At the tender age of eighteen, Henry, son of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, became Henry VIII, king of England. The year was 1509. Henry, a rather obstinate young man, succeeded his father to the throne and married Catherine of Aragon, his dead brother's widow. Autocratic, egotistic and pleasure-seeking, Henry had been raised as a Roman Catholic and was content to remain a true son of that church — content, that is, until he bumped his self-seeking nose against that of the pope. The pope, Leo X, forbade him something you see, and that something was a divorce.