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Henry VIII and History
Edited by
Thomas Betteridge and Thomas S. FreemanHenry VIII and History
To the late Kevin Sharpe,
a good friend and fine scholar, who brilliantly
examined the images of Henry VIII and his royal successors.Henry VIII and History
Edited by
Thomas Betteridge
Oxford Brookes University, UK
and
Thomas S. Freeman
University of Essex, UK© Thomas Betteridge, Thomas S. Freeman and the Contributors 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Thomas Betteridge and Thomas S. Freeman have asserted their right under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work.
Published by
Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company
Wey Court East Suite 420
Union Road 101 Cherry Street
Farnham Burlington
Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405
England USA
www.ashgate.com
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Henry VIII and history.
1. Henry VIII, King of England, 1491–1547–Public Opinion–History–Sources. 2. Henry
VIII, King of England, 1491–1547–In literature. 3. Great Britain–History–Henry VIII,
1509–1547–Historiography.
I. Betteridge, Thomas. II. Freeman, Thomas S., 1959–
942’.052’092-dc23
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Henry VIII and history / [edited by] Thomas Betteridge and Thomas S. Freeman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4094-0015-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-7546-9865-4 (ebook)
1. Henry VIII, King of England, 1491–1547. 2. Great Britain–History–Henry VIII, 1509–
1547–Historiography.
I. Betteridge, Thomas. II. Freeman, Thomas S., 1959–
DA332.H463 2012
942.05’2092–dc23
2011052189
ISBN 9781409400158 (hbk)
ISBN 9780754698654 (ebk)
XV
Printed and bound in Great Britain by the
MPG Books Group, UK.Contents
Abbreviations vii
Notes on Contributors ix
Introduction All is True – Henry VIII In and Out of History 1
Thomas Betteridge and Thomas S. Freeman
1 Harry’s Peregrinations: An Italianate Defence of Henry VIII 21
Brett Foster
2 From Perfect Prince to ‘Wise and Pollitike’ King: Henry VIII in
Edward Hall’s Chronicle 51
Scott Lucas
3 ‘It is perillous stryvinge withe princes’: Henry VIII in Works
by Pole, Roper, and Harpsfield* 65
Carolyn Colbert
4 Hands Defiled with Blood: Henry VIII in Foxe’s ‘Book of
Martyrs’ 87
Thomas S. Freeman
5 Fallen Prince and Pretender of the Faith: Henry VIII as Seen by
Sander and Persons 119
Victor Houliston
6 ‘It is unpossible to draw his Picture well who hath severall
countenances’: Lord Herbert of Cherbury and The Life and
Reign of King Henry VIII 135
Christine Jackson
7 Henry VIII in History: Gilbert Burnet’s History of the Reformation
(v. 1), 1679 151
Andrew Starkie
8 ‘Unblushing Falsehood’: The Strickland Sisters and the Domestic
History of Henry VIII* 165
Judith M. Richardsvi Henry VIII and History
9 Ford Madox Ford’s Fifth Queen and the Modernity of Henry VIII 179
Anthony Monta and Susannah Brietz Monta
10 The ‘Sexual Everyman’? Maxwell Anderson’s Henry VIII 195
Glenn Richardson
11 Drama King: The Portrayal of Henry VIII in Robert Bolt’s A Man
for All Seasons 207
Ruth Ahnert
12 ‘Anne taught him how to be cruel’: Henry VIII in Modern
Historical Fiction 223
Megan L. Hickerson
13 Booby, Baby or Classical Monster? Henry VIII in the Writings of
G. R. Elton and J. J. Scarisbrick 241
Dale Hoak
14 Through the Eyes of a Fool: Henry VIII and Margaret George’s
1986 novel The Autobiography of Henry VIII: With Notes by His
Fool, Will Somers 261
Kristen Post Walton
Index 275Abbreviations A&M [1563] John Foxe, Actes and monuments of these latter and perillous dayes (London, 1563) A&M [1570] John Foxe, The ecclesiasticall history contayning the actes and monuments (London, 1570) A&M [1576] John Foxe, The ecclesiasticall history contayning the actes and monuments (London, 1576) A&M [1583] John Foxe, Actes and monuments of matters most speciall and memorable (London, 1583) A&M [1596] John Foxe, Actes and monumementes of matters most speciall and memorable (London, 1596) BL British Library CSPD Calendar of State Papers Domestic CSPSp Calendar of State Papers Spanish Harpsfield Nicholas Harpsfield, The life and death of Sir Thomas More, ed. E. V. Hitchcock and R. W. Chambers, Early English Text Society, original series 186 (Oxford, 1932) HJ Historical Journal L&P Letters and Papers of the reign of Henry VIII, eds. J. S. Brewer, J. Gairdber and R. S. Brodie (21 vols., London, 1862–1932) ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) Roper William Roper, The lyfe of Sir Thomas More, ed. E. V. Hitchcock, Early English Text Society original series 197 (Oxford, 1935) SCJ Sixteenth Century Journal TNA The National Archive (Kew)
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Notes on Contributors Ruth Ahnert is a lecturer in Renaissance English Literature at Queen Mary, University of London. Her interests lie at the intersection of religious history, literary form and book history. Recent publications have been focused on literature and texts associated with imprisonment, from writings produced in prison, to representations of incarceration on the early modern stage. She is currently preparing a monograph entitled The Rise of Prison Literature in the Sixteenth Century, which charts innovations in English prison literature during the Reformation. Thomas Betteridge is Professor of English Literature and Drama at Oxford Brookes University. His books include Tudor Histories of the English Reformations (1999), Literature and Politics in the English Reformation (2004) and Shakespearean Fantasy and Politics (2005). He is currently working on a study of Sir Thomas More’s writing to be published by the University of Notre Dame Press, 2012. He was project leader of the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded research project ‘Staging the Henrician Court’ and the Wellcome Trust funded project ‘Medicine, Birth and Death at the Tudor Court’. Carolyn Colbert, a former Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada doctoral fellow, completed her Ph.D. in early modern literature in 2010 at Memorial University of Newfoundland, where she currently teaches. Her forthcoming publications focus on early modern women, including Mary Tudor, the subject of her dissertation. Brett Foster has had articles and reviews published in genre, Journal of British Studies, Modern Philology, Prose Studies, Renaissance Quarterly, Sixteenth Century Journal, Shakespeare Bulletin, and in the collections The Sacred and Profane in English Renaissance Literature and Christopher Marlowe the Craftsman. He recently wrote about Henry VIII for Books & Culture, and is also an author of a book of poetry. He teaches Renaissance literature and creative writing at Wheaton College in Illinois. Thomas S. Freeman is currently Visiting Research Fellow with the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge and Lecturer at the University of Essex. He is the co-author of Religion and the Book in Early Modern England: The Making of John Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ (2011) and the co-editor of four volumes, including The Myth of Elizabeth (2003) and Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives (2011).
