It is January 28th, 1547. We’re in Cuddon, beyond TUDA London’s southern boundary. Archbishop Thomas Cranmer hears a knock upon his chamber door. It’s gone midnight, but the Archbishop is not asleep. In fact, he spent the last few hours expecting this knock and knows what it is in aid of. He’s being summoned to the king’s side.
In years gone by, this kind of summons may have inspired Dread. The famously tyrannical king has become even more erratic in his old age. His most recent death warrant has been carried out just 9 days earlier. But not now. He won’t be dispatching anyone from Earth this evening. Tonight, it is the king’s own turn.
On arrival at White Hall Palace, Cranmer finds the king motionless in his bed. At some 28 stone, around 400 lbs, he remains an awesome figure. But he commands neither fear nor respect now. Decades of excess and hard living have taken their toll. The smell of diseased, infected wounds hangs thickly in the air. Cranmer knows what he must do.
He grips the monarch’s hand, feeling its weakness and mortality. He begs his king to entrust himself to Christ for salvation. The king, Cranmer feels, understands him. In response, he clutches the archbishop’s hand just a little tighter. This is perhaps the final of the king’s efforts. At around 2:00 a.m., King Henry is gone. His final years played out in grotesque agony as a litany of health problems finally caught up with him.
This is the story of King Henry VIII’s gruesome demise. Born in 1491 to King Henry VIIth and Elizabeth of York, young Henry was never supposed to lead England. That honor was reserved for his older brother, Arthur. But when Arthur died of an unknown illness, aged only 15, Henry got bumped up into pole position.
Two years later, he was crowned king. Tall, wealthy, even handsome, young Henry was something of a sportsman. He loved to recreate the pump and chivalry of the high middle ages through tournaments and contests. But as we’ve seen, the later Henry was the polar opposite of all this. By the time he died, aged 55, he had endured years of pain and ill health.
In stark contrast to the vivacity of his youth. So, how did it come to this? Was Henry’s monstrous condition of his own making? Or was he the victim of bad luck? Or, if you prefer, victim of divine retribution? Let’s remember that Henry had ordered the deaths of between 57,000 and 72,000 people, including two of his own wives.
But it’s also possible that his energetic and action-packed younger years led directly to his grim demise. Henry certainly loved the pageantry and excitement of a good tournament. When he was still only 28, he held the legendary Field of the Cloth of Gold, an 18-day long festival of physical competition with plenty of eating and boozing thrown in.
The idea was to demonstrate unity between the kings of England and France, whilst also showing off a bit of manly athleticism in the process. Eager to avoid any embarrassment, Cortiers conspired to keep King Henry and King Francis on the same side during the horseback combat event. But an apparently drunken wrestling match later on in the proceedings saw Henry thrown unceremoniously to the ground by his French counterpart.
Still, this didn’t dampen the king’s obsession with physical prowess or his desire to have a good old time. He was rather older than 28 when in January 1536, he participated in a jousting tournament at Greenwich Palace. During this tournament, the now 44-year-old Henry, already a bit of a big boy, took a heavy blow, crashing to the floor in full armor.
His horse also in Fama fell on top of him. There was a lot of weight and the results were bad. Witnesses claimed the king was unconscious for 2 hours. Many thought him dead, but he was not dead. Although the thousands of people who would die at his hands over the next decade may have wished he was, but it wasn’t all good news for the king.
He may have survived this weighty fall, but he’d suffered wounds that would never fully heal. Since his mid-30s, Henry had been plagued by sores on his left leg, possibly due to his predilection for wearing garters and skintight leggings, although more likely from an earlier jousting accident in 1527. The 1527 accident had actually required surgery carried out by physician Thomas Vickery.
Early 16th century surgery was far from a pleasant experience, but thanks to Vicer’s skill, Henry recovered quickly. However, the varicose ulcers remained for the rest of his life. These ulcers were easily punctured and easily infected, and the second jousting accident burst them wide open. They also spread to the king’s other leg. The oozing, stinking sores on his legs left Henry in constant pain, and this had two lasting effects on the king.
Firstly, it put him in a really, really bad mood. And basically, until the day he died, he’d been no pussycat before, but the agony of his mangled legs turned an occasionally tempestuous monarch into a full-blown tyrant. This was bad news for Anne Boleyn, who was beheaded that May, shortly after her brother and four other members of her circle.
