Heroics Without a Hero

HENRY VIII by J. J. Scarisbrick. 561 pages. University of California Press. $10.95.

Martin Luther accused him of playing God. An English observer saw him as an idler who wanted "only an apple and a fair wench to dally with." To one subject he was "a tyrant more cruel than Nero." When his wife Anne Boleyn was about to be beheaded by his executioner, she maintained: "A gentler nor a more merciful prince was there never." Even as they felt the impact of his boisterous personality, the sting of his vindictiveness, or the thrust of his appetite for pleasure and power, the contemporaries of King Henry VIII could never quite understand him.

Henry started his reign in 1509 as a handsome, strapping 17-year-old, seemingly the perfect embodiment of the chivalric tradition. A superb sportsman and a gifted musician, he also could hold his own intellectually in company with those lights of Renaissance humanism, Erasmus and Thomas More. Yet he grew into a gross, willful creature not so far removed from the modern layman's view of him, which seems to be based mainly on Charles Laughton's famous roaring, slobbering portrayal in the 1933 film The Private Life of Henry VIII. He gorged himself at seven-hour banquets, eventually became so fat that he had to be moved up and down stairs by machinery. He toyed with court intrigues, then grimly ended them with executions; he was crude enough to greet the news of his first wife's death by dressing in yellow and staging a feast.

Monumental Mosaic. Biographer Scarisbrick, a lecturer in history at the University of London, does not try to resolve the contradictions in Henry's character so much as to make them comprehensible, balancing them against each other and putting them in their complex historical perspectives. This sounds unexciting--and it is. Scarisbrick's study is no swashbuckler, but a sober, patient amassing of significant details. For the nonspecialist it becomes tedious at times, as when Scarisbrick expounds canon law or traces a dense web of diplomatic maneuvering; but in the end it adds up to a monumental mosaic that has all the quiet authority of first-rate scholarship.

As Scarisbrick sees him, Henry cast his career on a noble scale without achieving true nobility, indulged in vainglorious heroics without fully emerging as a hero. He made his boldest imprint on history when, frustrated by the Pope in his desire to divorce his first wife and marry Anne Boleyn, he roared: "I care not a fig for all his excommunications. Let him follow his own at Rome, I will do here what I think best." Turning the currents of the Reformation to his own purposes, he declared himself the earthly overlord of his subjects' souls, founded the Church of England, and implanted the idea of England as an empire.

But even here, argues Scarisbrick, Henry "seriously mishandled" his divorce case, leaving his succession in doubt for a dangerous decade. And as for the notion of Henry the Hot-Blooded--inspired by his succession of six wives--Scarisbrick tempers it with cool practicality. "Henry was probably neither a remarkably accomplished nor endearing lover," he writes, but simply a man driven by the "need to beget progeny in sufficient quantity to prove himself and assure his dynasty."

Costly Irresponsibility. Henry's reign, concludes Scarisbrick, "left a deeper mark on the mind, heart and face of England than did any event between the coming of the Normans and the coming of the factory." But what kind of mark? Most of the "good governance" of the time was the handiwork of two brilliant ministers, Thomas Cardinal Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell; Henry was more responsible for the burdensome taxes of the day. He forged a new sense of nationhood but left a legacy of internal religious strife. He thrust and parried skillfully in international politics, but had little effect on his country's position in the European balance of power, largely because his continental counterparts were equally skillful.

Worst of all, according to Scarisbrick, Henry acquired a fortune when he seized the Roman Catholic estates of the realm, but he failed to use it for schools, hospitals and other social requirements. By the time he died at 55, he may have been no less responsible than many kings, "but rarely, if ever, have the unawareness and irresponsibility of a king proved more costly of material benefit to his people."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.