The ‘general pardon’ he issued at the outset of his reign — essentially, writing off a number of the debts and fines with which his greedy father had hit the nobility — bought him loyalty, too. He moved everywhere to conciliate.
Henry VII had taken the throne by force of arms, and been forced to maintain it, often precariously, by the same. The pivotal movement in Henry VIII’s reign, as Starkey represents it, is from a long period of under-mighty monarchy towards one of crescent strength. The story of the closing pages of this book is the story of how Henry, initially circumscribed by his privy council, learned to exercise the power of the crown on his own.
It is also the period that saw the transition between the late-medieval and early-modern eras: a transition exemplified in microcosm by Henry’s changing intellectual influences. In childhood, he was tutored in Latin by that gloriously bizarre throwback, John Skelton; but as an adolescent, he fell under the spell of Erasmus. Skelton, packed off to Diss, made more than one appeal to return to court, but his time had passed.
Starkey tells his tale in chronological order, scantly footnoted, without pomposity and with a good sense of what adds colour. There’s a marvellous long discussion of Henry’s 11-foot prayer-roll (some of which is reproduced in one of the three generous wads of pretty colour plates), for example, giving a sense of the sheer oddness of medieval church ritual.
This was a world in which contact with the leg of a saint, or the mummified breast-milk of the Blessed Virgin, could get you a determinate number of days off purgatory — 40 days, in the case of the milk, at a cost of £1.13s.4d. Following the instructions on the prayer-roll promises, on the other hand, to knock 52,712 years and 40 days off your sentence.
The only real shortcoming of Starkey’s style is a hammy habit of ending sections with single-sentence paragraphs, sometimes verbless, as if for dramatic effect. It may be a habit learned from the television voice-over, but it sits ill in prose. ‘Five weeks later, the deed was done.’ ‘And that changed everything — for England as well as for Henry.’ ‘And all this at the age of only eighteen.’ Or, most annoying:
Henry, we know, like all conventional Christians at the time, believed profoundly in the force of oaths. He had sworn. And he fully intended to keep his word.
At the time.
This is naff stuff — and the only irritation in what is in all other respects a zippy, persuasive and enjoyable work of popular history.
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