ABSTRACT
A.F. Pollard’s biography of Henry VIII can claim with some legitimacy to be the first modern historical account of Henry and his reign. For Pollard, Henry may have been the man who had set England on the path of greatness, but this did not excuse the king’s lapses of behaviour. In a memorable phrase Pollard wrote: ‘Every inch a King, Henry VIII never attained to the stature of a gentleman.’1 In many ways this quote says as much about Pollard’s lateVictorian sense of what it meant to be a gentleman as it does about Henry’s kingship. But despite this, Pollard was right to suggest that there is a tension running through the Henrician period that has its roots in the contradictory nature of Henry and his reign. Henry was a man of learning and superstition, a generous king and patron whose acquisitive attitude towards the goods and possessions of his subjects seems at times to border on the avaricious. The Henrician court was a place of high art and low drama, where sophisticated paintings occupied the same cultural space as bawdy plays. It is perhaps as regards Henry’s religion that the contradictions are most apparent. Henry appears to have been a devout Catholic but was also the man who dissolved the monasteries and banished the Pope. His attitude to people who resisted his religious changes, such as Reginald Pole, seems at times to be closer to the world of The Godfather than that of Renaissance Europe.
