Selling the Tudor Monarchy: Authority and Image in Sixteenth Century England by Kevin Sharpe
Yale University Press, £30
Spin, as we know it, began in the 1990s. Between John Major atop a soapbox and Tony Blair’s cheesy little grin. Now go back hundreds of years. Minus television and focus groups, Henry VIII was up to a bit of media manipulation yet, supposedly, Henry V post-Agincourt was not.
Not that we think of Henry VIII as sensitive to public opinion. His break with Rome, the dissolution of the monasteries, his execution of two wives – everyone just had to lump it. After all, they didn’t have a vote, did they?
So is the author trying to shoehorn present-day concerns of image into a very different past, with the additional handicap of how protean a term spin is?
If so, Kevin Sharpe makes a convincing argument. And, the opening chapter apart, does so without getting bogged down in explanations of what constitutes spin or image – using “representation” as a non-pejorative substitute – or of linking the Tudor era excessively with other historical periods, including our own.
He cites the English Reformation as the beginning of the need to control representation. No longer could it be assumed that the religion of the king was the same as his subjects. Previously, conflict between the barons could be healed but now divisions were ideological, rather than personal, and thus more permanent. Fuelling the Reformation was the printing press, which likewise fuelled opposition to the established order.
Government reacted by giving the king’s version of events. But this was being contested. Not so much in Henry VIII’s time by print, but largely through rumour. A sermon may have been preached in favour of Queen Anne Boleyn but you cannot control a sullen response. The prophesies of mystics, such as the Nun of Kent, became so worrying that in 1542 there was an act outlawing them. Plays exhorting loyalty need not necessarily have been interpreted that way by the audience. What was important was now the fact that the people were being given a choice about what to believe.
Here Sharpe sees power not in a Foucault top-down manner but as reciprocal – a dialogue with subjects – whereby the king is allowed power in return for good governance of his people.
As well as the portraits of the Tudor rulers, Sharpe also examines the coins, medals and coats-of-arms. Representations of the monarch could now be seen on books – for example Henry was on the cover of the Covendale bible.
Henry had to rebrand himself after his break with Rome. Solomon-like in his wisdom, he would be the link between his people and their God. Justice and mercy would be delivered impartially. Interestingly, though Henry was later lauded as the originator of Protestantism he saw himself as free from confessional allegiances – burning, for instance, three Roman Catholics and three Protestants on the same day.
Mary I is someone with only a negative posthumous image. Yet she was the only royal who won the crown through popular support, after Edward VI had attempted to install Lady Jane Grey instead. Sharpe attributes her downfall chiefly to her marriage to a Spanish prince, though it is as likely that her Smithfield pyres revealed a lack of justice and mercy, particularly for a female monarch.
Elizabeth, you sense, recognised the importance of public representation from the failings of her older sister. She projected herself as being the single ruler of a providential nation. When Catholic priests were executed she stressed that they were being killed not for their religion but for their treachery – their allegiance to a foreign Catholic country on the Continent such as France or Spain. Elizabeth’s prevarication is renowned, but Sharpe sees this as a necessity. It meant the all-male Privy Council could not bully her while simultaneously signalling her instructions came directly from God.
Recognition of the importance of image may be in vogue but – to a lesser or greater extent – it was ever thus. Sharpe, therefore, allows us to look anew at the Tudor period and in doing so provides plenty to ruminate on. He is bringing out two further volumes – the first on the early Stuarts to the fall of the Commonwealth, the second from the Restoration to the coming of the Hanoverians. I am looking forward to them both.
Richard Woulfe
