Henry VIII

Accession to the throne

Henry was the second son of Henry VII, first of the Tudor line, and Elizabeth, daughter of Edward IV, first king of the short-lived line of York. When his elder brother, Arthur, died in 1502, Henry became the heir to the throne; of all the Tudor monarchs, he alone spent his childhood in calm expectation of the crown, which helped give an assurance of majesty and righteousness to his willful, ebullient character. He excelled in book learning as well as in the physical exercises of an aristocratic society, and, when in 1509 he ascended the throne, great things were expected of him. Six feet tall, powerfully built, and a tireless athlete, huntsman, and dancer, he promised England the joys of spring after the long winter of Henry VII's reign.

Henry and his ministers exploited the dislike inspired by his father's energetic pursuit of royal rights by sacrificing, without a thought, some of the unpopular institutions and some of the men that had served his predecessor. Yet the unpopular means for governing the realm soon reappeared because they were necessary. Soon after his accession, Henry married Catherine of Aragon, Arthur's widow, and the attendant lavish entertainments ate into the modest royal reserves.

More serious was Henry's determination to engage in military adventure. Europe was being kept on the boil by rivalries between the French and Spanish kingdoms, mostly over Italian claims; and, against the advice of his older councillors, Henry in 1512 joined his father-in-law, Ferdinand II of Aragon, against France and ostensibly in support of a threatened pope, to whom the devout king for a long time paid almost slavish respect.

Henry himself displayed no military talent, but a real victory was won by the earl of Surrey at Flodden (1513) against a Scottish invasion. Despite the obvious pointlessness of the fighting, the appearance of success was popular. Moreover, in Thomas Wolsey, who organized his first campaign in France, Henry discovered his first outstanding minister. By 1515 Wolsey was archbishop of York, lord chancellor of England, and a cardinal of the church; more important, he was the king's good friend, to whom was gladly left the active conduct of affairs. Henry never altogether abandoned the positive tasks of kingship and often interfered in business; though the world might think that England was ruled by the cardinal, the king himself knew that he possessed perfect control any time he cared to assert it, and Wolsey only rarely mistook the world's opinion for the right one.

Nevertheless, the years from 1515 to 1527 were marked by Wolsey's ascendancy, and his initiatives set the scene. The cardinal had some occasional ambition for the papal tiara, and this Henry supported; Wolsey at Rome would have been a powerful card in English hands. In fact, there was never any chance of this happening, any more than there was of Henry's election to the imperial crown, briefly mooted in 1519 when the emperor Maximilian I died, to be succeeded by his grandson Charles V. That event altered the European situation. In Charles, the crowns of Spain, Burgundy (with the Netherlands), and Austria were united in an overwhelming complex of power that reduced all the dynasties of Europe, with the exception of France, to an inferior position. From 1521, Henry became an outpost of Charles V's imperial power, which at Pavia (1525), for the moment, destroyed the rival power of France. Wolsey's attempt to reverse alliances at this unpropitious moment brought reprisals against the vital English cloth trade with the Netherlands and lost the advantages that alliance with the victor of Pavia might have had. It provoked a serious reaction in England, and Henry concluded that Wolsey's usefulness might be coming to an end.

Loss of popularity

While the greatness of England in Europe was being shown up as a sham, the regime was also losing popularity at home. The fanciful expectations of the early days could not, of course, endure; some measure of reality was bound to intrude. As it was, journalists and writers continued to be full of hope for a king who, from 1517, commanded the services of a new councillor, Sir Thomas More, one of the outstanding minds of the day. But More soon discovered that Henry found it easy to keep his enjoyment of learned conversation apart from the conduct of policy. Nothing for the moment could dent Wolsey's strength, and this had serious drawbacks for the king, who supported him. The country was showing increasing signs of its discontent, and Wolsey's efforts to remedy grievances only exasperated men of influence without bringing satisfaction to the poor. Feelings came to the boil in the years 1523–24. Although he disliked parliaments, Wolsey had to agree to the calling of one in 1523, but the taxes voted were well below what was required. Next year, the attempt to levy a special tax led to such fierce resistance that Henry rescinded it, he and the cardinal both trying to take the credit for the remission of what they had been jointly responsible for imposing. While he had Wolsey to take the blame, Henry could afford such fiascoes; the cardinal could not. By 1527 a government policy that, though seemingly Wolsey's, was really the king's was facing bankruptcy; ineffective abroad, unpopular at home, it made the regime look as empty of positive purpose as in fact it was.

At this point, the king entered affairs unmistakably and spectacularly. Among his failures so far had been his or Catherine's inability to provide a male heir to the throne; several stillbirths and early deaths had left only a girl, the princess Mary (born in 1516), to carry on the line, and no one relished the thought of a female succession with all the dynastic and political uncertainties it would bring. Being the man he was, Henry could not suppose the fault to be his. His rapidly growing aversion to Catherine was augmented by his infatuation with one of the ladies of the court, Anne Boleyn, the sister of one of his earlier mistresses. Henry was no profligate; indeed, he had a strong streak of prudery, but he sought the occasional relief from marriage to a worthy but ailing wife to which princes have generally been held entitled. In Anne he met his match; this 20-year-old girl, brought up in a tough school of courtly intrigue, would be more than a king's mistress. It took Henry, who in any case needed to marry her if the expected issue was to solve the succession problem, some six years to achieve their joint purpose. Inadvertently, he provoked a revolution.

From 1527 Henry pursued what became known as “the King's great matter”: his divorce from Catherine. He convinced himself that his first marriage had been against the divine law; that is, against the biblical injunction (Lev.) forbidding marriage with a brother's widow. The deaths of the children proved God's judgment on the union. With his characteristic readiness to convert his own desires into the law of God, Henry rapidly assured himself that he was living in mortal sin with Catherine and had to find relief if he was again to become acceptable to God. He appealed to Rome for a declaration of annulment. Popes had usually obliged kings in such matters, but Henry had picked both his time and his case badly. He was asking Pope Clement VII to help him discard the emperor's aunt, but Clement, the emperor's prisoner in 1527–28, never thereafter dared resist Charles, whose powerful feelings of familial honour and public prestige barred any concession to Henry's wishes. Moreover, the pope's reluctance was increased by the fact that he was being asked to declare illegal an earlier exercise of papal power—which had licensed Henry's marriage to his brother's widow—of a kind that brought a good deal of money to the papal coffers.

Thus, Henry's attempts to solve his dilemma in the accepted legal way were doomed from the start. Wolsey, in a worse dilemma, since only success in the impossible could keep him in power, obtained a trial of the case in England, but this was frustrated by his fellow judge, Cardinal Campeggio, on orders from Rome (1529). Within weeks, Wolsey was ousted, but his disappearance solved nothing, and the councillors who succeeded him could offer little help to their king, who knew only what he wanted, not how to get it.

The chancellorship went to Thomas More, who had told Henry that he did not approve of the divorce and who wished to devote himself to a fight against Lutheran heresy. Confusion was the keynote of policy for some three years while the king dithered between hope that Rome might yet be forced to let the formal trial of his first marriage take place in England and stirrings of a more radical nature—to reject Rome outright. But, though he occasionally talked of doing just that, neither he nor anyone else knew how to convert talk into action.