Henry VIII : the quest for fame - John Guy

I mentioned the Penguin Monarchs series a little while ago & I've now read one of them - John Guy's biography of Henry VIII, subtitled The quest for fame.

The books themselves are lovely. Small, pocket-sized hardbacks; white boards with a paper wrap around half-size jacket. Guy is a well-known writer & historian of the Tudor period. I enjoyed his biographies of Mary, Queen of Scots, My Heart Is My Own, & his last book, The Children of Henry VIII, so I was looking forward to this book. I was also interested in how he would write a biography of such a larger than life figure as Henry in just 100pp. Actually, I think that's going to be a challenge for most of the authors in this series.

John Guy tackles the task by focusing on one aspect of Henry's character while also managing to tell a coherent story mentioning the vital signposts of his life & reign. Henry VIII was consumed by his desire to be a chivalric champion

Henry was never meant to be king. He was brought up in his mother's household & was very close to her. A fascinating manuscript illustration was discovered only a few years ago which may show young Henry weeping for his mother's death. Henry's father, Henry VII, famously usurped the throne by defeating the last Yorkist king, Richard III, at Bosworth in 1485 & his marriage to Elizabeth of York was meant to bring together the two warring factions. The Tudor kings may have spent the next fifty years pursuing the last Yorkist claimants but, by & large, their reigns were peaceful. Rather than foreign invasions, the desire for a male heir to continue the dynasty would become a focus of the reign of every Tudor monarch.

Henry VII's eldest son, Arthur, died at the age of just 15 which meant that young Henry, his father's only surviving son, became the heir. Henry VII's grief at the death of Elizabeth of York in 1503, just a year after Arthur's death, changed his character. His health declined, he became suspicious & almost paranoid in his desire to protect Henry from any evil influences. When his father died in 1509, Henry was just eighteen & he was determined from the first to make his mark in European politics. He had a full treasury & a boundless belief in his own ideas. He was determined to go his own way & attempted to do this by marrying his brother's widow, Katherine of Aragon, in an attempt to forge an alliance with her father, Ferdinand of Spain. He tried, at various times, to ally himself with Francis I of France, Ferdinand's successor, Charles V & the various Popes in Rome. He tried to annex Scotland, whether through conquest in war against his nephew, James V, or through marriage alliance through the proposed marriage of his son, Edward with the baby Mary, Queen of Scots in the 1540s. None of his foreign wars were very successful & his loving, respectful relationship with the Papacy came to an end when he wanted to divorce Katherine & marry Anne Boleyn in his desperate search for a male heir.

John Guy is very good at elucidating Henry's character. Henry was eager to impress those he respected & admired, from Archduke Philip, who was shipwrecked in England in 1506 & dazzled the teenage Henry with his abilities as a jouster & all-round sportsman to Francis I & Pope Julius II. Henry also showed a remarkable ability to believe whatever was most convenient for himself, from choosing the passages in the Bible that supported his contention that his marriage to Katherine was invalid (while ignoring others that said the opposite) to his refusal to see those he had dismissed from his favour, from his wives to his most trusted courtiers & servants. Once they had disappointed or betrayed him, he never saw them again. It was as if he had deleted them from his memory, out of sight, out of mind. It was on to the next wife who would surely give him the son he craved, or the next minister who would carry out his grand plans. He is at his worst in the mid 1530s when he persecuted Thomas More, Bishop Fisher & the Carthusian monks for their refusal to accept the break with Rome.

I also enjoyed Guy's discussion of the way that Henry created his own image through his acquisitions of art & property. He became enormously wealthy through the Dissolution of the Monasteries, part of his break with Rome & the establishment of a new Church of England with Henry himself as the head. He commissioned tapestries woven with gold thread depicting the stories of King David (he loved the story of David so much that he eventually had nine sets of tapestries depicting the story) & Solomon. The quality of the work rivalled anything owned by the Pope. He patronised Hans Holbein, who produced a new style of portraiture at Henry's Court. Holbein's image of the king, standing full square & staring us straight in the eye, is still the image most of us see when we think of Henry.

Henry's last years were dominated by his own ill health, both physical & mental. He never recovered from a fall from his horse in the early 1530s which resulted in an ulcer on his leg that refused to heal. His paranoia grew as he aged & his temper grew more uncertain. His last wife, Katherine Parr, narrowly escaped arrest when she disputed religion with Henry. He was about to have her arrested for heretical views, encouraged by the conservative elements at Court. Fortunately she was warned in time & convinced Henry that she had only wanted to divert his mind from the pain of his leg with her arguments & that she would, of course, be guided by him in everything. It's hard to be sure whether Henry was serious about arresting Katherine or was he just trying to frighten her into obedience? It must have been a terrifying experience to be at Henry's Court in those final years.

