In addition to his sons Arthur and Henry, Henry VII. had several daughters, one of whom, Margaret, married James IV., king of Scotland, and another, Mary, became the wife of Louis XII. of France, and afterwards of Charles Brandon, duke of Suffolk.
The popular view of Henry VII.'s reign has always been derived from Bacon's _History_ of that king. This has been edited by J. R. Lumby (Cambridge, 1881). But during the last half century large accessions to our knowledge have been made from foreign and domestic archives, and the sources of Bacon's work have been more critically examined. For a complete account of those sources the reader may be referred to W. Busch's _England under the Tudors_, published in German in 1892 and in an English translation in 1895. Some further information of a special kind will be found in M. Oppenheim's _Naval Accounts and Inventories_, published by the Navy Records Society in 1896. See also J. Gairdner's _Henry VII._ (1889). (J. Ga.)
HENRY VIII. (1491-1547), king of England and Ireland, the third child and second son of Henry VII. and Elizabeth of York, was born on the 28th of June 1491 and, like all the Tudor sovereigns except Henry VII., at Greenwich. His two brothers, Prince Arthur and Edmund, duke of Somerset, and two of his sisters predeceased their father; Henry was the only son, and Margaret, afterwards queen of Scotland, and Mary, afterwards queen of France and duchess of Suffolk, were the only daughters who survived. Henry is said, on authority which has not been traced farther back than Paolo Sarpi, to have been destined for the church; but the story is probably a mere surmise from his theological accomplishments, and from his earliest years high secular posts such as the viceroyalty of Ireland were conferred upon the child. He was the first English monarch to be educated under the influence of the Renaissance, and his tutors included the poet Skelton; he became an accomplished scholar, linguist, musician and athlete, and when by the death of his brother Arthur in 1502 and of his father on the 22nd of April 1509 Henry VIII. succeeded to the throne, his accession was hailed with universal acclamation.
He had been betrothed to his brother's widow Catherine of Aragon, and in spite of the protest which he had been made to register against the marriage, and of the doubts expressed by Julius II. and Archbishop Warham as to its validity, it was completed in the first few months of his reign. This step was largely due to the pressure brought to bear by Catherine's father Ferdinand upon Henry's council; he regarded England as a tool in his hands and Catherine as his resident ambassador. The young king himself at first took little interest in politics, and for two years affairs were managed by the pacific Richard Fox (q.v.) and Warham. Then Wolsey became supreme, while Henry was immersed in the pursuit of sport and other amusements. He took, however, the keenest interest from the first in learning and in the navy, and his inborn pride easily led him to support Wolsey's and Ferdinand's warlike designs on France. He followed an English army across the Channel in 1513, and personally took part in the successful sieges of Therouanne and Tournay and the battle of Guinegate which led to the peace of 1514. Ferdinand, however, deserted the English alliance, and amid the consequent irritation against everything Spanish, there was talk of a divorce between Henry and Catherine (1514), whose issue had hitherto been attended with fatal misfortune. But the renewed antagonism between England and France which followed the accession of Francis I. (1515) led to a rapprochement with Ferdinand; the birth of the lady Mary (1516) held out hopes of the male issue which Henry so much desired; and the question of a divorce was postponed. Ferdinand died in that year (1516) and the emperor Maximilian in 1519. Their grandson Charles V. succeeded them both in all their realms and dignities in spite of Henry's hardly serious candidature for the empire; and a lifelong rivalry broke out between him and Francis I. Wolsey used this antagonism to make England arbiter between them; and both monarchs sought England's favour in 1520, Francis at the Field of Cloth of Gold and Charles V. more quietly in Kent. At the conference of Calais in 1521 English influence reached its zenith; but the alliance with Charles destroyed the balance on which that influence depended. Francis was overweighted, and his defeat at Pavia in 1525 made the emperor supreme. Feeble efforts to challenge his power in Italy provoked the sack of Rome in 1527; and the peace of Cambrai in 1529 was made without any reference to Wolsey or England's interests.