Leviathan: The Rise of Britain as a World Power. David Scott

in a fashion heretofore unknown, since she has such a king as she never had before?’³¹ With hindsight, of course, More’s words are full of irony. For when Henry VIII did finally prove himself such a king as never before, by breaking with Rome, More and many others were very far from rejoicing. But in 1509 there was no hint of the storm to come. Indeed, for the first fifteen or so years of his reign the young king made no radical break with his father’s reign, let alone with Catholic Christendom. What was new and dazzling about Henry VIII was his larger-than-life personality and glamorous style of kingship. Optimism abounded at his accession, partly because the people were thoroughly sick of his father, but also because the eighteen-year-old Henry VIII cut such a dashing and graceful figure. When the date of his coronation was announced ‘a vast multitude of persons at once hurried to London to see their monarch in the full bloom of his youth and high birth … everybody loved him’. At six feet two inches tall, with a 32-inch waist, the young Henry seemed, in the words of the Venetian ambassador,

      the handsomest potentate I ever set eyes on; above the usual height, with an extremely fine calf to his leg, his complexion very fair and bright, with auburn hair combed straight and short, in the French fashion, and a round face so very beautiful, that it would become a pretty woman.³²

      Henry’s beauty was complemented by his physical prowess. In his youth he was a fine athlete and tennis-player, and remained an accomplished horseman to the end of his life. Hunting was almost an obsession with him, causing his secretary (a bookish type) to complain that he turned ‘the sport … into a martyrdom’ for those obliged to keep up with him during the chase.³³ As with most princes of the period, Henry was trained in the art of killing men as well as deer, and was proficient in a wide variety of weapons, including sword, lance and longbow. He also liked to practise with firearms and to experiment with artillery, destroying the roof of a nearby house on one occasion. But when it came to martial pursuits his real passion was jousting. Like his father and Edward IV, Henry was fascinated by the culture of pageantry and chivalric machismo that had reached its apogee in the court of the dukes of Burgundy, and which was epitomised in the knightly tournament. No expense was spared in staging these extravagant spectacles at Henry’s court. The bill for the 1511 tournament alone came to £4,000, or considerably more than it cost to build the pride of Henry’s navy, the 78-gun Mary Rose. His father’s mantra of ‘keeping distance’ had confined him to the royal box during tournaments; Henry, on the other hand, was a full-blooded participant. His tournaments showcased not only Tudor magnificence, therefore, but also his own skill in arms to impressionable foreign dignitaries. So spectacular was the tournament he staged in 1517 to mark his alliance with the Emperor Maximilian, so sumptuously were the hundreds of knights and footmen arrayed (Henry’s armour and accoutrements alone were valued at 300,000 ducats, or roughly £75,000), that one visiting Italian clergyman among the 50,000 or so spectators was quite overcome:

      In short, the wealth and civilization of the world are here; and those who call the English barbarians appear to me to render themselves such. I here perceive very elegant manners, extreme decorum, and very great politeness; and amongst other things there is this most invincible King, whose acquirements and qualities are so many and excellent that I consider him to excel all who ever wore a crown …³⁴

      Henry’s jousting days did not come to an end until 1536, when the 44-year-old king was unhorsed by an opponent and knocked unconscious for two hours.

