The Private Life of Henry VIII
(1933) is on the surface a partial chronicle of the marriages of King Henry
VIII of England, but, underneath, the film is on the human instinctual urge of aggression.
With unchecked power, such as in the case of an absolute ruler or in the
international arena, the instinct can be quite dangerous. In other words, the
film demonstrates just how unsuited human nature is to the political type of
absolute ruler and a world of sovereign states sans something like what
Kant refers to as a world federation that could provide some check and balance
to wayward, aggressive states, which in turn are really just human beings.
As Henry VIII, Charles Laughton
acts out the foibles that absolute power can render particularly pernicious. When
Henry’s privy council informs the king that Katherine Howard, his fifth wife,
has been unfaithful in having an ongoing affair with Thomas Culpeper, Henry
physically attacks the messenger. At another point in the film, Henry wrestles
one of the two wrestlers performing at a banquet just because his wife has just
told Henry that one of the wrestlers is the strongest man in England. The
cinematography provides a link to the aggression that is the stuff of war, as the
shadows of Henry and one of the wrestlers are shown on a wall tapestry of an
army.
The attitude of the film toward
Henry is one of sympathy, for he is portrayed as a lonely man who feels that he
has never had a wife who has really loved him. He says at one point that he
would rather live the life of a man above a carriage house with a wife who
loves him than that of a king who must remarry for reasons of state. Unlike
most accounts of the king, this film portrays him as a victim of a political
system in which the ruler must give up so much of a personal life for the
state. Although on a constitutional rather than an absolute monarch, the
series, The Crown, on Queen Elizabeth II emphasizes how she must
sacrifice so much in putting the interests of the Crown above what she wants.
Is even a limited monarchy fair to the inhabitants of the role, given how
subservient their personal lives must be to the interests of the office?
In The Private Life of Henry
VIII, a title which if taken literally is an absurdity, for an absolute
ruler, in this case, a king of 3 million subjects, can have no private life,
Henry laments there being so many “cooks” in his court who treat him as a
breeder. “Refinement is a thing of the past,” Henry tells members of his court
at one point. “I’m either a king or a breeding bull.” He asks Cromwell, “Would
you make me a false marriage?” Although Cromwell’s reply, “we need more heirs”
so as to reduce the change of a power-struggle (i.e., aggression) when Henry
dies, Henry’s planned marriage to Anne of Cleves, a German, is to keep the warring
Germany and France from involving England in war. Later in the film, Henry
remarks that both Germany and France have offered new lands to England in exchange
for siding with the one or the other in their ongoing wars. “What’s the use of
new territories if it means war, war, war.” Henry wants peace in Europe, and fears
that the fighting between Germany and France would someday leave the continent
in ruins, but there is no one to help him to stop the aggression.
From the shadows wrestling on the
cloth tapestry of an army to having to marry an ugly foreigner to stave off war
from spreading to England, to having to keep marrying to get a male heir, the prominence
of aggression is highlighted in the film. For much of the film is either
showing angry fits of an absolute ruler or what he must give up for England to
avoid aggression in the political domain—both in the matter of succession and
in international relations. It is no wonder that Henry says to his infant son, “The
crown is no smiling matter.”
It is ironic that the film skips over, in ellipses, the (aggressive) beheadings of two of Henry’s wives. Perhaps the narrative’s extension to cover even Henry’s last wife in a reasonable playing time is the reason, but the audience is left only with the sharpening of the sword to intimate the missed state-sponsored acts of aggression against two women (though one of whom was not innocent). Even in the twenty-first century, executions under state auspices occur. How much more so that must have been the case when absolute rulership was common. Even in the time of Queen Victoria, when British sovereigns were no longer absolute monarchs, Lord Acton famously wrote to an Anglican bishop, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” By 1887, Parliament could act as a check on a monarch, but the titans of industry could still operate as absolute rulers over their workers in demanding very long hours and refusing to improve harsh working conditions.
We moderns look back at stories of ancient and early-modern kings like Henry VIII as if the problem of abuses of power has since been solved, yet we watch citizen-videos of horrendous police brutality against unarmed innocent people. Human nature has not changed even as political theory has made some progress. It is still true that if we are angels, then surely we must be killer angels. This line comes from Gettysburg (1985), an epic film about the bloody battles at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in 1863 as the Confederate States of America warred against the United States of America in what is more commonly known as the U.S. Civil War. More than seven thousand men died at Gettysburg and 33,000 were wounded. A total of 1.5 million casualties were reported in that war. This is nothing compared to the casualties in World War II during the “modern” twentieth century, and many more people died from Hitler and Stalin outside of battle. So I put to the reader, how significant really is the development in political theory since the time of Henry VIII? Have our great minds really come to terms with the salience of the aggressive instinctual urge in human nature in developing types and processes of political organization that take account of our intractable penchant for aggression?
The Private Life of Henry VIII would have us believe that much of what obligated that king was the need to forestall or obviate fighting. This points both to the salience of aggression in our “social” species and whether ethical obligation (i.e., a duty to the state being put above personal desires) should be relied on as a corrective or constraint.
