SOURCE: “History, Romance, and Henry VIII,” in Iowa State Journal of Research, Vol. 53, No. 3, February, 1979, pp. 177-83.

[In the following essay, Uphaus examines how the historical facts of Henry VIII are absorbed by Shakespeare's use of romantic convention, and claims that the play “presents an historical confirmation of the literary experience of romance.”]

There are several ways that we can see how Henry VIII conjoins the events of history with the conventions of romance in such a way that the play presents an historical verification of the literary experience of romance. The first way is to examine the falls of Buckingham, Wolsey, and Katherine, all of which draw on Holinshed's Chronicles. The second way is to note the religious drift in the play which, albeit anachronistically, steadily implies and anticipates a turn away from Catholicism to the rise of Protestantism,¹ and this turn is not only evident within the play, but within the play's primary source for Cranmer's trial—namely, Foxe's Acts and Monuments. The third way is to focus on how and why Cranmer, not Henry VIII, emerges in the last act as the primary spokesman for what the play means. It is my view that Cranmer's prophecy both consolidates and expresses the play's historical verification of the literary experience of romance.

If we first concentrate on the falls of Buckingham, Wolsey, and Katherine, we can see that these events are dramatized through a double focus, wherein the ostensible facts of history are absorbed by a larger providential interpretation that is characteristic of the romances. For example, the question of Buckingham's guilt or innocence seems much less important than the larger question, posed by the Second Gentleman, dealing with Buckingham's response after he has been found guilty of treason. The Second Gentleman asks, “After all this, how did he bear himself?” (II.i.30),² and the remainder of the scene is concerned with Buckingham's attitude to death, which is an attitude of “a most noble patience” (II.i.36). The virtue of patience, which is a prominent characteristic of Shakespeare's romances, is traditionally associated with Christ's humility and it signals an individual's resignation to providential forces larger than individual destiny. This conception, in the romances, dates as far back as Pericles, where Marina is emblematically likened to “Patience gazing on kings' graves, and smiling / Extremity out of act” (V.i.138-39). If Buckingham does not smile “Extremity out of act,” he at least translates his individual fate into an instrument for reaffirming the power of providence where “Heaven has an end in all” (II.i.124).

What is notable about Buckingham's fall, and quite characteristic of the play's remaining falls, is not only the poise and confidence with which he meets his fate, but his ability to project himself as an emblem of a larger destiny. This sense of destiny is distinguished by a spirit of faith, forgiveness, and charity, as we can see in Buckingham's following lines:

                                        Yet, heaven bear witness
And if I have a conscience, let it sink me,
Even as the axe falls, if I be not faithful!
The law I bear no malice for my death;
’T has done, upon the premises, but justice;
But those that sought it I could wish more Christians.
Be what they will, I heartily forgive ’em;

(II.i.59-65)

Buckingham then reaffirms the very rule of Henry VIII, which may have victimized him:

                                        Commend me to his Grace;
And if he speak of Buckingham, pray tell him
You met him half in heaven. My vows and prayers
Yet are the King's; and, till my soul forsake,
Shall cry for blessings on him.

(II.i.86-90)

Even Wolsey, who is frequently likened to the devil, and who is continually held responsible for the evil actions in the play, himself achieves a moment of affirmation where he, too, understands his historical fate as an emblem of providential destiny. Among other things, Wolsey says at the moment of his fall:

Vain pomp and glory of this world, I hate ye!
I feel my heart new open’d. O how wretched
Is that poor man that hangs on princes' favors!
There is, betwixt that smile we would aspire to,
That sweet aspect of princes, and their ruin,
More pangs and fears than wars or women have;
And when he falls, he falls like Lucifer,
Never to hope again.

(III.ii.365-72)

Then, after declaring “The King has cur’d me, / I humbly thank his Grace” (III.ii.380-81), Wolsey addresses an important speech to Cromwell:

Say Wolsey, that once trod the ways of glory,
And sounded all the depths and shoals of honor,
Found thee a way, out of his wrack, to rise in;
A sure and safe one, though thy master miss’d it.
Mark but my fall, and that that ruined me:
Cromwell, I charge thee, fling away ambition!
By that sin fell the angels; how can man then
(The image of his Maker) hope to win by it?
Love thyself last, cherish those hearts that hate thee;
Corruption wins not more than honesty.
Still in thy right hand carry gentle peace
To silence envious tongues. Be just, and fear not;
Let all the ends thou aim’st at be thy country's
Thy God's, and truth's; then if thou fall’st, O Cromwell,
Thou fall’st a blessed martyr.

