Although I’ve linked to the exhibition stuff already, I wanted to point out this link to some key documents related to Henry VIII that the British Library has in their online galleries. They also have clips from Starkey’s “Henry: The Mind of a Tyrant” series.
BBC News video:
Additional articles:
The Guardian: Kenilworth Castle garden reopens
The Independent: Recreated, the Tudor garden where an ambitious earl wooed the Virgin Queen
Leeds Castle. May 2003
If ever there was a place I need to go back and visit on a nicer day, it’s Leeds Castle! It’s such a beautiful castle and setting, it’s really a shame it was such so damp and dreary when we were there. Still, a lovely place to visit!
From The Telegraph:
Queen thanks Yeomen of the Guard on 500th anniversary of Henry VII’s death
The Queen expressed her thanks to the Yeomen of the Guard as she honoured the founder of the famous royal bodyguards.
More than 70 Yeomen – resplendent in their distinctive red and gold tunics, large white ruffled collars, scarlet stockings and flat brimmed black Tudor hats – gathered in Westminster Abbey in tribute to King Henry VII.
Henry VII created the Queen’s Body Guard of the Yeomen of the Guard in 1485 at the Battle of Bosworth.
To mark the 500th anniversary of his death, the Queen placed a posy at his tomb in the Abbey’s Lady Chapel.
And you could win a £100 gift certificate to the Library bookshop if you’re a good one!
From The British Library Henry VIII exhibition blog:
Move over Charles Laughton! Goodbye Ray Winstone! Better luck next time Sid James!
You, yes you, could win a free ticket to our Henry exhibition by turning up at our Henry VIII lookalikes event on Bank Holiday Monday 4 May.
Just wanted to let everyone know that the answers from Leanda de Lisle Q&A have now been posted over at the Lady Jane Grey Reference site!
I got this fun press release from the British Library in conjunction with the opening of the Henry VIII – Man and Monarch exhibition
They’ve also started a Henry VIII exhibition blog and a podcast!
And here is my previous post about the exhibition catalogue. I ordered mine yesterday and it has already shipped. Can’t wait to see it!
THE CREDIT CRUNCH KING
HOW HENRY VIII DIED IN DEBT AND OTHER THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW
Henry VIII would have been at home in today’s recession, research from the British Library suggests. As a youngster, Henry spent £2.5 million on capturing a small town from France, Tournai, equivalent to about £5.6 billion today and he died in massive debt. Frittering the State coffers is just the tip of the iceberg. Using evidence from manuscripts, paintings and artefacts on display in a major new exhibition, Henry VIII, Man & Monarch, opening this week, a list of thirteen startling facts has been unearthed.
Henry the hoarder
* By the time he died, Henry owned 50 palaces, a royal record for England. These included Hampton Court, Whitehall Palace (where he died) and St. James’s Palace (where he lay in state).
* Foreshadowing modern day credit crunch and overspending, Henry was a monarch who died in massive debt.
* On display is the Post-mortem inventory of Henry VIII. It lists nearly 20,000 items, including the largest tapestry collection on record, seventy ships and 6,500 handguns.
Henry the lover
* Henry VIII was a happily married man. He was married to Katharine of Aragon for 20 years.
* Henry was a bit of a toy boy: Katherine was 7 years his senior when he married her aged 19 in 1509.
Henry the musician
* He was a keen composer, although he didn’t write Greensleeves as is widely reported, he did however write music such as ‘Pastime with Good Company’ which is on display.
* The music-loving monarch owned 78 recorders, 78 flutes, five sets of bagpipes and a virginal – a type of harpsichord.
Other Henry Facts
* By the end of his life, Henry’s waistline measured four-and-a-half feet round. He was 6ft 2 inches tall.
* He self-medicated – Henry’s prescription book shows methods for treating ulcers, some of them apparently devised by Henry himself. (ff. 43v-44): ‘An Oyntment devised by the kinges Majesty made at Westminster. And devised at Grenwich to take away inflammations and to cease payne and heale ulcers called gray plaster’.
* Henry was terrified of catching the plague, and spent most summers away from London to avoid it. His court painter Holbein was not so lucky, and succumbed to the so-called Black Death in 1543.
* The Bishop of Rochester’s cook, taking vengeance against an ungrateful master, added a toxic herb to a dish and two guests died. Henry ordered that the cook should be boiled alive in his own pot, rather than hanged, and this remained the standard punishment for poisoners for five years.
