Henry VIII

The Life and Rule of England's Nero

John Matusiak

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780750960892, 9780752497075
• eBook ISBN: 9780752496825
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

This compelling new account of Henry VIII is by no means yet another history of the 'old monster' and his reign. The 'monster' displayed here is, at the very least, a newer type, more beset by anxieties and insecurities, and more tightly surrounded by those who equated loyalty with fear, self-interest and blind obedience. This ground-breaking book also demonstrates that Henry VIII's priorities were always primarily martial rather than marital, and accepts neither the necessity of his all-consuming quest for a male heir nor his need ultimately to sever ties with Rome. As the story unfolds, Henry's predicaments prove largely of his own making, the paths he chooses neither the only nor the best available. For Henry VIII was not only a bad man, but also a bad ruler who failed to achieve his aims and blighted the reigns of his two immediate successors. Five hundred years after he ascended the throne, the reputation of England's best known king is being rehabilitated and subtly sanitized. Yet Tudor historian John Matusiak paints a colourful and absorbingly intimate portrait of a man wholly unfit for power.

1

The Child Within the Man

‘You have vanquished your enemies; you have gained many kingdoms; you have subdued many empires; you have acquired sovereignty of the entire east: but all the same you have neglected to control, or have been unable to govern, the small domain of your mind and body.’

Aristotle’s words to Alexander the Great, quoted to the future Henry VIII by his tutor John Skelton.

The birth of Henry VIII, unlike that of his elder brother, Arthur, was a distinctly muted episode. When Arthur, Prince of Wales, was born four weeks prematurely on 20 September 1486, he was hailed at once as the ‘rosebush of England’, the living embodiment of lasting union between the rival houses of York and Lancaster. Accordingly, the place of his birth was chosen in careful symmetry with his first name both to conjure a sense of long tradition and to affirm the mystique of his exalted station. Winchester was, after all, the ancient capital of the country’s legendary past and in its cathedral hung the Round Table itself, freshly painted with Tudor emblems. As riders sped through the late summer countryside to herald the ‘comfortable good tidings’, bells pealed and joyous Te Deums resounded in chapels far and wide. In thronging streets huge bonfires blazed and roared to mark ‘the rejoicing of every true Englishman’, while at court, the Italian poets Pietro Carmeliano and Giovanni Gigli soared into raptures of exultant Latin verse in honour of the baby prince sent at last to heal a nation’s wounds.

If, however, there was like rejoicing nearly five years later on 28 June 1491 when Henry VIII slipped into the world, no chronicler records it. His christening in the church of the Franciscan Observants, to which the silver font from Canterbury Cathedral had been specially transported, was duly elaborate and, having been cleansed supposedly of the evil spirit, he was borne from the service in reverent style, preceded by the jubilant sound of trumpets and pipes and a splendid array of his godparents’ gifts of gold and silver plate. Yet though the king and queen considered their second son an entirely welcome addition, they hailed him more as safeguard than saviour, a hopefully unredeemed insurance policy for his elder brother against the vagaries of Renaissance medical science. On this occasion, too, just as poets were wholly underwhelmed, so posterity was largely overlooked. Amid the yawning propaganda vacuum, Bernard André, the royal historian, devoted no more than fifty words to the new prince’s birth in his Vita Henrici VII, including in the same inconsequential passage an incidental announcement of the birth of an elder sister, Margaret.

A similar vaguely half-hearted attitude seems to have influenced the choice of Henry’s birthplace. Neither Winchester nor Westminster (where Margaret had been born) was this time selected for the purpose. Instead, the lusty infant heaved his first breath at the palace named Placentia, better known to us today as Greenwich, which was then esteemed less for its weighty historic significance than for its sweet air, agreeable river setting and reassuring distance from the plague-ridden capital. It was here that Prince Henry, anointed with oil, sprinkled with rosewater and swaddled in blue velvet and cloth-of-gold, was first laid in the great cradle of estate. Like all new born babies he was, as yet, an innocent genetic mystery waiting to unravel with circumstance.

