Henry VIII
Henricus VIII
King of England · King of Ireland · Supreme Head of the Church of England · Defender of the Faith
1491 – 1547
- Born
- 1491
- Died
- 1547
- Reign
- 1509 – 1547
- House
- Tudor
Biography
Henry VIII ruled England from 1509 to 1547, a reign that transformed the country's religious and political order. Born at Greenwich in 1491, he was the second son of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York and became heir to the throne in 1502 on the death of his elder brother Arthur, Prince of Wales. Shortly after his accession in April 1509 he married Arthur's widow, Catherine of Aragon, daughter of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile, renewing the Anglo-Spanish alliance arranged by his father.
The early decades of the reign were dominated by war and diplomacy in France, managed largely by Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, and by spectacles such as the Field of Cloth of Gold meeting with Francis I in 1520. Catherine bore six children, but only one, Mary, survived infancy. Henry's wish for a male heir, and his desire to marry Anne Boleyn, led him from 1527 to seek an annulment of his marriage. When the papacy refused, Parliament enacted legislation severing the English church from Rome, culminating in the Act of Supremacy of 1534, which declared the king supreme head of the Church of England.
Henry married six times. Anne Boleyn, mother of the future Elizabeth I, was executed in 1536; Jane Seymour died in 1537 after giving birth to his only legitimate son, Edward. A fourth marriage, to Anne of Cleves, was arranged in 1540 to ally England with the German duchy of Jülich-Cleves-Berg, but was annulled within months. Catherine Howard was executed for adultery in 1542, and Catherine Parr survived him. The 1530s and 1540s also saw the dissolution of the monasteries, the executions of Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell, the legal union of England and Wales, and the suppression of the northern rising known as the Pilgrimage of Grace.
In his final years Henry resumed war with France and Scotland, the latter campaign linked to his failed attempt to secure a marriage between Prince Edward and the infant Mary, Queen of Scots. The Third Succession Act of 1544 restored his daughters Mary and Elizabeth to the line of succession after Edward. Henry died at Whitehall on 28 January 1547 and was buried at Windsor beside Jane Seymour. His nine-year-old son succeeded him as Edward VI.
Updated June 2026 · How we research
Events
In 1513 Henry VIII of England joined the Holy League against France and crossed the Channel to campaign in Picardy. James IV of Scotland, bound to France by the renewed Auld Alliance and to England by the 1502 Treaty of Perpetual Peace and his marriage to Henry's sister Margaret Tudor, honored the French connection. In August he led the largest army a Scottish king had ever taken across the border, equipped with modern artillery and continental pike tactics, and took the Norham and Ford castles in Northumberland. The English response was commanded by Thomas Howard, earl of Surrey, the veteran lieutenant left to guard the north. By a flanking march Surrey placed his army between the Scots and Scotland, and on 9 September 1513 the battle was fought near the village of Branxton. The Scottish pike columns advanced downhill across ground broken by a concealed marsh; their formations lost cohesion, and in the close fighting English bills outmatched the long pikes. James fought on foot in the leading division and was killed within reach of Surrey's standard. With him died a remarkable proportion of the Scottish leadership: contemporary accounts count an archbishop, bishops and abbots, around a dozen earls, and many lords and lairds, along with thousands of common soldiers. It remains the heaviest defeat in Scottish military history. The crown passed to James V, seventeen months old. Margaret Tudor, the widowed queen, became regent under the terms of her husband's will, the first of several unstable regencies of a long minority; she lost the office on her remarriage in 1514, and Scottish politics for the next generation turned on the contest between pro-French and pro-English factions. Henry VIII, for whom Flodden was won in absentia, gained security on his northern border but pressed no conquest of Scotland.
Also there: James IV of Scotland, Margaret Tudor
The Act of Supremacy, passed by Parliament in November 1534, declared Henry VIII supreme head of the Church of England and severed jurisdictional ties with Rome. The break originated in Henry's refusal to accept Pope Clement VII's denial of his annulment from Catherine of Aragon and his determination to marry Anne Boleyn; it produced the dissolution of the English monasteries, the seizure of perhaps a fifth of the kingdom's wealth, and the foundation of the Anglican church.
Also there: Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn
Connections across houses
Where Henry VIII's family tree leaves the Tudor and enters other ruling houses.
Recommended Reading
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