Henry: Virtuous Prince

Abysmal. I am shocked how poor this book is. The author, David Starkey, I have seen on several television documentaries and have always enjoyed them for what they are, popular history that those without the need to read can enjoy. Yes he comes across as a sanctimonious, pompous know-all but he, at least, told a good story.

This, my first read of any of his books has left me cold. I could not wait to finish this as it was so poorly presented and so badly written as to be of little use to the serious scholar interested in the youthful Henry VIII.

The introduction alone should have had the alarm bells ringing as we get a faecal matter joke. Seriously? Onwards and upwards this reader thought. Nope! There is constant supposition with poorly backed footnotes, nor a bibliography I might add, and some of the most pompous prose I have ever read. Take this for example when a very young Prince Henry is made Duke of York by his father.

“What, if anything, did the three and half year Henry understand of all this and remember? The higher symbolism – of physical cleansing, spiritual purification, sleep and awakening as a (re)new(ed) man – would have been beyond him, as indeed it was probably beyond adult fellow postulants as well. Perhaps instead the even lingered in his memory as a series of intense sensory experiences: cold and heat; wetting and being towelled dry; the scratchy fabric of his hermits gown; the mysterious gloom of the chapel in the small hours and the weariness of staying up later than he'd ever done before; and, in the morning the exhilaration of showing, once more, that he could ride all by himself”

And it don't finish there! We get another 124 words of dribble about his nurse, his mistress and women, vigils and watches and other complete rot that is utterly superfluous to the story of his dukedom and the machinations behind it.

And the analogies. When discussing William Compton, Henry VIII's Groom of the Stool, Starkey compares their relationship to Sancho Panza and Don Quixote, Figaro and Count Almaviva and Jeeves and Wooster! “....to play the rear legs and be the brains of the enterprise”

In the introduction Starkey makes it clear that this is a book on the youthful Henry VIII and as such is titled Henry Virtuous Prince. I suspect that he has bitten of more than he could chew because this book should have finished with his crowning as king. Instead it is padded out with his life up to the coming of Thomas Wolsey. The last chapter comes to an abrupt halt while discussing Wolsey and is so sudden, a short meaningless sentence to the future is at the end, that I would have thought that even more forgiving readers than me may have been surprised.

In the end a terrible book and for anyone interested in the fascinating life of Henry VIII steer well clear of this pretentious drivel.