History Cafe

When Columbus’s second voyage - the showy Armada of 1493 - reaches Hispaniola they find that the Arawak, including the chief who rescued Columbus from the shipwrecked Santa Maria on Christmas Eve 1492, have had enough. The avaricious, raping crew left behind at fort Navidad are now a pile of bleached bones.

Columbus is told where to find ‘pieces of gold as big as the ship’s great stern post.’ And that where the gold is, there are people called ‘Caribs’ who not only have bows and arrows, but also eat human flesh.

Within two days of Columbus making first landfall on an island he named San Salvador after his God, Columbus had kidnapped several men to take to Spain to train as interpreters. To prevent them escaping, he then rounded up ‘seven head of women,’ along with three children.

Nobody believed Columbus could reach the Indies (Asia, home to the Grand Khan). So why did Ferdinand and Isabella back him? The answer is all tied up with a torrid affair.

Columbus the romantic hero is a myth created in 1777 by the Scottish historian Revd William Robertson. It hit the big time with Washington Irving’s biography 50 years later. Tales of lone scientific geniuses were becoming popular and Columbus had been snapped up by rebellious American colonists waving their newly minted Declaration of Independence. But the historical research was hopelessly flawed. Columbus had been wrong about pretty much everything.

After years of negotiation and confrontation, Pope Clement VII was heard swearing unpapally over Henry VIII’s divorce. And no wonder. The history of Henry’s pope is a murky tale of code-breaking and ruthless sieges that involves Michelangelo and Machiavelli and a great deal of double-dealing. Pope Clement was trapped between a rock and a hard place: the only way to save his Medici family’s city of Florence was to refuse Henry his divorce and split Christendom.

Most of what we think we know about Anne Boleyn turns out to be later invention, with no historical basis. We argue that she was a MacGuffin: she was necessary to the way things turned out for Henry, but unimportant in herself. We’re not even sure he was in love with her.

The Ambassadors painting by Hans Holbein reveals the French horror at Henry’s decision in January 1533 to defy the pope and get remarried to a pregnant Anne Boleyn. But since Henry couldn't get an annulment he had no choice. No big-time European princess would marry him. With the Spanish seriously weakened by war, Turkish invasion and protestant revolt in Germany, and Henry’s French allies now needing him more than he does them, Henry’s long game to get the Pope on side against the Spanish is now in extra time. Henry is free to make himself head of the Church in England. See the painting at the National Gallery, London.

In a dynamite French document from August 1530, still overlooked by historians, the King of France offers to send troops to England to defend Henry VIII against the Spanish. No French government before or since has ever promised to send troops to defend England. Does this explain Henry’s sudden move in August 1530 to go on the offensive against Rome and the clergy in England?