Posts Tagged ‘English reformation’

Quintessential Leadership Analysis of Henry VIII – Pt. 3 – 1536 – 1547

Posted: March 21, 2013 in Examples and Analyses of Lack of Leadership and Unquintessential Leadership, General Things about Quintessential Leadership, Myths and Misconceptions About Management, Quintessential Leadership, Quintessential Leadership is an Art
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This last post analyzing the quintessential leadership of Henry VIII will cover the last 11 years of Henry’s life. We will pick up here where we left off at the end of Quintessential Leadership Analysis of Henry VIII – Pt. 2 – 1525 – 1536.

After having Anne Boleyn executed in early 1536, Henry VIII married Jane Seymour. Jane was perhaps, if such a thing existed for Henry VIII, the love of his life. Jane Jane Seymour - Third Wife of Henry VIIIbrought all the qualities of quiet submission, calming influence, virtuous dignity, and careful circumspection that Anne Boleyn lacked to her marriage and to the throne. Her family, as Boleyn’s had been, became ensconced at the royal court once Jane became queen.

While Jane’s character seems to be beyond reproach, the same cannot be said of her two brothers, Edward and Thomas Seymour (who was executed by the Privy Council two years after Henry VIII’s death on charges of treason). The longevity of the Seymour brothers being installed at court shows how mercurial both they and Henry VIII were. Edward and Thomas were good at eliminating their competition, blaming others for mistakes, and twisting things to appeal to increasingly-mentally-unstable Henry VIII. They had no ethics, unlike Jane, who seems to have been quite ethical, much like Catherine of Aragon.

Jane was able to accomplish several important things during her brief tenure as queen. She worked hard to bring Mary I back to court regularly, which enabled Henry VIII and Mary to develop a stronger familial bond. Most importantly, she gave birth to a healthy, live male heir – the one thing that mattered most in the world to Henry VIII. However, the labor was difficult and prolonged, and Jane died on October 24, 1537, twelve days after giving birth to Edward VI.

There are two pieces of evidence that support that Jane Seymour held a special place in Henry VIII’s life. One was that Henry mourned her death for an extended period of time and did not remarry – although Thomas Cromwell was almost immediately searching for marriage prospects for Henry after Jane’s death – for three years. The second was that Henry was buried according to his wishes beside Jane after his death in 1547.

Thomas Cromwell pretty much ran the country during Henry’s period of mourning, and it was in this capacity that he both overreached his abilities and made old enemies greater enemies and made new enemies as well, including the Seymour brothers.

Cromwell was a true religious reformist and saw an opportunity to further the English reformation and strengthen the crown’s coffers by taking over and shutting down monasteries throughout England. A lot of these monasteries had financial and physical assets that made them wealthy, and Cromwell saw an opportunity to both push the religious reform and confiscate those assets for the crown. He assured Henry that there was little to no opposition to it.

Cromwell, aided by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, began a systemic pillaging campaign against all the monasteries. There was organized opposition when the campaign got to the northern part of England, but it was quickly and harshly suppressed by mass executions sanctioned by Henry at Cromwell’s suggestion.

Thomas Cromwell’s undoing came as a result of the marriage he arranged between the German Anne of Cleves and Henry in January 1540. Cromwell touted the beauty of Anne to Henry, while hoping that an alliance with Lutheran Germany would truly bring reform to the English church, but he clearly misread the fact that Henry was thoroughly a Catholic in his dogma and, in true unquintessential leadership fashion,  was just using the church and reforms to achieve his own ends and serve his own interests.

The Anne that Henry met was not the Anne that Cromwell had described to him, and,Anne of Cleves - Fourth Wife of Henry VIII after failing to find a way to void the marriage contract, Henry relented to marry her. However, the marriage was never consummated and was annulled in July 1540.

Henry VIII was generous with Anne of Cleves (she fared the best in life of all his wives) after the annulment, and gave her estates and an income for the rest of her life. Anne and Henry also became good friends and Anne had very close relationships with both Mary and Elizabeth. Anne was instrumental in Henry’s decision to reinstate both daughters in the legitimate line of succession after Edward VI, and she lived to see Mary I crowned in 1553, after Edward’s death.

Henry blamed Cromwell for the marriage fiasco and the enemies that Cromwell had accrued at court saw their opportunity to get rid of him.

