Steven Gunn: What should we think of Henry VIII?
[Steven Gunn is Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Merton College, Oxford.]
What should we think of Henry VIII? This year we will all have to decide. For the 500th anniversary of his accession, the British Library and the Tower of London will host exhibitions, Channel 4’s Time Team will explore his palaces, and Hampton Court will make each of its many visitors a member of his court for a day. Henry will be hard to avoid.
We know more about Henry than about any previous English king. We have more portraits, painted, drawn and sculpted. We even have his suits of armour, so we can measure his expanding waistline from muscled youth to bloated age. We have more ambassadors’ reports, generated by the thickening web of resident embassies at the courts of Renaissance Europe. We have more state papers, hundreds of volumes in the National Archives and British Library, exhaustively calendared by Victorian scholars in the thirty-eight printed volumes of the Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII. We have account books and rolls in thousands, so many that it was not until 2004 that a researcher into the royal wardrobe discovered mention of Henry’s football boots.
Yet Henry remains controversial, not because we are short of evidence, but because he did controversial things. “Divorcements and such mischiefs”, as one of his favourite preachers, Hugh Latimer, dared to call them once the King was dead, polarize loyalties in any age. Breaking with Rome, destroying the monasteries, patronizing some aspects of evangelical reform but violently suppressing others, Henry was bound to make enemies in his lifetime and beyond. Carving his way through political life by executing queens, courtiers, noblemen, poets, his mother’s sixty-seven-year-old cousin, the Countess of Salisbury, and two intellectuals of European stature, Thomas More and John Fisher, he was bound to arouse passions. Huge changes in the government of Wales and Ireland and the attempt to annex Scotland by dynastic marriage could hardly go unnoticed. Wars against France so costly that he had to cut the silver content of the coinage by two-thirds, badly denting the national economy for a decade or more, demanded some kind of audit. Debate surrounds not only the significance, wisdom and morality of Henry’s actions, but even his responsibility for them. Was he steered into policies by his great ministers Thomas Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell, or perhaps cajoled into them by the cliques of courtiers that surrounded him day and night?
All this has made Henry a fascinating object of study. His reign attracted some of the most powerful English historical minds of the twentieth century, from A. F. Pollard to G. R. Elton via W. G. Hoskins, the doyen of English landscape historians, who characterized Henry’s generation as an “Age of Plunder” and the King himself as “the Stalin of Tudor England”. Yet full-scale biographies of the King are strangely rare. In part it is the magisterial quality of J. J. Scarisbrick’s work of 1968 that has enabled it to hold the field for so long. But there seems also to be a sense that Henry is so large a character, the evidence so bulky, the controversies so fierce, that the task daunts those who consider it.
We should therefore be grateful to David Starkey and Lucy Wooding for giving us new Lives, which will doubtless be much read in the coming year...
Read entire article at Times Literary Supplement (UK)
What should we think of Henry VIII? This year we will all have to decide. For the 500th anniversary of his accession, the British Library and the Tower of London will host exhibitions, Channel 4’s Time Team will explore his palaces, and Hampton Court will make each of its many visitors a member of his court for a day. Henry will be hard to avoid.
We know more about Henry than about any previous English king. We have more portraits, painted, drawn and sculpted. We even have his suits of armour, so we can measure his expanding waistline from muscled youth to bloated age. We have more ambassadors’ reports, generated by the thickening web of resident embassies at the courts of Renaissance Europe. We have more state papers, hundreds of volumes in the National Archives and British Library, exhaustively calendared by Victorian scholars in the thirty-eight printed volumes of the Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII. We have account books and rolls in thousands, so many that it was not until 2004 that a researcher into the royal wardrobe discovered mention of Henry’s football boots.
Yet Henry remains controversial, not because we are short of evidence, but because he did controversial things. “Divorcements and such mischiefs”, as one of his favourite preachers, Hugh Latimer, dared to call them once the King was dead, polarize loyalties in any age. Breaking with Rome, destroying the monasteries, patronizing some aspects of evangelical reform but violently suppressing others, Henry was bound to make enemies in his lifetime and beyond. Carving his way through political life by executing queens, courtiers, noblemen, poets, his mother’s sixty-seven-year-old cousin, the Countess of Salisbury, and two intellectuals of European stature, Thomas More and John Fisher, he was bound to arouse passions. Huge changes in the government of Wales and Ireland and the attempt to annex Scotland by dynastic marriage could hardly go unnoticed. Wars against France so costly that he had to cut the silver content of the coinage by two-thirds, badly denting the national economy for a decade or more, demanded some kind of audit. Debate surrounds not only the significance, wisdom and morality of Henry’s actions, but even his responsibility for them. Was he steered into policies by his great ministers Thomas Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell, or perhaps cajoled into them by the cliques of courtiers that surrounded him day and night?
All this has made Henry a fascinating object of study. His reign attracted some of the most powerful English historical minds of the twentieth century, from A. F. Pollard to G. R. Elton via W. G. Hoskins, the doyen of English landscape historians, who characterized Henry’s generation as an “Age of Plunder” and the King himself as “the Stalin of Tudor England”. Yet full-scale biographies of the King are strangely rare. In part it is the magisterial quality of J. J. Scarisbrick’s work of 1968 that has enabled it to hold the field for so long. But there seems also to be a sense that Henry is so large a character, the evidence so bulky, the controversies so fierce, that the task daunts those who consider it.
We should therefore be grateful to David Starkey and Lucy Wooding for giving us new Lives, which will doubtless be much read in the coming year...