DID CATHERINE OF ARAGON SLEEP WITH PRINCE ARTHUR OR WAS HENRY VIII A BIGAMIST? Six wives documentary

Hello everyone and welcome to my channel, this is history and today's video is the first in a series about the six

wives

of Henry VIII. We are going to see the two marriages of Catherine of Aragon, the first, with Prince Arthur Tudor, the second. to her younger brother Henry and asked if Catherine and Arthur knew if Henry had grounds to annul her marriage to her because she was her sister-in-law or he abandoned her for other reasons and committed bigamy by marrying Anne Boleyn. . To hear the indiscreet comments Arturo apparently made when he left his and Catherine's bedroom the morning after the wedding, and what Catherine told her confessor about the matter more than a quarter-century later, be sure to stick around to the end, too.

To hear what next week's Anne Boleyn deal will be about: remember to like this video, leave a comment below, and subscribe to my channel with the little notification bell on so YouTube alerts you every time. publish new content. You can also follow me on Instagram where my HistoryCalling username is Catherine of Aragon was born on this star in the archiepiscopal palace of Alcalá de Generes, near Madrid, on December 16, 1485, the daughter of the most powerful couple of the 15th century , King Ferdinand of Aragon and his wife Queen Isabella of Castile, known jointly as the Catholic Monarchs, with a pedigree like this, Catherine was a real catch and Henry VII of England and his wife Elizabeth York were lucky enough to get her in marriage for her eldest son, Prince Arthur of Wales, who had been born in September 1486. ​​The marriage would unite England with one of the great powers of Europe and would reinforce the prestige of the incipient and still quite unstable Tudor dynasty that had been founded in 1485, when Henry took the crown from his wife's uncle, Richard III, at the Battle of Bosworth.

The young couple became engaged in 1497, married by proxy in 1499 and 1500, and Catherine finally arrived in England on October 2, 1501. She and the 15-year-old Arthur performed a final in-person marriage ceremony at St. Pablo on the 14th of November then spent their wedding night here at Baynard Castle, as we will see in the course of this video, what happened or not that night is still debated to this day, shortly after they broke up the wedding celebrations. at home at Ludlow Castle unfortunately their marriage was short-lived only four and a half months after it was celebrated they both fell ill with an unknown illness Catherine recovered but Arthur did not die at Ludlow on April 2, 1502 dynastically the The loss of the heir to the throne who had just celebrated a spectacular marriage with a Spanish

prince

ss was a disaster, but the couple's parents did the best they could in the face of a bad situation.

Catherine, now a widowed

prince

ss of Wales was engaged to her brother-in-law. Henry in June 1503, while negotiations were still ongoing for a dispensation from Pope Julius II to allow the marriage to take place, this was necessary because under church law in the 16th century it was illegal to marry one's brother-in-law and seeing a document that dispensed with the rules, thus requiring dispensation of the name, the final paperwork was done in 1504, although, as we will see, it ultimately muddied rather than cleared the waters on this point, however, Henry she was still too young to go ahead with the royal marriage. he had been born in June 1491 and children could not properly marry until they were at least 14 years old.

In the end, thanks in large part to disputes over Catherine's diary, the marriage did not occur during her father-in-law's lifetime. law

henry

vii it was not until 1509, seven weeks after

henry

viii

had ascended the throne, that the couple married on June 11 at Greenwich together they were crowned king and queen at Westminster Abbey on the 24th everything seemed perfect as the of Catalina and Arturo However, the marriage did not last 20 years. Henry and Catherine are still married, but their marriage has been marred by the deaths of most of their children and only one girl, Princess Mary, born in 1516, has survived.

Catalina is now too old to produce. more children and Henry claims to have pangs of conscience saying that his marriage to her was against the laws of God due to her status as her sister-in-law. He wants Pope Clement VII to issue an annulment, of course, which he does not openly admit. What is his interest in one of Catherine's ladies at Anne Boleyn's wedding? The first thing to understand about the breakdown of Henry and Catherine's marriage is that the common belief that he divorced her is inaccurate. The concept of divorce under which each party is free to legally marry.

Again during the lifetime of the ancient species he did not exist in England at that time and would not do so for another 150 years. Henry wanted her marriage to Catherine annulled, meaning he denied ever being married to her in the first place. The second thing to understand is the theological reasoning Henry used to claim that an annulment was justified. This was based on his reading of a Bible passage from Leviticus chapter 20 verse 21 that says in the King James Bible and if a man takes his brother's wife, it is an unclean thing, he has discovered his brother's nakedness, now they will have no children, of course, henry and

catherine

were not childless, they had mary and there were many other children besides, they simply had not survived, henry, although he decided what this passage really meant.

