1536

The Year that Changed Henry VIII

Suzannah Lipscomb

• Publisher: Lion Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780745959030
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de la Grande-Bretagne

One of the best-known figures of British history, collective memory of Henry VIII presents us with the image of a corpulent, covetous, and cunning king whose appetite for worldly goods met few parallels, whose wives met infamously premature ends, and whose religion was ever political in intent.

1536 - focusing on a pivotal year in the life of the King - reveals a fuller portrait of this complex monarch, detailing the finer shades of humanity that have so long been overlooked. We discover that in 1536 Henry met many failures - physical, personal, and political - and emerged from them a revolutionary new king who proceeded to transform a nation and reform a religion.

A compelling story, the effects of which are still with us today, 1536 shows what a profound difference can be made merely by changing the heart of a king.

Prologue

For those living in 1536, the world could be a frightening place. To make sense of it, there were certain principles, values and beliefs to which people held – many of which require a great stretch of the imagination for the twenty-first century observer to understand. Yet, without grasping them, it is impossible even to begin to enter into the mind of our protagonist, Henry VIII himself.

Above all, this was a world that believed in the existence of a divinely created order. The disruption of this order was widely expected to bring the terrifying prospect of chaos on a cosmic scale. As Shakespeare wrote in Troilus and Cressida:

Take but degree away, untune that string,

And hark, what discord follows.

This order needed to be reflected in society, by rank, status and hierarchy. Everyone had their place and station; all men were not created equal. This fact was displayed even in what people wore. Sumptuary laws governed the dress of each rank of society: no man under the degree of a lord could wear cloth of gold or silver, or sable (the brown fur of the arctic fox). Only Knights of the Garter and above could wear crimson or blue velvet. No person under a knight could wear gowns or doublets of velvet. Those who owned land yielding £20 a year might wear satin or damask in their doublets, while husbandry servants, shepherds and labourers were forbidden to wear cloth costing more than two shillings a yard. The penalty for the latter was three days in the stocks. The threat of such a punishment represented the belief that dissatisfaction with one’s lot could engender disorder, injustice and anarchy. In practice, however, the social structure was accommodating enough to allow some superlative men, Thomas Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell included, to rise above the position of their birth. The corollary of hierarchy was the idea of patronage – that those of superior status would advance those of lower status who could be useful to them.²

At the top of the hierarchy was the king, who, it was believed, had been appointed by God. To be a king was therefore a high calling and a sacred duty. It was his role and responsibility to rule in a way that ensured peace, prosperity, stability and security in the realm. Kingship by divine right meant that, in theory, kings were answerable to God alone. They could not legitimately be removed from their position, nor was disobedience to them permissible. The role of the subject was to obey them as God. In practice, such absolute power was modified by the need to maintain the cooperation of the populace, but even that cooperation was wedded to the idea that the ‘commonwealth’ was produced by living in harmony in line with the divine ordering of society.³

For everyone in sixteenth-century society knew that there was a God in heaven and a devil in hell, and that every decision in their lives moved them closer to one or other of them. Everyone conceived of the world in religious terms, and religion was part of the natural warp and weave of everyday life. Everyone believed that one day they would face judgment and that the decisions they made on earth would determine their eternity. It has been suggested that it was not even conceptually possible to be an atheist in the sixteenth century. Some historians have suggested that the religion of the sixteenth century was so potent because it was an epoch dominated by fear, and religious belief offered a means of apparent control. This might be too reductionist, but either way, the depth and sincerity of religious conviction meant that decisions in Tudor times about what people today might see as the finer points of theology could have life and death consequences. How one conducted one’s religious life was of the utmost importance.⁴

This prevalence of religious belief meant that crime was conceived of as evidence of sin and not the consequence of social circumstances. As such, painful and spectacular punishment was thought necessary both to deter others and to cleanse society from the disorder and pollution of the criminal’s sin. The public – and often brutal – discipline of wrongdoers restored order through exemplary justice, and prevented God’s wrath on society as a whole. It was therefore divinely sanctioned. The violence of the times was not restricted to the lower classes of society: ‘polite society was almost as violent, almost as crowded and credulous, almost as brutal’.⁵

