King of spin

Draw two two-inch triangles, tip to tip, one on top of the other. A little way down the left flank of the upper triangle, take a perpendicular line out to an inch, then turn your pencil at a right angle and continue another inch. Repeat on the other side. Next, draw two short, splayed lines down from the base of the lower triangle. Finally, put an acute accent, an inch long, about two inches above the whole. What have you got? According to Dr David Starkey, who performs this trick at schools all over the country, Henry VIII in 13 lines. Apparently he is recognisable in this form as far afield as Japan, America, and even France.

Each generation makes history in its own image and we, preoccupied with spin and profile-management, are impressed anew with Henry for his genius in this field. Recent popular narratives of Henry’s life have emphasised this in the monuments he made to his own magnificence, particularly in the art and artefacts formerly overlooked as historical evidence: seals, stained glass, maps, instruments, illuminations. This has now been done fairly exhaustively. What is the biographer to do who is coming along on the back of this with mere words? David Loades’s solution is somehow indicative of his independent minded and calmly impressive approach to the task. Of course he has an excellent plate section full of unusual things. But his nod to spin is in following the fortunes of Henry’s image after it fell out of his own hands — that is, by supplying a concise historiography where the judgments of the last 500 years are beautifully compressed. Any reader of this book therefore gets the benefit of dozens of others and a course of further study set out for him, if desired.