The Last Office - Geoffrey Moorhouse

 Moorhouse's specialism is the 1536 Pilgrimage of Grace and its context, the Dissolution of the Monasteries by Thomas Cromwell on behalf of Henry VIII.   In this study Moorhouse focuses on Durham Abbey, which was unique in many ways.   It was part of the fortress of the Prince Bishop who was technically also the abbot of the abbey; in practice, the Prior was the head of the religious.   The Bishop, meanwhile, was the King's deputy in civil and legal matters in the whole of the North Country and held court in the castle adjoining the abbey.   When Henry VIII made himself Supreme Head of the Church in England, his bishop, Cuthbert Tunstall, found himself in a dilemma.   Fortunately for all concerned, Tunstall was a lifelong equivocator and Durham Abbey was neither in the forefront of dissolutions nor, in the end, resistant to its fate.

Moorhouse is a great source on the Dissolution and in particular its forerunner, the Visitations of 1535 and the Valor Ecclesiasticus, the monetary appraisal that sealed the fate of all religious houses.   No value, of course, was put on their service to local communities, which became ever greater the further they were from London.   They provided hospitals and hospices, alms and alms houses, shelter for the homeless, the orphaned, and the mentally ill.   They drove and underpinned local economies, providing work for local labourers and artisans.   All that was wiped away in less than a decade.   That, not love of supersition and mystic ritual, was what the Pilgrims rose up for.

Moorhouse feels obliged to continue his narrative post-Dissolution.   Given that Durham's transition was peaceful and measured, I personally lost interest.   Notwithstanding that, I find Moorhouse indispensable to my research into the English Reformation. 

Charles Brandon, Henry VIII's Closest Friend - Steven Gunn

Steven Gunn is a very distinguished history professor at Oxford. This book is based on his thesis from the Eighties. Research standards have moved on since then, not least because so many original sources are available online.

That brings me to the first problem. There is, as Gunn says, surprisingly little known about Brandon, given that he was a pivotal figure in a reign so thoroughly documented as Henry VIII's. There are reasons and those reasons are part of the attraction. He was always hard up and his matrimonial arrangements make Henry's seem straightforward. Very little written evidence from the man himself survives. I suspect he was bit thick. He was certainly a man who made his presence felt physically: he was bigger and better looking than Henry and he was a man who seems to have thrived on friendship.


One thing that is certainly known about him, and has always been known, though not apparently to Dr Gunn, is where he lived in London. He famously developed Suffolk House in Southwark, but Southwark Place, where he lived in his later years, was close by what is now Trafalgar Square. The evidence for this is twofold: the Elizabethan historian Stow, whom Gunn quotes on the subject but clearly didn't follow up by reading the passage in full, and the deed of Edward VI granting Southwark to the City of London, all except what used to be Suffolk House but had become Southwark Place, which belonged to Edward and his father before him, the latter having got it from Brandon in exchange for Norwich House in Westminster. An Oxford professor should really have sorted that one out.


The second problem is the habit of quoting the records as they were written. Why? Gunn has modernised dates, numbers etc., so what is so precious about leaving handwritten texts in ye olde englysshe? It doesn't work for me. It means the reader having to go over many of them twice when a goodly proportion weren't really worth reading once.


That said, the amount of research that has gone into building a picture of Brandon's activities outside London is hugely impressive. Gunn writes very well and even holds our interest through passages on feoffees and shire courts, which were no more interesting then than they are today. Overall, I miss the women surrounding Brandon. This, after all, is the man who married up to eight times, had at least six daughters, ran off with the French Queen and finally married his teenage ward, one of the brightest Englishwomen of the century. Brandon, I think, was very much a lady's man.

Henry: Virtuous Prince - David Starkey

The contrast with the earlier Starkey, also reviewed here this month, is (pun unavoidable) stark. The first, Personalities and Politics was short but deep; this - half a two-volume life of Henry VIII, published in tandem with a Channel 4 TV series in 2008, is chunky but feels very slight. Everything is in half-page segments, like the novelisation of a TV script.


