SOURCE: Healy, Thomas. “History and Judgement in Henry VIII.” In Shakespeare's Late Plays: New Readings, edited by Jennifer Richards and James Knowles, pp. 158-75. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999.

[In the following essay, Healy highlights the theme of historiography in Henry VIII, exploring the drama's concern with the evaluation, interpretation, and malleability of historical “truth.”]

I

MOPSA
I love a ballad in print, alife, for then we are sure they are true.
AUTOLYCUS
Here's one to a very doleful tune, how a usurer's wife was brought to bed of twenty money-bags at a burden, and how she longed to eat adders' heads and toads carbonadoed.
MOPSA
Is it true, think
AUTOLYCUS
Very

(The Winter's Tale, IV, iv, 251-6)

2ND Gentleman
[D]id you not late days
A buzzing of a separation
Between the king and Katherine?
1ST Gentleman
Yes, but it held not;
For when the king once heard it, out of anger
He sent command to the lord mayor straight
To stop the rumour, and allay those tongues
That durst disperse it.
2ND Gentleman
But that slander,
Is found a truth now.

(Henry VIII, II, i, 147-54)

The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eighth, as Henry VIII was titled in the First Folio, was known to its first audiences in 1613 as All Is True. Various modern critics have assumed that this original name argues the play's claims to historical exactness, particularly in contrast to the glaring inaccuracies of Samuel Rowley's When You See Me, You Know Me or the Famous Chronicle History of King Henry the Eight (1605 but reprinted in 1613).¹ As the passages above demonstrate, though, what is true is something drama of this period understands as problematic, linked to the question of what audiences can believe or be made to believe. This [essay] will contend that Shakespeare's and Fletcher's play determinedly sets out to provoke its audience to interrogate what is seen and heard and will try to provide some indications of why this questioning process is important. In doing so, it will maintain that the play participates in a widely used Reformation debate about the uses of history.

My argument begins from the premise that the dramatists are acutely aware of the inherent contradictions in the assertion that ‘all is true’: that this can appear either as the avowal of a singular, unique interpretation which the play may be proposed as attesting, or that in various ways the variety of differing perspectives on the events enacted, additionally subject to the contingent circumstances of an audience's understanding of them, might all be true. In a genre which commonly draws attention to its witnesses' credulousness about its fabrications, Henry VIII joins with other historical plays of this period in claiming ‘truth’ with the expectation of viewers both believing and disbelieving:

                    Such as give
Their money out of hope they may believe,
May here find truth too. Those that come to see
Only a show or two, and so agree
The play may pass, if they be still and willing,
I'll undertake may see away their shilling.

(Prologue, ll. 7-12)

The extracts opening this chapter appear to offer vastly differing senses of what is true: one humorously emerging from the world of the naive simpleton, the other from a more sinister world of realpolitik. Yet Henry VIII challenges ready separations between a gullible faith in the fabulous among simple folk and more urbane attempts to manipulate public beliefs through political machination. In the play's opening scene, there is a crucial instance of this in the Duke of Norfolk's description of the meeting of the French and English kings at the Field of Cloth of Gold. Norfolk readily conjoins the exaggerated fabulousness of the pageantry with a cynical reflection on the political emptiness of this excessive display:

                    To-day the French,
All clinquant all in gold, like heathen gods
Shone down the English; and to-morrow they
Made Britain India …
                    The two kings
Equal in lustre, were now best, now worst …
                    and being present both,
'Twas said they saw but one, and no discerner
Durst wag his tongue in censure. When these suns
(For so they phrase 'em) by their heralds challeng'd
The noble spirits to arms, they did perform
Beyond thought's compass, that former fabulous
Being now seen possible enough, got credit
That Bevis was believ'd.

(I, i, 18-38)

The chapbook world of popular romance represented by the exploits of Bevis of Hampton is aligned with the history of Henry VIII. But Norfolk's and his companions' celebratory tone rapidly transforms into one of hostility. The actuality of the displays at the Field of Cloth of Gold is that the nobility have financially impoverished themselves in a meaningless exercise, because the peace between France and England that it was supposed to represent was immediately abandoned. The whole event is concluded to belong to Cardinal Wolsey's vanity; rather than the stuff of romance it had ‘poor issue’ (I, i, 86). As we shall see, this scene is characteristic of a play which entices an audience to perceive events in a certain manner only to have their interpretation strained or contradicted. Attempts to unravel a consistent understanding of the events performed—a single narrative perspective on the meaning of this history—are futile. This is not to suggest the play as some postmodernist celebration of contingency. Rather, Henry VIII participates in patterns firmly established in contemporary historical drama and historiography, where recognising competing claims of historical truthfulness is seen as crucial in the developing of proper historical witness. Shakespeare and Fletcher are not claiming that there is no truth to be discovered; rather that it is a difficult but important pursuit, and one subject to revision within changing historical conditions.

