Great Harry

by Erickson, Carolly, 1943-

  On May 19, less than a year after Bishop Fisher had mounted the scaffold, the Tower courtyard was once again filled with huge crowds. By one account, two thousand people came to watch Anne Boleyn die, to hear her profess her guiltlessness and announce readiness to "yield herself humbly to the will of the king." They watched as the furred mantle of her gray gown was removed, and her elaborate headdress laid aside. A maid handed her a plain linen cap and she carefully tucked her hair up into it, baring her neck. As she knelt by the block she paused to draw her gown over her feet, then called for a servant to bandage her eyes.

  The French swordsman she had summoned from St. Omer struck off her head cleanly, and immediately one of her attendants took it and wrapped it in a white cloth. Anne's remains were buried in the Tower chapel of St. Peter in Chains, and Henry, as ready to note the passing of his second wife as of his first, put on a white suit for mourning.

  A very grete wretche the mouldwarp sal be, In every nede fast sal he fle. And on him sail light, who so right redes. The vengance of God for aid evill dedes.

  It was in the mid-1530s, the era of religious upheaval, of widespread terror and spectacular public executions, that the legend of Henry VIII took on a life of its own. The contours of that legend are familiar enough: an outsize man, at once stout and formidable, a royal satyr indulging his lusts and decapitating his discarded wives, a tyrannical ruler sweeping aside venerable institutions at his erratic whim. At root it is an image of power unleashed, of dark chthonic forces erupting into light—a Renaissance image of humanity unshackled.

  And it is, of course, a grotesque caricature. The legend overlooks much that was vital to Henry's personality—his keen intellectuality, his debonair high spirits, the charm of his manner and the thick patina of chivalry that marked him as very much a product of the medieval past. Like all distillations of personality it is monochromatic: it ignores the lights and shadows of sanguine expectations and underlying fears, it masks a host of evanescent qualities—petulance, gaiety, combativeness, vanity, arrogance, spontaneity, affection, joking candor—that went together to make up the king courtiers and diplomats and household intimates struggled to comprehend. The legend obscures Henry's daring and his restless energy, characteristics Wolsey saw so clearly when he described his master as "a prince of royal courage" who would rather lose half his kingdom than abandon his undertakings.

  Holbein's portraits crystallized the Henrician legend in visual form. The king gazes out in imperative splendor, his air of command intensified by the sheer bulk and weight of his broad chest and muscular arms and legs. His impassive, almost mindless expression takes away nothing from the impact of his wrestler's physique. It is an authority that overwhelms by sheer immensity, a majesty of size.

  The portrait stereotype conveys a grossness and heaviness of spirit much at odds with Henry's alertness and quicksilver temperament, yet it captures something even more fundamental. To contemporaries the king was, throughout his reign, a superhuman figure, larger than Hfe in person and psyche. In the early years of his reign he had seemed a resplendent, athletic hero; by 1536 he had taken on the appearance of a hulking,

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  vindictive villain. Yet the hero was godlike, the villain monstrous; they were mirror-images alike in exaggeration.

  To the country people who saw all events in the timeless light of prophecy and doom, Henry was more than superhuman; he was the dark anti-hero known as the Mould warp, whose coming had been foretold by Merlin hundreds of years earlier. According to the verse prophecy the sixth king (Henry was in fact the twelfth) after King John would be the Mole, or Mouldwarp, a hairy man with a hide like goatskin whose fate it was first to be greatly praised by his people, then "cast down with sin and with pride." After his fall the Mouldwarp was to "lead all his life/In war and in trouble and in much strife," condemned by the vengeance of God to wage a losing battle for his kingdom. In the end he would go down to defeat amid scenes of gore and destruction—his castles fallen, the rivers red with the blood of his vanquished armies, the very hills sundered in two with dread—and would flee like a coward to end his life in exile on a lonely island. England would be given over to the Mouldwarp's enemies, and would be known thereafter as "the land of conquest."^

  Henry seemed to incarnate the Mouldwarp. Beloved by his people in youth, he had been brought low through the sin of his relations with Anne Boleyn and his prideful defiance of the pope. Though neither hairy nor goatlike he had become physically prodigious, a wonder of nature, and like the Mouldwarp of prophecy he faced enemies on every side. Beyond the unrelieved threat of war with France or the Holy Roman Empire— currently preoccupied with their own conflict—he had to contend with the everpresent menace of the Scots on the northern border and in particular with rebellion in Ireland. England might indeed become a "land of conquest"; invasion was more than a remote possibility, it was an imminent danger.

