Henry VIII lives on in the history books as a ruthless king with a cantankerous temper. But a less confident man emerges in the margins of his own prayer books.
Following a jousting accident in 1536, Henry spent the last decade of his reign in considerable pain and came to view suffering as God’s punishment for his sin. This is an assessment by Micheline White, an associate professor at Carlton College, whose research in the King’s Prayer Book at Wormsley Library recently appeared in Quarterly Revival.
Henry’s Prayer Book. Photo: Courtesy of the Trustees of The Wormsley Fund and reproduced with permission of The Wormsley Estate.
The annotations in question largely consist of manicules, a hand with an extended index finger, and trefoils, a grouping of three dots, which the king placed next to passages he considered relevant. “He marked passages that ask God to stop punishing him, to forgive him and to impart divine wisdom to him,” White told Artnet News. “These marks reveal that Henry also experienced times of anxiety and uncertainty about the state of his soul and his position as an anointed leader of God.”
In one instance, a manicule is placed next to a passage that read, “Remove your plagues from me, for your punishment has made me both weak and unconscious.” In another, a shamrock is engraved next to the words: “Lord God, do not forsake me, though I have done no good in your sight.”
Manicule in the margins of Henry’s prayer book. Photo: Courtesy of the Wormsley Fund Trustees and reproduced with permission of The Wormsley Estate by Andrew Smart, AC Cooper, London.
White’s discovery was somewhat coincidental: she had just spent a week looking at the prayer books of Henry VIII in the British Library and so immediately recognized those in the Wormsley Library version. A detailed comparison revealed that the shape, size and placement of the manicule pages were the same.
Manicule in the margins of Henry’s prayer book. Photo: Courtesy of the Wormsley Fund Trustees and reproduced with permission of The Wormsley Estate by Andrew Smart, AC Cooper, London.
Perhaps more important is the provenance of the prayer book, White noted. It was a gift from his sixth and last wife Katherine Parr, who had translated and produced the book as a piece of military propaganda on behalf of the king. The king did not mark the prayer book in private, but rather surrounded by his entourage, making the annotations performative. “I see him acknowledging Parr’s intellectual and political work as he marked the gift book,” White said.
This moves Parr from the margins to the center of power, a point recognized by Henry’s decision to appoint her regent when he went to war with France in 1544. This position of political influence continued after the death of Henry in 1547, with Parr remaining as an important writer and queen dowager under King Edward.
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