Travel is people. You may go abroad to see the famous sites, but what you remember best are the people you meet. Among them, like unex-pected treasure, are a few memorable contacts that will make your travels unique, special, and delightful. "People" is devoted to some of those you may come in contact with during your Home At First travels.
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This article first appeared in December, 2008.

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 Inventors of the Modern World
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— SECOND OF A SERIES —
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Portrait by an unknown artist of
Henry VIII at about the age of 29 in
1520 when in June he met with King
Francis I of France on the Field of Cloth
of Gold, a great medieval tournament
that served as backdrop for one of the
first modern power summits of national leaders. Concurrently, Magellan was
circumnavigating the globe, Cortez was
conquering Mexico, and Martin Luther
was inventing Protestantism in Germany.

orn just 13 months before Columbus set off from Spain on his first voyage of discovery, Henry was the second son and third child of King Henry VII (formerly Henry Tudor) and his wife Elizabeth of York. His older brother, Arthur, was Prince of Wales and heir to the throne. Young Henry, second in line to the throne, prepared for a future as a kind of vice president: a heartbeat away from the throne. His education was lavish, and generalized, but with a concentration in religion. The Renaissance was underway, and, like a young de' Medici, Prince Henry received instruction in art, languages, science, religion, music, mathematics, the classics, and geography. Henry was an athlete, a sportsman, and a knight of the realm who participated in and won jousting tournaments. Prince Henry was set for life: handsome, strong, tall, rich, powerful, educated, and, at leisure. Then the fates intervened.

enry Tudor, aka King Henry VII of England, was dead at the age of 52. Founder of the Tudor Dynasty, Henry VII took the throne of the United Kingdom on the battlefield, beating the royal army and killing King Richard III at Bosworth Field, the famous battle where Shakespeare imagined Richard would gladly trade his crown and empire for a horse and escape. After Bosworth, Henry Tudor shrewdly had himself declared king retroactive to the day before the battle, thereby making anyone who opposed him on the battlefield a traitor against the crown.

Portrait by an unknown artist of
King Henry VII at about 1505.

          All the paranoiac stress of Henry VII’s quest for a stable monarchy was not lost on his two sons and two daughters. When Crown Prince Arthur died of illness in 1502 at the age of 15, he had already been married for five months to the Spanish princess Catherine of Aragon, herself not quite 16. Although only middle teenagers, the young royal couple were expected to begin a family immediately, to ensure future national stability by producing a crown prince of their own. When Arthur died childless, his brother, Henry, replaced him as crown prince, and, seven years later with the special dispensation of the Pope in Rome, replaced Arthur as husband to Catherine of Aragon.
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The widowed princess Catherine of Aragon in 1503 or 1504 by the
Estonian artist Michel Sittow. In four years she would marry Henry VIII.

          
          The marriage of Henry and Catherine of Aragon occurred only after the death of King Henry VII, who died in April 1509 doubting he wished the heir to the English throne to be tied to the Spanish throne by marriage. But young King Henry VIII—only 18 years old but already concerned with the critical issue of royal succession—married Catherine with whom he had had an off-and-on engagement of almost seven years within a month and a half of his father’s death. Thirteen days later, June 24, 1509, King Henry VIII and his royal consort Queen Catherine of Aragon were crowned in a lavish coronation at London’s Westminster Abbey.

           
          The newlyweds got right to work. In 1510, in the first year of marriage with Henry, the new queen gave birth to a girl, but the baby was premature and stillborn. Soon afterwards Catherine again became pregnant and bore this child to term, giving birth to a live son on New Years Day 1511. The excitement of the court of the arrival of an heir to the throne was ebullient but short-lived, as the child, who would have

become King Henry IX, died within two months of his birth. A second son arrived during 1513, but prema-turely, and he did not live. In December of 1514 Catherine bore a fourth child—and a third son—but he, too, was either stillborn or died shortly after birth. This boy was named for his father, Henry.
          The royal couple did not let their disappoint-ments keep them from their primary duty, and early in 1516 a healthy baby was born who would one day sit on the English throne as Queen Mary I, the first uncontested ruling woman monarch of England since the rebellious 1st century Briton Boudica took on the Romans.
          Because proper royal English heirs were to be males, Henry and Catherine did not look to baby Mary as the solution to their quest. In November 1518 Queen Catherine—now almost 33 years old—ended her last pregnancy much as she had ended her first, bearing a stillborn baby girl. There was no male heir to the throne of England.

