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

Article

Assisted dying

Care

Culture

Death & life

13 November 2024

8 min read

The deceptive appeal of assisted dying changes medical practice

In Canada the moral ethos of medicine has shifted dramatically.

Ewan Goligher

Ewan is a physician practising in Toronto, Canada.

a doctor consults a tablet against the backdrop of a Canadian flag.

Once again, the UK parliament is set to debate the question of legalizing euthanasia (a traditional term for physician-assisted death). Political conditions appear to be conducive to the legalization of this technological approach to managing death. The case for assisted death appears deceptively simple—it’s about compassion, respect, empowerment, freedom from suffering. Who can oppose such positive goals? Yet, writing from Canada, I can only warn of the ways in which the embrace of physician-assisted death will fundamentally change the practice of medicine. Reflecting on the last 10 years of our experience, two themes stick out to me—pressure, and self-deception.

I still remember quite distinctly the day that it dawned on me that the moral ethos of medicine in Canada was shifting dramatically. Traditionally, respect for the sacredness of the patient’s life and a corresponding absolute prohibition on deliberately causing the death of a patient were widely seen as essential hallmarks of a virtuous physician. Suddenly, in a 180 degree ethical turn, a willingness to intentionally cause the death of a patient was now seen as the hallmark of patient-centered doctor. A willingness to cause the patient’s death was a sign of compassion and even purported self-sacrifice in that one would put the patient’s desires and values ahead of their own. Those of us who continued to insist on the wrongness of deliberately causing death would now be seen as moral outliers, barriers to the well-being and dignity of our patients. We were tolerated to some extent, and mainly out of a sense of collegiality. But we were also a source of slight embarrassment. Nobody really wanted to debate the question with us; the question was settled without debate.

Yet there was no denying the way that pressure was brought to bear, in ways subtle and overt, to participate in the new assisted death regime. We humans are unavoidably moral creatures, and when we come to believe that something is good, we see ourselves and others as having an obligation to support it. We have a hard time accepting those who refuse to join us. Such was the case with assisted death. With the loudest and most strident voices in the Canadian medical profession embracing assisted death as a high and unquestioned moral good, refusal to participate in assisted death could not be fully tolerated.

We deceive ourselves if we think that doctors have fully accepted that euthanasia is ethical when only very few are actually willing to administer it.

Regulators in Ontario and Nova Scotia (two Canadian provinces) stipulated that physicians who were unwilling to perform the death procedure must make an effective referral to a willing “provider”. Although the Supreme Court decision made it clear in their decision to strike down the criminal prohibition against physician-assisted death that no particular physician was under any obligation to provide the procedure, the regulators chose to enforce participation by way of this effective referral requirement. After all, this was the only way to normalize this new practice. Doctors don't ordinarily refuse to refer their patients for medically necessary procedures; if assisted death was understood to be a medically necessary good, then an unwillingness to make such referral could not be tolerated.

And this form of pressure brings us to the pattern of deception. First, it is deceptive to suggest that an effective referral to a willing provider confers no moral culpability on the referring physician for the death of the patient. Those of us who objected to referring the patient were told that like Pilate, we could wash our hands of the patient’s death by passing them along to someone else who had the courage to do the deed. Yet the same regulators clearly prohibited referral for female genital mutilation. They therefore seemed to understand the moral responsibility attached to an effective referral. Such glaring inconsistencies about the moral significance of a referral suggests that when they claimed that a referral avoided culpability for death by euthanasia, they were deceiving themselves and us.

The very need for a referral system signifies another self-deception. Doctors normally make referrals only when an assessment or procedure lies outside their technical expertise. In the case of assisted death, every physician has the requisite technical expertise to cause death. There is nothing at all complicated or difficult or specialized about assessing euthanasia eligibility criteria or the sequential administration of toxic doses of midazolam, propofol, rocuronium, and lidocaine. The fact that the vast majority of physicians are unwilling to perform this procedure entails that moral objection to participation in assisted death remains widespread in the medical profession. The referral mechanism is for physicians who are “uncomfortable” in performing the procedure; they can send the patient to someone else more comfortable. But to be comfortable in this case is to be “morally comfortable”, not “technically comfortable”. We deceive ourselves if we think that doctors have fully accepted that euthanasia is ethical when only very few are actually willing to administer it.

We deceived ourselves into thinking that assisted death is a medical therapy for a medical problem, when in fact it is an existential therapy for a spiritual problem.

