Episode 109 looked at the precedence for Henry VIII’s divorce request from Katherine of Aragon. There’s a narrative that Henry was making a huge request, that he essentially invented divorce. But it was actually a very common event, and even Henry’s own sister got divorced. So in this episode, I go back in time and look at some of the major divorces in European history, from Eleanor of Aquitaine (who became the wife of Henry II and mother to Richard the Lionheart) to the divorce of Louis XII in France. We also look at a situation that was very similar to Henry and Katherine where a Danish princess was kept in prison while her husband remarried, despite the Pope telling him not to.
What made Henry’s divorce request unique was the degree to which it was contested, and that it never actually came through.
Sources:
The Canon Law of Henry VIII’s Divorce Case
The Great Matter of Henry VIII
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Episode Transcript:
Hello, and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast. I’m your host, Heather Teysko. I’m a storyteller who makes history accessible because I believe it’s a pathway to understanding who we are, our place in the universe, and having a deeper connection to our own humanity.
This is Episode 109. Can you believe that? And I know I haven’t been here in a while because I kind of took August to get ready for the Tudor Summit. If you haven’t participated in the Tudor Summit yet, it’s so much fun! It’s basically a two-day event that happens live every six months. We just had it September 2nd and 3rd. And we get together – leading podcasters, historians, authors, bloggers, all kinds of cool people to give talks on their particular subject. So for this past one, we had Claire Ridgeway talking about the fall of Katherine Howard, we had Janet Wertman talking about Edward Seymour, we had James Peacock, the founder of the Anne Boleyn Society talking about Anne Boleyn’s history, and Lauren Johnson talks about the year 1509, which was when Henry VIII came to power. So it’s super cool. We have 10 people and you can still get the talks, you won’t be participating live, but you can still get the talks at Tudorsummit.com. So that’s how I spent August, was getting ready for that.
And now I’m back with you. And this week, we’re going to talk about something that I’ve always been really interested in, which was – was there a precedent for Henry the VIII’s divorce with Catherine of Aragon? Because you often hear like Henry VIII invented divorce or Henry VIII is the one who came up with this idea of leaving his wife and taking a newer model and things like that, and he really wasn’t. So I wanted to research some of the more famous divorces in English history and European history where monarchs were divorcing and nobility were divorcing. So we’re going to take a look at some of those.
But before we do that, I want to tell you one thing, just one thing, one thing only. And that is TudorRadionetwork.com, the Tudor Radio Network. You guys I had a brainwave a couple of months ago. It was one of those hectic mornings where I was trying to get Hannah ready for school. And I was putzing around with an app on my phone trying to find something to listen to. Because you know, I have this vision of like listening to stuff while I’m getting her ready for school. And I was like, it was overwhelming. The choice. You know, sometimes all this on-demand streaming is just so overwhelming. And I just wanted to press a button and have something that I knew I would love, right? And so the idea came to me, why don’t I make that? And so I am creating and launching a radio station, an online radio station, and it’s launching in December. But if you come on board and support my Indiegogo campaign, which is helping with the fundraising to get started, you’ll get early access and there’s a lot of other really cool perks. So it’s TudorRadioNetwork.com, sends you to the Indiegogo campaign where you can learn a whole lot more about it. I’ve already got some other great podcasters involved, people creating original content. It’s going to be 24 hours a day of music and talk, original talk shows as well, as in podcasts from other podcasters in this world. So it’s basically all Tudor all the time. And I would love it, love it, love it, if you would check it out and check out the vision. So TudorRadioNetwork.com that forwards to the Indiegogo campaign. And from there, there are other links that you can learn more about this project. So I’m super, super excited. I hope you check it out. I hope that it is interesting to you. It’s going to be available worldwide right now, just through TuneIn and through websites and stuff like that, but we’re going to be developing an app too. So it’s really exciting. And that’s the only thing – TudorRadioNetwork.com.