Queen Mary I, daughter of King Henry
VIII and Queen Catherine of Aragon.
Portrait by court painter Hans Eworth
(Flemish) from 1554 during her reign
as England's first ruling queen (1553-8).

              
          Young King Henry VIII had not been neglecting his other royal duties. The Renaissance—born more than 100 years earlier in Tuscany, Italy—bloomed throughout

Charles V Holy Roman Emperor,
nephew of Queen Catherine of
Aragon and, during his reign from
1519-56, one of the two most power-
ful men in Europe. Portrait from
1548 attributed to Lambert Sustris
Dutch painter of the Titian school.

western Europe, introducing revolutionary ideas of literature, music, poetry, science, art, architecture, and religion as it spread along trade routes west and north. Powerful and wealthy city-states emerged from regional trading centers and became vibrant centers of the arts, education, technology, humanistic ideas, and, importantly, politics.
          European nation states grew out of the strategic alliances of the trading partners. On the Continent, two principal national powers were coalescing: the Kingdom of France, and the Holy Roman Empire, comprised of much of Italy, Spain, greater Austria, and the Netherlands. Two powerful secular rulers, King Francis I of France and Emperor Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire, jockeyed to dominate Europe. England’s King Henry VIII was non-aligned and openly being courted by his Continental peers. England, once an empire with control over large sections of France and Spain, had lost most of its Continental territory during the civil Wars of the Roses and was reduced to a secondary power sequestered from the wealth and power of the Continent.

                       
          Henry had been schooled as a Renaissance man, mastering languages (Latin, French, and Spanish), composing poetry and music, studying religion, and pursuing several sports and games. He was a fine horseman and successful jousting knight—
a risky sport that helped Henry VIII build a reputation as an athlete, adventurer, and warrior—a leader not to be trifled with. Suits of Henry’s armor may be seen at the Tower of London and in Windsor Castle.

          Henry VIII wanted England to be, in today’s vernacular, a “player” in the turbulent international politics of 16th century Europe. He sided with his Spanish in-laws and the Pope in a war against France from 1511-16. While Henry invaded France leading the English army, the French arranged for their ally, King James IV of Scotland, to invade England. Queen Catherine of Aragon, acting as temporary head of state with her husband in England, directed English troops to meet the Scots in battle. At Flodden Field in northern England the Scots suffered a calamitous defeat that ended their aggression and cost them their king’s life. James IV left a widow, Queen Margaret, elder sister of Henry VIII, whose great-grandson established the Stewart dynasty as King James I of England and replaced the Tudors at the start of the 17th century.

                           
          Following an at-best inconclusive (and at-worst lost) war against France, Henry VIII gained a grudging respect for England’s traditional enemy and its leader King Francis I. Like Henry, Francis I was a Renaissance man and an athlete, and the English king felt some competitive kinship with his French rival. Together they arranged to meet at a lavish 17-day summit in June 1520 called the Field of Cloth of Gold near Calais just across the English Channel in northeastern France. The gathering was to mark the post-war treaty of 1518 that officially ended hostilities between the neighbors.

          But the summit was an opportunity for both kings to demonstrate the impressive wealth and enlightened power of their kingdoms at the height of the Renaissance. Both kings made a great show, but the alliance between France and England remained a tenuous one, and King Henry hedged England’s bets by maintaining ties with his Spanish relative and France’s enemy, Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. By maintaining relations with both principal European powers, Henry bought the time to build a powerful navy and lay the foundations for what would soon become a growing, modern British Empire.

                                            
          Despite Henry’s successes centralizing a powerful government in Britain and preparing the nation to become an international power, the nagging question of succession remained unanswered. In 1525, Queen Catherine of Aragon was 40 years old and would not again conceive a child. Henry, age 33, needed to solve this vexing problem or risk all that he and his father had accomplished. In Part III we examine Henry's revolutionary and scandalous solution to the question of succession.

Live like a King when you come to London.
Stay at HOME AT FIRST’s Apartments at St. Katharine’s Marina.
They’re all named after their famous neighbors at the
Tower of London next door: the wives of Henry VIII.
Learn more about the individual apartments here:
 Catherine of Aragon    Anne Boleyn    Jane Seymour    Anne of Cleves    Kathryn Howard
 

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— END OF PART II —
Next Time: PART III A Scandalous Solution Starts a Revolution
SEE ALSO: PART I
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THIS ARTICLE FIRST APPEARED DECEMBER, 2008.