beauty and youth, Henry was free to divert himself with mistresses. And in his and Catherine’s one living child, their daughter Mary, he had a bright, attractive heir who naturally adored her formidable father. By virtue of her position, Mary was growing up with the most brilliant marriage prospects in Europe. She seemed fated not only to wear the English crown but to become, like her mother and her grandmother Isabella of Castile, the wife and partner of some great prince. Her children, Henry’s grandchildren, were likely to rule more than England only.
On top of all his other blessings, Henry had the inestimable advantage—one that fit beautifully with his increasingly grandiose conceptionof his own place in the world—of happening to rule at a time when the curious idea of the divine right of kings was becoming fashionable across much of Europe. The emergence of this notion was understandable as a reaction to the bloody instability of recent generations, and as an expression of the widespread hunger for law and order and therefore for strong central government. But it gave crowned heads a justification for turning themselves into despots with no obligations to anyone. It fed Henry VIII’s inclination to think of himself as a quasi-divine being whom heaven intended to be all-powerful and had endowed with the wisdom to decide all questions. He did not have to look far, in the first decades of the sixteenth century, to find scholars eager to assure him that it lay within his authority to overthrow centuries of law, tradition, and precedent.
The effects of so much good fortune were, perhaps inevitably, tragic. Henry remained lord and master of everyone around him for so long, and became so accustomed not only to doing whatever he wished but to making everyone else do as he wished and being applauded for doing it, that he lost contact with the commonplace realities of human experience. Power corrupts, as Acton famously said, and a generation into Henry’s reign there was beginning to hang over him the stench of corruption, of something like spiritual death. He was slipping into the special realm of fantasy reserved for those deprived too long of the simple truth even—or especially—about themselves. In ancient Greece or Rome he might have declared himself a god. Living in Christian England on the threshold of the modern world, he had to settle for being treated like a god.
Throughout the first half of his reign, from the 1513 war in France onward, the Crown’s worst problems had been financial. To some extent this was a function of the times: revenues were inadequate to needs in all but the most prudently managed kingdoms, and as a rule Henry was little worse off than the kings of France, his wife’s father in Spain, or even the imperial Hapsburgs. In any case his blithe assumption that the whole wealth of England was his to dispose of as he wished, that somehow money would always be available for whatever he wanted to do, meant that in practical terms the state of the treasury was not his problem but Wolsey’s. Time after time the cardinal had to search out new ways of keeping Henry and his wars, his diplomatic intrigues, andhis many amusements afloat. When the seemingly endless demands for new taxes reached intolerable levels, popular anger was always directed at Wolsey, never at the king.
But as the twentieth anniversary of his coronation approached, Henry found himself up against a problem that had nothing to do with money and that he could not possibly ignore because it was entirely of his choosing. It would become the defining challenge of his life and his reign—would come to be known, with good reason, as “the king’s great matter.” There were two elements to it, and there is no way for us to know which came first. One was the sad fact that Queen Catherine had become a rather dumpy little middle-aged woman whose childbearing years were clearly behind her. The other was Henry’s passionate
On top of all his other blessings, Henry had the inestimable advantage—one that fit beautifully with his increasingly grandiose conceptionof his own place in the world—of happening to rule at a time when the curious idea of the divine right of kings was becoming fashionable across much of Europe. The emergence of this notion was understandable as a reaction to the bloody instability of recent generations, and as an expression of the widespread hunger for law and order and therefore for strong central government. But it gave crowned heads a justification for turning themselves into despots with no obligations to anyone. It fed Henry VIII’s inclination to think of himself as a quasi-divine being whom heaven intended to be all-powerful and had endowed with the wisdom to decide all questions. He did not have to look far, in the first decades of the sixteenth century, to find scholars eager to assure him that it lay within his authority to overthrow centuries of law, tradition, and precedent.
The effects of so much good fortune were, perhaps inevitably, tragic. Henry remained lord and master of everyone around him for so long, and became so accustomed not only to doing whatever he wished but to making everyone else do as he wished and being applauded for doing it, that he lost contact with the commonplace realities of human experience. Power corrupts, as Acton famously said, and a generation into Henry’s reign there was beginning to hang over him the stench of corruption, of something like spiritual death. He was slipping into the special realm of fantasy reserved for those deprived too long of the simple truth even—or especially—about themselves. In ancient Greece or Rome he might have declared himself a god. Living in Christian England on the threshold of the modern world, he had to settle for being treated like a god.
Throughout the first half of his reign, from the 1513 war in France onward, the Crown’s worst problems had been financial. To some extent this was a function of the times: revenues were inadequate to needs in all but the most prudently managed kingdoms, and as a rule Henry was little worse off than the kings of France, his wife’s father in Spain, or even the imperial Hapsburgs. In any case his blithe assumption that the whole wealth of England was his to dispose of as he wished, that somehow money would always be available for whatever he wanted to do, meant that in practical terms the state of the treasury was not his problem but Wolsey’s. Time after time the cardinal had to search out new ways of keeping Henry and his wars, his diplomatic intrigues, andhis many amusements afloat. When the seemingly endless demands for new taxes reached intolerable levels, popular anger was always directed at Wolsey, never at the king.
But as the twentieth anniversary of his coronation approached, Henry found himself up against a problem that had nothing to do with money and that he could not possibly ignore because it was entirely of his choosing. It would become the defining challenge of his life and his reign—would come to be known, with good reason, as “the king’s great matter.” There were two elements to it, and there is no way for us to know which came first. One was the sad fact that Queen Catherine had become a rather dumpy little middle-aged woman whose childbearing years were clearly behind her. The other was Henry’s passionate
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