Some six years earlier, in September 1485, the infant’s father had been greeted in London for the first time as Henry VII. Though received at Shoreditch amid magnificent display, he was still as yet a mysterious king from nowhere, whose legitimacy was derived from little more than England’s desperation in that hour. While his great-grandfather had gained infamy as a fugitive Welsh brewer wanted for murder, his paternal grandfather had found fortune and influence only by seducing Henry V’s French widow after some years as an official of her household. It was true that the new king’s mother, Margaret Beaufort, was descended from John of Gaunt, but only from the wrong side of the blanket and although a parliament had made her legitimate along with her children, it had also expressly barred them from the throne. If, in any case, Henry VII’s claim came through his mother, it was she and not her son who should have been crowned. But, in spite of this inauspicious pedigree, it was the improbable victor of Bosworth Field who had ultimately come to lay his battle banners at St Paul’s, with trumpets sounding, and it was he who would demonstrate the strength to hold as well as the will to get in a land accustomed to turbulence.

‘The French vice is lechery and the English vice treachery’, ran the saying, and no impartial observer could have doubted at least the second half of this maxim when the first Tudor cautiously mounted his throne. Though for nine-tenths of the population the protracted and disjointed squabbles that today we call the Wars of the Roses were little more than ‘kings’ games’, a contemporary parliamentary petition had still complained how ‘in divers parts of this realm, great abominable murders, robberies, extortions, oppressions and other manifold maintenances, misgovernances, forcible entries, affrays and assaults be committed, and as yet remain unpunished’. Estate jumping, abduction of heiresses and casual brigandage had become, in effect, a modish pastime for the high-born Englishmen depicted to this day on their tombs and brasses in plate armour. Indeed, no less a figure than Sir Thomas Malory, who had apparently written Morte D’Arthur ‘that we fall not through vice and sin, but exercise and follow virtue’, found himself in prison in 1485 for sheep-stealing, sacrilege, extortion, rape and attempted murder.

Yet after little more than a decade of Henry VII’s coldly efficient application of the royal will, chroniclers’ laments and prayers for good rule would be out of fashion. The Venetian envoy Sanuto rightly recognised that the king was ‘a man of great ability’ and nowhere was this better exemplified than in his restoration of respect for due authority. True enough, he had limited objectives but, in the words of Francis Bacon, ‘what he minded he compassed’ and if his meticulous attention to detail and cagey awareness of human weakness were no doubt unpopular virtues at times, he knew how to behave regally, refusing to others ‘any near or full approach, either to his power or secrets’. Likewise, he chose and managed his servants well, won the disaffected to his cause by securing their ‘loving dread’, and had ensured by the time of his death that the royal coffers, while not bulging, were at least no longer achingly empty. If, however, Henry VII’s methodical realism might win a crown and tame a realm against all odds, the bridling of a troublous son would prove, in due course, an altogether different proposition. That this same son would lay waste so much of his father’s work and flout so many of the principles that had guided his rule had, of course, an irony all of its own.

It was not the least of the first Tudor’s merits that, in an age when the moral laxity of royal courts was all too common, he remained unswervingly faithful to his wife. No less than her husband, Elizabeth of York had been battered by past insecurities. Born the eldest daughter of Edward IV, she had been compelled at the age of 5, when Henry VI was restored briefly to the throne, to flee with her mother, Elizabeth Woodville, into sanctuary at Westminster. Six months later she had ridden out of the same Abbey gates in the embrace of her triumphant father, only to be forced back once more into the Church’s protection at his sudden death when she was all but eighteen. Thereupon, she and her sisters and surviving brothers (Edward aged 12 and Richard aged 9) had been declared illegitimate, while their mother was accused of sorcery. Nor was this the end of Elizabeth’s troubles, for later, after her uncle had been crowned Richard III, her brothers disappeared from view in the Tower amid rumours that they had been murdered.

The funeral effigy of Henry VIII’s mother in Westminster Abbey bears witness today to her graceful features, and the likeness of her now hanging in the National Portrait Gallery also suggests a woman of some considerable beauty with a well-proportioned face, fair complexion, golden tresses and long, elegant hands. Neither image lays bare the inner woman, however. To all who knew her, in fact, her reputation for piety was outstanding and wholly consistent with her undivided loyalty and subservience to her husband. Having stood by his side throughout the times of danger after his first landing in England, she proceeded to decorate his court dutifully and would bear him seven children, only three of whom would reach adulthood. But while she was described by contemporaries as ‘a very handsome woman and of great ability’, ‘very noble’ and ‘much beloved’ and ‘of the greatest charity and humanity’, a less buoyant note was sounded in two dispatches from Spanish envoys. The first described her as ‘kept in subjection by the mother of the king’ and in need of ‘a little love’, while the other observed that the king was much influenced by his mother and suggested further that the queen ‘as is generally the case, does not like it’.