x Henry VIII and History Megan L. Hickerson is Associate Professor History at Henderson State University in Arkansas. The principal focus of her research is the intersection of religious ideas with ideas about women and gender in early-modern England. She is the author of article-length publications on women and religion appearing in essay collections and journals such as Sixteenth Century Journal, Gender and History, and Journal of British Studies, as well as of a monograph, Making Women Martyrs in Tudor England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), which considers the presentation of women as martyrs in popular Tudor martyrology, most importantly John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (Book of Martyrs). She has a continuing interest in popular literature rising out of religious division in Reformation England, especially texts produced by and about those considered to be religious martyrs; thus, along with continuing her study of representations of Henry VIII in popular texts and other media, she is working on a follow-up to her first book, which will consider adaptations of John Foxe’s stories of women martyrs in post-reformation polemical literature. Dale Hoak (Ph.D., Clare College, Cambridge) is Chancellor Professor of History, Emeritus, at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. His many articles and books span the history of northern Renaissance art and Tudor political culture. His 24-part lecture series, ‘The Age of Henry VIII’, is available in various formats from The Teaching Company. He is presently writing an analytical study of Henry VIII for Palgrave/Macmillan. Victor Houliston is Professor of English at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. His study of Robert Persons’ printed works, Catholic Resistance in Elizabethan England, was published by Ashgate in 2007. He is currently preparing a multi-volume edition of the Correspondence and Unpublished Papers of Robert Persons. Christine Jackson is University Lecturer in History, Director of Graduate Studies and Fellow of Kellogg College at Oxford University Department for Continuing Education. She is working on a biographical study of Lord Herbert of Cherbury exploring his multiple roles as courtier, soldier, diplomat and county grandee as well as poet, philosopher and historian during the reigns of James I and Charles I. She has articles forthcoming on Herbert’s presentation of the construction and experience of elite masculinity in the autobiography he wrote for his descendents c. 1643–4, and on the impact of his philosophical ideas and personal experience of religious and political conflict upon his account of religious reformation in the Life and Reign of King Henry VIII. Scott Lucas is a professor of English Literature at The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina. He is the author of the monograph A Mirror for Magistrates and the Politics of the English Reformation (University of Massachusetts Press, 2009) and of articles on early modern English literature, culture, and history. His current work focuses on the chroniclers Edward Hall and Raphael Holinshed, mid-Tudor
Notes on Contributors xi political literature, and sixteenth-century Protestant polemic and satire. Recent articles and book chapters have appeared in Renaissance Studies, The Journal of British Studies, The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, and The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England: Essays in Response to Patrick Collinson. Anthony Monta is currently the Associate Director of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He earned his Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Wisconsin – Madison in 2000 and has published on Ford Madox Ford’s historical tetralogy of the First World War, Parade’s End. Susannah Brietz Monta is John Cardinal O’Hara, C.S.C. and Glynn Family Honors Associate Professor of English and editor of Religion and Literature at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England (Cambridge UP, 2005, 2009) and co-editor of Teaching Early Modern English Prose (MLA, 2010). She has published articles on history plays, early modern women writers, martyrology, hagiography, and devotional poetry and prose. Judith M. Richards is now a research associate at La Trobe University, Melbourne, where she previously taught Early Modern History. She has published a number of articles on a range of social and political issues from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; her most recent publications include biographies of Mary I (Routledge, 2008) and Elizabeth I (Routledge, 2012). Glenn Richardson is Reader in Early-Modern History at St Mary’s University College, London. He holds a BA in History with First Class Honours from the University of Sydney. He completed his Ph.D. thesis on Anglo-French Relations in Henry VIII’s reign at the London School of Economics. He is the author of Renaissance Monarchy: The Reigns of Henry VIII, Francis I and Charles V (2002) and co-editor with Susan Doran of Tudor England and its Neighbours (2005). He also edited ‘The Contending Kingdoms’: England and France, 1420-1700 (2008). He is currently writing a monograph on the Field of Cloth of Gold for Yale University Press and his next project is a biography of Cardinal Wolsey in Routledge’s Historical Biographies series. In the longer term he hopes to write a biography of Sir William Fitzwilliam, first Earl of Southampton and a comparative study of Christian and Muslim models of kingship in the sixteenth century, focusing on the Tudor, Valois, Habsburg, Safavid, Ottoman and Mughal dynasties. Andrew Starkie is the author of The Church of England and the Bangorian Controversy (Boydell, 2007). He read philosophy and theology as an undergraduate at Regent’s Park College, Oxford and studied for his Ph.D. at Selwyn College, Cambridge. His research interests include Reformation historiography, religious controversy and the relationship between the church and civil power in early modern England. He is Chaplain of Holy Cross College, Bury.
xii Henry VIII and History Kristen Post Walton is an Associate Professor at Salisbury University. Walton’s research interests lie specifically with questions of Anglo-Scottish relations during the early modern period, the role of women in politics, and the development of political ideologies. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin- Madison in Early Modern English and Scottish history and her BA with Highest Honors in History from the College of William and Mary. Her first book, Catholic Queen, Protestant Patriarchy: Mary, Queen of Scots and the Politics of Gender and Religion, was published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2007.