II

A fear of secular and spiritual corruption arising from ‘arbitrary government’, that is despotic tyranny, is a central issue in Henry VIII. For the play, excess and tyrannical tendencies are pre-eminently associated with Cardinal Wolsey and the Roman Church's hierarchy. His ultimate rejection by Henry, along with Henry's support for Cranmer, might initially appear to celebrate the king as an instrument for furthering the course of true religion and liberty. But Henry's role in this play, and in other plays of this period dealing with his reign, is far from certain. Accepting that the nature of government and that of religion are closely intertwined, the king's actions do not inspire confidence in his position either as defender of English liberties or as defender of the faith. While it is clear the play is anti-Roman, its assurance about an English capacity for proper temporal or spiritual government is less apparent, and it is this arena that it is most challenging. Rejection of Rome does not imply certainty about events in England.

In staging these concerns, Henry VIII develops a number of issues which are familiarly echoed in a wide variety of texts from the mid-sixteenth century: a sense of ‘true’ Englishness based on an opposition to tyranny and Roman Catholicism; a belief that national integrity is threatened; the enticement of an audience to witness this by comprehending a particular projection of history. This is a pattern prominently established by John Foxe's influential Acts and Monuments of these Latter and Perilous Dayes Touching Matters of the Church (1st edition 1563). Foxe's Acts and Monuments, arguably the most significant and certainly the most widely dispersed historical account in early modern England, with seven editions by 1610, illustrates an important conjunction of facets common within such English writing of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: that in the minds of contemporaries secular issues of political theory and practice surrounding England's rejection of the Church of Rome were inseparable from supernatural questions associated with popery—in extreme cases the equation of it with the diabolical Antichrist.² Tyranny is not only an undesirable secular force but one filled with resonances of subjection to the diabolic. Allowing its presence in England will diminish political freedoms long struggled for; more sinisterly, such losses enable the forfeiture of religious reformation.

Although historians and literary critics have recognised that supernatural historia—or unfolding narrative—and secular history were intertwined during the Renaissance, most have tended to witness this in terms of a lingering but evaporating legacy of historia being replaced by the emerging dominance of secular history, a process perceived as a sign of cultural development.³ This is too crudely reductive a view and fails to reflect contemporaries' views. Foxe's Acts and Monuments is an illustration of how increasing attention to accurate assemblage of detailed evidence interacted with a theoretical perspective which witnessed history as an unfolding narrative whose ‘meaning’ was to be discerned in Scripture. Foxe's Protestant truths are corroborated not only in what his martyrs represented in their deaths—their participation in patterns to be discovered in the early church—but in the historiography itself, the methods Foxe consciously employs to record the evidence he collected about these occurrences. The meticulousness which Foxe sought (even to reporting opposing claims about what occurs) invites the reader to endorse a Protestant quest for accuracy in contrast to the fabulous claims made in Roman Catholic saints' legends.⁴

If, however, a grand historical pattern might be observed resulting from a conflict between spiritual forces of good and evil, this does not imply that Foxe or his contemporaries believed that determining the significance of different historical actions was straightforward. Through the three editions of Acts and Monuments he was personally responsible for (1563, 1570, 1583), Foxe continually reassesses the incidents he relates: a ready illustration of the ways contemporaries responded to an awareness that events were constantly open to reappraisal.⁵ As Annabel Patterson has brilliantly demonstrated in Reading Holinshed's Chronicles, there was a deliberate attempt by the compilers of such chronicles—we can include the Acts and Monuments among these—to inculcate in the reader a recognition of the contingency of the significance of historical events.⁶ Neither seeking to foster modern views of objective detachment, nor merely refusing to come to a decision about the meaning of an event, the chroniclers' endeavour was to promote the engaged reader, one actively weighing differing views. Motivated by an urgency to discern truths which ultimately had spiritual as well as secular implications, the chroniclers believed an individual's involvement in understanding history was crucial. Accepting a supernatural agency (both ungodly corruption and godly grace), the chroniclers imagined that knowing what secular events might signify had implications for readers well beyond those claimed by the modern historian. This imposed a duty on both historian and reader to negotiate history carefully. One particular factor prompting this conscientiousness was a perception that the diabolic used misrepresentation as a key element in its arsenal. Upon whose ‘side’ truth lay was a dilemma not to be swept away by overly selective or partisan accounts. Educating the reader to be able to grasp historical meaning, to negotiate contending representation with a careful weighing of alternatives, becomes one of the principal endeavours of contemporary English chroniclers.