Henry VIII : the quest for fame is an excellent introduction to Henry's life. There's also a lot to enjoy if you've read other biographies of Henry as John Guy brings a new perspective to his portrait of the most famous monarch in England's history.

Next up is Stephen Alford's biography of Henry's son, Edward VI. Just as it's a difficult task to write a short biography of a king like Henry VIII, it will be interesting to see what Alford does with a boy who became king at the age of nine & was dead at sixteen.

The Children of Henry VIII - John Guy

John Guy has written a beautifully succinct account of the lives of Henry VIII's children - Edward, Mary, Elizabeth & his illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy. There have been so many books written about the Tudors & I've read so many of them that another book about the family seemed a little redundant. However, I loved John Guy's award winning biography of Mary, Queen of Scots, My Heart Is My Own, which I read in my pre-blog days. I also have A Daughter's Love, the story of Thomas More & his daughter, Margaret, on the tbr shelves, so I decided that any book by John Guy was worth my attention.

It's a well-known story. Henry VIII came to the throne in 1509 on the death of his father, Henry VII, the victor of Bosworth. The Tudors were still a new dynasty & Henry was determined that England would not be plunged back into the civil wars that plagued the 15th century. He had married Catherine of Aragon, the Spanish princess who was the widow of his brother, Arthur. Catherine bore Henry many children but only a daughter, Mary, survived childhood. Henry had many mistresses & may have fathered several illegitimate children. He only acknowledged one, Henry Fitzroy, born to Elizabeth Blount. Henry seems to have been genuinely fond of Fitzroy & he made him Duke of Richmond, giving his his own household in the north of England. His status was almost equal to that of Mary, his legitimate daughter. Mary, though, was a girl & Henry didn't believe that a woman could rule alone.

Catherine's failure to bear a son was an urgent problem. Henry may have considered legitimizing Fitzroy - after all, his own claim to the throne came through the illegitimate Beaufort line - but he longed for a legitimate heir, acknowledged by all. Anne Boleyn's refusal to become Henry's mistress & her promise that she would bear Henry a son if they were married, precipitated the crisis known as the King's Great Matter - the annulment of his marriage to Catherine. The proceedings dragged on for years as Henry's desire to marry Anne led to the Reformation & the break with Rome. Eventually, Henry & Anne were married although the longed for child, born in September 1533, was a girl, Elizabeth. Anne still retained her hold on Henry's affections although he began to look elsewhere for his pleasures. Anne's downfall began with the death of her great rival, Catherine of Aragon in January 1536. Anne miscarried a child soon after & the baby had been a boy. Henry's ominous words, "It seems that God will not give me male children" signalled the beginning of the end for Anne. Within four months, she was dead, executed at the Tower along with five men accused of being her lovers.

Henry had been courting Jane Seymour for some time before Anne's downfall. Jane was the opposite to Anne in every way. Meek instead of confident; modest instead of bold, Jane was coached by her family to be the perfect candidate for Henry's next wife. They were married just days after Anne's execution & Jane succeeded in giving Henry his long awaited heir when Edward was born in 1537. Unfortunately Jane died just days later. However, Henry had his heir & when he died in 1547, Edward succeeded him at the age of only nine.

One of the strengths of this book is the description of the relationships of the three children with each other (Fitzroy died young). Mary was displaced when Anne Boleyn was in the ascendant & she always resented Elizabeth as a consequence. Mary refused to acknowledge her father as head of the Church or to acknowledge the illegitimacy of her mother's marriage. As punishment, she was forced to live in the same household with Elizabeth who was now the acknowledged heir. When Anne Boleyn fell, Elizabeth was also made illegitimate & both girls removed from the line of succession.

Mary & Elizabeth always accepted Edward as heir to the throne & both had a loving relationship with him. Edward & Elizabeth were especially close, near in age & both brought up in the Protestant religion. Mary's Catholicism became a barrier between her & Edward as he & his advisers sought to consolidate the break with Rome. This policy culminated in Edward's Devise for the Succession, in which he removed both Mary & Elizabeth from the succession & appointed his Protestant cousin, Lady Jane Grey, as his heir. Mary & her supporters were ready when Edward died in 1553 & Queen Jane's reign lasted only a few days. Elizabeth very publicly arrived to support her half-sister at her triumphant entry into London & at her coronation but the spiky relationship between the two women would dominate Mary's reign.

