Titans of History

HENRY VIII

1491–1547

He never spared a man in his anger, nor a woman in his lust.

Sir Robert Naunton, Fragmenta Regalia, 1641

Henry VIII was a golden and gifted boy who grew up to become a forceful, energetic and ambitious ruler—he was a majestic and ruthless monarch who created an “imperial” monarchy by asserting English independence, defying Rome, breaking up the monasteries, promoting his realm’s military and naval power and his own autocracy, all ultimately enabling the triumph of Protestantism. Yet he became a bloated, thin-skinned tyrant who ordered the killing—on faked evidence—of many, including two of his wives, because of his own wounded pride. He was, in his paranoid cruelty, the English Stalin.

Henry was second son of the shrewd, mean and pragmatic Henry VII who, as Henry Tudor, had seized the throne in 1485, reconciling the York and Lancaster factions after the Wars of the Roses, and established a new dynasty. The early death of his heir, Prince Arthur, in 1502, shortly after marrying Catherine of Aragon, highlighted the fragility of the parvenu Tudors, which explains much of Henry VIII’s ruthlessness over the succession. Henry succeeded to the throne in 1509 and married his late brother’s Spanish widow. He was handsome, strapping and vigorous but also highly educated: courtiers hailed the dawning of a golden age. He promoted his glory with the macho sporting entertainments of a Renaissance prince—hunting, jousting, dancing, feasting—and won popularity by executing his father’s hated tax collectors, Empson and Dudley, on spurious charges. It set the pattern for how Henry would dispose of his ministers when expedient.

Henry longed to test his vigor in the lists of Europe, where Francis I of France and the Habsburg emperor, Charles V, were vying for dominance. He started to build a navy, including his huge battleship the Mary Rose (which later sank). At first, he backed the emperor against the French, leading an army to France and winning the Battle of Spurs in 1513, while defeating a Scottish invasion at Flodden. He made peace with France, meeting Francis at a magnificent summit, the Field of the Cloth of Gold, stage-managed by his able and hugely rich minister Cardinal Thomas Wolsey—a butcher’s son who had risen to the scarlet—but after Francis was captured at Pavia in 1525, Henry again changed sides, aspiring to hold the balance of power in Europe.

Henry’s queen, Catherine of Aragon, Emperor Charles V’s aunt, had provided him with a girl, the future Queen Mary, rather than a male heir—an affront to Henry’s pride and dynastic sensitivity, so he sought, via Wolsey, to have the marriage to his brother’s widow annulled. The pope, under the influence of Emperor Charles, would not permit Catherine to be cast aside. “The king’s great matter” was not just a matter of personality but of Henry’s insistence that his crown was “imperial”—not subordinate to the pope or any other power. This became even more important when he fell in love with Anne Boleyn, one of Catherine’s ladies-in-waiting, who—flirtatious, intelligent and ambitious—withheld her favors before marriage. The pope remained intransigent, so Henry turned on Wolsey. The cardinal would have faced the ax but died on his way to face charges of treason.

Henry now decided on a radical course, and in his Act of Supremacy and Treason Act of 1534 declared himself head of the Church in England and independent of the pope. At last Henry’s marriage to Catherine could be annulled, and in 1533 he married Anne Boleyn.

Henry, backed by his rising minister Thomas Cromwell, repressed anyone who questioned his religious policies: his former chancellor, Thomas More, was executed. A rebellion in the north, the Pilgrimage of Grace (1536), was defeated, then dispersed on Henry’s word of honor, which he then broke, executing the rebels ruthlessly. Throughout his reign, Henry was pitiless in killing anyone who opposed him: after Dudley and Empson he went on to execute Edmund de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, in 1513, Edward Stafford, duke of Buckingham, in 1521, all the way to the young poet Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, in the last days of his life. His number of victims is hard to calculate—the historian Holinshed absurdly claimed 72,000—but there were many.

Although Henry is sometimes credited with England’s Protestant Reformation, doctrinally he remained a Catholic conservative. Nonetheless, his political revolution made a Protestant England possible. His lucrative dissolution of the monasteries—an act of vandalism on a massive scale—funded his reign and marked his new absolutism. Anne Boleyn delivered a child to Henry in 1533, but it was a girl, the future Elizabeth I. Henry turned against her, ordering Cromwell to concoct charges of adultery, incest and witchcraft, evidenced by her “third nipple” used for suckling the Devil—actually a mole on her neck. Five men, including Boleyn’s brother, were framed and executed. Anne was beheaded on May 19, 1536. Ten days later Henry married Jane Seymour, who delivered a son, the future Edward VI, but died in childbirth—the only wife Henry ever grieved for.

Cromwell, pushing a Protestant foreign policy and promoted to earl of Essex, persuaded Henry to marry Anne of Cleves. But Henry, himself now fat and prone to suppurating sores, was repelled by this “Flanders Mare.” Cromwell was framed and executed in 1540, the very day Henry married the pretty Catherine Howard, just sixteen years old. Henry ordered that Cromwell’s beheading should be carried out by an inexperienced youth. The head was severed on the third attempt.

Each of the English wives was backed by an ambitious political-religious family faction. The Howards were pro-Catholic, but their teenage queen was a reckless and naïve flirt whose past mischief and present adulterous adventures allowed the Protestant faction to exploit the king’s fragile sexual pride. In 1542, at age eighteen, she was beheaded. His sensible last wife, Catherine Parr, outlived him.

Henry determined to marry his young son Edward to the infant Mary Queen of Scots. But Scottish intractability was unmoved by the so-called Rough Wooing, during which Henry sent his armies over the Border to put “man, woman and child to fire and sword without exception.” One of England’s most majestic and formidable kings, yet a flawed tyrant and a statesman of very mixed achievements, Henry was both hero and monster, brutal egotist and effective politician. As the duke of Norfolk understood: “The consequence of royal anger is death.” In 1544, he laid out the succession: the Protestant Edward, then Catholic Mary, followed by Protestant Elizabeth. Henry VIII was followed on the throne by his son, the fervent reformer Edward VI. He moved swiftly to firm up Protestantism’s hold on England, outlawing the Latin mass and clerical celibacy and demanding that services be carried out in English. But he was sickly, and died at fifteen. His sister Mary I reversed Edward’s reforms, fiercely enforcing Rome’s return to English religious life. Many hundreds died at the stake, but despite her marriage to Philip II of Spain she remained childless and this bitter and increasingly deranged figure could not prevent the crown from passing to her sister, Elizabeth, after her early death.