There can be virtually no aspect of Henry VIII’s life and reign, as Steven Veerapen puts it, that has not been ‘scrutinised under every available lens’. There have, of course, been any number of histories and biographies of Henry himself, and as many again of his wives and ministers to go alongside the films, plays and novels that, from Shakespeare to Hilary Mantel and (best of the lot) C.J. Sansom, show no signs of drying up.
So ‘why bother writing about Henry VIII?’ Veerapen asks – and he’ll not be the only one wondering that. He is happy to concede that this is probably an exhausted seam from a narrowly English perspective, but what of other perspectives? What of Henry’s immediate neighbours, targets of the imperial pretensions suggested by this book’s title? ‘Henry’s life was not merely an English one,’ Veerapen insists,
Henrician claims to an ‘overlordship’ smack as much of bombast and pique as of any settled imperial policy
Nor was his story an English story. His shadow fell heavily across every corner of the British Isles and his reign – and his developing regal identity – involved persistent attempts to assert and entrench English authority in Wales, Ireland and, most doggedly, in the holdout kingdom north of the border. Henry was by modern standards an ardent English nationalist, but he was not an isolationist; rather he was an aggressive expansionist.
