Henry VIII

• 1. Introduction

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  Henry VIII once dressed all in yellow, with a white feather in his bonnet, the day after he learned that Catherine of Aragon had died. He was King of England and Lord of Ireland from the 22nd of April 1509, and King of Ireland from 1542, until his death in 1547. Contemporaries thought him attractive, educated, and accomplished. One admirer called him one of the most charismatic rulers to sit on the English throne. Yet by the end he was a man covered in pus-filled boils, hauled about by mechanical devices, with a waist that measured 54 inches. How did a 17-year-old who took the throne untrained in the exacting art of kingship end up breaking England from Rome? How did one man come to have six wives, and behead two of them? And why did three of his children all become English monarchs in turn? The answers run through palaces and battlefields, through a king's great matter, and through the wreckage of England's monasteries.

• 2. The Spare Son

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  In 1493, at the age of two, Henry was appointed Constable of Dover Castle and Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports. By three he was Earl Marshal of England and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and soon after a Knight of the Bath. His father, Henry VII, handed these lucrative posts to a toddler so he could keep personal control of them rather than share them with established families.

  Born on the 28th of June 1491 at the Palace of Placentia in Greenwich, Henry was the second son, not the heir. His elder brother Arthur, Prince of Wales, stood first in line. Because Henry was not expected to rule, little is recorded of his early life beyond his appointments. What is known is that he received a first-rate education from leading tutors, became fluent in Latin and French, and learned at least some Italian.

  In 1502, Arthur died at the age of 15, just 20 weeks after his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. That death thrust all of Arthur's duties onto his 10-year-old brother, who became Duke of Cornwall and then Prince of Wales. Even then, Henry VII gave his second son few responsibilities, kept him strictly supervised, and rarely let him appear in public. He would ascend the throne, as one judgment put it, untrained in the exacting art of kingship. His path to a crown began with a betrothal to his dead brother's widow, a marriage that would one day tear his kingdom apart.

• 3. The King's Great Matter

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  By 1527 Henry had convinced himself that his marriage was blighted in the eyes of God. Catherine of Aragon had given him the future Mary I but no surviving male children, and Henry blamed scripture. In marrying his brother's wife he believed he had acted contrary to Leviticus 20:21, a verse Thomas Cranmer would later use to declare the marriage null.

  In 1525 Henry had grown enamoured with Anne Boleyn, a charismatic young woman in the Queen's entourage and sister of his former mistress Mary Boleyn. Anne refused to become his mistress as her sister had. That refusal pushed Henry toward the most drastic of his options for an heir, which courtiers came to call the King's great matter, the annulment of his marriage to the now 40-year-old Catherine.

  Pope Clement VII would not oblige. Catherine was the aunt of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, and the pope delayed his verdict under political pressure. After less than two months of hearing evidence, Clement called the case back to Rome in July 1529, from which it was clear it would never re-emerge. The cardinal who had failed to deliver, Thomas Wolsey, bore the blame. Charged with praemunire, his fall was sudden and total, and he died in 1530 while awaiting trial for treason. Henry now needed a new way to free himself, and he found it not in Rome but in his own Parliament.

• 4. Breaking From Rome

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  On the 23rd of May 1533, Cranmer sat in judgment at a special court at Dunstable Priory and declared the marriage of Henry and Catherine null and void. He had already presided over a secret wedding. Five days later he declared Henry's marriage to Anne Boleyn valid, and on the 1st of June 1533 Anne was crowned queen.

  With the Acts of Supremacy in 1534, Parliament recognised the King as the only Supreme Head on Earth of the Church of England. The Statute in Restraint of Appeals abolished the right of appeal to Rome. The Treasons Act 1534 made it high treason, punishable by death, to refuse the Oath of Supremacy. Pope Clement responded by excommunicating the King.

  John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, and Thomas More refused the oath. Both were convicted of high treason and executed in the summer of 1535, More on the evidence of a single conversation with Richard Rich. Henry credited himself with initiating the English Reformation, the process of turning England from a Catholic country to a Protestant one. As one historian, E. L. Woodward, put it, the annulment was the occasion rather than the cause. Behind the theology lay a more worldly engine of change, the seizure of the Church's vast wealth.

• 5. The Dissolution

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  In September 1535 Thomas Cromwell commissioned four appointee visitors to inspect the country's religious houses, and their conclusions were largely negative. Cromwell first assessed the taxable value of the Church's holdings, compiling an extensive register called the Valor Ecclesiasticus. The visitors also made the monks' lives harder by enforcing strict behavioural standards, encouraging houses to dissolve themselves.

  In January 1536 all religious houses worth less than 200 pounds were vested by statute in the crown. By January 1540 none remained; some 800 had been dissolved. The process was efficient, met minimal resistance, and brought the crown roughly 90,000 pounds a year. Cromwell's actions transferred a fifth of England's landed wealth to new hands, a programme designed to create a landed gentry beholden to the crown.

