by Susan Bordo
Hirst’s comparison with our own time also neglects to consider that this was a culture in which sexual consummation does not seem to have been the apotheosis of personal fulfillment that it was to become as physical desire replaced spiritualized, courtly constructions of “longing” in romantic love. Sexual fulfillment, by our time, has been pumped up to the status of a new religion, sold to us (by relationship experts, movies, TV, and advertising) as the “make or break” of relationships, and we expect a lot from it. The bodies are always perfect, the lovers are extraordinarily skilled, the men know just where to put their hands, and the women’s breasts never hang or flatten unglamorously. On kitchen tables strewn with plates that get masterfully swept to the floor, on staircases, in bathtubs surrounded by precariously placed candles, material obstacles are no match for the lovers’ passion.
The Tudors imports this worship of matchless, exquisite sex into the sixteenth century. In Henry’s time, however, religion was still religion, and sex was . . . well, sex. Henry could have it anytime he wanted—and did. I have always found it hard to believe that Henry’s passion could be aroused to such a pitch—and remain there for six years!—just because of a no. He wasn’t used to hearing the word, we’re told, and that’s true; this was a man around whom there clustered no shortage of fresh, flirty damsels to provide pleasure and sexual release, and who took advantage of their adoration—just how freely is debated among historians, but at the very least he did when Katherine (and later, Anne) was pregnant.15 But his overwhelming drive was for an heir. In April of 1533—by then, Anne and Henry were married, although he was not yet divorced from Katherine—Chapuys dared to suggest to him that he could not be sure of having children with Anne. Henry flew into a rage. “[Am I] not a man like other men?” he shouted three times.16 Our own interpretation would probably be that Henry was furious at having his sexual potency called into question. But more likely, it was his reproductive ability; this, at any rate, is how Chapuys interpreted the rage, which he goes on to say led him “to understand that [Henry’s] beloved lady was enceinte.”17
Although Henry’s pursuit of Anne was unlikely to have been driven by the mere prospect of sex with her, his desire for her to be his queen was probably increased by the enforcement (whether by him or by her) of her virginal status. In the romance of chivalry, on which Henry was raised, the heroine was an unattainable beauty, worshipped by her adoring knights but never to be sexually or emotionally possessed, and therefore always to be incurably desired. Henry’s relationship with Anne could not remain in that realm of unrealizable desire—to produce an heir, she had to be brought down to earth, had to become flesh. But so long as there was distance between them, he could imagine himself a fairy-tale warrior and Anne the glittering—but unsullied—prize. His later interest in Jane Seymour “marvelously increased,” Chapuys reports, when she sent a letter and gift back to Henry, unopened, with a note saying that she would rather “die a thousand deaths” than sully her honor by accepting anything from him.18 (By then, Anne was no longer fit, in Henry’s eyes, to be an object of worship by any chivalric criteria.)
Cultural Perspectives on Henry’s Love Letters
Henry’s love letters are extremely difficult to interpret, and not only because of their odd spelling, archaic phrases, and long-winded sentences. For one thing, unlike contemporary bloggers, Tudor correspondents and commentators were constantly mindful of what was respectful, what was pragmatically required, and what (if you weren’t king) was downright dangerous. Duplicity was not just acceptable, but recommended, as in Sir William Wentworth’s advice to his son, Thomas: “Be very careful to govern your tongue, and never speak in open places all you think . . . Judges, juries, under-sheriffs, and men of influence are to be courted both with flattery and with judicious gifts . . . As for noblemen, be careful not to make them hate you.”19 Those who were closest to the king had to be especially careful, not just because the stakes were so high (and could get hot), but also because Henry was aware of the conventions of flattery and how thinly they could cover plots against him. He was himself a master at contriving affection while planning destruction, lavishing soothing words on Katherine, Wolsey, More, and others moments before they were cut off, not just from their positions but from his company. He didn’t like confrontation, and he was notoriously adept at shifting blame. He knew how to use words to create fictions of affection and intention, and naturally was suspicious that others were up to the same thing with him. So his closest advisers had to walk skillfully between suspect flattery and the dangers of honesty, peppering their deference with just the right amount of critical counsel. It was a pretty tricky business, and very few survived intact.
Whether they came from a servant, knight, or king, Tudor words were more like clothing than instruments of (literal) communication; they were used to create an impression, advertise (or defer to) status, armor the naked self with beauty and protective convention. Above all, they were instrumental, chosen with purpose. This cultural context alone makes me skeptical of the claims of David Starkey, who views Tudor documents as the “magical objects . . . hidden in the world’s great libraries . . . that can bring a long-gone world vividly to life once more. They are the books, manuscripts, plans and letters that Henry and his contemporaries read, touched, and wrote. Through them, the dead can speak again. It’s in these original sources that I hope to find the real Henry.”20 Starkey is a master dramatist, and he makes entering a library look like an episode from an Indiana Jones movie. But the notion that original sources can bring the dead to life again astounds me, as I find most of those documents so opaque that I want to shake them, trying to make the person fall out of the parchment. This is particularly difficult with Henry. “Henry,” Thomas More once said to John Fisher, “has a way of making every man feel that he is enjoying his special favors, just as the London wives pray before the image of Our Lady by the Tower, until each of them believes it is smiling on her.”21 This may (or may not) have been a compliment, but it was also a caution: Don’t believe everything Henry says or does.
