How many henry viii children

During her reign she earned the moniker Bloody Mary, after having Lady Jane Grey beheaded and burning at the stake nearly Protestants who did not share her Catholic faith, which she fought to bring back in England.

She ruled until her death in — a much longer reign than either of her half siblings, but never married and had no children.

During her rule, she oversaw the defeat of the Spanish Armada in and saw the return of Protestantism in England. During his reign, the country went through a period of economic problems and social unrest, but as Edward VI was still a child, much of the governance was carried out by a regency council.

When Edward became ill, he hatched a plan for his cousin Lady Jane Grey to reign after him rather than his half-sisters. As well as this, Henry VIII is thought to have fathered several children with a number of mistresses. Fitzroy was born in , and was made the first Duke of Richmond and Somerset, but he died when he just 17 after becoming ill. As a young man and monarch, second in the Tudor Dynasty, Henry VIII exuded a charismatic athleticism and diverse appetite for art, music and culture.

He was witty and highly educated, taught by private tutors for his entire upbringing. He loved music and wrote some as well. A lover of gambling and jousting, he hosted countless tournaments and banquets. His father always envisioned Arthur as king and Henry as a high-ranking church official—the appropriate role at that time for his secondary birth order.

As fate would have it, Henry instead inherited an entire peaceful nation after his father ended the Wars of the Roses. After less than four months of marriage, Arthur died at the age of 15, leaving his year-old brother, Henry, the next in line to the throne.

Henry was good-natured, but his court soon learned to bow to his every wish. Two days after his coronation, he arrested two of his father's ministers and promptly executed them. He began his rule seeking advisers on most matters and would end it with absolute control. Wolsey enjoyed a lavish existence under Henry, but when Wolsey failed to deliver Henry's quick annulment from Catherine, the cardinal quickly fell out of favor.

After 16 years of power, Wolsey was arrested and falsely charged with treason. He subsequently died in custody. Henry's actions upon Wolsey gave a strong signal to the pope that he would not honor the wishes of even the highest clergy and would instead exercise full power in every realm of his court. After Henry declared his supremacy, the Christian church separated, forming the Church of England. Henry instituted several statutes that outlined the relationship between the king and the pope and the structure of the Church of England: the Act of Appeals, the Acts of Succession and the first Act of Supremacy, declaring the king was "the only Supreme Head in Earth of the Church of England.

These macro reforms trickled down to minute details of worship. Henry ordered the clergy to preach against superstitious images, relics, miracles and pilgrimages, and to remove almost all candles from religious settings. His catechism, called the King's Primer , left out the saints. Fully separated now from the pope, the Church of England was under England's rule, not Rome's.

From to , a great northern uprising known as the Pilgrimage of Grace took hold, during which 30, people rebelled against the king's changes. It was the only major threat to Henry's authority as monarch. The rebellion's leader, Robert Aske, and others were executed. The pope conceded, but the official marriage of Henry and Catherine was postponed until the death of Henry VII in His philandering ways were tame by the standards of his contemporaries, but they nonetheless resulted in his first divorce in Because Catherine was now 42 and unable to conceive another child, Henry set on a mission to obtain a male heir by configuring a way to officially abandon his marriage with Catherine.

The Book of Leviticus stated that a man who takes his brother's wife shall remain childless. Though Catherine had borne him a child, that child was a girl, which, in Henry's logic, did not count. He petitioned the pope for an annulment but was refused due to pressure from Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, Catherine's nephew.

The debate, during which Catherine fought mightily to maintain both her own and her daughter's titles, lasted for six years. The closest he came to it, it was shortly before his death when Elizabeth I was declared illegitimate, in June However, due to none of these ever being acknowledged by Henry VIII, none had any claim to the throne and have never been confirmed as his children.

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