The basic story of Henry’s Reformation of the Church is simple enough:

King Henry wants a son – a strong male heir – and his Queen, Catherine, isn’t providing one. So Henry decides to remarry. His intended is Anne Boleyn. But to remarry, Henry needs to get his marriage to Catherine annulled, and the Pope is dragging his heels. So after some haggling and wrangling, Henry announces that he is to break from Rome, and take England’s Church with him. He will be the head of the Church of England, his subjects’ “spiritual” leader as well as their “temporal” one. And as the ultimate arbiter, he will have his first marriage annulled and marry whomever he pleases.

Of course, the story is more complicated than that. Yes, Henry’s desire for a male heir led to his plans to divorce Catherine; and yes, this was made complicated by the firmness – Henry would have said “stubbornness” – of Pope Clement VII. But it wasn’t simply a matter of a radical man breaking away from a conservative, dogmatic religious establishment. For one thing, the Pope’s refusal to do what Henry wanted had as much to do with politics as religion – anything to form and maintain alliances with the right European leaders, with the French King François, with Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor…

And there’s also the fact that Henry really, really wanted to do things the old-fashioned way. He went to great lengths to secure the Pope’s consent and help. He didn’t simply take the decision lightly to break away from the Church; nor did he decide simply not to bother at all – and keep Catherine as his harmless wife and have children with a suitable mistress. No, instead Henry maintained a struggle with Rome lasting almost six years, before making a break as a drastic last resort.

After all, Henry had long been loyal to Rome. Indeed, so strong had been his support of the Pope in Rome against earlier Reformist attacks of men like Martin Luther, that Leo X had even bestowed on Henry the title Fidei Defensor – Defender of the Faith. (The legacy of this remains; look at any British coin today and beside the monarch’s name you’ll see the initials “FD”.)

But now in the 1530s, Henry and his counsellors planned an assault on the authority of the Pope. This assault was not only circumstantially motivated and cosmetic, though; it was (they would have us believe) founded on sound arguments from logic, theology and serious documentary evidence. The earlier Bible translator William Tyndale had written that for the King to take second place to the Pope was quite against the natural order. (“This is a book for me,” said Henry.) Tracts were published arguing that, on the one hand, there was in fact no evidence to suggest that the Pope should take particular precedence in the Church, and on the other that the King’s authority is indisputably God-given. As the King he is by definition the Lord’s anointed – that’s what makes him King, after all. The conclusion is inescapable – the crowned head of the country must also be supreme head of the country’s Church. And, indeed, so it remains in England today.

So Holbein’s portrait presents the King as powerful, larger-than-life, confident – just the sort of person one might want as head of one’s Church, you might say… Those in Henry’s court who saw the painting – or indeed had copies hanging in their own homes – would be in no doubt that this was more than just a man, this was a King, the Lord’s Anointed, a potent and authoritative head of His Church in England.

Behind Henry in the portrait are his parents, Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, founders of the Tudor dynasty – lest we forget his lineage, his clear and direct and indisputable right to the throne. And beside him is his third wife, Jane Seymour. With Catherine and Anne both lately dead, the legitimacy of Jane’s place as Henry’s Queen could not be questioned – which was a first for him! (Henry himself had cast doubts on the legitimacy of his marriage to Catherine; and the marriage to Anne Boleyn was only legitimate if you accepted the King’s own authority over the Church and the Pope.) And it was Jane who, the following year, would bear Henry the son he so desired.