henry VIII unmasked--1/21/25

21 Jan 2025

henry VIII unmasked--1/21/25

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Today's selection-- from Unruly by David Mitchell. Henry VIII’s legacy.

“When you think of the word 'king', what image springs to mind? This might be a bad time to ask you. You're reading a book all about kings. I've been mentioning them like mad — people in crowns will be buzzing round your head like tweeting birds round a concussed cartoon character. Still, I don't think I've got the rhetorical power to drive out the main kingly picture from your mind. Think of a king and your brain is likely to conjure up a portrait of Henry VIII.

“It'll probably be one of the Hans Holbein ones where he's all square: square ends to his feet which are planted wide apart so they're directly underneath his square shoulder pads, framing his big square chest. And plonked on top, his large square head, with beard covering the bottom two corners and hat covering the top two — the slightly jaunty angle of the latter utterly undermined by the extremely unjaunty look on the cruel piggy-eyed face. He looks a right prick. In summary, that's what he was.

“Of course it's more complicated than that and the chances are you already know that. He's such a famous king that almost anyone who would ever buy or read a history book in English knows the main things about him. There are six of them and they're his wives: Divorced, Beheaded, Died, Divorced, Beheaded, Survived. In retrospect we should have given them names. I've stolen that line from the great comedian Rob Brydon who says it after listing his children's ages. It works well for our dismissive relationship with those women. Now, as then, they only seem to matter in terms of their relationship with him. We all know men like that — at least Henry had the excuse of being king.

“The odd thing about Henry VIII is that we know such a lot about his feelings and desires. He lived his life in public, like a cross between Kim Kardashian and Vladimir Putin. We know about his physical vanity, his lusts, his desperation to have a son, the many crises in his love life, his conflicted spirituality, his young athletic sexiness, his embarrassing weight gain and increasing physical decrepitude.

Portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger

“His whole chaotic, bad-tempered personal life is still being played and replayed before us. If you visit the Tower of London, you can see his various suits of armour and how they got larger as he got fatter. How embarrassing for him. He was a very proud and self-important man — the thought of millions of people over hundreds of years knowing all about his ballooning waistline, his festering leg wound and, in later life, his irascible inability to get it up would have made him shudder and shout and have someone executed. In a sense, knowing all that humiliating detail is part of posterity's revenge.

“Only part though. The rest of this book is all about how wrong Henry VIII turned out to be about everything. Nothing he tried to put in place really worked out. Power went in very different directions from those he'd planned. His impact on history was not the one he intended, though he did become very very famous.

“The sense we get is of an enormous, tyrannical infant, throwing aside chicken bones like toys out of his pram. This vision of the king as child, as spoilt brat, is very influential — it infuses A. A. Milne's poem about King John and also another great one of his, 'The King's Breakfast', in which a monarch goes back to bed in a sulk because someone has suggested he might want to try marmalade: 'Nobody ... could call me a fussy man ... ' They certainly couldn't — they wouldn't dare — and they couldn't call Henry VIII a selfish fatso going through a midlife crisis ... I don't know whether Milne's view of a ruler would make sense without the thought of Henry VIII demanding that his ministers do the impossible and arrange for him to change wives.

“For me, this idea that he was spoilt is tied in with the fact that he's got exactly the wrong amount, and type, of entitlement. His father was a self-made man, for all his talk of royal blood. Henry VIII is, in some ways, a typical second generation waster. Phrases like 'he thinks the world owes him a living' spring to my resentful mind, which is strange because legitimate kings are justified in their sense of entitlement. The idea is that the world does owe them a living. They were entitled to be in charge and no one else was. My distaste when Henry VIII exhibits those assumptions is a sign that, heir of his father by primogeniture though he was, he is still tainted by usurpation.”