By Stephen Smoot
In a recent conversation with one much younger, but still well along in her adult life, I had a conversation concerning history and historical figures. I made the point that one should generally refrain from judging them and even then, make sure to apply context of time and place in history.
She questioned that and I responded that one cannot, for example, judge Thomas Jefferson for owning slaves since in his time and place that was common and rarely questioned.
Surely there were those who were against slavery, she replied. Doesn’t that make people in the 1700s able to be judged on that?
Yes, I said, Adam Smith, who in 1776 laid out the first ideals of free market capitalism also attacked slavery in moral terms. He is, however, an outlier for his times, a rarity. Similarly, the totalitarian murderousness of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, for example, was an outlier for their time and place. One can judge their evil because it was uncommon and not socially normal in their time and place.
The best way to illustrate the proper way to conduct history lies in breaking down the life and actions of a person that almost invariably gets judged harshly and not for no reason either.
King Henry VIII took the reigns of English royal power in 1509 and held them until 1547.
The turn of the century had come with the death of Pope Alexander VI and the end of the corrupt Borgia power over the Papacy. Portugal, then Spain, had transformed their former European backwater status into colonial powers amassing wealth in the first case from spices, the second via gold and silver.
Henry was never expected to take the throne of England. His elder brother Arthur had been prepared for that role, complete with marriage to Catherine of Aragon, a daughter of the newly rich Spanish royal house. Arthur passed, then too their father King Henry VII.
At the age of 18, now Henry VIII, the new king audaciously proposed to marry what the Roman Catholic Church still considered kin too close to wed, even with her first husband dead. He shored up his Catholic credentials by supporting the Papacy with vehemence in a time when division, then corruption, put that institution at its lowest ebb of influence .
Pope Julius II, an honest and skilled warrior, neither corrupt nor tremendously kind and compassionate, granted a dispensation to Henry to break the rules and marry his sister-in-law. The King got permission after stating that his brother had never consummated the marriage, either, an unpleasant fact or lie to share about one’s brother in front of the civilized world. The lack of consummation meant that the marriage was never, in the culture of the day, finalized.
That meant Henry VIII could marry Catherine without it being called incest.
One must remember that love and romance was generally foreign to royal and aristocratic classes. Marriages took place to cement alliances or deals. Much of the love poetry of centuries leading up to 1500 revolved around illicit romances conducted from unloving marriages.
“The young King of eighteen,” wrote historian G. M. Trevelyan, “exceeded the ordinary run of his subjects in body and in brain.” He had intelligence, physical strength and health, and a drive to stabilize an England still badly damaged and trying to recover from wars stretching back into the 1300s. He cemented relations with the Pope and received the title “Defender of the Faith” for writing against the movement of Martin Luther.
Henry VIII also enjoyed and relied upon the company of learned men and stocked his Court with people who, at first, were more learned and experienced than the King.
Here comes the important part, the reason why many find Henry irredeemable as a historical figure.
As time passed the King endeavored to do his primary duty, which was to reproduce. Trying and trying produced a single healthy and intellectually capable daughter, Mary. No son emerged to inherit the throne. Henry VIII soon faced a serious problem, He had one daughter and a wife many years his elder whose childrearing years would soon conclude.
And they did conclude.
The King would go to every extreme to have his son and heir. He could not get a divorce or an annulment from the previously accommodating Papacy because the Lutheran challenge had grown into open conflict. Roman Catholic doctrine does not allow for divorce, so Henry VIII went to Parliament and got it to vote to support severance from Rome.
Parliament allowed for the creation of the Church of England with the royal “Defender of the Faith” as its head instead of the Pope. The nation seized all Church property as well, which enriched the Crown immeasurably.
Henry VIII, as most in his time did, erroneously believed that mothers determined the sex of their children. He married a series of women in an effort to obtain his male heir, divorcing and also executing some as he labored to have a healthy son. From those marriages, he was blessed with a daughter Elizabeth and a weak, not very bright young man who inherited the throne from Henry and promptly died.
The strong-willed Mary took the throne, followed shortly after by the brilliant and cunning Elizabeth I. Every bit the monarch Henry dreamed of producing, save the gender, Elizabeth transformed a small and weak nation into a power ready to expand its influence globally through trade and a growing navy.
From the modern eyes, Henry VIII appears a horrific murderer, a lunatic in pursuit of a goal in itself that seems beyond the pale. Murder followed by apparent misogyny with the King overturning his realm and society itself to get his male heir.
Many judge harshly, or comedically, but few try to explore why the King pursued a male heir so doggedly.
First one should ask why the King felt his realm would not accept a Queen as its ruler.
Henry VII has faded mostly from history. He preceded VIII as king and dedicated his work to quiet and sound administration. Prior to him, however, had come the powerfully destructive Wars of the Roses. England had opened the Hundred Years War in the 1300s whilst controlling much of what is now France. Joan of Arc helped to turn the tide and the English were mostly evicted from the Continent at wars’ end.
The last quarter-century of the 1400s saw England in the grip of a conflict known as the Wars of the Roses. From the York and Lancaster family came claimants to an open throne. They and their allies waged something between a civil war and a massive family feud. Commoners mostly stood aside as royals and aristocracy slaughtered each other until the final victory at Bosworth field.
He, known first as the Earl of Richmond, then Henry VII, the patriarch of the Tudor family thus ascended the throne. Trevelyan described him as “cautious and thrifty to a fault” and that “after Bosworth, England wanted, not more adventures in shining armor but peace, retrenchment, and above all, the enforcement of order.
Henry VIII was not thrifty and not cautious, but he did inherit his father’s dedication to establishing the throne and nation in as secure of ground as possible.
A woman had not held a throne in the land known as England since well before it was England. Rome had conquered Celtic Britain around 40 Wied. but allowed for local governance over two more decades. Then the King the Romans had suffered to remain in place passed away. Roman administrators seized complete control and deprived leading landowners of their property.
Roman historians noted that her forces slaughtered the Roman Ninth Legion and massacred 70,000 of the conquerors and their allies. While that seems to be a sound example from which Henry VIII could draw on female leadership, one must remember that she lived 1,500 years before the King. He may have only been dimly aware of her existence. Most of his subjects outside of Wales likely had little or no knowledge of her either.
This condition left Henry VIII with a reasonable fear and a powerful impetus to fulfil what he saw as his duty to the Crown, his family, and England itself. He had solid reason to fear what would come of England should he leave her in the care of a female monarch. One can debate and discuss if the King did the right thing in response to his reasonable fears or not. One cannot simply dismiss him as mentally ill or imbalanced because the King had a powerful native intelligence and proceeded from it to action.
Serious historians will disagree with each other on various points. The point is that few things take place in history without reasons that can be explained if people will but hear them. Whether or not one changes their mind about this King is immaterial, one cannot evaluate without understanding.
And that is what history is about. The point is not figuring out whether Henry VIII is a “good guy” or a “bad guy,” then finding ways to use him to make a modern political point. That is not history. History is the pursuit of understanding. That may take us to dark places and difficult to untangle questions, but it is much better to understand (in most cases) historical figures , or nations for that matter, rather than rush to condemn based merely on sensibilities held by an elite minority of minds today and no other aspects of context and culture.
