1536: The Year That Changed Henry VIII (25 page)

Epilogue

Hear then, you kings, take this to heart; learn your lesson, lords of the wide world; lend your ears, you rulers of the multitude, whose pride is in the myriads of your people. It is the Lord who gave you your authority; your power comes from the Most High. He will put your actions to the test and scrutinize your intentions.

Wisdom of Solomon 6 (cited in Stephen Gardiner’s
In vera
obedientia
, 1535
)
¹

W
illiam Thomas wrote the first biography of Henry VIII in 1547 as a form of dialogue between himself and an Italian observer of Henry VIII’s reign. The purpose of the book was to answer the charges of tyranny put by the Italian against Henry VIII and to offer a ‘just excuse of my wrongfully slandered Prince, whose good renown, fame, and honour’ Thomas recommends to his readers. One of the charges is Henry’s treatment of his wives:

and not his first wife, but three or four more, did he not chop, change, or behead them, as his horse coveted new pasture, to satisfy the inordinate appetite of his lecherous will?

Were it not for the sixteenth-century language, this early assessment could pass for a modern appraisal of Henry VIII. Again and again, today’s popular media represents Henry VIII as lecherous, insatiable, callous, unfeeling and self-centred. The truth is a lot more complex. The character that has emerged over these pages is of a man of strong feeling but little emotional intelligence, wilful and obstinate but also fiery and charismatic, intelligent but blinkered, attempting to rule and preserve his honour against his profound sense of duty and heavy responsibility to fulfil his divinely ordained role. This was a man who channelled great loss and hurt into physical pursuits, intense theological interest and sometimes savage anger; above all, a proud, awesome and well-intentioned but also flawed and self-deceiving monarch.
²

There was, however, a distinct difference between the Henry VIII of his first forty-odd years, and the Henry VIII that emerged in and after 1536. Many of the flaws in his character were fashioned or catalyzed by the events of this one year. It is hard to underestimate the importance of this succession of events: Henry’s fall from his horse in January 1536, which brought fears for the king’s mortality was to have long-lasting consequences, most of all on his health, spelling the end of an active life for this king who had heretofore been acclaimed as a man of great strength, courage and energy. It directly contributed to his famous late-life obesity, and the continual and wearying pain of his ulcer became the source of much of his later irascibility. The end of his jousting symbolized the end of his youth in the year of his forty-fifth birthday, which was considered to mark the beginning of old age. In a gerontocratic society, where men of age were considered better fitted to rule due to their calm, sedate wisdom, this aging may not have been wholly bad – but for Henry, age brought none of these things. Instead, it plunged him headlong into a wealth of anxieties and insecurities, fostering and augmenting the preexisting angst that he felt towards his lack of an heir. Old age, for Henry, meant the onset of cynicism and suspicion.

The source of much of this cynicism was the awful, gnawing sense of betrayal that lodged itself in Henry after Anne Boleyn’s alleged adultery was discovered. The treachery of this woman on whom he had staked so much, for whom he had waited so long, was devastating. It ridiculed him – not just through the comments she and her brother had made about his prowess – but by the message her actions sent about his lack of sexual dominance and patriarchal governance. As such, it had the potential to shake his sense of masculinity and potency to the core. Henry’s initial reactions of hyperbolic self-pity, tears, tragedy and exaggeration show just how much the news had upset and upended his world, and how emotionally ill-equipped he was to deal with it. By the end of July 1536, over a few short months he had experienced an unbelievable catalogue of loss – two lost sons, two lost wives, the loss of his health and youth and the loss of his sense of masculinity and honour. This was suffered in the midst of threats, which looked like betrayals – the judgment of his cousin, Reginald Pole, and the sword of Damocles of the papal bull, prepared with the knowledge of his fellow monarchs. Psychologists today make clear links between loss and depression, and Henry VIII was to suffer from a depressive episode in 1541 following a serious bout of malaria, when he mourned Cromwell and remained confined at Hampton Court for a long period. But in 1536, Henry reacted as he would in fact mostly react to betrayal – he stifled the dissonance created in his mind by robustly and energetically throwing his energies into a new assertion of his power and masculinity and a new restoration of the social and patriarchal order.