Alright, so this week I am going to talk about the big “A” – annulment. Much is made of Henry VIII’s annulment with his marriage with Catherine of Aragon. The annulment heard around the world, right? We have this narrative that it was this huge deal, that divorcing a wife of a king was unheard of. That the pope wouldn’t grant an annulment because it just wasn’t done. This was the first time a king divorced a queen. But what if it’s not? What if Henry was actually asking for something incredibly common? Would that change your opinion of him? What if the thing that made this a big deal wasn’t actually that it was an unusual request? What if the thing that made this annulment, the annulment heard around the world, was that it was the way it was fought against? What if annulments were actually pretty common in European courts and Henry wasn’t asking for anything that’s out of left field? Instead, what if what was actually different was the fact that the annulment wasn’t granted?
And of course, we understand why it wasn’t granted because the Pope was in the control of Catherine of Aragon’s nephew – Charles V, but I would postulate or I am postulating that it wasn’t Henry’s request that was all that unusual. It was the fact that it wasn’t given that was unusual. So this week we’re gonna look at other European annulments throughout history and show that Henry was actually asking for something that was pretty routine, new big deal. At least it shouldn’t have been.
Let’s go back all the way to the 12th century, the famous Eleanor of Aquitaine, wife of Henry II, mother to Richard the Lionheart and King John. Did you know that she’d actually been married before to Louis VII of France? She was actually the original petitioner for the annulment. She had participated in the Second Crusade with her husband Louis soon after she asked for an annulment. She already had one daughter by him, no other children even though they had been married for over a decade. Their request was rejected by Pope Eugene III. But after she gave birth to another daughter, Louis seems to realize that he wasn’t going to have a son with her and he agreed to the annulment. The annulment was granted on grounds of consanguinity, that’s when you’re too closely related. Eleanor lost custody of her daughters but she regained her lands, her lands in Aquitaine.
Soon after, as an eligible bride with lands in Aquitaine in her own right, she married Henry II. She united his lands, Anjou, and other parts of France with hers and Aquitaine. And she also then became Queen of England when he became King of England. Henry II was the son of Matilda. If you’re familiar with this period, you will recognize the name Matilda. She was the woman who should have inherited or was set to inherit England after her father. I think she was the granddaughter of William the Conqueror or somebody is probably going to correct me if I’m incorrect about that. But she was set to inherit and she couldn’t get there in time. Her cousin Stephen got there. It started this whole period of civil war in the early 12th century, and her son was Henry and he went back and negotiated a deal where he would inherit the throne, and then Eleanor became Queen of England.
Eleanor had several sons with Henry and one wonders what Louis thought when he saw what Eleanor had become. After 15 years of marriage to him, she hadn’t had any sons by him and here then she goes off and becomes this really successful Queen of England.
A few decades later, another divorce attempt shook Christendom. Ingeborg of Denmark, she was married to Philip II of France. She became queen in 1193. She had a large dowry, and she was considered very pretty and wise at the age of just about 19. The day after the wedding though, Philip changed his mind and he decided that he didn’t actually want to be married to her. So kind of an Anne of Cleves sort of situation. He tried to send her back to Denmark, but she fled to an abbey to protest her treatment. Philip summoned an ecclesiastical court, very similar to what Henry VIII did. He presented a fake family tree showing that they were too closely related. The council agreed, the ecclesiastical court agreed, and the marriage was declared void. Ingeborg was not about to take this treatment sitting down though. Denmark sent a delegation to the Pope to protest. And Pope Celestine III saw that the family tree was fake and he declared the annulment void and prohibited Philip from marrying again. Philip ignored this, very Henry VIII-like, he kept Ingeborg in virtual prison for the next 20 years, very similar. There are so many parallels here to the treatment of Catherine of Aragon. Pope Celestine defended the queen, but there really wasn’t anything he could do. Philip asked for an annulment on the grounds of non-consummation “per maleficium,” impotence caused by sorcery, but similarly to Catherine of Aragon, Ingeborg insisted that the marriage actually had been consummated and that she was his wife and the rightful queen of France.
Philip married a woman named Agnes of Merania in June 1196. But in 1198, the new Pope Innocent III declared that this new marriage was void because he still didn’t have permission and the previous marriage was still valid. He ordered Philip to dismiss Agnes and take Ingeborg back. So see there are so many parallels here to Henry. Ingeborg had written to him, she said that she was being abused and she was isolated and she said that she was actually claiming thoughts of suicide because of the way she was being treated. Philip’s response to this was to lock Ingeborg away in a tower. He made her a prisoner. She was hungry, food was irregular and sometimes insufficient. No one was allowed to visit her except one time when two Danish chaplains were allowed to visit.
