Everybody thinks that they know Henry VIII. Described by Charles Dickens as “a
spot of blood and grease on the history of England”, he is the most infamous
monarch of them all, the only king whose shape you remember. And he is the
only king who had six wives, divorced four and beheaded two of them as well,
just to make sure.
This is the Henry VIII of myth and legend. The legend of course is based on
reality - or, rather, on one of them. For Henry VIII, the monstrous, bloated
tyrant with a face like a Humpty Dumpty of nightmare - is only one of a
myriad Henrys.
The Humpty Dumpty Henry of popular imagination derives from a rare engraving
by the Flemish artist Cornelis Metsys, and it's one of the many treasures on
display in the British Library exhibition that opens next month to celebrate
the 500th anniversary of Henry's accession on April 22, 1509.
The new British Library exhibition, Man and Monarch, which I have helped to
curate, is a quest for the real Henry. The Metsys engraving, made in 1544
when Henry was 53, shows him when he had only three more years to live. His
6ft-odd frame had swollen to gigantic size, and, with his 54-inch waist, he
was corpulent to the point of immobility. He was dragged along the endless
galleries of his palaces in wheeled chairs known as trams, and hauled up and
down stairs in a Tudor stair-lift. He was also in constant pain from his
ulcerated leg, which swelled, burst, drained and swelled once more in a
cycle of agony that ended only with his death from septicaemia on January
28, 1547.
This is how Henry ended up. But just as important is how he got there and how
he began. Also in the exhibition is the only contemporary portrait of Henry
as a young man that seems to have survived. It is normally displayed in the
Denver Art Museum in Colorado and it is revisiting Britain for the first
time in decades. This shows a very different Henry: tall and slim and with
handsome, regular features. This is the Henry who bowled over foreign
visitors and led to rave reports, such as the Venetian ambassador's in 1515:
Henry, he wrote home, is “the handsomest potentate I ever set eyes on ...
his complexion very fair and bright, with auburn hair combed straight in the
French fashion; and a round face so very beautiful that it would become a
pretty woman, his throat being rather long and thin”.
This almost feminine quality is also picked on by someone who had known Henry
since childhood and would become his closest friend and, in time, his most
upright opponent. Thomas More greeted Henry's accession and coronation with
a set of celebratory verses, written in Latin and elaborately illuminated,
which Henry seems to have kept in his library through all the vicissitudes
of his relationship with their author. These, too, step off the shelf into
the limelight of the exhibition with their astonishing description of the
newly crowned king, barely 18 years old. “In fact,” More observes, “that
face, admirable for its animated strength, could belong to either a young
girl or a man.”
And it wasn't just appearance. Henry's elder brother, Arthur, Prince of Wales,
received the sort of male-dominated upbringing typical of a Tudor
upper-class boy: he had his own household from earliest infancy; was Regent
of England at 6; and resident Prince of Wales at 7 or 8. The contrast with
Henry could not have been greater. Documents, normally buried in some of the
more obscure files of the National Archives and on show in the exhibition
for the first time, demonstrate that Henry instead was brought up with his
sisters and their women, up to and beyond puberty. This royal “nursery”, as
the documents call it, was usually based at Eltham, in the lushly wooded
country on the south bank of the Thames, only a few miles' easy ride from
his mother's favourite palace at Greenwich. Indeed she, Elizabeth of York,
was the dominant influence on the upbringing of her second son, even, as a
comparison of their handwriting shows, teaching him to write.
We normally think of Henry - with his legs astride, his arms akimbo and his
jutting codpiece - as the very model of selfconfident masculinity. But this
feminised upbringing, and its sudden, tragic end when his mother died in
childbirth in her 37th year and when Henry was not yet 12, take us behind
the strutting façade. The real Henry was needy: he was a man who needed
women. He believed that love and marriage were inextricable. So, when love
ended, he believed that marriage should also. And, since he was a king, he
was able to give effect to this belief - though at terrible cost to himself,
his kingdom and, above all, to the women whom he loved, married and then
destroyed.
So much, for the moment, for the man. But what of the monarch? Henry is famous
(or infamous, depending on your point of view) above all for the Break with
Rome, when he severed England's 1,000-year-old ties to the Papacy and set up
instead his own national Church of England, with himself as its Supreme Head
on Earth under Christ.