Chief among these reassertions was the even-greater significance attached to a policy of which Henry was already very fond: the royal supremacy. In a variety of ways, Henry newly emphasized and exercised this role. After leniency towards his daughter’s resistance for three years, Henry now insisted Mary sign in support of his supremacy and bastardize herself. His chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, was now permanently established as vicegerent in spirituals and vicar-general, and Henry issued his self-composed Ten Articles which arrogated to himself the right to define doctrine and exercise the ‘care of souls’ to which the Pilgrim rebels would later object. Papal authority in England was definitively abolished and royal injunctions imposed codes of practice to ensure the king’s doctrine was followed. In setting out his theology, which focused around the binaries of kingship and obedience, Henry defined the core values of a system of belief to which he would hold until his death and to which he also expected others to adhere. Its central tenets reveal much about his preoccupations – his own supremacy, unity, good works and a sense of himself as a reforming king. This self-conception was an elevated one, a protestation of righteousness that put Henry on a parallel with the reforming leaders of the Old Testament and claimed a relationship similar to that of God with David, the man whom God called ‘a man after my own heart’.

This belief in his own virtue combined ferociously with his reaction to dissonance – the way that perceived betrayal and treachery worked in him to produce self-justification and aggression – when his ego received its next challenge, the Pilgrimage of Grace. Such treasonous rebellion inflamed Henry into defiance, bombast and bravado. Pride and intransigence were Henry’s way of quelling the panic he felt at the deceit and betrayal that rebellion represented, and the only way for him to maintain his honour in face of another huge challenge to his dominance was to quash it. His treatment of the monasteries is a classic example of how rebellion led to rage and reaction. Although in early 1536, it looked very likely that reform of the monasteries was the goal of dissolution, by late 1536, his missives about the traitorous activities of the monks suggested Henry had equated them with his existing beliefs about the dangerous power of clerics, and plans for reform had changed into plans for destruction.

Henry’s reaction to rebellion was powerfully represented in the new image created for him at this time by the royal painter, Hans Holbein. The Thyssen and Whitehall portraits exuded a magnificence, dominance and power that reaffirmed Henry’s royal supremacy and asserted his pre-eminent masculinity. The confident, aggressive and domineering stance of this proto‘superman’ laid claim to power and virility, precisely because these things had so recently been under attack, and just as old age was threatening to erode them.

The consequence of so many disasters in quick succession in this year was to condition Henry VIII and instil in him a morbid fear of, and obsession with, betrayal. Injuries to the king’s pride became commensurate with treason, which expanded both in its legal definition and in the range of behaviours it covered in practice. Treason was no longer just a case of threats to the Crown; it also meant letting the king down or failing to conform to his will. His subjects called him the ‘Mouldwarp’ and covertly accused him of tyranny, and they were right; for from 1536, the use of attainder twisted the law to make arbitrary action possible. The government’s attitude towards dissidents and opponents was increasingly repressive and brutal as this ailing, aging monarch sought to fight his own decline by further despotism and overreaction. The whole of 1536, and all that followed, was arguably Henry’s reaction to the discomfort of holding these two different cognitions in tension.

The year 1536 marked a turning point in Henry VIII’s life. And yet, when one thinks of what could have happened, it is extraordinary that its effects were so contained. If Anne Boleyn and Henry were merry together until soon before her adultery was alleged, her fall was not inevitable, and our famous king of six wives might have lived with her until his death. She may yet have borne him a son, she may have persuaded him and the country towards further reformation, or perhaps her continuing presence would have sparked the publication of the papal bull in 1536 and invasion from Europe. After Anne’s death, there was a chance that Henry would have returned to Rome and brought the English Reformation, and the Anglican Church, to a swift and premature end – what is strange is that he didn’t. Finally, the Pilgrims might not have accepted the December pardon, not have stood down, and have pitched battle against the king’s troops, to the inevitable defeat of the royal army. 1536 could have been the year in which Henry VIII was deposed. Instead, it was the year that was to define and shape him for ever in posterity.

The terrifying and salutary thing is that, throughout, Henry VIII showed an extraordinary capacity for self-deception. He genuinely believed in the virtue of the path that he had chosen, and the story of his life after 1536 is of his ever more costly attempts to bolster his concept of himself against evidence that told him otherwise. Nevertheless, it would be hard not to feel for him in his tumultuous series of losses and misadventures. Thomas’s response to the charge laid by his Italian adversary expresses this: ‘the truth is he hath a great many wives, and with some of them hath as ill-luck as any other poor man’. The French ambassador, Charles de Marillac, observing Henry with Catherine Howard noted, ‘the King is so fond of her that he knows not how to express his affection’ – here was an emotionally inexpert, broken man but one whose sadness and rage would have devastating consequences. Perhaps an earlier French ambassador had it right when he concluded, ‘he is a man to be marvelled at and has wonderful people about him… but he is an old fox, proud as the devil and accustomed to ruling’.
²

Appendix 1

Timeline of 1536