Here is an unquintessential leadership trait that Henry VIII possessed. He was always susceptible – perhaps because of his own declining mental health – to believing stories of treason, corruption, and general dishonor. Henry was persuaded by Cromwell’s opponents that Cromwell was a traitor and Henry sentenced him to execution. Cromwell was beheaded, in what by all accounts was a botched execution that required several strokes of the ax before his head was actually cut off, on July 8, 1540.

Cromwell was the most capable, albeit ruthless and unscrupulous, chief minister that Henry VIII had, and Henry later regretted Cromwell’s execution, accusing his ministers of bringing false charges to him about Cromwell to secure his execution.

This is an example of unquintessential leadership as well. Henry VIII consistently blamed other people when things went wrong. He never took responsibility as the ultimate authority in England for decisions that brought consequences he later regretted. We see this trait throughout his life and throughout his rulership of England.

After Cromwell’s death, Charles Brandon, the Duke of Suffolk, and Edward Seymour became Henry VIII’s chief advisers, with Seymour handling the duties of chief minister.

It was just after Henry’s annulment from Anne of Cleves that he married Catherine Howard, the niece of Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk. Catherine was much Catherine Howard - Fifth Wife of Henry VIIIyounger than Henry VIII, which by itself made marriage difficult. But she was also flighty, indiscreet in all things  (including her arrogant and contemptuous attitude toward Henry’s children), and promiscuous before her marriage and had affairs during her marriage – most notably with Thomas Culpepper, Henry’s courtier. These were the nails, so to speak, in her coffin.

She was executed by beheading on grounds of adultery on February 23, 1542. Culpepper had already been executed on the same charges in December of 1541.

After Catherine Howard’s execution, Henry turned his attention toward foreign matters. He had become suspicious of the French and saw them as a contributing factor in Scotland’s frequent insurgencies into the northern part of England. Convinced that Francis was reneging on the Franco-English alliance, Henry decided to break the alliance and form a new alliance against France with Charles V and Spain.

In 1543, Henry also married again. His new wife was Catherine Parr. Catherine and Thomas Seymour had been planning to marry, which Henry was aware of, so Henry sent Thomas out of the country before Henry and Catherine were married. CatherineCatherine Parr - Sixth Wife of Henry VIII seems to have been much like Jane Seymour in her circumspection, and she welcomed and was extremely close to all of Henry’s children, taking the responsibility for ensuring the further education of Elizabeth I and Edward VI. She outlived Henry and died after childbirth in 1548 during her final marriage to Thomas Seymour (they married in secret about six months after Henry’s death).

In 1544, Henry and Charles decided to invade France. England supplied the navy and Spain supplied the ground troops. Henry intended to regain the land that the English had lost previously to France in Boulogne. Conquest proved difficult and Henry’s sieges were abruptly ended by Spain signing a peace treaty with France. Unable to sustain an all-out war, Henry and the English army returned home.

By this time, Henry VIII was in full decline mentally and physically. His Henry VIII near the end of his lifegluttony and lack of activity since a wound in a jousting match that never healed and limited his mobility caught up with him and by the time he died in 1547, he weighed about 400 pounds. He became a virtual recluse and his mental health deteriorated further. It now appears that he may have suffered from a rare genetic disease known as McLeod neuroacanthocytosis syndrome, which may explain some of the severe physical and most of the severe mental decline Henry experienced as he aged. Whatever genetic factors contributed to Henry VIII’s mental and physical problems, however, cannot be blamed for his intrinsic lack of good and right character.

The two things that consumed Henry, when he was well enough, the last two and a half years of his life were his son and religion. When he died on January 28, 1547, he left a son who would inherit the throne – although his reign would be cut short by an early death in July 1553, which would throw the English monarchy and England into utter chaos until Elizabeth I took the throne in January 1558 – and he left religious reforms – an English Bible, for instance – that paved the way for the English and their descendants to be able to read the Bible themselves and reject the erroneous idea that any human and any religious organization must be the intermediary between humans and their God, a fight still being fought today almost everywhere, although not always as overtly or as obviously as within the Catholic faith, in the world of religion.

On the whole, though, when we look at Henry VIII’s life and reign, regardless of what physiological factors may have played a role, we see an unquintessential leader.

He lacked the ability to build trust and be trustworthy.

He never accepted his responsibility for anything, but instead blamed others when things went wrong.

He was arrogant and full of pride and made some very bad decisions in attempts to prove his superiority to his peers, both at home and abroad.

He lacked any self-control in his private life and his public life.

