ABSTRACT
No sixteenth-century chronicler’s portrait of King Henry VIII had a wider acceptance or more enduring influence than Edward Hall’s in his massive history The Union of the two noble and illustre families of Lancaster and York (1548). Hall’s presentation of his own monarch’s reign provides the most detailed survey of Henry VIII and his rule by any Henrician author. Such was the stature of Hall’s narrative that it became the chief source for many subsequent Tudor accounts of Henry’s reign: indeed, influential Elizabethan writers such as Richard Grafton, John Foxe, and Raphael Holinshed simply appropriated great sections of Hall’s text – either verbatim or in paraphrase – to form the bulk of their own presentations of Henry VIII’s rule. Through its constant reproduction, Hall’s portrait became the image by which many sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century readers knew this long-reigning monarch, and it is an image that all subsequent historians have had to confront and wrestle with in their own investigations into Henry the man and the impact of his governance. No matter what opinion one might hold of Hall’s celebration of Henry VIII as the epitome of chivalric accomplishment in his youth and of wise governance in his maturity, none can deny the impact of Hall’s richly detailed, highly opinionated, and vigorously presented paean to Henry the man and his personal and political accomplishments.
