‘As glad a father as ever was King’: The Reformation counterfactuals of Henry VIII's children

Abstract

The frustrations of Henry VIII in his search for a male heir are well documented in historical research and in popular culture, with everything from soap operas to mnemonics tracing his destructive relationships with his six wives (The Tudors and the ever-unsettling ‘divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived’). Such attention is justified, as Henry's decision to break away from the Roman Catholic Church in his quest for his first divorce was the catalyst for decades of religious and political strife, domestically and internationally. But what if his first son had lived? What if one of his daughters had been a boy instead? This essay puts forward several counterfactual situations based on the sex and health of Henry's male and female children that could have had profound implications for English policy and the monarchy, and explores a facet of counterfactual research – biological chance – that has previously been underrepresented.

 An earlier version of this essay was handwritten and presented as an artifact or art object, in order to create the illusion of established, archived history being literally revised and changed into a counterfactual by an editor's pen. The tactile nature of that handwritten version perhaps brought home more strongly than this electronic rendering the idea of a specific human action or event changing the course of history, whatever the repercussions may be.

Keywords:

• Protestant Reformation
• Henry VIII
• counterfactuals
• English monarchy
• Tudor dynasty
• primogeniture

Notes

 1. Loades 1989, 12.

 2. Briggs 1998, 31.

 3. MacCulloch 2003, 660.

 4. Loades 1994, 18-19.

 5. Rex 2006, 20.

 6. Ibid., 7.

 7. Ibid., 12.

 8. Ibid., 7-8.

 9. Loades 1989, 16.

10. Ibid., 17.

11. Ibid., 14.

12. Loades 1994, 36.

13. Rex 2006, Ch. 1.

14. Starkey 2000, 4–5.

15. Rex 2006, 93.

16. Ibid.

17. Loades 1994, 41.

18. Ibid., 86–9.

19. Rex 2006, 44–5.

20. Ibid., 11.

21. Loades 1994, 70–3.

22. Demandt 1993, 5.

23. Skidmore 2007, 257–8.

24. Ibid., 6–7.

25. Ibid., 260–1.

26. Ibid., 35–6.

27. Ferguson 1999.

28. Ibid., 2.