Henry VIII: The Quest for Fame

"This is a brilliant book. Like MacCulloch’s it is scholarly, but reads like a novel. Guy is excellent on both the political and religious origins of the Reformation. But, perhaps above all, he is brilliant on the high politics of the reign, both domestic and international, crucial threads to the story. You can’t understand Cromwell’s project and its trajectory without understanding its vulnerability to both domestic and international opposition. This book will help you understand, in particular, how shifting international alliances in response to the Reformation had a crucial impact on the course of English political history during the 1530s and, in the end, provided the international context that brought about Thomas Cromwell’s fall. Dreadfully, in my opinion, although the book is absolutely not a hatchet job. Henry VIII is widely agreed to be one of the greatest of English monarchs. This book provides a very convincing picture that that assessment is woefully at odds with the reality. Henry emerges as a politician quite incapable of thinking strategically, but blown hither and thither by events. He left a country completely divided religiously and never managed to make up his mind about what he wanted the English Church to look like. He wanted to be a great martial prince-hero like Henry V, but his early military expeditions to France were a complete farce. In the 1520s he wanted a papal title and wrote works against Luther, praising the papal supremacy. Thomas More suggested he tone down his papalism, but he refused. Every schoolchild knows he executed two of his wives, but during the late 1530s and early 1540s he also executed a whole swathe of his extended cousinage because he was terrified they would conspire with overseas powers to depose him and restore the papal allegiance. His most able servants, Cromwell, More and Bishop John Fisher were executed. Wolsey died in disgrace. He also executed one of the greatest poets of the age, the Earl of Surrey (although, to be fair to Henry, not because he didn’t like his poetry). One of the greatest duties of a king is to provide an heir. Henry married six times and produced one sickly male heir who died young and without issue. It’s an extraordinary record of ineptitude and failure. If you take a favourable view of the Reformation, then there were real constitutional achievements, but as all these books show, Cromwell was really the mastermind of that process. Henry was a bad man and a bad King: vain, stupid, and capricious. That doesn’t stop him being a fascinating biographical study. Quite the contrary."