On stage from the start

Henry: Virtuous Prince, by David Starkey

Among the glories of Flanders and Swann is a long, erudite and silly shaggy-dog story about the Tudor theatre. It culminates in the appearance as from nowhere of a score for the tune known as ‘Greensleeves’ — or ‘Greenfleeves’ as Flanders and Swann have it. Someone wonders aloud who composed it, and a voice from the back of the auditorium booms: ‘We did.’ ‘Who are you?’ ‘We’re Henry the Eighth, we are.’

David Starkey’s new book adds an extra valency to this joke. It wasn’t just his royal status that called for the plural pronoun; there were, he argues, two Henry VIIIs. There’s the one we all know, the pope-bothering, richly-upholstered, bearded great trapezium of Holbein’s portrait. Then there’s the young man, as played on telly by Jonathan Rhys Meyers. Henry as a youth was handsome, pious, scholarly, athletic, generous, uxorious, and well-liked by his attendant lords.