June. Quarter’s wages to John Hawes and Dyso, watermen, 10s. each. 4th. Reward to the servant of the chancellor of France, for two tables, 50 cr. 5th. To two of lady Barkeley’s servants, for bringing hawks to the King, 30s. To a servant of the mayor of London, for bringing cherries to lady Anne, 6s. 8d.
Four bows for lady Anne, 13s. 4d. To Walter Walshe, to pay the tailor and skinner for stuff for lady Anne, and to a printer, for books for the King, 59l. 18s.
“She is ‘her father’s daughter’. This phrase is first used about her at the age of six, and constantly thereafter. For contemporaries had only to use their eyes to see that it was true. She looked like Henry, with her father’s hair, skin-colour, nose and lips. She had much of Henry’s character as well: his intelligence, his force of personality, his eloquence, and his ineffable star-quality that made her, like him, the automatic centre of attention.
But in other respects, she is self-consciously different. When her father makes himself Supreme Head of the Church, he begins by reconsidering his coronation, much of whose ritual and language was wholly incompatible with his present claims. In particular, he revised the second part of the coronation service, the oath, which is the equivalent of a contract between monarch and people. And he alters the oath fundamentally. Obviously, the monarch’s promise, central since Magna Carta, to respect ‘the liberties of the Church’ is wholly rewritten. But that is only the beginning. The result is to transform the oath from what it had been since the Anglo-Saxon period, a compact between the king and the people, into a solipsistic promise to defend the rights of the crown. But most interesting are his alterations to the undertaking that deals with the monarch and justice. At his coronation he had sworn, like his predecessors and like all his successors, from Elizabeth I to Elizabeth II, to do justice not only in truth but in mercy. But now, in his redrafting (which happily was never used), he crosses the word ‘mercy’ out.
“[Henry VIII] had over 2,000 pieces of tapestry, the largest collection ever
recorded. Only one or two per cent remain in the royal palaces. His books have
fared better. His library at Whitehall was made up of books catalogued in two
numerical series, one going up to 910, the other to 1,450. Several of these
remain in the Old Royal Library, which is now in the British Library. The
losses from the library at Greenwich, which numbered 329 volumes, were more
severe and only twenty-seven have been identified, all in the library of
Trinity College, Oxford.
In
fact only his munitions remain occasionally intact. The string of castles and
forts he built along the south coast still stand, whereas his palaces have
vanished; his armour and weapons, lodged now as then in the Tower, survive in
prodigious quantities; even his loss of his warship, the Mary Rose, has been
our gain.
Otherwise
the losses have done incalculable harm, both to the king’s reputation and to
our understanding of him. For, by an irony of time, what Henry destroyed has
survived better than what he built. The palaces have vanished, but the ruins of
the monasteries, whose confiscated wealth built those same palaces, stand as a
mute indictment of Henry’s policies. The achievement of Henry’s victims, More
and Fisher, as it was other-worldly, survives; the king’s own glory, as it was
this-worldly, has gone.
The
result is a gross imbalance. We judge Henry simply on the negative side of the
account. This is large, and I am not pretending otherwise. But so is the credit
side: if Henry destroyed and dispersed more than any other king of England, he
also built and accumulated more.”
Site Title 