Henry VIII's Health in a Nutshell (4 page)

The reproductive record of Henry and his partners, in conjunction with the reproductive issues shown in Henry’s maternal lineage, lend strong evidence to the idea that the king had a Kell positive blood type. Due to the fact that none of Henry’s children had offspring of their own, it is impossible to gather further evidence by following the Kell positive gene reproductive pattern via Henry’s direct descendants.

A tale of two Henrys:
The king before and after 1531

How much did Henry actually change? Isn’t it an exaggeration to imply he was a radically different person after his fortieth birthday?

No.

When he was a child, Henry was visited by Erasmus of Rotterdam, a humanist who was esteemed as “the most celebrated scholar of his age”
³⁵
, and Erasmus was so impressed by the future monarch’s intellectual abilities that he called Henry “a universal genius”. This was a fairly accurate assessment. Along with many other interests, Henry was educated in mathematics, the sciences, engineering, astronomy, cartography and was acknowledged as a musical prodigy. He was also fluent in French and Latin, as well as having a good command of Italian and Spanish.

Not only was Henry mentally gifted, the gods favoured him physically as well. His skeleton, which was exhumed in 1813, proved that he was 6’2’’ – immensely tall for his time period. His historical armour measurements that were taken in 1514, when he was a young man of 23, record that he had a 35’’ waist and a 42’’ chest. In today’s terms, this means he would be the same height and have roughly the same bodily demotions as Will Smith had when he starred in the 2007 movie
I Am Legend
. The personal correspondence of first-hand witness in the spring of 1515 described Henry as “the handsomest potentate I ever set eyes on; above the usual height, with an extremely fine calf to his leg, his complexion very fair and bright, with auburn hair combed straight and short, in the French fashion, and a round face so very beautiful that it would become a pretty woman”
³⁶
. Henry’s muscles weren’t just for show – he was a magnificent athlete who could ride for hours and he played almost every sport and game well. He was also more of a warrior than people realize, and was as good in the martial sports as he was in those with less serious intent. The king could draw “the bow with greater strength than any man in England”, and was said to have jousted “marvelously”
³⁷
.

Henry was certainly not a saint as a youth, but his only significant personality flaws seem to be egocentricity and a propensity to show off. That he was a bit full of himself is not surprising, since he was a polymath sports hero who had been taught since birth to believe that he was,
literally
, second only to God.
³⁸
Henry was a devout Catholic and somewhat ridged theologically, but he nevertheless enjoyed debates on the topic of faith and would listen to opinions that differed from his own with “remarkable courtesy and unruffled temper”
³⁹
. In contrast, as an older man Henry was inclined to execute those who disagreed with him.

Henry, who would later be characterized by his implacable wrath, was thought of as a very reasonable man during his earlier reign. His personal physician described the young king as “cheerful and gamesome”
⁴⁰
. William Blount, the 4
^th
Baron Mountjoy, who was an acclaimed humanist and knew the young king well, could not praise Henry enough. Mountjoy wrote to Erasmus of “how nobly, how wisely, the prince behaves”, and that the whole of England was “in ecstasies”
⁴¹
to have such a monarch, as well as declaring that:

I have no fear but when you heard that our Prince, now Henry the Eighth, whom we may call our Octavius, had succeeded to his father’s throne, all your melancholy left you at once. What may you not promise yourself from a Prince with whose extraordinary and almost Divine character you are acquainted? When you know what a hero he now shows himself, how wisely he behaves, what a lover he is of justice and goodness, what affection he bears to the learned I will venture to swear that you will need no wings to make you fly to behold this new and auspicious star. Oh, my Erasmus, if you could see how all the world here is rejoicing in the possession of so great a prince, how his life is all their desire, you could not contain your tears for joy.
⁴²

An older Henry would go on to judicially murder Mountjoy’s grandson on Tower Hill on 9 December 1538 for the iniquitous crime of being too closely related to the throne. There was neither justice nor goodness in the act, and it is a small mercy that Mountjoy was no longer alive to see Henry’s egregious behaviour.

Henry was also loyal and compassionate in his youth. When he married Katherina of Aragon in 1509 he was marrying an impoverished window who had nothing substantial to offer either politically or financially. Katherina’s royal father had shown himself to care little for his daughter’s fate, and she had long since been reduced to selling personal jewellery to buy household supplies and clothes. Worse, she was widow of the king’s brother and the possibility that she consummated her first marriage could overshadow their union. She was attractive, but not so great a beauty that a king would throw himself away on her. The Spanish ambassador was so certain Henry wouldn’t marry her that he had “already ordered Katherina’s belongings packed when news of the planned marriage reached him”
⁴³
. As a boy, the king had written Katherina letters that assured her that he loved her and he had promised to marry her, and he remembered his pledge and kept his word. Instead of leaving her a financially and emotionally distressed widow, and taking the more prudent course of seeking a richer and more influential bride, Henry chivalrously wed Katherina shortly after he became king.

The king was one of the more faithful monarchs in Europe. His affairs were extremely discrete, the sixteenth century’s version of royal fidelity. Unlike other monarchs, Henry did not appoint official mistresses or flaunt them in the queen’s face. Neither was he in constant pursuit of the next paramour. Henry tended to confine his affairs to times when the queen was pregnant and could not have intercourse for months at a stretch. Like most men of his time, the king believed that if his wife wasn’t readily available to him then it was perfectly permissible for him to relieve his sexual needs with other women. Considering that Henry could have been utterly profligate with no recourse for Katherina except to bear it, he was moderation and chastity personified. His motto was Sir Loyal Heart and, until the radical personality change that occurred in the middle of his affair with Anne Boleyn, he was always careful to keep his liaisons subdued. He made every effort to prevent his infidelities from being a source of humiliation to Katherina and he never put another woman ahead of her, either in public or in private. It is said of Henry that he was the only king to have more wives than mistresses, and “by the standards of his time he was positively uxorious”
⁴⁴
.