Introduction
All is True – Henry VIII In and Out of History
Thomas Betteridge and Thomas S. Freeman
Sir Thomas Wyatt knew Henry VIII well, or at least as well as any of the King’s
courtiers and friends. He was an esquire of the royal body by 1525 and from then until
his death remained a close confidante and servant to Henry. This did not, however,
protect Wyatt from the vicissitudes of Henrician politics; he was sent to Tower of
London in 1536 during the crisis precipitated by the fall of Anne Boleyn. Wyatt
found himself back in the Tower in 1541 as result of the accusations of Edmund
Bonner, the bishop of London, who accused him of having spoken disparagingly of
Henry while ambassador at the court of Charles V. Wyatt’s relationship with Henry
oscillated between close, at times intimate, friendship and terrifying moments of
failure and imprisonment. It is perhaps therefore not surprising that the image
of Henry that emerges from Wyatt’s poetry is ambiguous and shot through with
contradictions. Wyatt’s poem, ‘Who list his wealth and ease retain’, is one of his
most topical (it contains what appears to be an explicit reference to the fall of Anne
Boleyn since the ‘bell tower’ refers to one of the towers at the Tower of London):
The bell tower showed me such sight
That in my head sticks day and night.
There did I learn out of a grate,
For all favour, glory, or might
That yet circa Regna tonat.1
This verse creates an image of Wyatt, or at least his narrator, looking through the
grated window of a cell at the Tower and seeing the execution of Anne Boleyn
who, unlike the men accused of being her lovers, was executed within the precincts
of the Tower. One of the most interesting aspects of this poem is the Latin tag,
‘circa Regna tonat’ (‘it thunders around the Crown’ or translated a little more
freely ‘lightning strikes around the Crown’), which concludes all the verses. The
implication of this phrase is that Anne Boleyn’s execution and, indeed, Wyatt’s
imprisonment is part of the sudden destruction risked by those close to the King.
This has the effect of creating a sense of inevitability in terms of Wyatt’s current
predicament, but it also implies that Henry as monarch is a force of nature. It
suggests that Henry is powerful but arbitrary; he is dangerous but like a force of
1
Sir Thomas Wyatt, The Complete Poems, ed. R. A. Rebholz (London, 1978), p. 155.2 Henry VIII and History
nature unaccountable. One can no more stand in way of a thunderstorm then turn
back the tide. And it would be ridiculous to accuse thunder or lighting of acting
unlawfully or of being evil. One can also, however, see the thunder as a power that
Henry himself cannot control. Around the throne it thunders and in the process
the person sitting on the throne is rendered passive, even irrelevant. In this poem
Wyatt encapsulates a set of issues relating to Henry’s status as a king, ruler and
man that have continued to perplex and fascinate historians, serious and popular,
from John Foxe and William Shakespeare to G. R. Elton and Philippa Gregory.
The consequences of Henry’s reign were momentous, his life eventful and
his personality remarkable. As a result, the King has captured the imaginations
of writers for nearly half a millennium. Yet while biographies of Henry – to say
nothing of his wives and ministers - abound, and every year sees a harvest of
new studies of his reign, discussions of Henry’s reputation and of the ways in
which he has been perceived, invented and reinvented, from one generation to the
next, are much less numerous.2 This collection is at once narrower and broader
in its conception and scope than its counterparts. It is narrower in that we have
eschewed consideration of visual representations of Henry, whether on film or
in art. Such representations have been seminal in shaping popular perceptions
of Henry – it is quite arguable that outside of Holbein, no one has more greatly
influenced the ways in which most people view Henry than Charles Laughton
did – yet depictions of Henry in art and film have been discussed elsewhere.3 Our
collection is unusually broad in that it we cover depictions of Henry not only in the
work of historians, but also novelists and dramatists. And we consider depictions
of Henry across a broad chronological span from his death until the present.
A potential drawback to the approach in this volume is that there are important
differences between the works under consideration. Hall, Foxe, Burnet, Pollard
and Elton may all be labelled historians, but they employed vastly different
methodologies and wrote within very different generic frameworks. And novelists
and dramatists work within other divergent conventions, and with different
standards of success than professional historians do. (It is no denigration of, for
2
Two exceptions are Henry VIII in History, Historiography and Literature, ed. Uwe
Baumann (Frankfurt, 1992) and Henry VIII and his Afterlives: Literature, Politics,History
and Art, ed. Mark Rankin, Christopher Highley and John N. King (Cambridge, 2009).
Hereafter this latter collection will be cited as Afterlives.
3
For reading on Henry VIIII in art, Roy C. Strong, Holbein and Henry VIII (London,
1967) and Tatiana C. String, Art and Communication in the Reign of Henry VIII (Aldershot,
2008) provide useful starting places. Also useful is Ronald Paulson, ‘The Henry VIII story
in the eighteenth century: Words and images’ in Afterlives, pp. 115–40. On treatments of
Henry VIII in film and television see Greg Walker, The Private Life of Henry VIII (London,
2003), Thomas Betteridge, ‘Henry VIII and popular culture’ in Afterlives, pp. 208–22 and
Thomas S. Freeman, ‘A tyrant for all seasons: Henry VIII on film’ in The Tudors and Stuarts
on Film: Historical Perspectives, ed. Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman (Basingstoke,
2009), pp. 30–45.Introduction 3
example, Ford Madox Ford to observe that he freely invented or altered facts
in his novels about Katherine Howard, but it would be serious criticism to
make against, say, Pollard and Elton.) Yet Shakespeare, Ford, Bolt, Anderson,
Gregory, George and other writers have, like historians, interpreted Henry for
readers of, and according to the standards of, different historical periods. And
the writers of fiction have influenced public perceptions of Henry on a vaster
scale than historians have; Elton has influenced his thousands, but Gregory her
tens of thousands.
What unites the writers and readers of historical fiction, and the writers and
readers of histories, however, is Henry as an object of fascination. Writers of all
types and backgrounds have sought to understand Henry VIII: What drove him?
Was he a tyrant? And if so was he always one or did the events of his life, perhaps
particularly in 1536, make him one? Why did he marry so many times? What was
the nature of his relationship with his six wives, all of whom were such different
women? This introduction will begin by discussing two particularly important
and wildly different attempts to understand Henry VIII, William Shakespeare’s
in the play Henry VIII and A. F. Pollard, in his magisterial biography of Henry.
These two works present very different interpretations of Henry, ones that are
shaped by the circumstances in which they were written; Shakespeare expresses
an ambivalence about the King that was probably shared by many English people,
still reeling from the revolutionary changes that Henry’s reign had introduced,
and Pollard, writing in the late summer of British imperial power, lauded Henry
as the king and statesman who, whatever his personal failings, led England down
the road to parliamentary democracy and empire. And yet both Shakespeare and
Pollard were writing about recognizably the same monstrous, fascinating man.
