Royal taste in reading
Nicolas Barker
THE BOOKS OF HENRY VIII AND HIS WIVES by James P. Carley British Library, £20, pp. 161, ISBN 0712347917 ✆ £18 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 Henry VIII is the first English monarch whose features everyone knows. The sharp little eyes in the massive head, the golden beard, above all the commanding stance in which Holbein painted him, are infinitely familiar and always terrifying. This is the man who sent More and Cromwell, two of his wives and many others to the scaffold, who dissolved the monasteries and proclaimed himself head of a new English church. He was also the man who built up the navy and created the new, rich, confident Britain with imperial ambitions, but that is not so obvious in the portraits. Nor is his intellect, although it was that which distinguished him from most of his subjects and other contemporaries. Reconstructing the mind as well as body of this formidable figure is not easy, but the books that he owned offer a window on to it.
That we know about them is due to two fortunate and related circumstances: the existence of a huge inventory of the king’s possessions, 20,000 of them, including several lists of books; and the survival of some of the books themselves, now mainly in the British Library. The pieces of this jigsaw puzzle have long interested Professor Carley; he printed the book inventories in The Libraries of Henry VIII (2000), and this book is a pictorial supplement to those dry documents. The pictures in it are more than just illustrations; they recreate vividly the texture as well as appearance of the books in Henry’s life. The text explains what they meant to Henry, the first king also to be born into the new world created by the invention of printing.
Can these mute witnesses be made to speak? It is not an easy task. To us, books are things to read, which we own or borrow; our relationship to them is personal. In Henry’s time, it was more complicated. Books, in manuscript as well as print, were not uniform, so a particular book, perhaps elaborately decorated, had an independent character. To own or be given it created a special relationship. Reading was a public as well as private act: a king, like monks in a refectory, had a ‘reader’, and the act of reading might become a public dialogue. A library, containing books inherited (as Henry had) as well as personally acquired, was itself a public statement, as much for the use of others as the owner. Nor was it fixed: Henry had many houses, and moved from one to another. Some books travelled in coffers with him, although there were larger, stable collections at Richmond and Greenwich, and later at Westminster and Hampton Court.
Actual books, surviving or known to have belonged to Henry, have to be seen against this background. Many of those he inherited were illuminated: few were more than a century old, but his father, Henry VII, had a number of books thus decorated, sent (as diplomatic presents, not to ‘standing order’) by the great French publisher, Antoine Vérard. His own books were often handsomely bound and decorated in gilt in the new Renaissance manner, some at his own behest, some by their authors or others by whom they were given. Other books came by sequestration, of which the best known part came from monasteries. Once seen as a potential source of ammunition in the divorce controversy (a substantial number came from Rochester, see of the king’s main opponent, John Fisher), monastic books were later preserved as part of the national heritage by John Leland, the king’s ‘antiquarius’.
What then of Henry VIII as reader, in the modern sense? Both Thomas More and Erasmus, learned and with powerful minds of their own, were impressed by Henry’s intellect. If adept also in courtly flattery, their hopes of what an intelligent prince might achieve were universally shared. If they failed to recognise that absolute power would tend to corrupt absolutely, it was not just because Lord Acton had yet to coin the phrase. The scattered marginal jottings that Henry wrote in the books that he must have read do not add up to much: the famous remark ‘so not in our case’ against a text noting polygamy in the Old Testament merely makes one wonder how he came to be reading a book on the power of the Church printed as long ago as 1475. But he did read, and reading and writing added to the force of his will.
Nowhere was this more clearly demonstrated than in his attitude to marriage. In the early years when Catherine of Aragon was queen, theirs was seen as a marriage of minds, and the signs of Catherine’s well-educated use of books and writers are clear and frequent. Henry’s doubts about the validity of this marriage were not just cynical; his mind was genuinely engaged in the problem. It was Anne Boleyn’s mind, more than her person (she was no great beauty), that attracted his passion. Her early training in France had acquainted her with the evangelical scholar, Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples, and this led to her interest in reform, which equally attracted and alarmed Henry. Her special copy of Tyndale’s New Testament, printed on vellum with ANNA REGINA ANGLIAE painted in red on its gilt edges, is witness to it. Anne of Cleves also came from an intellectual background, and all three of the other queens left evidence of a bookish nature.
Apart from their picturesque splendour, the chief fascination of Henry VIII’s books is the reflection that they provide of the intellectual currents of that tumultuous time. In those, the chief influence was his own. The books are a reminder that it was the workings of his mind, as well as that commanding presence, that made him so formidable.
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