(III.ii.435-49)

Wolsey's gnomic lines at once drew on the known materials of history but reinterpret them in a strongly providential and Protestant manner. For example, Wolsey as a Catholic utters a line taken straight out of the Anglican Baptism Service, “Dost thou forsake the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of this world?”³ This allusion has prompted R. A. Foakes to suggest that “No doubt the allusion is intended, for Wolsey learns in his fall to be a Christian.”⁴ Furthermore, Wolsey's mentioning of the fall of Lucifer, together with the allusion to the Anglican Baptism Service, may imply that as a Catholic he is associated with the devil—but now that his heart is “new open’d” he is speaking as a Christian, which form of speech is later attached to Cranmer, who serves as the spokesman for the Anglican Church. No doubt, such an implication involves considerable historical distortion, but that distortion points to the basically Protestant intent of the play.

But there is still more evidence in this scene that the historical fall of Wolsey has been absorbed and reinterpreted through a conjunction of religious Protestantism and the providential impulse of Shakespearean romance. In the second passage I have quoted, Wolsey's speech draws on the tempest imagery of the romances. Wolsey, who has “sounded the depths and shoals of honor,” says that his own fall has found Cromwell “a way, out of [this] wrack, to rise in.” This is an exact description of romance's movement beyond tragedy, and it may well echo one of the suggested sources of The Tempest, William Strachey's True Repertory of the Wracke, which pamphlet plays on the double movement of wrack and redemption. Wolsey's fall signals Cromwell's rise, and Cromwell's rise heralds Henry's break with Rome; for it is Cromwell, Shakespeare's immediate audience would likely know, who assisted Henry VIII “in his unprecedented claim to be Supreme Head of the Church of England, which was decreed by the Act of Supremacy in 1534.”⁵

Historically, Cromwell may not have fallen as “a blessed martyr,” but his rise out of Wolsey's “wrack” does associate the romance's tempest imagery with the subsequent historical emergence of the Church of England. Indeed, as we shall see in Act V, which draws heavily on Foxe's Acts and Monuments, the tempest imagery of this play may allude to, but at least parallels, Foxe's exhortation to the Church of England now that it has escaped “the Babylonish captivity”:

God has so placed us Englishmen here in one commonwealth, also in one church, as in one ship together, let us not mangle or divide the ship, which, being divided, perisheth; but every man serve with diligence and discretion in his order, wherein he is called.—they that sit at the helm keep well the point of the needle to know how the ship goeth, and whither it should; whatsoever weather betideth, the needle, well touched with the stone of God's word, will never fail: such as labor at the oars start for no tempest, but do what they can to keep from the rocks: likewise they which be in inferior rooms, take heed they move no sedition nor disturbance against the rowers and mariners. No storm so dangerous to a ship on the sea, as is discord and disorder in a weal public. … The God of peace, who hath power both of land and sea, reach forth his merciful hand to help them up that sink, to keep up them that stand, to still these winds and surging seas of discord and contention among us; that we, professing one Christ, may, in one unity of doctrine, gather ourselves into one ark or the true church together; where we, continuing steadfast in faith, may at the last luckily be conducted to the joyful point of our desired landing-place by his heavenly grace.⁶

