1536: The Year That Changed Henry VIII

Copyright © 2009 Suzannah Lipscomb
This edition copyright © 2009 Lion Hudson

The right of Suzannah Lipscomb to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Published by Lion Books
an imprint of
Lion Hudson plc
Wilkinson House, Jordan Hill Road,
Oxford OX2 8DR, England
www.lionhudson.com/lion
UK hardback ISBN 978 0 7459 5365 6
US hardback ISBN 978 0 8254 7938 0
UK paperback ISBN 978 0 7459 5332 8
US paperback ISBN 978 0 8254 7922 9
epub ISBN 978 0 7459 5903 0
Kindle ISBN 978 0 7459 5902 3

First edition 2009
First electronic edition 2012

Text Acknowledgments
Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas
Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Cover illustration: Clare Melinsky

A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library

Praise for 1536

‘Suzannah Lipscomb shows vividly how the events of a single tumultuous year, from marital betrayal to mass rebellion, crystallized Henry’s personal fears, religious priorities, political style and visual image, shaping the tyranny of his last years, the idiosyncrasies of his Reformation and the lasting myth of the wilful colossus.’

Steven Gunn, Lecturer in Modern History, University of Oxford

‘An enlightening and comprehensive analysis of a pivotal year in Henry VIII’s reign.’

Tracy Borman, author of
King’s Mistress, Queen’s Servant: Henrietta Howard

‘
1536
is a lucid and evocative account of Henry VIII in his times, and a finely judged portrait of the pomp, envy, fury and melancholy of kingship. It is also an object lesson in male vainglory, and the precipitous decline even the most gilded life can lurch into: of how the best-known and most naturally gifted monarch in British history succumbed to the strange, familiar passions of age, arrogance and insecurity.’

Tom Chatfield, Arts & Books Editor,
Prospect

‘At once scholarly and a joy to read.’

Thomas Betteridge, Reader in Early Modern English Literature,
Oxford Brookes University

For my father and mother, Nick and Marguerite,
my great-aunt, Sylvia,
and in loving memory of my grandad, Charlie,
all of whom were proud of the book before
a word of it had been written.

Table of Contents

Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Praise for 1536
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Preface
Part One: Setting the Scene
  
Prologue
  
Chapter 1: The Change
  
Chapter 2: Young Henry
  
Chapter 3: The Divorce
  
Chapter 4: 1536 and All That
Part Two: The Crisis of Masculinity
  
Chapter 5: A Wife’s Death
  
Chapter 6: The King’s Honour
  
Chapter 7: The Fall of Anne Boleyn
  
Chapter 8: A Dearth of Heirs
  
Chapter 9: Masculinity and Image
Part Three: The King’s Religion
  
Chapter 10: The Reformation in England
  
Chapter 11: 1536: The Church Established
  
Chapter 12: The Role of Henry VIII in Later Reformation
  
Chapter 13: Henry VIII’s Theology
  
Chapter 14: The Aftermath of the Reformation
Part Four: Henry the Tyrant
  
Chapter 15: The Pilgrimage of Grace
  
Chapter 16: The Mouldwarp Prophecy
  
Chapter 17: Courtly Dissent
  
Chapter 18: Did Henry VIII Become a Tyrant?
Epilogue
Appendix 1: Timeline of 1536
Appendix 2: Henry VIII’s Wives
Appendix 3: The Cost of Living in Henry VIII’s Reign
Notes
Endnotes
Further Reading

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible had I not been offered the post of Associate in the Knowledge Transfer Partnership between Historic Royal Palaces and Kingston University, which is part-funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. I am very grateful for the wonderful opportunities this role has opened up to me, this book included.

I would like to express my gratitude to Historic Royal Palaces for kindly agreeing to release copyright on the research I had carried out as part of my duties as the Research Curator on the Henry VIII project, and especially would like to thank Lucy Worsley, Polly Schomberg, Erica Longfellow and Kent Rawlinson for their support and friendship. My thanks also go to Benedetta Tiana for being the first person to be enthused by the 1536 idea!

I am grateful to the many scholarly giants on whose shoulders I have stood. I would particularly like to acknowledge my debt to the work of George Bernard, Susan Brigden, Xanthe Brooke and David Crombie, Michael Bush and David Bownes, C. S. L. Davies, G. R. Elton, Christopher Haigh, R. W. Hoyle, Eric Ives, Stanford E. Lehmberg, Diarmaid MacCulloch, Peter Marshall, Alec Ryrie, David Starkey, Tania String and Greg Walker. I thank Tania String for giving me a copy of a forthcoming article in draft. I am very grateful to my peer-reviewer, Eric Ives, for his thoughtful comments on the text. As always, the errors that remain are mine alone.

On a personal note, I would like to thank Tom Betteridge, my wonderful DPhil supervisor Robin Briggs, Lyndal Roper and the Balliol history workshop, and Susan Brigden, my undergraduate tutor, inspiration and friend – the person who first introduced me to the words ‘you loke for ded men’s showys’. I’d also like to thank John Cairns for taking a great author’s photo and Miranda Powell for improving the book immeasurably with her thoughtful copy-editing. Thank you to the friends and family who have encouraged and supported me as I wrote this book. I am enormously grateful to Kate Kirkpatrick, my excellent editor, and to my mother, Marguerite Lipscomb, who’s been my splendid and untiring first reader and critic, and the source of much encouragement. Thank you.

