Mary I Queen Of ENGLAND

Other Events and Attributes:

• Fact: 19 Jul 1553, Acceded
• Fact 1: 1 Oct 1553, Crowned at Westminster Abbey

Notes:

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The daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, Mary was, like her mother, a fervent Catholic. With public support, she deposed the interloper Lady Jane Grey. Mary had numerous Protestants burned at the stake for heresy, repealed Protestant legislation, and restored Papal supremacy in England.

CRUEL QUEEN

While Mary's strong Catholic faith gave her a great sense of purpose, it also made her obstinate and narrow minded. Many cruelties were perpetuated in her name in order to restore England to Catholicism.

Mary married Philip II Of SPAIN on 25 Jul 1554 in Winchester Cathedral. Philip (son of Charles V Holy Roman EMPEROR and Isabella Of PORTUGAL) was born on 21 May 1527 in Palacio de Pimentel, Valladolid, Spain; died on 13 Sep 1598 in El Escorial, Spain. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

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In the Early years of his reign, Henry was content to leave governing in the hands of his Chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey. However, Wolsey fell from power when he failed to secure a divorce for Henry from Catherine of Aragon. The King became increasingly autocratic and by his death he was much hated.

As a young man, Henry was tall and handsome. However, when older he became grossly overweight and was riddled with disease.

Although well-educated, Henry at first had no enthusiasm for statecraft or personal rule, preferring hunting, the tourney, games, mistresses, and music to governing the country. During the first two decades of his reign, Henry entrusted the business of government to his great minister, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. born in 1475, Wolsey was the son of an Ipswich butcher. He entered the church and became Archbishop of York in 1514. A year later he received his cardinal's hat and became the Chancellor of England. Cardinal Wolsey looked after England's affairs at home and abroad with great skill, presiding over a period of growing prosperity. However, Wolsey fell from grace in 1529 when he failed to secure Henry's divorce from Catherine of Aragon. he died that year before he could be brought to trial for treason.

After Henry VIII's break with Rome, Thomas Cromwell set up a commission to examine the state of every monastery and convent in England, with a view to possible closure and appropriation of its wealth by the Crown. Many were found to be racked with corruption. Henry, who urgently needed money to finance his extravagant lifestyle, ordered their dissolution. In 1537, the smaller monasteries were closed and their property confiscated. the remainder were similarly dealt with in 1539.

Henry married Catherine Of ARAGON in 1509. Catherine (daughter of Ferdinand V of Castile Ferdinand II King Of ARAGON and Isabella I Queen Of Castile And LEON) was born on 16 Dec 1485 in Alcala de Henares; died on 07 Jan 1536. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Notes:

Queen Catherine of England ne Catherine of Aragon (Castilian: Catalina de AragÛn y Castilla) (December 16, 1485-January 7, 1536) was queen consort of England as Henry VIII of England's first wife. Henry tried to have their twenty-four year marriage annulled in part because all their male heirs apparent death in childhood, with only one of their six children, Princess Mary (later Queen Mary I) surviving as heir presumptive, at a time when there was no precedent for a woman on the throne. The Pope refused to allow the annulment of Henry's marriage to Catherine, which set off a chain reaction that led Henry to break with the Roman Catholic Church and his subsequent marriage to Anne Boleyn in the hope of fathering a male heir to continue the Tudor dynasty.

Catherine of Aragon was said to have made the lane "Aragon road" in Great Leighs, Chelmsford, and was said to have lived in Windsor house, which is situated on that lane to this very day
Born in Alcal· de Henares, Catherine was the youngest surviving child of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile. Her older siblings were Isabella, Princess of Asturias, John, Prince of Asturias, Joan I of Spain and Maria of Castile and Aragon, Queen of Portugal. She was an aunt, among others, of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, John III of Portugal and their wives, Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor and Henry I of Portugal.

She was a granddaughter of both John II of Castile and John II of Aragon born in 1558. She was descended from the English royal house through both her great-great-grandmothers Catherine of Lancaster and Philippa of Lancaster, daughters of John of Gaunt. She was thus a third cousin of both Henry VII and his wife Elizabeth of York.

Princess of Wales
Catherine first married to Prince Arthur, the eldest son of Henry VII of England, in 1501. As Prince of Wales, Arthur was sent to Ludlow Castle on the borders of Wales, to preside over the Council of Wales, and Catherine accompanied him. A few months later, they both became ill, possibly with the sweating sickness which was sweeping the area. Catherine herself nearly died; she recovered to find herself a widow. Catherine testified that, because of the couple's youth, the marriage had not been consummated; Pope Julius II then issued a dispensation, so that Catherine could become betrothed to Arthur's younger brother, the future Henry VIII of England.

Catherine of Aragon was said to have made the road 'Aragon Road' in the village of Great Leighs, Chelmsford, and was said to have lived in the Windsor house on that road.