  That Henry's subjects should apply the timewom vision of the Mouldwarp to the king they had once adored as Great Harry was a measure of Henry's changing image in their eyes. Adoration had turned to disillusionment, then revulsion, and if the English never lost sight of their ruler as a vice-ridden man ("as for the king," one of them said in 1537, "an apple and a fair wench to dally withal would please him very well"), they saw in him at the same time a figure with a supernatural destiny.^

  Sixteenth-century men and women had as eager a capacity for belief in the marvellous and the supernatural as their medieval ancestors. They routinely called down the powers of enchantment to aid them in their everyday affairs. There were charms to be spoken during childbirth and at the foaling of horses. Charms helped milk to chum more quickly and ale to brew. In time of sickness incantations were chanted to stop bleeding, and fevers and rheums were abated by a magical process called "casting of the heart." Country folk hung rue around their necks as an amulet against witchcraft, and put boughs of mountain ash and honeysuckle in their bams on the second of May to tum aside spells cast on their cattle. Hot wax from a paschal candle dropped between the beasts' horns and ears gave additional protection, while burying an aborted calf in the roadway prevented the cows from miscarrying.^

  Occult lore figured prominently in one attempt on the king's life. A Yorkshire villager named Mabel Brigge, with the encouragement of a friend who paid her in wheat and linen, undertook "Saint Trinian's Fast," a murderous three-day period of abstinence said to leave the faster's enemies dead. Mabel tried the technique on one other occasion, and before the fast ended her victim's neck was broken. Convinced that she could kill both the king and the duke of Norfolk, she began the fast again, but word of her attempt reached the king's Council of the North and she was seized and, before long, executed.'*

  Save in the enormity of her crime, Mabel Brigge was in no sense unique. There were reputed to be five hundred conjurers in England, and many more fortunetellers, wizards and purveyors of white magic. In the later part of Henry's reign London was full of stories of the exploits of one "prophesyer," Robert Allen, who kept his crystals and potions and conjuring books in readmess in various places throughout the city to advise his large clientele. Known for his extraordinary skill as the "god of Norfolk," Allen told women their children's futures, told men how to win at dice, and how to gain the love of their sweethearts. It was said nothing was beyond the reach of his skill—he could find lost articles, he could tell when a man was lying and when he spoke the truth, he could advise on strategy at cards based on the positions of the stars. Allen was eventually committed to the Tower "for matters of astronomy and suspicion of calculation," but there were dozens of others to take his place.^

  The occult arts were no less commonplace at the royal court than elsewhere in the country. It was widely believed that prominent courtiers owed their advancement to sorcery of some sort, and everyone who rose to importance around the king was suspected of using magic. During the years that Wolsey stood at the pinnacle of governmental power there were many stories of how he had made his way to fav
or. According to one account he had calculated the king's horoscope, then "made by craft of necromancy graven imagery, . . . wherewith he bewitched the king's mind, and made the king to dote upon him more than ever he did on any lady or gentleman." Others said the cardinal had a familiar demon in his service, still others that he had a magic ring—a traditional medieval talisman—with which he forced the king to do his will. (In 1538 a priest who had been in Wolsey's service admitted making his master "a ring with a stone that he wrought many things with."®)

  Among those who spread tales of Wolsey's powers were Norfolk and William Neville. The duke, always at odds with Wolsey, believed himself to be "sore vexed with a spirit" that the cardinal had set on him. He hired a priest to exorcise it, incidentally inquiring of the exorcist whether Wolsey himself had been enchanted by someone else. Neville took great interest in Wolsey's magic ring, and approached a conjurer to make him one like it. He had even more imaginative occult ambitions, however, and once tried to make himself a cloak of invisibility from linen and buckskin cloth treated with horse bones, skin, chalk, rosin and powdered glass.^

