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By 1527 Henry was worried. Catherine had only had one child that had lived and she was a girl. Henry wanted a male heir.
He also quite fancied a girl at court who was a maid of honour to Catherine. She was called Anne Boleyn. Henry had already had a brief affair with her sister,
Mary. But Anne refused to become Henry’s mistress and so Henry and Wolsey decided they had to get Henry’s marriage to Catherine cancelled by the Pope and they
wanted to use the reason that you couldn’t marry your sister-in-law. This was a bit cheeky as Henry had earlier asked the Pope to give permission. Also the
Pope was under the control at the time of Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, who was Catherine’s nephew.
Anyhow the Pope refused and Henry got cross and sacked Wolsey who sensibly died while on his way to the Tower of London thereby avoiding death as
he
would almost certainly have been tried and executed. Henry then appointed Thomas Cromwell as his new advisor. Cromwell, the name will appear again in a hundred
or
so years time, had been legal secretary to Wolsey but quietly working his way into Henry’s favour. With this appointment we must assume he was pretty successful
at doing that.
It should be noted that Henry was bit of a flirt, having quite a lot of affairs with ladies who worked as assistants to Catherine. He also had a son,
Henry Fitzroy after an affair with Elizabeth Blount, another of Catherine’s ladies in waiting.
Forward to 1533AD
