Monarchs · Tudor
1491–1547
House of Tudor — the break with Rome
In office: 1509–1547
Athletic, scholarly and vain at his accession, he ended his reign a suspicious, obese and murderous autocrat. His pursuit of a male heir drove the annulment of his first marriage, the break with Rome and the Royal Supremacy of 1534, and the dissolution of the monasteries transferred perhaps a quarter of England's landed wealth. Six marriages, three children and a series of discarded ministers — Wolsey, More, Cromwell — mark the reign that made England a Protestant kingdom almost by accident.
A meeting of two young kings near Calais in June 1520, in temporary palaces and tents of gold cloth, with feasting and a wrestling match (1520)
The Field of the Cloth of Gold, staged by Cardinal Wolsey; the French king is said to have thrown him in the wrestling.
A 1521 book attacking Luther that won a papal title still abbreviated on British coins (1521)
Assertio Septem Sacramentorum earned 'Fidei Defensor' — the F.D. on coinage — which parliament kept even after the break with Rome.
An act of 1534 declaring the sovereign the only supreme head on earth of the Church of England (1534)
The Act of Supremacy; refusing the oath cost Thomas More and John Fisher their heads the following year.
The suppression of some 800 religious houses between 1536 and 1540, their lands sold to the gentry (1536–1540)
Managed by Thomas Cromwell; it roughly doubled crown revenue for a time and left the ruined abbeys of the picturesque.
A northern rising of 1536 marching under a banner of the Five Wounds of Christ, dispersed by promises and then hanged (1536)
The Pilgrimage of Grace, led by the lawyer Robert Aske.
A victory over the Scots at Flodden in 1513, won by a queen acting as regent while her husband campaigned in France (1513)
Catherine of Aragon was regent; James IV of Scotland was killed, the last British monarch to die in battle.
A warship that heeled over and sank off Portsmouth in 1545 within sight of the king, and was raised in 1982 (1545 / 1982)
The Mary Rose, now in her own museum at Portsmouth.
Buried at Windsor beside the third of six wives — the only one to give him a son (1547)
Jane Seymour, who died of puerperal fever twelve days after Edward's birth in 1537.