What was convenient for him was that a brother and sister-in-law would have no surviving children together. Maria as a child simply didn't count. The annoying thing for him was that his already dubious reading of this text was further complicated by another biblical quote: Deuteronomy chapter 25. Verse 5 which says that if brothers live together and one of them dies and has no children, the dead man's wife will not marry without a stranger, her husband's brother will go to her and take her as his wife and fulfill the duty of a husband's brother upon her, this was exactly what Henry had done and, in fact, the two passages are quite easy to square with each other.

A man should not

sleep

with his brother's wife while his brother is alive, but he should take care of his brother and even get married. However, Widow Henry remained focused on Leviticus and her interpretation of it and tried to say that Deuteronomy was binding only on Jews and in any case referred to ceremonial law; The question of whether Catherine and Arthur had consummated their marriage would now come to the fore if they had not then, according to Catherine and her supporters, her marriage was not completely valid and her marriage to Henry posed no problems. If they had, Henry could claim that Catherine was indeed Arthur's wife and she should never have married him.

I think this is too simplistic. Reading Henry's beliefs and motives, it is possible that he actually believed that Arthur had never fully slept with Catherine, but he wanted to get rid of her and his claim was essentially that whether they had consummated the marriage or not, Catherine was legally married. with her brother and therefore could not be married to him, this obstacle contravened the laws of God according to the king and therefore not even a Pope could do without it. However, the annulment would have been much cleaner if Catherine had admitted to having relations with Arthur or if it could be proven and would have allowed the current Pope Clement VII to see some face in annulling the dispensation of her predecessor Julius II, therefore, it is He spent a great deal of time and energy trying to determine what had happened between Catherine and Arthur during their brief marriage;

In fact, there had always been some doubt about how far things had gone with the Prince and Princess of Wales and concern about the impediment their relationship would cause to a marriage with Henry, so the matter was specifically mentioned in the waiver. students of 1504, shortly after the death of Arthur, Catherine's mistress or governess. Doña Elvira Manuel had informed the princess's parents, King Fernando and Queen Isabel, that the marriage with Arturo had not been consummated; However, Henry VII had not agreed on this point and as a result, after drafting a summary, the final dispensation hedged his bets by discussing whether the marriage was consummated, he used the Latin word for tans, this translates as perhaps or perhaps, meaning that the dispensation passage can be read in two ways: it meant that it could have been consummated or it meant that the marriage had been consummated.

In 1504, this gray area was meant to keep everyone happy and allow the marriage to continue. 25 years later, Henry could use it as one more reason why the dispensation was not valid to establish the validity of Arthur and Catherine's marriage. Henry first resorted to his However, in 1527, his old friend, the chancellor, Cardinal Thomas Woolsey Woolsey, decided that the matter was too complicated for him and referred the matter to Rome. Under normal circumstances, Pope Clement VII could have given Henry what he asked for if it weren't for one almighty drawback: Catherine was a Spanish Princess and had family in very high places, in fact, her nephew was Charles V, the Holy Emperor.

Germanic Roman Empire and in 1527 its troops stormed Rome in an incident that became known as the Sack of Rome. This forced the Pope to retreat to Angelo Decent's castle, leaving him. In essence, a prisoner of the Emperor who was unwilling to allow her aunt's marriage to be dissolved and her cousin Mary disinherited while the Pope was under his control would have no annulment. Enrique and I changed attacks after a failed attempt. in June 1527 to affect what we might call a healthy break with Catherine during which he asked her to live separately from him and she wept and refused to do so.

She then wrote to her nephew asking for help. Henry requested that the Pope allow a commission to be held in England to decide his great matter, as the annulment was known at the time, so in the fall of 1528 Cardinal Lorenzo Campagio, the Pope's legate, arrived from Italy especially for work. At first he tried to avoid an open judicial process by asking Catherine to retire to a convent. which she refused to do, even making her confession to him and giving him permission to make it public, swearing that she and Arthur had only slept in the same bed seven times during their brief marriage and that

sleep

ing was all they did with the king and the Queen.

Still at a stalemate, the commission finally began at London's Dominican Ferrari, better known as Blackfriars, at the end of May 1529. At these hearings, witnesses were called who had been with Catherine and Arthur on the night of their wedding and The next morning, Sir Anthony Willoughby for An example reported that Arthur had left his bridal chamber with the words Willoughby, bring me a cup of eel for I have been in the middle of Spain tonight. Others recalled that Arthur said: Masters, it is a good pastime to have a wife. Catherine, however, sang a different tone, she came to court on June 21 and reiterated her case directly to Henry, falling to her knees in front of him as he, embarrassed by the situation, tried and failed to lift her, she asked him to consider his honor, his daughters and his that he should not be displeased that she defended him and that he should consider the reputation of his nation and his relatives, who would be gravely offended according to what she had said about his good willpower.