Yet there are more fundamental reasons for considering Shakespeare’s
play and Pollard’s biography together. A number of other treatments of Henry
(notably those of Foxe and Sander, which established the mainstream Protestant
and Catholic interpretations) are seminal, but Shakespeare and Pollard had
an especially wide influence on both learned and popular views of the King.
Shakespeare’s Henry VIII was extremely popular during the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries and has continued to inspire writers and other dramatists.4
It has also, arguably influenced treatments of Henry on film and television.
Pollard’s 1902 biography of Henry was not only authoritative through the first
half of the twentieth century, but it provoked (as is discussed in chapters in this
volume by Anthony and Susannah Monta, Ruth Ahnert and Megan Hickerson)
a number of dramatists and novelists to present very different interpretations of
Henry VIII.
4
For the continuing popularity of Henry VIII see Henry VIII, ed. Gordon McMullan,
(London, 2002), esp. pp. 17–37.4 Henry VIII and History
William Shakespeare and Henry VIII
Shakespeare’s Henry VIII is in some ways a self-conscious rewriting of the cruel
tyrant depicted in the work of historians such as Foxe and Sander. The play
opens, after the prologue, with the Dukes of Norfolk and Buckingham, and Lord
Abergavenny, on stage discussing the Field of the Cloth of Gold. After a lengthy
description of the festivities Buckingham asks Norfolk who was in charge and
‘set the body and the limbs / of this great sport together’(1.1.46–7).5 As soon
as Buckingham hears that it was Wolsey who was in charge the tone of the
play changes.
Buckingham: The devil speed him! [Wolsey] No man’s pie is freed
From his ambitious finger. What had he
To do in these fierce vanities’? I wonder
That such a keech can with his very bulk
Take up the rays o’th’ beneficial sun
And keep it from the earth (1.1.57)
Buckingham’s speech articulates two of the most important, and often-repeated
charges made against Wolsey in Reformation historiography – that he was
personally, and corporeally, excessive and that he was an over-ambitious
Machiavellian with a finger in every pie. It is only in the following scene that
Wolsey himself appears along with Katherine of Aragon. In this scene Shakespeare
conflates two distinct historical events: the protests against the Amicable Grant
(1525) and the fall of the Duke of Buckingham (1521).
The Amicable Grant was an attempt by Henry and his government to raise
extra-Parliamentary taxation in the guise of a ‘voluntary’ contribution; widespread
opposition forced Henry to abandon it. Both the resistance to the ‘grant’ and
Henry’s revocation were highly stylized political theatre. Those protesting against
the ‘grant’ insisted they were not rebels, the nobles who carried the protestors’
demands to court insisted they had been forced to do so, Wolsey insisted that
he was doing no more than acting as a member of the Privy Council and Henry
insisted he knew nothing about it.6 Of course none of this should be taken at face
value. In Henry VIII Shakespeare displaces the role of the protesting commons on
to Katherine and makes her their voice piece. The rest of the characters in the drama
retain their historical parts. The role Katherine plays, however, subtly changes
the nature of their behaviour by introducing gender as an element into the story.
5
All quotes from Henry VIII will be given in the body of the text and are from Henry
VIII, ed. Gordon McMullan.
6
G. W. Bernard, War, Taxation and Rebellion in Early Tudor England: Henry VIII,
Wolsey and the Amicable Grant of 1525 (Brighton and New York, 1986); also see The
Power of the Early Tudor Nobility: A Study of the Fourth and Fifth Earls of Shrewsbury
(London, 1985).Introduction 5
Katherine is the voice of common people. She petitions the King on their behalf
and even has to be corrected by Norfolk when she suggests that the commons were
not really being rebellious when they refused the grant. Katherine’s gender has
the effect of equalizing the status of the other principal characters in this scene,
Norfolk, Henry and Wolsey. This in turn has the effect of making Wolsey look
less like an arch-villain and more like a typical Tudor politician. It also, however,
allows the emergence on stage, in his first appearance in the play, of a strangely
un-knowing Henry. At the end of the debate over the Amicable Grant Henry tells
Wolsey that:
King: Things one without example in their issue
Are to be feared. Have you a precedent
Of this commission? [to raise the Amicable Grant] I believe not any.
We must not rend our subjects from our laws
And stick them in our will. (1.2.94)
In this speech Henry is articulating some pretty standard Tudor political saws. The
ruler’s will must not take precedence over the law and precedent legitimates while
novelty is dangerous. There is a sense, however, that this response, while it defuses
the immediate danger, does little to address the issues that Norfolk, Katherine and
Wolsey were debating. In the opening of this scene Shakespeare depicts a moment
of genuine political conflict in which the King does produce a kind of harmony,
but only by retreating into political platitudes. Did he really not know what Wolsey
and the Privy Council were doing? Does he need Katherine to tell him what is
happening in his country? In Henry VIII politics is focused on the monarch but at
its centre is a king who appears dangerously disengaged from his realm and who is
prone to retreat into wise sounding but ultimately sterile conventional statements
of political wisdom.
The second part of this scene focuses on the case against Buckingham.
Katherine asks Wolsey to deliver the charges against Buckingham with charity,
but what becomes clear is that Buckingham has at best been unwise and at worst
is guilty of treason. Or rather this is the case if one can believe the testimony of
Buckingham’s Surveyor, who, as Katherine points out, has recently been sacked
by the Duke. It is noticeable, however, that at the end of the scene Katherine seems
to accept Buckingham’s guilt:
King: A giant traitor.
Wolsey: Now, madam, may his highness live in freedom
And this man out of prison?
Katherine: God mend all. (1.2.201)
Katherine’s comment here is ambiguous. Does she mean all in relation to
Buckingham’s crimes or more generally in relation to the world of political
ambition exposed by the case. It is also, however, unclear what the word ‘mend’6 Henry VIII and History
refers to? It clearly has a gender-specific inflection in relation to the activity
of woman mending torn and ripped cloths, perhaps particularly those of their
husbands and children. The phrase, ‘God mend all’ is also proverbial, at once a
statement of fact, ‘God will mend all’, and a supplication, ‘Please God mend all’.
