne Boleyn, another lady-in-waiting to the queen, and eventually sought the Pope’s approval for an annulment. “He argued that his marriage to Catherine was invalid because her marriage to his brother Arthur had been consummated, but she always contested this,” Borman explains. When the Pope refused Henry’s request, the king divorced Catherine against the will of the Roman Catholic Church and established the Church of England—ushering in the Reformation.
Catherine died at Kimbolton Castle, as a princess, not a queen, on January 7, 1536.
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