The word 'truth' turns up no fewer than twenty-five times in Henry VIII, along with eighteen appearances of 'true' (nineteen, if you count the title of the play as reported by contemporary observers, All is True), six of 'truly,' and one of 'true-hearted.' The Prologue alone offers two mentions of 'truth' and one of 'true,' connecting the concept first of all with a nexus of faith, hope and expenditure ['Such as give / Their money out of hope they may believe, / May here find truth' (Prologue 7-9)], then with a sense of deliberate selectivity or, perhaps, election ['our chosen truth' (Prologue 18)], and finally with the relationship between artistic intention and representation ['the opinion that we bring / To make that only true we now intend' (Prologue 20-21)].² The play seems almost to tease its audience with 'truth,' hinting at contemporary relevance while retaining a certain ambivalence: 'Think ye see / The very persons of our noble story / As they were living' (Prologue 25-7), the Prologue demands, though it is not clear whether this is merely an exhortation to forget the time-lapse between the events on stage and the England of the present, or whether it is a broad hint that the characters have their counterparts in contemporary politics. A number of recent critics have opted for the latter, reading the emphasis on 'truth' as a straightforward assertion of the conscious topicality of the play.

The year of first performance of Henry VIII was an extraordinary one for English politics and in particular for the politics of English Protestantism. The death of Henry, Prince of Wales, in November 1612 shattered the millenarian hopes that militant Protestants had invested in him, with his passion for military display and his allegiance to the dream of a Protestant Europe. Henry's enthusiasm for the impending marriage of his sister Elizabeth to Frederick the Elector Palatine, the principal Continental Protestant ruler, was taken up with a fervour verging on desperation after his death, with the result that (ostensibly, at least) James and his militant Protestant subjects were in atypical harmony at the beginning of 1613. Henry's death had been a terrible blow, though, and the outpouring of grief for the dead prince was continually in danger of overshadowing the celebrations for the wedding, which was postponed to February. Like its sister collaboration The Two Noble Kinsmen, Henry VIII dwells on the mixed negative and positive emotions induced by the rapid succession of funeral and wedding.³ The Prologue predicts a melancholy play: 'if you can be merry then, I'll say / A man may weep upon his wedding day' (Prologue 31-2). And the two wry choric Gentlemen, commenting on the speed of political and emotional change, capture (as they do throughout the play) the mood of the moment:

2 Gent.          At our last encounter
The Duke of Buckingham came from his trial.
1 Gent. 'Tis very true. But that time offer'd
  sorrow,
This general joy.
                            (IV. i. 4 7)

It is hard not to see a parallel between the emotions expressed on stage at moments such as this and the political situation at the time of composition. And it is not surprising that those critics who concentrate on the topicality of the play are also most closely concerned with its relationship to Protestantism.

R. A. Foakes, in his influential Arden edition, points out that a 'play on the downfall of Wolsey, the last great Catholic statesman of England, on the rise of Cranmer, and the birth of 'that now triumphant Saint our late Queene Elizabeth' would have been very appropriate at such a time' (Foakes 1957, xxxi).⁴ He suggests that Henry VIII may well have been performed for the wedding itself, demonstrating a series of verbal parallels between contemporary descriptions of the occasion and the unusually detailed stage-directions in the Folio text, and emphasising the deliberate parallels drawn between Princess Elizabeth and her earlier namesake in sermons and pamphlets at the time. Frances Yates, in Shakespeare's Last Plays, [1975], examines the political effect that nostalgia for Elizabeth exercised in James's reign and notes the focus of Protestant hopes on Prince Henry. For her, Henry VIII is an unequivocally Protestant play which 'reflects the Foxian apocalyptic view of English history' (Yates 1975, 70).⁵ More recently, William Baillie ["Henry VIII: A Jacobean History," Shakespeare Studies 12, 1979] has analysed a series of topical motifs in the play which would be of particular relevance to militant Protestants, including 'the expansion of the monarch's personal authority in relation to the law, the sudden fall of a court favorite, and a divorce' (that of the Earl of Essex and Frances Howard) 248). And Donna Hamilton [Shakespeare and the Politics of Protestant England, 1992] has extended these claims, the latter in particular, arguing that Henry VIII aims specifically to discredit the 'Howard faction at court—a faction dominated by Catholics—by associating their values and projects … with Wolsey and the values he represents' (164). The consensus of these views (whatever the flaws of some of the individual arguments) is that Henry VIII was involved to a substantial degree in the politics of Protestantism at the time of composition.