If Annabel Patterson has argued this basis for historiography with Holinshed—one we can easily extend to include Foxe—it may also be readily observed with the contemporary history play. Thomas Dekker's The Whore of Babylon (c.1606) has some good illustrations of contemporary dramatists' alertness to England's opponents manipulating common materials to different ends, often deliberately adopting the same rhetoric and drawing on the same store of imagery.⁷ Dekker succinctly demonstrates how Protestant England and the Roman Catholic Continent both employed the same claims against one another. At the play's start the Empress of Babylon claims of Elizabeth:

That strumpet, that inchantresse (who, in robes
White as is innocence, and with an eye
Able to tempt stearne murther to her bed)
Calls her selfe Truth, has stolne fair Truths attire,
Her crowne, her sweet songs, counterfets her voyce,
And by prestigious tricks in sorcerie
Ha's raiz'd a base impostor like Truths father:
This subtile Curtizan sets vp againe,
Whom we but late banisht to liue in caues,
In rockes and desart mountaines.

(I, i, 56-65)

Dekker shows that it is the Empress of Babylon who is the ‘subtle courtesan’, but he draws attention to deception as one of the chief weapons in the wars of truth. Although in the lectori of his play, Dekker has absolved himself from his use of history in a cavalier fashion by proclaiming ‘I write as a poet, not as a historian, … these two do not live under one law’, The Whore of Babylon's prologue indicates that Dekker is trying to educate the reader in a manner similar to that of the chroniclers:

These Wonders sit and see, sending as guides
Your Iudgement, not your passions: passion slides,
When Iudgement goes vpright: for tho the Muse
(That's thus inspir'de) a Nouel path does tread,
Shee's free from foolish boldnes, or base dread.
Loe, scorne she scornes and Enuies ranckling tooth,
For this is all shee does, she wakens Truth.

(II. 20-26)

Encouraging judgement, and the difficulty in maintaining it in an environment subject to deception, is, indeed, a facet which marks out the English history plays of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and in which Shakespeare's fully participate. The only striking exception with Henry VIII among Shakespeare's other histories is in its dealing directly with events of Reformation history, and in its style more closely resembling that of other contemporary history plays, including Sir Thomas More, The True Chronicle of … Thomas Lord Cromwell, If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, When You See Me, You Know Me, and The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyatt. Many of these were multi-authored, most are difficult to date precisely and were frequently subject to later revision. However, they span approximately a twenty-year period from the mid-1590s (Sir Thomas More) to the mid-1610s (Henry VIII). Although they all share Protestant origins, and, as Julia Gaspar has demonstrated, a number appear to have been written in response to (or to take advantage of) events with strong Protestant connections such as the Essex rebellion or the Gunpowder plot, what is notable is how all of them do not reduce the history they perform to a narrow depiction of heroes and villains (Dekker's Whore of Babylon is, in fact, the most jingoistic among them) (pp. 190-216). All present puzzling scenes where an audience is posed with a series of problems in interpretation, both within the scene itself and in the scene's relation to others in the plays. All dramatise events or portray characters in manners that refuse narrow sectarian interpretations. Kathleen McLuskie's comment on Sir Thomas Wyatt can be said to refer to them all: ‘this is a politics of negotiation among contradictory alternatives, aware of the realpolitik of competing hierarchies and establishment of legitimate authority’.⁸

It is worth considering a few examples from some of these plays as they help illustrate how Henry VIII participates in this drama. Comparisons also help reveal the complexity of Protestant drama's historiography. One of the central concerns of Foxe's Acts and Monuments is to demonstrate true Catholic continuity in England against the false claims of the Roman Church. When practices could be argued as having been returned to purer, uncorrupted forms, the English Church generally promoted continuities, including ritualistic ones, with its past.⁹ The vast majority of English people were used to the prescribed Book of Common Prayer's emphasis on this (for example, the creed's declaration ‘I beleue one Catholike and Apostolike churche’). Further, Anglican opposition to the Roman Church did not automatically equate with wholesale xenophobia against those who continued to belong to it. The sympathetic presentation of the Spanish-born Queen Katherine in Henry VIII, for instance, finds ready parallels in these other history plays, emphasising the dramatists' refusal to collapse the implications of events into simple oppositions of the good versus the bad.

In Heywood's If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, part 1 (1605), for instance, there is a scene in which a Spaniard treacherously kills an Englishman: a dramatic instance apparently confirming xenophobic stereotypes. However, Philip of Spain (Mary Tudor's husband) immediately enters and, despite the pleas of Mary's English courtiers to pardon the Spanish villain, orders the murderer to be hanged. Throughout Heywood's play Philip works to try to reconcile Mary and the Princess Elizabeth against the machinations of Mary's English Roman Catholic faction, notably Stephen Gardiner. In Samuel Rowley's When You See Me, You Know Me (1605), while Wolsey is presented as uncompromisingly treacherous in his self-serving, Henry VIII is shown to be a figure wholly unable to control himself emotionally. The link between a failure of personal self-government with control of the realm is made explicit, drawing attention to Henry's inability to contain rebellion in Ireland. As Gordon McMullan's chapter in this collection demonstrates, Henry's lack of self-control is prominent, if more subtly so, in Henry VIII, and poses the same dilemma as Rowley's portrayal: is this a king unable to control his realm because of his inability to control himself? Is this a sound king who has been abused by false Roman Catholic clerical counsellors or one whose despotic tendencies allow popish corruption to flourish at his court?

