Article

Culture

Masculinity

Royalty

16 November 2023

6 min read

Henry VIII's toxic masculinity

There was much more to the famed monarch than a padded codpiece, Historian Suzannah Lipscomb unpacks how his toxic behaviour led to ridicule and dishonour. Part of The Problem with Men series.

Suzannah Lipscomb

Suzannah Lipscomb is a historian, writer, and broadcaster.

King Henry VII, wearing a hat, stares away, in a portrait.

Henry VIII, by Hans Holbein the Younger.

Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum.

History offers many examples of toxic masculinity – perhaps none better than King Henry VIII. Two central qualities of Henry's inflated sense of manhood remain familiar today: he believed that he was always right, and he treated brutally those who disagreed.

The sixteenth century was a patriarchal age. Men dominated every position of power and influence, cultural values favoured men, and women were obsessively controlled. Wives had no existence under law; a husband had a legal right to dispose of his wife's property and money without her consent and knowledge. Women were barred from holding office, and were thought to be morally, mentally, and emotionally weaker than men. Despite (or perhaps because of) this, it was an age in which patriarchs were increasingly anxious and masculinity had to be repeatedly enacted.

In an age before credit checks, personal honour counted for everything. Honour was chiefly a measure of someone's ability to conform to gender ideals. For women, this meant chastity: celibacy before marriage and fidelity after it. Men could demonstrate honour in a range of ways. As a young man, Henry VIII showed his masculinity in displays of courage and strength on the tiltyard and at war. But, for men too, honour could be sexual. Men had to demonstrate an energetic sexual appetite.

1534. Henry wanted complicity even in his subjects' thoughts. The Treasons Act of the same year made it high treason to call the king a 'heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel or usurper of the crown'.

Henry VIII's blinkered patriarchal vision (and, to be fair, English history to that point) meant that, unlike Katherine his wife, Henry could not envisage their only surviving child, Mary, as a ruling queen. All their other children had died within a few hours, days or weeks of birth or had been born dead, and Katherine was in her forties. So, on grounds he knew were untrue – the suggestion that Katherine's marriage to his brother Arthur had been consummated – Henry sought one. The Pope refused – but Henry needed to be right. With a hefty dose of self-delusion, he used a partial reading of scripture to justify separating from his wife of twenty years. It took schism from the Roman Catholic Church to make it a reality.

The whole country was pulled into saying black was white. The Act of Succession of 1534 included an oath that every man (only men) was required to swear. They were to state that they regarded Mary 'but as a bastard' and that Anne Boleyn was Henry's lawful wife and the rightful Queen of England 'without any scrupulosity of conscience'. Henry wanted complicity even in his subjects' thoughts. The Treasons Act of the same year made it high treason to call the king a 'heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel or usurper of the crown'. Those who failed to agree with Henry's perspective – Sir Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher chief among them – were executed.

Part of the reason was that Henry became very attached to his position as Supreme Head of the Church. He reckoned himself a theologian. In 1536, he wrote the first doctrinal statement of the Church of England. Henry’s theological position, in the all-to-play-for years of the 1530s, was his own idiosyncratic hodge-podge of contemporary Catholicism and Protestantism. He hated Martin Luther’s idea that a person could be made right with God without having earned it, but he also denied the reality of purgatory (though he left funds for his own soul to be prayed for after death, just in case). Later in life the king would annotate religious texts composed by his bishops and be compared in his commissioned tapestries and psalter to the Old Testament patriarchs Abraham and David, and the New Testament saint Paul. He was depicted on the frontispiece of the Great Bible as first under God. A rebellion that sought to challenge his supremacy was put down with extreme force.

In other words, Henry’s preoccupation with preeminent masculinity can be seen even here: he thought his personal faith should determine the religious practice of the whole kingdom. Those who did not agree on a point of doctrine – like John Lambert, who held that the bread and wine of the Mass were symbols of, not literally, Christ’s body and blood – were executed. Henry personally presided over Lambert’s trial. On one day in 1540, on the king’s orders, three Protestants were burned as heretics, and three Catholics were hanged as traitors.

Anne's alleged adultery (the evidence for any actual adultery is risible) therefore profoundly affected Henry's perceived honour. For a king, the apparent lack of control or dominance in his household was especially galling.

This religious activity took place against a background of trials of Henry’s masculinity. Ultimately, the gamble of the break with Rome and marriage to Anne did not pay off. In fact, it exposed Henry to ridicule and dishonour.

After Anne had a baby girl and miscarried a boy, Henry became convinced that she was committing adultery and incest with five men including her brother. That one of Henry’s reasons for being attracted to Anne had been her intense personal engagement with faith should have indicated to him how unlikely these charges were to be true. In conversation she had mentioned that the king might one day die – which was also illegal under the Treasons Act – and so, in addition to adultery and incest, she was convicted of conspiring the king's death. But the trials backfired. Anne’s brother admitted at his that Anne had told him that Henry was 'not skillful in copulating with a woman and had neither vigour and potency'. This was said in front of a crowd of two thousand people in the Great Hall at the Tower of London.

