autrenecherche:

Beautiful singing as always. But I think that might be the first time I’ve ever heard Henry VIII called “great”.

There are many ways to describe Henry the eighth. Never though[t] “great” would be one of them.

These are two of the comments on Karliene’s song on her album dedicated to Elizabeth the I, all because of the lines on the song Fire and Gold:

Can I be great like my Father?/ Will I be loved by my people?

Between this, and Henry VIII being voted “Worst Monarch in History”, it’s easy to assume his subjects– and his children, by that token– viewed him in the same light. 

The article about this says:

The 16th-century historian John Stow claimed Henry had some 70,000 people executed during his reign; though that was an extreme exaggeration, the number surely reached into the hundreds.

“The number surely reached into the hundreds”…?? So did the number under Mary I. So did the number under Elizabeth I (literally, in her response to the Northern rebellion alone; so much so that Cecil wrote about how he was worried there would not be any civilians left in the villages where people were being executed).

Catholic polemicists like Sanders certainly didn’t view him as “great”, nor did the French ambassador to his court, de Marillac, and many English citizens in later centuries went further than this in their criticsm. To Dickens, he was “a disgrace to human nature…a blot of blood and grease upon the history of England”. To the 15-year-old Jane Austen, “The Crimes & Cruelties of this Prince, were too numerous to be mentioned, (as this history I trust has fully shewn;) & nothing can be said in his vindication…[he was] a Man who was of no Religion himself.”

But this wasn’t the case, by and large, for his subjects. 

It certainly wasn’t the case for one of his subjects, William Thomas, who had been educated at Oxford University. Thomas was residing in Italy at the time he heard of Henry VIII’s death, in February 1547. 

“Thomas’s work is specially valuable as representing the popular view of the character of Henry VIII current in England at the time of his death. It is not free from mistakes, but the Victorian historian James Anthony Froude wrote of it that it had “the accuracies and the inaccuracies” which might be naturally expected “in any account of a series of intricate events given by memory without the assistance of documents”.  

Now, I don’t exactly know the context of this, but given how vehemently William Thomas seemed to defend Henry VIII as a great ruler to all the Italian lads sitting in a pub or w/e, I’m going to assume that after the news of his death was given, someone talked some shit and Thomas went like this:

(Froude assumes, by his speech, and the way in which he took the criticism so personally, that he must have known Henry “in the flesh”).

Here it is:

“Of personage he was one of the goodliest men that lived in his time; being high of stature, in manner more than a man…of countenace he was most amiable, courteous and benign in gesture unto all persons and specially unto strangers; seldom or never offended with anything. Prudent he was in council and forecasting; most liberal in rewarding faithful servants, and even unto his enemies, as it behoveth a Prince to be. He was learned in all sciences, and had the gift of many tongues. He was a perfect theologian, a good philosopher, and a strong man at arms, a jeweller, a perfect builder as well fortresses as pleasant palaces, and from one to another there was no necessary kind of knowledge, from a King’s degree to a carter’s, but he had an honest sight of it.”

Now, I’m not saying all of this was 100% true– with hindsight, obviously, we know his fortresses lasted far longer (many still stand today) than many of those “pleasant palaces” (although some of those were factors beyond his control, like the fire that consumed Whitehall during the reign of Charles II)– but I do think this was what Thomas honestly thought of him. Even though every attribute claimed is not displayed in the handling of every subject (”even unto his Enemies”, especially); they were evidently displayed enough that they were remembered.

It’s good to be skeptical of this account, especially since the historian Froude admitted some errors in it, but any close study of Tudor history would probably tell you that, actually, a lot of this account reflects other records. Sure, there were more ambassadorial accounts of Henry being “amiable”, good-natured, a “strong man at arms” and generous in the 1510s and 1520s than those of the 1540s; but those accounts still exist and those foreign ambassadors were not his subjects; and had no reason to lie about their impressions of him in their accounts. The Privy Purse Expenses of Henry VIII that exist online do reflect that Henry was “liberal in rewarding faithful servants”, especially those that had served his family. Campeggio himself wrote that Henry was “more well-versed as a great theologian or jurist”– not as well-versed/studied as a theologian, but more so. Upon examining all his notes pertaining to books of theology that he studied for the debates of the Great Matter, Campeggio’s observation is of little wonder. 

Tl;dr: Henry was viewed as a “great ruler” by many of his subjects. Modern opinion of Henry VIII can’t change that; and moreover modern scholarship pertaining to Henry VIII shouldn’t ignore it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read things like “Henry VIII was far worse than we could ever comprehend”, said with the authority of a person that has time traveled to 16th century England just to catapult to the 21st and type their opinion onto discussion threads on the Internet. People can say that, and similar things, all they want, but the fact of the matter is several foreign ambassadors did not consider Henry to be “terrible beyond comprehension”, and most of his subjects didn’t, either– no matter how much people want to think or state otherwise.