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Henry VIII and Henry IX: Unlived Lives and Re-written Histories

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Laura WrightORCiD

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Abstract

In 1612, with the sudden death of Henry Frederick, King James I and VI’s oldest son and heir, a potential future was cut short. Henry Frederick had been an icon of futurity, a ‘champion of Protestant and national interests, promoted in the context of a neo-chivalric revival’. As J. W. Williamson shows in his study of the prince’s mythology, ‘the quality of Protestant symbology as it applied to Prince Henry was unusually relentless’. He was, to the Scots poets who eulogized his birth, a ‘Hercules’ who offered a future free from vice. With his death, these hopes were ended. Henry Frederick, who fashioned himself as a far more militant figure than his father, could be mourned only for the battles he might have won. In a letter to Lady Carleton, dated 19 December 1612, Isaac Wake describes Henry’s armour being paraded before his mourners, ‘every parcel whereof, to his very gauntlet & spurs was carried by men of quality’. His funeral was punctuated by military music: ‘Henry’s obsequies, which buried him with the trappings of a Protestant warrior-king, were more reflective of what might have been than of what was.

Publication metadata

Author(s): Wright LJ

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: Shakespeare Survey

Year: 2022

Volume: 74

Pages: 283-297

Print publication date: 18/08/2022

Online publication date: 28/08/2021

Acceptance date: 01/11/2020

ISSN (print): 0080-9152

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

URL: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009036795.020

DOI: 10.1017/9781009036795.020

Notes: Volume title: Shakespeare and Education.

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