However, that doesn’t necessarily mean Henry wasn’t “sincere.” I put that word in quotes because the original meaning of the word is a particularly revealing example of the difference between the premodern worldview and our own—and unless we appreciate that difference, we can’t fully understand Henry. “Sincere” comes from the Latin sine (without) and caries (decay). Its original meaning was “undecayed,” or sometimes “not mixed or adulterated” or “uninjured” or “whole.” Just when it came to convey the modern meaning—“without deceit, pretense, or hypocrisy; being the same in actual character as in outward appearance”—isn’t clear. But what many scholars believe is that the juxtaposition of “actual character” and “outward appearance” would seem very odd to a man of the sixteenth century.
Here’s where philosophers, social theorists, and those who study the evolution of human consciousness can provide insight into a development that “straight” history misses. Philosopher Stephen Toulmin describes it as the emergence of “the inwardness of mental life”—and that’s something we take for granted.22 It feels normal to us to experience ourselves as having a private inner self that is unavailable to others (except through outward giveaway or verbal disclosure). When we lose that sense of self, we feel “depersonalized”; when it is in conflict with what we tell others, we may feel duplicitous; when it harbors nasty urges, we may feel guilty. Whole sciences and disciplines are devoted to its exploration and analysis. Whether we cherish its secrets or spend our lives protecting them, the inner life is a staple of our experience.
Sixteenth-century humans thought and felt, of course. But according to many scholars, they did not experience those thoughts and feelings as inside themselves in quite the way we do. “Before the scientific revolution,” Owen Barfield writes, “[man] did not feel himself isolated by his skin from the world outside to quite the same extent that we do. He was integrated or mortised into it, each different part of
him being united to a different part of it by some invisible thread.”23 The invisible threads that ran throughout the universe knit tightly the relations between people, the various “types” of human beings (phlegmatic, melancholic, choleric, sanguine), human virtues and vices (honor, loyalty, avarice, courage, and so on), and the effect of the planets—and God—on human destiny. And the outer manifestations of those relations spoke for themselves. Lacey Baldwin Smith puts it eloquently: “The tree was known by its fruits: the good pastor could be discerned by his acts of piety, charity and love; and the perfect knight was revealed by his deeds of loyalty, and generosity . . . The possibility that the walls which man presents to the outside world, however transparent they may appear, can obscure and distort the reflection of the true character within, or the concept that bragging can be a sign of insecurity rather than of pride, was totally foreign.”24
The difference between sixteenth-century and twenty-first-century life, then, went deeper than codpieces and the absence of plumbing. In determining what to do in a particular situation, one didn’t “look inside” to consult one’s deepest feelings and beliefs; one looked in the book—of the cosmos, of the Bible, of social conventions—and there one found “oneself.” As in the original meaning of “sincere,” one looked, not for a match between inner experience and outward expression, but for wholeness, for proof that the invisible cords between self and world were unfrayed. It’s easy, from a twenty-first-century perspective, to suspect that Henry’s invoking the passages in Leviticus when asking Rome for the divorce from Katherine was just a convenient rationalization for his desire to quit the marriage. But for Henry, Leviticus and personal motivation could not be separated in that way. His restlessness, his roving eye, his growing conviction that Katherine would never give him a son—he found them not so much justified as crystallized, revealed as whole, in Leviticus.
All that was to change, gradually, during the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the scientific revolution. The scientific revolution cut the umbilical ties between the human being and the heavens. The Reformation severed salvation from deeds and relocated it in the inner state of faith. Writers from Shakespeare to Montaigne seem at times to be literally discovering the difference between what lies inside the self and what is shown to the world. For Henry, however, the ideals of the Renaissance and Reformation were still ideas to be found in books. As an intellectual, he was drawn to them; as a king, he was delighted to find his royal position elevated by them, but they never became habits of being. Self-questioning was never his forte, and like those of his subjects who remained devout Catholics, he never stopped believing that external manifestation of virtue and the state of the soul were one. When he “dissembled” by our standards, he believed he was doing what was required for the greater good, which was his duty and formed his sense of identity. “Lying” suggests a clear understanding of the inner reality behind the outward appearance, but for Henry, the outward appearance of princely honor was the highest “reality.” He donned it, when necessary, as he donned his jewel-adorned robes. We see those robes as ridiculous in their ostentation and are always aware of the naked body beneath them. But for Henry, robes and body, prince and man, were one and the same. And there was no naked self underneath.