The above passage from Foxe provides a rationale for how the materials of history in Henry VIII, especially the falls of Catholics are absorbed by certain romance conventions that are linked with the rise of Protestantism. This romance absorption of historical tragedy may be seen in the fall of Katherine, the final tragedy of the play. Like Buckingham and Wolsey, Katherine undergoes a trial, but once again her historical fall is dominated by a providential interpretation.⁷ If we assume, as H. M. Richmond has argued, that “Katherine's character represents the norm against which we must measure the other characters,”⁸ then I think her fall is designed to elicit the romance experience of a state beyond tragedy. The introduction of several romance conventions reinforces this idea. Griffith, for instance, occupies the role of the loyal and wise counselor figure, continuing the tradition of Helicanus, Pisanio, Camillo, and Gonzalo in the other romances. As Katherine says, Griffith is “an honest chronicler” (IV.ii.72) because he states both the strengths and weaknesses of Wolsey's character in such a way that Katherine concludes: “Whom I most hated living, thou hast made me, / With thy religious truth and modesty, / Now in his ashes honor” (IV.ii.72-75). This change of estimate is in itself significant, and it certainly embodies the spirit of tolerance that Frances Yates has noted in the play.⁹ For the fall of Katherine both absorbs and explains the fall of Wolsey, her hated enemy. Katherine wants to know how Wolsey died because “If well, he stepp’d before me happily / For my example” (IV.ii.10-11). Thus, it is the manner, not the fact, of his death that matters, and it is fascinating to watch how Katherine's fall in part echoes what Wolsey says at the moment of his fall. As a loyal counselor, Griffith performs the same role for Katherine that Cromwell does for Wolsey. Just as Katherine responds to Griffith as an “honest chronicler” who speaks with “religious truth and modesty,” so Wolsey says to Cromwell: “I did not think to shed a tear / In all my miseries; but thou hast forced me / (Out of thy honest truth)” (III.ii.428-30). And just as Wolsey tells Cromwell, “I know myself now, and I feel within me / A peace above all earthly dignities, / A still and quiet conscience” (III.ii.378-80), so Shakespeare, through the vehicle of the character Patience—a clear romance emblem—and through the stage directions accompanying Katherine's vision, presents Katherine with an hierophany—that is, a sacred experience—“at which (as it were by inspiration) she makes (in her sleep) signs of rejoicing, and holdeth up her hands to heaven.”

These falls, as I earlier indicated, embody a romance absorption of historical facts, or a providential interpretation of historical events. The dramatic rhythm of the play is so designed that the audience is led to anticipate a fourth trial and fall—that of Cranmer. But before we look at Cranmer's trial, I wish to examine the relationship between the falls of Buckingham, Wolsey, and Katherine and the steady emergence of a Protestant ethos in the first four acts of the play. Such an examination is necessary not merely to demonstrate that the fifth act presents an historical confirmation of the literary experience of romance, but to counter-balance the critical view that the last act is in no way prepared for. Such a negative view of the fifth act has been most vigorously asserted by Peter Milward who writes:

In the fifth act, however, the play makes a complete volte-face; and the atmosphere of tragedy rolls away, with no accompanying change of character. … This is all quite out of harmony with the preceding acts, as shadow suddenly turns to light, tragedy ends in comedy, and tears are exchanged for laughter, without any justification in terms of character.¹⁰

We have already looked at how the various tragic falls are interpreted providentially, but if we backtrack for a few moments, I think we can see how the first four acts do prepare us for the fifth act. Linked with the falls of Buckingham, Wolsey, and Katherine there occurs the steady erosion of Papal authority and the corresponding rise of Protestantism, which is officially announced in the fifth act by Cranmer at the christening of the baby, Elizabeth. Wolsey is obviously the focus of Catholicism in the first four acts, and until his fall the play voices a streak of anti-Catholic commentary. At the same time, as we shall see, Anne Bullen and Cranmer are continually associated with Protestantism; and just as important, because Henry sides with Cranmer and Anne, the play's religious movement logically, albeit anachronistically, foretells and endorses the rise of Protestantism. That is, the fall of Wolsey and Henry's divorce from Katherine represent the end of Papal authority, as well as the end of tragedy, and the rise of Protestantism supports the play's version of romance. Thus, the “complete volte-face” that Milward repudiates is, in fact, an important part of the play's intention.

As early as I.i—a scene, I might note, assigned to Shakespeare by the collaborationists¹¹—Wolsey is used as the focus of the play's anti-Catholicism. Buckingham associates him with the devil (I.i.52), perhaps anticipating Wolsey's own remark about falling “like Lucifer” (III.ii.371), and Buckingham also calls him “This holy fox, / or wolf” (I.i.158-59). Abergaveny reinforces the association of Wolsey with the devil when he says:

                                        I cannot tell
What heaven hath given him—let some graver eye
Pierce into that—but I can see his pride
Peep through each part of him. Whence has he that?
If not from hell, the devil is a niggard,
Or has given all before, and he begins
A new hell in himself.