Dekker's and Webster's Sir Thomas Wyatt (1607, reprinted 1612) is one of the best examples of a play which develops around a shifting historical perspective, the succession of events performed complicating any easy audience response. It opens with expressions of Wyatt's fierce loyalty towards Mary Tudor's legitimacy. Having helped to confirm her claim to the throne, Wyatt then turns to revolt against Mary because of his fears over her Spanish marriage. His rebellion fails and though providing the dramatists with an opportunity for some stirring nationalistic rhetoric, it is not made explicit whether Wyatt's cause is justified. There is no doubt that the play reveals the crowned Mary as increasingly disregarding her obligations to tolerate her subjects' Protestantism. Nevertheless, the dramatists are intent on preventing their characters from sliding into reductive vehicles of Protestant saints versus Roman Catholic tormentors. The dramatic effect of Mary's announcement of the restoration of the monasteries, for example, is tempered by her insistence that she will pay for these herself so as not to impoverish her subjects: hardly the action of a unfeeling tyrant!

Centrally, though, Wyatt's defence of Mary's rights against Northumberland's and Suffolk's attempt to place Lady Jane Grey on the throne early in the play has serious implications for his own rebellion's legitimacy. In one telling incident, Suffolk is betrayed by a servant he thought he could trust. This elicits a denunciation of unreliable servants from Suffolk, but more importantly it shows the servant despairing of his deed and hanging himself. The parallels with Judas' betrayal of Christ are glaring: yet Suffolk, too, has been a betrayer of Mary, motivated by the prospect of familial advantage. Although presenting Wyatt's, Suffolk's, Jane Grey's and her betrothed Guildford's deaths in manners clearly derived from Foxe's accounts of Protestant saints in the Acts and Monuments, the play also promotes the centrality of loyalty, something all these characters are to varying degrees culpable of breaking. Applauding the maintenance of individual integrity—‘Ile dambe my soule for no man, no for no man. / Who at doomes day must answere for my sinne?’, announces Wyatt early in the play—Sir Thomas Wyatt shows how acting according to conscience's dictates is not a straightforward affair.¹⁰ What is genuine loyalty, what calculated action for political advantage, is not easily distinguished.

To turn to Henry VIII, it is worth considering two scenes to demonstrate how the play may be seen to entice an audience to be ruled by judgement rather than passion. Detailed consideration of these illustrates how finely the dramatists have arranged their materials to resist simplistic categorisation of the historical significance of what is performed. The first is the portrayal of the Duke of Buckingham's fall from favour and his execution for treachery (Acts I and II); the second Katherine's and Griffith's consideration of Wolsey after his death (IV, ii).

In the first case, the play initially appears to present Buckingham as the innocent victim of Wolsey's hatred. Norfolk counsels him that ‘The state takes notice of the private difference / Betwixt you and the Cardinal. I advise you … that you read / The Cardinal's malice and his potency / Together’ (I, i, 101-6). Buckingham is shown to be unable to control his anger towards Wolsey, who arranges his arrest for treason. Despite acknowledging the duke's merits, Henry is persuaded of his guilt by Wolsey, who organises a succession of Buckingham's servants to testify against him.

Determined opponents though they are, it is interesting that the drama shows Buckingham and Wolsey closely paralleling one another. Both claim to be utterly loyal and accuse one another of treachery. Both are reported by various characters, including Henry, to be learned and eloquent. Both are quick to show excessive anger and yet, when their respective falls come, both demonstrate (or are reported as demonstrating) fortitude, forgiveness and the ability to meet their end with Christian resignation. The significant difference is that Buckingham dies protesting his innocence, Wolsey repenting his faults.

Superficially, therefore, it appears that Buckingham's truth is contrasted with Wolsey's duplicitiousness, the latter duping Henry through corrupting a succession of Buckingham's servants falsely to accuse the duke. Wolsey's contrivances have not convinced the people, though. The play employs a group of gentleman (who importantly meet again in IV, i, to opine on Anne's coronation) to comment on Buckingham's fall. They report the general attitude to Wolsey and the duke:

                    All the commons
Hate him perniciously, and o' my conscience
Wish him ten faddom deep: this duke as much
They love and dote on; call him bounteous Buckingham
The mirror of all courtesy.