His relative fidelity was even more remarkable considering how often ambitious courtiers waved their pretty young female relations under Henry’s nose as tempting bait. Cardinal Wolsey, who as the Lord Chancellor practically controlled the English government on Henry’s behalf until the 1530s, was accused of acting as “the King’s bawd”, a panderer who guaranteed the king his choice of women who “were most wholesome and with the best complexions”
⁴⁵
. Even if the accusations against Wolsey were untrue, there were plenty of other men at court who paraded female kindred before the king in the hopes she could secure his affections. Male family members of the king’s inamoratas could expect to turn the women’s favours into political and financial favours, since almost invariably the family of the king’s mistress would receive such lagniappe as court positions, titles and lands. Even without the pressure of familial ambitions and the incentive of receiving royal gratuities, women probably would have been attracted to Henry because of his good looks and athleticism. When these facts are taken into consideration, it is plain that he was loyal to his wife far beyond what was expected of him by the cultural standards of his day.

So it was that Henry began his reign as an attractive, affable teenager who was respected as one of the most learned men in Europe. It is no wonder that Thomas More, who the older Henry would later execute, described the younger Henry as “the everlasting glory” of his time
⁴⁶
. Yet the average person is mostly familiar with the middle-aged, corpulent Henry who had the obnoxious habit of executing his wives. The moderate, loyal, loving, intelligent and rational king became a brutal, bloodthirsty, paranoid bully in his forties, a brute who “never spared a man in his anger nor a woman in his lust”
⁴⁷
.

Some historians blame the pain in his legs for the fact he grew so emotionally unstable and outright cruel in his forties. Notwithstanding the ill-temper pain can bring, it may not have been pain alone that was causing Henry to become cantankerous. There is substantial evidence that Henry underwent a significant change in his personality and mental perspicacity that cannot be correlated with the agony in his limbs. For one thing, Henry’s mental changes seem to have occurred with devastating swiftness long after his legs were causing him to suffer. In 1527, Henry’s legs were already ulcerated, but when Thomas More told Henry he believed that the king’s marriage to Katherina of Aragon was valid the king never threatened More to attempt to change his opinion. It was only half a dozen or so years later, in 1534, that the king turned against More and had him imprisoned. The following year Henry executed the renowned scholar, an action that sent a “shock wave that went out across Europe”
⁴⁸
. More’s death was a particularly pointless and unreasonable act considering the fact that he had accepted Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, assuring the king that he would not “murmur at it nor dispute upon it”
⁴⁹
. Henry, when faced with universal disapproval for this unjust execution, threw Anne Boleyn to the wolves and blamed her for his decision to kill More.

The worst thing the king seemed capable of before 1531 was gross hypocrisy. For example, even though Henry was in the midst of a nullity suit against Katherina while simultaneously wooing Anne Boleyn, he took the time to chastise his sister, Margaret, for her attempt to divorce her husband, the Earl of Angus. Unlike Henry, Margaret had grounds for her divorce that were commonly accepted as reasons to void a marriage. The earl had been precontracted to marry another woman. In spite of the fact that his sister had a much more secure religious and legal rational to end her marriage than he did, Henry wrote to Margaret instructing her that she should respect the “divine ordinance of inseparable matrimony”, and reminded her of the “danger of damnation” to which she was subjecting herself
⁵⁰
. Although this shows him to be impervious to irony, it is not irrational enough to demonstrate any deterioration of his mental faculties.

1. Figure 5 -
   Portrait of Henry VIII by the workshop of
   Hans Holbein the Younger
   

By 1530, however, the year in which Henry turned 39, the ugly future was becoming manifest. The majority of Henry’s newfound ill-will was expressed domestically, with increasing cruelties toward his wife and a more brazen courtship of Anne Boleyn. At this stage he still restrained his ire when dealing with public matters. When Thomas Abell, a loyal supporter of Katherina of Aragon, wrote a book in 1530 defending the legitimacy of her marriage to Henry, he incurred the king’s “severe displeasure”, but he wasn’t executed.
⁵¹
However, the king’s rationality and temper deteriorated until he had Abell imprisoned without warning in 1534 for having written the book four years earlier. It wasn’t until 1540, ten years after Abell’s rebellion, that he had Abell burned at the stake. It was completely irrelevant by that time. Both Anne and Katherina had been dead for years, and Abell’s book was therefore no longer any threat to Henry’s marriage plans. The priest’s murder made sense to no one but Henry.

Henry’s abrupt shift in behaviour is highlighted when it is examined over the course of his relationship with Anne Boleyn. Henry fell in love with her when he was 35 and executed her just before he turned 45. During the beginning of his relationship with Anne, he was a young man still lauded for his acumen and his chivalry, yet by the time he executed her in 1536 he was feared and reviled as a tyrant both domestically and abroad. At the beginning of their relationship, Henry adored Anne and they shared many intellectual pursuits and musical interests. For several years that’s probably all they shared, since there is no evidence they ever consummated their relationship prior to their first secret wedding in November 1532. Some historians believe she rejected him because she did not love him or desire him, while others believe she did not love him but withheld her sexual favours as a strategy to become queen. Almost no one suggests that Anne refused to have sex with him because she had legitimate moral convictions against premarital intercourse, in spite of the lavish evidence of her piety. If it was wholly Anne’s decision to refrain from sex for the roughly seven years of their courtship, it evinces that Henry wasn’t a man to consider raping a woman by force, coercion or intimidation. He may now be considered a kind of minotaur, a beast that devoured women and men alike in its rage, but the younger Henry was nothing if not a gentleman.