The Portrait and the Man
What sort of man was this monstrous king? In the portraits Hans Holbein the Younger drew of Henry and Jane Seymour, the king, in his heavy body, is dressed in gaudy clothes and leans on a jeweled sword. His broad, fleshy face shows his self-indulgence; the strength of his will can be seen in his nose, and his pressed lips and sullen eyes picture a quick-tempered, hard ruler. Henry was then forty-six and at the height of his power, but his bodily strength was failing. He married three more times, but had no further child. Of the children his six wives bore, only three did not die in infancy. One of them was the sickly Edward VI, who died at fifteen. Mary did not marry, and Elizabeth, perhaps because she saw some flaw in herself, never entertained the thought of marriage. The proudest royal house England ever saw was struck with the curse of barrenness and bodily defect.
Henry was shrewd and brave, with an iron will and a sound sense for judging men. His manner was rough, and as the years of youth passed he lost his curiosity. But with his friends he was kind and generous, and he easily won men over to devotion. Born into a royal house, he was from the start of life surrounded by flatterers and praisers. The few who dared stand against his wishes did not go to the grave with their heads on. Thomas More wrote from prison that it was a sad thing when a council subservient to the whims of rulers, and a weak-spirited clergy, led all Christian rulers astray with flattery. After More's death, the lack of men to stand against Henry's willfulness ruined him morally and physically. He was no more licentious than Francis I, and it seems that after Anne Boleyn's death he turned from other women more than Charles V did. Sexual license was not his worst weakness. He was fiercely bent on gaining money and power, and human feeling seldom kept him from seizing people's goods. He was not afraid to kill women who had once charmed him, or to destroy men like More and Cromwell who had served him faithfully for years. Even so, his crimes were small beside the horrors of Charles IX, who ordered the St. Bartholomew massacre, or Charles V, who overlooked the sack of Rome by his soldiers, or the German rulers who fought thirty years and shed blood to decide their subjects' religion.
A Life of Frustration and Fear
Another cause of Henry's decay was his repeated failure in love and marriage. Despairing of a male child, he broke the bond with his first wife; his second wife, for whom (in his view) he had risked his throne, betrayed him; the only wife who bore him an heir he lost after a short time; his marriage to a woman who shared neither his tongue nor his temper failed; and finally (as he himself believed) he was caught by trickery and cunning in the love of a woman from whom he hoped for a quiet family life. Though he could do as he pleased throughout England, he never enjoyed the domestic comfort of his humblest subjects. Besides, he suffered from a sore on his leg, and throughout his reign he had to wrestle with crises and internal revolts and to prepare against foreign attack, domestic treason and plots that might at any moment be laid against his life. How could such a man grow up with a natural, balanced character and stay free of suspicion, deceit and cruelty? And how can we, who are ourselves in the grip of anxiety, understand a man who bore the heavy burden of England's religious reform and took dangerous steps to break his nation's deep-rooted ties to Rome, while at the same time he was bewildered whether he had freed his nation or broken Christianity? Henry lived in an atmosphere whose chief elements were power and danger. He did not know how far his enemies would go or how far they would succeed.
In 1538 he ordered the arrest of Sir Geoffrey Pole, brother of Cardinal Reginald Pole. Geoffrey, in fear of ill treatment, confessed that he and his other brother, Lord Montagu, Sir Edward Neville, the Marquis of Exeter and the Marchioness of Exeter had exchanged treasonable letters with the cardinal. Geoffrey was pardoned, but the Marquis of Exeter, Lord Montagu and several others were put to death (1538–39); the Marchioness of Exeter was imprisoned; and the Countess of Salisbury, mother of the Poles, was put under watch. After Cardinal Pole met Charles V at Toledo (1539) and, on the pope's behalf, asked him to follow Francis I in banning trade with England, Henry imprisoned the Countess of Salisbury, then seventy (so the book). Perhaps he thus hoped to keep the cardinal from urging Charles to attack England. In the game of life and death, everything is permitted.
Anne of Cleves and the Fall of Cromwell
After two years without a wife, Henry, hoping to find an ally who would help England against Charles, had Cromwell choose a bride from the royal houses of Europe. Cromwell proposed Anne of Cleves, sister-in-law of the Elector of Saxony and sister of the Duke of Cleves (a stubborn opponent of the emperor). Cromwell hoped in this way to form a league of Protestant states in Europe and to move Henry to give up the anti-Lutheran "Act of Six Articles." Holbein, at Henry's order and probably with Cromwell's secret guidance, went to Germany to paint Anne's likeness. After seeing Holbein's portrait Henry liked her. Anne in Holbein's painting, now in the Louvre, looks sad and low, but she is more pleasing than Jane Seymour, who for a little while had won the king's heart. After Anne reached England (1 January 1540), the king at their first meeting felt his affection for her die. Even so, hoping to have from her an heir to the English throne, since Edward's illness was now worsening, he looked the other way and married her. Yet the king nursed a grudge against Cromwell.
