A recent voluble tour guide was lecturing us about the history of York and, while telling us about the ruins of their abbey, he started a remark:

“And then, when Henry took the throne, he…”

I had to interrupt (being a loud and obnoxious American), “Which Henry?”

He stopped his flow of lecture and blinked.  “The Eighth, of course.  We’ve only had two monarchs, you know: Henry and Elizabeth.  All the rest were just placeholders…”

Henry VIII, as rendered by Ewerth. National Portrait Gallery, London

The funny thing is that he’s not completely kidding.  While all the monarchs of Britain have left their marks, some have done so more than others.  Being ignorant Americans, who barely remember most of our own presidents, much less the leaders of that-other-country-over-there, we didn’t really realize the extent to which Henry VIII left much more of a mark than most others.  When you start looking around the UK, he stands out in the parade of royalty.  My history books in high school sort-of mentioned him, and we all know his famous portrait, but we (Americans) tend to think of him as an overweight, turkey-leg bearing chap, whose major accomplishments were writing Greensleeves, fathering Elizabeth I, and running through wives like Imelda Marcos ran through shoes.

No.

Henry VIII was a ruthless, bloodthirsty bastard, who ruled with might and terror.  He revolutionized the British military and was an advocate of advanced military technology.  He bucked almost a thousand years of tradition and accumulated power to break with the Catholic church in Rome.  Contrary to popular representations, that move was only partially about his desire for a divorce — it was probably much more about power and economics.  In one fell swoop, he broke the power of the monasteries and grabbed their money and lands which, by that point, included over a third of the property in England and Wales.  It was the largest land grab in British history (short of the Norman Conquest itself).  It represented a huge infusion of capital into England’s coffers and funded Henry’s continued warfare.

But just having grabbed their power, lands, and monies wasn’t enough.  It was necessary to break their spirits as well, in some sense.  Or, more properly, to wipe out any popular support for the clergy by utterly humiliating them.  Henry had horses stabled in churches, pulled down monasteries, and issued writs allowing townsfolk to carry of the stones and roof lead of abbeys at will, for whatever purpose they liked.  We visited one small church that had a waist-high gated fence around the altar because Henry had issued a permit allowing cockfighting in the sanctuary.  His soldiers used some churches as outhouses.

Henry didn’t hesitate to use force against those who opposed him, and the Tower of London saw a steady stream of political opponents on their way to the headsman’s block under Henry’s reign.  He once executed a priest’s mother because of the former’s political crusades against Henry on the continent.  By the time of his death, our tour guide estimated, over 50,000 families had lost someone to Henry’s reign.  It makes his daughter’s moniker, “Bloody Mary,” for a measly 300 Protestants burned at the stake, seem like blatant historical hypocrisy.  Another tour guide cited 153,000 writs of execution ordered under Henry.  This man had the “do not fuck with me” meter cranked to 11.

But this is just one example of the fuller portraits of European monarchs that we’re getting here.  (Living in Europe for a while has done way more for my sense of history than all my HS classes did.)  Take Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, for instance.  What do most of us get out of American history lessons about this sweet couple?  What’s that I hear?  Funded Columbus to sail to the Americas?  True enough, but Spain paints a much different picture.

Don Fernando y Doña Ysabel, Reyes de Castille y Aragon

Like Henry VIII, Ferdinand (II, of Aragon) and Isabella (I, of Castille) were way up there on the “scary and powerful” scale.  They united two kingdoms to create the first major modern nation-state in Europe (what we now think of as Spain).  In the process, they annihilated the last of the Islamic state on the peninsula and slaughtered the Moors.  They were also bent on establishing a fully Catholic state, so they didn’t stop with Muslims — they expelled or killed every Jew they could lay their hands on and purged any other non-Catholics they could identify.  To aid in this process, they created that fine institution that we know today as the Spanish Inquisition, which proceeded to repress, terrify, torture, kill, and purge Muslims, Jews, Protestants, and even other Catholics for over 350 years.  Their reign towers over Spanish history — certainly in the South of Spain, you can’t go anywhere without tripping over their actions.

Nice people.

Oh, and did I mention that their youngest daughter was Catalina, better known to history as Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII’s first wife?  That explains a lot…

Louis XIV

France had Louis XIV.  Best known today by American school children for Versailles, elaborate hairdos, and having dukes vie for the honor of being his personal royal poop-carriers.  All that is true enough, but again, that portrait evolves out of a much more complex, powerful, and dangerous man.  He reigned in France for over 72 years — still the longest run for any European monarch.  (Victoria, the longest-reigning British monarch, only made it a skosh over 63 years.)  During that time, he raised France to being the most powerful nation in Europe, and possibly in the world at that era.  Through his brilliant military leadership, France overturned the balance of military power in Western Europe of the time, emerging on the top of the heap after a series of wars.  He played his enemies as skillfully as he played his friends, keeping both at odds with each other and weak against him.  He defended the borders of France with a scorched-earth policy in Germany and he broke putatively impregnable fortresses.

Louis manipulated his nobles into an elaborate game of courtliness that kept them close at hand, where he could keep his eye on them.  Like F&A before him, he felt that the best way to a solid and united kingdom was religious unity, so he purged Protestants and Jews from France.  (Technically, his revocation of the Edict of Nantes allowed Protestants to remain in France, so long as they did not preach, advocate, or practice Protestantism.  Oh, and their children were to be forcibly baptized Catholic.)

His royal palace at Versailles is now known as one of the most extreme displays of power, decadence, and luxury that has ever been known in the Western world.  (Notwithstanding Bill Gate’s house.)  But it wasn’t just personal aggrandizement.  It was a calculated move as part of Louis’ strategy to centralize all power in France on himself and keep the nobility under his thumb.  By creating such a seat of luxury and wealth, he made it de rigueur to see and be seen there, so everybody who was anybody (anybody who might possibly have been a threat, that is) had to be there in person.  Similarly, by setting up a system of dispensing favors and power by physical proximity to his royal self, he kept the most powerful people the closest to him.  And I’m sure that he found the irony of keeping the second-most-powerful people in the kingdom waiting hand and foot on him utterly delicious.  His reign and designs set the social and political course of France for a century, leading ultimately to the Revolution, with all of its chaos and blood.

It’s interesting and kind-of strange.  Even in the cadres of  most-powerful-people-in-Europe, a few seem to stand out.  I guess that’s not surprising — most Americans know only about a very few presidents of the US either, let alone the other congress-critters and supreme court judges who have critically shaped our country.  Still, none of the US leaders resonate in history with the intensity that people like Henry, Ferdinand and Isabella, or Louis do.  Which is, of course, a lot of the point — by design, none of the US leaders can hold that kind of power.  (A great thing, if you think about some of the psychos we’ve managed to elect over the years.)  But it’s certainly an odd feeling to think about those eras and people.  Educational, but makes me spend a lot of time recompiling world views and going “hmmm…”

Oh, and Henry didn’t write Greensleeves either.

Edit: My Spanish postdoc wrote in with some corrections about Spanish history. (Good to have someone who really knows something giving feedback!) Here’s what she had to say:

The Catholic king and queen never join the two kingdoms. As a matter of fact, when Isabel died, she passed it to her daughter, Juana, who left it to her son Carlos V, who finally inherited everything their grandparents had … as well as the Austro-Hungarian Empire (from his other grandad). Which is kind of funny, because Carlos V shouldn’t have inherit any of his grandparents lands if his uncles/aunts had had a child before dying.

Spain as a unique kingdom is a really modern concept that many current Spaniards are not even happy with :-)