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The true story behind the infamous life of Henry VIII, one of history’s best-known characters and England’s most famous monarch. He is simultaneously the virtuous Renaissance prince gone wrong, the psychopathic, paranoid tyrant and the much-married glutton.
Oh, Henry. Has there ever been an English king – or a British king – so recognisable, so equally reviled and written-about, that he is, as the great Tudor historian Sir Geoffrey Elton once claimed, recognisable by his silhouette alone? The answer is ‘no.’
Portrait of King Henry VIII, painted by Joos van Cleve around 1535.
Even those unfamiliar with the history of reformation, or parliament, or constitutional law can recognise Henry as, at least, the bloody tyrant who had six wives. Whether one’s image of him is as the buffoonish Charles Laughton, the tyrannical Keith Michell, the leering Sid James, the youthful Jonathan Rhys Meyers, or the volatile Damian Lewis, the point is this: everyone certainly has an image of him.
This was one of the more daunting things I faced when deciding to write about Henry VIII, as was the knowledge that I was hardly the first to consider a book on him – indeed, it was the work of historians such as Alison Weir, Lucy Wooding, Eric Ives, Suzannah Lipscomb, Tracy Borman, Robert Hutchinson, Jasper Ridley, and Antonia Fraser who helped kindle my fascination with Henry and his reign.
What, I wondered, was there left to say?
To my surprise, there was quite a lot. For one thing, the totemic biography of Henry himself – the political biography nonpareil, which focuses on the man and his policies rather than on his court culture, bloody marital history, or association with significant statesmen (which are all interesting in their own right) – remains J. J. Scarisbrick’s 1968 biography.
In this book, which remains standard reading on the sovereign, the author creates an image which has coloured every subsequent study: a Henry VIII who dreamed, however chimerically, of conquering France in England’s name, and who had no coherent or consistent British policy (Scarisbrick not only indicates this but states it outright). To my surprise, as a long-time student of Scottish history who frequently encountered the king well away from the continent, this simply was not the Henry I’d met in the various and surprisingly voluminous Scottish sources. Still less was it the figure I then found lingering in the pages of various Irish and Welsh documents.
Could there be another Henry VIII?
This question propelled the writing of “Overlord” and made it a joy. Here was a new version of the king I thought I knew – and backed up by a variety of sources untouched in any existing biography. This made working on the book not a workmanlike experience but – to rely on a hoary cliché – a genuine journey of discovery.
Could there be another Henry VIII?
This question propelled the writing of “Overlord” and made it a joy. Here was a new version of the king I thought I knew – and backed up by a variety of sources untouched in any existing biography. This made working on the book not a workmanlike experience but – to rely on a hoary cliché – a genuine journey of discovery.
Readers, I hope, will feel the same way as they meet a familiar figure – swathed in his furs and surmounted by his bejewelled, feathered cap – in new surroundings and with all-new motives. “Overlord”, I hope, presents the would-be Emperor Henry VIII: a magnificent, awe-inspiring, frequently ghastly leader who saw himself bestriding the British Isles as a legally-justified, universally-respected colossus.
I can’t promise readers will like him any more than they do already (which is generally not at all), but I do hope they’ll be as spellbound by him – and his arrogance, bravado, and sheer self-belief – as I was.
Steven Veerapen
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