Queen consort of England
The Six Wives of
King Henry VIII
Catherine of Aragon
Anne Boleyn
Jane Seymour
Anne of Cleves
Catherine Howard
Catherine Parr
The marriage did not take place until after Henry VIII ascended the throne in 1509, the marriage on June 11, followed by the coronation on June 24, 1509. Both as Princess of Wales and as Queen, Catherine was extremely popular with the people. She governed the nation as Regent while Henry invaded France in 1513.

Henry VIII supposedly married Catherine of Aragon at his brother's dying wish and was happily-enough married to her, although not faithful, for 18 years, until he became seriously worried about getting a male heir to his throne as she approached menopause. Her first child, a daughter, was stillborn in 1510. Prince Henry, Duke of Cornwall was born in 1511 but died after 52 days. Catherine then had a miscarriage, followed by another short-lived son. On February 18, 1516 at the Palace of Placentia in Greenwich, London, she gave birth to a daughter named Mary (later Queen Mary I of England). There was another miscarriage in 1518. A male heir was essential to Henry. The Tudor dynasty was new, and its legitimacy might still be tested. The last time a female had inherited the English throne civil war had occurred; Henry I of England's daughter Empress Matilda had been ousted from the throne immediately upon succeeding as the English Barons refused to allow a woman to rule. The disasters of civil war were still fresh in living memory from the Wars of the Roses (1455 ? 1485).

In 1520, Catherine's nephew Charles V paid a state visit to England, and the Queen urged the policy of gaining his alliance rather than that of France. Immediately after his departure, May 31, 1520, she accompanied the king to France on the celebrated visit to Francis I, remembered (from the splendors of the occasion) as the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Within two years, however, war was declared against France and the Emperor once again made welcome in England, where plans were afoot to betroth him to Henry and Catherine's daughter Princess Mary.

At this point Catherine was not in physical condition to undergo further pregnancies. The marriage was further soured by trouble made by Catherine's father, Ferdinand, over payments of her dowry and by a shift of allegiance on the part of Ferdinand, who signed a treaty with the French, to Henry's fury. Because of the lack of heirs, Henry began to believe that his marriage was cursed and sought confirmation from two verses of the biblical Book of Leviticus, which said that, if a man marries his brother's wife, the couple will be childless. He chose to believe that Catherine had lied when she said her marriage to Arthur had not been consummated, therefore making their marriage wrong in the eyes of God. He therefore asked Pope Clement VII to annul his marriage in 1527.

The Pope stalled on the issue for seven years without making a final judgement, partially because allowing an annulment would be admitting that the Church had been in error for allowing a special dispensation for marriage in the first place, and partially because he was a virtual prisoner of Catherine's nephew Charles V, who had conquered Rome. Henry separated from Catherine in July 1531, and married one of Catherine's former ladies-in-waiting (and sister of his former mistress Lady Mary Boleyn), Anne Boleyn in January 1533. Henry finally had Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, annul the marriage himself on May 23, 1533. To forestall an appeal to Rome, which Catherine would have almost certainly won, he had Parliament pass the Act of Supremacy, repudiating Papal jurisdiction in England, making the king the head of the English church, and beginning the English Reformation.

Later years
Catherine refused to acknowledge the divorce and took the issue to the law, but she lost and was forced to leave Court. She was separated from her daughter (who was declared illegitimate) and was sent to live in remote castles and in humble conditions, in the hope that she would surrender to the inevitable; but she never accepted the divorce and signed her last letter, "Catherine the Queen". By this time, she was aware that Henry's marriage to Anne was turning bad, and she had not ceased to hope that he might one day return to her.

Catherine died of a form of cancer at Kimbolton Castle, on January 7, 1536 and was buried in Peterborough Cathedral with the ceremony due to a Princess Dowager of Wales, not a Queen. Catherine's embalmer confessed to her doctor that Catherine's heart had been black through and through, which led many people to believe that Anne Boleyn had poisoned her. Henry and Anne Boleyn celebrated her death - Henry did not attend the funeral, nor did he allow Princess Mary to do so.

Other Events and Attributes:

• Fact 1: Ancestor of Tudor and later Kings and Queens of England
• Fact: 22 Aug 1485, Defeated King Richard III at Bosworth

Notes:

Henry VII (January 28, 1457 - April 21, 1509), King of England, Lord of Ireland (August 22, 1485 - April 21, 1509), was the founder and first patriarch of the Tudor dynasty.