Four months later Henry imprisoned his most trusted minister on charges of corruption and misconduct in administration. Hardly anyone in England protested his arrest, for Cromwell, because of his origins, his methods of government, his love of money and the huge fortune he had gathered, was the most hated man in England. In prison he was asked to sign a document declaring the king's new marriage unlawful. Henry declared that he had never in his heart consented to the marriage and had not regarded it as consummated. Anne too, who claimed she was still a maiden, in return for a pension agreed to annul her marriage to Henry. She, who disliked the thought of seeing her brother, decided to spend the rest of her life alone in England; she died in 1557 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Cromwell was beheaded on 28 July 1540.
Catherine Howard
The same day Henry married the twenty-year-old Catherine Howard, who had been raised in a strict Catholic family. The Catholic party was now overcoming its opponents in England. Henry gave up flirting with the Protestants of Europe and made peace with Charles V. Once at ease about the emperor, he turned north to unite Scotland with England and extend his rule over all the British island. At this time another revolt against him broke out in the north of England. Before leaving London to put it down, Henry ordered the political prisoners in the Tower, among them the Countess of Salisbury, to be put to death (1541). The revolt was crushed, and Henry, upset by the event, returned to his new wife at Hampton Court to recover his calm.
The second Catherine, whom Henry married after parting from Anne of Cleves, was kinder than all his earlier wives. Henry, now attached to domestic comfort, took her to his heart and thanked God for the family peace he had at last found. But a day after this thanksgiving (2 November 1541), Archbishop Cranmer gave Henry papers charging that before marrying the king Catherine had had improper relations with three successive suitors. Two of her former suitors and Catherine herself confessed their fault (I mention this only in general terms). According to the French ambassador's report, Henry was seized by such grief and pain "that he seemed to have gone mad"; he now feared that God might have cursed all his marriages. Henry meant to overlook Catherine's offense, but at that moment he was informed that after marrying him she had had a liaison with her cousin. Catherine admitted receiving her cousin at night in the presence of Lady Rochford but denied committing any treason after her marriage to Henry; Lady Rochford confirmed her claim. But the royal court found Catherine guilty of treason. On 13 February 1542 she was beheaded on the very spot where Anne Boleyn had been beheaded six years before. Her suitors were sentenced to life imprisonment.
The King's Last Years
The king's body and spirit were now broken. The sore on his leg had defeated the physicians of the time, and his illness was spreading through his whole body. As the strength and vigor of youth ebbed, his body grew fat, and his fleshy cheeks covered his jaws and hid his eyes. Henry was now so weak that he could not walk without help. Aware that the lamp of his life was dying, in a new settlement (1543) he named Edward, Mary and Elizabeth in turn as his successors. The settlement made no mention of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, the lawful heir to the English throne. Soon after it, at the repeated urging of his privy council and in the hope that he might at last father a healthy male heir, he married for the sixth time (12 July 1543). His new wife, Catherine Parr, had been married twice before, but Henry no longer thought about his wife's virginity. Catherine was a learned and prudent woman who patiently nursed her sick husband, mended his relations with his disgraced and forgotten daughter Elizabeth, and worked hard to moderate the king's religious views and soften his vengeful temper.
Even so, Henry did not stop taking vengeance to the end of his life: in the last eight years of his reign twenty-six people were burned for heresy. In 1543 Henry's agents reported to Bishop Stephen Gardiner that Henry Filmer had said, "If God is in the consecrated bread of the Eucharist, then I have eaten God twenty times"; that Robert Testwood, when the Host was lifted, had mockingly told the priest to take care that God did not fall to the ground; and that Anthony Pearson had called priests who preached anything but "the word of God," meaning the Bible, thieves. By order of the Anglican bishops all these men were burned in a meadow overlooking the king's castle at Windsor. When the king learned that the report had been false and baseless, he was so angry that he imprisoned the informer in the Tower. In 1546 Bishop Gardiner sent four more people to the fire for denying the real presence of Christ in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. One of them, a woman named Anne Askew, held to her belief through an examination that lasted five hours, saying: "What you call God is only bread. If you doubt it, keep the consecrated bread for three months and see that nothing of it remains but moldy bread." She was cruelly ill-treated to make her name others who shared her belief. But she bore the suffering patiently and, in her own words, with "faith that she was going to paradise," went to her death. The king had no hand in this torment, but when its victims appealed to him they received no answer.
