Which English king had six wives?

Henry VIII, and the schoolroom rhyme - divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived - is not quite right. Two marriages were annulled rather than dissolved, which is a stronger claim: an annulment says the marriage never legally existed, which was the whole point, since Henry needed his first marriage to have been invalid rather than merely over.

The break with Rome followed from that argument rather than from doctrine. Catherine of Aragon had been married to Henry's brother, and Henry's case was that Leviticus forbade marrying a brother's widow and that the papal dispensation permitting it had been invalid. The Pope, whose position was complicated by Catherine's nephew Charles V having troops in Rome, would not agree. Henry made himself head of the English church to get the answer he wanted, and the theology arrived afterwards.

The consequences outlived the marriages by a long way. The dissolution of the monasteries transferred perhaps a quarter of England's land to the Crown and then to buyers, which created a new landed class with a permanent financial interest in the Reformation not being reversed. Henry himself died fat, ulcerated and probably in considerable pain, having had a jousting accident in 1536 that some historians think changed his personality - the tyrannical phase follows it closely.