Teddy Tudor

HENRY THE EIGHTH--Francis Hackett --Liveright ($3).

He stood among his councilors, taller than any, "hot-looking, heavily perfumed" --the new king. He was 18, golden-haired, pink-and-white, husky, gusty, eager to begin the business of running England. His penny-pinching old father had run that business pretty well, had piled up money, but the son thought Henry VII had been piddling. He would speed up the small but rich-going concern, put himself and England on the map. He always thought of himself first and said that all he did was for the glory of God. That was the fashion. Solidly behind him stood all England--soldiers, churchmen, ministers, tradesmen.

England was healthy, wealthy, wiser than it knew. Upthrusting middle classes were doing wonders in commerce. All over Europe, Henry's age (1500-1550) was a time bursting with new vigor. Old disciplines were breaking down. New countries were opening up--America, Africa. India. The imaginations of men burned with dreams of gold to be brought back by far-ranging ships. Had there been newspapers then, the following names would have been in the headlines-- Columbus, Cortes, Pizarro, Copernicus, Botticelli, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Titian, Holbein, Cellini, Erasmus, Cranmer, Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell, Luther, Rabelais. Machiavelli, Loyola.

For 38 years, in many ways like a later man named Roosevelt, Henry VIII hunted, swashbuckled, consorted with scholars, schemed, warred, legislated, toiled. He also married prodigiously.

France and the Holy Roman Empire (now, roughly, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, pieces of Italy) both were rich, more populous than England with its three million people. He played them off against each other so that they were often seeking England's aid. He launched a new church and designed a wagon to grind corn while it rolled along. He built up the navy, encouraged business, absorbed Wales, pacified (for a few moments) Ireland, weakened hostile Scotland, played the flute, started a book, jousted in the tiltyard, began the great English age that was to be called Elizabethan.

Average Reader pictures Henry VIII as a fat lecher who married many wives. He was, he did. But there was more in his marrying than lechery. An autocrat surrounded by lovely "maids of doubtful honor," he had no need to marry multitudinously. He needed a legitimate son for the sake of his pride, his dynasty, his country. By his halidom he would have a son if he had to marry and murder a half-dozen wives. Presented with the infant Elizabeth, later to be called great, he bellowed: "But Christ, this to me! To me! A daughter! I would prefer a son blind, deaf, crippled. . . . You make filth of me."

Author Hackett groups his history of Henry around the six wives. Some of them were of profound political influence. The roster:

(1) Catherine, a homely, pious Spanish girl, who had married Henry's elder brother Arthur for political reasons. Arthur died. Catherine failed to give Henry a son. Having natural evidence that this was not his fault, Henry divorced her.

(2) Anne Boleyn, young, bold, bright-faced, ambitious. Her sister had been a mistress of Henry's. No mistress would she be. Heavy-breathing Henry wrote long love letters to her with hearts drawn on them. She bore Elizabeth. He said she was adulterous, chopped off her head.

(3) Jane Seymour, still, pale-eyed, blank-faced, pretty. She gave him sickly Edward, his only male heir, then died of it.

(4) Anne of Cleves, a plain German, no longer young. Henry had seen only Holbein's portrait of her. He married her largely to gain influential friends against France. Seeing her for the first time, he "disliked her person." He went through with the ceremony, set her aside.

(5) Katheryn Howard, young, "very small and well-rounded with a delightful open expression." She had had lovers before, took another. Off came her head. Facing the block, she said: "I die a queen, but I would rather die the wife of Culpeper." She had stabbed Henry's pride. He was getting fat, middleaged. Laws were passed to make it praiseworthy to tattle on a naughty queen, to make it fatal for a royal-bride-to-be to hornswoggle the king as to her virtue.

(6) Katherine Parr, widow, woman of great good sense and good will. Henry was 50, his face greasy and yellow in candlelight, his hands "broken out with rings." He was going to chop off her head, but she quietly talked him out of it.

The Significance. Author Hackett's Henry is immense. Others who have written biographically of the gigantic, simpleminded, "red-tempered," go-getter king include: Froude (hero worship in magnificent prose); Gasquet (colored with religious emotion); H. A. L. Fisher (fairly, in The Political History of England, vol. 6). And there is the monumental Letters and Papers of the Reign of Henry VIII, 21 vols., a work of 50 years, deep mine of source material. Author Hackett used these and many another book and record. He worked on his biography over a period of six years. It has the best of material (perhaps too much), a brilliant style (now and then a polish with obvious labor in it). He demonstrates that the "psycho-historian" should be "then-minded." In addition to Henry and his immediate group, he gives an enlightening picture of contemporary Europe.

The Author was born in Kilkenny, Ireland, 1883; reached the U. S. in 1900; married Signe Toksvig of Denmark; did some law work in New York, editorial writing in Chicago, made the Friday Literary Review of the Chicago Evening Post the best thing of its kind in the Midwest; went to The New Republic to do books, resigned in 1922 to write books of his own--several historical-sociological works, one so-so novel (That Nice Young Couple), and now Henry the Eighth. He has found his work. Royalties on more than 100,000 copies of Henry are beginning to pour in upon Biographer Hackett, now at his home in Duncannon, Ireland.