Why Didn’t the King Kill William Peto?

The theory that Henry VIII had McLeod’s syndrome rests largely on the king’s drastic change in personality after his 40th birthday.

Henry was not the same man in 1530 that he was in 1535, and it was such a drastic change it almost requires a medical reason to explain it. Prior to the 1530s, the king was a self-absorbed yet affable monarch, but by 1535 he had become the monster most people know him as. His treatment of a priest named William Peto in 1532 a good example of the king’s formerly tolerant and genial nature.

On 31 March 1532, William Peto preached an Easter sermon in which he asserted that the king, who was in the congregation listening, would meet his end just like the Old Testament tyrant Ahab. He warned the king that if he didn’t mend his ways, dogs would lick his blood from the stones just as they had licked Ahab’s after his death in battle. Peto also strongly implied that Anne was Jezebel reborn. Considering that Jezebel was considered to be a harlot who had slaughtered prophets and replaced them with idol worshipers, this was a thundering theological condemnation of Anne.

Ahab and Jezebel

Henry was enraged, but he didn’t have Peto’s head cut off. He looked for other solutions or punishments. First, he had one of the theologians who was on his side, a priest named Curwin, preach the following Sunday. Peto was away at the time, so it seemed like a choice opportunity to refute him. Things did not go according to Henry’s plans, however, since another friar named Elstow stood up from among the assembled listeners and began loudly refuting Curwin.

Unsurprisingly, Peto and Elstow were called up in front of the king’s council, where Henry and his chief ministers castigated the pair soundly. The friars stood their ground. When the earl of Essex told them they should be stuffed into a sack and dropped into the Thames to drown, Elstow told Essex “Threaten these things to rich and dainty folk who are clothed in purple, fare delicately, and have their chiefest hope in this world, for we esteem them not, but are joyful that for the discharge of our duties we are driven hence. With thanks to God we know the way to Heaven to be as ready by water as by land, and therefore we care not which way we go”.

Despite of thumbing their noses at the king and his courtiers these friars were not executed. Instead, Peto and Elstow were freed and sent into exile. They emigrated to Antwerp, where Peto continued to needle Henry by publishing a book defending the legitimacy of Katherina’s marriage to the king.

Peto insulted the king, personally as well as spiritually, and challenged the Henry’s authority withing his own kingdom, yet the friar got to keep his head. Three years later, Henry would start slaughtering people – clergymen, scholars, or just your everyday citizens – who had the temerity to either defend his marriage to his first wife or to challenge his break from Rome. That is not an insignificant difference in mindset in the man who spared William Peto.

There may have been another explanation for the king’s dramatic alteration, however. It is possible that Henry had chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a form of brain damage that occurs due to repeated (often ‘mild’) concussions. Athletes are particularly prone to CTE from multiple impacts that jolt the brain inside the skull, and the brain damage can occur even when the initial symptoms of concussion is absent or faded. Henry, who loved to joust and hunt, would have certainly been exposed to repeated blows to the head or body that were hard enough to cause concussions. Moreover, CTE can occur even when the impacts to the head are all ‘softer’, non-concussive blows.  The king may have been rattling his brain around inside his skull almost every his horse landed after a vigorous jump, and years of bruising could have wasted his frontal lobes away in spots.

The role of athletic pursuits (outside of boxing) on CTE was  less discussed and understood in 2011, when I was writing the original version of Blood Will Tell, so it didn’t get mentioned in that edition. The updated, revised edition of Blood Will Tell, which was released this January, takes the possibility of CTE into account and explains how it could dovetail with, or even supplant, the original McLeod theory.

Peto’s remarks, and the ideology behind them, had lasting effects. There was a rumour, which has passed into lore, that Henry’s coffin was breached by expanding decomposition gases and his blood leaked out where it was licked from the floor by dogs — just as Peto had foretold. It is historically unlikely to have happened, but it was taken as a near-certainty by many Victorian and modern historians until relatively recently.

Moreover, Anne Boleyn, who had done everything possible to escape the king’s attentions for the first two years of their “courtship”, would continue to be slandered as viciously as the original Israelite queen herself. To this very day, Anne Boleyn — a devout women who refused to sleep with her married sovereign and helped secured the English language Bible in Britain — is still blamed for Henry’s disaffection with the Catholic Church, and is still called a harlot and a Jezebel.