In 1543 Henry went to war with Scotland and with "his beloved brother" Francis I, and allied himself with his old enemy Charles V. To meet the cost of the war he again asked the English people for "loans," refused to repay loans he had taken in 1542, and seized the endowments of the universities. Henry went to the field with his army and supervised the siege and capture of Boulogne. His soldiers raided Scotland and razed the abbeys of Melrose and Dryburgh and five other religious houses, but were routed at Ancrum Moor (1545). At last a favorable treaty was made with France (1546), and the king could lie down to die with an easy mind.
Now such weakness had come upon Henry that England's nobles openly began to compete over who would be regent during young Edward's reign. The poet Earl of Surrey was so sure his father, the Duke of "York" (the book's slip for Norfolk), would be chosen regent that he had made a doublet suited to the post. Henry arrested both. Father and son confessed their guilt, the poet was beheaded on 9 January 1547, and the duke's execution was set for after the 27th of that month. But on 28 January the king died. Though he was no more than fifty-five at his death, it seemed that he had lived ten times his years. He left a large sum to be devoted to Masses for the repose of his soul.
A Balanced Judgment
In his thirty-seven years of rule, Henry changed the face of England more than he probably wished or imagined. Without changing the old beliefs of the people, which bound them to certain moral limits, he ended the pope's authority over England and put his own influence in its place. But his victorious struggle with the pope, the dissolution of monasteries, the scattering of monks, the destruction of relics, repeated humiliation of the clergy, seizure of Church property and removal of the clergy from politics and government so reduced the power, influence and standing of the Church that a series of religious changes became unavoidable under Edward and Queen Elizabeth. Although the Reformation in England was not as deeply rooted in doctrine as in Germany, both produced the same result and made the Church obedient to the state. A people who had been freed from the infallible pope fell into the grip of a despotic king.
The English people gained nothing from this change. They paid tithes as before, but the net surplus went to the state rather than the Church. English peasants still worked on rented land, but the land no longer belonged to the abbots, whom Carlyle in Past and Present remembered kindly and whose time, when the country's fields were in their hands, he envied; it belonged to newly enriched landlords, harder and more merciless than their predecessors. The English Reformation, in William Cobbett's words, "as far as its social side is concerned, had no result but the victory of the rich over the poor." By the testimony of surviving records, English town workers and peasants lived better and more comfortably when Henry came to the throne than when he died.
Henry's reign also had bad moral results for the English people. By his sexual license, by embracing another woman a few days after the execution of his previous wife, and by his cruelty, callousness and greed, the king set an unfortunate example. The privileged class with its intrigues threw the country's administrative and judicial machinery into disorder; the middle class vied with the king in seizing Church property; and the manufacturers who plundered their workers' earnings were themselves exploited by the greedy king. The decline of alms and charity should not be put down as an improvement in people's lives, for the oppressed people, with the terror of a selfish, despotic king over them, had to accept humiliation and keep silent. Meanwhile the courage of the Protestant and Catholic martyrs alone changed the face of English society a little, though even the noblest of them, Fisher and More, took their turn in persecuting others.
Yet if we look at the England of those days more broadly, we find that even the black age of Henry VIII was the source of great changes for the good of the English people. The Reformation had to come. When we recall the corruption of the age that gave rise to it, we must not lose sight of its historical necessity. Breaking with the past was hard and painful, and only a savage blow could prepare people's minds for it. When the evil spirit left the people, nationalism, which at the start had prepared the ground for despotic government, turned into a creative force and breathed new life into the English body. The decline of papal power in England made the people lean on the state for some years, but in time, relying on themselves, they made the state subject to their will, rose to claim their rights, and as their understanding grew, enjoyed wider liberty. The terrible force that hung over England in the time of dread Henry could not last forever; the power of the state weakened under his sickly son and his hot-tempered daughter. Before long, in the reign of a hesitant but victorious queen, the English nation, with its freed intelligence and strength, became the intellectual leader of Europe. Had England not been freed from the pope's rule by its worst and strongest ruler, people like Elizabeth and Shakespeare might never have come into the world.