Contemporary thought made a link between potency and fidelity. A woman's adultery was thought to be her husband's fault: The 1607 book, The court of good counsell, instructs a cuckolded man to 'find how the occasion came from himself, and that he hath not used her, as he ought to have done'. This was not an injunction to be kinder; in early modern parlance, 'use' was a euphemism for sex. Husbands needed to demonstrate sexual dominance, which was considered a crucial part of patriarchal control. In something called a charivari, men who were childless, thought to be ruled by their wives, or who cuckolded were mocked without mercy.

A damaged sense of masculinity in a culture that insists on male dominance leads to doubling down.

It is for this reason that during the three short weeks between Anne's accusation and her execution, while she remained in the Tower, Henry visited Jane Seymour and danced with her late into the night. He remarried within eleven days of Anne's death. It was all to assert his sexual appetite – his manliness.

Henry's profound anxiety about his manhood also influences the picture we have of him. His most-copied, full-length portrait focuses on Henry not as a king – there is no crown, orb or sceptre – but as a man. In a martial stance, with broad shoulders and splayed feet, the king wears an enormously padded codpiece. Painted after Anne's death, it reeks of masculine bravado.

His toxic masculinity – as it has a habit of doing – replayed itself again and again. Henry had his marriage to Anne of Cleves (wife no. 4) dissolved on spurious grounds, but in fact because he was unable to consummate the marriage. He blamed his lack of arousal on her full breasts and large belly (which he took as indicators that she was not a virgin), insisting that wet dreams showed the problem was not with him. Meanwhile, wife no. 5, Kathryn Howard, was – history repeating itself – accused of adultery, raising once again the sense that Henry was unable to rule and reign.

A damaged sense of masculinity in a culture that insists on male dominance leads to doubling down. Both Anne Boleyn and Kathryn Howard were executed: one on the basis of concocted evidence, the other without a trial (an act of parliament declared Howard guilty). Henry VIII's reign is just one example of just how poisonous patriarchy can be.

Listen to Suzannah Lipscomb on Seen & Unseen's Re-enchanting podcast

Review

Awe and wonder

Books

Culture

Poetry

10 October 2024

6 min read

Charles Taylor on how poetry seeks cosmic connections

The philosopher yields an array of luminous insights.

Paul Weston

Paul Weston is a Fellow at Ridley Hall, Cambridge.

At dusk, three people sit on a field edge and look at the stars emerging.

Rad Pozniakov on Unsplash.

Charles Taylor, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment

At just shy of 600 pages, philosopher Charles Taylor’s latest book is not for the faint-hearted. At the heart of the book are fascinating questions. What kind of language should we use when we encounter ‘beauty’, or experience ‘wonder’ which seems to take us into a new kind of space, or make time stand still? It could be the sight of a breathtaking landscape. It could be a piece of music. It’s that sense of ‘connection’ with something bigger than ourselves. What might it mean? More particularly, how do we express what we intuitively feel to be real and deeply significant about such things when our usual language fails to capture it?

Taylor says that his latest book ‘is about (what I see as) the human need for cosmic connection . . . one shot through with joy, significance, inspiration’. And his hypothesis is that ‘the desire for this connection is a human constant, felt by (at least some) people in all ages and phases of human history’, even if ‘the forms this desire takes have been very different in the succeeding phases and stages of this history’. The book explores these questions by focusing on late-Romantic European poetry and traces its development through the work of later poets including Goethe, Rilke, Wordsworth, Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot.

The background to Taylor’s explorations is the ongoing impact of the Enlightenment on our language and understanding about ‘truth’ and ‘meaning’. Those familiar with his 2007 book A Secular Age will find echoes of it here, particularly the way in which post-Enlightenment language tended to develop the language of control. This, he argues, became increasingly dominant in Western modernity ‘because it is linked to a practical stance which is basically instrumentalist; we seek out the efficient causal relations in our world with the aim of discovering handles which will enable us to realise our purposes’. In reaction to this narrowing of possibilities, the Romantic poets focused on ‘the experience of connection, and the empowerment this brings: not a power over things, but one of self-realization’. And a key element of the Romantic movement was the recognition that a poem (alongside the wider arts) uncovers deeper meanings: it ‘reveals to us, brings us into contact with, a deep reality which would otherwise remain beyond our ken’.