Katherine at this moment is either accepting that the evidence against Buckingham
is so compelling that his only hope is in general Christian charity or much more
radically she is moving the discussion into a completely different territory. God
mend all either closes debate or radicalizes it by inviting Wolsey and Henry, but
also the audience, to ask what a politics would look like that took as its starting
part a shared human need for mending and a confidence that God would act, all
would be mended. The scene ends with a final ominous speech from Henry:
King: … he [Buckingham] is attached
Call him to present trial. If he may
Find mercy in the law, ‘tis his; if none,
Let him not seek’t of us. By day and night,
He’s traitor to th’ height! (1.2.214)
Henry is depicted in this speech as a man who cannot follow a thought from one
moment to the next. He starts by insisting that it is now for the court to judge
Buckingham but ends by asserting that the Duke is a traitor. There is clearly
a sense in which the lesson Henry gave Wolsey about the need to separate the
royal will from the law has now been lost. This moment also raises important
questions about the role of Katherine and Wolsey in the earlier part of the scene.
It is easy to assume that Katherine’s is the voice of political reason and justice
at Henry’s court and Wolsey is the arch-corrupt councillor. This certainly seems
to be the case in relation to the debate over the Amicable Grant. In relation to
Buckingham, however, things are less clear cut. Despite the assertions of the
Duke, which Katherine is quick to endorse, it does not appear from the text that
Wolsey is particularly or specifically responsible for Buckingham’s fall. There is
a lingering sense at the end of this scene of a political world in which power is at
once terrifyingly absolute and worryingly dependent on the whims of a capricious,
semi-detached king.
Needless to say Buckingham is found guilty. As he leaves the trial he tells
those accompanying him, and the audience, that although he has been condemned
as a traitor he is ‘faithful’. Buckingham goes on to suggest that his trial was not
fair, commenting:
Buckingham: The law I bear no malice for my death –
‘T has done upon the premises but justice –
But those that sought it I could wish more Christians.
Be what they will, I heartily forgive ‘em. (2.1.65)
Buckingham departs the stage asking the audience to pray for him:Introduction 7
Buckingham: All good people,
Pray for me. I must now forsake ye. The last hour
Of my long weary life is come upon me.
Farewell, and when you would say something that is sad
Speak how I fell. I have done, and God forgive me. (2.1.135)
Buckingham’s departure is elegiac. Shakespeare expands on his sources for this
scene, principally Holinshed, in order to stress the repentant nature of the Duke’s
final words. Buckingham asks God for forgiveness and he forgives his enemies.
In the process the shallow, vicious and ultimately inhuman world of Henrician
politics is replaced by a different set of more human concerns and desires.7 It is
possible to see this as simply a reflection of Henry VIII’s conservatism; its, and
Shakespeare’s return, to the earlier and simpler world of the Mirror for Magistrates
and the de casibus tradition. Clearly there is some truth to this. But why should
Shakespeare in one of his late plays, indeed quite possibly his last work, return to
the history, politics and ethics of his earliest work, Henry VI Pt II?
Henry VIII recapitulates the themes addressed in the fall of Buckingham at the
play’s end with the plot by the conservatives on the privy council to bring down
Archbishop Thomas Cranmer. In this part of the play Shakespeare is presenting a
dramatic episode, described in Foxe, from 1542 and bringing it forward to the early
1530s. What is noticeable is that again Shakespeare depicts Henry as strangely
passive in relation to the events happening around him. He is does not have the
cruelty that Foxe saw in Henry, but there is certainly something capricious about
his behaviour. At the beginning of the final act Henry summons Cranmer in order
to discuss ‘grievous complaints’ that have been made against the Archbishop.
When Cranmer enters the King’s presence he is immediately afraid:
Cranmer: [ aside ] I am fearful. Wherefore frowns he thus?
‘Tis his aspect of terror. All’s not well. (5.1.90)
Cranmer’s fear is well placed since Henry tells him that in the morning he will
accused by the council and sent to the Tower. Cranmer responds by thanking
Henry for the news, which rather surprises the King because he had expected
Cranmer to ask for his help. Cranmer, however, tells Henry:
Cranmer: Most dread liege,
The good I stand on is my truth and honesty.
If they shall fail, I with mine enemies
Will triumph o’er my person, which I weigh not
7
Thomas Cogswell and Peter Lake have recently suggested that this aspect of the
Henry VIII was what attracted the play to the Duke of Buckingham in 1628. ‘Buckingham
Does the Globe the Globe: Henry VIII and the Politics of Popularity in the 1620s’,
Shakespeare Quarterly, 60 (2009), 253–278.8 Henry VIII and History
Being of those virtues vacant. I fear nothing
What can be said against me. (5.1.126)
These lines, indeed much of the exchange between Cranmer and Henry in this
scene, are a paraphrase of John Foxe’s account of these events in Acts and
monuments. Henry is nonplussed by Cranmer’s naivety and tells him:
King: Know you not
How your state stand i’th’ world, with the whole world?
Your enemies are many and not small: their practices
Must bear the same proportion, and not ever
The justice and the truth o’th’ question carries
The due o’th’ verdict with it. (5.1.131)
Again as with the depiction of Henry during the fall of Buckingham there is a
sense that the King is not responsible for the state of the world. In particular, it is
important to note that Henry seems to be implying here that in his realm ‘justice
and truth’ are not the basis of verdicts. This is not, however, a moment of self-
realization. Henry is simply not prepared at this stage to intervene directly in the
process; instead he gives Cranmer a ring to be used if necessary.
The following morning Henry positions himself so that he can witness
the way the council treats Cranmer and is shocked by the lack of respect that
the Archbishop is given. At the final moment Henry descends, according to the
stage direction ‘frowning’. The object of his displeasure is Bishop Gardiner, the
ringleader of the plot against Cranmer,
King: You [ Gardiner ] were ever good at sudden commendations,
Bishop of Winchester, but know I come not
To hear such flattery now, and in my presence
They are too thin and bare to hide offences.
To me you cannot reach, you play the spaniel
And think with wagging of your tongue to win me.
But whatsoe’er thou takest me for, I’m sure
Thou hast a cruel nature and a bloody. (5.2.163)
This speech, indeed the whole episode is typical of Shakespeare’s Henry. At one
level he remains a hero, almost a god, descending from on high to dispense justice
and judgement. It concludes with a touching pledge from Henry to Cranmer
to be his ‘friend forever’. But what kind of friend? If Henry had the power, as
Shakespeare clearly depicts him having, to simply dismiss Gardiner’s plots why
did he not spare his friend the trauma of being accused? Indeed if Henry knows
Gardiner is cruel and bloody why is Gardiner a member of the King’s council?