Henry the Courtier
What then of the love letters? Surely, of all his letters and proclamations, they reveal the existence of an “inner” Henry, throbbing with longing for Anne’s presence, agony over her absence, and turmoil over his feelings.
My Mistress and friend, my heart and I surrender ourselves into your hands, beseeching you to hold us commended to your favour, and that by absence your affection to us may not be lessened: for it would be a great pity to increase our pain, of which absence produces enough and more than I could ever have thought could be felt . . . at least on my side; I hope the like on yours, assuring you that on my part the pain of absence is already too great for me; and when I think of the increase of that which I am forced to suffer, it would be almost intolerable, but for the firm hope I have of your unchangeable affection for me: and to remind you of this sometimes, and seeing that I cannot be personally present with you, I now send you the nearest thing I can to that, namely, my picture set in bracelets, with the whole of the device, which you already know, wishing myself in their place, if it should please you. This is from the hand of your loyal servant and friend, H.R.25
The mere physical act of writing such a letter is by itself an indication of Henry’s yearning for Anne. Although intellectually accomplished, he was an impatient and restless personality; in our time, he probably would be diagnosed with ADD. He read voraciously, but only after others had scoured the contents of books for him and presented them in digest form. (To ensure that he knew all sides of an issue, he assigned the same book to different advisers.) He didn’t even like to read his letters. And he absolutely hated to respond to them. His secretaries had to cajole him to deal with his correspondence, which he put off as long as possible and wouldn’t deal with until he had returned from hunting and had a good dinner.26 Since he was a terrific athlete whose kinetic energy had been bottled up during adolescence by his protective father and grandmother, his first impulse, on becoming king, was to let loose. Surrounded and cheered on by the like-minded young men he had chosen to be his inner circle, he spent the early days of his reign, as Katherine described it in a letter to her father, “in continual festival.”27 A 1510 description of a day during a typical “progress”—the king and queen, in those days, traveled from court to court and palace to palace, accompanied by a huge retinue—gives us an indication of what the festivities included.
“Shooting [archery], singing, dancing, wrestling, casting of the bar [throwing a wooden or iron baton], playing at the recorders, flute, virginals, setting of songs, making of ballads . . . jousts and tournays. The rest of this progress was spent in hunting, hawking and shooting.”28 In 1517, at a joust in honor of the Spanish ambassadors, Henry wanted to joust against all fourteen competitors. Forbidden to do so by his councilors (an older, more cautious crew than his boy pals), he channeled his desire to show off into “a thousand jumps in the air” before the queens and ladies, exhausting his horse—at which point he continued on one ridden by his pages.29 At another joust, he forgot to pull his visor down as he advanced toward his competitor and was knocked to the ground, stunned, his eye just barely missed by the lance. Within moments he was back on his horse, ready to go again.
This was the Henry who had been raised on tales of King Arthur’s Round Table, virtuous knights, maidens in distress, and chivalrous deeds. When he was knighted—becoming Duke of York at just three and a half years old—he went through all the Arthurian rituals a grown man would have gone through, and after a purifying bath, he was told that his duty, as a knight, was to be strong in the faith of the Holy Church, to love and defend the king, and to protect all widows and oppressed maidens. Undoubtedly, his father or mother must have taken him to Winchester Cathedral, thought to be the site of Arthur’s castle and the capital of Camelot, to show him the Round Table that was still there. (When Henry became king, he had his image painted over that of Arthur’s.) Nobility, generosity, mercy, justice, and the power of true love were the stuff of his boyish fantasies.
But by 1526, when Henry began to pursue Anne, Arthurian chivalry, a deeply spiritualized ideal, had been transformed into the political “art” of courtly behavior, aimed at creating the right impression, even if deceptive, to achieve one’s ends. Somehow, I managed to escape college and graduate school without reading The Book of the Courtier. So I was surprised to discover that the version of courtly love described by Castiglione was so different from the high-minded ideals and valiant heroes of the legends I grew up with. I was raised on bedtime stories—and later, movies—with strong, pure-of-purpose male leads (which set up some unrealistic expectations of the boys I dated) from Alexander the Great (my father’s favorite) to the self-sacrificing Arthur and absurdly handsome Lancelot of Lerner and Lo
ewe’s Camelot. When I thought of “courtly love,” I imagined knights on horseback worshiping ladies from afar and fighting great battles to win their love, their minds full of noble thoughts and dreams of honor. That’s how Henry the boy probably imagined chivalry, too, as court minstrels performed and sang of the heroic exploits of Jason, Hector, Charlemagne, Arthur, Lancelot, and Galahad. But by the time Henry was born, the printing press was competing with oral traditions for the hearts and minds of would-be courtiers, and along with print came popular books of “instructions” for courting that, like all guidebooks, replaced romance with formula. This is the genre that Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier belongs to. It is not so much a celebration of chivalry as it is an advice book on how to “perform” it.