Philip meanwhile, brings Agnes back and continues to live with her producing a second child, a son. For all of these offenses, Philip was excommunicated in 1200 and the kingdom was placed under an interdict, that means that you can’t have any kinds of services or any kinds of religious events at all. So you can’t have marriages. And he can’t have baptisms for everybody in the kingdom. So it basically puts everybody’s soul in peril. So then after that, Philip said that he would obey and he later reneged on that promise and then Agnes died. In 1201, Philip asked the Pope to declare his children legitimate and the pope complied, the Pope needed his political support. Later that year, Philip is again asking for an annulment, claiming that Ingeborg had tried to bewitch him in the wedding night and thus made him unable to consummate the marriage. Again, the same kind of story he was using before he asked for a divorce on the grounds of witchcraft, and this attempt also failed.
So later on, 12 years later, Philip and Ingeborg finally reconcile when Philip wanted to push his claim to the English throne through ties he had in Denmark. This is the period where King John was leading up to, in England, the Magna Carta. There’s a lot of strife going on in England and Philip thought he could get in on that and push claims to the English throne through ties he had in Denmark. 10 years later of course that didn’t work out and 10 years later, he was dying, and he supposedly told his son Louis VIII to treat Ingeborg well, and she would be acknowledged as the legitimate queen. She spent most of the time left that she had in a priory that she founded Saint-Jean-de-l’Ile, and unlike Catherine of Aragon, she survived her husband by more than 14 years.
Back in England, Henry II’s son John also had an annulment to contend with. In 1176, Henry II second betrothed his youngest son, John Lackland, then became King john, (he was called that because as the youngest son he didn’t have much land, right? “John lacks land”) to a woman called Isabella. They were half cousins since they were both great-grandchildren of Henry I but in the marriage agreement, Henry said that he would find a good match for Isabella if the Pope refused a dispensation. So at 1189, John and Isabella are married at Wiltshire and John took her lands in Gloucester, but Baldwin, the Archbishop of Canterbury, declared the marriage void, because of consanguinity, how closely they were related, and he put their lands under an interdict, that’s again, no religious services at all. Pope Clement III lifted the interdict and granted a dispensation to marry but he did forbid them from having marital relations, so I’m not sure what kind of marriage he expected them to have. Once John became king in 1199, he got an annulment of the marriage on the grounds of consanguinity, but John kept Isabella’s land in Gloucester and Isabella contested the annulment.
100 years later, the story comes to us of Alice de Lacy and Thomas, Earl of Lincoln. On the death of her mother, around 1309 or 1310, Alice, who was in her late 20’s inherited her mother’s titles and estates. She became the third Countess of Salisbury in her own right and her husband became the Earl of Salisbury by right of his wife. Her father died in February 1311, and she became the fourth Countess of Lincoln in her own right, and her husband became the Earl of Lincoln by right of his wife. Thomas of Lancaster inherited all of her father, Henry’s lands by right of his wife, he paid homage to Edward II of England for them shortly after Henry’s death. So at this point, Thomas has three earldoms that he inherited from his father and control of two earldoms through his wife and it made him the richest and most powerful man in England.
In the spring of 1317, Alice was abducted from her manor in Dorset by some of the household Knights of John de Warenne, Earl of Surrey, and taken to Castle Reigate. There were questions raised by contemporary chroniclers over the degree that Alice may have been part of this plan, but Warenne is thought to have carried out the abduction in order to humiliate Thomas, who had helped block Warenne’s divorce, so they had some beef with each other. After Alice was abducted, her husband Thomas waged a private war on Warenne but never once asked for Alice’s return. He just thought he could have the lands and rule the lands and he didn’t have to be bothered with having a wife and it’s actually not known when she was released. And her whereabouts for these five years between 1317 and 1322 are unknown.