Henry VIII famously concludes with Cranmer pronouncing a prophecy over
the infant Elizabeth. Henry responds by telling the Archbishop:Introduction 9
King: O lord Archbishop,
Thou hast made me now a man. Never before
This happy child did I get anything. (5.4.64)
There is something sobering, even sad, about these lines. Henry VIII depicts a
monarch who lurches from complete control to a strange sense of disengagement,
almost powerlessness. At the end of the play when Henry tells Cranmer that the
latter’s prophecy has ‘made me now a man’ the implication is that before this
he was a boy. Certainly there is something immature, at times almost infantile,
about Shakespeare’s Henry. Where Foxe depicts Henry as cruel and capricious,
Shakespeare suggests an explanation for this – that he is a boy only really growing
up once he realizes his place within a larger scheme of Tudor and English history.
Shakespeare’s Henry VIII was obviously drawn from earlier historical works:
the chronicles of Hall and Holinshed, Foxe’s Acts and monuments and George
Cavendish’s memoir of Wolsey. From these works, Shakespeare extracted, and
accentuated, elements that would remain part of part of Henry’s image to the
present. One theme is of Henry as a tyrant. Shakespeare is restrained in depicting
Henry’s cruelty but there is no doubt in the play of Henry’s capriciousness and
fundamentally unjust behaviour. Yet Shakespeare’s Henry is also inherently
weak. Beyond Henry’s over-reliance on either good or evil counsellors (Wolsey,
Katherine of Aragon, Gardiner and Cranmer), the King remains unwilling or unable
to control events. Even the seemingly triumphant conclusion to the play contains
an implicit, but nevertheless potent criticism of the King – the Reformation that he
started has to be completed by others.
A. F. Pollard and Henry VIII
For Pollard, on the other hand, Henry was always in control, at least during the
final decades of his reign. Peter Marshall has recently commented:
Pollard’s reign of Henry was …, to borrow a modern footballing cliché, a game
of two halves.8
For Pollard the key event in Henry’s reign was the fall of Thomas Wolsey. After
this, as far as Pollard was concerned, Henry was his own man and it was from this
moment that the real nature of Henry’s kingship emerged. Pollard’s Henry is at
times cruel but he is, unlike Shakespeare’s Henry, commanding. Pollard was too
much a product of his time to overlook Henry’s personal failings completely and,
at one point, he witheringly observes that ‘every inch a king Henry VIII never
8
Peter Marshall, ‘Henry VIII and the Modern Historians: the Making of a Twentieth-
Century Reputation’ in Afterlives, p. 247.10 Henry VIII and History
attained to the status of a gentleman’.9 Yet Pollard also saw the King as a great
creative statesman who fostered the English constitution and set his country on
the path to nationhood and empire. Pollard’s admiration for Henry the monarch
combined with his reservations about Henry’s character create tensions within
Pollard’s biography, as when he discusses the 1536, a key year in Henry’s reign.
Pollard’s account of 1536 is entitled, ‘The Crisis’. It opens discussing events
of the previous year and in particular the deaths of John Fisher and Thomas More.
In a rather purple passage Pollard places the deaths of these two men into a grand
historical narrative of conflicts between the state and conscience:
If conscience is deposed, man sinks to the level of the lower creation. Human
society can only be based on compromise, and compromise itself is a matter of
conscience. Fisher and More protest by their death against a principle which
they had practised in life; both they and the heretics whom they persecuted
proclaimed, as Antigone had done a thousand years before, that they could not
obey laws which they could not believe God had made.10
This is an interesting passage for a number of reasons. It reflects a Victorian
confidence in drawing wide-ranging historical parallels, and invoking moral
absolutes, that is largely absent from contemporary historical writing. Yet, it is
also important to note the effectiveness of Pollard’s rhetoric; his move in this
passage to the general and ahistorical also has the effect, deliberately or not, of
reducing Henry’s role in the death of More and Fisher.
Pollard’s version of the fall of Anne Boleyn, in the same chapter, is one of the
most dated parts of his biography. Confusing Tudor judicial processes with an
idealized view of Victorian judicial processes, Pollard naively suggests that no jury
would have condemned Anne without some credible evidence. Pollard continues:
If the charges were merely invented to ruin the Queen, one culprit besides herself
would have been enough. To assume that Henry sent four needless victims to the
block is to accuse him of a lust for superfluous butchery, of which even he, in his
most bloodthirsty moments, was not capable.11
What is entirely typical of Pollard is his removal of passion from any consideration
in Henry’s action. Pollard’s Henry almost always acts, albeit at times ruthlessly,
from rational calculation and in the interests of the state. Even the divorce from
Katherine of Aragon did not stem from the King’s infatuation with Anne Boleyn,
but from Henry’s desire for a male heir in order to avert a succession crisis.12
9
A. F. Pollard, Henry VIII (London, 1966), p. 268.
10
Ibid., p. 267.
11
Ibid., p. 277.
12
Ibid., pp. 139–56, esp. p. 50.Introduction 11
What makes Pollard’s comment that Henry was not capable of ‘superfluous
butchery’ particularly problematic is the fact that he is about to discuss the events
of the Pilgrimage of Grace. Pollard writes:
The second revolt gave Henry an excuse for recalling his pardon, and for
exacting revenge from all who had been implicated in either movement. Darcy
deserved little pity; earliest in his treason, he continued in the game to the end;
but Aske was an honest man, and his execution, condemned though he was by a
jury, was an act of injustice. Norfolk was sent to the North on a Bloody Assize,
and if neither he nor the King was a Jeffreys, the rebellion was stamped out with
a good deal of superfluous cruelty.13
Pollard seems unaware of the contradictions between this passage and his earlier
verdict on Anne Boleyn. Now Pollard accepts – with apparent equanimity – that
juries do convict unjustly and that Henry would employ ‘superfluous’ butchery.
The difference is that the execution of Anne was personal and domestic, while the
rebels were executed to preserve public order. And for Pollard one of Henry’s great
achievements, and one which justified even his crimes was that he maintained order.