(I.i.66-72)

In II.ii Wolsey is again likened to the devil, only this time the frame of reference extends to the Pope and intimates Henry's subsequent break with the Pope. The Lord Chamberlain says that “Heaven will one day open / The King's eyes, that so long have slept upon / This bold bad man [Wolsey],” to which Suffolk provocatively responds, “And free us from his slavery” (II.ii.41-43)—an echo perhaps of Foxe's “Babylonish captivity.” Norfolk then says “We had need pray / And heartily, for our deliverance” from Wolsey (II.ii.44-45), and Suffolk sums up the anti-Catholic (or at least anti-Papist) fervor of this exchange when he declares: “I knew him, and I know him; so I leave him / To him that made him proud, the Pope” (II.ii.54-55).¹²

Still, if Wolsey is the center, both as the object and primary influence of the play's version of tragedy, we need also to notice that two of the people whom he attacks—Anne and Cranmer—are just as clearly associated, not merely with Henry's Act of Supremacy, but with the emergence of Protestantism. Historically, that is, they occupy significant roles that ultimately tie into romance conventions. For example, the first time we hear of Cranmer, who died a Protestant martyr, he is at once defined against Catholicism and invested with a symbolic significance which aligns him with the oracles of “comfort” that recur in Shakespeare's romances. At the end of Act II, Henry condemns the “dilatory sloth and tricks of Rome,” and then, thinking of Cranmer, he continues: “My learn’d and well-beloved servant, Cranmer, / Prithee return; with thy approach, I know, / My comfort comes along” (II.iv.239-41).¹³

Interestingly, it is Wolsey who sums up the historic and symbolic importance of Anne Bullen and Cranmer when, in an aside, he says:

                                        Yet I know her for
A spleeny Lutheran, and not wholesome to
Our cause, that she should lie i’ th’ bosom of
Our hard-rul’d king. Again, there is sprung up
An heretic, an arch one, Cranmer; one
Hath crawl’d into the favor of the King,
And is his oracle.

(III.ii.98-104)

We need not take the word “Lutheran” altogether literally, for it is a kind of catch-all term for anti-Papist. A. F. Pollard has observed that “not everyone who was called Lutheran in England adopted the doctrines of Wittenberg; the phrase was a generic term used to express any sort of hostility to Rome or the clergy, and even the possession of the Bible in English [with which Cranmer was historically connected] was sometimes sufficient to make its owner a Lutheran suspect.”¹⁴ Furthermore, Foxe also talks of the Catholic association of heresy and Lutheranism, and attacks such a linkage by saying, “if it be heresy not to acknowledge the pope as supreme head of the church, then St. Paul was an heretic, and a stark Lutheran, which, having the scriptures, yet never attributed that to the pope, nor to Peter himself, to be supreme head of the church” (I.xiv).

The point, then, is that the first four acts do prepare the way for the fifth act, and they do so by employing a double movement that both traces the fall of Papal authority and the rise of a Protestant order symbolically associated with Cranmer, Anne, and Elizabeth. What the fifth act does is to assimilate all the prior historic tragedies in a strongly providential manner reminiscent of the basic design of Shakespearean romance. As many commentators have noted, the principal literary source of Act V is Foxe's Acts and Monuments, and it has also been observed that Henry himself is reduced to a curiously passive role in Act V. Correspondingly, Cranmer's trial becomes the dramatic center of interest, and his survival and prophecy summarize the providential import of the play. Indeed, like Foxe, Shakespeare finally emphasizes Cranmer and his trial because it is he, not Henry, who symbolically completes the break with Rome and who forecasts the rise of Protestantism under Elizabeth.¹⁵

For example, V.i. begins with Gardiner attacking Anne, Cranmer, and Cromwell. He wishes Anne “grubb’d up now” (V.i.23), and tells Lovell, whom he calls a “gentleman / Of mine own way” (that is, of a Catholic persuasion) that it “will ne’er be well—/ ’Twill not, Sir Thomas Lovell, take’t of me—/ Till Cranmer, Cromwell, her two hands, and she / Sleep in their graves” (V.i.29-32). He further asserts that Cranmer is “a most arch-heretic, a pestilence / That does infect the land … [a] rank weed … / And we must root him out” (V.i.45-46, 52-53). The scene opens this way not only to continue Wolsey's former attacks on Cranmer and Anne, but to isolate Gardiner as the last desperate gasp of a fading Papal order. Moreover, the characterization of Gardiner exactly conforms with Foxe's bitter estimate of him. Foxe writes: “But Winchester, although he had open sworn before all the states in the parliament, and in special words, against the pope's domination, yet inwardly in his fox's heart he bore a secret love to the Bishop of Rome” (VIII,11). Later on Foxe refers to Gardiner as “the arch-enemy to Christ and his gospel,” and to his “cavilling sophistication” and “unquiet spirit” (VIII,35).

