Physical and Mental Decline

The Cleves fiasco destroyed Cromwell; it enabled his many enemies to turn the king against him, and in July 1540 his head fell on the scaffold. Henry had by now become truly dangerous: always secretive and suspicious, now he was beginning to show paranoiac tendencies. Convinced that he controlled everyone, he was in fact readily manipulated by those who knew how to feed his suspicions and pander to his self-righteousness. Full of experience—the oldest king in Europe—and increasingly competent in the routine of rule, he lacked the comprehensive vision and large spirit that would have made him a great man. His temperamental deficiencies were aggravated by what he regarded as his undeserved misfortunes and by ill health; he grew enormously fat. His mind did not weaken, but he grew restless, peevish, and totally unpredictable; often melancholy and depressed, he was usually out of sorts and always out of patience. In 1540–42 he briefly renewed his youth in marriage to the 20-year-old Catherine Howard, whose folly in continuing her promiscuity, even as queen, brought her to the block. The blow finished Henry. Thereafter, he was really a sad and bitter old man, and, though he married once more, to find a measure of peace with the calm and obedient Catherine Parr, his physical ruin was complete. But he was still the king and, from Cromwell’s fall (which he regretted too late), the only maker of policy. Policy in the hands of a sick, unhappy, violent man was not likely to be either sensible or prosperous, and so it proved. Left to himself, Henry concentrated on keeping the realm united, despite the growing strife between the religious factions, and on keeping before the world his own image as the glorious monarch of the age. The first resulted in frequent explosions against the ingratitude of his subjects and against his councillors. The second brought him back to his first love—war and conquest, the sport of kings.

In 1542 the emperor and the king of France resumed hostilities. After a pretense of independence, Henry again joined the former; the Scots promptly joined the French. The Scots were routed at Solway Moss (1542), and their king died soon after: this opened the possibility of subjugating that country permanently by means of a marriage alliance between the infant heirs to the two thrones. But the Scottish dream quickly collapsed as Henry’s crude handling of that nation gave control to a pro-French party, determined to resist even an alliance with England; physical conquest was beyond the king’s means. Henry personally managed both the war and the subsequent negotiations, and he displayed amazing energy for so sick a man. But energy is not the same thing as competence. The war proved ruinous. Money had to be raised by selling off the monastic lands, which had brought a good income; the desperate expedient of debasing the coinage, though it brought temporary succor, led to a violent inflation that made things worse. Yet, even after the emperor made peace with France (1544), Henry would not let go until two years later.

As the year 1546 drew to a close, it was apparent to all observers that the king had not long to live. Not that it was clear to the man most concerned; he continued as before, lamenting religious dissension, attending to the business of government, continuing the pretense of deathless majesty, destroying the powerful Howard family, whom he suspected of plotting to control his successor. Conscious almost to the very end, he died on January 28, 1547. He left the realm feeling bereft and the government the more bewildered because, to the last, he had refused to make full arrangements for the rule of a boy king.