Henry VIII

Summary

Henry VIII (printed in the 1623 Folio as The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eighth, and apparently first staged as All Is True) is a play built on falls. A Prologue warns the audience that it has come to see no merry play but 'how soon this mightiness meets misery'. The first fall is Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham. Fresh from describing the splendour of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, he denounces Cardinal Wolsey as a corrupt manipulator of the king, and is promptly arrested on evidence supplied by his own dismissed surveyor. Queen Katherine pleads before Henry against Wolsey's crushing taxes, and the king remits them, but Wolsey quietly claims the credit. Buckingham is convicted; on his way to execution he forgives his enemies while protesting his loyalty. At Wolsey's banquet at York Place the king, disguised as a shepherd in a masque, dances with Anne Bullen, one of Katherine's maids of honour. Soon courtiers report that Henry's conscience is troubled by his marriage to his dead brother's widow, and they suspect another cause. Anne protests that she would not be a queen for all the world, then accepts the title of Marchioness of Pembroke. At the legatine court in Blackfriars, Katherine kneels to Henry, recounts twenty years of faithful marriage, refuses Wolsey as her judge, appeals to the Pope and walks out. Henry praises her and explains how doubts about his daughter Mary's legitimacy, and the deaths of his sons, convinced him that heaven judged the marriage. Wolsey's undoing comes by accident: papers sent to the king include an inventory of his private wealth and a letter urging the Pope to delay the divorce. Stripped of the great seal, he bids 'a long farewell' to his greatness, charges his servant Cromwell to fling away ambition, and finds an unexpected peace. Anne is crowned. At Kimbolton the dying Katherine hears from her usher Griffith of Wolsey's penitent death, is persuaded to hear his virtues as well as his vices, dreams of spirits offering her a garland, and asks to be buried as a queen. In the final act Gardiner and the council try to imprison the new Archbishop Cranmer for heresy, but Henry, warned by his physician Doctor Butts, has given Cranmer his ring and rebukes the council. The play closes with the christening of the infant Elizabeth, over whom Cranmer prophesies a reign of peace and a successor who will rise from her ashes like the phoenix.

Plot or Argument

• Prologue: a sad and true show

  The Prologue disowns jigs, fights and fools, and asks the audience to imagine the persons of the story 'as they were living', great and followed by thousands, and then to watch how quickly mightiness meets misery.

• Act I: Buckingham's accusation and the York Place masque

  Norfolk describes the Field of the Cloth of Gold; Buckingham rages at Wolsey and is arrested. In council Katherine exposes the hated levy of a sixth part of every subject's substance, the king cancels it, and Wolsey's secretary is told to spread the story that the cardinal procured the pardon. Buckingham's former surveyor testifies to his treasonous talk. At Wolsey's feast the king, masked, chooses Anne Bullen as his partner.

• Act II: Buckingham's farewell and the Blackfriars trial

  Two Gentlemen report Buckingham's conviction; he speaks to the crowd on his way to the scaffold, forgiving his accusers and comparing his fate to his father's. The king's 'scruple' about his marriage becomes public; Cardinal Campeius arrives from Rome; Anne is ennobled. At Blackfriars Katherine refuses the court's jurisdiction and leaves, and Henry gives his account of how his conscience was first troubled.

• Act III: the cardinals at the Queen's apartments and Wolsey's fall

  Wolsey and Campeius urge Katherine to submit; she accuses them of seeking her ruin. Wolsey's mistaken packet reveals his wealth and his double dealing with Rome; the lords strip him of the great seal and charge him with praemunire. Alone with Cromwell he reviews his life, learns that Thomas More is chancellor and Cranmer archbishop, and counsels his servant against ambition.

• Act IV: Anne's coronation and Katherine's death

  The Gentlemen watch the coronation procession and hear that Katherine has been divorced and moved to Kimbolton. There Griffith reports Wolsey's repentant death; Katherine speaks his faults, Griffith his virtues, and she forgives him. She sleeps, sees a vision of crowned spirits, receives the king's messenger Caputius, and gives orders for her burial.

• Act V: Cranmer's trial and Elizabeth's christening

  Gardiner plots against Cranmer; the king privately assures him and gives him a ring. Anne is delivered of a daughter. Cranmer is kept waiting at the council door until Butts shows the king; when the council moves to commit him to the Tower he produces the ring, and Henry reconciles the lords. After the Porter's comic struggle with the crowds, Cranmer christens Elizabeth and foretells her reign and James's succession.