(II, i, 49-53)

Crucially, while reporting this general opinion, they do not themselves pronounce unequivocally on Buckingham. The play refuses an unambiguous admission of Buckingham's innocence. The duke acknowledges he has been betrayed by his servants, but whether this is because they disclosed confidences or accused him falsely is unclear. Buckingham eloquently claims that he does not challenge the law because it has convicted him on evidence which appeared to be true but was in fact contrived. Should we accept, however, that his articulate speeches in II, i, are to be taken as an iteration of truth? The gentleman commentators give an audience reason to pause. The candour they manifest in their report of the progress of his trial reveals the dramatists' refusing to present this as a forthright instance of an English patriot destroyed by clerical treason. Although their report on the trial is lengthy, it is worth giving in full because it so aptly illustrates how judgement is called for in considering this scene. The first gentleman relates to the second how:

                    The great duke
Came to the bar; where to his accusations
He pleaded still not guilty, and alleged
Many sharp reasons to defeat the law.
The king's attorney on the contrary
Urg'd on the examinations, proofs, confessions
Of divers witnesses, which the duke desir'd
To have brought viva voce to his face;
At which appeared against him his surveyor,
Sir Gilbert Perk, his chancellor, and John Car,
Confessor to him, with that devil monk,
Hopkins, that made this mischief.
2ND Gentleman
That was he
That fed him with his prophecies.
1ST Gentleman
The same;
All these accus'd him strongly, which he fain
Would have flung from him; but indeed he could not,
And so his peers upon this evidence
Have found him guilty of high treason. Much
He spoke, and learnedly for life; but all
Was either pitied in him or forgotten.

(II, i, 11-29)

Buckingham's passionate defiance of his accusers may be a reflection of his truth, or it may be that rhetoric is his only weapon to fight a desperate defensive corner. The suggestion that Buckingham is trying to throw off his accusers but cannot may just as probably reflect that he did dabble in treachery. These gentlemen (their status is not wholly clear, but they do not seem to be courtiers) may be said to act as a fit audience to the drama of state which they witness and report on. Their discriminations may be seen as a guide for the larger audience of the play about the candour it should adopt.

The scene in Henry VIII which perhaps most vividly illustrates the dramatists' endeavours to develop considered judgement instead of an immediate emotional response to events is the discussion of Wolsey between Katherine and Griffith. After Wolsey's manipulation of her, Katherine's unsurprising response to news of his death is a catalogue of his faults. This focuses on Wolsey's skilful deceit, his two-facedness: something the audience has had ample opportunity to witness in the play. As a victim of Wolsey, and because of her presentation as an honest figure throughout the play, Katherine's summary of him might appear to articulate the play's general sentiment:

His own opinion was his law: i'th presence
He would say untruths, and be ever double
Both in his words and meaning. He was never
(But where he meant to ruin) pitiful:
His promises were as he then was, mighty,
But his own performance, as he is now,

(IV, ii, 37-42)

In response Griffith, who is described as a gentleman-usher to Katherine, acknowledges Wolsey's faults, which revolved around his greed. But he balances this with Wolsey's virtues when it came to giving, highlighting his founding of colleges in Oxford and Ipswich, and his contrition at his end (IV, ii, 48-68). Katherine responds by hailing Griffith as an ‘honest chronicler’:

After my death I wish no other herald,
No other speaker of my living actions
To keep mine honour from corruption,
But such an honest chronicler as Griffith.
Whom I most hated living, thou has made me,
With thy religious truth and modesty,
Now in his ashes honour.

(IV, ii, 69-75)

Exploring this scene in relation to material in Holinshed's Chronicles, Annabel Patterson has noted how the play intelligently employs material from Hall and Campion which is separated in the Chronicles: ‘someone highly intelligent and experienced in reading the Chronicles reversed their order, dramatised their disagreements, and rendered that disagreement, in terms of the philosophy of history, theoretical’.¹¹

The scene continues, though, to develop our interest in how events may be characterised by its next presentation, which provides further credibility to Griffith as ‘an honest chronicler’ and which fulfils, in part, Katherine's desire to have Griffith as the ‘speaker of my living actions’. Katherine falls asleep, we may even think for a few moments that she has died, and the audience is presented with a visionary dumb show which appears to reveal Katherine gaining a heavenly crown. Reporting the event, Katherine's own perspective on the spectacle provokes her to describe ‘a blessed troup / Invit[ing] me to a banquet’; ‘They promis'd me eternal happiness / And brought me garlands, Griffith, which I feel / I am not worthy yet to wear; I shall assuredly’ (IV, ii, 87-92). Rather than acknowledging Katherine's apparent elevation to sainthood, though, Griffith offers another outlook on this event: ‘I am most joyful, madam, such good dreams / Possess your fancy’ (IV, ii, 93-94). Griffith's analysis of what has taken place unsettles the audience's own view of the dumb show: has this been a true vision or a staging of a fanciful dream? The former gives considerable support to a view of Katherine as a figure the play is celebrating for her religious life (and raising troublesome questions about Henry's divorce provoking religious alteration). If, on the other hand, what we have seen is a mere dream, Katherine might even appear guilty of a false humility, denying her worthiness while imagining herself attaining a heavenly crown. Actually, Griffith's response largely diffuses the vision's potential to either beatify or castigate Katherine. His pleasure at what he sees as good dreams possessing her fancy and offering solace to a character in extremis prompts considerable sympathy for her, while refusing to allow this scene to be claimed as her unequivocal apotheosis. If, as Katherine claims for Griffith, he speaks with ‘religious truth and modesty’, this truth is not inclined to hagiography. Even if we propose Griffith is not a true chronicler—misinterpreting both Wolsey and what has happened to Katherine—the play has once again skilfully refused to let an audience rest contented with any straightforward interpretation, even of the actions they themselves have just witnessed.