True to her motto, ‘Humble and Reverent’, Elizabeth remained a kind and gracious presence, but little else besides, and her spouse, though loving, was often autocratic in his personal relations with her. In common, then, with other high-born women of her day, Elizabeth’s role as wife was limited entirely to passive obedience just as her maternal role would be confined to begetting rather than rearing, for she would neither feed her second son nor even live near him. Indeed, it was by dying, above all, that she eventually left her deepest mark upon the future Henry VIII. Predictably, she would also endure the intrusions of her mother-in-law with characteristic resignation and soon surrendered the care of the new prince to her without demur. In fact, only a few weeks after his christening, the infant Henry left his mother’s abode for Eltham Palace in Kent and here it was that he would be raised in severe seclusion under the doting but leaden devoutness of his grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort.

Not surprisingly, the earnest piety and precision of the ‘Venerable Margaret’ are unlikely to have left her second grandson with many cheerful memories. Intensely devout in her religious faith and devoutly intense in her political schemings, she was one of the most remarkable women of the century. After four marriages she had been widowed finally in 1504 and, at 61 years of age, immediately saw fit to take a solemn and public vow of chastity. She had also been instrumental in the plots that finally brought her son the crown and had lived through more reigns, with more opportunity to influence their outcome, than any other person at his court. To the Spanish ambassador in 1498 she was among the half-dozen people with the greatest influence in England and perhaps to compensate for her disappointment at not being allowed to interfere directly in government during his own reign, Henry VII allowed his mother to rule his domestic affairs. In consequence, her obsessions and ambitions were to leave an indelible imprint upon her second grandson.

The countess was, in effect, all prayer and learning, which made her, at one and the same time, both the best and worst of influences upon the highly impressionable boy in her charge. At her happiest when reading and translating pious works, such as The Imitation of Christ, she would begin her devotions at five every morning, one hour before the general time of rising and though she suffered grievously from rheumatism, this never deterred her from spending long periods on her knees in prayer. Next to her skin, for good measure, she wore a hair shirt ‘for the health of her soul’ and instead of regal fineries she dressed in modest robes, much like a nun’s habit. Nor was this the sum of her austerities. Always a sparing eater, she observed fast days meticulously and during Lent would restrict herself to one fish meal a day. In the meantime, she maintained twelve paupers in her house in Woking, washing their feet, serving them with meals when they were ill and studying them as they approached death, so that she might thereby learn how to die well when her own eagerly awaited appointment with eternity arrived.

Although not permanently resident with her, Henry is therefore likely to have feared his grandmother as much as he loved her, for she represented an oppressive mix of sharp wits, high expectations and maudlin piety, leavened by a pinch of slowly gnawing anxiety. She never forgot, after all, how history had turned at Bosworth Field and how her cherished son might have ended the day in King Richard’s place, a broken and dishonoured corpse. It was John Fisher, her confessor, who noted her knack for ‘marvellous weeping’ and it was he, too, who remarked upon her morbid pessimism. ‘Either she was in sorrow by reason of present adversities’, he observed, ‘or else when she was in prosperity she was in dread of the adversity to come.’ Haunted by fortune’s wheel, the ‘Venerable Margaret’ in her turn came to haunt her grandson’s childhood.

Apart from God the father and her own son, the third person of Margaret’s blessed trinity seems, in fact, to have been none other than Prince Henry himself, and it is tempting to think that she may well have seen in him something of the tenacious vigour and cunning instinct for survival that had sustained her in earlier adversity. In any event, family ambition as well as religion certainly burned behind the deep-set eyes in her narrow face and henceforth those eyes would be firmly set upon her second grandson. The Beaufort family had, after all, stood tantalisingly close to the throne for all of three generations and now that it was theirs, she was adamant that it must be held at all costs. As well as protecting Prince Henry’s person, therefore, she was equally intent upon nurturing his rank and by the time of his tenth birthday, she had singled the boy out as her heir, begging the king to arrange ‘that none of my tenants be retained with no man, but that they be kept for your fair sweet son, for whom they be most meet’. Moreover, as events would demonstrate, she was no less set upon imbuing in him a keen sense of his wider birthright.