  In 1538 the campaign reached the shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral, which was dismantled that September. As a consequence Pope Paul III excommunicated the King on the 17th of December. By 1542 England's remaining monasteries were all dissolved and their property transferred to the Crown. Abbots and priors lost their seats in the House of Lords, so the Lords Spiritual were for the first time outnumbered by the Lords Temporal. The monasteries had been the only support of the impoverished, and their loss helped provoke a great northern rising.

• 6. Six Wives

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  At eight in the morning on the 19th of May 1536, Anne Boleyn was executed on Tower Green. She had given Henry one child, the future Elizabeth I, then suffered a miscarriage of a male child on the day of Catherine's funeral. Accused of treasonous adultery and incest on unconvincing evidence, she was condemned alongside five men, including her brother George Boleyn.

  The day after Anne's execution Henry became engaged to Jane Seymour, one of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting. On the 12th of October 1537 she gave birth to Prince Edward, the heir Henry had craved, but the birth was difficult and Jane died on the 24th of October from an infection. She was buried at Windsor, and Henry would later be interred next to her.

  The fourth marriage failed at first sight. Hans Holbein the Younger had been sent to paint Anne of Cleves, but when the 49-year-old King met her in January 1540 he was much displeased. I like her much worse, he told Cromwell, complaining she had very evil smells about her. The marriage was never consummated and was dissolved in July 1540. Anne received the title of The King's Sister, two houses, and a generous allowance.

  Then came Catherine Howard, the Duke of Norfolk's niece, whom Henry married on the 28th of July 1540, the same day Cromwell was executed. She had an affair with the courtier Thomas Culpeper and employed a former fiance, Francis Dereham, as her secretary. Both men were executed, and Catherine was beheaded on the 13th of February 1542. Henry's last wife, the wealthy widow Catherine Parr, married him in July 1543, argued with him over religion, and helped reconcile him with his daughters Mary and Elizabeth.

• 7. Wars And Money

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  On the 30th of June 1513 Henry invaded France and his troops defeated a French army at the Battle of the Spurs. The English took Therouanne and Tournai, keeping the latter for five years. His absence prompted his brother-in-law James IV of Scotland to invade England, but an army overseen by Queen Catherine crushed the Scots at the Battle of Flodden on the 9th of September 1513, killing the Scottish king.

  Henry met King Francis I on the 7th of June 1520 at the Field of the Cloth of Gold near Calais for a fortnight of lavish entertainment. The strong air of competition ended any hope of lasting peace. Henry generally had more in common with Charles V, the nephew of his wife Catherine, who became king of Spain in 1516 and Holy Roman Emperor in 1519.

  Henry inherited a vast fortune from his frugal father, estimated at 1,250,000 pounds. His own reign was a near disaster financially. He hung 2,000 tapestries in his palaces, while James V of Scotland hung just 200. He collected 2,250 pieces of land ordnance and 6,500 handguns. War and dynastic ambition exhausted his surplus by the mid-1520s.

  Henry went to France again in June 1544, and Boulogne fell on the 18th of September. He had refused Charles's request to march on Paris, and Charles made peace with France that same day. Financially exhausted, France and England signed the Treaty of Camp on the 7th of June 1546. The 1544 campaign had cost 650,000 pounds, and England was once again facing bankruptcy.

• 8. Decline And Legacy

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  On the 24th of January 1536 Henry was thrown from his horse in a tournament and badly injured. The accident reopened an earlier leg wound, which festered for the rest of his life and became ulcerated. It prevented the level of physical activity he had once enjoyed, and is believed to have caused mood swings that altered his personality. He had been a large, well-built athlete over six feet tall, who excelled at jousting, hunting, and real tennis.

  Henry cultivated the image of a Renaissance man and the first English king with a modern humanist education. He read and wrote English, French, and Latin, owned a large library, and played the lute, the organ, and the virginals. His best-known work is the song Pastime with Good Company. It is often said he wrote Greensleeves, but that is certain to be false, since the tune is based on an Italian style that did not reach England until after his death.

  Henry's obesity hastened his death at the age of 55, on the 28th of January 1547 at the Palace of Whitehall, on what would have been his father's 90th birthday. He was interred in a vault at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, next to Jane Seymour. His will designated 16 executors to serve on a regency council until his nine-year-old heir Edward VI reached 18, with Edward Seymour chosen as Lord Protector.

  The will excluded the Stuarts, descendants of his sister Margaret Tudor, from the succession. That provision ultimately failed in 1603, when James VI of Scotland, Margaret's great-grandson, became king of England and Ireland. Three of Henry's children had already reigned by then, Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I, each one a link in the dynasty he had broken a church to secure.