III

Exploring the large-scale use of prophecy in the writing of Reformation England, Patrick Collinson has noted that, despite an underlying sense of God's providence for England, this mode of writing is marked by being ‘judgmental, inward-searching, and self-critical, not at all triumphalist’.¹² This distinction between a belief in the special position of England as a nation chosen by God and a refusal to bask in any assurance about this is an important modification to the concept of the elect nation frequently invoked in considering Protestant literature of this period.¹³ If employing biblical prophecy to project England's future left contemporary commentators uneasy, this is true also of their readings of England's history. Foxe's Acts and Monuments is once again a key illustration of this, a work which embraces both history and prophecy.¹⁴ While it is the case that Foxe celebrates England's opportunity to merge the invisible church of the godly—those who had maintained the true faith in times of persecution—with a newly cleansed visible church the formal institutions of church and state—what is also readily apparent is the sense of uncertainty the Acts and Monuments conveys over whether this opportunity is being realised, an anxiety which displaces any jingoistic religio-national triumphalism. Notably in the 1570 and 1583 editions of his work, Foxe registers his concerns about a nation which, while enjoying God's special favour, does not seem to be living up to its responsibilities. Far from being overthrown, the Antichrist remains a powerful threat in the nation as well as across the Channel.

As we have seen, Henry VIII shares with other history plays of its period an interest in complex types, ones shifting in intricate historical circumstances. It attacks popery, but Wolsey is more than the figure of sedition from a Protestant morality tradition. A distinction is created between the promise of Wolsey's native gifts and his misuse of these in office, perhaps suggesting that in a state of proper religious and secular government a figure such as Wolsey would have been of value. His contrition at the end may even be taken to suggest that he has been the victim of popery's corrupting influence rather than its thorough representative. By following Wolsey's dismissal with his contrition to Cromwell and then the favourable report of his death by Griffith, the play presents his downfall as a personal tragedy. It makes it apparent that Henry's pursuit of private passion over Anne Boleyn may only accidentally, or—perhaps more exactly—providentially, result in England's good.

The misgivings that Henry VIII registers about how decisively Henry's court is intent on pursuing a reformation of religion is shared by other contemporary dramatists'—and historians'—presentation of his reign. Typically, these history plays celebrate the true advent of reformed religion in England with either Edward VI under the tutelage of Cranmer (Rowley's When You See Me, You Know Me) or more commonly under Elizabeth (If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, Sir Thomas Wyatt, The Whore of Babylon). Indeed, part of twentieth-century criticism's difficulties in attempting to locate an unambiguous Reformation dynamic in Henry VIII may result from the abiding Whiggish view of the Henrican Reformation, which has had notable currency since the 1950s but which does not appear to have been particularly shared among late sixteenth—and early seventeenth-century commentators.¹⁵ Hindsight may enable some historians to declare an increasing Protestantisation in England from Henry's reign, but many contemporaries saw no such unstoppable direction: a source of anxiety or hope, depending on the individual's beliefs.

Henry VIII ends with a display of apparent Reformation prophecy, but one which reflects the self-critical fashion which Collinson sees as characteristic of the prophetic mode of this period. As with all the play's pageantry, the baptismal ritual, culminating in Cranmer's divination about the infant Elizabeth and England's future, is an uncertain spectacle. Once again, it poses challenging questions about what is true, notably highlighting the inseparability of secular questions of government and questions of supernatural conflict.

Cranmer's speech is rich in the resonance of supernatural prophecy (‘Let me speak sir, / For heaven now bids me’, V, iv, 14-15), and its promise describes a reign built round a political vision which emphasises the commonwealth (‘In her days every man shall eat in safety / Under his own vine what he plants’; ‘those about her / From her shall read the perfect ways of honour, / And by those claim their greatness, not by blood’, V, iv, 33-8). Central to Cranmer's vision of the future Elizabeth and of her successor James is that the nation's welfare rests on resisting tyranny within its own government: ‘She shall be lov'd and fear'd; her own shall bless her’ (V, iv, 30).

