Why did King Henry VIII of England want a male heir when his daughters could take the throne? Queen Elizabeth I was the direct descendant of King Henry VIII and inherited the throne after her half-siblings got there first. Her half-sister, Mary, inherited the throne and Mary, Queen of Scots, her cousin, both inherited the throne before her. If King Henry VIII had stayed with Queen Catherine of Aragon, then Mary could easily ascend the throne… and --gulp-- persecute Protestants.
Because it hadn’t ever been done yet, among other reasons. The only time the British throne had even considered passing to a woman you had the Stephen v. Maude fiasco.
They would have preferred a male heir, but none was available, and the family wasn’t going to give up power without trying something radical like a regnant Queen. So Elizabeth, et. al., were options of last resort.
A clear male successor was preferred. Henry’s fear was that a female successor would be unable to effectively lead the country. And a secondary fear was that it might lead to a multi-decade civil war like the War of the Roses.
Not to mention that obviously male heirs were valued socially far more than females.
Plus, generally, a woman was generally supposed to take econd place behind her husband - meaning whoever married Mary or Elizabeth would be the actual power. Most kings preferred that the power go to their offspring, not to someone else who maried in. Women were not seen as effective leaders of men. Elizabeth I turned out to be an exception. (Of course, a lot of kings were not great leaders of men either). IIRC, Mary of Orange agreed to be Queen only if her husband William (with a more tenous lineage claim) also got to be king.
Elizabeth determined that she would not marry (most likely…) because she expected that whoever married her would try to take over and rule as king. If she married someone from abroad, it would be a foreign take-over; if she married internally, all the internal politics and jockeying between the top English families would precede the choice she made. Worst case, one side might revert to a civil war to avoid losing position.
This, basically.
You have to look at Henry in his historical context: his dad was the guy who won the last round in the War of the Roses. A desputed succession could very easily see a return to that - destructive civil war.
Many, many people saw a female succession as a potenial opportunity for disputes of various sorts … in particular, even assuming she was accepted as legitimate (and remember that Henry had at various points declared both or his daughters to be less than legitimate), whoever the daughter in question married would at best have a large share of influence leading to jockying for position, and at worst usurp the government.
In fact, on the death of Henry’s son, something of the sort was attempted with lady Jane Gray (easily crushed by Mary’s supporters).
Henry was quite correct to see producing a male heir as a priority - he could not have predicted that his daughter Elizabeth would largely succeed in playing the political game and retain real power in her own hands.
Two points not yet mentioned:
(1) Many men, regardless of status, want a son specifically.
(2) A legitimate son would be heir apparent while a daughter would never be more than heir presumptive. Thus a son could be raised specially to inherit, while a daughter would always wonder when she was losing her Monarchy to a new birth.
“Must… sire… a dude…” - Homer Simpson, as Henry VIII
Mary of Scotland was never Queen of England.
This is the English throne (though it included the territories of Wales and Ireland). The Scottish throne was completely separate until 1603, hence the previously mentioned fact that Mary Stewart was never queen of England. Scotland could have had a queen regnant after the death of Alexander III, but Margaret Maid of Norway died when she was still very young, which led to the wars with Edward I of England.
And of course, this fear was more than theoretical, because Elizabeth and everyone else had seen what happened when her sister Mary I married Philip II of Spain. Philip took the title of King in England, and spent most of Mary’s reign trying to involve England in Spain’s wars. France did finally attack England in a war which led to the loss of Calais. Had Philip and Mary had a son, he would have been the joint heir to the Hapsburg dominions and England, which would have been a mess.
I want to point out that Henry VIII, did have a male heir, Edward VI was the King from January 1547 until his death in 1553.
In addition, he was clearly a misogynist. Legal succession aside, he was not really a fan of women as anything other than objects to be owned and disposed of.
Sorry, I was lazy in my terminology.
I do recall that King Henry VIII wanted Anne Boleyn as his mistress, but Anne wouldn’t be a mistress; she wanted to be a queen with legitimate children. So, Henry sought a divorce from his first wife, Catherine, which the pope refused. (He was a Catholic, after all.) So, he disposed the Catholic Church and founded the Anglican Church with him as the head of the Church, at which point he could invalidate his marriage to Catherine and validate his marriage to Anne, sealing a greater alliance between him and the Boleyn family.
I think Henry might have known that Catherine was originally intended for his older brother, but when the crown went to him, he married Catherine as a replacement and divorced her without a care. So, he might not loved her from the start. The marriage might have been an alliance between England and Spain. He probably also figured that Catherine was older than he and did not bear a single male heir that he was hoping for. Perhaps, he feared that Catherine might lose her fertility due to her age?
By that time, Catherine was already aging fast and had failed to produce any other living children despite several pregnancies. Henry was desperate anyway; Anne saw her chance and took it. Henry and Catherine were originally a pretty happy couple, as these things go, but the lack of sons soured him on her, and when she refused to grant him a divorce he saw it as a betrayal and hated her.
I can understand Henry’s desperation. His most important job was to produce a living male heir and he couldn’t hardly manage it, after years of trying there was just the one son with health problems. Mary was a bad prospect as an heir, not only because she was a girl (and an invitation to civil war and all sorts of disaster), she was also a fanatical Catholic. Henry spent all this energy ripping himself and England away from the RCC, and you can just imagine how the prospect must have looked: a queen that would force England back to Rome, producing more chaos and disorder. And of course that’s just what happened eventually.
That may be to get cause and effect round the wrong way. Historians remain divided as to which came first: Henry’s wish to marry Anne Boleyn or his scruples over his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. That’s because there simply isn’t enough evidence to pin down exactly when either of those first occured. So it is perfectly possible that Henry began to consider marrying Anne - or, more contentiously, even begun any sort of relationship with her - only after he had already decided to divorce Catherine.
This also has a crucial bearing on the question as to why the absence of a son was a problem. If one considers that Henry’s scruples were genuine (which is by no means the only way of interpreting the evidence), then the absence of a son wasn’t just a matter of having no male heir. That’s because, for Henry, that absence was also the proof that his marriage to Catherine was invalid. And that, in turn, cast doubt on the legitimacy of the child he did have, i.e. Mary.
As for fears of civil war, it wasn’t just recent English experiences that would have been on Henry’s mind. There was another, even more germane parallel, for he can hardly have been unaware that his own late mother-in-law, Queen Isabella, had had to fight a civil war against her neice, the Queen of Portugal, to assert her claim to the throne of Castile. The English parallel would be for Mary to have to fight a civil war against her aunt, Margaret, the Scottish Queen Dowager.
Not while Carlos, Philip’s son by his previous marriage, was alive or had left heirs. The marriage treaty specifically ruled out any claim to any of the Habsburg lands by a child from Mary’s marriage over those of Don Carlos or his heirs. This was all the more important as it prevented Philip partly overriding Carlos’s claims by dividing his Habsburg territories in the way that Philip’s own father, Charles V, planned to do. (Of course, in the event, Carlos did not outlive his father and left no children. But by then Mary was long dead anyway.)
And several bastards, proof to many it was Catharine, not Henry.
Yes indeed. I bet he wished many times in later years that he could just proclaim Henry FitzRoy his heir. I think the fact that Anne Boleyn was Mary’s sister probably helped her become queen. It worked with one sister, so why not the other?