He had faulty discernment of other people, and allowed himself to be manipulated by every kind of deception and dishonesty at every turn, especially when it suited his needs, served his purposes, or otherwise fulfilled the selfish nature that characterized this man. For Henry VIII, the end always justified the means.

He truly, in the end, only cared about how people and things were useful to him. If they weren’t useful, they ceased to exist (literally, by execution, and mentally in his memory).

As quintessential leaders, we need to observe and evaluate ourselves in light of the unquintessential leadership traits we see in Henry VIII. We need to be brutally honest and ask some hard questions as we look into our own mirrors of leadership.

Does the end justify the means for us? Are we willing to do or allow our teams to do anything, regardless of the ethics, the rightness, the morality, to achieve an outcome we want? If so, we’re being unquintessential leaders.

Do we practice or allow our teams to practice or allow ourselves to be influenced by any kind of deceit and dishonesty (presenting false information as true information, spinning information, angling information, omitting key or relevant information, or misinforming for any reason)? If so, we’re being unquintessential leaders.

Do we manipulate, allow our teams to manipulate, or allow ourselves to be manipulated to achieve an outcome we want? If so, we’re being unquintessential leaders.

Are our decisions made to serve ourselves or to serve others? Do we care about what we want more than we care about what anyone else wants or needs? Will we willingly and cavalierly sacrifice – or eliminate – anybody and everybody to satisfy our own wants and desires? If so, we’re being unquintessential leaders.

Are we always blaming everyone and everything else when things go wrong or don’t go the way we had intended or hoped, never taking any responsibility for our roles as leaders in making the decision? If so, we’re being unquintessential leaders.

Henry VIII should make all of us, as quintessential leaders, take a long, serious, and totally honest gut check to see if and where we are guilty of any of his unquintessential leadership traits and behaviors.

It takes courage, which it seems is hard to find in today’s society, to do a deep and honest moral inventory that actually looks at, actually admits, and immediately changes anything in our lives that reveals any unquintessential leadership traits and behaviors.

A lot of people in leadership positions today are cowards, much like Henry VIII was, who hid behind excuses, justifications, blame, and other people most of his life. Cowardice is the path of least resistance and a coward will find him or herself surrounded by plenty of company.

So I ask you, my fellow quintessential leaders, the same question I ask myself on a continual basis. Are you a coward or are you courageous?

Quintessential Leadership Analysis of Henry VIII – Pt. 2 – 1525 to 1536

Posted: February 21, 2013 in Examples and Analyses of Lack of Leadership and Unquintessential Leadership, Examples and Analyses of Quintessential Leadership, General Things about Quintessential Leadership, Myths and Misconceptions About Management, Qualities of a Quintessential Leader, Quintessential Leadership, Quintessential Leadership is an Art, Team Building & Development
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This post will do a quintessential leadership analysis of Henry VIII during the years between 1525, when Anne Boleyn came on the scene and Catherine of Aragon became an inconvenience, and 1536, when Anne Boleyn was executed.

It’s important to note at this point that although Catherine of Aragon produced only one child – Mary I – during their marriage (she had several miscarriages, as did Henry VIII’s Catherine of Aragonother wives, which now seem to have been scientifically linked to Henry VIII himself, who may have had a rare blood type known as Kell positive), up until 1525, she and Henry VIII seemed to have had an amiable marriage, in spite of Henry’s philandering.

Anne Boleyn, who often carries the lion’s share of the blame for what happened to Catherine and in England during the next 11 years, was in fact only a single factor – although perhaps the tipping one –Anne Boleyn in what led to the tumult and upheaval within the royal family, the country, and the church during that time.

Several factors had an impact on why Henry VIII suddenly reversed himself on the legality of his marriage to Catherine in 1525 after they’d been married for 16 years (their marriage would not be annulled by the Church of England until 1533, but Catherine of Aragon never accepted the decision and maintained that she was Henry’s wife and the queen until her death from natural causes in 1536).

The French monarchy, the Holy Roman Empire, Thomas Wolsey, and Henry’s and Wolsey’s enemies at court were major players in where English international relations were in 1525 and how they were quickly thrown up in the air and changed dramatically within a year.

By 1520, France and the Hapsburg dynasty were becoming the powers to be reckoned with in Western Europe. In 1520, eager for a Franco-Anglo alliance, Thomas Wolsey arranged a meeting between Francis I, the king of France and Henry VIII at Field of the Cloth of Gold in the Netherlands in 1520.

Henry and Francis were very much alike in their educations, interests, and athleticism. They were also both extremely competitive. In addition to the political purposes of this meeting, tournaments had been arranged to show off the skills and abilities of the two young kings with the agreement that they would not compete against each other.

Henry broke the agreement – an act of unquintessential leadership that he became well known for – by challenging Francis to a wrestling match in which Henry emerged as the loser.

As a result, no alliance came out of the two-week meeting and relations with France were definitely worsening.

Not long after the Field of the Cloth meeting, the ever-scheming Wolsey, whose greatest aspiration was to be a pope, decided to throw England’s lot in with Charles V, who was at the time the king of the Hapsburg dynasty.

(After defeating Pope Clement VII in Rome in 1527, Charles and Pope Clement became allies. In 1530 Pope Clement VII crowned Charles as the Holy Roman Emperor, so Charles’ ties to the Roman Catholic Church were not only strong and close, but unbreakable, and he could exert a lot of influence over papal decisions.)

Charles V was also the nephew of Catherine of Aragon and his allegiance to his aunt was unquestioning.

In the 1520 meeting that Wolsey arranged between Charles V and Henry VIII, they agreed to form an alliance against France, with Charles providing the land power and Henry providing the sea power. In addition, Mary I was betrothed in marriage to Charles V, which strengthened the bond of the alliance.

Charles led a very successful campaign against France, capturing Francis I in the first battle in 1525. This was also the year that Anne Boleyn came to court.

The same year Henry named his illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy, as heir to the throne, and gave him the titles and lands that would ensure his succession. The move infuriated Catherine, who believed Mary should be the heir to the throne, and perhaps initiated the bitterness that consumed her, understandably, the rest of her life.

Even though Henry had a male heir in place, he still wanted a legitimate male heir to succeed him. This driving desire brought out other unquintessential leadership traits in Henry that would be present the rest of his reign: changing the rules when they didn’t suit him, bullying, and trying to force everything to go the way he wanted it to and if it failed, blaming anyone and everyone involved and eliminating them by arrest on false charges and execution. The bloody period of Henry VIII’s reign was about to begin.

Anne Boleyn had already caught Henry’s eye. However, she refused to become his mistress and indirectly told him the only way Henry could have her was if Anne was his wife. Eager for a legitimate male heir and convinced, probably accurately, that Catherine would never be able to give him a male heir, Henry sought a way to dissolve his marriage to Catherine so he could marry Anne Boleyn.

Citing “new ecclesiastical understanding” based on Leviticus 18:16, Henry met with Wolsey and told him that God had cursed the marriage and he wanted Wolsey to go to Pope Clement and have it annulled. Henry used the issue of not knowing whether the marriage between Arthur and Catherine had been consummated (it is unlikely it was and Catherine maintained that it had not been, in which case the scripture wouldn’t apply), but passionately said that piety and obedience to God left him no choice but to end the marriage.

Wolsey was a shrewd politician and understood the position Henry was putting himself and Wolsey in politically and religiously and tried to talk Henry out of divorcing Catherine. Henry, showing another unquintessential leadership trait, refused to listen and demanded that Wolsey obtain the annulment. 

Pope Clement VII, at first, simply ignored Wolsey’s request. At the time, he and Charles V were enemies, and he knew that granting the annulment would have serious consequences for Rome. Henry kept pushing Wolsey and Catherine began a campaign of her own to save the marriage by sending surreptitious messages to Charles asking him to intervene.

When Charles heard that Henry wanted to divorce his aunt, while he did not intervene then with the pope, he immediately ended his engagement to Mary and took a wife. When Henry found out, he ended his alliance with Charles and entered into an alliance with France against him.

Meanwhile, Wolsey was between a rock and a hard place. Pope Clement, who had by now been captured in Charles’ defeat of Rome, had given him the authority to have a convocation of the cardinals in England to get the facts together, but had denied them any authority to make a binding decision. 

The struggle between the pope and Wolsey and Henry, who by 1528 had declared, in another unquintessential leadership stance, the sole and supreme religious and political law in England. While Henry didn’t directly, at this point, say the church in Rome didn’t have any authority over him, he certainly implied it. Henry began to take his case to the citizens of England, hoping to gain mass support from his subjects. 

He had two big obstacles. One was the sheer power the Catholic church had over aspects of the average Englishman’s life. The church was the center of English life. The second was Catherine’s popularity among the people, and the sense they had that she was getting a raw deal from Henry.

Obstacles like these never deterred Henry. As an unquintessential leader, he just bulldozed over everything that stood in his way, doing whatever he wanted to get the outcome he wanted. He certainly lived by the motto that “the end justifies the means.”

Wolsey continued to unsuccessfully try to obtain the annulment. Finally, Henry got fed up with his failure to do so – and because Anne Boleyn didn’t like and didn’t trust, for good reason, Wolsey and urged Henry to get rid of him – and had him arrested in November 1530 on charges of treason. Wolsey died of apparently natural causes – but who knows? – on his way to his trial on those charges later that month. Had he not, there is absolutely no doubt he would have been convicted and executed.

By 1531, Henry had moved further toward openly questioning the authority and the power of the pope and the Catholic church. He sent all the evidence for the divorce and the ensuing cardinal convocations with papal restrictions to the leading theological scholars at all the major universities in Europe to ask for their opinions. They were all in agreement that Pope Clement had exceeded the limits of his power and authority.

He also had English theologians developing reforms to the church in England, which included non-papal and non-Roman authority but only English authority – with the ruler as the head of the church – and he took the legal arguments to Parliament to adjudicate in December of 1531. Parliament also agreed that the pope had abused his power.

Pope Clement obviously was not happy with these developments and warned Henry of excommunication if he continued. However, Henry barged forward.

Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s chief statesman and an ardent supporter of the English reformation (a position that led him down a path similar to Wolsey’s in actions and made him a hated enemy of those in the English court who did not want to break with Rome), called a meeting of the English bishops in which he charged them with treason because of their loyalty oaths to the pope which conflicted with their loyalty to Henry.

The bishops realized the untenable situation they – and their lives – were in, and when they were brought to court to face the charges at Henry’s request, they offered Henry money and pledged their loyalty to him as “the supreme head of the Church of England.”

Henry took the bishops’ pledge to Parliament in January of 1532 and demanded that they produce official legislation that codified the pledge of loyalty to him, while keeping Catholicism as the official faith of England. This precipitated the final break with Rome.

In 1532, Thomas Cromwell engineered a meeting between English church officials and Parliament from which a conclusion was reached that an appeal to Rome about the dissolution of Henry and Catherine’s marriage was not necessary. The result was an English conclave of the bishops and Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in which the decision was made to allow the divorce of Henry and Catherine.

This resulted in the immediate severance of the English church from Rome, Henry being excommunicated, and the door opened for his marriage to Anne Boleyn. Catherine, however, continued to appeal to Rome, as a Catholic in good standing, until her death to intervene and restore the marriage. The bridges that Henry burned made her appeal fall on deaf ears.

In January 1533, with a new/old (Henry never gave up his Catholic beliefs and the Church of England stayed essentially Catholic in theology and look and feel, much as it does even today) church in place with Henry as its supreme leader, Henry and Anne were married.

Another unquintessential leadership trait that Henry had now becomes more apparent: the chase appeals to him far more than the conquest. By all accounts, the marriage was tumultuous. Henry began cheating on Anne almost immediately, and she, unlike Catherine, but very much like Henry, was strong-willed, opinionated, and not afraid to fight with Henry. Anne also made many enemies at court because she was  a strong person, so there were many people eager for a chance to undermine her and get rid of her.

Perhaps Anne’s worst fault, in Henry’s eyes, was that she didn’t give him a legitimate male heir. The marriage produced a daughter, Elizabeth I, in September 1533, who in the end succeeded Henry VIII, but not without her own wild and crazy ride to succession, but if there were any other pregnancies, they ended in miscarriage.

Anne’s enemies in court, sensing Henry’s disillusionment with her, began badmouthing her to Henry as early as 1534. Another unquintessential leadership trait that Henry had is that he listened to and believed them because it would give him an excuse to get rid of her and marry again in hopes of producing a legitimate male heir.

On May 2, 1536, Henry had Anne arrested on charges of adultery (unproven) and witchcraft (also unproven, but the highly-charged superstitious mindset that had developed during the Middle Ages and cast a long shadow over human thinking until the 18th Century, was very much alive and well), among others.

Anne was executed by beheading 17 days later on May 19, 1536. That this is unquintessential leadership should go without saying.

In the next post, we’ll do a quintessential leadership analysis on the last 11 years of Henry VIII’s life and reign.