Monarchy: From the Middle Ages to Modernity. David Starkey

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СКАЧАТЬ in the magnificent Lady Chapel which he had commissioned in Westminster Abbey. A few feet away would soon lie the other significant woman in his life, but for whom he might never have been king – his mother.

      Henry died in his bed and he died rich. But if the last forty years had proved anything at all, it was that the traditional English limited monarchy had, in an age of Continental absolutism and increasingly professional armies, ceased to work. Henry’s successor would give it one last try. And then, to his surprise and everyone else’s, he would create a new and revolutionary imperial monarchy, different alike from that of his medieval predecessors and his authoritarian father. This successor was Henry’s second son and namesake and, reigning as King Henry VIII, he would change the face of England for ever.

      

       KING AND EMPEROR

      HENRY VIII

      On 24 June 1509, Henry VIII was crowned in front of the high altar at Westminster Abbey. The supreme symbol of the Tudor monarchy, the Crown Imperial, was now his.

      But despite the myths and hopes embodied in the crown that sat on the seventeen-year-old boy’s head, it was a debased inheritance. All Henry VII’s dreams of an imperial English monarchy that ruled Scotland, Ireland and France and was a dominant power in Europe had ended in frustration. The old king, in his last inglorious years, was regarded as a miser and a tyrant hardly worthy of the crown he had designed. Instead, Henry VII ruled his ‘empire’ like a private landlord – strictly and with a beady eye on his rent. For those who knew anything of history, this was not how the ruler of a great nation was supposed to behave.

      The son agreed, and his subjects knew it. His personality – sunny, gregarious and romantic – was the opposite of his father’s, and it promised a fresh start – although no one could have guessed how radical, even revolutionary, it would prove to be. Naturally, the young king was greeted with an outburst of joy after so many years of repugnant rule. ‘Heaven and earth rejoice,’ wrote Lord Mountjoy; ‘everything is full of milk and honey and nectar … Avarice has fled the country, our king is not after gold, or gems, or precious metals, but virtue, glory, immortality.’

      He was right and Henry’s reign turned into a quest for fame as obsessive as that of any modern celebrity. It took many different forms. At first, Henry would try to breathe new life into the old monarchy. But it would essentially be a last gasp of traditional medieval kingship. Thereafter, the search for glory would eventually lead Henry into territory where no English king had ever dared to venture before. But it came at a price. Above all, it threatened to upset the traditional balance between freedom and authority and to turn English kingship into an untrammelled despotism that claimed power over men’s souls as well as their bodies.

      I

      At the time of Henry’s birth in 1491, the Tudors were a new, not very secure dynasty. His father had failed to reconcile the defeated Yorkist nobility and was about to embark on an unsuccessful war in France. Threats of rebellion and civil war stalked in the background, and the once hopeful king retreated ever more into privacy; ever more into the role of a greedy landlord.

      And, in any case, the future of the Tudor dynasty was not destined for Henry himself, but for his elder brother Arthur, Prince of Wales. Henry, as the second son, wasn’t expected to be king, and as a result he received a rather modern, unkingly kind of upbringing. Instead of having the rigorous demands of kingship knocked into him by male tutors and role models, he was brought up at Eltham Palace by his mother and with his sisters, who idolized the robust and self-confident boy.

      This early experience of women’s love made Henry a romantic, and paved the way to the great passions and crimes of his adult life. Yet he was no mere pampered prince. Instead, Henry would always combine his romantic passions with sincere, if second-rate, intellectual ambitions. Once again it went back to his mother. She made sure that his education was of the best and a succession of distinguished tutors gave him a thorough grounding in the latest Latin scholarship. Even the superlearned Erasmus was impressed, and when he met Henry, aged only eight, he was bowled over by the boy’s confidence, precocious learning and star quality.

      In 1502, when he was eleven, Henry’s life was struck by family tragedy. His brother Arthur died suddenly of a fever, followed soon after by their beloved mother. Henry was now the sole heir to the Tudor dynasty.

      For the boy, his new status was a double-edged sword. He might be the Prince of Wales, but the carefree life that he had known as a boy was gone for ever. Quickly brought to court, he learnt at first hand the uncertain and inglorious reality of Tudor monarchy. Nor was there much love lost between Prince Henry and the king. Henry was growing up fast and he was already taller and broader than his father. But the king, aware that the whole future of the Tudor dynasty depended on the life of his only surviving son, was fiercely protective.

      A chief source of the conflict came over participation in extreme sports. Henry wanted to take part in the manly, aristocratic sport of jousting. But, because it was so dangerous, his father allowed him to ride only in unarmed training exercises: the inheritance of Bosworth was too precious to be risked in mere games. So, when the real thing took place, Henry had to sit it out, chafing on the sidelines while his friends slugged it out like men. The result was a clash, not of arms, but of the conflicting values between father and son about what it meant to be an English king.

      But on 21 April 1509, after twenty-four years on the throne, Henry VII died, and Henry VIII was proclaimed king amidst wild scenes of popular rejoicing. The most impressive tribute came from Thomas More, the great scholar and lawyer, whose life and death were to be inextricably linked with Henry’s. ‘This day’, he wrote of the new king’s coronation, ‘is the end of our slavery, the fount of liberty; the end of sadness, the beginning of joy.’

      Fired with the idealism of youth, Henry had strong ideas about kingship. He had been brought up on the myths of King Arthur and the exploits of his ancestor Henry V, and like them he believed that a great king should be a great warrior. When he was fourteen, Henry first saw what was then believed to be Arthur’s Round Table at Winchester. The great visual and literary myths that surrounded the new Tudor dynasty might have been mere political contrivances for Henry VII; but for Henry VIII they were real. Now he was king, he was determined to take Arthur and Henry V as his models of kingship. Like them, he would be a great jouster, he would have a brilliant court, and above all he would follow in their footsteps and conquer France.

      Funded by the large inheritance left to him by his father, and benefiting from the first peaceful transition of power since the Wars of the Roses, Henry’s court took on the feel of a magnificently armed camp, with an endless round of tournaments and jousts. There was an insatiable appetite for martial entertainments and courtly splendour. All Europe was dazzled by the English court’s new-found glamour and extraordinary pageantry. A Spaniard reported home that the courtiers had instituted a twice-weekly foot combat with javelin and spear ‘in imitation of … knights of olden time, of whom so much is written in books’. Many young nobles participated: ‘But the most conspicuous … the most assiduous and the most interested … is the king himself.’ It satisfied the longing for a splendid monarchy. It also signalled Henry’s intention: the conquest of France.

      To that end, one of Henry’s first acts as king was to marry his brother’s widow, the Spanish Princess Catherine of Aragon, who was six years his senior. The marriage would sow the seeds of upheaval and revolutionary change in the English monarchy. At СКАЧАТЬ