At the same time, however, when Henry tells Cranmer that he will be tried he also says, “Stand up, good Canterbury! / Thy truth and thy integrity is rooted / In us, thy friend” (V.i.113-15); and Cranmer replies, “The good I stand on is my truth and honesty … God and your Majesty / Protect mine innocence” (V.i.122, 140-41). The clear dramatic purpose is to join Henry and Cranmer, defined against Gardiner, as the spokesman of “truth,” which bears directly on the apparently alternative title of Henry VIII, namely “All is True.” Evidently Cranmer's trial is designed to reveal and define the “truth” against Gardiner's malicious intentions, and the meaning of that truth can be precisely established by comparing a section from Foxe with Cranmer's prophecy after the trial. Under the general heading of “Vicit veritas” (“The truth hath the upper hand”), Foxe says of the period of Papal rule that “to speak most modestly, not the truth, but the time had victory” (VIII, 39). This is an especially interesting distinction because it parallels the play's understanding and use of history. That is, the known materials of Henry's reign are used in such a way that the time of Henry's history is finally replaced by the truth of Cranmer's prophecy; moreover, Foxe believes that truth to be in “Cranmer's book of the Sacrament, against Winchester, wherein the matter itself doth plainly cry, and always will cry, ‘The truth hath won’” (VIII, 40).

What, then, is the “chosen truth” of the play, and how does it tie in to my hypothesis that Henry VIII presents an historical confirmation of the literary experience of romance? Let me first quote parts of Cranmer's final speech which emphasize the truth of his prophecy. Cranmer begins:

                                        Let me speak, sir,
For heaven now bids me; and the words I utter
Let none think flattery, for they’ll find ’em truth.
This royal infant—heaven still move about her!—
Though in her cradle, yet now promises
Upon this land a thousand thousand blessings,
Which time shall bring to ripeness.

(V.iv.14-20)

Cranmer then continues, “Truth shall nurse her, / Holy and heavenly thoughts still counsel her” (V.iv.28-29), and he later says, “God shall be truly known, and those about her / From her shall read the perfect ways of honor” (V.iv.36-37). The first thing to notice is that Cranmer does not choose to speak; rather, heaven “bids” him to speak, and thus he speaks as the voice of providence. Furthermore, Henry's responses to Cranmer's speech heighten our sense of a romance hierophony—i.e., “Thou speakest wonders. … This oracle of comfort has so pleas’d me / That when I am in heaven I shall desire / To see what this child does, and praise my Maker” (V.iv.55, 66-68). What the child, Elizabeth, does is to oversee the time—the new Protestant time of deliverance from the “Babylonish captivity”—when “God shall be truly known.”

What is highly unusual, but dramatically appropriate, about this prophetic moment is that unlike in the prior romances the hierophany, or sacred moment, is overtly supported by a religious doctrine. In other words, the historical reign of Henry VIII is used to promote a romance experience supported by Protestant doctrine. Moreover, what Cranmer prophesies as “shall” in the future, Shakespeare's immediate audience could easily confirm as “was” and “is” in the immediate past and present. Similarly, the baptism scene that closes the play functions both historically and symbolically, as does Cranmer's role of godfather to Elizabeth. Cranmer is not just the godfather of Elizabeth, but historically the godfather, if you will, of the rise of Protestantism.¹⁶ The baptism of Elizabeth symbolically marks the baptism of England into the Church of England.

Thus, what the fifth act presents is a hierophanic spectacle of the triumph of a new Protestant order, in which the experience of romance that Cranmer expresses as a prophetic act of faith may be felt by a sympathetic audience as historical fact.¹⁷ Seen in this light, “all is true” because the play, viewed as the conjunction of romance and history, celebrates what Foxe calls “this noble anthem of victory: ‘Vicit veritas’—‘The truth hath the upper hand’” (VIII, 39).

