Hearty Good-Fellowship

HENRY VIII AND THE REFORMATION (480 pp.)--H. Maynard Smifh--Macm///an ($8.50).

Although only the second and fifth of King Henry's wives* actually went from the bed to the block, English folklore (and the cinema) have stressed the Bluebearded side of his life. But history, with a surer stress on the important, credits Henry with a stroke more momentous than any ever struck by his executioners: he severed the Church in England from the Church of Rome.

H. Maynard Smith, the latest interpreter of this great event, is a canon emeritus of Gloucester Cathedral, but he writes as a historian first and an Anglican second. Henry's history has been finecombed by eminent scholars of the past generation (notably the Englishman A. F. Pollard and the American R. B. Merriman),and Canon Smith has no advantage over them in sources or in scholarship. From the vantage point of the mid-20th Century, however, he can see more ironies than they could in the Reformation carried out by bluff King Hal.

As a gorgeous Renaissance prince, Henry's wants were simple: personal and dynastic power, personal gratification and money. Life would have been simpler if people had given him what he wanted in the first place. Had Katherine of Aragon given him a son & heir, he might never have married Anne Boleyn since he might have had her as mistress; had Pope Clement VII consented to annul the marriage with Katherine, Henry might never have insisted that he, not the Pope, was head of the Church in England; had the royal treasury been full, he might never have confiscated the Church lands.

Cannon & Good Sense. "His permanent achievements," Canon Smith writes, "were, for the most part, due to afterthoughts. He had a particular object and obtained it; the object had then to be justified by postulating a general principle, and, when the general principle was applied, unforeseen results ensued." In Henry's case, the results were serious and the rationalizing process monumental.

His principle, in essence, was that the King's will was the will of God. A sample result: Henry's legal vengeance on St. Thomas of Canterbury, who had been martyred nearly 400 years before by courtiers of Henry II for upholding a different principle (the authority of Church against King). "He was not content with plundering [Canterbury's] shrine and conveying its wealth in 26 wagons to London, but he burnt the bones of the saint, mingled the ashes with earth, and dissipated them from the mouth of a cannon . . ."

Henry VIII could never have carried out such acts if there had not been a movement against Rome among his people: it was led by men willing to fight papacy and Church for the freedom to read and interpret the Bible as they saw fit. Henry never countenanced such radicals, and he burned some as heretics during his reign. To Henry, that was just good sense.

Nevertheless, he risked civil war. In the course of his suppression of monasteries, the northern counties rose against his Vice-Regent, Thomas Cromwell, in the so-called "Pilgrimage of Grace." At the height of this rising, Robert Aske had 30,000 men behind him and might have won half of England if he had advanced; but Henry was conciliatory. He could be a charming prince. "Aske was shortly afterwards called to London and was received by bluff King Hal in that spirit of hearty good-fellowship for which he was famous." When Henry had thoroughly confused and dispersed the rebels with promises of redress and pardon, he ordered Lord Norfolk to unfurl the King's banner and march north (with a force of cutthroats recruited from London prisons).

Stiff Competition. "Before you close up our said banner again," commanded the King, "you shall in any wise cause such dreadful execution to be done upon a good number ... as they may be a fearful spectacle to all other hereafter . . ." Robert Aske he ordered hanged.

This sort of procedure moves Historian Smith to rate Henry VIII, though the competition was stiff, among the most accomplished Machiavellians of his time. Canon Smith calls the tendencies of the early 16th Century "totalitarian," and Henry's resemblances to certain 20th Century totalitarians are inescapable. Yet England--and America--could never have developed as they did had it not been for Henry. Canon Smith takes a balanced view of his achievements, aware, as a historian must be, that good may come even of hard and crooked deeds, and that they are the stuff of history.

* Anne Boleyn and Katharine Howard.

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