Lamest balloon animals ever…
From the ever-amusing Blogadilla
As we struggle to inflate, we might tip the mitre to the Anglican Church (or to the Episcopal, if that’s handier for some readers), as it was on this date in 1530 that King Henry VIII’s request for an annulment of his childless marriage to Catherine of Aragon was denied by Pope Clement VII… initiating the chain of events that proceeded through the estrangement of Cardinal Wolsey and the murder of Sir Thomas More to Henry’s marriage to Ann Boleyn (1533), and his subsequent declaration (in 1534) that he, not the Pope, was supreme head of England’s church, and thus to the establishment of the Church of England.
Holbein’s portrait of His Holiness
Update and Correction, 3.7.09: The almanac post above incorrectly suggested that Henry VIII sought an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon because it was childless. In fact, Catherine bore Henry six children, but only two boys– both of whom died. Henry’s concern (at a time when there was no precedent for a female monarch) was to have a male heir; to wit his appeal to the Pope. Ironically, of course, one of Catherine’s daughters, Mary, became England’s queen on Henry’s death, to be followed by her half sister Elizabeth… your too-casual-and-now-contrite correspondent is grateful to reader KM (more accurately, to her mother) for the catch… and is now returning to his Antonia Frasier…