Let’s talk about Tudor Annulments and love dissolving, when love goes bad and Tudor divorces. Because there were some precedents for even for Henry and his divorces. There had been monarchs who had annulments. Of course, it wasn’t divorce as we consider it now. It was more of an annulment. Marriage itself was indissoluble, but you could say that the marriage never took place. There were precedents for that.
There had been a French king who put his wife aside when he wanted to marry someone younger, that had happened just 20-30 years before Henry’s great matter. So there had been precedent for it. And of course, because of what Henry did during his reign, it sort of changed that.Â
Mixed with the growing Renaissance humanism and the focus on this life being important, as opposed to just being a practice for the next life. And people deserving to be happy in this life and kind of thinking about what that even meant. It definitely did have an effect. We saw some changes with that throughout the 16th century.
So marriage at the beginning of the Tudor period and through the end, it didn’t change that much, but we did start to see some changes. It wasn’t just a personal union. It was a sacred institution intertwined with the fabric of social and religious life. This period marked the blend of feudal traditions. And like I said, the emerging Renaissance humanism, it did see marriage as a divine covenant and a societal cornerstone.
It was a means to secure alliances, to consolidate power, to ensure social order. The sanctity of marriage was underscored by Protestant theologians and conduct book writers like William Gouge, who said that the family was a little church and a little commonwealth, highlighting its role in mirroring and maintaining the hierarchical and moral order of the wider society.
Henry VIII came along with his marriage controversies and his six wives and the schism with the Catholic Church, casting a long shadow over marriage in Tudor England. And it set some unprecedented precedents for marital disillusion. There were some signs that people were watching and people were paying attention and even mimicking what he was doing.
Around the same time, there was this fellow in Wales called Edward Griffith. He was a member of the Welsh gentry. And a lot of what he did actually mirrored what Henry did, suggesting a bit of a ripple effect with the king’s actions on the realm. So he had three marriages.
First he married a woman called Jane, and then she died, and he married her sister Agnes. But then that was annulled because of matters of consanguinity, where you’re related because he’d been married to the sister, which is kind of what Henry was saying with Catherine having been married to his brother.
Then he married another woman called Jane, and there were all these issues that popped up in terms of inheritances and what his children could inherit and who belonged to what, who got what, what belonged to whom, all of that. But it did reflect a sort of mimicry of the monarch’s personal life, hinting at a broader cultural and legal impact of royal marital decisions.
The legal grounds for annulment in Tudor England ranged from consanguinity and non-consummation to pre-contracts and underage unions. It reveals the complex interplay between the law, morality, and social norms. Annulments were rare but they were actually the legal recourse that people had for invalidating a marriage that went against these strictures.
So if you married somebody and you found out that they had a pre-contract with somebody else, you could annul that. Like what we saw with Edward Griffith. There were other similar cases. The marriage between Henry Parker, who was the 10th Baron Morley, and Alice St. John was dissolved due to an alleged pre-contract that she had with Edward Neville, revealed the complexities of the Tudor marriage contracts.
How did you get your marriage annulled if you wanted to get your marriage annulled and you were living in Tudor England? Well, the church courts is where you would go. They played the pivotal role in adjudicating marital disputes, operating under a legal framework that intertwined religious doctrine with civil law. These courts wielded authority of the church. They were the primary venues for addressing grievances related to marriage, including requests for annulments and separations.
You could get a divorce from bed and board. That was a form of legal separation that did not permit remarriage, and it was very narrowly defined, typically limited to cases of adultery or cruelty, but it was a legal mechanism that allowed for couples who had distressing circumstances to live apart while still maintaining that the marriage itself was still valid, but it gave them an opportunity to live apart.
So that was what you would do if you were having issues related to your husband being cruel to you or committing adultery or something like that. You would get a divorce from bed and board.
But of course, the adjudication of these cases often revealed a stark gender bias because women faced greater scrutiny and were held to higher standards of proof, especially in cases of cruelty or adultery.
Because of course, societal expectation was that women would be chaste, women would be faithful, women would be obedient. So if you weren’t those things, it was easier for your husband to say that you weren’t living up to your end of the bargain.
The man, of course, was supposed to be strong and go out and have affairs and do all of that. I mean, he wasn’t really supposed to, but it was much more accepted. So you had a much harder time as a woman proving cruelty or adultery. There was so much of this gender disparity.
Even Henry VIII’s sister, Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scotland, through her marriage to James IV, found herself entangled in some of this complexity and some of this gender bias. After James IV died, she quickly married Archibald Douglas, the 6th Earl of Angus, and their marriage quickly soured, and she wanted to seek a divorce.
This quest was fraught with political implications, and of course, Henry VIII had to step in and say he very much disapproved because of course he did. He didn’t quite get the irony, but he said that the marriage was indissoluble and she needed to go back and be a good wife to her husband. So there was a lot of gender bias and a lot of hypocrisy with that, but hey, what else is new, right?
We talked about Edward Griffith. I mentioned previously his case illustrates the complexities of these social influences. We have a lot of records of his case. There was a lot of court documents with arguing over these inheritances and who got what and whether marriages were legal or not.
So the divorce cases, annulments, and surrounding legal framework in Tudor England reflect a period of tension between personal desires, legal constraints, and societal expectations. The church courts, with their limited grounds for annulment and inherent biases against women largely, highlight the complexity in marital law in an era that valued marriage as a sacred and indissoluble institution.
These narratives that we talked about underscore the intricate balance between individual agency and the broader societal norms that governed the marital relationships in the Tudor period, revealing, of course, that there was a deep interconnectedness between the personal lives, the legal systems, and the social structures.
Related link:
Episode 227: The Love Lives Of Tudor And Stuart Queens
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Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast,  the original Tudor history podcast, started in 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. In 2019 she created Tudorcon, which is now a yearly event, in addition to writing books, and running TudorFair.com - a whimsical Tudor Merch shop. She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 20 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history.