Henry VIII's Health in a Nutshell (7 page)

One of the explanations of Henry’s behaviour not involving mental illness but acknowledging the king’s behaviour may have had medical roots is the idea that the king sustained a brain injury. Some historians suggest that one notable jousting accident in January 1536 may have led to an alteration in his personality
¹⁰²
, and the public has become largely aware of that theory, but fewer people know or remember that in the early 1950s an English physician argued that it was Henry’s head injury in 1524 that is the true culprit behind the king’s alteration
¹⁰³
.

Taking the postulations in reverse order, did the accident in 1536 hurt Henry’s brain so severely that he became almost a different person? During one of the tournaments he held to celebrate his first wife’s death, Henry was unhorsed and knocked senseless, remaining unconscious for more than two hours
¹⁰⁴
. Some people have theorized that the king sustained brain damage in this jousting accident, and it was the resulting intracranial haemorrhage that caused him to change so drastically. It is possible that the strong blow to the head during the accident could have caused a blood clot in his brain, which in turn would have created intracranial pressure and pushed his brain forward in his skull, squashing the frontal lobe against the inside of his forehead. The frontal lobe of the brain is considered to be the centre of an individual’s personality. Although an injury like this would not necessarily impair his motor functions, it could have caused serious psychological problems. Some symptoms of a brain injury are lethargy, difficulty in concentrating, memory issues, bad judgment, depression, irrationally moody behaviour, emotional outbursts, insomnia, a low sex drive and radical personality changes
¹⁰⁵
. The personality changes can be so severe that it is comparable to having schizophrenia.

Although such an injury could potentially be the cause of a personality change such as Henry’s, as well as his mood swings and depression, it was unlikely to be the only source of the king’s alteration. Henry was already exhibiting signs of mental change
before
his accident. He was definitely becoming irascible as early as 1532 and he started his first judicial killing spree in 1535. Before the age of 40, the king seldom executed someone he knew personally, having to be pushed to such extreme measures by his chancellors if there was a clear and present danger to his throne. An older Henry showed no such hesitation. In fact, he had begun to order the agonizing deaths of his subjects and courtiers for the flimsiest of reasons, or sometimes for no reason at all.

The first sign of Henry’s new bloodthirstiness was the execution of three Carthusian priests and a Bridgettine monk on 4 May 1535, more than a year before the king would kill Anne Boleyn
¹⁰⁶
. The monks had enraged Henry by their steadfast, treasonous, belief that the pope was the head of the church. Henry ordered the full traitors death for them, a nasty business involving being hung, then let down from the noose before they died from lack of oxygen, then being disembowelled and castrated while still conscious and having their entrails burnt in front of them. Once they were dead their bodies were cut into quarters and the heads chopped off. There is even a rumour that their castrated privates were stuffed into their mouths to stop their ceaseless prayers, but historians are not sure whether this is the truth or merely a rumour spread to strengthen Henry’s reputation for barbarism.

On 19 June, he sent three more Carthusians to the same hideous death, including one named Sebastian Newdigate, a man who had once been one of Henry’s courtiers before he renounced his earthly wealth and joined the religious order
¹⁰⁷
. Newdigate appears to have been the first of the king’s personal friends or acquaintances to be executed in connection with Henry’s Great Matter. The king himself attempted to persuade Newdigate to change his mind about the pope’s supremacy. According to the
Catholic Encyclopedia
of 1913, Newdigate “was thrown into the Marshalsea prison, where he was kept for fourteen days bound to a pillar, standing upright, with iron rings round his neck, hands, and feet. There he was visited by the King, who offered to load him with riches and honours if he would conform. He was then brought before the Council, and sent to the Tower, where Henry visited him again”
¹⁰⁸
. Newdigate refused to acquiesce to Henry’s wishes or accept the validity of Henry’s arguments and died with his fellow Carthusians.

Although Henry’s injury in 1536 could have made him decidedly worse, it couldn’t explain why he had turned “bad” in the first place.