Notes

1. G. Wilson Knight, who views Henry VIII as “Shakespeare's one explicitly Christian play,” argues that we are “to feel British Protestantism rising in Cranmer, his advance contrasting with the fall of Wolsey, whose intrigues are partly to be associated with Rome” [The Crown of Life (London: Methuen, 1965), pp. 277, 315].

2. The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). All further references to Henry VIII, as well as to other Shakespearean texts, are from this edition and cited within the text.

3. Richmond Noble, Shakespeare's Biblical Knowledge (New York: Octagon, 1970), pp. 26, 255.

4. King Henry VIII, ed. R. A. Foakes (London: Methuen, 1968), p. 120.

5. Peter W. Milward, Shakespeare's Religious Background (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1973), p. 164. Indeed, J. J. Scarisbrick says of Cromwell: “That the 1530's were a decisive decade in English history was due largely to his energy and vision.” [Henry VIII Berkeley: Univ. of California, 1968), p. 303].

6. The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, 8 vols., ed. Josiah Pratt (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1877), I, xxiv. All further quotations are from this edition and cited within the text. Frances Yates has also observed that “in Henry VIII, we have the culmination of Foxian history with the throwing off of papal power in the name of the sacred majesty of the Monarch” [Shakespeare's Last Plays (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 71]. See also Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, on Foxe's “theology of History” (pp. 386-387).

7. Howard Felperin has noted that “This recurrent pattern of secular fall and spiritual reformation suggests a close relation between the world of Henry VIII and that of morality drama” [Shakespearean Romance (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), p. 203].

8. H. M. Richmond, “Shakespeare's Henry VIII: Romance Redeemed by History,” Shakespeare Studies, 4 (1968), 344.

9. Yates, Shakespeare's Last Plays, p. 73.

10. Milward, Shakespeare's Religious Background, pp. 168-169.

11. Although there continue to be disputes about whether Shakespeare wrote Henry VIII or collaborated on the play, probably with John Fletcher, I lean toward the view expressed by S. Schoenbaum that “the problem admits of no ultimate solution” [King Henry VIII, ed. S. Schoenbaum (New York: Signet, 1967), p. xxii].

12. Significantly, at the end of the phrase “the Pope” S. Schoenbaum enters a textual note which reads, “(the expected reference would be to the devil)” [King Henry VIII, ed. Schoenbaum, p. 83].

13. Skeptics might refer to Cranmer's “comfort” as his approval of Henry's divorce, for historically Cranmer was in Europe seeking a favorable opinion from various universities of Henry's divorce—an activity further alluded to in III.ii.63-67. There is no question, as A. F. Pollard has argued, that “Of all the incidents affecting Cranmer's life the most important is the divorce of Catherine of Aragon. That divorce and its ramifications were the web into which the threads of Cranmer's life were woven” [Thomas Cranmer and the English Reformation 1489-1556 (London: Putnam's, 1926), p. 24]. Nevertheless, the extent of Cranmer's dramatic significance and the source of his “comfort” exceed his involvement with and approval of Henry's divorce; and this may be why the play minimizes his direct contact with the divorce proceedings.

14. Pollard, Thomas Cranmer, p. 94.

15. In this regard, Frances Yates very usefully mentions an illustration in Foxe's Acts and Monuments “which shows Henry seated on the throne of royal majesty, dismissing the papal representatives and honouring Cranmer, who holds the open Bible” [Shakespeare's Last Plays, p. 72]. The illustration itself appears in Yates's Astraea (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975], plate 5a. However, the plate in fact shows Henry VIII with his feet on the Pope, a gesture that is representative of the strongly anti-papist bent of the play. Scarisbrick argues that Henry “would allow the Pope … but not the Papacy” [Henry VIII, p. 295].

16. As A. F. Pollard has shrewedly remarked, “it accorded well with the fitness of things that the first Metropolitan of the Reformed Church of England stood as godfather to the infant under whose guidance the cause of the Reformation finally triumphed” (Thomas Cranmer, p. 60). Interestingly, Scarisbrick suggests that Henry may not have attended the christening. [Henry VIII, pp. 323-324].

17. We should perhaps keep in mind Muriel St. Clare Byrne's observation that Henry VIII, “is a play about Tudor succession, by an Elizabethan” [“A Stratford Production: Henry VIII,” Shakespeare Survey, 3 (1950), 127].