Preface

M
y publishers and I quibbled over the word ‘changed’ in the title. I had put forward the extraordinary litany of events that occurred in 1536, all with huge repercussions for Henry VIII, those around him and his kingdom in general, and marshalled the evidence of his behaviour after this point, noting how markedly it differed from the early years of his reign. But ‘changed’? Was it not too dogmatic, too emphatic? I worried about the confines of a year, especially as the Tudors understood their years to start and end at different points to our 1 January – 31 December axis. I also worried about the apparent conceit of positing the seismic shifts of Henry VIII’s thinking within this one (Gregorian) calendar year that occurred after his ‘divorce’ from Katherine of Aragon, his marriage to Anne Boleyn, the Acts of Supremacy and Succession and the deaths of Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher.

And yet, the more I researched, studied, and pondered the facts, the more convinced I’ve become that this year really
did
change Henry VIII. He did move from being the much fêted, glorious, and fun young monarch of the 1510s and 1520s, into the overweight, suspicious, ruthless tyrant who is commonly depicted as in popular culture. In some ways, of course, this was the result of a cumulative process, but the events of 1536 catalyzed, fostered and entrenched this change. Whether looking at Henry VIII’s character, health, religion, image, reputation or legacy, it is possible to talk of ‘before’ and ‘after’ 1536.

This book really explores how Henry VIII became Henry VIII – and who Henry VIII really was. As such, it sets itself up to tackle what Eric Ives has called ‘the ultimate unresolvable paradox of Tudor history: Henry VIII’s psychology’.
¹
There are evident difficulties with doing this. The available evidence gives us limited access to Henry VIII’s thoughts, motivations and emotions – there are, for example, no helpful personal diaries or confessional letters that tell us his thoughts and feelings over, say, the period of Anne Boleyn’s arrest and execution.
¹

A number of commentators have put Henry VIII on the psychiatrist’s couch. Psychologist J. C. Flügel considered Henry VIII with reference to the Oedipus complex. In doing so, he suggested that Henry was driven by conflicting tendencies in his ‘psychosexual life’; that is, the simultaneous desire for, and repulsion by, sexual rivals, incestuous liaisons and chastity in his wives. Miles F. Shore suggested Henry VIII’s childhood separations from his parents, and alternating adulation and brutality, contributed to a mid-life ‘crisis of generativity’, extreme narcissism, grandiose fantasies, and transience in relationships. With these serious analyses by psychologists at one end of the scale, at the other is the pop psychology that has informed the production of the myriad films about Henry VIII. The scriptwriter of ITV’s 2003 Henry VIII, Peter Morgan, described Henry as a ‘neglected second son… there’s a vulnerability to him… [he’s] impulsive, powerful, not a complete oaf, a wounded character’. Ray Winstone, who played the title role, reflected, ‘Once [Henry] got rid of his first wife, who was his brother’s widow, he lost a bit of his soul. Once you do that, you can’t get it back. And each [wife] became easier to get rid of. That’s what I was trying to portray. A man who, at the beginning, was a young man in love, but had been left this legacy by his father: have a son. And that would consume him.’ Henry VIII can appear to be, as Lacey Baldwin Smith described him, ‘a baffling composite of shifting shadows’.
²

My experience at Hampton Court Palace has shown me that what visitors want to know about people in the past above all is ‘how they felt’. Yet, it can be difficult enough knowing what one feels oneself, let alone understanding the feelings of another person at a 500-year remove. There are numerous ways to read Henry VIII’s character, but it is important to be confined by the available evidence. This book attempts to recreate and understand the pressures on, and convictions of, Henry VIII, and it does so by analyzing contemporary reports of his behaviour and speech, material produced by Henry VIII himself including his letters, theological treatises, royal proclamations and other state papers, and the context of the culture and attitudes of the period. It does this cautiously, however, and refrains, I hope, from wild speculation or unreasonable conjecture. It is sometimes necessary to infer and extrapolate from available evidence, but my inference has been trammelled by existing evidence and reasoning. The picture one can form of Henry, the man and monarch, is one composed of fragments – be they his letters to the rebels of the Pilgrimage of Grace, the artwork he commissioned, the marginal annotations in his psalter or the gossip reported by the Imperial ambassador, Eustace Chapuys. From this we can make reasoned, intelligent guesses, but this must always be in line with what we actually know.

To readers familiar with Tudor history, much of what follows will be commonplace; as Lacey Baldwin Smith once wrote, ‘most of the ideas have been knocking about the historical attic for years’. I do think, however, that there is a new perspective to be gained from the historical method of examining the events of a year in conjunction with each other. Connections can be made between, for instance, Anne Boleyn’s alleged adultery and the art history narrative of Holbein’s Henry, or between Reginald Pole’s
De Unitate
and Thomas Cromwell’s appointment as vicegerent in spirituals over all ecclesiastical affairs. Links can also be made between even apparently contradictory behaviour, like Henry’s partying with Jane Seymour and the ladies of the court during Anne’s imprisonment, and his later telling Chapuys that he felt himself growing old. Set in the context of the reign as a whole, the analysis of 1536 and its repercussions can shape a deeper understanding of this most fascinating and elusive of monarchs – an understanding that both humanizes him and looks unflinchingly at his flaws. The Henry VIII who emerges is one whose reactions to betrayal negatively determined the fates of many.
³