There is little doubt that, for all the problems of truth and testimony the audience have witnessed by the time they arrive at Elizabeth's christening, Cranmer's prophecy nonetheless has a powerful and direct emotive charge. Foakes is clearly right in arguing that the Jacobean audience would have been attuned to two Elizabeths and two royal ceremonies. The prophecy is thus directed at a series of futures, some already completed by 1613, others still projected. And it depends heavily upon the audience's hindsight for its success. The completed predictions serve to validate those as yet unfulfilled, offering a clear linear dynamic to the eschatological mindset, but it is important both to recognise the play's rejection of direct historical agency and to ponder the expected response to the unproven predictions, in particular the Jacobean audience's reading of the scene's references to and predictions for King James. And I would argue that the play demands the deployment of hindsight as a means to examine the contemporary status of the Reformation in England.

Part of the curiosity of Cranmer's speech is that it seems to ascribe to James imperial aspirations which were associated with militant Protestantism but which were at best marginal to the king's own preferred policies. Apocalypse and Empire have a traditional intimacy: here it is the colonisation of America, promoted by Protestants but viewed with suspicion by the king, which is emphasised in 'predicting' James's achievements ['Wherever the bright sun of heaven shall shine, / His honour and the greatness of his name / Shall be, and the make new nations'iv. 50-52)]'⁷ Moreover, the phoenix' metaphor by which cranmer' fudges Jame's relationship to Elizabeth is shared with that most militant of Protestant plays, Dekker's Whore of Babylon:

           [O]ut of her ashes may
A second Phoenix rise, of larger wing,
Of stronger talent, of more dreadfull beake,
Who swooping through the ayre, may with his
 beating
So well commaund the winds, that all those
 trees
Where sit birds of our hatching (now fled
 thither)
Will tremble, … yea and perhaps his talent
May be so bonie and so large of gripe,
That it may shake all Babilon.
                            (Dekker 1607, F2^V

James, however, had little intention of shaking 'all Babilon' his interest was in establishing Continent-wide peace by way of dynastic marriage and in confirming his personal appropriation of the seventh beatitude, Beati Pacifici. And of course juxtaposing Cranmer's prophecy with the passage from Dekker simply serves to underline the relative bloodlessness of Cranmer's 'apocalyptic' vision. More to the point, as Julia Gasper observes, it is noticeable that though Cranmer makes several biblical allusions in the course of his prophecy, he refers each time to Old Testament prophets and resolutely avoids the obvious text for apocalyptic visions, the Book of Revelation (Gasper 1990, 97). The relationship between Cranmer's prophecy and Protestant apocalypticism thus begins to seem very uncomfortable, particularly when seen in the particular 1612-13 context. And I would argue that it becomes still more problematic with the recognition that the christening scene invokes powerful visual as well as verbal images, drawing on two separate iconographie traditions, each of which presents Henry VIII in a less than flattering light. The first is the tradition of Veritas Filia Temporis which we have already examined as a broad context for the play's obsession with Truth; the second is the iconography of David and Bathsheba.

It is important to remember that, in the christening scene, it is Archbishop Cranmer, not King Henry, who occupies centre stage along with the infant Elizabeth. He stands over the child to make his climactic prophecy, and at this key moment of celebration, the scene, I would argue, evokes in a very specific way the iconography of Veritas Filia Temporis. The effect of this evocation is to exclude the king from the sacramental scene: at the precise moment in which Elizabeth inherits the mantle of English Protestantism, she is presented to the audience as the spiritual, if not the natural, daughter of Cranmer rather than of Henry. As we have already noted, the language of the prophecy encourages us to see the future Queen Elizabeth as the incarnation of Protestant Truth ['Which time shall bring to ripeness' (V. iv. 20)], and if, as Judith Doolin Spikes has suggested [in "The Jacobean History Play and the Myth of the Elect Nation," Renaissance Drama 8, 1977], the figure of Time in The Whore of Babylon informs the portrayal of Cranmer here in Henry VIII, then this is confirmed by the iconography 140). With Henry to one side, amazed by the archbishop's words, the audience sees the familiar vignette: Time stands over Truth and rapturously predicts the End of History. The moment serves abruptly to decentre the king, removing him from full paternity and leaving the circumstances of Elizabeth's birth (and consequently her legitimacy) as shrouded as her death in Cranmer's prophecy.