I didn't see the series, so I can't tell if this is in fact the case. However, the sense of slightness is misleading. There is a great deal of information here that I haven't encountered anywhere else. For example, there is detail on the treasonable behaviour of the Duke of Suffolk, Edmund de la Pole, in 1501. Similarly, though of less interest to me personally, Starkey provides lots of information about Prince Henry's nurses and an early favourite, Lord Mountjoy. On the other hand, there is far too much - in my view - about Henry's love of the joust. I suspect Starkey is laying the groundwork for an argument in the second half that jousting accidents turned Henry into a tyrant. It's a weak argument which we will never know the truth about. Severe injuries, especially to the head, have unpredictable outcomes. Both of mine, for example, have been largely beneficial.


The real problem, though, is that nobody really cares about the young Henry VIII. He was vain, self-indulgent, and lazy. He achieved very little in the first half of his reign and, equally, hardly any harm. Everything of interest - five of the wives, the Break with Rome, the Pilgrimage of Grace and the elephantine weight - comes in the second half. Still, if you're stuck with writing a life, doing so in two volumes is a reasonable way out, though the first half will inevitably be padded. I'm about to request the second instalment (Henry: The Mind of a Tyrant) from my local library.


Finally, the notes and references here are better, but still nowhere near good enough for the serious student. There is again no bibliography whatever. And to think - they may have been axed to make room for the awful author interview which takes up twelve unwanted and unnecessary pages at the end.

The Reign of Henry VIII, Personalities and Politics - David Starkey

This deceptively slim volume is Starkey at his best, one of his earliest books (written in 1995, republished in this form in 2002), before he became a TV character, cartoonish contraversialist and fawning royalist.

The attitude here is what made his name - that Henry VIII was the source of political power, not powerful in himself, and that his court was driven - and riven - by faction.
Because Starkey here is not aiming for sales but for reputation, he does not shy away from explaining his thesis and discussing the views of others. That gives tremendous life to the text. He also paints vivid pen portraits of the key players, not only Wolsey and Cromwell but figures like Anthony Denny, Groom of the Stool and absolute controller of access to the king. Likewise he offers assessments of the court women, especially the queens, that are fresh and which invite debate.


Essential reading, then, for both those new to the idea of court politics and those who simply want a vigorous and invigorating refresher. This Vintage paperback, however, sorely needs a better bibliography. A discursive one is not good enough for a thesis so heavily reliant on court papers of the time.

Tudor: The Family Story - Leandra de Lisle

I was a big fan of de Lisle’s book about the Grey sisters The Sisters Who Would be Queen, and there was much here that I liked. Eventually, though, I had to give up, because de Lisle’s conservative agenda became too much. I have no problem with conservative writers; it sometimes does me good to be reminded how the other half think. I read the Daily Telegraph from time to time – I have even read Leandra de Lisle in the Telegraph – but she also writes for the unacceptable, inexcusable Daily Mail and when she got to discussing Bloody Mary in this book the tone became out-and-out Daily Mail – incoherent ranting along the lines of Everyone’s wrong ‘cept me, the bastards! Yes, I daresay Mary I had her good side, and much of her problems later in life can be attributed to the appalling way her mother was cast aside, but the fact is her burning-at-the-stakes stats are much worse than those of Henry VIII who everyone agrees was a self-indulgent tyrant. She burned more people over a much shorter reign, and that is the yardstick by which to judge her.

The first half of the book was pretty good. De Lisle is excellent on Lady Margaret Beaufort and she introduced me to a character I had not come across before, Owen Tudor’s illegitimate son David, who was brought up for a time with the future Henry VII and who featured at various Tudor family occasions. Where I think she started to go wrong was when Henry VIII lost interest in governing, circa 1540. There is too little about the Pilgrimage of Grace, which must have shocked even Henry to the core, and even less about the Western and East Anglian rebellions in Edward’s reign, and next to nothing about Wyatt’s Rebellion in 1554, which she tries to attribute to the ineffective Marquess of Dorset.