• Epilogue

  The Epilogue admits the play may please few of those who came for sleep or satire, and rests its hopes on good women, for the play has shown them one.

Characters

• King Henry VIII, king

  Genial, watchful and absolute; his favour decides every fall in the play, and his 'conscience' about his first marriage is left open to the audience's reading as scruple, desire or both.

• Queen Katherine, Henry's first wife

  Katherine of Aragon, 'a stranger, born out of your dominions'; she defends her marriage with dignity and plain speech, refuses a judge she distrusts, and dies forgiving.

• Cardinal Wolsey, Archbishop of York and Lord Chancellor

  Butcher's son turned king-cardinal, the engineer of Buckingham's ruin; his fall produces the play's most famous speeches of self-knowledge and repentance.

• Duke of Buckingham, nobleman

  Proud enemy of Wolsey, arrested on his surveyor's testimony; on his way to execution he forgives his enemies and warns against trusting great men.

• Anne Bullen, maid of honour, later queen

  Professes pity for Katherine and reluctance to be a queen, yet rises to marchioness and is crowned; the play gives her few lines and keeps her motives unexamined.

• Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury

  Meek, honest and accused of heresy by the council; protected by the king's ring, he speaks the closing prophecy over Elizabeth.

• Thomas Cromwell, Wolsey's servant, later the king's

  Weeps at his master's fall and receives his parting counsel; later the council's secretary who defends Cranmer.

• Stephen Gardiner, the king's secretary, later Bishop of Winchester

  Wolsey's creature and Cranmer's chief enemy, who wants the archbishop committed as a heretic.

• Griffith, Katherine's gentleman usher

  Her 'honest chronicler', who insists on speaking the good of Wolsey after she has named his faults.

• Cardinal Campeius, papal legate

  Sent from Rome to sit with Wolsey in judgement on the marriage.

• Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, Earl of Surrey, Lord Chamberlain, courtiers

  A chorus of nobles who resent Wolsey, read the king's moods, and help pull the cardinal down.

• Old Lady, Doctor Butts, the Porter, minor figures

  The Old Lady teases Anne about ambition and announces the birth; Butts, the king's physician, exposes the council's slight to Cranmer; the Porter holds back the christening crowds.

Lessons

• Wolsey's farewell: what a fallen man finally sees

  Wolsey's soliloquy in Act III, Scene 2 turns a political defeat into a moral recognition. He compares himself to a plant killed by frost and to boys swimming on bladders far out of their depth, then tells Cromwell that ambition was the sin by which the angels fell, and that had he served God with half the zeal he served his king he would not be naked to his enemies. The play does not make the speech cheap: Wolsey is still stripped of everything, and his insight comes only after the loss. Students can weigh whether repentance forced by ruin is less real, and notice that Wolsey's counsel ('Love thyself last') reverses the habit of his whole career.

  • Wolsey says the king 'has cured me' by taking his offices. Is he being ironic, sincere, or both?
  • Which image in the 'long farewell' speech best describes how pride works, and why?
  • Griffith later says Wolsey's 'overthrow heaped happiness upon him'. Does the play persuade you that losing power can be a mercy?

• Katherine at Blackfriars: courage without rebellion

  Katherine kneels to the king she is resisting. In Act II, Scene 4 she reminds Henry that she is a foreigner without an impartial judge, recounts twenty years as an obedient wife, names Wolsey as her enemy, appeals to the Pope and walks out when summoned back. In Act III, Scene 1 she tells the two cardinals that 'there sits a judge that no king can corrupt'. Her resistance is lawful, courteous and open, and the play treats her with more sympathy than any other character. Students can compare her refusal with Buckingham's angry plotting talk and ask what distinguishes faithful resistance from defiance.

  • Why does Katherine kneel before Henry at the beginning of her plea rather than stand to accuse him?
  • She refuses Wolsey as her judge. Is that pride or a just demand? What reasons does she give?
  • How does the play keep the audience's sympathy with Katherine while also celebrating the marriage and child that replace her?

• Brass and water: telling the truth about the dead

  At Kimbolton, Katherine lists Wolsey's vices: his ambition, his simony, his doubleness of speech. Griffith asks leave to speak his good, and praises his learning and his colleges at Ipswich and Oxford, observing that men write evil deeds in brass and virtues in water. Katherine answers that she would be malicious if she refused to listen, and ends by honouring the man she hated. The scene is a lesson in just memory: neither flattery nor slander, but a whole account, and a dying woman's forgiveness of her chief enemy.

