Paperback. White title and Henry III image on the cream cover.

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This detailed biography concentrates on the domestic life of the monarch, foreign affairs in which he was involved and his influence on religion.

Review: I recently reacquainted myself with Professor Scarisbrick’s classic study after first reading it in the 80’s for my history undergraduate degree. The text of this edition was updated to reflect new historiography in the 90’s. It remains the best and most comprehensive treatment of England’s most notorious monarch. Don’t come looking here for juicy titbits about the wive’s. The fall of Ann Boleyn is dealt with, concisely, in one page. If this is your bag then you will be better served by Alison Weir or Antonia Fraser. This is a serious academic history, concerned with the religious and diplomatic issues of the day. However, there is nothing here beyond the layman without an academic grounding in the early modern period and who is prepared to do a little background reading. Scarisbrick’s Henry is an egotistical creature, subject to rages and acts of bloodthirsty vengeance, who unleashed forces he was barely able to control. A paradoxical figure who emerged as an early defender of the sacraments against the Lutheran heresy, subsequently rejected papal authority in England (relying on the pseudo-historical nonsense of Monmouth, Arthur and the Donation of Constantine to assert imperial authority over church and state in England), but remained ambivalent towards protestantism until his dying day. Scarisbrick is particularly good on the legal and diplomatic wrangles of the divorce from Catherine and Henry’s assertion of supremacy over the English Church. It’s often overlooked that Wolsey grasped the solution to the divorce from Catherine as early as 1527 (that if Henry’s brother had not consummated his marriage with Catherine, then the bull granting Henry permission to marry her was defective because it failed to explicitly grant absolution from the impediment of public honesty). Henry refused to grasp this argument because it was not his idea. For the next 6 years he continued to flog the dead horse of the Leviticus argument, which was his brainchild, and which got him precisely nowhere. Finally, he had to sever England’s connection with Rome to divorce Catherine. If it wasn’t for Henry’s egoism and pig-headedness, the course of English history might have looked quite different.

This is primarily a diplomatic, political and religious history of Henry’s reign. There is little social history. Readers interested in filling out their picture with these aspects of Tudor England should look at Lucy Wooding’s excellent and recent study, Tudor England. This has, amongst other things, an excellent chapter on Henry. The Yale English Monarchs series remains the benchmark for historical biographies of our monarchs. It’s remarkable that Professor Scarisbrick’s book, originally written in 1969, has stood the test of time so well.

John Joseph Scarisbrick is a British historian who taught at the University of Warwick. He is also noted as the co-founder with his wife Nuala Scarisbrick of Life, a British anti-abortion charity founded in 1970. Born in 1928 in London, Scarisbrick was educated at The John Fisher School and later Christ’s College, Cambridge, after spending two years in the Royal Air Force. He specialises in Tudor history and his most critically acclaimed work is Henry VIII, first published in 1968. Scarisbrick was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1969. He was appointed MBE in 2015 for services to vulnerable people as founder of Zoe’s Place, a hospice for children in Coventry.