Henry VIII

Lucy Wooding

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317520306
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This new edition of Lucy Wooding's Henry VIII is fully revised and updated to provide an insightful and original portrait of one of England's most unforgettable monarchs and the many paradoxes of his character and reign. Henry was a Renaissance prince whose Court dazzled with artistic display, yet he was also a savage adversary, who ruthlessly crushed all those who opposed him. Five centuries after his reign, he continues to fascinate, always evading easy characterization. Wooding locates Henry VIII firmly in the context of the English Renaissance and the fierce currents of religious change that characterized the early Reformation, as well as exploring the historiographical debates that have surrounded him and his reign. This new edition takes into account significant advances in recent research, particularly following the five hundredth anniversary of his accession in 2009, to put forward a distinctive interpretation of Henry's personality and remarkable style of kingship.

It gives a fresh portrayal of Henry VIII, cutting away the misleading mythology that surrounds him in order to provide a vivid account of this passionate, wilful, intelligent and destructive king. This compelling biography will be essential reading for all early modern students.

1 The education of a Christian prince, 1491–1509

As God set up a beautiful likeness of himself in the heavens, the sun, so he established among men a tangible and living image of himself, the king.¹

Henry VIII was born in 1491, almost six years after his father, Henry VII, had become king. He was the third child and the second son produced by Elizabeth of York, Henry VII’s queen, since their marriage in January, 1486. With a new regime to render secure, the need for royal offspring was paramount. In the matter of producing children the Tudor dynasty was often to be blighted by disappointment, but it began remarkably well, since Henry’s older brother, Arthur, was born just eight months and a day after his parents’ wedding.² The eldest girl, Margaret, was born in 1489, and Henry followed two years later. He was born in the royal palace at Greenwich on 28 June and baptised by Richard Fox, Bishop of Exeter, in the church of the Observant Franciscans, whose religious community was based at Greenwich.

Everything about this prince’s birth spoke of his father’s hopes for the future. Greenwich was given special status by Henry VII, and was greatly embellished between 1500 and 1504, becoming the favoured abode of the new king. In this, as in so much else, Henry VII sought to sanction his royal profile with material display of the most fashionable sort. The new redbrick palace he constructed was in the modern Renaissance style, inspired by the example of the more stylish French and Burgundian courts. It had no moat, but a river frontage, with plentiful provision of windows. Its outward elegance and light-filled interiors marked the rejection of dark medieval castles and the attempt of the fledgling dynasty to embrace the kind of cultural sophistication which dignified royal courts abroad.³ Greenwich was to retain its importance throughout Henry’s life, even though it was surpassed by the new Palace of Whitehall from the 1530s. It was at Greenwich Palace too that Henry VIII was to marry Katherine of Aragon, and where he insisted that Anne Boleyn give birth in 1533, when he so confidently expected a son, and was instead presented with his daughter Elizabeth.

The religious sanction bestowed upon the new baby also had resonance for the future of one who would one day be ‘Supreme Head of the Church in England’. Richard Fox, who baptised the small prince, was Lord Privy Seal as well as Bishop of Exeter, eventually to become Bishop of Winchester; a churchman and courtier on the Renaissance model. Fox was to follow the trend set by other erudite reformers, including Henry VII’s own formidable mother, in dissolving decayed monastic houses and with the proceeds founding a new university college, Corpus Christi College in Oxford. Such educational establishments were dedicated to fostering the Renaissance learning with which Henry VIII would seek to adorn his royal pretensions, and which in due course he would use to reconfigure English kingship and launch a religious revolution.

The Observant Franciscans were also symbolic of new currents in religious thought, ‘observant’ because they followed a reformed and ascetic Franciscan tradition. As an elite religious order they were often associated with royalty; the venerable Spanish primate, Cardinal Ximenes, belonged to their order and was confessor to Queen Isabella, Henry VII’s prized ally and Henry VIII’s impressive future mother-in-law. Henry VII made sure there were Observant Franciscans close to both his major palaces of Richmond and Greenwich, and the Franciscans at Greenwich were to provide confessors to the king and queen until Henry’s break with Rome. This emulation of continental trends in court architecture and religious life was symptomatic of Henry VII’s careful construction of his royal image. Spain was at this time a major European power and a centre of religious learning and reform, and Henry VII’s achievement of an alliance with Spain’s royal house for his eldest son was another attempt to add lustre to the new regime. When Henry VIII decided to marry his dead brother’s Spanish wife after Henry VII’s demise, it was a continuation of his father’s aspirations. Comparisons are often drawn between the imposing and majestic figure of Henry VIII and the more shadowy figure of his father, but in the matter of furthering their dynastic strength and security, father and son were at one.

