Wisdom of Solomon 6 (cited in Stephen Gardiner’s In vera
obedientia, 1535)1
William Thomas wrote the first biography of Henry VIII in 1547 as a form of dialogue between himself and an Italian observer of Henry VIII’s reign. The purpose of the book was to answer the charges of tyranny put by the Italian against Henry VIII and to offer a ‘just excuse of my wrongfully slandered Prince, whose good renown, fame, and honour’ Thomas recommends to his readers. One of the charges is Henry’s treatment of his wives:
and not his first wife, but three or four more, did he not chop, change, or behead them, as his horse coveted new pasture, to satisfy the inordinate appetite of his lecherous will?
Were it not for the sixteenth-century language, this early assessment could pass for a modern appraisal of Henry VIII. Again and again, today’s popular media represents Henry VIII as lecherous, insatiable, callous, unfeeling and self-centred. The truth is a lot more complex. The character that has emerged over these pages is of a man of strong feeling but little emotional intelligence, wilful and obstinate but also fiery and charismatic, intelligent but blinkered, attempting to rule and preserve his honour against his profound sense of duty and heavy responsibility to fulfil his divinely ordained role. This was a man who channelled great loss and hurt into physical pursuits, intense theological interest and sometimes savage anger; above all, a proud, awesome and well-intentioned but also flawed and self-deceiving monarch.2
There was, however, a distinct difference between the Henry VIII of his first forty-odd years, and the Henry VIII that emerged in and after 1536. Many of the flaws in his character were fashioned or catalyzed by the events of this one year. It is hard to underestimate the importance of this succession of events: Henry’s fall from his horse in January 1536, which brought fears for the king’s mortality was to have long-lasting consequences, most of all on his health, spelling the end of an active life for this king who had heretofore been acclaimed as a man of great strength, courage and energy. It directly contributed to his famous late-life obesity, and the continual and wearying pain of his ulcer became the source of much of his later irascibility. The end of his jousting symbolized the end of his youth in the year of his forty-fifth birthday, which was considered to mark the beginning of old age. In a gerontocratic society, where men of age were considered better fitted to rule due to their calm, sedate wisdom, this aging may not have been wholly bad – but for Henry, age brought none of these things. Instead, it plunged him headlong into a wealth of anxieties and insecurities, fostering and augmenting the preexisting angst that he felt towards his lack of an heir. Old age, for Henry, meant the onset of cynicism and suspicion.
The source of much of this cynicism was the awful, gnawing sense of betrayal that lodged itself in Henry after Anne Boleyn’s alleged adultery was discovered. The treachery of this woman on whom he had staked so much, for whom he had waited so long, was devastating. It ridiculed him – not just through the comments she and her brother had made about his prowess – but by the message her actions sent about his lack of sexual dominance and patriarchal governance. As such, it had the potential to shake his sense of masculinity and potency to the core. Henry’s initial reactions of hyperbolic self-pity, tears, tragedy and exaggeration show just how much the news had upset and upended his world, and how emotionally ill-equipped he was to deal with it. By the end of July 1536, over a few short months he had experienced an unbelievable catalogue of loss – two lost sons, two lost wives, the loss of his health and youth and the loss of his sense of masculinity and honour. This was suffered in the midst of threats, which looked like betrayals – the judgment of his cousin, Reginald Pole, and the sword of Damocles of the papal bull, prepared with the knowledge of his fellow monarchs. Psychologists today make clear links between loss and depression, and Henry VIII was to suffer from a depressive episode in 1541 following a serious bout of malaria, when he mourned Cromwell and remained confined at Hampton Court for a long period. But in 1536, Henry reacted as he would in fact mostly react to betrayal – he stifled the dissonance created in his mind by robustly and energetically throwing his energies into a new assertion of his power and masculinity and a new restoration of the social and patriarchal order.
