What should we think of Henry VIII? This year we will all have to decide. For
the 500th anniversary of his accession, the British Library and the Tower of
London will host exhibitions, Channel 4’s Time Team will explore his
palaces, and Hampton Court will make each of its many visitors a member of
his court for a day. Henry will be hard to avoid.
We know more about Henry than about any previous English king. We have more
portraits, painted, drawn and sculpted. We even have his suits of armour, so
we can measure his expanding waistline from muscled youth to bloated age. We
have more ambassadors’ reports, generated by the thickening web of resident
embassies at the courts of Renaissance Europe. We have more state papers,
hundreds of volumes in the National Archives and British Library,
exhaustively calendared by Victorian scholars in the thirty-eight printed
volumes of the Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of
Henry VIII. We have account books and rolls in thousands, so many that it
was not until 2004 that a researcher into the royal wardrobe discovered
mention of Henry’s football boots.
Yet Henry remains controversial, not because we are short of evidence, but
because he did controversial things. “Divorcements and such mischiefs”, as
one of his favourite preachers, Hugh Latimer, dared to call them once the
King was dead, polarize loyalties in any age. Breaking with Rome, destroying
the monasteries, patronizing some aspects of evangelical reform but
violently suppressing others, Henry was bound to make enemies in his
lifetime and beyond. Carving his way through political life by executing
queens, courtiers, noblemen, poets, his mother’s sixty-seven-year-old
cousin, the Countess of Salisbury, and two intellectuals of European
stature, Thomas More and John Fisher, he was bound to arouse passions. Huge
changes in the government of Wales and Ireland and the attempt to annex
Scotland by dynastic marriage could hardly go unnoticed. Wars against France
so costly that he had to cut the silver content of the coinage by
two-thirds, badly denting the national economy for a decade or more,
demanded some kind of audit. Debate surrounds not only the significance,
wisdom and morality of Henry’s actions, but even his responsibility for
them. Was he steered into policies by his great ministers Thomas Wolsey and
Thomas Cromwell, or perhaps cajoled into them by the cliques of courtiers
that surrounded him day and night?
All this has made Henry a fascinating object of study. His reign attracted
some of the most powerful English historical minds of the twentieth century,
from A. F. Pollard to G. R. Elton via W. G. Hoskins, the doyen of English
landscape historians, who characterized Henry’s generation as an “Age of
Plunder” and the King himself as “the Stalin of Tudor England”. Yet
full-scale biographies of the King are strangely rare. In part it is the
magisterial quality of J. J. Scarisbrick’s work of 1968 that has enabled it
to hold the field for so long. But there seems also to be a sense that Henry
is so large a character, the evidence so bulky, the controversies so fierce,
that the task daunts those who consider it.
We should therefore be grateful to David Starkey and Lucy Wooding for giving
us new Lives, which will doubtless be much read in the coming year. Their
books are very different. Lucy Wooding covers the whole reign, necessarily
drawing on others’ work, expounding and reviewing it in a way that students
will greet with joy. A long afternoon in the company of her book, deftly
used, will give them an air of easy familiarity with the great debates of
the past few decades. Yet her work is emphatically not an “A-says-this,
B-says-that” crammer. She takes her own line at every point, formulates her
judgements in fluent and pointed prose, and illustrates her case liberally
with quotations from chronicles, letters and formularies of faith. She also
has the knack of pleasantly surprising the reader with an unforeseen
connection, like Henry’s role in the creation of today’s London parks, or an
engagingly bizarre detail, like Pope Julius II’s gift of a hundred Parmesan
cheeses to cement the Anglo-Papal alliance.
David Starkey spends most of his book, Henry: Virtuous prince, on the obscure
years before Henry came to the throne, and ends in 1511 with Wolsey’s first
steps to power. The subject has been tried before, and not badly, in Mary
Louise Bruce’s The Making of Henry VIII (1977), but Starkey tackles it with
remarkable verve and insight. The brio is partly that of his characteristic
style – there are three-word, two-word and even one-word sentences – but
also of lively argument and imaginative use of sources. Only scraps survive
to tell us of a prince who, after all, was not even meant to be king until
his elder brother Arthur died in 1502. Yet they are all interrogated for
signs of Henry’s activity and character: household accounts, Exchequer
warrants, lists of jewels, rolls of prayers; the writings of his tutor John
Skelton and his companion in study William Blount, Lord Mountjoy; Henry’s
own letters and poems, even the shape of his handwriting.
For all their contrasts, the two books have much in common. Both pay more
rewarding attention than previous biographies to Henry’s material world.
They are aided in this by the recent publication, underDavid Starkey’s
editorship, of the exhaustive inventories of Henry’s goods made after his
death. Henry’s musical enthusiasm, for example, is witnessed by his
seventy-two flutes and seventy-six recorders. But they also have much to say
about palaces, clothes, armour, tapestries, food, landscape and travel. Both
make good use of the Tudor penchant for painstaking description of
significant set-piece events, from royal christenings to coronations and
diplomatic conferences.
