England’s 16th-century Stalin

Henry VIII is one of the most difficult and controversial figures in English history. The Victorian scholars who were the first to apply themselves seriously to his reign, regarded him as a lecherous despot. The king’s role in the foundation of the Church of England was either the providential by-product of his lust for Anne Boleyn, or the ultimate argument against its legitimacy, depending on one’s point of view. Another generation, inured to despotism and comfortable with lechery, has taken a more indulgent view. In popular imagination Henry has even emerged as the archetypal figure of a mythical Merrie England.

The modern view of the period is due mainly to that fearsome, Germanic scholar, Sir Geoffrey Elton, who died in 1994 but still dominates the subject from his urn. Elton resolved the controversies which had divided his predecessors by writing Henry out of the history of his own reign. His Henry was not important enough to be a monster: weak, vain and inconstant, intellectually banal, emotionally erratic and easily manipulated. Real power was exercised by successive cabals of courtiers and politicians, and pre-eminently by Elton’s hero Thomas Cromwell, who was the king’s principal counsellor during the seminal decade of the 1530s. As the figure of Henry faded into the background, so too did the religious issues which had once made his reign so interesting. The English Reformation, at any rate in Henry’s time, became a largely administrative and constitutional phenomenon, almost devoid of spiritual meaning. The dissolution of the English monasteries and the suppression of shrines and pilgrimages, one of the most profound cultural changes in English history, became an essentially political and financial transaction.

G. W. Bernard will have none of this. His book is a sustained attack on almost every orthodoxy of modern historical writing on the subject.