Chief among these reassertions was the even-greater significance attached to a policy of which Henry was already very fond: the royal supremacy. In a variety of ways, Henry newly emphasized and exercised this role. After leniency towards his daughter’s resistance for three years, Henry now insisted Mary sign in support of his supremacy and bastardize herself. His chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, was now permanently established as vicegerent in spirituals and vicar-general, and Henry issued his self-composed Ten Articles which arrogated to himself the right to define doctrine and exercise the ‘care of souls’ to which the Pilgrim rebels would later object. Papal authority in England was definitively abolished and royal injunctions imposed codes of practice to ensure the king’s doctrine was followed. In setting out his theology, which focused around the binaries of kingship and obedience, Henry defined the core values of a system of belief to which he would hold until his death and to which he also expected others to adhere. Its central tenets reveal much about his preoccupations – his own supremacy, unity, good works and a sense of himself as a reforming king. This self-conception was an elevated one, a protestation of righteousness that put Henry on a parallel with the reforming leaders of the Old Testament and claimed a relationship similar to that of God with David, the man whom God called ‘a man after my own heart’.
This belief in his own virtue combined ferociously with his reaction to dissonance – the way that perceived betrayal and treachery worked in him to produce self-justification and aggression – when his ego received its next challenge, the Pilgrimage of Grace. Such treasonous rebellion inflamed Henry into defiance, bombast and bravado. Pride and intransigence were Henry’s way of quelling the panic he felt at the deceit and betrayal that rebellion represented, and the only way for him to maintain his honour in face of another huge challenge to his dominance was to quash it. His treatment of the monasteries is a classic example of how rebellion led to rage and reaction. Although in early 1536, it looked very likely that reform of the monasteries was the goal of dissolution, by late 1536, his missives about the traitorous activities of the monks suggested Henry had equated them with his existing beliefs about the dangerous power of clerics, and plans for reform had changed into plans for destruction.
Henry’s reaction to rebellion was powerfully represented in the new image created for him at this time by the royal painter, Hans Holbein. The Thyssen and Whitehall portraits exuded a magnificence, dominance and power that reaffirmed Henry’s royal supremacy and asserted his pre-eminent masculinity. The confident, aggressive and domineering stance of this proto‘superman’ laid claim to power and virility, precisely because these things had so recently been under attack, and just as old age was threatening to erode them.
The consequence of so many disasters in quick succession in this year was to condition Henry VIII and instil in him a morbid fear of, and obsession with, betrayal. Injuries to the king’s pride became commensurate with treason, which expanded both in its legal definition and in the range of behaviours it covered in practice. Treason was no longer just a case of threats to the Crown; it also meant letting the king down or failing to conform to his will. His subjects called him the ‘Mouldwarp’ and covertly accused him of tyranny, and they were right; for from 1536, the use of attainder twisted the law to make arbitrary action possible. The government’s attitude towards dissidents and opponents was increasingly repressive and brutal as this ailing, aging monarch sought to fight his own decline by further despotism and overreaction. The whole of 1536, and all that followed, was arguably Henry’s reaction to the discomfort of holding these two different cognitions in tension.
The year 1536 marked a turning point in Henry VIII’s life. And yet, when one thinks of what could have happened, it is extraordinary that its ef
fects were so contained. If Anne Boleyn and Henry were merry together until soon before her adultery was alleged, her fall was not inevitable, and our famous king of six wives might have lived with her until his death. She may yet have borne him a son, she may have persuaded him and the country towards further reformation, or perhaps her continuing presence would have sparked the publication of the papal bull in 1536 and invasion from Europe. After Anne’s death, there was a chance that Henry would have returned to Rome and brought the English Reformation, and the Anglican Church, to a swift and premature end – what is strange is that he didn’t. Finally, the Pilgrims might not have accepted the December pardon, not have stood down, and have pitched battle against the king’s troops, to the inevitable defeat of the royal army. 1536 could have been the year in which Henry VIII was deposed. Instead, it was the year that was to define and shape him for ever in posterity.