‘Poetry goes beyond creating a mood, an atmosphere of feeling, and claims to give access to the inner force in a thing, not by describing it, but by making it palpable’

Charles Taylor

The book focuses on the variety of forms that this reaction took amongst Romantic poets. A unifying desire for ‘connection’ led to differing ideas about how poetic language makes this possible and what kinds of meaning are revealed. But the central belief remained constant: that poetic language was the key to addressing a prevailing cultural atmosphere of ‘disenchantment’, in which the desire for cosmic connection had been sidelined.

On the English side of the channel, Taylor finds in Keats’ poetry, a new form of expression summed up in his statement ‘Beauty is Truth and Truth Beauty’. In Taylor’s words, ‘Art raises the object to a new unity and intensity, which constitutes Beauty. But this is not something which just exists in the mind of the artist (or reader); it has reality, and hence Truth, even though this reality is partly brought to fruition by artistic (re)creation’.

Similarly, for Gerard Manley Hopkins, the form of poetic language itself can become a means of ‘connection’. As Taylor puts it, in Hopkins’ work, ‘Poetry goes beyond creating a mood, an atmosphere of feeling, and claims to give access to the inner force in a thing, not by describing it, but by making it palpable’. His poetry embodies this in that it ‘renders the rhythms of the being itself through the “sprung rhythm” of the verse’.

The second half of the book looks to poets of the last 200 years who have navigated parallel pathways towards this ideal of experienced fullness – in the face of increasing industrialisation and disenchantment. Baudelaire longs for the experience of fullness, but finds it barred by a state of melancholy that he described as ‘Spleen’. It is a melancholy brought about by the endless repetitions of mundane and urbanised life. Baudelaire’s attempt to find release from our imprisonment in trapped time is to face Spleen head on and to transform it through poetic contemplation.

T. S. Eliot’s poetry similarly aims to evoke the sources of a fuller life in a culture of decay by means of the ‘continual surrender’ of the poet to something more significant and valuable. In Eliot’s case this resolves in a more-or-less traditional sense of Christian order, but Taylor notes that his poetry doesn’t necessarily require this. Miłosz on the other hand, amidst the social and political upheavals in Poland, sought a higher form of poetry: a poetry that could rise above the discord of social turmoil in order to define a moment and clarify the path that needed to be taken.

‘The work of art opens for us a new field of meaning, by giving shape to it’.

Charles Taylor

At times, the weight and detail of Taylor’s exposition threatens to overwhelm the reader, but he offers an array of luminous insights along the way, and he is largely successful in keeping an eye on the broader questions and themes. Perhaps the most important here is his belief that the human desire for ‘cosmic connection’, with its yearning for joy, significance and inspiration is perennial. The book is in this sense an elaborate historical worked example of this desire, understood – perhaps imperceptibly – as a sense of ‘loss’ or ‘longing’. It is this ‘central aspiration of the Romantic period’, he concludes, that ‘remains powerful today’.

My own experiences of talking with people today seems to amply confirm Taylor’s view. And the search for language to describe the desire for this sense of connection (or the longing for it) continues to thrive even within a so-called secularised culture (most likely because of it). It too seeks language for expression and sometimes struggles for some of the same reasons that the Romantics identified. Taylor’s phrase ‘the immanent frame’ (from his A Secular Age) powerfully evokes a sense of being held on a restricted rein, unable to name or explore the realms of ‘beauty’ or the ‘transcendent’ beyond perceived cultural boundaries. Connected to this is the still commonly held belief that any supposed knowledge derived through the arts doesn’t put us in touch with anything other than ourselves.

Taylor convincingly transcends the supposed dichotomy between these so-called ‘subjective’ or on the other hand, ‘ontological’ possibilities. ‘The work of art’, he says, ‘opens for us a new field of meaning, by giving shape to it’. Moreover, it can ‘realize a powerful experience of fulfillment . . . of connection which empowers’. And Taylor backs his theory with autobiography. In Goethe’s ‘Wanderer Nachtlied’, he says, ‘There is a kind of rest/peace which I long for. I don’t fully understand it, but now I have some sense of it’. Or broadening the artistic field, he finds that listening to Chopin’s Fantasie-Impromptu in C sharp minor ‘opens me up to an unnameable longing’, or that when he listens to Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, he feels ‘a striving upwards, an expression of praise and thanks, straining to reach some higher addressee (for me, this would be God), but I can imagine that someone else, feeling the ascending movement, would imagine another destination’).

Here then is a book that shines a light on the possibilities of ‘cosmic connection’. Taylor affirms our desires, reassuring us that we should not feel strange to share the same longings for ‘fullness’, for ‘transcendence’, for ‘joy’ and for ‘connection’ as did the Romantic poets. Our recognition of these desires may well have been evoked by the kind of poetry or music that Taylor talks about here. But for all of us, it is good to be reminded that in a western world still heavily influenced by the climate of secularisation many today are still searching for the sense of cosmic connection that Taylor describes.

Charles Taylor’s Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment is published by Harvard University Press.