To understand the significance of Henry’s birth and the objectives behind his upbringing, it is necessary to know something of the political world into which he was born. The glories of Tudor kingship, despite appearances, were built on shaky ground, and the reputation of this flamboyant dynasty often obscures its fragile and precarious origins. Henry VII had an uncertain claim to the throne, founded on two very unlikely marriages. In 1396 John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, third son of Edward III, had married his long-term mistress, Katherine Swynford, and had their already adult children legitimated by act of parliament. These were the Beauforts, and although they and their descendants were key political figures in the dramatic events of the fifteenth century, their legitimation had barred them from claiming the throne. It was Margaret Beaufort who gave birth to the future Henry VII, when she was 13, and already a widow. The second unlikely marriage was when Henry V’s widow, Queen Katherine, the French princess won by the king after his victory at Agincourt, had fallen for a handsome Welshman of the royal household, Owen Tudor, and married again. Her son, Edmund Earl of Richmond, was Margaret Beaufort’s first husband, and father to the future Henry VII, the child he never saw. Edmund was admittedly half-brother to Henry VI, but through his French mother, which made Henry VII’s claim to the English throne far from obvious.

The fifteenth century had been a time of unparalleled political instability. From Richard II in 1399 to Richard III in 1485, five kings suffered deposition, three of whom were murdered, with one dying on the field of battle. The explanation behind these events, which were unhelpfully labelled ‘the Wars of the Roses’ (the phrase was first used by David Hume in 1762), remains complex. There was a genuine dynastic problem, as it was unclear whether the Yorkist or the Lancastrian line had the better claim to the throne, but this problem had only surfaced because of the profound failure of Henry VI to fulfil the obligations of kingship.⁴ Thus Henry VIII’s grandfather, Edward IV, had won the throne in 1461 only to lose it again in 1470. He regained it a year later, but when he died, leaving two underage sons, they vanished in the Tower and their uncle, who had ironically been appointed Protector, usurped the throne as Richard III. That these events gripped the imagination of the time is clear from their prominent place in the history plays of Shakespeare a century later. There could not have been a more vivid warning to any future king of the absolute necessity of maintaining royal dignity and popularity, and of securing the succession with healthy adult children.

The situation after 1483, when Richard III’s usurpation of the throne from his nephew left the Yorkist camp divided and in distress, had provided unexpected opportunity for Henry of Richmond, soon to be Henry VII, who was the only person close to a Lancastrian candidate for the throne. His pledge to marry Elizabeth of York, eldest daughter of Edward IV, secured him the support of those Yorkists who could not bear to serve Richard III, and who seem to have known that the princes in the Tower were now dead. French backing brought him to England, and victory at Bosworth secured him the rest. He defeated Richard III, was crowned, married Elizabeth, and saw the birth of their first son, all within thirteen months. Victory in battle, an important dynastic alliance and the birth of an heir: this succession of events might appear fortunate to the modern observer, but to fifteenth-century eyes it confirmed that God had blessed the new king. In the early modern period Providence was a valuable ally. The birth of a second healthy son in 1491 strengthened Henry VII’s position still further. When Henry VIII became king, he had only to turn to the immediate past to gain piercing insight into the potential within kingship for both triumph and disaster.

The perpetuation of the new regime remained a constant struggle and it is important to realise how the fifteenth-century difficulties cast a long and menacing shadow over Tudor rule. It would be wrong to characterise the fifteenth century as an age of anarchy, where power-hungry magnates could topple kings and private feuds could escalate into civil war, although that analysis has proved an easy one for many commentators.⁵ In fact, fifteenth-century politics were capable of great sophistication and political protest nearly always made emphatic appeals to clearly understood principles.⁶ The system depended, however, on personal supervision by the monarch, and where the monarch failed to understand the rules by which his kingship was expected to work, instability resulted. Most famously, the reign of Henry VI saw a failure of kingship which precipitated civil war. Such was its level of drama that it produced three plays by Shakespeare, when most reigns merited only one.⁷

Such experiences rendered the English increasingly introspective on the subject of kingship. By the time Henry VII came to the throne, there was a particularly acute longing for peace and strong, steady government by a wise and balanced king; there was also a lot of intellectual activity being devoted to the question of how best to secure good governance. Henry VIII’s reign was to see both the development of the cult of personal kingship and the introduction of new institutions and methods of government; both were a response to the problems that had gone before.⁸ Yet there were also many loose ends that had yet to be tied up. Where the sixteenth century was to suffer from the lack of royal progeny, the later fifteenth century had been burdened by too much royal issue, and Henry VII and Henry VIII were both to remain wary of the Yorkist nobility whose claim to the throne might have challenged their own. Henry VII fought off a Yorkist challenge in 1486. In 1487 he defeated Lambert Simnel, who had been crowned king in Dublin. For most of the 1490s he battled the threat of Perkin Warbeck, who claimed to be Richard, Duke of York, the younger of the two princes in the Tower, and who could command support in Ireland, Scotland, France and Burgundy. Warbeck was executed in 1499, as was the long-imprisoned Earl of Warwick, but it was not until 1506 that the Earl of Suffolk was handed over by Burgundy and imprisoned in the Tower.⁹