Later on in 1322, Thomas of Lancaster, the husband, was captured after the failure of rebellion against the king. He was executed for treason at what had been Alice’s family home of Pontefract Castle, it had become his favorite residence. With Thomas gone, all of the lands, all of her inheritance should have reverted back to Alice from both of her parents for the first time. Thomas’s estates were forfeit to the crown, but that could not legally include the estates that he controlled by the right of his wife and her own inheritance. But because he had been a rebel, the king decided to punish her even though she had nothing to do with it and confiscate her land. So he had her arrested and imprisoned again along with her stepmother. So in June of 1322, she surrendered back some of the lands that she had inherited from her father and she tried to reach a deal with the king. She was effectively being extorted by the king, although she was then permitted to hold some of her lands in life tenure by the king’s “special grace” and she was not released until she paid 20,000 pounds to the crown, and then by paying that, she was allowed to remarry if she chose.
Alice went on to have a very colorful life. She married again, she was abducted again, because she was an heiress. It made life very difficult for her because everybody wanted control of her land, right? We saw the same thing happen with Lady Margaret Beaufort. So she had another abduction. She married for love, she was imprisoned, it went on and on and on. She’s a very interesting woman. But the relationship that she had with her first husband, Thomas, was the thing of most interest looking at the fact that their marriage ended when she was abducted, and he never actually even cared to get her back because he just cared about the land.
Later on, we have an example of a woman successfully divorcing her husband. Anne of York was the Duchess of Exeter, also known as Anne Plantagenet. She was born around 1439 and lived until 1476. So she was alive during the Wars of the Roses. She was the first child of Richard Plantagenet, the Duke of York and Cecily Neville. So this is the Duke of York that kind of starts the whole Wars of the Roses, and the father of Edward IV. So she was the sister of Edward IV and Richard III, and that whole family. So when she was just eight years old in 1447, she was married to Henry Holland.
He was the 3rd Duke of Exeter, and he sided with the House of Lancaster against his wife’s family, the House of York. He was the commander at some of the Lancastrian victories like the Battle of Wakefield and the Second Battle of St Albans. He was also a commander at the Battle of Towton, which the Lancastrians lost. He fled to Scotland after the battle, he joined Margaret of Anjou in her exile in France. Margaret of Anjou was, of course, the wife of Henry VI who was the king that they were rebelling against, and then Anne’s younger brother Edward, Duke of York was declared king in London, King Edward IV. Henry Holland was attainted. But the new king gave his estates to Anne, his sister with the remainder to their daughter Anne Holland. Anne and Exeter separated in 1464, and she divorced him in 1472. She had a second marriage in 1474 after she had successfully divorced her husband and she married a fella named Thomas St. Leger, who was a follower of Edward IV, and he did take part in Buckingham’s rebellion against Richard III, and he was executed for that in 1483.
But perhaps the most famous contemporary annulment, kind of the one that Henry VIII would have been looking at, was in 1476, Louis XI forced Louis his second cousin to marry his daughter, Joan of France. The son of Louis XI, Charles VIII, succeeded to the throne of France in 1483. But Charles died childless and so the throne passed on to that second cousin Louis who became Louis XII. Now, Charles had been married to Anne, the Duchess of Brittany, and they were trying to unite Brittany with France.
So then to keep this union going, Louis XII had his marriage to Joan annulled in 1498 after he became the king so that he could marry Charles VIII’s widow Anne of Brittany. So he had been married to her for 22 years, and then he divorces her so he could marry Charles’ widow. The annulment was considered “one of the seamiest lawsuits of the age”, it was not simple. Louis did not argue the marriage to be void due to consanguinity, that was kind of the general thing that people went to, it was the “irrevocable differences” of the time period – consanguinity. He could produce witnesses to claim that the two were closely related due to various marriages, there was no documentary proof. He also could not argue that he had been below the legal age of consent to marry. That was another thing that people would go to because, this is such an interesting thing – nobody was actually certain when he had been born. There were no birth certificates at that time, right? You didn’t go to a public record office and get your birth certificate. So you would often rely on the midwives or the people who were there to say, “Oh, I was about 30 when that happened, and now I’m 60. And so it was 30 years ago.” And Louis claimed that he was 12 at the time, but others said he was between 11 and 13. And there was no real proof. So he had to bring forth other arguments.
