On stage from the start

Henry: Virtuous Prince, by David Starkey

Among the glories of Flanders and Swann is a long, erudite and silly shaggy-dog story about the Tudor theatre. It culminates in the appearance as from nowhere of a score for the tune known as ‘Greensleeves’ — or ‘Greenfleeves’ as Flanders and Swann have it. Someone wonders aloud who composed it, and a voice from the back of the auditorium booms: ‘We did.’ ‘Who are you?’ ‘We’re Henry the Eighth, we are.’

David Starkey’s new book adds an extra valency to this joke. It wasn’t just his royal status that called for the plural pronoun; there were, he argues, two Henry VIIIs. There’s the one we all know, the pope-bothering, richly-upholstered, bearded great trapezium of Holbein’s portrait. Then there’s the young man, as played on telly by Jonathan Rhys Meyers. Henry as a youth was handsome, pious, scholarly, athletic, generous, uxorious, and well-liked by his attendant lords. He was greeted in coronation encomia by Thomas More as ‘the end of history’, a gift from God who would ‘wipe the tear from every eye and put joy in the place of our long distress’. More later had occasion to modify his view, but at the time, he spoke for the nation.

This younger Henry — the ‘virtuous prince’ of the subtitle — is the concern of Starkey’s breezy book. The first part of a proposed two-volume biography, it takes us from the gothically involuted tail-end of the Wars of the Roses up to Henry’s 20th year where — with the appearance from the wings of that silky operator, Thomas Wolsey — he can be said to have reached a turning point. The question, as Starkey frames it, is: ‘Should we read him backwards, from what he became? Or forwards, from what he was?’ Starkey chooses, quite properly, to go forwards, noting only parenthetically — and usually plausibly — the seeds of the man in the boy.