      Henry’s personal accomplishments were not confined to the tiltyard or the tennis court. He was educated in a manner befitting a Renaissance prince, according to a classically inspired curriculum of history, poetry, grammar and ethics. Somewhere along the way he acquired a strong grounding in theology – as his later debates with his senior clergy were to show – and an enthusiasm for astronomy and geometry. He was also a fine linguist. According to the Venetian ambassadors, Henry could speak French and Latin, and understood Italian well. He had a particular talent for music, and ‘played on almost every instrument, [and] sang and composed fairly’.³⁵ The celebrated Dutch humanist and church critic Desiderius Erasmus (c.1467–1536) thought him a genius, but that was mere flattery. Henry’s intellectual interests were genuine, but not profound. Moreover, his eagerness to attract the Continent’s best poets, musicians, painters and architects to his court was rooted in the same desire that fed his passion for chivalric ostentation – that is, to outshine his fellow monarchs. He followed his father, therefore, in commissioning works from some of the most fashionable virtuosi of the day, including the Florentine sculptor Pietro Torrigiano and the Flemish painter Hans Holbein. Torrigiano tried to persuade his fellow Florentine the brilliant Benvenuto Cellini to join him in England, but Cellini had no wish to live among ‘such beasts as the English’.³⁶ Most of Henry’s client artists were essentially second-raters. Nevertheless, his patronage of Renaissance talent went some way to dispel the belief at the centres of European culture that the English were little better than barbarians.

      Henry’s flamboyant kingship certainly made a change from the rapacious authoritarianism of his father’s final years. But there would be no fundamental shift in royal policy, at least on the domestic front, until the king’s ‘great matter’ began to trouble the political waters in the later 1520s. One of Henry’s first decisions on becoming king was to honour what he claimed was his father’s deathbed wish that he marry Prince Arthur’s widow Katherine of Aragon. Similarly, Henry inherited his father’s determination to extend royal authority at the expense of the Church in England. But he showed no sympathy with the challenge to Catholic orthodoxy and papal authority begun in the late 1510s by the German friar and theology professor Martin Luther (1483–1546) – a confrontation that precipitated the Protestant Reformation. Indeed, in 1521, Henry was given the title ‘defender of the faith’ by a grateful pope for writing a rebuttal of Luther’s ideas, although most of the hard work on it had been done by a small group of scholars that included Thomas More, who was knighted that same year.

      Another carryover from the previous reign revealed a darker side to Henry’s character: his suspicion of possible Yorkist claimants to the crown. It would be many years before Henry had a son – or at least one that lived beyond a few weeks – and until he did so the Tudor dynasty remained insecure. Like his father, therefore, he used political executions to weed out potential challengers. Among the earliest victims of Henry’s suspicious mind were the earl of Suffolk (Lincoln’s brother) and the duke of Buckingham. Both men went to the block for the sole reason that they had more Plantagenet blood in their veins than Henry did. Henry executed more of his leading subjects than any English monarch before or since. The death toll would eventually include two wives, the 68-year-old countess of Salisbury (surely a threat to nobody), and six close attendants. It was Henry who introduced the punishment of boiling alive, although this particularly macabre form of death was reserved for poisoners. ‘If all the pictures and Patternes of a mercilesse Prince were lost in the World,’ thought Sir Walter Ralegh (1554–1618), ‘they might all againe be painted to the life, out of the story of this King.’³⁷ Henry was less distrustful of the nobility in general than his father had been, and its numbers revived during his reign. But though he had the Council Learned in the Law abolished, he continued the use of penal bonds to keep aristocratic troublemakers in line. He also followed his father in exploiting the crown’s feudal and prerogative rights to maximise cash-flow, and for the first few years of his reign he stuck with the wise heads of Henry VII’s council, minus those of Empson and Dudley. Again like his father, Henry was indifferent to the needs of the merchant community. His wars and the taxation required to fund them depressed rather than promoted trade.

      When Henry did stray from his father’s style of government it was not to reform or innovate but to free himself from the chores of being king. Following the precedents set by his medieval predecessors, Henry employed able bishops to undertake the major administrative offices of the realm. But one, in particular, rose so high in the king’s favour, and took over so many of the day-to-day tasks of kingship, that he came to be known as alter rex, ‘the second king’ – this was Thomas Wolsey (c.1470–1530), archbishop of York from 1514, and lord chancellor and a cardinal from the following year. The son of an Ipswich butcher – hence the jibes about his ‘greasy genealogy’ – Wolsey had made his name as a gifted and energetic administrator. Above all, he was an acute reader of the royal character.