Henry VIII: Man and Monarch

Yesterday, I visited the British Library’s Henry VIII: Man and Monarch exhibition for the third time. Guest curated by David Starkey it is an uncompromising affair. Documents abound: final letters from Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell; Henry’s amendments to the endless theological debates concerning his divorce from Katherine of Aragon; Bibles, Books of Hours, love letters. There are tremendous portraits too, especially Holbein’s brilliant study of the manipulative, scheming and supremely smug courtier Richard Southwell, who appears to have had a hand in just about every prominent personal downfall of the time. There is an almost complete absence of gizmos and flashing lights, and it is all the better for that, though it is noticeable how few children have been there when I have visited. But if you want to know what proper historians really do, there is no better place. The exhibition has entered its final month and everyone interested in English history should go. Wednesdays and Thursdays have late-night openings.

More info here: www.bl.uk/henry

Our most important ruler?

Yesterday, in his Guardian column, the environmentalist George Monbiot, considering England’s current democratic deficit in the light of its colonial past, explained how he was ‘indifferent’ to the country of his birth. I find it hard to believe that anyone is indifferent to the country to which they belong. They may hate it (as I suspect George does and, as Orwell pointed out, many English left-wing intellectuals do), they may love it to pieces, or like it just a little bit. But indifferent? Was he unaffected by the monument to British worthies that stands in the grounds of his stately public school, Stowe? Did he not engage with the politics of his father, a former deputy chairman of the Conservative party, or his mother, an Oxford councillor? Aren’t his present politics in some way a reaction to his impeccably English upper middle class background? No, it seems George bestrides the world of which he is a ‘global citizen’ in some strangely numb and wholly objective manner, averse to the prejudices of we lesser folk. Oh to think such pure thoughts.

It is impossible to feel indifferent towards Henry VIII. Yesterday, Dr David Starkey, member of History Today’s advisory board, was at the British Library to unveil a love letter from Henry to Anne Boleyn. Probably written in January 1528, it has been hidden away in the Vatican collections for the best part of 500 years, and will be on display in a British Library exhibition on the king which opens on April 23rd. Dr Starkey is rarely short of an opinion, one of the many reasons why he is one of our most compelling historians, and declared at the unveiling that ‘Henry is not only England's best-known king - with his wives, his girth and his bloodthirstiness - he is also our most important single ruler. When he came to the throne, Henry was the pious prince who ruled an England at the heart of Catholic Europe. When he died, he was the great schismatic, who had created a national church and an insular, xenophobic politics that shaped the development of England for the next 500 years.’ Two questions arise from that statement. Was the politics that shaped England from the Tudor age to the present day really marked by insularity? Can empires be born of insularity? Is not curiosity about the world beyond a motivating factor, as it was in the rise of science in England? And is Henry really ‘our most important single ruler’? Cases can certainly be made for William I, Henry II, Elizabeth I, Cromwell, among others.