Reading - Henry VIII by John Guy
I’ve just finished reading John Guy’s short book Henry VIII, which is part of the Penguin Monarch’s series. After The Man on a Donkey, I was fascinated to find out more about Henry and to try and understand if H.F.M Prescott’s depiction of him as an unfeeling, mass-murdering, psychopathic proto-Stalin is at all realistic. It turns out that it is. Henry is a man who is estimated to have killed between 50,000-60,000 people, including two of his wives. He was quite content to wipe out entire families if he felt that they were any threat to his power. He ended his days as a disgustingly obese man with a 54-inch waist and ulcered legs, unable to walk, lying in bed for days, if not weeks, at a time because of the agony caused by his physical condition. Below are some observations about him that I found quite interesting. I suppose these are largely about where he went wrong and maybe some of them can be applied to our lives in some way.
Religious Fanaticism
Henry was a man who had convinced himself that he was God’s vice-regent upon earth and that he was directly answerable to God and nobody else: “By God, I trust no one but myself”, he was reputed to have said. This belief must have provided him with the psychological justification for his appalling bloodlust and rapacity. Many of the judicial murders he carried out were not even necessary to secure his position but were undertaken out of sheer spitefulness. His conviction that he was essentially God’s actor on earth must have calmed any scruples he might have had about these actions.
Roman Catholics sometimes accuse Protestants of each being their own pope. I don’t think that accusation is entirely fair but, in the case of Henry VIII, it most certainly is. Henry did not want the Pope to be in charge of the Church for the simple reason that he wanted to be and that he wanted to do whatever he liked with the power.
It is a salutary reminder that it is very easy to use our faith in Christ to delude ourselves that our actions are justified in the sight of God. This is where the brakes of tradition, the Scriptures and accountability to others should have an effect upon us. Sadly for Henry, he was willing to submit himself to none of these things and so descended into total darkness.
Overeating and Ill-Health
Henry was a devilishly handsome youth: tall, athletic and a wonderful sportsman. He developed an ulcer on his leg which curtailed his activity as he grew older but he did not change his eating habits. He was reputed to eat roughly 5,000 calories worth of meat every day. For perspective, that is over double the amount of calories a grown man would need to eat to day simply to maintain his current weight with a reasonable amount of exercise. He was putting this away for years, decades, whilst hardly doing any exercise at all. And inevitably he grew morbidly obese and the one ulcer turned into two which turned into physical agony that dominated his life.
One of the tragedies of our modern societies is the ill-health that we bring upon ourselves by overeating and lack of regular exercise. Once one has seen this reality, one realises that there really is no need for it. It is part of the way we are conditioned to live and I am convinced that this is in part because it benefits financial industries such as big agriculture and big pharma. It suits them to have us fat, unhealthy and riddled with series health problems for reasons which I am sure are obvious.
I say that there is no reason for this because it is usually relatively straightforward to make positive changes in this area. Most people have such horrendous eating habits that even small alterations bring enormous benefits both in terms of weight loss, energy levels and mental focus. This way we can avoid the horrendous fate of Henry VIII and many in our culture who end their days in agony because they have neglected their physical health.
Art in the Time of Totalitarianism
Finally on this, one of my favourite passages in the book is about the Swiss portraitist Hans Holbein. Holbein is the man who gives us the images from this story: famous pictures of Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell and Henry himself. The most well-known image of Henry is a full-length image of him dressed in his finest doublet with his hands on his hips, full face to the viewer. This was unusual for the time but Henry apparently asked Holbein to paint him in this way in order, I suppose, to show his manliness. A more routine pose is struck in the Holbein portrait immediately below:
John Guy’s comments on this are fascinating:
Like Thomas More and his fellow art connoisseurs, Holbein knew when a sitter’s motives were base. Henry may have wanted to go down in history as an Old Testament patriarch and the new pope in England, but in the king’s most celebrated three-quarter-face portrait, his features are cold and threatening and his piggy eyes glower with suspicion. He seems blissfully unaware that portraits - by Holbein’s rules - can ‘talk’ to us. Their function was to depict ‘the figure and similitude’ of the sitter’s soul rather than ‘the features of the body’.
John Guy, Henry VIII, pp.96-97
That is a happy reminder that art can always sneak past the guards and tell the truth, even in times of totalitarian terror.
History Oversimplified
Very finally, on Henry VIII, I found this wonderful series of history films on YouTube called History Oversimplified. The one on Henry VIII is excellent. My children sat perfectly still and watched the whole thing, recalling parts of it later in the day. It has at least one use of the word “crap”…just so you know.
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