* As a child Henry had his own ‘whipping boy’ who was punished every time the young Prince did something wrong
* Henry had a remarkable memory and could remember the names of every single servant employed in the Royal households.
If you’ve ever wondered what goes in to researching portrait identification, head on over to Stephan Edwards’ (a.k.a PhD Historian) website to see some fascinating work that he recently did.
Here’s the abstract:
In mid February 2009, I was contacted by a private collector in regard to a painting he had recently purchased from an estate. The painting, seen above, bears the label Princess Elizabeth (afterwards Queen) , “The Harington Portrait” and has been attributed in the past to the artist Antonio Mor (d. ca. 1578). The collector questioned the identification and requested my opinion on it. I was able to determine at first glance that it was not, in fact, an authentic portrait of Elizabeth Tudor, so the owner asked for my assistance in determining who the sitter may have actually been. Thus began a two-month period of intensive research, and the results of that investigation are now presented here for the first time.
Armor for man and horse of Henry VIII from about 1515, on display at the White Tower in the Tower of London. Photo May 2003.
In celebration of the 500th anniversary of Henry VIII’s accession to the throne this week, I went with this picture of armor from early in Henry’s reign. The gold-colored (it’s actually brass) border of the skirt on the human armor are the letters H and K (for Henry and Katherine). This armor is currently part of the Dressed to Kill exhibition at the Tower of London.
From a press release found via Google news:
The Historic Royal Palaces, the independent charity that cares for Hampton Court Palace and the Tower of London, will send its followers updates on the events in the run-up to Henry VIII’s coronation at Westminster Abbey on June 24 – exactly 500 years after they happened.
It is believed to be the first time the website has been able to engage users in historical events from the first person perspective, and in real time over the actual period they took place, a spokesman for the charity said.
And here is the Twitter profile page for Henry/HRP
And some of you may have already seen over in the sidebar that I’m on Twitter too, although I’ll warn people now that I mostly post about science, tech and everyday life stuff, not much Tudor history. But if you’re interested – here’s my profile.
Just in case there are folks here who haven’t been over the The Raucous Royals blog lately, I wanted to post something here about Carlyn’s great analysis of this season’s episodes of “The Tudors”.
Here’s a link to the write-up for Episode 3 and the entries for previous episodes can be found at the bottom of that post.
The Independent ran an interesting article about the jousting fall in 1536 that will be in an upcoming documentary:
The jousting accident that turned Henry VIII into a tyrant
Medical study uncovers turning point in king’s life. Michael McCarthy reports
Henry VIII became the tyrannical monster remembered by history because of a personality change following a serious jousting accident, according to a new historical documentary.
After the accident – just before he became estranged from the second of his six wives, Anne Boleyn – the king, once sporty and generous, became cruel, vicious and paranoid, his subjects began talking about him in a new way, and the turnover of his wives speeded up.
The accident occurred at a tournament at Greenwich Palace on 24 January 1536 when 44-year-old Henry, in full armour, was thrown from his horse, itself armoured, which then fell on top of him. He was unconscious for two hours and was thought at first to have been fatally injured.
But, although he recovered, the incident, which ended his jousting career, aggravated serious leg problems which plagued him for the rest of his life, and may well have caused an undetected brain injury which profoundly affected his personality, according to the History Channel documentary Inside the Body of Henry VIII. The programme focuses on the king’s medical problems which grew worse in his later years, especially his ulcerated legs and his obesity: measurements of his armour show that, between his 20s and his 50s, the 6ft 1in monarch’s waist grew from 32in to 52in, his chest expanded from 39in to 53in, and, by the time of his death in 1547 at the age of 56, he is likely to have weighed 28 stone.
Robert Hutchinson, a biographer of Henry; Catherine Hood, a doctor; and the historian Lucy Worsley, who is chief curator of Britain’s Historic Royal Palaces, offer a picture of a sovereign eventually overwhelmed by health problems by the time of his death. His doctors recorded that he had badly ulcerated legs, was unable to walk, his eyesight was fading, and he was plagued by paranoia and melancholy.
The program will be on the History Channel in the UK, but I don’t know about the US channel yet. I’m sure it will show up eventually (hopefully sooner rather than later).
From The Telegraph:
The year 1536 changed Henry VIII from a handsome, popular and athletic king to a corpulent tyrant who thought little of dispatching his many wives, a historian has claimed.
A new look at the life of one of England’s most famous monarchs argues that a series of calamitous events within the space of 12 months had an irreversible effect on his life.