There is also self-deception with respect to the cause of death. In Canada, when a patient dies by doctor-assisted death, the person completing the death certificate is required to record the cause of death as the reason that the patient requested euthanasia, not the act of euthanasia per se. This must lead to all sorts of moments of absurdity for physicians completing death certificates—do patients really die from advanced osteoarthritis? (one of the many reasons patients have sought and obtained euthanasia). I suspect that this practice is intended to shield those who perform euthanasia from any long-term legal liability should the law be reversed. But if medicine, medical progress, and medical safety are predicated on an honest acknowledgment about causes of death, then this form of self-deception should not be countenanced. We need to be honest with ourselves about why our patients die.

There has also been self-deception about whether physician-assisted death is a form of suicide. Some proponents of assisted death contend that assisted death is not an act of deliberate self-killing, but rather merely a choice over the manner and timing of one's death. It's not clear why one would try to distort language this way and deny that “physician-assisted suicide” is suicide, except perhaps to assuage conscience and minimize stigma. Perhaps we all know that suicide is never really a form of self-respect. To sustain our moral and social affirmation of physician-assisted death, we have to deny what this practice actually represents.

There has been self-deception about the possibility of putting limits around the practice of assisted death. Early on, advocates insisted that euthanasia would be available only to those for whom death was reasonably foreseeable (to use the Canadian legal parlance). But once death comes to be viewed as a therapeutic option, the therapeutic possibilities become nearly limitless. Death was soon viewed as a therapy for severe disability or for health-related consequences of poverty and loneliness (though often poverty and loneliness are the consequence of the health issues). Soon we were talking about death as a therapy for mental illness. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then so is grievous and irremediable suffering. Death inevitably becomes therapeutic option for any form of suffering. Efforts to limit the practice to certain populations (e.g. those with disabilities) are inevitably seen as paternalistic and discriminatory.

There has been self-deception about the reasons justifying legalization of assisted death. Before legalization, advocates decry the uncontrolled physical suffering associated with the dying process and claim that prohibiting assisted death dehumanizes patients and leaves them in agony. Once legalized, it rapidly becomes clear that this therapy is not for physical suffering but rather for existential suffering: the loss of autonomy, the sense of being a burden, the despair of seeing any point in going on with life. The desire for death reflects a crisis of meaning. We deceived ourselves into thinking that assisted death is a medical therapy for a medical problem, when in fact it is an existential therapy for a spiritual problem.

We have also deceived ourselves by claiming to know whether some patients are better off dead, when in fact we have no idea what it's like to be dead. The utilitarian calculus underpinning the logic of assisted death relies on the presumption that we know what it is like before we die in comparison to what it is like after we die. In general, the unstated assumption is that there is nothing after death. This is perhaps why the practice is generally promoted by atheists and opposed by theists. But in my experience, it is very rare for people to address this question explicitly. They prefer to let the question of existence beyond death lie dormant, untouched. To think that physicians qua physicians have any expertise on or authority on the question of what it’s like to be dead, or that such medicine can at all comport with a scientific evidence-based approach to medical decision-making, is a profound self-deception.

Finally, we deceive ourselves when we pretend that ending people’s lives at their voluntary request is all about respecting personal autonomy. People seek death when they can see no other way forward with life—they are subject to the constraints of their circumstances, finances, support networks, and even internal spiritual resources. We are not nearly so autonomous as we wish to think. And in the end, the patient does not choose whether to die; the doctor chooses whether the patient should die. The patient requests, the doctor decides. Recent new stories have made clear the challenges for practitioners of euthanasia to pick and choose who should die among their patients. In Canada, you can have death, but only if your doctor agrees that your life is not worth living. However much these doctors might purport to act from compassion, one cannot help see a connection to Nazi physicians labelling the unwanted as “Lebensunwortes leben”—life unworthy of life. In adopting assisted death, we cannot avoid dehumanizing ourselves. Death with dignity is a deception.

These many acts of self-deception in relation to physician-assisted death should not surprise us, for the practice is intrinsically self-deceptive. It claims to be motivated by the value of the patient; it claims to promote the dignity of the patient; it claims to respect the autonomy of the patient. In fact, it directly contravenes all three of those goods.

It degrades the value of the patient by accepting that it doesn't matter whether or not the patient exists.

It denies the dignity of the patient by treating the patient as a mere means to an end—the sufferer is ended in order to end the suffering.

It destroys the autonomy of the patient because it takes away autonomy. The patient might autonomously express a desire for death, but the act of rendering someone dead does not enhance their autonomy; it obliterates it.

Yet the need for self-deception represents the fatal weakness of this practice. In time, truth will win over falsehood, light over darkness, wisdom over folly. So let us ever cling to the truth, and faithfully continue to speak the truth in love to the dying and the living. Truth overcomes pressure. The truth will set us free.