Henry VIII is the first English monarch whose features everyone knows. The sharp little eyes in the massive head, the golden beard, above all the commanding stance in which Holbein painted him, are infinitely familiar and always terrifying. This is the man who sent More and Cromwell, two of his wives and many others to the scaffold, who dissolved the monasteries and proclaimed himself head of a new English church. He was also the man who built up the navy and created the new, rich, confident Britain with imperial ambitions, but that is not so obvious in the portraits. Nor is his intellect, although it was that which distinguished him from most of his subjects and other contemporaries. Reconstructing the mind as well as body of this formidable figure is not easy, but the books that he owned offer a window on to it.
That we know about them is due to two fortunate and related circumstances: the existence of a huge inventory of the king’s possessions, 20,000 of them, including several lists of books; and the survival of some of the books themselves, now mainly in the British Library. The pieces of this jigsaw puzzle have long interested Professor Carley; he printed the book inventories in The Libraries of Henry VIII (2000), and this book is a pictorial supplement to those dry documents. The pictures in it are more than just illustrations; they recreate vividly the texture as well as appearance of the books in Henry’s life. The text explains what they meant to Henry, the first king also to be born into the new world created by the invention of printing.
Can these mute witnesses be made to speak? It is not an easy task. To us, books are things to read, which we own or borrow; our relationship to them is personal.
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