It was determined that the current location was suspicious and because the case had already begun in the courtroom, so she left the courthouse never to return on July 23. compezio adjourned the case until October but finally renounced his powers as legitimate persons in September and When he returned home, the annulment was returned to the Pope, so what are we to make of all this? Whether Arthur lied in 1501, Catherine lied in the 1520s, or whether the witnesses called by Henry simply told what the king wanted to hear, it is impossible to know. I'm sure Arthur may well have said the words that Willoughby and others remembered, but that doesn't mean he was telling the truth; he could have been showing off to the men around him the morning after his wedding, even if the marriage was not consummated.

On the night several months passed before the Prince of Wales fell ill, would he really have refused to consummate the marriage all that time or if Willoughby and the other witnesses at the trial lied through their teeth was Catherine, in fact, lying? through his queen? Catherine has gone down in history as an incredibly pious woman who is unlikely to have lied, but she also believed in the power of the Pope to dispense with any impediment to her marriage to Henry and absolutely believed that she was his true wife and that her su Mary's daughter was legitimate, she even had the verse of Deuteronomy to support her in her beliefs, it is conceivable, therefore, that she thought that lying about her relationship with Arthur was the lesser of two evils if it would allow her to protect her own position and the of his daughter and save Henry's. soul preventing her from entering into another bigamous marriage David Starkey even wonders if at 15 and 16 she knewEnough about marital relations to know what had or had not happened with Arthur and how much a quarter of a century later he would have really remembered about her.

Less than five months with a boy he barely knew. Eventually Enrique got tired of waiting and came up with a radical solution to his problem. He broke with the church in Rome and established the Church of England, being himself a supreme leader by believing or at least claiming it. Although he and Catherine had never married in the first place, he married Anne Boleyn probably in November 1532 with another ceremony at the end of January 1533. Thomas Woolsey had long since fallen from fever and died in 1530, so it was The Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer who declared the marriage to Catherine void on May 23, 1533 and the marriage in Berlin valid five days later Catherine was stripped of her title as queen reduced to Princess Darger of Wales and was prohibited from returning to court. having already been banished in 1531.

Worse yet due to her refusal to concede that her marriage to Henry was invalid, she was prohibited from seeing her daughter Mary, who had been declared illegitimate in March 1534, the judgment of the court finally came and He ruled in Catherine's favor stating that their marriage was sound, it was too late, Henry never saw her again and she died at Kimbelton Castle in January 1536, aged 50. She was buried in Peterborough Cathedral with the honors due only to a Dorager Princess of Wales. However, history has been kinder to her and today she is recognized as queen in her tomb, so Catherine had consummated the marriage with Arthur and was Henry VIII the

bigamist

.

It is impossible to know the answer to the first question if I had to bet money would say that she probably had not completely slept with him based on the fact that even at the time of her widowhood Her servants claimed that she remained in the same condition she was in when she left Spain nor that she became pregnant by Arturo, which It's certainly not conclusive evidence by any means, but it's worth keeping in mind that it was. by Henry regularly in the early years of her marriage, Catherine was also incredibly religious and swearing as she had that she had not met Arthur when she had done so would have risked her immortal soul in her eyes. as I have done.

It was already discussed, although she also had good reasons for lying and ultimately she was only human, not a saint. She also believed in the power of confession and forgiveness and she may have relied on these so she could tell the court and lie while she apologized to God later. through her confessor at a distance of more than a quarter of a century, it is possible that she did not really remember exactly what had happened and that she had been mistaken without even realizing it as to Henry's bigamy status, certainly by the laws of the Catholic church at the time established by the Pope he remained married to Catherine until her death, making his marriage to Anne Boleyn invalid and his daughter Elizabeth illegitimate.

His interpretation of Scripture was also very dubious, to say the least, to the point where it wouldn't have mattered. Whether his brother had slept with Catherine or not, Leviticus does not prohibit a man from marrying his brother's widow and Deuteronomy practically requires it by modern standards, he would also have been considered a

bigamist

since his grounds for annulment would not hold up. in a court. In England today, although he could have sought a divorce today, Henry made his own laws and his own church and, according to them, his marriage to Catherine had legally ended, in fact it had never begun, as Catherine discovered to her cost when Henry I wanted something.

He understood it and in his kingdom the truth and the law were what he did, so what do you think of all this? Arthur and Catherine consummated their marriage and Henry was a bigamist. Let me know in the comments section below if you want. To find out more, I'll leave links to some books, movies, and TV shows that feature Catherine's story in the description box, and remember to make sure you're subscribed with notifications on so you don't miss next week's video featuring The Mystery That surrounds when Anne Boleyn was born until then continues learning.