Yes, this is expressly an account of the Tudor family, but I would argue that in order to understand the tumultuous eleven years between Henry VIII’s death and the accession of Elizabeth you have to understand the very real threats to the first cabinet government in English history, the self-appointing juntas of Somerset and Northumberland. This is probably where de Lisle’s politics start to get in the way. As a contemporary conservative she has to believe that government by a cabinet which is not even in tune with its own party, let alone the people, is acceptable. I don’t – and nor did the ordinary people of England 1547-1558. It is my firm belief that nobody outside London gave two hoots about kings until Henry VIII, having time on his hands as England’s first non-warrior king, started to interfere with their beliefs. It may even be that they weren’t that worried about liturgical changes, that what really prompted their rebellion was the removal of their welfare state, the safety blanket of the monasteries which, corrupt as they were, nevertheless provided alms, sanctuary and medical care to the poor.

Returning to Mary, if she cared anything about popular support, she would have refounded the monastic system, but she didn’t because she cared about authority, those who sided with her, and the proceeds of the dissolution which she happily shared with them.

One final criticism: De Lisle chooses to call the Marquess of Dorset ‘Harry’ Grey. In her notes she says that King Edward used the diminutive in his journal and that she uses to lessen the number of Henrys in her text. To me it sounds wrong. No one called him Harry (or Henry) outside his immediate family (of which Edward was one by marriage). They called him Dorset and later Suffolk. Surnames were not important in early modern England; titles were everything.

Young & Damned & Fair - Gareth Russell

You wait years for a serious biography of Henry VIII's fifth queen, Katherine Howard, then two comes along almost simultaneously. I have already reviewed Josephine Wilkinson's (below). This, by one of the emerging Tudor historians, is the deeper, more thoroughly researched, and therefore the better. It is by no means the better written. 390 pages on a girl who was only about twenty when she died and who only figured on the public stage for perhaps two years, tends to speak for itself.


Russell's problem, in some ways, is that he knows too much. He has done his research and he means you to know that. What he lacks, in my view, is understanding of human nature. He sets up a persona for his principals, and sticks with it. Henry is a querulous ogre, Norfolk a lickspittle, and Katherine herself a bit of a gormless tart. They are the puppets of history rather than its drivers. Russell does not understand that people respond to events; they make choices and they change their opinions.


Where Russell succeeds however, is in those areas where his deep research pays off, for example in the detail he provides for the comings and goings of Francis Dereham, Katherine's fatal fascination. He is very good indeed in describing the way the apparatus of state turned on Katherine and basically crushed her. It really is astonishing how much persecution the Tudor statesmen could cram into their day.


Ironically then, the reader who wants a broad insight into Katherine Howard and her very limited world needs to read both Russell and Wilkinson. Which would be my tip.

Katherine Howard - Josephine Wilkinson

Katherine Howard has been the subject of a couple of biographies recently. It is certainly true that she is probably the queen of whom least is known. Anne of Cleves, of course, lived longer, and Jane Seymour has been covered as context to the careers and tangled affairs of her two attention-seeking brothers. Otherwise it's Ann Boleyn, Katherine of Aragon and Kate Parr, very much in that order.

Wilkinson falls into the trap of treating Katherine Howard as one would a contemporary teenaged girl. By the standards of her time, she wasn't. She was fourteen or fifteen when she started having sex (history is vague about her actual age). Many women of her rank were married by that age. Henry VIII's grandmother, Margaret Beaufort, perhaps the most influential of all Tudor women, was married, widowed and a mother at the age of thirteen. If Edmund Tudor wasn't seen as a paedophile, nor should his grandson be.

The fact remains, Henry was old enough to be her father - indeed, he had a daughter older than Katherine. Again, this is nothing new. Henry's problem, I have always maintained, is that he was always in the shadow of his childhood friend Charles Brandon, who was bigger, better looking, a more skillful jouster, who had even more wives than Henry and no problem begetting children, especially sons. Brandon, the duke of Suffolk, has recently married his ward Catherine Willoughby and fathered two strapping sons. This is doubtless what Henry wanted from Katherine Howard.

