Jousting was a dangerous sport, and on 10 March 1524 King Henry VIII was very nearly maimed — or killed — during a tournament.
Edward Hall’s Chronicle recounts:
“Then [Charles Brandon, the Duke of Suffolk] set forward and charged with his spear, and the king likewise unadvisedly set off towards the duke. The people, seeing the king’s face bare, cried hold, hold; the duke neither saw nor heard, and whether the king remembered his visor was up or not few could tell. Alas, what sorrow was it to the people when they saw the splinters of duke’s spear strike the king’s headpiece. For most certainly the duke struck the king on the brow right under the guard of the headpiece on the very skull cap or basinet piece to which the barbette is hinged for strength and safety, which skull cap or basinet no armorer takes heed of, for it is always covered by the visor, barbette and volant piece, and thus that piece is so protected that it takes no weight. But when the spear landed on that place there was great danger of death since the face was bare, for the duke’s spear broke into splinters and pushed the king’s visor or barbette so far back with the counter blow that all the King’s head piece was full of splinters. The armorers were much blamed for this, and so was the lord marquise for delivering the spear blow when his face was open, but the king said that no one was to blame but himself, for he intended to have saved himself and his sight … Then the king called his armorers and put all his pieces of armor together and then took a spear and ran six courses very well, by which all men could see that he had taken no hurt, which was a great joy and comfort to all his subjects present.”
This accident, albeit less famous than his jousting mishap in 1536, is important because of what it reveals about Henry himself. The king, although given every incentive to blame other people for his mistake, took full responsibility for his error. His conduct is radically different from the way he would act a dozen years later.
As an older man, King Henry VIII blamed anyone but himself for misfortunes or negative consequences for his own actions. The middle-aged monarch blamed Anne Boleyn for his decision to kill Thomas More in 1535, and he blamed her for his persecution of his daughter, Mary, even after he had Anne murdered in 1536. He would later blame his ministers for Thomas Cromwell‘s execution in 1542. It is as though the gracious, honest, and forgiving King Henry of the 1520s was a completely different man. It almost seems implausible to suggest this radical change in character could have come about as a result of anything other than a significant underlying illness or brain injury.
What caused this alteration of Henry’s personality? Was it the the jousting accident of 1524?
It is decidedly plausible, considering that head injuries can leave a person with “Jekyll and Hyde” like dual personalities or outright turn them into ‘strangers’ full of anger and anxiety, and Henry would shift between his normative good-natured self into monster of paranoid rage. However, the timing doesn’t fit. Most significant is the fact that from 1527 to 1532 there are no signs of extreme personality changes in the king. Rumors had swirled for years that he would put Katherina of Aragon aside in favor of a new, young, and hopefully son-producing bride, so his decision to end his marriage was not a sudden one. Until the summer of 1532 Henry continued to treat Katherina with the same unstinting courtesy he had shown her during the halcyon days of their marriage. It was only after 1533 that the king became outright cruel to his first wife and eldest daughter in a very short space of time, and only in his later years that he became uniformly tyrannical. Usually, brain impairment is less progressive than that; it manifests within a week or so after the injury and doesn’t slowly go downhill over time. Instead, the undamaged sections of the brain learn to compensate for and assume the ‘responsibilities’ of the injured area, helping the patient get better – not worse – as the years pass. On average it takes between 10-15 years for people with severe brain injuries to show marked signs of improvement. If anything, 10 — 15 years after his jousting accident (1534 -1539) Henry was had only begun to behave like a brute.
Was it the jousting accident of 1536 that caused the king to change? Again, the timing is off. Henry’s bloodthirsty rampages started well before his second major jousting accident.
Maybe the problem was caused by repeated blows to the head? Minor injuries to the brain caused when a jousting lance impacted against Henry or when his horse came down from a jump during hunting could have reached a critical point where they would have left permanent damage in his frontal lobes. These unnoticed, undiagnosed concussions, formerly called “mild” traumatic brain injuries or mTBI and now associated with chronic traumatic encephalopathy(CTE), can cause the same kinds of psychiatric illness and personality change as one big blow to the head, due to bleeding and bruising in the frontal lobes of the brain.
Or could Henry have changed due to the neural degeneration that sometimes comes with McLeod’s syndrome?
The illness resembles Huntington’s disease and may operate in a similar fashion by causing the degeneration of the basal ganglia. Among other things, it affects the nervous system, weakening the muscles and also sometimes causing a deterioration of memory and executive functions, paranoia, depression, and socially inappropriate conduct. Patients are typically healthy during their infancy and childhood, but they can start to weaken in their 30s and then the disease really kicks in around the 40th birthday, getting progressively worse as the person ages (Danek et al, 2001). This would explain both the specific degeneration of Henry’s leg muscles in his 30s and the increasingly severe personality changes in his 40s.