When Henry VIII ascended the throne in 1509, he was heralded as the humanists’ ideal monarch—open-minded, idealistic, and benevolent. England seemed on the verge of a new golden age. But by the time of Henry's death in 1547, he was widely regarded both at home and abroad as the archetypal tyrant who had unleashed religious and political chaos on his country while sinking into abject personal depravity. Greg Walker's splendid book tells the story of Henry's and England's transformation between the early 1530s and the king's death from the point of view of the writers who struggled to come to terms with these changes. All the writers Walker considers were the products of a humanist culture that encouraged intellectual inquiry and debate and made the counseling of princes the highest priority of the civic-minded intellectual. For nearly two decades, Henry accepted the assumptions of this culture, appreciating frank council while distrusting flatterers. The political climate changed dramatically, however, with the opening of the first Reformation Parliament in 1529 and the controversy over the divorce and remarriage in the early 1530s. From this point, Henry ignored or silenced the diverse voices of council that he had once encouraged, turning instead to a narrow, partisan, and evangelical cohort of advisers. Once Henry had broken with Rome and assumed the Supremacy in church and state, his subjects’ written and spoken words were scrutinized for hints of disloyalty and treason. Before the onset of official paranoia, however, the writers Walker studies retained the belief that Henry and his policies could be changed via the traditional channels of persuasion.
Walker takes as his first exhibit the 1532 edition of Chaucer's Works, edited by William Thynne and Sir Brian Tuke. Several scholars have argued that this landmark Chaucer edition was informed by religiopolitical motives and that England's greatest poet became a battleground for different factions, each claiming him for their own cause. However, whereas previous critics have argued that the Thynne-Tuke edition supported Henry's pretension to an imperial sovereignty, Walker sees the edition as a kind of speculum principis, lodging a carefully calibrated appeal for moderation at a time of deepening crisis. As he does for each of the authors he studies, Walker builds his argument by seamlessly layering different kinds of analysis. He discusses the identities of the Chaucer editors as well as the structure of the edition and its individual components in the context of local religious and political pressures. Turning to the plays and poems of John Heywood, Walker argues that they too carry a conservative doctrinal charge but also appeal to Henry's self-restraint and his willingness to subordinate personal gratification to the common good. In a brilliant reading, Walker shows how The Play of the Weather exploits the ambiguous figure of Jupiter to both scrutinize and mock Henry in a way that very soon would be virtually suicidal.
The book's second of three sections argues against the misconception of Sir Thomas Elyot as the dull spokesman of Tudor orthodoxy. Walker's Elyot is a daring political writer who struggled to balance loyalty to the regime he served with adherence to the humanist ideal of the virtuous prince that Henry was so clearly violating. Walker's reading of The Book of the Governor moves effortlessly among the text and its contexts, discovering rich seams of allusion and topicality produced by Elyot's careful selection of classical anecdotes and humanist platitudes. Elyot's many examples of rulers who are destroyed by not heeding good council warn Henry of the dangers of hubris. Elyot also picks Erasmus's model of the beehive as his ideal analogue for the well-ordered commonwealth because the king of the bees rules by persuasion rather than coercion, enjoying limited rather than absolute power. Elyot continues to interrogate the limits of princely power as well as the responsibilities of subjects to restrain its excesses in dialogues, translations of advice books for rulers, and a collection of maxims, The Banquet of Sapience (1534). Elyot proclaims the need for loyal subjects to speak truth to power without resorting to the hostile railing of Pasquil, the nominal hero of his Lucianic dialogue Pasquil the Plain. In The Banquet, though, Elyot comes close to ignoring his own advice by including dangerously bold examples of the evils of divorce and remarriage—examples that for early readers would have mirrored Henry's indiscretions. By the end of his life, Elyot had all but lost faith in the efficacy of good council, proposing in The Image of Governance a royal council with constitutional power to guide and, when necessary, overrule the royal will.
The book's final section, “The Death of Council: Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey,” explores the unfolding crises of Henry's reign through the life and work of the period's most rebellious yet brilliant “courtly makers.” Walker discusses howew complexities and ironies in these epistles that reject the royal court as the focus of literary endeavor and instead construct a community of aristocratic readers profoundly ambivalent about the traditional institutions of power. Walker is particularly good at explaining the political attractions of the sources Wyatt chooses to translate and at teasing out the significance of the changes that he makes to his “originals.” Both Wyatt and Surrey adapted biblical as well as classical texts. Their paraphrases of the Psalms, for example, transformed an established literary exercise from an act of personal contrition into a meditation on the nature of tyranny. They found King David, as both wise ruler and murderous adulterer, an irresistible archetype of Henry VIII. Surrey, asserting the privileges of his high birth, went further than Wyatt and others in condemning Henry's conduct and the state of England. Surrey's subversive writings were not mentioned at his treason trial in 1547; he was condemned for displaying a heraldic crest that implied his place in the royal succession—a self-aggrandizing gesture that echoes throughout the poetry.
In conclusion, Walker argues that England experienced a cultural revolution during the 1530s and 1540s. Henry's behavior undermined previous assumptions about the moderating and humanizing effect literature could have upon a rational ruler. In a changed climate of totalitarian control, writers needed to find different identities, strategies, and languages for exploring and explaining a world turned upside down. A new literary culture developed despite the king, not for him; a literature of council had become a literature of despair or resistance. Walker's readings invest the literature of the early sixteenth century with a complex political urgency that is more often associated with Elizabethan texts. This thoroughly researched and well-written book asks us to rethink the standard narrative of sixteenth-century literary history that sees pedestrian beginnings eventually turning into an Elizabethan Golden Age. For scholars in the fields of literature and history, Writing under Tyranny is destined to be a classic.