Henry VII was always conscious of a potential challenger waiting in the wings. One report of a potentially treasonable conversation from the later years of his reign records a conversation in Calais where the deputy-governor and others speculated on what might happen at the king’s death. Some spoke of Buckingham, some of Edmund de la Pole; none of them mentioned the Prince of Wales.¹⁰ It was to take many long years before the Tudor dynasty was firmly established.¹¹

Henry VII’s attempts to ensure the safety of himself and his heirs established some patterns of government which his son would continue to follow, even as he rejected others. Henry VII fostered tight security, kept a strict rein on any potentially subversive nobles, and pursued a foreign policy geared chiefly towards defence, the elimination of Yorkist pretenders and the reinforcement of his dynasty through advantageous royal marriages. At home he played the part of the Renaissance monarch, building and beautifying palaces, patronising Italian and Burgundian scholars and artists, and developing the ceremonial importance of the royal court. He was the first English king to establish a royal bodyguard, one of his first actions on coming to power, and Henry VIII never saw the need to disband these ‘yeomen of the guard’, who have been with us ever since. Characteristically, the idea was taken from the French court where Henry VII had lived in exile; father and son alike were to borrow ideas from more established royal houses on the continent, playing their parts to the hilt in the hope that as many people as possible would be taken in by their performance.

Henry VII’s reputation has suffered from his falling between two historical eras, at the end of the late medieval period and the beginning of the early modern, with neither side paying sufficient attention to his reign.¹² There is also a traditional caricature of Henry VII as mean, guarded, defensive and rapacious, which is taken from Francis Bacon and Polydore Vergil. Bacon lived a century too late to know the king, but Vergil, an Italian scholar commissioned to write the history of the reign, knew him quite well, and it should be noted that Vergil’s criticism was in fact far outweighed by his praise of his patron:

In government he was shrewd and prudent.… He was gracious and kind and was as attentive to his visitors as he was easy of access. His hospitality was splendidly generous

These were virtues appropriate to kingship.

He well knew how to maintain his royal majesty and all which appertains to kingship at every time and at every place. He was most fortunate in war, although he was constitutionally more inclined to peace than to war. He cherished justice above all things; as a result he vigorously punished violence, manslaughter, and every other kind of wickedness.… Consequently he was greatly regretted on that account by all his subjects.

Vergil’s portrait, quite unfairly, is only remembered for the last indictment, that:

all these virtues were obscured latterly by avarice, from which he suffered … in a monarch indeed it may be considered the worse vice since it is harmful to everyone, and distorts those qualities of trustfulness, justice and integrity by which the State must be governed.¹³

It seems clear that Henry VII did become overly exacting in his later years, in particular through the use of recognizances, extracting fines from law-breakers in a manner which was not illegal, but was certainly immoderate. In Henry’s defence, the use of bonds and recognizances was also a policy for securing good behaviour, and it was after the devastating loss of his wife and eldest son in 1502–3, when the survival of the dynasty hung on the person of Prince Henry, that the use of recognizances became so extraordinary.¹⁴ Henry VIII was to make ostentatious renunciation of his father’s exacting ways, and brought about the judicial murder of his two most disliked financial agents in an early bid for popularity. But he must also have been powerfully aware of his father’s achievements, as a dynamic and successful pretender to the throne, who after fourteen years in exile launched a successful invasion of England, and swept to power and success as an established and internationally respected monarch known for his strong and prosperous government.

History has generally contrasted father and son, and emphasised the difference between Henry VIII and Henry VII; the picture has been of the flamboyant, expansive but dangerous heir replacing his secretive, miserly, over-cautious predecessor. As we have seen, this demonstrates an abject failure to understand the true character of Henry VII; it also fails to grasp a fundamental underlying anxiety about the succession which shaped the reigns of all five Tudors. As a family, they were never free from the worry that they might be usurped by another noble family claiming royal blood. There was a perpetual suspicion of those who married anyone with royal associations. For example, Lord Thomas Howard died in the Tower in 1537, imprisoned for marrying the king’s niece, Lady Margaret Douglas, without permission, and thirty years later Elizabeth I was to imprison the Earl of Hertford and his bride Lady Katherine Grey, her cousin, for marrying in similar fashion. Many executions for alleged treason were hastened by the noble lineage of the victim. This was a policy established by Henry VII, for example with the execution of the Earl of Warwick in 1499 for alleged treason. Another possible Yorkist claimant, William de la Pole, was imprisoned in the Tower by Henry VII in 1501, and stayed there until he died in Henry VIII’s reign, thirty-eight years later.¹⁵ When it came to safeguarding dynastic security, there was a distinct family resemblance between all the Tudors.

Henry VIII’s reign was to be thick with examples of such royal unease, which often mounted to the level of paranoia, given that his nobility were in reality very loyal and showed the strong commitment to the royal service that was expected of them by contemporaries.¹⁶ The literature of the time made many appeals to the nobility to follow their duty and do service to king and commonwealth, petitions which were resonant with the ideals of chivalry.¹⁷ This kind of idealised appeal reflected the very real dedication to royal service manifested in so many of the nobility. Much of the time Henr...