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A Guide to Nine Days a Queen Part One : THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Nine Days a Queen is a glimpse of 16th-century England. It portrays a portion of one of the most important periods in all English history. In it England was being transformed from a nation of farmers into a nation of traders and shopkeepers. But the photoplay does not concern itself with this. It opens with the death of the second ruler of the Tudor line of monarchs, to whose foresight and statesmanship England owes much of her present position as a European and a world power. The power of the old feudal nobility had been shattered in the Wars of the Roses which ended with the accession of Henry VIII's father, the founder of the Tudor line. The nobles who took their places owed their titles and power to the Tudor monarchs. The struggle for power characteristic of the photoplay is among the members of this new nobility, and their fortunes are identified not only with the political but with the economic and religious changes of the period.
Henry VIII helped to usher in the Reformation, whose influence was already felt before he took the radical step of separating the church in England from the power of the Pope. This break was intimately associated with his plans for the succession, and these in turn, with his foreign policy. His Catholic wife, Catharine of Aragon (celebrated in Shakespeare's King Henry VIII), whom he had married at the behest of his father, had given him a daughter Mary (born in 1516) , but no male heir. For centuries no woman had ruled England and the future of the dynasty must not be jeopardized. Charles V, King of Spain and Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire was Catharine's nephew. The marriage between Henry VIII and Catharine had been the outcome of one of those arrangements of his father which were designed to establish more firmly the position of the Tudor family. Henry VII had likewise consummated other marriages, notably with the Scottish royal house, through which ultimately the two kingdoms were to be united.
Henry VIII's personal inclinations were undoubtedly involved when he divorced Catharine in 1533. By so doing he cast the stigma of illegitimacy upon his daughter by that marriage, the "bloody Mary" of the photoplay. Henry VIII also had to reckon with her powerful nephew and at the same time adjust his relations with King Francis I of France, whose ambitions clashed with those of his Spanish and imperial rival and neighbor. By Henry VIII's marriage with Anne Boleyn, one of Catherine's ladies-in-waiting, he had the Princess Elizabeth (born in 1533). Upon her too rested the stigma of illegitimacy, especially with those Englishmen who, as good Catholics, refused to accept the divorce, and naturally identified her with the Protestant reform movement. Henry was still without a male heir. The intrigues of powerful families, motivated in part by religious differences, brought Queen Anne to the execution block, and Henry turned for his next wife to the Seymour family, representative of the Protestant faction. Jane Seymour,