What about the head injury from 1524? If Henry had begun to show signs of growing instability in 1527, wouldn’t that account for his behaviour by 1535? It is decidedly plausible, considering that head injuries can leave a person with “Jekyll and Hyde” - like dual personalities, or turn them outright into strangers full of anger and anxiety
¹⁰⁹
. Henry would shift between his normative good-natured self into a monster of paranoid rage, and a traumatic brain damage could explain it. Nevertheless, there are some gaps in the theory. Most significantly is the fact that from 1527 to 1532 there are no signs of extreme personality changes in the king. Rumours had swirled for years that he would put Katherina of Aragon aside in favour of a new, young and hopefully son-producing bride, so his decision to end his marriage was not a sudden one. Until the summer of 1532, Henry continued to treat Katherina with the same unstinting courtesy he had shown her during the halcyon days of their marriage. Although he was increasingly impatient and callous in his behavior toward his first wife and eldest daughter for the two years prior, it wasn’t until after 1533 that the king became outright cruel to them in a seemingly short space of time, and only in his later years that he became uniformly tyrannical. Usually, brain impairment is less progressive than that. It manifests within a week or so after the injury and doesn’t slowly go downhill over time. Instead, the undamaged sections of the brain learn to compensate for and assume the ‘responsibilities’ of the injured area, helping the patient get better – not worse – as the years pass. On average it takes between ten to fifteen years for people with severe brain injuries to show marked signs of improvement. If anything, ten to fifteen years after his jousting accident, 1534 -1539, Henry had only
begun
to behave like a brute.

Some historians and scholars have actually broached the topic of Henry’s possible mental illness. Among these theories are that he was a psychopath, a sociopath, had narcissistic personality disorder, suffered from bipolar disorder, or was afflicted with clinical depression. Was Henry an autocratic ruler, a psychotic monster, or a man in the grip of unaccountable brain chemistry that undermined his decision making capabilities?

A significant flaw in any theory about Henry’s mental condition is that psychological theories are based largely on “
weird
” people, i.e. the subject of psychology experiments are usually
W
estern,
E
ducated, from
I
ndustrialized and relatively
R
ich societies, which are usually in
D
emocratic countries. The king was more royal “we” than royal weird. He was Western and … that is about it. He was educated as much as possible for his era, but his education assured him that the planets affected his humours and that the sun revolved around the earth. England was not particularly industrialized, or comparatively rich, and beyond contestation it was not a democracy. Trying to measure Henry against a modern person may mean that psychologists are using a yardstick to try to measure cubic litres.

Professor Kevin Dutton, a psychologist and an affiliate member of Magdalen College at Oxford, used Robert D Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist-Revised to assess Henry, and he found that the king was probably a psychopath. According to Dutton, the king had a score of 174, and anything over 168 put him firmly in psychopathic territory. Dutton was quoted as saying that Henry “scored very highly for emotional detachment and cold-hearted ruthlessness”
¹¹⁰
. When one looks at some of Henry’s behaviour as an older king, such as the wanton destruction of cousins he had grown up with and with whom he had been good friends, it certainly seems that Dutton is justified in his opinion of Henry, but does this apply to the actions of the younger king? Psychopathology isn’t something you can grow into or out of. You are either born a psychopath or you are not. Thus, Henry’s emotional detachment and cold-hearted ruthlessness should have been consistent throughout his life, but it was not.

What would have been some of the other tell-tale signs that Henry was a psychopath? According to the
Encyclopedia of Mental Disorders
, the traits of psychopaths are a “glib and superficial charm, grandiose (exaggeratedly high) estimation of self, need for stimulation, pathological lying, cunning and manipulativeness, lack of remorse or guilt, shallow affect (superficial emotional responsiveness), callousness and lack of empathy, parasitic lifestyle, poor behavioural controls, sexual promiscuity, early behaviour problems, lack of realistic long-term goals, impulsivity, irresponsibility, failure to accept responsibility for own actions, many short-term marital relationships, [and] juvenile delinquency”. Which of these traits did Henry display, and if so – did Henry show any of them prior to the 1530s?

