#henry 8

Fun fact: the Renaissance (in England) is said as starting in the year 1485, the year Henry VII came to the throne after defeating Richard III at Bosworth field.

The year is totally arbitrary as there weren’t any drastic changes that year, but by Henry VIII we were in the Renaissance so they had to pick a year.

Thanks for this question! And good news! I've read all of nostalgebraist, so I can answer this one.

Henry VIII has six wives, but only because they were married to him -- the real problem, in the early days of Henry VIII's reign, was his inability to sire a child with his wife Catherine Howard. So they married to fix the problem, and it fixed everything.

Anyway, the wives are:

Anne of Cleves

Katherine of Aragon

Anne Boleyn

Jane Seymour

Margaret Ralegh

Catherine Howard

Henry VIII wasn't a particularly interesting monarch overall, and was often married off to women who had been previously married, but the Tudor queens were pretty cool. Anne Boleyn actually lived in the Tower of London during the reign of Henry VIII as the Queen Consort of England, and Henry and Anne had four children.

Jane Seymour and Margaret Ralegh lived in various castles during the Tudor period and had three daughters and two sons and the king even took an interest in William as a boy who went on to be a famous poet and soldier who lived with Elizabeth, the queen consort of the Tudors.

Catherine Howard also lived in a castle with a lot of interesting architecture, in her case married to the king, but she couldn't produce children of her own so she spent a lot of time as a lady-in-waiting at court.

And Anne of Cleves is what she is because Anne was a fairly ambitious woman. She went on to be the lady-in-waiting who accompanied Henry VIII on his way to be crowned Tower.

Kathryn {Kitty} Howard (Wife #5)

The young niece of the powerful and ambitious Duke of Norfolk and a cousin of ill-fated wife #2 Anne Boleyn, Kitty Howard was a vivacious young woman with a sad past. Kitty was 17-20 when she married the 49 year old Henry just 19 days after his annulment from Anne of Cleves in July of 1540 . Kitty had been used by older men her whole life, having first been manipulated by her music teacher at 13, she was naïve and full of jovial cheer that made her easy to use as a pawn for power. Henry was besotted with his young wife, dubbing her his “rose without a thorn”. Kitty was found to be flirting with a groom of Henry’s, a Master Thomas Culpepper. She was tried for “her” adulteries both before and during the marriage as well as treason. Culpepper was arrested for treason too, and was eventually executed at Tyburn where he was hanged, drawn, and quartered. Kitty was beheaded for her infidelities' (even though she had been a child when they happened) on the 13th of February 1542.   

Katherine Parr (Wife #6) 

“I’m Henry the Eighth, I had six wives.” “Some might say I ruined their lives...”

Bitch.