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).

The Last Abbey Surrenders

Waltham Abbey in Essex, in its last foundation a house of Augustinian Canons, surrendered to the Crown on March 23, 1540. It was the last abbey to surrender in the Dissolution or Suppression of the Monasteries. Robert Fuller was the last abbot; he had officiated at Queen Jane Seymour's funeral in 1537. He received a generous pension but may have died soon after the surrender as his will was probated in November 1540. Waltham Abbey was refounded by Henry II as penance after the murder of St. Thomas a Becket; it had originally been founded as a church and college by Harold Godwinson and he was buried there after the Battle of Hastings. Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn visited the Abbey and the abbot tried to maintain the house, bribing Cromwell. According to British History Online:

The net value of the abbey is given in the Valor as £900 4s. 3d., the gross value (fn. 73) being £1,079 2s. 1d. yearly. It was thus the richest house in Essex. But though the most important of the English Augustinian houses it was not quite the richest, being surpassed by Cirencester, Merton, Leicester and Plympton. No event of any importance occurred in connexion with the dissolution. The abbot appears to have paid the usual bribes to Cromwell, as much as £50 being received (fn. 74) from him in 1535. Waltham managed to outlast every other abbey in England, and it was not until 23 March, 1540, that it was formally surrendered (fn. 75) by Robert, abbot, Thomas Waryn, Robert Wodleff, Robert Reed, William Lelle, Thomas Hawkyns, George Sollys, Edmund Sander, Robert Parkar, Edward Story, Hugh Yonge, Humphrey Martyn, Miles Garrard, John Noris, John Sander, John Homstyd, Robert Hull and Edmund Freke. The last three of these were at Leighs and Martyn was at Dunmow in 1534, all, apparently, having been transferred to Waltham after the dissolution of their priories. On the day after the surrender pensions (fn. 76) were awarded; the abbot receiving the large amount of £200 yearly in lands and other possessions, and the prior, chaunter, sub-prior, sexton and other canons sums varying from £20 to £5 yearly. The abbot had a grant (fn. 77) for life accordingly, on 6 May, of the manors of Woodford, Theydon Bois, Netteswell, Passelow, Stanford le Hope, Wormingford, Stanway, Cullings and Arlesey, and the rectories and advowsons of the churches of Wormingford and Arlesey besides other lands which had belonged to St. Bartholomew's Priory.

In the original scheme (fn. 78) for the establishment of new bishoprics at the dissolution it was intended that Waltham should be raised to the position of a cathedral, but this was never done. Its possessions were dispersed after the surrender. The demesne lands of the monastery were leased (fn. 79) to Anthony Denny on 12 April, 1541, He was made keeper (fn. 80) of the site on 9 January, 1542; and on 28 June, 1547, this was granted (fn. 81) to him in fee.

An extensive inventory (fn. 82) was taken of the goods of the abbey. Most of the vestry stuff is marked as given to the parish church of Waltham and other poor churches round. The church and household plate was mostly reserved for the king, and Sir John Williams, master of the jewels, received 1,169 ounces to his use on 18 March, 1541; but part of the household plate was given to the abbot and part sold to Denny. Part of the goods were received by the abbot, Denny and others, and rewards of a year's wages were given to a large number of servants.

Anthony Denny did very well through the Court of Augmentations and Henry VIII's friendship, according to his Parliamentary biography:

Between 1535 and 1545 Denny became the most intimate of Henry VIII’s few friends. As keeper of Westminster palace and of the royal household there he acted as receiver and paymaster of the King’s personal spending money, much of which was kept in the jewel house in the palace. His own income from offices has been estimated at some £200 but royal grants of land were the chief source of his wealth; in his will he acknowledged that ‘by the princely liberality’ of Henry VIII he had gained ‘all that I leave or can leave to my posterity’. The most important of these grants were, in 1536, houses in Westminster known as Paradise, Purgatory and Hell, and Cheshunt priory with its lands in four counties; in 1538, Hertford priory; in 1540, Amwell manor, Hertfordshire and Waltham rectory, Essex; in 1542, Mettingham college, Suffolk, with six East Anglian manors; and in 1547, in the distribution of crown lands after Henry VIII’s death, the freehold reversions to most of Waltham abbey’s estates, with over 2,000 acres of land elsewhere. An exchange of lands with the King was confirmed by an Act (35 Hen. VIII, no. 23) in 1544. Denny also leased property from the crown and made extensive purchases in Essex and Hertfordshire from private individuals. At his death he owned about 20,000 acres in Essex and Hertfordshire alone, his annual income from land being probably as much as £750. With the possibility of raising considerable sums from his London customs office, and from a licence granted him in December 1546 to export wheat, beer and leather, he was undoubtedly a wealthy man.

The abbey church is now an Anglican parish and remains of the abbey, the gatehouse and bridge, are part of the English Heritage program.