PopeWatch: Henry VIII

The male Tudor line, Henry VIII’s six marriages notwithstanding, was extinguished in his son, Edward VI.
The present British royal family is descended from Henry VIII’s sister Margaret, who married James IV of Scotland. The marriage was not universally popular in Scotland, many feeling it a degradation of the noble House of Stuart, to intermarry with “the thieves and broken men of England.”
Alas, James IV, was killed by the English in the disastrous defeat of Flodden Field on 9 September 1513, commemorated in the most haunting of laments, “Flowers of the Forest.”
http://tinyurl.com/kx7ah8o
Margaret was the grandmother of Mary, Queen of Scots and, by her second marriage to the Earl of Angus, of Mary’s husband, Henry, Lord Darnley. Their son was James VI of Scotland and 1st of England.
James’s daughter, Elizabeth Stuart, Electress Palatine and Queen of Bohemia, is the ancestor, not only of the present queen, but of the monarchs of Belgium, Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain and Sweden (and of the former royal families of Germany, Greece, Romania and Russia)

Eye of the Tiber is so very true, that it hurts. I am not laughing.

Somehow I think that if Henry’s case came up in the modernist Church, he could have gotten his annulment.

Maggie wrote, “Somehow I think that if Henry’s case came up in the modernist Church, he could have gotten his annulment.”
It is surprising what a popular topic the prohibited degrees was for the Reformers; they accused the Church of multiplying impediments, in order to multiply dispensations and the fees they attracted, as also of dissolving, on the strength of them, marriages that were valid and binding in God’s sight, whilst dispensing in cases that “God in His Word had forbidden in all time coming.” They were unanimous in insisting that the only prohibited degrees were those in Leviticus XVIII and that these were indispensible.
The Council of Trent dealt with the issue in its 24th Session on marriage in 1564. The 3rd canon defines, “If any one says, that those degrees only of consanguinity and affinity, which are set down in Leviticus, can hinder matrimony from being contracted, and dissolve it when contracted; and that the Church cannot dispense in some of those degrees, or establish that others may hinder and dissolve it ; let him be anathema.” The Council did not specify which of the Levitical degrees were dispensable; for on that there was no consensus.
The Levitical degrees, or rather Calvin’s interpretation of them (which no one disputed, even in that disputatious age) became the law in most Protestant states. Unfortunately, the rise of biblical exegesis in Germany after the Napoleonic Wars, notably at the universities of Tübingen and Halle, revealed that the Jewish interpretation, both Talmudic and Karaite differed from Calvin’s and notably on marriage with a deceased wife’s sister.
There was a 65 year campaign in the British Parliament, with a bill being introduced in every session, referred to by Gilbert & Sullivan in Iolanthe, where the Queen of the Fairies has the line
“He shall prick that annual blister, marriage with deceased wife’s sister.”