Read The Last Days of Henry VIII: Conspiracy, Treason and Heresy at the Court of the Dying Tyrant for Free Online

Author’s Note
    Henry VIII is the most famous king in England’s history, and you may think that the story of this psychotic and ruthless ruler is well known. However, it was during the last few years of his long reign that his uncertain health finally broke down, he mounted his final foreign military adventures and the conspiracies over politics and religion within his own court reached fever pitch. These years, 1543–7, were the defining moments of his time as king and sowed the poisoned seeds that were to bear bloody fruit when his offspring successively occupied the throne.
    Such dramatic events require a new, detailed examination. Instead of forming the last pages of the many excellent published descriptions of the entire thirty-seven years of Henry’s reign written by a host of distinguished and learned historians, this study examines, in depth, the events of that short, tumultuous period. I have also endeavoured to convey a graphic sense of exactly how precarious an existence Henry’s courtiers and officials led during his final years in the whispering corridors of his sumptuous palaces, in the face of an aggressive, vengeful, cunning and pain-racked king.
    This book also examines his all-important medical condition. Unknown to his cohorts of doctors – the best available at the time – the king was probably suffering from a disease that turned his waking hours into a paranoid nightmare, emotionally detached him from those he was fond of and threw him into troughs of melancholy from which only his faithful fool, or jester, could rouse him. Henry was no theatricalcaricature: he was a huge, devious man-mountain capable of remorseless cruelty – a true bully who was never afraid to exercise his total power of life or death over those he ruled, friend and foe alike. He must have been truly terrifying. In his moments of paranoia, he was certainly mad; he was undoubtedly bad and clearly dangerous to know.
    This is a sad, violent story of a once splendid prince who could not cope with old age or the limitations that disease and pain put upon him. The sixteenth-century techniques of government – for example, the cynical use of propaganda and the isolation of the ruler from reality by a handful of largely self-seeking men – will seem familiar to us today, mirrored as they are in many contemporary regimes. So also will the harsh methods of his totalitarian state. In many ways, Henry’s character closely resembles those who held and wielded absolute power in the world in the twentieth century and who continue to do so in the twenty-first. Certainly that power corrupted government in the middle of the sixteenth century in England. None the less, Henry, for all his faults, did much to create the nation we live in today.

Acknowledgements
    This book could not have been written without the help and active support of many friends and colleagues, not least my dear wife who has had to live with Henry VIII for many months.
    In particular, I would like to thank Bernard Nurse, Librarian, and Adrian James, Assistant Librarian, of the Society of Antiquaries of London; the ever-willing and helpful staff at the former Public Record Office (now the National Archives) at Kew; the enthusiastic team at the library of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine; the manuscripts and rare-book departments at the British Library; Robin Harcourt Williams, Librarian and Archivist to the Marquis of Salisbury at Hatfield House; Julia Hudson, Assistant Archivist at St George’s Chapel, Windsor; Patricia Robinson of the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the Gloucestershire Record Office; Claude Blair for details of Henry’s armour and his new research regarding that worn by the king on the Boulogne campaign; Dr Seonaid Simpson for her kindness in helping with many details concerning the king’s medical condition; the Revd Father Jerome Bertram for much help with Latin translations; David Chipp for his helpful comments on the manuscript; Ian