Monster: The Real Henry VIII and His Magnitude

Let no one persuade you that England's King Henry VIII was anything but a monster. He may not have started off that way in his long reign of thirty-eight years (1509-1547) but he sure arrived there by the crucial decades of his historical significance. Hollywood films and HBO-type shows do an adequate job of displaying his moral depravity, but by focusing narrowly on his marital relations they never zoom out enough to capture the big picture of his heavy tyranny.

Some despots like Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong at least brought geo-political power and glory to their countries on the world stage. The same cannot be said for Henry VIII. He inherited from his father a treasury with a surplus and a stable society and throne. (His daddy, Henry VII, put an end to the endemic Wars of the Roses and founded the Tudor dynasty). In the early years of Henry VIII, the surplus vanished due to his lavish spending on his gluttonous lifestyle and pointless wars in France.

Henry began looking for creative ways to shake down England's nobles and commoners for ever more cash long before he contemplated breaking from the Roman Catholic church and confiscating its many treasures in England - following the travails of his first divorce drama he did precisely that in epic fashion. The church's many monasteries were closed in waves of suppression including threats, executions, blackmail, and plunder. There was no welfare state in sixteenth-century England. The church was the only safety net for the needy. Henry added ten of thousands to the needy by displacing multitudes of monks, nuns, and others who had made the church their livelihood. Gold and countless art treasures were packed into chests and carted off to be sold or melted down to become just more money to be greedily spent by the king on things that were of zero benefit to the country.

Henry treacherously turned on his chief subordinates and beheaded them whenever political strategy suited it in an endless process that reminds one of Stalin's purges in the 1930's. (Not just Anne Boleyn, but all his top ministers over the years including Thomas Cromwell, Thomas More, etc. went to the chopping block.)

By making himself head of the newly formed Church of England (after the break from the pope  in Rome) and failing to establish a doctrinal formula to base it on, Henry ensured that it would become a seesaw between succeeding monarchs who would yank the country back and forth between Catholicism and Protestantism leaving oceans of bloodshed in their wake. Henry VIII's legacy is one of ruin and debauchery but he can arguably be called the most consequential monarch in all of England's history.

Consider this passage from Historian J.M. Roberts:

Yet neither Lutheranism nor Calvinism provoked the first rejection of papal authority by a nation-state. In England a unique religious change arose almost by accident. A new dynasty originating in Wales, the Tudors, had established itself at the end of the fifteenth century and the second king of this line, Henry VIII, became entangled with the papacy over his wish to dissolve what would turn out to be the first of his six marriages in order to remarry and get an heir, an understandable preoccupation. This led to a quarrel and one of the most remarkable assertions of lay [meaning secular] authority in the whole sixteenth century; it was also one fraught with significance for England’s future.



G.J Meyer has written an invaluable history of the Tudor dynasty that sets the record straight on a great many misconceptions surrounding Henry and his heirs: