David Starkey provides an introduction to the remarkable ruler born 500 years ago, whose anniversary the Greenwich exhibition is marking, and places his achievements in a European context.
Henry VIII was born five hundred years ago on June 28th, 1491, in the palace of Placentia at Greenwich. It remained his most frequently visited palace and, covering sixteen acres, was his second largest after the vast palace of Whitehall, which sprawled over twenty-three. Yet scarcely a trace of it remains. In this Greenwich serves as a kind of exemplar for the fate of Henry VIII's constructive achievements.
He was one of the greatest builders in English history. Yet this monarch who began his reign with a dozen palaces and finished it with fifty-five is remembered by fragments of only two: Hampton Court (which the public primarily associates not with the king but with his minister, Cardinal Wolsey) and St James's (which is not open to the public at all).
Henry was one of the greatest royal collectors too. His Inventory, which lists everything from warships to comb-cases, takes up two huge folio volumes, one of which has been subdivided into two. The collections recorded in the Inventory are fabulous in both quality and quantity. He had 2,028 pieces of plate. Only three survive. He had over 2,000 pieces of tapestry, the largest collection ever recorded. Only one or two per cent remain in the royal palaces. His books have fared better. His library at Whitehall was made up of books catalogued in two numerical series, one going up to 910, the other to 1,450. Several of these remain in the Old Royal Library, which is now in the British Library. The losses from the library at Greenwich, which numbered 329 volumes, were more severe and only twenty-seven have been identified, all in the library of Trinity College, Oxford.
In fact only his munitions remain occasionally intact. The string of castles and forts he built along the south coast still stand, whereas his palaces have vanished; his armour and weapons, lodged now as then in the Tower, survive in prodigious quantities; even his loss of his warship, the Mary Rose, has been our gain.
Otherwise the losses have done incalculable harm, both to the king's reputation and to our understanding of him. For, by an irony of time, what Henry destroyed has survived better than what he built. The palaces have vanished, but the ruins of the monasteries, whose confiscated wealth built those same palaces, stand as a mute indictment of Henry's policies. The achievement of Henry's victims, More and Fisher, as it was other-worldly, survives; the king's own glory, as it was this-worldly, has gone.
The result is a gross imbalance. We judge Henry simply on the negative side of the account. This is large, and I am not pretending otherwise. But so is the credit side: if Henry destroyed and dispersed more than any other king of England, he also built and accumulated more.
In the quincentennial exhibition to commemorate Henry's birth, for which I am Historical Consultant, I have tried to present the credit side of the balance. The exhibition is being held in the National Maritime Museum, which occupies the site of Greenwich Palace. My approach has been to set the exhibition in an imaginative reconstruction of the palace and to furnish it with much of the best art and artefacts of the reign, using survivals from Henry's own collections as the core. Each area of the exhibition represents a part of the palace or its environs; it also represents an event which took place there: in the tiltyard, the jousts of July 7th, 1517; in the presence chamber, the presentation of New Year gifts on January 1st, 1538, and so on. The objects associated with each event are then assembled into a tableau that is more real than any waxwork. For who needs waxworks when Holbein's triumphant realism is available instead?
The exhibition catalogue, Henry VIII: A European Court in England, is organised in the same way. This commemorative edition of History Today offers both an anticipation and a development. Most of the contributors have also written about the same subjects in the catalogue. But here they take a broader view and set their themes in the larger context of both the reign and Europe. For it is in terms of European, and not merely English, history that one of the protagonists of the Field of Cloth of Gold must be judged.
Greenwich Palace itself stood at the crossroads of England and Europe. To the south, by Blackheath, ran the London to Dover road; immediately to the north was the Thames, the Grand Canal of sixteenth-century London, which offered rapid transport by private barge or public wherry to the City and Westminster. Greenwich today is unique in England in that it combines water, architecture and landscape into a single composition worthy of St Petersburg or Versailles. It is theatrical on the grand scale. The theatre was introduced by Henry VIII and it was designed to play to a European audience.
The palace Henry VIII inherited from his father was newly built. The main rooms were grouped in a two-storey range running along the south bank of the river and separated from it by a tow-path. The king's own privy lodging was contained – for the sake of fashion rather than defence – in a donjon or tower-block towards the west end of the range. With three courts to the south, accommodation was plentiful. This is one of the reasons why, when the privy palace of Westminster burnt down at the beginning of Henry VIII's reign, Greenwich was chosen to replace it as the king's usual winter palace. The other was the excellence of its communications, to London and the continent.
But a palace was more than a residence. The court needed entertainment; these entertainments were also the most effective showcase for monarchy. Henry VII. by no means (as Steven Gunn points out) the all-work-and-no-play king of legend, understood this well and built the first royal recreational complex at his favourite palace of Richmond. His son, who was an enthusiastic participant in court entertainment, rather than an appreciative spectator, like his father, determined to outdo Richmond at Greenwich.
In 1515 work started on the tilt-yard. It was as well equipped as any modern stadium with two five-storey viewing towers, a spectators' gallery, a sort of 'hall of fame', in which armours for horse and men were displayed on wooden dummies, and nearby the royal armour manufactory. There took place the sequence of lavish tournaments that stand out in the pages of Edward Hall's Chronicle like so many medieval miniatures – except that, as in the architecture of the fantastic tiltyard towers, the medievalism is already mock and the gothic, neo.
Henry jousted so much because he enjoyed it and was good at it (not least because it required the same physical build as rugby and Henry was over six foot and broad in proportion). But, when he jousted, he combined business with pleasure. The spectacle was aimed at both a foreign and a domestic audience. At home, the king's enthusiastic participation in the tournament helped reassure the aristocracy that the king was 'one of us' at a time when other royal policies, like his choice of Wolsey as his minister and Wolsey's espousal of a levelling justice, raised doubts.
