![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bouzyges"...The story of Henry VIII’s is the story of an eccentric clique capturing society and recasting it in its own image. From 1529-47 nearly all of England’s historic institutions were destroyed. All the things that had given life its shape and meaning were junked: the monasteries torn down and their assets made off with; guilds suppressed; commons enclosed (a fitful attempt by Cardinal Wolsey to reverse this notwithstanding); old customary rights stamped out; the cosmopolitan link to Europe severed. The old mediaeval learning was torn up by its roots and the universities refounded in the study of the Classics...
...Henry-ism had no popular backing to speak of. One man’s ego; a handful of religious extremists; a few dodgy Giuliani-esque attorneys. These were sufficient to turn the world upside down. Everything that happened in those years happened in the face of settled custom, settled opinion, so-called common sense. The forces that would dominate English life for the next 400 years – Hellenic revival and religious radicalism – were alien ones, the preserve of this small Henrician circle. The reign of Henry VIII was about the conquest of reality by dreams...
...The most cherished of these whimsies was Hellenism. Henry VIII’s new grammar schools and his reformed universities created a governing elite that looked more to classical Greece and Rome than to the society around them ... Grecian stone urns in the badlands of Northumberland, Temples to Venus in Stowe: these were the physical symbols of an alien civilisation being grafted onto the old one. British people were still exclaiming the name Jove at the end of the 20th century. There are now all kinds of debates about what Britishness really means: ‘pretending to be Greek’ is probably the best answer...
...Another cadge from ancient Greece was the spirit of agon – competition. Mediaeval English society was a web of mutual obligations in which everyone had a place. Henricianism destroyed this and replaced it with a competitive free-for-all. Much like classical Greece, English society became a series of regulated games in which the prizes were glory and renown...
...Amid all this, Henry seems like a man out of time, eerily out of place in his own age. He appears to us as a Subjective Man of the 19th century – full of introspection, rumination, and self-reproach. In him we can see all the defining traits of a modern person. The capacity for romantic love. The prickly amour-propre. The consuming neediness. Henry is familiar to us in a way that the Sun King Louis XIV – who lived 150 years later – is not...
...When Henry VIII came to the throne, England was a normal European country. By 1700 it was a lunar landscape: its countryside a work of complete artifice, with shaped topiaries, carved hedges and artificial lakes; blasted heaths created by deforestation; farmers replaced with sheep by Act of Parliament; dotted everywhere with imitation Greco-Roman temples. Its neighbours thought its people were dangerous lunatics and had only recently ceased to treat it as a rogue state. By pure will, England had been made as remote and peripheral to the continent as Russia...
...Does the England that Henry VIII created still exist? The grammar schools have largely been abolished and the last of England’s pagan virtues were exorcised by New Labour. The country is once again ruled by dull landowners who believe in human rights..."
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/henry-viii-turned-england-upside-down/ (кажется, статья только в платном доступе)
...Henry-ism had no popular backing to speak of. One man’s ego; a handful of religious extremists; a few dodgy Giuliani-esque attorneys. These were sufficient to turn the world upside down. Everything that happened in those years happened in the face of settled custom, settled opinion, so-called common sense. The forces that would dominate English life for the next 400 years – Hellenic revival and religious radicalism – were alien ones, the preserve of this small Henrician circle. The reign of Henry VIII was about the conquest of reality by dreams...
...The most cherished of these whimsies was Hellenism. Henry VIII’s new grammar schools and his reformed universities created a governing elite that looked more to classical Greece and Rome than to the society around them ... Grecian stone urns in the badlands of Northumberland, Temples to Venus in Stowe: these were the physical symbols of an alien civilisation being grafted onto the old one. British people were still exclaiming the name Jove at the end of the 20th century. There are now all kinds of debates about what Britishness really means: ‘pretending to be Greek’ is probably the best answer...
...Another cadge from ancient Greece was the spirit of agon – competition. Mediaeval English society was a web of mutual obligations in which everyone had a place. Henricianism destroyed this and replaced it with a competitive free-for-all. Much like classical Greece, English society became a series of regulated games in which the prizes were glory and renown...
...Amid all this, Henry seems like a man out of time, eerily out of place in his own age. He appears to us as a Subjective Man of the 19th century – full of introspection, rumination, and self-reproach. In him we can see all the defining traits of a modern person. The capacity for romantic love. The prickly amour-propre. The consuming neediness. Henry is familiar to us in a way that the Sun King Louis XIV – who lived 150 years later – is not...
...When Henry VIII came to the throne, England was a normal European country. By 1700 it was a lunar landscape: its countryside a work of complete artifice, with shaped topiaries, carved hedges and artificial lakes; blasted heaths created by deforestation; farmers replaced with sheep by Act of Parliament; dotted everywhere with imitation Greco-Roman temples. Its neighbours thought its people were dangerous lunatics and had only recently ceased to treat it as a rogue state. By pure will, England had been made as remote and peripheral to the continent as Russia...
...Does the England that Henry VIII created still exist? The grammar schools have largely been abolished and the last of England’s pagan virtues were exorcised by New Labour. The country is once again ruled by dull landowners who believe in human rights..."
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/henry-viii-turned-england-upside-down/ (кажется, статья только в платном доступе)