Henry VIII: History in an Hour

Simon Court

• Publisher: William Collins
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780007554119
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Love history? Know your stuff with History in an Hour.

King of England, claimant King of France, Lord – and later King – of Ireland, Supreme Head of the Church of England and, perhaps most famously, six times a husband, Henry VIII is England’s most notorious monarch.

Succeeding his father, Henry VII, he allied with the Holy Roman Emperor and began his many obsessive invasions of France. Meanwhile the handsome, worldly king embarked on his famous quests for a suitable wife and heir. With marriage to Anne Boleyn came the separation of the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church, Reformation and the Dissolution of the Monasteries. From his childhood to his later years and famed appetites for food, sex and validation, ‘Henry VIII: History in an Hour’ describes the life of a man whose desires and determination changed England and the world.

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Appendix 1: Key Players

Catherine of Aragon (1485–1536)

Born in Madrid, the youngest surviving child of King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile, Catherine had long red hair, blue eyes and a fair complexion. By the age of 3 she had become betrothed to Prince Arthur, the heir-apparent to the English Crown, marrying him in 1501. A widow a year later, she married Henry VIII in 1509. Throughout their marriage Catherine was pregnant six times, but only Mary survived to adulthood. Divorced from Henry in 1533, she died 3 years later, aged 50.

Well educated and spirited, Catherine had studied religion, the Classics and Latin. She commissioned the controversial book by Juan Luis Vives, The Education of a Christian Woman, which argued that women had the right to be educated, and donated to several colleges which encouraged female education. She also started a programme for the relief of the poor. With Henry in France in 1513 and the Scots invading England, she rode north in full armour to address the troops, despite being heavily pregnant. When Henry pressurized her to accept an annulment and retire quietly to a nunnery she resolutely refused, saying defiantly, ‘God never called me to a nunnery, I am the king’s true and lawful wife.’ It was this courage which led her supporter Thomas More to say that ‘There are few women who could compete with the Queen in her prime’, and drew her opponent Thomas Cromwell to acknowledge that ‘If not for her sex, she could have defied all the heroes of History.’

A devout Catholic and a member of the Third Order of Saint Francis, she confined herself in her final years to one room, dressed only in the hair shirt of her Order, and fasting continuously. For refusing to recognize Anne Boleyn as Henry’s legitimate new queen, she was forbidden to see her daughter, Mary, again. Yet close to her death, her final letter to Henry, her ‘most dear lord and husband’, is forgiving. She wrote, ‘For my part, I pardon thou everything, and I desire to devoutly pray God that He will pardon thou also.’ The letter ends: ‘Lastly, I makest this vogue [vow], that mine eyes desire thou aboufe all things.’ Highly respected and mourned among the people, Catherine is buried in Peterborough Cathedral.

Thomas Wolsey (1473–1530)

Born in Ipswich of a humble family, Wolsey studied theology at Magdalen College, Oxford, before serving Henry VII as royal chaplain. When the new king Henry VIII appointed Wolsey as Almoner a close personal relationship developed between them. They shared a love of pomp and circumstance, while Henry’s disinterest in the tedious details of government was dealt with by the extremely industrious Wolsey. Henry had total confidence in him, and granted him a great deal of freedom and power within his court, so that he rapidly became the dominant, even overwhelming force, and chief adviser to the king.

Wolsey was always highly pragmatic in dealing with the king. When Henry sought to invade France, Wolsey changed his mind about the merits of doing so and organized the logistics of the military campaign. He was also key in the peace negotiations of 1514, ensuring that Henry kept his prized possession of Tournai. He was later to organize the extravagant summit meeting at the Field of Cloth of Gold.

In 1514, Wolsey became Archbishop of York, and in 1515 Lord Chancellor, and a cardinal. As such, Wolsey had both a political and religious role in Henry’s service, and was also Papal Legate in England. The issue of the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Catherine led eventually to his downfall, as Pope Clement VII’s continual delays in coming to a decision led Henry to start doubting Wolsey’s loyalty. By July 1529 Henry had had enough and sought to remove Wolsey from both office and memory. He was arrested and stripped of his government office and (by now substantial) property. This included the recently expanded residence of Hampton Court, which Henry decided to occupy himself, instead of the Palace of Westminster. Cardinal College in Oxford, which Wolsey had founded, was renamed King’s College, and later became known as Christ Church. Wolsey was, however, allowed to remain Archbishop of York, but while travelling to his diocese he was accused of treason and ordered back to London. In great distress, he fell ill on the journey and died aged 57.

