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Henry VIII Week– Day 5: Henry VIII + twilight years

“Starkey and [Lacey Baldwin] Smith shared a fascination with the end of Henry’s reign. In Smith’s view, in Henry’s later years– and especially after his health began to worsen in 1541– the ‘mask of royalty’ began to slip and the monster began to emerge. Smith’s Henry VIII was at his worst– suspicious, vindictive, perhaps even paranoid– in his later years. The Renaissance prince of the early years gave way to a nasty and vicious man who went to his reward gracelessly– kicking and screaming almost to the end. Starkey also focused on the end of the reign to support his thesis of the limited degree of Henry’s control, and especially saw the last months of his reign, with the destruction of the Howards and the rigging of his will, as evidence of factionalism run rampant. A vigorous and healthy Henry VIII could control the shape and direction of politics, if not the details; a sick and dying king let events slip out of his hands, permitting a radically Protestant succession that he never intended and, had he been alive to see it, would never have supported.” – If a Lion Knew His Own Strength, David M. Head, 1997

“’[Anne] Boleyn was the crucial catalyst for three of the most important events in modern history: the break with Rome causing the English Reformation, the advent of the nation state, and the birth of a daughter whose forty-three years on the throne stand as England’s most spectacular literary and political success story.‘”

— Lacey Baldwin Smith, Anne Boleyn - the Queen of Controversy.