When All is True: Law, History and Problems of Knowledge in Henry VIII

Summary

In the last scene of The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eight. Cranmer’s prophecy provides Elizabeth’s father with knowledge of the future not available at the play’s ostensible chronological cut-off point in 1533;; nor, because of the legal arrangements Henry left, was this future imaginable when Henry died in 1547. The panegyric delivered from the perspective of 1613 is a utopian evaluation of the Elizabethan past and the Jacobean present which the stage Henry receives as an ‘oracle of comfort’ (5.4.66), and the obvious flattery requires Cranmer’s prefatory affirmation that the words he utters are all ‘truth’ (15–16); less obvious in this context of apparently uncomplicated praise is that the prophecy builds on a series of real historical ironies and legal reversals that represented major defeats for Henry and his plans for the future. Henry learns here that Elizabeth will reign, but that she will die childless (thus extinguishing the direct line of succession with which he was obsessed); the second major piece of information Cranmer provides is buffered by linguistic evasions that neatly sidestep the problem of revealing the name of Elizabeth’s Stuart successor and the ultimate triumph of the Scottish line that Henry had passed over when he laid out his dispositions for succession in his last will and testament.