  • Is Katherine's list of Wolsey's faults fair? Is Griffith's list of his virtues?
  • What does Griffith mean by 'Men's evil manners live in brass; their virtues we write in water'? Can you think of a public figure remembered only for faults?
  • Why does the play place this scene immediately before Katherine's vision of heavenly garlands?

• The king's conscience and the audience's judgement

  The word 'conscience' recurs throughout the play. Henry explains at Blackfriars that the French ambassador's doubt about Mary's legitimacy and the deaths of his infant sons made him fear heaven's judgement. Yet Suffolk has already quipped that the king's conscience 'has crept too near another lady', and Henry's own aside about leaving 'so sweet a bedfellow' lets the audience see both motives at once. The play never settles the matter. Students can practise holding a character's stated reasons and the evidence of his conduct side by side, without either taking him at his word or assuming the worst.

  • List every time someone mentions conscience in the play. Whose conscience seems most trustworthy, and why?
  • Does Henry's long speech at Blackfriars sound sincere? What would change if it were spoken before he met Anne?
  • Why might a play written for James I's court leave Henry's motives ambiguous rather than condemn or excuse him?

• Cranmer's prophecy and history written backward

  The play ends in 1533 with a prophecy that looks forward to Elizabeth's long reign, her death, and the rise of James from her ashes. The audience of 1613 knew what Cranmer's characters could not: that Anne would be executed, that Cranmer himself would be burned under Mary, and that Elizabeth had died ten years before. The prophecy therefore praises the reigning king through a story everyone knew had darker sequels. Reading historically means noticing what the playwrights compress or omit (Katherine actually died after Elizabeth's birth; Cranmer's trouble with the council came about a decade later) and asking why a celebratory ending was wanted.

  • Which later events does Cranmer's prophecy leave out, and what effect does the silence have on an audience that knew them?
  • Cranmer foretells a reign where 'every man shall eat in safety under his own vine'. Where does that image come from in Scripture, and why use it here?
  • Is it honest for a history play to rearrange dates? When does compression become distortion?

Context

The play stages events from the Field of the Cloth of Gold (1520) and Buckingham's execution (1521) through the legatine trial at Blackfriars (1529), Wolsey's fall and death (1529-30), Anne Boleyn's coronation and Elizabeth's birth (1533), with Katherine's death (January 1536) and Cranmer's conflict with the council (in the 1540s) moved forward. Its chief source is Holinshed's Chronicles (2nd ed., 1587), which drew on George Cavendish's life of Wolsey; the Cranmer episode follows John Foxe's Acts and Monuments. It was written for the King's Men in the reign of James I, Elizabeth's successor, in the year of the marriage of James's daughter Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine.

Composition

The play was new in 1613. On 29 June 1613, at a performance of a play about Henry VIII that Sir Henry Wotton called All Is True, cannon fired during the king's arrival at Wolsey's house set the thatch of the Globe alight and the theatre burned down. Since James Spedding's essay of 1850 the play has generally been divided between Shakespeare and John Fletcher on metrical and linguistic evidence; the exact division of scenes remains debated. It was first printed in the First Folio (1623) as the last of the histories.

Reception

The play was popular on the Restoration and eighteenth-century stage, valued for its processions and for the roles of Wolsey and Katherine, which attracted leading actors and actresses such as Sarah Siddons. Victorian productions, notably Henry Irving's (1892) and Herbert Beerbohm Tree's (1910), emphasized spectacle. In the twentieth century it was less often staged and its authorship and episodic structure drew critical attention, though Wolsey's farewell and Katherine's trial speech have remained among the most quoted passages in the canon.

Comparisons

• Richard III

  Both plays end with the birth of a Tudor peace, but Richard III gets there through a villain's open butchery, while Henry VIII moves through quiet courtly ruin in which no one is a pure villain and the king is never blamed.

• Utopia

  Thomas More, who wrote Utopia's satire on counsellors who flatter princes, appears in Henry VIII only as a name: Wolsey's successor as chancellor, whom Wolsey hopes will 'do justice for truth's sake and his conscience'. Readers who know More's later execution will feel the irony of that blessing.

• The Winter's Tale

  Hermione's trial in The Winter's Tale and Katherine's at Blackfriars are written within a few years of each other: in both a falsely treated queen defends her honour before her husband-judge, but Hermione is vindicated by an oracle while Katherine is simply set aside.