A final, obvious observation to make of sixteenth-century English society is that women were considered to be inferior to men, weaker in mind and body and more prone to sin. Medical theory held that women’s bodies were imperfectly formed (inverted) males, and were cold and moist, to men’s superior qualities of hot and dry. Women were also thought to be naturally more lustful than men, and therefore, the source and cause of sexual sin. Honour, for both men and women, was linked to ensuring women’s chastity, before and within marriage. Such beliefs were to have major repercussions in the life of Henry VIII in 1536.⁶

CHAPTER 1

The Change

We are a bit like cocky adolescents when it comes to Henry VIII – we all think that we know him and all about him. We can define him in an instant. In a column in The Observer in 2007, Victoria Coren wrote, ‘if you type “wife-killing” into Google, the first listing is a reference to Henry VIII, of wife-killing notoriety. Oh, that Henry VIII.’ At around the same time as I read this, I overheard two men in Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, commenting on a damaged tomb whose heads of female figurines had broken off or worn away. One said to the other, ‘Henry VIII has a lot to answer for, hasn’t he?’ Market research by Historic Royal Palaces has shown that the popular perception of Henry VIII is that he was a fat guy who had six, or maybe eight, wives and killed a lot of them. The appearance of Henry in films over the years, whether played by Charles Laughton, Richard Burton, Keith Michell, Sid James, Ray Winstone, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers or Eric Bana, has given us our script – Henry VIII is seen as a misogynistic, ruthless, egotistical, fickle, predatory, infantile and sex-obsessed glutton. This is not to say that he wasn’t some of these things, but they are certainly not all, or even chiefly, what Henry VIII was.¹

Indeed, for more than twenty years after he came to the throne in 1509, his contemporaries used the words gifted, courageous, gentle, noble, brilliant and accomplished to describe him. Even after this point (in 1539), one courtier could describe Henry’s nature as ‘so benign and pleasant that I think till this day no man hath heard many angry words pass his mouth’ (though this speaker knew Henry VIII would read his comments). Another could wax, in 1545, that to hear the king speak ‘so sententiously, so kingly, or rather fatherly… was such a joy and marvellous comfort as I reckon this day one of the happiest of my life’. Henry VIII was evidently extremely charismatic. Thomas More had commented on the king’s ‘way of making every man feel that he is enjoying his special favour’. He was also surprisingly intelligent, devout, serious, moralistic and legalistic.²

Yet, Henry VIII was also prone to rage and cruelty – certainly in the later years of his reign. From being the glorious young prince of his accession, Henry changed to become a man who was markedly dour, irritable, mistrustful and repressively brutal towards his enemies. This was matched by his physical degeneration, from a handsome, athletic youth, into an obese old man, plagued by ill-health. Even before he died, people were starting to call him by the dreaded epithet ‘tyrant’.

So, it seems that at some point Henry VIII changed. This is not a new idea. Many historians have recognized this character shift, but there has been less of a consensus on when Henry reached this important psychological turning point. Miles F. Shore, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, suggests the years 1525–27. After this point, he noted, Henry had more than four wives, turned on his closest male friends and advisers, demonstrated ‘distinct behavioural changes’ and experienced at least one major episode of depression. The turning point was a ‘crisis of generativity’ – when the reality of middle age failed to live up to Henry’s youthful narcissistic fantasies of omnipotence, resulting in ‘abrupt decompression’, disappointment and depression. Sir Arthur Salisbury MacNulty, MD, studied Henry VIII’s medical history, and he also concludes that the turning point came around 1527. He links this to a head injury sustained by Henry in 1524, resulting in severe headaches which worsened around 1527, and cautiously suggested that a cerebral injury could be linked to the alteration in Henry VIII’s behaviour and character. ‘From being a kindly and jovial monarch…’ he writes, ‘he gradually became an irritable, suspicious and selfish tyrant’. He was a ‘double personality, a Jekyll and Hyde’, with the Jekyll predominant in the first half of his reign, Hyde in the second. Historian Greg Walker concurs with this timing. He suggests that for the first eighteen years of his reign – that is, until 1527 – Henry did deliver on the promise he had earlier displayed.³

