Читать книгу Monarchy: From the Middle Ages to Modernity - David Starkey - Страница 16

At the time of Henry’s birth in 1491, the Tudors were a new, not very secure dynasty. His father had failed to reconcile the defeated Yorkist nobility and was about to embark on an unsuccessful war in France. Threats of rebellion and civil war stalked in the background, and the once hopeful king retreated ever more into privacy; ever more into the role of a greedy landlord.

And, in any case, the future of the Tudor dynasty was not destined for Henry himself, but for his elder brother Arthur, Prince of Wales. Henry, as the second son, wasn’t expected to be king, and as a result he received a rather modern, unkingly kind of upbringing. Instead of having the rigorous demands of kingship knocked into him by male tutors and role models, he was brought up at Eltham Palace by his mother and with his sisters, who idolized the robust and self-confident boy.

This early experience of women’s love made Henry a romantic, and paved the way to the great passions and crimes of his adult life. Yet he was no mere pampered prince. Instead, Henry would always combine his romantic passions with sincere, if second-rate, intellectual ambitions. Once again it went back to his mother. She made sure that his education was of the best and a succession of distinguished tutors gave him a thorough grounding in the latest Latin scholarship. Even the superlearned Erasmus was impressed, and when he met Henry, aged only eight, he was bowled over by the boy’s confidence, precocious learning and star quality.

In 1502, when he was eleven, Henry’s life was struck by family tragedy. His brother Arthur died suddenly of a fever, followed soon after by their beloved mother. Henry was now the sole heir to the Tudor dynasty.

For the boy, his new status was a double-edged sword. He might be the Prince of Wales, but the carefree life that he had known as a boy was gone for ever. Quickly brought to court, he learnt at first hand the uncertain and inglorious reality of Tudor monarchy. Nor was there much love lost between Prince Henry and the king. Henry was growing up fast and he was already taller and broader than his father. But the king, aware that the whole future of the Tudor dynasty depended on the life of his only surviving son, was fiercely protective.

A chief source of the conflict came over participation in extreme sports. Henry wanted to take part in the manly, aristocratic sport of jousting. But, because it was so dangerous, his father allowed him to ride only in unarmed training exercises: the inheritance of Bosworth was too precious to be risked in mere games. So, when the real thing took place, Henry had to sit it out, chafing on the sidelines while his friends slugged it out like men. The result was a clash, not of arms, but of the conflicting values between father and son about what it meant to be an English king.

But on 21 April 1509, after twenty-four years on the throne, Henry VII died, and Henry VIII was proclaimed king amidst wild scenes of popular rejoicing. The most impressive tribute came from Thomas More, the great scholar and lawyer, whose life and death were to be inextricably linked with Henry’s. ‘This day’, he wrote of the new king’s coronation, ‘is the end of our slavery, the fount of liberty; the end of sadness, the beginning of joy.’

Fired with the idealism of youth, Henry had strong ideas about kingship. He had been brought up on the myths of King Arthur and the exploits of his ancestor Henry V, and like them he believed that a great king should be a great warrior. When he was fourteen, Henry first saw what was then believed to be Arthur’s Round Table at Winchester. The great visual and literary myths that surrounded the new Tudor dynasty might have been mere political contrivances for Henry VII; but for Henry VIII they were real. Now he was king, he was determined to take Arthur and Henry V as his models of kingship. Like them, he would be a great jouster, he would have a brilliant court, and above all he would follow in their footsteps and conquer France.

Funded by the large inheritance left to him by his father, and benefiting from the first peaceful transition of power since the Wars of the Roses, Henry’s court took on the feel of a magnificently armed camp, with an endless round of tournaments and jousts. There was an insatiable appetite for martial entertainments and courtly splendour. All Europe was dazzled by the English court’s new-found glamour and extraordinary pageantry. A Spaniard reported home that the courtiers had instituted a twice-weekly foot combat with javelin and spear ‘in imitation of … knights of olden time, of whom so much is written in books’. Many young nobles participated: ‘But the most conspicuous … the most assiduous and the most interested … is the king himself.’ It satisfied the longing for a splendid monarchy. It also signalled Henry’s intention: the conquest of France.

To that end, one of Henry’s first acts as king was to marry his brother’s widow, the Spanish Princess Catherine of Aragon, who was six years his senior. The marriage would sow the seeds of upheaval and revolutionary change in the English monarchy. At the time, however, it was much simpler. Henry loved Catherine, but the marriage also cemented England’s alliance with Spain against France. In 1510 peace with France was renewed, but when the ambassador came to thank Henry, he angrily retorted to an unwisely phrased French sentence, ‘I ask peace of the King of France, who dare not look me in the face let alone make war on me!’ Henry was rearming England, and in 1511 he got both the council’s agreement and a moral justification for war. The French king had committed the most mortal sin as far as Henry was concerned: he threatened to depose Pope Julius II and he had insulted the English ambassadors. On 28 June 1513, the English army crossed the Channel to France with Henry’s banners intertwined with those of the Pope. For the first time in almost a century, Parliament had proved willing to vote serious war taxation. The result was the largest and best-organized English army since Agincourt. This was a holy war, and Henry was the Pope’s greatest ally against schismatic France. The French king was stripped of the title ‘Most Christian King’, and it was given to Henry.

Henry, like his great hero Henry V, led the English army in person. He even came under fire occasionally. He defeated the French in the Battle of the Spurs – so called because the French knights ran away so quickly; captured important prisoners; and took two French cities after set-piece sieges. Henry hadn’t conquered all France, of course, but he had restored the reputation of English arms. He had made England once more one of the big three European powers alongside France and the Habsburg Empire. Above all he had covered himself in glory.

At the same time, however, Henry – or rather Catherine, since it was always the woman who was blamed – had failed to produce an heir. She gave birth to a short-lived son in 1511, but then followed miscarriage after miscarriage. Henry was surprisingly understanding, but how long could he wait for a son?