Abroad, spectacle picked up where war left off. Henry had put himself on the map with his early intervention in France; the lavishness of his court entertainments, and his own starring role in them, made sure that he stayed there. After watching the Greenwich jousts of July 7th, 1517, which were expressly arranged for 'the solace, of the foreign ambassadors at the English court, the papal nuncio was unstinting in his praise: 'The wealth and civilisation of the world are here', he wrote, 'and those who call the English barbarians appear to me to render themselves such.'
There is a certain emptiness in this praise as there is in Henry's usual title (before he was made 'Defender of the Faith') of 'inclitissimus': 'most renowned' or 'most famous'. Henry and England were, it could be said, famous for being famous. But given the fact that France, the smaller of the two major continental powers, was three times as big as England, five times as populous and, on paper at least, yielded nearly ten times as much revenue, what else could Henry do? And he was, of course, soon famous for something else when the Defender of the Faith decided that he had the power to choose which faith to defend.
Both Henry's defence of the papacy and his breach with it highlight another aspect of this multifarious man: his bookishness. Henry was not the first English king to be literate, but he was probably the first to be thoroughly at home with books. He was certainly the first to write and put one into print himself. Much of the preparatory work (for which Henry naturally had research assistants, like Thomas More) for his Assertio septem sacramentorum must have taken place in the library at Greenwich. This was Henry's second addition to the palace after the tiltyard, and similarly displaced his father's at Richmond. Its contents were different too, as Janet Backhouse points out. Henry VII's library, like Edward IV's which was incorporated into it, consisted mainly of big, boldly illuminated books. These, like their coffee-table equivalents today, were for patrons who looked at books rather than read them. Henry VIII, on the other hand, read, marked and inwardly digested his, and his annotations, in his unmistakable hand, are still extant in his manuscripts and provide some of the most valuable guides to the otherwise unfathomable processes of his mind.
The breach with Rome was an even more massive scholarly enterprise and involved the creation of a royal research library. This was sited at York Place, or Whitehall as it was soon popularly known, which Henry had seized from the fallen Wolsey in 1529 and rebuilt at breakneck speed as his main working palace. The library was soon put to wider uses and Sir Thomas Elyot revised his pioneering Latin-English dictionary here by royal invitation. But it never lived up to the more ambitious dreams of scholars like John Leland and his disciple John Bale, who saw it as a true national library rising phoenix-like from the ruins of the monastic libraries.
Learned and bookish too, though in different ways, were the principal victim and the chief beneficiary of the early Reformation, Henry's first and second queens: Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn. As Maria Dowling explains, Catherine's learning was Latin, formal and orthodox; Anne's French, vernacular and religiously radical. Indeed Anne now appears in her proper light, not merely as the unthinking trigger of the Reformation, but as one of the principal patrons of Evangelical thought. Henry also rises for choosing two such women – and falls for disposing of them so brutally.
Anne is particularly identified with Greenwich. The royal apartments were redecorated immediately after her marriage; she had her confinement at Greenwich and her daughter Elizabeth was horn and christened here in a hastily scaled down version of a ceremony which had been prepared for the confidently expected prince. Finally it was at the May Day jousts at Greenwich that she was arrested in 1536.
The fall of Anne Boleyn was the first, domestic crisis of the English Reformation. The second, international crisis came in 1538-39 with the threatened invasion of heretical England by both the continental Catholic powers, France and the empire of Charles V. Henry's response was launched from Greenwich with a passionate, nationalistic sermon by Bishop Tunstall of Durham: 'Only take an English heart unto thee and mistrust not God', the preacher cried, and let the world do what it could, it would not prevail. Henry did not trust to the power of words alone. Only a few days previously the king had returned from a whirlwind trip to Dover to inspect the new castles he was building on the Downs. These were part of a massive scheme of coastal fortification, stretching from the Thames estuary to Milford Haven, and designed to protect every substantial harbour against an enemy landing. This scheme, and its effectiveness in resisting the French invasion of 1545, are examined by Marcus Merriman and AlexanderMcKee. McKee, in particular, shows Henry as a much more competent strategist and general than he is normally reckoned.
The image of England as a fortified island garden, walled round and sea girt, which forms the frontispiece to Henry's music book, had now become a reality. The fortification scheme clearly made a tremendous impact: it appears repeatedly in the literature of the following years, and always in the context of a heightened self-awareness of being English. A new pride was taken in England's language, literature and law and their idiosyncrasies were seen as the product of a peculiar national character. The foundations of this had been laid at Greenwich too.
In 1532 the first collected edition of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer had appeared in print. The preface, written by Sir Brian Tuke, Henry's Treasurer of the Chamber, as he 'was tarrying for the tide at Greenwich', advanced a bold claim for English as a great European language and for Chaucer as its supreme poet.
The same year the Poet-Earl, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, accompanied Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn on their journey from Greenwich to Boulogne to meet with Francis I. Howard, in company with his bosom friend, the Duke of Richmond, Henry's bastard son, stayed on and spent several months at the court of Francis I, mainly at Fontainebleau. His verse, as William Sessions explains, is a fusion of Chaucer with the poetic experiments of continental Europe. It is at once a savage indictment of Henry and a monument to the cultural creativity of his reign. Surrey's supreme achievement was the invention of blank verse in his translation of two books of the Aeneid. The Aeneid tells how Troy was destroyed and how Rome arose from the ruins. The reign of Henry VIII is a similar story of destruction and renewal.
