The Autobiography of Henry VIII_ With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers - Margaret George [269]
If you would like to do further reading and research of your own, I include here some of my sources for the various areas of his life.
HENRY THE KING
Biographies: A.F. Pollard, Henry VIII, 1902 (New York: Harper Torch-book edition, 1966) the basic pioneering work; J.J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1968) now the standard work. Other descriptions: Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, 1613, for a near-contemporary picture of the majesty and trappings; Muriel St. Clare Byrne, The Letters of Henry VIII (London: Cassell & Co., 1936) gives Henry in his own words. Lord Herbert of Cherbury, The Life and Raigne of King Henry the Eighth, 1672, uses lost documents and splendid language. S.T. Bindoff, Tudor England (C. Nicholls & Co., 1950).
The Young Henry VIII
The young Henry left behind some physical evidence of his athletic thinness (height, 6’2”; chest, 42”; waist, 35”) in the armor on display at the Tower of London. See his armor for foot-combat, as well as his jousting armor, covered with Katherine of Aragon’s initials in true knightly fashion.
You can also see the young, golden-haired Henry VIII in a large painting in Chichester Cathedral by Lambert Barnard, painted in 1519; in the Great Tournament Roll of Westminster; and in the initial letters of the Plea Roll of Trinity 1517 (K.B.27/1024), reproduced in “Royal Portraits from the Plea Rolls,” Public Record Office Museum Pamphlets No. 5, HMSO 1974. There is one portrait of the young Henry VIII by an unknown artist in the National Portrait Gallery. You can recognize him by his characteristic lips and nose.
The young Henry was a warrior, and you can follow his footsteps in France, to Calais, and in Belgium, in Tournai, which he captured in the war of 1513. There he built, with characteristic over-excitement, a huge fortress, sparing no expense. He had thought to hold Tournai permanently. The Henry VIII Tower is now a museum.
Go to Portsmouth and see the reclaimed “great ship,” the Mary Rose, which was built and originally launched by Henry VIII in 1510, wearing a jewel-encrusted gold whistle. Reading: Ernle Bradford, The Story of the Mary Rose (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1982).
In London, Eltham Palace, where he spent much of his childhood, is still extant, and retains a feeling of the original countryside setting around Greenwich.
In Rouen, there is a carving at the Palais de Justice commemorating that great chivalric event, the Field of Cloth of Gold, showing the young Henry VIII and Francis I meeting in glory.
—Books relating to the period of Henry’s early kingship: Sebastian Giustinian, Four Years at the Court of Henry VIII, 1520, ed. R. Brown, 2 vols (London, 1854count of Henry VIII’s invasion of France, 1513 (Oxford, 1969).
—Pomp and display: Sidney Anglo, Spectacle, Pageantry, and Early Tudor Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969); Joycelyne G. Russell, The Field of Cloth of Gold, Men and Manners in 1520 (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969); Neville Williams, Henry VIII and His Court (New York: Macmillan Co., 1971).
The Middle-Aged Henry VIII
—Government and the Reformation: G.R. Elton, The Tudor Revolution in Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), particularly good on Thomas Cromwell and his role; G.R. Elton, England Under the Tudors (Cox & Wyman Ltd., 1974). Also Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (New York: Jove Book edition, 1982) by the Rev. John Foxe, a minister in Elizabeth’s reign who described the Protestant martyrs in Henry’s and Mary’s reign.
—Dissolution of the Monasteries: visit ruined abbeys, such as Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk; take the pilgrims’ walk to the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, in Walsingham, Norfolk; visit Canterbury Cathedral and the former site of Becket’s tomb.
—Height of power and glory: visit Hampton Court, which Henry VIII acquired from Cardinal Wolsey as the balance of power tipped toward the King. R.J. Minney,