Hi everyone and welcome or welcome back to History Calling, where I bring you new videos every Friday
delving into the stories of the past. Today we’re asking the question, was Henry VIII a brain
damaged King? There have long been theories that a series of sporting accidents which occurred in the
1520s and 1530s left Henry with a traumatic brain injury that led to changes in his personality and
influenced his decisions during the last 11 years of his life to execute two wives and a litany of
other relations and servants. But how compelling is the evidence for his injuries, what exactly do
we know about his physical and mental state in the final portion of his life and might there
be another explanation or explanations for his increasingly tyrannical behaviour? Let’s find out.
The theory that Henry VIII was brain damaged gained a new lease on life in 2016 when a
group of neurologists from Yale University published a short article in the Journal of
Clinical Neuroscience, arguing that the time was ripe to re-examine this theory because of
advances in their field. This article is behind a paywall, however if you’re a university student or
staff member, or you know someone who is, you can access it through their library, so I’ll
leave a link in the description box. The authors list a number of symptoms they believe Henry had
which can result from brain damage, specifically a changed personality consistent with sociopathy,
memory problems, difficulties with impulse control, headaches, insomnia and depression.
They link these symptoms to three specific accidents, so let’s look at these in more detail.
The first was on 10 March 1524 while Henry was jousting with his brother-in-law,
Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. We have a detailed description of it from the chronicler
Edward Hall, who writes that the men were at opposite ends of the tilt, ready to joust.
Henry was handed his spear by the Marquess of Dorset, with his visor still up, while Suffolk,
at the other end of the tilt, was told the King was ready to go. Suffolk couldn’t see
Henry though, because his own visor was already down and severely limiting his field of vision.
We can get a sense of what this must have been like by looking at this suit of armour,
which actually belonged to Henry and which dates from 1527. As you can see from the helmet, with
the visor down to protect his face, especially the eyes, the wearer would be almost blinded.
Suffolk now set off down the field, at which point Henry, seeing him coming,
did the same, but without putting his visor in place first. The spectators could see the
danger and began screaming at the two men to halt, but neither did. Then came the impact.
According to Hall, Suffolk’s spear hit Henry ‘on the brow right under the defece of y hedpiece on
the very soyffe scull [it means a skull cap] or bassenetpece wherevnto the barbet for power and
defence is charneld.’ This section of helmet was designed to be protected by the visor and so was
not able to withstand such a blow. Hall continues: ‘but when ye spere on that place lighted,
it was great ieopardy of death insomuche that the face was bare, for the Dukes spere brake all to
shyuers, [meaning splinters] and bare the kynges viser or barbet so farre backe by the contrebuffe
that all the kynges headpiece was full of spleters [again, he means splinters].’
Onlookers were horrified and Suffolk swore never to joust against the King again (though in fact
he did end up doing so), but Henry said that no one was blame but himself and proceeded to
run a further 6 tilts that day in order that ‘all men might perceiue that he had no hurt,
which was great ioy and comfort to all his subiectes there present’.
Hall also adds that if Henry had been hurt, his servants ‘would haue put the Duke in ieopardy.’
The fact that they didn’t is further evidence that the King was unharmed. The 2016 article claims
that the King was ‘de-horsed and dazed’, but Hall says nothing of the sort and in fact this is just
one of many places in which the neurologists have made mistakes in their use of the primary sources,
I assume because they didn’t look at them themselves and instead tried to take shortcuts by
just reading some secondary works. Had Henry been seriously injured, he couldn’t have gotten up,
shaken himself off, conversed with Suffolk and his servants and then ridden in six more jousts.
Furthermore, the neurologists assert that his headaches began after this point,
while others have noted that these pains only began in 1528, four years later. I therefore
don’t see any connection between the two, nor is there any evidence that Henry had constant,
debilitating migraines. There are sporadic references to headaches in the accounts of
those who knew him and Henry even references one himself in a letter to Anne Boleyn,
but they could just as easily have been stress induced as the King was, by the late 1520s,
trying to extricate himself from his marriage to Catherine of Aragon
in order to marry Anne and finding it a lot harder to get his own way than he’d expected.
The second supposed head injury occurred in 1525.
Again the source for this is Edward Hall, who says:
In this yere the kyng folowing of his hauke lept ouer a diche beside Hychyn,
with a polle and the polle brake, so that if one Edmond Mody, a foteman,
had not lept into the water, & lift vp his hed, whiche was fast in the clay he had been drouned’.
The neurologists say the King ‘may have been dazed or unconscious’ on the basis
that he had to be pulled out of the ditch, but again, that’s not what the source says
and I dislike the leap that they’re making here. Henry was stuck but it doesn’t mean
he’d taken a serious head blow and there’s nothing here to suggest unconsciousness.
