Henry VIII: Statesman Or Tyrant?

On Midsummer's Day in 1509, a 17-year-old was crowned King of England. He would go on to transform his realm over almost four decades on the throne. He would revolutionise its religion, reforge its politics and its relations with neighbouring countries, and establish a royal navy. But by the time he died in 1547, the athletic boy, whose cloth and hair were spun with gold, had become an obese, temperamental monster. His reputation was that of a brute whose hands were soaked with the blood of the executions he had ordered, among them two of his six wives. The bloody twists and turns of Henry's career, the marriages, murders and upheavals, have captivated people ever since. His critics and defenders have fought to blacken or celebrate his memory. So who was Henry VIII? Man, or monster? Statesman, or tyrant? Henry will forever be remembered for his marriages. Six, by far the most of any English king. He sought glory and immortality. His awareness of his dynasty and legacy grew more and more pronounced as he grew older. In 1509, Henry married his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, who was the widow of his older brother, Arthur. While they had a lengthy marriage, by Henry's later standards, Catherine had tremendous difficulty bearing children. She went through the trauma of having six pregnancies, but only one child, Mary, surviving into adulthood. She had not borne the male heir that Henry believed would secure his dynasty. The Tudors only won the crown in 1485, after 30 years of political instability during the Wars of the Roses. Henry became plagued with doubts that marrying his elder brother's wife had damned him before God. Convinced that his marriage was unlawful, and lusting after one of Catherine's ladies-in-waiting, the stylish courtier Anne Boleyn, Henry sought an annulment. He asked Pope Clement VII for this in 1527, and he fully expected the Pope to agree. Henry's sister Margaret had just had her marriage annulled by the Pope in March of that same year. But in May, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V had captured Rome and held the Pope as prisoner. Charles was Catherine's nephew. At exactly the moment that Henry's request for an annulment arrived, Catherine's relative controlled the Pope. Henry came to realise that if the papacy wouldn't bend to his wishes, he would have to break with Rome itself and establish his own church. What happened next would alter the course of British history forever. Beginning in 1529, Henry upended England's religion with the start of the English Reformation. No longer would he bow his head to the Pope in Rome. He embraced a faith in which the divinely appointed sovereign was a kingdom's link between man and God. He ordered the dissolution of the monasteries, religious establishments that were powerhouses of prayer for the dead, and controlled huge wealth and tracts of land. Between 1536 and 1540, over 800 abbeys, nunneries and monasteries were ruthlessly dissolved. Inspectors produced evidence of manifest sin, vicious, carnal and abominable sin. Their riches and lands were seized, roofs stripped of lead, monks and nuns turned out and pensioned Henry wrought a revolution, but it inspired resistance. Rebellions, plots, foreign invasions came to dominate the king's thinking. Ever more convinced that he was the sole interpreter of divine will, Henry's megalomania and paranoia grew. He became a tyrant. The Reformation enabled Henry to have his way and marry Anne Boleyn in 1533, but her failure to give birth to a male heir, an increasing strife with the king, led to her downfall. With Henry seeking a way out of an unhappy marriage, she was tried for treason and adultery and beheaded. A third wife, Jane Seymour, died from complications in childbirth. A fourth, to Anne of Cleves, was unconsummated and annulled just six months later. By August 1540, Henry had married, for a fifth time, to Catherine Howard. But this marriage lasted just two years before Catherine Howard met the same fate as Anne Boleyn. She was executed for treason. Henry was just as unsparing with his enemies. Chancellors and chief ministers found themselves at the executioner's block when they fell out of favour. Thomas More, who served as Lord High Chancellor, opposed the Reformation and refused to acknowledge the annulment of Henry and Catherine of Aragon's marriage. In July 1535, he was beheaded. In 1537, Henry had mercilessly executed the leaders of the Pilgrimage of Grace, an uprising opposed to the king's religious reformation. The removal of the monasteries had suddenly altered the religious life of many communities and stripped them of a source of employment and welfare. In 1539, the Act of Proclamations attempted to bolster his royal power. From now on he could rule by decree, his personal edicts having equal force to Acts of Parliament. Thomas Cromwell had been one of More's opponents and then succeeded him as Henry's chief advisor. He was an architect of the Reformation but he also fell out of favour and was decapitated. While Henry later regretted Cromwell's execution, he still sanctioned it. Without trial, on the 28th July 1540, the same day he married Catherine Howard, treason had already been extended to punish those uttering disloyal words. Many would die horribly as a result. Laws were also passed against witchcraft and sodomy which led to hundreds of innocent people being persecuted over the next 200 years. Late in his reign, his lavish lifestyle, the epic corruption of selling off church lands and his aggressive foreign policy had brought his kingdom to the point of bankruptcy. He