Henry was born in Pembroke Castle, Wales, in 1457, the only son of Edmund Tudor and Margaret Beaufort. His father died two months before he was born, which meant that the young Henry spent much of his early life with his uncle, Jasper Tudor. With the return of Edward IV to the throne in 1461, Henry was forced to flee to Brittany, where he was to spend most of the next fourteen years. After the failure of the revolt of his second cousin, Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, in 1483, Henry Tudor became the leading Lancastrian contender for the throne of England. With money and supplies borrowed from his host, Francis II, Duke of Brittany, Henry made an unsuccessful attempt to land in England but turned back after encountering Richard III's (1483?85) forces on the Dorset coast. Richard III attempted to ensure his return through a treaty with the Breton authorities, but Henry was alerted and escaped to France. He was welcomed by the French court, who readily supplied him with troops and equipment for a second invasion.

Rise to the throne
Having gained the support of the in-laws of the late Yorkist King Edward IV, he landed with a largely French and Scottish force in Mill Bay, Pembrokeshire, and marched into England, accompanied by his uncle, Jasper Tudor, and the experienced John de Vere, 13th Earl of Oxford. Wales had traditionally been a Yorkist stronghold, and Henry owed the support he gathered to his ancestry, being directly descended, through his father, from the Lord Rhys. He amassed an army of around 5000 soldiers and travelled north.

Though outnumbered, Henry was aware that this was his only chance to seize the throne. Using reinforcements that waited in Nottingham and Leicester his Lancastrian forces decisively defeated the Yorkists under the King at the Battle of Bosworth Field on 22 August 1485 when several of Richard's key allies, such as the Earl of Northumberland and William and Thomas Stanley, crucially switched sides or deserted the field of battle. This effectively ended the long-running Wars of the Roses between the two houses, though it wasn't the final battle. Henry's claim to the throne was tenuous: it was based upon a lineage of illegitimate succession, and overlooked the fact that he had been disqualified by an earlier act of attainder. However this proved to be no barrier to the throne. Following the battle all other claimants were either dead or too weak to challenge him. In the end Henry dealt with the act of attainder by claiming that it could not apply to a king.

The first of Henry's concerns on attaining the throne was the question of establishing the strength and supremacy of his rule. His own claim to the throne was limited, but he was fortunate in that there were few other claimants to the throne left alive after the long civil war. His main worry was pretenders such as Perkin Warbeck, who pretended to be Richard, Duke of York, the younger of the Princes in the Tower and son of Edward IV. These pretenders were backed by disaffected nobles. Henry triumphed in securing his crown by a number of means but principally by dividing and undermining the power of the nobility, especially through bonds and recognisances, as well as forcing them to disband their private armies. He also honoured his pledge of December 1483 to marry Elizabeth of York, daughter and heir of King Edward IV. The marriage took place on January 18, 1486 at Westminster. This unified the warring houses, gave him a greater claim to the throne due to Elizabeth's line of descent and ensured that his children would be of royal blood (although there is evidence that Edward was born illegitimate).

Henry's first action was to declare himself king retroactive to the day before the battle, thus ensuring that anyone who had fought against him would be guilty of treason. It is interesting to note, therefore, that he spared Richard's designated heir, John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln. He would have cause to regret his leniency two years later, when Lincoln rebelled and attempted to set a boy pretender, Lambert Simnel, on the throne in Henry's place. Lincoln was killed at the Battle of Stoke, but Simnel's life was spared and he became a royal servant.

Simnel had been put forward as "Edward VI", impersonating the young Edward, Earl of Warwick, son of George, Duke of Clarence, who was still imprisoned in the Tower of London. Henry had shown uncharacteristic leniency in dealing with Edward and did not find a pretext for executing him until he had grown into adulthood, in 1499. Edward's elder sister, Margaret Pole, who had the next best claim on the throne, inherited her father's earldom of Salisbury and survived well into the next century (until she fell victim to a bill of attainder for treason too, under Henry VIII).

Name:
Henry VII of England, King of England, son of Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond, by Margaret, daughter and heiress of John Beaufort, 1st Duke of somerset, regarded by the remnants of the Lancastrian party as the hope of Lancaster (though from an illegitimate line) on the extinction of the Royal line of the House of Lancaster, having invaded England, defeated and killed Richard III at Bosworth on 22 Aug 1485, chosen King of England on the battlefield, crowned 30 Oct 1485.

Henry married Elizabeth PLANTAGENET on 18 Jan 1486 in Westminster. Elizabeth (daughter of Edward IV 'Plantagenet' King Of ENGLAND and Elizabeth WOODVILLE) was born on 11 Feb 1465 in Westminster; died on 11 Feb 1503 in Tower of London. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Other Events and Attributes:

• Name: Ferdinand V King Of Aragon
• Fact: Between 1468 and 1516, King of Castile, Sicily
• Fact: 1469, Became Ferdinand V of Castile when he married Isabella
• Fact: Between 1479 and 1516, King of Aragon
• Fact: Between 1504 and 1516, King of Naples
• Death: 1516

Notes:

Wikipedia Encyclopedia:

Ferdinand was the son of John II of Aragon by his second wife, the Aragonese noblewoman Juana Enriquez. He married Infanta Isabella, the half-sister and heiress of Henry IV of Castile, on October 19, 1469 in OcaÒa and became Ferdinand V of Castile when Isabella succeeded her brother as Queen of Castile in 1474. The two young monarchs were initially obliged to fight a civil war against Juana, princess of Castile (also known as Juana la Beltraneja), the purported daughter of Henry IV, but were ultimately successful. When Ferdinand succeeded his father as King of Aragon in 1479, the Crown of Castile and the various territories of the Crown of Aragon were united in a personal union creating for the first time since the 8th century a single political unit which might be called Spain, although the various territories were not properly administered as a single unit until the 18th century.

The first decades of Ferdinand and Isabella's joint rule were taken up with the conquest of the Kingdom of Granada, the last Muslim enclave in the Iberian peninsula, which was completed by 1492. In that same year, the Jews were expelled from both Castile and Aragon, and Christopher Columbus was sent by the couple on his expedition which would ultimately discover the New World. By the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494, the extra-European world was split between the crowns of Portugal and Castile by a north-south line through the Atlantic Ocean.

The latter part of Ferdinand's life was largely taken up with disputes over control of Italy with successive Kings of France, the so-called Italian Wars. In 1494, Charles VIII of France invaded Italy and expelled Ferdinand's cousin, Alfonso II, from the throne of Naples. Ferdinand allied with various Italian princes and with Emperor Maximilian I, to expel the French by 1496 and install Alfonso's son, Ferdinand, on the Neapolitan throne. In 1501, following the death of Ferdinand II of Naples and his succession by his uncle Frederick, Ferdinand of Aragon signed an agreement with Charles VIII's successor, Louis XII, who had just successfully asserted his claims to the Duchy of Milan, to partition Naples between them, with Campania and the Abruzzi, including Naples itself, going to the French and Ferdinand taking Apulia and Calabria. The agreement soon fell apart, and over the next several years, Ferdinand's great general Gonzalo Fern·ndez de CÛrdoba conquered Naples from the French, having succeeded by 1504. Another less famous "conquest" took place in 1503, when Andreas Paleologus, de jure Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, left Ferdinand and Isabella as heirs to the empire, thus Ferdinand became de jure Roman Emperor.

After Isabella's death, her kingdom went to her daughter Joanna. Ferdinand served as the latter's regent during her absence in the Netherlands, ruled by her husband Archduke Philip. Ferdinand attempted to retain the regency permanently, but was rebuffed by the Castilian nobility and replaced with Joanna's husband, who became Philip I of Castile. After Philip's death in 1506, with Joanna mentally unstable, and her and Philip's son Charles of Ghent was only six years old, Ferdinand resumed the regency, ruling through Francisco Cardinal Jimenez de Cisneros, the Chancellor of the Kingdom.

In 1508, war resumed in Italy, this time against Venice, which all the other powers on the peninsula, including Louis XII, Ferdinand, Maximilian, and Pope Julius II joined together against as the League of Cambrai. Although the French were victorious against Venice at the Battle of Agnadello, the League soon fell apart, as both the Pope and Ferdinand became suspicious of French intentions. Instead, the Holy League was formed, in which now all the powers joined together against France.

In November 1511 Ferdinand and his son-in-law Henry VIII of England signed the Treaty of Westminster, pledging mutual aid between the two against France. Earlier that year, Ferdinand had conquered the southern half of the Kingdom of Navarre, which was ruled by a French nobleman, and annexed it to Spain. At this point Ferdinand remarried with the much younger Germaine of Foix (1490?1538), a grand-daughter of Queen Leonor of Navarre, to reinforce his claim to the kingdom. The Holy League was generally successful in Italy, as well, driving the French from Milan, which was restored to its Sforza dukes by the peace treaty in 1513. The French were successful in reconquering Milan two years later, however.

Ferdinand died in 1516 in Madrigalejo, C·ceres, Extremadura. He had made Spain the most powerful country in Europe. The succession of his grandson Charles, who would inherit not only the Spanish lands of his maternal grandparents, but the Habsburg and Burgundian lands of his paternal family, would make his heirs the most powerful rulers on the continent. Charles succeeded him in the Aragonese lands, and was also granted the Castilian crown jointly with his insane mother, bringing about at long last the unification of the Spanish thrones under one head.

Ferdinand married Isabella I Queen Of Castile And LEON on 19 Oct 1469 in Ocana. Isabella (daughter of JuanIIJohn II King Of Castile And LEON and Isabel Of PORTUGAL) was born on 23 Apr 1451; died on 26 Nov 1504. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Other Events and Attributes:

• Name: Isabel I Queen Of Castile
• Residence: Between 1474 and 1504, Queen of Castile and Leon
• Death: 1501