'Topical' critics tend to emphasise the very last scene of the play—and in particular Cranmer's prophecy over the child Elizabeth—to support the general principle that Henry VIII celebrates and projects a future for English Protestantism under James. Yet curiously, despite the rigorous contextualisation effected by these readings, there is a further broad context which has yet to be acknowledged in topical readings of Henry VIII, but which is crucial for any reading which aims to assess the play's claims about truth. For Cranmer's language in the last scene and the many other references to truth in the play belong to an established tradition of sectarian appropriation which has clear associations with the crisis of 1612-13. 'Let me speak sir,' Cranmer demands of the king, 'For heaven now bids me; and the words I utter, / Let none think flattery, for they'll find 'em truth' (V. iv. 14-16). The child Elizabeth, he claims, 'promises / Upon this land a thousand thousand blessings, / Which time shall bring to ripeness' (18-21). In this time of revelation, he tells us,

                Truth shall nurse her,
Holy and heavenly thoughts still counsel her;
She shall be lov'd and fear'd: her own shall
 bless her;
Her foes shake like a field of beaten corn,
And hang their heads with sorrow. …
God shall be truly known, and those about her
From her shall read the perfect ways of
 honour.
                          (V. iv. 28-32, 36-7)

And he goes on to foreshadow James's reign after the 'maiden phoenix' (40) has been called by heaven 'from this cloud of darkness' (44):

        Peace, plenty, love, truth, terror,
That were the servants to this chosen infant,
Shall then be his, and like a vine grow to
 him;
Wherever the bright sun of heaven shall shine,
His honour and the greatness of his name
Shall be, and make new nations.
                               (V. iv. 47-52)

This repetition of 'truth,' particularly in the context of revelation, read in tandem with the emphasis on Elizabeth's election, invokes the resurgence in 1612-13 of a sectarian iconography which had developed around the concept in the course of the previous century.

The appropriation of 'Truth' for Protestant iconography has been traced as early as 1521, when John Knoblouch of Strasbourg, printer to a range of advocates of religious reform from Erasmus to Luther, had deliberately used as his printer's mark an image of Truth personified as a harassed woman emerging from a cave. The belligerently anti-Catholic use to which Knoblouch's image was in due course put in England is clear from the titlepage woodcut to William Marshall's Goodly Prymer in Englyshe, published shortly after the Henrician schism, in which medieval images of the Harrowing of Hell are reworked to depict 'the liberation of Christian Truth (as seen by Protestant reformers) from her captivity under the monster of Roman hypocrisy.' The introduction here of the figure of Time as Truth's rescuer forcefully appropriates the motto Veritas Filia Temporis ('Truth the daughter of Time'), which focusses on the temporal revelation of Truth in the framework of apocalypse. Truth was claimed by both sides in the course of the sixteenth century, acquired for Edward VI, reappropriated for Roman Catholicism by Queen Mary at her accession, and then revived by Elizabeth for Reformed religion. Shortly after she came to the throne, Elizabeth went on a procession through London and was greeted by a figure representing Time leading a white-clad Truth who handed to Elizabeth the verbum veritatis, the Bible in English. Keen to confirm her association with Truth, the queen allegedly stopped and cried out, 'And Time hath brought me hither!'