replaced gold coins with copper ones in the great debasement of his final years, a bare-faced fraud. By the day of Henry's death in January 1547, some of those watching his mute, terrified grab at Archbishop Thomas Cramner's hand must have been relieved that their corpulent king was breathing his last. It's also possible to point to his charismatic leadership, his formidable physical and mental strength and his stubborn defence of the national interest. Some argue that Henry was one of England's greatest statesmen. In 1513 he launched a campaign against France. His army took Teruane and more importantly Tournai which were the largest medieval cities in northern Europe. If Henry had managed to hold on to it, it would have been a real foothold in France beyond Calais. He didn't, so he tried peace. Henry and his chief minister, Cardinal Wolsey, organised a congress in September 1518, an ambitious attempt at a Europe-wide settlement. They signed the Universal and Perpetual Peace with France. To celebrate, a lavish festival was held two years later, the Field of the Cloth of Gold, which glorified diplomacy as a new kind of power. This placed England firmly at the centre of European politics instead of being regarded as a remote, rain-swept island at the edge of the known world. Henry also brought a zeal to government. His emphasis on parliament turned it from an occasional king's court into a central pillar of the English constitution. Henry then used his parliaments to iron out some of the medieval ambiguities he saw around him. He had inherited the title Lord of Ireland when he came to the throne, a title given to his forebears by the papacy in the 12th century. In 1542 Henry passed an Act of Parliament which established himself as King of Ireland. His sovereignty now sprang from Parliament rather than Pope. Wales had been excluded from Parliament and ruled either direct by the Crown or by a large number of feudal lordships, a remnant of the violent conquest of Wales in previous centuries. Henry swept this aside with Acts of Parliament which incorporated Wales into England. Lordships were stripped of their powers, the land divided into counties with royal officials appointed and members of parliament sent to Westminster. Other innovations proved just as long lasting. In 1518 Henry turned his attention to the medical profession. To that point, apothecaries and physicians practised without any regulation. Quacks and scammers offered medical services to desperate members of the community who fell ill. Henry changed this. By royal decree he established what would become the Royal College of Physicians and followed it up with an Act of Parliament which remains in force today. This body now granted licences to those qualified to practice and punished those who were not. They also introduced the first standards for malpractice. It was a first step dragging medicine from an era of superstition and setting it on the path to becoming a scientific pursuit. His insecurity brought other benefits. Fearing for his realm he launched an astonishing campaign to map the whole coastline of England and where he mapped he fortified. It was Henry who conceived of England as a single landmass to be protected and turned into a defensible island by building forts along the south coast many of which he designed and by establishing a powerful navy. Previous leaps had been transitory and tiny by comparison to the one Henry now amassed. Henry built a standing navy with a bureaucracy, dockyards at Deptford, Woolwich and Portsmouth and dozens of vessels. He established a council for marine causes which would become the Admiralty and he transformed the ships and the way they fought from unwieldy vessels carrying soldiers who would board an enemy and fight it out hand to hand to sleek fast ships with heavy cannon that would blast their enemy into submission. For the first time the kingdom had a standing royal navy consisting of a fleet of battleships. Henry's impact on English culture was just as profound. He encouraged the art forms of sonnets and blank verse. He issued the first official complete works of Chaucer. Henry invented a national poet, a repository of England and Englishness, a literary past that would run alongside the history of England created for his Church of England. In some ways it was Henry who invented the very idea of what it means to be English. Most historians agree that there was an extraordinary change in Henry's character. Some have blamed this on a serious jousting accident in January 1536. He was thrown from his horse and crushed by it. The fall caused serious leg problems, greatly affecting his mobility in later life and leading to obesity at the time of his death. Studies have also concluded that it caused a brain injury that may have led to erratic behaviour. It appears that the late 1530s were when the handsome, musical, intelligent man who had succeeded to the throne grew vicious, capricious and unpredictable. When he became king, Henry had wanted to be loved. He wanted his kingship to be natural and just. He thought of himself as good. But by the end of his reign he reached for the tools of coercion, punishment and execution. Many of the changes he brought to English society would have been inconceivable before his reign. But many of the men and women who helped him drive through those changes ended up on the receiving end of his wrath. Cardinal Wolsey was hounded to death. His organising genius Thomas Cromwell and his beloved Queen Anne were executed. And they were but three of many. Victims of England's capricious renaissance prince. But a prince who reshaped England.