Others have positioned the change in Henry’s personality a little bit later. Psychologist J. C. Flügel notes that Henry’s character ‘underwent a marked transformation’ after the split with Rome, that is, around 1533, after which point Henry became ‘vastly more despotic’. Historian Lacey Baldwin Smith does not explicitly assign a date, but explores Henry’s behaviour from around 1542 by reflecting that geriatric studies suggest that during the final stages of life a man ‘casts off a portion of the protective shield hammered out during childhood and adolescence and reveals the raw personality beneath’.⁴

Some, however, unable to identify a turning-point, conclude that Henry VIII’s character was constant (that is, constantly unpleasant). J. J. Scarisbrick, in his important 1968 biography entitled Henry VIII, does not believe that there was ever a great change in Henry’s character. He rejects suggestions that Henry had been brain-damaged either by the accident of 1524 or by a fall from his horse in January 1536 (a theory put forward by Frederick Chamberlin in 1932). He writes ‘whether it [the 1536 fall] caused any brain damage is doubtful, not least because it is difficult to see the deterioration of character which, as has sometimes been argued, set in thereafter. Henry was not notably more cruel afterwards than he had been before’. Yet, the arguments set forward by this book will suggest otherwise. Even Alison Weir who, following J. J. Scarisbrick, says there is no evidence of a sudden change in Henry’s character, later contrasts the Henry who had ‘once been open-handed, liberal and idealistic’, with the older king who was ‘now contrary, secretive, dogmatic, and unpredictably changeable’.⁵

This book suggests that Henry VIII did undergo a change, and that although this was in part a cumulative process, it was greatly accelerated by the events of 1536. The damage that this year made to Henry’s physical, and less tangibly, his psychological, health, appears to have started a chain-reaction, tapping into his propensity for high self-regard, and exaggerating it into a brutal, egotistical obduracy that had terrible consequences.

But he had not always been like this.

CHAPTER 2

Young Henry

Prince Henry, later Henry VIII, was born on 28 June 1491 at Greenwich Palace. He was one of seven children born to Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, although only four survived infancy. As the second son, he was not destined for the throne. That honour and responsibility fell to his elder brother, Arthur, Prince of Wales. Yet, the renowned Desiderius Erasmus later wrote glowingly of Henry in these years, stating that even ‘when the King was no more than a child… he had a vivid and active mind, above measure to execute whatever tasks he undertook… you would say that he was a universal genius’.¹

In May 1502, Arthur, who had recently married and taken on a position of responsibility in the Welsh Marches, died at the age of fifteen. As a result, the spotlight suddenly turned on the ten-year-old Henry, the next heir-apparent. Unlike Arthur, however, Henry was given no opportunity to practise ruling – the only surviving heir needed to be protected. His life remained the confined, secluded lifestyle of a lesser royal child, both indulged and frustratingly sheltered, and so when Henry came to the throne, he was unrehearsed in the art of sovereignty. The loss of his mother quickly followed that of his brother. In February 1503, Elizabeth of York died as a result of childbirth when Henry was eleven years old, and Henry’s later correspondence shows he took her death badly. In June, Henry also effectively lost his sister Margaret, who moved to Edinburgh to marry James IV.²

