Titans of History

Although Henry is sometimes credited with England’s Protestant Reformation, doctrinally he remained a Catholic conservative. Nonetheless, his political revolution made a Protestant England possible. His lucrative dissolution of the monasteries—an act of vandalism on a massive scale—funded his reign and marked his new absolutism. Anne Boleyn delivered a child to Henry in 1533, but it was a girl, the future Elizabeth I. Henry turned against her, ordering Cromwell to concoct charges of adultery, incest and witchcraft, evidenced by her “third nipple” used for suckling the Devil—actually a mole on her neck. Five men, including Boleyn’s brother, were framed and executed. Anne was beheaded on May 19, 1536. Ten days later Henry married Jane Seymour, who delivered a son, the future Edward VI, but died in childbirth—the only wife Henry ever grieved for.

Cromwell, pushing a Protestant foreign policy and promoted to earl of Essex, persuaded Henry to marry Anne of Cleves. But Henry, himself now fat and prone to suppurating sores, was repelled by this “Flanders Mare.” Cromwell was framed and executed in 1540, the very day Henry married the pretty Catherine Howard, just sixteen years old. Henry ordered that Cromwell’s beheading should be carried out by an inexperienced youth. The head was severed on the third attempt.

Each of the English wives was backed by an ambitious political-religious family faction. The Howards were pro-Catholic, but their teenage queen was a reckless and naïve flirt whose past mischief and present adulterous adventures allowed the Protestant faction to exploit the king’s fragile sexual pride. In 1542, at age eighteen, she was beheaded. His sensible last wife, Catherine Parr, outlived him.

Henry determined to marry his young son Edward to the infant Mary Queen of Scots. But Scottish intractability was unmoved by the so-called Rough Wooing, during which Henry sent his armies over the Border to put “man, woman and child to fire and sword without exception.” One of England’s most majestic and formidable kings, yet a flawed tyrant and a statesman of very mixed achievements, Henry was both hero and monster, brutal egotist and effective politician. As the duke of Norfolk understood: “The consequence of royal anger is death.” In 1544, he laid out the succession: the Protestant Edward, then Catholic Mary, followed by Protestant Elizabeth. Henry VIII was followed on the throne by his son, the fervent reformer Edward VI. He moved swiftly to firm up Protestantism’s hold on England, outlawing the Latin mass and clerical celibacy and demanding that services be carried out in English. But he was sickly, and died at fifteen. His sister Mary I reversed Edward’s reforms, fiercely enforcing Rome’s return to English religious life. Many hundreds died at the stake, but despite her marriage to Philip II of Spain she remained childless and this bitter and increasingly deranged figure could not prevent the crown from passing to her sister, Elizabeth, after her early death.

SULEIMAN THE MAGNIFICENT

1494–1566

I who am the sultan of sultans, the sovereign of sovereigns, the shadow of God on earth, sultan and emperor of the White Sea [Mediterranean] and the Black Sea …

Suleiman the Magnificent writing to the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V (1547)

Under the rule of Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman empire, which stretched from the Middle East to North Africa, the Balkans and central Europe, reached its glorious peak. He expanded its borders, rooted out corruption, overhauled the laws, ruled with tolerance, patronized the arts and wrote fine poetry. His legacy was a vast, well-governed, culturally flourishing empire, which continued to thrive for a century after his death.

When Suleiman came to power as Ottoman sultan or padishah (emperor) in 1520, at age twenty-six, succeeding his father Selim the Grim, he inherited an empire centered on Turkey, which had been strengthened by his father’s acquisitions of Syria, Palestine and Egypt, as well as the two holiest Islamic cities, Medina and Mecca. Suleiman saw himself as the universal emperor, successor to the Roman emperors but also as “the second Solomon,” his namesake—he determined to expand this empire in every direction.