January 28, 1547—King Henry VIII of England died, ending the 38-year reign of a tyrant of unquenchable appetites who changed the course of British and world history.
I love mnemonic devices as means of helping me remember all sorts of esoteric facts (such as HOMES, an acronym for the Great Lakes). The couplet that generations of schoolchildren remembered about the fate of Henry’s wives -- “Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived” – strikes me as particularly inspired, if a bit flip about their ultimate fates.
In the early ‘70s, I remember watching The Six Wives of Henry VIII as a summer mini-series on CBS (this was probably after WNET had broadcast it earlier), and was enthralled by its depiction of the massive monarch.
In a reminiscence of the show in his Masterpiece: A Decade of "Masterpiece Theater" (1981), the series’ urbane host Alistair Cooke made as well-argued a case as you can get for Henry as a complicated figure: “a fine musician, a remarkable athlete, linguist, mathematician; a statesman of imagination and industry who unified the government of England, Wales and the northern provinces and whose foresight in building a navy made possible the later defeat of the Spanish Armada and opened the Atlantic to the colonizing of America; a theological scholar subtle enough to find plausible pretexts, other than his ire at the Pope and his fear of Spain, for wanting to break with Rome.”
How even-handed an assessment. How reasonable. How British.
And how beside the point.
The problem with Cooke’s picture is that it’s Henry as a young man. Moreover, it overlooks the instinct to carry all before him that was present from early in his career. Cardinal Wolsey told another adviser, “I warn you to be well advised and assured what matter ye put in his head; for ye shall never pull it out again.”
I’ve come to think of Henry as a psychopath with a scepter, much of it the result of his own doing.
The king’s appetites for food led to a bloated frame—and resulting ulcers on his leg. By his mid-40s, he had grown so abnormally obese that in one four-year period his waist increased by 17 inches. (That's why I like the portrait accompanying this blog.)
Two jousting accidents left him depressed and belligerent.
The miscarriages suffered by his first two wives and the lack of children from his three children, coupled with his physical torments and rages, a diagnosis of syphilis one that cannot be dismissed out of hand.
In a fascinating essay contributed to Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies (1995), Richard Marius made a revisionist case against the depiction of St. Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons, and even disputed the notion that Henry was a “raging maniac.”
But Marius’ own portrait of the king is, if anything, of a man far more dangerous than the movie image he disputes. “In public, especially in his younger days, he could be viperlike in his cunning. Henry remained personally friendly, almost to the last, with many of the people he destroyed—including [Thomas] Cromwell and Thomas Cardinal Wolsey.”
Make no mistake, then: this was a cruel and capricious ruler who sent loyal retainers to the gallows when he wasn’t hounding them to a premature grave, a man who broke with Rome not for any serious theological disagreement but (contra Alistair Cooke) because of the result of a sexual liaison.
This was an imperious monarch who fomented what historian Eamon Duffy called a “stripping of the altars” and helped sever a people who had no argument with the Pope from a religion to which their ancestors had adhered for centuries.
Yet a triumphant Protestantism dubbed Henry’s older daughter “Bloody Mary” and, even today, in a nation where church attendance has dropped precipitously, the initials “D.F.” (for “Defender of the Faith,” the title given by the pope to Henry for his defense against Luther) are retained on coinage. Go figure.
(For an excellent 1914 contrarian view of pre-Reformation England, please see History of the Catholic Church From Renaissance to the French Revolution, by the Jesuit historian James MacCaffrey.)
Henry has proven an irresistible subject for stage, film and TV, starting with Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. His reign presented three actors with the opportunity for plenty of scene-chewing, landing each Academy Award-nominated roles—Charles Laughton in The Private Life of Henry VIII (the one winner in the group); Robert Shaw in A Man for All Seasons; and Richard Burton in Anne of the Thousand Days. On TV, he’s been portrayed by Keith Michell (The Six Wives of Henry VIII) and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers (the recent Showtime series The Tudors).
Michell’s portrayal may be the best at detailing the gradual devolution of this monarch into physical and emotional decrepitude, but Shaw’s seems to me to penetrate the most to the heart of a type of absolutist impulse that achieved its apotheosis in the 20th century: a leader of surpassing hail-fellow-well-met charm one moment who can, on a dime, turn into a tyrant who poses an overwhelming danger to anyone unlucky enough to be within the vicinity of his wrath. (For a contemporary counterpart, see Forest Whitaker’s Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland.)
