“We are, by the sufferance of God, King of England; and the Kings of England in times past never had any superior but God.” King Henry VIII to Cardinal Wolsey

When on 21st April 1509 the King, Henry VII, breathed his last, the mantle fell to his only surviving son Henry Tudor to take up the throne. His rule would go on to be defined as a time of both great cultural and artistic prosperity, and political and religious upheaval.

A ‘Renaissance prince,’ Henry, just 17 years old at the time of his ascension to the throne, spent lavishly and was a huge patron of the arts. He threw huge court festivities characterised by their scale and extravagance, dressed in the finest fabrics and jewels, and was said to play every musical instrument available to him. Well educated by the best tutors of the time as a boy, he would certainly have been schooled in subjects ranging from literature, languages, music and the arts to philosophy and arithmetic. The Dutch theologian and humanist Desiderius Erasmus once described him as having a “lively mentality which reached for the stars, and he was able to bring to perfection whichever task he undertook…”

Yet how do we balance this view with that of a man who executed two of his six wives, and whose begetting of the English Reformation (ultimately leading to the Dissolution of the Monasteries) was wholly a reaction to the Catholic churches refusal to grant an annulment to his marriage to Catherine of Aragon?

Though a devout Catholic during his early reign, in 1534 Henry VIII declared that he as monarch, rather than the Pope, was the rightful head of the Church of England. When Henry VIII broke with the Catholic church, it had been simple political expediency and the need to secure a male heir that had underpinned the English Reformation. The theology of Martin Luther Henry VIII had previously scorned as heretical. His book ‘Defence of the Seven Sacraments’ had even seen him named as “Defender of the Faith” by Pope Leo X.

Henry may have cited Leviticus in his bid to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, he might even have accepted a later apology from Luther over the theologians robust defence addressed directly to the English monarch over the criticisms within ‘Defence of the Seven Sacraments’  but political necessities aside, Henry VIII remained a theological conservative all his life and Lutheran beliefs remained anathema to all he was and remained. The English Reformation might have seen the Bible upheld as the one sole authority, but power under the Tudors remained what it had always been, brutal and absolute. The only difference this time being that it was the English monarch, not the Holy Roman Church who held the keys to the church doors and finances.