So he claimed that Joan was physically malformed. He provided a lot of information as to precisely exactly how and that she therefore had been unable to consummate the marriage. This is really mean after 22 years of marriage right? She fought this fiercely. She produced witnesses where Louis boasted of “having mounted my wife three or four times during the night”. And Louis then claimed that this had been inhibited by witchcraft. So again, pulling this whole witchcraft thing, which is what people would often throw to women, was kind of a catch-all. Louis’ case was really, really weak. If the Pope had been neutral, Joan totally would have won but Pope Alexander VI had political reasons to grant the annulment ruled against Joan and he granted the annulment on the grounds that Louie did not freely marry but was forced to marry by Joan’s father. Outraged, Joan reluctantly submitted, she said that she would pray for her former husband and she became a nun and she was canonized in 1950. So you can only imagine what the tabloids would have done with a court case like this right? Saying that the wife was so malformed that he was unable to perform his duty after 22 years, we’re just finding out about that, right?
And then after Anne dies, Louie marries Mary Tudor, this is where Henry VIII’s sister goes to marry Louis, he’s already very old by this point. And she extracts that promise where she can marry for love afterwards. And he only lived for about six months after that. So then Mary Tudor got to marry Charles Brandon.
So those are the details of what would have been a pretty nasty divorce that Henry would have kind of seen happening. He was quite young when it happened, but he would have been hearing about it. And it was a case of a king putting aside a wife after a really long time – 22 years. And getting a new wife. Even Henry VIII’s own sister Margaret Tudor experienced wanting to get a divorce and thinking that there would be a way out of her marriage when she married Archibald Douglas after the death of her husband, James IV. Civil war actually broke out in Scotland over that marriage because of the different factions and the jealousy of the nobles and the opposition, everything like that. But she wound up losing the regency to John Stewart, the Duke of Albany. Margaret had to flee and it was a really bad scene, she went back to London, and then he wound up getting involved with another woman having an illegitimate child. And then he took her land and used the land that she should have had as the Dowager Queen of Scotland, to use for his own private stuff without even asking. And so then in response to that, she said she wanted to get a divorce, and she wanted to leave him. But Henry VIII did not side with his sister. In the early 1520’s, there’s a letter that still survives, where he wrote to her of just how awful the idea of divorce was, and how could she think of such a thing, and she needed to return immediately to her husband. But Margaret stayed true to her conviction that she was done with him. She refused to have anything to do with him at all. She was just over all of him. And finally in 1527 in March, Pope Clement VII granted her divorce petition, and she married Henry Stewart in 1528. Like I said, ignoring the warnings of her brother that marriage was divinely ordained, this is right as he was starting to think about leaving Catherine of Aragon. He said marriage was divinely ordained, and he protested against the shameless sentence sent from Rome. And of course, half a decade later, Henry would leave Rome so he could remarry.
And so that kind of sums up some of the precedents that bring us right around the time period when Henry was divorcing Catherine of Aragon. And I wanted to go through and look at these even though this isn’t how – we kind of went back way back several hundred years to look at for example, the annulment of Eleanor of Aquitaine. But I think it’s worth it to see that this was quite a common event at this time period. This wasn’t that unusual. And so the idea that Henry was asking for something that was really crazy and way out there, it just doesn’t hold up. People were marrying and divorcing each other and it was a very common thing. So I just wanted to kind of go back and examine some of those relationships that had happened and some of those marriages that broke up, that were annulled throughout history. So I hope you’ve enjoyed this little examination of marriages ending. At least I didn’t do it around Valentine’s Day, right?
So again, there are show notes at Englandcast.com with sources to all of this stuff and TudorRadioNetwork.com, go there, go to TudorRadioNetwork.com and learn more about the Tutor radio station that I’m starting up. It’s going to be so cool. I’m so excited you guys, thanks so much for listening and I will be back again in about two weeks or so. And I’m going to be on a much more regular schedule now that school’s started. Alright, talk to you soon. Bye!
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Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast,  one of the longest running indie history podcasts, going since 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. She writes books, created the original Tudor Planner (a yearly diary filled with Tudor history) and in 2019 created the world's first Tudorcon (you can "attend" online this year!). She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 20 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history.