It was also bad news for anyone associated with a monastery, too. Henry’s rapid and ruthless destruction of English Catholicism left thousands of people destitute and led to rebellion. When that rebellion failed, Henry put at least 200 participants to death in his trademark ruthless style. Now, there’s a good chance he’d have done this anyway, but the raging pain almost certainly sealed the deal.
The second big change was that it transformed him physically. You can say what you like about the young Henry, but he definitely got his steps in. However, after the catastrophic leg injuries, this changed. He found himself unable to exercise and his waistline ballooned from 35 inches to 54. Henry had always had a prodigious appetite for the finer things in life, the best food, and the best wine.
Just take one of the king’s dinner menus for an example. It includes among other delicacies manship bread, thick broths, chines of beef, venison, pestles of red deer, carps of young veal and fritters. And this was just the first course. A second course of jelly, creams of almond, pheasant, bitten clovers, gouls, venison in fine paste, and other delights would follow.
Of Henry’s banquets, Oxford lecturer Thomas Starky said in 1529, “If Henry and his nobles do not have 20 varied meat dishes at dinner and supper, they consider themselves slighted.”
The menu could provide each courtier with up to 5,000 calories per day. It’s easy to see why the now largely immobile king experienced such rapid weight gain in his later years.
This led to two of the most famous innovations from King Henry’s court: the wooden paladins used to carry him from place to place in his own palace and the system of winches and pulleys required to lift him. He was also drinking a great deal. These days, Henry would probably be diagnosed with depression and alcoholism and may have been able to get the help that he needed if it were the modern day.
But such diagnosis didn’t exist in the 1540s, and no one would have dared suggest the king should change his habits anyway. This drinking not only made his mood far worse, but also increased the pain in his lower limbs. His diet of fatty red meat and large amounts of Gascon wine gave him crippling gout, a formal arthritis that results in extreme pain in the feet and toes.
By the last years of his life, Henry’s festering lower limbs became one of his most defining features. It was said that the stench they produced could be detected three rooms away, and the courtiers would typically smell the king’s approach long before they heard or saw him. Of course, the king’s legs weren’t simply left to rot away.
He had the best doctors in the country on his side. It’s just a pity that this was the 16th century, and these best doctors in the country would probably be struck off these days. When Henry’s ulcers opened, which was quite often, his physicians lanced and cauterized them with burning hot irons, which must have been blindingly painful for the ailing king.
They also applied less agonizing treatments. A recipe for pusset ointment for skin sores is believed to have been formulated by the king himself. And to be honest, it starts off quite promisingly.
“Take chamomile flowers, melo flowers, rose leaves, honeysuckle leaves in the same amount equally. Boil these in water of rose and honeysuckle flowers as much as shall suffice. Then strain and take thereof 1 ounce. Then take 2 ounces of hen’s sew it well washed with rose water and province more than lukewarm.”
And then it begins to get a little wild. The next part of the recipe calls for gold tutti, a crude zinc oxide compound, red coral, and pearls before finally unicorn horn 1 oz.
It’s likely that Henry did procure some unicorn horn, or at least that’s what he thought he had. Walrus tusks and narwhal horns could actually be passed off as such in Tudor times. As to whether the remedy actually worked, that’s a bit more doubtful. Henry would have suffered from plenty of other ailments, too, as the great king let himself go in such a spectacular way towards the end of his life.
He certainly experienced horrific gastrointestinal pain, which is hardly surprising given his diet. Lengthy bouts of constipation and chronic indigestion were treated with regular enemas, some of which included dill oil, chicken and duck grease, and white wine. This is another remedy we cannot know the efficacy of, but we can make a pretty good guess.
These stomach ailments would have contributed to his swelling girth as the king’s agonized belly grew horrendously distended. These treatments, let’s not forget, would have also added their own notes to the increasingly complex aroma emitted by his infected sores. This idea of infection is important here. Henry suffered repeated infections in his legs and elsewhere over the final years of his life.
And the old maxim of what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger doesn’t really apply in this case, and the constant bodily effort of battling the infection would have severely weakened the monarch. This wasn’t really helped by the relative ignorance of physicians in the period. Since the devastation of the black death in the 1340s, there was some vague knowledge of transmission and contagion.