But just how great an upheaval was this for Henry himself? Views differ, with
some historians arguing that Henry, influenced by his boyhood mentor, the
great Dutch scholar Erasmus, had always been a reforming Catholic and one
sceptical of the superstitious excesses of popular devotion. But the
exhibition is able to show the contrary, thanks to the survival of another
relic of Henry's boyhood: his Bede or Prayer Roll. Held for the past century
and a half in the collections of a remote Catholic seminary on the bleak
moorland to the north of Durham and never exhibited before, the roll is as
remarkable in appearance as in content. It is a very long and narrow strip
of parchment (11ft x 5in), made up of several membranes - that is,
individual sheep-skins - stitched together end to end and illuminated with
harrowing images of Christ's sufferings on the cross and the lingering
martyrdoms of saints. Alongside each image are Latin prayers and rubrics (so
called because they are written in red ink) in English.
And it is these latter that are so important, because they instruct the
faithful not only how they shall worship but also what their acts of piety
will bring them: protection from disease and death; safety in childbirth;
and, above all, a remission of time that the soul spent in agony in
Purgatory - the place where, the medieval Church taught, the moderately
sinful soul was purged of its earthly wrongdoing before entering the joys of
Heaven. That Henry performed the rituals with devotion we know because he
inscribed the roll with a dedication to his friend and close personal
attendant during these years. “William Thomas,” the inscription reads in
Henry's unmistakable handwriting, “I pray you pray for me, your loving
master, Prince Henry.” Only 25 years later, however, Henry, now king, would
start to ban these traditional forms of worship - by law and with the
ultimate penalty of death.
What had happened to transform Henry's religion and, with it, everything else
- changing, coarsening and hardening his character as the Prince Charming of
his youth turned into the monstrous monarch of his maturity?
The answer, paradoxically, was love, as Henry fell out of love with his first
wife, Catherine of Aragon, and began a passionate affair with Anne Boleyn,
the daughter of one of his middle-ranking courtiers. Anne had recently
returned from France, where she had acquired a Gallic polish that
transformed her rather plain brunette features into a smouldering sexuality.
She became the sensation of the court and Henry was one of many who were
caught.
The course of their affair can be followed in minute detail thanks to the
survival of 17 of Henry's love letters. Normally, they are doubly
inaccessible: they are written in French, undated and hoarded among the
treasures of the Vatican library, where they were spirited, almost
certainly, because they undercut almost everything that Henry claimed in
public about his attempt to divorce Queen Catherine. Most devastating is the
letter (traditionally numbered as 5), in which Henry, having thanked Anne for
her étrenne (New Year's Day gift), with its figurative acceptance of his
love, pledges in return to marry her. Such, he vows, is his “unchangeable
intention”: “either that or nothing” (“aut illic aut nullibi”).
Henry - to everyone's surprise, perhaps even to his own - kept his promise.
The result changed history - and Henry. For, a few months after this letter
was written in January 1527, the troops of Queen Catherine's nephew, the
Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, sacked Rome, made the Pope a virtual prisoner
and established Charles as the dominant power in Italy. Even if he had
wanted to, the Pope could not have granted Henry his divorce. It took Henry
(though not Anne) two long, bitter years to realise this. But then he began
the quest for another way. It would eventually lead him to break with Rome,
shatter his own family, execute his sometime friend Thomas More and provoke
the greatest rebellion of the 16th century. And all for love of a woman -
that love he had learnt, along with his letters, at his mother's knee.
For the first time in almost 500 years the Vatican letter returns to England
to form the centrepiece of the exhibition. What makes it even more
remarkable is that it is displayed alongside the writing desk, once
belonging to Henry, on which it may well have been written. Over the next
two decades Henry would write more and more documents on this desk and
similar desks - letters, annotations, imperiously scribbled corrections - as
he worked, as perhaps no king had ever worked before, to remake his Church
and kingdom. The most important and interesting of these are in the
exhibition as well: from his rewriting of the coronation oath to his will.
Henry has had the reputation of a rather lazy king, and the younger Henry
indeed did no more business than he had to. But the older Henry was
different. We also show the difference that he made. For the King's pen
moved mountains: it brought the monasteries tumbling down, refashioned the
faith, remapped and refortified England and built the first Royal Navy. It
put the Bible into English and remade the English language itself. It sent
queens, nobles and even a cardinal to the block and thundered defiance at
kings, emperors and popes.
Henry, in short, is the most remarkable monarch - for good and ill - to have
sat on the English throne. He is also one of the most interesting men:
fallible, flawed despite all his pretensions, yet endlessly, fascinatingly
human.
“Am I not a man? Am I not a man?” he once cried at the imperial ambassador, “a
man like any other?” Visit the exhibition and read him and meet him. You
will not be disappointed.
Henry VIII: Man and Monarch is at the British Library, April 23 to
September 6 (www.bl.uk 01937 546546)
Henry VIII: Mind of a Tyrant, begins on Channel 4 on April 6, 9pm
