autrenecherche:

“Both Henry’s defence of the papacy and his breach with it highlight another aspect of this multifarious man: his bookishness. Henry was not the first English king to be literate, but he was probably the first to be thoroughly at home with books. He was certainly the first to write and put one into print himself. Much of the preparatory work (for which Henry naturally had research assistants, like Thomas More) for his Assertio septem sacramentorum must have taken place in the library at Greenwich. This was Henry’s second addition to the palace after the tiltyard, and similarly displaced his father’s at Richmond. Its contents were different too, as Janet Backhouse points out. Henry VII’s library, like Edward IV’s which was incorporated into it, consisted mainly of big, boldly illuminated books. These, like their coffee-table equivalents today, were for patrons who looked at books rather than read them. Henry VIII, on the other hand, read, marked and inwardly digested his, and his annotations, in his unmistakable hand, are still extant in his manuscripts and provide some of the most valuable guides to the otherwise unfathomable processes of his mind.”

–David Starkey | Published in History Today, Volume 41: Issue 6, June 1991