History has tended to portray Katherine as a brainless tart, so a corrective approach is long overdue. The trouble is, Wilkinson takes it too far. Katherine was demonstrably not stupid; everyone who wrote about her (usually for the advisement of foreign kings) approved of the way she handled her new role as queen. Therefore ignorance cannot excuse her pre-marital promiscuity, having sexual encounters with two of her step-grandmother's servants and setting her cap at a third. Katherine knew what was expected of an eligible bride.  The whole point of being cloistered with the dowager Duchess of Norfolk (who had herself married a man almost fifty years her senior) was to prepare her for married life to some landed gent or other. At best, Katherine was the victim of an overheated puberty.

Her other great quality was honesty. She seems to have immediately admitted her fault, perhaps in the hope of simply being set aside as Katherine of Aragon and Anne of Cleves had both been. After all, she might have been indiscreet and distinctly unwise towards Thomas Culpeper during her marriage to Henry but no one ever claimed she had been unfaithful. Henry, however, went into a sulk and had her head lopped off, a fate she bore with stoicism. Wilkinson provides a nice detail of Katherine practicing with the block the night before her execution.

So, it's a decent account of a sad and ultimately inconsequential life. She didn't put Henry off his marital adventures, she just made him chose better next time. We of course feel sorry for Katherine, but no one made her behave as she did - and even nowadays a young woman with Katherine's sexual antecedents would not be accepted as a potential queen consort by the more ardent royalists. Consider the fate of Sarah, duchess of York.

One thing that really annoyed me, however, was Wilkinson's pretentious habit of fiddling with names. She insists on referring to King Francis of France as Francois I. Yes, he was actually christened Francois, and his subjects would have referred to him as King Francois, but if we're being pedantic then French history calls him Francois premier, and contemporary Frenchmen simply called him le roi Francois, since we only start numbering when there has been more than one. Equally inexcusable is calling Richard Rich Riche; where did that come from? I daresay Wilkinson has found a reference to Riche somewhere, but we all know about Tudor spelling and there are many hundreds of references to plain and simple Richard Rich. He clearly called himself Rich. Blessed with a surname like that, who wouldn't?

The Mistresses of Henry VIII - Kelly Hart

Hart started something of a trend when this book appeared in 2009.  Before that, everyone knew that King Henry had one illegitimate son, the Duke of Richmond and Somerset (the double duke) by Bessie Blount, who became the king's mistress shortly after the birth of Princess Mary.  Most people also knew that Mary Boleyn preceded her sister Anne between the royal sheets.  Mary did not rise so high as her sister, nor did she fall so far and so fatally.  What Hart brings into the equation is the question of whether Mary Boleyn's two children, Catherine and Henry Carey, were actually the king's by-blows.  Sure, many people have thought they were, over the years, but Hart discusses the matter in detail, laying out the pros and cons without coming to any firm conclusion.  My suspicion is that she feels the Carey siblings were half-Tudor.  I base this on the lack of similar discussion about other proposed bastards, all of whom are dismissed out of hand.  It is interesting (and I did not know this) that Catherine and Henry flourished at court - but, of course, they were Queen Elizabeth's cousins in any event.  My own favourite potential royal bastard, Ethelreda or Audrey Malte, is one of those summarily dismissed by Hart.  But she too moved in royal circles (serving Princess Elizabeth during her time in Tower) and might have risen higher had she survived Mary's reign.  What is certain is that Henry VIII gave Audrey land and money - this from a man who didn't even pay for the funeral of his acknowledged bastard Richmond.  In the end, we can only speculate, which Hart does very well.

Her main problem, though, is that there weren't enough mistresses to warrant a full-length book.  So she speculates about who may or may not have slept with the king over the years.  Many are only snide remarks in Ambassador Chapuys' reports to the Emperor.  Others are confused within their own families - for example Mary, Madge and Margaret Shelton; only one did the deed with the dude, but which one?

She also fills space by tracing the family connections of her protagonists.  She makes too much, I feel, about cousins in an environment where everyone was to a greater or lesser degree the cousin of everyone else.  Similarly, she relies overmuch on what the Church considered a proscribed degree of consanguinity and the status of sisters-in-law.  The crowned heads of Europe were accustomed to give not a toss about such things, save where it suited them.

Nevertheless, this is a well-written and thoroughly entertaining read.