Suzannah Lipscomb, a research curator at Hampton Court Palace and Oxford scholar, said the apparent betrayal by his wife, a dangerous fall from a horse and a religious rebellion all played their part in transforming Henry.
She said: “He did move from being the much fêted, glorious, and fun young monarch of the 1510s and 1520s, into the overweight, suspicious, ruthless tyrant who is commonly depicted as in popular culture.
“The events of 1536 catalyzed, fostered and entrenched this change. It was Henry VIII’s annus horribilis.”
King Henry VIII’s astrolabe at the British Museum. May 1998.
From the British Museum website:
This small astrolabe, signed by Bastien Le Seney from Normandy, clockmaker to Henry VIII, is inscribed with the King’s motto and arms but surprisingly the quartering is mixed up and lions in the top left quarter face in the wrong direction.
Dimensions
Diameter: 85.5 millimetres
Thickness: 4.5 millimetres
Length: 124 millimetres (Overall length including suspension loop.)Curator’s comments
For the reversed quartering (namely England appearing in the first and fourth quarters rather than the second and third) cf. Philip Lankaster, ‘A note on some partizans with the Tudor royal arms in the Royal Armouries’, in: Royal Armouries Yearbook, 7, 2002, pp. 40-45 (Copy on file).The quality of the markings and the execution of the intrument as well as the lions in the first quarter facing sinister raise serious doubts about its authenticity as an instrument made for Henry himself.
This popped up all at once through various news sources, so I’ll just pick one:
From Broadcasting & Cable:
Jonathan Rhys-Meyers reign as King Henry VIII will end in 2010. Showtime has picked up a fourth and final season of drama The Tudors.
The series will return to the network for its final bow in Spring 2010, with production slated to begin this June in Dublin, Ireland.
Head on over to the Lady Jane Grey Reference Site blog and submit them! The deadline is April 15.
[Please submit the questions at the link above, not at this site]
From The New York Times:
Just a King for His Time: Executions, Wives, Divorces and Bad Diets
THE Henry VIII whom Dickens called “one of the most detestable villains who ever drew breath” and a “big burly, noisy, smelly, small-eyed, large-faced, double-chinned, swinish-looking fellow,” is not much in evidence at an exhibition called “Vivat Rex!,” at the Grolier Club in Manhattan. Nor is Charles Laughton’s gluttonous lecher, nor the moody, gym-buffed horndog played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers in “The Tudors,” the third season of which is in progress on Showtime. The Henry of this exhibition, commemorating the anniversary of his accession to the throne 500 years ago this month, is a scholar, a diplomat, a politician, a zealous churchman and altogether a shrewd operator.
…
Rather than a tyrant, Henry emerges as a mercurial, paradoxical figure: a doting father who banished his children, a loyal friend who turned on his supporters with no warning, a scholar and lover of learning who tore down monasteries and their libraries. Most of all here, he is less a lech than a pragmatist in need of an heir.
…
Among the manuscripts on display are a letter written by Catherine of Aragon, Henry’s first wife, complaining (in Spanish) about the “abominable litigation” between the king and herself and asserting that though she had first been married to Henry’s brother Arthur, she “remained a maid and was a maid” at the time of her marriage to Henry.And there is a letter from one of Henry’s secretaries, written in Latin and partly in code, to Cardinal Wolsey, discussing negotiations with the pope over Henry’s request for a divorce. It says in effect that the pope, imprisoned at the time by Catherine’s nephew, the Emperor Charles V, found himself between a rock and a hard place.
The UK National Archives has an on-line exhibition for the 500th anniversary of Henry VIII’s accession to the throne: Henry VIII – Power, Passion, Parchment. The exhibition features some documents that you can zoom in on and examine up close.
And here is an article from the Telegraph on the exhibition – Salacious claims of Anne Boleyn’s incest in Henry VIII documents placed online
AP photo
This is pretty cool… I can have both a history and tech geek-out!
From The Telegraph:
Scientists have managed to “virtually restore” the faded hues of his 28ft long tapestry using coloured light beams.
The Manchester University researchers looked at the back of the heavy wool and silk tapestry, which has been less affected by sunlight, to gauge what the original colours might have been.
They then measured the colour of every yarn on the front and used computer software to calculate how much of the original pigments of woad (blue), weld (yellow) and madder (red) had been lost.
High-definition projectors have now been used to beam two million pixels of different coloured light on to the tapestry.
Also check out the BBC story, with videos