Though two generations, gender and temperament divided grandmother from grandson, she succeeded admirably and momentously in encouraging at least one common bond between them: a strong sense of grievance against the French, which the boy would carry with him throughout his life. It was widely known that the King of France still owed Lady Margaret a large sum of money that had been advanced by her mother to the Duke of Orléans in 1440 to pay the ransom fee after his capture at Agincourt. But notwithstanding Margaret’s continual petitions, the debt remained stubbornly unpaid and such was her crafty frustration that she eventually chose to gift the sum to her son in the hope that he might attempt to recover it by force. His letter in response, though gentle, still left her in no doubt that now was not the time to plan for war against such a formidable foe, and the rankling impact of this filial palm-off may well be imagined. Doubtless the grandmother’s indignation about the unremitted debt will have raked her sorely and it is hard to imagine that her smouldering sense of grievance will not have communicated itself to Prince Henry, fuelling in its own way, perhaps, his later naive urges to repossess land lost to France in the Hundred Years War.

In the old lady’s capacity as mistress of court ceremonial, it was she, too, who fashioned the bustling microcosm of the Tudor nursery, at the hub of which, especially in the early months, was Prince Henry’s wet nurse, Anne Luke. Though largely unregarded in the records, we can be sure of much about this young woman, for both her physical and her mental qualities would have had to match precisely the exacting paediatric standards outlined for posterity in Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Boke Named the Governour. A ‘sanguine complexion’, for instance, suggesting the predominance of blood among the four humours, was an absolute essential. This meant that Anne would have needed glowing cheeks, thick auburn hair, a buxom figure and a hearty, outgoing, amorous disposition, since this was the type considered most apt to produce milk that ‘excelleth all other both in sweetness and substance’. She was required, too, to be ‘of ripe or mature age, not under twenty years or above thirty’ and ‘of approved virtue, discretion, and gratuity’, since ‘the child sucketh the vice of his nurse with the milk of her pap’. Accordingly, she would be expected to abstain from sex and, if any ill were to befall the baby, the fault would be hers alone to bear, for the philosopher-physician, Avicenna, had left no doubt that ‘the first thing in curing infants is to regulate the nurse’. She could expect at any time, therefore, to be phlebotomised, cupped, ‘cured by vomiting’ or made to suffer ‘the turmoil of purgation’, and should her supply of milk wane, she would find herself treated to a special diet of stewed udders, dried cow’s tongue or powdered earthworm.

Perhaps it was only fitting, therefore, that after his accession Henry decided to award Anne Luke a yearly pension of £20 in recognition of her efforts on his behalf. But whether even so diligent and self-sacrificing a nurse could really have offered the infant prince the kind of unconditional love that his absent mother might have provided remains open to question. Nor could Anne Luke, or anyone else in the prince’s household for that matter, relate to him with the kind of informality or spontaneity that might have made his later interaction with others more rounded. Literally from the instant of his birth until the age of 7, the vast majority of individuals who surrounded Henry in his insulated nursery world were impassive, one-dimensional figures, attending and providing rather than interacting and amending, and this is likely to have been especially true for the one who first supplied his most basic needs at closest quarters. If, then, the prince’s early upbringing succeeded admirably in fitting him for his future role by ridding him of the humilities usually derived from more conventional dealings with adults, it also helped spawn a disregard for the inner workings of others that would increase exponentially during his adolescence and early manhood.

