David Starkey has produced an unforgettable biography of a Renaissance prince who turned tyrant—to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Henry VIII’s accession on 21 April 1509. His reign altered the course of British history and a lasting legacy.
Henry VIII was born a second son: the “spare” and not the “heir” as long as his elder brother, Arthur, lived. Rarely did his parents feel secure, since pretenders to the throne won support at home and abroad. Starkey shows more vividly than any previous historian that Bosworth's victor could never be reconciled to the Yorkist rump whatever he tried to do, and that Henry's doting mother, Elizabeth of York, saw her younger son as a crucial piece on the chessboard. From the moment he was created Duke of York at the age of three, she conditioned him to be a peacemaker. Court protocol, on which Starkey excels, required the queens of England to keep separate establishments, and until Arthur's death in 1502, Henry lived in Elizabeth's household with his two sisters. He became a mother's boy: spoilt, extrovert, competitive, over- defensive, overshadowed in every way by his elder brother and father, whose achievements he would later try to beat.
Starkey investigates Henry's education and religious beliefs, and whether he'd been earmarked by his father to be archbishop of Canterbury, which is possible, but unlikely. There was, however, a revolution in Henry's education when he became Prince of Wales after Arthur's death. His fussy, old-fashioned tutor, John Skelton, was sacked and fresh ones hired with connections to Erasmus of Rotterdam, the literary genius of the European Renaissance. Thereafter, Henry could be found carefully annotating his Latin copy of Cicero, jotting down the meanings of significant words and absorbing definitions of “virtue” rooted in moral and philosophical values. For a while, it seemed as if the next king of England might be a scholar. But Erasmus's hopes would be dashed, for although Henry was capable of prodigious bursts of enthusiasm for history, mathematics, music and astronomy, he turned out to be a wayward and opinion- ated student, with a short attention span.
Henry, meanwhile, had married Catherine of Aragon, although the ceremony wasn't binding on a 13-year-old and had to be repeated as soon as he became king. Starkey knows he will divide opinion over Catherine: he says she was a liar, accepting long-disputed evidence that her previous marriage to Arthur had been consummated, which she denied. This evidence, all hearsay with one exception, first emerged 20 years later when Henry wanted a divorce. The best of it came from William Thomas, a former groom of Arthur's privy chamber, who said he'd often escorted Arthur in his nightshirt as far as Catherine's bedroom door. Does that prove they had sex? Starkey thinks they did, but nobody really knows. After her marriage to Henry, Catherine lied in a letter to her father, Ferdinand of Aragon, about a miscarriage. Starkey makes hay with this, but he's too good a historian not to tell us that the two cases aren't alike. When she wrote to Ferdinand, Catherine was following an official government communiqué to spare her husband (and herself) embarrassment. When, however, she said that she was still a virgin when she married Henry, she took a solemn oath.In 1506, Henry met the Archduke Philip of Burgundy. Stylish, handsome and gregarious, a brilliant jouster (and sexual predator) who loved to join in everything, Philip was the very model of the young Henry's hero: his grandfather, Edward IV. Starkey describes their encounters in eye-catching detail: Henry wanted to be like Philip, and from then onwards he dreamt of Camelot, not Cicero. Jousting (or more accurately until he was king, a junior version known as “running at the ring”) became a craze.
Henry became king two months before his 18th birthday. His father's death was kept secret for two days while his councillors, Kremlin-style, fought each other over the corpse. Empson and Dudley, those most closely associated with Henry VII's reign of terror in his final years, were sent to the Tower. The young Henry began his reign with a flurry of grand gestures designed to win popularity. Money flowed liked water as he showered gifts on his friends, esp-ecially his Yorkist relations. Intoxicated with his power, he soon found that his more sober and experienced ministers stepped in to curtail his spending. A stalemate resulted, until the young king, using his crony, the upstart William Compton, to do his dirty work, attempted to break free.
Compton, whom Starkey unmasks for the first time as Henry's backstairs fixer and pimp, was partly successful at liberating Henry, but not successful enough. Then, at 19, Henry was introduced to Thomas Wolsey, the butcher's son who became his chief policy guru and hatchet man for the next 18 years. Wolsey began as he meant to go on, teaching Henry how to overrule the lord chancellor. And that was that. Once Henry had been freed of conciliar supervision, says Starkey, his days as a “virtuous prince” are over, and his mature years begin.
That, of course, departs radically from convention, which takes the watershed to be Wolsey's dismissal in 1529 and replacement by the blacksmith's son, Thomas Cromwell. Starkey's decision is bold: there are 36 action-packed years of Henry's life to be crammed into volume two. For its extraordinary insights into the smouldering embers of the Wars of the Roses, Henry: Virtuous Prince is masterly. As a biography of England's most celebrated king, it's an outstanding overture. The main performance is still to come.
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