If a case needs to made for Henry VIII's Anglican Protestant vision of England, it rests in this final Act. Here the monarch recognises the fundamental virtue of the archbishop he has appointed to the governorship of the Church in England and protects him from the manoeuvring of evil counsellors. Henry and Cranmer display a model of loyalty and fidelity which reflects the reciprocal duties of their positions. Cranmer's relies on interior spiritual qualities as an answer against his accusers; Henry points out that such a defence betrays little knowledge of the ways of the world and statecraft. It is these which the monarch offers his archbishop as protector: ‘Thy truth and thy integrity is rooted / In us thy friend’ (V, i, 114-15). In return, Cranmer plays the part of spiritual mentor, speaking for heaven in his projection of idealised monarchy under Elizabeth and James. In doing so, he apparently transforms Henry. As Gordon McMullan's chapter in this volume details, for most of the play Henry is shown not to possess the self-control which is the proper province of the masculine governor. At the conclusion, in response to Cranmer's predication he proclaims: ‘O lord archbishop, / Thou has made me now a man; never before / This happy child did I get anything’ (V, iv, 63-5). In exercising his authority in protecting Cranmer, confirming his governorship of the English church, Henry is rewarded by this church's blessing. Henry's concluding speech reinforces exactly this concept in declaring Elizabeth's baptism a holy/holi-day, employing language which demonstrates how the secular and spiritual state have apparently properly combined to promote a national sense of common accord, a general feast which renders concrete Cranmer's future prediction:

                    This day, no man think
'Has business at his house; for all shall stay:
This little one shall make it Holy-day.

(V, iv, 74-6)

In the play Wolsey's and Gardiner's endeavours pursue the consolidation of their own and Rome's power through upsetting the proper function of monarchy, standing between king and the fit exercise of rule over his people (see esp. I, ii, 9-108). Cranmer's refusal to meddle in state politics, except as a prophet of the future, is in notable contrast and prompts the king to assume a more beneficent role as the state's temporal governor.

A contemporary audience witnessing this scene, though, would probably have raised some sceptical complications over this prophecy. Far from ushering in an era of peace and plenty, the Boleyn marriage was merely another chapter in the clashes among differing groups for power and control. Foxe's Acts and Monuments notably presents both Cranmer and Elizabeth as two of the most significant Protestant ‘martyrs’ of the Marian period (Heywood's If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, part 1 similarly portrays Elizabeth in this way). Cranmer's inspired projection of the future is refuted by historical experience, one which saw Cranmer's death at the stake. Henry's declaration of a holy/holi-day may be seen as drawing attention to this visual and rhetorical pageant as a show, an interlude in the reality of English history.

Henry VIII opens with Norfolk reporting events of the Field of Cloth of Gold, which event:

Beyond thought's compass, that former fabulous
Being now seen possible enough, got credit
That Bevis was believ'd.

(I, i, 36-8)

The play concludes with a prediction that recreates the legend of the golden age, virtually the land of Cockaigne of the popular imagination. The events Norfolk reports in France are quickly deflated by the admission that the stuff of legend is subject to the laws of economics and politics: it has bankrupted the nobility and achieved nothing of substance. The Field of Cloth of Gold was only a show. The dramatists leave Cranmer's prediction of prosperity and political perfection unanswered except by the audience's own experience. The ‘judgmental, inward-searching, and self-critical, not at all triumphalist’ qualities which Patrick Collinson notes in this era's use of the prophetic mode prompt a response which would place current realities against what should have happened, emphasising that in failing to achieve the stability and plenty which should have arisen from Reformation, England's political and spiritual direction has yet to be fulfilled. To accept Cranmer's future vision of Elizabeth's and James's rule as a reflection of reality is to participate in the world of the credulous simpleton:

                    Such as give
Their money out of hope they may believe,
May here find truth too.

(Prologue, ll. 7-9)

First produced in 1613, Henry VIII appeared in a year in which London was filled with plays, pageants, masques and other spectacles to celebrate the marriage of the Elector Palatine to the Princess Elizabeth. Shakespeare's and Fletcher's use of extensive pageantry has helped prompt some critics to argue its appropriateness within these Stuart celebrations, ones which many contemporaries saw as strengthening Protestantism in Europe.¹⁶ As Julia Gaspar has noted, though, a play centred on divorce would seem a poor choice for marriage celebrations (pp. 207-8). Even more so, the play's inquiry into, and scepticism about, the spectacles its drama encompasses renders it judgemental about attempts to present organised displays of royally sponsored ‘truth’.

Shakespeare's and Fletcher's clever deployment of commentators on events—Norfolk, Abergavenny and Buckingham on the Field of Cloth of Gold; the three gentleman who observe Buckingham's trial and Anne's coronation; Griffith's perspective on Wolsey and on Katherine's dream; Cromwell's counter to Gardiner's excessive condemnation of Cranmer—reflect the lack of any straightforward appraisal of what is displayed and, notably among the less exalted characters, demonstrate the importance of candour in the exercise of judgement.