It is this specifically Elizabethan appropriation, best known from the figure of Una in Book One of Spenser's Faerie Queene, that is key to the resurgence of the iconography of Truth at the time of the first production of Henry VIII. The playwright Thomas Dekker had forcefully dramatised the associations of the Time-Truth image early in James's reign in The Whore of Babylon [1607], which Gasper calls 'the definitive militant Protestant play's ([The Dragon and the Dove: The plays of Thomas Dekker, 1990], 62). As the play opens, Truth awaits the death of Mary so that she and her father Time can help Elizabeth (in the shape of Titania, the Fairy Queen) defeat the malign forces of the Whore of Babylon. The printers of the 1607 Quarto incorporate marginal glosses to help the reader negotiate the significance of the allegory, but by 1612 such interpretative assistance would have been unnecessary. Two examples of entertainments heavily invested with the iconography of Veritas Filia Temporis will serve to demonstrate the status of Truth at the time of Prince Henry's death: the anonymous Masque of Truth and Thomas Middleton's The Triumphs of Truth.

Middleton's entertainment was the first of his series of six pageants written for mayors of London in the 1610s and 1620s. The Triumphs of Truth was, according to David Norbrook ["'The Masque of Truth': Court Entertainments and International Protestant politics in the Early Stuart Period," in The Seventeenth Century 1, 1968], the most expensive of all such pageants in the Renaissance: 'for no other state occasion in James's reign did the City summon up so much enthusiasm' (94). It echoes the typology of Spenser and Dekker, presenting a 'lengthy struggle … between a female figure representing Truth', who is 'poor, thin, and threadbare,' and 'idolatrous Error' (94) riding in a glorious chariot. The arrival of Time precipitates an apocalyptic scene '[a]t which a flame shoots from the head of Zeal, which fastening upon that chariot of Error, sets in on fire, and all the beasts that are joined to it,' so that, by the close of the pageant, with the help of a few fiery special effects, the 'proud seat of Error' lies 'glowing in embers,' and Truth is triumphant. Middleton here seeks ways to instigate a 'reformation of the masque,' to reform a genre associated by English Protestants with James's unmilitant tendencies: the pageant draws on the Protestant triumphalism revived by the wedding of Elizabeth and Frederick after the shock of the death of Prince Henry, and as such is designed to send a strong message from city to court at a time of sectarian crisis.

It seems that Henry's death had already caused an iconographic reversal in the midst of the wedding celebrations themselves, a dilution of the Protestant fervour Henry had championed in the aesthetic arena, since there is evidence of an overtly apocalyptic masque-project for the wedding—The Masque of Truth—which was promoted by Henry but aborted immediately after his death (Norbrook 1986). The cancellation of this masque is of particular note because, where Middleton's pageant serves as an address to the court from outside, The Masque of Truth seems to have been initiated and supported from within. In the event, it was replaced by a conservative masque commissioned from Thomas Campion, a client of the Howard family, who (as Hamilton's analysis shows) were decidedly at odds with militant Protestant aspirations. No original text of The Masque of Truth is extant, but we do have an outline and partial transcription in French, which makes its apocalyptic allegiances abundantly clear. As the masque begins (or would have begun), Atlas is tired of holding up the world, and has come to England to give up his 'burden to Aletheia (Truth), … represented on stage by a huge reclining statue reading a Bible and holding a globe in her left hand' (Nor-brook 1986, 83). The Muses call on the various nations of Europe 'to pay tribute to King James for his patronage of the Truth' (Norbrook 1986, 83). Europe and her five daughters—France, Spain, Germany, Italy, and Greece—then bow to Truth and offer tribute to James. At the very end of the masque, 'the globe splits in two and disappears, leaving behind it a paradise guarded by an angel bearing a flaming sword' (Nor-brook 1986, 83). Truth invites the various nations to repent and enter paradise, and the gates close behind them.

'Truth' can be seen in this context to be a highly loaded term, a Protestant absolute implying a militant foreign and domestic politics and with a heavy investment in the cult of Henry, Prince of Wales. As a result, the project offers a very different view of the marriage of Elizabeth and Frederick from that promoted by James. It presents the union not as the first of a series of Protestant and Catholic marriages designed to bring Europe together in peace but as a 'confessional alliance': James, as guardian of English Calvinist Protestantism, by uniting with the Protestant Palatinate, will ensure that the other nations bow to Reformed religion. It is clear enough why the masque was never performed: it would not exactly have been a diplomatic coup. But if Prince Henry did have a hand in its design, then its cancellation in the immediate wake of his death underlines the immensity of his loss to English militant Protestants.