Finally, we have what is perhaps the most famous of Henry’s accidents and also the
most misunderstood. This was another incident at a joust and occurred at Greenwich on 24 January 1536
when the King fell off his horse. One reason this accident gets so much attention is because Anne
Boleyn had a miscarriage shortly afterwards on 29th, which she blamed on her distress at the King
falling. Another reason is the description of it found in a letter written on 6 March by Dr Pedro
Ortiz, the Spanish Ambassador in Rome, to the Empress of Spain. Ortiz says that he has recently
received a letter from the Spanish Ambassador in France dated 15 February which told him that
‘The French king said that the king of England had fallen from his horse,
and been for two hours without speaking. "La Ana" was so upset that she miscarried of a son.’
This obviously sounds like a serious injury.
The phrase ‘without speaking’ suggests that Henry was unconscious and the neurologists and several
other medical experts who have written about his supposed injuries and personality changes
have latched onto this and run with it. What they don’t usually do however, is consider
the reliability of this source, or look at any other sources which contradict what Ortiz says.
First, let’s consider where Ortiz is getting his information. He’s sitting in Rome in early 1536,
getting a letter from an ambassador in France, who’s repeating something he heard the French King
say, who presumably heard it from his ambassador in England, though we don’t know for sure. It
could just as easily have been gossip sent in a letter to someone else at the French court,
which then made its way to the King’s ears, or even hearsay coming in from English and French
sailors crossing the channel for trade purposes. The ambassador who wrote the letter may even
have misunderstood the French King’s meaning. No matter what, this is one long chain of evidence,
spread across 6 weeks and half the continent of Europe with no definitive, original source.
It appears entirely possible that some details of the fall have become garbled. This seems all the
more likely when we look at two pieces of evidence which come from people who were actually in
England at the time of Henry’s fall and who paint a very different picture of the severity of the
incident. The first is the Imperial ambassador, Eustace Chapuys. He wrote on 29 January that:
On the eve of the Conversion of St. Paul, the King being mounted on a great horse to run at
the lists, both fell so heavily that every one thought it a miracle he was not killed,
but he sustained no injury.
He added a further detail in another letter to the Emperor dated 10 February,
confirming that Anne Boleyn had blamed her recent miscarriage ‘on the duke of Norfolk, whom she
hates, saying he frightened her by bringing the news of the fall the King had six days before.’
However once again, he downplays the seriousness of Henry’s fall, writing that ‘it is well known
that is not the cause, for it was told her in a way that she should not be alarmed or attach much
importance to it.’ Chapuys was well placed to get good, first-hand accounts of Henry’s health
and disliked the King for his treatment of Catherine of Aragon and Princess Mary.
Had Henry been seriously hurt, Chapuys would have reported it
and I think, with a certain sense of glee that the King was getting his just deserts.
Finally we have the report of English herald and chronicler Charles Wriothesley, also on the
spot in London at the time. He too recorded that Anne had a miscarriage and asserted that ‘it was
said she tooke a fright, for the King ranne that tyme at the ring and had a fall from his horse,
but he had no hurt; and she tooke such a fright withal that it caused her to fall in travaile,
and so was delivered afore her full tyme.’
So, as you can see, no one who was actually in the capital and in a position to get first-hand
information about this fall set much store by it. It could have gone horribly wrong,
but it didn’t. All in all therefore, I think we’ve established that the evidence for any
serious head blows, let alone repeated ones is very shaky indeed, while there is little
evidence of a series of headaches which can be reliably attached to any fall or head blow either.
But what about the rest of the symptoms which are often tied to the claim of brain damage?
Did Henry actually display these problems and if so, might there be another explanation for them?
The first is amnesia and here the writers of the 2016 article make some serious errors.
They claim that after an argument with Queen Catherine Parr in 1546,
Henry ordered his 6th wife to be taken to the Tower of London, only to forget he had done
so the next day when he berated those who arrived to arrest her. The Tudor historian, Tracy Borman,
wrote an excellent response to this article in the History Today magazine (linked below)
in which she mentions this claim and notes that ‘In fact, the warrant was part of a conspiracy led
by the queen’s enemy, Stephen Gardiner, and Henry knew nothing about it until Katherine ran to him,
pleading for her life.’ One of the neurologists came back and said that he wasn’t an historian and
that they had read the story in a secondary source whose opinion differed from Borman’s. This gang,
is a classic example of why you should always look at the primary sources yourself and why,
if you want to write an interdisciplinary article in a field far removed from your own, you need at
least one of the co-authors to be an expert in that field. Had these neurologists brought a
historian onboard, this problem and the others I’m about to mention, likely wouldn’t have happened.