Starkey in particular displays the gift his work has always shown for noticing
when, where and with whom things happened. One of his main arguments is that
Henry, brought up as a second son with his sisters and close to his mother
rather than sent away to the Welsh Marches to learn to rule as Arthur was,
turned out more Yorkist than Lancastrian. This fitted his physical
resemblance to his brawny grandfather, Edward IV, rather than his
spare-framed father, and perhaps the resemblance of his reign to Edward’s
more noble-friendly style of kingship.
Both authors are good with objects, but they certainly do not neglect ideas.
Both stress the importance of chivalry, romance and heroic predecessors –
Arthur, Henry V – in Henry’s mental universe. Both see Desiderius Erasmus,
the stellar Dutch humanist, and his English friend Thomas More as important
influences on Henry, and Wooding captures well the excitement of the revival
of classical learning. She also argues strongly for the consistency of
Henry’s aspirations for religious reform, compounded of twin desires for
supremacy over the Church and the banishment of superstition. If the first
derived from the divorce campaign, with its blend of high statesmanship and
histrionic midlife crisis, the second fitted an Erasmian, rather than a
Protestant, biblicism. In this way, he found it easy to license an English
Bible, while persecuting the Protestants who translated it for their denial
of the Real Presence in the Mass or their insistence on justification by
faith alone. Wooding concedes that some of those around Henry had different
agendas from the King, notably Archbishop Cranmer with his attachment to the
theology of the Continental Reformers, but she maintains, surely correctly,
that Henry kept control of the key decisions on religion as on other
matters.
The problem is that, in religion as elsewhere, Henry’s ambitions were, as she
puts it, “fierce, but indistinct”, and those who framed proposals for
his consideration, or undertook the detailed implementation of his policies,
could shape their formulation and impact. Wooding catches the King’s
frustration at the way “even his closest advisors persisted in misreading
his intentions”.
Both give us a Henry prone to insecurity because closer to the Wars of the
Roses than we usually think. Starkey conjures up his fear, waiting with his
mother in the Tower of London, as his father’s army took on the rebels at
Blackheath in 1497. Wooding suggests that his concern to find the perfect
marriage sprang from his awareness of the importance of his parents’ match
in his father’s fragile political settlement. Both also give us a Henry who
thought in European terms. Starkey’s is an admirer of Philip the Fair, the
jousting and tennis-playing Habsburg ruler of the Netherlands, whom the
Prince met in 1506. Wooding’s is anxious to make a mark on Europe, whether
by conquest or magnificent peacemaking.
Both, strikingly, give us two Henries: one before and one after the King’s
quest for “virtue, glory, immortality”, as trumpeted by Mountjoy in 1509,
turned to a tyrannous determination to remake the world whatever the cost.
For Wooding the turning point came after 1527, as the struggle for the
divorce made Henry’s inability to see how anyone could disagree with him a
motor for destruction. Each suggests some traits of the young Henry that
would work themselves out in later life, but each perhaps neglects some
incidents that might blur the contrast, notably the decision to execute his
father’s imprisoned ministers Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley some thirteen
months after they were convicted for plotting to take control at the start
of the reign.
Wooding and Starkey alike provide compelling portraits of Henry, but Wooding
faces an extra difficulty. How far should a full royal biography also be a
history of the reign? Starkey largely avoids the issue by his concentration
on the claustrophobic world of the Prince and the young King, still in
tutelage to his father’s councillors, though in his promised second volume,
covering the remainder of the reign, he will surely have to confront it.
Wooding’s answer seems to be to treat things as they mattered to the King.
So foreign policy and religion loom large and the administrative changes
that dominated Elton’s work are virtually absent: no Court of Augmentations,
no Court of Star Chamber, no creation of the Privy Council. Popular
political engagement features only as Henry had to confront it, in the
Amicable Grant risings (1525) and the Pilgrimage of Grace (1536). More
disorientatingly, there is no sign of social problems like enclosure; even
two of Henry’s wars, those with the Netherlands in 1528 and Scotland in
1532–4, pass unnoticed; and Wales and Ireland get a paragraph between them.
The effect is like one of those alarmingly distorted homunculi, in which
parts of the body are represented in proportion, not to their size, but to
the number of nerve endings they contain.
This may well be a picture of the world as Henry saw it, but, if so, it is a
salutary reminder. Henry may well have been, as Starkey’s back cover
proclaims him, “England’s most powerful monarch”. His reign demonstrated the
power of personal monarchy to dominate the lives of contemporaries and the
fate of generations to come. But studies of the King as closely- focused as
these also suggest by implication the limitations of Henry’s rule. Perhaps
the hardest thing to do this year will be to stand back from Henry’s
overpowering presence, to gain a little perspective on the King and on the
contexts and the contemporaries that shaped, constrained or condemned him.
David Starkey
HENRY
Virtuous prince
418pp. Harper Press. £25.
978 0 00 724771 4
Lucy Wooding
HENRY VIII
339pp. Routledge. Paperback, £13.99.
978 0 415 33995 7
Steven Gunn is Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Merton College,
Oxford. His books include Early Tudor Government, 1485-1558 (1995) and War,
State and Society in England and the Netherlands, 1477-1559 (with David
Grummitt and Hans Cools) , 2007.
