HENRY VIII.—Continued.
How King Henry married six times; and how he got rid of his wives
when he was tired of them.
Henry the Eighth’s first wife was Catherine of Arragon. She was a
princess from Spain, who came to England to be married to Prince
Arthur, King Henry’s brother. But as you read in the chapter before
the last, Prince Arthur died when he was very young; and Catherine
was married to Henry.
They had only one daughter, the Princess Mary, who came to be Queen
of England, as you will read. Now, though Henry was very fond of
his wife for a great many years, he grew tired of her at last, and
wished very much to marry a beautiful young lady who lived with Queen
Catherine.
[Illustration: Wolsey entering Leicester Abbey.]
He determined to get some of those people who are always willing to
do as their king pleases, instead of being honest and doing only what
is right, to find out some excuses for sending away good Queen
Catherine, for indeed she was very good, and loved the king very
dearly. So at last they found some, which you could not understand
if I told you; and they divorced Queen Catherine, that is, they sent
her away from the king, and said he might marry anybody else that he
pleased.
The good queen lived about three years afterwards, sometimes at
Ampthill, sometimes at other country places, and died at Kimbolton.
The second wife of Henry was the beautiful young lady, Anne Boleyn,
whose daughter, Elizabeth, became Queen of England after her sister
Mary. But now King Henry, who had found out that he could make
excuses for sending away one wife, began to wish for another change.
I told you Anne Boleyn was young and beautiful. She was also clever
and pleasant and I believe really good. But the king and some of his
wicked friends pretended that she had done several bad things; and,
as Henry had become very cruel as well as changeable, he ordered poor
Anne’s head to be cut off.
On the day she was to suffer death she sent to beg the king to be
kind to her little daughter Elizabeth. She said to the last moment
that she was innocent; she prayed God to bless the king and the
people, and then she knelt down, and her head was cut off.
I ought to have told you, that, before she was brought out of her
room to be beheaded, she said to the gentleman who went to call her,
“I hear the executioner is very skilful; my neck is very small;” and
she put her hands round it and smiled, and made ready to die.
The cruel king married another very pretty young woman the very
next day. Her name was Jane Seymour, and she had a son, who was
afterwards King Edward the Sixth. She died twelve days after the
little prince was born, or perhaps Henry might have used her as ill
as he did poor Anne Boleyn.
The king’s fourth wife was found for him by his minister, Thomas
Cromwell. She was the Princess Anne of Cleves, a German lady. But
Henry took a dislike to her looks, so he put her away as he did Queen
Catherine, and gave her a house to live in, and a good deal of money
to spend, and thought no more about her.
Next he married the Lady Catherine Howard; but a very few months
afterwards he accused her of some bad actions; and he had her
beheaded. So he had put away two of his wives, he had cut off the
heads of two others, and only one had died a natural death.
Yet he found a lady, named Catherine Parr, who was a widow; and she
married him very willingly, for she was ready to run the risk for the
sake of being a queen. She was very clever, and contrived to keep the
passionate and cruel king in good humour till he died, when I dare
say she was not sorry to find herself alive and safe, for he had once
intended to put her to death like Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard.
Now we will end this chapter about Henry’s wives. You will find that
as he grew old he grew more and more passionate and cruel; and in
what I have to tell you about some other parts of his reign, in the
next chapter, you will see that he grew wicked in almost everything.