Henry VIII: Man and Monarch

This where Zero and I are going today:

Henry VIII: Man and Monarch
Thu 23 Apr
2009 - Sun 6 Sep 2009
PACCAR
Gallery, British Library
Price: Adults £9
(concessions £7 / £5)
Now open until 8pm Monday to Thursday.

We have had our eye on this exhibition ever since it opened, and thought we should get there before it closed. I haven't explored the website for the exhibition yet, but it appears to contain a lot of information related to the exhibition. If you can't make the exhibition, the site seems to be well worth a visit.

UPDATE AFTER OUR VISIT:

We had tickets timed for 11.30 am, on a Saturday - priced at a concession rate of £5 courtesy of Zero spotting a promotion in The Times. The exhibition was busy, but not overcrowded. The organisers "filter" entry, to avoid a bottle neck of people at the beginning, and this spreads people through the exhibition. We spent THREE hours working through the exhibition, so we were ready for lunch at the end. The air conditioning is also a bit on the cold side - so you will need to take a jumper or cardigan or you will be frozen by half way through.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can easily see how Henry VIII's decision to seek the appopriate papal dispensation and marry Katherine of Aragon was going to have BIG consequences later on. The exhibition layout communicated very readily how Henry entered on this course of action at the time, without having any inkling of the later implications.

Another interesting part of the exhibition covered the assembly in the King's library of books that were then being used by his "experts" to assemble a theological case in favour of his divorce from Katherine. I hadn't quite appreciated just how big an operation this was, involving the gathering of books from universities and monasteries throughout the land. Some pages of the summary text resulting from this are displayed in an electronic display - push the button in front of the displayed page, and a blue line appears to direct you to the cabinet containing the original text from which that page came. All rather clever, though it wasn't a part of the exhibition at which one tended to linger. It did communicate the point and extent of the exercise very effectively, though.

Many of the items displayed are documents or manuscript books - the script and the language make them impossible to read directly. However, the labels with each display give a very good account of each document, and, in some instances, where there are marginal annotations by Henry VIII or another, an electronic version of the text is displayed. Push the button - the original text appears, with, a few moments later the annotations also visible, and, finally, a commentary explaining the content and signficance of the annotations. What I found really effective was being able to linger in front of some of these documents and get a bit of a buzz from seeing a manuscript that really changed the history of the country. Perhaps the manuscript of the Act of Supremacy, and the treaties of marriage, were most impressive from this point of view. The love letter from Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn, on loan to the exhibition from the Vatican is also quite interesting.

The exhibition also gives a good portrayal of the character of Henry VIII. I do not have the expert knowledge of history to know how far it is an accurate portrait. But one can follow a progress from his childhood and education - with its inevitable "gentleness", through the development of a "play boy" mentality (fine when it involved a fair to celebrate the birth of a son, but then not so good when it manifested itself in warfare against France and an approach to European politics grounded in a desire for grandeur), to the determination and brutality that came to characterise the "King's Great Matter", and subsequent developments in the history of England. This is encouraged by the last display in the exhibition, which lists those executed during Henry VIII's reign, giving an example of the sheer arbitrariness of charges brought against those who fell out of Henry's favour.

A section of the exhibition looks at the developments in the Church after the break with Rome. Whilst in many ways Henry VIII remained "Catholic" in the substance of his beliefs, there was nevertheless a project to establish a new order in the Church. This was influenced in different ways at different times by different theological currents - but what is strikingly communicated is the way in which the law of Parliament and the King now became the measure of the structures and practices of the Church. The exhibition demonstrates Henry VIII's keen interest in this process, with some drafts of legislation being displayed with Henry's own amendments and corrections apparent. Ah, the implications of the "King's Great Matter" ...