The terrifying and salutary thing is that, throughout, Henry VIII showed an extraordinary capacity for self-deception. He genuinely believed in the virtue of the path that he had chosen, and the story of his life after 1536 is of his ever more costly attempts to bolster his concept of himself against evidence that told him otherwise. Nevertheless, it would be hard not to feel for him in his tumultuous series of losses and misadventures. Thomas’s response to the charge laid by his Italian adversary expresses this: ‘the truth is he hath a great many wives, and with some of them hath as ill-luck as any other poor man’. The French ambassador, Charles de Marillac, observing Henry with Catherine Howard noted, ‘the King is so fond of her that he knows not how to express his affection’ – here was an emotionally inexpert, broken man but one whose sadness and rage would have devastating consequences. Perhaps an earlier French ambassador had it right when he concluded, ‘he is a man to be marvelled at and has wonderful people about him… but he is an old fox, proud as the devil and accustomed to ruling’.2
Appendix 1
Timeline of 1536
January 7 Katherine of Aragon dies
from
January Threat of papal bull
January 24 Henry falls from his horse while jousting
January 29 Katherine of Aragon’s funeral
January 29 Anne Boleyn miscarries
February 10 Jane Seymour first noted by the Spanish ambassador,
Eustace Chapuys
February End of monastic visitation
March Act passed for Dissolution of Smaller Monasteries
March Reginald Pole sends Henry an open letter
April 18 Spanish ambassador, Chapuys, invited to kiss Anne Boleyn’s hand
April 30 Mark Smeaton arrested
May 1 Smeaton moved to the Tower
May Day jousts
Henry questions Henry Norris
May 2 Norris, Anne Boleyn and George, Lord Rochford arrested
May 4, 5 William Brereton, Richard Page, Sir Francis Weston,
Sir Thomas Wyatt, Sir Francis Bryan detained
May 10 Grand jury indict all the accused except Page and Wyatt
May 12 Smeaton, Brereton, Weston and Norris tried and found guilty
May 15 Anne Boleyn and Rochford tried and found guilty
May 17 Archbishop Cranmer declares marriage of Anne and Henry null and Elizabeth a bastard
May 19 Anne Boleyn executed
May 19 Cranmer issues dispensation for Henry to marry Jane Seymour
May 20 Henry and Jane Seymour betrothed
May 30 Henry and Jane Seymour marry
after May Holbein paints Thyssen portrait of Henry VIII
c. June Second Succession Act
mid-June Mary signs oath swearing her father’s supremacy and her own illegitimacy
June King’s niece and second in line to the throne is imprisoned for marrying illegally
June 28 Henry turns 45
July 18 King makes Cromwell vicegerent over all ecclesiastical affairs
July 23 King’s illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond and Somerset, dies, aged 17
July King issues Ten Articles, first doctrinal statement of Anglican Church
August Cromwell as new vicegerent issues Royal Injunctions to enforce Ten Articles
August King proclaims that no one is to preach on controversial issues
August King’s proclamation cuts the number of holy days
August Dissolution of monasteries begins
October 1 Lincolnshire rebellion begins at Louth
October 8 Pilgrimage of Grace (huge armed rebellion) begins in Yorkshire at Beverley
16 Yorkshire Pilgrims march to York (10,000 men).
York surrenders
21 Pontefract Castle surrenders to Pilgrims
21 Henry sends Lancaster Herald to Pontefract
Oct-Nov Pole made a cardinal
27 Pilgrim representatives sent to Henry
December 2–4 Council of Pilgrims
6 Meeting of Pilgrims with Norfolk
7 Pardon accepted by Pilgrims
mid-Dec Henry asks Aske to court for Christmas
Appendix 2
Henry VIII’s Wives
Katherine of Aragon (16 December 1485 – 7 January 1536)
Married Henry on 11 June 1509. He was 17, she was 23.
Princess Mary was born on 18 February 1516.
‘Divorced’ 23 May 1533 (married for 23 years and 11 months).
Died 7 January 1536. Likely cause of death was stomach cancer.
Anne Boleyn (c. 1500-1501 – 19 May 1536)
Married Henry on 14 November 1532 AND 25 January 1533.
He was 41, she was 31–32.
Princess Elizabeth was born on 7 September 1533.
Beheaded 19 May 1536 (married for 3 years and 3 months).