Without question Henry was charming, but unlike most psychopaths the king became less able to charm people as he grew older. Psychopaths are so good at “gas-lighting”, a form of emotional abuse in which the abuser tries to convince the abused he or she is at fault or in the wrong by denying abusive incidents occurred, or altering the account of incidents so skilfully that the abused becomes uncertain of reality and even convinced the abuser did nothing untoward. They can keep supporters or make new ones, even in egregious circumstances. Also, there is no evidence before 1530 that Henry’s charm was superficial, rather than the genuine charisma of someone who is not a psychopath.

Did Henry have a grandiose sense of self? How does one tell with a king? Henry was raised in the conviction that royalty was appointed by God Himself. He was taught that a monarch was the epitome of the great chain of being and was therefore an
inherently better
person than all other men. From birth he had been told that the king and England are one and the same. With the exception of believing himself to have become a god or messianic figure, it would be hard for Henry to have grandiose ideas about his worth. An argument for grandiosity is, of course, that Henry did declare himself the supreme head of the Church of England, supplanting the pope as religious authority. However, the king made that decision based on a lot of encouragement from reformers and lawyers like Thomas Cromwell, who persuasively argued that he
was
the supreme head of the church and he should take up his mantle. Henry did not try to declare himself pope and insist that he had supplanted the Bishop of Rome in his ecclesiastical duties.

No one can deny that Henry had a need for stimulation, since he constantly arranged entertainments such as hunting, dancing, gaming and music for himself and his friends. This does not necessarily fit into the psychopathic category, though. Extroverts also need stimulation and pleasant company, but that does not make extroverts axiomatically remorseless predators. There are too many other explanations for a man enjoying himself than psychopathology to account for it.

There is no sign that Henry was a pathological liar in his youth. In fact, the opposite was true. Psychopaths hate to lose any contest, regardless of how trivial, and will lie to win if at all possible. In contrast, in card games and other kinds of friendly gambling, the king didn’t value winning enough to cheat or lie, because he frequently lost huge sums during games of cards or dice
¹¹¹
. This means his courtiers also knew they could best him without fear of retaliation. This kind of enduring good sportsmanship is very unlikely if Henry were a psychopath.

It is true that as an older man the king was both cunning and manipulative. In 1543, the anti-reformist faction asked Henry for permission to arrest the reformist Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, and imprison him in the Tower for heresy. When the king agreed to the scheme it seemed to be the end for Cranmer, but Henry sent for the archbishop and warned him of the plot, telling him that “false knaves will soon be procured to witness against you and condemn you”
¹¹²
. Henry then gave his royal ring to Cranmer, an act that carried extreme significance as it indicated the possessor was in the king’s favour. When the anti-reformists sprang their ambush on Cranmer, he dramatically whipped out the ring he had been given, causing his enemies immediate and pronounced consternation. When the conservative coalition retreated to confer with Henry, they were “savagely rebuked” by the irate king
¹¹³
. Henry employed this kind of double-bind subterfuge to ensnare his courtiers multiple times during the final years of his reign
¹¹⁴
. Yet these traps were noted because they were such a change from Henry’s earlier style of kingship. Henry would waffle when he was younger, but it was because he was cautious, not cunning.

It is hard to see why anyone familiar with his marital history would think Henry had shallow emotional responses. He married his first wife when no one expected him to, because she was pretty and a damsel in distress, and he was publically devoted to her for almost twenty years. When he later wanted to divorce her and try for a male heir, he ripped holes in the fabric of European religion and politics to marry Anne Boleyn rather than make an “acceptable” marriage with a foreign noblewoman or princess. His love for Anne didn’t turn into indifference -- it became scalding and implacable hate. He practically set up a shrine to Jane Seymour when she died shortly after the birth of their son. He could not keep a politically expedient marriage to Anna of Cleves functioning because he didn’t
love
her enough. He wept and nearly had a breakdown when he found out his fifth wife, Katheryn Howard, had not been a virgin when they wed. He wanted to be married so much that he all but forced Catherine Parr to accept his proposal. Moreover, he retained a lifelong friendship with Charles Brandon, an emotional connection usually beyond the grasp of a psychopath. The king was not a man plagued by emotional detachment.