Charlie Fenton’s Reviews > Henry VIII: The Decline and Fall of a Tyrant > Status Update

‘Those formalities over, the first macabre priority was to stabilise the twenty-eight stone (178kg) corpse, already corrupted by the blood and pus of his ulcerated legs, by ‘splurging, cleansing, bowelling, cereing, embalming and dressing with spices.’ The royal apothecary Thomas Alsop supplied perfumed unguent oils - including cloves, myrrh and sweet-smelling nigella and musk’

‘Together with the crown, Edward was left all Henry’s plate and ‘household stuff’, artillery and other ordnance, warships, money and jewels - valued at an estimates £1,200,000 or £517 million at 2019 prices. Debts - and Henry, in a remarkable lapse of memory, knew of none - were his executors’ first duty to settle after his burial.’

‘Jump forward to 1540 and another armour being made. The change is dramatic. Henry’s waist had swelled to a massive 54in and his chest to 58in (137, 147cm). By the time he died just over six years later, he must have weighed at least twenty-eight stone (178kg) with a BMI of 51.9kg/m2. His weight is off the scale used in calculating BMI today.’

‘As a young man in 1514, his armour, specially made for him, shows that he was 6ft 1in (1.85m) in height and had a trim waist measurement of 35in and a chest diameter of 42in (89, 107cm). Here was a fit athlete, the muscular embodiment of chivalry and sixteenth-century sporting prowess, with a svelte Body Mass Index (BMI) of 25.6 - 27kg/m2.’

‘For four centuries, the precious metal content of coins had been maintained in England at 92.5 per cent purity. During Henry’s ‘Great Debasement’ that continued up to 1546, this was reduced to twenty-five per cent by adding base copper to the gold or silver melt.’

‘Henry’s strategic mistake in unilaterally scrapping the allies’ grand plan to march on Parish and focus on capturing Boulogne, failed to deliver a knock-out blow on French military might. Instead, like a small boy mischievously attacking a wasps’ nest with a stick, he had left himself open to angry retribution. The tide of France’s inexorable retaliation, planned since early January, was now in full flood

‘The armour of jousting on horseback weighed a mighty 110lbs (50kg). The burden of the foot-combat version, at 88lbs (40kg), suggests that only a fit, agile man could fight with a sword or a poleaxe while wearing more than six stone of metal - particularly on a hot day. Henry was that warrior in his fantasy, but reality dictated that instead of fighting alongside his knights, he should sit out any battle’

‘In July 1543, Suffolk and Cuthbert Tunstall, bishop of Durham, described how they loosened the tongues of two prisoners (‘one a very simple creature’)... They fitted the prisoners with new leather shoes, well saturated with pig’s grease, and set them in stocks, their feet held fast, close to a blazing hot fire. Basically, they fried their feet.’

‘In his heart, Norfolk knew his accident-prone expedition had failed, but he presented a brave face, boasting to Gardiner and Wriothesley, of the ‘great hurt we have done in Scotland’ and that ‘this is the goodliest army that I have seen’. However, if it had invaded two months earlier with sufficient food supplies, ‘we might have done what we would without great resistance’.’

‘Searching desperately for some much-needed kudos, the duke [of Norfolk] now sought to win credit for the discovery of his own family’s crimes against the crown. He reminded Henry that much of what had come to light was contained in his own report after searching Dereham’s coffers at Lambeth.’