As might be expected, all Henry’s needs were cosseted tirelessly and none more so than those pertaining to his health. His ailments were treated in accordance with the very best conventions of Tudor child care, which recommended, amongst other things, bitches’ milk or chicken fat mixed with hares’ brains as a trusted remedy for sore gums, and plasters of oil and wax, clapped ‘hot on the belly’, for wind. Rather less drastically, the baby prince’s earache would have been soothed by drops derived from myrrh and pulverised acorns in honey and wine. Meanwhile, when he cried in the cradle, his four rockers, who had been specially chosen by his grandmother, would bend to their task. And when later he had learned to walk outside the pen, the prince would always be followed anxiously by hovering, fussing dames lest he should stumble, damage his spine and develop a humped back. His faltering steps were likely to have been aided, too, by a small brass jousting toy of the type that appears to have been popular throughout the royal nurseries of Europe at this time. Mounted on wheels and featuring an armoured knight poised for combat, this was a toy with more than one purpose since, in addition to supporting a tottering infant, it could be hurled and crashed in noisy combat.

Such items were designed, of course, to begin a prince’s meticulous initiation into the military skills considered so indispensable that they could not be taught too early. Indeed, there was an unapologetically bloodthirsty emphasis upon slaughter in the upbringing of all royal children at this time, as we can see from a contemporary woodcut by Hans Burgkmair of Augsburg, which depicts the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I at play with his offspring. The cosy family gathering is depicted in the midst of a spree of casual carnage with a lethal miniature cannon duly primed to wreak havoc upon any passing wildlife. One child is gleefully despatching a songbird from a tree, while a baited trap is being laid for another. Elsewhere, a longbow lies temporarily discarded. We can be sure, of course, that Henry’s toys would have followed a similar pattern. And though he had other playthings, such as spinning tops, bone skittles and an almost life-size hobby horse, his toy weaponry would have assumed a special significance, for as well as being a would-be warrior against the French, he was also the son of a king whose fear of treachery and sudden death would never fully leave him.

Throughout Prince Henry’s early years, in fact, his father was far from secure upon his throne and it seems hard to believe that the pervasive insecurity of this time would not have had an insidious influence upon his future development. There were, in 1485, at least ten people with a better blood claim to the throne than Henry VII and, in due course, there would also emerge two pretenders: the ‘feigned boy’, Lambert Simnel, and his more dangerous and persistent counterpart, Perkin Warbeck, who between 1491 and 1497 flitted menacingly around Ireland, France and Scotland. In the Latin treatise Speculum Principis, written for him specially by his tutor John Skelton, young Henry was said to be surrounded by ‘grievous wounds and deaths, days of suspicion and fear, incalculable secret hates, loyal words and deeds the opposite, the frightening curse of war, rare friendship, a thousand nuisances, a pretence at love and cowardly hearts’. Therefore, as the diminutive prince toddled after his brother and sister and played with his toy weapons in the care of Anne Luke, the moated palace of Eltham in its rolling parkland was nothing less than a haven of security in a sea of menace.

The year 1497 would prove of particular crisis as the Scots threatened the border, and Cornishmen led by the lawyer Thomas Flamank and a giant blacksmith called Michael Joseph marched in anger across the breadth of England to protest against the ‘crafty means’ by which the king had elicited his ‘outrageous sums’. Today there is still a plaque by the lychgate at St Keverne, one of the early centres of the rising, recording how the rebels ‘marched to London and suffered vengeance’. But it was not until they reached Blackheath that they were finally thwarted. And as the Cornishmen had advanced on the capital, armed with bills, staves, scythes and whatever other instruments of harm might be at hand, the 5-year-old prince was forced to seek shelter with his mother in the White Tower. On that same day, 15,000 men from the West Country, ‘stout of stomach, mighty of body and limb’, encamped at Farnham. Now, Henry would witness at first hand the Tower’s armourers honing their weapons as London’s citizens piled up great mounds of timber against the city’s gates. And as mother and son, bound by their common dange...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Dedication
• Author’s Note
• Acknowledgements
• 1. The Child Within the Man
• 2. A Prince Beyond Improvement
• 3. The Golden World of Coeur Loyall
• 4. Brought Up Out of Nought
• 5. Palace of Illusions
• 6. Defender of the Faith
• 7. Puissance and Penury
• 8. Impulse Born of Passion
• 9. The Infinite Clamour of Deadlock
• 10. Plenary, Whole and Entire Power
• 11. The Lion Learns His Strength
• 12. Who Hastes to Climb Seeks to Revert
• 13. Opinionate and Wilful
• Epilogue
• Source Notes and Bibliographical Information
• Plate Section
• Copyright