  Henry shared his subjects' unquestioned acceptance of the pervasive influence of superhuman forces in everyday life. Believing natural

  phenomena to be charged with occult significance he crossed himself when it thundered, took seriously the import of unseasonable weather and other oddities of climate, and spent hours observing the heavens and talking over the meaning of celestial bodies with knowledgeable men. Astrology was to Henry both a constant fascination and something of a guide to life, but it accounted only in part for his interest in the skies. He enjoyed speculating on the nature and portent of comets, and made the Oxford astrologer and mathematician John Robyns his chaplain. Robyns dedicated his treatises on comets to the king in memory of discussions the two had had at Woodstock and Buckingham in the early 1530s— discussions in which Henry impressed his scholarly chaplain with his mathematical knowledge.®

  When Henry complained, shortly before Anne Boleyn's disgrace, that he now realized she owed her years of influence over him to witchcraft, the respect he paid to the supernatural gave his statement weight. Yet to those who saw him as the cursed Mouldwarp he alone seemed squarely and brutally responsible for Anne's death, just as he bore the blood guilt for the deaths of Fisher and More and the butchered monks who died with them. From at least 1535 on, Henry's legend overshadowed him, obscuring the private, falHble man Henry Tudor as he struggled through midlife.

  The diplomats and courtiers who dealt with the king from day toHSay were as baffled and exasperated by him as they were fearful of his displeasure. "Such are this king's fickleness and natural inclination to new or strange things," Chapuys wrote, "that I could not find words to describe it."^ Having ordered one thing, he peremptorily commanded the opposite, and observers found it impossible to tell whether he had seriously reconsidered the matter or was simply indulging a contrary whim. He seemed to take a perverse delight in upholding the opposite side of any argument, creating disharmony where there had been agreement and reducing his advisers to helpless vexation.

  "His natural inclination is to oppose all things debateable," Chapuys observed, "taking great pride in persuading himself that he makes the world believe one thing instead of another."^^

  Now capricious, now argumentative, now simply contrary, Henry often seemed villainously quixotic. The boasting and assertiveness that had always marked his relations with diplomats and foreign envoys turned to insulting bravado. He irritated Chapuys by talking disparagingly of the imposing quadrireme Charles V had built, with its twenty-seven benches of oarsmen. He meant to order one made with a hundred benches, Henry swore, adding that in any case his enviably strong fortresses at Calais and Dover made his realm secure even without it. Toward the emperor himself Henry showed patronizing scorn. "He is simple-minded, and knows no Latin," he said to a German envoy; in other conversations he took credit for gaining the throne of Spain and the office of emperor for Charles, and for winning the imperial victory at Pavia.^^

  "He never-forgets his own greatness, and is silent as to that of others." The French envoy Castillon who sent this description of Henry to Francis I left out of it one essential fact: Henry was constantly

  measuring himself against his fellow-sovereigns and attempting to surpass themi Historians who have sought to account for the executions of 1535 have overlooked the highly influential circumstance that the continental rulers showed Henry the way. In the Netherlands Protestants were being burned and smothered and garroted by the hundreds in that year in accordance with recent harsh orders from the emperor. In France the king was exalting himself as the hammer of heretics, making himself the pious centerpiece of a macabre spectacle))

  Late in January of 1535 a sofemn procession wound through the narrow streets of Paris. Crowds massed as the word spread that the king himself was coming, and in time he came, not in state but walking, bareheaded, behind the bishop who carried the sacred host. Surrounding King Francis were his sons and the clergy, behind him the ladies of the court. Each of them carried a torch to light the fires under the heretics, enemies to God and the faith, that had been brought to suffer for their errors.