Henry VIII and other contemporary history plays of this era confront attempts to reduce what is staged to narrow, jingoistic evocations of a Protestant celebration of England's divine destiny. Reflecting contemporary anxieties about whether England was acting out the historia which ideally belonged to the nation, these plays emphasise the need to be vigilant in interpreting history, acutely aware of both the secular and supernatural dangers in tyranny and popery. Despite Dekker's assertion that poets and historians do not live under the same law, these history plays share with chroniclers such as Foxe and Holinshed the desire to encourage a judgemental audience as witnesses to their work. Henry VIII is a further instance that the too readily accepted division between the didactic Protestant theatre of the early Reformation and the secular commercial theatre from the late 1580s continues to call out for wholescale reassessment.¹⁷

Notes

1. See Foakes's introduction to Henry VIII, p. xxix; Gaspar, ‘The Reformation plays’, p. 207.

2. See Lake, ‘Anti-popery’.

3. See Levy, Tudor Historical Thought; Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past. For a specifically Shakespearean orientation see Rackin, Stages of History, esp. pp. 1-85.

4. The best general introduction to Foxe is Wooden, John Foxe.

5. See Flech, ‘Shaping the reader’.

6. Patterson, Reading Holinshed's Chronicles.

7. All references are to Dekker, The Whore of Babylon in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, vol. II.

8. McLuskie, Dekker and Heywood, p. 40.

9. See Lake, Anglicans and Puritans?, and Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, as examples of studies which have challenged the frequent critical assumption that the reformed English Church was essentially Calvinist in dispostion.

10. Dekker and Webster, Sir Thomas Wyatt, I, i, 34-5.

11. Patterson, “‘All is true’”, p. 153

12. Collinson, ‘Biblical rhetoric’, p. 24.

13. See particularly Haller, Foxe's Book of Martyrs. Haller's views have prominently influenced one of the few critical considerations of English Reformation history plays, Spikes, ‘The Jacobean history play’.

14. See particularly Betteridge, ‘From prophetic to apocalyptic’.

15. The most influential account of the increasing Protestantisation of the Reformation is Dickens, The English Reformation. This has been widely challenged: see Scarisbrick, The Reformation; Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars; and Haigh, English Reformations.

16. Henry VIII, ed. Foakes, pp. xxviii-xxxv.

17. Recent studies which have importantly begun this reassessment include White, Theatre and Reformation; McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood; and Diehl, Staging Reform.

Works Cited

Primary

Dekker, Thomas, The Whore of Babylon, in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. F. Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953-61), vol. II (1955)

Dekker, Thomas and John Webster, Sir Thomas Wyatt, in The Dramaic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. F. Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953-61), vol. I (1953)

Shakespeare, William, Henry VIII (or All is True), ed. R. A. Foakes (London: Methuen, 1957)

Secondary

Betteridge, Tom, ‘From prophetic to apocalyptic: John Foxe and the writing of history’, in John Foxe and the English Reformation, ed. David Loades (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997), pp. 210-32

Burke, Peter, The Renaissance Sense of the Past (London: Edward Arnold, 1969).

Collinson, Patrick, ‘Biblical Rhetoric: The English nation and national sentiment in the prophetic mode’, in Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, eds. Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 15-45

Dickens, A. G., The English Reformation (London: Fontana, 1964; 2nd edition, 1989)

Diehl, Hutson, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and the Popular Theatre in Early Modern England (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 1997)

Duffy, Eamon, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992)

Flech, Susan, ‘Shaping the reader in the Acts and Monuments’ in John Foxe and the English Reformation, ed. David Loades (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997), pp. 52-65

Gaspar, Julia, ‘The Reformation plays on the public stage’, in Theatre and Government Under the Early Stuarts, eds J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 190-216.

Haigh, Christopher, English Reformations: Religion, Politics and Society under the Tudors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993)

Haller, William, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (London: Jonathan Cape, 1963)

Lake, Peter, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988)

Lake, Peter, ‘Anti-popery: the structure of a prejudice’, in Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics, 1603-1642, eds Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (Harlow and New York: Longman, 1989), pp. 72-106

Levy, F. J. Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1967)

McEachern, Claire, The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590-1612 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)

McLuskie, Kathleen E., Dekker and Heywood: Professional Dramatists (Houndmills, Basingstoke and London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994)

Patterson, Annabel, Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994)

Patterson, Annabel, “‘All is true’: negotiating the past in Henry VIII,” in Elizabethan Theater: Essays in Honor of S. Schoenbaum, eds R. B. Parker and S. P. Zinter (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1996), pp. 147-66

Rackin, Phyllis, Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990)

Scarisbrick, J. J. The Reformation and the English People (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984)

White, Paul Whitfield, Theatre and Reformation: Protestantism, Patronage, and Playing in Tudor England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)