Keeping Up with the TudorsHenry VIII: The Life and Rule of England's Neroby John MatusiakThe History Press, 2013 Any biography of King Henry VIII that has the gusto to slap the Roman emperor Nero's name right there in its sub-title, as does John Matusiak's enormously entertaining Henry VIII: The Life and Rule of England's Nero, must contend - explicitly or otherwise - with the 'quinquennium Neronis' that so haunts biographers of Nero himself. The phrase comes from that quasi-professional chatterbox Aurelius Victor, a fourth-century anecdote-collector who reports that when the great Roman emperor Trajan was asked who ranked highest among his imperial predecessors, he surprised his listeners by citing 'quinquennium Neronis,' the first five years of Nero's reign. This has been a mortifying little sticking point for broadside historians ever since, most of whom have preferred to seek safety in numbers by siding with their fellow Nero-slanderers Tacitus, Suetonius, and the entire Mordor-like edifice of the Roman Catholic Church. That's what a sub-title like "The Life and Rule of England's Nero" is seeking to do: it's using "Nero" as a popular shorthand term for "brutal, oblivious tyranny." It wants to evoke a whole concept of tyranny, and to do so using the generally reprehensible method of guilt by association.Matusiak himself might be spared the worst of the imputation, since authors don't always pick the titles their books end up with (although this particular author certainly picked his book's epigraph, in which attractive Reformation worrywart Philipp Melanchthon makes the Nero-comparison for very specific theological reasons of his own having to do with the aforementioned Mordor-like edifice); Nero is scarcely alluded to in the text of Henry VIII and doesn't rate a mention in the index - it's entirely possible he was hauled on-stage just to jazz up the proceedings and help this Tudor biography stand out from the fourteen others that were published this afternoon.Regardless of who made the decision, it was a bad one. Aside from a plaintive remnant of tenured propagandists (most working under the long arm of the aforementioned Mordor-like edifice), nobody anymore believes in the shorthand "Nero" - certainly no trained historian does - and a book that uses that kind of guilt by association runs the risk of being written off as slapdash quasi-history.Henry VIII: The Life and Rule of England's Nero isn't slapdash quasi-history! In fact it's excellent throughout, an acid-etched and bracingly caustic examination of Henry's reign that for once doesn't waste readers' time with endless petticoat-obsessions about the infamous six wives. Matusiak has bigger fish to fry than mere serial wiving; his central contention is that Henry would still have been a deplorable ruler even if he'd been as chaste as the Virgin Mary. He indicts Henry on professional grounds, as a bad king.There's ample justification for this kind of attack, and of course countless Tudor historians have made such attacks in the past. Matusiak's central gripe is correct: the popular image of 'bluff king Hal' - an image carefully crafted by Henry and his ministers - remains remarkably tenacious even today (not quite as tenacious as Nero 'fiddling while Rome burned,' but give it time), and it warrants every attempt to knock it down. All of Matusiak's accusations - that Henry was cold-blooded with his intimates, that he was ruthless in his dealings with the very subordinates he should most have valued, that he pursued his passions and manias to the detriment of his government and his nation, and so on - are made with a scholarly backing and a careful precision that hides itself well under a prose style as profusely ornate (and compulsively, almost hilariously readable) as anything in Carlyle:

So it was, with the approach of spring in his fifty-third year, that the wiry and chronically bronchitic king [Henry VII, of course], whose teeth were by now 'few, poor and blackish,' began his final creaking descent into a 'consuming sickness'. And it was against this background of peace, quiet, and aching dullness that Henry VIII was finally proclaimed king, just short of his eighteenth birthday and still technically a minor. Taking tranquillity for granted, there was little lasting grief among Englishmen when the time came. Indeed, the unleashing at long last of the new king's pent-up ego now resulted in an explosive euphoria that soon swept logic and all good sense before it. As the second Tudor burst upon his kingdom, therefore, his extravagance would merely be welcomed as liberality after the parsimonious days of his predecessor. Likewise, when [Henry VII's rapacious tax officials Richard and Edmund] Empson and Dudley were casually thrown to the wolves, the only cries to be heard were those of satisfaction that justice, long overdue, had at last been done. Nor were there protests when England's very own majestic troubadour made profligate war against the Scots and French, or plunged headlong into a legally suspect marriage with a Spanish princess six years his senior, whom he had long neglected. Men yearn, it seems, for rest, only to become restless once it is finally theirs.

(That final Tacitean fillip isn't unique to this passage - they occur frequently throughout the book, and as in the case of Tacitus, readers will find themselves eagerly awaiting them)Matusiak spends a good deal of time on those 'profligate' wars of Henry's reign, as well he should, considering their ruinous cost and paltry returns. But that's by no means the only item on our author's bill of indictment - as damningly insightful as he is on Henry's war-making, he's even more critical of Henry's mishandling of his own central preoccupation: securing a smooth Tudor succession. Henry's preoccupation famously took the form of an increasingly morbid search for a legitimate male heir, but Matusiak is quite right - and excellent on the point - that Henry ignored all the opportunities represented by his eldest daughter Mary, who could have been advantageously married (most so to her first cousin the heir to the throne of Scotland) and busily producing royal grandchildren for Henry as early as the late 1520s, thus guaranteeing that smooth succession which Henry instead endangered at every turn. Well-justified is the scorn with which Matusiak notes that even aged, decrepit Henry's last pronouncements mention of the possibility of his fathering more children; this biography presents a damning portrait of an egomaniac in complete denial of the realities around him.It's not a completely accurate portrait (damning portraits seldom are); it takes little account of the incredible subtleties of which Henry was capable, especially in his later years when his byzantine dealings with France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, and the German principalities were marked by devious double-dealing, yes, but also by an almost inhuman finesse and control far beyond the capability of even his most able advisors. But what it sacrifices in even-handed accuracy it more than recovers in radiant cheerful readability - I hadn't heard of Matusiak before I encountered this book, and now that I've read it, I wouldn't miss anything written by him for all the mud in Egypt. He attacks even the most familiar stories of the period with such verve that you feel like you're reading them for the first time - as in the case of the arrest and trial of Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey (before he was to enjoy what Matusiak calls "the fleeting hospitality of the gallows"):

Howard's eventual defence at his trial was a superb, but unavailing, display of aristocratic sauce. Advancing the principle that the proof of the pudding was in the pedigree, he claimed simply that a true nobleman, such as he, would not lie. The honour of his line did not, however, prevent him from an unenviable escape attempt involving a slippery slide down the privy of his cell in the Tower to a waiting boat. In the event, he was apprehended just after his messy descent and further compounded his predicament by announcing that he had escaped, because 'they always find the innocent guilty' - a clear and grievous aspersion on the king's justice.

What little there is of "the king's justice" in Henry VIII: The Life and Rule of England's Nero is mostly held up to ridicule and condemnation, which is every author's prerogative and this author's special zeal. The real Nero - the one Trajan esteemed, the one buried and annihilated by the aforementioned Mordor-like edifice - was a careful administrator, a legal reformer, an excellent military leader, a respecter of Senatorial authority, and a friend to working merchants, enlisted men, and the poor. You won't find more than scattered hints of him in most propaganda, ancient or modern, and you likewise won't find more than scattered hints in Matusiak's book of the Henry who greatly strengthened both the international prestige of England and the domestic power of law and Parliament. But we still read Tacitus and Suetonius just the same, and we should most eagerly read John Matusiak as well - as a corrective, and for the sheer fun of it.