The cordon sanitaire set up around Europe to prevent the further spread of plague was evidence of this, but such knowledge was comparatively limited. Doctors in the 16th century were far more concerned with things like the four humors than with anything keeping clean. It was these humors they believed to be the root of Henry’s suffering.
In a letter back to his court, the French ambassador said, “For 10 to 12 days, the humors, which had no outlet, were like to have stifled him, so that he was sometime without speaking, black in the face, and in great danger.”
To rid Henry of these humors, his doctors created fistulae where they basically pierced holes into his rotting abscesses through which pus and all manner of other foul liquids could flow.
Instead of curing him, of course, these rotten fistulae caused sepsis and periods of fever. Henry, who was actually a big advocate for the medical profession and had even founded the Royal College of Physicians in 1518, was in reality being slowly killed by his own doctors. So, it was a mixture of sporting injury, a spectacularly lavish lifestyle, and medical ignorance that brought about Henry’s grim and rather disgusting end.
We don’t know for sure, though. There may have been other factors involved. Some have put forward the idea that Henry was suffering from McLeod syndrome, a very rare blood disorder. This theory stems from just how many of Henry’s children died young or were stillborn. Five of Henry’s children with Katherine of Aragon were either stillborn or died in infancy which is consistent with Henry having a Kell-positive blood type.
McLeod syndrome is often associated with this blood type and sufferers may experience cognitive and physical decline in their 30s and 40s which is about the time that Henry started going rapidly downhill. One thing he probably didn’t have though was syphilis. This is a common myth surrounding Henry and the idea of a lumbering syphilitic king has become quite popular among the large numbers of people who really don’t like him.
But no evidence suggests that Henry or any of his sexual partners ever had syphilis. Mercury was the accepted cure of the day for the great pox as they called it. And there are no records of any of the royal apothecaries dispensing mercury whether directly to the king or to any of his wives.
Henry certainly had a litany of health troubles in his final years, but syphilis is probably one that we can rule out. So, what actually dealt the final blow to Henry as he lay in his bed that bitter January night, surrounded by his trusted men? Well, what a few of them were left by then anyway. Academic Alec Samuels hedged his bets citing inflammation and infection of various organs as well as infection in the bones topped off with kidney failure.
Author Robert Hutchinson and Alison Weir take a simpler view. Hutchinson believes his kidneys gave out and for it was a pulmonary embolism that finished the monarch off. In short, we just don’t know. But more than 300 years after Henry finally died, an architect and artist named Alfred Nut visited the royal tomb at Windsor Castle in 1888.
At the time, several relics of Charles I were being returned to the crypt. So, Nut makes a quick survey sketching the arrangement of the coffins where former royals lie in eternal rest. And suddenly Henry VIII’s coffin is of particular interest because it’s very obviously damaged.
And so three centuries on the rumor mill starts to turn once again. Even in death, the king’s putrid health and colossal weight are the source of embarrassing speculation. Nut himself offers his own lurid theory that the damage was caused by the action of internal forces outward. In other words, the king’s rancid body had exploded in its sarcophagus.
One last outburst from the famously temperamental ruler. Amazingly, this might actually be true. There are unconfirmed stories of the king’s corpse exploding while the coffin rested overnight at Syon House in Middlesex on its way to Windsor. In a stomach-churning twist, it’s said that some of the king’s liquefied remains leaked from the coffin, attracting stray dogs eager to lick up the mess.
It is of course possible that this never happened, though the king had plenty of enemies, many of whom were just waiting for the chance to write humiliating accounts of him. And now that he was dead, he wasn’t likely to punish anyone by lopping off their heads. Other contemporaries say the massive coffin was simply dropped on the way to its final resting place.
Some theorize that the rough handling of Charles I’s coffin by the victorious parliamentarians in 1649 was actually what led to Henry’s coffin being damaged. Like with many other details of Henry’s life and his death, we simply can’t be sure. But by piecing together what we can be sure of, I think it’s pretty safe to say that his final years were rather unpleasant.
After a reign characterized by wrath and violence, there were probably plenty of people who would have been quite pleased by this.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