• Foxe's Book of Martyrs

  The council's attempt to imprison Cranmer and the king's gift of a ring are taken almost directly from Foxe's account of Cranmer; Foxe also records the archbishop's burning under Mary, which the play's ending leaves unspoken.

• The Book of Common Prayer (1662): Selections

  The Cranmer whom the play shows as a meek councillor protected by the king is the chief author of the English Prayer Book; reading a collect from it alongside Act V lets students hear the real man's prose beside Shakespeare and Fletcher's portrait.

• Speech to the Troops at Tilbury

  Cranmer's prophecy imagines the infant Elizabeth as loved and feared and her enemies shaking 'like a field of beaten corn'; the Tilbury speech lets students hear how the adult queen herself presented her rule in 1588.

• Edward the Second

  Marlowe's Edward II also turns on a king's favourite who rises above the nobility and is destroyed by them, but there the king falls with his favourite, while Henry sheds Wolsey and stands untouched.

Quotes

Medical Lens

Not a medical play, but its dynastic plot rests on childbirth and infant death, and it gives two carefully staged deaths. Henry's account at Blackfriars treats the deaths of his infant sons as a sign of divine judgement, an early-modern reading of obstetric loss that students should keep distinct from any modern explanation. The play watches the body as an index of the mind (Wolsey's agitated gestures; Henry's conscience felt 'full sick') and treats music as a remedy for grief. Katherine's death at Kimbolton is staged with physical detail (failing legs, sleep, pallor, coldness) and a consoling vision, and a royal physician, Doctor Butts, has a small but plot-turning role. Any retrospective diagnosis of the historical Henry or Katherine lies outside the text and should be offered only as a reading.

• Act II, Scene 4

  Henry explains that his male children died in the womb or soon after birth, which he took as heaven's judgement on the marriage and the cause of his conscience feeling sick.

  Childbirth Maternal Death Dying Mind Body
• Act III, Scene 1

  Katherine's woman sings 'Orpheus with his lute' to ease her mistress's sorrow; the song claims music can make care and grief of heart fall asleep or die.

  Grief
• Act III, Scene 2

  Norfolk describes Wolsey's distracted postures and gestures; the king interprets them as a mutiny in his mind.

  Mind Body
• Act IV, Scene 2

  Griffith reports Wolsey's sudden illness on the road from York and his penitent death three nights after reaching Leicester Abbey, at an hour he had foretold.

  Death Dying
• Act IV, Scene 2

  The sick Katherine, attended by Griffith and Patience, sleeps to solemn music and sees a vision of garlanded spirits; Patience notes her sudden pallor and coldness, and Katherine gives orders for her embalming and burial.

  Death Dying Dreams Nightmares Nursing Caregiving
• Act V, Scene 1

  Lovell reports that the queen is in labour 'in great extremity' and feared for her life; the Old Lady later announces the birth of a daughter.

  Childbirth Maternal
• Act V, Scene 2

  Doctor Butts, the king's physician, sees Cranmer kept waiting among pages at the council door and brings the king to a window to witness it.

  Physicians Doctors

Creative Prompts

• Dialogue

  Write the conversation Cromwell might have had with Thomas More on the day More received the great seal, drawing on Wolsey's advice in Act III, Scene 2.

• Essay

  Katherine and Wolsey both die forgiving their enemies. Compare the two deaths as the play reports them and argue which repentance or forgiveness is more convincing.

• Classroom

  Stage the Blackfriars trial (Act II, Scene 4) twice: once with Henry played as sincere, once as self-serving. Change only gestures and tone, not words, and discuss what the text allows.

• Poetry

  Write a short poem in Griffith's manner that records one person's virtues 'in brass' rather than water.

• Fiction

  Retell the burning of the Globe on 29 June 1613 from the point of view of a groundling watching the masque at Wolsey's house when the cannon fire.

Further Reading

• Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (2nd ed., 1587), Raphael Holinshed and others

  The play's main source for Buckingham, the divorce and Wolsey's fall and death.

• The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey, George Cavendish

  Memoir by Wolsey's gentleman usher, written in the 1550s and used by the chroniclers.

• Acts and Monuments, John Foxe

  Source of the Cranmer council episode in Act V.

• King Henry VIII (All Is True), Arden Shakespeare, Third Series, ed. Gordon McMullan

  Edition with a full discussion of collaboration, sources and stage history.

• Henry VIII, J. J. Scarisbrick

  Standard biography for checking the play's compressed chronology.

• Thomas Cranmer: A Life, Diarmaid MacCulloch