Overlord: The Life and Reign of Henry VIII by Steven Veerapen review: 'looks beyond the soap opera'

Steven Veerapen | Kirsty Anderson

In his introduction to Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, GK Chesterton noted that although the historian Thomas Carlyle had read many accounts of the French Revolution and Dickens had only read Carlyle’s, the novelist’s take on events was probably the more accurate. Any historian writing about Henry VIII in the wake of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy risks a similar judgment: that when it comes to understanding the second Tudor on the English throne, the historian cannot compete with the historical novelist.

Or can they? No-one is better placed to judge than Steven Veerapen, the Glasgow-born historical writer who teaches English at the University of Strathclyde. In the last nine years alone, he has published no fewer than 15 historical novels and six non-fiction histories - all set in late Tudor or early Stuart England and Scotland. And that’s even without counting this door-stopper of a biography.

The psychodramas of Henry VIII’s six marriages - “divorced, beheaded and died/divorced, beheaded, survived” in the words of the Horrible Histories song - are catnip for both low culture and high. In some part of the English collective unconscious, Charles Laughton is forever tossing a chicken leg over his shoulder, Sid James is staring down Anne Boleyn’s décolletage and Damian Lewis trying to mask his disappointment at Anne of Cleves’s plainness.

The historian, though, has to look beyond the royal soap opera, no matter how enduringly gripping it has turned out to be. In Verappen’s case, that means standing up a thesis that Henry sought to establish English domination over every part of these islands. This seems easy enough to do: Henry never stopped asserting his suzerainty over Scotland, even though Scottish sovereignty had long been recognised by the Pope and the Stuarts came from a historically more robust lineage.

There were limits to what domination of Scotland meant to Henry. In the 1540s, it meant raids and terror but no plans for extra garrisons or extended occupation. The prime military objectives were in France, where they had always been. It was there Henry went in person, whether at the ostentatiously lavish diplomatic summit of the Cloth of Gold in 1520 to meet Francis I or at the head of his army seven years earlier against Louis XII. But while he never went further north than York, Henry remained constantly wary of Scotland as a potential base for a papal-backed Catholic crusade against England - particularly so after the break with Rome.

Historiographically, there are two main schools of thought about Henry VIII: that he was either a frighteningly effective ruler who laid the foundation of the Protestant English nation-state or one pulled between various factions of his court. Veerapen’s Henry is somehow both: insecure, yet domineering, driven to defy the Pope yet devout to the point of attending five masses a day.

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Although he emphasises the extent to which Henry looked at securing power in Wales (effectively), Ireland (partially) and Scotland (ultimately not at all), Veerapen also shows how much these actions were often in turn determined by the ebb and flow of European politics. To take just one example: in 1525 the Battle of Padua left the Pope at the mercy of Habsburg emperor Charles V, who wanted to stand by his aunt, Catherine of Aragon. After it, any chance of Henry obtaining papal consent to a divorce from her disappeared. The counterfactual consequences? No Reformation in England, no Protestant Scotland, no Union, an altogether different America.

Veerapen opens his book by pointing out Henry VIII’s portrait in the ceiling of the King’s Presence Chamber at Stirling Castle - alongside one of his sister Margaret Tudor, her husband James IV, Emperor Charles V and many other contemporary luminaries. But although Overlord is overloaded with occasionally archaic-sounding narration (and far too many brackets), by the time he reaches his conclusion - that “simply considering him [Henry VIII] as a king of England, however influential, will no longer do” - Veerapen has made his case.

Overlord: The Life and Reign of Henry VIII by Steven Veerapen, Birlinn, £30. Steven Veerapen is appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 20 August.

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