He is quoted as saying: ‘If I had served my God as diligently as I did my king, He would not have given me over in my grey hairs.’ Although he had planned to be buried in a magnificent tomb in Windsor, he was buried in Leicester Abbey without a monument. He left two children, who were the offspring of a relationship with Joan Larke, whom Wolsey had arranged to be married off to someone else to avoid embarrassment.

Thomas More (1478–1535)

A dominant intellectual force of his generation, a devout Catholic and lawyer whose interests extended to philosophy, statesmanship and humanism, More was born the son of Sir John More, himself a successful lawyer and judge. Thomas studied at Oxford and then Lincoln’s Inn before being called to the Bar in 1502. Elected to Parliament in 1504, he became increasingly influential as an adviser to Henry VIII. In 1521, he assisted Henry in writing the Assertio, a formal response to the Protestant radical Martin Luther’s attack on Catholicism. In 1523, he became the Speaker of the House of Commons, and succeeded Wolsey as Lord Chancellor in 1529.

More became increasingly worried about Henry’s leanings towards the Protestant Reformation, which he considered to be heretical. He had earlier assisted Wolsey in preventing the spread of the writings of Luther, and was later to suppress the use of William Tyndale’s English translation of the New Testament in churches. His spiritual life is reputed to have included practices such as wearing a hair shirt next to his skin and occasional self-flagellation.

In 1530, More refused to sign a letter from leading churchmen and aristocrats to Pope Clement VII requesting the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Catherine, and by May 1532 he was forced to resign as Lord Chancellor. After refusing to attend the coronation of Anne Boleyn a year later, he was charged with accepting bribes and conspiracy but successfully defended himself. When he and John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester, refused to take the Oath of Supremacy or to acknowledge that Catherine’s marriage was lawfully annulled, he was arrested for treason in 1534 and imprisoned in the Tower of London.

In July 1535, More was brought to trial. A lawyer to the last, he sought to rely on the legal precedent that ‘who is silent is seen to consent’ and he argued that he could not be convicted of high treason for failing to take the Oath of Supremacy if he did not expressly deny that the king was the Supreme Head of the Church. However, the Solicitor-General Richard Rich testified that More had made such a denial in his presence, and although this testimony was highly dubious, it took just fifteen minutes for the jury to find More guilty. Mounting the steps of the scaffold, More said ‘see me safe up and for my coming down, I can shift for myself’, and declared that he died ‘the king’s good servant, but God’s first’. In 1935, Pope Pius XI canonized both More and John Fisher.

Anne Boleyn (1501/7–36)

Although a lack of parish records makes it impossible to know Anne Boleyn’s exact date and place of birth, she was the daughter of Sir Thomas Boleyn and his wife Lady Elizabeth Howard. Thomas Boleyn served as a diplomat under Henry VIII, and Anne spent nearly seven years in France as maid-of-honour to Queen Claude, wife of Francis I. This gave her a love of all things French, and in particular the game of courtly love and flirtation. In 1522, Anne was recalled to England to marry her Irish cousin, James Butler, but when the marriage negotiations broke down, she joined Henry’s court as a lady-in-waiting to Catherine of Aragon. She entered into a secret betrothal with the aristocrat Henry Percy, but again this came to nothing, as ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• The ‘Virtuous Prince’
• Jousting and the Heraldic Past
• The King of England and of France
• The Field of Cloth of Gold
• The ‘King’s Great Matter’
• The Break with Rome
• ‘The Goggle-Eyed Whore’: Anne Boleyn
• A King is Born
• The Reformation and the Dissolution of the Monasteries
• The ‘Fat Flanders Mare’: Anne of Cleves
• The Gruesome End of Thomas Cromwell
• The ‘Lewd and Naughty’ Catherine Howard
• Death and Succession
• Personality as Political Policy
• Henry Tudor: Psychological Post-mortem
• Appendix 1: Key Players
• Appendix 2: Timeline
• Copyright
• Got Another Hour?
• About the Publisher