Next up we have the claim that Henry had impulse control issues. The neurologists offer almost no
evidence for this, beyond a three word quote from a French ambassador in 1540 saying that
Henry suffered from ‘lightness and inconstancy’. They make a few other un-referenced claims about
his anger, paranoia and unpredictability, but I wouldn’t say that being a grumpy old man
and suffering paranoia in Tudor England, when you’ve made as many enemies as Henry had,
are necessarily signs of a brain injury. As monarch, changing one’s mind could even be read
as a clever political move, to keep observers on their toes and not become too predictable.
As for sociopathy, all they cite here is a book by author Derek Wilson, which says that the worst of
the ‘bloodletting of those close to the Crown’ occurred after 1536. That’s factually correct,
but in no way conclusive evidence of a brain injury. Mary I, having never shown violent
tendencies beforehand, executed a number of members of her extended family and allowed
nearly 300 people to be burnt to death, all in less than 5 years, however no one is saying that
she was physically brain damaged. We also need to consider the claim that Henry went through a
sudden personality change and out of nowhere, began executing family members and friends.
This is simply untrue. I’ve always believed when studying Henry’s life that what we see
is the natural evolution of a man who could be charming and magnanimous when it suited him
(for instance when courting Anne Boleyn as you see here) and incredibly nasty and cruel when
it didn’t (and here we see Anne being executed on her husband’s orders). Watch my videos on the life
of Mary I for more evidence of this to see how badly he treated her and her mother from the late
1520s onwards because they wouldn’t agree to the annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon.
He’d also executed one of his oldest friends and advisors, Thomas More, in 1535,
before the 1536 fall from his horse. I therefore see no sudden change in his personality.
This is someone who had been given almost unlimited power at the age of 17 without ever
really having to work for it, who had no one in his life who could really say no to him and who
lived in a violent era when things like torture and execution were legal and common. Under such
circumstances I might actually be more surprised if he hadn’t indulged in tyrannical behaviour.
Moving on, the 2016 authors correctly note that Henry had periods of depression, often linked
to deaths of those close to him (even if he was the one who had had them killed, as in the case
of his advisor, Thomas Cromwell). This seems like a normal human reaction that anyone might suffer
however. It’s not linked by the scientists to any head injury and I have to wonder why they bothered
to bring it up when they seemed unable to really make anything of it. Henry was a man who’d lost
most of his children, seen his wife, Jane Seymour, die, believed that one of her replacements,
Katherine Howard, had cheated on him, who’d split with the Church in Rome despite being Catholic
and who had perhaps realised that he wasn’t as important a player on the international stage
as he liked to believe himself to be. Periods of melancholy are therefore hardly strange.
I’ve already explained that the headaches started years after 2 of the supposed head injuries
and as for insomnia, even the neurologists admit that it’s hard to connect this to a brain injury
when dealing with someone like Henry, who had chronic pain. This brings us nicely to the
many other health issues the King suffered which can account for a large number of his symptoms.
Henry famously had problems with his legs which were flaring up as early as 1527 while he was
staying at Canterbury during a royal progress. Suzannah Lipscomb (whose book is linked in the
description box) has postulated that the 1536 fall caused a pre-existing ulcer to burst,
noting that by April, just before the fall of Anne Boleyn, a courtier reported that ‘The King goes
seldom abroad because his leg is something sore’, something which Henry himself confirmed that June.
His leg troubles would continue for the rest of his life and they were incredibly painful.
On one occasion in 1537 he was in such agony that he was black in the face and unable to speak.
Prevented from exercising as much as he used to, his suits of armour show that he had gained
a massive amount of weight between 1527 and 1544 (much of it after 1536 according to those who saw
him in person). This pain also easily explains his irascible nature, insomnia and dark moods,
while (if you want to insist that he occasionally forgot things, or changed his mind suddenly),
a lack of sleep could certainly lead to brain fog and impaired cognitive function
as any of us who have had a late night followed by an early morning can attest.
Other modern doctors have put forward additional hypotheses to explain Henry’s
increasingly tyrannical behaviour and other health problems, including lead poisoning
from his so-called medications, Cushing syndrome (which is when you have too much
of the hormone cortisol in your system) and the neurological disorder, McCleod syndrome.
So, do I think Henry VIII was brain damaged? Well, while I admit that it’s almost always impossible
to rule out anything entirely (for all we know he was dropped on his head as a baby for instance),
I think the evidence put forward to support such a claim is very weak and that other explanations
are far more likely. Above all, it’s long been my belief that Henry was essentially a nasty,
spoilt individual who lacked the emotional maturity to deal with life’s disappointments
or recognise his own faults and limitations, instead opting to lash out at others.
I think that this, more than anything else, is the main cause of the terrible things he did.
What do you think though? Let me know in the comments section if you believe
the King suffered a brain injury and while you’re down there, if you enjoyed this video,
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You can learn more about the Tudors by going to my Tudor monarchs series or my
playlist on the six wives of Henry VIII, or for something different, why not try my
video on the mystery of skeleton lake? I’ll be back next week and until then, keep learning.