THE CORRUPTION OF The Corruption of Henry VIII
EXPERT BIO
GLENN RICHARDSON
Glenn Richardson is a Professor of Early Modern History at St. Mary's University, London. He specialises in Tudor politics and is the author of Wolsey (Routledge Press, 2020).
Remembered as the monarch with six wives who broke away from the Catholic. Church, Henry VIII's reputation has been cemented as a result of his outrageous behaviour and bloody-minded approach to kingship. At the beginning of his reign, Henry embodied the ideal of an enlightened Renaissance prince who presided over a majestic court and could have taken England into a new golden age after years of uncertainty. So how did it all go wrong, and why did Henry VIII become memorialised as England's most tyrannical monarch?
A HUMANIST PRINCE
When Henry VII won the Battle of Bosworth and became King of England in 1485, he needed to secure his throne. It was vitally important that his sons, who would succeed him, were raised to be capable and well-prepared to defend the Tudor throne and rule with authority when and if the time came. To achieve this, he was eager to provide the best education for Arthur (born 1486) and Henry (born 1491). As the ideals of the Italian Renaissance spread across the continent, a new way of learning gained traction. Humanism was a system of education pioneered by Italian academics and philosophers that revolved around the revival of ancient knowledge from Greece and Rome. It also stressed the importance of eloquent writing and rhetoric, which gave rise to a style of writing that came to be characteristic of the Renaissance period. In Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus, humanism found its leading light. He wrote in his work (1516) that "no commonwealth can be happy unless either philosophers are put at the helm, or those to whose lot the rule happens to have fallen embrace philosophy." Propounded by the emerging humanists at the
