Henry VIII's Psalter: Himself as King David

Earlier this year there was an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City on The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England. One of the featured exhibits was the Psalter King Henry VIII commissioned from Jean Mallard in 1540, on loan from the British Library. Both the British Library and the Smithsonian Magazine comment on how Henry VIII designed the Psalter to reflect his piety--including comparisons of himself to King David--and how he annotated certain psalms to identify himself in the psalms as one who had done the Lord's Will and was being rewarded for it (i.e., the birth of his son Edward).

From the British Library's Medieval manuscripts blog:

The Psalter was commissioned by the King himself in 1540 and written and illustrated for him by Jean Mallard, a French scribe and illuminator. It is a lavish production and is still in its original binding, which although quite threadbare, retains traces of deep red velvet. The Psalms are written in an elegant, humanist script and accompanied by exquisitely decorated initials showing birds, insects, fruit, flowers and foliage.

But the Psalter’s true significance lies in its main illustrations, four of which depict Henry, and its annotations written by the King. Taken together, they demonstrate that by the 1540s Henry perceived himself as King David of the Old Testament who, according to tradition, composed the Psalms and whose story was used to justify Henry’s declaration of independence from Rome and to define the Royal Supremacy. . . .

The Smithsonian Magazine article includes some analysis of Henry VIII's annotations in the margins of his Psalter:

Henry appears to have found the self-justification he’d been seeking. Handwritten annotations in the psalter reveal what the king thought of the text and its implications for his own power. On one page, Henry scrawled “nota de peccatore quid ait,” Latin for “note: what he says about the sinner,” next to a passage declaring that sinners’ hereditary lines will be cut off as punishment for their evil deeds. By 1540, after years of waiting and seizing power to enable his multiple marriages, he had at last been rewarded with a son who would continue the Tudor line. Based on his interpretation of the psalm, Henry saw himself as being in God’s good graces—perhaps unthinkable when modern readers consider that he had already executed one of his wives, Anne Boleyn, and would soon execute another, the young Katherine Howard.

In 1540, Henry married again--twice!--to Anne of Cleves and then to Katherine Howard, who followed, as stated above, his second wife to the block.

The article goes on to state:

If these markings tell scholars anything, it’s that Henry wasn’t suffering from a twinging conscience. On the contrary, he viewed unfolding events as vindicating the very choices that later led to his reputation as a callous tyrant. Henry’s notes implicitly justify his self-empowerment; his marriages; and the executions of those who opposed him or fell out of favor, including chief adviser Thomas Cromwell and his old tutor and lord chamberlain, Thomas More. These individuals and many others were, in one way or another, casualties of Henry’s attempt to break from Rome and marry Anne Boleyn.

Following one's conscience is an important theme in Henry VIII's religious and marital matters. He complained of his conscience bothering him after years of marriage to Catherine of Aragon that he had done wrong in marrying his brother's widow. St. Thomas More writes extensively about how he had formed his conscience to answer Henry VIII's questions about the validity of that marriage. His Dialogue on Conscience also explains his position and he explained the traditional Catholic view of conscience to Cromwell and those questioning him on why he would not take the Oath as his monarch required when Cromwell tried to compare More's conscience to the consciences of the heretics which More had investigated as Chancellor (as he described the conversation to his daughter Meg in a letter dated June 3, 1535):

To this Master Secretary said that I had before this when I was Chan­cellor examined heretics and thieves and other malefactors and gave me a great praise above my deserving in that behalf. And he said that I then, as he thought and at the leastwise Bishops did use to examine heretics, whether they believed the Pope to be the head of the Church and used to compel them to make a precise answer thereto. And why should not then the King, since it is a law made here that his Grace is Head of the Church, here compel men to answer precisely to the law here as they did then concerning the Pope.

I answered and said that I protested that I intended not to defend any part or stand in contention; but I said there was a difference between those two cases because at that time, as well here as elsewhere through the corps of Christendom, the Pope's power was recognized for an undoubted thing which seems not like a thing agreed in this realm and the contrary taken for truth in other realms. Whereunto Master Secretary answered that they were as well burned for the denying of that as they be beheaded for deny­ing of this, and therefore as good reason to compel them to make precise answer to the one as to the other.

Whereto I answered that since in this case a man is not by a law of one realm so bound in his conscience, where there is a law of the whole corps of Christendom to the contrary in matter touching belief, as he is by a law of the whole corps though there hap to be made in some place a local law to the contrary, the reasonableness or the unreasonableness in binding a man to precise answer, standeth not in the respect or difference between beheading and burning, but because of the difference in charge of con­science, the difference standeth between beheading and hell.

What the Smithsonian Magazine article highlights is that by 1540 Henry VIII was not suffering from any troubled conscience about what he had done to achieve his desire to sire a legitimate son to succeed him. Henry VIII died in 1547, leaving that son, Edward VI a young boy who would never reach the age of majority, marry, or sire a son to succeed him. 

The commentator in the article, James Clarke, notes that Henry might have thought himself in God's good graces, but was concerned that that youth had passed him by and that he was getting old: he was beginning to face his mortality, if not his morality! 

Image Credit (Public Domain): Henry VIII reading Psalm 1: Beatus Vir (Blessed the man).