Jane Seymour (c. 1508-9 – 24 October 1537)
Married Henry on 30 May 1536. He was 44, she was 26–27.
Prince Edward was born on 12 October 1537.
Died 24 October 1537 (married for 1 year and 4 months).
Likely cause of death was puerperal sepsis (‘childbed fever’).
Anne of Cleves (22 September 1515 – 16 July 1557)
Married Henry on 6 January 1540. He was 48, she was 24.
‘Divorced’, 9 July 1540 (married for six months).
Died 16 July 1557.
Catherine Howard (c. 1518-1524 [likely 1521] – 13 February 1542)
Married Henry on 8 August 1540. He was 49, she was 17–22.
Beheaded 15 February 1542 (married for 2 years and 6 months).
Kateryn Parr (1512 – 5 September 1548)
Married Henry on 12 July 1543. He was 52, she was 31.
Survived Henry (married for 3 years and 6 months). Henry VIII died on 28 January 1547.
Died 5 September 1548. Likely cause of death was puerperal sepsis (‘childbed fever’).
Appendix 3
The Cost of Living in Henry VIII’s Reign
In Henry VIII’s reign,
20 shilling (s) = 1 pound sterling
12 pence (d) = 1 shilling
Here are some sample salaries and prices.
Salaries
Speaker of the House of Commons £100 per annum
Master of the Jewels £20 per annum
King’s apothecary £10 per annum
Master mason at the Tower of London 1s a day
Yeoman of the Guard 6d a day
In the army
Captain 2s a day
Archer 8d a day
Ordinary soldiers 6d a day
In the navy
Admiral 10s a day
For labourers doing a day’s work (12 hours)
Freemason, plumbers 6d a day
Agricultural labourers 4d a day
(without meat and drink, an extra 2d with)
Superior carpenters at Hampton Court 8d, 7d and 6d a day
Gardeners 6d a day
Common labourers 4d a day
Cost of goods
‘The Story of David’ tapestry £1500
Gold cup and c
over weighing 53 ounces £19 7s
A coat of white and green royal livery 4s
The yearly clothing of a chief shepherd 5s
Oxen 29s 10½d each
Mutton 3s 7d
Pheasants 2s
Geese 7d
Eggs 1s per 100 eggs
Figures in this book:
Total expenditure on Field of the Cloth of Gold: £8,839 2s 4d
Cost of Westminster tournament of 1511: £4,000
Money left in Henry VIII’s will for prayers for his soul: £1,266
Hans Holbein’s annual salary: £30
Payment of Anne Boleyn’s executioner: £23 6s 8d
Subsidy levied on men worth over: £20
Notes
Abbreviations
Aymot, ‘Constantyne’ Thomas Amyot, ‘A Memorial from George Constantyne to Thomas, Lord Cromwell’, Archaeologia: Or, Miscellaneous Tracts Relating to Antiquity vol. 23 (1831), pp. 50-78
CSP, Span G.A. Bergenroth, Calendar of Letters, Despatches and State Papers, Relating to the Negotiations between England and Spain (London, 1862–1954)
Baldwin Smith, Henry VIII Lacey Baldwin Smith, Henry VIII: The Mask of Royalty (St Albans, 1971)
Bernard, The King’s Reformation G.W. Bernard, The King’s Reformation: Henry VIII and the Remaking of the English Church (New Haven and London, 2005)
CSP, Ven Brown, Rawdon (ed.), Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts Relating to English Affairs existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice (1867–1873)
Bush and Bownes, The Defeat Michael Bush and David Bownes, The Defeat of the Pilgrimage of Grace: A Study of the Postpardon Revolts of December 1536 to March 1537 and their Effect (Hull, 1999)
Cox, Cranmer J.E. Cox, Miscellaneous Writings and Letters of Thomas Cranmer (Cambridge, 1846)
EHR English Historical Review
Foxe, Acts and Monuments John Foxe, Acts and Monuments, ed. S.R. Cattley and G. Townsend, 8 vols (London, 1837–41)
1536: The Year that Changed Henry VIII Page 19