At the end of the biography Pollard reflects upon the legitimacy of Henry’s rule:
If we are to believe that Henry’s policy was at variance with the national will,
his reign must remain a political mystery, and can offer no explanation of the
facts that Henry was permitted to do his work at all, and that it has stood so long
the test of time. He had, no doubt, exceptional facilities for getting his way. His
dictatorship was the child of the Wars of the Roses, and his people, conscious of
the fact that Henry was their only bulwark against the recurrence of civil strife,
and bound up as they were in commercial and industrial pursuits, were willing
to bear with a much more arbitrary government than they would have been in
less perilous times.14
The events of the half century after Pollard’s biography of Henry was published
would demonstrate conclusively that some regimes are worse than disorder or
even civil war. Pollard’s apparent readiness to forget about the eggs when he
was enjoying the omelette, and his belief – noticeable in his treatment of More
and Fisher – that the suppression of individuals in the name of great causes is
acceptable, make his work suspect to many modern readers. (And, in fact, as Ruth
Ahnert argues in her chapter in this volume, Robert Bolt, in his play A Man for All
Seasons, takes direct aim at Pollard and his complacent dismissals of those who
defied Henry). For these reasons, Pollard’s depiction of Henry now seems as much
a product of a particular time as Shakespeare’s.
13
Ibid., p. 286.
14
Ibid., pp. 344–5.12 Henry VIII and History
Yet it is important to remember that Pollard’s biography was not only highly
respected, it was regarded as authoritative for half a century. Part of Pollard’s
influence stemmed from the accessibility and lucidity of his vigorous prose
style. A. G. Dickens, writing when Pollard had begun to fall from academic
favour, nevertheless observed: ‘In its fashion this book remains a work of art.’15
Although a note of condescension is resonant even in this modicum of praise –
Dickens sounds like an art critic encountering a toilet bowl on display at a Dadist
exhibition – it is not an observation that could be made of many subsequent
academic works on Henry. More importantly, Pollard was the first historian to
make use of the massive calendar of sources for Henry VIII’s reign, the Letters
and Papers of Henry VIII. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, historians
of the King’s reign were dependent on the same sources that Burnet had used.
The Catholic historian John Lingard gained credibility for his revisionist account
of the Reformation by drawing on foreign collections, notably the Barberini and
the Vatican archives. James Anthony Froude, in crucial respects the precursor of
Pollard, drew on his own transcriptions of documents in the Public Record Office
and in the Spanish archives at Simancas. Building on the Letters and Papers,
Pollard was able to make his biography of Henry definitive until Geoffrey Elton
and others began to consult the original documents and not simply rely on the
calendars of them. Yet even while Pollard’s biography reigned unchallenged in
the academic world, novelists and dramatists were constructing different, and less
heroic, interpretations of Henry.
Interpreting Henry VIII
The chapters in this collection discuss the numerous ways in which different
writers and historians have grappled with the King and his reign. One of the first
to do so, and certainly the first to mount a thorough going defence of Henry was
William Thomas, whose laudatory account of the King is analysed by Brett Foster.
Early in Edward VI’s reign, Thomas portrayed Henry as an English David and a
great reformer. Although Thomas’s depiction of Henry fitted admirably into the
propaganda of Edward’s regime, and seems to have found favour at Edward’s
court, it is striking how little impact it would have on early modern Protestant
historical writing about the King. Thomas S Freeman in his chapter on John Foxe
discusses the evolving picture of Henry as he appears in the various editions of Acts
and Monuments. The Henry that ultimately emerges from Acts and Monuments is,
in Freeman’s words, ‘a shuttlecock bounced from one religious position to the
other by competing teams of advisers’. Ultimately Foxe seemed unsure what to
make of Henry. He knew that he did not approve of much that the King had done
but as the reign of Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth, progressed Foxe’s view of Henry
does seem to have got somewhat less critical. Yet Foxe, whose account of the
15
Ibid., p. xiii.Introduction 13
English Reformation remained authoritative among Protestants for centuries, had
nevertheless penned a startlingly un-heroic portrait of the monarch who broke
with Rome.
As Scott Lucas observes, a similar ambivalence pervades Edward Hall’s
Chronicle. Hall begins by extolling the young Henry VIII as a paragon of chivalry
and, for the first fifteen years or so, this portrait of Henry as the epitome of royal
virtues persists. Yet Hall eventually seems to have become disillusioned with
Henry’s kingship. Certainly he lauds Henry, but as Lucas points out, ‘Hall finds
himself increasingly forced to acknowledge instances of popular dissatisfaction,
anger, and even outright resistance prompted by Henry’s … actions’. Hall died in
1544 before his chronicle was finished, and the London printer and evangelical
Richard Grafton completed it. Grafton added to the increasingly chilly account
of Henry, paying notable attention to the evangelicals whom the King had
burned and vehemently attacking what he saw as the religious conservatism of
Henry’s final rule. Because of its detail, and the fact that it was written almost
contemporaneously with the events it describes, Hall’s Chronicle has decisively
shaped later interpretations of Henry. In particular, it laid the basis for a still
widely-held view of Henry as good, benign ruler until the 1530s but one who was
increasingly brutal and authoritarian thereafter.
Sixteenth-century Catholic historians of Henry’s rule differed with Hall on
many things, but they also shared his view of a king who began well but whose
rule degenerated. Carolyn Colbert, examining Reginald Pole’s De unitate,
written around 1535, describes how this work portrays Henry as a prince with
considerable potential to be good ruler and one who reigned well until he divorced
Katherine. After that Pole depicts Henry as changing as swiftly as Lucifer falling
from the heavens, into a monstrous tyrant. The biographies of Thomas More
written by William Roper and Nicholas Harpsfield during the reign of Henry’s
eldest daughter, also see Henry’s decision to divorce Katherine of Aragon as a
turning point in which Henry, hitherto a friend and supporter of More, became
his persecutor. These Henrician and Marian Catholic writers laid the foundations
for accounts of Henry by Elizabethan Catholics such as William Allen, Robert
Persons and, above all, Nicholas Sander. These works, carefully analysed and
contextualized by Victor Houliston in his contribution to this collection, further
developed the image of a virtuous young Henry who, under the evil influence of
Anne Boleyn, became a bloodthirsty despot. They also described a monarch who
became a slave to his sexual appetites and lusts.