  The procession halted, and the king put his torch to the dry wood at the base of the stake. The others followed his example, until within minutes the air was filled with thick smoke and with the stink of burning flesh. As the victims were consumed Francis gave thanks that he had been given the discernment to see and condemn the evil of false belief, and asked God to forgive him for having pardoned one or two of the heretics. With his subjects as witness he swore that from then on there would be no more leniency; every Protestant in Paris would be burned.^^

  Parisians talked for weeks of their king's reverential, determined assault on heresy, and of how he kept his word and came again soon afterward to bum more of the guilty. Word of the ceremonious public burnings reached England, and Henry, not to be outdone, determined "to do something new and strange to make people talk of him."^^ Before long the outrageous executions which brought him such infamy had begun.

  The exasperating changeability, the self-glorification, the ceaseless bragging and open rivalry Henry showed were real enough, but they were in one sense a smokescreen. For behind his swaggering complacency was insecurity, behind his mercurial caprice an uncertainty that deepened as he matured.

  His religious policies, which seem in retrospect monuments of decisive forethought, were at the time bold and potentially catastrophic expferinienjs whose outcome could only be imagined. The popular reaction against enforcement of the Reformation statutes was deeply disconcerting to Henry—all the more so in that he believed himself to be divinely guided in the course he took. To these distressing worries were added background fears of war and rebellion. Henry was "wonderfully afraid," one courtier said, that he would have to withstand a military challenge from the continent; closer to home, the revolt in Ireland caused him equal if not greater anxiety. He was overheard to say in 1534 that he would much prefer to fight against Charles V "and another like him" than against the Irish.^'^

  Nor was the war he feared likely to be an occasion for chivalric valor and heroism. If it came, it would be a contest of strategies and of

  defenses, with victory dependent on well-caulked ships and effective ordnance and fortress walls kept in good repair. Concern over these matters preoccupied Henry throughout the mid-1530s, along with the ever expanding details of a government he managed, essentially, on his own.^^

  More and more he had renounced the trust, if not the aid, of others in the essentials of rule. Like his father he narrowed the circle of his trust as he grew older, until even his intimates were excluded from it. Suspicious by nature, he was made more suspicious during the years of his divorce proceedings when many courtiers disguised their allegiance to Katherine under a cloak of support for his cause. The strain of those years hardened his mistrust, until it was said he was "so troubled in his brain about this matter that he do
es not trust any one alive." Still later he saw those in whom he had confided—particularly his chancellor Thomas More— betray his confidence (or so it seemed to Henry) and treasonously defy his laws. In the end he believed, with very little evidence, that his wife had not only cuckolded him but laughed with his gentlemen behind his back, slandered his potency, and conspired to take his life.*®

  To be sure, Henry still showed flashes of boyish affection and good humor. He was capable of tenderness (as he was of heartiessness) toward his beleaguered daughter Mary, and disarmed his advisers by his warmth and physicality. He liked to come up behind his courtiers, take them by the arm or sleeve and lead them off to a private conversation. With Chapuys he was often markedly affectionate, though the ambassador knew full well that the king's displays of fondness, like his displays of hostility or affronted dignity, were calculated in part to annoy or hearten the French ambassador. In December of 1535 Henry met Chapuys at Greenwich and, "after a most courteous and kind reception," he wrote, "put his hands around my neck, and walked for some time with me in the presence of all the courtiers."*^ Henry was still ready enough to laugh at whatever struck him as absurd, though either he laughed less frequently now or court observers noted it less often. A new fool, a story, a graphic letter full of news from the continent could send him into hearty laughter. He became "very merry" when he heard that Thomas Boleyn, in retirement in the countryside after his daughter's death, had written requesting a large sum of money.*^

  Yet his laughter at Boleyn's effrontery had more irony about it than mirth, and as time went by his mounting suspicion corroded his moments of lightheartedness. (Without fully realizing it he was taking on many of his father's habits of life—his bad-tempered shouting, his eccentricity, above all his guardedness and fear. Torrigiano's portrait busts of Henry and his father were now kept in thd king's study at Whitehall; it is tempting to think that the bust of Henry VII brought to his son's mind scenes he had witnessed in boyhood—scenes of loud bullying, of caprice and unpredictable behavior.