Jane Seymour

Much is made of Henry VIII’s maniacal obsession with obtaining a male heir to the throne. This was a big factor in the Church of England’s break from the Roman Catholic Church in 1534 that soon opened the door to the English Reformation and its settlement into Protestantism. Jane Seymour, Henry’s third wife, gave him his only living legitimate son. She died on October 24, 1537, twelve days after giving birth to the future King Edward VI. She was the only one of his six wives to be given a proper queen’s funeral, and when he died in 1547, Henry was buried beside Jane in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle. Her untimely death left Edward's education in the supervision of humanist and evangelical (i.e., Protestant) tutors, including Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer and Katherine Parr, his new mother of whom Edward was reportedly very fond. In Edward's short reign the Protestant rumblings of the previous hundred years finally coalesced. Under him the recognized “Anglican formularies” were written: the first book of Homilies, the 42 Articles of Religion (the Church of England’s confession that would be consolidated to the Thirty-nine Articles in 1571), and the Book of Common Prayer (1552, which became the 1662 authorized version).