Moments in Royal History - January 25

1533 - Henry VIII of England officially married his second wife, Anne Boleyn.

Anne Boleyn

     King Henry had been pursuing Anne Boleyn for about seven years, but she refused to become his mistress, as her elder sister Mary had done. Henry, who was already frustrated by the inability to father a male heir through his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, was determined to marry the younger Boleyn for love and the heir he so desperately desired. He sought to get the Church to annul his marriage to Catherine, but when it became clear that Pope Clement VII would not do so (in part because Catherine's nephew, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, was in control on Rome around this time), Henry famously broke with Rome and with Parliament, declared Royal supremacy over the of the Church of England in 1532. 

     Henry and Anne secretly married in 1532, and she became pregnant. A second marriage ceremony was held in January 1533, and this one was considered lawful. In May of that year, Henry's new Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, annulled his marriage to Catherine and validated the marriage to Boleyn.

1858 - Victoria, Princess Royal married Prince Frederick of Prussia

Victoria, Princess Royal by Franz Xaver Winterhalter (1867)

     Princess Victoria - Queen Victoria's eldest child - had met the German prince during the Great Exhibition of 1851, and they became privately engaged in 1855 when she was fourteen and he was twenty-four. The engagement was publicly announced in 1857, and the ceremony itself took place the following year in the Chapel Royal at St. James's Palace (the same place where Prince George was recently baptized). Victoria and Frederick - the second in line to the Prussian throne - were married as a couple in love, but the match also occurred for dynastic reasons - to forge greater ties between Britain and Germany.

     The wedding was known for the performance of Felix Mendelssohn's Wedding March. Mendelssohn was a favorite musician of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and he often played for them during his visits to Britain. The Wedding March itself had been written in 1842, but it did not gain significant popularity Princess Victoria chose it to be played at her wedding.

     Frederick and Victoria would eventually go on to become King and Queen of Prussia and Emperor and Empress (Kaiser and Kaiserin) of Germany, and this marriage produced Kaiser Wilhelm II, Queen Victoria's eldest grandson, who would wage war against Britain during the First World War.