Although these Catholic historical works had their impact on even Protestant
histories of Henry and his reign – indeed, Gilbert Burnet was very concerned to
rebut Sander – they also powerfully affected popular conceptions of the King.
Maxwell Anderson’s Anne of the Thousand Days and Robert Bolt’s A Man for All
Seasons both work within the outlines of this Catholic historiographical tradition
(which is not to say that either Anderson and Bolt were writing from a Catholic
perspective) and focus on Henry at the moment of his descent into tyranny. Both
also assume that lust and passion for Anne were behind not only the divorce from14 Henry VIII and History
Katherine, but also the rejection of papal authority. And popular conceptions of
Henry as a Lothario and a glutton, while enormously enhanced by cinema and
television, are rooted in the works of Pole, Sander and their co-religionists. Of
course, Henry’s marital misadventures, apart from demonstrating the truth of
Marx’s dictum that history begins as tragedy and repeats itself as farce, are the
main reason for Henry’s lurid reputation. Yet neither Hall, Grafton nor Foxe, in
all of their criticisms of Henry, portray the King as being driven primarily by
sexual desire. It is the Catholic historians who placed the origins of the English
Reformation in Henry’s codpiece, and in doing so, created perhaps the most
enduring and, perhaps endearing, aspect of the popular image of Henry.
Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Henry VIII’s first biographer, judged Henry from
a more secular viewpoint. While Herbert was concerned to defend the Royal
Supremacy, he was primarily concerned with assessing Henry as a ruler and,
Christine Jackson suggests, providing lessons in statecraft for Charles I. (Although,
in the event, Herbert’s biography was not printed until two months after Charles’s
execution.) Herbert penned the most positive historical account of Henry since
William Thomas. While he did not deny Henry’s cruelty, Herbert regarded him
as a successful king and his biography ‘played a major part of establishing
Henry VIII’s reputation as an ambitious and powerful monarch’. Herbert was also
did diligent research, making his biography the first historical work since the Acts
and Monuments to base an account of Henry on new archival research.
Gilbert Burnet’s History of the Reformation, first printed some thirty years
after Herbert’s biography, reflected the politics of the Charles II’s reign. It was,
as Andrew Starkie observes, written to provide historical support for arguments
to have the heir presumptive to throne, the duke of York, excluded from the
succession because of his Catholicism. It was also intended to provide object
lessons in royal governance for Charles. Thus while Burnet saw the English
Reformation as a work of divine providence, he also lamented that Henry was
driven to break with Rome by his base passions and appetites. Ultimately Burnet
held a position on Henry that was not that far from Foxe’s – Henry was a person
who did some admirable things but often for sordid reasons. Moreover, many of
his greatest achievements were due to his being influenced by ‘good’ advisors:
Anne Boleyn, Cromwell, and, for Burnet, especially Cranmer. As a result, Burnet
could only muster tepid enthusiasm for Henry: ‘I do not deny that he is to be
numbered among the ill princes, yet I cannot rank him among the worst.’ Burnet
also continued the Foxean tradition in another respect – he consulted some of
the State Papers, major manuscript collections – notably the Cotton Library – the
Privy council registers and the mass of sources accumulated by John Strype.
Burnet and Strype were the last scholars of Henry VIII’s reign to conduct
significant archival research until the first half of the nineteenth century. Until
then, most writing on Henry, even when it provided a new interpretation of the
King’s reign – as with, for example, David Hume’s phenomenally popular History
of England – was a roundup of the usual sources. But a very fresh perspective
on Henry came with The Lives of the Queens of England (1840–48) by AgnesIntroduction 15
and Elizabeth Strickland. The Strickland sisters were among the most notable
and successful members of a group of women, who, in the nineteenth century,
broke into what had been the masculine preserve of professional history writing.
(These women did not hold academic posts, but they earned their livings from the
sales of their historical works and these sales depended not only on their ability to
write interesting narratives but also on the maintenance of their credibility through
competent research.)
Judith Richards points out that Agnes and Elizabeth Strickland brought
a new, gendered, perspective to the study of Henry’s life. Their efforts moved
Henry’s wives, for the first time, from the wings of historical writing to centre
stage. Increased attention on Henry’s marital career could only discredit Henry,
and the Stricklands did his reputation no favours. But they also further increased
the popular fascination with the King. Arguably, their greatest influence was on
historical novelists who followed the path they blazed, and delved into Henry’s
personal and domestic life with alacrity.
In fact, the twentieth century saw a fundamental division emerge in
interpreting Henry and his reign between historians and biographers, on the one
hand, and writers of historical fiction on the other. The former continued to focus
on issues of governance and on public affairs. Their interest was in how Henry
ruled, who was responsible for his policies, how those policies were executed
and what his objectives were. (An exception to this trend was Lacey Baldwin
Smith’s Henry VIII: The Mask of Royalty, published in 1971, which focused
on examining Henry’s character, generally from a psychiatric perspective.) The
historical novelists, stimulated by the advent of Freud and the dramatic rise of
public interest in psychology, focused on Henry’s character, his marriages and his
domestic life. These different approaches were epitomized in Ford Madox Ford’s
trilogy of novels on Henry and his penultimate wife, Katherine Howard: Fifth
Queen (1906), Privy Seal (1907) and Fifth Queen Crowned (1908). Anthony and
Susannah Monta point out that Ford had himself toyed with the idea of writing
a historical account of Henry VIII and his times, only to be pre-empted by the
appearance of Pollard’s biography. Ford felt that Pollard and other academic
historians distorted and over-simplified the past by assuming that Henry’s actions
and policies were based purely on calculated statecraft and that they did not take
into account the complex psychological forces that drove Henry.
As the chapters by Megan Hickerson and Kristen Walton reveal, historical
novelists have followed Ford in their determination to plumb the depths of Henry’s
character. These authors all strap Henry firmly to the psychiatrist’s coach; indeed
Plaidy and George examine the King from an unabashedly Freudian perspective.
And despite differences in their assessments of Henry – Plaidy sees the King as
a sociopath, Gregory portrays him as manipulated by strong-willed women and
George emphasizes his insecurity and vulnerability – the Henry portrayed in all of
these novels could not be more divergent from that of Pollard. No one is a hero to
their analyst and Pollard’s masterful, coldly rational statesman was replaced by a
monarch driven by passions, rages, lusts and fears.You can also read