In June 1503, a year after Arthur’s death, Henry was betrothed to his brother’s widow, the seventeen-year-old Katherine of Aragon. In receipt of a papal dispensation to overcome the obstacle of the couple’s consanguinity (after Katherine’s marriage to Arthur), Henry and Katherine were scheduled to marry when Henry attained his fifteenth birthday. A condition of the marriage was that Katherine’s father, Ferdinand of Spain, should provide in advance 100,000 crowns in plate, jewels and coin as a marriage portion. Yet by 1505, this had not been received, and so the date for the wedding came and went; the solemnization of the marriage appeared to be indefinitely postponed. Henry VII began to toy with making another alliance for his son with Eleanor of Austria, Katherine of Aragon’s niece. In fact, the negotiations for a marriage between Henry and Eleanor were only stopped by Henry VII’s death on 21 April 1509 (later Eleanor would marry Henry’s rival, Francis I of France).³

So, on 22 April 1509, aged seventeen, Henry was proclaimed King Henry VIII. His coronation was greeted with rapture. William Blount, Lord Mountjoy wrote to Erasmus on 27 May:

When you know what a hero [the king] now shows himself, how wisely he behaves, what a lover he is of justice and goodness, what affection he bears to the learned, I will venture that you will need no wings to make you fly to behold this new and auspicious star. If you could see how all the world here is rejoicing in the possession of so great a prince, how his life is all their desire, you could not contain your tears of joy. The heavens laugh, the earth exults, all things are full of milk, of honey, of nectar. Avarice is expelled from the country. Liberality scatters wealth with bounteous hand. Our King does not desire gold or gems or precious metals, but virtue, glory and immortality.

One of his first acts as king was to marry Katherine on 11 June in the Franciscan church at Greenwich Palace. While it is possible that in doing so Henry was fulfilling his father’s deathbed wish, it seems likely to have been a match primarily based on affection. The sources state that Henry wrote to his father-inlaw in 1513 saying ‘the love he bears Katherine is such, that if he were still free he would choose her in preference to all others’. Other men may have commented that Katherine was ‘rather ugly than otherwise’ and ‘not handsome, though she had a very beautiful complexion’, but Henry chose her. The couple were jointly crowned in Westminster Abbey on Midsummer’s Day, 24 June 1509, four days before Henry’s eighteenth birthday.⁴

It is clear that in these early years, and indeed, for the first twenty years of his reign, Henry was truly quite brilliant, having been blessed by nature with all the attributes and qualities he might desire. The chronicler Edward Hall said as much:

The features of his body, his goodly personage, his amiable visage, princely countenance, with the noble qualities of his royal estate, to every man known, needs no rehearsal, considering that, for lack of cunning, I cannot express the gifts of grace and of nature that God has endowed him with all.

Reports from foreign observers at his court run into hyperbole. In 1515, Henry VIII was described as ‘not only very expert in arms and of great valour, and most excellent in his personal endowments, but... likewise so gifted and adorned with mental accomplishments of every sort that we believe him to have few equals in the world’. Two years later, Francesco Chieregato wrote that Henry was a ‘most invincible King, whose acquirements and qualities are so many and excellent that I consider him to excel all who ever wore a crown’. And in his final report on four years spent at Henry’s court between 1515 and 1519, the Venetian ambassador Sebastian Giustinian concluded that Henry was ‘much handsomer than any other Sovereign in Christendom… [and] the best dressed sovereign in the world’.⁵

The grounds for all this praise were that besides being exceedingly good-looking, Henry VIII appeared to be accomplished in every way. He was a talented linguist – he spoke French, Spanish and Latin, the latter to the point of being able to reply spontaneously to an oration in elegant Latin. He loved music and was a skilled musician and composer: when an embassy from France arrived in 1517, Henry entertained the visitors himself by ‘singing and playing on every musical instrument’ quite excellently. He danced beautifully, surpassed all the archers of his guard with his bowmanship (‘as’, adds this commentator, ‘he surpasses them in stature and personal graces’), and was ‘a capital horseman and a fine jouster’.⁶

From contemporary sources we can build up a composite picture of Henry’s character. He was full of spirit, vigour and energy, ‘young, lusty and courageo...