Tome Thursday: The Autobiography of Henry VIII

Hello everyone!

OKAY.

I will admit. This one took me forever. I actually checked on Goodreads and I started reading it in September.

IT'S NOVEMBER NOW, GUYS.

Yeah, I was bad with this. Really, really bad. My only excuse? I kept getting distracted. It's not that the book wasn't interesting or that I was forcing myself to crunch through it. That wasn't the case at all. The problem was that every hundred or two hundred pages, my brain literally wanted to fritz out with all the information and personality complex.

Which was why I always needed a break in between the reading sections, and that was why it took FOREVER to finish this, but I actually made a gameplan and sat down, expressively, to finish reading so that Maegan wouldn't send me over to kingdom come.

She can be a little impatient with her Tudor stuff, so let's get on with the Autobiography of Henry VIII!

I'll confess right now.

I knew this was going to be a monster read.

Hello, the thing has one thousand pages of Henry thinking and describing. I may not be a Tudor nut (or well, not much anyway), but I DO know how things went for the man by the time he became sovereign in his own right and started going for Bachelor of the Millenia award.

Meaning, Cersei Lannister would probably have called him brother and made out.

But, I digress.

This is a fictional autobiography of England's most famous king, with notes by his fool, and to tell you the truth I thought it was going to be one of those horrible books where authors overtry everything and it just never works.

I was pleasantly surprised, because this Henry is actually, probably a very good portrayal as far as things go. We will never know entirely, considering he left nothing of the sort for us to read in reality, but the truth is that Margaret George seemed to capture the essence of what we DO have in writing about the Tudor king, especially in his later years.

The story chronicles basically all his life, from the time when Arthur and his parents still lived, and Arthur was heir, then moving along through all the events in Henry's life that we already know from history: Arthur's death, the subsequent change of heir apparent, Henry's marriage to Katherine of Aragorn, and his following ones with Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard, and Katherine Parr. But in between all that we have his friendship with Charles Brandon, Brandon's marriage to Mary Tudor, the war with France, the endless backstabbings these European kings seemed to thrive on back in the day (you couldn't have a single treaty without either the French or the Spanish allying against England, or with England against one another), and all the political intrigue you could ask for. And Nonesuch, and the French invasion ... We also see inclusions of some 'voice of the people' through Will, the king's fool, who usually has smart insights when the king himself is a little too high up in the clouds.

Because, admittedly, he was.

The thing about autobiographies, especially about people who you know were a little ... unstable, shall we say, is that you know they'll sometimes be hard to chew through.

This was one of those, on moments.

Henry was a brilliant king who managed, despite everything else going on in his personal life, to bring his subjects together (whether they loved or hated his queens is a different matter), well, most of the time. He did have his hiccups (like, with SIX wives, and the Pilgrimage of Grace, and ... you know what, let's not go there), but at the end of his reign, the thing he COULD say, or what could be said about him was that his kingdom wasn't exactly falling to pieces at that moment (that happened later, but luckily Henry was buried deep, deep down and didn't see it). 

The problem, however, was that he tended to ramble a lot about God. Okay, I'll be honest - he waxed poetry about it. Whether he was cussing out because life was unfair, or he was having an earnest heart-to-heart and being thankful, there was a lot of that in here. Now, I'm not against it - and I knew he was always very religious. But it's one thing to know, and another to actually read it written as if he himself wrote it.

Those were my hiccups, knowing I'd have to munch through it. But I did! I'm so proud.

I enjoyed seeing him evolve through the years though; he starts out as a very ambitious, young, favoured king who wants to do no wrong and wants his people to love him. This becomes a lot more cynical over the years (honestly, he was in love with the idea of being in love, anyway), and jaded, as Henry grows older.

Also, I really enjoyed watching him go after women time and time again. In the beginning it was basically because he would probably go after a shark in a skirt. Then it was the heir issue. And then it was just love.

But the highlight, for me, and this is a personal view, was Brandon.

I will admit, I'm biased, but even so, the relationship between the king and his best friend is probably the most poignant one in the whole book. It isn't the centerpiece, however, so you have to watch for those nuances.

When Brandon dies, and Henry is chief mourner at his funeral, however ... the section made me cry.

Henry spent all his life chasing love, wanting and NEEDING to be loved, by the women he married (unsuccessfully) and by his subjects.

And only when his best friend passed to the realm beyond did he realize that he ALWAYS had that - he just didn't know where to look. Charles Brandon is often an understated or underestimated character whenever one compares him to Henry, but what I've always said about him, from the first time I was made aware of their relationship, was that he was the only one of Henry's friends who actually survived life at court, that friendship, remained loyal, and died of an illness and not with his head on a spike. And he pissed the king off A LOT OF TIMES, and still survived, so that's an acquired skill for the man.

Not to mention, there are quotes that say Henry was never the same after Brandon died. 

The moral of this story: you may not have romantic love, but friends will ALWAYS be there for you.

And now I want to write about Charles Brandon because there aren't enough good books about him out there.

xx

*image not mine