I love mnemonic devices as means of helping me remember all sorts of esoteric facts (such as HOMES, an acronym for the Great Lakes). The couplet that generations of schoolchildren remembered about the fate of Henry’s wives -- “Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived” – strikes me as particularly inspired, if a bit flip about their ultimate fates.
In the early ‘70s, I remember watching The Six Wives of Henry VIII as a summer mini-series on CBS (this was probably after WNET had broadcast it earlier), and was enthralled by its depiction of the massive monarch.
In a reminiscence of the show in his Masterpiece: A Decade of "Masterpiece Theater" (1981), the series’ urbane host Alistair Cooke made as well-argued a case as you can get for Henry as a complicated figure: “a fine musician, a remarkable athlete, linguist, mathematician; a statesman of imagination and industry who unified the government of England, Wales and the northern provinces and whose foresight in building a navy made possible the later defeat of the Spanish Armada and opened the Atlantic to the colonizing of America; a theological scholar subtle enough to find plausible pretexts, other than his ire at the Pope and his fear of Spain, for wanting to break with Rome.”
How even-handed an assessment. How reasonable. How British.
And how beside the point.
The problem with Cooke’s picture is that it’s Henry as a young man. Moreover, it overlooks the instinct to carry all before him that was present from early in his career. Cardinal Wolsey told another adviser, “I warn you to be well advised and assured what matter ye put in his head; for ye shall never pull it out again.”
I’ve come to think of Henry as a psychopath with a scepter, much of it the result of his own doing.
The king’s appetites for food led to a bloated frame—and resulting ulcers on his leg. By his mid-40s, he had grown so abnormally obese that in one four-year period his waist increased by 17 inches. (That's why I like the portrait accompanying this blog.)
Two jousting accidents left him depressed and belligerent.
The miscarriages suffered by his first two wives and the lack of children from his three children, coupled with his physical torments and rages, a diagnosis of syphilis one that cannot be dismissed out of hand.
In a fascinating essay contributed to Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies (1995), Richard Marius made a revisionist case against the depiction of St. Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons, and even disputed the notion that Henry was a “raging maniac.”
But Marius’ own portrait of the king is, if anything, of a man far more dangerous than the movie image he disputes. “In public, especially in his younger days, he could be viperlike in his cunning. Henry remained personally friendly, almost to the last, with many of the people he destroyed—including [Thomas] Cromwell and Thomas Cardinal Wolsey.”
Make no mistake, then: this was a cruel and capricious ruler who sent loyal retainers to the gallows when he wasn’t hounding them to a premature grave, a man who broke with Rome not for any serious theological disagreement but (contra Alistair Cooke) because of the result of a sexual liaison.
This was an imperious monarch who fomented what historian Eamon Duffy called a “stripping of the altars” and helped sever a people who had no argument with the Pope from a religion to which their ancestors had adhered for centuries.
Yet a triumphant Protestantism dubbed Henry’s older daughter “Bloody Mary” and, even today, in a nation where church attendance has dropped precipitously, the initials “D.F.” (for “Defender of the Faith,” the title given by the pope to Henry for his defense against Luther) are retained on coinage. Go figure.
(For an excellent 1914 contrarian view of pre-Reformation England, please see History of the Catholic Church From Renaissance to the French Revolution, by the Jesuit historian James MacCaffrey.)
Henry has proven an irresistible subject for stage, film and TV, starting with Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. His reign presented three actors with the opportunity for plenty of scene-chewing, landing each Academy Award-nominated roles—Charles Laughton in The Private Life of Henry VIII (the one winner in the group); Robert Shaw in A Man for All Seasons; and Richard Burton in Anne of the Thousand Days. On TV, he’s been portrayed by Keith Michell (The Six Wives of Henry VIII) and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers (the recent Showtime series The Tudors).
Michell’s portrayal may be the best at detailing the gradual devolution of this monarch into physical and emotional decrepitude, but Shaw’s seems to me to penetrate the most to the heart of a type of absolutist impulse that achieved its apotheosis in the 20th century: a leader of surpassing hail-fellow-well-met charm one moment who can, on a dime, turn into a tyrant who poses an overwhelming danger to anyone unlucky enough to be within the vicinity of his wrath. (For a contemporary counterpart, see Forest Whitaker’s Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland.)
No comments:
Post a Comment