Henry VIII

Henry VIII (1491-1547), king of England (1509-47). Henry was born on 23 June 1491 at Greenwich, the third child and second son of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York. On the death of his elder brother Arthur in April 1502 he became heir apparent; a few days after the death of his unpopular father, he was proclaimed king on 23 April 1509. Despite being only 17, Henry acted as king in his own right at once. Shortly after his accession he solemnized his fateful marriage to Catherine, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain and widow of his brother Arthur. However, apart from sacrificing Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley, his father's two most detested servants, he made few changes among his leading advisers. He began to play the European game of military alliances almost at once: a disastrous campaign in the Pyrenees in 1512 was followed in 1513 by the more successful seizure of Tournai and Thérouanne and the earl of Surrey's demolition of the Scottish aristocracy at Flodden. Peace was made in 1514.

The political scene was transformed by Thomas Wolsey, who used his position as royal chaplain and almoner to build-up a formidable collection of church and government posts, becoming lord chancellor in 1515 and papal cardinal-legate a latere in 1518. With the accession of Francis I of France (1515-47) Henry found a rival whom he both disliked and imitated. For several years he manœuvred in the diplomatic game, until in 1518 he and Wolsey stage-managed the great European peace treaty of London (1518). The next year another charismatic leader, Charles V of Austria, Burgundy, and Spain, became Holy Roman emperor, and Henry began meddling in the endless duel between Charles and Francis. He attacked France in 1522-3, but withdrew from the alliance just too soon to profit from Francis's defeat and capture at Pavia (1525).

During the 1520s Henry's marriage to Catherine had deteriorated. After bearing a princess (the future Mary I) in 1516, the queen had suffered a series of miscarriages and still-births which reawakened Henry's early misgivings about the marriage. By early 1527 an annulment of the marriage was openly discussed. However, in that year Charles V's troops sacked Rome and forced Pope Clement VII to seek protection from Charles V. While in the emperor's hands, the pope would not shame his captor's aunt by annulling her marriage. Wolsey tried unsuccessfully to persuade the pope to allow him to resolve the issue in England. When the final failure of this effort became apparent, Wolsey was stripped of his offices; he only escaped treason charges by his own death (1530).

The king's belief in his status as God's representative now became a potent political factor. It was exploited by a group of political theorists managed by the new rising minister, a former client of Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell (1485-1540). In the Act in Restraint of Appeals (24 Hen. VIII c. 12, 1533), the preamble enunciated Henry's claim to ‘imperial’ authority, without earthly superior, over clergy and laity alike. Henry secretly married Anne Boleyn in January 1533, and was formally separated from Catherine the following May. Having then been excommunicated by the pope, however, Henry's regime enacted further statutes up to 1536, which cut all fiscal, legal, and spiritual ties to Rome and left the English church in schism.

Having broken with the papacy, the question of doctrine could not be evaded. Henry had a queen, Anne Boleyn, an archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cramer, and a leading minister, Cromwell, all of whom were in varying degrees Lutheran sympathizers. Henry's personal detestation of Luther, with whom he had exchanged polemics in the 1520s, and his horror of what he called ‘sacramentarian’ heresy left religious policy the plaything of factions. Nevertheless, enough innovations, both religious and fiscal, were introduced to bring about the revolts known as the ‘Pilgrimage of Grace’ in autumn 1536. The regime survived these by biding its time and retaining the loyalty of the nobility and the south. However, the Act of Six Articles of 1539 marked a reaffirmation of certain traditional shibboleths and a hunt for ‘heretics’. Meanwhile, the regime plundered the church, taxing the seculars heavily while abolishing the regular orders entirely and confiscating their wealth (1536-40).

Instability in official doctrine was matched by sanguinary feuds at court. In May 1536, after the birth of a daughter (the future Elizabeth I) and a miscarriage, the temperamental Anne Boleyn, with her brother and several of her attendants, were executed for alleged acts of treasonable adultery. By the end of the month the king had married Jane Seymour, who bore him his only son, the future Edward VI, on 12 October 1537 and died twelve days afterwards. Court rivalry and religious instability combined in the king's search for a fourth wife. Despite the reactionary strain then evident in religious policy, Henry was cajoled into a marriage-contract with Anne, sister of the duke of Cleves, a reforming sympathizer. Henry accepted her on the strength of a flattering portrait, and married her, with evident distaste, on 6 January 1540. Thomas Cromwell survived this disastrous marriage for only a few months.

In his final years the king became more unpredictable and vulnerable. Catherine Howard, niece of the duke of Norfolk, whom Henry had married on the day of Cromwell's execution, proved unfaithful. Her fall and execution on 13 February 1542 left the king devastated. He threw himself once more into diplomacy and war. A successful campaign in 1542 by Lord Wharton in Scotland left Scotland's army broken and accelerated the death of its king, but Henry did not follow up the victory. Instead he made fresh overtures to Charles V and in June 1544 invaded France again, capturing Boulogne at huge cost shortly before Charles V made a separate peace with Francis I. In these final years Henry wavered between a campaign against ‘heresy’, which reached peaks in 1543 (when it threatened Cranmer) and 1546 (when it briefly threatened Henry's last queen, Catherine Parr), and periods when Henry allowed Cranmer to embark on cautious, partial reform of the old liturgy. In the dying months of the reign the reformers, led by the earl of Hertford (Somerset), secured the near-total defeat of the conservative Howards; the duke of Norfolk was awaiting execution when the king himself died on 28 January 1547. The education of the young Edward VI had been committed to reforming humanist tutors, so the old king's conservative legacy did not last into the new reign.

Few kings of England set out so consciously to glorify the style of the monarchy. Henry was the first to be addressed as ‘Majesty’ and the first defender of the faith and supreme head of the church. He had great athletic strength, a talent for music, and an enthusiasm for theology. In this light, the impression is of advantages squandered. He came to the throne rich and bequeathed debts, a corrupt coinage, and roaring inflation. His impact on the history of his time was colossal; yet nearly every part of his legacy was either disowned or significantly reinvented under his successors.