I would thus argue that an iconographic interpretation of this moment, taken together with the ambivalence of the portrayal of the king throughout, rejects the Erastian readings sometimes made of the play, rigorously questioning Henry's spiritual authority and thus by implication (extrapolating from the equation of Queen Elizabeth and Princess Elizabeth noted by Foakes) that of King James. Moreover, a second, more covert layer of iconographie potential at the moment of Elizabeth's christening can be seen to exacerbate the discomfort of this moment for James. The reference to 'Saba' (the Queen of Sheba) in Cranmer's prophecy obliquely associates the young Elizabeth with David's son Solomon, implying her adoption of Solomon's various attributes (notably that of wisdom). But seen in conjunction with the sidelining of King Henry and the absence of Anne Bullen at this key moment of the play, it also offers an additional, politically unsettling possibility.

The story of David's desire for and adultery with Bathsheba, his arrangement for the death in battle of her husband Uriah, and his subsequent repentance following denunciation by Nathan the prophet was one of the best-known of Old Testament stories, and an iconographie tradition had grown up which associated David's 'Penitential Psalms' with the Bathsheba story, particularly the initial image of David watching Bathsheba bathing.⁸ Reformation readings of 2 Samuel 11-12 tended to emphasise the story as an example of the inevitability of sin and the necessity of repentance, partly in reaction to a Roman Catholic tradition of fairly breathtaking licence in which David's desire for Bathsheba was interpreted as Christ's desire for his Church, Uriah became the 'Prince of this World,' and David's adultery was conveniently reworked as his rescue of the Church from the Devil. Certainly, the Penitential Psalms, like the image of Veritas Filia Temporis, were well-known as a Reformation battle-ground and were associated with the development of Protestant doctrine. The story had, though, been given a dark political significance during the reign of Henry VIII by Sir Thomas Wyatt, who produced versetranslations of the Penitential Psalms, was rumoured to have had an affair with Anne Boleyn before the king met her, and was imprisoned by the king at the time of her execution.⁹ According to Rivkah Zim, Wyatt 'may have seen King David—the royal lover guilty of manslaughter, if not murder, in the pursuit of illicit passion—as representing Henry VIII' (Zim 1987, 73-4; also [Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From more to Shakespeare, 1980], 115, 146-7). It would be hard to deny the dangerous resonances the story held for King Henry, desperately awaiting the birth of a son. David's penitence is such that God lets him live, but his punishment is the death of his first child by Bathsheba. The conception and birth of Solomon in the wake of this marks the return of God's favour, and is confirmed by an alternative name for the child, Jedidiah, 'beloved of God,' given him through Nathan the prophet.

It is thus possible to read the last scene of Henry VIII through an alternative iconographie tradition which associates the birth of Elizabeth and her subsequent life and reign with the return of God's favour to his chosen nation in the wake of sinful and adulterous behaviour on the part of the king. Cranmer's centrality as the counterpart of Nathan the prophet has the effect once more of marginalising King Henry in his uncomfortable equivalence to the easily-tempted David, God's anointed, but not always entirely reliable, king. And this might well have uneasy resonances for 1612-13, particularly if the audience were again to see in the character of Henry VIII a shadowing of King James. In view of Dennis Kay's assertion [in Melodious Tears: The English Funeral Elegy from Spenser to Milton, 1990] that the death of Henry, Prince of Wales, was widely represented, in a kind of nationwide act of penitence, as 'divine retribution for the nation's sin' (134), an awkward, and presumably highly dangerous, topical interpretation is on offer. The iconographie retreat from Erastianism we have already registered is thus highly telling. The English Reformation is represented at the climactic moment of the play both as something which has happened and as something which is still to happen, even in the reign of James I.

The last scene thus exemplifies the inherent contradictions of the play. In a practical exposition of the Derridean idea that truth is produced at the moment of the dissolution of truth, it is possible to see that the iconographie triumph of Protestant propaganda is achieved at a moment which highlights the contemporary uncertainties of the claim. The scene is a looking-forward to the future which is also a return to the past, mythologising the transition from Elizabeth to James by way of the (unhistorically direct) transition from Henry to Elizabeth, and at the same time strongly hinting at the ambiguous status of the militant Protestant apocalyptic project under James. Henry VIII can thus be seen as a meditation on the state of the English Reformation in 1612-13 which sets linear and cyclical models of history against each other in order to project a future for English Protestantism which is at the same time a return to the past.