Mary & Elizabeth were rivals from the start. Mary's desire to take the English Church back to Rome was out of step with her people's desires especially when she started burning heretics at the stake. Her marriage to a foreign prince, Philip of Spain, was unpopular, & her failure to have an heir meant that her legacy looked increasingly shaky. Elizabeth was lucky to survive Mary's reign. Seen as the saviour of Protestant hopes, Elizabeth was the focus of several attempted revolts against Mary's rule. She was clever enough to avoid any direct involvement with rebels although she spent several anxious months in the Tower. She also managed to avoid marrying any of the candidates put forward by Mary & Philip in a bid to sideline her. Eventually, on her deathbed, Mary had to acknowledge Elizabeth as her heir, knowing that her first act would be to dismantle the religious settlement she had been determined to implement.

Elizabeth learnt many lessons from Mary's mistakes. Her reign was characterized by her desire to reach a moderate religious settlement without "making windows into men's souls". She refused to marry either a foreign prince or one of her own subjects & she refused to name an heir, knowing from bitter experience how men look to the rising sun if they're dissatisfied with the current monarch.

The Children of Henry VIII is a richly detailed story told with real flair & concision. John Guy has told a complex story with an enormous cast of characters in just over 200pp (in my ebook edition). It makes me wonder why any history needs to be longer.

I read The Children of Henry VIII courtesy of NetGalley.

Books I'm looking forward to

As if I didn't have enough sources of new books & more than enough to read on the tbr shelves, I've recently discovered NetGalley. This is a website that supplies free pre-publication e-books for reviewers, bloggers & anyone who promotes books & reading. I've already enjoyed reading several books from NetGalley including Martin Edwards' The Frozen Shroud & The Creation of Anne Boleyn by Susan Bordo.

I've recently downloaded several books to be published over the next few months that I'm very excited about. John Guy is a well-known historian who has written biographies of Mary, Queen of Scots & Thomas Becket. His new book, published in July, is The Children of Henry VIII. As I'm always interested in another book about the Tudors & I've read & enjoyed Guy's other books, I'm looking forward to this very much.

A first novel to be published in July, Letters from Skye, by Jessica Brockmole, immediately caught my attention. It ticks so many boxes - Skye, set during WWI & WWII, a poet, letters & a mysterious disappearance. Already, without having read a word, it has echoes for me of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer, The Glass Guardian by Linda Gillard & Pictures at an Exhibition by Camilla Macpherson. Here's the blurb from Amazon,

March 1912: Twenty-four-year-old Elspeth Dunn, a published poet and a fisherman's wife, has never seen the world beyond her home on Scotland's bucolic Isle of Skye. So she is astonished when a fan letter arrives from an American college student, David Graham.As the two strike up a correspondence - sharing their favorite books, wildest hopes, and deepest secrets - their exchanges blossom into friendship, and eventually into love. But as World War I moves across Europe and David volunteers as an ambulance driver on the Western front, Elspeth can only wait for him on Skye, hoping he comes back alive.
June 1940: More than twenty years later, at the start of World War II, Elspeth's daughter, Margaret, has fallen for her best friend, a pilot in the Royal Air Force. Her mother warns her against finding love in wartime, an admonition Margaret doesn't understand. And after a nearby bomb rocks Elspeth's house, and letters that were hidden in a wall come raining down, Elspeth disappears. Only a single letter, sent decades before by a stranger named David Graham, remains as a clue to Elspeth's whereabouts. As Margaret sets out to discover who David is and where her mother has gone, she must also face the truth of what happened to her family long ago . . .
 

I've always been fascinated by nuns & movies featuring nuns are among my absolute favourites. So, I was so pleased to be offered a copy of Veiled Desires by Maureen A Sabine which is published in August. This is an exploration of the way nuns have been portrayed in the movies from the 1940s to the present day. Among the movies discussed are Black Narcissus (that's Deborah Kerr as Sister Clodagh on the cover), The Nun's Story (Audrey Hepburn & the most distinguished cast of Sisters & Reverend Mothers ever seen in a movie, I think - Dame Peggy Ashcroft, Dame Edith Evans, Rosalie Crutchley & Mildred Dunnock), In This House of Brede (Diana Rigg, Pamela Brown & Gwen Watford) & Change of Habit (Mary Tyler Moore with Elvis Presley as a doctor!). And those are just my favourites. Other movies include Heaven Knows, Mr Allison, Sea Wife & The Bells of St Mary's.

My only problem is stopping myself from reading all three books straight away! I like to read & review books as close as I can to the publication date so I'm trying to forget that these gems are on my e-reader until it's closer to publication day. Wish me luck!