King Henry VIII’s Psalter

The British Library’s Medieval Manuscript Blog always makes for interesting reading and it has recently published an article about the personal psalter of King Henry VIII which has been lent by the Library to a major New York exhibition on portraits of the King and his family. The work of a French artist the psalter dates from 1540. It is from a time when the now aging or tiring King had broken with Rome and dissolved the monasteries. He was seeking to create or sustain his own, idioscyncratic brand of national Catholicism in a time of uncertainty and factionalism. It is therefore traditional but also takes on its own Henrician identity, reflecting the King’s view of himself as a Godly Ruler informed by humanist ideas of reform or renewal and Biblical analogies.

Rather than being designed for public viewing, as it actually is today the manuscript volume was very personal to the King and his devotional life. His vision of his Henrician church is implicit in the illuminations. Two of them often reproduced in books on the King  - that of the King reading the psalms in his bedroom and that of him playing the harp with his fool Will Somers in attendance - but the other two are not well known, depicting the King as slaying the Goliath who wasPipe Paul III and as a penitential Davidic figure amongst ruins. Extraordinary as they are these deserve to be better known are. In addition there are also the King’s own added marginalia - insight indeed to his thoughts and self-image.

The King’s view of his role in the tradition of Davidic monarchy was expressed in some public imagery, but its appeal was perhaps limited. King David as recorded in the Old Testament may be a great hero of Israel, and presented, rather than King Saul, as the founder of the monarchy but the events of his reign include not a few episodes which make him less than a paragon. That does not seem to have troubled King Henry. David as a youth fighting Goliath could be appropriated as a figure of Republican Idealism and Independence in Florence and again as the harpist author of the psalms by the aging King Henry in England a few decades later. Previous monarchs had perhaps tended more to identify with King Solomon as a regal ideal - most notably in the singing of “Zadok the Priest”, long before Handel provided a new setting in 1727, during the anointing of a new monarch. It is not Samuel anointing Saul or David, but rather the established spiritual authorities anointing the designated, hereditary heir in the youthful Solomon. As does his father David Solomon appears on one of the enamelled panels of the Ottonian crown of the Holy Roman Empire, and it was twisted Solomonic pillars that were used symbolically by both Church and monarchs to suggest their continuity with the Old Dispensation whilst being part of the New.

The splendidly illustrated post about the Psalter can be seen at https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2022/10/king-henry-psalter.html