Something very important in the history of England happened on 24 January 1536, when King Henry VIII, celebrating the vigil of the feast of St Paul’s conversion, staged a splendid tournament in the tiltyard of his palace at Greenwich. The monarch, ‘mounted on a great horse to run at the lists’, was unseated by an opponent’s lance. As Henry staggered to his feet the heavily armoured charger fell on top of him, causing severe concussion and the opening of a varicose ulcer for which he had been treated ten years earlier. Almost at once the bluff King Hal of Holbein’s swaggering portraits, the poet, scholar and musician, disappeared from view, to be replaced by a sickly tyrant, brooding and vindictive, the reach of his power symbolised by periodic beheadings as a sequel to elaborately staged show trials.
Until recently the first of these two Henrys has obviously attracted us more, but after a century so marked by tyranny in its various forms his latter incarnation holds a ghoulish allure.
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