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.
Starkey’s view is that one key to Henry’s character is in his not having grown up the heir. Whereas his elder brother, Arthur, was installed in his own princely household from infancy, Henry’s early years were spent sequestered with his mother, sisters and short-lived younger brother. It is probable, Starkey suggests, that Henry was taught to read and write by his mother.
Childhood did not last long. The pace of life in Tudor times is startling to the modern mind. Henry rode solo into London, and was installed as a Knight of the Bath, at the age of three and a half. (Starkey wonders, ‘What, if anything, did the three-and-a-half-year-old Henry understand of all this, let alone remember?’ I’m inclined to reverse the order of ‘remember’ and ‘understand’.) His brother, Arthur, was regent at the age of six; and when the Yorkists’ puppet pretender, Perkin Warbeck, threatened to invade from the Netherlands, Henry VII’s response was to install his second son as lord warden of the Cinque Ports and constable of Dover Castle. Henry was not yet two.
All this, of course, is a token of the ceremonial theatre of late-medieval monarchy, something Starkey brings out well. Henry was, if not literally born on stage, literally christened there. And with the death of the Prince of Wales in 1502, he went from being the understudy to being the star turn.
Henry’s political moves were shrewd from the start. It happened that he adored jousting; and he made much of it. This did more than just indulge a boyish enthusiasm (Starkey suggests, with splendid vulgarity, that loving the tiltyard then was the equivalent of being a footie-mad teenager now). By putting a sport that had become identified with Yorkist blowhards at the centre of his political pageantry, he co-opted it. He was, you could say, the original big-tent guy.
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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